Disappointment

Passages

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• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The graciousness of her reception was only slightly marred by the fact that she was not expecting singers and thought they were a new group of can vassers. She arranged for them to take rooms on Butler Street at the YMCA. Here the first gap between promise and per formance was made manifest, a gap, they felt, which was per haps too trifling to make a fuss about. In New York they had been promised comparative privacy, two to a room; but now, it developed, they were to sleep in a dormitory. This gap, in fact, it was the province of Mr. Warde to close, but whether he was simply weary from the trip or overwhelmed by the aristocratic Mrs. Price, he kept his mouth shut and, indeed, did not open it again for quite some time. When they returned to headquarters, somewhat irritated at having had to wait three hours for the arrival of Louis Burner, who had the money tor their rooms, Mrs. Price suggested that they go out canvassing. This was wholly unexpected, since no one had mentioned canvassing in New York and, since, more over, canvassers arc voluntary workers who are not paid. Fur ther, the oldest of them was twenty, which was not voting age, and none of them knew anything about the Progressive Party, nor did they care much. On the other hand, it is some what ditncult to refuse a grey-haired, aristocratic lady who is toiling day and night f(>r the benefit of your people; and Mr. Warde, who should have been their spokesman, had not yet recovered his voice; so they took the petitions, which were meant to put the Wallace party on the ballot, and began knocking on doors in the Negro section of Atlanta. They were sent out in pairs, white and black, a political device which JOURNEY TO ATLA NTA 59 operates not only as the living proof of brotherhood, but which has the additional virtue of intimidating into passive silence the more susceptible beholder, who cannot, after al l, unleash the impatient scorn he may feel with a strange, be ne,·olent white man sitting in his parlor. They cam·assed for three days, during which time their ex penses-$ 2.2 5 per man per day-were paid, but during which time they were doing no singing and making no money. On the third day they pointed out that this was not quite what they had been promised in New York, to be met with another suggestion from the i1wincible Mrs.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  "I' ve got to make some kind of decision soon," he says. I tell him that I am coming to the campus the next day, OTH ER ES SAYS and this elic its from him the names of students he wants me to meet, and also the names of Reverend Steele, Reverend Speed and Mr. Haley. I think it is safe to say that these three, along with one other person whom I cannot, for the person's sake, name-and it strikes me as horrendous that such a con sideration should be necessary in this country- were the four Negro adults most respected by the students. This fact alone, since they are four utterly dedicated and intransigent people, ought to cause the municipality to reflect. The next day I meet and briefly talk to A., lean, light-col ored, taciturn, nineteen, from Ohio, a sociology major, who has been arrested for his part in the sit-ins and is on a year's probation. He is very matter-of- fact and quiet, very pleasant and respectful, and absolutely tense with the effort this costs him. Or perhaps I exaggerate, but I am always terribly struck by the abnormal self -containment of such young people. A. speaks about the possibility of transferring to another college. Somehow I do not get the impression that this possibility is very real to him, and then I realize that part of his tension is due to worry about his exams. I also talk to V., eighteen, from Georgia, the skinniest child I have ever seen, who is also on a year's probation. He is rather bitter about the failure of the Negro community to respond as he had expected it to. "/ haven't got to live with it," he tells me-so mewhat unrealistically since, as it later turns out, his relatives are determined to keep him in Tallahassee and he will certainly be living with the problem for the next couple of years. "I did it fix them. Looks like they don't appreciate it." He was appalled that the Negroes of Frenchtown-the section of town in which I am staying-sh ould have vanished on the evening of March J2.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Wallace. Since this quartet included two of my brothers, I was given the details of the trip; indeed, David, the younger, kept a sort of journal for me-literally a blow-by-blow account. Harlem is filled with churches and on Sundays it gives the impression of being filled with music. Quartets such as my brothers' travel fr om church to church in the fashion of circuit preachers, singing as much for the love of singing and the need for practice as for the rather indifferent sums collected for them which arc then divided. These quartets have "battles of song," the winning team adding, of course, immensely to its prestige, the most consistent winners being the giants in this field. The aim of all these quartets, of course, is to branch out, to hit the big time and sing for a livelihood. The Golden Gate Quartet, judging at least from its music, had its roots here, and out of such a background came Sister Rosetta Tharpe, whom I heard, not quite ten years ago, plunking a guitar in a store-front church on Fifth Avenue. The Melodeers have not been singing very long and arc very far from well known, and the invitation to sing on tour with the Wallace party in the South seemed, whatever their misgivings about the Mason-Dixon line, too good an opportunity to pass up. This invitation, by the way, seems to have been the brain storm of a Clarence Warde, a Negro merchant seaman once employed as a cottage father in a corrective institution up state; it was he in New York who acted as a go-between, ar ranging, since The Melodeers arc minors, to be their legal guardian and manager on the road. An extended tour, such as was planned, met with some opposition from the parents, an opposition countered