Anxiety

Passages

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• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The prayer meeting had originally been the brain storm of R. , a white student, foreign-born, very measured in speech, very direct in manner. There was first some uncertainty as to whether the prayer meeting should be held at all because of the pressure of exams and the homegoing plans of students, many of whom would have departed by Thursday. There had also been the hope originally, since CORE is by now a dirty word in Tallahassee, of getting broader commu nity support by asking the ministers of all faiths to give the news to their congregations and urge them to join the stu dents. It was possible to gauge the depth of official hostility and community apathy by the discussion this suggestion pre cipitated. OTH ER ESS AYS One of the Negro students suggested that not all the min isters were to be trusted; one of them would surely tccl it his duty to warn the police. A white coed student protested this vehemently, it being her view that there was no possible harm in an open prayer meeting-" lt's just a y'all-come prayer meeting!"-and refused to believe that the police would not protect such spectacular piety. And this brought up the whole question of strategy: If the police were not warned, then the prayer meeting would have to be described as spontaneous. "But you can't," said a Negro coed, "decide to have a spon taneous prayer meeting. Especially not on the steps of the Capitol on Thursday at one o'clock." "Oh, it'll be sponta neous enough," said another student-my notes do not in dicate his color-"by the time we start praying." D., a white coed, was against informing the police: "We love them dearly," she said with rather heavy sarcasm, "but I don't want them to get the impression that I'm asking their permission to do anything." "We're not asking their permission," said another white student. "We have every right to have prayer meeting and we're just informing them of it." "There's no reason," said the girl who felt that the police would not pos sibly do anything to peacefully praying people, "f or them not to treat us just like they'd treat any other group of citizens." This led to rather cynical laughter and someone, looking around the room, otl cred to name "oh, about twenty-five multicolored reasons." In all this there was no question of tear of the police; there was simply no belief whatever that they would act impartially or "that they might turn out," as Reverend Steele unconvincingly suggested, "to protect us."

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  They are only be ginning to realize that the world is difficult and dangerous, that they arc, themselves, tormentingly complex and that the years that stretch before them promise to be more dangerous than the years that arc behind. And they always seem to be wrestling, in a private chamber to which no grownup has ac cess, with monumental decisions. Everyone laughs at himself once he has come through this THEY CAN 'T TURN BACK 629 storm, but it is borne in on me, suddenly, that it is a storm, a storm, moreover, that not everyone survives and through which no one comes unscathed. Decisions made at this time always seem and, in fact, nearly always turn out to be decisions that determine the course and quality of a lif e. I wonder for the first time what it can be like to be making, in the adoles cent dark, such decisions as this generation of students has made. They are in battle with more things than can be named. Not only must they summon up the force to face the law and the lawless-who are not, right now in Tallahassee, easily dis tinguishable-or the prospect of jail or the possibility of being maimed or killed; they are also dealing with problems yet more real, more dangerous and more personal than these: who they are, what they want, how they are to achieve what they want and how they are to reconcile their responsibilities to their parents with their responsibilities to themselves. Add to this exams; the peculiar difficulty of studying at all in so electric a situation; the curious demoralization that can occur in a youngster who is unable to respect his college president; and the enormous questions that, however dealt with or sup pressed, must live in the mind of a student who is already, legally, a convict and is on a year's probation. These are all very serious matters, made the more serious by the fact that the students have so few models to emulate. The young grow up by watching and imitating their elders-it is their universal need to be able to revere them; but I submit that in this country today it is quite impossible for a young person to be speeded toward his maturity in this way. (This impossibility contains the key to what has been called "the beat genera tion.") What the elders have that they can offer the young is evidence, in their own flesh, of defeats endured, disasters passed and triumphs won. This is their moral auth ority, which, however mystical it may sound, is the only authority that en dures; and it is through dealing with this authority that the young catch their first glimpse of what has been called the historical perspective.

