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)

  I know that when certain pow erful and blatant enemies of black people are shoveled, at last, into the ground I may feel a certain pity that they spent their lives so badly, but I certainly do not mourn their passing, nor, when I hear that they arc ailing, do I pray for their recovery. I know what I would do if I had a gun and someone had a gun pointed at my brother, and I would not count ten to do it and there would be no hatred in it, nor any remorse. People who treat other people as less than human must not be sur prised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned. I'm black and I'm proud: yet, I suppose that the most ac curate term, now, tor this history, this particular and peculiar danger, as well as f(>r all persons produced out of it and strug gling in it, is: Afro-American. Which is but a wedding, how ever, of two confusions, an arbitrary linking of two undefined and currently undefinable proper nouns. I mean that, in the case of Atrica, Af rica is still chained to Europe, and exploited by Europe, and Europe and America are chained together; and as long as this is so, it is hard to speak of Africa except as TO BE BAPTI ZED 473 a cradle and a potential. Not until the many millions of people on the continent of Africa control their land and their re sources will the Af rican personalit y flower or genuinely African institutions flourish and rC\'Cal Africa as she is. But it is striking that that part of the North American continent which calls itself , arrogantly enough, America poses as profound and dan gerous a mystery for human understanding as docs the fabled dark continent of Africa. The terms in which the mystery is posed, as well as the mysteries themselves, arc very different. Yet, when one places the mysteries side by side-ponders the history and possible future of Africa, and the history and pos sible future of America- something is illu minated of the na ture, the depth and the tenacity of the great war between black and white lif e styles here. Something is suggested of the nature of fecundity, the nature of sterility, and one realizes that it is by no means a simple matter to know which is which: the one can \'cry easily resemble the other. Questions louder than drums begin beating in the mind, and one realizes that what is called civilization lives first of all in the mind, has the mind above all as its province, and that the ci,·ilization, or its rudiments, can continue to live long after its externals have vanished- they can nC\'Cr entirely vanish from the mind.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  At the root of the Amer ican Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself. And the history of this problem can be reduced to the means used by Amer icans-lynch law and law, segregation and legal acceptance, terrorization and concession-either to come to terms with this necessity, or to find a way around it, or (most usuall�·) to find a way of doing both these things at once. The resulting spectacle, at once foolish and dreadful, led someone to make the quite accurate obsen·ation that "the Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which m·enakes white men." In this long battle, a battle by no means finished, the un foreseeable effects of which will be felt by many future gen erations, the white man's mori,·e was tl:ie �roteetien e.f-his iQ_entity; the black man was moti\'ated b,· the need to establis h an identitv.:find despite the terrori zation which the �egr o in :AiTlerica endur ed and endures sporadically until today, despite the cruel and totally inescapable ambi,·alence of his status in his country, the battle for his identity has long ago been won. He is not a visitor to the \Vest, but a citizen there, an Amer ican; as American as the Americans who despise him, the Americans who fear him, the Americans who lm·e him-the Americans who became less than themseh·es, or rose to be greater than themseh·es by virtue of the fact that the challenge he represented was inescapable. He is perhaps the only black man in the world whose relationship to white men is more terri ble, more subtle, and more meaningful than the relation- 128 NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON ship of bitter possessed to uncertain possessor. His survival depended, and his development depends, on his ability to turn his peculiar status in the Western world to his own advantage and, it may be, to the very great advantage of that world. It remains for him to fashion out of his experience that which will gi,·e him sustenance, and a voice.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Had they failed? How much depended on the point of view? For it would seem that a certain category of exceptions never failed to make the world worse-that category, prec isely, for whom power is more real than love. And yet power is real, and many things, including, very often, love, cannot be achieved without it. In the eeriest way possible, I suddenly had a glimpse of what white people must go through at a dinner table when they arc trying to prove that Negroes arc not subhuman. I had almost said, after all, "Well, take my friend Mary," and very nearly descended to a catalogue of those virtues that gave Mary the right to be alive. And in what hope? That Elijah and the others would nod their heads sol emnly and say, at least, "Well, she's all righ t-but the others!" And I looked again at the young faces around the table, and looked back at Elijah, who was saying that no people in history had ever been respected who had not owned their land. And the table said, "Yes, that's right." I could not deny the truth of this statement. for everyone else has, is, a nation, with a specific location and a flag-even, these days, the Jew. It is only "the so-called American Negro" who remains DO WN AT THE CROSS 329 trapped, disinherited, and despised, in a nation that has kept him in bondage for nearly four hundr ed years and is still un able to recognize him as a human being. And the Black Mus lims, along with many people who arc not Muslims, no longer wish for a recognition so grudgi ng and (should it ever be achieved) so tardy. Again, it cannot be denied that this point of view is abundantly justified by American Negro histor y. It is galling indeed to have stood so long, hat in hand, waiting for Americans to grow up enough to realize that you do not threaten th em. On the other hand, how is the American Ne gro now to form himself into a separate nation?

