The Cross of Redemption (12 page)

Because you have thus given him his freedom, the American Negro can do whatever he wills; you can no longer do anything to him. He doesn’t want anything you’ve got; he doesn’t believe anything you say. I don’t know why and I don’t know how America arrived at this peculiar point of view. If one examines American history, there is no apparent reason for it. It’s a bloody history, as bloody as everybody else’s history, as deluded, as fanatical. One has only to look at it from the time we all got here. Look at the Pilgrims, the Puritans—the people who presumably fled oppression in Europe only to set up a more oppressed society here—people who wanted freedom, who killed off the Indians. Look at all the people moving into a new era, and enslaving all the blacks. These are the facts of American history as opposed to the legend. We came from Europe, we came from Africa, we came from all over the world. We brought whatever was in us from China or from France. We
all
brought it with us. We were not transformed when we crossed the ocean. Something else happened. Something much more serious. We no longer had any way of finding out, of knowing who we were.

Many people have said in various tones of voice, meaning various things, that the most unlucky thing that happened in America was the presence of the Negro. Freud said, in a kind of rage, that the black race was the folly of America and that it served America right. Well, of course, I don’t quite know what Freud had in mind. But I can see that, in one way, it may have been the most unlucky thing that happened to America, since America, unlike any other Western power, had its slaves on the mainland. They were here. We had our slaves at a time, unluckily for us, when slavery was going out of fashion. And after the Bill of Rights. Therefore, it would seem to me that the presence of this black mass here as opposed to all the things we said we believed in and also at a time when the whole doctrine of white supremacy had never even been questioned is one of the most crucial facts of our history. It would be nightmarish now to read the handbooks of colonialists a hundred years ago; even ten years ago, for that matter. But in those days, it was not even a question of black people being inferior to white people. The American found himself in a very peculiar position because he knew that black people were people. Frenchmen could avoid knowing it—they never met a black man. Englishmen could avoid knowing it. But Americans could not avoid knowing it because, after all, here he was, and he was, no matter how it was denied, a man, just like everybody else. And the attempt to avoid this, to avoid this fact, I consider one of the keys to what we can call loosely the American psychology. For one thing, it created in Americans a kind of perpetual, hidden, festering, and entirely unadmitted guilt. Guilt is a very peculiar emotion. As long as you are guilty about something, no matter what it is, you are not compelled to change it. Guilt is like a warm bath or, to be rude, it is like masturbation: you can get used to it, you can prefer it, you may get to a place where you cannot live without it, because in order to live without it, in order to get past this guilt, you must act. And in order to act, you must be conscious and take great chances and be responsible for the consequences. Therefore, liberals, and people who are not even liberals, much prefer to discuss “the Negro problem” than to try to deal with what this figure of the Negro really means personally to them. They still prefer to read statistics, charts, Gallup polls, rather than deal with the reality. They still tell me, to console me, how many Negroes bought Cadillacs, Cutty Sark, Coca-Cola, Schweppes last year; how many more will buy Cadillacs, Cutty Sark, Coca-Cola, and Schweppes next year. To prove to me that things are getting better. Now, of course, I think it is a very sad matter if you suppose that you or I have bled and suffered and died in this country in order to achieve Cadillacs, Cutty
Sark, Schweppes, and Coca-Cola. It seems to me if one accepts this speculation about the luxury of guilt that the second reason must be related to the first. That has to do with the ways in which we manage to project onto the Negro face, because it is so visible, all of our guilts and aggressions and desires. And if you doubt this, think of the legends that surround the Negro to this day. Think, when you think of these legends, that they were not invented by Negroes, but they were invented by the white Republic. Ask yourself if Aunt Jemima or Uncle Tom ever existed anywhere and why it was necessary to invent them. Ask yourself why Negroes until today are, in the popular imagination, at once the most depraved people under heaven and the most saintly. Ask yourself what William Faulkner really was trying to say in
Requiem for a Nun
, which is about a nigger, whore, dope addict, saint. Faulkner wrote it. I never met Nancy, the nun he was writing about. He never met her either, but the question is, why was it necessary for him and for us to hold on to this image? We needn’t go so far afield. Ask yourself why liberals are so delighted with the movie
The Defiant Ones
. It ends, if you remember, when Sidney Poitier, the black man, having been chained interminably to Tony Curtis, the white man, finally breaks the chain, is on the train, is getting away, but no, he doesn’t go, doesn’t leave poor Tony Curtis down there on the chain gang. Not at all. He jumps off the train and they go buddy-buddy back together to the same old Jim Crow chain gang. Now this is a fable. Why? Who is trying to prove what to whom? I’ll tell you something. I saw that movie twice. I saw it downtown with all my liberal friends, who were delighted when Sidney jumped off the train. I saw it uptown with my less liberal friends, who were furious. When Sidney jumped off that train they called him all kinds of unmentionable things. Well, their reaction was at least more honest and more direct. Why is it necessary at this late date, one screams at the world, to prove that the Negro doesn’t really hate you, he’s forgiven and forgotten all of it? Maybe he has. That’s not the problem.
You
haven’t. And that
is
the problem:

There’s one more thing I ought to add to this. The final turn of the screw that created this peculiar purgatory which we call America is that aspect of our history that is most triumphant. We really did conquer a continent; we have made a lot of money; we’re better off materially than anybody
else in the world. How easy it is as a person or as a nation to suppose that one’s well-being is proof of one’s virtue; in fact, a great many people are saying just that right now—you know, “We’re the best nation in the world because we’re the richest nation in the world.” The American way of life has proven itself, according to these curious people, and that’s why we’re so rich. This is called “Yankee virtue” and it comes from Calvin, but my point is that I think this has again something to do with the American failure to face reality. Since we have all these things, we can’t be so bad, and since we have all these things, we are robbed, in a way, of the incentive to walk away from the TV set, the Cadillac, and go into the chaos out of which and only out of which we can create ourselves into human beings.

To talk about these things in this country today is extremely difficult. Even the words mean nothing anymore. I think, for example, what we call “the religious revival” in America means that more and more people periodically get more and more frightened and go to church in order to make sure they don’t lose their investments. This is the only reason that I can find for the popularity of men who have nothing to do with religion at all, like Norman Vincent Peale, for example—only for example; there’re lots of others just like him. I think this is very sad. I think it’s very frightening. But Ray Charles, who is a great tragic artist, makes of a genuinely religious confession something triumphant and liberating. He tells us that he cried so loud he gave the blues to his neighbor next door.

How can I put it? Let us talk about a person who is no longer very young, who somehow managed to get to, let us say, the age of forty, and a great many of us do, without ever having been touched, broken, disturbed, frightened—forty-year-old virgin, male or female. There is a sense of the grotesque about a person who has spent his or her life in a kind of cotton batting. There is something monstrous about never having been hurt, never having been made to bleed, never having lost anything, never having gained anything because life is beautiful, and in order to keep it beautiful you’re going to stay just the way you are and you’re not going to test your theory against all the possibilities outside. America is something like that. The failure on our part to accept the reality of pain, of anguish, of ambiguity, of death has turned us into a very peculiar and sometimes monstrous people. It means, for one thing, and it’s very serious, that people who have had no experience have no compassion. People who have had no experience suppose that if a man is a thief, he is a thief; but, in fact, that isn’t the most important thing about him. The most important thing about him is that he is a man and, furthermore, that if he’s a thief or a murderer
or whatever he is,
you
could also be and you would know this, anyone would know this who had really dared to live. Miles Davis once gave poor Billie Holiday one hundred dollars and somebody said, “Man, don’t you know she’s going to go out and spend it on dope?” and Miles said, “Baby, have you ever been sick?”

