Nobody Knows My Name Page 7

  My first hero was Joe Louis. I was ashamed of Father Divine. Haile Selassie was the first black emperor I ever saw—in a newsreel; he was pleading vainly with the West to prevent the rape of his country. And the extraordinary complex of tensions thus set up in the breast, between hatred of whites and contempt for blacks, is very hard to describe. Some of the most energetic people of my generation were destroyed by this interior warfare.

  But none of this is so for those who are young now. The power of the white world to control their identities was crumbling as they were born; and by the time they were able to react to the world, Africa was on the stage of history. This could not but have an extraordinary effect on their own morale, for it meant that they were not merely the descendants of slaves in a white, Protestant, and puritan country: they were also related to kings and princes in an ancestral homeland, far away. And this has proved to be a great antidote to the poison of self-hatred.

  It also signals, at last, the end of the Negro situation in this country, as we have so far known it. Any effort, from here on out, to keep the Negro in his “place” can only have the most extreme and unlucky repercussions. This being so, it would seem to me that the most intelligent effort we can now make is to give up this doomed endeavor and study how we can most quickly end this division in our house. The Negroes who rioted in the U.N. are but a very small echo of the black discontent now abroad in the world. If we are not able, and quickly, to face and begin to eliminate the sources of this discontent in our own country, we will never be able to do it on the great stage of the world.

  5. A Fly in Buttermilk

  YOU CAN TAKE THE CHILD OUT of the country,” my elders were fond of saying, “but you can’t take the country out of the child.” They were speaking of their own antecedents, I supposed; it didn’t, anyway, seem possible that they could be warning me; I took myself out of the country and went to Paris. It was there I discovered that the old folks knew what they had been talking about: I found myself, willy-nilly, alchemized into an American the moment I touched French soil.

  Now, back again after nearly nine years, it was ironical to reflect that if I had not lived in France for so long I would never have found it necessary—or possible—to visit the American South. The South had always frightened me. How deeply it had frightened me—though I had never seen it—and how soon, was one of the things my dreams revealed to me while I was there. And this made me think of the privacy and mystery of childhood all over again, in a new way. I wondered where children got their strength—the strength, in this case, to walk through mobs to get to school.

  “You’ve got to remember,” said an older Negro friend to me, in Washington, “that no matter what you see or how it makes you feel, it can’t be compared to twenty-five, thirty years ago—you remember those photographs of Negroes hanging from trees?” I looked at him differently. I had seen the photographs—but he might have been one of them. “I remember,” he said, “when conductors on streetcars wore pistols and had police powers.” And he remembered a great deal more. He remembered, for example, hearing Booker T. Washington speak, and the day-to-day progress of the Scottsboro case, and the rise and bloody fall of Bessie Smith. These had been books and headlines and music for me but it now developed that they were also a part of my identity.

  “You’re just one generation away from the South, you know. You’ll find,” he added, kindly, “that people will be willing to talk to you … if they don’t feel that you look down on them just because you’re from the North.”

  The first Negro I encountered, an educator, didn’t give me any opportunity to look down. He forced me to admit, at once, that I had never been to college; that Northern Negroes lived herded together, like pigs in a pen; that the campus on which we met was a tribute to the industry and determination of Southern Negroes. “Negroes in the South form a community.” My humiliation was complete with his discovery that I couldn’t even drive a car. I couldn’t ask him anything. He made me feel so hopeless an example of the general Northern spinelessness that it would have seemed a spiteful counterattack to have asked him to discuss the integration problem which had placed his city in the headlines.

  At the same time, I felt that there was nothing which bothered him more; but perhaps he did not really know what he thought about it; or thought too many things at once. His campus risked being very different twenty years from now. Its special function would be gone—and so would his position, arrived at with such pain. The new day a-coming was not for him. I don’t think this fact made him bitter but I think it frightened him and made him sad; for the future is like heaven—everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now. And I imagine that he shared the attitude, which I was to encounter so often later, toward the children who were helping to bring this future about: admiration before the general spectacle and skepticism before the individual case.

  That evening I went to visit G., one of the “integrated” children, a boy of about fifteen. I had already heard something of his first day in school, the peculiar problems his presence caused, and his own extraordinary bearing.

  He seemed extraordinary at first mainly by his silence. He was tall for his age and, typically, seemed to be constructed mainly of sharp angles, such as elbows and knees. Dark gingerbread sort of coloring, with ordinary hair, and a face disquietingly impassive, save for his very dark, very large eyes. I got the impression, each time that he raised them, not so much that they spoke but that they registered volumes; each time he dropped them it was as though he had retired into the library.