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The Muslims do not expect anything at all from the white people of this country. They do not believe that the American professions of democracy or equality have ever been even remotely sincere. They insist on the total separation of the races. This is to be achieved by the acquisi tion of land fr om the United States-land which is owed the Negroes as "back wages" for the labor wrested from them when they were slaves, and for their unrecognized and un honored contributions to the wealth and power of this coun try. The student movement depends, at bottom, on an act of faith, an ability to sec, beneath the cruelty and hysteria and apathy of white people, their bafflement and pain and essential decency. This is superbly difficult. It demands a perpetually cultivated spiritual resilience, for the bulk of the evidence con tradicts the vision. But the Muslim movement has all the ev idence on its side. Unless one supposes that the idea of black supremacy has virtues denied to the idea of white supremacy, one cannot possibly accept the deadly conclusions a Muslim draws from this evidence. On the other hand, it is quite im possible to argue with a Muslim concerning the actual state of Negroes in this country-the truth, after all, is the truth. This is the great power a Muslim speaker has over his au dience. His audience has not heard this truth-the truth about their daily lives-honored by anyone else. Almost anyone else, black or white, prefers to soften this truth, and point to a new day which is coming in America. But this day has been coming for nearly one hundred years. Viewed solely in the light of this country's moral professions, this lapse is inexcusable. Even more important, however, is the fact that there is desperately little in the record to indicate that white America ever seri ously desired-or desires-to sec this day arrive. EAST RIVER, DOWNTOWN Usually, for example, those white people who are in favor of integration prove to be in favor of it later, in some other city, some other town, some other building, some other school. The arguments, or rationalizations, \vith which they attempt to disguise their panic cannot be respected. North erners proffer their indignation about the South as a kind of badge, as proof of good intentions; never suspecting that they thus increase, in the heart of the Negro they arc speaking to, a kind of helpless pain and rage-and pity. Negroes know how little most white people are prepared to implement their words with deeds, how little, when the chips arc down, they arc prepared to risk.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Let him curse and I remember him fa lling down the cellar steps, and howling, and I remember, with 29! 292 THE FIRE NEXT TIME pain, his tears, which my hand or your grandmother's so easily wiped away. But no one's hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today, which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs. I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and fo r which neither I nor time nor history will ever fo rgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thou sands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know · it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, fo r this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of man kind.) But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime. Now, my dear namesake, these innocent and well-meaning people, your countrymen, have caused you to be born under conditions not very far removed from those described fo r us by Charles Dickens in the London of more than a hundred years ago. (I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, "No! This is not true! How bitter you are!"-but I am writing this letter to you, to try to tell you something about how to handle them, fo r most of them do not yet really know that you exist. I know the conditions under which you were born, fo r I was there. Your countrymen were not there, and haven't made it yet. Your grandmother was also there, and no one has ever accused her of being bitter. I suggest that the innocents check with her. She isn't hard to find. Your countrymen don't know that she exists, either, though she has been working fo r them all their lives.) \Veil, you were born, here you came, something like fifteen years ago; and though your fa ther and mother and grand mother, looking about the streets through which they were carrying you, staring at the walls into which they brought you, had every reason to be heavyhearted, yet they were not. For here you were, Big James, named fo r me-you were a big baby, I was not-here you were: to be loved. To be loved, MY DUNGEON SHOOK 29 3 baby, hard, at once, and fo rever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Indeed, it was on this exclus ion that the rise of this power inexorably depended; and now the exclu ded-"so it has been already"-whose lands have been robbed of the minerals, for example, which go into the building of railways and telegraph wires and TV sets and jet airliners and guns and bombs and fleets, must attempt, at exorbitant cost, to buy their manufactured resources back which is not even remotely possible, since they must attempt this purchase with money borrowed from their exploiters. If they attempt to work out their salvation- their autonomy on terms dictated by those who have excluded them, they are in a delicate and dangerous position, and if they refuse, they 404 TO BE BAPTI ZED 405 are in a desperate one: it is hard to know which case is worse. In both cases, they are confronted with the relentless neces sities of human lif e, and