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

  They would tell her how much they hate her except for me. I keep them apart. You see, my mom is pretty isolated. She would like a relationship with my dad and stepmother but there is nothing there for her. I don’t want her to find out what they really think. So I keep it cool and I always, always watch what I say. And we manage.” This was the first inkling I had that the “don’t fight” rule had limitations. In their behavior, Lisa’s parents had had the most civilized divorce of all the couples in the study. If parents got grades for how they handled divorce and the postdivorce years, these people would have earned an A plus. There was no open fighting during the marriage and there was almost none after it ended. An only child, Lisa continued to see both parents in ways that felt fair and equitable to everyone. Sometimes her father and stepmother babysat her in her mother’s home, which remained her primary residence. Both parents were devoted to their daughter. Money was adequate in both homes and included college support and vacation trips. Although her mother and stepmother experienced the kinds of ongoing tensions I just described, there was never any open conflict. Neither woman expected Lisa to take sides and both went out of their way not to criticize any family member. But there are things that adults cannot hide from children. Continuing tensions between ex-partners and stepparents are conveyed directly to children via countless nonverbal signals. A roll of the eyes, a shrug of the shoulders, an edge in the voice are enough to tell any child the truth—these adults are getting along on my behalf but they’re pretending. Lisa grew up aware of their intense enduring anger and her mother’s hurt. Good intentions can always become undermined by the frailties of human nature and its passions. Except for her continued worry about her mother and an occasional mother’s “boyfriend who drives me up the wall,” Lisa enjoyed her adolescence. Unlike children living under strict court-ordered visiting schedules, she had lots of choices about what she could do and when. Her father called her every week to arrange what they would do, according to her preferences—which included not seeing him if other activities were more desirable. She had many girlfriends at high school and prided herself on her skill in making friends. She grew up slowly. In fact, she seemed to be holding back from involvement with boyfriends. Unlike many in her generation, she was in no hurry to have a sexual relationship. The one boy she fell in love with from afar, she said sadly, “didn’t like me back.” School was enjoyable for Lisa; she got good grades and did well in sports and dance. She avoided drugs and alcohol. “They just don’t interest me,” she announced.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  There was a demarcation line, to be walked every hour of every day. The demarcation line was my apprehension of, and, therefore, my responsibility for, my own experience: the chill ing vice versa of what I had made of my experience and what that experience had made of me. I will owe the French a debt forever, for example, if only because, during one of my pas sionately insane barroom brawls, I suddenly realized that the Frenchman I was facing had not the remotest notion-and could not possibly have had the remotest notion-{)f the ten sian in my mind between Or/Cans, a French city, and New Orleans, where my father had been born, between lottis, the coin, and Louis, the French king, for whom was named the state of Louisiana, the result of which cele brated purchase had been the death of so many black people. Neither did any Af rican, as far as I could tell, at that moment of my own time and space, have any notion of this tension and torment. But what I began to see was that, if they had no notion of my torment, I certainly had no notion of theirs, and that I was treating people exactly as I had been treated at home. In order to keep the faith- climbing Jacob's ladder-! came home, to go to Little Rock and Charlotte, and so forth and so on, in 1957, and was based in America from 1957 to 1970. I have been in and out of my country, in and out of various cauldrons, for a very long time, long enough to see the doc trine of white supremacy return, like a plague, to the continent which spawned it. This is not a bitter statement. It comes, to tell the truth, out of love, for I am thinking of the children. I watch-here, for example -French and Algerian children trying to become friends with each other, reacting to, but not 778 OTH ER ES SAYS yet understanding, the terrors of their parents, and very far indeed from having any notion of the terrors of the state. They have no way of knowing that the state is menaced and shaken to the degree, precisely, that they, themselves, the pre sumed victims, or at least, the wards of the state, make man ifest their identity-wh ich is not what it might be, either for better or for worse, if they were still in Algeria. They cannot possibly know that they, ex-s lave and ex- master, cannot be used as their fathers were used-that all identities, in short, arc in question, arc about to be made new.