Contempt

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)

  Since even she is so thoroughly handicapped by the peculiar necnsities of Carmm Jones, I should like to make it clear that, in discussing the rest of the cast, I am nor trying to judge their professional competence, which, on the basis of this movie-they do nor even sing in their own voices it would be quite untair ro do. CARM EN JONE S 37 rather entertaining works as Stormy Weather or Cabin in the Sky- in which at least one could listen to the music; Carmen Jo nes has moved into a stratosphere rather more interesting and more pernicious, in which even Negro speech is parodied out of its charm and li beralized, if one may so put it, out of its force and precision. The result is not that the characters sound like everybody else, which would be bad enough; the result is that they sound ludic rously false and affected, like ante-bellum Negroes imitating their masters. This is also the way they look, and also rather the way they are dressed, and the word that springs immediately to mind to describe the appallingly technicolored sets-a n army camp, a room, and a street on Chicago's South Side, presumably, which Bigger Thomas would cenainly fail to recognize-is "spotless ." They could easily have been dreamed up by someone determined to prove that Negroes are as "clean" and as "m odern" as white people and, I suppose, in one way or another, that is exactly how they JVere dreamed up. And one is not allowed to forget for an instant that one is watching an opera (a word apparently synonymous in Mr. Preminger's mind with tragedy and fantasy), and the tone of Carmen Jo nes is stifling: a wedding of the blank, lofty solem nity with which Hollywood so often approaches "works of an" and the really quite helpless condescension with which Hol lywood has always handled Negroes. The fact that one is watching a Negro cast interpreting Carmen is used to justify their remarkable vacuity, their complete improbability, their total divorce from anything suggestive of the realities of Ne gro lif e.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The market was part of the folly that alw ays seemed to be overtaking white people, and it was always leading them to the same end. They wept briny tears, they put pistols to their heads or jumped out of windows. Ihat) s just like JVhite folks, was my father's con temptuous judgment, and we took our cue from him and felt no pity whatever. You reap JVhat you soJV, Daddy said, grimly, carrying himself and his lunch box off to the factory, while we carried our lunch boxes off to school and, soon, into the streets, where my brother and I shined shoes and sold shop ping bags. Mama went downtown or to the Bronx to clean white ladies' apartments. Yet there is a moment from that time that I remember today and will probably always remember-a photograph from the center section of the Daily NeJVs. We were starving, people all over the country were starving. Yet here were several photo graphs of farmers, somewhere in America, slaughtering hogs and pouring milk onto the ground in order to force prices up (or keep them up), in order to protect their profits. I was much too young to know what to make of this beyond the obvious. People were being forced to starve, and being driven to death, for the sake of money. One might say that my recollection of this photograph marks a crucial moment in my education; but one must also say that my education must have begun long before that moment, and dictated my reaction to the photograph. My education began, as does everyone's, with the people who 790 OTH ER ES SAYS towered m·er me, who were responsible fi:>r me, who were f(mning me. They were the people who loved me, in their fashion-whom I loved, in mine. These were people whom I had no choice but to imitate and, in time, to outwit. One realizes later that there is no one to outwit but oneself . \Vhen I say that I was luckier than the children are today, I am deliberately making a very dangerous statement, a state ment that I am willing, even anxious, to be called on. A black boy born in New York's Harlem in 1924 was born of south erners who had but lately been driven from the land, and therefore was born into a southern community. And this was incontestably a community in which every parent was respon sible for every child. Any grown-up, seeing me doing some thing he thought was wrong, could (and did) beat my behind and then can)' me home to my Mama and Daddy and tell them why he beat my behind. Mama and Daddy would thank him and then beat my behind again. I learned respect fi>r my elders.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Whatever unsettling questions are raised are evanescent, titillating; re mote, for this has nothing to do with us, it is safely ensconced in the social arena, where, indeed, it has nothing to do with anyone, so that finally we receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that we are reading such a book at al l. This report from the pit reassures us of its reality and its darkness and of our own salvat ion; and "As long as such books arc 16 NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON being published," an American liberal once said to me, "everything will be all right." But unless one's ideal of society is a race of neatly analyzed, hard-\\"orking ciphers, one can hardly claim for the protest novels the lofty purpose they claim for themselves or share the present optimism concerning them. They emerge for what they arc: a mirror of our confusion, dishonesty, panic, trapped and immobilized in the sunlit prison of the American dream. They arc fantasies, connecting nowhere with reality, senti mental; in exactly the same sense that such movies as The Best Ycm-s of Our Lives or the works of Mr. James M. Cain arc fantasies. Beneath the dazzling pyrotechnics of these current operas one may still discern, as the controlling force, the in tense theological preoccupations of Mrs. Stowe, the sick va cuities of The Rover Boys. Finally, the aim of the protest novel becomes something