the rigors of hu man nature. Any one, for example, who has worked in, or witnessed, any of the "anti- poverty" programs in the American ghetto has an instant understanding of "f oreign aid" in the "un der developed" nations. In both locales, the most skillful adven turers improve their material lot; the most dedicated of the natives are driven mad or inactive-or underground-by frus tration; while the misery of the hapless, voiceless millions is increased-and not only that: their reaction to their misery is described to the world as criminal. Nowhere is this grisly pat tern clearer than it is in America today, but what America is doing within her borders, she is doing around the world. One has only to remember that American investments cannot be considered safe wherever the population cannot be considered tractable; with this in mind, consider the American reaction to the Jew who boasts of sending arms to Israel, and the prob able fate of an American black who wishes to stage a rally for the purpose of sending arms to black South Mrica. America proves, certainly, if any nation ever has, that man cannot live by bread alone; on the other hand, men can scarcely begin to react to this principle until they-and, still more, their children-have enough bread to eat.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The climate and the events of the last dec ade, and the steady pressure of the "cold" war, have given Americans yet another means of avoiding self -examination, and so it has been decided that the riots were "Communi st" inspired. Nor was it long, naturally, before prominent Negroes rushed t(mvard to assure the republic that the U.N. rioters do not represent the real feeling of the Negro community. According, then, to what I take to be the prevailing view, these rioters were merely a handful of irresponsible, Stalinist corrupted pnJJJocatem·s. I find this view amazing. It is a view which even a minimal ctl(>rt at observation would immediately contradict. One has 180 EAST RIVER, DO WNTOWN 181 only, for example, to walk through Harlem and ask oneself two questions. The first question is: Would I like to live here? And the second question is: Why don't those who now live here move out? The answer to both questions is immediately obvious. Unless one takes refi.1ge in the theory-however dis guised-that Negroes are, somehow, different from white people, I do not see how one can escape the conclusion that the Negro's status in this country is not only a cruel injustice but a grave national liability. Now, I do not doubt that, among the people at the U.N. that day, there were Stalinist and professional revolutionists acting out of the most cynical motives. Wherever there is great social discontent, these people are, sooner or later, to be found. Their presence is not as frightening as the discontent which creates their opportunity. What I find appalli ng-and really dangerous-is the American assumption that the Negro is so contented with his lot here that only the cynical agents of a foreign power can rouse him to protest. It is a notion which contains a gratuitous insult, implying, as it does, that Negroes can make no move unle ss they are manipulated. It forcibly suggests that the Southern attitude toward the Negro is also, essentially, the national attitude. When the South has trouble with its Negroes-when the Negroes refuse to re main in their "place "-it blames "outside" agitators and "Northern interference." When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin. And this, by no means incidentally, is a very dangerous thing to do. We thus give credit to the Communists for attitudes and victories which are not theirs. We make of them the champions of the oppressed, and they could not, of course, be more delighted. If , as is only too likely, one prefers not to visit Harlem and expose oneself to the anguish there, one has only to consider the two most powerful movements among Negroes in this country today. At one pole, there is the Negro student move ment. This movement, I believe, will prove to be the very last attempt made by American Negroes to achieve acceptance in the republic, to force the country to honor its own ideals.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And it isn't long-in fact it begins when he is in school-before he discovers the shape of his oppression. Let us say that the child is seven years old and I am his father, and I decide to take him to the zoo, or to Madison Square Garden, or to the U.N. Building, or to any of the tremendous monuments we find all over New York. We get into a bus and we go from where I live on 13 1st Street and Seventh Avenue downtown through the park and we get into New York City, which is not Harlem. Now, where the boy lives-even if it is�_;l _ _ housing projc�.:r_}s rn·-a;1 undesirable nclghbcirYi�od. If he lives in one of those housing projects of which-everyoi1e in New York is so proud, he has at the front door, if not closer, the pimps, the whores, the junkies-in a word, the danger of life in the ghetto. And the child kfiews this, though be doesn't know . .why. I still remember my first sight of New York. It.-� ....-(9 lly a!!..ot�g_sitr_�.lJ� �asj).orp �� �- We looked down over the Park Avenue streetcar tracks. It was Park Ave nue, but I didn't kno w what Park Avenue meant downtown. The J?arkj\.venue I grew up Ol!_��hi.�_h_i_s.�!.il.Lstanding, is dark aD§_qir�y,. No one wo.tilddream of opening a Tiffany's on that Park Avenue, and when you go downtown you discover that you are literally in the white world. �t is rich-:::::--or at leag...it loQks_ric)1 . It is clean-because they collect garbage down town. There arc doorme n. People walk about as though they owned where they were-and indeed they do. And it's a great shock. It's very hard to relate yourself to this. You don't know what it means. You know-you know instinctively-that .n.ooe o(!his is for you. Y Q!J JcnQw this before you are tol�. And who is it for and who is paying for it? And why isn't it for you? Later on when you become a grocery boy or messenger and you try to enter one of those buildings a man says, "Go to the back door." Still later, if you happen by some odd chance to have a friend in one of those buildings, the man says, "Where's your package?" Now this by no means is the core of the matter. What I'm trying to get at is that by this time A TALK TO TEACH ER S 681 the Negro child has had, effectively, almost all the doors of opportunity slammed in his face, and there are very few things he can do about it. He can m�:J!£2 _ !_ l�£ ;t_�.:;cc::pt it wi1h.. an absolut ely inarticulate and dangerous rage inside-all the more dangerous because it is never expressed. It is precisely those silent people whom white people see every day of their lives-I mean your porter and your maid, who never say any thing more than "Yes Sir" and "N o Ma'am."

