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

  The Terror of ConflictA CONFLICT-FREE MARRIAGE is an oxymoron. Every married couple must learn how to deal with differences in ways that suit their style, values, and particular relationship. This is a major challenge of modern marriage. Disputes are no longer settled by the father who knows best, a council of elders, or folk tradition. Women hold equal power and not all differences can be compromised, mediated, or settled by taking turns. If he wants no children and she wants one, you can’t have half a child. And you can’t walk away from the conflict. Someone has to prevail or you have to find a way to agree. You can’t live in his hometown in California and your hometown in Boston and be in the same household. Nor is it a solution to live midway in Chicago. You have to face the issue squarely, contain the anger and the disappointment that follows, and solve it peaceably to maintain the marriage. And you have to face the fact that this or another conflict will reappear. It’s an ongoing, challenging process that can be the key to a good marriage or the road to divorce. We learn our most important lessons about conflict at home, while growing up. Every day, children observe how differences and anger are resolved or not resolved in their own families. The lessons are constant, ingrained, permanent. All adults draw on experiences from childhood and adolescence to guide them in knowing how to manage conflict in their close relationships at home, at work, everywhere they turn. This is a never ending struggle because all close relationships—between friends, work or recreation partners, parents and children, or lovers—hold the seeds of repeated conflict. All need to be resolved or the relationship is on the rocks. Children of divorce have trouble with conflict because they grew up in homes where major arguments were not resolved but were surrendered to. Conflict evokes painful memories and feelings of terror from long ago. The quarrels they remember are not those that got worked out but those that spun out of control, escalated, and exploded. Karen’s panic following her husband’s fairly mild rebuke is typical of how adult children of divorce can react to simple disagreements. For them any conflict spells danger, a devil that threatens to tear the fabric of family life, destroy their marriage, and break their hearts.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But this choice was a choice in terms of a personal, a private better (I was, after all, a wr iter); what was its relevance in terms of a social worse? Here was the South Side-a million in captivity-stretching from this doorstep as fa r as the eye could see. And they didn't even read; depressed populations don't have the time or energy to spare. The affluent populations, which should have THE FIRE NEXT TIME been their help, didn't, as fa r as could be discovered, read, either-they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn: in order to learn new attitudes. Also, I knew that once I had entered the house, I couldn't smoke or drink, and I fe lt guilty about the cigarettes in my pocket, as I had fe lt years ago when my fr iend first took me into his church. I was half an hour late, having got lost on the way here, and I fe lt as deserving of a scolding as a schoolboy. The young man who came to the door-he was about thirty, perhaps, with a handsome, smiling face-didn't seem to find my lateness offensive, and led me into a large room. On one side of the room sat half a dozen women, all in white; they were much occupied with a beautiful baby, who seemed to belong to the youngest of the women. On the other side of the room sat seven or eight men, young, dressed in dark suits, very much at case, and very imposing. The sunlight came into the room with the peacefulness one remembers fr om rooms in one's early childhood-a sunlight encountered later only in one's dreams. I remember being astounded by the quietness, the case, the peace, the taste. I was introduced, they greeted me with a genuine cordiality and respect-and the respect increased my fright, fo r it meant that they expected something of me that I knew in my heart, fo r their sakes, I could not give-and we sat down. Elijah Muhammad was not in the room. Conversation was slow, but not as stiff as I had fe ared it would be. They kept it going, fo r I simply did not know which subjects I could acceptably bring up. They knew more about me, and had read more of what I had written, than I had expected, and I wondered what they made of it all, what they took my usefulness to be. The women were carrying on their own conversation, in low tones; I gathered that they were not expected to take part in male conversations. A fe w women kept coming in and out of the room, apparently making preparations tix dinner. We, the men, did not plunge deeply into any subject, fo r, clearly, we were all waiting fo r the appearance of Elijah. Presently, the men, one by one, left the room and returned.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Howbeit (quoth they) keepe him not wholly for your owne riding, but let us likewise have him at commandement. Therewithall they led me into the stable, and tied me to the manger: there was a certaine yong man with a mighty body, wel skilled in playing on instruments before the gods to get money, who (as soone as he had espied me) entertained me verie well, for he filled my racke and maunger full of meat, and spake merrily saying, O master Asse, you are very welcome, now you shall take my office in hand, you are come to supply my roome, and to ease me of my miserable labour: but I pray God thou maist long live and please my Master well, to the end thou maist continually deliver me from so great paine. When I heard these words I did prognosticate my miserie to come.