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The entire purpose of society is to create a bulwark against the inner and 669 670 OTH ER ES SAYS the outer chaos, literally, in order to make lif e bearable and to keep the human race alive. And it is absolutely inevitable that when a tradition has been evolved, whatever the tradition is, that the people, in general, will suppose it to have existed from before the beginning of time and will be most unwilling and indeed unable to conceive of any changes in it. They do not know how they will live without those traditions which have given them their identity. Their reaction, when it is sug gested that they can or that they must, is panic. And we see this panic, I think, everywhere in the world today, from the streets of our own New Orleans to the grisly battleground of Algeria. And a higher level of consciousness among the people is the only hope we have, now or in the future, of minimizing the human damage. The artist is distinguished from all the other responsible actors in society-the politicians, legislators, educators, sci entists, et cetera-by the fact that he is his own test tube, his own la boratory, working according to very rigorous rules, however unstated these may be, and cannot allow any consid eration to supersede his responsibility to reveal all that he can possibly discover concerning the mystery of the human being. Society must accept some things as real; but he must always know that the visible reality hides a deeper one, and that all our action and all our achievement rests on things unseen. A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven . One cannot possibly build a school, teach a child, or drive a car without taking some things for granted. The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the an swer hides. I seem to be making extremely grandiloquent claims for a breed of men and women historically despised while living and acclaimed when saf ely dead. But, in a way, the belated honor which all societies tender their artists proves the reality of the point I am trying to make. I am really trying to make clear the nature of the artist's responsibility to his society. The pe culiar nature of this responsibility is that he must never cease warring with it, for its sake and for his own. For the truth, in spite of appearances and all our hopes, is that everything is THE CR EA TIVE PR OCESS 671 always changing and the measure of our maturity as nations and as men is how well prepared we are to meet these changes and, further, to use them for our health.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This was a supposition which the modern era, which was to bring about such vast changes in the aims and dimensions of power, put to death; it only begins, in unprec edented fashion, and with dreadful implications, to be resur rected today. But even had this supposition persisted with undiminished force, the American Negro slave could not have used it to lend his condition dignity, for the reason that this supposition rests on another: that the slave in exile yet remains related to his past, has some means-if only in memory-of revering and sustaining the f( >rms of his former life, is able, in short, to maintain his identity. This was not the case with the American Negro slave. He is unique among the black men of the world in that his past was taken fro m him, almost literally, at one blow. One won ders what on earth the first slave found to say to the first dark STRANGER IN THE VILLAGE 12 5 child he bore. I am told that there are Haitians able to trace their ancestry back to African kings, but any American Negro wishing to go back so fa r will find his journey through time abruptly arrested by the signature on the bill of sale which served as the entrance paper for his ancestor. At the time-to say nothing of the circumstances--of the enslavement of the captive black man who was to become the American Negro, there was not the remotest possibility that he would ever take power fr om his master's hands. There was no reason to sup pose that his situation would ever change, nor was there, shortly, anything to indicate that his situation had ever been different. It was his necessity, in the words of E. Franklin Frazier, to find a "motive fo r living under American culture or die." The identity of the American Negro comes out of this extreme situation, and the evolution of this identity was a source of the most intolerable anxiety in the minds and the lives of his masters. F�o r the history of the....AmeriG&n-Negro_is_rnliq.ue---a.lso in this: that the question of his humaniry:,_an<iof.hi•>-figi:J-ts--th(}fe fo re as a human being, becam e_Lb.urn.ing_Qn c...ior.... s .cyJ.:r..al generations of Americans, so burning a question tha!_!Lulti m;rrcty""oecarrfCorre-oriliose used to .divide the. nation. It is our-ofthinw·gun1Cnt1nat the vem)fi1of the - epTtllet�N�er! is derived. It is an argument which Europe has never had, and hence Europe quite sincerely fa ils to understand how or why the argument arose in the first place, why its ctfects are so frequently disastrous and always so unpredictable, why it re fuses until today to be entirely settled. Europe's black posses sions remained-and do remain-in Europe's colonies, at which remove they represented no threat whatever to Euro pean identity. If they posed any problem at all tor the Eu ropean conscience, it was a problem which remained com fortingly abstract: in effect, the black man, as a man, did not exist for Europe.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  What hap pened in defense plants and army camps had repercussions, naturally, in every Negro ghetto. The situation in Harlem had grown bad enough fo r clergymen, policemen, educators, pol iticians, and social workers to assert in one breath that there was no "crime wave" and to otTer, in the very next breath, suggestions as to how to combat it. These suggestions always seemed to involve playgrounds, despite the fa ct that racial skirmishes were occurring in the playgrounds, too. Playground or not, crime wave or not, the Harlem police fo rce had been augmented in March, and the unrest grew-perhaps, in fa ct, partly as a result of the ghetto's instinctive hatred of police men. Perhaps the most revealing news item, out of the steady parade of reports of muggings, stabbings, shootings, assaults, gang wars, and accusations of police brutality, is the item con cerning six Negro girls who set upon a white girl in the sub way because, as they all too accurately put it, she was stepping on their toes. Indeed she was, all over the nation. I had never before been so aware of policemen, on fo ot, on horseback, on corners, everywhere, always two by two. Nor had I ever been so aware of small knots of people. They were on stoops and on corners and in doorways, and what was striking about them, I think, was that they did not seem to be talking. Never, when I passed these groups, did the usual sound of a curse or a laugh ring out and neither did there seem to be any hum of gossip. There was certainly, on the other hand, occurring between them communication extraor dinarily intense. Another thing that was striking was the un expected diversity of the people who made up these groups.