Love the Blood
I was an undergraduate student in Yale’s American Studies department—a department that claimed my heart and my mind—but even after four years, I was still trying to find my place on campus.
我是耶鲁大学美国研究系的一名本科生——这个系占据了我的心和我的思想——但即使四年后，我仍然试图在校园里找到自己的位置。
That search went on during my subsequent years in New Haven as a PhD student in American Studies.
我在纽黑文作为美国研究博士生的随后几年继续进行这种搜索。
I was looking for models, for fellow travelers, particularly like-minded women who had things to teach me.
我一直在寻找模特，为同行的人，特别是志同道合的女性，她们可以教我一些东西。
This is what I found in Kymberly Pinder.
这是我在金伯利·平德 (Kymberly Pinder) 身上发现的。
As graduate students, Kym and I “was girls together,” to use a phrase from Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel, Sula .
用托尼·莫里森 (Toni Morrison) 1973 年的小说《苏拉》(Sula) 中的一句话来说，作为研究生，我和凯姆“在一起是女孩”。
We were Black girls together at Yale, to be specific.
具体来说，我们是耶鲁大学的黑人女孩。
Kym was at the beginning stages of what would be a formidable career as an art critic and a historian, one that has led her back to Yale as dean of the School of Art.
作为一名艺术评论家和历史学家，凯姆正处于职业生涯的开始阶段，这一职业将是令人敬畏的，这使她回到耶鲁大学担任艺术学院院长。
Back then, her fascination with medieval art fascinated me.
那时，她对中世纪艺术的迷恋让我着迷。
It was clear that she had the same passion for the bold colors on the works to which she introduced me as I felt for black type on the page.
很明显，她对她介绍给我的作品中大胆的色彩有着同样的热情，就像我对页面上的黑色字体的热情一样。
It was a passion that was bottomless.
那是一种无底的激情。
We were the same age, but Kym seemed to have the kind of intellectual authority and creative boldness that I did not think I possessed.
我们同龄，但凯姆似乎拥有我认为自己不具备的知识权威和创造性大胆。
I thought she was courageous, mastering a body of work that had not even anticipated her very existence.
我认为她很勇敢，掌握了一系列甚至没有预见到她的存在的工作。
I was excited by my chosen field of study—the Harlem Renaissance—but my own commitment felt a bit predictable compared with the scholarly adventure Kym had designed for herself.
我对我选择的研究领域——哈莱姆文艺复兴感到兴奋——但与凯姆为自己设计的学术冒险相比，我自己的承诺感觉有点可预测。
I was also, at the time, suffering from deep ambivalence.
当时我也陷入了深深的矛盾心理之中。
Beneath my placid exterior roiled a true conundrum: I had fallen in love with a white man, and not just any white man but, very decidedly, the wrong white man.
在我平静的外表下，隐藏着一个真正的难题：我爱上了一个白人，而且不仅仅是任何一个白人，而且非常明确地，爱上了一个错误的白人。
That man was Carl Van Vechten.
那个人就是卡尔·范·维克滕。
As a champion of the Harlem Renaissance, Van Vechten helped further the careers of Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and many others, and his photographs of the movement’s artists were brilliant, vital, and enduring.
作为哈莱姆文艺复兴的拥护者，范·韦希滕帮助佐拉·尼尔·赫斯顿、兰斯顿·休斯和其他许多人的事业发展，他为该运动艺术家拍摄的照片才华横溢、充满活力且经久不衰。
But it was the publication of his 1926 novel Nigger Heaven— which depicted the lives of Harlem residents—that incurred the wrath of W.
但正是他 1926 年出版的小说《黑鬼天堂》——描绘了哈莱姆区居民的生活——激起了 W.
E.
E.
B.
B.
Du Bois and others, for both its title and its lurid content.
杜波依斯和其他人，因为它的标题和耸人听闻的内容。
By the time I was a graduate student, I had loved Van Vechten for years, but I still didn’t really want anyone to know how far I had truly fallen.
当我还是一名研究生时，我已经爱范·维克滕很多年了，但我仍然不想让任何人知道我真正堕落了多远。
I thought Kym might have gone through a similar kind of struggle, or had entertained a similar kind of ambivalence when it came to medieval art.
我认为凯姆可能经历过类似的斗争，或者在谈到中世纪艺术时也有类似的矛盾心理。
I wanted to know how she had answered the internal and external voices that might have urged her in another scholarly direction.
我想知道她是如何回应内部和外部的声音的，这些声音可能促使她走向另一个学术方向。
I wanted to know where her courage came from.
我想知道她的勇气从何而来。
What was it about medieval art, I asked her, that so compelled her?
我问她，中世纪艺术为何如此吸引她？
“I love the blood,” she said, without missing a beat.
“我热爱血液，”她毫不犹豫地说。
And that was it.
就是这样。
A woman laying claim to her own imagination without apology.
一个女人毫无歉意地宣称自己的想象力。
A woman in charge of her own curiosity.
一个对自己的好奇心负责的女人。
Liberation.
解放。
Awareness.
意识。
It was, for me, a eureka moment.
对我来说，这是一个灵光一现的时刻。
In a 1984 interview, when asked about the process of his “coming out” (a term that he did not use himself), James Baldwin said, “You have to go the way your blood beats.”
在 1984 年的一次采访中，当被问及他“出柜”（这个词他自己没有用过）的过程时，詹姆斯·鲍德温说，“你必须按照你的血液跳动的方式走。”
To have a passion is to have an identity.
拥有激情就拥有身份。
And the forging of any identity is almost always a bloody business.
伪造任何身份几乎总是一件血腥的事情。
“I have had a lifelong obsession with blood, and I’m not the only one,” writes Lawrence Hill in the early pages of his 2013 collection of lectures, Blood: The Stuff of Life .
劳伦斯·希尔 (Lawrence Hill) 在其 2013 年演讲集《血液：生命的物质》(Blood: The Stuff of Life) 的前几页中写道：“我一生都对血液痴迷，而且我不是唯一一个。”
“As both substance and symbol, blood reveals us, divides us, and unites us.