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I had come home to a city in which nearly everyone was gracelessly scurrying tor TAKE ME TO THE WATER 37 1 shelter, in which friends were throwing their friends to the wolves, and justifYing their treachery by learned discourses (and tremendous tomes) on the treachery of the Comintern. Some of the things written during those years, justifYing, for example, the execution of the Rosen bergs, or the crucifixion of Alger Hiss (and the beatification of Whittaker Chambers) taught me something about the irresponsibility and cowardice of the liberal community which I will never forget. Their per formance, then, yet more than the combination of ignorance and arrogance with which this community has always pro tected itself against the deepest implications of black suffering, persuaded me that brilliance without passion is nothing more than sterility. It must be remembered, after all, that I did not begin meeting these people at the point that they began to meet me: I had been delivering their packages and emptying their garbage and taking their tips for years. (And they don't tip well.) And what I watched them do to each other during the McCarthy era was, in some ways, worse than anything they had ever done to me, for I, at least, had never been mad enough to depend on their devotion. It seemed very clear to me that they were lying about their motives and were being blackmailed by their guilt; were, in fact, at bottom, nothing more than the respectable issue of various immigrants, strug gling to hold on to what they had acquired. For, intellectual activity, according to me, is, and must be, disinterested-the truth is a two-edged sword-and if one is not willing to be pierced by that sword, even to the extreme of dying on it, then all of one's intellectual activity is a masturbatory delusion and a wicked and dangerous fraud. I made such motions as I could to understand what was happening, and to keep myself afloat. But I had been away too long. It was not only that I could not readjust myself to life in New York-it was also that I would not: I was never going to be anybody's nigger again. But I was now to discover that the world has more than one way of keeping you a nigger, has evolved more than one way of skinning the cat; if the hand slips here, it tightens there, and now I was offered, gracefully indeed, membership in the club. I had lunch at some elegant bistros, dinner at some exclusive clubs. I tried to be under standing about my countrymen's concern for difficult me, and 37 2 NO NAME IN THE STREET unruly mine-and I really was trying to be understanding, though not without some bewilderment, and, eventually, some malice. I began to be profoundly uncomfortable. It was a strange kind of discomfort, a terrified apprehension that I had lost my bearings. I did not altogether understand what I was hearing.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The American image of the Negro lives also in the Negro's heart; and when he has surrendered to this image lif e has no other possible reality. Then he, like the white enemy with whom he will be locked one day in mortal struggle, has no means save this of asserting his identity. This is why Bigger's murder of Mary can be referred to as an "act of creation" and why, once this murder has been committed, he can feel for the first time that he is living fi.illy and deeply as a man was meant to live. And there is, I should think, no Negro living in America who has not felt, briefly or for long periods, with anguish sharp or dull, in varying degrees and to varying effect, simple, naked and unanswerable hatred; who has not wanted to smash any white face he may encounter in a day, to violate, out of motives of the cruelest vengeance, their women, to break the bodies of all white people and bring them low, as low as that dust into which he himself has been and is being trampled; no Negro, finally, who has not had to make his own precarious adjustment to the "nigger" who surrounds him and to the "nigger" in himself . Yet the adjustment must be made-rather, it must be at tempted, the tension perpetually sustained-f or without this 30 NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON he has surrendered his birthright as a man no less than his birthright as a black man. The entire universe is then peopled only with his enemies, who are not only white men armed with rope and rifle, but his own far-flung and contemptible kinsmen. Their blackness is his degradation and it is their stu pid and passive endurance which makes his end inevitable. Bigger dreams of some black man who will weld all blacks together into a mighty fist, and feels, in relation to his family, that perhaps they had to live as they did precisely because none of them had ever done anything, right or wrong, which mattered very much. It is only he who, by an act of murder, has burst the dungeon cell. He has made it manifest that he li\'es and that his despised blood nourishes the passions of a man. He has forced his oppressors to see the fruit of that oppression: and he feels, when his family and his friends come to visit him in the death cell, that they should not be weeping or frightened, that they should be happy, proud that he has dared, through murder and now through his own imminent destruction, to redeem their anger and humiliation, that he has hurled into the spiritless obscurity of their lives the lamp of his passionate lif e and death. Hencef orth, they may remem ber Bigger-who has died, as we may conclude, fi>r them.