|
Books by John
Oliver Killens
Youngblood /
And Then
We Heard the Thunder /
The Cotillion
/
The Great Black Russian
A Man-Aint-Nothin But A Man Adventures of John Henry /
Slaves /
Sippi A Novel /
Black-SouthernVoices: An Anthology
Great-Gittin-Up-Morning: A Biography of Denmark
Vesey /
The Black Man's Burden
Keith
Gilyard,
Liberation Memories: The Rhetoric and Poetics of
John Oliver Killens (2003)
* * * * *
DownSouth—UpSouth
By John Oliver Killens
We are
a Southern Country, fundamentally. At least for me,
Macon, Georgia, where I was born is “Down South,” and
New York City, to which I escaped, is “Up South,” and
the difference is far less than the eight hundred miles
that uneasily divide them. I am reminded of a bit of
folklore I first heard when I was a boy striving
desperately to grow to manhood in the dear old Georgia
of my childhood dreams and disillusions. Doubtless it is
still going the rounds.
It
seems that during the Great Depression a certain hungry
soul-brother (African American) arrived in New York
City, freshly escaped from Georgia. Unemployed and
destitute and much too nervous to steal, he decided to
become a beggar, so he went from house to house along
Park Avenue of the Great Affluence. Our hapless hero
would knock on the front doors of majestic mansions with
hat in hand, and when a door was opened he would go into
song-and-dance about his hard luck and his hunger and
his mighty awful desperation. Time after time, he was
told, with profound warmth and courtesy and in all
sincerity, and in great sympathy even: “Sorry, sir. We
have nothing to give you, sir, but we want you to know
in all humanity that we wish you all the success in the
world, and hope that you all the success in the world,
and hope that you will always trust in our Lord and
Savior Jesus.” Or heartwarming words of Christian
brotherhood and fellowship to that effect, which however
much it may have warmed the cockles of the brother’s
heart, did not fill a single nook or cranny of the
vacuum in the brother’s belly, though it did keep his
human dignity intact.
Near
the end of his rope (as they used to say, his stomach
was beginning to think his throat was cut), he finally
knocked on the door of the largest mansion on the
street, and a tall, quality-type gentleman came to
listen to his sad sad tale. At the conclusion he laughed
and said good naturedly, “All right, nigger, you know
better than to be coming to my front door. Go on ‘round
to the back and tell Mandy I said give you something to
eat.”
Whereupon the grateful soul-brother replied, “Thank you
kindly, suh. You are the first Southern gentleman I met
since I arrived in New York City!”
We used
to laugh at this alleged joke, when we had no better
sense. In retrospect, it was undoubtedly concocted by a
Southern gentleman from Georgia or Alabama to make the
point that the South knew better how to take care of the
nigrahs than the North. You see, we negroes in the South
were always a little envious of those uppity,
up-the-country Negroes a few years removed from down
home, who had managed to shake the red Georgia dust from
their feet for the last, last time.
It was
a time when some of us were serving advocates of
and true believers in the Southern Way of Life
and Southern Womanhood and Segregation, and even
lynchings, when they happened, and they very often
happened.
Some
black brains had been so thoroughly whitewashed they
believed religiously in “our” good white folks, who
treated the negro fairly so long as he stayed in his
place, which place was in the most menial of low-paying
jobs, in the back of the bus, way up on the last balcony
of the movie houses, and in the clapboard segregated
one-teacher schoolhouses that covered the southern
countryside like the morning dew did dear old Dixie. We
believed that rich white folks were good white folks,
which strangely enough contradicted Our Lord and Savior,
Jesus Christ, who clearly and on many occasions took a
very dim view of the rich man’s chances of achieving His
Father’s Kingdom. And we had good reason, the Holy Bible
and Karl Marx’s revolutionary working class
notwithstanding. For our experience had grimly taught us
that the white workingman clung to his whiteness far
more desperately than he did to his Christianity and his
so-called revolutionary tradition. Was not the white
worker the one whom black men saw with the lynch rope in
his hand in the cool of a Sunday evening after prayer
meeting at the Friendship Tabernacle Church? Was he not
the very same man who would against black membership in
the labor union? Was he not one of the obvious reasons
that the C.I.O. “Operation Dixie” failed in his noble
undertaking to organize the Southern unorganized, the
most exploited working class in the country?
