EDITOR’S NOTE

When it was decided to reissue J. Saunders Redding’s famous little book

in a paperback edition, we wrote to Mr. Redding at Hampton Institute,

where he teaches English, to ask if he wished to update the book or

perhaps write a new introduction. In due course an answer arrived from

Nigeria, where Mr. Redding is presently lecturing and traveling, telling

us to go ahead with whatever updating we would think important to the

text. We went over the book carefully. It is true, some things have

changed: Mr. Redding is a little older, his sons have grown into young

men, his father died last year, at the age of ninety-two—but except for

those things we found that, unfortunately, no updating was needed.

New York City

May 12, 1962

“By the way, have I ever told you——”

“Enough of the truth?” she asked.

“There is never enough of the truth,” the

Colonel said. “There is only more and

more.”

—_From notes for

“The Colonel and His Lady.”_

1

This is personal. I would call it a “document” except that the word has

overtones of something official, vested and final. But I have been

clothed with no authority to speak for others, and what I have to say

can be final only for myself. I hasten to say this at the start, for I

remember my anger at the effrontery of one who a few years ago undertook

to speak for me and twelve million others. I concurred with practically

nothing he said. This was not important in itself, but when one presumes

to speak for me he must reflect my mind so accurately that I find no

source of disagreement with him. To do this, he must be either a

lack-brain parrot or a god. Though there are many lack-brains, historic

and present circumstances prove that there are no gods dealing with the

problem of race—or, as dangerous to the American ideal and as exhausting

to individual Americans as it has been for three hundred years, it would

have been settled long ago. Else the gods are singularly perverse.

There have been opportunities for complaisant gods. Every crisis has

brought an opportunity. In Revolutionary times, even before we were a

nation and the social structure and the ways of thinking that went with

nationhood had solidified, there was splendid scope. But no gods

arrived. Again, in the awful pause following the Civil War, when the

social structure of half the country had disintegrated and men prayed

only to be told what to think and do, no god answered. Instead, the

ready devils of positive unreason took over and ruled for a long time.

The First World War and the Second held the potential too, but we common

men and the leaders we looked to were content with strong indictments

and feeble measures. There was a hell-reek of baleful prophecy:

“A small group of Negro agitators and another small group of white

rabble-rousers are pushing this country closer and closer to an

interracial explosion which may make the race riots of the First

World War and its aftermath seem mild by comparison.... Unless saner

counsels prevail we may have the worst internal clashes since

Reconstruction, with hundreds, if not thousands, killed and amicable

race relations set back for decades.”[1]

With such dire forebodings screaming in our ears, we fell back on a

peculiar (and American) misinterpretation of Hegelian philosophy—that

time, the flow of history, _inevitably_ brings changes for the better.

2

I speak only for myself for another reason also. From adolescence to

death there is something very personal about being a Negro in America.

It is like having a second ego which is as much the conscious subject of

all experience as the natural self. It is not what the psychologists

call dual personality. It is more complex and, I think, more morbid than

that. In the state of which I speak, one receives two distinct impacts

from certain experiences and one undergoes two distinct reactions—the

one normal and intrinsic to the natural self; the other, entirely

different but of equal force, a prodigy created by the accumulated

consciousness of Negroness.

An incident illustrates.

At the college in Louisville where I taught during the depression, a

white slum crawled to the western edge of the campus. I could see its

dirt, its poverty and disease in any direction I cared to look from my

classroom window. In the littered back yards, each with a pit toilet,

snotty-nosed children with rickets played and lank-haired women shrilled

obscenities at them all day long. I remember seeing a man only once—an

ancient, senile man bent with a monstrous hernia. By the time autumn

paled into winter the pity I felt for the people in the slum had been

safely stacked away among other useless emotional lumber.

One day as I stood by the window thinking of other things, I gradually

became aware of movement in the yard directly below me. The college

building was as quiet as a church, for it was a Saturday when we had no

classes. There would have been no shock in seeing a woman of the

neighborhood dressed only in a ragged slip, but a powdery snow had

fallen the night before and the day was bitter cold. When I saw the

woman, who seemed quite young, she was lurching and staggering in the

rear of the yard. A dog must have followed her out of the house, for one

stood by the open door watching and flicking its tail dubiously. The

woman’s face was stiff and vacant, but in her efforts to walk her body

and limbs jerked convulsively in progressive tremors. I could not tell

whether she was drunk or sick as she floundered in the snow in the yard.

Pity rose in me, but at the same time something else also—a gloating

satisfaction that she was white. Sharply and concurrently felt, the two

emotions were of equal strength, in perfect balance, and the corporeal

I, fixed in a trance at the window, oscillated between them.

When she was within a few steps of the outhouse, the poor woman lurched

violently and pitched face downward in the snow. Somehow utterly unable

to move, I watched her convulsive struggles for several minutes. The dog

came down the yard meanwhile, whining piteously, and walked stiff-legged

around the white and almost naked body. The woman made a mess in the

snow and then lay still.

Finally I turned irresolutely and went into the corridor. There was the

entrance door and near it the telephone. I could have gone out and a few

steps would have brought me to the yard where the woman lay and I could

have tried to rouse someone or myself taken her into the house. I went

to the telephone and called the police.

“There’s a drunken woman lying in the back yard of a house on Eighth

Street, seven-hundred block,” I said.

“You say drunk? In her own yard? Then leave her lay.”

“But there doesn’t seem to be anyone there, and she may not be drunk.”

“You said she was drunk,” the voice said. “Now what’s the story?” There

was a pause. “And who’re you anyway?”

“She could freeze to death,” I said, and hung up. Thus I washed my hands

of it.

The woman was still lying there and the dog sat quivering and whining

near her when a lone policeman arrived almost an hour later. The next

morning I read on a back page of the local paper that the woman, aged

twenty-six, had died of exposure following an epileptic seizure suffered

while alone.

One can wash his hands, but the smudges and scars on the psyche are

different.

I offer no excuses for my part in this wretched episode. Excuses are

unavailing. The experiences of my Negroness, in a section where such

experiences have their utmost meaning in fear and degradation, canceled

out humaneness. How many times have I heard Negroes mutter, when witness

to some misfortune befallen a white person, “What the hell! He’s white,

isn’t he?” What the exact psychological mechanism of this is, I cannot

say, but certainly the frustration of human sympathy and kindness is a

symptom of a dangerous trauma. Never having been white, I do not know

whether Southern white people feel a similar reaction to Negroes, but,

considering their acts and their words, it can hardly be judged

otherwise. Actions speak for themselves; printed words not always.

For there is this about books on the “race question” (how weary one

grows of the phrase!) by Southern whites: they have no detachment. They

may seem to have. Within what has always seemed to me a questionable

frame of reference, there may be brilliant exposition, analysis,

interpretation, and even history. They may roar, as do the writings of

David L. Cohn; they may purr lyrically and graciously in the manner of

Archibald Rutledge and the late William Alexander Percy; they may

remonstrate and apologize with unobtrusive erudition, as Virginius

Dabney’s and Hodding Carter’s editorials do; or they may bristle with

the flinty phraseology of Howard Odum’s scholarship—but nearly all of

them elaborate an argument that is certainly not derived from

self-knowledge and that cannot be effective as an instrument of

self-control.

The reasoning in them is very subtle, not to say metaphysical, and it

runs like this: History is an imperative creative force (from Hegel

again!) and man is its vassal. It is beyond the reach and the control of

conscience and also beyond direction and prophecy. It created slavery,

the southwestward migration, the Civil War, Ku-Kluxism. History does not

conform to man’s will; it compels conformity, and under this compulsion

man and his society and his institutions are shaped into what they are

and into what they become by categorical directives as potent as the

word of God. History is above moral judgment and history’s errors are

beyond redress. Man’s world is mechanistic.

This is not mere error; it, too, is symptomatic of a trauma all the more

dangerous because this concept of history is what most Southern whites

believe when they are being reasonable about the race question; when

they are writing books about it, or talking quietly in their living

rooms; or when they come together and “gladly agree to co-operate ... in

any _sound_ program aimed at the improvement of race relations.” This

reasoning, at once defensive and defiant, expresses itself in clichés,

which are the hardened arteries through which thought flows. “The white

South is _inexorably_ conditioned by cultural complexes.” “In both the

physical and cultural heritage of the South there are certain cumulative

and tragic handicaps that represent _overpowering_ factors in the

situation.” There are “legal and customary patterns of race relations in

the South, whose _strength and age_ we recognize.”[2] The idealism of

these people of good will is negated by the meanings of their own

phrases.

The pattern of reason these phrases express has been the most

influential factor in race relations for nearly a hundred years. And if

Hodding Carter, one of the young Southern liberals, is representative

(“The spirit [of which these stories are symbols] is harmless enough; a

little pathetic perhaps, and naïve and provincial. Let alone, it will,

of course, wear itself out some day. Not tomorrow or next year or the

next year. But some day.”[3]), it promises to remain so for another

century.

