--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-- NA --

Front Matter
Title Page and Credits
THE PRICE OF THE TICKET

JAMES BALDWIN

Collected Nonfiction 1948-1985

M St. Martin's / Marek New York

-- [ix] --

The Price of the Ticket
My soul looks back and wonders how I got over -- indeed: but I find it unexpectedly difficult to remember, in detail, how I got started. I will never, for example, forget Saul Levitas, the editor of The New Leader, who gave me my first book review assignment sometime in 1946, nor Mary Greene, a wonderful woman, who was his man Friday: but I do not remember exactly how I met them.

I do remember how my life in Greenwich Village began -- which is, essentially, how my career began -- for it began when I was fifteen.

One day, a DeWitt Clinton H.S. running buddy, Emile Capouya, played hookey without me and went down to Greenwich Village and made the acquaintance of Beauford Delaney. The next day, he told me about this wonderful man he had met, a black -- then, Negro, or Colored -- painter and said that I must meet him: and he gave me Beauford Delaney's address.

I had a Dickensian job, after school, in a sweat shop on Canal Street, and was getting on so badly at home that I dreaded going home: and, so, sometime later, I went to 181 Greene Street, where Beauford lived then, and introduced myself.

I was terrified, once I had climbed those stairs and knocked on that door. A short, round

-- x --
brown man came to the door and looked at me. He had the most extraordinary eyes I'd ever seen. When he had completed his instant X-ray of my brain, lungs, liver, heart, bowels, and spinal column (while I had said, usefully, "Emile sent me") he smiled and said, "Come in," and opened the door.

He opened the door all right.

Lord, I was to hear Beauford sing, later, and for many years, open the unusual door. My running buddy had sent me to the right one, and not a moment too soon.

I walked through that door into Beauford's colors -- on the easel, on the palette, against the wall -- sometimes turned to the wall -- and sometimes (in limbo?) covered by white sheets. It was a small studio (but it didn't seem small) with a black pot-bellied stove somewhere near the two windows. I remember two windows, there may have been only one: there was a fire escape which Beauford, simply by his presence, had transformed, transmuted into the most exclusive terrace in Manhattan or Bombay.

I walked into music. I had grown up with music, but, now, on Beauford's small black record player, I began to hear what I had never dared or been able to hear. Beauford never gave me any lectures. But, in his studio and because of his presence, I really began to hear Ella Fitzgerald, Ma Rainey, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Paul Robeson, Lena Horne, Fats Waller. He could inform me about Duke Ellington and W. C. Handy, and Josh White, introduce me to Frankie Newton and tell tall tales about Ethel Waters. And these people were not meant to be looked on by me as celebrities, but as a part of Beauford's life and as part of my inheritance.

I may have been with Beauford, for example, the first time I saw Paul Robeson, in concert, and in Othello: but I know that he bought tickets for us -- really, for me -- to see and hear Miss Marian Anderson, at Carnegie Hall.

Because of her color, Miss Anderson was not allowed to sing at The Met, nor, as far as The Daughters of The American Revolution were concerned, anywhere in Washington where white people might risk hearing her. Eleanor Roosevelt was appalled by this species of patriotism and arranged for Marian Anderson to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. This was a quite marvellous and passionate event in those years, triggered by the indignation of one woman who had, clearly, it seemed to me, married beneath her.

By this time, I was working for the Army -- or the Yankee dollar! -- in

-- xi --
New Jersey. I hitchhiked, in sub-zero weather, out of what I will always remember as one of the lowest and most obscene circles of Hell, into Manhattan: where both Beauford and Miss Anderson where on hand to inform me that I had no right to permit myself to be defined by so pitiful a people. Not only was I not born to be a slave: I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave-master. They had, the masters, incontestably, the rope -- in time, with enough, they would hang themselves with it. They were not to hang me: I was to see to that. If Beauford and Miss Anderson were a part of my inheritance, I was a part of their hope.

I still remember Miss Anderson, at the end of that concert, in a kind of smoky yellow gown, her skin copper and tan, roses in the air about her, roses at her feet. Beauford painted it, an enormous painting, he fixed it in time, for me, forever, and he painted it, he said, for me.

Beauford was the first walking, living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist. In a warmer time, a less blasphemous place, he would have been recognized as my Master and I as his Pupil. He became, for me, an example of courage and integrity, humility and passion. An absolute integrity: I saw him shaken many times and I lived to see him broken but I never saw him bow.

His example operated as an enormous protection: for the Village, then, and not only for a boy like me, was an alabaster maze perched above a boiling sea. To lose oneself in the maze was to fall into the sea. One saw it around one all the time: a famous poet of the twenties and thirties grotesquely, shamelessly, cadging drinks, another relic living in isolation on opium and champagne, someone your own age suddenly strung out or going under a subway train, people you ate with and drank with suddenly going home and blowing their brains out or turning on the gas or leaping out of the window. And, racially, the Village was vicious, partly because of the natives, largely because of the tourists, and absolutely because of the cops.

Very largely, then, because of Beauford and Connie Williams, a beautiful black lady from Trinidad who ran the restaurant in which I was a waiter, and the jazz musicians I loved and who referred to me, with a kind of exasperated affection, as "the kid," I was never entirely at the mercy of an environment at once hostile and seductive. They knew about dope, for example -- I didn't: but the pusher and his product were kept far away from me. I needed love so badly that I could as easily have been hit with a needle as persuaded to share a joint of marijuana. And, in fact, Beauford and the

-- xii --
others let me smoke with them from time to time. (But there were people they warned me not to smoke with.)

The only real danger with marijuana is that it can lead to rougher stuff, but this has to do with the person, not the weed. In my own case, it could hardly have become a problem, since I simply could not write if I were "high." Or, rather, I could, sometimes all night long, the greatest pages the world had ever seen, pages I tore up the moment I was able to read them.

Yet, I learned something about myself from these irredeemable horrors: something which I might not have learned had I not been forced to know that I was valued. I repeat that Beauford never gave me any lectures, but he didn't have to -- he expected me to accept and respect the value placed upon me. Without this, I might very easily have become the junky which so many among those I knew were becoming then, or the Bellevue or Tombs inmate (instead of the visitor) or the Hudson River corpse which a black man I loved with all my heart was shortly to become.

Shortly: I was to meet Eugene sometime between 1943 and 1944 and "run" or "hang" with him until he hurled himself off the George Washington Bridge, in the winter of 1946. We were never lovers: for what it's worth, I think I wish we had been.

When he was dead, I remembered that he had, once, obliquely, suggested this possibility. He had run down a list of his girl friends: those he liked, those he really liked, one or two with whom he might really be in love, and, then, he said, "I wondered if I might be in love with you."

I wish I had heard him more clearly: an oblique confession is always a plea. But I was to hurt a great many people by being unable to imagine that anyone could possibly be in love with an ugly boy like me. To be valued is one thing, the recognition of this assessment demanding, essentially, an act of the will. But love is another matter: it is scarcely worth observing what a mockery love makes of the will. Leaving all that alone, however: when he was dead, I realized that I would have done anything whatever to have been able to hold him in this world.

Through him, anyway, my political life, insofar as I can claim, formally, to have had one, began. He was a Socialist -- a member of the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) and urged me to join, and I did. I, then, outdistanced him by becoming a Trotskyite -- so that I was in the interesting position (at the age of nineteen) of being an anti-Stalinist when America and Russia were allies.

-- xiii --

My life on the Left is of absolutely no interest. It did not last long. It was useful in that I learned that it may be impossible to indoctrinate me; also, revolutionaries tend to be sentimental and I hope that I am not. This was to lead to very serious differences between myself and Eugene, and others: but it was during this period that I met the people who were to take me to Saul Levitas, of The New Leader, Randall Jarrell, of The Nation, Elliott Cohen and Robert Warshow, of Commentary, and Philip Rahv, of Partisan Review.

These men are all dead, now, and they were all very important to my life. It is not too much to say that they helped to save my life. (As Bill Cole, at Knopf, was later to do when the editor assigned Go Tell It On The Mountain had me on the ropes.) And their role in my life says something arresting concerning the American dilemma, or, more precisely, perhaps, the American torment.

I had been to two black newspapers before I met these people and had simply been laughed out of the office: I was a shoeshine boy who had never been to college. I don't blame these people, God knows that I was an unlikely cub reporter: yet, I still remember how deeply I was hurt.

On the other hand, around this time, or a little later, I landed a job as messenger for New York's liberal newspaper, PM. It is perhaps worth pointing out that PM had a man of about my complexion (dark) in the tower, under whom I worked, a coal black Negro in the cellar, whom nobody ever saw, and a very fair Negro on the city desk, in the window. My career at PM was very nearly as devastating as my career as a civilian employee of the US Army, except that PM never (as far as I know) placed me on a blacklist. If the black newspapers had considered me absolutely beyond redemption, PM was determined to save me: I cannot tell which attitude caused me the more bitter anguish.

Therefore, though it may have cost Saul Levitas nothing to hurl a book at a black boy to see if he could read it and be articulate concerning what he had read, I took it as a vote of confidence and swore that I would give him my very best shot. And I loved him -- the old man, as I sometimes called him (to his face) and I think -- I know -- that he was proud of me, and that he loved me, too.

It was a very great apprenticeship. Saul required a book review a week, which meant that I had to read and write all the time. He paid me ten or twenty dollars a shot: Mary Greene would sometimes coerce him into giving me a bonus. Then he would stare at her, as though he could not believe

-- xiv --
that she, his helper, could be capable of such base treachery and look at me more tragically than Julius Caesar looked at Brutus and sigh -- and give me another five or ten dollars.

As for the books I reviewed -- well, no one, I suppose, will ever read them again. It was after the war, and the Americans were on one of their monotonous conscience "trips": be kind to niggers, for Christ's sake, be kind to Jews! A high, or turning point of some kind was reached when I reviewed Ross Lockridge's sunlit and fabulously successful Raintree County. The review was turned in and the author committed suicide before the review was printed. I was very disagreeably shaken by this, and Saul asked me to write a postscript -- which I did. That same week I met the late Dwight MacDonald, whom I admired very much because of his magazine, Politics, who looked at me with wonder and said that I was "very smart." This pleased me, certainly, but it frightened me more.

But no black editor could or would have been able to give me my head, as Saul did then: partly because he would not have had the power, partly because he could not have afforded -- or needed -- Saul's politics, and partly because part of the price of the black ticket is involved -- fatally -- with the dream of becoming white.

This is not possible, partly because white people are not white: part of the price of the white ticket is to delude themselves into believing that they are. The political position of my old man, for example, whether or not he knew it, was dictated by his (in his case) very honorable necessity not to break faith with the Old World. One may add, in passing, that the Old World, or Europe, has become nothing less than an American superstition, which accounts, if anything can, for an American vision of Russia so Talmudic and self-serving that it has absolutely nothing to do with any reality occurring under the sun.

But the black American must find a way to keep faith with, and to excavate, a reality much older than Europe. Europe has never been, and cannot be, a useful or valid touchstone for the American experience because America is not, and never can be, white.

My father died before Eugene died. When my father died, Beauford helped me to bury him and I then moved from Harlem to the Village.

This was in 1943. We were fighting the Second World War.

We: who was this we?

For this war was being fought, as far as I could tell, to bring freedom

-- xv --
to everyone with the exception of Hagar's children and the "yellow-bellied Japs."

This was not a matter, merely, of my postadolescent discernment. It had been made absolutely clear to me by the eighteen months or so that I had been working for the Army, in New Jersey, by the anti-Japanese posters to be found, then, all over New York, and by the internment of the Japanese.