When
“Operation Dixie” invaded the South, Negroes hailed it
as the Freedom Train, and they leaped aboard with great
enthusiasm and profound dedication. But the trained got
bogged down very quickly and finally was derailed in the
muck and mire of white supremacy. In my home town a
negro church (the one in which I grew up) opened its
doors to the organizers (white and black0 as a meeting
hall. One elderly Negro businessman even jeopardized his
life and livelihood by helping the C.I.O. organize the
unorganized, though this had nothing to do directly with
him or his business, but being black he realized it had
everything to do with him, or should have. A couple of
years before he died he said to me: “Son, there ain’t no
colored or no Negro problem in the land. The color of
the problem is pure-dee white. It’s the white folks that
ain’t ready yet.”
When
white and black labor organizers came to Macon, they
paid nightly visits to Negro homes and talked to black
folk about the union, but practically nobody talked to
the white workers; to tackle those poor, misguided,
brainwashed bastards would have been to touch them at
their tenderest spot, their racial prejudices. To do so
would have challenged the Southern way of Life at its
foundations. The C.I.O.’s “Operation Dixie,” like
Reconstruction, indeed like the American Revolution and
every other American movement that should have spelled
freedom and equality for Americans of all colors and
religions, died still-born. To give the C.I.O. its due,
it did not keep the Negroes out. The trouble was
it could not keep the white workers in.
Well-to-do white folk, actually, have always confused
the Southern Negro. They have always been to the black
man like the dog that wags his tails and growls
simultaneously. One is hard put to know which end to
believe. We do know, though, that the well-heeled Mister
Charlies control the jobs of working people, black and
white, and also the Southern mass-communications media.
And therefore, in a real sense, they control the minds
of poor white Southerners. We also know that
historically they have parlayed the racial prejudices of
the poor whites vis-à-vis Negroes into a profitable
system of divide-and-rule that has, in plain words,
meant cheap non-union labor. Ask any honest labor
organizer who hoed the union row in Dixie.
During
the great race riot in Atlanta near the beginning of the
century, wealthy white folks stripped their own “house
niggers” and took their clothes and locked them in their
rooms and then went out and killed other Negroes on the
streets of Atlanta.
The
pragmatic philosophy of some Negroes, particularly in
the smaller Southern towns, used to be: “The way for a
black man to get along is to attach himself to some
well-to-do good white folks. Just one big white
folks is all you need. Then don’t care what happen,
can’t nobody do you no big harm. Not the sheriff,
police, judge, nobody! Not even the Good Lord Up
on High.”
Nobody
but the good white folks, that is. I remember as a boy
walking the streets of my home town one night when a big
black Packard drove up alongside me with two
well-appointed white gentlemen in the front seat and
stopped. One of them leaned out and beckoned me over.
“Hey, boy, you know where we can get a colored gal?”
I
yelled, “Go get you dear old mother like you been
doing!” and ran, with tears in my eyes. Angrily, I
wished to God I’d been a grown man that night, but at
the same time I was relieved that I was only ten years
old and didn’t have to assert my manhood. Even at that
age, I felt the sharp denial of my manhood. And that is
another thing the struggle between the black man and his
country is all about, his manhood, his black manhood,
which has been denied him ever since he was brought here
in slavery.
Two
summers ago, in a little sleepyhead cotton-center town
in Dixie, a white man walked up to a black man and his
black wife and shot the husband down dead in full view
of the momentarily startled pedestrians. The only words
that passed between them came from the self-righteous
white man who said, just before he pulled the trigger,
“Nigger, didn’t I tell you to stay away from this black
woman?”