And that thorny prospect brings me to yet another reason for the

personal slant of this essay. I do not wish to live with the race

problem for the next one hundred years—though of course I shall not live

so long. I do not wish to die knowing that my children and theirs to the

third generation must live with it. I have known it too long and too

intimately already. It has itself been an imperative, channelizing more

of my energies than I wished to spare through the narrow gorge of race

interest. Yet I have felt myself in no sense a crusader. I have not been

uplifted with the compensatory afflatus of the inspired leader. Let me

be quite frank. I have done what I have, not because I wanted to, but

because, driven by a daemonic force, I had to. The necessity has always

been a galling affliction to me and the root of my personal grievance

with American life. This should not be hard to understand.

Connected with all this, of course, has been a sense of impersonal

obligation which I like to think of as growing out of a decent regard

for the common welfare. This civic sense has not expressed itself widely

in group and racial activities and organizations, for I am not that kind

of person. If it is a fault, I am sorry for it. I tried to be that kind

of person. At one time or another I have been a member of most of the

racial uplift groups, and am still a member of some, and when I was in

my early twenties I thought I had taken fire from the mass and that if

need be I could exhort and harangue and make public protest with the

best of them. But I did not know myself so well then. What I felt was

merely the exuberant, youthful need for self-losing identification. It

gives me sad amusement to recall that in those days a friend of mine

used teasingly to call me “Marcus Garvey”—a name that was the very

apotheosis of blatant race chauvinism. But I had no real chance to be

blatant—a habit, I suppose, like any other—and no natural inclination.

Nor could I really lose myself in the mass.

3

But the years of my twenties were enkindling and tumultuous. The world

was well into that series of social revolutions which started, we are

told, with the First World War and is not yet ended, and the American

Negro people were a kind of revolutionary catalytic agent in their own

country. It was their historic role, to be sure, but it had been

suspended while Negroes played a supernumerary part in the European

conflict. Americans in general seemed not to realize what had happened

in Europe. They did not think of it as change. It was merely an eruption

which they had helped put down and were intent on sealing off with the

cement of isolationism. But after the war American Negroes reenlivened

the spirit of revolt, and the country was alarmed by the truculent

persistence with which they fought for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, for

instance, and by the vigor of their opposition to the confirmation of

Judge John Parker to the United States Supreme Court, and by the inroads

of Communism among them, and by their implacable solidarity in the

Scottsboro case.

How emotional the times were! What comings-together, what incitement!

Out of college just three years at the time of the Scottsboro case in

1931, I remember the almost weekly meetings. Especially do I remember

one at which Alice Dunbar Nelson spoke. The widow of Paul Dunbar, a

Negro poet nationally famous at the turn of the century, Mrs. Nelson had

been one of my teachers in high school and an old family friend. She was

beautiful—tall, with ivory skin and a head of glinting red-gold hair—and

she was also of great and irresistible charm. One thought of her as

being saturated in a serene culture, even in divinity. I doubt that she

had ever been much concerned with the common run of Negroes, and that

night as she spoke to a large audience of all classes of a united

people, she was like a goddess come to earth—but a goddess. In the end,

with tears glistening in her eyes, she stretched out her gloved hands

and cried, “Thank God for the Scottsboro case! It has brought us

together.”

It was a thing to arouse even one constitutionally insensible to mass

excitement, and I was not insensible—not in those days. I had found that

out the year before, my second in the deep South. A student of mine was

murdered, apparently in cold blood, by a white man or men. It happened

in the late afternoon, in a section of Atlanta some distance from the

college, and I knew nothing of it for several hours. But that night a

colleague of about my own age rushed into my dormitory room without the

usual courtesy of knocking.

“Come on,” he said, gesturing vehemently, “we got to go.”

I resented his bursting in on me. We did not particularly care for each

other anyway. “You might have knocked,” I said.

“For Christ’s sake, this is no time for the amenities!” he said. “We got

to go.”

“Go where? I’m not going anywhere.”

“To the meeting.”

“What meeting?”

“My God, man, don’t you know that Dennis Hubert’s been lynched?” His

eyes blazed like fires in a draft. He was greatly agitated.

“What!” It must have been a yawp of horror and disbelief. The boy had

sat in my class not five hours before.

“Lynched by some goddamned drunken crackers. The Negroes out in East

Atlanta are getting together, and we’re going to get together too. We’re

not going to take this lying down. Those crackers might come out here

any time.”

I could not follow his thinking, even after he reminded me that a

relative—either an uncle or a cousin—of the murdered boy was on the

college faculty; but the dangerous possibilities of “those crackers”

coming bloomed in my imagination like poisonous flowers.

“And if they come, then what?” I said.

“That’s what we’re having the meeting for. Come on.”

And I went. We were only a few, mostly younger instructors, and we tried

to appear disciplined and resolute, but hysteria was abroad, and I was

caught up in it long enough to pledge to buy a gun through the

underground means we had to employ; and long enough to be thrilled by

the possession of it when it was delivered in great secrecy the next

day; and even long enough to wish to use it on any skulking white man

that offered.

The college environs and, I suppose, all the Negro sections of the city,

were like alerted camps. There were many false alarms: cars loaded with

white men were prowling the neighborhood; another student had been

murdered; some white youths had caught a Negro girl coming from work,

stripped her of her clothes and chased her naked through the downtown

streets. And to match these were the heroics, like guarding the house of

the college president and of the Hubert relative who was on the faculty.

Every few days for a month Negroes held meetings, but after a time I did

not go to them any more. They came to seem like public displays of very

private emotions, in the same unbecoming taste of those obscene

religious services in which worshipers handle snakes.

One day I took my gun and the box of bullets that came with it and rode

out into the country and fired at a dead tree. Wrapped in greased, gray

flannel in a cardboard box, the gun is still somewhere among my

possessions, but I have not seen it since.

4

Many Negroes will deny that the force which I have described as daemonic

has operated in their lives. If asked about it, they will take quick

offense, as if it were of the same stripe as an unnatural sex drive

which, of course, is wisely kept secret by those who possess it. They

will aver that they live _normal_, _natural_, _wholesome_ lives, even in

the South. They will point out their “normal” interests in their

professional lives and in their home lives. They will tick off the list

of their white friends. They will say, truthfully enough, “Oh, there are

ways to avoid prejudice and segregation.” I have no quarrel with them

(nor with any others): it is simply that I do not believe them. Having

to avoid prejudice and segregation is itself unwholesome, and the

constant doing of it is skating very close to a psychopathic edge. My

experience has been that no two or three Negroes ever come together for

anything—even so unracial a thing as, say, a Christmas party—but that

the principal subject of conversation is race. One grows mortally sick

of it.

So in a sense, partly through the writing of this essay, I seek a purge,

a catharsis, wholeness—as all of us do perhaps unconsciously in one way

or another. I do this consciously, feeling that I owe it to myself. I

need to do it for spiritual reasons, as others need to seek God. Indeed,

this is a kind of god-seeking, or at least an exorcism. To observe one’s

own feelings, fears, doubts, ambitions, hates; to understand their

beginnings and weigh them is to control them and to destroy their

dominance. By setting certain things down, I hope to get rid of

something that is unhealthy in me (that is perhaps unhealthy in most

Americans) and so face the future with some tranquillity.

Also, and finally, I hope this piece will stand as the epilogue to

whatever contribution I have made to the “literature of race.” I want to

get on to other things. I do not know whether I can make this clear, but

the obligations imposed by race on the average educated or talented

Negro (if this sounds immodest, it must) are vast and become at last

onerous. I am tired of giving up my creative initiative to these

demands. I think I am not alone. I once heard a world-famous singer say

that as beautiful as the spirituals are and as great a challenge as they

present to her artistry, she was weary of the obligation of finding a

place for them in every program, “as if they were theme music” wholly

identifying her. She was tired of trying to promote in others and of

keeping alive in herself a race pride that had become disingenuous and

peculiar. The spirituals belong to the world, she said, and “yet I’m

expected to sing them as if they belong only to me and other Negroes and

as if I believe my talent is most rewardingly and truly fulfilled in

singing them, and I just don’t think it necessarily is.” As a matter of

fact, she added, she was having more and more trouble _feeling_ her way

into them.

I knew what she meant. She could no longer be arrested in ethnocentric

coils: she did not wish to be. The human spirit is bigger than that.

The specialization of the senses and talent and learning (more than

three fourths of the Negro Ph.D.’s have done their doctoral

dissertations on some subject pertaining to the Negro!) that is expected

of Negroes by other members of their race and by whites is tragic and

vicious and divisive. I am tired of trying, in deference to this

expectation, to feel my way into the particularities of response and

reaction that are supposed to be exclusively “Negro.” I am tired of the

unnatural obligation of converting such talent and learning as I have

into specialized instruments for the promotion of a false concept called

“race.” This extended essay, then, is probably my last public comment on

the so-called American race problem.