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  His voice was light and even rather sweet, with a Southern melody in it; his body was more round than square, more square than tall; and his grin was more boyish than I had expected, and more dif fident. He had a trick, when he greeted me, of saying, "He y, boy!" with a kind of pleased, surprised expression on his face. It was very friendly, and it was also, faintly , mockingly con spiratorial-as though we were two black boys, in league against the world, and had just managed to spirit away several loads of watermelon. We sat in the living room and Richar d brought out a bottle of bourbon and ice and glasses. Ellen Wright was somewhere in the back with the baby, and made only one brief appearance near the end of the evening. I did not drink in those days, did not know how to drink, and I was terrified that the liqu or, on my empty stomach, would have the most disastrous 25+ NOBOD Y KN OWS MY NAME consequences. Richard talked to me or, rather, drew me out on the sub ject of the novel I was working on then. I was so afraid of tailing off my chair and so anxious fi>r him to be interested in me, that I told him far more about the novel than I, in fact, knew about it, madly improvisi ng, one jump ahead of the bourbon, on all the themes which cluttered up my mind. I am sure that Richard realized this, for he seemed to be amused by me . But I think he liked me. I know that I liked him, then, and later, and all the time. But I also know that, later on, he did not believe this. He agreed, that night, to read the sixty or seventy pages I had done on my novel as soon as I could send them to him. I didn't dawdle, naturall y, about getting the pages in the mail, and Richard commented very kindly and favorably on them, and his support helped me to win the Eugene F. Saxton Fel lowship. He was very proud of me then, and I was puffed up with pleasure that he was proud, and was determined to make him prouder still.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Once this happens, as it certainly will one day, the state of Georgia will be up in arms and the present administration of the city will be out of power. I did not meet a soul in Atlanta (I naturally did not meet any members ofthe White Citizens' Council, not, anyway, to talk to) who did not pray that the present mayor would be re elected. Not that they loved him particularly, but it is his ad ministration which holds off the holocaust. Now this places Atlanta's wealthy Negroes in a really quite sinister position. Though both they and the mayor are de \'otcd to keeping the peace, their aims and his are not, and cannot be, the same. Many of those lawyers are working day and night on test cases which the mayor is doing his best to keep out of court. The teachers spend their working day at tempting to destroy in their students-and it is not too much to say, in themselves-those habits of inferiority which form one of the principal cornerstones of segregation as it is prac ticed in the South. Many of the parents listen to speeches by people like Senator Russell and find themselves unable to sleep at night. They are in the extraordinary position of being com pelled to work for the destruction of all they have bought so dearly-their homes, their comfort, the safety of their chil dren. But the satcty of their children is merely comparative; it is all that their comparative strength as a class has bought them so tar; and they arc not sate, really, as long as the bulk of Atlanta's Negroes live in such darkness. On any night, in that other part of town, a policeman may beat up one Negro too many, or some Negro or some white man may simply go berserk. This is all it takes to drive so delicately balanced a city mad. And the island on which these Negroes have built their handsome houses will simply disappear. This is not at all in the interests of Atlanta, and almost c\'cryonc there knows it. Left to itselt� the city might grudg ingly work out compromises designed to reduce the tension and raise the level of Negro lite. But it is not left to itself; it belongs to the state of Georgia.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But she herself doesn't have a job and so doesn't risk losing one. Nor, she told me, had anyone said anything to her husband, who, how C\'Cr, by her own proud suggestion, is extremely close mouthed. And it developed later that he was not working at his regular trade but at something else. As to whether she was worried, "No," she told me; in much the same way that G., when asked about the blockade, had said, "Nothing, sir." In her case it was easier to sec what she meant: she hoped for the best and would not allow herself, in the meantime, to lose her head. "I don't feel like nothing's going to happen," she said, soberly. "I hope not. But I know if anybody tries to harm me or any one of my children, I'm going to strike back with all my strength. I'm going to strike them in God's name." G., in the meantime, on the sofa with his books, was pre paring himself for the next school day. His face was as impas si\'C as e\'er and I found myself wondering-again-how he managed to face what must surely have been the worst mo ment of his day-the morning, when he opened his eyes and realized that it was all to be gone through again. Insults, and incipient \'iolence, teachers, and-exams. "One among so many," his mother said, "that's kind of rough." A FLY IN BUTTERMILK 1 93 "D o you think you'll make it?" I asked him. "Would you rather go back to --High?" "No," he said, "I'll make it. I ain't going back." "He ain't thinking about going back," said his mother proudly and sadly. I began to suspect that the boy managed to support the extreme tension of his situation by means of a nearly fanatical concentration on his schoolwork; by holding in the center of his mind the issue on which, when the deal went down, others would be forced to judge him. Pride and silence were his weapons. Pride comes naturally, and soon, to a Negro, but even his mother, I felt, was worried about G.'s silence, though she was too wise to break it. For what was all this doing to him really? "It's hard enough," the boy said later, still in control but with flashing eyes, "to keep quiet and keep walking when they call you nigger. But if anybody ever spits on me, I know I'll have to fight." His mother laughs, laughs to ease them both, then looks at me and says, "I wonder sometimes what makes white folks so mean." This is a recurring question among Negroes, even among the most "liberated"-which epithet is meant, of course, to describe the writer. The next day, with this question (more elegantly phrased) still beating in my mind, I visited the prin cipal of G.'s new high school.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  There began, now, a time of rumor unlike anything I had ever been through before. In a way, I was somewhat insulated against what was happening to the Algerians, or was aware of it from a certain distance, because what was happening to the Algerians did not appear to be happening to the blacks. I was still operating, unconsciously, within the American frame work, and, in that framework, since Arabs are paler than blacks, it is the blacks who would have suffered most. But the blacks, from Martinique and Senegal, and so on, were as vis ible and vivid as they had always been, and no one appeared to molest them or to pay them any particular attention at all. Not only was I operating within the American frame of ref erence, I was also a member of the American colony, and we were, in general, slow to pick up on what was going on around us. Nevertheless, I began to realize that I could not find any of the Algerians I knew, not one; and since I could not find one, there was no way to ask about the others. They were in none of the dives we had frequented, they had apparently abandoned their rooms, their caf es, as I have said, were closed, and they were no longer to be seen on the Paris sidewalks, changing money, or selling their rugs, their peanuts, or them selves. We heard that they had been placed in camps around Paris, that they were being tortured there, that they were be ing murdered. No one wished to believe any of this, it made us exceedingly uncomfortable, and we felt that we should do something, but there was nothing we could do. We began to realize that there had to be some truth to these pale and cloudy rumors: one woman told me of seeing an Algerian hurled by the proprietor of a cafe in Pigalle through the cafe's closed plate- glass door. If she had not witnessed a murder, she had certainly witnessed a murder attempt. And, in fact, Al gerians JVere being murdered in the streets, and corraled into prisons, and being dropped into the Seine, like flies.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Porter took me downtown to the main branch of the public library at Forty-second Street and waited for me while I began my research . He was very proud of the story I eventually turned in. But I was so te rrified that afternoon that I vomited all over his shoes in the subway. The teachers I am talking about accepted my limits. I could begin to accept them without shame. I could trust them when they suggested the possibilities open to me. I understood why they changed the list of colleges they had hoped to send me to, since I was clearly never going to become either an athlete or a businessman. I was an exceedingly shy, withdrawn, and uneasy student. 79+ OTH ER ES SAYS Yet my teachers somehow made me believe that I could learn. And when I could scarcely see for myself any future at all, my teachers told me that the future was mine. The question of color was but another detail, somewhere between being six feet tall and being six feet under. In the long meantime, every thing was up to me. Every child's sense of himself is terrif)ringly fragile. He is really at the mercy of his elders, and when he finds himself totally at the mercy of his peers, who know as little about themselves as he, it is because his peers' elders have abandoned them. I am talking, then, about morale, that sense of self with which the child mu st be invested. No child can do it alone. But children, I submit, cannot be fooled. They can only be betrayed by adults, not fooled-f or adults, unlike children, are fooled very easily, and only because they wish to be. Chil dren- innocence being both real and monstrous- intimidate, harass, blackmail, terrifY, and sometimes even kill one another. But no child can fool another child the way one adult can fool another. It would be impossible, for example, for children to bring off the spectacle-the scandal-of the Republican or Democratic conventions. They do not have enough to hide-or, if you like, to flaunt. I remember being totally unable to recite the Pledge of Allegiance until I was seven years old . Why? At seven years old I was certainly not a card-carrying Communist, and no one had told me not to recite "with liberty and justice for all." In fact, my father thought that I should recite it for safety's sake. But I knew that he believed it no more than I, and that his recital of the pledge had done nothing to con tribute to his safety, to say nothing of the tormented safety of his children. How did I know that?

