Despair

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)

  It is inescapable that this is only pos sible because of his position in this country and it has very fr equently seemed at least equally apparent that this is a po sition which no one, least of all the politician, seriously in tended to change. Since Negroes have been in this country their one major, devastating gain was their Emancipation, an emancipation no one regards any more as having been dictated by humanitarian impulses. All that has followed fr om that brings to mind the rather unfortunate image of bones thrown to a pack of dogs sufficiently hungry to be dangerous. If all this sounds rather deliberately grim, it is not through any wish to make the pic ture darker than it is; I would merely like to complete the picture usually presented by pointing out that no matter how many instances there have been of genuine concern and good will, nor how many hard, honest struggles have been carried on to improve the position of the Negro people, their position has not, in fact, changed so far as most of them are concerned. Sociologists and historians, having the historical perspective in mind, may conclude that we are moving toward ever greater democracy; but this is beyond the ken of a Negro growing up in any one of this country's ghettos. As regards Negro politicians, they are considered with pride as politicians, a pride much akin to that felt concerning Marian Anderson or Joe Louis: they have proven the worth of the Negro people and in terms, American terms, which no one can negate. But as no housewife expects Marian Anderson's genius to be of any practical aid in her dealings with the landlord, so nothing is expected of Negro representatives. The terrible thing, and here we have an American phenomenon in relief, is the fact that the Negro representative, by virtue of his position, is ever more removed fr om the people he ostensibly serves.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart tr ee of hatred and despair. This intimation made my heart heavy and, now that my father was irrecoverable, I wished that he had been beside me so that I could have searched his face tor the answers which only the future would gJ\'e me now. PART THREE Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown I N PARIS nowadays it is rather more difficult for an American Negro to become a really successful entertainer than it is rumored to have been some thirty years ago. For one thing, champagne has ceased to be drunk out of slippers, and the frivolously colored thousand-franc note is neither as elastic nor as freely spent as it was in the 19 20's. The musicians and sing ers who are here now must work very hard indeed to acquire the polish and style which will land them in the big time. Bearing witness to this eternally tantalizing possibility, per formers whose eminence is unchallenged, like Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong, occasionally pass through. Some of their ambitious followers are in or near the big time already; others are gaining reputations which have yet to be tested in the States. Gordon Heath, who will be remembered for his per formances as the embattled soldier in Broadway's Deep Are the Roots some seasons back, sings ballads nightly in his own night club on the Rue L'Abbaye; and everyone who comes to Paris these days sooner or later discovers Chez Inez, a night club in the Latin Quarter run by a singer named Inez Cavanaugh, which specializes in fried chicken and jazz. It is at Chez Inez that many an unknown first performs in public, going on thereafter, if not always to greater triumphs, at least to other night clubs, and possibly landing a contract to tour the Riviera during the spring and summer. In general, only the Negro entertainers arc able to maintain a useful and unquestioning comradeship with other Negroes. Their nonperforming, colored countrymen arc, nearly to a man, incomparably more isolated, and it must be conceded that this isolation is deliberate. It is estimated that there arc five hundred American Negroes living in this city, the vast majority of them veterans studying on the G.l. Bill. They arc studying everything from the Sorbonnc's standard Cours de Civilisation Fran f aise to abnormal psychology, brain surgery, music, fine arts, and literature. Their isolation from each other 8 5 86 NOTES OF A NATIVE SON is not difficult to understand if one bears in mind the axiom, unquestioned by American landlords, that Negroes are happy o nly \\'hen they arc kept together. Those driven to break this pattern by leaving the U.S. ghettos not merely have effected a social and physical leave-taking but also have been precipi tated into cruel psychological warfare.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It can be, and it has been, suicidal to attempt to speak of this to a multitude, which, assuming it knows that time exists, believes that time can be outwitted. Something like this, anyway, has something to do with my beginnings. I was trying to locate myself within a specific in heritance and to use that inheritance, precisely, to claim the birthright fr om which that inheritance had so brutally and spe cifically excluded me. It is not pleasant to be forced to recognize, more than thirty years later, that neither this dynamic nor this necessity have changed. There have been superficial changes, with results at best ambiguous and, at worst, disastrous. Morally, there has been no change at all and a moral change is the only real one. "Plus fn change,) ) groan the exasperated french (who should certainly know), aplus c'est le meme chose. ) ) (The more it