P.S. (23 page)

 

 

JAMES BALDWIN: It’s happened to every one of us, I’m sure. You know, when one has read something which you thought
only happened to you, and you discovered that it happened a hundred years ago to Dostoevsky. And this is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person who always thinks that he’s alone.

 

[The Weavers sing]

 

MIRIAM MAKEBA: Yes, she never went to school. All she did was work all her life. She started working when she was about ten years old. They used to work in—she was born in Swaziland—and to be able to live they had to work for the white man who owns the farm. They didn’t get paid. They just worked for a place to live.

 

 

[Makeba singing beneath her words]

 

MIRIAM MAKEBA: Oh, yes, she knew most of them. Some of them are not as old as she would be, but most of them are. And she . . . she used to work for these white people. She spoke very good Afrikaans, which is Dutch, and she spoke English very fluently. You would never know she never went to school.

 

 

GEORGIA TURNER: Did I cut trees? [Laughter] I wish you’d seen the trees I cut! You know, I’m gonna tell you one thing. If you think I’m not telling you truth, go in the neighborhood down there.

Now, my sister had a little boy. He named Willie Sheldon; he yet live down there on the place. And he used to haul the wood. He was about ten years old—he wasn’t large enough to do much cuttin’. I’d cut, and he’d haul. And he’d give me half of the wood. I cut five loads of wood every day—five loads, and he hauled it. He hauled loads, two loads, and a half to my house and two loads and a half to his house. That’s how I got my wood. I cut it! Yeah, cut big loads—couldn’t hardly meet your arms around it! Wouldn’t take me long. I tell you, I’m a good axman. You ought to know. You don’t know what good work in me. I can yet do it! I can yet work.

 

 

GWENDOLYN BROOKS: Vit—of course, that wasn’t her name—was a friend of mine who had the irrepressibility that just seems unconfinable, even in death. And that’s why I wrote:

 

[Bessie Smith singing “Gimme a Pig Foot and a Bottle of Beer”]

 

 

SALVATORE BACCALONI: He is the most great actor—the most great personality I know in the world. When he sing the Boris, oh, yes, there are many, many Boris around. Some are good, or less good [Laughs], but Chaliapin remained the master. He go down in the street near to death. . . . I remember, he attack the
monologo
with one little breath of voice.

 

 

BACCALONI: [Sings]
O triste il cor
. . . He’s tremble on the stage, because he is near to fall down. But many Boris today acts [Sings again, this time much louder and with less feeling]
O triste il cor
. . . What kind of sick man is this? Is no sick at all! [Big laugh]

 

 

BACCALONI: He was no singer, he’s not an actor; Chaliapin, when he play Boris, was Boris! [Laughs]

 

He was Boris!
[
Both laugh
]

 

[The sounds of cast members of Brendan Behan’s play
The Hostage.
They are discussing the author in a mood of high hilarity. Terkel points out that Behan is really saying, “There’s no place on earth like the world.” The cast members decide to sing this song, which Behan had written for the play.

[Pete Seeger singing “Abiyoyo”]

 

 

PETE SEEGER: You know, once, long, long, long ago there was a little boy. And he liked to play the ukulele. Plink, plink, plink! He was always playing the ukulele all over the place. But,
you know, the grown-ups say, “Get away, we’re working here! Go off by yourself, you’re getting in our way!”

Not only that, but the boy’s father was a magician. He had a little magic wand . . . he could make things disappear . . . [Fades out]

I’m sorry to say I don’t know much about telling stories. Gradually now, in my forty-one years, I’ve just barely learned how, just a little bit, to tell a story. But it’s taken me all of this time to learn.

A child learns how to talk, and they talk all the time. A man buys an automobile and he rides and forgets how to use his legs. And the fact is, let’s face it—printing was invented and a lot of people forgot how to tell stories. You don’t need to tell stories to your children at night. You buy them a twenty-fivecent book at the local drugstore, or buy them a phonograph record, or switch on the radio or TV. You don’t have to use your brains anymore. You don’t have to make music, obviously. You don’t have to be an athlete anymore. You can turn on the TV and watch the best athletes in the world use their muscles, and you sit back and grow a potbelly. You don’t need to be witty anymore. You turn on the TV and watch an expert be witty. And of course the crowning shame of it all is for a man and wife to sit back and watch the expert lover pretend to make love on the little screen there.

 

JAMES BALDWIN: I don’t ever intend to make my peace with such a world. There’s something much more important than Cadillacs, Frigidaires, and IBM machines, you know. And precisely one of the things that’s wrong is this notion that IBM machines and Cadillacs prove something. People are always telling me how many Negroes bought Cadillacs last year, and it terrifies me. I always wonder: Is this what you think the country
is for? Do you think this is really what I came here and suffered and died for? A lousy Cadillac?

 

REV. WILLIAM SLOANE COFFIN JR.: Because we love the word, we pray now, oh, Father, for grace to quarrel with it, oh, thou, whose lover’s quarrel with the world is the history of the world . . .

 

 

COFFIN: Grant us grace to quarrel with the worship of success and power, with the assumption that people are less important than the jobs they hold. Grant us grace to quarrel with the mass culture that tends not to satisfy, but exploit the wants of people; to quarrel with those who pledge allegiance to one race, rather than the human race. Lord, grant us grace to quarrel with all that profanes, and trivializes, and separates men.

