Fear

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)

  Their very presence is an insult, and it would be, even if they spent their entire day feeding gumdrops to children. They represent the force of the white world, and that world's real intentions are, simply, for that world's criminal profit and ease, to keep the black man corralcd up here, in his place. The badge, the gun in the holster, and the swinging club make vivid what will happen should his rebellion become overt. Rare, indeed, is the Harlem citizen, from the most circum spect church member to the most shiftless adolescent, who does not have a long tale to tell of police incompetence, in justice, or brutality. I myself have witnessed and endured it more than once. The businessmen and racketeers also have a story. And so do the prostitutes. (And this is not, perhaps, the place to discuss Harlem's very complex attitude toward black policemen, nor the reasons, according to Ha rlem, that they arc nearly all downtown.) It is hard, on the other hand, to blame the policeman, blank, good-natured, thoughtless, and insuperably innocent, for being such a perfect representative of the people he serves. He, too, believes in good intentions and is astounded and offended when they arc not taken for the deed. He has never, himself, done anything tor which to be hated-which of us has?-and yet he is facing, daily and nightly, people who would gladly sec him dead, and he knows it. There is no way for him not to know it: there arc few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people. He moves through Harlem, therefore, like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country; which is precisely what, and where, he is, and is the reason he walks in twos and threes. And he is not the only one who knows why he is alw ays in company: the people who are watching him know why, too. Any street meeting, sacred or secular, which he and his colleagues uneasily cover has as its explicit or im- FIF TH AVE NUE, UPTOWN 177 plicit burden the cruelty and injustice of the white domina tion. And these days, of course, in terms increasingly vivid and jubilant, it speaks of the end of that domination. The white policeman standing on a Harlem street corner finds himself at the very center of the revolution now occurring in the world. He is not prepared tor it-naturally, nobody is-and, what is possibly much more to the point, he is exposed, as few white people are, to the anguish of the black people around him. Even if he is gifted with the merest mustard grain of imagi nation, something must seep in. He cannot avoid observing that some of the children, in spite of their color, remind him of children he has known and loved, perhaps even of his own children. He knows that he certainly does not want his chil dren living this way.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I discouraged the chatter of m\' ::-.Jew York friend and this left me alan; with my thoughts. {was beginning to be fright ened and I bent all my energies, therefore, to keeping my panic under control. I began to realize that I was in a country 106 NOTES OF A NATIVE SON I knew nothing about, in the hands of a people I did not understand at all. In a similar situation in New York I would have had some idea of what to do because I would have had some idea of what to expect. I am not speaking now oflegality which, like most of the poor, I had never for an instant trusted, but of the temperament of the people with whom I had to deal. I had become very accomplished in New York at guessing and, therefore, to a limited extent manipulating to my advantage the reactions of the white world . But this was not New York. None of my old weapons could serve me here. I did not know what they saw when they looked at me. I knew very well what Americans saw when they looked at me and this allowed me to play endless and sinister variations on the role which they had assigned me; since I knew that it was, for them, of the utmost importance that they never be con fr onted with what, in their own personalities, made this role so necessary and gratifying to them, I knew that they could never call my hand or, indeed, afford to know what I was doing; so that I moved into every crucial situation with the deadly and rather desperate advantages of bitterly accumulated perception, of pride and contempt. This is an awful sword and shield to carry through the world, and the discovery that, in the game I was playing, I did myself a violence of which the world, at its most ferocious, would scarcely have been capable, was what had driven me out of New York. It was a strange feeling, in this situation, after a year in Paris, to discover that my weapons would never again serve me as they had. It was quite clear to me that the Frenchmen in whose hands I found myself were no better or worse than their American counterparts. Certainly their uniforms frightened me quite as much, and their impersonality, and the threat, always very keenly felt by the poor, of violence, was as present in that commissariat as it had ever been for me in any police station. And I had seen, fi>r example, what Paris policemen could do to Arab peanut vendors. The only difference here was that I did not understand these people, did not know what tech niques their cruelty took, did not know enough about their personalities to sec danger coming, to ward it off, did not know on what ground to meet it. That evening in the com missariat I was not a despised black man.