by the possible long-term benefits of the tour in so far as the boys' careers were concerned and, even more urgently, by the assurance that, at the very least, the boys would come home with a considerably larger sum of money than any of them were making on their jobs. (The political implications do not seem to have carried much weight.) A series of churches had been lined up for them pre sumably throughout the South. "The understanding," writes David, "was that we were supposed to sing"; after which the ;8 NOTES OF A NATIVE SON party was to take over to make speeches and circulate peti tions. "The arrangement," David notes laconically, "sounded \·cry promising, so we decided to go." And, indeed, they traveled South in splendor, in a Pullman, to be exact, in which, since what David describes as a "South ern gentleman and wife" took exception to their presence, they tra\'clcd alone. At the Wallace headquarters in Atlanta they were intro duced to a Mrs. Branson Price, a grey-haired white woman of incurably aristocratic leanings who seems to have been the directress of the party in that region.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  They arc treated by these teachers with the same highhandcdncss, and they accept their dicta with the very same measure of American salt. Nor can it be said that they produce canvases of any greater interest than those to be found along Washington Square, or in the cold-water flats of New York's lower cast side. There is, au contraire, more than a little truth to the contention that the cast side has a certain edge over Montparnassc, and this in spite of the justly renowned Paris light. If we tentatively usc purely by virtue of his numb ers-the student painter as the nearest possible approach to a "typical" student, we find that his motives for coming to Paris arc anything but clear. One is fi>rccd to suppose that it was nothing more than the legend of Paris, not infrequently at its most vulgar and superficial level. It was certainly no love for french tradition, whatever, indeed, in his mind, that tradition may be; and, in any case, since he is himself without a tradition, he is ill equipped to deal with the traditions of any other people. It was no love for their language, which he doesn't, beyond the most ines capable necessities, speak; nor was it any love fi>r their history, his grasp of french history being yet more feeble than his A QU ESTI ON OF IDEN TITY 93 understanding of his own. It was no love for the monument s, cathedrals, palaces, shrines, for which, again, nothing in his experience prepares him, and to which, when he is not totally indifferent, he brings only the hurried bewilderment of the tourist. It was not even any particular admiration, or �ympaQ"ty for the French, or, -at least,-none strong enough to bear the str;in of actual CQ.!_lj;act. He may, at homc,-ha-vcadm i recrllieir movies, in which case, confronting the reality, he tends to feel a little taken in. Those im ages created by Marcel Carne, for example, prove themselves treacherous precisely because they are so exact. The sordid French hotel room, so admirably de tailed by the camera, speaking, in its quaintness, and distance, so beautifully of romance, undergoes a sea-change, becomes a room positively hostile to romance, once it is oneself, and not Jean Gabin, who lives there.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The young have no confidence in the old; lacking which, they cannot find any standards in themselves by which to live. The most serious result of such a chaos, though it may not seem to be, is the death of love. I do not mean merely the bankruptcy of the concept of romantic love-it is entirely possible that this concept has had its day-but the breakdown of communic ation between the sexes. Bergman talked a little about the early stages of his career. He came to the Filmstaden in 1944 , when he wrote the script for Torment. This was a very promising beginning. But prom ising beginnings do not mean much, especially in the movies. Promise, anyway, was never what Bergman lacked. He lacked flexibility. Neither he nor anyone else I talked to suggested that he has since acquir ed much of this quality; and since he was young and profoundly ambitious and thoroughly untried, he lacked confidence. This lack he disguised by tantrums so violent that they are still talked about at the Filmstaden today. His exasperating allergies extended to such things as refusing to work with a carpenter, say, to whom he had never spoken but whose face he disliked. He has been known, upon finding guests at his home, to hide himself in the bathroom until they left. Many of these people never returned and it is hard, of course, to blame them. Nor was he, at this time in his life, particularly respec tful of the feelings of his friends. "He's impr oved," said a woman who has been working with him for the last several years, "but he was impossible. He could say the most terrible things, he could make you wish you were dead. Especially if you were a woman." She reflected. "Then, later, he would come and apologize. One just had to accept it, that's all." THE NOR THER N PR OTE STANT 243 He was referred to in those days, without affection, as "the young one" or "the kid" or "the demon director." An Amer ican property whose movies, in spite of all this temperament, made no money at the box office, would have suffered, at best, the fate of Orson Welles. But Bergman went on working, as screen writer and director in films and as a director on the stage. "I was an actor for a while," he says, "a terribly bad actor. But it taught me much ." It probably taught him a great deal about how to handle actors, which is one of his great gifts. He directed plays for the municipal theaters of Halsingborg, Goteborg, and Malmo, and is now working-or will be as soon as he completes his present film schedul e-for the Roy al Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  They said so. By the time we had been abroad two years, each of us, in one way or another, had received this message. It was one of the things that was meant when we were referred to as children. We had been perfectly willing to refer to all the other