This
was, no doubt, in the proud tradition of protecting
Southern womanhood. This is how the white man has so
nobly fought miscegenation. In any event, for one brief
moment the town awoke, then went immediately back to
sleep again. The brave gunfighter was inconvenienced for
two or three hours at the county jail and—case closed.
During
the days of slavery the black man was given another
ultimatum: “Deny your manhood or die!” And ever since we
were brought here in chains we have been cast in the
role of eunuchs in a great white harem. But now, at the
historic moment, “Down South” and “Up South,” we refuse
to be your eunuchs any longer.
I
remember the first day I came to Washington, D.C., from
the Deep South. I was nineteen years old, with the great
American success story exuding from my every pore and
glowing in my eyes, however tentatively. Life is
tentative for most people, but especially for Negroes.
We never look a gift horse in the mouth, but we have
learned to keep an eye on it from other vantage points.
Like hoboes, metaphorically speaking, we always sleep
with one eye open. I had been in called by my government
to work in the nation’s capital, which I somehow
imagined to be the freest place on earth. But even my
young naïve imagination had more sense than that.
Nevertheless, I would be working in the White House, and
I had high hopes. Never mind that it was only a
messenger’s job, it was in the White House.
Now let
me state here categorically: I was never in the White
House in my entire life. But to the innocent,
unsophisticated Southlander, Washington was just one
great big White House, and everybody who left Dixie to
go to work for the government in Washington was going to
work in the White House. Even colored people. My older
brother was already working in the White House, at the
Government printing Office more than a mile away.
When I
walked into the file room that first Monday morning and
announced that I was John Oliver Killens, a tall white
boy from New York City thrust his hand toward me for a
friendly handshake. As I recall, my split-second
reaction (conditioned reflex0 was to throw up my guard
or duck my head, believing that young “Whitey” was going
to hit me for being arrogant and sassy, or for no
particular reason at all. There never had to be a
reason. In any event I was very slow on the draw,
downright backward really, it being the first time a
white man had offered me his hand to me or ever called
me “Mister” Killens.
I was
the only Negro working at the National Labor Relations
Board, and all day long I walked around the place
wondering where the drinking fountain and the toilet
were—For Colored, that is. I was too proud to ask my
white colleagues and lacked the courage to take anything
for granted, especially white folk. It was a part of my
upbringing to take nothing for granted when it came to
the schizophrenic ways of white folk.
It was
about four in the sweaty afternoon before necessity and
sheer desperation dictated that I go for broke and damn
the consequences. Of course there were no drinking or
toilet facilities exclusively For Colored. There
had been no occasion for them, since I was one of those
peculiarities in the life of Black America known as a
“First Negro,” notwithstanding my humble messenger
status, which is pretty hysterical when you come to
ponder on it. Such humiliating experiences are certainly
not unique in the context of the American Negro
experience, and hardly worth mentioning. But how many
red-blooded, all American white boys ever experience
this particular kind of lynching of the human spirit,
this psychological castration?
It was
on my first trip back to Macon that I realized the chasm
between the Northern and the Southern Negro, built on
myth and misconception on both sides of the Mason-Dixon
Line. Under the impact of the Negro Revolt, this chasm
is slowly disappearing, but it was real and wide and
deep in those days of not so long ago, I had been in
Washington no more than six or seven months when my
older brother and I drove back at the end of the summer.
Everybody put on the dog for us; most everybody also put
up a wall between them and us. Most of the
boys and girls I’d grown up with, all of my buddies with
whom I had spent my childhood, swimming naked in the
muddy Ocmulgee River, had laughed and played and cried
and cussed and dreamed with, most of them now looked
upon me as a stranger. To them, I was an agent from an
alien land spying on them. By my very presence I was an
unspoken accusation, as if I were actually challenging
each and every one of them: “Why in the hell haven’t you
had the gumption to leave this hell hole like I did?”