changes, the more it remains the same.) At least they have the style to be truthful about it. The only real change vividly discernible in this present, un- INTRODUCTION TO " NOTES .. , 8II speakably dangerous chaos is a panic-stricken apprehension on the part of those who have maligned and subjugated others for so long that the tables have been turned. Not once have the Civilized been able to honor, recognize, or describe the Savage. He is, practically speaking, the source of their wealth, his continued subjugation the key to their power and glory. This is absolutely and unanswerably true in South Africa-to name but one section of Africa-and, as to how things fare for Black men and women; here, the Black has become, eco nomically, all but expendable and is, therefore, encouraged to join the Army, or, a notion espoused, I believe, by Daniel Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, to become a postman-to make himself useful, for Christ's sake, while White men take on the heavy burden of ruling the world. Well. Plus ra change. To say nothing, speaking as a Black citizen, regarding his countrymen, of friends like these. There is an unadmitted icy panic coiled beneath the scaf folding of these present days, hopes, endeavors. I have said that the Civilized have never been able to honor, recognize, or describe the Savage. Once they had decided that he was savage, there was nothing to honor, recognize or describe. But the savages describe the Europeans, who were not yet, when they landed in the New(!) World, White, as the people from heaven. Neither did the savages in Africa have any way of foreseeing the anguished diaspora to which they were about to be condemned. Even the chiefs who sold Africans into slav ery could not have had any idea that this slavery was meant to endure forever, or for at least a thousand years.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Reading these novels I was struck by an almost paralyzing desperation: What could one possibly say about them? What, in these days, is a novel? If it is conceded that KinlJsblood Royal is a new low, even for the American liberal middlebrow, what then is one to say about Albert Sears, a resolutely undistinguished novel which, by virtue of its present company, seems graceful and percep tive and quite thoroughly worthwhile? The line between what might be called the personal or creative intellectual and that vast culture of the masses with which we arc, willy-nilly, in volved, is a precarious one: on the one hand there is corrup tion and on the other a remote vista closdy resembling No Man's Land. Granting the initial debasement of literary standards, the arrival of the protest novel was inevitable. The question fix ever posed by the existence of the protest novel-a kind of writing becoming nearly as formalized as those delicate vi gnettes written for the women's magazines-is whether or not its power as a corrective social force is sufficient to override its deficiencies as literature. It is better, it is said, to have a KinJTSblnod Royal or a Gentleman ' s Agreement, shoddy as they 582 THE IM AGE OF THE NEGR O are, than nothing at all; it is an improvement over the un realistic, hush-h ush attitude of preceding generations. At least, the existence of these novels keeps urgent social questions in the public mind; no one can hide �rom them. But this attractive and optimistic analysis poses questions of its own : How closely do these novels reflect the social ques tions which-since, admit tedly, they are not, by and large, good novels -are their sole reason for being? With what reality are they concerned, how is it probed, how translated, exactly what message is being brought to this amorphous pub lic mind? Finally: is the "great work" these novels arc presum ably doing in the world quite worth the torture they are to read? Albert Sears comes under the heading of a protest novel somewhat arbitrarily. Much, but not all, of the story is con cerned with the efforts of a Negro family to move into a white neighborhood. The book differs from its fello ws in that, if the struggle is recounted without distinction or power, it is also relatively free of the condescension and the infantile bitterness which forms the pulpy core of the other novels here. Mr. Brand is not really at ease when writing about the national problem, but one almost admires his occasional honest stiff ness when one considers what nightmares of tolerance he might have evoked instead.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I submit, though I may be wrong, that I was then at the beginning of a terri fYing adventure, not too un like the conundrum which seems to menace Norman now: "I had done a few things and earned a few pence"; but the things I had written were behind me, could not be written again, could not be repeated. I was also realizing that all that the world could give me as an artist, it had, in effect, already given. In the years that stretched bef ore me, all that I could look forward to, in that way, were a few more prizes, or a lot more, and a little more, or a lot more money. And my private life had failed-had failed, had failed. One of the reasons I had fought so hard, after all, was to wrest from the world fame and money and love. And here I was, at thir ty-two, finding my notoriet y hard to bear, since its principal effect was to make me more lonely; money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did; and love, as far as I could see, was over. Love seemed to be over not merely because an affair was ending; it would have seemed to be over under any circumstances; for it was the dream of love which was ending. I