5

Names have been given to the advocates and promoters of various racial

policies. There are gradualists (and they are black and white), who feel

that somehow by a process of mechanical progression everything will work

out, though to what concrete ends they do not say. The race chauvinists

advocate a self-sustaining Negro economic, social and cultural island,

and seem to have no fear of a destructive typhoon roaring in from the

surrounding sea of the white world. The educationists believe that

intellectual competence as indicated by the number of Negro Phi Beta

Kappas, doctors of philosophy and various experts will win for the race

the respect it does not now receive. There are the individualists who

urge that each man work out for himself the compromises that will bring

the self-fulfillment he seeks. Finally there are the radicals (there are

no degrees of radicalism among them) who, because they seem to see

destruction as an end and would first uproot everything, are actually

nihilists.

Various racial and biracial institutions look on themselves as

representing and implementing one or the other of these policies. The

Southern Regional Council, for instance, is gradualist. The Negro press

is chauvinist. Most Negro Greek-letter organizations (of which there are

seven national and many dozen sectional and local) are educationist.

Howard University—though not its president—and the best-known private

Negro colleges are individualistic in their approach. Until its demise,

the National Negro Congress was radical.

But none of these is seamless, pure and undefiled. Into each of them

have seeped influences from one or more of the others. In so far as the

Southern Regional Council believes in segregation (and that is very far

indeed), it is chauvinistic, and in as much as it sets a premium on

intellectual growth as measured by scholarly achievement, it is also

educationistic. By the very circumstances of their founding, private

Negro colleges lean toward chauvinism, and they encourage this tendency

further by courses in “Negro” history, art, literature, business and

life. Recently, moreover, some Negro colleges have spoken in favor of

the South’s segregated regional education plan—the private ones for

reasons not quite clear; the public ones because only segregation will

save them from extinction. The radicals who, anyway, take the position

that radicalism is the highest, brightest star in the ideological

heavens, are very proud of the intellectual caliber of Paul Robeson, Ben

Davis, and that other Davis, John, erstwhile president of the National

Negro Congress. The Negro press, of course, reflects these conflicts and

inconsistencies.

But something more fundamental than the contradictions accounts for

the failures of these policies. Gradualism, a habit of thought that

marks interracial activities in the South, is geared to the

historic-compulsion idea mentioned earlier. It is mostly faith without

works, thunder without God, and lengthy, frequently fraudulent reports

of “victories” as represented in the decline of lynching and the “long

step forward” (nearly a generation in the taking) from the Holcutt

case (1932) to the Sweatt case (1950).[4] As a principle, gradualism

is very flattering to the Negro people. It ascribes to them superhuman

patience, fortitude and humility in the face of very great social

evils. Gradualism is _laissez faire_—a proscription of planning and

foresight in the dynamics of society.

Chauvinism is as impractical for the Negro in America as it is

fundamentally dangerous for any people anywhere. Even if Negroes could

duplicate the social and economic machinery—and I doubt that they

could—the material resources on which their racial island must then

depend would have to come from somewhere outside. In a constantly

shrinking world, complete independence and isolation are impossible. And

even if they were not impossible for the Negro in America, would not the

achieving of them result in permanent relegation to secondary status?

The very numbers involved—that is, the population ratio—would assure it.

I cannot imagine the white majority saying, “Sure, come on and set up

your self-sustaining household in a corner of my house.”

There is still a great deal of race chauvinism, and the fact should

surprise no one. Negro organs of expression, including scholarly

journals, document it: _Phylon: [A] Review of Race & Culture_, published

by Atlanta University; the _Journal of Negro Education_, published by

Howard University; the _Journal of Negro Higher Education_, published by

Johnson C. Smith University; the _Journal of Negro History_, published

by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History; and a spate

of lesser publications. A purely emotional conviction informs

chauvinism. It is partly the frustrated pride that is expressed in

“Negro History Week” observances, which dichotomize United States

history, and in courses in “Negro” literature and art, which turn out to

be valiant but thin trickles forcibly and ingenuously diverted from the

main stream of American life. Chauvinism springs from a natural desire

to find remission from the unequal struggle between black and white, and

surcease of discrimination.

The philosophy of the educationist is only superficially different from

that of the individualist. The concepts in which they are hallowed seem

only to obscure the fact that no man is completely the master of his

fate. Only the immature fail to recognize that individual wishes now

have almost no authority in the world. Educationists and individualists

acknowledge the existence of co-operative evils but deny the necessity

to act co-operatively against them. This is also, it seems to me, a

denial of brotherhood—a principle which must be made to operate in

increasingly wider and wider arcs of human endeavor. Any statement of

the individualist’s ideals would sound like a throwback to the time

before theories of social compact, or better, social contract, evolved.

The contradictions and conflicts in all this go deeper, much deeper than

any short and general analysis can indicate. They plunge their iron

tentacles into the minds of individual Negroes, raggedly fragmenting

them, scoring them into oversensitized compartments. It is this that we

must understand when we think, for instance, of Paul Robeson; and when

we hear a Negro college president declare himself opposed to

segregation, while at the same time he urges the state to add graduate

courses to his already substandard curriculum, so that Negro aspirants

to graduate degrees will not embarrass the state’s white university; and

when we read on page one of a Negro paper a vilification of white women

who “run after” Negro men and on the next page an encomium of a

successful mixed marriage. This is more than simply resiliency and

accommodation, and there is more than just Negro heart and mind

involved. For the Negro is not _the_ problem _in toto_, nor a problem

_in vacuo_. His behavior, the patterns of his multiple personality, the

ebb and flow of action and counteraction and the agonizing ruptures in

his group life result from the ill-usage to which he is subject at the

hands of American white people.

6

Looking back now, I know that the essence of these conflicts was

distilled in my own boyhood home. My mother, who certainly would not

have phrased it so, or even consciously thought it so, was an

individualist. She was also the perfect embodiment of a type of Negro

womanhood whose existence is still denied by those who cling to the old

abasing habits of thought. Virtuous, educated and noted for her beauty,

she lived her short life in a firm belief that the moral exercise of

individual initiative, imagination and will was enough to overcome the

handicap of a colored skin. I have before me now some lines she wrote,

obviously thinking of her sons.

And so you are a son of darker hue!

Think then that God sees in your face

A lesser image of his love and grace—

The ills of life all meant for you?

What light before you beckoning?

The iron will, the open heart and mind,

The hope, the wish, the thought refined—

These compass points for a true reckoning.

These are not a full expression of her thought, for there was enough of

the chauvinist and enough of the sense of reality in her to make it

clear that in her time, except in the most unusual circumstances, the

limits of progress for the Negro were within the Negro world. Yet she

spoke with pensive pride of Howard Drew, who had been a great college

athlete and who was then a Hartford lawyer with an entirely white

clientele; and of Maria Baldwin, the Negro principal of the very

estimable Agassiz School in Cambridge, where many Harvard professors

sent their children; and of Lillian Evans (Madame Evanti), who sang

opera for a season at La Scala; and even (though with less pride, for

the theater was still suspect in her mind) of Bert Williams.

But my father was different. He took pride in such successes too, but it

irritated him that the knowledge of them was not more widespread. He

would have used them on the one hand as arguments against the

white-superiority theories of Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant and Jerome

Dowd, and on the other, as arguments for his own theory that the Negro

could and should develop his own American culture. I saw him brought to

the verge of tears when the Brown and Stevens Bank—“the richest and

safest Negro bank in the world”—failed back in the early 1920’s. And

this was not because he lost money in that disastrous collapse—he

didn’t—but because that failure cast dark shadows over the prospects of

a self-sustaining Negro culture. He saw other shadows many times, but he

remained (and now in his eighty-second year remains still in his heart,

I think) a race chauvinist. For him there was no incongruity between

this and his insistence that his sons go East to a New England college.

Through all the years of my boyhood, my father was secretary of the

Wilmington, Delaware, branch of the National Association for the

Advancement of Colored People; secretary-treasurer of the Sara Ann White

Home (now the Layton Home) for Aged Colored People; and a member of the

board of the local Negro Y.M.C.A., which he helped found. Besides, he

had certain pet, private projects, like needling the truant officer for

not making colored children go to school, and upbraiding the police for

permitting (interracial) vice to flourish in some Negro neighborhoods,

and scolding fallen Negro women and derelict Negro men wherever he found

them. He was buoyant and earnest and uplifted in the prosecution of

these activities. What characters were drawn to our house! How desperate

they were (I know now) in their search for simplification and for that

dignity of being that derives only from a sense of belonging!

For these—simplicity and dignity—after all are the true things for which

men strive. Unable to attain them in the large sense, men slice life up

into manipulatable segments, institute policies of control, reduce to

some petty enslaving program and to slogans the great purposes of

life—“America for Americans,” “For the Advancement of Colored People,”

“The True Church”—and march uneasily toward their graves under the

illusion that the particular distortion into which they have been drawn

is the straight and narrow path to salvation.

My father was like that. I think that all the Negroes I knew in my

childhood were like that. It was not altogether their fault. It need not

be pointed out that they had almost no say in determining the basic

conditions under which they lived, and that it was this common suffering

that drew them together in the first place. But subject to the common

suffering was no mass man, but classes and individuals, and what they

endured together they examined separately in the powerful lights of

personal and class interests and ambitions. And under these lights the

caste principle, which white society insisted on and to which the

Negroes were responding in the first place—under these lights, the caste

principle broke down. Negroness was not itself enough. The phrase,

“We’re all Negroes together,” so often heard as a battle cry, had only a

sporadic potency. Within the Negro group there were bitter conflicts and

grave contradictions.