very closely resembling the zeal of those alabaster missionaries to Africa to cover the nakedness of the natives, to hurry them into the pallid arms of Jesus and thence into slavery. The aim has now become to reduce all Americans to the compulsive, bloodless dimensions of a guy named Joe. It is the peculiar triumph of society-and its loss-that it is able to convince those people to whom it has given inferior status of the reality of this decree; it has the force and the \\"capons to translate its dictum into fact, so that the allegedly inferior arc actually made so, insofar as the societal realities arc concerned. This is a more hidden phenomenon now than it was in the days of serfdom, but it is no less implacable. Now, as then, we find ourselves bound, first without, then within, by the nature of our categorization. And escape is not effected through a bitter railing against this trap; it is as though this very striving were the only motion needed to spring the trap upon us. We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is pre cisely through our dependence on this reality that we arc most endlessly betrayed.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Similarly, even though the American cult of literacy has chiefly operated only to provide a market for the Reader1s Digest and the Daily News, literacy is still better than illiteracy; so Negro leaders must demand more and better schools for Negroes, though any Negro who takes this schooling at face value will fi nd himself virtually incapacitated for life in this democracy. Pos sibly the most salutary effect of all this activity is that it assures the Negro that he is not altogether forgotten: people are working in his behalf, however hopeless or misguided they may be; and as long as the water is troubled it cannot become stagnant. The terrible thing about being a Negro leader lies in the term itself. I do not mean merely the somewhat condescend ing differentiation the term implies, but the nicely refined tor ture a man can experience fr om having been created and defeated by the same circumstances. That is, Negro leaders have been created by the American scene, which thereafter works against them at every point; and the best that they can hope for is ultimately to work themselves out of their jobs, to nag contemporary American leaders and the members of their own group until a bad situation becomes so complicated and ++ NOTES OF A NATIVE SON so bad that it cannot be endured any longer. It is like needling a blister until it bursts. On the other hand, one cannot help observing that some Negro leaders and politicians are far more concerned with their careers than with the welfare of Negroes, and their dramatic and publicized battles are battles with the wind. Again, this phenomenon cannot be changed without a change in the American scene. In a land where, it is said, any citizen can grow up and become president, Negroes can be pardoned for desiring to enter Congress. The Negro press, which supports any man, provided he is sutnciently dark and well-known-with the exception of cer tain Negro novelists accused of drawing portraits unflattering to the race-has for years received vastly confusing criticism based on the fact that it is helplessly and always exactly what it calls itself, that is, a press devoted entirely to happenings in or about the Negro world. This preoccupation can probably be forgiven in view of the great indifference and fr equent hos tility of the American white press. The Negro press has been accused of not helping matters much-as indeed, it has not, nor do I see how it could have.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And they are hated for the same reason: both reveal, unbearably, the real attitude of the white world, no matter how many liberal speeches are made, no matter how many lofty editorials are written, no matter how many civil-rights commissions are set up. The projects are hideous, of course, there being a law, ap parently respected throughout the world, that popular hous ing shall be as cheerless as a prison. They are lumped all over Harlem, colorless, bleak, high, and revolting. The wide win dows look out on Harlem's invincible and indescribable squalor: the Park Avenue railroad tracks, around which, about fi>rty years ago, the present dark community began; the un rehabilitated houses, bowed down, it would seem, under the great weight of frustration and bitterness they contain; the dark, the ominous schoolhouses fr om which the child may emerge maimed, blinded, hooked, or enraged for life; and the churches, churches, block upon block of churches, niched in FIFTH AVENUE, UPTOWN 1 75 the walls like cannon in the walls of a fortress. Even if the administration of the projects were not so insanely humiliating (for example: one must report raises in salary to the manage ment, which will then eat up the profit by raising one's rent; the management has the right to know who is staying in your apartment; the management can ask you to leave, at their dis cretion), the projects would still be hated because they are an insult to the meanest intelligence. Harlem got its first private project, Riverton *-which is now, naturally, a slum-about twelve years ago because at that time Negroes were not allowed to live in Stuyvesant Town. Harlem watched Riverton go up, therefore, in the most vio lent bitterness of spirit, and hated it long before the builders arrived. They began hating it at about the time people began moving out of their condemned houses to make room for this additional proof of how thoroughly the white world despised them. And they had scarcely moved in, naturally, before they began smashing windows, defacing walls, urinating in the elevators, and fornicating in the playgrounds. Liberals, both white and black, were appalled at the spectacle. I was appalled by the liberal innocence-or cynicism, which comes out in practice as much the same thing. Other people were delighted to be able to point to proof positive that nothing could be done to better the lot of the colored people.