Black Like Me (7 page)

“I wish those kind souls wouldn’t be so protective. I know plenty who’d be willing to take the chance of being ‘disillusioned,’ ” the proprietor laughed.

“They’re about fifty years behind the times,” an elderly man said. “The social scientists have shown this is wrong. Our own people have proven themselves in every field - not just a few, but thousands. How can the racists deny these proofs?”

“They don’t bother to find out about them,” Mr. Gayle said flatly.

“We need a conversion of morals,” the elderly man said. “Not just superficially, but profoundly. And in both races. We need a great saint - some enlightened common sense. Otherwise,
we’ll never have the right answers when the pressure groups - those racists, super-patriots, whatever you want to call them - tag every move toward racial justice as communist-inspired, Zionist-inspired, Illuminati-inspired, Satan-inspired … part of some secret conspiracy to overthrow the Christian civilization.”

“So, if you want to be a good Christian, you mustn’t act like one. That makes sense,” Mr. Gayle said.

“That’s what they claim. The minute you give me my rights to vote when I pay taxes, to have a decent job, a decent home, a decent education - then you’re taking the first step toward ‘race-mixing’ and that’s part of the great secret conspiracy to ruin civilization - to ruin America,” the elderly man said.

“So, if you want to be a good American, you’ve got to practice bad Americanism. That makes sense, too,” Mr. Gayle sighed. “Maybe it’d take a saint after all to straighten such a mess out.”

“We’ve reached a poor state when people are afraid that doing the decent and right thing is going to help the communist conspiracy,” the proprietor said. “I’m sure a lot of people are held back just on that point.”

“Any way you look at it, we’re in the middle,” concluded the elderly man. “It’s hard for me to understand how letting me have a decent job, so I can raise my children in a better home and give them a better education is going to help the enemies of my country. …”

Walking along Dryades, through the ghetto, I realized that every informed man with whom I had spoken, in the intimate freedom of the colored bond, had acknowledged a double problem for the Negro. First, the discrimination against him. Second, and almost more grievous, his discrimination against himself; his contempt for the blackness that he associates with his suffering; his willingness to sabotage his fellow Negroes because they are part of the blackness he has found so painful.

“Want something, mister?” a white merchant said as I passed. I glanced at him sitting in the doorway of his junky store. “Come on in,” he wheedled, sounding for the world as though he were pimping for the shoes he had on display.

I had not gone ten feet when I heard him solicit someone else in the same tone. “Want something, mister?”

“Yeah, but you ain’t my type,” the man behind me answered without humor.

On Chartres Street in the French Quarter, I walked toward Brennan’s, one of New Orleans’ famed restaurants. Forgetting myself for a moment, I stopped to study the menu that was elegantly exposed in a show window. I read, realizing that a few days earlier I could have gone in and ordered anything on the menu. But now, though I was the same person with the same appetite, the same appreciation and even the same wallet, no power on earth could get me inside this place for a meal. I recalled hearing some Negro say, “You can live here all your life, but you’ll never get inside one of the great restaurants except as a kitchen boy.” The Negro often dreams of things separated from him only by a door, knowing that he is forever cut off from experiencing them.

I read the menu carefully, forgetting that Negroes do not do such things. It is too poignant, like the little boy peering in the candy store window. It might affect the tourist.

I looked up to see the frowns of disapproval that can speak so plainly and so loudly without words. The Negro learns this silent language fluently. He knows by the white man’s look of disapproval and petulance that he is being told to get on his way, that he is “stepping out of line.”

It was a day of giving the gracious smile and receiving the gracious rebuff as I asked again and again about jobs.

Finally, I gave up and went to the shine stand. From there I set out to return at dusk to Dryades. But I had walked too far. My legs gave out. At Jackson Square, a public park, I found a long, curving bench and sat down to rest for a moment. The park appeared deserted. A movement through the bushes attracted my attention. I looked to see a middle-aged white man across the park slowly fold the newspaper he was reading, get to his feet and amble toward me. The fragrance of his pipe tobacco preceded him, reassuring me. Racists are not the pipe-smoking type, I thought to myself.

With perfect courtesy he said, “You’d better find yourself
someplace else to rest.”

I took it as a favor. He was warning me so I could get out before someone insulted me. “Thank you,” I said. “I didn’t know we weren’t allowed in here.”

Later, I told the story at the Y, and discovered that Negroes have the right to sit in Jackson Square. This individual simply did not want me there.

But at the time I did not know it. I left, sick with exhaustion, wondering where a Negro could sit to rest. It was walk constantly until you could catch a bus, but keep on the move unless you have business somewhere. If you stop to sit on the curb, a police car will pass and probably ask you what you’re doing. I have heard none of the Negroes speak of police harassment, but they have warned me that any time the police see a Negro idling, especially one they do not recognize, they will surely question him. This is worrisome, certainly an experience any Negro wants to avoid.

I walked over to Claiborne and caught the first bus that passed. It took me out to Dillard University, a beautiful campus. I was too tired to explore it, however, and sat on the bench waiting to catch another bus into town. Buses were inexpensive to ride and it was a good way to rest.

Night was near when I finally caught the bus going toward town. Two blocks before Canal, the bus makes a left turn off Claiborne. I rang the bell to get off at this stop. The driver pulled to a halt and opened the door. He left it open until I reached it. I was ready to step off when the door banged shut in my face. Since he had to remain there waiting for a clear passage through traffic, I asked him to let me off.

“I can’t leave the door open all night,” he said impatiently.

He waited another full minute, but refused to open the door.

