We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
--Little Gidding, by T.S. Eliot
In this modest review of Never Stop: A Memoir, I hope to do for my former student in Freshman Seminar, Bernard Sutton (aka Simba Sana) what Manning Marable did for Malcom X, namely, to probe, not prove, the true meaning of the book and its suffering author. Just yesterday, after 12 hours of brutal driving through heavy rain and thick fog, I snagged my Advance Readers Copy of Never Stop and devoured it by 3 a.m. this morning.
The title of this fine memoir is appropriate because the author never quite stops: the true meaning is in the journey, not the destination. Three curious themes mark the journey for Simba: his ever-present mother, his absent father and a looming question: “Where will I go after death?” uttered by the author at age 9 and again by his son about the same age. These three themes frame the marvelous story.
Yup, I was the one who suggested that Bernard read Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice that led to Malcolm X who wrote: “the price of freedom is death,” and to Simba. However, the author eventually reads James Baldwin who wrote: “There's only one race, and we're all a part of it.” Simba then begins to move beyond Nation of Islam, the African Development Organization, Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism to the Dalai Lama and The Great Books of Western Civilization, and back to his childhood favorites C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. In the closing pages, the author realizes that Bernard Sutton and Simba Sana have “essentially the same meaning” for him. Wow, what a revelation.
Sutton and Sana never stops thinking about his beloved mother, afflicted by mental illness like Malcolm X's wife, Betty Shabazz. Every indication was that he was the Good Son, but she also frames the narrative. Her fierce Roman Catholicism led him to St. Anthony Catholic School in Brookland, in the shadow of the National Shrine and Catholic U. where I was Director of Journalism Studies at the time. He went on to Gonzaga Jesuit High on Capitol Hill and then to Mount St. Mary's College where I taught Rhetoric & Communications plus Freshman Seminar for three decades. The Catholic Ethos seems to have saturated the soul of young Bernard Sutton, and that led to this question to his dear mother: “Mom, who is my father?” She answers: “God is your father, and you will live forever.” Our Father who art in Heaven....
Seven pages later, young Bernard asks his mother: Where will I go after death?” The nuns had given him a clear if over-simplified answer: Pray the 60 prayers of your Rosary each night “so that our souls could reach the eternal bliss of heaven, instead of the suffering everlasting in hell.” At the end of the memoir, February 2017, his son Talib asks: “What's going to happen when I die?” His father's reply is fuzzier, much more abstract. The student of The Great Books graduate program at St. John's College in Annapolis provides a more philosophical answer about a “belief in life after death,” and encourages the 9-year-old to “seek out his own answers to life's big questions.” But this is Simba's story, not his son's, and the author concludes that his son “dropped a big question on me that actually represented the completion of a circle in my life's journey,” where we know the place for the first time.
Meanwhile, Simba looks for love in all the wrong places, and his “spiritual adviser” warns him that he must find love in his current wife or else “our children would resent me.” But he tells the mother of his three children that he has never really loved her and that the marriage is irretrievably broken.
Finally, on Feb. 15, 2007, Simba meets an intriguing Realtor at a convention but doesn't see her again until May 3 when he needs her advice on renting a property. One thing leads to another until Simba and his wife talk openly about divorce on May 14. The next morning, Simba has the grace of a mystical experience and calls the Realtor: “I don't care if you ever speak to me again,but I must tell you this. I know that you're the one for me!” Another guru called this a “timeless moment,” an overpowering instant without thought, but when he tells his trustworthy “spiritual adviser” who practices Yorube, she claims that the new woman in his life is damaged, not good for him, and that she would “eventually stray.” The Realtor, who had recently decided to stay single, seemed offended by the “spiritual adviser” and decided to confront her, obtaining an apology. Two weeks after the impulsive phone call, Simba proposed and she accepted.
You might think this is a romantic ending, but not so. Simba's chain of Karibu bookstores began to falter, his first marriage and divorce turned bitter and he was jailed twice when he could not come up with child support money. The bookstore debacle hit The Washington Post on January 24, 2008, and Simba began to liquidate. Ironically, he found peace when his workaholic days were over, his divorce went through later that year, he remarried shortly after, and his Ex apologized for the rocky divorce. He picked up a Master's Degree in Great Books, taught a year at Dunbar High in D.C., and managed a tax service office. He now gives inspirational talks to young men and shares custody with his kids. “Doing what I love, not being in conflict with myself, having a loving family, and being intimately connected to God are what I'm seeking,” Simba ends Never Stop, as the journey continues.
As a kind of postscript to this review I'd like to add one more insight into Simba's transformation. He does not moan over the horrible suffering he endured over the past decade. Instead, he suggests that it was a cleansing process that made him a better person. And he found God again, but not the plastic Jesus of his youth. “If God is love,” he says in a chapter titled Love, “then loving someone else can't be temporary....” That's a reference to my favorite piece of Scripture. Whenever I read the First Letter of John, chapter 4, half-verse 16b, I imagine someone coming up to John and asking, Who or what is God? In Star Wars, we hear: “May the Force be with you.” But John says, “God is love, and we who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in us.” Love never dies.
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Rating	4.2 (207488 ratings)
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Category	Communication

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