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Here, black equates with evil and white with grace; if, being mindful of the necessity of good works, she could not cast out the blac ks-a wretched, huddled mass, apparently, claim ing, lik e an obsession, her inner eye-she could not embrace them either without purifYing them of sin. She must cover their intimidating nakedness, robe them in white, the gar ments of salvation; only thus could she herself be delivered from C\'cr-prcscnt sin, only thus could she bury, as St. Paul demanded, "the carnal man, the man of the flesh ." Tom, therefore, her only black man, has been robbed of his hu manity and divested of his sex. It is the price for that darkness \\'ith which he has been branded. Uncle Tom's Cabin, then, is activated by what might be called a theological terror, the terror of damnation; and the spirit that breathes in this book, hot, self -righteous, fearful, is EVER YBODY ' S PR OTES T NO VEL 15 not different from that spirit of medieval times which sought to exorcize evil by burning witches; and is not different from that terror which activates a lynch mob. One need not, in deed, search for examples so historic or so gaudy; this is a warfare waged daily in the heart, a warfare so vast, so relentless and so powerful that the interracial handshake or the inter racial marriage can be as crucifying as the public hanging or the secret rape. This panic motivates our cruelty, this fear of the dark makes it impossible that our lives shall be other than superficial; this, interlocked with and feeding our glittering, mechanical, inescapable civilization which has put to death our freedom. This, notwithstanding that the avowed aim of the American protest novel is to bring greater freedom to the oppressed. They are forgiven, on the strength of these good intentions, whatever violence they do to language, whatever excessive de mands they make of credibility. It is, indeed, considered the sign of a frivolity so intense as to approach decadence to sug gest that these books are both badly written and wildly im probable. One is told to put first things first, the good of society coming before niceties of style or characterization. Even if this were incontestable -f or what exactly is the "good" of society?-it argues an insuperable confusion, since lit erature and sociology are not one and the same; it is im possible to discuss them as if they were. Our passion for categorization, lif e neatly fitted into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress; confusion, a breakdown of meaning. Those categories which were meant to define and control the world for us have boomeranged us into chaos; in which limbo we whirl, clutching the straws of our definitions. The "protest" novel, so far from being disturbing, is an ac cepted and comforting aspect of the American scene, ramit)r ing that framework we believe to be so necessary.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe fo r many years, and fo r innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would fe el if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be fri ghtened because it is out of the order of nature. Any up heaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their fo undations. You, don't be afraid. I said that it was intended that you should perish in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go behind the white man's definitions, by never being allowed to spell your proper name. You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention; and, by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those in nocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality. But these men are your broth ers-your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall fo rce our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease flee ing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumen tal dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off MY DUNGEON SHOOK 295 You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you, James, and Godspeed.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I sat down on one of the stools, and a black man came in, grunted a greeting to me, went to the window, ordered, paid, sat down, and began to eat. I sat there for a while, think ing that I'd certainly asked tor one hell of a gig. I wasn't sorry I'd come-! was never, in fact, ever to be sorry about that, and, until the day I die, I will always consider myself among the greatly privileged because, however inadequately, I was TAKE ME TO THE WATER 399 there. But I could see that the difficulties were not going to be where I had confidently placed them-in others-but in me. I was far from certain that I was equipped to get through a single day down here, and if I could not so equip myself then I would be a menace to all that others were trying to do, and a betrayal of their vast travail. They had been under going and overcoming for a very long time without me, after all, and they hadn't asked me to come: my role was to do a story and avoid becoming one. I watched the patient man as he ate, watched him with both wonder and respect. If he could do that, then the people on the other side of the mesh were right to be frightened-if he could do that, he could do anything and when he walked through the mesh there would be nothing to stop him. But I couldn't do it yet; my stomach was as tight as a black rubber ball. I took my hamburger and walked outside and dropped it into the weeds. The dark si lence of the streets now frightened me a little, and I walked back to my hotel. My hotel was a very funky black joint, so poverty stricken and for so long, that no one had anything to hide, or lose not that they had stopped trying: they failed in the first en deavor as monotonously as they succeeded in the second. Life still held out the hope of what Americans, helpl essly and hon estly enough, call a "killing" and what blacks, revealingly enough, call a "hit." There seemed to be music all the time, someone was dancing all the time. It would have seemed, from a casual view, that this hotel was the gathering place for all the dregs of the town and that was true enough. But, since these dregs included the entire black society, it was a very various and revealing truth.