Americans as children-in the beginning; we had not known what it meant; we had not known that we were included. By 1950 some of us had already lef t Paris for more promising ports of call, Tangiers for some, or It aly, or Spain; Sweden or Denmark or Germany for others. Some girls had got married and vanished; some had got married and vanished and reap peared- minus their husbands. Some people got jobs with the ECA and began a slow retreat back into the cocoon from which they had never quite succeeded in emerging. Some of us were going to pieces- spectacularly, as in my own case, quietly, in others. One boy, for example, had embarked on the career which I believe still engages him, that of laboriously writing extremely li terary plays in English, translating them laboriously-into french and Spanish, reading the trilingual results to a coterie of friends who were, even then, beginning to diminish, and then locking them in his trunk. Maga zines were popping up like toadstools and vanishing like fog. Painters and poets of thin talent and no industry began to feel abused by the lack of attention their efforts elicited from the french, and made outrageously obvious-and successful bids for the attention of visiting literary figures from the States, of whose industry, in any case, there could be no doubt. And a certain real malice now began to make itself felt in our attitudes toward the French , as well as a certain defen siveness concerning whatever it was we had come to Paris to do, and clearly were not doing. We were edgy with each other, too. Going, going, going, gone-were the days when we walked through Lcs Hailes, singing, loving every inch of france, and loving each other; gone were the jam sessions in Pigalle, and our stories about the whores there; gone were the nights spent smoking hashish in Arab caf es; gone were the THE NE W LOST GENER ATI ON 667 mornings which found us telling dirty stories, true stories, sad, and earnest stories, in grey, workingmen's cafes. It was all gone. We were secretive with each other. I no longer talked about my novel. We no longer talked about our love affairs, for either they had failed, were failing, or were serious. Above all, they were private-how can love be talked about? It is probably the most awful of all the revelations this little lif e affords.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This, said Diop, indicated the blind horror which the spiritual heritage of Africa inspired in their breasts. The question of assimilation could not, however, be posed this way. It was not a question, on the one hand, of simply being swallowed up, of disappearing in the maw of Western culture, nor was it, on the other hand, a question of rejecting assimilation in order to be isolated within Atrican culture. Nei ther was it a question of deciding which African \'alues were to be retained and which European Yalues were to be adopted. Life was not that simple. It was due to the crisis which their cultures were now un dergoing that black intellectuals had come together. They were here to define and accept their responsibilities, to assess the riches and the promise of their cultures, and to open, in effect, a dialogue with Europe. He ended with a brief and rather moYing reference to the fifteen-year struggle of himself and his confreres to bring about this day. His speech won a great deal of applause. Yet, I te lt that among the dark people in the hall there was, perhaps, some disappointment that he had not been more specific, more bit ter, in a word, more demagogical; whereas, among the whites in the hall, there was certainly expressed in their applause a somewhat shame-taced and uneasy relief. And, indeed, the at mosphere was strange. No one, black or white, seemed quite to believe what was happening and eYeryone was tense with the question of which direction the conference would take. Hanging in the air, as real as the heat fr om which we suffered, were the great specters of America and Russia, of the battle going on between them tor the domination of the world. The resolution of this battle might Yery well depend on the earth's non-European population, a population \'astly outnumbering Europe's, and which had suffered such injustices at European hands. With the best will in the world, no one now living could undo what past generations had accomplished. The great question was what, exactly, had they accomplished: whether the evil, of which there had been so much, alone liYed after them, whether the good, and there had been some, had been interred with their bones. Of the messages from well-wishers which were read NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME immediately after Diop's speech, the one which caused the greatest stir came fr om America's W. E. B. Du Bois.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The graciousness of her reception was only slightly marred by the fact that she was not expecting singers and thought they were a new group of can vassers. She arranged for them to take rooms on Butler Street at the YMCA. Here the first gap between promise and per formance was made manifest, a gap, they felt, which was per haps too trifling to make a fuss about. In New York they had been promised comparative privacy, two to a room; but now, it developed, they were to sleep in a dormitory. This gap, in fact, it was the province of Mr. Warde to close, but whether he was simply weary fr om the trip or overwhelmed by the aristocratic Mrs. Price, he kept his mouth shut and, indeed, did not open it again for quite some time. When they returned to headquarters, somewhat irritated at having had to wait three hours for the arrival of Louis Burner, who had the money tor their rooms, Mrs. Price suggested that they go out canvassing. This was wholly unexpected, since no one had mentioned canvassing in New York and, since, more over, canvassers arc voluntary workers who are not paid. Fur ther, the oldest of them was twenty, which was not voting age, and none of them knew anything about the Progressive Party, nor did they care much. On the other hand, it is some what ditncult to refuse a grey-haired, aristocratic lady who is toiling day and night f( >r the benefit of