P.S. (7 page)

 

 

No, we don’t. That’s the whole point. And I suggest this: that in order to learn your name, you’re going to have to learn mine.
In a way, the American Negro is the key figure in this country. And if we don’t face him, we will never face anything.

 

If I don’t know your name, I, a white man, will never know mine. Thinking now, as a country—We think of Africa immediately, and you have, again (returning to your work, by the way, may I suggest this work to listeners—James Baldwin’s.
Nobody Knows My Name
, published by Dial, and even though I say it is a collection of essays, it isn’t that. It is a novel; it is an autobiography, really, in a way), you have a journalistic report, and a very accurate and astute one: “Princes and Powers,” it’s called. You were covering a meeting of Negro writers of the world in Paris, and African writers were speaking, too.

 

Yeah. It was really an African conference; it was predominantly African. The Negroes were there as Africans, or as, well, the black people of the world, let’s put it that way.

 

 

The twentieth century, in fact—

 

 

It’s a very great question. It’s almost impossible to assess what was lost, which makes it impossible to assess what’s gained. How can I put this? In a way, I almost envy African writers because there’s so much to excavate, you know, and because their
relationship to the world, at least from my vantage point—and about this I may be wrong—seems much more direct than mine can ever be. But God knows, the colonial experience destroyed so much, blasted so much, and of course changed forever the African personality. So one doesn’t know what really was there on the other side of the flood. It’s going to take generations before that past can be reestablished and, in effect, used.

And at the same time, of course, all of the African nations are under the obligation, the necessity, of moving into the twentieth century at really some fantastic rate of speed, which is the only way they can survive. And of course all Africans, whether they know it or not, have endured the European experience and have been stained and changed by the European standards.

In a curious way, the unification of Africa, insofar as it can be said to exist, is a white invention. That is to say, the only thing that really unites, as far as I can tell, all black men everywhere, is the fact that white men are on their necks. What I’m curious about is what will happen when this is no longer true and for the first time in the memory of anybody living, black men have their destinies in their own hands. What will come out then, and what the problems and tensions and terrors will be then, is a very great and very loaded question.

I think that if we were more honest here we could do a great deal to aid in this transition. Because we have an advantage, which we certainly consider to be a disadvantage, over all the other Western nations. That is to say, we have created—forgetting, you know, quite apart from anything else—the fact is we have created, and no other nation has, a black man who belongs, who is a part of the West. Now, and in distinction to Belgium or any other European power, we had our slaves
on the mainland. And therefore, no matter how we deny it, we couldn’t avoid human involvement with them, which we’ve almost perished denying, but which is, nevertheless, there.

Now, if we could turn about and face this, we could have a tremendous advantage in the world today. But as long as we don’t, there isn’t much hope for the West, really. If one can accept the fact that it is no longer important to be white, it would begin to cease to be important to be black. If one could accept the fact that no nation with twenty million black people in it, for so long and with such depth of involvement—no nation under these circumstances can really be called a white nation, this would be a great achievement and it would change a great many things.

 

 

I have a tendency to doubt it, but then of course there’s no way of knowing. I have a tendency, judging only from my very limited experience in Paris with a few Africans after all—my tendency is to doubt it.

I think that the real impulse is to excavate that heritage, at
no matter what cost, and bring it into the present. And I think that this is a very sound idea, because I think it’s needed. I think that all the things that were destroyed by Europe, which will never really be put in place again, still in that rubble I think there’s something of very great value, not only for Africans, but for all of us.

I really think that we’re living in a moment which is as important as that moment when Constantine became a Christian. I think that all the standards by which the Western world has lived for so long are in the process of breakdown and of revision, and a kind of passion and a kind of beauty and a kind of joy which was in the world before, and has been buried so long, has got to come back.

 

 

Yes, exactly.

 

 

Yes, yes, yes. And obviously this cannot—Well, I would hate to see it continue. 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. And precisely one of the things wrong with this country 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? And do you think this is really what I came here and suffered and died for? A lousy Cadillac?