• From Best Erotic Romance

  That first elevator ride with Robin had been like a flipped switch, jolting him out of his coma. She’d forced the air back into his lungs and the blood back through his veins. He had begun to live for the weekends he spent with her, craving her laughter and smiles, her touch and her scent. But when she’d suggested they take their relationship to the next level, he had panicked, prompting her to walk out on him with her head held high and his heart in her hands. Reminded of how damned lucky he was to have her ready and willing again, Paul pinned her slender body against the door and took her mouth in a lush, hot kiss. His lips sealed over hers, his tongue gliding along the lower curve before slipping inside. She was stiff at first, resistant, which got his guard up. When it came to physical intimacy, they’d never had any barriers between them. As he stroked his tongue along hers, Robin reached for his cock and slung one leg around his waist. She jacked him with both hands, making him so hard and thick he groaned into her mouth and slickened her fingers with pre-cum. She used him to prime herself, massaging the tiny knot of her clitoris with the head of his dick. Impatient, he brushed her hands aside and tucked his cockhead into her slit. She was so ready, he slipped through her wetness and sank an inch inside her. As her cunt fluttered around him, his chest heaved with the loss of his control. What he wanted was to nail her to the door with pounding thrusts; what she needed was to know that he was committed to making their relationship work. “Hurry,” she hissed. Before he could rein himself in, her hands gripped his ass and yanked him into her. The unexpected thrust sent him tunneling deep. His palms hit the door on either side of her head and a curse burst from his lips. “Robin, baby,” he growled. “Give me a damn minute.” But she was already coming. With her head thrown back against the door and a purely erotic moan of pleasure, her cunt tightened around his aching dick like a tender fist. When the delicate muscles began milking his length in incredible ripples, he lost it. “Ah, shit,” he gasped, feeling his balls tighten and semen rush to the tip of his cock. Gripping her ass in the palms of his hands, Paul fucked her convulsing pussy like a mad man, banging her with hammering strokes. The violent orgasm was the rawest of his life, the pleasure so pure and hot he couldn’t stop the growls that tore from his throat. Or the words. “Robin...fuck...I love you, baby.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It was Southern, therefore, to put it brutally , because of the his tory of America-the United States of America: and small black boys and girls were now paying for this holocaust. They were attempting to go to school. They were attempting to get an education, in a country in which education is a synonym for indoctrination, if you are \vhite, and subjugation, if you are black. It was rather as though small Jewish boys and girls, in Hitler's Germany, insisted on getting a German education in order to overthrow the Third Reich. Here they were, nev ertheless, scrubbed and shining, in their never-to-be-f orgotten stiff little dresses, in their never-to-b e-f orgotten little blue suits, facing an army, facing a citizenry, facing white fathers, facing white mothers, facing the progeny of these co-citizens, 390 NO NAM E IN THE STREET facing the white past, to say nothing of the white present: small soldiers, armed with stif f, white dresses, and long or short dark blue pants, entering a leper colony , and young enough to believe that the colony could be healed, and saved. They paid a dreadful price, those children, for their missionary work among the heathen. My terror involved my realization of the nature of the hea then. I did not meet any of my official murderers, not during that first journey. I met the Negro's friends. Thus, I was forced to recognize that, so long as your friend thinks ofyou as a Negro, you do not have a friend, and neither does he your friend. You have become accomplices. Everything be tween you depends on what he cannot say to you, and what you will not say to him. And one of you is listening. If one of you is listening, to all those things, precisely, which are not being said, the intensity of this attention can scarcely be de scribed as the attention one friend brings to another. If one of you is list ening, both of you are plotting, though, perhaps, only one of you knows it. Both of you may be plotting to escape, but, since very different avenues appear to be open to each of you, you are plotting your escape from each other. I have written elsewhere about those early days in the South, but from a distance more or less impersonal. I have never, for example, written about my unbelieving shock when I realized that 1 was being groped by one of the most pow erful men in one of the states 1 visited. He had got himself sweating drunk in order to arrive at this despairing titillat ion. With his wet eyes staring up at my tace, and his wet hands groping fc:>r my cock, we were both, abruptly, in history's ass pocket.