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  When, at school, she suggested taki ng me to the theater, I did not, as I might ha,·e done if she had been a :;-.Jegro, find a way of discouraging her, but agreed that she should pick me up at my house one evening. I then, ,·ery cle,·erly, left all the rest to my mother, who sug gested to my father, as I knew she would, that it \Votrld not be ,·ery nice to let such a kind woman make the trip for noth ing. Also, since it was a schoolteacher, I imagine that my mother countered the idea of sin with the idea of "educa tion," which word, even with my father, carried a kind of bitter weight. Before the teacher came my father took me aside to ask wb_Y she was coming, what interest she could possibly ha,·e in our house, in a bov like me. I said I didn't know but I, too, sug gested that it . had something to do with education. And I understood that my father was waiting for me to say some thing-! didn't quite know what; perhaps that I wanted his protection against this teacher and her "education." I said 68 NOTES OF A NATIVE SON none of these things and the teacher came and we went out. It was clear, during the brief interview in our living room, that my fa ther was agreeing very much against his will and that he would have refused permission if he had dared. The bet that he did not dare caused me to despise him: I had no way of knowing that he was facing in that living room a wholly unprecedented and fr ightening situation. Later, when my f:1ther had been laid off from his job, this woman became very important to us. She was really a very sweet and generous woman and went to a great deal of trou ble to be of help to us, particularly during one awful winter. My mother called her by the highest name she knew: she said she was a "christian." My fa ther could scarcely disagree but during the fo ur or five years of our relatively close association he never trusted her and was always trying to surprise in her open, Midwestern face the genuine, cunningly hidden, and hideous motivation. In later years, particularly when it began to be clear that this "education" of mine was going to lead me to perdition, he became more explicit and warned me that my white fr iends in high school were not really my friends and that I would see, when I was older, how white people would do anything to keep a Negro down. Some of them could be nice, he admitted, but none of them were to be trusted and most of them were not even nice. The best thing was to have as little to do with them as possible.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  At the time-to say nothing of the circumstances--of the enslavement of the captive black man who was to become the American Negro, there was not the remotest possibility that he would ever take power from his master's hands. There was no reason to sup pose that his situation would ever change, nor was there, shortly, anything to indicate that his situation had ever been different. It was his necessity, in the words of E. Franklin Frazier, to find a "m otive for living under American culture or die." The identity of the American Negro comes out of this extreme situation, and the evolution of this identity was a source of the most intolerable anxiety in the minds and the lives of his masters. F�or the history of the....AmeriG&n-Negro_is_rnliq.ue---a. lso in this: that the question of his humaniry:,_an<iof.hi•>-figi:J-ts--th(}fe fore as a human being, became_ Lb.urn.ing_Qnc.. .i or. ... s.cyJ.:r ..al generations of Americans, so burning a question tha!_!Lulti m;rrcty"" oecarrfCo rre- oriliose used to .divide the. nation. It is our-ofthinw·gun1Cnt1nat the vem)fi1 of the - epTtllet�N�er! is derived. It is an argument which Europe has never had, and hence Eur ope quite sincerely fails to understand how or why the argument arose in the first place, why its ctfects are so frequently disastrous and always so unpredictable, why it re fuses until today to be entirely settled. Europe's black posses sions remained-and do remain-in Europe's colonies, at which remove they represented no threat whatever to Euro pean identity. If they posed any problem at all tor the Eu ropean conscience, it was a problem which remained com fortingly abstract: in effect, the black man, as a man, did not exist for Europe. But in America, even as a slave, he was an inescapable part of the general social fabric and no American could escape having an attitude toward him. Americans at tempt until today to make an abstraction of the Negro, but the very nature of these abstractions reveals the tremendous effects the presence of the Negro has had on the American character. 126 NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON When one considers the history of the Negro in America it is of the greatest importance to recognize that the moral be lids of a person, or a people, arc never really as tenuous as lite-w hich is not moral-very oti:en causes them to appear; these create tor them a frame of retercnce and a necessary hope, the hope being that when lite has done its worst they will be enabled to rise above themselves and to triumph over life. Lite would scarcely be bearable if this hope did not exist. Again, c\·en when the worst has been said, to betray a belief is not by any means to have put oneself beyond its power; the betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And this incoherence which seems to afflict this country is analogous to that. I mean that in order to have a conversation with someone you have to reveal yourself. In order to have a real relationship with somebody you have got to take the risk of being thought, God forbid, "an oddball." You know, you have to take a chance which in some peculiar way we don't seem willing to take. And this is very serious in that it is not so much a writer's problem, that is to say, I don't want to talk about it fr om the point of view of a writer's problem, because, after all, you didn't ask me to become a writer, but it seems to me that the situation of the writer in this country is symptomatic and reveals, says something, very terrifying about this country. If I were writing hypothetically about a Frenchman I would have in a way a fr ame of reference and a point of view and in tact it is easier to write about frenchmen, comparatively speaking, because they interest me so much less. But to try to deal with the American experience, that is to say to deal with this enormous incoherence, these enormous puddings, this shapeless thing, to try and make an American, well listen to them, and try to put that on a page. The