At the same time, one was expected to be "patriotic" and pledge allegiance to a flag which had pledged no allegiance to you: it risked becoming your shroud if you didn't know how to keep your distance and stay in your "place."

And all of this was to come back to me much later, when Cassius Clay, a.k.a. Muhammad Ali, refused to serve in Vietnam because he was a Muslim -- in other words, for religious reasons -- and was stripped of his title, while placards all over New York trumpeted, Be true to your faith!

I have never been able to convey the confusion and horror and heartbreak and contempt which every black person I then knew felt. Oh, we dissembled and smiled as we groaned and cursed and did our duty. (And we did our duty.) The romance of treason never occurred to us for the brutally simple reason that you can't betray a country you don't have. (Think about it.) Treason draws its energy from the conscious, deliberate betrayal of a trust -- as we were not trusted, we could not betray. And we did not wish to be traitors. We wished to be citizens.

We: the black people of this country, then, with particular emphasis on those serving in the Armed Forces. The way blacks were treated in, and by, an American Army spreading freedom around the globe was the reason for the heartbreak and contempt. Daddy's youngest son, by his first marriage, came home, on furlough, to help with the funeral. When these young men came home, in uniform, they started talking: and one sometimes trembled, for their sanity and for one's own. One trembled, too, at another depth, another incoherence, when one wondered -- as one could not fail to wonder -- what nation they represented. My brother, describing his life in uniform, did not seem to be representing the America his uniform was meant to represent --: he had never seen the America his uniform was meant to represent. Had anyone? did he know, had he met, anyone who had? Did anyone live there? judging from the great gulf fixed between their conduct and their principles, it seemed unlikely.

Was it worth his life?

For he, certainly, on the other hand, represented something much larger

-- xvi --
than himself and something in him knew it: otherwise, he would have been broken like a match-stick and lost or have surrendered the power of speech. A nation within a nation: this thought wavered in my mind, I think, all those years ago, but I did not know what to make of it, it frightened me.

We: my family, the living and the dead, and the children coming along behind us. This was a complex matter, for I was not living with my family in Harlem, after all, but "down-town," in the "white world," in alien and mainly hostile territory. On the other hand, for me, then, Harlem was almost as alien and in a yet more intimidating way and risked being equally hostile, although for very different reasons. This truth cost me something in guilt and confusion, but it was the truth. It had something to do with my being the son of an evangelist and having been a child evangelist, but this is not all there was to it -- that is, guilt is not all there was to it.

The fact that this particular child had been born when and where he was born had dictated certain expectations. The child does not really know what these expectations are -- does not know how real they are -- until he begins to fail, challenge, or defeat them. When it was clear, for example, that the pulpit, where I had made so promising a beginning, would not be my career, it was hoped that I would go on to college. This was never a very realistic hope and -- perhaps because I knew this -- I don't seem to have felt very strongly about it. In any case, this hope was dashed by the death of my father.

Once I had left the pulpit, I had abandoned or betrayed my role in the community -- indeed, my departure from the pulpit and my leaving home were almost simultaneous. (I had abandoned the ministry in order not to betray myself by betraying the ministry.)

Once it became clear that I was not going to go to college, I became a kind of two-headed monstrosity of a problem. Without a college education, I could, clearly, never hope to become a writer: would never acquire the skills which would enable me to conquer what was thought of as an all-white world. This meant that I would become a half-educated handyman, a vociferous, bitter ruin, spouting Shakespeare in the bars on Saturday night and sleeping it off on Sunday.

I could see this, too. I saw it all around me. There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows that he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

-- xvii --

I fled. I didn't want my Mama, or the kids, to see me like that.

And if all this seems, now, ridiculous and theatrical apprehension on the part of a nineteen-year-old boy, I can say only that it didn't seem remotely ridiculous then. A black person in this democracy is certain to endure the unspeakable and the unimaginable in nineteen years. It is far from an exaggeration to state that many, and by the deliberate will and action of the Republic, are ruined by that time.

White Americans cannot, in the generality, hear this, anymore than their European ancestors, and contemporaries, could, or can. If I say that my best friend, black, Eugene, who took his life at the age of twenty-four, had been, until that moment, a survivor, I will be told that he had "personal" problems. Indeed he did, and one of them was trying to find a job, or a place to live, in New York. If I point out that there is certainly a connection between his death (when I was twenty-two) and my departure for Paris (when I was twenty-four) I will be condemned as theatrical.

But I am really saying something very simple. The will of the people, or the State, is revealed by the State's institutions. There was not, then, nor is there, now, a single American institution which is not a racist institution. And racist institutions -- the unions, for one example, the Church, for another, and the Army -- or the military -- for yet another, are meant to keep the nigger in his place. Yes: we have lived through avalanches of tokens and concessions but white power remains white. And what it appears to surrender with one hand it obsessively clutches in the other.

I know that this is considered to be heresy. Spare me, for Christ's and His Father's sake, any further examples of American white progress. When one examines the use of this word in this most particular context, it translates as meaning that those people who have opted for being white congratulate themselves on their generous ability to return to the slave that freedom which they never had any right to endanger, much less take away. For this dubious effort, and still more dubious achievement, they congratulate themselves and expect to be congratulated --: in the coin, furthermore, of black gratitude, gratitude not only that my burden is -- (slowly, but it takes time) being made lighter but my joy that white people are improving.

My black burden has not, however, been made lighter in the sixty years since my birth or the nearly forty years since the first essay in this collection was published and my joy, therefore, as concerns the immense strides made by white people is, to say the least, restrained.

Leaving aside my friends, the people I love, who cannot, usefully, be described as either black or white, they are, like life itself, thank God, many

-- xviii --
many colors, I do not feel, alas, that my country has any reason for self-congratulation.

If I were still in the pulpit which some people (and they may be right) claim I never left, I would counsel my countrymen to the self-confrontation of prayer, the cleansing breaking of the heart which precedes atonement. This is, of course, impossible. Multitudes are capable of many things, but atonement is not one of them.

A multitude is, I suppose, by definition, an anonymous group of people bound or driven together by fears (I wrote "tears") and hopes and needs which no individual member could face or articulate alone.

On the one hand, for example, mass conversions are notoriously transitory: within days, the reformed -- "saved" -- whore, whoremonger, thief, drunkard, have ventilated their fears and dried their tears and returned to their former ways. Nor do the quite spectacularly repentant "born again" of the present hour give up this world to follow Jesus. No, they take Jesus with them into the marketplace where He is used as proof of their acumen and as their Real Estate Broker, now, and, as it were, forever.

But it does not demand a mass conversion to persuade a mob to lynch a nigger or stone a Jew or mutilate a sexual heretic. It demands no conversion at all: in the very same way that the act demands no courage at all. That not one member of the mob could or would accomplish the deed alone is not merely, I think, due to physical cowardice but to cowardice of another order. To destroy a nigger, a kike, a dyke, or a faggot, by one's own act alone is to have committed a communion and, above all, to have made a public confession more personal, more total, and more devastating than any act of love: whereas the orgasm of the mob is drenched in the blood of the lamb.

A mob is not autonomous: it executes the real will of the people who rule the State. The slaughter in Birmingham, Alabama, for example, was not, merely, the action of a mob. That blood is on the hands of the state of Alabama: which sent those mobs into the streets to execute the will of the State. And, though I know that it has now become inconvenient and impolite to speak of the American Jew in the same breath with which one speaks of the American black (I hate to say I told you so, sings the right righteous Reverend Ray Charles, but: I told you so), I yet contend that the mobs in the streets of Hitler's Germany were in those streets not only by the will of the German State, but by the will of the western world, including those architects of human freedom, the British, and the presumed guardian of Christian and human morality, the Pope. The American Jew, if I may say

-- xix --
so -- and I say so with love, whether or not you believe me -- makes the error of believing that his Holocaust ends in the New World, where mine begins. My diaspora continues, the end is not in sight, and I certainly cannot depend on the morality of this panic-stricken consumer society to bring me out of --: Egypt.

A mob cannot afford to doubt: that the Jews killed Christ or that niggers want to rape their sisters or that anyone who fails to make it in the land of the free and the home of the brave deserves to be wretched. But these ideas do not come from the mob. They come from the state, which creates and manipulates the mob. The idea of black persons as property, for example, does not come from the mob. It is not a spontaneous idea. It does not come from the people, who knew better, who thought nothing of intermarriage until they were penalized for it: this idea comes from the architects of the American State. These architects decided that the concept of Property was more important -- more real -- than the possibilities of the human being.

In the church I come from -- which is not at all the same church to which white Americans belong -- we were counselled, from time to time, to do our first works over. Though the church I come from and the church to which most white Americans belong are both Christian churches, their relationship -- due to those pragmatic decisions concerning Property made by a Christian State sometime ago -- cannot be said to involve, or suggest, the fellowship of Christians. We do not, therefore, share the same hope or speak the same language.

To do your first works over means to reexamine everything. Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came.

This is precisely what the generality of white Americans cannot afford to do. They do not know how to do it --: as I must suppose. They come through Ellis Island, where Giorgio becomes Joe, Pappavasiliu becomes Palmer, Evangelos becomes Evans, Goldsmith becomes Smith or Gold, and Avakian becomes King. So, with a painless change of name, and in the twinkling of an eye, one becomes a white American.

Later, in the midnight hour, the missing identity aches. One can neither assess nor overcome the storm of the middle passage. One is mysteriously shipwrecked forever, in the Great New World.

The slave is in another condition, as are his heirs: I told Jesus it would be all right/ If He changed my name.

-- xx --

If He changed my name.

The Irish middle passage, for but one example, was as foul as my own, and as dishonorable on the part of those responsible for it. But the Irish became white when they got here and began rising in the world, whereas I became black and began sinking. The Irish, therefore and thereafter -- again, for but one example -- had absolutely no choice but to make certain that I could not menace their safety or status or identity: and, if I came too close, they could, with the consent of the governed, kill me. Which means that we can be friendly with each other anywhere in the world, except Boston.

What a monumental achievement on the part of those heroes who conquered the North American wilderness!

The price the white American paid for his ticket was to become white --: and, in the main, nothing more than that, or, as he was to insist, nothing less. This incredibly limited not to say dimwitted ambition has choked many a human being to death here: and this, I contend, is because the white American has never accepted the real reasons for his journey. I know very well that my ancestors had no desire to come to this place: but neither did the ancestors of the people who became white and who require of my captivity a song. They require of me a song less to celebrate my captivity than to justify their own.

-- NA --

THE PRICE OF THE TICKET

-- [13] --

Body
Lockridge: The American Myth
1. THE BOOK AS SYMPTOM

In his lifetime Ross Lockridge came across a great many words and in Raintree County he has set down every one of them. It follows from this that his reading was prodigious: apparently almost every volume of American history ever published and most of the best (and much of the mediocre) writing of past epochs and our own: Shakespeare, Donne, Wolfe, Whitman, Joyce, Dos Passos. He heard and remembered almost every folk song, ballad, and doggerel verse which can be called American; he accepted, with a really remarkable zest, all of the best American sentiments and practically listed all of the old familiar aims and concepts. His book is as American, as banal and brave and cheerful, as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," which, in fact, it resembles to an appalling degree; and since Raintree County is not nearly so concise it is a good deal more difficult to get through without gagging.