 

MIRIAM MAKEBA: In South Africa if you don’t have a sense of humor, it would be difficult to survive, with all that’s going on there.

Every once in a while, maybe once a year, we have a big feast where we slaughter a cow, or maybe two sheep, and we cook and invite all our neighbors and the people around us to meditate to our great-grandfathers and mothers who died, and ask them to ask the Lord to help us go on living. And then the people eat and drink and they dance, and then they go back to their homes. And so . . . we sing, and we’re happy . . . we try.

 

[Makeba singing]

 

WOMAN’S VOICE: After so many years, you know, in prisons, and in camp, and . . . and many years of this constant humiliation—the SS tried to convince us that there is no hope for us—we really started to believe that there was no hope for us—we really started to believe that there was no hope for us . . .

 

 

WOMAN: We tried to believe that there would be a liberation someday. We tried and tried and convinced ourselves, and tried to convince the weaker ones that we were sure that the Americans or the British or the Red Army would come very soon to liberate us. But it was so long, you know. Every day for us was like a year. I think I would be right to say that we just lost hope. We tried to convince ourselves that we hoped, but we really didn’t. I couldn’t imagine when I could lie in a bed again—that I would have breakfast again, and lunch, and be a human being, and walk on the street and listen to music. And then, perhaps, lie in a hospital bed and die like a . . . like a normal human being.

I think they were simple people, German people, who believed that they are the
Herrenrasse
, the . . . the . . .

 

MAN’S VOICE: The master race.

 

WOMAN: The master race; they were . . . big people and we were just the . . . the

 

Untermenschen
. . . [Fades out]

 

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR: We feel we are guilty. We feel guilty because we have not the power to do what we want, or to prevent
ourselves from doing what we don’t want, and we feel sad because of that. And then chiefly, because we have felt the Occupation, we have hated the Nazis when they tortured and oppressed us, and we were in the Resistance. We don’t understand: the people who have been in the Resistance now do exactly the same thing to the Algerians that the Germans did to us. That’s very difficult to understand . . . that’s not understandable, and anyhow, we don’t accept it.

 

[Singing “La Marseillaise”]

 

LILLIAN SMITH: The parts of our nature that are torn open; the wound that must not be healed: This, in a sense, is what I like to write about. But they would like to say, “This wound has been healed. Therefore we don’t have to even
read
anymore about it.” And this is very interesting about people, isn’t it? They want to be on the side of truth without ever facing truth. They want to be on the side of virtue without ever knowing what virtue is.

 

[The Weavers sing.]

[A brief recapitulation of the opening: the Japanese woman and the translator saying, “They were looking up in the sky, trying to spot the airplane”; the Japanese children’s song; the couple around the dinner table saying, “Heck, when I was nine or ten years old, I was wondering if the pond would have polliwogs
in it this year”; once again the American children’s song, “Children of the Lord”; followed by Perry Miranda’s interview with the youth, and the phrase “You were born to die, that’s all”; Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on banjo; and Terkel repeating Miranda’s question, “Born to die? What about between the time you are born and the time you die?”; and then:]

 

SEAN O’CASEY: That’s the question, “What is life,” my boy, “What is life?” Well, I found life an enjoyable, enchanting, active, and sometimes a terrifying experience. And I’ve enjoyed it completely. A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other. And to me, life is simply an invitation to live.

 

 

O’CASEY: You know, God, or Nature if you like, dumps a little boy at the tick of a clock, maybe, or the dawn of a day, into life, and a tick after he dumps a little girl beside him. So the boy and girl meet very early. And God says to the little boy; and God says to the little girl: “Be brave. Be brave. And evermore be brave.”

 

SHANTA GANDHI: In one village, we had an experience which I’ll never, never forget in my life . . .

 

 

GANDHI: It used to be our practice that after the show we would come out and just appeal for whatever people could give. We used to tell them, in very few words—sometimes through song, even—extra song; we’d appeal to give whatever they could for the people of Bengal. On one such occasion—
in a very small village it was—after the show, when we came out in the auditorium, we found there was a tremendous commotion. An old woman—she must be about fifty-five or sixty, she was bent—and she was dragging a cow right into the auditorium! I couldn’t understand what was happening, and before I could recover from the surprise, she came up and said, “Take this.” I had no word to say! What could I say? I said, “Well, well, well,” and that’s about all I could! All the speech . . . everything was gone; forgotten. It was the old woman who said, “My child, I have nothing else to give, but take this cow. It still gives milk, you know. And as you say the children are starving, without milk. Please take this. I’m an old woman; I don’t need very much milk. And while I live villagers will see to it that I don’t quite starve. You take this cow with you.” And she insisted on giving the cow to us. What could we say? We didn’t want to deprive the old woman of the cow. More than that, it would have been very difficult indeed to take the cow to Bengal. Luckily we hit on some idea, and said to her, “Grandma, please look after the cow for us ’til we are able to make some arrangement to take this cow to Bengal. It is our cow, we know, but you are
here
. And who can look after the cow better than you?” And that alone persuaded the old woman to take the cow. That was the India of that time. And we wanted to depict
that
India.