P.S. (6 page)

It’s always now.

 

 

Time is always now. I think everybody who’s thought about his own life knows this. You know you don’t make resolutions about something you’re going to do next year. No. You decide
to write a book? No. The book may be finished twenty years from now, but you’ve got to start it now.

 

I’m thinking of the subtitle of your book and the position of the Negro woman–Negro man—
Notes of a Native Son
. Naturally, I immediately think of Richard Wright, who has meant so much to you as an artist and as a man.

 

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

 

 

Yeah. It’s a beautiful, terrifying story. And it really gets at something which has been hidden for all these generations, which is the ways in which—It really suggests, more forcibly than anything I’ve read, really, the humiliation the Negro man endures. And it’s this which the country doesn’t want to know.

And therefore, when people talk about the “noble savage,” you know, and the greater sexuality of Negroes and all that jazz, you know—Whereas I know I could name, if we were not on the air, six people who I know, with whom I grew up, six men who are on the needle, just because there is really no . . . the demoralization is so complete. In order to make the act of love, there’s got to be a certain confidence, a certain trust. Otherwise it degenerates into nothing but desperate and featureless brutality.

 

 

Yes, that’s right. That’s right. I knew a boy very well once, who told me, almost in just that many words, that he wasn’t trying to get high he was just trying to hold himself together, you know. He also said, talking about himself walking through one of our cities one morning and the way people looked at him . . . And he said to himself, he told me: You ought to be able to bear me if I can bear you.

What is most appalling about it is that all of these things might not be so terrible if, when facing well-meaning white people, one didn’t realize that they don’t know anything about this at all and don’t want to know. And this, somehow, really is the last drop in a very bitter cup. Because if
they
don’t know and don’t want to know, then what hope is there?

When people talk to me about the strides that have been made and—all these dreary movies Hollywood keeps turning out about be kind to Negroes today, and isn’t this a good sign, well, of course they’ve never seen these movies with a Negro audience watching them.

 

 

Well, for example, in
The Defiant Ones
, a movie which I really cannot say anything about. [Laughs] At the end of that movie, when Sidney, who was very brilliant in it, and who does his best with a rather dreary role—there’s something with it which I wouldn’t believe could have been done. Anyway, at the end of that movie, when Sidney jumps off that train to rescue Tony Curtis—Downtown, I saw it twice deliberately. I saw it downtown in front of a white, liberal audience—I suppose they’re liberal—there was a great sigh of relief and clapping, and I felt that this was a very noble gesture on the part of a very noble black man. And I suppose in a way it was.

I saw it uptown, and Sidney jumps off the train, and there’s a tremendous roar of fury from the audience, with which I must say I agreed, you know. They told Sidney to “get back on the train, you fool.” And in any case, why would he go back to the chain gang when they’re obviously going to be separated again?—a silly Jim Crow chain gang. What’s the movie supposed to prove? What the movie is designed to prove really, to white people, is that Negroes are going to forgive them for their crimes, and that somehow they’re going to escape scot-free.

Now, I myself am not being vengeful when I say this at all, because I would hate to see the nightmare begin all over again with the shoe on the other foot. But I’m talking about a human fact, and the human fact is this: that one can’t escape anything that one’s done. One’s got to pay for it. And you either pay for it willingly or you pay for it unwillingly.

 

 

Yes, precisely. And I must admit that there is a great ambivalence in myself. For example, I’m devoted to King and I’ve worked with CORE and tried to raise money for the freedom riders. And I adore those children; I have tremendous respect for them. And yet, at the same time, in talking to very different people, and somewhat older, and also talking to excellent students who said I simply can’t take it anymore . . . I don’t know.

Let me put it another way. King’s influence is tremendous, but his influence in the North is slight. And the North doesn’t
talk about the South. Chicagoans talk about Mississippi as though they had no South Side, and, you know, white people in New York talk about Alabama as though they had no Harlem. And it’s a great device on the part of white people to ignore what’s happening in their own backyard. Now whether, let us say, I were for or against violence, this is absolutely irrelevant.

The question which really obsesses me today is that whether or not I like it, and whether or not you like it, unless this situation is ameliorated, and very, very quickly, there will
be
violence. There will be violence—and I am as convinced of this as I am that I’m sitting in this chair—one day in Birmingham. And it won’t be the fault of the Negroes in Birmingham; it’s the fault of the administration in Birmingham and the apathy of Washington. It is an intolerable situation, which has been intolerable for one hundred years.

I really cannot tell my nephew or my brother—my nephew is fourteen; my brother is a grown man—I can’t really tell my nephew that when someone hits him he shouldn’t hit back. I really cannot tell him that. Still less can I tell my brother that if someone comes to his house with a gun he should let him in—no—and allow him to do what he wants with his children and his wife. But the point is, even if I
were
able to tell my brother that he should, there’s absolutely no guarantee that my brother will, and I can’t blame him.