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But the hatred is not equal on both sides, for it does not have the same roots. This is, perhaps, a very subtle argument, but black men do not have the same reason to hate white men as white men have to hate blacks. The root of the white man's hatred CHAPTER TWO 525 is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on the black, surfacing, and concentrating on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind. But the root of the black man's hatred is rage, and he docs not so much hate white men as simply want them out of his way, and, more than that, out of his children's way. When the white man begins to have in the black man's mind the weight that the black man has in the white man's mind, that black man is going mad. And when he goes under, he does not go under screaming in terror: he goes under howling with rage. A black man knows that two men chained together ha\'e to learn to forage, eat, fart, shit, piss, and tremble, and sleep together: they arc indispensable to each other, and anything can happen between them, and anyone who has been there knows this. No black man, in such a situation, and especially knowing what Poitier conveys so vividly Noah Cullen knows, would rise to the bait proffered by this dimwitted poor white child, whose only real complaint is that he is a bona-fide mediocrity who failed to make it in the American rat-race. But many, no better than he, and many much worse, make it e\'ery day, all the way to vVashington: sometimes, indeed, via Hollyw ood. It is a species of cowardice, grave indeed, to pretend that black men do not know this. And it is a matter of the most disas trous sentimentality to attempt to bring black men into the white American nightmare, and on the same terms, moreo\'er, which make lif e for white men all but intolerable. It is this which black audiences resented about T11e Defiant Ones: that Sidney was in company far beneath him, and that the unmistakable truth of his performance was being pla ced at the mercy of a lie.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Both The Naked and The Dead and (for the most part) Barbary Shore are written in a lean, spare, muscular prose which accom plishes almost exactly what it sets out to do. Even Barbary Shore, which loses itself in its last half (and which deserves, by the way, far more serious treatment than it has received) never becomes as downright impenetrable as The White Negro does. Now, much of this, I told myself, had to do with my resis tance to the title, and with a kind of fur y that so antique a vision of the blacks should, at this late hour, and in so many borrowed heirlooms, be stepping off the A tr ain. Bu t I was also baffled by the passion with which Norman appeared to be imitating so many people inferior to hims elf, i. e., Kerouac, and all the other Su zuki rhythm boys. From them, indeed, I expected nothing more than their pablum-clogged cries of Kicks! and Holy! It seemed very clear to me that their glori fication of the orgasm was but a way of avoiding all of the terrors oflife and love. Bu t Norman knew better, had to know better. The Naked and The Dead, Barbary Shore, and The Deer Park proved it. In each of these novels, there is a toughness and subtlety of conception, and a sense of the danger and complexity of human relationships which one will search for in vain, not only in the work produced by the aforementioned coterie, but in most of the novels produced by Norman's con temporaries. What in the world, the n, was he doing, slum ming so outrageously, in such a dreary crowd? For, exactly because he knew better, and in exactly the same way that no one can become more lewdly vicious than an imitation libertine, Norman felt compelled to carry their mys tique further than they had, to be more "hip," or more "beat," to dominate, in fact, their dreaming field; and since this mystique depended on a total rejection of life, and insisted on the fulfillment of an infantile dream of love, the mystique could only be extended into violence. No one is more dan gerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is una ssailable. Bu t why should it be necessary to borrow the Depression language of deprived Negroes, which eventually evolved into jive and bop talk, in order to justifY such a gri m system of NOBOD Y KNOW S MY NAME delusions? Why malign the sorely menaced sexuali ty of Ne groes in order to ju stif)r the white man's own sexual panic? Especially as, in Norman's case, and as indicated by his work, he has a very real sense of sexual responsibility, and, even, odd as it may sound to some, of sexual morality, and a genuine commitment to life. None of his people, I beg you to notice, spend their lives on the road.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This puzzled me at first, but it shouldn't have. This is the way people react to the loss of empire-for the loss of an empire also implies a radical revision of the individual identity-and I was to see this over and over again, not only in France. The Arabs were not a part of Indo-China, but they were part of an empire visibly and swiftly crumbling, and part of a history which was achieving, in the most literal and frightening sense, its denouement-was revealing itself , that is, as being not at all the myth which the French had made of it-and the French authority to rule over them was being more hotly contested with every hour. The challe nged authority, unable to justify 368 NO NAME IN THE STRE ET itself and not dreaming indeed of even attempting to do so, simply increased its force. This had the interesting result of revealing how frightened the French authority had become, and many a North Mrican then resolved, coute que cout e, to bring the French to another Dien Bien Phu. Something else struck me, which I was to watch more closely in my