was beginning to realize, most unwilli ngly, all the things love could not do. It could not make me over, for example. It could not undo the journey which had made of me such a strange man and brought me to such a strange place. But at that time it seemed only too clear that love had gone out of the world, and not, as I had thought once, because I was poor and ugly and obscure, but precisely because I was no longer any of these things. \Vhat point, then, was there in working if the best I could hope for was the Nobel Prize? And how, indeed, would I be able to keep on working if I could never be released from the prison of my egocentricity? By what act could I escape this horror? For horror it was, let us make no mistake about that. And, beneath all this, which simplified nothing, was that sense, that suspicion-which is the glory and torment of ever y writer-that what was happening to me might be turned to good account, that I was trembling on the edge of great rev- 274- NOBODY KNOWS MY NA ME elations, was being prepared for a very long journey, and might now begin, having sur vived my apprenticeship (but had I su rvived it? ), a great work. I might really become a great writer.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And sometimes he would get them out he had no objection to getting people out of trouble. But it was a lottery; it depended on whose number came up; and he certainly wasn't bucking the machine. Day after day after day, we would leave him and go to the Tombs, and I would see Tony: who was bearing up fantastically well; I'd not have +++ NO NAM E IN THE STR EE T believed he could be so tough. Seeing him, I felt guilt y, frus trated, and helpless, felt time flowing through my hands like water. Val would be waiting fix me when I came down, we might walk around a bit, and then I would leave her with the others, who were waiting for the six o'clock visit. \Vhocver wishes to know who is in prison in this country has only to go to the prisons and watch who comes to visit. \Ve spent hours and hours, days and days, eternities, down at the Tombs, Val and I, and, later, my brother, David. I suppose there must have been white visitors; it stands, so to speak, to reason, but they were certainly overwhelmed by the dark, dark mass. Black, and Puerto Rican matrons, black, and Puerto Rican girls, black, and Puer to Rican boys, black, and Puerto Rican men: such are the fish trapped in the net called ju stice. Bewilderment, despair, and poverty roll through the halls like a smell: the visit ors have come, looking for a miracle. The miracle will be to find someone who really cares about the people in prison. But no one can affi:>rd to care. The prison is overcrowded, the calendars full, the ju dges bus y, the lawyers ambitious, and the cops zealous. What docs it matter if some one gets trapped here for a year or two, gets ruined here, goes mad here, commits murder or suicide here? It's too bad, but that's the way the cookie crumbles sometimes. I do not claim that everyone in prison here is innocent, but I do claim that the law, as it operates, is guilt y, and that the prisoners, therefore, are all unju stly imprisoned. Is it conceiv able, after all, that any middle-class white boy-or, indeed, almost any white boy-would have been arrested on so grave a char ge as murder, with such flimsy su bstantiation, and f(>rccd to spend, as of this writing, three years in prison? What t(>r cc, precise ly, is operating when a prisoner is advised, re qu ested, ordered, intimidated, or fi:>rccd, to confess to a crime he has not committed, and promised a lighter sentence fi:>r so perjuring and debasing himself?

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  They were perfectly sincere, too, and, within their limits, they were right. They pointed out how Negroes and whites in the South had loved each other, they recounted to me tales of devotion and heroism which the old order had produced, and which, now, would never come again. But the old black men I looked at down there-those same black men that the Southern liberal had loved; for whom, until now, the South ern liberal-and not only the liberal-has been willing to undergo great inconvenience and danger-they were not weeping. Men do not like to be protected, it emasculates them. This is what black men know, it is the reality they have lived with; it is what white men do not want to know. It is not a pretty thing to be a father and be ultimately dependent on the power and kindness of some other man for the well being of your house. But what this evasion of the Negro's humanity has done to the nation is not so well known. The really striking thing, for me, in the South was this dreadful paradox, that the black men were stronger than the white. I do not know how they did it, but it certainly has something to do with that as yet unwritten history of the Negro woman. What it comes to, finally, is that the nation has spent a large part of its time and energy looking away fr om one of the principal facts of its life. This failure to look reality in the face diminishes a nation as it diminishes a person, and it can only be described as un manly. And in exactly the same way that the South imagines that it "knows" the Negro, the North imagines that it has set him fr ee. Both camps arc deluded. Human freedom is a com plex, difficult-and private-thing. If we can liken life, for a moment, to a furnace, then fr eedom is the fire which burns away illusion. Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we arc fr om the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we arc not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distin guished and monumental failures in the history of nations. 