It’s too easy, in another way, for the country to sit in admiration before the sit-in students, because it doesn’t cost them anything. And they have no idea what it costs those kids to go through that, to picket a building, for example, when people upstairs in the building are spitting down on your head or trying to vomit down on you. This is a tremendous amount to demand of people who are technically free, in a free country, which is supposed to be the leader of the West. It seems to me
a great cowardice on the part of the public to expect that it’s going to be saved by a handful of children for whom they refuse to be responsible.

 

 

It is always much easier, obviously, to . . . How can I put this? Well, in Harlem, there are meetings every Saturday night; those people are there, listening to those speeches and all kinds of other speeches, because they are in despair, and they don’t believe. And this is the most dangerous thing that has happened. They don’t believe. They’ve been betrayed so often and by so many people, not all of them white, they don’t believe that the country really means what it says, and there is nothing in the record to indicate the country means what it says.

Now, when they’re told that they are better than white people, it is a perfectly inevitable development. You know, if for all these hundreds of years white people are going around saying that they’re better than anybody else, sooner or later they’re bound to create a counterweight to this, especially with Africa on the stage of the world now, which is simply to take the whole legend of Western history, the entire theology, changing one or two pronouns, and transferring from Jerusalem to Islam, and just this small change can turn it all against the white world. And the white world can’t do anything about this, can’t call the Muslim leaders or anybody else on this, until they’re willing to face their own history.

 

 

Well, in the beginning, I looked upon Paris as a refuge, too; I never intended to come back to this country.

I lived there so long, though, and I got to know a great deal about Paris, and I suppose that several things happened to me. One of them was watching American Negroes there who had dragged Mississippi, so to speak, across the ocean with them, and are operating now in a vacuum. I myself, you know, carried all my social habits to Paris with me, where they were not needed, where it took me a long time to learn how to do without them. And this complex frightened me very much.

But more important than that, perhaps, was my relationship with Africans and with Algerians there who belonged to France, and it didn’t demand any spectacularly great perception to realize that I was treated, insofar as I was noticed at all, differently from them because I had an American passport. I may not have liked this fact, but it was a fact. And I could see very well that if I were an Algerian I would not have been living in the same city in which I imagined myself to be living as Jimmy Baldwin. Or if I were an African, it would have been a very different city for me. And I also began to see that the West, the entire West, was changing, was breaking up; that its power over me, over Africans, was gone and would never come again. So then it seemed that exile was but another way of being in limbo.

But I suppose, finally, the most important thing was that I am a writer, and that sounds grandiloquent, but the truth is that I don’t think that, seriously speaking, anybody in his right mind would want to be a writer. But you do discover that you
are one, and then you haven’t got any choice; either you live that life or you don’t live any. And I’m an American writer; this country is my subject. And in working out the forthcoming novel, I began to realize that the New York I was trying to describe was a New York that was by this time nearly twenty years old. I had to come back to check my impressions and to, as it turned out, to be stung again, to look at it again, bear it again, and be reconciled to it again.

Now, I imagine, in my own case, I will have to spend the rest of my life, however long that will be, as a kind of transatlantic commuter. Because at some point when I’m in this country I always get to a place where I realize I don’t see it very clearly anymore. Because it’s very exhausting to spend—after all, you do spend twenty-four hours a day resisting and resenting it, you know, and trying to keep a kind of equilibrium in it. So I suppose that I will keep going away and coming back.

 

 

Yeah. I began to see this country for the first time. If I hadn’t gone away, I would never have been able to see it, and if I hadn’t been able to see it, I would never have been able to forgive it.

You know, I’m not mad at this country anymore. I’m very worried about it. And I’m not worried about the Negroes in the country even so much as I’m worried about the country. The country doesn’t know what it’s done to Negroes. But the country has no notion whatever—and this is disastrous—about what it’s done to itself. They have yet to assess the price they paid, North and South, for keeping the Negro in his place. And, from my point of view, it shows in every single level of our lives, from the most public—

 

 

Well, one of the reasons, for example, I think that our youth is so badly educated—and it is inconceivably badly educated—is because education demands a certain daring, a certain independence of mind. You have to teach young people to think, and in order to teach young people to think, you have to teach them to think about everything. There mustn’t be something they cannot think about. If there’s one thing they can’t think about, then very shortly they can’t think about anything, you know.

Now, there’s always something in this country, of course, that one cannot think about, and what one cannot think about is the Negro. Now, this may seem like a very subtle argument, but I don’t think so. I think that really time will prove the connection between the level of the lives we lead, and this extraordinary endeavor to avoid black men. And I think it shows in our public life.

When I was living in Europe, it occurred to me that what Americans in Europe did not know about Europeans is precisely what they didn’t know about me. And what Americans today don’t know about the rest of the world, like Cuba, or Africa, is what they don’t know about me. An incoherent—totally incoherent—foreign policy of this country is a reflection of the incoherence of the private lives here.