  We sat in the living room, his mother, younger brother and sister, and I, while G. sat on the sofa, doing his homework. The father was at work and the older sister had not yet come home. The boy had looked up once, as I came in, to say, “Good evening, sir,” and then left all the rest to his mother.

  Mrs. R. was a very strong-willed woman, handsome, quiet-looking, dressed in black. Nothing, she told me, beyond name-calling, had marked G.’s first day at school; but on the second day she received the last of several threatening phone calls. She was told that if she didn’t want her son “cut to ribbons” she had better keep him at home. She heeded this warning to the extent of calling the chief of police.

  “He told me to go on and send him. He said he’d be there when the cutting started. So I sent him.” Even more remarkably perhaps, G. went.

  No one cut him, in fact no one touched him. The students formed a wall between G. and the entrances, saying only enough, apparently, to make their intention clearly understood, watching him, and keeping him outside. (I asked him, “What did you feel when they blocked your way?” G. looked up at me, very briefly, with no expression on his face, and told me, “Nothing, sir.”) At last the principal appeared and took him by the hand and they entered the school, while the children shouted behind them, “Nigger-lover!”

  G. was alone all day at school.

  “But I thought you already knew some of the kids there,” I said. I had been told that he had friends among the white students because of their previous competition in a Soapbox Derby.

  “Well, none of them are in his classes,” his mother told me—a shade too quickly, as though she did not want to dwell on the idea of G.’s daily isolation.

  “We don’t have the same schedule,” G. said. It was as though he were coming to his mother’s rescue. Then, unwillingly, with a kind of interior shrug, “Some of the guys had lunch with me but then the other kids called them names.” He went back to his homework.

  I began to realize that there were not only a great many things G. would not tell me, there was much that he would never tell his mother.

  “But nobody bothers you, anyway?”

  “No,” he said. “They just—call names. I don’t let it bother me.”

  Nevertheless, the principal frequently escorts him through the halls. One day, when G. was alone, a boy tripped him and knocked him down and G. reported this to the principal. The white boy denied it but a few days later, while G. and the pr
incipal were together, he came over and said, “I’m sorry I tripped you; I won’t do it again,” and they shook hands. But it doesn’t seem that this boy has as yet developed into a friend. And it is clear that G. will not allow himself to expect this.

  I asked Mrs. R. what had prompted her to have her son reassigned to a previously all-white high school. She sighed, paused; then, sharply, “Well, it’s not because I’m so anxious to have him around white people.” Then she laughed. “I really don’t know how I’d feel if I was to carry a white baby around who was calling me Grandma.” G. laughed, too, for the first time. “White people say,” the mother went on, “that that’s all a Negro wants. I don’t think they believe that themselves.”

  Then we switched from the mysterious question of what white folks believe to the relatively solid ground of what she, herself, knows and fears.

  “You see that boy? Well, he’s always been a straight-A student. He didn’t hardly have to work at it. You see the way he’s so quiet now on the sofa, with his books? Well, when he was going to ——— High School, he didn’t have no homework or if he did, he could get it done in five minutes. Then, there he was, out in the streets, getting into mischief, and all he did all day in school was just keep clowning to make the other boys laugh. He wasn’t learning nothing and didn’t nobody care if he never learned nothing and I could just see what was going to happen to him if he kept on like that.”

  The boy was very quiet.

  “What were you learning in ——— High?” I asked him.

  “Nothing!” he exploded, with a very un-boyish laugh. I asked him to tell me about it.

  “Well, the teacher comes in,” he said, “and she gives you something to read and she goes out. She leaves some other student in charge …” (“You can just imagine how much reading gets done,” Mrs. R. interposed.) “At the end of the period,” G. continued, “she comes back and tells you something to read for the next day.”

  So, having nothing else to do, G. began amusing his classmates and his mother began to be afraid. G. is just about at the age when boys begin dropping out of school. Perhaps they get a girl into trouble; she also drops out; the boy gets work for a time or gets into trouble for a long time. I was told that forty-five girls had left school for the maternity ward the year before. A week or ten days before I arrived in the city eighteen boys from G.’s former high school had been sentenced to the chain gang.

  “My boy’s a good boy,” said Mrs. R., “and I wanted to see him have a chance.”

  “Don’t the teachers care about the students?” I asked. This brought forth more laughter. How could they care? How much could they do if they did care? There were too many children, from shaky homes and worn-out parents, in aging, inadequate plants. They could be considered, most of them, as already doomed. Besides, the teachers’ jobs were safe. They were responsible only to the principal, an appointed official, whose judgment, apparently, was never questioned by his (white) superiors or confreres.