7. Fa ulkner and Desegregation A NY real change implies the breakup of the world as one 1"1.. has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  And behold she perceived a far off in a vally a Temple standing within a Forest, faire and curiously wrought, and minding to over-passe no place whither better hope did direct her, and to the intent she would desire pardon of every God, she approached nigh unto the sacred doore, whereas she saw pretious riches and vestiments ingraven with letters of gold, hanging upon branches of trees, and the posts of the temple testifying the name of the goddesse Juno, to whom they were dedicate, then she kneeled downe upon her knees, and imbraced the Alter with her hands, and wiping her teares, gan pray in this sort: O deere spouse and sister of the great God Jupiter which art adored and worshipped amongst the great temples of Samos, called upon by women with child, worshipped at high Carthage, because thou wast brought from heaven by the lyon, the rivers of the floud Inachus do celebrate thee: and know that thou art the wife of the great god, and the goddesse of goddesses; all the east part of the world have thee in veneration, all the world calleth thee Lucina: I pray thee to be my advocate in my tribulations, deliver me from the great danger which pursueth me, and save me that am weary with so long labours and sorrow, for I know that it is thou that succorest and helpest such women as are with child and in danger. Then Juno hearing the prayers of Psyches, appeared unto her in all her royalty, saying, Certes Psyches I would gladly help thee, but I am ashamed to do any thing contrary to the will of my daughter in law Venus, whom alwaies I have loved as mine owne child, moreover I shall incurre the danger of the law, intituled, De servo corrupto, whereby am forbidden to retaine any servant fugitive, against the will of his Master. Then Psyches cast off likewise by Juno, as without all hope of the recovery of her husband, reasoned with her selfe in this sort: Now what comfort or remedy is left to my afflictions, when as my prayers will nothing availe with the goddesses? what shall I do? whither shall I go? In what cave or darknesse shall I hide my selfe, to avoid the furor of Venus? Why do I not take a good heart, and offer my selfe with humilitie unto her, whose anger I have wrought? What do I know whether he (whom I seeke for) be in his mothers house or no? Thus being in doubt, poore Psyches prepared her selfe to her owne danger, and devised how she might make her orison and prayer unto Venus. After that Venus was weary with searching by Sea and Land for Psyches, shee returned toward heaven, and commanded that one should prepare her Chariot, which her husband Vulcanus gave unto her by reason of marriage, so finely wrought that neither gold nor silver could be compared to the brightnesse therof.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Here it comes, un readable as ever, the patient bones steady beneath the skin, eyes veiling the mind's bewilderment and the heart's loss, only the lips cryptically suggesting that all is not well with the spirit 702 OTH ER ESSAYS which li\'es within this clay. Then one selects the uniform which one will wear. This uniform is designed to telegraph to others what to see so that they will not be made uncomfort able and probably hostile by being forced to look on another human being. The uniform must suggest a certain setting and it must dictate a certain air and it must also convey, however subtly , a dormant aggressiveness, like the power of a sleeping lion . It is necessary to make anyone on the streets think twice betore attempting to vent his despair on you. So armed, one reaches the un loved streets. The unlo ved streets. I have very often walked through the streets of New York fancying myself a kind of unprecedented explorer, trapped among savages, searching for hidden trea sure; the trick being to discover the treasure bef ore the savages discovered me; hence, my misleading uniform. After all, I have lived in cities in which stone urns on park parapets were not unthinkable, cities in which it was perfectly possible, and not a matter of taking one's lif e in one's hands, to walk through the park. How long would a stone urn last in Central Park? And look at the New York buildings, rising up like tyrannical eagles, glass and steel and aluminum smiting the air, jerry built, inept, contemptuous; who can function in these build ings and for whose profit were they built? Unlo ved indeed: look at our children. They roam the streets, as arrogant and irreverent as business-men and as dangerous as those gangs of children who roamed the streets of bombed European cities after the last World War. Only , these children have no strange and grinning soldiers to give them chocolate candy or chew ing gum, and no one will give them a home. No one has one to give, the very word no longer conveying any meaning, and, anyway, nothing is more vivid in American lif e than the fact that we have no respect for our children, nor have our chil dren any respect for us. By being what we have become, by placing things above people, we broke their hearts early, and drove them away. We have, as it seems to me, a very curious sense of real ity-or, rather, perhaps, I should say, a striking addiction to irrcality. How is it possible, one cannot but ask, to raise a child without loving the child? How is it possible to love the child if one docs not know who one is? How is it possible for the NO THING PER SONA L child to grow up if the child is not loved?