your people; and Mr. Warde, who should have been their spokesman, had not yet recovered his voice; so they took the petitions, which were meant to put the Wallace party on the ballot, and began knocking on doors in the Negro section of Atlanta. They were sent out in pairs, white and black, a political device which JOURNEY TO ATLANTA 59 operates not only as the living proof of brotherhood, but which has the additional virtue of intimidating into passive silence the more susceptible beholder, who cannot, after all, unleash the impatient scorn he may feel with a strange, be ne,·olent white man sitting in his parlor. They cam·assed for three days, during which time their ex penses-$2.2 5 per man per day-we re paid, but during which time they were doing no singing and making no money. On the third day they pointed out that this was not quite what they had been promised in New York, to be met with another suggestion from the i1wincible Mrs.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Amarintha Work, who recorded in detail the dc\'clopment of her mulatto son, Craig.) Ebony and Our World are the two big magazines in the field, Ebony looking and sounding very much like Life, and Our World being the black man's Look. Our World is a very strange, disorganized magazine indeed, sounding sometimes like a college newspaper and sometimes like a call to arms, but principally, like its more skillful brothers, devoted to the prop osition that anything a white man can do a Negro can prob ably do better. Ebony digs feature articles out of such things as the "real" Lena Horne and Negro FBI agents, and it travels into the far corners of the earth for any news, however trivial, concerning any Negro or group of Negroes who are in any way unusual and/or newsworthy. The tone of both Ebony and Om' World is affirmative; they cater to the "better class of Negro." Ebony's November 1947 issue carried an editoral en titled "Time To Count Our Blessings," which began by ac cusing Chester Himes (author of the novel Lonely Crusade) of having a color psychosis, and went on to explain that there arc Negro racists also who are just as blind and dangerous as Bilbo, which is incontestably true, and that, compared to the millions of starving Europeans, Negroes are sitting pretty which comparison, I hazard, cannot possibly mean anything to any Negro who has not seen Europe. The editorial con cluded that Negroes had come a long way and that "as pa triotic Americans" it was time "we" stopped singing the blues and realized just how bright the future was. These cheering sentiments were flanked-or underscored, if you will-by a photograph on the opposite page of an aging Negro farm woman carrying home a bumper crop of onions. It apparently escaped the editors of Ebony that the very existence of their magazine, and its table of contents for any month, gave the lie to this effort to make the best of a bad bargain. The true mison d)ett'e of the Negro press can be found in the letters-to-the-editor sections, where the truth about life among the rejected can be seen in print. It is the terrible di lemma of the Negro press that, having no other model, it THE HARLEM GHETTO 47 models itself on the white press, attempting to emulate the same effortless, sophisticated tone-a tone its subject matter renders utterly unconvincing. It is simply impossible not to sing the blues, audibly or not, when the lives lived by Negroes are so inescapably harsh and stunted. It is not the Negro press that is at fault: whatever contradictions, inanities, and political infantilism can be charged to it can be charged equally to the American press at large.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Amarintha Work, who recorded in detail the dc\'clopment of her mula tto son, Craig.) Ebony and Our World are the two big magazines in the field, Ebony looking and sounding very much like Life, and Our World being the black man's Look. Our World is a very strange, disorganized magazine indeed, sounding sometimes like a college newspaper and sometimes lik e a call to arms, but principally, like its more skillf ul brothers, devoted to the prop osition that anything a white man can do a Negro can prob ably do better. Ebony digs feature articles out of such things as the "real" Lena Horne and Negro FBI agents, and it travels into the far corners of the earth for any news, however trivial, concerning any Negro or group of Negroes who are in any way unusual and/or newsworthy. The tone of both Ebony and Om' World is affirmative; they cater to the "better class of Negro." Ebony's November 1947 issue carried an editoral en titled "Time To Count Our Ble ssings," which began by ac cusing Chester Himes (author of the novel Lon ely Crusade) of having a color psychosis, and went on to explain that there arc Negro racists also who are just as blind and dangerous as Bilbo, which is incontestably true, and that, compared to the millions of starving Europeans, Negroes are sitting pretty which comparison, I hazard, cannot possibly mean anything to any Negro who has not seen Europe. The editorial con cluded that Negroes had come a long way and that "as pa triotic Americans" it was time "we" stopped singing the blues and realized just how bright the future was. These cheering sentiments were flan ked-or underscored, if you will-by a photograph on the opposite page of an aging Negro farm woman carrying home a bumper crop of onions. It apparently escaped the editors of Ebony that the very existence of their magazine, and its table of contents for any month, gave the lie to this effort to make the best of a bad bargain. The true mison d)ett'e of the Negro press can be found in the letters-to-the- editor sections, where the truth about lif e among the rejected can be seen in print. It is the terrible di lemma of the Negro press that, having no other model, it THE HARLEM GH ETTO 47 models itself on the white press, attempting to emulate the same effortless, sophisticated tone-a tone its subject matter renders utterly unconvincing. It is simply impossible not to sing the blues, audibly or not, when the lives lived by Negroes are so inescapably harsh and stunted. It is not the Negro press that is at fault: whatever contradictions, inanities, and political infantilism can be charged to it can be cha rged equally to the American press at large.