  The principal of G.’s former high school was about seventy-five when he was finally retired and his idea of discipline was to have two boys beat each other—“under his supervision”—with leather belts. This once happened with G., with no other results than that his parents gave the principal a tongue-lashing. It happened with two boys of G.’s acquaintance with the result that, after school, one boy beat the other so badly that he had to be sent to the hospital. The teachers have themselves arrived at a dead end, for in a segregated school system they cannot rise any higher, and the students are aware of this. Both students and teachers soon cease to struggle.

  “If a boy can wash a blackboard,” a teacher was heard to say, “I’ll promote him.”

  I asked Mrs. R. how other Negroes felt about her having had G. reassigned.

  “Well, a lot of them don’t like it,” she said—though I gathered that they did not say so to her. As school time approached, more and more people asked her, “Are you going to send him?” “Well,” she told them, “the man says the door is open and I feel like, yes, I’m going to go on and send him.”

  Out of a population of some fifty thousand Negroes, there had been only forty-five applications. People had said that they would send their children, had talked about it, had made plans; but, as the time drew near, when the application blanks were actually in their hands, they said, “I don’t believe I’ll sign this right now. I’ll sign it later.” Or, “I been thinking about this. I don’t believe I’ll send him right now.”

  “Why?” I asked. But to this she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, give me any answer.

  I asked if there had been any reprisals taken against herself or her husband, if she was worried while G. was at school all day. She said that, no, there had been no reprisals, though some white people, under the pretext of giving her good advice, had expressed disapproval of her action. But she herself doesn’t have a job and so doesn’t risk losing one. Nor, she told me, had anyone said anything to her husband, who, however, by her own proud suggestion, is extremely closemouthed. And it developed later that he was not working at his regular trade but at something else.

  As to whether she was worried, “No,” she told me; in much the same way that G., when asked about the blockade, had said, “Nothing, sir.” In her case it was easier to see what she meant: she hoped for the best and would not allow herself, in the meantime, to lose her head. “I don’t feel like nothing’s going to happen,” she said, soberly. “I hope not. But I know if anybody tries to harm me or any one of my children, I’m going to strike back with all my strength. I’m going to strike them in God’s name.”

  G., in the meantime, on the sofa with his books, was preparing himself for the next school day. His face was as impassive as ever and I found myself wondering—again—how he managed to face what must surely have been the worst moment of his day—the morning, when he opened his eyes and realized that it was all to be gone through again. Insults, and incipient violence, teachers, and—exams.

  “One among so many,” his mother said, “that’s kind of rough.”

  “Do you think you’ll make it?” I asked him. “Would you rather go back to ——— High?”

  “No,” he said, “I’ll make it. I ain’t going back.”

  “He ain’t thinking about going back,” said his mother—proudly and sadly. I began to suspect that the boy managed to support the extreme tension of his situation by means of a nearly fanatical concentration on his schoolwork; by holding in the center of his mind the issue on which, when the deal went down, others would be forced to judge him. Pride and silence were his weapons. Pride comes naturally, and soon, to a Negro, but even his mother, I felt, was worried about G.’s silence, though she was too wise to break it. For what was all this doing to him really?

  “It’s hard enough,” the boy said later, still in control but with flashing eyes, “to keep quiet and keep walking when they call you nigger. But if anybody ever spits on me, I know I’ll have to fight.”

  His mother laughs, laughs to ease them both, then looks at me and says, “I wonder sometimes what makes white folks so mean.”

  This is a recurring question among Negroes, even among the most “liberated”—which epithet is meant, of course, to describe the writer. The next day, with this question (more elegantly phrased) still beating in my mind, I visited the principal of G.’s new high school. But he didn’t look “mean” and he wasn’t “mean”: he was a thin, young man of about my age, bewildered and in trouble. I asked him how things were working out, what he thought about it, what he thought would happen—in the long run, or the short.

  “Well, I’ve got a job to do,” he told me, “and I’m going to do it.” He said that there hadn’t been any trouble and that he didn’t expect any. “Many students, after all, never see G. at all.” None of the children have harmed him and the teachers are, apparently, carrying out their rather tall orders, which are to be kind to G. and, at the same time, to treat him like any other student.

  I asked him to descri
be to me the incident, on the second day of school, when G.’s entrance had been blocked by the students. He told me that it was nothing at all—“It was a gesture more than anything else.” He had simply walked out and spoken to the students and brought G. inside. “I’ve seen them do the same thing to other kids when they were kidding,” he said. I imagine that he would like to be able to place this incident in the same cheerful if rowdy category, despite the shouts (which he does not mention) of “nigger-lover!”