Mr. Lockridge, then, is concerned with America. The jacket states reverently that he has attempted no less than a complete embodiment of the American Myth: an heroic undertaking indeed! His people are as invincibly

-- 14 --
American as the Fourth of July and it takes them 1066 pages to celebrate; everything that happens to them takes place in a fragrant, booming benevolent confusion called the Republic. The Hero is John Wyckliff Shawnessy, who is something of a cross between Lincoln, Mickey Rooney, Van Johnson, and Shakespeare, with much in his makeup of the "Shropshire Lad": though he does not, of course, ever allow himself such suicidal excesses of gloom. He and the book have moments that are genuine enough: perhaps the book's best moments are those concerned with Johnny's childhood. In spite of the fact that Mr. Lockridge writes far too much, there are times when he does not write badly. (It cannot honestly be said that he ever writes well.) His ear for speech is accurate if it is not sensitive; his characterization is vivid -- like Sinclair Lewis, or, more accurately, like Dickens, he depends on a series of carefully exaggerated foibles -- but it is never revelatory: his people are as clear as the sunlight in which they always seem to be bathed and, ultimately, as static and uninteresting.

Incorporating the nature of the American Myth between the covers of any novel is admittedly a gigantic task, and it is made almost impossible by the fact that so many versions of the same myth are used for so many warring purposes. Which America will you have? There is America for the Indians -- which Mr. Lockridge mentions hastily and drops. There is America for the people who settled the country, concerning whom Mr. Lockridge is vehemently lyrical but no more startling than a Thanksgiving hymn. There is America for the laborer, for the financier. America of the north and south, America for the hillbilly, the urbanite, the farmer. And there is America for the Protestant, the Catholic, the Jew, the Mexican, the Oriental, and that arid sector which we have reserved for the Negro. These Americas diverge significantly and sometimes dangerously and they have much in common. All of them bound doubtfully together create a picture and a climate not indicated in Raintree County. Mr. Lockridge is not entirely unaware of these national contradictions; he simply does not know what to make of them. ("The Union forever!" he cries desperately. "O beautiful, unanalyzable concept!")

At each impasse similar rhetoric is trotted out. The book, which had no core to begin with, becomes as amorphous as cotton candy under the drumming flows of words. These words are designed less to illuminate than they are to conceal; or, more accurately, Mr. Lockridge uses them as a kind of shimmering web, hiding everything with an insistent radiance and proving that, after all, everything is, or is going to be, all right. This

-- 15 --
dependence on the Word, especially as illustrated by this novel, strikes me as something quite peculiarly American. (In the beginning -- and the Word was God.) Here is evinced a remarkable and touching regard for all things written and an almost slavish respect for anyone who writes. This does not, as one might think, lead to taste or discrimination or insight: the devotion is unqualified. Mr. Lockridge behaves in the presence of the Word like a child let loose in a well-stocked ice cream parlor. This allows him to speak, in the same affectionate, admiring tone, of Shakespeare and Shawnessy, both boy poets. In the beginning one accepts this as a gentle kind of mockery, but later on, when Mr. Lockridge has become more explicit about his concept of writing and Shakespeare -- whose greatest play, by virtue of a dialect we have no room for here, concerned the shooting of Abraham Lincoln and was, unhappily, never written -- and has further allowed us to read some of the work produced by his Hero, one concludes that Mr. Lockridge was in earnest all the time. The terrible, blind, indiscriminate dependence on all things literary, which operates to dignify any and all rhetoric and makes of Shakespeare merely a superior rhetorician, is an integral part of this novel; perhaps, indeed, Raintree County would be inconceivable without it. An endearing part of our myth is the right of everyone to be heard, and this theoretical right has somehow become sufficiently debased that the mere act of verbalization is endowed with a wholly disproportionate grandeur. This is due, in part perhaps, to the national uneasiness in the presence of a work of art and it is part of our culture, our popular culture: in America anyone can do anything. The writer has, of course, failed unless he is able to reach a large audience; if he is not sufficiently close to the people, sufficiently "American" he is regarded with suspicion and dislike. We have, in effect, defied the individual out of existence. At the same time there is lurking distrust and dissatisfaction with the product of this psychology; we are, as a nation, accused of being artistically shallow. Hence "greater" and "greater" novels, "mightier" movies, more "searching" plays. (We have done dreadful things to the adjective too.) Long articles appear in wide-selling periodicals concerning our native talent; we have artists, too, not one whit inferior to those of other times and places, and ours are better paid. The resultant confused struggling is further confounded by the necessity to be ultimately affirmative. (Weekly Mr. Adams in the Times charts the wretched path trodden by those writers who are not.) Gloom must have a comedy relief, the acid comment must be followed by a cheer. In a word,

-- 16 --
since a work of art, literary arts specifically, is almost always dangerous, we are aiming at a product which will be indisputably Art, which will be resoundingly popular -- and financially successful -- and so far from being disturbing, will gratify the national ego and cause no one -- except, perhaps our enemies -- any trouble at all.

This is not, of course, new; it is remarkable only because the complacent mechanisms of our culture have made this attitude so widespread. There is observable now moreover, to an extent unprecedented hitherto, an anxiety on the part of Americans concerning themselves and their heritage. This anxiety cannot yet be called probing; Americans are not noted for introspection and rather disapprove of it. Rather we are approaching a state of mind which closely resembles shock. In Mr. Lockridge's Republic, whatever goes wrong -- and nothing, of course, is irrevocably wrong -- there's room for everyone and certain things are sure; but this is not any longer true in fact. Time has challenged us, our dream; and we find now that no one is very clear or specific about the nature of the dream. There were always contradictions, but we assumed that they would be taken care of; and, since never before have we been in quite so important a position in the world, the contradictions have never been quite so glaring before. Something has gone wrong, no one quite knows where; no one knows where we are going; we seem to be headed in several directions at once. The strain is made a good deal more unbearable by the fact that Americans passionately believe in their avowed ideals, amorphous as they are, and are terrified of waking from a radiant dream. Raintree County is a kind of ultimate defense of the dreaming and the dream. It seeks to explain us to ourselves in the light of the irrevocable past. But this can only be done if the past is truly examined. Mr. Lockridge has, instead, given us the usual, superficial sunlight. He has exploited nearly every possible device to explain away all contradictions. He holds back the darkness by a perpetual insistence that darkness is not possible: or, at any rate, not possible in America, "the last best hope of earth."

If it is, indeed, the last, best hope we had better find out more about it. And this will demand an understanding which can only be arrived at through a thorough self-appraisal. This might, at once, make us less complacent and more mature; we might discover that affirmation consists of more than a handful of cheerful slogans. Raintree County, according to its author, cannot be found on any map: and it is always summer there. He might also have added that no one lives there anymore.

-- 17 --

2. POSTSCRIPT: THE MAN

[The following remarks were appended by Mr. Baldwin after announcement of the startling suicide of Ross Lockridge, Jr.]

The death of Ross Lockridge, Jr., of carbon monoxide poisoning on the night of Saturday, March 6, wrote the grisliest possible finale to his ambitious novel. The newspaper accounts reported his suicide as the result of overwork: he put his whole heart into the book, we are told, and suffered a complete breakdown. Overworked suicides are by no means rare in what is known as the literary world; the history of writing is crammed with vignettes of the lonely, starving artist rushing gratefully to death; but it is not the kind of thing one expects from a young, superbly successful novelist, certainly not the kind of thing predicted for the author of the Great American Novel. It must have been a savage blow to Mr. Adams.

Raintree County is nothing if not affirmative. It elects to weld into an inviolable unity these sprawling United States. (One is tempted to remark here: but the unity has always been taken for granted. Why the need now to prove that the United States of America is actually that?) In encompassing this aim Mr. Lockridge makes it apparent that he loves his country; and it becomes apparent that he does not really understand it and that he is disturbed. The disturbance -- manifested, for instance, by those long tortured philosophical discussions between the Hero and Professor Webster Stiles -- is perhaps the healthiest aspect of Raintree County. Here the disturbance is anterior and hidden; the author stacks his cards as best he can against the cynical professor. It is as though the professor were there to espouse the darkness so that Mr. Shawnessy can argue for the light. It is always apparent that one is expected to like the professor but never to agree with him; he has, after all, renounced those virtues and those aspirations which form the blood and skeleton of the good life.

And these virtues, aspirations? We have all grown up with them; we learned them in Sunday School and in Boy Scout meetings; they have formed the basis for countless valedictories. These precepts are designed for our instruction and protection; they are designed to prove that life in the Republic is always green and fertile, that our hopes and our strivings form the noblest dream of all. Why, then, are we so loath to come to terms with it?

The gulf between our dream and the realities that we live with is something that we do not understand and do not wish to admit. It is almost as

-- 18 --
though we were asking that others look at what we want and turn their eyes, as we do, away from what we are. I am not, as I hope is clear, speaking of civil liberties, social equality, etc., where, indeed, a strenuous battle is yet carried on; I am speaking instead of a particular shallowness of mind, an intellectual and spiritual laxness, a terror of individual responsibility, and a corresponding terror of change. This rigid refusal to look at ourselves may well destroy us; particularly now since if we cannot understand ourselves we will not be able to understand anything.

Mr. Lockridge's death is an inconceivable end for the hero of Raintree County. He, who lived his zestful life through, was not slated in the Lockridge scheme to meet death at his own hand. This is ultimate negation, antithetical to everything John Wyckliff Shawnessy so thoroughly believed in, whose initials at the book's end are written in the air.

"What is America?" Mr. Shawnessy asks the question and except to call it a noble dream the question is not answered. Since the book at every point evades the riddle of the human being the question is never really asked. The death of the hero of Raintree County admits an uncertainty and a desperation the entire country would conspire to deny. But if America is a dream, it is also a reality; a sunlit dream is not enough to live by. We are not unlike the audience which assembled to hear the only political speech made by Mr. Shawnessy when he was running for office: they liked him, they knew it was a great speech. But they could not remember nor repeat a single word of it.

-- [153] --

The Crusade of Indignation
"The love of money," Saint Paul once wrote, with a fairly typical lack of precision, "is the root of all evil." This formulation seems to leave a great many evils out of account, and it does not even raise the question of just why the human heart, in which this love money lives, should be so base. Nor does it raise the question of what money is, what is its power, what it means to people or states. With so many knotty questions thus neatly disposed of, people who share Paul's attitude about money can also believe -- as he, being bigoted in quite another direction, did not -- that people will be made better as their economic state improves. It is an extremely attractive theory, and most of us have at one time or another espoused it.

Only -- in order to bring about this economic utopia, one needs a band of people who do not care about money -- or power -- who will carry out the necessary operation of taking the money from those who now have an abundance of it and distributing it among those who have too little?

In this operation -- the love of money persisting so tenaciously -- blood is likely to be shed. And the shedding of blood will probably prove

-- 154 --
to be the operation's most real achievement. When things go back to what may be called normal, it will be seen that the people who were to be made better still persist in loving money and in trying -- no matter what it may do to themselves, their neighbors, or their children -- to make it.

People who approach the Negro problem from this doctrinaire point of view are always embarrassed by at least two facts. One is that Negroes love money quite as much as whites do, and rather more than they love one another. The other is that the people in America least attracted to the idea of a worker's state are the workers. They are not interested in themselves as workers -- except in their clashes with management, in which they are represented by those other managers, the union leaders. They are interested in achieving what, in fact, can still be achieved at this period in American life: a measure of economic peace. Unless forced by outside pressure, they are not terribly concerned with what may be happening next door -- among Negroes, for example.

