BECOMING SOMEBODY

By Jack E. White

At the start of his exploration into the convoluted soul of Jesse Jackson, biographer Marshall Frady makes two highly charged assertions about the hugeness of the task. Any serious evaluation of Jackson, he writes, must begin with the acknowledgement that "the fundamental American crisis is that of race"; and with a recognition that the gulf between blacks and whites remains so deep that there are "inherent limits to any white writer's understanding beyond which he properly should not venture."

In this astonishing biography, Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson (Random House; 552 pages; $28.50), Frady proves that the first concern is valid, if limiting, but that the second, at least in his case, is misplaced. This is as subtle and perceptive a portrait as any black writer could have produced of one of the most complex public figures of our times. Jackson has always combined the moral clarity of a prophet with the grubby opportunism of a jackleg preacher. The tendency among the millions who have watched his career unfold over the past 30 years has been to seize upon one of those facets of his character to the exclusion of the other. Frady, who has previously delved into the lives of George Wallace and Billy Graham, shows that both aspects of Jackson's personality are not only genuine but also inextricably entangled. Jackson's lifelong task has been to put flesh on his trademark slogan, "I am somebody," which has always seemed directed as much at himself as to those he has preached to.

The fact that Jackson was born black in the segregated South is essential to unraveling his character, but, as Frady convincingly demonstrates, the pangs of racial insult are not the sole, or even most important, source of Jackson's relentless drive for attention and self-definition. The illegitimate offspring of 16-year-old Helen Burns and her married next-door neighbor Noah Robinson, Jackson suffered the taunt "Jesse ain't got no daddy" from other children in his native Greenville, South Carolina. After his mother married hardworking Charles Jackson and had a child with him, three-year old Jesse was sent to live with his grandmother.

From these painful beginnings was forged a classic example of what author Colin Wilson called "the outsider," which Frady describes as a "prodigally gifted but displaced loner who undertakes to compensate for his alienation from the world around him by resorting to extraordinary, and often tragic, exertions to reinvent himself in heroic proportions." In Jackson's case that translated into a total identification with the inspiring struggle of the civil rights movement. Unfortunately for him, his quest has played out in the morally murky aftermath of Martin Luther King's assassination, which robbed the movement--and the nation--of the one leader capable of playing the role Jackson aspires to.

Jackson's subsequent rise has been as ambiguous as the era in which he lives. Frady tells it all, from Jackson's self-aggrandizing appearance on the Today show the morning after King's death dressed in a turtleneck stained with the blood of the martyr, to his break from King's old colleagues to form his own grandiosely named organization, People United to Serve Humanity, to his two historic runs for President. On the personal side, Frady recounts Jackson's loving relationship with his wife and five children, for whom Jackson has supplied the stability he never had, as well as the rumors of his legendary womanizing and the stories of his shaking down black businessmen who benefited from his campaigns to open up opportunities in the corporate world.

Frady provides such a full-bodied portrait of this awesomely gifted but equally flawed man that it should provoke a repositioning of Jackson's place in history. For Jackson, as Frady writes, has accomplished much more than he is usually given credit for. His presidential bids, far from being merely extravagant displays of ego, represented the consolidation of King's most significant achievement, ensuring the right to vote for blacks. His exhortations to black youths to rise above their circumstances--"You may be born in the slum, but the slum is not born in you"--have inspired uncounted numbers to resist the sociological forces that drag so many others into the underclass. Frady's unsparing but sympathetic study captures all the paradoxes that make up Jesse Jackson. It also establishes that, with an effort, a white writer can comprehend both the deepest sorrows and greatest joys of black Americans.