Nigger: The Strange Career Of A Troublesome Word (3 page)
Read Nigger: The Strange Career Of A Troublesome Word Online
Authors: Randall Kennedy
Later the woman stumbled out, bleeding, crying, and holding her stomach.… When I went to the rear of the store, the boss and his son were washing their hands in the sink. They were chuckling. The floor was bloody and strewn with wisps of hair and clothing. No doubt I must have appeared pretty shocked, for the boss slapped me reassuringly on the back.
“Boy, that's what we do to niggers when they don't want to pay their bills,” he said, laughing.
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Along with intimidation, sex figured in Wright's tales of Negro life under segregationist tyranny. Describing his job as a “hall-boy” in a hotel frequented by prostitutes, the writer remembered
a huge, snowy-skinned blonde [who] took a room on my floor. I was sent to wait upon her. She was in bed with a thickset man; both were nude and uncovered. She said she wanted some liquor and slid out of bed and waddled across the floor to get her money from a dresser drawer. I watched her.
“Nigger, what in hell you looking at?” the white man asked me, raising himself up on his elbows.
“Nothing,” I answered, looking miles deep into the black wall of the room.
“Keep your eyes where they belong if you want to be healthy!” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
On a different evening at this same hotel, Wright was leaving to walk one of the Negro maids home. As they passed by him, the white night watchman wordlessly slapped the maid on her buttock. Astonished, Wright instinctively turned around. His doing so, however, triggered yet another confrontation:
Suddenly [the night watchman] pulled his gun and asked: “Nigger, don't you like it?”
I hesitated.
“I asked yuh don't yuh like it?” he asked again, stepping forward.
“Yes, sir,” I mumbled.
“Talk like it then!”
“Oh, yes, sir!” I said with as much heartiness as I could muster.
Outside, I walked ahead of the girl, ashamed to face her. She caught up with me and said: “Don't be a fool! Yuh couldn't help it!”
This watchman boasted of having killed two Negroes in self-defense.
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Among the ubiquitous stories featuring
nigger
that appear in literature by and about black Americans, several others also stand out.
In the summer of
1918
, Lieutenant George S. Schuyler, proudly dressed in the uniform of the United States Army, stopped to get his boots shined at the Philadelphia railroad station. The bootblack, a recent immigrant from Greece, refused in a loud voice to serve “a nigger.” This affront helped push Schuyler into going absent without leave, an infraction for which he was briefly imprisoned.
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Although Schuyler became a writer and mined his own life for much of his material, this encounter with
nigger
-as-insult was so upsetting that he never publicly mentioned it.
In
1932
a young black Communist named Angelo Herndon found himself on trial for his life in Atlanta, Georgia, for allegedly organizing an insurrection. Testifying against him was a hostile witness who referred to him as a nigger. Herndon's black attorney, Benjamin Jefferson Davis, requested that the white judge intervene, prompting an ambiguous ruling:
Davis:
I object, Your Honor. The term “nigger” is objectionable, prejudicial, and insulting.
Judge Wyatt:
I don't know whether it is or not.… However, I'll instruct the witness to call [Herndon] “darky,” which is a term of endearment.
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Radicalized by this experience, Davis himself soon thereafter joined the Communist party.
The civil rights activist Daisy Bates recalled an episode from her childhood in which a butcher refused to take her order until he had served all of the white customers in the shop, regardless of whether she had preceded them. “Niggers have to wait,” the butcher stated.
30
When a clerk at a drugstore soda fountain called him “nigger,” nine-year-old Ely Green asked his foster mother what it meant. “Why should I be called a nigger?” he inquired. “It must be very bad to be a nigger.” Bothered by her refusal or inability to explain, the boy spent a sleepless night trying to decipher the meaning of this mysterious word. “What could a nigger be,” he wondered, and “why should God make me a nigger?”
31
Paul Robeson earned a degree from Columbia Law School but turned his back on a career as an attorney after, among other incidents, a stenographer refused to work for him, declaring, “I never take dictation from a nigger.”
32
Malcolm X remembered that during his childhood, after his family fell apart following the murder of his father, the whites who served as his guardians openly referred to blacks as niggers. And then there was his encounter with a white teacher who, in recommending a career in carpentry rather than the law, urged young Malcolm to be “realistic about being a nigger.”
33
When Jackie Robinson reported to the Brooklyn Dodgers’ top minor-league team, the manager earnestly asked the team's owner whether he really thought that niggers were human beings.
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Robinson, of course, would have to contend with
nigger
throughout his fabled career. During a game played on April
22, 1947
, he recalled hearing hatred pour forth from the dugout of the Philadelphia Phillies “as if it had been synchronized by some master conductor”:
“Hey, nigger, why don't you go back to the cotton field where you belong?”
“They're waiting for you in the jungles, black boy!” “We don't want you here, nigger.”
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On a tour of the South in
1951
, the journalist Carl Rowan tried to buy a newspaper in the white waiting room of a train depot since there were no papers in the colored waiting room. As he was about to pay, a white station agent hurriedly intervened to stop the transaction. Rowan complained that under the separate-but-equal theory of segregation he should be able to purchase any item in the colored waiting room that was available in the white waiting room. But the station agent was insistent:
“Well, you'll have to go back and let the redcap come and get the paper,” he explained.
“The redcap? He's darker than I am and I've got the nickel—what's the logic there?” I argued.
“He's in uniform.”
“Suppose I were in uniform—[the uniform] of the United States Navy?”
“You'd still have to go where niggers belong.”