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Three years earlier, I had not encountered very many people-1 am speaking now of Negroes-who were really critical of him. But many more people seemed critical of him now, were bitter, disappointed, skeptical. None of this had anyth ing to do-l want to make this absolutely cle ar with his personal character or his integrity. It had to do with OTH ER ESS AYS his effectin�ness as a leader. King has had an extraordinary ctfect in the Negro world, and therefore in the nation, and is now in the center of an extremely complex cross fire. He was born in Atlanta in 1929. He has Irish and Indian blood in his veins-Irish from his tather's, Indian from his mother's side. His maternal grandfather built Ebenezer Bap tist Church, which, as I have said, young Martin now co pastors with his father. This grandfather seems to have been an extremely active and capable man, having been one of the NAACP leaders in Atlanta thirty or forty years ago, and having been instrumental in bringing about the construction of At lanta's first Negro high school. The paternal grandfather is something else again, a poor, violent, and illiterate farmer who tried to find ref uge from reality in drinking. He clearly had a great influence on the formation of the character of Martin, Sr., who determined, vety early, to be as unlike his father as possible. Martin, Sr. came to Atlanta in 1916, a raw, strapping country boy, determined, in the classic American tradition, to rise above his station. It could not have been easy for him in the Deep South of 1916, but he was, luckily, too young for the Army, and prices and wages rose during the war, and his im provident father had taught him the value of thrift. So he got his start. He studied in evening school, entered Atlanta's Morehouse College in 192 5, and graduated in June of 1930, more than a year af ter Martin was born. (There are two other children, an older girl who now teaches at Spelman College, and a younger boy, pastor of a church in Noonan, Georgia.) By this time, Martin, Sr. had become a preacher, and was pastor of two small churches; and at about this time, his tather-in-law asked him to become the assistant pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, which he did. His children ha,•e never known poverty, and Martin, Sr. is understandably very proud of this. "My prayer," he told me, "was always: Lord, grant that my children will not have to come the way I did." They didn't, they haven't, the prayers certainly did no harm. But one cannot help feeling that a per son as single- minded and determined as the elder Reverend King clearly is would have accomplished anything he set his hand to, anyway.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It seemed, indeed, that Richard felt that, with the establishment of this club, he had paid his dues to American Negroes abroad, and at home, and forever; had paid his dues, and was off the hook, since they had once more pr oved themselves incapable of following where he led. For yet one or two years to come, young Negroes would cr oss the ocean and come to Richard's door, wanting his sympat hy, his help, his time, his money. God knows it must have been trying. And yet, they could not possibly have taken up more of his time than did the dreary sycophants by whom, as far as I could tell, he was more and more surrounded. Richard and I, of course, drifted farther and farther apart-our dialogues became too frustrat ing and too acrid-but, from my helplessly sardonic distance, I could only make out, looming above what seemed to be an indescribably cacophonous parade of mediocrities, and a cou ple of the world's most empty and pompous black writers, the tough and loyal figure of Chester Himes . There was a notice able chill in the love affair which had been going on between Richard and the French intellectuals. He had always made American intellectuals un easy, and now they were relieved to discover that he bored them, and even more relieved to say so. By this time he had managed to estrange himself from almost all of the younger American Negro writers in Paris. They were often to be found in the same cafe, Richard com pulsively playing the pin-ball machine, while they, spitefully and deliberately, refused to acknowledge his presence. Gone 266 NOBODY KN OWS MY NAME were the days when he had only to enter a cafe to be greeted with the American Negro equivalent of "cher maitre" ("Hey, R..ichard, how you making it, my man? Sit down and tell me somethi ng"), to be seated at a table, while all the bright faces turned toward him. The brightest faces were now turned from him, and among these faces were the faces of the Mricans and the Algerians. They did not trust him-and their distrust was venomous because they felt that he had promised them so much . When the African said to me I believe he thinks he's JJJhite, he meant that R..ichar d cared more about his safety and comfcxt than he cared about the black condition. But it was to this condition, at least in part, that he owed his safety and comfort and power and fame. If one-tenth of the suf fering which obtained (and obtains) among Mricans and Algerians in Paris had been occurring in Chicago, one could not help feeling that R..ichard would have raised the roof.