“作为物质和象征，血液揭示了我们，分裂了我们，并将我们团结在一起。
We care about blood because it spills literally and figuratively into every significant corner of our lives.”
我们关心血液，因为它确实和象征性地渗透到我们生活的每一个重要角落。”
As a woman, as a religious person, as a survivor of a violent encounter with a knife, and as the mother of children who endured their fair share of skinned knees and bloody noses, I am also deeply and personally acquainted with blood, as both a reality and a symbol of something bigger than what is contained in the world we can see.
作为一名女性、一名宗教人士、一名持刀暴力事件的幸存者、以及一名忍受过膝盖破皮和流鼻血的孩子们的母亲，我对血有着深刻的亲身体验，它既是一种现实，又是某种比我们所能看到的世界所包含的更伟大事物的象征。
If the forging of identity is a messy, bloody business, so too is life itself, particularly its beginnings.
如果说塑造身份是一件混乱而血腥的事情，那么生命本身也是如此，尤其是它的开始。
We all come roaring out of somebody’s womb, making a terrible bloody mess in the process.
我们都是从某人的子宫里咆哮出来的，在这个过程中造成了可怕的血腥混乱。
My own emergence from the birth canal brought my mother’s body to the point of near-fatal distress.
我自己从产道中出来，使母亲的身体处于濒临死亡的痛苦境地。
The ob-gyn in attendance posed to my father a choice worthy of King Solomon: Save the woman or save the child?
在场的妇产科医生向我父亲提出了一个值得所罗门王做出的选择：救女人还是救孩子？
“The woman,” my father, himself an ob-gyn, said, reportedly not missing a beat.
“那个女人，”我的父亲（他自己也是一名妇产科医生）说道，据说他没有错过任何一个节拍。
My father’s logic must have gone like this: I can make another one of those (meaning: me), but my wife is truly one of a kind .
我父亲的逻辑一定是这样的：我可以再做一个（意思是：我），但我的妻子确实是独一无二的。
I think my father would tell me this story—and he told it more than once—to remind me of how exceptional my mother was.
我想我的父亲会给我讲这个故事——他不止一次地讲过这个故事——以提醒我我的母亲是多么的杰出。
He did it also, I think, to enforce in me a belief that my life should add up to something.
我认为，他这样做也是为了让我相信我的生活应该有所作为。
After all, it had nearly cost him the life of someone he had loved long before I arrived.
毕竟，在我到达之前很久，他就差点失去了他所爱的人的生命。
I grew up with the awareness that I should not waste my time here on Earth.
我从小就意识到我不应该在地球上浪费时间。
A lot of blood had been spilled so that I could thrive.
为了让我能够茁壮成长，我付出了很多的鲜血。
My parents were both trained as medical professionals, and they didn’t believe in using cute euphemisms for bodily functions.
我的父母都接受过医学专业培训，他们不相信用可爱的委婉语来表达身体功能。
In general, they were not ones to put much stock in the very human impulse to pretty up the messiness of life.
总的来说，他们不太相信人类想要美化生活的混乱的冲动。
They were not afraid of blood.
他们并不惧怕血。
They were also religious people, and they took their children to church every Sunday to drink the blood and eat the body of the emblem, or human being, we referred to as the living Christ—to consume all the words and symbols of our faith—and thereby confirm our devotion to the ideals that would go on to shape my dreams, fears, and life’s ambitions.
他们也是宗教人士，每周日都会带着孩子去教堂喝象征物或人类的血，吃我们称之为活着的基督的身体，吃掉我们信仰的所有文字和象征，从而确认我们对理想的奉献，这些理想将继续塑造我的梦想、恐惧和人生的抱负。
We drank the blood and ate the body in a small Nashville chapel that catered mostly to the students attending Fisk University and Meharry Medical College; my parents were graduates of both schools.
我们在纳什维尔的一个小教堂里喝了血并吃掉了尸体，该教堂主要为菲斯克大学和梅哈里医学院的学生服务。我的父母都是两所学校的毕业生。
All three institutions—chapel, university, and medical school—are within strolling distance of one another and of the Carl Van Vechten Art Gallery, which sits on the edge of the Fisk campus.
所有三个机构——教堂、大学和医学院——彼此之间以及位于菲斯克校区边缘的 Carl Van Vechten 美术馆都在步行距离之内。
The gallery was established in 1949, toward the end of Van Vechten’s long life, well after the celebrity and controversy that had made him a fixture in the world of culture had faded.
该画廊成立于 1949 年，当时范·维克滕漫长的生命即将结束，而让他在文化界占据一席之地的名人和争议已经消退很久。
Over the course of his career, Van Vechten had been a visionary in the arenas of literature, music, dance, and photography, both in the United States and abroad.
在他的职业生涯中，范·维克滕在美国和国外的文学、音乐、舞蹈和摄影领域都是一位有远见的人。
But neither fame nor infamy is sustainable for most people.
但对于大多数人来说，名声和恶名都不是可持续的。
Van Vechten watched his star fade.
范维克滕眼睁睁地看着他的明星陨落。
Even though his ego suffered greatly in the process, he was never one to admit defeat.
尽管他的自尊心在这个过程中受到了极大的伤害，但他从来都不是一个认输的人。
He doubled down on institution-building projects, such as the establishment of archives and galleries all over the country.
他加倍致力于机构建设项目，例如在全国各地建立档案馆和画廊。
It was a gesture of goodwill and a sincere and admirable expression of his commitment to artistic citizenship on the highest level.
这是一种善意的姿态，也是他对最高水平的艺术公民承诺的真诚和令人钦佩的表达。
But such undertakings also ensured that his name would live on.
但这样的事业也确保了他的名字得以流传。
He was as calculating as he was reckless, as altruistic as he was egotistical.
他既精于算计又鲁莽，既无私又自私。
In the end, he was a full human being, just like the rest of us.