Consequently, when you asked one of your best friends an
innocuous question like “How’s every little thing?” he
went out of his way to assure you that nobody had it so
good. He pointed to his automobile, his new home on the
outskirts of town. He exaggerated the progress that had
been made since you left, as if you’d been away for
ages. The new mayor and the sheriff were good white
folks. Things were different from what they used to be.
Never once did he let you get beneath the thin layer of
his insecurity, brought about immediately upon hearing
you were back in town. You knew what he was thinking:
“Lording it over everybody, hasn’t been up North long
enough to get his feet wet, and already he’s talking
with a brogue.’
In
retrospect, there was at least some superficial truth in
this reaction. One of the first things a Southern negro
did upon moving farther North was to begin work on
losing his Southern accent, the symbol of the near-slave
status he had just put behind him, forever, he hoped.
This losing of our “Southerness” was a defense mechanism
of us latecomers to the North against that rarity of the
species, the Northern-born Negro, or against negroes who
had taken off their Southern shoes one whole year ahead
of us.
In
those days most Negroes were fiercely ashamed of their
Southern background, so much so, that it amounted to an
inferiority complex. My first year in the army, during
the late World-Wide Madness, I was the company clerk for
a segregated company. Not a single one of the men in my
outfit admitted being from Georgia or Alabama or
Mississippi. They were all from Chicago, Cleveland,
Detroit, or New York, and you wondered about the very
Southern accents they carried with them, dogging their
heels, belying their “birthplaces.” You wondered, that
is, until you looked at their files and found that Billy
Joe Washington was indeed from Cleveland, though he had
been there for at most two or three weeks before he was
drafted, having spent the remainder of his twenty-two
years in Yazoo city, Mississippi. The same applied to J.B. Jones, from Georgia via new York City, and Victor
Jackson, who had been from Chicago a scant three month
after escaping from Chittling Switch, Alabama.
Each
time I went South, the chasm widened, though it is
probable that it did not deepen, since the chasm, after
all, was superficial. After the war, I went back with my
Northern wife and children. The number of my schoolmates
who had remained in Macon had dwindled considerably. A
few had offered up their lives as sacrifices in the
great bloodletting, and the Jim Crow American Legion
post was named after one of them. Others had remained in
Paris after the war, or stopped off on their way home in
New York or Chicago or Detroit or Los Angeles, and never
made it back. But those who did come back stayed; they
built landscaped ranch-type houses and bought bigger
automobiles and became more and more defensive vis-à-vis
the Northern Negro.
I often
felt like saying: “Look, fellows, remember me? I’m the
same guy you grew up with. You don’t have to prove
anything to me, any more than I have to prove anything
to you. Who is to say which took more courage? To stay
with the south and fight it out here, or to give up and
migrate to the North like D.P.s in time of war?”
Negroes
in Northern ghettoes often lived in a fool’s paradise,
and somehow the Southern Negro knew it and resented it.
Many Northern Negroes thought they had it made, no
matter what their circumstances, merely because they
were up North. They felt a condescending pity for their
downtrodden brother in the South, but they no longer
felt the same bond of mutual suffering and exploitation.
In a way it was an extension of the Southern ‘good white
folks” myth. Everything in this dialogue was based on
the attitudes of white folks, “good” or “bad” “Crackers”
or “Northerners.” White folks were still the determining
factor. And what the Southern Negro said in rebuttal was
at least partially true. “You raggedly-ass Negroes up
there in Harlem and on the South side of Chicago living
on top of each other in the company of rats and bedbugs,
what you got to be so high and mighty about? You got
freedom all right—freedom to starve to death. What if
you can go to them hotels downtown? Hell, you can’t even
afford the subway fare!”
Once
when I was in Montgomery, Alabama, as a guest of the
vice president of Alabama State Teacher’s College, his
wife told me, “We often thought about moving North, but
in the final analysis we decided it didn’t make that
much difference. Whenever we visited New York and looked
up our old friends, we found most of them living in
Harlem, just as segregated as they’d ever been and just
as far away from the cultural life of New York—the
theater and Carnegie Hall—as they’d been when they lived
in Alabama. All they’d done was travel hundreds of miles
to settle in another Southern community. We see more of
Broadway on our visits than they do their whole life
through.”