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  "Still," I said at last, after a rather painful pause, "I should think that the trouble in this situation is that it's very hard for you to face a child and treat him unjustly because of something for which he is no more responsible than-than you are." The eyes came to lif e then, or a veil fell, and I found myself staring at a man in anguish. The eyes were full of pain and bewilderment and he nodded his head. This was the impos sibility which he faced every day. And I imagined that his tribe would increase, in sudden leaps and bounds was already in creasmg. For segregation has worked brilliantly in the South, and, in fact, in the nation, to this extent: it has allowed white people, with scarcely any pangs of conscience whatever, to create, in every generation, only the Negro they wished to sec. As the walls come down they will be forced to take another, harder look at the shiftless and the menial and will be forced into a wonder concerning them which cannot fail to be agonizing. It is not an easy thing to be forced to re-examine a way of lif e and to speculate, in a personal way, on the general injustice. "What do you think," I asked him, "will happen? What do you think the future holds?" NOBOD Y KNOWS MY NAME He gave a strained laugh and said he didn't know. "I don't want to think about it." Then, "I'm a religious man," he said, "and I believe the Creator will always help us find a way to solve our problems. If a man loses that, he's lost everything he had." I agreed, struck by the look in his eyes. "You're from the North?" he asked me, abruptly. "Yes," I said. "Wel l," he said, "you've got your troubles too." "Ah, yes, we certainly do," I admitted, and shook hands and left him. I did not say what I was thinking, that our trou bles were the same trouble and that, unless we were very swift and honest,· what is happening in the South today will be happening in the North tomorrow. 6. Nobody J(nows My Name: A Letter from the South I walked down the street, didn,t have on no hat, Asking everybody I meet, Where>s my man at? -MA RAINEY N EGROES in the North are right when they refer to the South as the Old Count ry. A Negro born in the North who finds himself in the South is in a position similar to that of the son of the Italian emigrant who finds himself in Italy, near the village where his father first saw the light of day. Both are in countries they have never seen, but which they cannot fail to recognize.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Not all of these people, it is worth remem bering, left the world better than they found it. The deter mined will is rare, but it is not invariably benevolent. Furthermore, the American equation of success with the big times reveals an awful disrespect for human life and human achievement. This equation has placed our cities among the most dangerous in the world and has placed our youth among the most empty and most bewildered. The situation of our youth is not mysterious. Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models. That is exactly what our children are doing. They are imitating our immo rality, our disrespect for the pain of others. All other slum dwellers, when the bank account permits it, can move out of the slum and vanish altogether from the eye of persecution. No Negro in this country has ever made that much money and it will be a long time before any Negro does. The Negroes in Harlem, who have no money, spend what they have on such gimcracks as they are sold. These include "wider" TV screens, more "faithful" hi-fi sets, more "pow erful" cars, all of which, of course, are obsolete long before they are paid for. Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor; and if one is NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME a member of a captive population, economically speaking, one's feet have simply been placed on the treadmill forever. One is victimized, economically, in a thousand ways-rent, for example, or car insurance. Go shopping one day in Har lem-for anything-and compare Harlem prices and quality with those downtown . The people who have managed to get off this block have only got as far as a more respectable ghetto. This respectable ghetto does not even have the advantages of the disreputable one-friends, neighbors, a familiar church, and friendly tradesmen; and it is not, moreover, in the nature of any ghetto to remain respectable long. Every Sunday, people who have left the block take the lonely ride back, dragging their increas ingly discontented children with them. They spend the day talking, not always with words, about the trouble they've seen and the trouble-one must watch their eyes as they watch their children-they are only too likely to see. For children do not like ghettos. It takes them nearly no time to discover ex actly why they are there. The projects in Harlem are hated. They are hated almost as much as policemen, and this is saying a great deal.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  (There arc excep tions among the teachers as there are among the students, but, in this country surely, schools have not been built for the exceptional. And, though white people often seem to expect Negroes to produce nothing but exceptions, the fact is that Negroes are really just like everybody else. Some of them are exceptional and most of them are not.) The teachers are answerable to the Negro principal, whose power over the teachers is absolute but whose power with the 202 NOBOD Y KNOWS MY NAME school board is slight. As for this principal, he has arrived at the summit of his career; rarely indeed can he go any higher. He has his pension to look forward to, and he consoles him selt� meanwhile, with his status among the "better class of Negroes." This class includes tew, if any, of his students and by no means all of his teachers. The teachers, as long as they remain in this school system, and they certainly do not have much choice, can only aspire to become the principal one day. Since not all of them will make it, a great deal of the energy which ought to go into their vocation goes into the usual bitter, purposeless rivalry. They are underpaid and ill treated by the white world and rubbed raw by it every day; and it is altogether understandable that they, very shortly, cannot bear the sight of their students. The children know this; it is hard to fool young people. They also know why they are going to an overcrowded, outmoded plant, in classes so large that even the most strictly attentive student, the most gifted teacher cannot but feel himself slowly drowning in the sea of general help lessness. It is not to be wondered at, the refore, that the violent dis tractions of puberty, occurring in such a cage, annually take their toll, sending female children into the maternity wards and male children into the streets. It is not to be wondered at that a boy, one day, decides that if all this studying is going to prepare him only to be a porter or an elevator boy-or his teacher-wel l, then, the hell with it. And there they go, with an overwhelming bitterness which they will dissemble all their lives, an unceasing effort which completes their ruin. They become the menial or the criminal or the shiftless, the Ne groes whom segregation has produced and whom the South uses to prove that segregation is right. In Charlotte, too, I received some notion of what the South means by "time to adjust."