最终，他成为了一个完整的人，就像我们其他人一样。
And yet, at institutions such as Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where Van Vechten’s extraordinary work is prominent, I have yet to hear his name spoken with anything other than embarrassment, except by me.
然而，在像耶鲁大学拜内克善本和手稿图书馆这样的机构中，范维克滕的非凡作品尤为突出，除了我之外，我还没有听到过他的名字除了让我感到尴尬之外。
As a child growing up in Nashville in the 1970s and ’80s, I had no idea who Carl Van Vechten was.
作为一个 20 世纪 70 年代和 80 年代在纳什维尔长大的孩子，我不知道 Carl Van Vechten 是谁。
It is not impossible to imagine that my mother, a poet and student of Robert Hayden’s who graduated from Fisk in the late 1950s, literally crossed paths with him, a tall, odd-looking, white-haired white fellow with notoriously protruding front teeth.
不难想象，我的母亲是一位诗人，也是罗伯特·海登 (Robert Hayden) 的学生，于 20 世纪 50 年代末从菲斯克毕业，她与他确实有过交集，他是一个高大、相貌怪异、白发的白人，门牙突出是出了名的。
Why not?
为什么不呢？
They both loved and respected the same things: Fisk University, art that stirred and disturbed, and Blackness.
他们都热爱并尊重同样的事物：菲斯克大学、令人兴奋和不安的艺术，以及黑人。
Fisk carried in its very body the hopes and beliefs of its founders in the possibility of a “New Jerusalem,” to borrow a phrase from the same James Baldwin interview I referenced earlier, a sacred space steeped in the secular Protestant ethics of work, duty, and sacrifice as almost Romantic concepts.
菲斯克的身体里承载着其创始人对“新耶路撒冷”可能性的希望和信念，借用我之前提到的詹姆斯·鲍德温采访中的一句话，这是一个充满世俗新教伦理的神圣空间，工作、责任和牺牲几乎是浪漫的概念。
Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson played central roles, at various points, in the life of the campus.
兰斯顿·休斯和詹姆斯·韦尔登·约翰逊在校园生活的不同阶段发挥了核心作用。
W.
W.
E.
E.
B.
B.
Du Bois received one of his two undergraduate degrees from Fisk (the other was from Harvard).
杜波依斯在菲斯克获得了他的两个本科学位之一（另一个来自哈佛大学）。
My parents’ union looked to many like a Du Boisian ideal of service and fidelity to the race, and I grew up hearing his name repeated in my home the same way Catholic kids grow up hearing the names of certain saints.
在许多人看来，我父母的工会就像杜波依斯式的服务和对种族忠诚的理想，我从小就听到他的名字在家里重复出现，就像天主教孩子长大后听到某些圣人的名字一样。
The past reigned supreme in our house.
过去在我们家占据着至高无上的地位。
It held faster to my parents’ imaginations than did the present or the future, which were both precarious and unknown, given that we lived in the belly of the beast: the slowly—and, in many cases, resentfully—desegregating American South.
它比现在或未来更能激发我父母的想象力，因为我们生活在野兽的肚子里：美国南方缓慢地——在很多情况下，充满怨恨地——废除种族隔离，现在和未来都是不稳定和未知的。
The strict and fatal line separating Black from white was eroding and intensifying at the same time.
区分黑人和白人的严格而致命的界限正在被侵蚀和强化。
I was raised according to unwritten rules passed down through generations of ancestors who understood that in order to survive, Black people had to learn early to navigate white expectations.
我是根据几代祖先传承下来的不成文规则长大的，他们明白为了生存，黑人必须尽早学会适应白人的期望。
If the present was in flux, the past was neither safe nor settled, and my parents told their stories over and over, each time refining or uncovering details that both enthralled and terrified me, their only daughter, who, as a result of her robust imagination, began to believe that her own destiny was wedged somewhere within the lines of their narratives.
如果现在在不断变化，那么过去既不安全也不安定，我的父母一遍又一遍地讲述他们的故事，每一次提炼或揭示的细节都让我这个他们唯一的女儿既着迷又害怕，由于她丰富的想象力，她开始相信自己的命运被困在他们叙述的某个地方。
Regardless of their intentions, the lessons of my parents’ pasts composed the map of my future.
不管他们的意图如何，我父母过去的教训构成了我未来的地图。
I grew up in the shadow of revolutions—more bloody business.
我是在革命的阴影下长大的——更血腥的事情。
First the Civil War, in whose ashes the dream of a university first gathered in the minds of the three men who started the Fisk School in 1865, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
首先是内战，在战争的灰烬中，大学的梦想首次在 1865 年（即《解放奴隶宣言》颁布两年后）创办菲斯克学校的三人心中浮现。
Later, several lunch-counter sit-ins and demonstrations, which turned Nashville on its back, were plotted out by classmates of my parents at Fisk.
后来，我父母在菲斯克的同学策划了几次午餐柜台静坐和示威活动，使纳什维尔陷入了翻天覆地的变化。
As a medical student, my father would tend to the burned flesh of students who had maintained perfect composure as they sat at lunch counters while enraged white people put out cigarettes on their skins.
作为一名医科学生，我父亲会照顾那些坐在午餐柜台前保持完美镇静的学生，而愤怒的白人则把香烟放在他们的皮肤上。
On Sundays, those same students would attend our church, where the priest and parishioners tended to their souls.
周日，这些学生也会去我们的教堂，牧师和教区居民会在那里照顾他们的灵魂。
The never-ending project of radical racial renovation—a project steeped in robust disagreement—began with the New Negro Movement and has, to my mind, neither slowed nor ceased.
永无休止的激进种族革新计划——一个充满强烈分歧的计划——始于新黑人运动，在我看来，它既没有放缓也没有停止。
By the time I actually crossed the threshold of the Carl Van Vechten Art Gallery, I was a scholar, which is to say that I was an adult.
当我真正踏入Carl Van Vechten美术馆的门槛时，我已经是一名学者了，也就是说我已经是一个成年人了。
Sort of.
