The Cross of Redemption (34 page)

If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

Therefore: peace.

Brother James
November 19, 1970

A
RTISTS AND PRISONERS
have more in common with each other than have the servants of the State. Put it another way: the warden of the prison is not expected, still less required, to answer to his conscience; he is expected (and required) to execute the will of the State. (How he explains this to his children is, cunningly enough, no concern of the State, which has every reason to believe that the son will grow up to be like the father.) Or, to put it in yet another way, the artist, insofar as the State is compelled to consider this inconvenient creature at all, is nothing more—and also nothing less—than a potential prisoner. The artist is the prisoner at large who has so far escaped his just deserts by means of his private cunning and the liberal bleeding-heart public cowardice.

What artists and prisoners have in common is that both know what it means to be free.

Now, this is a thoroughly unattractive paradox which I, like many another, would like to be able to avoid. But it is impossible not to recognize that the people who are endlessly boasting of their freedom—
we’re the best because we’re free!
—loathe the very suggestion of such a possibility for anyone
other than themselves. They are forever stitching flags, making and threatening and dropping bombs, creating instruments of torture and torture chambers and overseers and deputies and detention centers. Their notion of freedom is so strenuously calisthenic, not to say defensive, that freedom becomes a matter of keeping everybody else out of your backyard. Or bomb shelter: there are none, by no means incidentally, in the ghetto. (If I happen to be wrong about ghetto bomb shelters, I would love to be corrected.)

A vast amount of energy (the word is not yet obsolete) and an indefensible proportion of the public treasury—this government is spending
our
money, after all—go into endeavors which have as their single intention and concrete purpose and effect that no one be so rash as to act, or to dream of acting, on his or her right to be.

I have suggested that the connection between the artist and the prisoner is an unattractive paradox. But it is more than that. I have called it an unattractive paradox because it would seem to indicate that, in general, we value freedom, or find ourselves compelled to attempt to define it, only when it is arbitrarily limited, or menaced: when another
human
power has the right to tell us when and where to stand or sit or move or live or make love or have (or claim) our children—or bow mighty low, or die. We do not feel this way about the rain, the snow, the thunder, or the earthquake, or death. These have no reason to consider our hope, or anguish. The thunder which deafens me or the water which drowns me is not a man like me, is not compelled to hear my cry or answer my plea.

But we are compelled to hear each other: knowing perfectly well how little can be done, one discovers how to do some things.

This may be part of the definition, or pride or price of freedom, for this apprehension necessarily involves a real recognition of, and respect for, the other and for the condition of the other. The other is no longer other and is indeed, as the song puts it, closer than a brother—the other is oneself.

There is absolutely nothing, in my experience, more painful, more devastating, than this revelation. One can scarcely live with it, but one can certainly not begin to live without it. It is this perception, as I begin more and more to believe, which gives the person the energy—the passion—to break the chains which bind him. Or, to be accurate, the chains which bind us. The unattractive paradox is that it is this danger, this action, this recognition of what it means to love one another, which defines freedom, which brings it to being, which makes it as real as the Word become flesh, to dwell among us.

Brethren, please remember, especially in this speechless time and place, that in the beginning was the Word. We are in ourselves much older than any witness to Carthage or Pompeii and, having been through auction, flood, and fire, to say nothing of the spectacular excavation of our names, are not destined for the rubble.

(1982)

•      •     •

T
HOUGH
I
AM MOT
a religious or, more precisely, a churchgoing man, I, like all black Americans, come out of the church—the black church, for we were not allowed to be members of the white one. I can, therefore, use an image which is part of my inheritance and say that you and I, who have never met on earth (but who may meet in that kingdom that you are struggling to make real), have already met: in hell. And a more felicitous dwelling place has a very precise meaning for those who meet in hell.

But this is a very particular and peculiar hell. It is not built foursquare. It is hard to convey the quality of the inhabitants. Every system involves a hierarchy, so perhaps I could suggest a system of this hell by observing that those who meet there manage to meet because they know where they are. The others—the minority in your country, the majority in mine—never meet, because they imagine that hell is a place for others. They also imagine that they control this system.

It will be considered offensive—unpatriotic—to compare the South African situation to the American situation: nor will I, in fact, make such a comparison, because I do not know enough about your country (I may not know enough about my own). Yet, you must have sometimes been struck, as I have been, by the vehemence of the Western leaders (my own nominal representative in France
en tête)
concerning global freedom and democracy: deep concern over Polish freedom, the determination of the American government to bring freedom to South America and the Philippines by any means whatever, and the ineffable gallantry of the British prime minister’s insistence on freedom for the islands off Argentina.

But none of this bellicosity is exhibited in the case of South Africa.

To backtrack, and in order to make my point clear: I am certainly concerned about the freedom of the Poles in Warsaw; but the Poles in Chicago are whites who hate blacks. I am certainly concerned about Ireland: but the Irish in Boston are whites who hate niggers. I may be ambivalent concerning the physical purposes of the state of Israel, but American Jews are, in the main, indistinguishable from American white Christians: and I would not like to be an Arab in Jerusalem. And Israel is, also, an ally of South Africa—which Western nation, indeed, is not? (And it is worth pointing out that the ANC [African National Congress] is as homeless as the PLO, for the same reasons.)