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I could not make my peace with that particular lie-a lie, in any case, for me. I did not want to become Baby-Face Martin-I could see that coming, and, indeed, it demanded no spectacular perception, since I found myself surrounded by what I was certain to become. But nei ther did I know how to leav e-to jump: it could not be ex plained to my brothers and sisters, or my mother, and my father had begun his descent into the valley. Emile took me to this film, of which I remember only a close-up of a tam bourine. I played the tambourine, in church: the tambourine on the screen might as well have been Gabriel's trumpet. I collapsed, weeping, terrified, and Emile led me out. He walked me up to Herald Square. It was night. He talked to me; he tried to make me sec something-tried to do some thing only a friend can do: and challenged me, thus: Even if what I was preaching was gospel, I had no right to preach it if I no longer believed it. To stay in the church merely because I was afraid of leaving it was unutterably far beneath me, and too despicable a cowardice for him to sup port in any friend of his. Therefore, on the coming Sunday, he would buy two tickets to a Broadway matinee and meet me on the steps of the 42nd Street Library, at two o'clock in CHAPTER ONE 503 the afternoon. He knew that I spent all day Sunday in chu rch-the point, precisely, of the challenge. If I were not on the steps of the library (in the bookshelves of which so much of my trouble had begun! ) then he would be ashamed of me and never speak to me again, and I would be ashamed of myself . (I cannot resist observing that this still seems to me a quite extraordinary confrontation between two adolescents, one white and one black: but, then, I had never forgotten Bill's quiet statement, when I went down to her house on 12 th Street to tell her that I had been "saved" and would not be going to the movies, or the theater anymore-which meant that I would not be seeing her anymore: Fve lost a lot of respect for you. Perhaps, in the intervening time, I had lost a lot of respect for myself .) But beneath all this, as under a graveyard pallor, or the noonday sun, lay the fact that the leap demanded that I com mit myself to the clear impossibility of becoming a writer, and attempting to save my family that way. I do not think I said this.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Nor had I ever been so aware of small knots of people. They were on stoops and on corner s and in doorways, and what was striki ng about them, I thi nk, was that they did not seem to be talking. Never, when I passed these groups, did the usual sound of a curse or a laugh ring out and neither did there seem to be any hum of gossip. There was certain ly, on the other hand, occurring between them commun ication extraor dinarily intense. Another thing that was striking was the un expected diversity of the people who made up these groups. NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON Usua lly, for example, one would see a group of sharpies stand ing on the street corner, jiving the passing chicks; or a group of older men, usual ly, for some reason, in the vicin ity of a barber shop, discussing baseball scores, or the numbers, or making rather chilling observations about women they had known. Women, in a general way, tended to be seen less often together -unless they were church women, or very young girls, or prostitutes met together fi>r an un professional instant. But that summer I saw the strangest combinations: large, re spectable, churchly matrons standing on the stoops or the cor ners with their hair tied up, together with a girl in sleazy satin whose face bore the marks of gin and the razor, or heavy-set, abrupt, no-nonsense older men, in company with the most disreputable and fanatical "race" men, or these same "race" men with the sharpies, or these sharpies with the churchly women. Seventh Day Adventists and Methodists and Spiri tualists seemed to be hobnobbing with Holyrollers and they were all, alike, entangled with the most flagrant disbelievers; something heavy in their stance seemed to indicate that they had all, incredibly, seen a common vision, and on each face there seemed to be the same strange, bitter shadow. The churchly women and the matter-of-fact, no-nonsense men had children in the Army. The sleazy girls they talked to had lovers there, the sharpies and the "race" men had friends and brothers there. It would have demanded an unquestion ing patriotism, happily as uncommon in this country as it is undesirable, f(>r these people not to have been disturbed by the bitter letters they received, by the newspaper stories they re ad, not to have been enraged by the posters, then to be found all over New York, which described the Japanese as "yellow-bellied Japs."

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I had met him at a party, with some friends of mine-who were, really , friends of his; had seen him, in tact, only once, and very briefly. If I could scarcely remember his name, he would certainly have the same difficulty with mine, and, if he was a fugitive trom justice, he would scarcely take a chance on coming to hide in my cabin. I knew the name now, and I was determined not to reveal it. It was no part of my duty to help them trap the cat, and, no doubt, he had his reasons tor deserting the Marines. But the interrogation was rugged, ruthless, and prolonged, and, eventually , the name slipped out: "W ell, there was Carmen, and me, and Joe, and Teddy-" "Teddy? Is this Teddy?" I cursed myself, for, of course, they had known the name all along. My utterance of the name had confirmed something, and I had been helpful to them, after all . This frightened me in a new way, in a way that I had never been frightened before. I could see, suddenly, that they could keep me against this wall, under this sun, tor the foreseeable future, and, finally, whatever I knew would be dragged out of me. But, in tact, thank God, or somebody, all I knew about the boy was his name. I did not even know his last name. And the afternoon wore on, with threats and curses. They came to my cabin, and searched it-I felt that they had searched it before. When the interrogation was finally over, one of them took out a nickel and dropped it into my palm. With this nickel, the moment I had any news of Teddy I was to call him. I'd be a mighty sorry nigger if I didn't. I took the nickel, and I assured him that I would certainly call him the moment I had any news of Teddy. I thought, You can bet your ass I'll call you. Don't piss, don't shit, don't fuck, until I call you: do nothing till you hear trom me. Thev lct i: me, final lv, haunted the cabin, and roamed the town i·or two days. T�ddy never appeared. I never spent the nickel, I threw it away. * CHAPTER TWO 549 Teddy was turned in. This, I learned much la ter, in New Yo rk, during my visit in 1952.