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In the early
1960
s, at the height of his celebrity as a comedian, Dick Gregory ventured south to join other activists in protesting blacks’ exclusion from the voting booth. In his autobiography, he recounted an altercation he had with a policeman in Greenwood, Mississippi, who, without just provocation, shoved him and ordered,
“Move on, nigger.”
“Thanks a million.”
“Thanks for what?”
“Up north police don't escort me across the street against the red light.”
“I said, move on, nigger.”
“I don't know my way, I'm new in this town.”
The cop yanked on my arm and turned his head. “Send someone over to show this nigger where to go,” he hollered.…
I pulled one of my arms free and pointed at the crowd.
“Ask that white woman over there to come here and show me where to go.”
The cop's face got red, and there was spittle at the corner of his mouth. All he could say was: “Nigger, dirty nigger.…”
I looked at him. “Your momma's a nigger. Probably got more Negro blood in her than I could ever hope to have in me.”
He dropped my other arm then, and backed away, and his hand was on his gun. I thought he was going to explode. But nothing happened. I was sopping wet and too excited to be scared.
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Either Gregory was lucky or his celebrity gave him more protection than others enjoyed. When Charles McLaurin, an organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was jailed in Columbia, Mississippi, a patrolman asked him, “Are you a Negro or a nigger?” When
McLaurin responded, “Negro,” another patrolman hit him in the face. When he gave the same reply to the same question, McLaurin was again beaten. Finally, asked the question a third time, he answered, “I am a nigger.” At that point the first patrolman told him to leave town and warned, “If I ever catch you here again I'll kill you.”
38
As a child, the playwright August Wilson stopped going to school for a while after a series of notes were left in his desk by white classmates. The notes read: “Go home nigger.”
39
The Olympic sprinter Tommie Smith remembers an incident from his boyhood in which a white child snatched an ice cream cone out of his hand and snarled, “Niggers don't eat ice cream.”
40
Michael Jordan was suspended from school for hitting a white girl who called him “nigger” during a fight over a seat on a school bus in Wilmington, North Carolina.
41
Tiger Woods was tied up in kindergarten by older schoolmates who called him “nigger.”
42
Recalling the difficulties she faced in raising her black son in a household with her white female lover, the poet Audre Lorde noted that “for years in the name-calling at school, boys shouted at [her son] not—‘your mother's a lesbian’—but rather—‘your mother's a nigger.’ ”
43
The musician Branford Marsalis has said he cannot remember a time when he was
not
being called “nigger.” “If you grew up in the South,” he observed, whites “called you nigger from the time you were born.”
44
Reminiscing about the first time someone called her “nigger,”
the journalist Lonnae O'Neal Parker described a trip she took to Centralia, Illinois, with her parents when she was five years old. She was playing in a park when
two white girls walked up to me.… They were big. Impossibly big. Eleven at least. They smiled at me.
“Are you a nigger?” one of the girls asked.…
I stood very still. And my stomach grew icy.… “I, I don't know,” I told her, shrugging my shoulders high to my ears.…
Then the other repeated, more forcefully this time, “Are you a nigger? You know, a black person?” she asked.
I wanted to answer her. To say something. But fear made me confused. I had no words. I just stood there. And tried not to wet my panties.
Then I ran.
45
Responding to Parker's published recollection, a reader shared two stories of her own. Brenda Woodford wrote that in the predominantly white middle-class community where she grew up, little white boys on bicycles would constantly encircle her, chanting, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” Later Woodford continued to be shadowed by
nigger.
On one occasion, the word flew out of the mouth of a white man during an argument; at the time, she thought he loved her.
46
In
1973
, at the very moment he stood poised to break Babe Ruth's record for career home runs, the baseball superstar Hank Aaron encountered
nigger
-as-insult on a massive scale, largely in the form of hateful letters:
Dear Nigger,
Everybody loved Babe Ruth. You will be the most hated man in this country if you break his career home run record.
Dear Black Boy,Listen Black Boy, we don't want no nigger Babe Ruth.
Dear Mr. Nigger,I hope you don't break the Babe's record. How can I tell my kids that a nigger did it?
Dear Nigger,You can hit all dem home runs over dem short fences, but you can't take dat black off yo face.
Dear Nigger,You black animal, I hope you never live long enough to hit more home runs than the great Babe Ruth.…
Dear Nigger Henry,You are [not] going to break this record established by the great Babe Ruth if you can help it.…Whites are far more superior than jungle bunnies.… My gun is watching your every black move.
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An offshoot of
nigger
is
nigger lover
, a label affixed to non-blacks who become friendly with African Americans or openly side with them in racial controversies. In the Civil War era,
Republicans’ antislavery politics won them the appellation “black Republicans” or “nigger lovers.” To discredit Abraham Lincoln, his racist Democratic party opponents wrote a “Black Republican Prayer” that ended with the “benediction”
May the blessings of Emancipation extend throughout our unhappy land, and the illustrious, sweet-scented Sambo nestle in the bosom of every Abolition woman… and the distinction of color be forever consigned to oblivion [so] that we may live in bands of fraternal love, union and equality with the Almighty Nigger, henceforth, now and forever. Amen.
48
One of Senator Charles Sumner's white constituents in Massachusetts suggested sneeringly that his exertions in favor of abolition amounted only to “riding the ‘nigger’ hobby.”
49
Another dissatisfied constituent maintained that the senator suffered from “a deep-seated nigger cancer,” that he could “speak of nothing but the ‘sublime nigger,’ ” and that his speeches offered nothing but “the nigger at the beginning, nigger in the middle, and nigger at the end.”
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