own country. The French were hurt and furious that their stewardship should be questioned, especially by those they ruled, and if, in this, they were not very original, they were exceedingly intense. After all, as they continually pointed out, there had been nothing in those colonies before they got there, nothing at al l; or what meagre resources of mineral or oil there might have been weren't doing the natives any good because the natives didn't even know that they were there, or what they were there for. Thus, the exploitation of the colony's resources was done for the good of the natives; and so vocal could the French become as concerns what they had brought into their colonies that it would have been the height of bad manners to have asked what they had brought out. (I was later to see something of how this fair exchange worked when I visited Senegal and Guinea. ) It was strange to find oneself , in another language, in an other country, listening to the same old song and hearing oneself condemned in the same old way. The French (for ex ample) had always had excellent relations with their natives, and they had a treasurehouse of anecdotes to prove it. (I never found any natives to corroborate the anecdotes, but, then, I have never met an African who did not loathe Dr.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  He had been a criminal lawyer for a long time, practically since birth, and he had, I was told, a "good" reputation. But I was to discover that to have a "good" reputation as a criminal lawyer does not necessarily reflect any credit on said lawye r's competence or dedication; still less does it indicate that he has any interest in his clients: the term seems to refer almost exclusively to the lawyer's abil ity to wheel and deal and to his influen ce with other lawyers and judges, and district attorneys. A criminal lawye r's repu tation-except, of course, for the one or two titans in the field-wo uld appear to depend on his standing in this club. TO BE BAPTI ZED 4-4-1 The fate of his client depends, to put it brutally , on the client's money: one may say, generally, that, if a poor man in trouble with the law receives justice, one can suppose heavenly inter vention. A poor man is always an isolated man, in the sense that his intimates are as ignorant and as helpless as he. Tony has been in prison since October 27, 1 967, and remains in prison still. He had been brought to trial once in all that time; the trial resulted in a hu ng jury. A citizen more favorably placed than Tony would never have been treated in this way. It would appear, for example, that Tony's constitutional rights were vi olated at the very moment he was arrested because of the means used to identify him. This question has never been brought up, though Tony has insisted on it time and again. The police are very sensitive about being accused of \'iolating a suspect's constitutional rights-they are, indeed, as sensitive to any and all criticism as aging beauty queens-and would never have arrested Tony in the way that they did if they had not been certain that his accusation could never be heard. Tony had almost nothing going for him, except his devoted sister, Valerie, and me. But neither Valerie nor I are equipped to deal with the world into which we found ourseh·es so sud denly plunged, and I found myself severely handicapped in this battle by being forced to fight it from three thousand miles away. This meant that there was a vacuum where Tony's witness should ha\'e been. This would not have been so if the system worked differently, or if it were served by different people. But the system works as it works, and it attracts the people it attracts.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Mt er all, speaking now again as a creation of the Christian Church , as a black creation of the Christian Church, I watched what the Christian Church did to my father, who was in the pulpit all the years of his lif e, I watched the kind of poverty, the kind of hopeless pov erty, which was not an act of God, but an act of the State, against which he and his children struggled, I watched above all, and this is what is crucial, the ways in which white power can destroy black minds, and what black people are now fight ing against, precisely that. We watched too many of us being destroyed for too long and destroyed where it really matters, not only in chain gangs, and in prisons and on needles, not only do I know, and every black person knows, hundreds of 75+ OTH ER ESS AYS people, thousands of people, perishing in the streets of my nation as we stand here, perishing, for whom there is no hope, perishing in the jails of my country, and not only my country. For one reason, and one reason only, because they arc black and because the structure into which they were born, the Christian structure, had determined and fore-ordained that destruction, to maintain its power. Now, of course, this, from the point of view of anyone who takes the preaching of the man from Galilee seriously, is very close to being the sin against the Holy Ghost, for which you will remember there is no forgiveness. It seems to me, then, that the most serious thing that has happened in the world today and in the Christian conscience is that Christians, having rationalized their crimes for so long, though they live with them every day and see the evidence of them every day, they put themselves out of touch with them selves. There is a sense in which it can be said that my black flesh is the flesh that St. Paul wanted to have mortified. There is a sense in which it can be said that very long ago, for a complex of reasons, but among them power, the Christian personality split itself in two, split itself into dark and light, in fact, and it is now bewildered, at war with itself , is li terally unable to comprehend the force of such a woman as Mahalia Jackson, who docs not sound like anyone in Canterbury Ca thedral, unable to accept the depth of sorrow, out of which a Ray Charles comes, unable to get itself in touch with itself , with its selfless totality.