Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Ye t the advent of the Panthers was as in evitable as the arrival of that day in Montgomery, Alabama, when Mrs. Rosa Parks refused to stand up on that bus and TO BE BAP TIZED 4-55 give her seat to a white man. That day had been coming for a very long time; danger upon danger, and humiliation upon hu miliation, had piled intolerably high and gave Mrs. Parks her pla tform. If Mrs. Parks had merely had a headache that day, and if the community had had no grievances, there would have been no bus boycott and we would never have heard of Martin Luther King. Ju st so with the Panthers: it was inevitable that the fury would erupt, that a black man, openly, in the sight of all his fellows, should challenge the policeman's gun, and not only that, but the policeman's right to be in the ghetto at all, and that man happened to be Hue y. It is not conceivable that the challenge thus thrown down by this rather stubby, scrubbed-looking, gingerbread-colored youth could have had such repercussions if he had not been articulating the rage and repudiating the humiliation of thousands, more, millions of men. Hue y, on that day, the day which prompted Bobby Seale to describe Huey as "the baddest motherfucker in history," re stored to the men and women of the ghetto their honor. And, for this reason, the Panthers, far from being an illegal or a lawless organization, are a great force for peace and stability in the ghetto. But, as this suggests an unprecedented measure of autonomy for the ghetto citizens, no one in authority is prepared to face this overwhelmingly obvious fact. White America remains unable to believe that black America's griev ances are real; they are unable to believe this because they cannot face what this fact says about themselves and their country; and the effect of this massive and hostile incompre hension is to increase the danger in which all black people live here, especially the young. No one is more aware of this than the Black Panther leadership. This is why they are so anxious to create work and study programs in the ghetto-every thing from hot lunches for school children to academic courses in high schools and colleges to the content, format, and distri bution of the Black Panther newspapers. All of these are an tidotes to the demoralization which is the scourge of the ghetto, are techniques of self -realization. This is also why they are taught to bear arms-not, like most white Americans, be cause they fear their neighbors, though indeed they have the +56 NO NAM E IN THE STRE ET most to fear, but in order, this time, to protect their lives, their women and children, their homes, rather than the lif e and property of an Uncle Sam who has rarely been able to treat his black nephews with more than a vaguely benign con tempt.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Why-and how-does one moYe from the middle of the road where one was aiding �e groes into the streets-to shoot them? Now it is easy enough to state flatly that Faulkner's middle of the road does not-cann ot-exist and that he is guilty of great emotional and intellectual dishonesty in pretending that it does. I think this is why he clings to his fantasy. It is easy enough to accuse him of hypocrisy when he speaks of man being "i ndestructible because of his simple \\ill to freedom." But he is not being hypocritical; he means it. It is only that Man is one thing-a rather unlud .. ·-y abstraction in this case and the Negroes he has always known, so fatally tied up in his mind \\ith his grandfather's slaYes, are quite another. He is at his best, and is perfectly sincere, when he declares, in Hmpe1·s, "To liYe anywhere in the world today and be against equalit y because of race or color is like liYing in Alaska and being against snow. We ha,·e already got snow. And as \\'ith the Alaskan, merely to li,·e in armistice with it is not enough. Like the Alaskan, we had better use it." And though this seems to be flatly opposed to his statement (in an interYiew printed in T11e Repo1·te1·) that, if it came to a contest between the federal gm·ernment and Mississippi, he would fight for Mississippi, "eYen if it meant going out into the streets and shooting � e groes," he means that, too. Faulkner means eYerything he says, means them all at once, and with ,·ery nearly the same intensitY. This is wh,· his statements demand our attention. He has . perhaps nne � before more concretely expressed what it means to be a Southerner. \Vhat seems to define the Southerner, in his own mind at 2I2 NO BODY KN OWS MY NAME any rate, is his relationship to the North, that is to the rest of the Republic, a relationship which can at the very best be described as uneasy. It is apparently very difficult to be at once a Southerner and an American; so difficult that many of the South's most independent minds arc forced into the American exile; which is not, of course, without its aggravating, circular effect on the interior and public lif e of the South. A Bosto nian, say, who leaves Boston is not regarded by the citizenry he has abandoned with the same venomous distrust as is the Southerner who leaves the South.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I do not belie, ·e a police officer will do that." 452 NO NAM E IN THE STR EE T This is a fairly vivid and accurate example of the American piety at work. The beginning of the statement is revealing indeed: " -- racism, bigotry, and segregation is something we have to wipe out of our hearts and minds and not on the street." One can wonder to whom the "we" here refers, but there isn't any question as to the object of the tense, veiled accusation contained in "not on the street." Whoever the "we" is, it is probably not the speaker-to lea ve it at that: but the anarchy and danger aon the street" are the fault of the blacks. Unnecessarily: for the police are honorable, and the courts arc just. It is no accident that Americans cling to this dream. It in volves American self-love on some deep, disastrously adoles cent level. And Americans arc very carefully and deliberately conditioned to believe this fantasy: by their politicians, by the news they get and the way they read it, by the movies, and the television screen, and by every aspect of the popular cul ture. If I learned nothing else in Hollywood, I learned how abjectly the pu rveyors of the popular culture are manipulated. The brainwashing is so thorough that blunt, brutal reality stands not a chance against it; the revelation of corruption in high places, as in the recent "scandals" in New Jersey, for example, has no ef fect whatever on the American compla cency; nor have any of our recent assassinations had any more effect than to cause Americans to arm-thus proving their faith in the law!