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Miss Horne's column made her sound like an embittered Eleanor Roosevelt, and the only column of Robeson's I have read was concerned with the current witch-hunt in Holly wood, discussing the kind of movies under attack and Hol lywood's traditional treatment of Negroes. It is personally painful to me to realize that so gifted and forceful a man as Robeson should have been tricked by his own bitterness and by a total inability to understand the nature of political power in general, or Communist aims in particular, into missing the point of his own critique, which is worth a great deal of thought: that there are a great many ways of being un-Amer ican, some of them nearly as old as the country itself, and that the House On-American Activities Committee might find concepts and attitudes even more damaging to American life in a picture like Gone With the Wind than in the possibly equally romantic but far less successful Watch on the Rhine. The only other newspapers in the field with any significant sale in Harlem are the Pittsburgh Courier, which has the rep utation of being the best of the lot, and the Afro -American, which resembles the New York Journal-American in layout and type and seems to make a consistent if unsuccessful effort to be at once readable, intelligent, and fiery. The Courier is a high- class paper, reaching its peak in the handling of its society news and in the columns of GeorgeS. Schuyler, whose Olym pian serenity infuriates me, but who, as a matter of fact, re flects with great accuracy the state of mind and the ambitions of the professional, well-to-do Negro who has managed to find a place to stand. Mr. Schuyler, who is remembered still for a satirical novel I have not read, called Black No More, is aided enormously in this position by a genteel white wife and a child-prodigy daughter-who is seriously regarded in some circles as proof of the incomprehensible contention that the NOTES OF A NATIVE SON mating of white and black is more likely to produce genius than any other combination. (The Afro-American recently ran a series of articles on this subject, "The Education of a Genius," by Mrs.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Without this passion we may all smother to death, locked in those airless, labeled cells, which isolate us fr om each other and separate us from ourselves; and without this passion when we have discovered the connection between that Boy-Scout who smiles from the subway poster and that underworld to be found all over America, vengeful time will be upon us. Zero, Summt>r 1949 The Negro at Home and Abroad No GREEN PASTURES, by Roi Ottley. Scribner's. 234 pp. $3 .00. M R. OTTLEY takes us through England, France, Italy, Germany, through the Russian-dominated Balkan states, to Greece, Egypt, and Israel, triumphantly uncovering the black skeleton in the Old World's closet. One can scarcely imagine that this will greatly impress the Europeans, who have lived for generations on a continent absolutely phosphores cent with dry bones; but Mr. Ottley, twentieth-century Amer ican ("Negro though I am"), does not approve of skeletons, and he makes this disapproval manifest whenever they are found. Unhappily, all skeletons have their histories, in the face of which nothing is more irrelevant than disapproval-to suggest the first limitation of Mr. Ottley's book. Secondly, he cannot make us believe that any American Negro is any longer al lowed the luxury of looking at the world as though it were a simple matter of black against white. Only the backward peo ples, i.e., natives under colonial domination, are able to do that. Finally, the journalistic method is not really so flexible as we suppose; it is capable of description but rarely of pen etration. Because one feels that Roi Ottley is more intent upon proving his thesis-the existence of racial prejudice in Eu rope-than he is upon illuminating the root, manner, and rea son for this prejudice, the point of No Green Pastm'es is lost: that American Negroes are better off than Negroes anywhere else in the world, and that Europe ought to clean house be fore trumpeting about our lynchings. In the first place, racial prejudice in Europe is not news. Such an idea can only spring from an arbitrary juxtaposition of the situations of the Negro in Europe and the Negro in America-or, rather, out of an attempt to consider these two very different situations as though their history and motiva tions were the same. The racial lexicon of Europe is not that of America, and the significance of the Negro in the European 601 602 OTHER ESSAYS imagination has very little to do with the displacement the Negro causes in the American mind. According to Mr. Ottley, some Negro soldiers stationed in the Netherlands during the Second World War found, to their "shock" and "humiliation," at a Dutch celebration of Christ mas, that a Dutchwoman had blackened her face with cork, impersonating "offensively" the black servant of Sinterklaas. But what else is a Dutchwoman likely to know about Negroes except that they are black, and-so far as she is concerned have always been servants?

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  People now approach ing, or past, middle age, who have spent their lives in such struggles, have thereby acquired an understanding of America, and a belief in her potential which cannot now be shaken. (There are exceptions to this, however, W. E. B. Du Bois, for example. It is easy to dismiss him as a Stalinist; but it is more interesting to consider just why so intelligent a man became so disillusioned.) But I very strongly doubt that any Negro youth, now approaching maturity, and with the whole, vast world before him, is willing, say, to settle for Jim Crow in Miami, when he can-or, before the travel ban, could-f east at the welcome table in Havana. And he need not, to prefer Havana, have any pro-Communist, or, for that matter, pro Cuban, or pro-Ca stro sympathies: he need merely prefer not to be treated as a second-c lass citizen. These are extremely unattractive facts, but they are facts, and no purpose is served by denying them. Neither, as I have already tried to indicate, is any purpose served by pretending that Negroes who refuse to be bound by this country's pe culiar attitudes are subversive. They have every right to refuse to be bound by a set of attitudes as useless now and as ob solete as the pillory. Finally, the time is forever behind us when Negroes could be expected to "wai t." What is de manded now, and at once, is not that Negroes continue to adjust themselves to the cruel racial pressures of lif e in the United States but that the United States readjust itself to the facts of lif e in the present world. One of these facts is that the American Negro can no longer, nor will he ever again, be controlled by white Amer ica's image of him. This fact has everything to do with the rise of Af rica in world affairs. At the time that I was growing up, Negroes in this country were taught to be ashamed of Africa. They were taught it blu ntly, as I was, for example, by being told that Mrica had never contributed "anything" to civilization. Or one was taught the same lesson mor e obliquely, and even more effectively, by watching nearly na ked, dancing, comic-opera, cannibal istic savages in the movies. They were nearly always all bad, sometimes funny, sometimes EAST RIVER, DO WNTOWN 18 5 both. If one of them was good, his goodness was proved by his loyalty to the white man. A baffling sort of goodness, par ticularly as one's father, who certainly wanted one to be "good," was more than likely to come home cursing-cursing the white man.