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I 616 ON CATFISH ROW 61 7 am told that Miss Dandridge is a singer, though she seems never to have sung in the movies, but she is not an actress. Other people in Porg_v and Bess are very gifted players indeed and under less depressing conditions have done admirable work; and there are others who give every indication of being able to act-if they could only find a director. In short, the saddest and most infuriating thing about the Hollywood pro duction of Porgy and Bess is that Mr. Otto Preminger has a great many gifted people in front of his camera and not the remotest notion of what to do with any of them. The film cost upwards of six, or sixty, millions, or billions, of doll ars but all that was needed for the present result was a little card board and a little condescension. As for the cardboard, con sider the set, surely the most characterless in this opera's entire history; and as for condescension, consider the costumes, most of which seem to have been left over from one of those trav eling "Tom" shows. All of this, needless to say, in color, on a screen a block wide, and in stereophonic sound-which last means that one is not allowed to listen to the music but is beaten over the head with it. The camera takes an interest in the proceedings which can best be described as discreet: trun dling lamely behind Diahann Carroll, for example, while she mauls someone's heroically patient inf ant and waits for her man to be lost at sea. This event, like everything else in the movie, is so tastelessly overdone, so heavily telegraphed rolling chords, dark sky, wind, ominous talk about hurri cane bells, etc.-that there is really nothing left for the actors to do. It is always necessary to suppose that the director knows more than his actors, knows, that is, how to get the best out of them, as individual performers and as an ensemble . This is a supposition which the facts do not alw ays support. In the case of a white director called upon to direct a Negro cast, the supposition ceases-with very rare exceptions-to have any validity at all . The director cannot know anything about his company if he knows nothing about the life that produced them. We still live, alas, in a society mainly divided into black and white. Black people still do not, by and large, tell white people the truth and white people still do not want to hear it. By the time the cameras start rolling or rehearsals begin, 618 OTH ER ES SA YS the director is entirely at the mercy of his ignorance and of whatever system of theories or evasions he has evolved to cm·er his ignorance.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The meaning of his existence has already been most adequately expressed, nor does anyone wish, particularly not in the name of democracy, to think of it any more; as for the possibility of articulation, it is this possibility which abm·c all others we most dread. Morem·er, the courtroom, judge, jury, witnesses and spectators, recognize immediately that Bigger is their creation and they recognize this not only with hatred and fear and guilt and the resulting fury of self righteousness but also with that morbid fullness of pride mixed with horror with which one regards the extent and power of one's wickedness. They know that death is his por tion, that he runs to death; coming from darkness and dwell ing in darkness, he must be, as often as he rises, banished, lest the entire planet be engulfed. And they know, finally, that they do not \\ish to forgi,·e him and that he docs not wish to be forgi,·en; that he dies, hating them, scorning that appeal which they cannot make to that irrccm·erablc humanity of his which cannot hear it; and that he wa11t s to die because he glories in his hatred and pref ers, like Lucifer, rather to rule in hell than sen·e in hea,·cn. For, bearing in mind the premise on which the lif e of such a man is based, i.e., that black is the color of damnation, this is his only possible end. It is the only death which "ill allow him a kind of dignity or c,·cn, however horribly, a kind of 3+ NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON beauty. To tell this story, no more than a single aspect of the story of the "nigger," is inevitably and richly to become in \'oh·cd with the t(:>rce of lif e and legend, how each perpetually assumes the guise of the other, creating that dense, many sided and shifting reality which is the world we live in and the world we make. To tell his story is to begin to lib erate us from his image and it is, for the first time, to clothe this phan tom with flesh and blood, to deepen, by our understanding of him and his relationship to us, our understanding of our selves and of all men.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  J oc Adams is Hu sky Miller (Escamilla) and he is also rather taft)r-colorcd, but since he is the second lead and by way of being the villain, he is not required to be as blank as Mr. Bcl af ontc and there is thcrcfc>rc, simply in his presence, some fleeting hint of mas culine or at least boyish force. For the rest, Pearl Bailey is quite dark and she plays, in effect, a floozie. The wicked sergeant who causes Joe to desert the army-in one of many wildly improbable scenes-and who has evil designs on Carmen is very dark indeed; and so is Hu sky Miller's trainer, who is, one is given to suppose, Miss Bailey's sugar-daddy. It is quite clear that these people do not live in the same world with Carmen, or Joe, or Cindy Lou. All three of the leads arc presented as indefinably complex and tragic, not after money or rhine stones but something else which causes them to be mis understood by the more earthy types around them. This CARM EN JONES 39 something else is love, of course, and it is with the handling of this love story that the movie really goes to town. It is true that no one in the original Carmen, least of all Carmen and her lover, are very clearly motivated; but there it scarcely matters because the opera is able to get by on a purely theatrical excitement, a sort of