It must
be said that when the ex-Southern Negro returned home
for a visit he was also on the defensive. He had to give
the impression that he had done well up North. So when
he was there he usually showed up at church on Sunday,
even though in New York he never attended, and wearing
the latest style in clothing. He showed off his Northern
brogue, which was oftentimes an unknowing caricature of
the real thing, and he might even have borrowed
somebody’s big long Cadillac to drive down in. But
notwithstanding, the differences between the black
brothers and sisters, North and South, were always
superficial. The ties were never broken fundamentally;
the Northern Negro still had family ties and friendships
back home. Richard Wright was never closer to the truth
when he spoke of the irreducible strength of familial
love, which transcended all the white man’s laws and
conventions. Despite the eternal, unabating pressure on
the black man to hate the face he stares at in the
mirror, his love for his black brother has survived.
I
remember when I was a lad in Macon, you would hear that
a funeral was going to be on Thursday, then Friday,
then Saturday or Sunday, and then it might finally take
place on the following Tuesday or Wednesday. What was
happening was that the family was waiting for its
members to gather from the far corners of the land. And
so long as there was hope that a brother or a sister or
even a distant cousin would make it, the funeral would
be postponed again and again.
A
family very close to mine, when I was about eight years
old, lost one of its member. It was winter and a cold
one for our part of the country; snow lay on the land
from the Great Lakes all the way to Jacksonville. One of
the brothers of the deceased was living in Chicago as
was one of his sisters. He had come upon hard times and
was penniless. But he borrowed enough money from his
sister to get his clothes and suitcases out of hock and
checked the bags on her ticket. She rode the train as a
passenger; he rode the boxcars. At Atlanta, where it was
necessary to change trains, he got his bag and went into
the colored restroom to bathe, shave, and put on his
best suit, then caught the same train to Macon with his
sister. The people in Macon shook their heads.
“That
boy did prosper up the country!”
Now,
lest the wrong impression be given, there were always
some Southern Negroes who had no need to be defensive,
had no good white folks to speak of, and always spoke
their minds and told it like it was. One of them told me
a fantastic (true) story about a young man who had come
back from the second World-Wide Madness, and built up a
promising vegetable trucking business. He was married
and had a couple of children, and through industry and
faith in free enterprise had built up a fairly
successful business. Each day he would drive his truck
out to the edge of town where the farmers’ markets were
to buy produce and bring it back to the neighborhood to
sell.
One
morning he was on his way to the market in his truck
when the white driver of an automobile tried to take the
highway away from him. The young veteran would not
relinquish his position, a few words were passed, and
they both went their contemplative ways. He arrived at
the first market and exchanged greetings with his friend
the wholesale produce man, a real sensitive friendly
type good white man, who didn’t hold anything against
the Negro simply because he was a Negro. Besides it was
good business to be friendly to young prospering
Negroes. After all, you didn’t have to invite them into
your home.
“Morning, Mr. Henry,” the young black ex-G.I. said
pleasantly.
“Morning, Joe,” the chubby produce man replied, with
equal plesantness. “Excuse me for a minute, I’ll be back
directly.”
While
Mr. Henry was inside for one hot minute, the white
driver appeared and, leaping from his car, jumped G.I.
Joe, shouting insults about “goddamn biggedy niggers.’
By the time Mr. Henry came back outside, Joe and the
white man were rolling in the dust. Rushing back into
the store, he reappeared with his pistol and shot Joe as
dead as he had to be to die. That’s right, killed his
‘friend” and cash customer, even though he’d never seen
this white man before in his entire life.
One
thing the Negro Revolt has taught the negro, North and
south, is the universality of his degradation, that so
long as human dignity is denied him in one section of
this country, he will never achieve it fully in the
other. Such wisdom was not always with us.