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Rats live there too, feeding off the garbage, and we first en counter Bigger in the act of killing one. One may consider that the entire book, fr om that harsh Erring! to Bigger's weak "Good-by" as the lawyer, Max, leaves him in the death cell, is an extension, with the roles inverted, of this chilling meta phor. Bigger's situation and Bigger himself exert on the mind the same sort of fascination. The premise of the book is, as I take it, clearly conveyed in these first pages: we are confront ing a monster created by the American republic and we are, through being made to share his experience, to receive illu mination as regards the manner of his life and to feel both pity and horror at his awful and inevitable doom. This is an arresting and potentially rich idea and we would be discussing a very different novel if Wright's execution had been more perceptive and if he had not attempted to redeem a symbolical monster in social terms. One may object that it was precisely Wright's intention to MANY THOUSANDS GONE 27 create in Bigger a social symbol, re,·elatory of social disease and prophetic of disaster. I think, however, that it is this as sumption which we ought to examine more carefully. Bigger has no discernible relationship to himself, to his mm life, to his own people, nor to any other people-in this respect, per haps, he is most American-and his force comes, not fr om his significance as a social (or anti-social) unit, but from his sig nificance as the incarnation of a myth. It is remarkable that, though we follow him step by step from the tenement room to the death cell, we know as little about him when this jour ney is ended as we did when it began; and, what is eYen more remarkable, we know almost as little about the social dynamic which we are to belie,·e created him. Despite the details of slum life which we are gh·en, I doubt that anyone who has thought about it, disengaging himself from sentimentality, can accept this most essential premise of the nm·el for a moment. Those �egroes who surround him, on the other hand, his hard-working mother, his ambitious sister, his poolroom cro nies, Bessie, might be considered as far richer and far more subtle and accurate illustrations of the ways in which �egroes are controlled in our society and the complex techniques they have e\•olved for their suryi,·al. We are limited, however, to Big ger's ,·iew of them, part of a deliberate plan which might not haYe been disastrous if we were not also limited to Big ger's perceptions.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  From my point of view, it seems to me that the flesh and the spirit arc one; it seems to me that when you mortifY the one, you have mortified the other. It would seem to me that the morality by which the Christian Church claims to live, I mean the public morality, that mo rality governing our sexual relations and the structure of the family, is terribly inadequate for what the world, and people in the world, must deal with now. One of the things that happened, it seems to me, with the rise of the Christian Church, was precisely the denial of a cer tain kind of spontaneity, a certain kind of joy, a certain kind of freedom, which a man can only have when he is in touch with himself, his surroundings, his women and his children. It seems to me that this shows very crucially in the nature, the WH ITE RAC ISM OR WORLD COMMUN ITY? 755 structure of our politics and in the personalities of our chil dren, who would like to learn, if I may put it this way, how to sing the blues, because the blues are not a racial creation, the blues are an historical creation produced by the confron tation precisely between the pagan, the black pagan from M rica, and the alabaster cross. I am suggesting that the nature of the lies the Christian Church has always helplessly told about me are only a reflection of the lies the Christian Church has always helplessly told itself , to itself , about itself. I am saying that when a person, when a people, are able to persuade themsel ves that another group or breed of men are less than men, they themselves become less than men and have made it almost impossible for themselves to confront reality and to change it. If I deny what I know to be true, if I deny that that white child next to me is simply another child, and if I pretend that that child, because its colour is white, de serves destruction, I have begun the destruction of my own personality and I am beginning the destruction of my own children.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Albert Camus in the pages of the french political newspaper, Combat. Camus had been TAKE ME TO THE WATER 37 9 born in Oran, which is the scene of his first novel, The Stranger. He could be described, perhaps, as a radical human ist; he was young, he was lucid, and it was not illogical to assume that he would bring-along with the authority of knowing the land of his birth-some of these qualities to bear on his apprehension of the nature of the French-Algerian conflict. I have never esteemed this writer as highly as do so many others. I was struck by the fact that, tor Camus, the European humanism appeared to expire at the European gates: so that Camus, who was dedicated to liberty, in the case of Europe ans, could only speak of "justice" in the case of Algeria. And yet, he must surely have known, must have seen with his own eyes, some of the results of French "justice" in Algeria. ("A