papier-mache violence, and the intense, if finally incredible, sexuality of its heroine. The movie does not have any of this to work with, since here excitement or violence could only blow the movie to bits, and, while the movie certainly indicates that Carmen is a luscious lollipop, it is on rather more uncertain ground when confronted with the notion of how attractive she finds men, and it cannot, in any case, use this as a motivating factor. Carmen is thus robbed at a stroke of even her fake vitality and all her cohesiveness and has become, instead, a nice girl, if a little fiery, whose great fault- and, since this is a tragedy, also her triumph-is that she looks at "lif e," as her final aria states it, "straight in de eye." In lieu of sexuality the movie-makers have dreamed up some mumbo jumbo involving buzzards' wings, signs of the zodiac, and death-dealing cards, so that, it appears, Carmen ruins Joe because she loves him and decides to leave him because the cards tell her she is going to die. The fact that between the time she leaves him and the time he kills her she acquires some new clothes, and drinks-as one of her arias rather violently indicates she intends to-a great deal of cham pagne is simply a sign of her intense inner suffering.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It is only too clear that even with the most malevolent will in the world Negroes can never manage to achieve one-tenth of the harm which we fear. No, it has everything to do with ourselves and this is one of the reasons that for all these generations we have disguised this problem in the most incredible jargon. One of the reasons 220 NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME we are so tC: md of sociological reports and research and inves tigational committees is because they hide something. As long as we can deal with the Negro as a kind of statistic, as some thing to be manipulated, something to be fled fr om, or some thing to be given something to, there is something we can aYoid, and what we can avoid is what he really, really means to us. The question that still ends these discussions is an ex traordinary question: Would you let your sister marry one? The question, by the way, depends on several extraordinary assumptions. First of all it assumes, if I may say so, that I JVant to marry your sister and it also assumes that if I asked your sister to marry me, she would immediately say yes. There is no reason to make either of these assumptions, which are clearly irrational, and the key to why these assumptions are held is not to be found by asking Negroes. The key to why these assumptions are held has something to do with some insecurity in the people who hold them. It is only, after all, too clear that everyone born is going to have a rather difficult time getting through his life. It is only too clear that people fall in love according to some principle that we have not as yet been able to define, to discover or to isolate, and that marriage depends entirely on the two people involved; so that this objection does not hold water. It certainly is not justifi cation for segregated schools or for ghettos or for mobs. I suggest that the role of the Negro in American life has some thing to do with our concept of what God is, and fr om my point of view, this concept is not big enough. It has got to be made much bigger than it is because God is, after all, not anybody's toy. To be with God is really to be involved with some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you. I conceive of my own lite as a journey toward something I do not under stand, which in the going toward, makes me better.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This is because white Americans have supposed "E urope" and "civilization" to be synonyms which they are not-and have been distrustful of other stan dards and other sources of vitality, especially those produced in America itself , and have attempted to behave in all matters as though what was east fi>r Europe was also east for them. What it comes to is that if we, who can scarcely be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we con demn ourselves, with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay, whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new lif e to the Western achievements, and trans form them. The price of this transformation is the uncondi tional freedom of the Negro; it is not too much to say that he, who has been so long rejected, must now be embraced, and at no matter what psychic or social risk. He is the key figure in his country, and the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as his. And the Negro recognizes this, in a negative way. Hence the questi on: Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house? White Americans find it as difficult as white people else where do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption-wh ich, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards-is revealed in all kinds of striking ways, from Bobby Kennedy's assurance that a Negro can become President in forty years to the un t<>rtunate tone of warm congratulation with which so many li berals address their Negro equals. It is the Negro, of course, who is presumed to have become equal-an achievement that not only proves the comforting fact that perseverance has no color but also overwhelmingly corroborates the white man's sense of his own value. Alas, this value can scarcely be cor roborated in any other way; there is certainly little enough in the white man's public or private lif e that one should desire DOWN AT THE CROSS 341 to imitate. White men, at the bottom of their hearts, know this. Therefore, a vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man's profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be seen as he is, and at the same time a vast amount of the white anguish is rooted in the white man's equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  If the concept of God has any validity or any usc, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him. I