truth about dialogue, for example, or the technical side of it, is that you try and make people say what they would say if they could and then you sort of dress it up to look like speech. That is to say that it's really an absolute height, people don't ever talk the way they talk in novels, but I've got to make you believe they do because I can't possibly do a tape recording. But to try and find out what Americans mean is almost impossible because there arc so many things they do not want to face. And not only the Negro thing which is simply the NOTES FOR A HYPOTHETICAL NOVEL 229 most obvious and perhaps the simplest example, but on the level of private life which is after all where we have to get to in order to write about anything and also the level we have to get to in order to live, it seems to me that the myth, the illusion, that this is a free country, for example, is disastrous. Let me point out to you that fr eedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as fr ee as they want to be.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Both my friend and my brother had a point. I had already read 17Je Devils; now, I forced myself to read Ihe EX01'cist-a ditficult matter, since it is not written; then, I saw the film again, alon e. I tried to be absolutely open to it, suspending judgment as totally as I could. For, after all, if l had once claimed to be "fi lled" with the Holy Ghost, and had once really believed, af ter all, that the Holy Ghost spoke through me, I could not, out of hand, arbitrarily sneer at the notion of demonic possession. The fact that I had been an adolescent boy when I belie Yed all this did not really get me off the hook: I can produce no documents proving that I am not what I was. My friend and I had a drink together, ati:er we had seen the 568 THE DEVIL FINDS WORK film, and we discussed it at some length. He was most struck by the figure of the young priest: he found the key to this personage in a rather strange place, and his observation haunted me for weeks. Father Karras confesses, at one point, that he has lost his faith. "So, we must be careful," David said to me, "lest we lose our faith-and become possessed." He was no longer speaking of the film, nor was he speaking of the chu rch. I carried this somewhat chilling admonition away with me. When I saw the film again, I was most concerned with the audience. I wondered what they were seeing, and what it meant to them. The film, or its ambience, reminded me of The Godfather, both being affiicted with the same pious ambiguity. Ambiguity is not quite the word, for the film's intention is not at all ambiguous; yet, hypocrisy is not quite the word, either, since it suggests a more deliberate and sophisticated level of cun ning. The Exorcist is desperately compulsive, and compulsive, precisely, in the terror of its unbelief.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  In spite- perhaps because of all my cff<>ns to feel relaxed and free and at home (fix America is my home!) I began to feel unreal-almost as though I were playing an unworthy part in a cheap, unworthy drama. I, who have spent half my lif e in hotels, sometimes woke up in the middle of the night, terrified, wondering where I was. But, though I scarcely realized it, and might even have been ashamed to admit it to myself, I think that this had partly to do with the fact that I was the only black person in the hotel. I must stress that in no way whatever did anyone in the hotel ever make me ted this, nor, indeed, did I ever consciously feel it-i t's only now, in looking back, that I suspect it had to be partly that. My presence in the hotel was absolutely unques tioned, even by people who did not know who I was, or who TO BE BAPTI ZED 429 thought I was Sammy Davis. It was simply taken for granted that I would not have been in the hotel if I had not belonged there. This, irrationally enough, got to me-did I belong there? In any case, thousands of black people, miles away, did not belong there, though some of them sometimes came to visit me there. (People had to come and get me, or come to visit me, because I do not drive.) The drive from Beverly Hills to Watts and back again is a long and loaded drive-l some times felt as though my body were being stretched across those miles. I don't think I felt anything so trivial as guilt, guilt at what appeared to be my comparative good fortune. I knew more about comparative fortunes than that, but I felt a stunning helplessness. These two worlds would never meet, and that fact prefigured disaster for my countrymen, and me. It caused me to look about me with an intensit y of wonder which had no pleasure in it. Perhaps even more than the drive from Beverly Hills to Watts, the effect of this ruthless division was summed up for me by a visit I received from a young, very bright black man whom I had met years before, in Bos ton, after a lecture. The n, he had been very bright indeed, eager, full of ideas for his future, and the future of black peo ple . A few years later, I had run across him, briefly, in Hel sinki-he was studying, and seeing the world.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It has to do with political power and it has to do with sex. And this is a nation which, most unluckily, knows very little about either. The city of Atlanta, according to my notes, is "big, wholly segregated, sprawling; population variously given as six hun dred thousand or one million, depending on whether one goes beyond or remains within the city limits. Negroes 25 to 30 per cent of the population. Racial relations, on the record, can be described as fair, considering that this is the state of Georgia. Growing industrial town. Racial relations manipu lated by the mayor and a fairly strorlg Negro middle class. This works mainly in the areas of compromise and concession and has \'ery little effect on the bulk of the Negro population and none whatever on the rest of the state. :\To integration, pending or actual." Also, it seemed to me that the Negroes in Atlanta were "ver y vividly cit y Negroes"-they seemed less patient than their rural brethren, more dangerous, or at least more unpredictable. And: "H ave seen one wealthy Negro sec tion, very pretty, but with an unpaved road. . . . The section 200 NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME in which I am living is composed of frame houses in various stages of disrepair and neglect, in which two and three families live, often sharing a single toilet. This is the other side of the tracks; literally, I mean. It is located, as I am told is the case in