In the Negro world, as in the white world, Negroes who have money band together and try to ignore the existence of their unluckier brothers. That is the way the love of money works. But neither money, nor the love of it, is the root of all evil. The importance of money is simply that power in the world does not exist without it and power in the world is what almost everyone would like to have.

The love of money thesis is the thesis of Daniel Guerin's Negroes on The March, and, since I find it impossible to take the thesis seriously, I find it rather difficult to discuss the book -- which is, anyway, less a discussion of the American Negro's situation than a rather shill diatribe against the capitalist system. No one with any pretension to intellectual honesty claims that the capitalist system is perfect, or is likely to be made so. It may indeed be doomed, and we may all be the slothful and pussyfooting creatures Mr. Guerin says we are. But his own tone is so extremely ungenerous that I cannot avoid a certain chill when I think of the probable fate of dissenters in his van-colored brave new world. Here he is on Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish social scientist whose An American Dilemma Mr. Guerin finds "feeble in interpretation." (All italics are Mr. Guerin's.) ". . . it does not explain how, by whom and why race prejudice was brought into being." (It certainly does not; I, too, should like to read the book which does.) But Myrdal's feebleness, it turns out, is blacker than mere incompetence. "Without calling into question Myrdal's good faith, we must nevertheless make the observation that his method is quite in harmony with the concerns of those who subsidized his work and serves their interests quite well. For

-- 155 --
what did the trustees of the Carnegie Foundation actually want?" What they didn't want was a "cause-and-effect relationship . . . established between capitalism, oppression and race prejudice." Bright students, or people who have heard this song before will already have guessed the reason, as follows: "The victims of race prejudice would be likely to draw conclusions dangerous to the established order." Nor would the awakened white workers have taken long to realize that their best interests lay in black-white solidarity. Myrdal's real task, according to Mr. Guerin, was to avoid saying anything which, my leading to such a holocaust, would displease and possibly destroy the Carnegie Foundation.

A man whose vision of the world remains as elementary as Mr. Guerin's can scarcely be trusted to help us understand it. It is true enough, for example, as far as it goes, that slavery was established and then abolished for economic reasons; but slavery did not come into the world along with capitalism any more than race prejudice did; and it need scarcely be said, at this late date, that where capitalism has been abolished slavery and race prejudice yet remain. It is also true -- again, as far as it goes -- that, as Mary McLeod Bethune said, "The voice of organized labor has become one of the most powerful in the land and unless we have a part in that voice our people will not be heard." But "our people" are then speaking as a part of organized labor. Labor's interests may often be identical with the Negro's interests; but Mr. Guerin fails to understand that, in the light of the white worker's desire to achieve greater status, his aims and those of the Negro often clash quite bitterly.

All this is changing, to be sure, but so very, very slowly, and in such unexpected ways that only a madman would dare to predict the final issue -- if one can speak, in human affairs, of a final issue. The world in which people find themselves is not simply a vindictive plot imposed on them from above; it is also the world they have helped to make. They have helped to make, and help to sustain, it by sharing the assumptions which hold their world together. Mr. Guerin's book, so far from having broken with any of the assumptions which have helped to cause such agony in the world -- so far from being revolutionary or even "modern" -- is a desperate cliche, is painfully, stiflingly old-fashioned. It is certainly not revolutionary today to suggest, that, whereas it was wrong for capitalists to murder workers, it is right for workers to murder capitalists; whereas it is wrong for whites to murder Negroes, Negroes may be pardoned for murdering whites. Mr. Guerin is unable to recognize a sadly persistent fact: the concepts contained

-- 156 --
in words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply. Since Mr. Guerin lacks any sense of history, except as something to be manipulated, and has really no respect whatever for the human personality, he is unable to give us any sense of the perpetual interaction of these forces on one another. Without this sense all states become abstractions, and lawless ones at that.

Mr. Guerin wants us all to go out right away and begin preparing for the equitable new state which will succeed to the present inequitable one; and should the present state seem reluctant to wither away, he has no objection to setting it to the torch. One of his heroes, John Brown, is one of the minor villains in J. C. Furnas's admirable Goodbye to Uncle Tom. Mr. Furnas's attitude can be gathered from his comment that "What Mrs. Stowe and John Brown did was not to create the forces that would free the slave but to make sure that North and South went into their crisis in the least promising state of mind." In view of the enormous bitterness the Civil War has left us, this statement seems disquietingly close to the truth. It suggests that indignation and goodwill are not enough to make the world better. Clarity is needed, as well as charity, however difficult this may be to imagine, much less sustain, toward the other side. Perhaps the worst thing that can be said about social indignation is that it so frequently leads to the death of personal humility. Once that has happened, one has ceased to live in that world of men which one is striving so mightily to make over. One has entered into a dialogue with that terrifying deity, sometimes called History, previously, and perhaps again, to be referred to as God, to which no sacrifice in human suffering is too great.

Mr. Furnas maintains that, despite the world-renowned indignation of its author, Uncle Tom's Cabin is a shoddy and almost totally undocumented piece of fiction, which it is; and, further, that it is this book which has set the tone for the attitude of American whites toward Negroes for the last one hundred years. This may seem, at first, rather too heavy a weight to place on a single book. Yet when one considers this novel's enormous prestige and popularity, remembers that it was read for generations as though it were another Bible, that it is involved with the deepest, most lasting bitterness, and the bloodiest conflict this nation has ever known; when one reflects, above all, how it flatters the popular mind, positively discouraging that mind from any tendency to think the matter through for itself -- and

-- 157 --
this to such an extent that pro and anti-Negro sentiment have read this book as scripture -- one is forced to the conclusion that Mr. Furnas is almost certainly more nearly right than wrong. Add to this the impact of the "Tom" shows, which persisted, according to Mr. Furnas, until 1933, the last one being heard of in 1950, which definitively jettisoned whatever validity Mrs. Stowe's work might have had, and which introduced -- with Topsy -- that blackfaced comic-character who is the despair of Negro actors even today -- well, at least it can be said that few indeed are the novels which can boast of such a long, varied, and influential life, few the novels which the objective conditions conspired to keep in fashion for so long. Even today, Mr. Furnas places the annual sale of this novel at about 8,000 copies.

And, indeed, if anyone seriously doubts that the attitudes to be found in Uncle Tom's Cabin are still prevalent among us, he has only to wade or sit through that other publishing landmark and mammoth movie, Gone with the Wind, or see almost any other movie dealing with Negro life, or read almost any other novel on the same subject published in this country since 1852. Or simply: ask himself what he really knows about the American Negro, what he really feels about him. It is a question, after all, whether what we will here call the ordinary American of good will knows anything more about Negro life than what has filtered through to him via memories of an exemplary Negro maid, or the experience -- for which he is almost certainly not prepared -- of, say, some Billie Holiday records, perhaps a trip or two through Harlem, perhaps one or two Negro colleagues, or a Negro college friend. And what he feels concerning all this is a mystery, probably even to himself. The sad truth is that he has probably taken refuge from this exceedingly disturbing question in the arbitrary decision that Negroes are just like everybody else. But, obviously, and especially in this context, this is no truer than the sporadically old-fashioned notion that Negroes are inferior to everybody else: sporadically, because fashions in thought -- in the breast and in the world -- are subject to bewildering and shameful cycles. We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours. And this is the danger of arriving at arbitrary decisions in order to avoid the risks of thought, of striking arbitrary attitudes. If the attitude is a cover, what it is covering will inevitably be revealed.

And exactly this, in fact, has happened so often that there is another, and very crucial difficulty encountered in interracial communication, in attempting to discover not what, but who the Negro is. In the first place, popular belief to the contrary, it is not enough to have been born a Negro to

-- 158 --
understand the history of Negroes in America. And, whereas whites have a complicated social machinery and a natural -- and cultivated -- mental and spiritual laziness operating to keep far from them any sense of how Negroes live; Negroes, beginning with the natural desire to escape the humiliations, the downright persecutions, which Negroes endure, end, often enough, by despising all the other Negroes who have brought them to this condition -- a condition which they spend incalculable amounts of energy blotting out of their conscious minds. But they, naturally enough, therefore, also hate all whites, who make the world as bleak for them as does a cloud before the sun. This universal hatred, turning inward and feeding on itself, is not the least ghastly aspect of the heritage of the American Negro, for all that it remains, by its nature, so hidden. It is, for one thing, the absolute death of the communication which might help to liberate both Negroes and whites.

And all this, according to Mr. Furnas (and in the words of Abraham Lincoln) because of the "little woman who made this big war." Well, of course, not quite. Mr. Furnas, who clearly cannot stand the "little woman," makes the point that she was able to have such a tremendous effect because she was a mildly gifted woman who mirrored the assumptions of her time -- and place -- so perfectly. She helped to inspire and keep aflame the zeal in the general northern breast to liberate those slaves, of whom they knew only that the souls belonged to God. Of the motives beneath the zeal she helped inspire, Mrs. Stowe knew nothing; it was not real to her that the war which was finally being fought was not being fought to free the slave, that it was a hand-to-hand contest between the North and the South for dominance. And when the slave was finally freed, it developed that his soul did indeed belong to God and that God could take it, for all the nation seemed to care.

For it is easy to proclaim all souls equal in the sight of God: it is hard to make men equal on earth, in the sight of men. This problem had never entered Mrs. Stowe's mind, for the reason that it had never entered her mind that the Negro could conceivably be an equal. She knew nothing about the Africa to which projects were made to send him, as, when writing Uncle Tom's Cabin, she had known nothing of slavery beyond what she had gathered by reading and one or two short trips to Kentucky. Perhaps if she had known more about the slave's condition, and what this condition does to a people, she (and the nation) would have had a more realistic, more responsible view of what would probably happen when thousands of unlettered, abruptly homeless, totally vulnerable and unprepared people were

-- 159 --
turned loose upon the body politic. Mr. Furnas is not being unjust when he observes that the righteous zeal of Mrs. Stowe, like that of most of the Abolitionists, resembled that of an anti-vivisectionist committee. It had not entered their heads that they were fighting for the rights of men like themselves. They were fighting for the right of the "sons of Ethiopia, whatever . . . their natural stupidity . . . to stretch forth their hands to God." Of the right of the "sons of Ethiopia" to conquer that unquestioned "natural stupidity," of their right to work, live, vote, marry, and even to become unbelievers, they had never thought. We are until today struggling with many of the results of this righteous zeal in action.

One of the results is the continuing bitterness felt by the descendants of those "sons of Ethiopia," whom we have never yet, wholly, managed to regard as men. Perhaps nothing in Goodbye to Uncle Tom more justifies the title than Mr. Furnas's unsentimental insistence that this must be done, and now, for no other reason than our common humanity, and that the way to begin is by taking a hard look at oneself.

-- [177] --

On Catfish Row
Grandiose, foolish, and heavy with the stale perfume of self-congratulation, the Hollywood-Goldwyn-Preminger production of Porgy and Bess lumbered into the Warner theater shortly before the death of Billie Holiday. These two facts are not, of course, related in any concrete or visible way. Yet, at the time I was watching Bess refuse Sporting Life's offer of "happy dust," Billie was in the hospital. A day or so later, I learned that she was under arrest for possession of heroin and that the police were at her bedside. A number of people, some of whom I knew, were trying to have the dying woman accorded more humane treatment. "She's sitting up today," said one of the last people to see her alive, "and if they don't bug her to death, she'll never die." Well, she is dead and I tend to concur with the woman who suggests that she was "bugged" to death. We are altogether too quick to disclaim responsibility for the fate which overtakes -- so often -- so many gifted, driven, and erratic artists. Nobody pushed them to their deaths, we like to say. They jumped. Of course there is always some truth to this, but the pressures of the brutally indifferent world cannot be dismissed so

-- 178 --
speedily. Moreover, though we disclaim all responsibility for the failure of an artist, we are happy to take his success or survival as a flattering comment on ourselves. In fact, Billie was produced and destroyed by the same society. It had not the faintest intention of producing her and it did not intend to destroy her; but it has managed to do both with the same bland lack of concern.