有点像。
I remember the stiff and slightly uncomfortable suit I wore when I went to meet the curator and get a tour of the modest building.
我记得当我去见馆长并参观这座朴素的建筑时，我穿着僵硬且有点不舒服的西装。
My second book featuring Van Vechten had recently come out, and I had been invited to testify, as a writer and a teacher, to the life of the man, to tell about the person whose name the gallery bore.
我的第二本以范·维克滕为主角的书最近出版了，我被邀请以作家和教师的身份为这个人的生活作证，讲述画廊里那个名字的人。
I had been in the Van Vechten game, at that point, for many years, so I was very familiar with the meaning behind the curious looks and lukewarm smiles that alighted on the faces of Black people—whether scholars, students, or readers—when they learned of the object of my fascination.
那时，我已经参与范维奇滕游戏很多年了，所以我非常熟悉当黑人——无论是学者、学生还是读者——得知我所着迷的对象时，他们脸上所流露出的好奇表情和冷淡微笑背后的含义。
Carl Van Vechten has long been the locus of trouble as much as pleasure in my life.
卡尔·范·韦希滕长期以来一直是我生活中的麻烦和快乐的根源。
Years ago at Yale, I sat in a dining hall across from a dear friend who had seemed unusually irritated with me of late.
几年前，在耶鲁大学的一个餐厅里，我坐在一位亲爱的朋友对面，他最近似乎对我异常恼火。
When I asked him why, he confessed, “Out of all the people in the Harlem Renaissance for you to write about, why are you writing about that white man?”
当我问他为什么时，他坦白道：“在哈莱姆文艺复兴时期可供你写的所有人物中，你为什么要写那个白人？”
I want to offer some context for this comment before I go any further.
在进一步讨论之前，我想为这个评论提供一些背景信息。
First, that friend is still dear to me; it was only a disagreement.
首先，那个朋友对我来说仍然很亲爱；这只是一个分歧。
In fact, we have revisited the exchange more than once over the years, always with new eyes and insights.
事实上，多年来我们不止一次地重新审视了这一交流，总是以新的眼光和见解。
Second, we were both college seniors at the time, making the long, final laps before we would be set free into the world.
其次，我们当时都是大学四年级学生，在我们被释放到这个世界之前，要跑最后一圈。
I was shoulders-deep into my senior essay, which concerned the dynamic between white patrons and Black artists of the Harlem Renaissance.
我正在深入研究我的高级论文，该论文涉及哈莱姆文艺复兴时期的白人赞助人和黑人艺术家之间的动态。
Central to the story I was trying to tell was the 40-plus-year correspondence between Carl Van Vechten and Langston Hughes, which would become the topic of my first book.
我想要讲述的故事的核心是 Carl Van Vechten 和 Langston Hughes 之间 40 多年的通信，这将成为我第一本书的主题。
Whenever I told people about this work, they always—to a person—assumed that the draw was Hughes.
每当我告诉人们这项工作时，他们总是——对一个人——认为抽奖的是休斯。
I understood why they made that assumption.
我明白他们为什么做出这样的假设。
With his pleasing appearance and sonorous literary style, Hughes has always been easy on the eyes and the ears.
休斯以其令人愉悦的外表和铿锵有力的文风，一向赏心悦目。
I am my mother’s child, however, and I am far more drawn to art that disturbs—especially art that provokes me at the very foundation of my beliefs.
然而，我是我母亲的孩子，我更喜欢那些令人不安的艺术，尤其是那些在我的信仰基础上激发我的艺术。
I remember the peculiar cocktail of emotions that gathered in my chest when my college professor, while going over a list of options for paper topics, introduced us to the story of Carl Van Vechten and his relationship to the Harlem Renaissance.
我记得当我的大学教授在检查论文主题选项清单时，向我们介绍卡尔·范·韦希滕的故事以及他与哈莱姆文艺复兴的关系时，我的胸中聚集着一种奇特的情绪。
The title of his notorious 1926 novel jumped out and grabbed me by the throat.
他 1926 年那本臭名昭著的小说的标题突然跳出来，掐住了我的喉咙。
My parents never used the n-word, not even in the ironic way that Van Vechten claimed to use it, which is the way I had heard other Black people use it, in the correct company, in my tidy-seeming, proper-speaking Black Nashville world.
我的父母从来没有使用过“n”这个词，甚至没有以范·韦希滕声称的讽刺方式使用它，这是我听到其他黑人在正确的公司中，在我那个看起来整洁、说话得体的纳什维尔黑人世界中使用它的方式。
As a girl, I had heard white people use that word only maliciously.
作为一个女孩，我听说白人只是恶意地使用这个词。
But here was a white man from a long time ago who had used it in a title of a book!
但很久以前就有一个白人在一本书的标题中使用了它！
A book from the Harlem Renaissance, no less, the world from which I had already decided, at 20 years old, that I had myself somehow emerged.
这是一本来自哈莱姆文艺复兴时期的书，在我 20 岁时，我就已经决定，我要以某种方式从这个世界中脱颖而出。
Who was this white man?
这个白人是谁？
And what did it all mean?
这一切意味着什么？
The latter question is one that I am still trying to figure out.
后一个问题是我仍在试图弄清楚的一个问题。
But my friend had decided who that white man was and who that white man was not—both for him and for me, if I was to become the Race Woman my parents had raised me to be.
但我的朋友已经决定了那个白人是谁，那个白人不是谁——无论是为了他还是为了我，如果我想成为我父母养育我成为的种族女性。
In that moment, my friend certainly believed he had it all figured out.
那一刻，我的朋友确信他已经明白了一切。
But as college students in the 1980s, we were steeped in identity wars whose contours and implications neither of us as yet fully appreciated.
但作为 20 世纪 80 年代的大学生，我们陷入了身份之争，我们都还没有完全理解这场身份之争的轮廓和含义。
Only now, when we go back over who we were then, and what brought us to that moment in the dining hall, do we realize that we both thought we understood the world, ourselves, and each other in a way that we simply did not.
