Interviewer: I want you to begin by talking about your childhood, where you were born, your family, and the kind of community you grew up in. Will you talk in some detail about the churches and schools you attended?

Charles Henry Rowell: I was born-and I say that in the same voice of the creators of the slave narratives-into a family of landowning farmers in Auburn, Alabama, where I was baptized in the Protestant faith, only to convert to Roman Catholicism in college. It is also in Auburn and in Loachapoka, Alabama, that I received my early formal education-a public education, from grades one through twelve. Auburn, where I was born and reared, is a town in a state and a region where white supremacy continues to be the rule of the day.
       When I speak of my family as landowners, I am talking about my immediate family and father's paternal family, the Rowells, who had the bourgeois habit (and my family never thought of their values in such negative terms) of evaluating people in terms of how much land they owned and how self-sufficient they were in their ownership. I remember this so well: it was according to how much land you owned (which is associated with how much money you can acquire)-not how well educated you were or how much money you had in the bank or what positive good you offered your community-that my father and Grandpa Paul rated people. Of course, you also needed to be a Christian of high moral character. But it was these economic and social values-not education-that my father drummed into my head throughout my childhood. Although my mother was very pleased with the career I selected and the progress she witnessed me making in it, my father, who also loved and indulged me, was never really pleased that I became, in his words, "just an English teacher." When he discovered that I had been admitted to enter Tuskegee Institute to study agricultural economics, as it was called in the late fifties, and to Alabama A&M College to study landscape architecture, he was very happy, be-cause he thought I would eventually return home to work toward the improvement and expansion of our 125 acre farm. (I, like the other black teenagers graduating from high school, was forbidden by state law from applying or being admitted to Auburn University, which is only three or so miles from my father's farm. Auburn University, like the University of Alabama, was for whites only.)
       No, my father never thought much of what I elected to do with my life, especially when he discovered that I never bought a home with acres surrounding it. He sometimes, I believe, feared for me, who was a very frail and sickly little creature from childhood through my early adult life; after all, I was often thought of as "the baby." He wanted me to have some kind of immediate security, and he thought land would provide it. Daddy and my three brothers would occasionally voice their displeasure in my landlessness until I at last stopped renting and bought a home in 1978, after I moved from Louisiana to Kentucky. Grandpa Paul was their model; he (and my grandmother, Molly Lock-hart Rowell) owned over three hundred acres of land, some of which he tilled along with his tenant farmers-land that is still in our family. In terms of patriarchy, materialism, and male domination of women, Grandpa Paul was a major figure in his community in Lee County, Alabama. After all-and my father frequently reminded my siblings and me of this fact-Grandpa Paul's father, Edmond Rowell, an ex-slave, was also a big landowner who, in his will, divided his land among his four children. To his portion, Grandpa Paul added many acres, and indoctrinated my father (and his other children) with his narrow materialism-my father, Hosea Rowell, who would years later stand in judgment of me, the landless son he sent to college to become "just an English teacher." In 1981, my father, like his father before him, died of cancer.
       My mother, who died of a stroke in 1966, was a totally different kind of person. She indulged me in my efforts to develop in the arts-from singing in the church choir and acting in school plays to competing in oratorical contests and studying painting. Instead of being sent off to play baseball, football, basketball, or, for that matter, piano, I went into the city of Auburn to take watercolor lessons with William Johnson who, for a brief period (1966-1967), was my colleague when I taught at Mississippi Valley State College. I am very happy that I studied painting, even though I never kept up the practice after high school. I think that my early aesthetic education and, over the years, my continued reading about art (African, European, and Asian) are responsible for my current addictions: collecting art, and making long visits to galleries and museums. I need not mention how my continued interest in visual art informs my selecting cover art for Callaloo and my creating visual art features in the journal.
       I am also certain that my mother's aesthetic impulses and her love of beauty had a profound impact on my formation. First of all, she was an extraordinary raconteur, and her oral narratives were always marked by a passionate love of language, for which she was revered by all who got to know her. To this very day, when I come in contact with individuals who knew my mother, they almost always praise her for her speech acts, her courtesy, her generosity, and her devotion to the Baptist faith.