But I do not intend to talk about Billie Holiday, who has gained her immortality dearly and who is no need of any remarks of mine. She would have made a splendid, if somewhat overwhelming Bess and, indeed, I should imagine that she was much closer to the original, whoever she was, of this portrait than anyone who has ever played or sung it. She was certainly much closer to it than Dorothy Dandridge, who plays the role, loosely speaking, in the present production. I am told that Miss Dandridge is a singer, though she seems never to have sung in the movies, but she is not an actress. Other people in Porgy and Bess are very gifted players indeed and under less depressing conditions have done admirable work; and there are others who give every indication of being able to act -- if they could only find a director. In short, the saddest and most infuriating thing about the Hollywood production of Porgy and Bess is that Mr. Otto Preminger has a great many gifted people in front of his camera and not the remotest notion of what to do with any of them. The film cost upwards of six, or sixty, millions, or billions, of dollars but all that was needed for the present result was a little cardboard and a little condescension. As for the cardboard, consider the set, surely the most characterless in this opera's entire history; and as for condescension, consider the costumes, most of which seem to have been left over from one of those traveling "Tom" shows. All of this, needless to say, in color, on a screen a block wide, and in stereophonic sound -- which last means that one is not allowed to listen to the music but is beaten over the head with it. The camera takes an interest in the proceedings which can best be described as discreet: trundling lamely behind Diahann Carroll, for example, while she mauls someone's heroically patient infant and waits for her man to be lost at sea. This event, like everything else in the movie, is so tastelessly overdone, so heavily telegraphed -- rolling chords, dark sky, wind, ominous talk about hurricane bells, etc. -- that there is really nothing left for the actors to do.

It is always necessary to suppose that the director knows more than his actors know, that is, how to get the best out of them, as individual performers and as an ensemble. This is a supposition which the facts do not always

-- 179 --
support. In the case of a white director called upon to direct a Negro cast, the supposition ceases -- with very rare exceptions -- to have any validity at all. The director cannot know anything about his company if he knows nothing about the life that produced them. We still live, alas, in a society mainly divided into black and white. Black people still do not, by and large, tell white people the truth and white people still do not want to hear it. By the time the cameras start rolling or rehearsals begin, the director is entirely at the mercy of his ignorance and of whatever system of theories or evasions he has evolved to cover his ignorance.

So is his company, which knows very well that, as he has no way of understanding the range of the Negro personality, he cannot possibly assess any given performer's potential. They know, in short, that in this limited sense, as in so many others, they are going to be ill-used and they resign themselves to it with as much sardonic good nature as they can muster. They are working, at least, and they will be seen; this part may lead to a better part or even better parts for others. So the disaster proceeds and the miracle is that even in so thoroughgoing a disaster as Porgy and Bess a couple of very effective moments are achieved. This is partly by virtue of the material. For we have not even mentioned the probable quality of the script on which the Negro performer will be working or the reasons that this script finds itself in production.

I like Porgy and Bess but I do not think it is a great American opera. We do not have one yet. It is -- or it was, until Mr. Preminger got his hands on it -- an extraordinarily vivid, good-natured, and sometimes moving show. It is the story of a Negro beggar-cripple and his prostitute-addict sweetheart and it takes place in a Charleston ghetto; and it owes its vitality to the fact that DuBose Heyward loved the people he was writing about. (By which I do not mean to imply that he loved all Negroes; he was a far better man than that.)

Just the same, it is a white man's vision of Negro life. This means that when it should be most concrete and searching it veers off into the melodramatic and the exotic. It seems to me that the author knew more about Bess than he understood and more about Porgy than he could face -- than any of us, so far, can face. The idea of a Negro beggar-cripple who yet has enough force in his hands to kill a man and enough force in his body -- to say nothing of his spirit -- to possess a woman is surely an arresting one; as is the notion that this woman is, herself, because of her own uncontrollable drives, at the mercy of two whore masters, one of whom is a murderer

-- 180 --
and both of whom are dope addicts. And Heyward was not inventing all this but describing things that he had seen.

What has always been missing from George Gershwin's opera is what the situation of Porgy and Bess says about the white world. It is because of this omission that Americans are so proud of the opera. It assuages their guilt about Negroes and it attacks none of their fantasies. Since Catfish Row is clearly such a charming place to live, there is no need for them to trouble their consciences about the fact that the people who live there are still not allowed to move anywhere else. Neither need they probe within their own lives to discover what the Negroes of Catfish Row really mean to them. But I am certainly not the first person to suggest that these Negroes seem to speak to them of a better life -- better in the sense of being more honest, more open, and more free: in a word, more sexual. This is cruelest fantasy of all, hard to forgive. It means that Negroes are penalized, and hideously, for what the general guilty imagination makes of them. This fantasy is at the bottom of almost all violence against Negroes. It is the reason they are not to be mixed in buses, houses, schools, jobs; they are to remain instead in Catfish Row, to have fish fries and make love. It is a fantasy which is tearing the nation to pieces and it is surely time we snapped out of it. For nobody in Catfish Row is having fish fries these days, and love is as rare and as difficult there as it has always been verywhere else. They struggle to pay the rent, the life insurance, the note due on the bedroom suite, the TV set, the refrigerator, the car. They worry about their children. They begin to heat each other, they turn to mysticism or to dope, they die there.

Obviously, neither Samuel Goldwyn nor Otto Preminger nor most of the audience for Porgy and Bess knows this, or wants to know it, and they would defend their production, I suppose, in the words of Mr. Preminger, as taking place in "a world which does not really exist." This is an entirely illegitimate defense, and, in any case, the people in front of the camera keep reminding one, most forcefully, of a real Catfish Row, real agony, real despair, and real love. Many of them have been there, after all, and they know. Out of the Catfish Row or another came the murdered Bessie Smith and the dead Billie Holiday and virtually every Negro performer this country has produced. Until today, no one wants to hear their story, and the Negro performer is still in battle with the white man's image of the Negro -- which the white man clings to in order not to be forced to revise his image of himself. But in the Catfish Row where I was born, the truth, they said, will out. And certainly something comes "out" in Ruth Attaways' miming of "My Man's Gone Now," some genuine depth is touched which

-- 181 --
has nothing to do with the vulgar production in which she is, for the rest of the time, quite thanklessly trapped.

No one can admire Sidney Poitier more than I do, but he is entirely wrong for the role of Porgy. He does not succeed in making me believe that he is afraid of Crown, Crown's wounds, or the police, or buzzards -- or indeed, of anything else, nor do I believe for a moment that he is unable to get up off the cart and walk. The very qualities which lend him his distinction -- his intelligence, virility, and grace -- operate against him here. Yet he does do something else which is utterly remarkable, especially against the eery sexual chill emanating from Miss Dandridge: he makes me believe that he loves Bess. Poitier is, in fact, one of the very few actors on the American screen who is not compelled to spend most of his cinema time proving that he is not afraid of women. One is not compelled to watch him flexing his muscles and screwing up his courage in order to approach his mortal enemy and accomplish the unspeakable.

There is a great and instructive irony in this. That image one is compelled to hold of another person -- in order, as I have said, to retain one's image of oneself -- may become that person's trial, his cross, his death. It may or may not become his prison: but it inevitably becomes one's own. People who thought of Bessie Smith as a coarse black woman, and who let her die, were far less free than Bessie, who had escaped all their definitions by becoming herself. This is still the only way to become a man or a woman -- or an artist. Now Billie Holiday has escaped forever from managers, landlords, locked hotels, fear, poverty, illness, and the watchdogs of morality and the law. "I had a long, long way to go," she used to sing. Well, she made it, all the way from Catfish Row, and no one has managed to define her yet. For the Negro is not a statistic or a problem or a fantasy: he is a person and it is simply not possible for one person to define another. Those who try soon find themselves trapped in their own definitions.

Whoever has found himself in a real Catfish Row knew that he had two choices, to live or to die, and some lived. If the day ever comes when the survivors of the place can be fooled into believing that the Hollywood cardboard even faintly resembles, or is intended to resemble, what it was like to be there, all our terrible and beautiful history will have gone for nothing and we will all be doomed to an unimaginable irreality. I prefer to believe that the day is coming when we will tell the truth about it -- and ourselves. On that day, and not before that day, we can call ourselves free men.

-- [215] --

They can't Turn Back
I am the only Negro passenger at Tallahassee's shambles of an airport. It is an oppressively sunny day. A black chauffeur, leading a small dog on a leash, is meeting his white employer. He is attentive to the dog, covertly very aware of me and respectful of her in a curiously watchful, waiting way. She is middle-aged, beaming and powdery-faced, delighted to see both the beings who make her life agreeable. I am sure that it has never occurred to her that either of them has the ability to judge her or would judge her harshly. She might almost, as she goes toward her chauffeur, be greeting a friend. No friend could make her face brighter. If she were smiling at me that way I would expect to shake her hand. But if I should put out my hand, panic, bafflement, and horror would then overtake that face, the atmosphere would darken, and danger, even the threat of death, would immediately fill the air.

On such small signs and symbols does the southern cabala depend, and that is why I find the South so eerie and exhausting. This system of signs and naunces covers the mined terrain of the unspoken -- the forever unspeakable -- and everyone in the region knows his way

-- 216 --
across this field. This knowledge that a gesture can blow up a town is what the South refers to when it speaks of its "folkways." The fact that the gesture is not made is what the South calls "excellent race relations." It is impossible for any northern Negro to become an adept of this mystery, not because the South's racial attitudes are not found in the North but because it has never been the North's necessity to construct an entire way of life on the legend of the Negro's inferiority. That is why the battle of Negro students for freedom here is really an attempt to free the entire region from the irrational terror that has ruled it for so long.

Of course, there are two points of view about the position of the Negro in the South and in this country, and what we have mainly heard for all these years has been the viewpoint of the white majority. The great significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view or the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed. What students are demanding is nothing less than a total revision of the ways in which Americans see the Negro, and this can only mean a total revision of the ways in which Americans see themselves.

The only other black man at the airport is one of the shapeless, shambling ones who seem always to be at southern airports for the express purpose of making sure that I get my bags into the right taxicab -- the right cab being the one that will take me. And he performs this function in the usual, head-down way. There is an alcove here with "Colored Waiting Room" printed above it. This makes me realize that a study of federal directives regarding interstate travel would have been helpful only if I had come South to be a test case -- that is, if I had come to be a story as opposed merely to writing one. As an interstate passenger, both I and the airport would be breaking the federal law if I were to go into a colored waiting room.

I tell my taxi driver that I am going to the university. There is no need to specify which of the city's two universities I mean, and he tells me that there are people going there all the time. Oh, you people have caused a lot of talk, he seems to be saying. He is a pallid, reddish type, around forty. I suppose, quite good-natured and utterly passive. There seems to be no point in asking what he thinks of the situation here. Even to mention it is to mark oneself as a troublemaker, which my typewriter, accent, and presence have already sufficiently done. Yet I have the feeling that he would love to say something about it -- but perhaps if he did he would also be marked as a troublemaker. I volunteer a few comments about the landscape, in the faint hope of opening him up. The South is very beautiful but its

-- 217 --
beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live, and have lived here, are so ugly that now they cannot even speak to one another. It does not demand much reflection to be appalled at the inevitable state of mind achieved by people who dare not speak freely about those things which most disturb them.