had heard a great deal, long before I finally met him, of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and of the Nation of Islam movement, of which he is the leader. I paid very little atten tion to what I heard, because the burden of his message did not strike me as being very original; I had been hearing vari ations of it all my life. I sometimes found myself in Harlem on Satur day nights, and I stood in the crowds, at I25th Street and Seventh Avenue, and listened to the Muslim speakers. But I had heard hun dreds of such speeches-or so it seemed to me at first. Anyway, I have long had a very definite tendency to tune out the moment I come anywhere near either a pulpit or a soapbox. What these men were saying about white people I had often heard before. And I dismissed the Nation of Is lam's demand for a separate black economy in America, which I had also heard before , as willful, and even mischievous, non sense. Then two things caused me to begin to listen to the speeches, and one was the behavior of the police. After all, I had seen men dragged fr om their platforms on this very corner for saying less vir ulent things, and I had seen many crowds dispersed by policemen, with clubs or on horseback. But the policemen were doing nothing now. Obviously, this was not because they had become more human but because they were under orders and because they were afraid. And indeed they were, and I was delighted to sec it. Ther e they stood, in twos and threes and tours, in their Cub Scout unif orms and with their Cub Scout faces, totally unpr epared, as is the way with American he-men, for anything that could not be settled with a club or a fist or a gu n. I might have pitied them if I had DO WN AT THE CROSS 315 not found myself in their hands so often and discovered, through ugly experience, what they were like when they held the power and what they were like when you held the power.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But I have alway s been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human lif e, of human touch, so deep, that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, or ganic connection between his public stance and his private lif e. This is what makes them so baffling, so moving, so exasper ating, and so untrustworthy. "Only connect," Henry James has said. Perhaps only an American writer would have been driven to say it, his very existence being so threatened by the failure, in most American lives, of the most elemen tary and crucial connections. NO NA ME IN THE STREET This failure of the private lif e has always had the most dev astating effect on American public conduct, and on black white relations. If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have needed to invent and could never have become so dependent on what they still call "the Negro problem." This problem, which they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters, and it is destroying them; and this not from anything blacks may or may not be doing but because of the role a guilty and constricted white imagination has assigned to the blacks. That the scapegoat pays fi>r the sins of others is well known, but this is only legend, and a revealing one at that. In fact, however the scapegoat may be made to suffer, his suffering cannot purity the sinner; it merely incriminates him the more, and it seals his damnation. The scapegoat, eventually, is released, to death: his murderer continues to live. The suffering of the scapegoat has resulted in seas of blood, and yet not one sinner has been saved, or changed, by this despairing ritual. Sin has merely been added to sin, and guilt piled upon guilt. In the private chambers of the soul, the guilty party is identified, and the accusing finger, there, is not legend, but consequence, not f.1n tasy, but the truth. People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have al lowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead. The crucial thing, here, is that the sum of these individual abdications menaces lif e all over the world. ror, in the generality, as social and moral and political and sexual entities, white Americans arc probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any color, to be found in the world today.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Clare are terribly in earnest. Neither of them questions the medieval morality from which their dialogue springs: black, white, the devil, the next world-posing its alternatives between heaven and the flames-were realities for them as, of course, they were for their creator. They spurned and were terrified of the darkness, striving mightily for the light; and considered from this aspect, Miss Ophelia's exclamation, like Mrs. Stowe's novel, achieves a bright, almost a lurid significance, like the light from a fire which consumes a witch. This is the more striking as one considers the novels of Negro oppression writ ten in our own, more enl ightened day, all of which say only: "This is perfectly horrible! You ought to be ashamed of your selves!" (Let us ignore, for the moment, those novels of oppression written by Negroes, which add only a raging, ncar paranoiac postscript to this statement and actually reinforce, as I hope to make clear later, the principles which activate the oppression they decry.) Uncle Tom's Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with II 12 NOTES OF A NA TIVE SON Little lVomm. Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of ex (Cssi\"c and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to ted; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his a\·crsion to experience, his fear of lif e, his arid heart; and it is always, thcrd(>re, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty. Uncle Tom's Ca bin-l ike its multitudi nous, hard-boiled descendants-is a catalogue of violence. This is explained by the nature of Mrs. Stowe's subject matter, her laudable determination to flinch from nothing in present ing the complete picture; an explanation which falters only if we pause to ask whether or not her picture is indeed complete; and what constriction or fail ure of perception forced her to so depend on the description of brutality-u nmotivated, senseles s-and to leave unanswered and unnoticed the only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds. But this, let us say, was beyond Mrs. Stowe's powers; she was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer; her book was not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong; was, in fact, perfectly horrible. This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel; and the only question lef t to ask is why we arc bound still within the same constriction. How is it that we are so loath to make a further journey than that made by Mrs. Stowe, to discover and reveal something a little closer to the truth?