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Price: how would they like to sing on the sound-truck? They had not the taintest desire to sing on a sound-truck, especially when they had been promised a string of churches; however, the churches, along with Mr. \Yarde's vigor, seemed una,·ailable at the moment; they could hardly sit around Atlanta doing nothing; and so long as they worked with the party they were certain, at least, to be fed. "The purpose of our singing," Da,·id writes, "was to draw a crowd so the party could make speeches." �ear the end of the singing and during the speeches, leaflets and pe titions were circulated through the crowd. David had not tound Negroes in the South difterent in any important respect from Negroes in the ::Sorth; except that many of them were distrustful and "they are always talking about the North; they ha,·e to let you know they know some body in New York or Chicago or Detroit." Of the crowds that gathered-and, apparently, The Melodeers attracted great numbers-"many of these people couldn't read or write their names" and not many of them knew anything at all about the Progressive Party. But they did di,·ine, as American Negroes must, what was expected of them; and they listened to the speeches and signed the petitions. Becoming both desperate and impatient, The Melodeers be gan making engagements and singing on their own, stealing time fr om canvassing to rehearse. They made more appoint ments than they were able to keep; partly because the lack of money limited their mobility but also because the Party, dis covering these clandestine appointments, moved in, demand ing to be heard. Those churches which refused to make room for the Party were not allowed to hear the quartet, which thus 60 NOTES OF A NATIVE SON lost its last hope of making any money. The quartet wondered \\'hat had happened to Mr. Warde. David's account all but ignores him until nearly the end of the trip, when his position during all this is perhaps given some illumination. Things now began to go steadily worse. They got into an argument with the manager of the Y, who objected to their rehearsing, and moved to a private home, tor which the Party paid 75 ¢ per man per day; and the Party, which was, one gath ers, furiously retrenching, arranged for them to cat at Fraziers' Catc, a Negro establishment on Hunter Street, tor $1.2 5 per man per day. My correspondent notes that they had no choice of mcals-"thcy served us what they likcd"-which seems to have been mainly limp vegetables-and "we were as hungry when we walked out as we were when we walked in." On the other hand, they were allowed to choose their beverage: tea or cotlcc or soda pop.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  NOTES OF A NATIVE SON Usua lly, fo r example, one would see a group of sharpies stand ing on the street corner, jiving the passing chicks; or a group of older men, usually, fo r some reason, in the vicinity of a barber shop, discussing baseball scores, or the numbers, or making rather chilling observations about women they had known. Women, in a general way, tended to be seen less often together-unless they were church women, or very young girls, or prostitutes met together fi>r an unprofessional instant. But that summer I saw the strangest combinations: large, re spectable, churchly matrons standing on the stoops or the cor ners with their hair tied up, together with a girl in sleazy satin whose fa ce bore the marks of gin and the razor, or heavy-set, abrupt, no-nonsense older men, in company with the most disreputable and fa natical "race" men, or these same "race" men with the sharpies, or these sharpies with the churchly women. Seventh Day Adventists and Methodists and Spiri tualists seemed to be hobnobbing with Holyrollers and they were all, alike, entangled with the most flagrant disbelievers; something heavy in their stance seemed to indicate that they had all, incredibly, seen a common vision, and on each face there seemed to be the same strange, bitter shadow. The churchly women and the matter-of-fact, no-nonsense men had children in the Army. The sleazy girls they talked to had lovers there, the sharpies and the "race" men had fr iends and brothers there. It would have demanded an unquestion ing patriotism, happily as uncommon in this country as it is undesirable, f(>r these people not to have been disturbed by the bitter letters they received, by the newspaper stories they read, not to have been enraged by the posters, then to be fo und all over New York, which described the Japanese as "yellow-bellied Japs." It was only the "race" men, to be sure, who spoke ceaselessly of being revenged-how this vengeance was to be exacted was not clear-fi>r the indignities and dan gers suffe red by Negro boys in uniform; but everybody fe lt a dircctionlcss, hopeless bitterness, as well as that panic which can scarcely be suppressed when one knows that a human being one loves is beyond one's reach, and in danger.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  What the Negro has discovered, and on an international level, is that power to intimidate which he has always had privately but hitherto could manipulate only privately-for private ends often, f(>r limited ends always. And therefore when the country speaks of a "new" Negro, which it has been doing every hour on the hour fo r decades, it is not really referring to a change in the Negro, which, in any case, it is quite incapable of assess ing, but only to a new difficulty in keeping him in his place, to the fa ct that it encounters him (again! again!) barring yet another door to its spiritual and social case. This is pr obably, hard and odd as it may sound, the most important thing that one human being can do tor another-it is certainly one of the most important things; hence the torment and necessity of love-and this is the enormous contribution that the Negro has made to this otherwise shapeless and undiscovered coun try. Consequently, white Americans arc in nothing more THE FIRE NEXT TIME deluded than in supposing that Negroes could ever have imagined that white people