“Will you please let me off at the next corner then?” I asked, controlling my temper, careful not to do or say anything that would jeopardize the Negroes’ position in the area.

He did not answer. I returned to my seat. A woman watched me with sympathetic anger, as though she in no way approved of this kind of treatment. However, she did not speak.

At each stop, I sounded the buzzer, but the driver continued
through the next two stops. He drove me eight full blocks past my original stop and pulled up then only because some white passengers wanted to get off. I followed them to the front. He watched me, his hand on the lever that would spring the doors shut.

“May I get off now?” I asked quietly when the others had stepped down.

“Yeah, go ahead,” he said finally, as though he had tired of the cat-and-mouse game. I got off, sick, wondering how I could ever walk those eight blocks back to my original stop.

In all fairness, I must add that this is the only example of deliberate cruelty I encountered on any of the city buses of New Orleans. Even though I was outraged, I knew he did not commit this indignity against me, but against my black flesh, my color. This was an individual act by an individual, and certainly not typical.

After a week of wearying rejection, the newness had worn off. My first vague, favorable impression that it was not as bad as I had thought it would be came from courtesies of the whites toward the Negro in New Orleans. But this was superficial. All the courtesies in the world do not cover up the one vital and massive discourtesy - that the Negro is treated not even as a second-class citizen, but as a tenth-class one. His day-to-day living is a reminder of his inferior status. He does not become calloused to these things - the polite rebuffs when he seeks better employment; hearing himself referred to as nigger, coon, jigaboo; having to bypass available rest-room facilities or eating facilities to find one specified for him. Each new reminder strikes at the raw spot, deepens the wound. I do not speak here only from my personal reaction, but from seeing it happen to others, and from seeing
their reactions.

The Negro’s only salvation from complete despair lies in his belief, the old belief of his forefathers, that these things are not directed against him personally, but against his race, his pigmentation. His mother or aunt or teacher long ago carefully prepared him, explaining that he as an individual can live in dignity, even though he as a Negro cannot. “They don’t do it to you because you’re Johnny - they don’t even know you. They do it against your Negro-ness.”

But at the time of the rebuff, even when the rebuff is impersonal, such as holding his bladder until he can find a “Colored” sign, the Negro cannot rationalize. He feels it personally and it burns him. It gives him a view of the white man that the white can never understand; for if the Negro is part of the black mass, the white is always the individual, and he will sincerely deny that he is “like that,” he has always tried to be fair and kind to the Negro. Such men are offended to find Negroes suspicious of them, never realizing that the Negro cannot understand how - since as individuals they are decent and “good” to the colored - the whites as a group can still connive to arrange life so that it destroys the Negro’s sense of personal value, degrades his human dignity, deadens the fibers of his being.

Existence becomes a grinding effort, guided by belly-hunger and the almost desperate need to divert awareness from the squalors to the pleasures, to lose oneself in sex or drink or dope or gut-religion or gluttony or the incoherence of falsity; and in some instances the higher pleasures of music, art, literature, though these usually deepen perceptions rather than dull them, and can be unbearable; they present a world that is ordered, sane, disciplined to felicity, and the contrast of that world to theirs increases the pain of theirs.

When I went out that morning the face of the Negro populace was glum and angry.

At the shoe stand, Sterling did not give his usual cordial greeting. His eyes looked yellower than usual.

“You heard?” he asked.

“No … I haven’t heard anything …”
He told me the Mississippi jury refused to indict in the Parker lynch case. The news had spread over the quarter like a wave of acid. Everyone talked of it. Not since I was in Europe, when the Russo-German Pact of 1939 was signed, had I seen news spread such bitterness and despair.

Sterling handed me this morning’s issue of
The Louisiana Weekly
, a Negro newspaper. The editorial page condemned the jury’s actions.

The point that crushed most was that the FBI had supplied a dossier of evidence identifying the lynchers, and the Pearl River County Grand Jury had decided not to look inside it.

I handed the paper back to Sterling. In a voice heavy with anger he held it at arm’s length and read: “The calculated lack of respect for law and order in Mississippi has made it a veritable jungle of intimidation, terrorism and brutality where only the fittest survive. Further, it has shamed the United States in the eyes
of the world and added to the shame of the South, already experiencing strained, tense and explosive race relations because white supremacy mob rule substitutes too often for democracy. …”

He lowered the paper. “That’s what pisses me off. They rant about how the rest of the country’s against the Southern white - hell, how could they help being? Well, this just proves it. This is what we can expect from the white man’s justice. What hope is there when a white jury won’t even
look
at the evidence against a lynch mob?”

I could find nothing to say.

“We might as well learn not to expect
nothing
from Southern Justice. They’re going to stack the cards against us every time,” Sterling said.

No one outside the Negro community could imagine the profound effect this action had in killing the Negro’s hope and breaking his morale.

I decided it was time to go into that state so dreaded by Negroes.

Joe returned with peanuts. I told them of my decision to move into Mississippi.

They jumped on the news almost angrily. “What the hell you want to go there for?” Joe protested. “That’s no place for a colored man - especially now with this Parker mess.

“They’re going to treat any Negro like a dog,” Sterling said. “You sure better not go.”

“That’s part of my work.”

“I’m telling you,” Joe insisted. “I know. I been there once and I couldn’t get out quick enough. And things weren’t as bad as they are now.”

“Yes, but Mississippi tells the rest of the world they got a wonderful relationship with their Negroes - that they understand each other, and like each other. They say outsiders just don’t understand. Well, I’m going there to see if I can understand.”