I remember when the tidal wave of Garveyism[5] swept over the walls my

father had been hastily building against it. He had not had much

warning. As secretary of the Wilmington, Delaware, N.A.A.C.P., he

read—nay, studied—the _Crisis_, the Association’s national organ. He

knew the official line was that Marcus Garvey was a mountebank and his

outfit swindlers preying on the poverty and ignorance of the lower

classes. “Do not,” the _Crisis_ said, “invest in the conquest of Africa.

Do not take desperate chances in flighty dreams.” My father knew also,

with increasing disquiet, how fast the Garvey following was growing. But

somehow he felt that only people of the slums _could_ be attracted to

it, and he did not think of Wilmington as having a real slum. Of course

he was naïf in this, for a stone’s throw east of our house began a

noisome squalor of existence that spread like thick slime to the river.

When a sturdy, hard-working citizen (respected because he was

hard-working and kept his children in school and did not let his

insurance lapse) came bringing my father an official invitation to join

the Garveyite “line of march,” my father issued an urgent call to the

members of the N.A.A.C.P. for a meeting.

But it was too late, for suddenly the Garveyites were upon us. They came

with much shouting and blare of bugles and a forest of flags—a black

star centered in a red field. They made speeches in the vacant lot where

carnivals used to spread their tents. They had a huge, colorful parade,

and young women, tensely sober of mien and plain even in their uniforms,

distributed millions of streamers bearing the slogan “Back to Africa.”

My father and I stood on the cross street below our house and watched

the parade swagger by. Among the marchers my father spotted more than

one “Advancer” (his term), even their wives and children. They were not

people of the slums. They were men with small struggling

clothes-pressing shops and restaurants, personal servants, and what

Thomas J. Woofter, Jr., calls “black yeomen,” unlearned but percipient.

They had been dependable attendants at meetings promising Negro uplift,

and loyal though perhaps somewhat awed members of the N.A.A.C.P. Some of

them my father had personally recruited, and low groans of dismay

escaped him when he saw them in the line of march. I was a boy, but I

remember. And not so much because of the parade as for what happened

after.

For the coming of the Garveyites shattered the defensive bulwark around

the protective community of Negroes. The whites did not understand this

at first, nor ever fully. Accustomed as they were to thinking of the

Negro as an undifferentiated caste, they could not be expected to. Where

there had seemed to be solidarity, there were factions. Where there had

been one leadership, now there were more. Where it had been common to

associate the force in the local Negro world with individuals, now the

mass seemed to rear up faceless; and where no spontaneous drive had

seemed to exist, now there was a hum of self-generating energy. The

whites did not understand, but some of them found and took an advantage.

In our district which, with only a scattered thirty per cent of the

population white, was fast becoming a ghetto, Negroes had enjoyed

political control. They had had no trouble electing one of their own to

the school board and another to the city council. The same men had been

returned to office time and again. What they did there (and they did

little) seemed not nearly so important as just being there. They had

enormous prestige and influence among Negroes, and they had not had to

fight to keep it.

But in the fall elections of that year they did. Directed by agents from

New York, the local Garveyites put up their own candidates, chosen on

class lines: the encumbents who, in the common phrase, were “dickties,”

found their following split. The campaign smelled of pitch and brimstone

and led to street brawls between the sadly outnumbered teen-aged

children of the encumbent faction and the Garveyites. Still the whites

understood only enough of what was happening to give it burlesque

treatment in the press. But the agents from New York were professionals,

and their professionalism soon showed itself. They made a deal with the

white leaders in the ward. Before the Negroes knew anything, the whites

had picked their own candidates, and while Negroes fought one another,

whites won the offices.

This was a blow—but that is to put it mildly. In our town, as elsewhere

in border state and northerly towns, the pattern of a strong, single

Negro leadership was fixed (and so, I suspect, was the pattern of a

strong, single Polish and Italian and Jewish leadership), and now the

white people were in a quandary. The pattern had been broken; they

themselves had knocked down the stanchion that gave stability to race

relations. A bond issue was coming up, and Negro backing was

indispensable to its success. Hitherto the white people had influenced

the direction of Negro thought through local Negro leaders. But who were

the leaders now? The white people needed them; they felt uncomfortable

and even frightened without them; they needed to know and to control, if

possible, what the Negroes were thinking. The race riots in Northern

cities—Washington, Chester, Chicago—were still green in memory, and

Wilmington itself had almost plunged into that civic horror. Congress

just then was drumming up a Bolshevist scare, and Congressman James

Byrnes, of South Carolina, had called for indictments for sedition

against certain national Negro spokesmen.[6]

But the Negroes were equally lost and frightened by the immutable

evidence of their own factionalism—and frightened the more that white

people knew of it. So long as they could seem to maintain a solid front,

no matter what internal tensions actually rived them, they felt

reasonably safe. But “Now the white people can cut us up,” my father

said. “We are divided.” It never occurred to him that the last thing in

the world the white people wanted was a divided Negro population.

Enforced segregation and the caste system were proof that they did not.

My father, who had spent more than two thirds of his life above the

Mason-Dixon line, hated segregation, but he had developed the

ghetto-mind which made it bearable and safe.

A war of impulses was (and is, I fear) going on all the time in both

whites and Negroes. It is the symptom of an American psychological

malady. It is also an indictment of our culture and an offense against

democracy. Many understand this now, but most do not. Indeed, most have

built sophistic bulwarks against understanding. They do not know this,

for the many small, subtle fallacies which they abide through force of

habit lessen their sense of moral conflict when they are faced with the

great contradiction. My father’s saying, “Don’t ever trust a white man,”

is in intent no different from the white man’s saying, “All niggers look

alike to me.” The phrases represent the lowest common denominator in the

American race-experience. They are the essence of empiricism. They voice

experiences so debased and so bereft of humaneness as utterly to

discredit our way of life in the eyes of the world. They deny the

inspiring first principle of democracy—that the person counts as person,

no matter what his color or creed.

“Son,” my father said, the night before I went East to college,

“remember you’re a Negro. You’ll have to do twice as much twice better

than your classmates. Before you act, think how what you do may reflect

on other Negroes. Those white people will be judging the race by you.

Don’t let the race down, son.”

I have no memory of protesting this terrible burden laid on my mind and

heart. Indeed, I am sure I did not. What my father said checked with

what I had been taught to _feel_. My father went on.

“Out East you may feel it less because there’re fewer Negroes, or for

the same reason, you may feel it more. Some say one thing, some the

other. But no matter where you go in this country, you’ll never get away

from being made to know that you are a Negro.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“We’re aliens in an alien land.” (And yet he had fought the Garveyites’

dream of going “back to Africa”; had applauded the deportation of Emma

Goldman; on every day of national memorial had hung out the flag, and

when the breezes of May, the suns of July and the snows of February rent

and seared it, had bought another!) “But there’s some purpose in it,” he

went on wearily. “‘God works in mysterious ways....’ There’s certainly

some purpose. So do your best. Remember you’re a Negro.”

“I’ll remember,” I said, knowing that I would, because I had been well

and exactly taught and because such lessons thrust deep. But feeling

even then, I like to think, the iron unfairness of it; perhaps even

drawing a sorry comfort from it, like many a Negro boy before and since.

For after all, it is a ready-made excuse. More, it is license for us all

to live in that blind, egoistic immaturity which, even under the most

wholesome learning, we are reluctant to forego anyway. “Twice as much

twice better....”

“A Negro’s just as good as anybody else,” my father said, “but he’s

always got to prove it.”

Thus burdened, I went off to college.

7

The assumptions that were held valid in my boyhood were all wrong. So

much has been said about them that I mention them reluctantly, but their

strength is attested by the fact that many, many still trust them. And

not merely Southern whites, and the misinformed, and the ignorant; nor

whites alone, but blacks. Hodding Carter, novelist and Pulitzer

prize-winning journalist, no doubt deserves his reputation as a Southern

liberal, but only a few months ago he wrote of “a common insistence upon

white political domination in the South,” which is “as unbreakable as

anything woven by the mind of man,” and declared himself unalterably

committed to race segregation on the ground of preserving the white

race’s “ethnic integrity.” Somewhat earlier, the Georgia Commissioner of

Agriculture had said, “The yellow people, the brown people and the

blacks”—not even bothering to add “people”—“are mentally unfit for

directors in our form of government.” And in 1951 Kerr Scott, the

Governor of North Carolina (“most liberal state in the South”) echoed

the Georgian. Asked by a Negro reporter why his inaugural promise had

been fulfilled only to the extent of making one Negro appointment, the

Governor snapped, “If I were you I’d never have asked that question. I

have given you [people] more than you can handle.... That’s why I tell

you you should never have asked that question.”