And now
it should be said, lest someone gets a false impression,
we black folk do not spend twenty-four hours of each day
musing over the ways of white folks. Believe it or not,
our time is much too valuable. When we leave the white
man’s job most of us really leave the white man’s
job. We go home to another life which is black and has
dignity, and though we may be the janitor in your
apartment building or an elevator operator or the
cleaner of your streets, we are leaders in our own
communities. Club presidents and trustees and deacons
and elders and Grand Exalted Rulers. As much as it is
possible, we shut your alien white life out of our
hearts and souls and minds. Every evening we leave the
foreign country, and we go home to our families, our
associations, our Grand Lodges, our societies, our Elks,
our Masons, our churches. The Negro Revolt
notwithstanding, our main involvement is with ourselves,
not with white folks, not even with integration, which
you believe to be our obsession. It may hurt some white
folk’s tender sensibility to hear this, but the truth is
most Negroes could not care less about integrating with
most white folk. We are not so uncritical, having lived
in a society among a people that has denied us for
nearly four hundred years. There must be something
basically sick about such a society or something
basically wrong with us, and loving us, as we do, we
favor the former.
When I
listen to my people’s songs, when I feel the beauty and
the strength and the depth of their feelings, when I
ponder over the essential had-working goodness of my
people, along with the human weaknesses which are common
to all men; as I have shed my own tears and heard their
laughter, just as I have felt their tears and heard
their laughter, which is mine and mine theirs, for in
the deepest sense our hopes and aspirations are one and
indivisible; as I ponder all these things, I raise this
question: How could you, who claim to be the land that
spawned the basic rights of man, deny an entire people
such as we? We upon whose backs the nation’s initial
wealth was accumulated?
There
is something wrong here, fundamentally wrong. That is
why we don’t aspire merely to reach where you stand now
on sinking sand. We want to move the whole country to
higher ground and build a society that will make sense
for all the people, black and white. We want freedom and
we will be free, And integration and freedom are not
synonymous, certainly not in our dictionary.
Freedom is a principle men have historically laid down
their lives for; integration with dignity for the
integrated can only come after the fact of freedom.
Another
thing. You are forever buying off us “different” ones,
but the price is never right. The offer never includes
manhood or freedom. Historically, the reward has been,
and still is, merely to graduate to “house niggers,” to
be grateful for the crumbs from old Massa’s table. And
in compensation for this we must play the role of Gunga
Din. This is what is still expected, be it Down South or
Up South, of every “different,” “educated” Negro.
When I
was an undergraduate at Morris brown College in Atlanta,
I remember vividly the “integrated” forums we used to
attend of a Sunday afternoon over on the Atlanta
University (or the Morehouse or Spellman) campus. There
would usually be a few students from Georgia Tech and
Emory (both very-lily-and-very-very-white at the time0,
but most of us were from the surrounding Negro colleges.
We
black people, whether we come from the city or village
or the country farms of Georgia are rarely ever more
than one generation removed from a peasant background, a
background very close to the soil and fraught with
deprivation. Yet most of our parents instilled in us a
kind of nervous and precarious dignity and a blind faith
in the American dream, to wit: “If you persevered and
prepared yourself, you would be ready to go inside the
door of success when opportunity knocked.” If the
metaphor were badly mixed, it was probably because the
reasoning was terribly mixed up and the dream itself had
little or nothing to do with the American reality.
At most
of those forums we inevitably and interminably discussed
how to rid the country of the “Problem.” What else was
there for black and white students to discuss together
on a college campus in Atlanta on a Sunday afternoon?
One Sunday afternoon I remember in particular. The
speaker (white and aristocratic-looking) had finished,
and questions had been coming from the floor for
three-quarters of an hour when a tall, blond, crew-cut
boy from Emory or Georgia Tech got to his feet and
proclaimed to one and all that he had the
solution to the “nigrah” problem. We all waited with
bated breadth, as the cliché goes.