 

 

For white or black, yes, exactly. I think the country’s got to find out what it means by “freedom.” Freedom is a very dangerous thing, you know. Anything else is disastrous. But freedom is dangerous. You know, you’ve got to make choices; you’ve got to make very dangerous choices; you’ve got to be taught that your life is in your hands.

 

 

Well, part of his freedom, of course, is just purely economical. It’s based on the social structure, the economic structure of Sweden. So he hasn’t got to worry about the money for his films, which is a very healthy thing for him.

But on another level, he impressed me as being free because he had—and this is a great paradox, it seems to me, about freedom—because he had accepted his limitations, the limitations within himself and the limitations within his society. I don’t mean that he necessarily accepted these limitations; I don’t mean that he was passive in the face of them. But he’d recognized that he was Ingmar Bergman who could do some things, and therefore could not do some others. He was not going to live forever. He had recognized what people in this country have a great deal of trouble recognizing, that life is very difficult, very difficult for
anybody
, anybody born. Now, I don’t think people can be free until they recognize this.

In the same way Bessie Smith was much freer—always and
terrible as this may sound—much freer than the people who murdered her, or let her die, you know. And Big Bill Broonzy was a much freer man than the success-ridden people running around on Madison Avenue today. If you can accept the worst, as someone said to me, then you can see the best. But if you think life is a great big, glorious plum pudding, you’ll end up in the madhouse, which is where, you know . . .

 

 

Yes, yes, exactly. Well, I think the proof that Negroes are much stronger in the South today is simply, you know—

 

 

She knew who she was. And after all, that child has been coming for a very long time. She didn’t come out of nothing. That Negro families are able to produce such children, whereas the good white people of the South have yet to make any appearance, proves something awful about the moral state of the South. Those people in Tallahassee who are never in the streets when the mobs are there, well, you know, why aren’t they? It’s their town, too.

 

 

Lillian Smith is a great—I think a very great—and heroic, and very lonely figure, obviously. She has very few friends in that little hamlet in Georgia where she carries on so gallantly. She’s paid a tremendous price for trying to do what she thinks is right. And the price
is
terribly, terribly high. The only way for the price to become a little less is for more people to pay it.

 

 

The majority is usually—I hate to say this—wrong. I think there’s a great confusion in this country anyway about that.

 

Ibsen’s
Enemy of the People.

 

Yes, yes. I really think seriously there’s a division of labor in the world. And some people are here to, I can see . . . Let me put it this way: There are so many things I’m not good at. I can’t drive a truck. I couldn’t run a bank. Well, all right. Other people have to do that. Well, in a way they’re responsible to me and I’m responsible to them, you know.

My responsibility to them is to try to tell the truth as I see it—not so much about my private life as about
their
private lives, you know. So that there is in the world a standard for
all
of us, which will get you through your trouble. Because your trouble’s always coming, you know. And Cadillacs don’t get you through it. And neither do psychiatrists, incidentally. All that gets you through it, really, is some faith in life, which is not so easy to achieve.

Now, when you talk about majorities and minorities, I always have the feeling that this country’s talking about a kind of popularity contest in which everybody works together toward some absolutely hideous, hideously material end. But in truth, I think that politicians—for example, in the South where it’s shown most clearly—I think all the southern politicians have failed their responsibility to the white people of the South. Somebody in the South must know that obviously the situation, the status quo, will not exist another hundred years. And their responsibility is to prepare the people who are now forming those mobs, to prepare those people for that day. You know, to minimize the damage to
them
, even.

Now, the majority rule in the South is not a majority rule at all; it’s a mob rule. And what these mobs feel is a moral vacuum, which is created by the lack of a leader. And it seems to me this is the way the world is. And I’m not talking about dictatorships. I mean that—

 

 

Statesmen, and people who are sitting in government are supposed to know more about government than people who are driving trucks and digging potatoes and trying to raise their children. That’s what you’re in the office for.

 

 

Yes, which is precisely what we don’t have here.

 

 

Yes, if you don’t know what’s happened behind you, you have no idea what’s happening around you. That’s a law.

 

 

That’s right.