So the old assumptions hold: the assumption of the Negro’s inherent

inferiority; of tragic social and cultural consequences if segregation

is broken down on any but the most superficial levels; of Negroes

preferring segregation, and many more. They were taken on in the first

place as rationalizations by means of which the white man tried, as

Gunnar Myrdal says, “to build a bridge of reason” between his acclaimed

equalitarian creed and his countervailing deed. Because of this

guilt-ridden adoption, they were the more avidly loved. They were also

the more furiously drummed into the general consciousness where,

reverberating like thunder in a valley, they have rolled out the tune to

which white people and Negroes have danced since 1900—the Negroes

because they must.

It is a static but a curiously hectic dance. We gyrate through its

complicated patterns with responses as conditioned and involuntary as

reflexes. In spite of all the fervent clapping and shouting, our

reactions to the race problem are not really emotional and intellectual,

but muscular. I cannot now, as long ago I could, believe in the moral

and intellectual conviction of the demagogues, of men like Richard

Russell and James Byrnes and Strom Thurmond; for I cannot believe that

the findings of modern science are so cabined and confined, even in

South Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi, as to have escaped the

knowledge of these educated men. The older demagogues had this to excuse

them; they were ignorant. The younger ones are knowing puppeteers,

cynically manipulating the strings of the past.

And even the masses who respond to the strings know better than they

used to; even with them conviction flags and cynicism takes over. The

moral conviction that it was for the social welfare that they reserved

all power to themselves no longer operates. Power for power’s sake is

now the rule, and when a leading Georgia politician said so in a

political address, the rafters rang. “We have the power and we mean to

keep it where it belongs. If the Negroes vote wholesale, and if the

county unit system goes, we’ll have that much less power. But it must

not go. The county unit system, which used to protect our rural

population from slick city politics, now arms us all with power against

the enemies of white supremacy.”

The old assumptions hold, but, worse, others have been added to evade

the knowledge that cannot now be ignored and to make possible the

conformity to the vicious dialectic of power which rings as plangently

in America now as in the rest of the world. And the chief of them is

this—that hostility is the accepted state in which to live. Dualism is

looked on as the natural division of absolute opposites, of enemies:

Communism and democracy, Eastern man and Western man, native and

foreign, and, most pertinent to this argument, black and white. Not

black as formerly—the pathetically weak and erring child of nature; nor

white as formerly—the tolerant chastiser and protector, the strong

adult. But black raised by the findings of science (and the decisions of

the highest court in the land) to close equality with white, and

therefore the enemy to white.

Exaggerated? But toward truth, not away from it. That competition, which

was once confined to the lowest economic levels and which resulted in

the legendary hatred of the poor-white masses for the Negro and vice

versa, operates on higher levels now. It is on the level of skilled

labor, as the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen knew when

they brought suit to enjoin railroads from promoting Negro firemen (also

members of the Brotherhood) to engineers. It is on the level of

education, and persons reported to be students of the medical college of

the University of South Carolina admitted sending threatening letters to

a Negro applicant and burning a cross on his front lawn. It is on the

level of the professions, so that a committee of the National Bar

Association, a Negro group, felt constrained to report that “as the

quality of training rises, Negro lawyers find it harder to win admission

to the bar in some Southern states.”

Actually, of course, it is no longer possible to predicate

discrimination and segregation on Negro inferiority. So long as it was

possible and seemed forever possible, the “practical-minded” found a

kind of social justification in disfranchisement, in raising economic

and cultural barriers, in the despotic paternalism which said, “Thou

shalt not.” Even _the_ Negro leader, Booker Washington, found it

blameless and, indeed, good, without ever suspecting that the tradition

of _noblesse oblige_, on which all this was claimed to be founded, might

someday be as ineffective as necromancy. Segregation was order; it was

control; it was the steel and concrete casing sealing up a devastating

social explosion. It still seems so to the vast majority and their

leaders.

The strongest voices in the South today say that segregation must be

kept: Governor James Byrnes in his inaugural was not so intent on

expressing his views on foreign policy that he did not assure his

listeners of his unaltered opposition to the Fair Deal. Hodding Carter,

the liberal mentioned above, is not so liberal that he does not see it

as “tragic for the South, the Negro, and the nation itself” if

segregation is done away with. And “only a fool,” Lillian Smith quotes

from the Atlanta _Constitution_, “would say the Southern pattern of

separation of the races can, or should be overthrown.” But if

segregation must be kept, it must now be predicated on something else

than Negro inferiority.

And what else is there? The cynical ideology of power-worship, what H.

A. Overstreet calls “the fight-and-grab image,” the philosophy of hate.

It is what Hitler came to. It is the result of a pattern of thinking

desperately threatened by science and social change.

8

I am an integrationist. I have been for a long time. It is not a

principle that I arrived at through intellection. Until the past few

years, I did not bring to bear on it whatever intelligence I have. I

felt my way to it, just as some men, in spite of obstructing experience,

feel their way to ideals of honesty, sobriety and continence. Nor was

the feeling of my way wholly conscious. It was rather like the action of

one who kicks and splashes frantically to save himself from drowning and

suddenly finds that he has reached a shelf on which he can stand in the

river bed. His objective was not the shelf, but just to be saved. I

kicked and splashed in all directions, and suddenly there I was.

I was an integrationist when the Communists camped almost nightly on my

trail in the early 1930’s and lighted beckoning bright fires in the

frightening dark of that time. I did not believe then (any more than

now) that the moment the bars of segregation are lifted all the white

women of the South will fall into the arms of Negro mates. Many of my

acquaintances gleefully professed to believe this and would just as

gleefully declare that Negroes lynched for rape had been only unlucky in

being caught with their always-willing white paramours. They found

substance for this opinion in both fact and fiction, which too loudly

proclaimed the revulsive feeling of the white female for the Negro and

the inviolable purity of white womanhood. My acquaintances believed that

Southern whites protested too much.

And so, it seems, did the Communists. Or perhaps they did not. It could

have been just a line and the carrying out of explicit directives on

“How to Recruit Negroes in the Eastern States.” It could have been that

they played expertly on what they thought were the secret dreams of a

young, green, mixed-up and lonely man.

I suppose all people suffer from these maladies, and especially from

youth, in early adulthood; but I had more besides. I had a severe case

of “Negrophophilia” which alternately wrenched my heart with hate and

love. I was confused about the direction of my life and extremely

doubtful (as I sometimes am today) of life’s purpose. Whether naturally

or through learning, I shrank from all but a handful of people, and some

of these were a disappointment to me, and I have no doubt that I was a

sore trial to them. I lacked social accommodation. I have never thought

tolerance admirable as a principle either of adjustment or feeling, and

I rejected it entirely for my friends. Dogs were to be tolerated, and

crying babies, and strangers with whom one did not have to become

acquainted. My friends were constantly not living up to my foolish

expectations; my judgments were severe. I was continually breaking with

and rejoining them, but with no increase in understanding.

I do not think I would have become a Communist even had these

deficiencies not been in me. But, certainly, except for them, the

Communists would have had an easier time assailing my weak position on

the extreme left flank of democracy. The wrong scouts came to

reconnoiter, and they took the wrong approach.

The first who came was a moist, sleazy fellow, fat and asthmatic. I had

often seen him in the little restaurant where I took dinner. Frequently

he would be there in low-voiced conversation with various people—men and

women—when I entered. He always sat at the round, family table back in

the corner at an angle from the door, and my glance would fall there

first. There would be beer before him (it was just legal again) and a

dish of olives and olive pits and a plate of fried potatoes which he ate

with his fingers. Though I did not think he was aware of me, no one

could be unaware of him. Even from my table by the window and with my

back squarely toward him, I was conscious of his presence. In lulls of

dish rattling and conversation, his wheeze could be heard all over the

tiny restaurant.

One evening when I went there later than usual, because I had waited for

a cold rain to stop, and took my place, Eric, the German waiter, told me

that “Philip” wanted to talk to me. He indicated the fat man at the big

table. There was little possibility of Eric’s having made a mistake. The

restaurant had only a dozen tables and it catered to a limited and

steady patronage of unimportant executives, clerks and apprentices from

the jewelry manufacturies and a few plebeian graduate students like

myself. I do not remember ever seeing another Negro there. Even though

Eric had made no mistake, I was sure that I did not want to talk to

“Philip.” But before I could put my thoughts into words and summon the

courage to utter them, Philip was standing there. He looked at me

expressionlessly as he pulled the chair far out—to allow for his

pendulous belly—and sat down.

“This rain. My friends are all late tonight,” he said. “You’ll excuse

me.” There was nothing questioning, or tentative, or apologetic in the

way he spoke. I was acutely embarrassed. He took a piece of potato out

of the dish he had brought with him and carried it to his mouth. It was

a small, full-lipped mouth. His hands, too, I noticed, were small and

very white, though the nails and the knuckles were dirty, in contrast to

his moist, flushed face.

“What does the ‘J’ in your name represent?” he asked. I was taken by

surprise and must have shown it, for he blew out an indulgent laugh.

“You wouldn’t think I would know your name.” This was not a question

either. “I do.” And he spoke it.

