Contradictions at a city’s heart

“Blues City” is the latest title in the “Crown Journeys” series, a collection of highly literary travel guides whose conceit is to place a writer of distinction at large in a place that he or she knows especially well and then see what happens. As rendered by Ishmael Reed, a distinguished novelist, playwright, poet and essayist, however, “Blues City” is less a travelogue than a potent and provocative mix of literary memoir, revisionist history, amateur urbanology and red-hot political manifesto.

Reed was raised in Buffalo, N.Y., and started out in the early ‘60s as an aspiring writer in New York City, then Los Angeles and finally the San Francisco Bay Area, where he rooted himself and flowered. By 1979, when he settled in Oakland, the city was the focus of an African American renaissance. “From the seventies through the nineties, there was a black mayor, a black symphony conductor, a black museum head, black members of the black city council, and, in Robert Maynard, the only black publisher of a major news daily,” he writes. “[T]he [Black] Panthers wanted [Mayor Lionel Wilson] to lead a nationalist surge like Sun Yat-sen.”

Under the leadership of Jerry Brown, who reinvented himself yet again by running for mayor of Oakland in 1998, urban planners aspired toward what Brown called “elegant density.” A result, Reed argues, is that “many poor residents and residents of modest means are finding themselves priced out of the city.” In fact, “Blues City” includes a running tirade against Brown, whom Reed calls “an imperial mayor” and condemns for “maintain[ing] a countercultural style while practicing a brutal capitalist philosophy.”

At certain rhapsodic moments, Reed finds much to celebrate. “Oakland is a city where identities blur. Where one encounters hip-hop dancers at a festival in Chinatown; where the mistress of ceremonies at a Kwanzaa celebration is a white woman in Yoruba dress; where, perhaps less surprising, about a fifth of the audience at a Native American powwow is black,” Reed writes. “When you watch the crowds of blacks, Asians, and Hispanics coexisting peacefully in the late afternoon on Broadway and Fourteenth, near the Tribune Tower, you get a glimpse of what the world could look like.”

Then, too, as Reed conducts his readers on a walking tour of Oakland, he reminds us of cultural traditions that are as rich and deep as those of the far more celebrated city across the bay. Thus he points out the wooden shack near Jack London Square, built out of the timbers of old ships in 1880, that houses Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon: “East Bay Bohemian writers Bret Harte, Rex Beach, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joaquin Miller, and Jack London drank here,” he pauses to observe. And he points out that what may be Oakland’s oldest ongoing community celebration is the Black Cowboy Parade, which recalls and honors the fact that “four out of ten cowboys in the Old West were black.”

But Reed is not content with mere quaintness, and he refuses to pretty up what he sees or what he thinks. He concedes that the gangs of Oakland are responsible for its high murder rate, but he insists on calling them “outlaw capitalists” and likens them to both the ‘49ers of the Gold Rush era and the “ ‘99ers” of the dot-com era, all of whom, insists Reed, were out to get rich quick. And though he despairs of the sheer chaos that afflicts even the street where he lives -- including over-amplified hip-hop music that he likens to “the kind of torture tactic that was used to flush out Noriega” -- he also seems to suggest that the problem can be attributed to, among other things, a bad diet.

“I asked [my daughter] to put on some gloves and examine the debris teenagers left behind after a night of performing ‘sideshows’ on our street,” he writes. “She found food from a fast-food joint ... food low in nutrition and high in carbohydrates, fat, sugar, and salt.”

A wholly different perspective on the same troubled landscape is offered by Robert O. Self, a professor of history and urban studies at the University of Milwaukee, in “American Babylon,” a monograph that focuses on Oakland as a test case in the study of American cities in crisis. “Oakland ... embodied what was at stake in California politics between the end of World War II and the late 1970s,” Self explains -- the conflict between white suburban tax revolt and “a black power politics of community defense and empowerment” whose most dramatic expression was the birth of the Black Panther Party in 1966.

“Oakland embodied the seeming contradictions of the postwar American metropolis,” Self argues. “It was characterized by poverty amidst wealth; racial apartheid at the heart of liberalism; and high unemployment in periods of economic growth.”

Self and Reed, of course, express themselves in starkly different vocabularies. “Oakland is Blues City,” Reed writes. “Blues is the music of the working class, of the brawling and husky.” But Self adopts another metaphor, one used by the Panthers to warn that American civilization itself would “ ‘perish like Babylon’ ... under the weight of its own corruption and imperial ambitions” if it did not address the suffering of cities like Oakland. “Oakland stood for the national condition of black America,” Self writes, “a colonized nation living in an underdeveloped urban ghetto.”

Both books leave us at what Self calls “a poignant but ambivalent moment.” Self insists that “a new generation of political movements, from both the liberal left and the conservative right, sought to revive and reinvent the promise of California” -- and seems to hold out the possibility that they might yet succeed. But even Reed, who deserves to be regarded as the poet laureate of Oakland, finds himself compelled to say (more than once) that its problems sometimes seem “intractable.” The emblematic moment comes in “Blues City” when Reed calls on Dave Hilliard, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party, and discovers that the former firebrand is now reduced to conducting “Black Panther Legacy” bus tours. *