many Southern cities, just beyond the underpass." Atlanta contains a high proportion of Ne groes who own their own homes and exist, visibly anyway, independently of the white world. Southern towns distrust this class and do everything in their power to prevent its appearance. But it is a class which has a certain usefulness in Southern cities. There is an incipient war, in fact, between Southern cities and Southern towns between the city, that is, and the state-wh ich we will discuss later. Little Rock is an ominous example of this and it is lik ely - indeed, it is certain-that we will see many more such examples before the present crisis is over. Before arriving in Atlanta I had spent several days in Char lotte, North Carol ina. This is a bourgeois town, Presbyterian, pretty-if you like towns-and socially so hermetic that it con tains scarcely a single decent restaurant. I was told that Ne groes there are not even licensed to become electricians or plumbers. I was also told, several times, by white people, that "race relations" there were excellent. I failed to find a single Negro who agreed with this, which is the usual story of "race relations" in this country. Ch arlotte, a town of I65,000, was in a ferment when I was there because, of its 50,000 Negroes, four had been assigned to previously all-white schools, one to each school.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  They were, moreover, the only people in the world who did; and not only did they know us better than we knew ourselves, but they knew us better than we knew them. This was the piquant flavoring to the national joke, it lay be hind our uneasiness as it lay behind our benevol ence: Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom, our creations, at the last evaded us; they had a lif e-th eir own, perhaps a better lif e than ours and they would never tell us what it was. At the point where we were driven most privately and painfully to conjecture what depths of contempt, what heights of indifference, what prod igies of resilience, what untamable superiority allowed them so vi,·idly to endure, neither perishing nor rising up in a body to wipe us from the earth, the image perpetually shattered and the word failed. The black man in our midst carried murder in his heart, he wanted vengeance. We carried murder too, we wanted peace. In our image of the Negro breathes the past we deny, not dead but living yet and powerful, the beast in our jungle of statistics. It is this which defeats us, which continues to defeat us, which lends to interracial cocktail parties their rattling, genteel, nervously smiling air: in any drawing room at such a gathering the beast may spring, filling the air with flying things and an unenlightened wailing. Wherever the problem touches there is confusion, there is danger. Wherever the Ne gro tacc appears a tension is created, the tension of a silence filled with things unutterable. It is a sentimental error, there t<>rc, to believe that the past is dead; it means nothing to say that it is all forgotten, that the Negro himself has forgotten it. It is not a question of memory. Oedipus did not remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless the marks they lef t testified to that doom toward which his feet were leading him. The man docs not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him, as a child; nevertheless, the MANY THOU SAN DS GONE 23 hand and the darkness remain with him, indivisible from him self forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to take flight. The making of an American begins at that point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land. This problem has been faced by all Americans throughout our history-in a way it is our history-and it baffles the immigrant and sets on edge the second generation until today. In the case of the Negro the past was taken from him whether he would or no; yet to for swear it was meaningless and availed him nothing, since his shameful history was carried, quite literally, on his brow.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I did not think I had been away too long: but I could not fa il to begin, how ever unwillingly, to wonder about the uses and hazards of expatriation. I did not think I was white, either, or I did not think I thought so. But the Africans might think I did, and who could blame them? In their eyes, and in terms of my history, I could scarcely be considered the purest or most de pendable of black men. And I think that it was at about this point that I began to watch Richard as though he were a kind of object lesson. I could not help wondering if he, when facing an African, fe lt the same awful tension between envy and despair, attraction and revulsion. I had always been considered very dark, both Negroes and whites had despised me fo r it, and I had despised ALAS, POOR RICHARD 261 myself. But the Africans were much darker than I; I was a paleface among them, and so was Richard. And the distur bance thus created caused all of my extreme ambivalence about color to come floating to the surface of my mind. The Africans seemed at once simpler and more devious, more di rectly erotic and at the same time more subtle, and they were proud. If they had ever despised themselves fo r their color, it did not show, as fa r as I could tell. I envied them and fe ared them-feared that they had good reason to despise me. What did Richard fe el? And what did Richard fe el about other American Negroes abroad? For example: one of my dearest friends, a Negro writer now living in Spain, circled around me and I around him for months before we spoke. One Negro meeting another at an all-white cocktail party, or at that larger cocktail party which is the American colony in Europe, cannot but wonder how the other got there. The question is: Is he fo r real? or is he kissing ass? Almost all Negroes, as Richard once pointed out, are almost always acting, but before a white audience-which is quite incapable of judging their performance: and even a "bad nigger" is, inevitably, giving something of a perfor mance, even if the entire purpose of his performance is to terrifY or blackmail white people. Negroes know about each other what can here be called fa mily secrets, and this means that one Negro, if he wishes, can "knock" the other's "hustle"-can give his game away. It is still not possible to overstate the price a Negro pays to climb out of obscurity-for it is a particular price, involved with being a Negro; and the great wounds, gouges, amputa tions, losses, scars, endured in such a journey cannot be cal culated.