直到现在，当我们回顾当时的我们是谁，以及是什么让我们来到餐厅的那一刻时，我们才意识到我们都以为我们以一种我们根本不知道的方式理解了世界、我们自己和彼此。
I respected my friend, so his words stayed with me.
我尊重我的朋友，所以他的话一直铭记在心。
You should have seen us: two individuals whose faces bore the clear, unmistakable imprints of their multiple bloodlines and cultures of origin, trying desperately to negotiate the narrow boxes of identity that the world had created to simplify or deny—certainly not elucidate—the truly complex story of their lives.
你应该看看我们：两个人的脸上带着他们多重血统和起源文化的清晰无误的印记，拼命地试图协商世界为简化或否认——当然不是阐明——他们生活中真正复杂的故事而创造的狭窄的身份框。
We were both trying valiantly to be Black with an uppercase B years before that capitalization became standard practice.
在大写字母 B 成为标准做法的几年前，我们都勇敢地尝试用大写 B 来表示黑人。
And the kind of Blackness we were both trying to embody could not tolerate my growing love and admiration for Carl Van Vechten.
我们都试图体现的那种黑人无法容忍我对卡尔·范·韦希滕日益增长的爱和钦佩。
Have you ever tried to fall out of love?
你曾经尝试过失恋吗？
I tried, but I kept returning to Carl.
我尝试过，但我总是回到卡尔身边。
Among other things, he helped me better understand both Fisk and Meharry—those living testimonies to Black excellence during the eras of segregation and beyond that shaped my parents’ experiences.
除此之外，他帮助我更好地了解菲斯克和梅哈里——他们是种族隔离时代及之后黑人卓越表现的活生生的见证，塑造了我父母的经历。
He enabled me to view and approach the staggering explicit and implicit expectations enshrined in the halls of those institutions through the lens of his inimitable flair and irreverence.
他使我能够通过他无与伦比的才华和不敬的眼光来看待和接近这些机构大厅中所体现的令人震惊的明确和隐含的期望。
I owe him for this, and much more.
我欠他这个，还有更多。
I saw him as a gift in my life, and I did not want to give him up.
我把他视为我生命中的一份礼物，我不想放弃他。
What is a true gift?
什么是真正的礼物？
According to Lewis Hyde, it “is a thing we do not get by our own efforts.
刘易斯·海德 (Lewis Hyde) 表示，“这是我们无法通过自己的努力获得的东西。
We cannot buy it; we cannot acquire it through an act of will.
我们买不到它；我们无法通过意志行为获得它。
It is bestowed upon us.”
这是赐予我们的。”
What Van Vechten gave me is the gift of being able to see my own life in a new way.
Van Vechten 给我的礼物是能够以新的方式看待自己的生活。
I had been raised to see the history of Black people as a series of steady achievements; we were on a prolonged, and often interrupted, march toward greatness: the Du Boisian ideal.
我从小就被认为黑人的历史是一系列稳定的成就；我们正朝着伟大的目标——杜波依斯的理想——漫长且时常中断的前进。
Into this noble procession Van Vechten smashed like a Mack truck, at least in my understanding of my own history.
范·维克滕像一辆麦克卡车一样冲进了这支高贵的队伍，至少在我对自己的历史的理解中是这样。
Into the sober drawing rooms where Black progress was debated in long, immaculate speeches, Van Vechten arrived in a top hat and sarong.
走进严肃的客厅，范维克滕戴着高礼帽，穿着纱笼，在那里进行了长篇、完美的演讲，讨论了黑人的进步。
He was quite the spectacle, and his own perspectives on race, art, and identity broadened my own.
他非常引人注目，他对种族、艺术和身份的看法拓宽了我的视野。
To know someone is to feel qualified to anticipate their positions on things.
了解某人就是感觉有资格预测他们对事物的立场。
I am confident that Van Vechten would be frustrated by our current cultural climate.
我相信范维克滕会对我们当前的文化氛围感到沮丧。
We call it being correct or progressive, but at its worst, our present cultural “reckoning” invites a new call to conformity.
我们称之为正确或进步，但在最糟糕的情况下，我们目前的文化“清算”引发了新的顺从呼声。
The criminal activity of some of our modern monsters is stuff for which there should be unending punishment.
我们现代一些怪物的犯罪活动应该受到无休止的惩罚。
But compliance for its own sake is a bad habit that only Van Vechten could help me shed.
但为了服从本身就是一个坏习惯，只有 Van Vechten 才能帮助我改掉。
The correction had to come out of left field.
修正必须来自左场。
I used to be exclusively focused on the goals my parents had laid out for me.
我曾经只专注于父母为我制定的目标。
I had to be hit over the head by a tall, strange-looking fellow in a topcoat and tails.
我不得不被一个穿着大衣、穿着燕尾服、身材高大、相貌怪异的家伙击中头部。
I spent years walking the line, but I no longer play the segregation game in any of my lives, and certainly not my creative life.
我花了很多年的时间在这条线上行走，但我不再在我的生活中玩隔离游戏，当然也不再是我的创造性生活。
Carl Van Vechten made being disobedient look like so much more fun.
卡尔·范·维克滕让不听话变得更加有趣。
I think it’s fairly safe to say that the archives and galleries that Van Vechten either established or enriched constitute an exceptional and truly fine legacy.
我认为可以相当肯定地说，范·维克滕建立或丰富的档案馆和画廊构成了一项非凡且真正优秀的遗产。
His photographs betray the range of his curiosity and the depth of his awareness of the talent that flourished around him.
他的照片暴露了他好奇心的范围和他对周围才华横溢的认识的深度。
It is not possible to tell a complete story of African-American life without including Van Vechten’s photographs—evidence of his own foresight and rightness when it came to recognizing talent.
如果不包括范维克滕的照片，就不可能讲述非裔美国人生活的完整故事——这些照片证明了他在识别人才方面的远见和正确性。
He’s the white drop in the black paint—to put my own spin on the story of Lucius Brockway in Invisible Man —that makes Blackness shine brighter.