-and double-lock their doors. No doubt, be hind these locked doors, with their weapons handy, they switch on the tube and watch The F. B.I., or some similarly reassuring fable . It means nothing, therefore, to say to so thoroughly insulated a people that the forces of crime and the forces of law and order work hand in hand in the ghetto, bleeding it day and night. It means nothing to say that, in the eyes of the black and the poor certainly, the principal distinc tion between a policeman and a criminal is to be found in their attire. A criminal can break into one's house without warning, at will, and harass or molest everyone in the house, and even commit murder, and so can a cop, and they do; whoever operates whatever hustle in the ghetto without pay ing ofT the cops does not stay in business long; and it will be rcmcmbcrcd-M alcolm certainly remembered it-that the TO BE BAPTI ZED 453 dope trade flourished in the ghetto for years without ever be ing seriously molested.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Elijah was at the head of our table, and I was seated at his left. I can scarcely re member what we ate, except that it was plentiful, sane, and simple-so sane and simple that it made me fe el extremely decadent, and I think that I drank, therefore, two glasses of milk. Elijah mentioned having seen me on television and said 324 THE FIRE NEXT TIME that it seemed to him that I was not yet brainwashed and was trying to become myself. He said this in a curiously unnerving way, his eyes looking into mine and one hand half hiding his lips, as though he were trying to conceal bad teeth. But his teeth were not bad. Then I remembered hearing that he had spent time in prison. I suppose that I JVould like to become myself, whatever that may mean, but I knew that Elijah's meaning and mine were not the same. I said yes, I was trying to be me, but I did not know how to say more than that, and so I waited. Whenever Elijah spoke, a kind of chorus arose from the table, saying "Yes, that's right." This began to set my teeth on edge. And Elijah himself had a further, unnerving habit, which was to ricochet his questions and comments off some one else on their way to you. Now, turning to the man on his right, he began to speak of the white devils with whom I had last appeared on 1V: What had they made him (me) fe el? I could not answer this and was not absolutely certain that I was expected to. The people referred to had certainly made me fe el exasperated and useless, but I did not think of them as devils. Elijah went on about the crimes of white people, to this endless chorus of "Yes, that's right." Someone at the table said, "The white man sure is a devil. He proves that by his own actions." I looked around. It was a very young man who had said this, scarcely more than a boy-very dark and sober, very bitter. Elijah began to speak of the Christian relig ion, of Christians, in the same soft, joking way. I began to see that Elijah's power came fr om his single-mindedness. There is nothing calculated about him; he means every word he says. The real reason, according to Elijah, that I f.1 iled to realize that the white man was a devil was that I had been too long exposed to white teaching and had never received true in struction. "The so-called American Negro" is the only reason Allah has permitted the United States to endure so long; the white man's time was up in 1913, but it is the will of Allah that this lost black nation, the black men of this country, be re deemed from their white masters and returned to the true f.1 ith, which is Islam.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But we had a great time, lying around the beach, and driving about, and we began to be closer than we had been for a long time. It was during this Provi ncetown visit that I realized, for the first time, during a long exchange Norman and I had, in a kitchen, at someone else's party, that Norman was really fas cinated by the nature of political power. But, though he said so, I did not really believe that he was fascinated by it as a possibility for himself. He was then doing the great piece on the Democratic convention which was published in Esquire, and I put his fascination down to that. I tend not to worry about writers as long as they arc working-which is not as romantic as it may sound-and he seemed quite happy with THE BL AC K BOY LOOK S AT THE WHITE BO Y 283 his wife, his family, himself. I declined, natura lly, to rise at dawn, as he apparently often did, to go running or swimming or boxing, but Norman seemed to get a great charge out of these admirable pursuits and didn't put me down too hard for my comparative decadence. He and Adele and the two children took me to the plane one afternoon, the tiny plane which shuttles from Provi nce town to Boston. It was a great day, clear and sunny , and that was the way I felt: for it seemed to me that we had all, at last, re-established our old connection . And then I heard that Norman was running for mayor, which I dismissed as a joke and refused to believe until it became hideously clear that it was not a joke at all. I was furious. I thought, You son of a bitch, you're copping out. You're one of the very few writers around who might really become a great writer, who might help to excavate the buried consciousness of this cou ntry , and you want to settle for being the lousy mayor of New York. It)s not your job. And I don't at all mean to suggest that writers are not responsible to and for-in any case, always for-the social order. I don't, for that matter, even mean to suggest that Norman would have made a particula rly bad Mayor, though I confess that I simply can not see him in this role. And there is probably some truth in the suggestion, put forward by Norman and others, that the shock value of having such a man in such an office, or merely running for such an office, would have had a salutary effect on the life of this city-particula rly, I must say, as relates to our young people, who are certainly in desperate need of adults who love them and take them seriousl y, and whom they can respect.