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It is a terrible thing, simply, to be trapped in one's history, and attempt, in the same motion (and in this, our life! ) to accept, deny, reject, and redeem it- and, also, on whatever level, to profit from it. And: with one's head in the fetid jaws of this lion's mouth, attempt to love and be loved, and raise one's children, and pay the rent, and wrestle with one's mortality. In the final scene at the station, there is something choked and moving, something sensed through a thick glass, dimly, in the Sheriff's sweet, boyish, Southern injunction, to Virgil, "take care, you hear?" and something equally choked and rigid in the black detective's reaction. It reminded me of nothing so much as William Blake's Little Black Boy-t hat remote, that romantic, and that hopeless. Virgil Tibbs goes to where they call him Miste1', far away, presumably, from South Street, and the CHAPTER TWO 521 Sheriff has gone back to the niggers, who are really his only assignment. And nothing, alas, has been made possible by this obligatory, fade-out kiss, this preposterous adventure: except that white Americans have been encouraged to continue dreaming, and black Americans have been alerted to the ne cessity of waking up. People who cannot escape thinking of themselves as white are poorly equipped, if equipped at all, to consider the meaning of black: people who know so little about themselves can face very little in another: and one dare hope for nothing from friends like these. This cruel observa tion is implicit in the script: tor what would have happened to our Mr. Tibbs, or, indeed, to our Sheritl� had the widow demanded the black man's blood as the price for the wealth she was bringing into the town? Who, among that manly crew, would have resisted the widow's might? The people of In the Heat of the Night can be considered moving and pa thetic only if one has the luxury of the assurance that one will never be at their mercy. And that no one in the world has the luxury of this assurance is beginning to be clear: all over the world. In The Birth of a Nation, the Sheriff would have been an officer of the Klan. The widow would, secretly, have been sewing Klan insignia. The murdered man (whether or not he was her husband) would have been a carpetbagger. Sam would have been a Klan deputy. The troublesome poor whites would have been mulattoes. And Virgil Tibbs would have been the hunted, not the hunter. It is impossible to pretend that this state of atl airs has really altered: a black man, in any case, had certainly best not believe everything he sees in the movies. In 1942, Bette Davis, under the direction of John Huston, delivered a ruthlessly accurate (and much underrated) portrait of a Southern girl, in the Warner Brothers production of Ellen Glasgow's novel, In Ib is, Our Life.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It is possible, as it were, to have one's pleasure without paying for it. But to have one's pleasur e without paying for it is precisely the way to find oneself reduced to a search for pleasure which grows steadily more desperate and more gro tesque. It does not take long, after all, to discover that sex is only sex, that there are few things on earth more futile or more deadening than a meaningless round of conquests. The really horrible thing about the phenomenon of present-day homosexuality, the horrible thing which lies curled like a worm at the heart of Gide's trouble and his work and the reason that he so clung to Madeleine, is that today's unl ucky deviate can only save himself by the most tremendous exertion of all his forces from falling into an under world in which he never meets either men or women, where it is impossible to have either a lover or a friend, where the possibility of genuine human involvement has altogether ceased. When this possi bility has ceased, so has the possibility of growth. And, again: It is one of the facts of life that there arc two sexes, which fact has given the world most of its beauty, cost it not a little of its anguish, and contains the hope and glory of the wor ld. And it is with this fact, which might better per haps be called a mystery, that every human being born must find some way to live. For, no matter what demons drive them, men cannot live without women and women cannot live without men. And this is what is most clearly conveyed THE MALE PRISON 235 in the agony of Gide's last journal. However little he was able to under stand it, or, more imponant perhaps, take upon him self the responsibility for it, Madeleine kept open for him a kind of door of hope, of possibility, the possibility of entering into communion with another sex. This door, which is the door to life and air and freedom from the tyranny of one's own personality, must be kept open, and none feel this more keenly than those on whom the door is perpetually threat ening or has already seemed to close. Gide's dilemma, his wrestling, his peculiar, notable and ex tremely valuable failure testifY-which should not seem odd to a powerful masculinit y and also to the fact that he found no way to escape the prison of that masculinit y.