他是黑色颜料中的白色一滴——用我自己的视角来诠释《隐形人》中卢修斯·布罗克韦的故事——这让黑色更加闪耀。
I believe it’s very safe to say that his infamous 1926 novel is not among his greatest achievements.
我相信可以非常肯定地说，他 1926 年臭名昭著的小说并不是他最伟大的成就之一。
By the end of his life, even Van Vechten himself may have agreed.
在他生命的最后一刻，甚至连范维克滕本人也可能同意了。
Still, the novel was the bestseller of the Harlem Renaissance, outdistancing even Claude McKay’s equally scandalous (according to Du Bois) novel Home to Harlem (1928).
尽管如此，这部小说仍然是哈莱姆文艺复兴时期的畅销书，甚至超过了克劳德·麦凯（根据杜波依斯的说法）同样丑闻的小说《哈莱姆之家》（1928）。
In the pre-internet age, when there was much less to talk about, everyone was talking about Van Vechten’s novel.
在前互联网时代，可谈论的东西少得多，每个人都在谈论范韦希滕的小说。
Van Vechten loved being famous.
范·维克滕喜欢出名。
The naked pleasure he took in being known sprang up alongside the panic that grew in him as he saw his fame turn quickly to infamy.
当他看到自己的名气很快变成臭名昭著时，他在被人知道时所获得的赤裸裸的快乐与他内心的恐慌同时出现。
When his novel was being denounced from pillar to post, he had dreams that he was being chased by Black people.
当他的小说遭到各方谴责时，他梦见自己被黑人追赶。
“At 4 Langston Hughes appears & later Jim Harris with a list of questions regarding Nigger Heaven, as apparently he is being pestered by people who say I have betrayed the race!
“4点时，兰斯顿·休斯出现，随后吉姆·哈里斯出现，提出了一系列有关黑鬼天堂的问题，因为显然他正被那些说我背叛了种族的人纠缠！
All this upsets me as much as usual,” he wrote in his daybook in September 1926.
所有这一切都像往常一样让我心烦意乱，”他在 1926 年 9 月的日记中写道。
He slept badly that night and sought comfort from his wife at the time, Fania Marinoff: “Before dawn crept into Marinoff’s bed.” His distress generated vivid, violent dreams.
那天晚上他睡得很不好，并向当时的妻子法尼亚·马里诺夫寻求安慰：“黎明前爬上了马里诺夫的床。”他的痛苦使他产生了生动而暴力的梦。
“I go to bed about one & dream I am a Negro being chased in riots,” he recorded in one entry.
“我上床睡觉时梦见自己是一名在骚乱中被追赶的黑人，”他在一篇文章中写道。
Even good reviews and breathtaking sales could not cure his anxiety.
即使好评和惊人的销量也无法消除他的焦虑。
“I dream I am a Negro & being pursued,” he wrote four days after the first set of bad dreams.
“我梦见自己是一名黑人，并被追捕，”在第一次噩梦发生四天后，他写道。
It’s fair to say that Van Vechten got what was coming to him.
可以公平地说，范维克滕得到了他想要的东西。
He ignored friends who told him he was making a mistake by using that title, that people would simply not understand.
他忽略了朋友们的意见，他们告诉他，他使用这个头衔是一个错误，人们根本无法理解。
He argued with intimates, though he registered the pain he caused them in his notes to himself.
他与亲密的人发生争执，尽管他在自己的笔记中记录了他给他们带来的痛苦。
When Van Vechten tried the title out on Countee Cullen, the author of Color and The Black Christ turned “white with hurt,” as Van Vechten wrote in his daybook.
当范·维克滕在卡伦伯爵身上尝试这个书名时，正如范·维克滕在他的日记中所写，《色彩与黑色基督》的作者“因受伤而脸色苍白”。
Van Vechten was exceptionally stubborn, and he rejected the advice of his own father, who took him to task for his hubris.
范维克滕异常固执，他拒绝了自己父亲的建议，父亲责备了他的狂妄自大。
“If you are trying to help the race, as I am assured you are,” the elder Van Vechten wrote his son, “I think every word you write should be a respectful one toward the black.” But Van Vechten wouldn’t listen, so he wound up like Narcissus, obsessed with his own reflection.
“如果你想帮助种族，正如我向你保证的那样，”老范维克滕写信给他的儿子，“我认为你写的每一个字都应该是对黑人的尊重。”但范维克滕不听，所以他最终像纳西索斯一样，沉迷于自己的倒影。
He was perhaps most mortified by the reaction of Du Bois, who in his review for the Crisis called the novel “a blow in the face.” Du Bois expressed the view of many Black readers: Van Vechten had been invited into our home only to call us out of our name.
也许最让他感到羞愧的是杜波依斯的反应，杜波依斯在对《危机》的评论中称这本小说是“当头一棒”。杜波依斯表达了许多黑人读者的观点：范韦希滕被邀请到我们家只是为了叫我们的名字。
The intimate, domestic analogy—the home—must have pained Van Vechten, who spent most of the 1920s in and out of the parlors and dining rooms of various Black friends and acquaintances.
这种亲密的家庭类比——家——一定让范·维克滕感到痛苦，他在 20 年代的大部分时间里都在各种黑人朋友和熟人的客厅和餐厅里进出。
The apartment on West 55th Street that Van Vechten shared with Marinoff was known as “the midtown office of the NAACP.” Parties were so important to Van Vechten that in his final novel, published in 1930 and fittingly titled Parties, he paid homage to their centrality in his life.
范维克滕与马里诺夫合住的位于西 55 街的公寓被称为“全国有色人种协进会的市中心办公室”。派对对 Van Vechten 来说是如此重要，以至于在他 1930 年出版的最后一部小说中，他以恰当的标题《派对》向派对在他生活中的中心地位致敬。
But in 1920s America, social occasions provided more than just opportunities to drink gin out of someone else’s shoe.