The cab driver answers me pleasantly enough, taking his tone and also, alas, the limits of the conversation from me. We reach the campus of the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. It is a land-grant college. When it was founded, in 1887, "by constitutional provision and legislative enactment," it was the State Normal College for Colored Students. Later on it became the Florida A & M College for Negroes. After the Second World War -- possibly, by this time, it had become redundant -- the "for Negroes" was dropped.

It is a very attractive campus, about a mile outside of town, on the highest of Tallahassee's seven hills. My driver seems very proud of the state of Florida for having brought it into being. It is clear that he intends to disarm any criticism I may have by his boasts about the dairy farm, the football field, the guesthouse, the science buildings, the dormitories. He is particularly vocal about the football team, which seems to be, here as on less beleagured campuses, the most universally respected of the university's achievements. F.A.M.U. turns out, in fact, to be just as poor a center of learning as almost any other university in this country. It is very nearly impossible, after all, to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind. The fact that F.A.M.U. is a Negro university merely serves to demonstrate this American principle more clearly: and the pressure now being placed on the Negro administration and faculty by the white Florida State Board of Control further hampers the university's effectiveness as a training ground for future citizens. In fact, if the Florida State Board of Control has its way, Florida will no longer produce citizens, only black and white sheep. I do not think or, more accurately, I refuse to think that it will have its way but, at the moment, all that prevents this are the sorely menaced students and a handful of even more sorely menaced teachers and preachers.

My driver impresses upon me the newness of most of the campus buildings. Later on I found out that these buildings date from 1956, just two years after the Supreme Court declared the separate-but-equal statute to be invalid. The old buildings, however, are dreadfully old and some of the faculty live in barracks abandoned by the Air Force after the Second World War. These, too, were "renovated" after the separate-but-equal statute had

-- 218 --
been outlawed. During the time that "separate-but-equal" was legal it did not matter how unequal facilities for Negroes were. But now that the decree is illegal the South is trying to make Negro facilities equal in order to keep them separate. From this it may not be unfair to conclude that a building, a campus, or a system is considered renovated when it has merely been disguised. But I do not say any of this to my driver.

The university guesthouse is not expecting me: this frightens and angers me, and we drive to a motel outside of town. The driver and the Negro woman who runs the motel know each other in a casual, friendly way. I have only large bills and the driver has no change; but the woman tells him she will take the money I owe him out of my room rent and pay him when he comes again. They speak together exactly as though they were old friends, yet with this eerie distance between them. It is impossible to guess what they really think of each other.

Some students I met in New York had told me about Richard Haley. I had written him and he now arrives and places himself, shortly, as my ally and my guide. He and another member of F.A.M.U.'s staff had come to the airport earlier to meet me but had arrived too late. I tell him that I had concluded, from the fact that I was not met, that the F.A.M.U. people had not wanted me to come and had taken this way to let me know. Haley is a tall man in his early forties, who, shortly after I left Tallahassee, was dismissed from his position in the Music Department because he backed the student protest movement. He looked grave as I spoke, said he appreciated my bluntness, and agreed that I might find hostility on the part of many of the people I was likely to meet. The events of the last few months had created great divisions in the Negro world. The F.A.M.U. president, for example, would not be glad to see me, for he and his supporters were hoping that the entire problem would somehow go away. These men are in an impossible position because their entire usefulness to the state of Florida depends on their ability to influence and control their students. But the students do not trust them, and this means the death of their influence and their usefulness alike. These men are as unable as the state of Florida to find anything that will divert the students from their present course.

Until now the Negro college president's usefulness to the students, to the Negro community, and to the state was determined by the number of alternatives to equality that he could produce out of the southern hat. The docility of the students was the tacit price agreed upon for more funds, new buildings, more land. And these were tangible alternatives, for these things

-- 219 --
were hideously needed. As for curricular expansion, it usually came about in order to contain the discontent of Negro students. For example, at one time the state made no provision for the study of law at its Negro university. Students then applied, with every intention of testing the legality of the state's position, for instruction in white colleges. To prevent such testing, law was added to the Negro university curriculum. And what has happened is that precisely those dormitories, chemistry labs, and classrooms for which Negro presidents formerly bargained are now being built by the South in a doomed attempt to blunt the force of the Supreme Court decision against segregation. Therefore, the Negro college president has, literally, nothing more whatever to offer his students -- except his support: if he gives this, of course, he promptly ceases to be a Negro college president. This is the death rattle of the Negro school system in the South. It is easy to judge those Negroes who, in order to keep their jobs, are willing to do everything in their power to subvert the student movement. But it is more interesting to consider what the present crisis reveals about the system under which they have worked so long.

For the segregated school system in the South has always been used by the southern states as a means of controlling Negroes. When one considers the lengths to which the South has gone to prevent the Negro from ever becoming, or even feeling like, an equal, it is clear that the southern states could not have used schools in any other way. This is one of the reasons, deliberate or not, that facilities were never equal. The demoralizing southern school system also says a great deal about the indifference and irresponsibility of the North. The Negro presidents, principals, and teachers would not be nearly so frightened of losing their roles if the possibility of working in northern schools were not almost totally closed to them.

Richard Haley found a room for me in town and introduced me to the Tallahassee Inter-Civic Council, an organization that makes no secret of its intention to remain in business exactly as long as segregation does. It was called into existence by a bus boycott in 1956. The Tallahassee boycott began five months after the boycott in Montgomery, and in a similar way, with the arrest of two Negro coeds who refused in a crowded bus to surrender their seats to whites on the motorman's order. The boycott ran the same course, from cross-burning, fury, and intransigence on the part of the city and bus officials, along with almost total and unexpected unanimity among the Negroes, to reprisal, intimidation, and near-bank-ruptcy of the bus company, which took its buses off the streets for a month.

The Reverend C. K. Steele, president of the ICC, remembers that "those

-- 220 --
were rough days. Every time I drove my car into the garage, I expected a bullet to come whizzing by my head." He was not being fanciful: there are still bullet holes in his living room window. The Reverend Daniel Speed, a heavy, rough-looking man who might be completely terrifying if he did not love to laugh and who owns a grocery store in Tallahassee, organized the boycott motor pool, with the result that all the windows were blown out of his store. The Speed and Steele children are among the state's troublesome students. And Speed and Steele, along with Haley, are the people whom the students most trust. Speed's support of the students is particularly surprising in view of his extreme vulnerability as a Negro businessman. "There has been," he told me, "much reprisal," but he preferred that I remain silent about the details.

Haley drove me to the hotel that he had found for me in one of the two Negro sections of Tallahassee. This section seems to be the more disreputable of the two, judging at least from its long, unpaved streets, the gangs of loud, shabby men and women, boys and girls, in front of the barbershops, the poolrooms, the Coffee House, the El Dotabo Café, and the Chicken Shack. It is to this part of town that the F.A.M.U. students come to find whisky -- this is a dry county, which means that whisky is plentiful and drunkards numerous -- and women who may or may not be wild but who are indisputably available. My hotel is that hotel found in all small southern towns -- all small southern towns, in any case, in which a hotel for Negroes exists. It is really only a rather large frame house, run by a widow who also teaches school in Quiney, a town not far away. It is doomed, of course, to be a very curious place, since everyone from NAACP lawyers, visiting church women, and unfrocked preachers to traveling pimps and the simply, aimlessly, transiently amorous cannot possibly stay anywhere else. The widow knows this, which makes it impossible for her -- since she is good-natured and also needs the money -- to turn anyone away. My room is designed for sleeping -- possibly -- but not for work.

I type with my door open, because of the heat, and presently someone knocks, asking to borrow a pencil. But he does not really want a pencil, he is merely curious about who would be sitting at a typewriter so late at night -- especially in this hotel. So I meet J., an F.A.M.U. student who is visiting a friend and also, somewhat improbably, studying for an exam. He is nineteen, very tall and slender, very dark, with extraordinarily intelligent and vivid brown eyes. It is, no doubt, only his youth and the curious combination of expectancy and vulnerability, which are among the attributes

-- 221 --
of youth, that cause me to think at once of my younger brothers when they were about his age.

He borrows the pencil and stands in the door a moment, being much more direct and curious about me than I am able to be about him. Nevertheless I learn that he is from a Florida town not very far away, has a sister but is the only son of very modestly situated people, is studying here on a scholarship and intends to become a bacteriologist. There is also about him something extremely difficult to describe because, while all of us have been there, no one wishes to remember it: the really agonizing privacy of the very young. They are only beginning to realize that the world is difficult and dangerous, that they are, themselves, tormentingly complex and that the years that stretch before them promise to be more dangerous than the years that are behind. And they always seem to be wrestling, in a private chamber to which no grownup has access, with monumental decisions.

Everyone laughs at himself once he has come through this storm, but it is borne in on me, suddenly, that it is a storm, a storm, moreover, that not everyone survives and through which no one comes unscathed. Decisions made at this time always seem and, in fact, nearly always turn out to be decisions that determine the course and quality of a life. I wonder for the first time what it can be like to be making, in the adolescent dark, such decisions as this generation of students has made. They are in battle with more things than can be named. Not only must they summon up the force to face the law and the lawless -- who are not, right now in Tallahassee, easily distinguishable -- or the prospect of jail or the possibility of being maimed or killed; they are also dealing with problems yet more real, more dangerous and more personal than these: who they are, what they want, how they are to achieve what they want and how they are to reconcile their responsibilities to their parents with their responsibilities to themselves. Add to this exams: the peculiar difficulty of studying at all in so electric a situation: the curious demoralization that can occur in a youngster who is unable to respect his college president: and the enormous questions that, however dealt with or suppressed, must live in the mind of a student who is already, legally, a convict and is on a year's probation. These are all very serious matters, made the more serious by the fact that the students have so few models to emulate. The young grow up by watching and imitating their elders -- it is their universal need to be able to revere them: but I submit that in this country today it is quite impossible for a young person to be speeded beyond his maturity in this way. This impossibility contains the key to what has been called "the beat generation." What the elders have

-- 222 --
that they can offer the young is evidence, in their own flesh, of defeats endured, disasters passed, and triumphs won. This is their moral authority, which, however mystical it may sound, is the only authority that endures; and it is through dealing with this authority that the young catch their first glimpse of what has been called the historical perspective. But this does not, and cannot exist, either privately or publicly, in a country that has told itself so many lies about its history, that, in sober fact, has yet to excavate its history from the rubble of romance. Nowhere is this clearer than in the South today, for if the tissue of myths that has for so long been propagated as southern history had any actual validity, the white people of the South would be far less tormented people and the present generation of Negro students could never have been produced. And this is certainly one of the reasons that the example of Martin Luther King, Jr., means so much to these young people, even to those who know nothing about Gandhi and are not religious and ask hard questions about nonviolence. King is a serious man because the doctrine that he preaches is reflected in the life he leads. It is this acid test to which the young unfailingly put the old, this test, indeed, to which it is presently putting the country.