would "give" them anything. It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they arc guarding and keeping, whereas what they arc actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself-that is to say, risk ing oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply in capable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free. This, in the case of the Negro, the American republic has never become sufficiently mature to do. White Americans have contented themselves with gestures that arc now described as "tokenism." For hard example, white Americans congratulate themselves on the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in the schools; they sup pose, in spite of the mountain of evidence that has since ac cumulated to the contrary, that this was proof of a change of heart-or, as they like to say, progress. Perhaps. It all depends on how one reads the word "progress." Most of the Negroes I know do not believe that this immense concession would ever have been made if it had not been fo r the competition of the Cold War, and the fa ct that Africa was clearly liberating herself and therefore had, fo r political reasons, to be wooed by the descendants of her fo rmer masters. Had it been a mat ter of love or justice, the 1954 decision would surely have oc curred sooner; were it not fo r the realities of power in this difficult era, it might very well not have occurred yet.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  What this means for the nm·el is that a nec essary dimension has been cut away; this dimension being the relationship that �egroes bear to one another, that depth of involvement and unspoken recognition of shared experience which creates a way of lif e. What the novel reflects-and at no point interprets-is the isolation of the �egro within his mm group and the resulting fury of impatient scorn. It is this which creates its climate of anarchy and unmotivated and un apprehended disaster; and it is this climate, common to most �egro protest nm·els, which has led us all to believe that in �egro lif e there exists no tradition, no field of manners, no possibility of ritual or intercourse, such as may, for example, sustain the Jew eYen after he has left his father's house. But the fact is not that the �egro has no tradition but that there has as yet arrived no sensibility sufficiently profound and tough to make this tradition articulate. For a tradition ex- 28 NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON presses, after all , nothing more than the long and painful ex perience of a people; it comes out of the battle waged to maintain their integrity or, to put it more simply, out of their struggle to survive. When we speak of the Jewish tradition we arc speaking of centuries of exile and persecution, of the strength which endured and the sensibility which discovered in it the high possibility of the moral victory. This sense of how Negroes live and how they have so long endured is hidden from us in part by the very speed of the Negro's public progress, a progress so heavy with complexity, so bewildering and kaleidoscopic, that he dare not pause to conjecture on the darkness which lies behind him; and by the nature of the American psychology which, in order to appre hend or be made able to accept it, must undergo a metamor phosis so profound as to be literally unthinkable and which there is no doubt we will resist until we arc compelled to achieve our own identity by the rigors of a time that has yet to come. Bigger, in the meanwhile, and all his furious kin, serve only to whet the notorious national taste for the sensa tional and to reinforce all that we now find it necessary to believe.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless. I and two Negro acquaintances, all of us well past thirty, and looking it, were in the bar of Chicago's O'Hare Airport several months ago, and the bar tender refused to serve us, because, he said, we looked too young. It took a vast amount of patience not to strangle him, and great insistence and some luck to get the manager, who defended his bartender on the ground that he was "new" and had not yet, presumably, learned how to distinguish between a Negro boy of twenty and a Negro "boy" of thirty-seven. \Veil, we were served, finally, of course, but by this time no amount of Scotch would have helped us. The bar was very DOWN AT THE CROSS 3 1 9 crowded, and our altercation had been extremely noisy; not one customer in the bar had done anything to help us. When it was over, and the three of us stood at the bar trembling with rage and fr ustration, and drinking-and trapped, now, in the airport, fo r we had deliberately come early in order to have a fe w drinks and to eat-a young white man standing near us asked if we were students. I suppose he thought that this was the only possible explanation fo r our putting up a fight. I told him that he hadn't wanted to talk to us earlier and we didn't want to talk to him now. The reply visibly hurt his fe elings, and this, in turn, caused me to despise him. But when one of us, a Korean \Var veteran, told this young man that the fight we had been having in the bar had been his fight, too, the young man said, "I lost my conscience a long time ago," and turned and walked out. I know that one would rather not think so, but this young man is typical. So, on the basis of the evidence, had e\·eryone else in the bar lost his conscience. A few years ago, I would ha,·e hated these people with all my heart. Now I pitied them, pitied them in order not to despise them. And this is not the happiest way to fe el toward one's countrymen. But, in the end, it is the threat of universal extinction hang ing over all the world today that changes, totally and fo rever, the nature of reality and brings into de,·astating question the true meaning of man's history. \Ve human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves; this seems to be the entire sum of our achievement. \Ve have taken this journey and ar ri,·ed at this place in God's name. This, then, is the best that God (the white God) can do.