       My mother's love of visual art was not limited to the interior of our home. When I first heard Alice Walker deliver her essay "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens" at Jackson State University in 1976, I wanted to thank her for writing about my mother, who made an indelible, positive impact on me as I came of age. My mother loved flowers, not a few flowers here and there, but myriad plants-flowers and shrubs on the immediate grounds surrounding our home, and a profusion of petunias, roses, zinnias, peonies, bleeding hearts, gladiolas, black-eyed susans, tulips, daffodils, you name them-gathered against various kinds of shrubs forming the background of both sides of the long curving private road that led from the public road up to our home. My four sisters, at some time or other, from spring through early fall, had to help maintain those flowers and shrubs.
       As a very shy and delicate boy, I wanted always to be alone in my refuge, in my own room to read and paint; during the warm months, alone in a special spot, where a certain part of our pasture met the woods, to listen to my voice (oratorical and singing) come back to me as it echoed out of the woods, my audience.
       Although she wanted me to succeed in the arts or whatever else I wanted to pursue as a career, my mother (and my father) never allowed me to live exclusively in my invented world. I did not have to do heavy or demanding farm work as my brothers, who were typical strong Amer-ican boys growing into young men. Like my sisters and brothers, I, too, was enlisted as a caretaker of my mother's flower beds, which she seem-ed never to stop planting and cultivating. Our neighbors and pure strangers would often stop along the public road to admire my mother's flowers, and they would sometimes say as much if they found one of us nearby. Each time I reread Alice Walker's eloquent essay, I discover how much an artist my mother was, and how much her love of language and beauty must have influenced me as a future student of literature, a poet, an educator, an art collector, and an editor. (Tom, editing is not a new experience for me; my founding and editing Callaloo goes all the way back, perhaps, to my reactivating and editing our college yearbook and to my editing our college newspaper, The Hillside Chronicle. Actually, it seems as if I have been editing all my life.) My mother loved beauty, and I love it, too.
       My father attended church with the family every Sunday, but it was my mother who encouraged me to sing in the children's and, later, young adults' choir. It was my mother, too, who encouraged me to make religious and political speeches at church events, including conventions. It was my mother who made sure that each of my siblings and I attended Sunday School and the main services every Sunday. It was my mother who made me join the young men's church group called the Crusaders, an organization that taught me leadership responsibilities.
       The community in which I grew up was mainly white; my neighborhood was a two or three mile road with about ten families. The Bradfords were our only black neighbors. Like my parents, they also owned a large farm. But unlike my parents, who always warned us that white folks were "evil and dirty people who hated colored people," the parents of the Bradford children allowed their children to play with some of the white kids on our road. What my parents were referring to were the consequences of white supremacy and racial segregation, both of which were invented by white people for their exclusive benefit. What my parents were also talking about is the tribal impulse of white racists. For example, when a white person tells a lie against a black person, white racists conveniently believe the lie and, without question or verification, act against that particular black person (or against any black person in sight) with either physical or psychological violence. Remember the immediate responses of European American bigots when Susan Smith of South Carolina lied about black men. My parents warned me that white racists believe as fact or truth any lies other white people tell on black people.
       As I look back now, I remember, too, that some of the white people on our road were economically the same as we, and some were very poor. I recall, too, that, in spite of her position on whites as racists, my mother was generous in giving the poor whites food from our kitchen or vegetables from our garden when they came begging, and that my father, when asked, frequently loaned some of his farm implements to two white farmers whose land was adjacent to ours. Yes, out of fear of the consequences of white supremacy, my parents forbade me to play with the white neighboring children. My parents did not want harm to come to me, and they didn't want me to experience one of the social practices of white supremacy: the sudden physical and violent psychological separation of black and white children once they come of a certain age; their intimate social relations and exchanges end, and the white child growing into adolescence suddenly becomes the superior being to his/her black counterpart. No, I never played with the white kids on our road.