I suggest to J. that perhaps he and his friend would like a drink and we carry my half-bottle of bourbon down the hall. His friend turns out to be really his distant cousin and a gospel singer, and I begin to realize that J. himself is very religious in much the same way I remember myself as being. But once I myself had left the church I suppose I thought all young people had, forever. We talk. I somewhat lamely, about the religious standards J.'s family expects him to maintain. I can see, though I do not know if he can -- yet -- that he talks about these standards because he is beginning to wonder about his lifelong ability to live up to them. And this leads us, slowly, as the bourbon diminishes and the exam begins to be forgotten, to the incipient war between himself and his family and to his strange position on the F.A.M.U. campus. J. is one of those youngsters whose reality one tends to forget, who really believe in the Ten Commandments, for whom such words as "honor" and "truth" conjure up realities more real than the daily bread. From him I get my first picture of the campus, a picture that turns out to be quite accurate. The actively dissident students are a minority, though they have the tacit, potentially active support of the entire student body. J. is not one of the active students because he is going to school on a scholarship and is afraid of hurting his family by being thrown out of school. He himself confesses that the fact that he can be deterred

-- 223 --
by such a consideration means that he is "not ready for action yet." But it is very clear that this unreadiness troubles him greatly. "I don't know," he keeps saying, "I don't know what's the right thing to do." But he is also extremely unhappy on the campus because he is part of that minority of students who actually study. "You know," he says, with that rather bewildering abruptness of a youngster who has decided to talk, "the dean called me in one day and asked me why I didn't have any friends. He said: `I notice you don't go out much for athletics.' I told him I didn't come to college to be an athlete, and anyway I walk all the time and I've got all the friends I need, everybody respects me and they leave me alone. I don't want to hang out with those kids. They come over here" -- the section of town in which we were sitting -- "every night. Well, I wasn't raised that way." And he looks defiant: he also looks bewildered. "I got the impression that he would like me better if I was more like all the other kids." And now he looks indignant. "Can you imagine that?"

I do not tell him how easily I can imagine that, and he gets around to saying that he would rather be in some other college -- "farther north, in a bigger town. I don't like Tallahassee." But his parents want him to remain nearby. "But they're worried about my leaving now, too, on account of the student sit-ins, so maybe --" He frowns. I get a glimpse of his parents, reading the newspapers, listening to the radio, burning up the long-distance wires each time Tallahassee is in the news. He tells me about the twelfth of March, 1960, when a thousand marching students were dispersed by tear-gas bombs and thirty-five of them were arrested. "I was on the campus -- of course I knew about it, the march, I mean. A girl came running back to campus, she was crying. It seemed the longest time before I could make any sense out of what she was saying and, Lord, I thought there was murder in that town." But he is most impressed by this fact: "I came over here that night and maybe you don't know it, but this part of town is always wide open but that night --" he gestures -- "boy, nobody was in the streets. It was quiet. It was dark. It was like everybody'd died. I couldn't believe it -- nothing." He is silent. "I guess they were afraid." Then he looks at me quickly. "I don't blame them." I think that he means that he has no right to blame them. "I've got to make some kind of decision soon," he says.

I tell him that I am coming to the campus the next day, and this elicits from him the names of students he wants me to meet, and also the names of Reverend Steele, Reverend Speed, and Mr. Haley. I think it is safe to say that these three, along with one other person whom I cannot, for the person's sake, name -- and it strikes me as horrendous that such a consideration

-- 224 --
should be necessary in this country -- were the four Negro adults most respected by the students. This fact alone, since they are four utterly dedicated and intransigent people, ought to cause the municipality to reflect.

The next day I meet and briefly talk to A. -- lean, light-colored, taciturn, nineteen, from Ohio, a sociology major, who has been arrested for his part in the sit-ins and is on a year's probation. He is very matter-of-fact and quiet, very pleasant, and respectful, and absolutely tense with the effort this costs him. Or perhaps I exaggerate, but I am always terribly struck by the abnormal self-containment of such young people. A. speaks about the possibility of transferring to another college. Somehow I do not get the impression that this possibility is very real to him, and then I realize that part of his tension is due to worry about his exams.

I also talk to V., eighteen, from Georgia, the skinniest child I have ever seen, who is also on a year's probation. He is rather bitter about the failure of the Negro community to respond as he had expected it to. "I haven't got to live with it," he tells me, somewhat unrealistically since, as it turns out, his relatives are determined to keep him in Tallahassee and he will certainly be living with the problem for the next couple of years. "I did it for them. Looks like they don't appreciate it." He was appalled that the Negroes of Frenchtown, the section of town in which I am staying, should have vanished on the evening of March 12. I got the impression that he had rather expected them to meet the students in the street with trumpets, drums, and banners.

During the sit-ins of February the students had attempted, without success, to see the mayor and had spoken, without results, to the managers of the local Woolworth and McCrory dime stores. (As of this writing, the mayor of Tallahassee, who, I was told, uses the word "nigger" freely, has seen the students of his city only at lunch counters and in court.) It was to break the official and managerial silence that the sit-in of March 12 was organized. It was on this occasion that members of the White Citizens' Council, along with friends, sympathizers, and people who "just happened to be in from the country for the day," met the students with baseball bats and knives. The good people of Tallahassee were not in the streets that day, of course; there were only the students, the police, and the mob; and from this, which has now become a pattern in the South, I think it is safe to suggest that the convictions of the good people have less reality than the venom and panic of the worst. The police did not arrest any members of

-- 225 --
the mob but dispersed the students with tear gas and arrested, in all, thirty-five of them, twenty-nine Negroes and six whites.

Tallahassee has been quiet since March 12. The students felt that this time they themselves had been too quiet. Students from Tallahassee's two universities -- Florida State, set up for whites, and Florida A & M for Negroes -- are not allowed to visit each other's campuses. And so, on a Monday night during my May visit, they met in a church to make plans for a prayer meeting on the steps of the Capitol to remind the town that the students had no intention of giving up their struggle. There were about twenty students, in a ratio of about two Negroes to one white. It was a CORE meeting (the Congress of Racial Equality is an organization dedicated to bringing about change by passive resistance in social injustice), and Haley, Steel, and the warrior to whom I can give no name were present as the Adult Leadership.

The prayer meeting had originally been the brainstorm of R., a white student, foreign-born, very measured in speech, very direct in manner. There was first some uncertainty as to whether the prayer meeting should be held at all because of the pressure of exams and the homegoing plans of students, many of whom would have departed by Thursday.

There had also been the hope originally, since CORE is by now a dirty word in Tallahassee, of getting broader community support by asking the ministers of all faiths to give the news to their congregations and urge them to join the students. It was possible to gauge the depth of official hostility and community apathy by the discussion this suggestion precipitated.

One of the Negro students suggested that not all the ministers were to be trusted: one of them would surely feel it his duty to warn the police. A white coed student protested this vehemently, it being her view that there was no possible harm in an open prayer meeting -- "It's just a y'all-come prayer meeting!" -- and refused to believe that the police would not protect such spectacular piety. And this brought up the whole question of strategy: If the police were not warned, then the prayer meeting would have to be described as spontaneous. "But you can't," said a Negro coed, "decide to have a spontaneous prayer meeting. Especially not on the steps of the capitol on Thursday at one o'clock." "Oh, it'll be spontaneous enough," said another student -- my notes do not indicate his color -- "by the time we start praying." D., a white coed, was against informing the police: "We love them dearly," she said with rather heavy sarcasm, "but I don't want them to get the impression that I'm asking their permission to do our thing." "We're

-- 226 --
not asking their permission," said another white student. "We have every right to have a prayer meeting and we're just informing them of it." "There's no reason," said the girl who felt that the police would not possibly do anything to peacefully praying people, "for them not to treat us just like they'd treat any other group of citizens."

This led to rather cynical laughter and someone, looking around the room, offered to name "oh, about twenty-five multicolored reasons." In all this there was no question of fear of the police; there was simply no belief whatever that they would act impartially or "that they might turn out," as Reverend Steele unconvincingly suggested, "to protect us." It is significant, I think, that none of the students, except for one lone girl -- who turned out to be the daughter of a segregationist and who was therefore in a way defending her father against the imputation of villainy -- believed that they could call on the police for protection. It was for this reason that it was decided not to ask the city's ministers to invite their congregations. "If too many people know, they'll just have time to call in all those people from the country and state troopers and it'll be a mess," someone said. And this left open the great question of how, precisely, to handle the police. Was it, strategically speaking, better to inform them or better to give them no warning. "If you tell the police," said one Negro student, "it's just as good as telling the White Citizens' Council." Again it is significant that no one, white or black, contested this statement. It was finally decided not to inform the police and to arrive at the steps of the Capitol singly or in pairs. "That way they won't have time to get their boys together."

Now the prayer meeting, in fact, did not take place. Phones began ringing early in the morning of the scheduled day, warning that news of the plans had somehow leaked out and the students could expect great trouble if they tried to get to the Capitol.

A day later I talk with Haley and ask him what, in his judgment, is the attitude of most white people in the South. I confess myself baffled. Haley doesn't answer my question directly.

"What we're trying to do," he tells me, "is to sting their consciences a little. They don't want to think about it. Well, we must make them think about it.

"When they come home from work," Haley continues, "and turn on the TV sets and there you are --" he means you the Negro -- "on your way to jail again, and they know, at the bottom of their hearts, that it's not because you've done anything wrong -- something happens in them, something's got

-- 227 --
to happen in them. They're human beings, too, you know," and in spades. We are standing in the hall of the university's music building.

It is near the end of the day and he is about to go and give an exam. I have heard him say what he has just told me more than once to some embittered and caustic student, trying with all his might to inculcate in the student that charity without which -- and how this country proves it! -- social change is meaningless. Haley always speaks very quiet. "We have to wake up all those people in the middle," he says. "Most white people in the South don't especially like the idea of integration, but they'll go along with it. By and by they'll get used to it."

And all this, I think to myself, will only be a page in history. I cannot help wondering what kind of page it will be, whether we are hourly, in this country now, recording our salvation or our doom.

I can tell from the way Haley looks at me that he knows that I am feeling rather caustic and embittered today. I wonder how he feels. I know that he is afraid of losing his job. I admire him much more than I can say for playing so quietly a chips-down game.

Haley goes off to give his exam and I walk outside, waiting for my taxi and watching the students. Only a decade and a half divide us, but what changes have occurred in those fifteen years! The world into which I was born must seem as remote to them as the Flood. I watch them. Their walk, talk, laughter are as familiar to me as my skin, and yet there is something new about them. They remind me of all the Negro boys and girls I have ever known and they remind me of myself: but, really, I was never like these students. It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.

Well, they didn't have to come the way I came. This is what I've heard Negro parents say, with a kind of indescribable pride and relief, when one of their children graduated or won an award or sailed for Europe: began, in short, to move into the world as a free person. The society into which American Negro children are born has always presented a particular challenge to Negro parents. This society makes it necessary that they establish in the child a force that will cause him to know that the world's definition of his place and the means used by the world to make this definition binding are not for a moment to be respected. This means that the parent must prove daily, in his own person, how little the force of the world avails against the force of a person who is determined to be free. Now, this is a cruel challenge, for the force of the world is immense. That is why the vow. My

-- 228 --
children won't come like I came is nothing less than a declaration of war, a declaration that has led to innumerable casualties. Generations of Negro children have said, as all the students here have said: "My Daddy taught me never to bow my head to nobody." But sometimes Daddy's head was bowed: frequently Daddy was destroyed.

These students were born at the very moment at which Europe's domination of Africa was ending. I remember, for example, the invasion of Ethiopia and Haile Selassie's vain appeal to the League of Nations, but they remember the Bandung Conference and the establishment of the Republic of Ghana.