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I seemed to observe in some of the eyes that watched them that same bright, paranoid, flinching bewilderment I have seen in the eyes of some white Americans when they encoun ter a black man abroad. In the latter case, one sometimes had the feeling that they were ducking a blow-that they had en countered their deadliest enemy on a lonely mountain road. The eyes seemed to say, I didn)t do it! Let me pass! and in such a moment one recognized the fraudulent and expedient nature of the American innocence which has always been able to persuade itself that it docs not know what it knows too well . Or, it was exactly like watching someone who finds himself caught in a lie: for a black man abroad is no longer one of "our" niggcrs, is a stranger, not to be controlled by 470 NO NAME IN THE STREET anything his countrymen think or say or do. In a word, he is free and thus discovers how little equipped his countrymen are to behold him in that state. In San Francisco, the eyes that watched seemed to feel that the children were deliberately giving away family secrets in the hope of egging on the blacks to destroy the family. And that is precisely what they were doing-helple ssly, unconsciously, out of a profound desire to be saved, to live. But the blacks already knew the family secrets and had no interest in them. Nor did they have much confi dence in these troubled white boys and girls. The black trou ble was of a different order, and blacks had to be concerned with much more than their own private happiness or unhap piness. They had to be aware that this troubled white person might suddenly decide not to be in trouble and go home and when he went home, he would be the enemy. Therefore, it was best not to speak too freely to anyone who spoke too freely to you, especially not on the streets of a nation which probably has more hired informers working for it, here and all over the world, than any nation in history. True rebels, after all, are as rare as true lovers, and, in both cases, to mis take a fever for a passion can destroy one's lif e. The black and white confrontation, whether it be hostile, as in the cities and the labor unions, or with the intention of forming a common front and creating the foundations of a new society, as with the students and the radicals, is obviously crucial, containing the shape of the American future and the only potential of a truly valid American identity. No one knows precisely how identities arc forged, but it is safe to say that identities are not invented: an identity would seem to be arri\·cd at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Your uncle, James Down at the Cross Letter from a Region in My Mind Take up the White Man's burden Ye dare not stoop to less- Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloak your weariness; By all ye cry or whisper, By all ye leave or do, The silent, sullen peoples Shall weigh your Gods and you. -Kipling Down at the cross where my Saviour died, Down where fo r cleansing fr om sin I cried, There to my heart was the blood applied, Singing glory to His name! -Hymn I UNDERWENT, during the summer that I became fo urteen, a prolonged religious crisis. I use the word "religious" in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then dis covered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell. And since I had been born in a Christian nation, I accepted this Deity as the only one. I supposed Him to exist only within the walls of a church-in fa ct, of our church-and I also sup posed that God and safety were synonymous. The word "safety" brings us to the real meaning of the word "religious" as we use it. Therefore, to state it in another, more accurate way, I became, during my fo urteenth year, fo r the first time in my life, afraid-afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without. What I saw around me that summer in Har lem was what I had always seen; nothing had changed. But now, without any warning, the whores and pimps and rack eteers on the Avenue had become a personal menace. It had not before occurred to me that I could become one of them, but now I realized that we had been produced by the same circumstances. Many of my comrades were clearly headed fo r the Avenue, and my fa ther said that I was headed that way, 29 6 DOWN AT THE CROSS 29 7 too. My friends began to drink and smoke, and embarked at first avid, then groaning-on their sexual careers. Girls, only slightly older than I was, who sang in the choir or taught Sunday school, the children of holy parents, underwent, be fo re my eyes, their incredible metamorphosis, of which the most bewildering aspect was not their budding breasts or their rounding behinds but something deeper and more subtle, in their eyes, their heat, their odor, and the inflection of their voices.