但在 20 年代的美国，社交场合提供的不仅仅是从别人鞋子里喝杜松子酒的机会。
They gave Black and white people a rare chance to congregate as equals, even in New York, where color bars prevented such interactions.
他们为黑人和白人提供了难得的平等聚集的机会，即使在纽约，种族隔离阻碍了这种互动。
I don’t think the negative critiques of his novel would have penetrated—if Van Vechten would ever have appreciated the degree of injury his book caused—if he hadn’t been shut out of some of his favorite interior spaces as a result, such as the Smalls Paradise nightclub, which allowed him back in only after Zora Neale Hurston and Walter White helped smooth things over.
我认为，如果范维克滕没有意识到他的书所造成的伤害程度，如果他没有被排除在他最喜欢的一些室内空间之外，比如斯莫尔斯天堂夜总会，只有在佐拉·尼尔·赫斯顿和沃尔特·怀特帮助解决问题后，才允许他重新进入，我认为对他小说的负面批评不会渗透进来。
And ultimately even Du Bois forgave him.
最终，就连杜波依斯也原谅了他。
He sat for Van Vechten’s camera.
他坐在范·维克滕的镜头前。
And in 1928, just two years after he urged his Crisis readers to throw Van Vechten’s novel down the sewer, he was inviting the author of that book to witness the wedding of his only daughter, Yolande.
1928 年，就在他敦促《危机》读者将范·维克滕的小说扔进下水道两年后，他邀请该书的作者见证他唯一的女儿约兰德的婚礼。
Ultimately, what had looked like a war between Du Bois and Van Vechten amounted only to a temporary disagreement.
最终，杜波依斯和范维克滕之间看似一场战争，只是暂时的分歧。
Van Vechten learned his lesson.
范维克滕吸取了教训。
He never published another fictional word about Black people.
他再也没有发表过任何有关黑人的虚构词语。
And he triumphed in the end.
他最终取得了胜利。
Eternally stubborn, he continued to go the way his own blood beat, and he served the uplift of Blackness for the rest of his natural life and beyond, with his archives, photographs, scrapbooks, and diaries—and all the life lessons he left behind for someone like me to come along and learn from, and enjoy.
他永远固执地继续走自己血液跳动的路，在他的余生及以后的生活中，他用他的档案、照片、剪贴簿和日记，以及他留下的所有人生教训，供像我这样的人一起学习和享受，为黑人的提升服务。
Recently, I have been happily engaged in an imagined, internal argument with Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, a 2023 nonfiction work that teeters between memoir and narrative.
最近，我很高兴地与克莱尔·戴德勒 (Claire Dederer) 的《怪物：粉丝的困境》(Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma) 进行了一场想象中的内部争论，这是一部 2023 年出版的非小说类作品，介于回忆录和叙事之间。
Early in the book, Dederer confesses that she “wished someone would invent an online calculator—the user would enter the name of an artist, whereupon the calculator would assess the heinousness of the crime versus the greatness of the art and spit out a verdict: you could or could not consume the work of this artist.”
在书的开头，戴德勒承认，她“希望有人能发明一个在线计算器——用户输入一位艺术家的名字，计算器就会评估犯罪的可憎性与艺术的伟大性，并给出一个结论：你可以或不能消费这位艺术家的作品。”
The catalyst for Monsters is Dederer’s uncomfortable, unsettled imagined relationship with Roman Polanski; he’s the “monster” whose criminal behavior—the rape of a 13-year-old girl, to be exact—is something Dederer cannot reconcile with the clear genius of his creative vision.
《怪物》的催化剂是戴德勒与罗曼·波兰斯基之间不舒服、不稳定的想象关系；他是一个“怪物”，他的犯罪行为——确切地说是强奸一名 13 岁女孩——是德德勒无法与他天才的创造性愿景相协调的事情。
“I wasn’t supposed to love this work, or this man,” she writes in her opening paragraphs.
“我不应该喜欢这份工作，或者这个男人，”她在开头几段中写道。
“He was the object of boycotts and lawsuits and outrage.”
“他是抵制、诉讼和愤怒的对象。”
Polanski and Van Vechten are miles apart in many respects, and Van Vechten was not a criminal, although he did spend time in jail as a young man when he failed to pay alimony to his first wife, Anna Snyder.
波兰斯基和范维克滕在很多方面相差甚远，范维克滕并不是罪犯，尽管他年轻时确实因未能向第一任妻子安娜·斯奈德支付赡养费而入狱。
He was also an unapologetically gay man at a moment in history when homosexuality itself constituted a crime.
在同性恋本身就构成犯罪的历史时刻，他也是一个毫无歉意的同性恋者。
For many years of his life, Van Vechten struggled with alcohol, and sometimes when he got drunk, he became violent with his beloved Fania Marinoff, his wife of 50 years, whom he referred to as “the most permanent influence” in his life.
范维克滕一生中很多年都在与酒精作斗争，有时当他喝醉时，他会对心爱的法尼娅·马里诺夫（他结婚 50 年的妻子）发起暴力，他称她是他一生中“最永久的影响”。
His diaries reveal the shame his bad behavior caused him.
他的日记揭示了他的不良行为给他带来的耻辱。
When he got drunk, he could be nasty, as he was during one evening with Hughes, Hurston, and others.
当他喝醉时，他可能会变得令人讨厌，就像他在一个晚上与休斯、赫斯顿和其他人在一起时那样。
“I get very drunk & abusive & finally pass out,” he recorded in a 1926 daybook entry.
“我喝得酩酊大醉，胡言乱语，最后昏倒了，”他在 1926 年的日记中写道。
Sometimes when he became abusive with Marinoff, she would retreat to the house of a close friend for the night.
有时，当他辱骂马里诺夫时，她就会躲到一位密友家里过夜。
Two months before Nigger Heaven was published, they got into a fight and Marinoff left, saying she was leaving him for good.
