Who wants to be a MacArthur genius?

Who Wants to Be a MacArthur Genius?

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot vividly remembers the moment she learned she had been named a MacArthur Fellow. The year was 1984 and the young sociology professor had just published The Good High School The book received high marks for her pioneering technique of "portraiture," a joining of beautiful, journalistic narrative with the drier empirical data. Still, for all the kudos, hers was a name known mostly in academia.

So she stood there, at first all visceral reaction, heart pounding, profusely sweating, as she was told she'd be getting $40,000 a year for the next 5 years. Tax free. No strings attached. "I hung up the phone and got very still, very quiet," she says, her voice still excited 15 years later. "Then I heard an unusual voice come out of my mouth. It said `Good, Sara. Now you can write a book about your mother.'"

Such a project was counter to everything the social scientist in her had ever contemplated. But the money bought her the time, the freedom, the luxury of writing her critically acclaimed and popular book, A Balm in Gilead, a biography of her mother, Margaret Morgan-Lawrence, one of the first black women to graduate Cornell and Columbia with a medical degree. Since then, she's weighed in with I've Known Rivers, a meditation on the lives of a handful of successful blacks and the things they overcame, and her latest, Respect, an exploration of that civility. "I probably began to do work I would not have done if I had not received the award," she states.

Over the last 18 years, the MacArthur Foundation has awarded $563 million in grant monies to 176 people across a variety of disciplines, from fiction writers to community activists to scientists. Sixty-three of the recipients have been African American, pulling in about $19 million of the assets. The awards range from $160,000 to $375,000, depending on the recipient's age, and are given out over 5 years.

But in a world full of grants and awards, the MacArthur has its own ethereal status, to the point where the gifts are known as "genius awards." Part of the allure is the way the awards are granted. Gone is the usual peer review and recommendation process and politics of most application-based procedures. Instead, the foundation relies on somewhere between 120 to 125 "scouts" to make recommendations to its selection committee. The identity of both the scouts and the board are kept secret. Thus, out of the blue, around each June somewhere between 20 to 30 people are surprised with the news they have won the award, with no way of knowing the identity of their nominators. "You're in trouble if you're hoping and wishing for it every year. It's a totally secretive and mysterious process," warns Lawrence-Lightfoot. "But that's part of why its so compelling and fantastic. It's mysterious. You have no idea you're going to win."

Still, what do you have to do to be labeled a genius? The foundation notes that the awards are based not on one's past performance, but rather is an "investment in a nominee's originality, insight and potential to effect positive change." They lay out criteria, most of which sounds standard -- be a creative and independent thinker, have work of excellent quality, etc. But it's this designation that makes all the difference with the award: "A person should need a fellowship to accomplish what could otherwise not be done."

It is that tending hand that seems to guide the Foundation. First of all, scouts seem to look for people on the verge. The list of black winners includes names like academic Skip Gates; novelists Octavia Butler and Derek Wolcott; children's advocate Marian Wright Edelman; actress Anna Deavere Smith; and artist Kara Walker. All received the awards at points where the cognoscenti, but probably not the public, were aware of them. And in its aftermath, they all seem to have taken places as pillars in our communities and culture. "They are geared towards people who are about to make it big or need time or space to develop work that's pathbreaking and exciting," says Lawrence-Lightfoot. "Its not like the Nobel, where you have to be extremely senior with a big body of work."

And the award is like being touched by an angel in more ways than one. Reached at his Philadelphia home, novelist John Edgar Wideman cracks a joke when asked about his 1993 award of $315,000: "The only thing bad about it is the last check." For some that check makes the difference of daily as well as creative livelihood. In 1992, Unita Blackwell, a Mississippi grassroots activist, remembers screaming "Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Lord," at the news that she would be getting $350,000. "The government got a lot of it," she playfully gripes now (the awards became taxable in 1986). But with that money the poor elderly woman paid down her FHA housing loan, bought a used car and put aside money for her grandson's education as well as funding community initiatives. "I was very poor and didn't have any money. I made $500 a month at best," she says. "Now I'm traveling and putting together projects."

But as great a boost may be the message the award sends. "It's really a gift that has tremendous reinforcement. It's recognition. If there's not success in terms of sales, it reminds you that someone's watching." And so the award not only cites people on the fringes of success, but has a strong presence in elevating them to it. Indeed, after his award Wideman wrote his seminal works: The Cattle Killing, Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society, and Two Cities. "I'm certain that spate of creativity is connected with that extra money. There was a boost in confidence," he says.

But not only the obscure can win the award. Example: 1998's black winners were established writers Charles Johnson (Middle Passage) and Ishmael Reed (Mumbo Jumbo). Last year's black recipients were artist Fred Wilson, activist Gay J. McDougall and lauded historian and W.E.B. DuBois biographer David Levering Lewis (W.E.B. DuBois: A Reader).

The Foundation says nominations often take time, even years, to come to fruition. But still, while one shouldn't count on it, that phone call is a lovely fantasy for the writer slaving away long hours, wishing for a little more time and freedom, a little help in lifting his light from under a bushel. You never know, as Wideman points out, who's watching. And perhaps there will indeed be a joyful ring from Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, who now sits on the MacArthur Board, similar to the one she made to her stunned friend Anna Deavere Smith in 1996. "We had a real sister conversation," she laughs. "In each call, I'm more excited than getting it myself."

Photo (Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot)