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 don't know if Na bisco is Jewish, but I didn't like cleaning their basement. I don't know if Riker's is Jewish, but I didn't like scrubbing their floors. I don't know if the big, white bruiser who thought it was fun to call me "Shine" was Jewish, but I know I tried to kill him-and he stopped calling me "Shi ne." I don't know if the last taxi driver who refused to stop for me was Jewish, but I know I hoped he'd break his neck before he got home. And I don't think that General Electric or Gen eral Motors or R.C.A. or Con Edison or Mobiloil or Coca Cola or Pepsi-Cola or Firestone or the Board of Education or the textbook industry or Hol lywood or Broadway or televi sion-or Wall Street, Sacramento, Dallas, Atlanta, Albany, or Washington-arc controlled by Jews. I think they are con trolled by Americans, and the American Negro situation is a direct result of this control. And anti-Semitism among Ne- NEGROES ARE ANTI -SE MI TIC BEC AUSE .. . 74-I groes, inevitable as it may be, and understandable, alas, as it is, does not operate to menace this control, but only to con firm it. It is not the Jew who controls the American drama. It is the Christian. The root of anti-Semitism among �egroes is, ironically, the relationship of colored peoples -all m·er the globe-to the Christian world. This is a fact which may be difficult to grasp, not only for the ghetto's most blasted and embittered inhab itants, but also for many Jews, to say nothing of many Chris tians. But it is a fact, and it will not be amel iorated-in fact, it can only be aggra,·ated-by the adoption, on the part of colored people now, of the most devastating of the Christian \'lCeS. Of course, it is true, and I am not so naive as not to know it, that many Jews despise �egroes, even as their Aryan broth ers do. (There are also Jews who despise Jews, e\·en as their Aryan brothers do.) It is true that many Je ws use, shamelessly, the slaughter of the 6,ooo,ooo by the Third Reich as proof that they cannot be bigots-or in the hope of not being held responsible for their bigotry. It is galling to be told by a Jew whom you know to be exploiting you that he cannot possibly be doing what you know he is doing because he is a Jew.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  However, where violence is concerned, children do need help in understanding what is wrong with such behavior. They need to be told that violence not only hurts the victim physicially but hurts people’s feelings and that the damage can last a lifetime. This is not self-evident to a child who has been raised in a family where a parent has been violent. After all, children model their own behavior after the model their parents provide. They need guidance in learning alternative ways for resolving conflict. Indeed, there are many ways that these ethical ideas can be taught. A good curriculum would include games and videos that help children learn how to deal with their own anger and how to control their impulse to hit people or destroy property. The important thing to remember is that the divorce itself has no impact on these critical issues for the child. Moreover, it’s difficult for parents to deal with these issues during and after the breakup without professional guidance. Parents and children both need help. We as a society have an obligation to provide it. When There’s No EscapeBEFORE GETTING TO Larry’s adult life, I want to return to Carol and her adolescent years to help hammer home a major point about being raised in chaotic intact families. As we have seen, divorce was never an option for this family. The parents had no desire to stop their destructive behaviors. And if they had divorced, nothing would have changed for Carol and her siblings. Divorce is only a “solution” for people who want and have the ability to change. For the Carols of this world, there is far less opportunity to escape from the madness that surrounds them because there are no true adults to give them a helping hand. Carol’s voice was low and angry. “When I was a teenager, my mom would listen in on my phone calls and she’d go through my stuff. She’d ask nosy questions about me and boys. She accused me of hanging out with a bad crowd at school. All she could think about was that I was in trouble.” “Were you?” “Not really. Certainly not in the way she thought. Compared with some of my friends I wasn’t bad at all. I didn’t use drugs and I didn’t drink. I was afraid of being thrown out if I got involved with guys. I knew that’s what she was waiting for when she listened in on my calls.” As Carol described her adolescence, I was struck by her assertion that she had stayed away from sex and alcohol, both of which were prominent in her home. Because these activities were so familiar to her, it would have been easy for her to adopt the same behaviors. “Why didn’t you drink, especially when many of your friends were doing it?”

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Repeating the Past A WEEK AFTER talking to Racer, I met Paula to discuss what I’d learned. The child was obviously frustrated. I couldn’t help wondering, shouldn’t his mother, who was so unhappy as a child of divorce, have a huge amount of empathy for her son’s predicament and take steps to protect him? I asked Paula if she could do more to accommodate to Racer’s concern that his interests would get no support from either parent. Her face contorted. “I’ve done all the accommodating so far,” she said. “If Brad will back off and come to me, then maybe we can talk. But I’ll be damned if I’m always the one who explains things to Racer, the one who makes the sacrifices. Racer will have to live with who Brad is and who I am—and he’ll have to make the best of it!” I was troubled at her angry response, which had blotted out her genuine concern for her son. But I had seen this before. I decided to try again: “Paula, is there anything you learned from your own experience as a child of divorce that would make it easier for Racer? He’s having a hard time and trying very hard not to show it.” She sat glumly for a moment and then relented. “Maybe during the baseball season, which doesn’t last forever, Brad and I can figure out another custody arrangement that would work better for him. Maybe I should call my ex-mother-in-law.” Sadly, children of divorce who divorce are not better at protecting their children. I’d hoped that they might draw on their own experiences and treat their children with more understanding when their marriages failed. But I was bitterly disappointed. Although all those in our study complained that their parents didn’t explain the divorce to them and failed to ease their adjustment to the new circumstance, they made the same mistakes with their own children. Nor did they welcome the children’s questions or try to understand their troubles. Like their own parents, they were overwhelmed with the demands of their new lives, finding a place to live, making do with less money, and planning for the future. I knew before seeing Racer that Paula hadn’t learned much from her own childhood, although she remembered vividly how angry she was at her mother and how she worried that her parents would disappear. Like many parents, Paula assumed that Racer was a resilient child who’d understand what was happening. He was expected to manage. But she didn’t see that he might feel as lonely and abandoned as she had as a child or that he might develop the same kind of anger that had shaped her life for many years. I’ve come across Paula’s attitude many times in my work with divorcing parents.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It becomes at once apparent that his curious, slow-moving blandness is related to the grace and patience of a jungle cat and that the intelligence behind those spectacles is of a very penetrating and dem agogic order. The cult ural crisis through which we are passing today can be summed up thus, said Cesaire: that cultur e which is strong est from the material and techno logical point of view threatens to crush all weaker cultures, particularly in a world in which, distance counting fo r nothing, the technologically weaker cul tures have no means of protecting themselves. All cultures have, furthermore, an economic, social, and political base, and no culture can continue to live if its political destiny is not in its own hands. "Any political and social regime which dest roys the self-determination of a people also destroys the creative power of that people." When this has happened the culture of that people has been destroyed. And it is simply not true that the colonizers bring to the colonized a ne\v culture to replace the old one, a cultur e not being something given to a people, but, on the con trary and by definition, something that they make themselves. Nor is it, in any case, in the natur e of colonialism to wish or to permit such a degree of well-being among the colonized. The well-being of the colonized is de sirable only insofar as this well-being enriches the dominant co untry, the necessity of which is simply to remain dominant. Now the civilizations of Europe, said Cesaire, speaking very clearly and intensely to a packed and attentive hall, evolved NO BODY KNOWS MY NAME an economy based on capital and the capital was based on black labor; and thus, regardless of whatever arguments Eu ropeans usc to defend them selves, and in spite of the absurd palliat i,·cs with which they have sometimes tried to soften the blow, the fact, of their domination, in order to accomplish and maintain this dominat ion-in order, in fact, to make money-they destroy ed, with utter ruthlessness, everyth ing that stood in their way, languages, customs, tribes, lives; and not only put nothing in its place, but erected, on the co ntrary, the most tremendous bar riers between themselv es and the people they ruled. Europeans never had the remotest inten tion of raising Africans to the Western level, of sharing with them the instruments of physical, political or economic power. It was precisely their intention, their necessity, to keep the people they ruled in a state of cultur al anarchy, that is, simply in a barbaric state. "The famous inferi ority complex one is pleased to obse rve as a characteristic of the colonized is no accident but something very definitely desired and deli berately inculcated by the colonizer."

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The waiter said, 505 506 THE DE VIL FINDS WORK "No, madame," whereupon the car door slammed, and the car drove off. Camus's hour had yet so savagely to strike: and both men eventually disappeared from the Flore. The curious, and, on the whole, rather obvious doctrine of l'existentialisme flourished, and the word negritude, though it was beginning to be muttered, had yet to be heard. I Shall Spit on Your GraJJes, and Vian himself, and a tense, even rather terrified wonder about Americans, were part of this ferment: and, fur ther, the straight-laced French (who had not yet heard of Jcan Genet, and who remain absolutely impervious to Rimbaud and Baudelaire) considered the novel pornographic. One of the reasons-perhaps the reason-that the novel was considered pornographic is that it is concerned with the vin dictive sexual aggression of one black man against many white women. (At that moment in time, the black G.I. in Europe was a genuinely disturbing conundrum. ) The novel takes place in America, and the black man looks like a white man-this double remove liberating both fantasy and hope, which is, perhaps, at bottom, what pornography is all about. This is certainly what that legend created by Rudolph Valentino, in The Sheik, is all about, as is made clear by his fan mail-poor boy!-and this fantasy and hope contain the root appeal of Tarzan (King of The Apes!). Both the Sheik and Tarzan arc white men who look and act like black men-act like black men, that is, according to the white imagination which has created them: one can cat one's cake without having it, or one can have one's cake without eating it. What informs Vian's book, however, is not sexual fantasy, but rage and pain: that rage and pain which Vian (al most alone ) was able to hear in the black American musicians, in the bars, dives, and cellars, of the Paris of those years. In his book, a black man who can "cross the line" sets out to avenge the murder of his younger, darker brother; and the primary tool of this vengeance is-his tool . Vian would have known something of this from faulkner, and from Richard Wright, and from Chester Himes, but he heard it in the music, and, indeed, he saw it in the streets. Vi an's character is eventually uncovered, but not before he has seduced and murdered two of the richest and most attractive white women he can find.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  What to do in the face of this deep and dangerous estrangement? It seemed to me-l would say, sipping coffee and trying to be calm-that the principle of what had to be done was extremely simple; but bef ore anything could be done, the principle had to be grasped. The principle on which one had to operate was that the government which can force me to pay my taxes and force me to fight in its defense anywhere in the world docs not haJJc the attth01'it_v to say that it cannot protect my right to vote or my right to earn a living or my right to live anywhere I choose. Furthermore, no nation, wishing to call itself free, can possibly survive so massive a defection. What to do? \Veil, there is a real estate lobby in Albany, for example, and this lobby, which was able to rebuild all of New York, downtown, and for money, in less than twenty years, is also responsible for Har lem and the condition of the people there, and the condition of the schools there, and the future of the childr en there. What to do? Why is it not possible to attack the power of this lobby? Are their profits more important than the health of our children? What to do? Are textbooks printed in order to teach children, or are the contents of these textbooks to be con trolled by the Southern oligarchy and the commercial health of publishing houses? What to do? Why are Negroes and Puerto Ricans virtually the only people pushing trucks in the garment center, and what union has the right to trap and victimize Negroes and Puerto Ricans in this way? None of these things (I would say) could possibly be done without the consent, in fact, of the government, and we in Harlem know this even if some of you profess not to know how such a hideous state of aff airs came about. If some of these things are not begun- I would say- then, of course, we will be sit ting on a powder keg all summer. Of course, the powder keg may blow up; it will be a miracle if it doesn't. 73+ OTH ER ESS AYS They than ked me. They didn't believe me, as I conclude, since nothing was ever done. The summer was always violent. And in the spring, the phone began to ring again. Now, what I have said about Harlem is true of Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco-is true of every Northern city with a large Ne gro population.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Many did, but there were consequences when they broke the rules. (It’s important to bear in mind that the youngsters in the comparison group had been neighbors of the families that divorced, making the differences in the families all the more striking.) The same kind of rule-based structure exists in remarried families, but the moral authority of stepparents is almost never equal to that of a biological parent. When push comes to shove in adolescence, as it so often does, the boy or girl is likely to shout, “Who the hell are you to tell me what to do?” Little Boy Lost MY THIRD INTERVIEW with Larry took place shortly after the episode in the police station when he was seventeen years old. The little master of the house had grown into a tall, slender young man with reddened eyes and a sallow complexion. Chain-smoking Marlboros, face fixed in a scowl, he spat out his feelings: “The last five years have been a total bummer. My mom gets on my nerves just like she always got on my dad’s nerves. She wants me to be responsible.” He threw back his head and laughed. “Christ, I come home every night bombed out of my head. I drink more than my dad did when he was a kid. Except for all the Russian crap, I think I’m going to live a lot of my life just like my dad. It helps me solve my problems to drink. A couple of weeks ago I hit my girlfriend in the face.” He seemed proud. “I guess I’m going to live my life like my dad.” I was deeply dismayed by his words and hostile manner. “Tell me,” I said, “how much do you feel in control of your life?” Larry’s shoulders sagged as he answered truthfully, “About three-quarters. I’m maybe three-quarters in control.” And then he described how disappointed he was in the father who seemed no longer interested in him. “Do you know that when my dad got remarried, I didn’t find out for four months! When I talk to him, it’s always by phone. I guess he’s pretty busy.” Then Larry hastily pulled back, regained his scowl, and returned to the familiar theme. “My life is a lot worse because of their divorce. Not having a father was hard on me. My mom pushed him out. I’ll never forgive her for that.” After I left Larry sitting at his kitchen table that day, I had the sense of seeing a lost child who had advanced in years but who had hardly matured since his mother took him and his sister to a motel in the middle of the night. It was as if he had remained fixated developmentally from that time on. As an adolescent, he was just beginning to face the pain of his increasing distance from his father. He continued blaming his mother for all his suffering.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I made some sardonic comment about the name of the diner and we walked out into the streets. This was the time of what was called the "brown-out," when the lights in all American cities were very dim. When we re-entered the streets something happened to me which had the tcJrce of an optical illusion, or a nightmare. The streets were very crowded and I was facing north. People were mov ing in every direction but it seemed to me, in that instant, that all of the people I could see, and many more than that, were moving toward me, against me, and that everyone was white. I remember how their f.<ces gleamed. And I felt, like a physical sensation, a click at the nape of my neck as though NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON 71 some interior string connecting my head to my body had been cut. I began to walk. I heard my friend call after me, but I ignored him. Heaven only knows what was going on in his mind, but he had the good sense not to touch me-l don't know what would have happened if he had-and to keep me in sight. I don't know what was going on in my mind, either; I certainly had no conscious plan. I wanted to do something to crush these white faces, which were crushing me. I walked for perhaps a block or two until I came to an enormous, glit tering, and fashionable restaurant in which I knew not even the intercession of the Virgin would cause me to be served. I pushed through the doors and took the first vacant scat I saw, at a table for two, and waited. I do not know how long I waited and I rather wonder, until today, what I could possibly have looked like. Whatever I looked like, I frighte ned the waitress who shortly appeared, and the moment she appeared all of my fury flowed towards her. I hated her for her white face, and for her great, astounded, frightened eyes. I felt that if she found a black man so frightening I would make her fright worth -while. She did not ask me what I wanted, but repeated, as though she had learned it somewhere, "We don't serve Negroes her e." She did not say it with the blunt, derisive hostility to which I had grown so accustomed, but, rather, with a note of apology in her voice, and fear. This made me colder and more murderous than ever. I felt I had to do something with my hands. I wanted her to come close enough for me to get her neck between my hands. So I pretended not to have under stood her, hoping to draw her closer.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I admit that I found her protest both rational and convincing. Since she had been given no say over her free time, how could she think differently? She was keenly aware that none of her friends had such obligations. I was also concerned by the strength of her feeling that her father and “some silly judge” had treated her unjustly. As a young teenager, she was trying to establish her own ideas and values, yet the adults who held authority over her life set a questionable example. “What happens when you ask him if you can go to a weekend school activity?” Tears welled in Joan’s eyes. “He won’t let me change. I tried. He says that’s his time.” She shook her head sadly. Then in a rush she added, “When summer comes, all the other kids in my class look forward to it. I dread it. I hate July. It’s terrible for me. Last July I cried the whole month and thought, why am I being sentenced? What crime did I commit? I was so lonely and I missed my friends. Paula and I would cry ourselves to sleep every night. I felt like a second-class citizen.” After this interview, I worried about Joan. Surely her conclusion that she was being sentenced by the court, like someone who had broken the law, to spend lonely summers with her father was hurtful to her and would not contribute to her loving or respecting him then or in the future. Her phrase “second-class citizen” reverberated in my mind. For her part, Paula’s mom quickly came to appreciate the new freedom offered by two childless weekends per month. She could spend Friday nights in the city with her boyfriend and long weekends catching up on work, sleeping, and reading the Sunday paper. She became as protective as her ex-husband about keeping the schedule as planned. She turned a deaf ear to Joan’s and Paula’s complaints that their social life was being disrupted, that school projects weren’t getting done, and that Santa Rosa was boring. The girls’ initial excitement at seeing their father quickly faded to grumbling, resentment, and protests. When neither parent showed a willingness to listen or to change the arrangement, complaints gradually subsided into sullen acceptance and apathy. Paula displayed a rare moment of animation when I asked her about her visits with her father during our five-year follow-up visit. Her cheeks growing pink with indignation, she burst out, “Racer can’t come on the bus and Daddy won’t drive down to get us. Mom doesn’t take good care of Racer while I’m gone and sometimes he doesn’t even have water when I get back!”

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This is how his mother tells it: "I think it was three (detectives) come up and they asked are you Danny Hamm? And he says yes and right away-g un right to the head and slapping him up, one gun here and one here-just all the way down the hall-beating him and knocking him around with the gun to his head." The other boys were arrested in the same way, and, again of course, they were beaten; but this arrest was a far greater torture than the first one had been because some of the mothers did not know where the boys were, and the police, who were holding them, refused for many hours to say that they were holding them. The mothers did not know of what it was their children were accused until they learned, via television, that the charge was murder. At that time in the state of New Y ark, this charge meant death in the electric chair. Let us assume that all six boys are guilty as (eventually) charged. Can anyone pretend that the manner of their arrest, or their treatment, bears any resemblance to equal justice under the law? The Police Department has loftily ref used to "dignify the charges." But can anyone pretend that they would dare to take this tone if the case involved, say, the sons of Wall Street brokers? I have witnessed and endured the bru tality of the police many more times than once-but, of course, I cannot prove it. I cannot prove it because the Police Department investigates itself , quite as though it were an swerable only to itself . But it cannot be allowed to be an swerable only to itself ; it must be made to answer to the community which pays it, and which it is legally sworn to protect; and if American Negroes arc not a part of the Amer- REPOR T FR OM OCCUP IED TERRITORY 737 ican community, then all of the American professions are a fraud. This arrogant autonomy, which is guaranteed the police, not only in New York, by the most powerful forces in American lif e--o therwise, they would not dare to claim it, would, in deed, be unable to claim it-creates a situation which is as close to anarchy as it already, visibly, is close to martial law. Here is Wallace Baker's mother speaking, describing the night that a police officer came to her house to collect the evidence which he hoped would prove that her son was guilty of murder. The late Mrs. Sugar had run a used-clothing store and the policeman was looking for old coats. "N asty as he was that night in my house. He didn't ring the bell. So I said, have you got a search warrant? He say, no, I don't have no search warrant and I'm going to search anyway.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The American soil is full of the corpses of my ancestors, through 4-00 years and at least three wars. Why i__s_m_�_fn:edom, my citizenship, in question now? What one begs the Amer- AM ER ICAN DR EAM AND AME RIC AN NEGR O 717 ican people to do, for all our sakes, is simply to acceot:/our historv _ _ It seems to me when I watch Americans in Europe that what they don't know about Europeans is what they don't know about me. They were not trying to be nasty to the French girl, rude to the French waiter. They did not know that they hurt their feelings: they didn't have any sense that this particular man and woman were human beings. Thev walked over them with the same so� qf.J:�_L�rJdj gnorance. and condescension, the chann..a.IJ. d..cheerfulness,. with which they had patted me on tbe_ head.and- which made them upset when I was upset. When I was brought up I was taught in American history books that Mrica had no history and that neither had I. I was a savage abo�t whom the least sard the-be ttef\\vfio fiad been saved by Europe and who had been brought to America_ill CQ!:Irse, I believed it. I diqr1 't h�v� much _c hQi�e .. These were the only books there were. Everyone else seemed to agree. If you went out of Harlem the whole world agreed. What you saw was much bigger, whiter, cleaner, safer. The garbage was collected, the children were happy. You would go back home and it would seem, of course, that this .was an- .ac;t4>t=- Goo. You. belonged where white peopl�_l;!t_j :Q!!. It is only since World War II that there has been a counter image in the world. That image has not come about because of any legislation by any American Government, but because Mrica was suddenly on the stage of the world and Mricans had to be dealt with in a way they had never been dealt with before. This gave the Amer:iqq_ Negro, for_the _ .first time, a sense of himself not as a savage. It has �reatec land .will - create a great �any col1 undniffis . - ·· -- -- One of the things the white worlp __ q()_��-not know,_b _uLI think I know, rs tli'[fo�ople are just like everybody s....�� we are also mercenaries, dictators, murderers, liars. We are human, too. Unl ess we can establish some kind of dialogue between those people who enjoy the American dream and those people who have not achieved it, we will be in terrible trouble. This is what concerns me most. We are sitting in this 718 OTHER ES SAYS room and we arc all civilized; we can talk to each other, at least on certain levels, so that we can walk out of here assum ing that the measure of our politeness has some effect on the world.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  That summer, for example, it was not enough to get into a fight on Lenox Avenue, or curse out one's cronies in the barber shops. If ever, indeed, the violence which fills Har lem's churches, pool halls, and bars erupts outward in a more direct tashion, Harlem and its citizens arc lik ely to vanish in an apocalyptic flood. That this is not likely to happen is due to a great many reasons, most hidden and powerful among them the Negro's real relation to the white American. This relation prohibits, simply, anything as uncomplicated and sat isf.<ctory as pure hatred. In order really to hate white people, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON one has to blot so much out of the mind-and the heart that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self destructi\·e pose. But this does not mean, on the other hand, that loYe comes easily: the white "·orld is too powerful, too complacent, too ready with gratuitous hu miliation, and, abm·e all, too ignorant and too innocent for that. One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one's own reac tions are always canceling each other out. It is this, really, which has dri,·en so many people mad, both white and black. One is always in the position of haYing to decide between amputation and gangrene . Amputation is swift but time may prm·e that the amputation was not necessary-or one may delay the amputation too long. Gangrene is sl o"·, but it is impossible to be sure that one is reading one's symptoms right. The idea of going through lif e as a cripple is more than one can bear, and equally unbearable is the risk of swelling up slowly , in agony, with poison. And the trouble, finally , is that the risks are real eyen if the choices do not exist. "But as for me and my house," my father had said, ""·e ''ill sen·e the Lord." I wondered, as we dro,·e him to his resting place, what this line had meant for him. I had heard him preach it many times.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This task would have been extremely difficult even had ther e obtained in the black world a greater unity-geogr aphical, spiritual, and historical-than is actually the case. Under the circumstances, it was an endeavor com plicated by the nearly indefinable complexi ties of the word PRI NCES AND POWER S culture, by the fact that no coherent statement had yet been made concer ning the relationship of black cultur es to each other, and, finally, by the necessity, which had obtained throughout the confer ence, of avoiding the political issues. The inability to discuss politics had cert ainly handicapped the conference, but it could scarcely have been run otherwise. The political question would have caused the conference to lo se itself in a war of political ideologies. Moreover, the con ference was being held in Paris, many of the delegates repre sented areas which belonged to France, most of them represented areas which were not free. There was also to be considered the delicate position of the American delegation, which had sat throughout the conference uncomf ortably aware that they might at any moment be fo rced to rise and leave the hall. The declaration of political points of view being thus pro hibited, the "cultural" debate which raged in the hall that morning was in peipetual danger of drown ing in the sea of the unstated. For, according to his political posi tion, each del egate had a different interpretation of his culture, and a dif ferent idea of its future, as well as the means to be used to make that future a reality. A solution of a kind was offered by Senghor's suggestion that two comm ittees be fo rmed, one to take an inventory of the past, and one to deal with present prospects. There was some feeling that two com mittees were scarcely necessary. Diop suggested that one committee be fo rmed, which, if necessary, could divide itself into two. Then the question arose as to just how the commit tee should be appointed, whether by count ries or by cultur al areas. It was decided, at length, that the commit tee should be set up on the latter basis, and should have re solutions drafted by noon. "It is by these res olutions," protested Mercer Cook, "that we shall make our selves known. It cannot be done in an ho ur." He was entirely right. At eleven-twenty a commit tee of eighteen mem bers had been fo rmed. At fo ur o'clock in the afternoon they were still invisible. By this time, too, the most tr emendous impatience reigned in the crowded hall, in which, today, Negroes by far out numbered whites. At fo ur-twenty five the impatience of the audience erupted in whistles, cat calls, and stamping of feet.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I didn't ted that my unsupported testimony would mean very much, and I couldn't get the groundswcll going which might TO BE BAPTIZED 443 lead to a public hue and cry. I couldn't work at it full time because I was under contract in Calit(Jrnia and had to get back there. And, furthermore, I now had to finish that screenplay, if only to collect my tee: what price justice indeed! Val and I would meet in Siegel's office, to learn that the trial had been postponed again, but that this might be all to the good because it meant that Judge So-and-So instead of Judge What-not would be sitting-at least, he would try to make certain that it was Judge What-not instead ofJudge So and-So. He, Siegel, was on friendly terms with Judge What not, he'd call him later in the evening. And he would smile in a very satisfied way, as though to say, You see how I'm putting myself out for you, how much I take your interests to heart. No, his private investigators had failed to locate Dennis Morris. (Morris is the unknown who identified Tony by means of a photograph.) Morris had disappeared. No one seemed to know where he was. No, there was no word about the where abouts of Michael Crist, either. All of this took time and money-and he would light a cigar, his bright blue eyes watching me expectantly. Well, what in the world could we say to this tcrrit)•ing old man? How could we know whether he had spoken to a single person, or made the remotest phone call on Tony's behalt? We could spend the rest of our lives in this office, while Tony was perishing in jail, and ne,·er know. He didn't care about Tony, but we hadn't expected him to-we had supposed that he cared about something else. What? his honor as a criminal lawyer? Probably-which proved what t(Jo)s we were. His honor as a criminal lawyer was absolutely unassailable, he was a lifetime member of the club. We had no way whatever of lighting a fire under his ass and making him do what we were paying him to do. He didn't need us. There were thousands like us, yes, and black like us, who would keep him in cigars forever, turning over their nickels and dimes to get their loved ones out of trouble. And sometimes he would get them out he had no objection to getting people out of trouble. But it was a lottery; it depended on whose number came up; and he certainly wasn't bucking the machine. Day after day after day, we would leave him and go to the Tombs, and I would see Tony: who was bearing up fantastically well; I'd not have +++ NO NAME IN THE STREET believed he could be so tough.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Tony had been beaten, and beaten very hard; his cheekbones had disappeared and one of his eyes was crooked; he looked swollen above the neck, and he took down his shirt collar, presently, to show us the swel ling on his shoulders. And he was weeping, trying not to-I had seen him with tears in his eyes, but I had never seen him weeping. But when I say that heads surely rolled and that someone had goofed, I do not mean that they goofed because they beat him. They goofed because they let us see him. No one would have taken my word for this beating, or our lawyer's word. But Fritz knows what it means to be beaten in prison. And he, therefore, not only alerted the German press, but armed with the weight of one of the most powerful of German pub- 4-24- NO NAME IN THE STRE ET lishing houses, sued the German state. So, there it was, after all, anyway, in the newspapers, and I, too, had to meet the press. "I' ve got a religious medallion," Tony said-he has become a kind of Muslim, or, at least, an anti-Chr istian-"and the guard told me the other day that they were going to let me have it back again. Because they took it, you know. And I wanted it back. It means a lot to me-I'm not about to kill myself with it, I'm not about to kill myself. So, when the guard walked in, I asked him for it because he said he would bring it to me Friday night." (And this was Friday.) "Well, I don't know, he jumped salty and he walked out. And I started beating on the door of my cell, trying to make him come back, to listen to me, at least to explain to me why I couldn't have it, after he'd promised. And then the door opened and fifteen men walked in and they beat me up-fifteen men!" The headline on one of the German newspapers, which, incongruously or cunningly enough also has beneath the headline an old photograph of myself, laughing, is: "Tony Never Lies"! This means at least two things, for it is not hu manly possible for it to mean what it says. It means that Tony has never lied to me, though I have frequently watched him attempt to delude me into his delusions: but we human beings do this with each other all the time. Friends and lovers are able, sometimes, not always, to resist and correct the delu sions. But it also means something exceedingly difficult to capture, which is that some people are liars, and some people are not. We will return to this speculation later. Somewhere in the Bible there is the chilling observation: Ye are liars, and the truth's not in you. I had been in London when Malcolm was murdered.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Beneath the widely published catalogue of brutal it y-bringing to mind, somehow, an image, a memory of church-b ells burdening the air-is this reality which, in the same nightmare notion, he both flees and rushes to embrace. In America, now, this country dcmted to the death of the paradox-which may, therefore, be put to death by one-his lot is as ambiguous as a tableau by Katka. To flee or not, to move or not, it is all the same; his doom is written on his forehead, it is carried in his heart. In Native Sou, Bigger Thomas stands on a Chicago street corner watching airplanes flown by white men racing against the sun and "Goddamn" he says, the bitterness bubbling up lik e blood, remembering a million indignities, the terrible, rat-infested house, the hu miliation of home-relief , the intense, aimless, ugly bickering, IS NO TES OF A NATIVE SON hating it; hatred smoulders through these pages like sulphur fire. All of Bigger's lite is controlled, defined by his hatred and his tear. And later, his tear drives him to murder and his hatred to rape; he dies, having come, through this violence, we are told, t()r the first time, to a kind of lif e, having for the first time redeemed his manhood. Below the surface of this novel there lies, as it seems to me, a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy. Bigger is Uncle Tom's descendant, flesh of his flesh, so exa ctly opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed together, it seems that the contemporary Negro novelist and the dead New En gland woman are locked together in a deadly, timeless battle; the one uttering merciless exhortations, the other shouting curses. And, indeed, within this web of lust and fury, black and white can only thrust and counter-thrust, long tor each other's slow, exq uisite death; death by torture, acid, knives and burning; the thrust, the counter-thrust, the longing mak ing the heavier that cloud which blinds and suffocates them both, so that they go down into the pit together. Thus has the cage betrayed us all, this moment, our lite, turned to noth ing through our terrible attempts to insure it. For Bigger's tragedy is not that he is cold or black or hungry, not even that he is American, black; but that he has accepted a theology that denies him lite, that he admits the possibility of his being sub-hum an and feels constrained, therefore, to battle tor his humanity according to those brutal criteria bequeathed him at his birth. But our humanity is our burden, our lif e; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult-that is, accept it.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Now, this means that one's concept of human freedom is in a sense frozen or strangled at the root. This has to do, of course, with the fact that though he was born in Nazareth under a very hot sun, and though we know that he spent his life beneath that sun, the Christ I was presented with was presented to me with blue 7 49 750 OTHER ESSAYS eyes and blond hair, and all the virtues to which I, as a black man, was expected to aspire had, by definition, to be white. This may seem a very simple thing and fr om some points of view it might even seem to be a desirable thing. But in fact what it did was make me very early, make us, the blacks, very early distrust our own experience and refuse, in effect, to ar ticulate that experience to the Christians who were our op pressors. That was a great loss for me, as a black man. I want to suggest that it was also a great loss for you, as white people. For example, in the church I grew up in, we sang a song that that man who was hung on a Roman cross between two thieves would have understood better than most church prel ates. We sang-and we knew what we meant when we sang it-"I've been rebuked and I've been scolded." We won our Christianity, our faith, at the point of a gun, not because of the example afforded by white Christians, but in spite of it. It was very difficult to become a Christian if you were a black man on a slave ship, and the slave ship was called 'The Good Ship Jesus.' These crimes, for one must call them crimes, against the human being have brought the church and the entire Western world to the dangerous place we find ourselves in today. Because if it is true that your testimony as Christians has proven invalid; if it is true that my importance in the Christian world was not as a living soul, dear to the sight of God, but as a means of making money, and representatively more sinister than that too representing some terrifying di vorce between the flesh and the spirit; if that is true (and it would be very difficult to deny the truth of this) then at this moment in the world's history it becomes necessary for me, t< >r my own survival, not to listen to what you say but to watch very carefully what you do, not to read your pronouncements but to go back to the source and to check it for myself.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It was a gam ble which I knew I might lose, and which I lost-a very bad day at the races: but I learned something. Fox was then resolving the Cuban-A merican tension by means of a movie called Chef. This enterprise gave us Omar Sharif, as Chc Guevara, and Jack Palance, as Fidel Castro: the resulting vaudeville team is not required to sing, or dance, nor is it permitted, using the words very loosely, to act. The United Fruit Company is not mentioned. John Foster Dulles is not mentioned, either, though he was the lawyer for said company, nor is his brother, Allen, who was the head of the CIA. In the person of Chc, we arc confronted with a doomed, romantic clown. His attempts to awaken the peasants merely disturb them, and their goats: this observation, which is in exorably and inevitably true on one level, is absolutely false on the level at which the film uses it. In the person of Castro, we arc confronted with a cigar-smoking, brandy-drinking maniac: a "spic," as clearly unsuited for political responsibility as the nigger congressmen of The Birth of a Nation. 