“The
way to get rid of the nigrah problem,” he said gravely,
“is to collect all the nigrahs together and take them to
the river and dump them in.”
There
was shocked silence. But well, he wore a serious
expression, you know. He wasn’t making with the joke And
he appeared to be perfectly sober.
On
another Sunday afternoon we were lectured at by a
charming white professor from one of the liberal, white,
Southern colleges. And afterward, as we stood outside on
the campus ‘neath the falling shadows of a dying day in
autumn, he approached a group of about five of us young
colored “elite,” who gathered around him expectantly as
he lt us in on the great big secret. “You fellows are
all right,” he said. “You’re different, you’re not like
the rest of them. It’s the riff-raff over on Decatur
Street that makes things hard for the rest of you-all.”
And we all felt properly superior and smiled our
dazzling dark smiles at this magnanimous great white
father. He had knighted us, and we were properly
grateful. He even almost shook our hands.
The
funny thing about the South, more alarming than
hilarious, is that they believe their own propaganda.
They believed in the reality of their happy nigrahs.
They created the myth and came to believe in it
religiously, making it into a way of life. And that is
the scary part. That is the sickness.
During
the Montgomery Bus protest Movement, I spent some time
in the “Cradle of the Confederacy.” I witnessed a
growing realization, a deep sense of disillusionment
among the white folk, that something was wrong with
their own “dyed-in the-wool-happy-and-contented-Dixie-nigrahs.
One
elderly red-necked newsman from the North: “I just can’t
understand it. Here we were minding our own business,
and the races gittin’ along together separately, they on
they side of the street and us on ourn, and then one day
boom! All this bus-boycott business and carrying
on!”
The old
man scratched and shook his scraggly head, rather in the
manner of Stepin Fetchit or Willie Best. His old face
wore a puzzled expression. “It’s like fifty thousand
other nigrahs moved into town under cover of darkness
and took the places of our nigrahs. They look like our
nigrahs, but Lord in heaven knows they sure don’t act
like them!”
And all
over the South today, with the demonstrations, white men
look at their own Southern nigrahs with a hurt sense of
deep betrayal. Black folk are no longer speaking their
lines according to the old script, and this is
disquieting. “When you can’t rely on your own nigrahs,
what is this old world coming to? It makes you lose
faith in human nature, not that nigrahs are human,
necessarily.”
And yet
it is difficult for a Negro raised in the South to put
that part of the country irrevocably behind him. It is
not easy to leave a place where you have lived out the
days of your childhood, when all your memories have not
been those of ugliness. You do remember the soft quiet
beauty of a southern town, which is unmatched by the
crowded, noisy, soot-filled urban centers of the North.
You do remember the fragrance of honeysuckle and
magnolias. You do remember going barefoot in the early
Southern springs that come when blankets of snow still
lie over most of the Northern country, and the clouds of
birds that filled the sky coming South and going further
South. You recall the lazy hot summer days when there
was a greenness over everything and the smell of the
Georgia pines standing tall and lording it over the rest
of the forest. And that was good. You have memories of
going for hikes into the woods and picking wild
blackberries and muscadines and going swimming out the
“Big Road” in an infamously treacherous swimming hole on
the sly and getting a whipping when you go home because
you forget to dry your hair. And Sunday-school picnics
that always came in May, the long games played and the
romping and tearing about as if nobody ever had a care
in the world. You even remember the teachers in the
segregated schools who seemed “mean” and “strict,”
because they cared, the whipping you get at school or
the one your parents gave you when you got home with the
note saying you hadn’t done your best. Everybody cared,
everybody believed in you and in your capacity as a
human being, and you belonged to everybody, so everybody
was determined that you do your best. This is the kind
of loving care a black child misses almost entirely in
the “integrated’ schools Up South in new York City,
where most of the teachers are white, and many of them
could not care less whether you are prepared for the
future, or even if you have a future. This is the great
contradiction in the fight for “integrated” schools.