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The re lationship, ther ct(>rc, of a black boy to a white boy is a very complex thing. There is a ditlerence, though, between Norman and myself in that I think he still imagines that he has something to save, whereas I have never had anything to lose. Or, perhaps I ought to put it another way: the thing that most white people imagine that they can salvage trom the storm of lite is really, in su m, their innocence. It was this commodity precisely which I had to get rid of at once, literally, on pain of death. I am atraid that most of the white people I have ever known impr essed me as being in the grip of a weird nostalgia, dream ing of a vanished state of secur ity and order, against which dream, unfailingly and unconsciously, they tested and very of ten lost their lives. It is a terrible thing to say, but I am atraid that t<>r a very long time the troubles of white people failed to impress me as being real trou ble. They put me in mind of children cryi ng because the breast has been taken away. Time and love have modified my tough-boy lack of charity, but the attitude sketched above was my first attitude and I am sure that there is a great deal of it left. To proceed: two lean cats, one white and one black, met in a french living room. I had heard of him, he had heard of me. And here we were, suddenly, circling around each other. We liked each other at once, but each was frightened that the other would pull rank. He could have pulled rank on me be cause he was more tamous and had more money and also because he was white; but I could have pulled rank on him precisely because I was black and knew more about that pe riphery he so helplessly maligns in Ihe White Negro than he could ever hope to know. Already, you sec, we were trapped in our roles and our attitudes: the toughest kid on the block was meeting the toughest kid on the block. I think that both of us were pretty weary of this grueling and thankless role, I know that I am; but the roles that we construct are con structed because we ted that they will help us to su rvive and also, of course, because they fulfill something in our person alities; and one docs not, thcr ct(>re, cease playing a role simply because one has begun to understand it. All roles are dan- THE BL ACK BOY LOOK S AT THE WHITE BOY 271 gerous.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It is not Bigger whom we fear, since his appearance among us makes our victory certain. It is the others, who smile, who go to church, who give no cause for complaint, whom we sometimes consider with amusement, with pity, even with affection-and in whose faces we sometimes sur prise the merest arrogant hint of hatred, the faintest, with drawn, specula tive shadow of contem pt-who make us uneasy; whom we cajole, threaten, flatter, fear; who to us remain unknown, though we arc not (we feel with both relief and hostility and with bottomless confusion) unknown to them. It is out of our reaction to these hewers of wood and drawers of water that our image of Bigger was created. It is this image, living yet, which we perpetually seck to evade with good works; and this image which makes of all our good works an intolerable mockery. The "nigger," black, be nighted, brutal, consumed with hatred as we arc consumed with guilt, cannot be thus blotted out. He stands at our shoul ders when we give our maid her wages, it is his hand which we tear we arc taking when struggling to communicate with the current "intelligent" Negro, his stench, as it were, which MA NY THOU SAN DS GONE 29 fills our mouths with salt as the monument is unveiled in honor of the latest Negro leader. Each generation has shouted behind him, Nigger! as he walked our streets; it is he whom we would rather our sisters did not marry; he is banished into the vast and wailing outer darkness whenever we speak of the "purity" of our women, of the "sanctity" of our homes, of "American" ideals. What is more, he knows it. He is indeed the "n ative son": he is the "n igger." Let us refrain from in quiring at the moment whether or not he actually exists; for we believe that he exists. Whenever we encounter him amongst us in the flesh , our faith is made perfect and his necessary and bloody end is executed with a mystical ferocity of joy. But there is a complementary faith among the damned which involves their gathering of the stones with which those who walk in the light shall stone them; or there ex ists among the intolerably degraded the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual those fantastic crimes of which they have been accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through making the nightmare real.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  On what, then, will the economy of this separate nation be based? The boy gave me a rather strange look. I said hurriedly, "I'm not saying it can1t be donc-1 just want to know how it's to be done." I was thinking, In order fo r this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be t(>rccd to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have. I didn't fe el that the things I had in mind, such as the pseudo - elegant heap of tin in which we were riding, had any very great value. But life would be very different without them, and I wondered if he had thought of this. How can one, however, dream of power in any other terms than in the symbols of power? The boy could sec that freedom depended on the possession of land; he was persuaded that, in one way or another, Negroes must achieve this possession. In the meantime, he could walk the streets and fe ar nothing, because there were millions like him, coming soon, now, to DOWN AT THE CROSS 333 power. He was held together, in short, by a dream-though it is just as well to remember that some dreams come true and was united with his "brothers" on the basis of their color. Perhaps one cannot ask fo r more. People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal re sponsibility. Yet I could have hoped that the Muslim movement had been able to inculcate in the demoralized Negro population a truer and more individual sense of its own worth, so that Negroes in the Northern ghettos could begin, in concrete terms, and at whatever price, to change their situation. But in order to change a situation one has first to see it fo r what it is: in the present case, to accept the fact, whatever one does with it thereafter, that the Negro has been fo rmed by this nation, fo r better or fo r worse, and does not belong to any other-not to Africa, and certainly not to Islam. The para dox-and a fe arful paradox it is-is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere, on any continent, as long as he is unwilling to accept his past. To accept one's past-one's history-is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought. How can the American Negro's past be used? The unprecedented price demanded-and at this embattled hour of the world's history-is the transcendence of the realities of color, of nations, and of altars. "Anyway," the boy said suddenly, after a very long silence, "things won't ever again be the way they used to be.