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This so severely cramps the American com·ersational style, that one looks on this student with awe, and some shame-he is so spectacularly getting out of his Eu ropean experience everything it has to giYe. He has certainly made contact with the French, and isn't wasting his time in Paris talking to people he might perfectly well ha\'e met in America. His friends are French, in the classroom, in the bis tro, on the boule\'ard, and, of course, at home-it is only that one is sometimes dri,·en to wonder what on earth they find to talk about. This wonder is considerably increased when, in the rare conversations he condescends to ha\·e in English, one discovers that, certain picturesque details aside, he seems to know no more about life in Paris than e\'erybody knew at home. His friends have, it appears, leaped unscathed from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, entirely undisma yed by any of the re\'erses suffered by their country. This makes them a remarkable band indeed, but it is in Yain that one attempts to discm ·er anything more about them-their com·ersation being limit ed, one gathers, to remarks about French wine, witticisms concerning l'amom·, French history, and the glories of Paris. The remarkably limited range of their minds is matched only by their perplexing definition of friendship, a definition which does not seem to include any suggestion of commun ication, still less of intima cy. Since, in short, the re lationship of this perfectly adapted student to the people he now so strenuously adores is based simply on his unwillingness to allow them anv of the human attributes with which his NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON countrymen so confounded him at home, and since his vaunted grasp of their history reveals itself as the merest aca demic platitude, involving his imagination not at all, the ex tent of his imm ersion in French life impr esses one finally as the height of artificiality, and, even, of presumpti on. The most curious thing about the passion with which he has emb raced the Continent is that it seems to be nothing more or less than a means of safeguarding his American simplicity. He has placed himself in a kind of strongbox of custom, and refuses to see anything in Paris which can't be seen through a golden haze. He is thus protected against reality, or experience, or change, and has succeeded in placing beyond the reach of corruption values he prefers not to examine. Even his multi tudinous French friends help him to do this, for it is impos sible, after all, to be friends with a mob: they are simply a cloud of faces, bearing witness to romance.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It is also a ma liciously funny indictment of the sexual terror and hostility of American whites: and the horror of the story is increased by its humor. "Man, God Ain't Like That," is a fable of an African's dis covery of God. It is a far more horrible story than "Man of All Wor k," but it too manages its effects by a kind of Grand Guignol humor, and it too is an unsparing indictment of the frivolity, egotism, and wrong-headedness ofwhite people-in this case, a french artist and his mistress. It too is told entirely in dialogue and recounts how a french artist traveling through Africa picks up an African servant, uses him as a model, and, in order to shock and titillate his jaded European friends, brings the African back to Paris with him. Whether or not Wri ght's vision of the African sensibility will be recognized by Africans, I do not know. But certainly he has managed a frighte ning and tru thful comment on the in exorably mysterious and dangerous relationships between ways of life, which arc also ways of thought. This story and ALAS, POOR RICH ARD 251 "Man of All Work" left me wondering how much richer our extremely poor theater might now be if Wright had chosen to work in it. But "The Man Who Killed a Shadow" is something else again; it is Wright at the mer cy of his subject. His great tc>rte, it now seems to me, was an ability to convey inward states by means of externals: "The Man Who Lived Underground," t(>r example, conveys the spiritual hor ror of a man and a city by a relentless accumulation of details, and by a series of brief, sharply cut-otT tableaus, seen through chinks and cracks and keyholes. The specifically sexual horror taced by a Negro can not be dealt with in this way. "The Man Who Killed a Shadow" is a story of rape and mur der, and neither the mur derer nor his victim ever comes alive. The entir e story seems to be occurring, somehow, beneath cotton . There are many reasons tc>r this. In most of the novels written by Negroes until today (with the exception of Chester Himes' If He Hol lers Let Him Go) there is a great space where sex ought to be; and what usually fills this space is violence. This violence, as in so much of Wright's work, is gratuitous and compulsive. It is one of the severest criticisms than can be leveled against his work.