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But it is not lef t to itself ; it belongs to the state of Georgia. The Negro vote has no power in the state, and the governor of Georgia-that "third- rate NOBODY KNO WS MY NAM E 207 man," Atlantans call him-makes great political capital out of keeping the Negroes in their place. When six Negro ministers attempted to create a test case by ignoring the segregation ordinance on the buses, the governor was ready to declare martial law and hold the ministers incommunicado. It was the mayor who prevented this, who somehow squashed all pub licity, treated the ministers with cvciy outward sign of respect, and it is his office which is preventing the case from coming into court. And remember that it was the governor of Arkan sas, in an insane bid for political power, who created the pres ent crisis in Little Rock-a gainst the will of most of its citizens and against the will of the mayor. This war between the Southern cities and states is of the utmost importance, not only for the South, but for the nation. The Southern states arc still very largely governed by people whose political lives, insofar, at least, as they arc able to con ceive of lif e or politics, arc dependent on the people in the rural regions. It might, indeed, be more honorable to try to guide these people out of their pain and ignorance instead of locking them within it, and battening on it; but it is, admit tedly, a difficult task to tiy to tell people the truth and it is clear that most Southern politicians have no intention of at tempting it. The attitude of these people can only have the effect of stiffening the already implacable Negro resistance, and this attitude is absolutely certain, sooner or later, to create great trouble in the cities. When a race riot occurs in Atlanta, it will not spread merely to Birmingham, for example. (Bir mingham is a doomed city. ) The trouble will spread to cve1 y metropolitan center in the nation which has a significant Ne gro population . And this is not only because the tics between Northern and Southern Negroes arc still vc1y close . It is be cause the nation, the entire nation, has spent a hundred years avoiding the question of the place of the black man in it. That this has done terrible things to black men is not even a question. "Int egration," said a vc1y light Negro to me in Alabama, "has always worked very well in the South, after the sun goes down." "It' s not miscegenation," said another Ne gro to me, "unless a black man's involved."

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  She was by no means a stupid girl, nor even a particularly narrow minded one: she was all in favor of the millennium, even to working with Jews to achieve it; but she was not prepared ever to accept a Jew as a friend. It did no good to point out, as I did, that the exploi tation of which she accused the Jews was American, not Jewish, that in fact, behind the Jewish face stood the American reality. And my Jewish friends in high school were not like that, I said, they had no intention of exploiting me, we did not hate each other. (I remember, as I spoke, being aware of doubt crawling like fog in the back of my mind.) This might all be very well, she told me, we were chil dren now, with no need to earn a living. Wait until later, when your friends go into business and you try to get a job. You'll see! It is this bitterness-f elt alike by the inarticulate, hungry population of Harlem, by the wealthy on Sugar Hill, and by the brilliant exceptions ensconced in universities-wh ich has defeated and promises to continue to defeat all efforts at in terracial understanding. I am not one of the people who be lieve that oppression imbues a people with wisdom or insight or sweet charity, though the survival of the Negro in this country would simply not have been possible if this bitterness had been all he felt. In America, though, lif e seems to move faster than anywhere else on the globe and each generation is promised more than it will get: which creates, in each gen eration, a furious, bewildered rage, the rage of people who cannot find solid ground beneath their feet. Just as a moun tain of sociological investigations, committee reports, and plans for recreational centers have failed to change the face of Harlem or prevent �egro boys and girls from growing up and facing, individually and alone, the unendurable frustration of being always, everywhere, inferior-until finally the cancer at tacks the mind and warps it-so there seems no hope for het ter �egro-Jewish relations without a change in the American pattern. THE HARLE:\ ! GH ETTO 53 Both the �e gro and the Jew are helpless; the pressure of living is too immediate and incessant to allow time for un derstanding. I can conceive of no �egro nati,·e to this country who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his lif e .. All m·er Harlem, �egro boys and girls are growi ng into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive. The Negro's outlets are des perately constricted. In his dilemma he turns first upon himself and then upon whate,·er most represents to him his own emasculation.