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Semblably she changed one of her neighbours, being an old man and one that sold wine, into a Frog, in that he was one of her occupation, and therefore she bare him a grudge, and now the poore miser swimming in one of his pipes of wine, and well nigh drowned in the dregs, doth cry and call with an hoarse voice, for his old guests and acquaintance that pass by. Like wise she turned one of the Advocates of the Court (because he pleaded and spake against her in a rightful cause) into a horned Ram, and now the poore Ram is become an Advocate. Moreover she caused, that the wife of a certain lover that she had should never be delivered of her childe, but according to the computation of all men, it is eight yeares past since the poore woman first began to swell, and now shee is encreased so big, that shee seemeth as though she would bring forth some great Elephant: which when it was knowne abroad, and published throughout all the towne, they tooke indignation against her, and ordayned that the next day shee should most cruelly be stoned to death. Which purpose of theirs she prevented by the vertue of her inchantments, and as Medea (who obtained of King Creon but one days respit before her departure) did burn all his house, him, and his daughter: so she, by her conjurations and invocations of spirits, (which she useth in a certaine hole in her house, as shee her selfe declared unto me the next day following) closed all the persons in the towne so sure in their houses, and with such violence of power, that for the space of two dayes they could not get forth, nor open their gates nor doore, nor break downe their walls, whereby they were inforced by mutuall consent to cry unto her, and to bind themselves strictly by oaths, that they would never afterwards molest or hurt her: and moreover, if any did offer her any injury they would be ready to defend her. Whereupon shee, mooved by their promises, and stirred by pitty, released all the towne. But shee conveyed the principal Author of this ordinance about midnight, with all his house, the walls, the ground, and the foundation, into another towne, distant from thence an hundred miles, scituate and beeing on the top of an high hill, and by reason thereof destitute of water, and because the edifices and houses were so nigh built together, that it was not possible for the house to stand there, she threw it downe before the gate of the towne. Then I spake and said O my friend Socrates you have declared unto me many marvellous things and strange chances, and moreover stricken me with no small trouble of minde, yea rather with great feare, lest the same old woman using the like practice, should fortune to heare all our communication. Wherefore let us now sleepe, and after that we have taken our rest, let us rise betimes in the morning, and ride away hence before day, as far as we can possible. THE FIFTH CHAPTER How Socrates and Aristomenus slept together in one Chamber, and how they were handled by Witches.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Every etfort made by the child's elders to prepare him tor a fa te from which they cannot protect him causes him secretly, in terror, to begin to await, without knowing that he is doing so, his mysterious and inexorable punishment. He must be "good" not only in order to please his parents and not only to avoid being punished by them; behind their authority stands another, nameless and imper sonal, infinitely harder to please, and bottomlessly cruel. And this filters into the child's consciousness through his parents' tone of voice as he is being exhorted, punished, or loved; in the sudden, uncontrollable note of tear heard in his mother's or his tathcr's voice when he has strayed beyond some partic ular boundary. He docs not know what the boundary is, and he can get no explanation of it, which is fr ightening enough, but the tear he hears in the voices of his elders is more fr ight ening still. The tear that I heard in my fa ther's voice, fo r example, when he realized that I really belieJJed I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the tear I heard when one of us was ill or had fa llen down the stairs or strayed too tar ti·om the house. It was another tear, a fe ar that the child, in chal lenging the white world's assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction. A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other. He reacts to the fe ar in his parents' voices because his parents hold up the world f(.>r him and he has no protection without them. I de tended myself, as I imagined, against the tear my fa ther made me tee! by remembering that he was very old-tashioned. Also, I prided myself on the tact that I already knew how to outwit DOWN AT THE CROSS 3 0 3 him. To detend oneself against a tear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; tears must be faced. As for one's wits, it is just not true that one can liYe by them not, that is, if one wishes really to liYe.