The Cross of Redemption (14 page)

I think that it might be useful, in order to survive our present crisis, to do what any individual does, is forced to do, to survive his crisis, which is to look back on his beginnings. The beginnings of this country (it seems to me a banality to say it, but, alas, it has to be said) have nothing whatever to do with the myth we have created about it. The country did not come about because a handful of people in various parts of Europe said, “I want to be free,” and promptly built a boat or a raft and crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Not at all, not at all. In passing, let me remark that the words “liberty” and “freedom” are terribly misused words. Liberty is a genuine political possibility, in spite of the fact that the word is so often used as a slogan; and freedom—which, as I understand it, is beyond politics, though affecting politics and affected by it—may be the very last thing that people want. The very last thing. Anyway, the people who settled the country, the people who came here, came here for one reason, no matter how disguised. They came here because they thought it would be better here than wherever they were. That’s why they came. And that’s the only reason that they came. Anybody who was making it in England did not get on the
Mayflower
. It is important that one begin to recognize this because part of the dilemma of this country is that it has managed to believe the myth it has created about its past, which is another way of saying that it has entirely denied its past. And we all know, I think, what happens to a person who is born where I was born, say, in Harlem, and goes into the world pretending that he was born in Sutton Place. And what happens to a person, however odd this may sound, also happens to a nation, a nation being, when it finally comes into existence, the achievement of the people who make it up; and the quality of the nation being absolutely at the mercy of, defined and dictated by, the nature and the quality of its people.

Let me point, if I may, to another thing, which is really the same thing. The Italian immigrant arriving from Italy, for example, or the son of parents who were born in Sicily, makes a great point of not speaking Italian, because he’s going to become an American. And he can’t bear his parents, because they are backward. This may seem a trivial matter. But it is of the utmost importance when a father is despised by his son, and this is one of the facts of American life, and is what we are really referring to, in oblique and terrible fashion, when we talk about upward mobility.

In this extraordinary endeavor to create the country called America, a great many crimes were committed. And I want to make it absolutely clear, or as clear as I can, that I understand perfectly well that crime is universal, and as old as mankind, and I trust, therefore, that no one will assume that I am indicting or accusing. I’m not any longer interested in the crime. People treat each other very badly and always have and very probably always will. I’m not talking about the crime; I’m talking about denying what one does. This is a much more sinister matter. We did several things in order to conquer the country. There existed, at the time we reached these shores, a group of people who had never heard of machines, or, as far as I know, of money—which we
had
heard about. We promptly eliminated them; we killed them. I’m talking about the Indians, in case you don’t know what I’m talking about. Well, people have done that for centuries, but I’m willing to bet anything you like that not many American children being taught American history have any real sense of what that collision was like, or what we really did, how we really achieved the extermination of the Indians, or what that meant. And it is interesting to consider that very few social critics, very few, have begun even to analyze the hidden reasons for the tremendous popularity of the cowboy–Indian legend in American life, a legend so powerful that it still, in 1963, dominates the American television screen. I suspect that all those cowboy–Indian stories
are designed to reassure us that no crime was committed. We’ve made a legend out of a massacre. In which connection, if I may digress for a moment, there used to be an old joke going around among Negroes. If you remember the Lone Ranger, he was white, of course, and he had a sidekick called Tonto, an Indian. There’s always a good Indian. He rode around with the Lone Ranger, and according to my memory of the story, Tonto and the Lone Ranger ran into this ambush of nothing but Indians. And the Lone Ranger said, “What are we going to do, Tonto?” And Tonto said, “What do you mean, ‘we’?”

Well, I tell that joke in order to point out something else. It’s a Negro joke. One of the other things we did in order to conquer the country, physically speaking, was to enslave the Africans. Now slavery, like murder, is one of the oldest human institutions. So we cannot quarrel about the facts of slavery. That is to say, we could, but that’s another story. We enslaved them because, in order to conquer the country, we had to have cheap labor. And the man who is now known as the American Negro, who is one of the oldest Americans, and the
only
one who never wanted to come here, did the dirty work, hoed the cotton—in fact, it is not too much to say that without his presence, without that strong back, the American economy, the American nation, would have had a vast amount of trouble creating that capital of which we are now so proud, and to which we claim Negroes have never contributed anything. If the Negro had not done all that totin’ of barges and liftin’ of bales, America would be a very different country, and it would certainly be a much poorer country.

The people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn’t—I mean
you can tell
, they knew he wasn’t—anything
else
but a man; but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one’s life was to say that he
was not
a man. For if he wasn’t a man, then no crime had been committed. That lie is the basis of our present trouble. It is an extremely complex lie. If, on the one hand, one man cannot avoid recognizing another man, it is also true then, obviously, that the black man in captivity, and treated like an animal, and told that he was,
knew
that
he
was, a man being oppressed by other men who did not even have the courage to admit what they were doing. When the African, in Africa, enslaved other men, he did not pretend that he was merely breaking in oxen.