Americans keep wondering what has "got into" the students. What has "got into" them is their history in this country. They are not the first Negroes to face mobs: they are merely the first Negroes to frighten the mob more than the mob frightens them. Many Americans may have forgotten, for example, the reign of terror in the 1920s that drove Negroes out of the South. Five hundred thousand moved North in one year. Some of the people who got to the North barely in time to be born are the parents of the students now going to school. This was forty years ago, and not enough has happened -- not enough freedom has happened. But these young people are determined to make it happen and make it happen now. They cannot be diverted. It seems to me that they are the only people in this country now who really believe in freedom. Insofar as they can make it real for themselves, they will make it real for all of us. The question with which they present the nation is whether or not we really want to be free. It is because these students remain so closely related to their past that they are able to face with such authority a population ignorant of its history and enslaved by a myth. And by this population I do not mean merely the unhappy people who make up the southern mobs. I have in mind nearly all Americans.

These students prove unmistakably what most people in this country have yet to discover: that time is real.

-- [245] --

The Dangerous Road before Martin Luther King
I first met Martin Luther King, Jr., nearly three years ago now, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was there on a visit from his home in Montgomery. He was "holed up," he was seeing no one, he was busy writing a book -- so I was informed by the friend who, mercilessly, at my urgent request, was taking me to King's hotel. I felt terribly guilty about interrupting him but not guilty enough to let the opportunity pass. Still, having been raised among preachers, I would not have been surprised if King had cursed out the friend, refused to speak to me, and slammed the door in our faces. Nor would I have blamed him if he had, since I knew that by this time he must have been forced to suffer many an admiring fool.

But the Reverend King is not like any preacher I have ever met before. For one thing, to state it baldly, I liked him. It is rare that one likes a world-famous man -- by the time they become world-famous they rarely like themselves, which may account for this antipathy. Yet King is immediately and tremendously winning, there is really no other word for it; and there he stood, with an inquiring and genuine

-- 246 --
smile on his face, in the open door of his hotel room. Behind him, on a desk, was a wilderness of paper. He looked at his friend, he looked at me, I was introduced; he smiled and shook my hand and we entered the room.

I do not remember much about that first meeting because I was too overwhelmed by the fact that I was meeting him at all. There were millions of questions that I wanted to ask him, but I feared to begin. Besides, his friend had warned me not to "bug" him. I was not there in a professional capacity, and the questions I wanted to ask him had less to do with his public role than with his private life. When I say "private life" I am not referring to those maliciously juicy tidbits, those meaningless details, which clutter up the gossip columns and muddy everybody's mind and obliterate the humanity of the subject as well as that of the reader. I wanted to ask him how it felt to be standing where he stood, how he bore it, what complex of miracles had prepared him for it. But such questions can scarcely be asked, they can scarcely be answered.

And King does not like to talk about himself. I have described him as winning, but he does not give the impression of being particularly outgoing or warm. His restraint is not, on the other hand, of that icily uneasy, nerve-wracking kind to be encountered in so many famous Negroes who have allowed their aspirations and notoriety to destroy their identities and who always seem to be giving an uncertain imitation of some extremely improbable white man. No, King impressed me then and he impresses me now as a man solidly anchored in those spiritual realities concerning which he can be so eloquent. This divests him of the hideous piety which is so prevalent in his profession, and it also saves him from the ghastly self-importance which until recently, was all that allowed one to be certain one was addressing a Negro leader. King cannot be considered a chauvinist at all, not even incidentally, or part of the time, or under stress, or subconsciously. What he says to Negroes he will say to whites; and what he says to whites he will say to Negroes. He is the first Negro leader in my experience, or the first in many generations, of whom this can be said; most of his predecessors were in the extraordinary position of saying to white men, Hurry, while saying to black men, Wait. This fact is of the utmost importance. It says a great deal about the situation which produced King and in which he operates; and, of course, it tells us a great deal about the man.

"He came through it all," said a friend of his to me, with wonder and not a little envy, "really unscarred. He never went around fighting with himself, like we all did." The "we" to whom this friend refers are all considerably older than King, which may have something to do with this

-- 247 --
lightly sketched species of schizophrenia; in any case, the fact that King really loves the people he represents and has -- therefore -- no hidden, interior need to hate the white people who oppose him has had and will, I think, continue to have the most far-reaching and unpredictable repercussions on our racial situation. It need scarcely be said that our racial situation is far more complex and dangerous than we are prepared to think of it as being -- since our major desire is not to think of it at all -- and King's role in it is of an unprecedented difficulty.

He is not, for example, to be confused with Booker T. Washington, whom we gratefully allowed to solve the racial problem singlehandedly. It was Washington who assured us, in 1895, one year before it became the law of the land, that the education of Negroes would not give them any desire to become equals; they would be content to remain -- or, rather, after living for generations in the greatest intimacy with whites, to become -- separate. It is a measure of the irreality to which the presence of the Negro had already reduced the nation that this utterly fantastic idea, which thoroughly controverts the purpose of education, which has no historical or psychological validity, and which denies all the principles on which the country imagines itself to have been founded, was not only accepted with cheers but became the cornerstone of an entire way of life. And this did not come about, by the way, merely because of the venom or villainy of the South. It could never have come about at all without the tacit consent of the North; and this consent robs the North, historically and actually, of any claim to moral superiority. The failure of the government to make any realistic provision for the education of tens of thousands of illiterate former slaves had the effect of dumping this problem squarely into the lap of one man -- who knew, whatever else he may not have known, that the education of Negroes had somehow to be accomplished. Whether or not Washington believed what he said is certainly an interesting question. But he did know that he could accomplish his objective by telling white men what they wanted to hear. And it has never been very difficult for a Negro in this country to figure out what white men want to hear: he takes his condition as an echo of their desires.

There will be no more Booker T. Washingtons. And whether we like it or not, and no matter how hard or how long we oppose it, there will be no more segregated schools, there will be no more segregated anything. King is entirely right when he says that segregation is dead. The real question which faces the Republic is just how long, how violent, and how expensive the funeral is going to be; and this question it is up to the Republic to

-- 248 --
resolve, it is not really in King's hands. The sooner the corpse is buried, the sooner we can get around to the far more taxing and rewarding problems of integration, or what King calls community, and what I think of as the achievement of nationhood, or, more simply and cruelly, the growing up of this dangerously adolescent country.

I saw King again, later that same evening, at a party given by this same friend. He came late, did not stay long. I remember him standing in the shadows of the room, near a bookcase, drinking something nonalcoholic, and being patient with the interlocutor who had trapped him in this spot. He obviously wanted to get away and go to bed. King is somewhat below what is called average height, he is sturdily built, but is not quite as heavy or as stocky as he had seemed to me at first. I remember feeling, rather as though he were a younger, much-loved, and menaced brother, that he seemed very slight and vulnerable to be taking on such tremendous odds.

BITTER MILK

I was leaving for Montgomery the next day, so I called on King in the morning to ask him to have someone from the Montgomery Improvement Association meet me at the airport. It was he who had volunteered to do this for me, since he knew that I knew no one there, and he probably realized that I was frightened. He was coming to Montgomery on Sunday to preach in his own church.

Montgomery is the cradle of the Confederacy, an unlucky distinction which no one in Montgomery is allowed to forget. The White House which symbolized and housed that short-lived government is still standing, and "people," one of the Montgomery ministers told me, "walk around in those halls and cry." I do not doubt it, the people of Montgomery having inherited nothing less than an ocean of spilt milk. The boycott had been over for a year by the time I got there, and had been ended by a federal decree outlawing segregation in the busses. Therefore, the atmosphere in Montgomery was extraordinary. I think that I have never been in a town so aimlessly hostile, so baffled and demoralized. Whoever has a stone to fling, and flings it, is then left without any weapons; and this was (and remains) the situation of the white people in Montgomery.

I took a bus ride, for example, solely in order to observe the situation on the busses. As I stepped into the bus, I suddenly remembered that I had neglected to ask anyone the price of a bus ride in Montgomery, and so I asked the driver. He gave me the strangest, most hostile of looks, and

-- 249 --
turned his face away. I dropped fifteen cents into the box and sat down, placing myself, delicately, just a little forward of the center of the bus. The driver had seemed to feel that my question was but another Negro trick, that I had something up my sleeve, and that to answer my question in any way would be to expose himself to disaster. He could not guess what I was thinking, and he was not going to risk further personal demoralization by trying to. And this spirit was the spirit of the town. The bus pursued its course, picking up white and Negro passengers. Negroes sat where they pleased, none very far back; one large woman, carrying packages, seated herself directly behind the driver. And the whites sat there, ignoring them, in a huffy, offended silence.

This silence made me think of nothing so much as the silence which follows a really serious lovers' quarrel: the whites, beneath their cold hostility, were mystified and deeply hurt. They had been betrayed by the Negroes, not merely because the Negroes had declined to remain in their "place," but because the Negroes had refused to be controlled by the town's image of them. And, without this image, it seemed to me, the whites were abruptly and totally lost. The very foundations of their private and public worlds were being destroyed.

I had never heard King preach, and I went on Sunday to hear him at his church. This church is a redbrick structure, with a steeple, and it directly faces, on the other side of the street, a white, domed building. My notes fail to indicate whether this is the actual capitol of the state or merely a courthouse; but the conjunction of the two buildings, the steepled one low and dark and tense, the domed one higher and dead white and forbidding, sums up, with an explicitness a set designer might hesitate to copy, the struggle now going on in Montgomery.

At that time in Montgomery, King was almost surely the most beloved man there. I do not think that one could have entered any of the packed churches at that time, if King was present, and not have felt this. Of course, I think that King would be loved by his congregation in any case, and there is always a large percentage of church women who adore the young male pastor, and not always, or not necessarily, out of those grim, psychic motives concerning which everyone today is so knowledgeable. No, there was a feeling in this church which quite transcended anything I have ever felt in a church before. Here it was, totally familiar and yet completely new, the packed church, glorious with the Sunday finery of the women, solemn with the touching, gleaming sobriety of the men, beautiful with children. Here were the ushers, standing in the aisles in white dresses or in dark

-- 250 --
suits, with arm bands on. People were standing along each wall, beside the windows, and standing in the back. King and his lieutenants were in the pulpit, young Martin -- as I was beginning to think of him -- in the center chair.

When King rose to speak -- to preach -- I began to understand how the atmosphere of this church differed from that of all the other churches I have known. At first I thought that the great emotional power and authority of the Negro church was being put to a new use, but this was not exactly the case. The Negro church was playing the same role which it has always played in Negro life, but it had acquired a new power.

Until Montgomery, the Negro church, which has always been the place where protest and condemnation could be most vividly articulated, also operated as a kind of sanctuary. The minister who spoke could not hope to effect any objective change in the lives of his hearers, and the people did not expect him to. All they came to find, and all that he could give them, was the sustenance for another day's journey. Now, King could certainly give his congregation that, but he could also give them something more than that, and he had. It is true that it was they who had begun the struggle of which he was now the symbol and the leader; it is true that it had taken all of their insistence to overcome in him a grave reluctance to stand where he now stood. But it is also true, and it does not happen often, that once he had accepted the place they had prepared for him, their struggle became absolutely indistinguishable from his own, and took over and controlled his life. He suffered with them and, thus, he helped them to suffer. The joy which filled this church, therefore, was the joy achieved by people who have ceased to delude themselves about an intolerable situation, who have found their prayers for a leader miraculously answered, and who now know that they can change their situation, if they will.

And, surely, very few people had ever spoken to