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I for got to mention the priest, who is, perhaps, the master stroke of the film. Though, as the film carefully informs us, the Tracy-Hepburn couple are not Catholic, this priest is their best friend, and he is, unequivocally, on the side of the young couple. The two crass, practical fathers find, therefore, that they have taken on those two formidable adversaries, the Church, and mother love-the last being also related to wom en's intuition. The Church, here, is truculent (rather than mil itant) and mocks the fears of the white father: and mother love, as projected by Bea Richards in her brief scene with Spencer Tracy, moderately poignant and perceptive. The out come cannot really very much longer be left in doubt (the film has got to end) but before we can arrive at the film's resolution, there is another matter to be dealt with, and that involves the relationship of the black father to the black son. It is here that the film's polish cracks- becomes, as it were, unglued. There is no way, simply, for so light and self -serving a fable to deal with a matter so weighty-and so painful. It is not enough for the father to feel that his son has gone mad, and is throwing away his lif e, or his future, because of a doomed infatuation. The crucial element in such a conf ron tation is the question-vivid, though nearly unspoken-be tween the father and the son: what did the father raise the son to respect? For the son can make his lonely decision now only by conf ronting the nature and the value of that gift. A black man who has raised a son who has achieved his own lif e, and a son who has also achieved worldly eminence, has great respect for that son. He will off er his judgment, but he will not attempt to impose his will. As for being frightened f(.>r that son, the father has been frightened so long that this tear has become no more remarkable to him than the fact that CHAPTER TWO 535 he has to shave; moreover, hiding his fear from his son has been one of the principal conditions of his lif e, as a father, and a man. And rarely does the father complain about the sacrifices he has made: the subject arrives during adolescence, when the father is attempting to prepare the son for the price he will have to pay for his lif e. All this takes place, anyway, in a kind of short-hand virtually impossible to translate for the bulk of white Americans. But, leaving all that aside, the father has absolutely no motive for this scene.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I was somewhere around seven or eight. God knows how I did it, but I somehow climbed up and dragged the book down. Then, my mother, as she herself puts it, "didn't hide it any more," and, indeed, from that moment, though in fear and trembling, began to let me go. I understood, as Bill had intended me to, something of revolution-under stood, that is, something of the universal and inevitable hu man ferment which explodes into what is called a revolution. Revolution: the word had a sole mn, dread ful ring: what was going on in Spain was a revolution. It was said that Roosevelt had saved America: from a revolution. Rev olution was the only hope of the American working cl ass the proletariat, and world-wide revolution was the only hope of the world. I could understand (or, rather, accept) all this, as it were, negatively. I could not see where I fit in this for mulation, and I did not see where blacks fit. I don't think that I ever dared pose this question to Bill, partly because I hadn't yet really accepted, or understood, that I was black and also because I knew (and didn't want her to know, although, of course, she did) how much my father distrusted and disliked her. My father was certainly a proletarian, but I had been sent downtown often to pay his union dues, and I knew how much he hated these greasy, slimy men-also proletarian-whom he called, quite rightly, robbers. In the film, I was not overwhelmed by the guillotine. The guillotine had been very present for me in the novel because CHAPTER ONE I already wanted, and for very good reasons, to lop ofr heads. But: once begun, how to distinguish one head from another, and how, where, and for what reason, would the process stop? Beneath the resonance of the word, revolution, thundered the word, revenge. But: vengeance is mine, saith the Lord: a hard saying, the identity of the Lord becoming, with the passage of time, either a private agony or an abstract question. And, to put it as simply as it can be put, unless one can conceive of (and endure) an abstract lif e, there can be no abstract ques tions. A question is a threat, the door which slams shut, or swings open: on another threat. I was haunted, fix example, by Alexandre Manette's doc ument, in A Tale of Two Cities, describing the murder of a peasant boy-who, dying, speaks: I say, 1ve were so robbed, and hunt ed, and were made so poor, that our father told us it was a dreadful thing to bring a child into this world, and that what 1ve should most pray for was that our women might be barren and our miserable race die out! (I had never before, observes Dr.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Malcolm's statement is not answered by refer ences to the triumphs ofthe N.A.A.C.P., the more particularly since very tew liberals have any notion of how long, how costly, and how heartbreaking a task it is to gather the evi dence that one can carry into court, or how long such court battles take. Neither is it answered by references to the student sit-in movement, if only because not all Negroes are students and not all of them live in the South. I, in any case, certainly refuse to be put in the position of denying the truth of Malcolm's statements simply because I disagree with his con clusions, or in order to pacifY the liberal conscience. Things DOWN AT THE CROSS 3 21 are as bad as the Muslims say they are-in fa ct, they arc worse, and the Muslims do not help matters-but there is no reason that black men should be expected to be more patient, more forbearing, more fa rseeing than whites; indeed, quite the con trary. The