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The first white man I ever saw was the Jewish manager who arrived to collect the rent, and he collected the rent because he did not own the building. I never, in fact, saw any of the people who owned any of the buildings in which we scrubbed and suffered for so long, until I was a grown man and famous. None of them were Jews. And I was not stupid: the grocer and the druggist were Jews, for example, and they were very very nice to me, and to us. They were never really white, for me. The cops were white. The city was white. The threat was white, and God was white. Not for even a single split second in my lif e did the despicable, utterly cowardly accusation that "the Jews killed Christ" re verberate. I knew a murderer when I saw one, and the people who were trying to kill me were not Jews. But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western in terests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of "divide and rule" and for Europe's guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years. finally: there is absol utely-r epeat: absoluteZv-no hope of establishing peace in what Europe so arrogantly calls the Middle East (how in the world would Europe know? having so dismally failed to find a passage to India) without dealing with the Palestinians. The collapse of the Shah of Iran not only revealed the depth of the pious Ca rter's concern for "human rights," it also revealed who supplied oil to Israel, and to OPEN LETTER TO THE BORN AGAIN 787 whom Israel supplied arms. It happened to be, to spell it out, white South Africa. Well. The Jew, in America, is a white man. He has to be, since I am a black man, and, as he supposes, his only protec tion against the fate which drove him to America. But he is still doing the Christian's dirty work, and black men know it. My friend, Mr. Andrew Young, out of tremendous love and courage, and with a silent, irreproachable, indescribable no bility, has attempted to ward off a holocaust, and I proclaim him a hero, betrayed by cowards. 1be Nation, September 29, 1979 Dark Days I HIT the streets when I was seven. It was the middle of the Depression and I learned how to sing out of hard ex perience. To be black was to confront, and to be forced to alter, a condition forged in history.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The son is a world famous doctor, thirty-seven years old, who has already been married, and who has lived all over the world; and who, if he marries the girl, is immediately taking her away with him, out of the United States. The father knows perfectly well that America is not the world: indeed, it would have to be a part of his pride that his effort has helped to release his son from the obscenely crippling pressures of his homeland . It can make absolutely no difference to him who his son marries: if the son is free and happy, the father is, too. And it is worth noting, perhaps, that the film appears completely to forget the wonder doctor's eminence, and the effect that this would have on his parents. As the parents of a world-f amous man, they, indis putably , outrank their hosts, and might very well feel that the far from galvanizing fiancee is not worthy of their son: it is not the black parents who would be ill at ease. But the American self -evas ion, which is all that this country has as history, has created the myth on which this film is based, and this myth cannot endure so treacherous a perception; treacherous to the American self -image, and to what passes, in America, for self -esteem. Onl y yesterday, if, indeed, it was yesterday, the hotly contested white fiancee cried death before dishonor! (or you yellow do gs!) and ran out of this lif e, into the arms of Jesus, in order not to be defiled by the nigger's touch. Today-if it is today-s he tells her mother, in a scene manip ulated with such cool efficiency that it almost seems to be true, that, although she certainly wanted to sleep with her black fiance, he was too honorable to touch her: in this day of so many liberations, make of this collision of inadmissible fantasies whatever you will. In any case, it is out of all this that the black son must say, finally, to his black father, and ignobly enough, "Y ou're a colored man. I just want to be a THE DE VIL FIND S WORK man." Which means that a man exists only in the brutally limited lexicon of those who think of themselves as white, and imagine, therefore, that they control reality and rule the world.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It is an act which cannot be forgotten, any more than the branding iron on the skin can be forgotten. And, if it cannot be forgotten, which is to say undone, then it will cer tainly, in one way or another, be repeated: therefore, it cannot be forgiven: a grave matter, if one accepts my central premise, which is that all men are brothers. Similarly, The Birth of a Nation is really an elaborate justi fication of mass murder. The film cannot possibly admit this, which is why we are immediately placed at the mercy of a plot labyrinthine and preposterous-as tallows: The gallant South, on the edge of the great betrayal by the Northern brethren: this is the pastoral and yet doom-laden weight of the early images. Two brothers, robust, two sisters, fair, a handsome house, a loving and united family, and happy, loyal slaves. Unhappily, however, for the South, and for us all, a certain eminent Southern politician has a mulatto slave mistress-a house nigger, whose cot he shares when the sun goes down: she does not share his bed, to which he returns shortly before the sun comes up: and the baleful effect of this carnal creature on the eminent Southern politician helps bring about the ruin of the South. I cannot tell you exactly how she brings about so devastating a fate, and I defY anyone to tell me: but she does. Without attempting to track my way through any more 512 THE DEVIL FINDS WORK of what we will call the pre-plot: the War comes. The South is shamefully defeated-or, not so much defeated, it would appear, as betrayed: by the influence of the mulattoes. For the previously noted eminent and now renegade Southern poli tician has also, as it turns out, a mulatto protege (we do not know how this happened, but we are allowed to suspect the worst) and