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  How many times have we seen her! She is Dilsey, she is Mammy, in Gone with the Wind, and in Imitation of Life, and The Member of the Wedding-mother of sorrows, whore and saint, reaching a kind of apotheosis in Requiem for a Nun. (And yet, black men have mothers and sisters and daughters who are not like that at al l!) In Guess Who, her presence is meant to be taken as comic, and the film seems to be using her to suggest that backward people can be found on both sides of the racial fence-a point which can scarcely be made so long as one is sitting on it. In any case, in lif e, she has a family, she may even have a doctor for a son, and she assuredly does not love the white family so deeply as they are compelled to suppose: she cannot, since she knows how bitterly her black family is endangered by her white one. Then, there is the scene with the mother and the lady assistant at the art gallery, a scene which Miss Hepburn obviously relishes, and which she plays with a marvelously vindictive skill. The lady assistant is horrified at the news of this impending disastrous marriage, and is full of sympathy for the mother: who reacts with a cold, proud, and even rather terrified contempt. (This is probably the best scene in the film, and it juts out from it because of Hepburn's genuine indig nation.) She walks the lady to her car, makes her get into the car, instructs her to pay herself her wages, and a bonus, to start her car motor, to get rid of the artistic monstrosity with which we have seen the doctor amusing himself earlier, and get permanently lost. One down, then, but several more to go, for, now, here come the doctor's father and mother. The film's high polish docs not entirely succeed in blinding us to a kind of incipient reality suggested by these two. 534 THE DEVIL FINDS WO RK Though they come, principally , out of a Hol lywood script writer's imagination, they unexpectedly resist being manipu lated into total irrelevance-or, in other words, it proved somewhat difficult to find a place for them in this so briefly troubled Eden. The black mother and the white mother become allies at once, firmly opting for the happiness of their children. The black father and the white father, without becoming allies, nevertheless agree that their children should not marry.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And so do the prostitutes. (And this is not, perhaps, the place to discuss Harlem's very complex attitude toward black policemen, nor the reasons, according to Harlem, that they arc nearly all downtown.) It is hard, on the other hand, to blame the policeman, blank, good-natured, thoughtless, and insuperably innocent, for being such a perfect representative of the people he serves. He, too, believes in good intentions and is astounded and off ended when they arc not taken for the deed. He has never, himself, done anything tor which to be hated-which of us has?-and yet he is facing, daily and nightly, people who would gladly sec him dead, and he knows it. There is no way for him not to know it: there arc few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people. He moves through Harlem, therefore, like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country; which is precisely what, and where, he is, and is the reason he walks in twos and threes. And he is not the only one who knows why he is always in company: the people who are watching him know why, too. Any street meeting, sacred or secular, which he and his colleagues uneasily cover has as its explicit or im- FIFTH AVENUE, UPTOWN 1 77 plicit burden the cruelty and injustice of the white domina tion. And these days, of course, in terms increasingly vivid and jubilant, it speaks of the end of that domination. The white policeman standing on a Harlem street corner finds himself at the very center of the revolution now occurring in the world. He is not prepared tor it-naturally, nobody is-and, what is possibly much more to the point, he is exposed, as few white people are, to the anguish of the black people around him. Even if he is gifted with the merest mustard grain of imagi nation, something must seep in. He cannot avoid observing that some of the children, in spite of their color, remind him of children he has known and loved, perhaps even of his own children. He knows that he certainly does not want his chil dren living this way. He can retreat fr om his uneasiness in only one direction: into a callousness which very shortly becomes second nature. He becomes more callous, the population be comes more hostile, the situation grows more tense, and the police force is increased. One day, to everyone's astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up. Before the dust has settled or the blood congealed, editorials, speeches, and civil-rights commissions are loud in the land, demanding to know what happened. What happened is that Negroes want to be treated like men. Negroes JVant to be treated like men: a perfectly straight fo rward statement, containing only seven words.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The people did not go away, of course; once a people arise, they never go away (a fact which should be included in the Marine hand book). S� he club � se, t��- �l�o_d carn�:do\\'n,_and- his-bit terness and his anguish and his guilt were compqunded. And I have seen it in the eyes of rookie cops in Harlem rookie cops who were really the most terrified people in the world, and who had to pretend to themselves that the black junkie, the black mother, the black father, the black child were of ditle rent human species than themselves. The southern sherifi� the rookie cop, could, and I suspect still can only deal with their lives and their duties by hiding behind the color curtain-a curtain which, indeed, eventually becomes their principal justification for the )i,·es they lead. They thus will barricade themselves behind this curtain and continue in their crime, in the great unadmitted crime of what they have done to themselves. \Vhite man, hear me! A man is a man, a woman is a woman, Lc hii<:L Ls ��hiJ<J. To de� i:hese Tact'S!Si:o " opentll ea oorson a chaos deeper and deadlier, and, within the space of a man's lif etime, more timeless, more eternal, than the medieval vision of Hell . White man, you have already arrived at this unspeak able blasphemy in order to make money. You cannot endure the things you acquire-the only reason you continually ac quire them, like junkies on hundred dollar a day habits-a nd your money exists mainly on paper. God help you on that day when the population demands to know what is behind that paper. But, even beyond this, it is terrif)•ing to consider the precise nature of the things you have bought with the flesh you ha\'e sold-of what you continue to buy with the flesh you continue to sell. To what, precisely, are you headed? To what human product, precisely, are you devoting so much ingenuity, so much energy? In Henry James' novel, The Ambassado1'S, published not long before James' death, the author recounts the story of a middle-aged �ew Englander, assigned by his middle-aged bride-to-be, a widow, the task of rescuing from the flesh- pots of Paris her onlv son. She wants him to come home to take over the directic;n of the family factory. In the e\·ent, it is the THE WH ITE MAN 'S GUIL T 727 middle-aged New Englander, The Ambassador, who is se duced, not so much by Paris as by a new and less util itarian view of lif e.