The sound of it coming from a complete stranger seemed to establish some

kind of power over me. I felt a twinge of fright even, as if I were

suddenly vulnerable in ways I knew not of.

“How do you know?”

He swung his head from side to side and his face smiled at me. “I know.

And I know more,” he said. He called off items of biographical fact as

if he were reading from a file card—the year and place of my birth, my

father’s name, my brother’s name, my schooling, an attack of scarlet

fever I had had. Momentarily I half expected him to go into an account

of monstrous crimes I had committed in some other and unremembered

character. It seems silly now, for I know that to get such information

as he had was an easy matter, but then I felt that for some dark purpose

I could not guess a million pairs of eyes had followed me since birth.

I do not wish to play up this episode nor to dramatize my reaction to

it, for what followed was ridiculous emotional anticlimax. Through the

next talk Philip had with me a week or so later, his efforts to get on

terms of easy familiarity dissipated my sense of being mysteriously

overpowered and exposed. I did not respond to the first-name

camaraderie. Not knowing his last name, I avoided calling him anything.

I think my formal civility frustrated him, and I think this is why, in a

kind of desperation during the third or fourth meeting, he pulled out a

folder of very detailed obscene photographs and handed them to me. He

laughed when he asked in pretended casualness (for I could feel him

watching me sharply) whether I had seen anything like them before. And

weren’t they the most amusing things, and one in particular, because he

knew the girl in it—a student at the art school. He had some “delicious”

friends, he said, and he would like me to meet them. He said that there

was one “bonnie brunette especially, from ‘way down in Georgia—but

completely, and I mean completely, emancipated” and without prejudice.

They lined up fast enough once they were really free, he said, and it

only went to show what would happen to the race problem all over the

country were it not for the strength and pressure of reaction. “There

just wouldn’t be any if it were left to the women.”

I think Philip was running ’way ahead of his timetable. Or, to change

the figure, he had cast his net on the wrong tide. There was not enough

weight to it in any case. I knew later that there was quite a potential

catch of assorted fish, including a young college student who wore very

thick glasses, a French-descended politician who had considerable power

in local labor circles, and a very wealthy widow in her late thirties.

Even then the widow was contributing generously to the cell, and some

years later she became nationally known as pro-Communist. There were

others too, but I do not know how they had been approached, nor how many

were caught. Perhaps Philip and those who joined him in subsequent weeks

fumbled the assignment badly. At least this one got away. The approach

to my intellect is not through my gonads.

One approach perhaps is through my curiosity, and it was curiosity that

teased me into going here and there with Philip. I wanted to see what

kind of people these were. I had listened to soapbox Communists on the

streets of New York, but they had aroused nothing in me save vague

speculations over such questions as were bruited about in those days.

What was wrong with our government? Did the rich and powerful think only

to gain more power and reap more benefits from the exploitation of the

working class? What should the government do? What could it do? What was

Hoover doing that he should not do, and vice versa? I felt a certain

shallow contempt for the emotionalism, the unreasoning bitterness and

the actless anger of the soapbox radicals.

I do not know whether it was because they were a cohesive motley of

white Americans, Negroes, Italians, Portuguese and French, but I liked

better the brazen self-interest of the radical workers whom I had seen

milling about the shut-down (what an ominous word that was!)

blank-walled factories in southwest Providence. But I could not identify

myself with them either. They talked of violence and did violence (as

once when the police tried to scatter them) in an implacable,

matter-of-fact way that repelled me. I have never believed in violence.

I have heard Negroes advocate it. I once knew of a group of Negroes who

organized to kill a white man every time a Negro was lynched. They

called themselves the Kwick Kure Klub, Inc., in grim parody of the Ku

Klux Klan. They were to have branches in every principal city of the

South. Though it was rumored, and is still widely believed among

Negroes, that the violent and unsolved murder of a constable in Greene

County, Missouri, in the 1930’s was the work of the black KKK, I think

the organization never really got started.

Nor could I identify myself in more than a superficial way with the

campus group of intellectual radicals with whom a common interest in

writing brought me into contact. They were enthusiastic and wellmeaning,

but quite innocent and harmless. They knew considerably more about John

Reed, Heywood Broun and H. L. Mencken than about Marx, Lenin and the

deviationism of Trotsky. They knew something about Nietzsche too, and

they were learning, goggle-eyed, something about Freud. But the German

philosopher’s “will to power” was not translated into political terms,

and Freud’s _Civilization and Its Discontents_, which had only recently

appeared in this country, was simply a yardstick by which they measured

their imaginary personal gripes against smugness and conservatism.

Theirs was the rebellion of youth. They talked a lot, but what they said

was mostly brilliant nonsense which had no more relation to the actual

destruction of the bridges over which their parents had passed than a

pyrotechnic display on a moonless night. Only one of them became a

writer—a humorist, and a good one. His latest book now lies before me.

Sensitive, talented, some of them wealthy, they turned out to be

thoroughly conservative college professors, investment brokers and

lawyers who had no trouble making a peace with things as they are.

My problems were different from theirs. The drives—self-preservation,

anxiety, vanity, sex, the “complete discharge of strength” Nietzsche

speaks of—were considerably modified by my Negroness. Such an admission

is embarrassing to make, but I recognized its truth even then.

Self-preservation, for instance, was not a galvanic drive in me, nor in

other Negroes I knew. I have written elsewhere that five of my closest

acquaintances committed suicide in a span of six red and terrible years.

Pride and vanity were excessive. Since Negroes were assumed to be

sexually immoderate, I made a show of strict asceticism, chastising the

flesh in a way most unnatural to youth. What I did not recognize was

that I was being forced into the narrowest egocentrism; into an

involvement with self that was morbid beyond reason and that only the

lucky are able to sublimate—and this only partially—into group concern

and, with extreme luck, wider social concern. It need not be said, and

certainly not in the way of apology, that this is not altogether the

fault of the Negro. It is the fault also of the American

life-situation—neither quite an accidental wickedness nor a complex of

impersonal coercions—over which both the individual and the group

control of minority people is limited.

The campus group of intellectual radicals broadened me. They stimulated

my reading, my imagination, my sympathies. To the reading of James,

Santayana and DeUnamuno, to whom Professor Ducasse had introduced me, I

added Nietzsche (especially _Thus Spake Zarathustra_) and Marx and much

else that I would not have come across in the ordinary routine of my

graduate study.

But I was not broadened enough to take what Philip and his circle

offered. Had their offerings stayed on the level of the first parties I

attended with Philip, matters might have been different. I can take any

amount of talk, and there ran through their rapid-fire conversations

phrases that, exploding like firecrackers, drew my attention: “the

political state” (as distinct from the economic and social state—they

were drawing such distinctions then); “the omnicompetent state”;

“responsibility in areas of cultural autonomy.” Of course I had ideas as

to meanings, but nothing they said really coalesced into concepts. I was

not moved either to agreement or disagreement. I simply heard.

In later meetings, however, I began to listen and to understand, but not

what it was expected I would understand. Rather the opposite. I began to

comprehend that they talked like people who had a vested interest in a

democratic catastrophe. It was not Communism’s strength and validity,

its constructive and health-seeking activities on which they based their

arguments: it was democracy’s weaknesses. They rejoiced in the economic

depression because they saw in it the beginning of democracy’s total

collapse. The ideal, they said, was security _and_ freedom (and I agreed

with this), but under “your system”—they were talking directly to me and

to Hakely, a young but grizzled silversmith apprentice—“there is

neither.” They were too smart actually to make capitalism and democracy

synonymous, so I could judge only that this equating one with the other

was a deliberate effort to confuse.

And I was confused, and I showed it in childish exasperation at the way

in which they pointed out, with a kind of glib, cold fervor, every

weakness, every failure, every instance of corruption and discrimination

and injustice, and how these affected one personally, and especially the

Negro. The inference was plain that in the “omnicompetent state,” the

“service state” (which were equated), these things would not be. But

when I pressed for proof of their inferences, Philip and the

intellectual leaders of the cell withdrew into taunts and challenges and

were not percipient enough to see how dangerously they threatened my

self-esteem. The idea of democracy was itself not particularly dear to

me then, but I resented the doubts cast on my inherited assumptions

about it. If anything, I resented democracy for leaving me and itself so

defenseless; but I hated Communism for putting me on the defensive. My

anger and frustration carried over from one meeting to the next, for

though their arguments were basically weak, I had no answers to them.

After the fifth meeting, I was certain that I was through with the

Communists and all their works.

But I did not figure on the proselyting passion of Philip and Honey.

This latter was one of the five women in the cell whom I had seen

regularly at meetings. “Honey” was a cell nickname, and it suited only

her physical appearance. Among her colleagues at the city hospital,

where she told me she worked as a technician, she was known as Branca. I

never learned her last name. Of foreign extraction—Austrian or Czech, I

judged—she had soft honey-blond hair, worn in a long bob, so that when

she turned or lowered her head a wave of hair fell across her face. It

was a good face, not pretty and decorated, but well-structured and

strong, with pale yellow eyes set under square brows. She talked a great

deal in a rather strident and insolent tone, and she laughed a lot,

insolently too. Both her laughter and her talk seemed to come from very

near the surface. Yet one felt that she had depths. Sometimes one was as

hard put to follow the erratic train of her thought as to follow her

restless, vital movements.