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I must have been about five, I should think, when I made my connection between ideas and velvet, but I may have been younger; this may have been the same year that my father had me circum cised, a terrifying event which I scarcely remember at all; or I may think I was five because I remember tugging at my moth er's skirts once and watching her face while she was telling someone else that she was twenty-seven. This meant, for me, that she was virtually in the grave already, and I tugged a little harder at her skirts. I already knew, for some reason, or had given myself some reason to believe, that she had been twenty-two when I was born. And, though I can't count to day, I could count when I was little. I was the only child in the house-or houses-for a while, a halcyon period which memory has quite repudiated; and if I remember myself as tugging at my mother's skirts and star ing up into her face, it was because I was so terrified of the man we called my father; who did not arrive on my scene, really, until I was more than two years old. I have written 3 5 3 35 4 NO NAME IN THE STREET both too much and too little about this man, whom I did not understand till he was past understanding. In my first memory of him, he is standing in the kitchen, drying the dishes. My mother had dressed me to go out, she is taking me someplace, and it must be winter, because I am wearing, in my memory, one of those cloth hats with a kind of visor, which button under the chin-a Lindbergh hat, I think. I am apparently in my mother's arms, for I am staring at my father over my mother's shoulder, we are near the door; and my father smiles. This may be a memory, I think it is, but it may be a fantasy. One of the very last times I saw my father on his feet, I was staring at him over my mother's shoulder-she had come rushing into the room to separate us-and my father was not smiling and neither was I. His mother, Barbara, lived in our house, and she had been born in slavery. She was so old that she never moved from her bed. I remember her as pale and gaunt and she must have worn a kerchief because I don't remember her hair. I rem em ber that she loved me; she used to scold her son about the way he treated me; and he was a little afraid of her. When she died, she called me into the room to give me a present--one of those old, round, metal boxes, usually with a floral design, used for candy.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Vous etes extraitJJ-which simply terrified me, since I did not know what interpretation to put on the word ({ex trait, JJ and since my cell mates had been amusing themselves with me by telling terrible stories about the inefficiency of French prisons, an inefficiency so extreme that it had often happened that someone who was supposed to be taken out and tried found himself on the wrong line and was guillotined instead. The best way of putting my reaction to this is to say that, though I knew they were teasing me, it was simply not possible for me to totally disbelieve them. As far as I was con- EQUAL IN PARIS ll 3 cerned, once in the hands of the law in France, anything could happen. I shuffled along with the others who were extrait to the center of the prison, trying, rather, to linger in the office, which seemed the only warm spot in the whole world, and fo und myself again in that dreadful wagon, and was carried again to the lie de Ia Cite, this time to the Palais de Justice. The entire day, except for te n minutes, was spent in one of the cells, first waiting to be tried, then waiting to be taken back to prison. For I was not tried that day. By and by I was handcuffed and led through the halls, upstairs to the courtroom where I found my New York friend. We were placed together, both stage-whisperingly certain that this was the end of our ordeal. Nevertheless, while I waited for our case to be called, my eyes searched the courtroom, looking for a face I knew, hoping, anyway, that there was someone there who knew me, who would carry to someone outside the news that I was in trou ble. But there was no one I knew there and I had had time to realize that there was probably only one man in Paris who could help me, an American patent attorney for whom I had worked as an office boy. He could have helped me because he had a quite solid position and some prestige and would have testified that, while working for him, I had handled large sums of money regularly, which made it rather unlikely that I would stoop to trafficking in bedsheets. However, he was somewhere in Paris, probably at this very moment enjoying a snack and a glass of wine and as far as the possibility of reach ing him was concerned, he might as well have been on Mars. I tried to watch the proceedings and to make my mind a blank. But the proceedings were not reassuring. The boy, for example, who had stolen the sweater did receive a six-month sentence. It seemed to me that all the sentences meted out that day were excessive; though, again, it seemed that all the people who were sentenced that day had made, or clearly were going to make, crime their career.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Some of them are social, and these reasons are somewhat more important because they have to do with our social panic, with our fear of losing status. This really amounts sometimes to a kind of social paranoia. One cannot affi>rd to lose status on this peculiar ladder, for the prevailing notion of American lif e seems to involve a kind of rung-by-rung ascension to some hideously desirable state. If this is one's concept of lif e, ob viously one cannot afford to slip back one rung. When one slips, one slips back not a rung but back into chaos and no longer knows who he is. And this reason, this fear, suggests to me one of the real reasons fi>r the status of the Negro in this country. In a way, the Negro tells us where the bottom IN SE ARCH OF A MAJO RITY 219 is: because he is there, and where he is, beneath us, we know where the limits are and how far we must not fall. We must not fall beneath him. We must never allow ourselves to fall that low, and I am not trying to be cynical or sardonic. I think if one examines the myths which have proliferated in this country concerning the Negro, one discovers beneath these myths a kind of sleeping terror of some condition which we refuse to imagine. In a