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  For one of the ways of being black is to accept what the world tells you about your mother and your father, your brother and your sister; and what that world tells you-in many ways, from the language of the lawgiver to the language of the liberal-is that "your" people deserve, in etl cct, their fate. Your fate-"your" people's fate-involves being, forever, a little lower than these particular angels, angels who, never theless, are always ready to give you a helping hand. Well, this is, after all, but another way of observing that it is exceedingly difficult for most of us to discard the assump tions of the society in which we were born, in which we live, to which we owe our identities; very difficult to defeat the trap of circumstance, which is, also, the web of safety; virtually impossible, if not completely impossible, to envision the fu ture, except in those terms which we think we already know. Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock. Including this writer, of course, who was far, however, years ago, from being able to forgive himself for being so irretriev ably human. The power of the social definition is that it be comes, fatally, one's own-but it took time, and much deep water, to make me see this. Rage and misery can be a source of comfort, simply because one has lived with rage and misery for so long. But to accept this rage and misery as a source of comfort is to enter one of the vicious circles of hell. One does not, after all, forgive the world for this horror, nor can one forgive one self . Because one cannot forgive oneself , one cannot forgive others, or, even, really, see others-one is always striking out at the wrong person, for only some other, poor, doomed in nocent, obviously, is likely to be in striking range. One's self esteem begins to shrivel, one's hope for the future begins to crack. In reacting against what the world calls you, you end lessly validate its judgment. I had not conceived, then , that I had only to study the 776 OTH ER ES SAYS hieroglyphic of my circumstances if I wished to decipher my inheritance. Ci1'Cttmstances: a rather heavy word, when you consider it, connecting, for me, by means of Ezekiel's wheel in the middle of a ll'hecl, with the iron, inescapable truth of revolutions-we black folk say, what goes around, comes around. Circumstances, furthermore, are complicated, simpli fied, and, ultimately, defined by the person's reaction to these circumstances-f or no one, no matter how it may seem, sim ply endures his circumstances. If we are what our circum stances make us, we are, also, what we make of our circumstances.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  He grinned, as though I were his pupil. "But you're a pretty tough little mother, too," he said, and referred to one of the grimmer of my Village misadventures, a misadventure which certainly proved that I had a dangerously sharp tongue, but which didn't really prove anything about my courage. Which, anyway, I had long ago given up trying to prove. I did not see Norman again until Provincetown, just after his celebrated brush with the police there, which resulted, ac cording to Norman, in making the climate of Provincetown as "mellow as Jello." The climate didn't seem very different to me-dull natives, dull tourists, malevolent policemen; I certainly, in any case, would never have dreamed of testing Norman's sanguine conclusion. But we had a great time, lying around the beach, and driving about, and we began to be closer than we had been fo r a long time. It was during this Provincetown visit that I realized, fo r the first time, during a long exchange Norman and I had, in a kitchen, at someone else's party, that Norman was really fa s cinated by the nature of political power. But, though he said so, I did not really believe that he was fa scinated by it as a possibility fo r himself. He was then doing the great piece on the Democratic convention which was published in Esquire, and I put his fa scination down to that. I tend not to worry about writers as long as they arc working-which is not as romantic as it may sound-and he seemed quite happy with THE BLACK BOY LOOKS AT THE WHITE BOY 28 3 his wife, his fa mily, himself. I declined, naturally, to rise at dawn, as he apparently often did, to go running or swimming or boxing, but Norman seemed to get a great charge out of these admirable pursuits and didn't put me down too hard fo r my comparative decadence. He and Adele and the two children took me to the plane one afternoon, the tiny plane which shuttles from Province town to Boston. It was a great day, clear and sunny, and that was the way I fe lt: fo r it seemed to me that we had all, at last, re-established our old connection. And then I heard that Norman was running fo r mayor, which I dismissed as a joke and refused to believe until it became hideously clear that it was not a joke at all. I was furious. I thought, You son of a bitch, you're copping out.