Philip and Honey came to my lodginghouse one night after I had twice

failed to show up at meetings. It was embarrassing to have them come

there, for my landlady, though she had been born and had lived all her

life in New England and though she thought that this was in itself some

sort of victory or credit for a Negro—my landlady was only less

suspicious of white people than she was of Negroes who consorted with

them. Even had they desired it, my visitors could not have come in, so I

went with them to the two untidy rooms which Honey occupied over a

delicatessen in the oldest and a-step-from-genteel section of the city.

There were just the three of us, and over a bottle of very sour wine,

which was called dago red, they questioned me about my absences. I told

them that I had been preparing for midyear examinations, which was true,

and anyway was I to consider myself obligated to be present at every

cell meeting?

They looked at each other for a moment. Then Honey laughed deliciously

and said, “Of course not,” and Philip laboriously wheezed an echo of

this. In cell meetings Philip was the center, but here Honey had

complete charge. She led the talk into all sorts of trivial channels.

Shifting restlessly in her chair, tossing her head, crossing and

uncrossing her legs, Honey talked and talked. Her vitality and the wine

were exhilarating. She was profane and final in her judgments of people.

She jokingly accused Philip of trying to bring into the cell some

“profound asses,” some “absolutely untouchable unteachables,” like a

certain Sidney she mentioned, who was positively, she said, a

“reconditioned pervert.” Oh, she was sure of it! And Faye Hariston (this

was the wealthy widow), who “every day jumped into a barrel of

peroxide,” and who, for all her efforts at femininity, showed that she

was a “conditioned hermaphrodite.” Laughing gaily, Honey wanted to know

what Philip was doing, recruiting people for his own pleasure? Was that

what he was making of the cell, a circle of Lesbians and libertines?

Unembarrassed and unsmiling, Philip only shook his head, and after a

time Honey went on to something else. The atmosphere was very casual,

very friendly, and I was sorry when Philip announced that he must leave.

It was my cue to go too, and I got up.

There was a moment’s hesitation before Philip said, “Oh, but I’ll be

back! You wait for me here.” I looked at Honey, but she was already

reclaiming the hat I had picked up. I thought she smiled mockingly at

Philip.

What Honey and I talked about after Philip’s departure, I do not know.

In my notebook the next day I wrote exactly what follows.

“I wish I could make out a case of moral rectitude for myself, but I

cannot. What I kept thinking of last night was all the possible

consequences. When Honey came and sat on the couch too close to me, I

remembered all I had heard about ‘parlor whores’—that they were bold and

brazen and without discrimination, and that they were bound to be

diseased. I had never had more than a dozen words with her until last

night, so there was no affection for me. There was only passion, and

even this may not have been genuine. I half wished it were, or that I

could think it so. My feeling was that her object was to arouse passion

in me while she kept herself out of it and under control. She shivered

and rolled her head against my shoulder and dug her nails into my thigh,

but I think that it was all faked. I do not know what we talked about

between times, or whether we talked about anything.

“But if she were outside it, I was outside it too, and I kept thinking

that Honey had some ulterior motive and that she was trying to realize

it at too high a price. I knew that she wanted me to have sex relations

with her and I knew also that I would not, could not, dared not. I do

not think she tempted me at all, really; she just frightened me. I did

not see how anyone could go to such a length to obtain a result that in

the long run could have almost no importance. Certainly I cannot think

myself _that_ important to the Communists. And suppose this were not her

reason? Then what? Just sex. I cannot trust a white woman that way. No

matter how willingly a white woman gives herself to a colored man, if

she is found out, she will yell rape. Last night I pictured newspaper

headlines such as I have seen many times and I thought of them referring

to me: BLACK BRUTE. I did the right thing last night, though maybe I did

it for all the wrong reasons.”

I fled. Though I knew I had done the right thing, I was ashamed to see

Honey and Philip again, for I convinced myself that I had been naïf and

cowardly. I did not go back to the little restaurant at the bottom of

the hill. Once I had a note from Philip, and once he—or someone very

like him—inquired of me from my landlady, but I did not see him, nor

Honey, nor any of the people I used to see in the cell. I am certain

that Honey, laughing with strident insolence, spoke of me as one of

Philip’s “untouchable unteachables,” and pretty quickly forgot me.

9

But I did not forget Communism, then or later. In New York the next

year, 1933, the Party was quite fashionable among my acquaintances, some

of whom took it seriously. One could be sure that among the guests at

Harlem’s middle and upper-class social gatherings would be white people

and that these were admitted Communists or fellow travelers at least.

Some of them were said to be well known in _avant-garde_ and esoteric

circles and in the theater but I had never heard of most of them, and I

am inclined to think that the reputations they were given in Harlem were

a kind of defense in depth against the allegation that the only whites

Negroes could mingle with socially were peripheral people, nobodies,

tramps. The white people I met at such parties seemed average

intellectual types. I was struck by the fact that they did not talk

Communism, but gave the impression of living on a higher and freer level

than American democracy afforded. The atmosphere they created was easy

and sophisticated, with a high sexual content of which, it was said,

nearly everyone took advantage. No one bothered to whisper the stories

of liaisons between white women and Negro men and Negro women and white

men. They were accepted without shock, and the actors in these little

dramas seemed to play their roles with a lack of embarrassment and even

a natural grace that fascinated me.

I do not think any of the Communists I met in these circumstances were

seriously political-minded. Certainly they were not Party workers. They

did not make speeches from flag-draped stepladders wedged against

curbings, as so many Communists were doing daily in front of the Home

Relief stations scattered over the city. They did not rustle up

meetings, nor belong to instructional cells, nor try to indoctrinate

anyone. They were not of the “soiled shirt, sinkers and coffee brigade.”

My Negro acquaintances would not have had them in their homes if they

had been. Communism was merely the rose under which they pursued more

pleasurable activities.

There were a good many hastily printed Communist leaflets being passed

out in those days. I seemed to get them all; I also read them. They were

slanted for the middle-class Negro—the professional, the intellectual,

the student. With only half an eye one could see that the Party was

conducting a campaign to recruit a potential, educated Negro leadership.

The labor masses had been a disappointment to the Communists who,

anyway, employed the wrong methods to enlist them. Negro labor was far

from ready for the proletarian revolution. It was not class struggle but

race struggle that interested them. What the Negro labor masses wanted

was to be treated as a special case first. They wanted job security.

They wanted to be brought up to the level of white workers before they

could march in the ranks with them toward the bigger Communist goal.

Equality first, and then integration. Besides, Negro labor had the same

suspicion of Communism that it had of socialism and trade-unionism—a

suspicion of being used rather than helped, and used for the

establishment of an order of things that was not quite clear.

So the new recruitment was to be among the class of which I was an

inconsequential representative. The Communists were determined not to

make the same mistake twice. _Equality, Land and Freedom: A Program for

Negro Liberation_, issued by the League of Struggle for Negro Rights in

1933, put it this way: “The task that confronts the ... Party in

organizing the Negro workers and rallying them for the daily class

struggle ... side by side with the white workers is no light one.... The

Negro evinces no militant opposition towards Communism, but he wants to

know how it can improve his social status, what bearing does it have on

the common practice of lynching, political disfranchisement,

segregation, industrial discrimination.... The Negro is revolutionary

enough in a racial sense....” In short, he is race-conscious, and this

was enough to concentrate on. In the late 1920’s and the early 1930’s,

the Communists got some good advice from somewhere. They also took

advantage of two circumstances.

The Angelo Herndon case was still bubbling and boiling and the

Scottsboro case was just reaching another of its vociferous climaxes in

1933. The International Labor Defense was formed in those days, and I

met William L. Patterson, its secretary. Next to James D. Ford, the

Communist Party’s Vice-Presidential nominee in 1932, Patterson held the

highest rank of any Negro in the Party. But I was not impressed by him.

He seemed of small intellectual caliber, though very ambitious and bold.

I was more impressed by a well-known and engaging Negro journalist. He

had just returned from Russia (and, I suppose, a period of

indoctrination) when I met him backstage at the Fourteenth Street

Theatre, where _Stevedore_ was playing. I can remember his saying to me,

“We Negro writers have a great opportunity and an inflexible duty to

promote the revolution that will extirpate caste, class and race.” How

flattering! “We Negro writers—” to lump me in with Langston Hughes,

Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Rudolph Fisher, Countee Cullen and himself,

all of them talented, all of them well known. He could not possibly have

heard of me—I had written and published professionally only one story at

that time. But the Negro art and literary “renaissance” had not waned

enough for those close to it to see that it was fading, and now and

then, a completely unknown student, I basked in that artificial light

like a homeless beggar keeping himself warm over a sidewalk grating.