way, if the Negro were not here, we might be forced to deal within ourselves and our own per sonalities, with all those vices, all those conundrums, and all those mysteries with which we have invested the Negro race. Uncle Tom is, for example, if he is called uncle, a kind of saint. He is there, he endures, he will forgive us, and this is a key to that image. But if he is not uncle, if he is merely Tom, he is a danger to everybody. He will wreak havoc on the coun tryside. When he is Uncle Tom he has no sex-when he is Tom, he docs-and this obviously says much more about the people who invented this myth than it does about the people who are the object of it. If you have been watching television lately, I think this is unendurably clear in the faces of those screaming people in the South, who are quite incapable of telling you what it is they are afraid of. They do not really know what it is they are afraid of, but they know they are afraid of something, and they are so frightened that they are nearly out of their minds. And this same fear obtains on one level or another, to varying degrees, throughout the entire country. We would never, never allow Negroes to starve, to grow bitter, and to die in ghettos all over the country if we were not driven by some nameless fear that has nothing to do with Negroes.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I had the feeling that they were waiting to be selected as members of the firing squad. I had not the remotest notion as to why they had come looking for me. I knew of nothing which I could possibly have done to have attracted their attention. Much later in my lif e, I knew very well what I had done to attract their attention, and intended, simply, to keep on keeping on. In any case, once you have come to the attention of the fBI, they keep a friendly file on you, and your family, and your friends. But, on this morning, I was terribly frightened, and I was desperately trying to keep one jump ahead of them-to guess what it was bef ore they revealed it. If I could guess what it was, then I might know how to answer and know what to do. It developed that they were looking for a boy who had deserted from the Marines. I knew no one answering that description, and I said so. They conveyed, very vividly, what they would do to me if I did not tell them the truth-what they could do to smart niggers lik e me. (I was a smart nigger because I worked, part-time, as an artist's model, and lived in an artist's colo ny, and had a typewriter in my sha ck. ) My ass would be in a sling-this was among the gentler warnings. They frightened me, and they humiliated me-it was like be ing spat on, or pissed on, or gang-raped-but they made me hate them, too, with a hatred like hot ice, and all I knew, simply, was that, if I could figure out what they wanted, noth ing could induce me to give it to them. They showed me a series of photographs. from their ques tions, I realized that they were talking about something that had taken place in the city, during my last visit there. I had spent a lot of time in the restaurant, where I was still occa sional waiter. And I had been to a party, briefly, with some friends of mine. One photograph rang a distant bell in my memory: and they saw this. I had seen the face somewhere, THE DE VIL FINDS WO RK but I could not remember where. And, now, my problem was to remember where I had seen the tace, and then double lock the memorv out of their reach. And, eventually, I did remember. The boy's name was Teddy.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I would be inclined to agree with this, simply from what we know of human nature. It is not my im pression that people wish to become worse; they really wish to become better but very often do not know how. Most people assume the position, in a way, of the Je ws in Egypt, who really wished to get to the Promised Land but were afraid of the rigors of the journey; and, of course, before you em bark 215 216 NOBOD Y KN OWS MY NAME on a journey the terrors of whatever may overtake you on that journey live in the imagination and paralyze you. It was through Moses, according to legend, that they discovered, by undertaking this journey, how much they could endure. These speculations have led me a little bit ahead of myself. I suppose it can be said that there was a time in this country when an entity existed which could be called the majority, let's say a class, for the lack of a better word, which created the standards by which the country lived or which created the standards to which the country aspired. I am referring or have in mind, perhaps somewhat arbitrarily, the aristocracies of Vir ginia and New England. These were mainly of Anglo-Saxon stock and they created what Henry James was to refer to, not very much later, as our Anglo-American heritage, or Anglo American connections. Now at no time did these men ever form anything resembling a popular majority. Their impor tance was that they kept alive and they bore witness to two elements of a man's life which are not greatly respected among us now: (1) the social fo rms, called manners, which prevent us from rubbing too abrasively against one another and (2) the interior lif e, or the lif e of the mind. These things were im portant; these things were realities for them and no matter how roughhewn or dark the country was then, it is important to remember that this was also the time when people sat up in log cabins studying very hard by lamplight or candlelight. That they were better educated than we are now can be proved by comparing the political speeches of that time with those of our own day. Now, what I have been trying to suggest in all this is that the only useful definition of the word "majority" does not refer to numbers, and it docs not refer to power. It refers to influence . Someone said, and said it very accurately, that what is honored in a country is cultivated there. If we apply this touchstone to American lif e we can scarcely fail to arrive at a very grim view of it.