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  A needle, or a piece of bread are nothing, but it is very important that all Panther members are forbidden to steal or take even that much from the people: and it changes a person when he conceives of himself, in Hue y's words, as "an ox to be ridden by the peo ple .'' To study the economic structure of this country, to know which hands control the weal th, and to which end, seems an academic exercise-and yet it is necessary, all of it is necessary, for discipline, for knowledge, and for power. Since the blacks are so seriously outnumbered, it is possible to dis miss these passionate exercises as mere acts of faith, prepos terous to everyone but the believer: but no one in power appears to find the Panthers even remotely preposterous. On the contrary, they have poured out on these black, defenseless, outnumbered heads a storm of retribution so unspeakably vin dictive as to have attracted the wondering and skeptical notice of the world-wh ich docs not accept the American version of reality as gospel; and they apparently consider the Panthers so dangerous that nations-or, rather, governments-f riendly to the United States have refused to allow individual Panthers to land on their shores, much to the displeasure of their already restive and distinctly crucial student populations. This is to sum up the effect of the Panthers negatively, but this effect reveals volumes about America, and our role in the world. Those who rule in this country now-as distinguished, it must be said, from governing it-are determined to smash the Pan thers in order to hide the truth of the American black situa tion. They want to hide this truth from black people -by making it impossible for them to respond to it-and they would like to hide it from the world; and not, alas, because they arc ashamed of it but because they have no intention of TO BE BAPTI ZED changing it. They cannot afford to change it. They would not know how to go about changing it, even if their imaginations were capable of encompassing the concept of black freedom. But this concept lives in their imaginations, and in the popular imagination, only as a nightmare. Blacks have never been free in this country, never was it intended that they should be free, and the spectre of so dreadful a freedom-the idea of a license so bloody and abandoned-conjures up another, unimagina ble country, a country in which no decent, God-f earing white man or woman can live. A civilized country is, by definition, a country dominated by whites, in which the blacks clearly know their place. This is really the way the generality of white Americans feel, and they consider-q uite rightly, as far as any concern for their interest goes-that it is they who, now, at long last, are being represented in \Vashington.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And she did step a very short step closer, with her pencil poised incongruous ly over her pad, and repeated the formula: " ... don't serve Negroes here ." Somehow, with the repetition of that phrase, which was already ringing in my head like a thousand bells of a night mare, I realized that she would never come any closer and that I would have to strike from a distance. There was nothing on the table but an ordinary watermug half fu ll of water, and I picked this up and hurled it with all my strength at her. She ducked and it missed her and shattered against the mirror behind the bar. And, with that sound, my frozen blood NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON abruptly thawed, I returned from wherever I had been, I saw, tlx the first time, the restaurant, the people with their mouths open, already, as it seemed to me, rising as one man, and I realized what I had done, and where I was, and I was fright ened. I rose and began running for the door. A round, pot bellied man grabbed me by the nape of the neck just as I reached the doors and began to beat me about the face. I kicked him and got loose and ran into the streets. My friend whispered, aRun!) ) and I ran. My friend stayed outside the restaurant long enough to mis direct my pursuers and the police, who arrived, he told me, at once. I do not know what I said to him when he came to my room that night. I could not have said much. I felt, in the oddest, most awful way, that I had somehow betrayed him. I lived it over and over and over again, the way one relives an automobile accident after it has happened and one finds one self alone and safe. I could not get over two facts, both equally difficult for the imagination to grasp, and one was that I could have been murdered. But the other was that I had been ready to commit murder. I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this: that my life, my rca/ lif e, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart. II I had returned home around the second week in Ju ne-in great haste because it seemed that my father's death and my mother's confinement were both but a matter of hours. In the case of my mother, it soon became clear that she had simply made a miscalculation. This had always been her tendency and I don't believe that a single one of us arrived in the world, or has since arrived anywhere else, on time.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  He is seeking to exorcise a history which is also a curse. He wants the old order, which came into existence through unchecked greed and wanton murder, to redeem itself without further bloodshed-without, that is, any further menacing itself -and without coercion. This, old orders never do, less because they would not than because they cannot. They cannot because they have always existed in relation to a force which they have had to subdue. This subjugation is the key to their identity and the triumph and justification of their history, and it is also on this contin ued subjugation that their material well-being depends. One may see that the history, which is now indivisible from oncsclt � has been full of errors and excesses; but this is not the same thing as seeing that, for millions of people, this history-one self -has been nothing but an intolerable yoke, a stinking prison, a shrieking grave. It is not so easy to sec that, t(>r millions of people, lif e itself depends on the speediest possible demolition of this history, even if this means the leveling, or the destruction of its heirs. And whatever this history may have given to the subju gated is of absolutely no val ue, since they have never been free to reject