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And I looked again at the young faces around the table, and looked back at Elijah, who was saying that no people in history had ever been respected who had not owned their land. And the table said, "Yes, that's right." I could not deny the truth of this statement. for everyone else has, is, a nation, with a specific location and a flag-even, these days, the Jew. It is only "the so-called American Negro" who remains DOWN AT THE CROSS 329 trapped, disinherited, and despised, in a nation that has kept him in bondage for nearly fo ur hundred years and is still un able to recognize him as a human being. And the Black Mus lims, along with many people who arc not Muslims, no longer wish fo r a recognition so grudging and (should it ever be achieved) so tardy. Again, it cannot be denied that this point of view is abundantly justified by American Negro history. It is galling indeed to have stood so long, hat in hand, waiting for Americans to grow up enough to realize that you do not threaten them. On the other hand, how is the American Ne gro now to fo rm himself into a separate nation? For this-and not only from the Muslim point of view-would seem to be his only hope of not perishing in the American backwater and being entirely and fo rever forgotten, as though he had never existed at all and his travail had been for nothing. Elijah's intensity and the bitter isolation and disaffection of these young men and the despair of the streets outside had caused me to glimpse dimly what may now seem to be a fa n tasy, although, in an age so fa ntastical, I would hesitate to say precisely what a fa ntasy is. Let us say that the Muslims were to achieve the possession of the six or seven states that they claim arc owed to Negroes by the United States as "back payment" fo r slave labor. Clearly, the United States would never surrender this territory, on any terms whatever, unless it fo und it impossible, fo r whatever reason, to hold it-unless, that is, the United States were to be reduced as a world power, exactly the way, and at the same degree of speed, that England has been forced to relinquish her Empire.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  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 endl essly betrayed. Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth bcfi:>rc the Word was spoken, the foundations of society arc hidden. from this void-ourselves-it is the func tion of society to protect us; but it is only this void, our un- EVERYBODY ' S PROTEST NOVEL 1 7 known selves, demanding, forever, a new act of creation, which can save us-"from the evil that is in the world." \Vith the same motion, at the same ti me, it is this toward which we endlessly struggle and from which, endlessly, we struggle to escape. It must be remembered that the oppressed and the oppres sor arc bound together within the same society; they accept the same criteria, they share the same beliefs, they both alike depend on the same reality. Within this cage it is romantic, more, meaningless, to speak of a "new" society as the desire of the oppressed, for that shivering dependence on the props of reality which he shares with the Hen·mvolk makes a truly "new" society impossible to conceive. \Vhat is meant by a new society is one in which inequalities will disappear, in which vengeance will be exacted; either there will be no oppressed at all, or the oppressed and the oppressor will change places. But, finally, as it seems to me, what the rejected desire is, is an elevation of status, acceptance within the present com munity.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  How could they care? How much could they do if they did care? There were too many children, from shaky homes and worn-out parents, in aging, inadequate plants. They could be considered, most of them, as already doomed. Besides, the teachers' jobs were safe. They were responsible only to the principal, an appointed official, whose judgment, apparently, was never questioned by his (white) superiors or confreres. The principal of G.'s former high school was about seventy five when he was finally retired and his idea of discipline was to have two boys beat each other-"under his supervision" "ith leather belts. This once happened "ith G., with no other results than that his parents gave the principal a tongue-lash ing. It happened "ith two boys of G.'s acquaintance with the result that, after school, one boy beat the other so badly that he had to be sent to the hospital. The teachers ha,·e them seh·es arrived at a dead end, for in a segregated school system they cannot rise any higher, and the students are aware of this. Both students and teachers soon cease to struggle. "If a boy can wash a blackboard," a teac her was heard to say, "I'll promote him." I asked Mrs. R. how other Negroes felt about her having had G. reassigned. "Well, a lot of them don't like it," she said-though I gath ered that thev did not sav so to her. As school time ap proached, mo�e and more people asked her, "Are you going I').! NO 110 DY KNOWS MY NAME to s�:nd him?" "\Veil," she told them, "the man says the door is open and I ti:d like, yes, I'm going to go on and send him." Out of a population of some fifty thousand Negroes, there h.1d be�:n onlv t(my-five applications. People had said that they \Hluld send their children, had talked about it, had made plans; but, as the time drew ncar, when the application blanks \n·rc actually in their hands, they said, "I don't believe I'll sign this right now. I'll sign it later." Or, "I been thinking about this. I don't believe I'll send him right now." "\ Vhy?" I asked. But to this she couldn't, or wouldn't, give me any anS\\·cr. I asked if there had been any reprisals taken against herself or her husband, if she was worried while G. was at school all day. She said that, no, there had been no reprisals, though some white people, under the pretext of giving her good ad \'icc, had expressed disapproval of her action.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The kids would die in the chain gang, and we would drop dead on the road. Or, as my friend the actress Miss Ruby Dee once put it to me, after four girls were killed in the 19 63 bombing of the Birmingham Sunday School, and as we were trying to organize a protest rally-to demand, in fact-that the American people, in the light of so dreadful an event, declare Christmas a day of mourning, of atonement: asoon, there won't be enough black people to go a round. " I was present at the culmination of the voter-registration drive in Selma, Alabama, not so very long ago. My friend James Forman had been organizing for six months, or there abouts; it is not easy, in such a town, where virtually every 768 OTH ER ES SAYS white man considers that he owns every black man. (I am speaking with the utmost restraint and will not attempt to describe the events of that day.) Nevertheless, hundreds of people came out