this mulatto protege is maneuvered into the pre viously all-white Congress of the United States. At which point the Carpetbaggers arrive, and the movie begins. For the film is concerned with the Reconstmction, and how the birth of the Ku Klux Klan overcame that dismal and mistaken chap ter in our-American-history. The first image of the film is of the Mrican slave's arrival. The image and the title both convey the European terror be fore the idea of the black and white, red and white, saved and pagan, confrontation. I think that it was Freud who suggested that the presence of the black man in America foreshadowed America's doom-which America, if it could not civilize these savages, would deserve: it is certainly the testimony of such disparate witnesses as William Faulkner and Isadora Duncan. For Marx and Engels, the presence of the black man in Amer ica was simply a usefi.il crowbar for the liberation of whites: an idea which has had its issue in the history of American labor unions.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  His friends are French, in the classroom, in the bis tro, on the boule\'ard, and, of course, at home-it is only that one is sometimes dri,·en to wonder what on earth they find to talk about. This wonder is considerably increased when, in the rare conversations he condescends to ha\·e in English, one discovers that, certain picturesque details aside, he seems to know no more about life in Paris than e\'erybody knew at home . His friends have, it appears, leaped unscathed from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, entirely undismayed by any of the re\'erses suffered by their country. This makes them a remarkable band indeed, but it is in Yain that one attempts to discm·er anything more about them-their com·ersation being limited, one gathers, to remarks about French wine, witticisms concerning l'amom·, French history, and the glories of Paris. The remarkably limited range of their minds is matched only by their perplexing definition of friendship, a definition which does not seem to include any suggestion of communication, still less of intimacy. Since, in short, the re lationship of this perfectly adapted student to the people he now so strenuously adores is based simply on his unwillingness to allow them anv of the human attributes with which his NOTES OF A NATIVE SON countrymen so confounded him at home, and since his vaunted grasp of their history reveals itself as the merest aca demic platitude, involving his imagination not at all, the ex tent of his immersion in French life impresses one finally as the height of artificiality, and, even, of presumption. The most curious thing about the passion with which he has embraced the Continent is that it seems to be nothing more or less than a means of safeguarding his American simplicity. He has placed himself in a kind of strongbox of custom, and refuses to see anything in Paris which can't be seen through a golden haze. He is thus protected against reality, or experience, or change, and has succeeded in placing beyond the reach of corruption values he prefers not to examine. Even his multi tudinous French friends help him to do this, for it is impos sible, after all, to be friends with a mob: they are simply a cloud of faces, bearing witness to romance. Between these two extremes, the student who embraces Home, and the student who embraces The Continent-both embraces, as we have tried to indicate, being singularly devoid of contact, to say nothing of love-there are far more grada tions than can be suggested here. The American in Europe__js ec�l}rwhcre confronted with th<: q��s ! ion (>fhis identity, and this may be taken as the key to all the contradictions one encounters when attempting to discuss him.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The movie's lifeless unreality is only occasionally threatened by 3 5 NOTES OF A NATIVE SON Pearl Bailey, who has, however, been forestalled by Mr. Prcminger's direction and is reduced-in a series of awful cos tumes, designed, it would appear, to camouflage her person ality-to doing what is certainly the best that can be done with an abomination called Beat Out That Rhythm on a Drum and delivering her lines tor the rest of the picture with such a murderously amused disdain that one cannot quite avoid the suspicion that she is commenting on the film. For a second or so at a time she escapes the film's deadly inertia and in Miss Bailey one catches glimpses of the imagination which might have exploded this movie into something worth seeing. But this movie, more than any movie I can remember having seen, cannot afford, dare not risk, imagination. The "sexiness," tor example, of Dorothy Dandridge, who plays Carmen, becomes quite dearly manufactured and even rather silly the moment Pearl Bailey stands anywhere ncar her.* And the moment one wishes that Pearl Bailey were playing Carmen one understands that Carmen Jones is controlled by another movie which Hollywood was studiously not making. For, while it is amusing to parallel Bizet's amoral Gypsy with a present-day, lower-class Negro woman, it is a good deal less amusing to parallel the Bizet violence with the violence of the Negro ghetto. To avoid this-to exploit, that is, Carmen as a brown skinned baggage but to avoid even suggesting any of the mo tivations such a present-day Carmen might have-it was helpful, first of all, that the script tailed to require the services of any white people. This seals the action otl� as it were, in a vacuum in which the spectacle of color is divested of its dan ger. The color itself then becomes a kind of vacuum which each spectator will fill with his own f. . 1ntasies. But Carmen Jones docs not inhabit the never-never land of such bogus but *I have singled out Miss Bailey because the quality of her personality, fo rth right and wry, and with the authoritative ring of authenticity, highlights fo r me the lack of any of these qualities, or any positive qualities at all, in the movie itself. She is also the only pertimner with whose work I am more or less t:uniliar.