real reason that non-violence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes-I am not speaking now of its racial value, another matter altogether-is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened. One wishes they would say so more often. At the end of a television program on which Malcolm X and I both appeared, Malcolm was stopped by a white member of the audience who said, "I have a thousand dollars and an acre of land. What's going to happen to me?" I admired the directness of the man's ques tion, but I didn't hear Malcolm's reply, because I was trying to explain to someone else that the situation of the Irish a hundred years ago and the situation of the Negro today can not very usefully be compared. Negroes were brought here in chains long before the Irish ever thought of leaving Ireland; what manner of consolation is it to be told that emigrants arriving here-voluntarily-long after you did have risen fa r above you? In the hall, as I was waiting fo r the elevator, some one shook my hand and said, "Goodbye, Mr. James Baldwin. We'll soon be addressing you as Mr. James X." And I thought, fo r an awful moment, My God, if this goes on much longer, you probably will. Elijah Muhammad had seen this show, I think, or another one, and he had been told about me. Therefo re, late on a hot Sunday afternoon, I presented myself at his door. I was frightened, because I had, in effect, been summoned into a royal presence. I was frightened fo r another reason, too. I knew the tension in me between love and power, between pain and rage, and the curious, the grinding way I remained extended between these poles-perpetually attempting to choose the better rather than the worse.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part 3 12 THE FIRE NEXT TIME of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fo untain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum-that is, any reality-so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone fo r reality-for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, fu rthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public atti tudes. They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person. Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves. White Christians have also fo rgotten several elementary his torical details. They have fo rgotten that the religion that is now identified with their virtue and their power-"God is on our side," says Dr. Verwoerd-came out of a rocky piece of ground in what is now known as the Middle East before color was invented, and that in order fo r the Christian church to be established, Christ had to be put to death, by Rome, and that the real architect of the Christian church was not the disrep utable, sun-baked Hebrew who gave it his name but the mer cilessly fa natical and self-righteous St. Paul. The energy that was buried with the rise of the Christian nations must come back into the world; nothing can prevent it. Many of us, I think, both long to see this happen and are terrified of it, fo r though this transformation contains the hope of liberation, it also imposes a necessity fo r great change. But in order to deal with the untapped and dormant fo rce of the previously sub jugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be t(xced to reexamine themselves and release themselves from many things that arc now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long. "The white man's Heaven," sings a Black Muslim minister, "is the black man's Hell." One may object-possibly-that this puts the matter somewhat too simply, but the song is true, and it has been true fo r as long as white men have ruled the world.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It was another tear, a fear that the child, in chal lenging the white world's assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destructi on. A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what un believable cruelty people treat each other. He reacts to the fear 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 father made me tee! by remembering that he was very old-tashioned. Also, I prided myself on the tact that I already knew how to out wit DO WN AT THE CROSS 303 him. To detend oneself against a tear is simply to insur e that one will, one day, be conquered by it; tears must be faced. As for one's wits, it is ju st not true that one can liYe by them not, that is, if one wishes really to liYe. That summer, in any case, all the tears with "·hich I had grown up, and which "·ere now a part of me and controlled my Yision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and droYe me into the church. As I look back, e\·erything I did seems curiou sly deliberate, though it certainly did not seem deliberate th en. For example, I did not join the church of which my father "·as a member and in which he preached. My best friend in school, who at tended a different church, had already "surrendered his lit e to the Lord," and he was Yery anxious about my soul's sah·ati on. (I wasn't, but any human attention was better than none.) One Saturday afternoon, he took me to his church. There were no sen·ices that day, and the church was empty, except for some women cleaning and some other women praying. My friend took me into the back room to meet his pastor a woman. There she sat, in her robes, smiling, an extremely proud and handsome woman, with Africa, Europe, and the America of the American Indian blended in her face. She was perhaps forty-fi,·e or fifty at this time, and in our world she was a \"ery celebrated woman.

• 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.