黑鬼天堂出版前两个月，他们发生了争执，马里诺夫离开了，说她要永远离开他。
He couldn’t sleep and paced the floor well into the night.
他无法入睡，在地板上踱步直到深夜。
“She says she is through forever,” he wrote in his daybook the next morning.
“她说她已经永远结束了，”第二天早上他在日记中写道。
“If she is, what is there in life for me?” They soon reconciled, and he was never violent with his wife again, although they continued to quarrel, often in public.
“如果她是，那我的生活还有什么意义呢？”他们很快就和解了，尽管他们经常在公共场合争吵，但他再也没有对妻子施暴过。
Choosing an offensive word for the title of your book is not illegal, but critics today continue to treat Van Vechten as a noxious element in the glorious, ongoing pageant of Black progress, a rude stain on an otherwise glittering moment of Black pride that they would prefer to remove.
在你的书名中选择一个冒犯性的词并不违法，但今天的批评家仍然将范·韦希滕视为光荣的、正在进行的黑人进步盛会中的有害元素，是黑人骄傲的灿烂时刻的粗鲁污点，他们宁愿将其去除。
In a 2014 review of the latest Van Vechten biography, Lawrence Jackson calls Van Vechten a fickle, insincere schemer and likens him to a vampire.
在 2014 年对范·维克滕最新传记的评论中，劳伦斯·杰克逊称范·维克滕是一个善变、不真诚的阴谋家，并将他比作吸血鬼。
Most of the time, however, Van Vechten is just ignored.
然而，大多数时候，范维克滕只是被忽视。
I wonder how Van Vechten would fare in Dederer’s hands.
我想知道 Van Vechten 在 Dederer 的手中会表现如何。
And I am glad that the calculator that Dederer envisions does not exist.
我很高兴德德勒设想的计算器并不存在。
There is no formula for deciding whose art survives and whose does not—nor should there be.
没有一个公式可以决定谁的艺术得以幸存，谁的艺术不能生存——也不应该有公式。
Van Vechten would certainly have been eliminated in the early rounds of the ongoing game of cancel culture.
范维克滕肯定会在正在进行的取消文化游戏的早期几轮中被淘汰。
In many ways, he has suffered the same fate as others whose past misdeeds have come back to haunt them.
在很多方面，他都遭受了与其他人相同的命运，他们过去的罪行再次困扰着他们。
But there must be distinctions made between outright pathological behavior and acts that, however harmful, are evidence only of arrogance, shortsightedness, or poor judgment.
但必须区分彻头彻尾的病态行为和无论多么有害但仅表明傲慢、短视或判断力差的行为。
When it comes to Van Vechten, I don’t pretend objectivity.
当谈到范维克滕时，我并不假装客观。
To the contrary, I use the language of love on purpose.
相反，我是故意使用爱的语言。
I love all the gifts that Van Vechten left behind for me to learn from, his triumphs as well as his failures, chronicled in black type on white paper, in the inimitable scrawl of his handwriting, and in the various bold and exotic colors he used for his signature in correspondence, and in his photographs.
我喜欢范维克滕留给我学习的所有礼物，他的成功和失败，这些都以白纸上的黑色字体、他独特的潦草笔迹、以及他在信件和照片中用于签名的各种大胆而异国情调的颜色记录下来。
It’s all there: his mistakes, inconsistencies, fears, and fantasies.
一切都在那里：他的错误、矛盾、恐惧和幻想。
Having spent most of my adult life inside his, I have had the distinct privilege of watching how he changed and grew over time.
我成年后的大部分时间都在他的身边度过，我有幸目睹他如何随着时间的推移而改变和成长。
He was a human being who lived a human life, which is always a messy business.
他是一个人，过着人类的生活，这总是一件混乱的事情。
In Paths Toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry, a book that has shaped my perspective on life, anthropologist Michael Jackson writes, “The problem with our intellectual endeavor to transcend the vicissitudes of lived experience is that it inclines us to believe there is a deep split within Being itself between a ‘higher’ conceptual realm where certitude may be found and an ‘inferior’ realm of the sensory, bodily, material, and practical life which is intrinsically unstable and uncertain.” For certain people, life is an enterprise of the mind alone, not of the body, the emotions—feelings.
人类学家迈克尔·杰克逊在《走向清理之路：激进经验主义和民族志探究》一书中写道：“我们在智力上努力超越生活经验的变迁，问题是它让我们倾向于相信存在本身存在着深刻的分裂，在‘更高’的概念领域（可以找到确定性）和‘低等’领域（感官、身体、物质和实际生活）之间存在着深刻的分歧。”这本质上是不稳定和不确定的。”对于某些人来说，生活只是心灵的事业，而不是身体和情感的事业。
What’s wrong with feelings?
感情有什么问题吗？
Dederer tells on herself when she confesses that she once “rejected the word ‘feelings,’ with its weakness and its vagueness and its, its womanliness .”
当黛德勒承认她曾经“拒绝‘感情’这个词，因为它的弱点、它的模糊性以及它的女性气质……”时，她讲述了自己的故事。
But it is wrong to suppose that, in Jackson’s words, “knowing is a kind of outside beholding rather than a matter of participation in the ongoing drama of the world.”
但用杰克逊的话说，“认识是一种外部观察，而不是参与世界上正在发生的戏剧”，这是错误的。
I contend, along with Jackson, Van Vechten, and many others, that the glory of human life lies in the mess that we create or that is created for us—“the ongoing drama of the world.” Instead of ignoring, sidestepping, or simplifying the mess, taming the wildness, or muting the color, let us embrace the vicissitudes and find joy and meaning in the messiness.
我与杰克逊、范维克滕和许多其他人一样认为，人类生活的荣耀在于我们创造的混乱或为我们创造的混乱——“世界上正在上演的戏剧”。让我们拥抱沧桑，在混乱中寻找快乐和意义，而不是忽视、回避或简化混乱，驯服野性，或淡化色彩。
In other words, let us all love the blood.
换句话说，让我们都热爱血液。