But Communism gave off a light of a different quality. It had no comfort

in it. As harsh and as revealing as the light in a surgical operating

room, it cast no cozy shadow into which one could slip for those moments

of quiet reflection which seemed as necessary to me as food and drink.

Communism did not allow for the play of individual thought and

initiative. It had no warmth in it. Or perhaps it is untrue to say this,

since intense heat and intense cold produce the same primary reaction—a

shriveling up, a drying out, until the living thing loses its own

identity and becomes one with the heat or the cold. I saw something of

this reaction in New York and I was appalled by it. Or perhaps this too

is untrue. Perhaps what appalled me was the realization that there were

people who felt themselves so helplessly cast out of American society

and democratic reckoning that they could suck with voracious hunger at

the cold breast of Communism. One of the things I could not understand

was the unquestioning submission to control.

I do not mean to give the impression that I met many avowed Negro

Communists. I did not—not more than a half dozen in all. But with one of

them I had nearly seven months of close association. He had a room next

to mine in the place where I was living and we shared a bath. He was a

thief. He did not make his living in this way. He had to do with the

stock and delivery room of a garment making firm, he told me, and he was

a minor official in a local union of either truckers or garment makers,

I do not know which. He was a thief solely for the benefit of the Party.

That was his Party work and his duty and he served it blindly. It was a

strange work. At more or less regular intervals he stole bolts of

cloth—“suitings” was his word—and kept them in his room until someone,

seldom the same person twice, identifying himself by some prearranged

means, made contact and relieved him of the goods. He never knew what

happened to them ultimately.

Curiously enough this was almost the only information about himself

Clark (we will call him) ever volunteered, and of course I did not know

this at first. What I did know about Clark—but only after probing—was

that he came originally from Pennsylvania and had been graduated from a

high school in one of the towns in that state. When the CCC agency was

organized, he applied for admission to one of the work groups, but was

rejected because high school was supposed to have given him a vocation

by means of which he could earn a living. Caught in the depression,

without money and, I gathered, without stable family connections, he

drifted for a while—to Pittsburgh, to Philadelphia and finally to New

York. He was a rugged-looking, stiff-faced young man of twenty-four or

twenty-five. One would never suspect from his appearance or from his

unimpassioned manner of speaking what a steady flame of fanaticism

burned in him. He did not talk well. His voice was coarse, his tongue

slightly thick, and he had a very limited command of the language. He

spoke of this one day after we had got to know each other fairly well.

“I wish I could talk—like you,” he said. I was about to protest that I

was no model, when he added, “Or like James Ford.” This was a complete

letdown for me. I had both seen and heard James Ford when he was

stumping the Eastern seaboard for the League of Struggle for Negro

Rights, and I did not think much of him. He seemed basically ignorant,

like a parrot fluently repeating phrases he had been carefully taught.

His manner seemed gross.

“James Ford?”

“If I could talk like him, maybe I could be where he is now,” Clark

said.

“And where is he?” I genuinely wanted to know. I had heard nothing of

him since his farcical campaign as the Communist Party’s

Vice-Presidential candidate.

“I don’t know, but I think he’s in Russia,” Clark said.

“You want to go to Russia? But why?”

“What’s this country ever done for me? What am I here?” he asked

impassively. “A nigger anybody can spit on. In Russia I could be a man.”

This too came without anger or bitterness, and I could understand it. He

was giving idiomatic expression to a simple wish for dignity and

self-respect. One heard it so often among Negroes that one was likely to

forget the deep wound of denial which it covered like a scab.

“I know a fellow who went to Russia,” I said brightly. “Apparently he

likes it. He’s never come back.”

“He’s got the right idea. I wouldn’t come back neither, if I ever went.”

“It doesn’t appeal to me,” I said. “You’ve been listening to the guys on

the stepladder, the Reds, across the street.”

Clark gave me then a long, slow look, but there was nothing in it that I

could detect—no quickening either of speculation or resentment. “I’m a

Communist,” he said.

I laughed with surprise and embarrassment and, still with his passive

eyes on me, he said again, “I’m a Communist,” bluntly.

There was nothing to say and so I kept silent, and to keep silent with

Clark was like nothing so much as expecting to be talked to by a wall.

He went to his own room shortly. The next day when we met, I felt a

little twinge of embarrassment, but he seemed not to, and the feeling

soon passed.

Though I did not know it then, I talked to Clark for next to the last

time less than a month later. He came to my room one night, as he often

did, but this time he announced phlegmatically that he was in trouble.

He neither looked nor sounded like a man in trouble and I could think

only that he was in trouble with a girl—though girls had never been a

subject of conversation between us.

“What kind of trouble?” I inquired.

I suppose Clark lacked a certain sensitiveness, though I would not have

called him callous. I do not think it was because he did not care: it

was just that he could not estimate the effect his words had upon

others.

“I’m a thief and I think they suspicion me,” he said.

I must have said something like “Oh, go on,” or “Quit kidding,” but I

knew he had no sense of humor and was quite incapable of kidding. I

looked at him. He seemed to think I had not heard him. “I’m a thief and

I think they suspicion me,” he repeated. And when he took me to his room

and showed me a flat-top trunk half full of bolts of cloth, I believed

him.

“But what are you going to do with this stuff? If they suspect you and

come——”

“I’m going to get shut of it,” he said stoically. “I’m going to get shut

of it now in a few minutes.” He was stuffing the bolts of cloth into two

battered valises.

“What are you going to do? How are you going to get rid of it?”

This time he did not answer, but swung the valises off the bed, brushed

past me and went down the hall.

The next time (and the last time) I talked with Clark was in the Ninth

Precinct jail. He was arrested on a Saturday. On Sunday a newspaper

reporter who covered the precinct telephoned me, saying that Clark

wanted to see me. I did not like it. I was vexed by the fear of somehow

becoming involved in his trouble. I went with reluctance. The desk

sergeant, I thought, eyed me suspiciously when I asked for Clark, but

perhaps it was just my nervousness, for he called another officer who,

taking a key, led me through some doors and along a tier of empty cells.

Clark was in the last cell on the tier and he must have heard us coming,

for I found him standing expectantly. He smiled stiffly when he saw me,

but waited until the policeman had gone before he spoke.

“They got me,” he said.

My mood was not pleasant, I’m afraid, nor talkative. I had no wish to

draw him out. If he had anything to say to me, I thought, then he would

damned well say it without help from me. He was still smiling stiffly.

“They got me,” he said again.

“So I see,” I said. “Now what?”

They were holding him for a preliminary hearing on Monday, he said.

Then, as if it were something which did not concern him—as if he were

speaking of someone else who was altogether a stranger to him—he told me

of his work for the Communists as I have related it above. I could not

understand it. I stared at him, for what he was saying sounded crazy,

especially to be coming in so calm and uninflected a voice.

“But why?” I wanted to know.

“It was my job,” he said, as if that explained it truly and entirely; as

if it completely satisfied the demands of my question.

“What did you send for me for? I can’t do anything for you,” I said.

“Somebody’s made a fool of you. Let them look out for you.”

“You got it all wrong,” he said, shaking his head slowly.

“You’ve got it all wrong. You’re in jail,” I said bitingly.

“But I ain’t no fool, unless doing things for a good point is one. And I

don’t want nobody to look out for me.”

“Well, if you did, somebody else would have to do it.”

“What could they do? You want me to get them in trouble?”

“You mean the Communists?”

“My action group,” he said. “They can’t do nothing. They ain’t supposed

to do nothing.”

I stared at him with even greater intensity. “They know and they won’t

even go bail for you or get you a lawyer?” My outraged credulity was as

lost on him as my vexation had been.

“I told you,” he said.

“You mean it’s supposed to be this way? You knew that if something like

this happened, your action group wouldn’t do anything?”

“I ain’t going to drag nobody else in,” he said doggedly.

“They shouldn’t have to be dragged in,” I said, and I think I raised my

voice in exasperation. “They ought to come in.”

“You wrong,” he said.

“But you’re the one who’s in jail.”

I could not believe that what was happening to him could happen. Of

course I had heard stories of strict Party discipline, of orders being

given to Party members to do what no one in his right mind would do, but

I had not believed such stories, though they were common and though they

were also congruous with the newspaper accounts of the purges that were

then taking place in Russia. I had kept my reservations. But this

business with Clark was real. He was someone I knew, and this was

happening to him.

“Look,” I said, “why don’t you be sensible? Why don’t you——”

He was shaking his head before I could finish. There seemed to be

nothing I could say to arouse him to a true recognition of the fix he

was in. Perhaps at bottom he had a martyr complex, but I could not see

in him any of the things I associated with martyrdom. There was none of

the fire, none of the dignity and nobility I thought of as belonging in

the picture. There were not even defiance and rebellion in him—or if

they were, Clark kept them hidden beneath layers of stony reserve that

could not be penetrated. Besides, it seemed to me that to _have_ to

suffer alone for a principle made the principle suspect.

And he suffered alone. I did not go to see him in the Tombs where he was

remanded after the preliminary hearing, and on the day of his trial I

searched four papers before I found in one of them a short notice: NEGRO

CONVICTED OF THEFT.