Interviewer: You are a black man, a Southerner, and a very dark-skinned African American. Tell me about the racial landscape of your adolescence and early adulthood in and outside your immediate home. What were your parents' attitudes towards light-skinned blacks? What were their reactions to whites?

Rowell: This is an interesting question which assumes that all the people in my family are dark-skinned. Like many other African American families, some of the members of my family are light-skinned and some are dark-skinned. But in my family the intra-racial color prejudice and color envy you imply in your question had no meaning. In fact, I have always thought the energy we expend on this color distinction to be a waste of time. After all, no one is responsible for his/her biological makeup. At home and school, we accepted each other as we were, dark-skinned or light-skinned. Actually these skin tones had no real meaning to me until I moved, in 1967, to Baton Rouge where the historic color prejudice among the Creoles (light-skinned blacks, who like the mulattos in Haiti and other Caribbean societies, tried over the years to set themselves apart from other blacks, whom they considered to be their inferiors). This imitation of white people, who must have given them their light skin primarily through the rape of their black foremothers, is infantile. Bigoted Creoles and other bigoted light-skinned blacks are tragic-but theirs is a self-willed tragedy; they are self-loathing. Self-loathing light-skinned African Americans-and I am not referring to those who are a product of mixed marriages-are the only people in the world who take great pride in being the descendants of bastards, who were the product of violence and dehumanization. And those dark-skinned African Americans are equally self-loathing in their color envy and in their imitation of white biological characteristics. You will probably say that I have lived a sheltered life when I make this confession: I admit that it was not only until a few years ago that I discovered how deeply rooted intra-racial color prejudice is in our communities across the United States. This problem is a pain we-dark-skinned and light-skinned alike-inflict upon ourselves; it is with self-loathing that we victimize each other. And the most victimized in the process is the dark-skinned African American woman.
       Intra-racial color prejudice had no meaning in my family or in my school. The prejudice in my all-black school had to do with where you lived. If you lived in the city of Auburn, you were considered superior to the students from the countryside. That was tragic, and to this day I curse the names of our teachers who operated from that premise. I remember the injustice done my brilliant cousin, Mary Will Hicks, who lived deeper in the countryside than I, for example. She was probably the best student that my high school teachers had ever had the privilege of teaching, but because she was a rural kid she was not given the honors she had earned with her superior mind and grades. By the way, she has light skin.
       I think I answered your question about what my parents thought of whites. The only whites my parents knew or had dealings with were, unfortunately, white bigots. Therefore, my parents were always suspicious of whites and regarded them as dangerous to us and as the enemies of black people. My parents did everything they could to protect us from white people, to keep us away from them, from their dangerous reach. My parents were literally alarmed when they saw the catalogue of the University of Missouri (Columbia), my first graduate school. All of the photographs in it were of European Americans. My mother's first comment on my selection was, "Charles, there are no Negroes there. Are there?" I told her there were a few there and that I would add to the number. Neither she nor my father found that humorous. In spite of their fear of what would happen to me, I en-rolled at Missouri's graduate school during the fall of 1961, when on-campus housing was still racially segregated. The next August, I received the MA degree in English, but not without quite a few confrontations with white bigots who came in the forms of students, faculty, and just plain citizens around Columbia. Yes, my parents wanted to protect me. At any rate, it is unfortunate that, before they died, my parents really never had the opportunity to meet and get to know some of the Europeans and European Americans who have, over the years, become my close friends. I have no idea of what my mother would think-if she were alive-of my teaching at the university founded by Thomas Jefferson, who was a slave owner. In phrasing echoing the styles of West African proverbs, my mother would probably remind me that time past is time present, both directing us into future time. In this context, the intention of her words, like those of my father, would be a danger warning.

Interviewer: Where and what years did you attend college? What did you study? Was it at this time that you began to read and study literature seriously? Who were some of the authors that influenced you the most? Will you talk about your graduate education also?

Rowell: As I told you earlier, I attended racially segregated public schools. So was my undergraduate school. With the intention of studying floriculture and landscape architecture, I entered Alabama A&M College in 1958 and graduated with a major in English in August of 1961. During the fall of 1961, I was admitted to the University of Missouri at Columbia to study for the MA degree in English, which I completed in August 1962, when I began teaching at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. But I did not return to graduate school until 1964, when I entered Ohio State University to study for the PhD in English. I left Ohio State in 1966 to teach at Mississippi Valley State College and a year later at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I was a member of the faculty at Southern until August, 1977. In 1972, I completed the doctorate at Ohio State and continued teaching at Southern, where I founded the non-profit Callaloo in fall of 1976.