legal means," said an Atrican recipient, "of administering injustice.") Given the precepts upon which he based his eloquent discourses concerning the problems of individual liberty, he must have seen that what the battle of Algiers was really about was the fact that the French refused to give the Algerians the right to be wrong; refused to allow them, so to speak, that "existentialist" situation, of which the french, for a season, were so enamored; or, more accurately, did not even dare imagine that the Algerian situation could be "existen tialist"; precisely because the French situation was so extreme. There was no way for him not to have known that Algeria was French only insofar as French power had <.i ccrccd it to be French. It existed on the European map only insotar as Eu ropean power had placed it there. It is power, not justice, which keeps rearranging the map, and the Algerians were not fighting the French for justice (of which, indeed, they must have had their fill by that ti me) but for the power to determine their own destinies. It was during this time that Camus translated and directed, tor the Mathurin Theatre, in Paris, William Faulkner's Re quiem for a Nun, and an American magazine asked me to review it. I would almost certainly not have seen this produc tion otherwise, tor I had seen the play in New York, and I had read the book, and had tound Faulkner's table to be a preposterous bore.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  We decided to prioritize resentencing hearings in Louisiana for the “old-timers,” juvenile lifers who had been there for decades. Joshua Carter and Robert Caston were the first two cases we decided to litigate. In 1963, when he was sixteen, Joshua Carter was accused of a rape in New Orleans and quickly given the death penalty. A condemned black child awaiting execution in those days had little reason to hope for relief. But to coerce a confession from him, police officers had beaten Joshua so brutally that even in 1965 the Louisiana Supreme Court felt the need to overturn his conviction. Mr. Carter was resentenced to life imprisonment without parole and sent to Angola. After struggling for years, he became a model prisoner and trustee. In the 1990s, he developed glaucoma and didn’t get the medical care he needed, and he soon lost his sight in both eyes. We tried to persuade New Orleans prosecutors that Mr. Carter, blind and in his sixties, should be released after nearly fifty years in prison. Robert Caston had been at Angola for forty-five years. He lost several fingers working in a prison factory and was now disabled as a result of his forced labor at Angola. I traveled back and forth between the trial courts in Orleans Parish quite a bit on the Carter and Caston cases. The Orleans Parish courthouse is a massive structure with intimidating architecture. There are multiple courtrooms aligned down an enormous hallway with grand marble floors and high ceilings. Hundreds of people crowd the hallways, bustling between the various courtrooms each day. Hearings in the vast courthouse are never reliably scheduled. Frequently, there would be a date and time for the Carter and Caston resentencings, but it seemed to mean very little to anyone. I would arrive in court, and there would always be a stack of cases, and clients with lawyers gathered in an overcrowded courtroom, all waiting to be heard at the time of our hearings. Overwhelmed judges tried to manage the proceedings with bench meetings while dozens of young men—most of whom were black—sat handcuffed in standard jail-issued orange jumpsuits in the front of the court. Lawyers consulted with clients and family members scattered around the chaotic courtroom. After three trips to New Orleans for sentencing hearings, we still did not have a new sentence for Mr. Carter or Mr. Caston. We met with the district attorney, filed papers with the judge, and consulted with a variety of local officials in an effort to achieve a new, constitutionally acceptable sentence. Because Mr. Carter and Mr. Caston had both been in prison for nearly fifty years, we wanted their immediate release.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I was not going to come crawling out of my ruined house, all bloody, no, baby, sing no sad songs fo r me. And the great gap between Norman's state and my own had a terrible effect on our relationship, fo r it inevitably con nected, not to say collided, with that myth of the sexuality of Negroes which Norman, like so many others, refuses to give up. The sexual battleground, if I may call it that, is really the same fo r everyone; and I, at this point, was just about to be carried off the battleground on my shield, if anyone could find it; so how could I play, in any way whatever, the noble savage? At the same time, my temperament and my experience in this country had led me to expect very little from most Amer ican whites, especially, horribly enough, my fr iends: so it did not seem worthwhile to challenge, in any real way, Norman's views of life on the periphery, or to put him down fo r th em. I was weary, to tell the truth. I had tried, in the States, to convey something of what it fe lt like to be a Negro and no one had been able to listen: they wanted their romance. And, anyway, the really ghastly thing about trying to convey to a white man the reality of the Negro experience has nothing whatever to do with the fa ct of color, but has to do with this man's relationship to his own life. He will face in your life only what he is willing to face in his. Well, this means that one finds oneself tampering with the insides of a stranger, to no purpose, which one probably has no right to do, and I chickened out. And matters were not helped at all by the fact that the Negro jazz musicians, among whom we sometimes f(mnd ourselves, who really liked Norman, did not fo r an in stant consider him as being even remotely "hip" and Norman did not know this and I could not tell him. He never broke through to them, at least not as fa r I know; and they were fa r too "hip," if that is the word I want, even to consider break ing through to him. They thought he was a real sweet ofay cat, but a little frantic.