early in the morning and lined up in front of the courthouse. In Selma, there arc two courthouses, the state courthouse and a Federal courthouse, and they face each other across a narrow street-catty -corner to these two buildings is a re cruiting station (U ncle Sam JVants you!). The sheriff, armed, forced us to move from one side of the street to the other-that is, to the steps of the Federal court house. "We" arc now, among others, Representative John Conyers, my brother David, and myself. Representatives of the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation arc standing on the steps with us, under the American flag. (We have already seen the sheriff and his deputies beat up two black boys and hurl them into a truck-but they were on the wrong side of the street. ) The sheriff crosses the street and demands that we leave the steps of the Federal courthouse. I ask the Justice Department, or the F.B.I., if he has any right to throw us off Federal prop erty. No, is the answer, but JVe ca n}t do anythin g about it. I am watching the recruiting station. We'll move inside be cause the alternative is slaughter. It is 4:30 and the whistle blows; it means the courthouse is closed. The people who have been standing there all day long, only I2 of whom have been allowed to enter the courthouse, and none of whom have been registered, turn and walk away.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  In great pain and terror because, thereafter, one enters into battle with that historical creation, Oneself , and attempts to re-create oneself according to a principle more hu mane and more lib erating: one begins the attempt to achieve a level of �sonal maturity a!J.d freed_Qm whk!Lr o!:>s_ history_of its ty� rannical power, and also changes histO_!:Y. · · But , obv1ously, I am speaking as an historical creation which has had bitterly to contest its history, to wrestle with it, and finally accept it, in order to bring myself out of it. My point of view certainly is formed by my history, and it is probable that only a creature despised by history finds history a ques tionable matter. On the other hand, people who imagine that history flatters thein(as It does, mdeed, since tfleY\vrote -It) are im12aled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and be come incapable of seeing or changing themsclYcs_._Q[_ the wodd. This is the place in which it seems to me, most white Amer icans find themselves. Impaled. They are dimly, or vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, but the do not know how to release themselves from it, and they suffer enormous y rom t e resu tmg persona mcohcr ence. This incoherence is heard nowhere more plainly than in those stammering, terrified dialogues which white Americans sometime entertain with that black conscience, the black man in America. The nature of this stammering can be reduced to a plea: QQ not blame me, I was not there. I did not do it. My his!Qry_il��I1othing to do with Europe or the slave trade. Any w� l!: _\Y .<l� 1f!_Ur chic�_ who _s_ old_J ou_ t..o_me. I was not preseilt on the middle passage, I am not responsible for the textile mills of Manchester, or the cotton fields of Mississippi. Be sides, consider how the English, too, suffered in those mills and in those awful cities! I also despise the governors of south- OTH ER ES SAYS ern states and the sheriftS of southern counties, and I also want your child to have a decent education and rise as high as his capabilities will permit. I have nothing against you, nothing! \Vhat ha, ·e you got against me? What do you want?

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  On that low ground where Negroes live something is hap pening: something which can be measured in decades and generations and which may spell our doom as a republic and almost certainly implies a catacly sm. Unlike Bigger Thomas, gone to his death cell, inarticulate and destroyed by his need for identification and for revenge, and with only the faintest intimation in that twilight of what had destroyed him and of what his lif e might have been, Mr. Himes' protagonist, Lee Gordon, sees what has happened and what is happening and watches helpl essly the progress of his own disease. And there is no path out. In a group so pressed down, terrified and at bay and carrying generations of constricted, subterranean hos tility, no real group identification is possible. Nor is there a Negro tradition to cling to in the sense that Jews may be said to have a tradition; this was left in Africa long ago and no one remembers it now. Lee Gordon is forced back on himself , not even bitterness can serve him as a weapon any more. The impact of rejection and continual indignity on his personality is a personal one and this impact, multiplied, can destroy, not only himself, but an entire nation. The minstrel man is gone and Uncle Tom is no longer to be trusted. Even Bigger Thomas is becoming irrelevant; we are faced with a black man as many faceted as we ourselves are, as individual, with our ambivalences and insecurities and our struggles to be loved. He is now an American and we cannot change that; it is our attitudes which must change both towards ourselves and him. "H istory," says Joyce, "is a night mare from which I am struggling to awaken." We have all heard what happened to those who slept too long. The New Leader, October 25, 1947 The Image of the Negro ALBER T SEARS. By Millen Brand. New Yo rk, Simon and Schuster, 1947 . 273 pp. $2. 75. KlNGSBL OOD RoYAL. By Sinclair Lewis. New Yo rk, Ran dom House, 19 47. 348 pp. $3.00. THE PATH OF THUNDER. By Peter Abrahams. New Yo rk, Harper, 1 948. 278 pp. $2. 75. Gon IS FOR WHITE FOLKS. By Will Thomas. New Yo rk, Creative Age, 19 47. 305 pp. $3.00. QUALITY. By Cid Ricketts Sumner. New York, Bobbs Mcrrill, 19 +7· 278 pp. $2. 75. (Bantam Reprint, 1 947. $.2 5.) P ERHAPS the measure of the really stupendous inadequacy of the five novels under consideration here is the fact that, of them all, the most impressive and the most valid is Millen Brand's quite unremarkable Albert Sears.