it; they will never even be able to assess it until they are free to take from it what they need, and to add to history the monumental fact of their pres ence. The South Mrican coal miner, or the Af rican digging for roots in the bush , or the Algerian mason working in Paris, not only have no reason to bow down before Shakespeare, or Descartes, or Westminster Abbey, or the cathedral at Chartres: they have, once these monuments intrude on their attention, no honorable access to them. Their apprehension of this his tory cannot fail to reveal to them that they have been robbed, maligned, and rejected: to bow down before that history is to accept that history's arrogant and unjust judgment. This is why, ulti mately, all attempts at dialogue between the subdued and subduer, between those placed within history and those dispersed outside, break down. One may say, in deed, that until this hour such a dialogue has scarcely been attempted: the subdued and the subduer do not speak the same language.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love the mselves and each other, and when they 300 THE FIR E NE XT TIME have achieved this-which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never-the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed. People more advantageously placed than we in Harlem were, and are, will no doubt find the psychology and the view of human nature sketched above dismal and shocking in the extreme. But the Negro's experience of the white world can not possibly create in him any respect for the standards by which the white world claims to live. His own condition is overwhelming proof that white people do not live by these standards. Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes filr generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic super iorit y of white people. Even the most doltish and servile Negro could scarcely fail to be impressed by the disparity between his situation and that of the people for whom he worked; Negroes who were neither doltish nor servile did not feel that they were doing anything wrong when they robbed white people. In spite of the Puritan-Yankee equation of virtue with well-being, Ne groes had excellent reasons for doubting that money was made or kept by any very striking adherence to the Christian virtues; it certainly did not work that way filr black Christi ans. In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft ever y hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand. They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law-in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not re spected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever. And those virtues preached but not practiced by the white world were merely another means of holding Negroes in subjection. It turned out, then, that summer, that the moral barriers that I had supposed to exist between me and the dangers of a criminal career were so tenuous as to be nearly nonexistent.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But no black editor could or would have been able to give me my head, as Saul did then: partly because he would not have had the power, partly because he could not have af fordcd-{)r needed-Sau l's politics, and partly because part of the price of the black ticket is involved- fatally-with the dream of becoming white. This is not possible, partly because white people arc not white: part of the price of the white ticket is to delude them selves into believing that they arc. The political position of my old man, for example, whether or not he knew it, was dictated by his (in his case) very honorable necessity not to break faith with the Old World. One may add, in passing, that the Old World, or Europe, has become nothing less than an American superstition, which accounts, if anything can, for an American vision of Russia so Talmudic and self -serving that it has ab solutely nothing to do with any reality occurring under the Still. OTHER ESSAYS But the black American must find a way to keep faith with, and to excavate, a reality much older than Europe. Europe has ne\·er been, and cannot be, a useful or valid touchstone for the American experience because America is not, and never can be, white. My tather died before Eugene died. When my father died, Beauford helped me to bury him and I then moved from Har lem to the Village. This was in 1943 . We were fighting the Second World War. We: who was this we? For this war was being fought, as tar as I could tell, to bring freedom to everyone with the exception of Hagar's children and the "yellow-bellied Jap s." This was not a matter, merely, of my postadolescent dis cernment. It had been made absolutely clear to me by the eighteen months or so that I had been working for the Army, in New Jersey, by the anti-Jap anese posters to be found, then, all over New York, and by the internment of the Japanese. At the same time, one was expected to be "patriotic" and pledge allegiance to a flag which had pledged no allegiance to you: it risked becoming your shroud if you didn't know how to keep your distance and stay in your "place ." And all of this was to come back to me much later, when Cassius Clay, a.k .a.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  His jour ney will have cost him too much, and the price will be revealed in his estrangement-unless he is very rare and luc ky-f rom other colored people, and in his continuing isolation from whites. Furthermore, for e\·ery Negro boy who achi eves such a taxi ride, hundreds, at least, will have perished around him, and not because they lacked the boldness to dream, but be cause the Republic despises their dreams. Perhaps one must be in such a situation in order really to understand what it is. But if one is a Negro in Watts or Harlem, and knows why one is there, and knows that one has been sentenced to remain there for lif e, one can't but look on the American state and the American people as one's oppressors. For that, after all, is exactly what they are. They have corralled you where you are for their ease and their profit, and are doing all in their power to prevent you from finding out enough about yourself to be