55 0 CHAPTER THREE 55 1 Since both the film for which I had been hired, and Che! were controversial, courageous, revolutionary films, being packaged for the consumer society, it was hoped that our film would beat Che! to the box-office . This was not among my concerns. I had a fairly accurate idea of what Ho llywood was about to do with Che!. (This is not black, bitter paranoia, but cold, professional observation: you can make a fairly accurate guess as to the direction a film is likely to take by observing who is cast in it, and who has been assigned to direct it. ) The intention of Che! was to make both the man, and his Bolivian adventure, irrelevant and ridiculous; and to do this, further more, with such a syrup of sympathy that any incipient Che would think twice before leaving Mama, and the ever-ready friend at the bank. Che, in the film, is a kind of Lawrence of Arabia, trapped on the losing side, and unable, even, to un derstand the natives he has, mistakenly, braved the jungles to arouse. I had no intention of so betraying Malcolm, or his natives. Yet, my producer had been advised, in an inter-office memo which I, quite unscrupulously, intercepted, that the writer (me) should be advised that the tragedy of Malcolm's lif e was that he had been mistreated, early, by some whites, and betrayed (later) by many blacks: emphasis in the original. The writer was also to avoid suggesting that Malcolm's trip to Mecca could have had any political implications, or reper cussions.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  In Kingsblood Royal the sting of transgression is removed by the complete innocence of the transgressor and the impossibility of taking his one-thirty-second Negro-ness seriously. God Is For White Folks ends in quite an impressive display of abrupt insanity, murders, and sudden deaths in which all of the elderly trans gressors arc destroyed and the lover and his lass, produced, incontrovertibly, by sin, are redeemed through blood and al lowed to enter the manse. In The Path of Thunder, Lanny, despite his father's blood, is dark, and Sarie is fair, and they arc shot to death in an old cabin; it is Lanny's father, inci dentally, who shoots them. But the quarrel here is not with the violent incident; or the THE IMAGE OF THE NEGRO violent death; or the difficulty of union between black and white. The reports ofviolence may not come in the nature of a revelation, but it is a real and valid aspect of the lives that Negroes lead. One suspects, however, that the very fr equency and sameness of the reports operate on the public mind as a bludgeon, numbing the hypothetical response; it may, indeed, be insisted that unless the report has the urgency of a reve lation, the report is worthless. Out of whatever motives, we have here, in effect, merely the exploitation of an ugly reality. Finally, we are shown noth ing, we feel nothing, nothing is illuminated. The worthless ness of these novels consists precisely in that they supposedly expose a reality that in actuality they conspire to mask. For this is not the reality: the reality is more sinister, more treach erous, and more profound than this; and it is, above all, more personal. In none of the foregoing has it been my purpose to resurrect or exploit the ancient bogeyman of sex between the races, but only to inquire how and why in the first place it became a bogeyman at all, and why, if it has been exorcised, it exerts yet, as the sole breath oflife in these ambitious novels, so ferocious and unmistakable a force. It is a question we are inclined to dismiss with jeers: that old stum But the question has not been answered and the failure is significant.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  My little Philanderer could make a fortune out of escorting truly glamorous men—and not all of them would turn out to be as weird as the eye-catching Gabriel. It was quite likely, wasn’t it, that Phil had already caught Gabriel’s eye? I found the corner by the service lift and the steep flight of stairs up to Phil’s attic. It was a drab, cheapjack little area, unambiguously removed from the public, and yet I had come to love it in a way I never could the rest of the monstrous edifice. The little room—and above it the lonely roof—were nothing really, but like the lovers’ cottage in ‘Tea for Two’ they had been wonderfully sufficient for our romance. I knew there was no chance of finding him in—he would be well off on his laddish booze by now—but it would be comforting to sit there for a bit with the window open and surrounded by his empty clothes. When I put my key in the lock, though, there was a muffled call of surprise, I thought, from within. Phil and Bill were kneeling face to face on the bed. Bill’s hand rested on Phil’s shoulder, and it looked like some College jerk-off job. Their tilting dicks, alert as orgiasts’ on a Greek vase, withered astonishingly under my expressionless stare. Not for them the witless priapism of Gabriel; but there was enough defiance in their confusion for them not to blabber excuses—not to say anything at all. And I couldn’t think of anything much to say. I know I swallowed and coloured and took in, as if I needed to satisfy myself, the circumstantial details. Certainly there were no signs of passionate haste. Bill’s trousers were neatly folded and his vast smalls were spread like an antimacassar across the back of the chair. I nodded repeatedly and slowly withdrew, closing the door as if not to disturb a sleeper. Before I had reached the top of the stairs I heard a gasped ‘Oh my God’ and a loud frightened laugh. And so to James’s. By the time I got there my anger, hurt, care were welling up under the frigid discipline I had instinctively assumed. I smeared away stupid tears.