Now, you don’t know that by reading, by looking. You don’t know what the river is like or what the ocean is like by standing on the shore. You can’t know anything about life and suppose you can get through it clean. The most monstrous people are those who think they are going to. I think this shows in everything we see and do, in everything we read about these peculiar private lives, so peculiar that it is almost impossible to write about them, because what a man
says
he’s doing has nothing to do with what he’s
really
doing. If you read such popular novelists as John O’Hara, you can’t imagine what country he’s talking about. If you read
Life
magazine, it’s like reading about the moon. Nobody lives in that country. That country does not exist and, what is worse, everybody knows it. But everyone pretends that it does. Now, this is panic. And this is terribly dangerous, because it means that when the trouble comes, and trouble always comes, you won’t survive it. It means that if your son dies, you may go to pieces or find the nearest psychiatrist or the nearest church, but you won’t survive it on your own. If you don’t survive your trouble out of your own resources, you have not really survived it; you have merely closed yourself against it. The blues are rooted in the slave songs; the slaves discovered something genuinely terrible, terrible because it sums up the universal challenge, the universal hope, the universal fear:

Well, that is almost all I am trying to say. I say it out of great concern. And out of a certain kind of hope. If you can live in the full knowledge that you are going to die, that you are not going to live forever, that if you live with the reality of death, you can live. This is not mystical talk; it is a fact. It is a principal fact of life. If you can’t do it, if you spend your entire life in flight from death, you are also in flight from life. For example, right now you find the most unexpected people building bomb shelters, which is very close to being a crime. It is a private panic which creates a public delusion that some of us will be saved by bomb shelters. If we had, as human beings, on a personal and private level, our personal authority, we would
know better; but because we are so uncertain of all these things, some of us, apparently, are willing to spend the rest of our lives underground in concrete. Perhaps, if we had a more working relationship with ourselves and with one another, we might be able to turn the tide and eliminate the propaganda for building bomb shelters. People who in some sense know who they are can’t change the world always, but they can do something to make it a little more, to make life a little more human. Human in the best sense. Human in terms of joy, freedom which is always private, respect, respect for one another, even such things as manners. All these things are very important, all these old-fashioned things. People who don’t know who they are privately, accept as we have accepted for nearly fifteen years, the fantastic disaster which we call American politics and which we call American foreign policy, and the incoherence of the one is an exact reflection of the incoherence of the other. Now, the only way to change all this is to begin to ask ourselves very difficult questions.

I will stop now. But I want to quote two things. A very great American writer, Henry James, writing to a friend of his who had just lost her husband, said, “Sorrow wears and uses us but we wear and use it too, and it is blind. Whereas we, after a manner, see.” And Bessie said:

(1964)

P
ART OF THE PRICE
that Americans have paid for delusion, part of what we have done to ourselves, was given to us in Dallas, Texas. This happened in a civilized nation, the country which is the moral leader of the Free World, when some lunatic blew off the President’s head. Now, I want to suggest something, and I don’t want to sound rude, but we all know that it has been many generations and it hasn’t stopped yet that black men’s heads have been blown off—and nobody cared. Because, as I said before, it wasn’t happening to a person, it was happening to a “nigger.”

We all know that this country prides itself in something it calls “upward mobility.” “Upward mobility” means, among other things, other sinister things, that if you were born a poor boy—say, you are born in the ghetto, or in the backwoods someplace, or in Sicily, and you can’t speak English very well yet—it means that if you work hard and save your pennies and be a good boy (or know how to be a bad boy) you can get to be a junior executive by the time you are thirty. That is what “upward mobility” means and that is
all
it means. It does not apply, of course, to one-tenth of the population. A black boy born in the backwoods and a black boy born in the ghetto knows he is not going to get out of the ghetto by saving his pennies and being a nice boy. Now, if I am imprisoned in the ghetto, somebody is keeping me there. I can’t walk out because of the warden. There are two people
you always find in prison: the man in the prison and the man who is keeping him there. I, as the prisoner, have a terrible advantage since I have to understand by the time I am twelve the nature of the prison and
your
nature, since you are my warden, and then I have to figure out how to outwit you and how to lick you and I do, and I manage, very often anyway, to survive all your prisons, but you, the wardens, have not. If we in this country had a stronger grasp of reality—and when I say “reality” I mean the reality of another human being—another human being!—if we had not lost that, then the assassination of Medgar Evers would have aroused the country
then
.