And finally, to discuss—I dismiss—“the Russian menace”: I have known very few black Communists; black Americans, on the whole, are far less romantic than white Americans. The Russian menace has been invented by the West in order to distract attention from the moral and actual chaos in the West. People one day ahead of death by starvation do not huddle before their campfires (assuming that they have any fire at all) reading Marx or arguing about dialectical materialism. And it is worth pointing out that my country, which accuses Cuba of exporting revolution, is the most notorious exporter of revolution of this century. Neither Havana nor
Moscow has the remotest interest in each other—why on earth should they have? What could they have hoped to do for each other? No. It was expected that the U.S.A., “the last best hope of earth,” a country itself born of a revolution, would be their hope and their friend.

But there are revolutions and revolutions—to leave it at that. They are glorified in the past. They are dreaded and, insofar as possible, destroyed in the present.

Now, I do not know if what is happening in South Africa is a revolution (but perhaps each revolution redefines the word), but I do know this: the moral pretensions of the West are being tested and exposed, and the real meaning of the “civilizing mission” revealed.

You are, yourself, incontestably, one of the products of this mission, and so was the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and so was Harry Belafonte, and my mother and myself. Yet, we do not owe our presence to the Civilized. We are here in spite of the Civilized. And nowhere is this clearer than in South Africa now, and in the reaction of the Civilized to this slaughter. We are not white, we are black, and we exist therefore, in this system, this hierarchy, on another, quite literally unspeakable level.

No one wishes to admit this, for it would be to admit something else. Africa fed itself, for generations, long before the Civilized arrived. As of that moment, Africa was forced to feed the world. There is not a single diamond mine, as far as I know, in England; nor, as it turns out, enough coal to keep the English warm. My grandfather, perfectly capable of feeding his family and keeping them warm, was forced instead to pick cotton to keep white families warm. The wealth of England and my country, the wealth of the Western world, in short, is based on slave labor, and the intolerable guilt thus engendered in hearts and minds of the Civilized is the root of what we call racism. From this root spring the legends concerning—proving—the inferiority of black people. One must justify the appalling action of turning a man into a thing. To turn a human being into a moneymaking beast of burden and, by this action, believe—or make oneself believe—that one is “civilizing” this creature is to have surrendered one’s morality and imperiled one’s sense of reality.

“The problem of the twentieth century,” [said] W. E. B. DuBois, in 1903, “is the problem of the color line.” And this problem begins to arrive now in an unanswerable dénouement, in Africa, where white men—or perhaps white power—began it.

Finally, it is exceedingly hypocritical for the West to pretend that it will not apply sanctions against South Africa, nor disinvest, because this would
hurt black people. This pretension is scarcely worth noting, much less answering. The morality of the West and its economic self-interest are allied, as they always were. Now, as the dungeon in which we were meant to be used forever shakes, one sees how little the free world trusts the possibility of freedom.

But you believe in this possibility—and so do I. Our assassinations and our funerals testify to the absolute truth that the world’s present social and economic arrangements cannot serve the world’s needs: and racism is the cornerstone and principal justification of these arrangements. And I am sure that you believe, with me, this paradox: black freedom will make white freedom possible. Indeed,
our
freedom, which we have been forced to buy at so high a price, is the only hope of freedom that they have.

Till we meet, then, sir, and with my deepest respect,

Yours in the faith,

(1985)

·      ·     ·

W
E ARE LIVING THROUGH
the most crucial moment of our history, the moment which will result in a new life for us, or a new death. I am not being in the least metaphorical about this. When I say “a new life,” I mean a new vision of America, a vision which will allow us to face, and begin to change, the facts of American life; and when I say “death,” I mean Carthage. This seems a grim view to take of our situation, but it is scarcely grimmer than the facts. Our honesty and our courage in facing these facts is all that can save us from disaster. And one of these facts is that there has always been a segment of American life, and a powerful segment, too, which equated virtue with mindlessness.

In this connection, the House Un-American Activities Committee is one of the most sinister facts of the national life. It is not merely that we do not need this committee; the truth is, we cannot afford it. It always reminds me of a vast and totally untrustworthy bomb shelter in which groups of frightened people endlessly convince one another of its impregnability, while the real world outside—by which, again, I mean the facts of our private and public lives—calmly and inexorably prepares their destruction. It is perhaps because I am an American Negro that I have always felt white Americans, many if not most of them, are experts in self-delusion—they usually speak as though I were not in the room. “I,” here, does not refer so much to the man called Baldwin as it does to the reality which produced me, a reality with which I live, and from which most Americans spend all their time in flight. People in flight never can grow up, which means they can never, really, become citizens—and we simply must not surrender this great country to those people. We must not allow their fear to control us, and, indeed, we must not allow it to control them. Rather, we should attempt to release them from their panic and their unadmitted sorrow. We ought to try, by the example of our own lives, to prove that life is love and wonder and that that nation is doomed which penalizes those of its citizens who recognize and rejoice in this fact. We must dare to take another view of majority rule, disengaging it from anything resembling a popularity contest; taking it upon ourselves to become the majority by changing the moral climate. For it is upon this majority that the life of any nation really depends.