able to rejoice in the only lif e you have. * 7+4 OTH ER ESS AYS One docs not wish to believe that the American Negro can feel this way, but that is because the Christian world has been misled by its own rhetoric and narcoticized by its own power. For many generations the natives of the Belgian Congo, for example, endured the most unspeakable atrocities at the hands of the Belgians, at the hands of Europe. Their suff ering oc curred in silence. This suffering was not indignantly reported in the Western press, as the suff ering of white men would have been. The suffering of this native was considered necessary, alas, for European, Ch ristian dominance. And, since the world at large knew virtually nothing concerning the suffering of this native, when he rose he was not hailed as a hero fighting for his land, but condemned as a savage, hungry for white flesh. The Christian world considered Belgium to be a civilized country; but there was not only no reason for the Congolese to feel that way about Belgium; there was no possibility that they could. What will the Christian world, which is so uneasily silent now, say on that day which is coming when the black native of South Africa begins to massacre the masters who have mas sacred him so long? It is true that two wrongs don't make a right, as we love to point out to the people we have wronged. But one wrong doesn't make a right, either. People who have been wronged will attempt to right the wrong; they would not be people if they didn't.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  She does not know enough about him. The woman is presented as a kind of pathetic, unthinking racist. But she cannot be so unthinking (no woman is) as to take for granted that the man she met last night will approve of being made, in fact, her accomplice in murder. After all, she knows only 528 THE DE VIL FIND S WORK that the man she met last night ordered her to feed the black boy: and the white boy who orders you to feed his black boy may not be willing to authorize you to kill him. This is not only what every woman knows, it is, more crucially, what every white Southern woman knows. It would appear, however, that this revelation on the part of the woman has the etTect of opening our white hero's eyes to the bottomless evil of racial hatred, and, after a stormy scene-a scene quite remarkably unconvincing-and, after the little boy has shot him in the shoulder, our hero lights out for the swamps, and Noah. He finds Noah, and they head for the train-Lord, that Hollywood train, forever coming round the bend!- but the gunshot wound slows the white boy up. Noah refuses to leave him-yo u're dragging on the chain! he cries, stretching out his arm. They get to the train, the black man jumps on, but the white boy can't make it, and the black man jumps off the train, it is hard, indeed, to say why. Well. He jumps off the train in order to reassure white peo ple, to make them know that they are not hated; that, though they have made human errors, they have done nothing for which to be hated. Well, blacks may or may not hate whites, and when they do, as I have tried to indicate, it's in their fashion. Whites may or may not deserve to be hated, depend ing on how one manipulates one's reserves of energy, and what one makes of history: in any case, the reassurance is false, the need ignoble, and the question, in this context, absolutely irrelevant. The question operates to hide the question: for what has actually happened, at the end of The Defiant Ones, is that a white male and a white female have come together, but arc menaced by the presence of the black man. The white woman, therefore, eliminates the black man, so that she and the white man can be alone together. But the white man can not endure this rupture-from what one must, here, perhaps, call his other, better, worse, or deeper self -and so rejects the white woman, crashing through the swamps, and braving death, in order to regain his black buddy.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  A black person in this democracy is certain to endure the unspeakable and the unimaginable in nineteen years. It is far from an exaggeration to state that many, and by the deliberate will and action of the Republic, are ruined by that time. White Americans cannot, in the generality, hear this, any more than their European ancestors, and contemporaries, could, or can. If I say that my best friend, black, Eugene, who took his lif e at the age of twenty-f our, had been, until that moment, a survivor, I will be told that he had "personal" problems. Indeed he did, and one of them was trying to find a job, or a place to live, in New York. If J point out that there is certainly a connection between his death (when I was THE PRICE OF THE TICKE T twenty-two) and my departure for Paris (when I was twenty four) I will be condemned as theatrical. But I am really saying something very simple. The will of the people, or the State, is revealed by the State's institutions. There was not, then, nor is there, now, a single American institution which is not a racist institution. And racist insti tutions-the unions, for one example, the Church, for an other, and the Army-or the military-f or yet another, are meant to keep the nigger in his place. Yes: we have lived through avalanches of tokens and concessions but white power remains white. And what it appears to surrender with one hand it obsessively cl utches in the other. I know that this is considered to be heresy. Spare me, for Christ's and His Father's sake, any further examples of Amer ican white progress. When one examines the use of this word in this most particular context, it translates as meaning that those people who have opted for being white congratulate themselves on their generous ability to return to the slave that freedom which they never had any right to endanger, much less take away. For this dubious effort, and still more dubious achievement, they congratulate themselves and expect to be congratulated-: in the coin, furthermore, of black gratitude, gratitude not only that my burden is-(slowly, but it takes time) being made lighter but my joy that white people are improving.