Let me tell you a small anecdote. I was in Dakar about a year ago, in Senegal, and just off Dakar there is a very small island, which was once the
property of the Portuguese. It is simply a rock with a fortress; from Africa, it is the nearest point to America. My sister and I went to this island to visit something called the Slave House. The house was not terribly large. It looks a little like houses you see in New Orleans. That’s the truth. It’s got two stories and a courtyard and a staircase on each side, sweeping stone staircases. I assume that the captains and the slavers lived upstairs; downstairs were the slave quarters. You walked through a kind of archway, very dark, very low, made of stone, and on either side of you were a series of cells, with stone floors and rusted bits of iron still embedded in the walls. This may be my imagination, but it seemed to me that the odor was still there, that I could still smell it. What it must have smelled like, with all those human beings chained together, in such a place. I remember that they couldn’t speak to each other, because they didn’t come from the same tribe. In this corridor, as I say, there are the cells on either side of you, but straight ahead, as you enter the archway, or corridor, is a very much smaller doorway, cut out of the stone, which opens on the sea. You go to the edge of the door, and look down, and at your feet are some black stones and the foam of the Atlantic Ocean, bubbling up against you. The day that we were there, I tried, but it was impossible—the ocean is simply as vast as the horizon—I tried to imagine what it must have felt like to find yourself chained and speechless, speechless in the most total sense of that word, on your way
where?

There were some French tourists around and I confess that for a moment I almost hit one of them on the head. They wouldn’t have known why.

Anyway, it was the black man’s necessity, once he got here, to accept the cross; he had to survive, to manage somehow to outwit his Christian master; what he was really facing when he got here was the Bible and the gun. But I’m not complaining about that now, either. What is most terrible is that American white men are not prepared to believe my version of the story, to believe that it happened. In order to avoid believing that, they have set up in themselves a fantastic system of evasions, denials, and justifications, which system is about to destroy their grasp of reality, which is another way of saying their moral sense.

What I am trying to say is that the crime is not the most important thing here. What makes our situation serious is that we have spent so many generations pretending that it did not happen. Ask yourself on what assumptions rest those extraordinary questions which white men ask, no matter how politely. On what assumption rests the question “Would you let your
sister marry one?” It’s based on some preoccupation in the minds of white men. God knows I’m not interested in marrying your sister. I mean that. On what assumption, again, rests the extraordinary question “What does the Negro want?” The question betrays a flight from reality which is absolutely unimaginable: if we weren’t dealing with what, in the public mind, is a
Negro
, the question could never be asked; we’d know damn well what he wanted. We know very well that
we
would not like to live the way we compel Negroes to live. Anyone who asks “What does the Negro want?” is saying, in another way, that he does not wish to be told, is saying that he is afraid to change, is afraid to pay his dues.

Let’s go back, for a minute, to where I started. Let’s go back to Nietzsche: “I stand before my highest mountain, and before my longest journey, and, therefore, must I descend deeper than I have ever before descended.” And we spoke a little earlier about the necessity, when the collision between your terms and life’s terms occurs, of saying yes to life. That’s the descent. The difference between a boy and a man is that a boy imagines there is some way to get through life safely, and a man knows he’s got to pay his dues. In this country, the entire nation has always assumed that I would pay their dues for them. What it means to be a Negro in this country is that you represent, you are the receptacle of and the vehicle of, all the pain, disaster, sorrow which white Americans think they can escape. This is what is really meant by keeping the Negro in his place. It is why white people, until today, are still astounded and offended if, by some miscalculation, they are forced to suspect that you are not happy where they have placed you. This is true; and I’m not talking about the Deep South. People finally say to you, in an attempt to dismiss the social reality, “But you’re so bitter!” Well, I may or may not be bitter, but if I were, I would have good reasons for it: chief among them that American blindness, or cowardice, which allows us to pretend that life presents no reasons, to say nothing of opportunities, for being bitter.

In this country, for a dangerously long time, there have been two levels of experience. One—to put it cruelly, but, I think, quite truthfully—can be summed up in the images of Doris Day and Gary Cooper: two of the most grotesque appeals to innocence the world has ever seen. And the other, subterranean, indispensable, and denied, can be summed up, let us say, in the tone and in the face of Ray Charles. And there has never been in this country any genuine confrontation between these two levels of experience. Let me force you, or try to force you, to observe a paradox. Though almost all white Americans come from Europe, Europe understands the
American Negro better than they understand the white American. White Americans find it extremely difficult to establish any dialogue between themselves and Europeans for the very good reason, no doubt, that they have yet to break into communion with themselves; but black Americans and Europeans know what it is to suffer, and are far beyond any hope of innocence. A bill for the American endeavor to get from the cradle to the grave looking like Eisenhower has now come in.

White people are astounded by Birmingham. Black people aren’t. White people are endlessly demanding to be reassured that Birmingham is really on Mars. They don’t want to believe, still less to act on the belief, that what is happening in Birmingham (and I mean this, and I’m not exaggerating; there are several thousand ways to kill or castrate a man) is happening all over the country, and has been for countless generations; they don’t want to realize that there is not one step, one inch, no distance, morally or actually, between Birmingham and Los Angeles.

Now, it is entirely possible that we may all go under. But until that happens, I prefer to believe that since a society is created by men, it can be remade by men. The price for this transformation is high. White people will have to ask themselves precisely why they found it necessary to invent the nigger; for the nigger is a white invention, and white people invented him out of terrible necessities of their own. And every white citizen of this country will have to accept the fact that he is not innocent, because those dogs and those hoses are being turned on American children, on American soil, with the tacit consent of the American Republic; those crimes are being committed in your name. Black people will have to do something very hard, too, which is to allow the white citizen his first awkward steps toward maturity. We have, indeed, functioned in this country in precisely that way for a very long time—we were the first psychiatrists here. If we can hang on just a little bit longer, all of us, we may make it. We’ve got to try. But I’ve tried to outline what I take to be some of the conditions for our survival.

(1964)