Negro children often find themselves in a school system
where nobody seems to give a damn, and discipline is
almost wholly for precious discipline’s sake.
I went
a couple of years ago, to an “Open School week,” and
overheard a Brooklyn high school teacher tell a worried
Negro parent, “I wouldn’t worry about Jerry, Mrs.
Wilson. He’s doing all right, about as well as could be
expected. He’s a nice boy, doesn’t give anyone any
trouble. We don’t have any disciplinary problems with
Jerry at all.”
“But,”
the frustrated mother protested, “I am not worried about
the deportment, I’m worried about his grades. I know he
can do better.”
“Everybody thinks his child can do better, Mrs. Wilson.”
In the
“integrated” schools, too many of the authority symbols
are white, almost all the principals and assistants,
most of the teachers. There are only two negro school
principals in the whole of New York City. If integration
is to have any real meaning for black children,
integration must be achieved at the level of authority,
as well as in the student body. I mean black and white
kids must experience some black authority. How can there
be incentive without example?
Are all
Northern white teachers antagonistic to their Negro
students? No. There are a few who care. I have known a
precious few. My son has also, as has my daughter. I
have heard of others. But they are the exceptions that
prove overwhelmingly what the rule might be, but isn’t.
Yes,
it’s easy to be nostalgic about a Southern childhood.
Christmas mornings when black folk went from house to
house, knocking on doors, and when the doors were
opened, crying, “Christmas gift!’ Then the answer: “Hand
it here!”
And
this from those who had nothing to give but the gift of
giving. You remember Easter mornings when you gathered
on the hill (even a few “good’ white folks gathered to
the side of you), and sang songs of Jesus’ crucifixion
and of his triumph over the grave and watched the
sunrise shout for joy for Mary’s boy-child and his
Resurrection.
Or
going home on a train, leaving Washington with the snow
lying quietly over everything but beginning to vanish as
you moved deeper into Virginia, then North Carolina and
its faint hint of springtime and South Carolina where
spring had already arrived, and finally the red clay
hills of North Georgia, with the tall pine trees
glistening in the warm sunlight. You remembered suddenly
all the good things about your home, and it was
home, after all, no matter how violently you denied it.
And you got a choking in your throat of sweet nostalgia.
Then
the not-so sweet reality as the train dashed by the
little country stations with red-neck Crackers sitting
outside staring at the world passing them by forever,
with black men standing to the side, always to the side,
staring too, but with a different look, and then all at
once you became aware of the little outhouses alongside
the stations with the signs that reminded you in bold
crude letters” FOR WHITE ONLY.
So you
were brought sharply back to the truth about your dear
old honeysuckled Southland. Whatever the natural beauty
of this land, it was a superficial beauty; it had the
prettiness of a lovely woman with the insides of a
hard-hearted whore. And you wept inside for what it
could be but never had been, and you began to wonder if
it ever would. You’re sometimes seized with a helpless
anger at the sickness of this beautiful bitch. She could
be beautiful inside. You knew she could be. But, Good
Lord, would she ever, as long as she pretended that she
was already the mostest of the very most?
And yet
the hope is always there with man black folk that the
South shall one day lead the nation. She has misled us
all these years since Reconstruction. This is what makes
them stay with the South and struggle with her
redemption. The hope that the few white folk who care
will increase steadily and gain more courage from our
display of black courage so that no longer will they le
the loudmouthed ones intimidate them. The desperate hope
that there are many more white folk “ready” than black
folk dare suspect. It is this that gives the Freedom
Riders such fierce conviction when they sing: “We shall
overcome some day.”
But
white allies or no, we black folk mean to overcome.
We are
a Southern country, not incidentally, but fundamentally,
and the sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we will
be able to get down to the business of changing. This
is, after all, what the demonstrating is all about,
including the Freedom Rides, the Sit-Ins, Malcolm X,
James Farmer, the Wade-Ins, Daisy Bates, the Harlem
Riot, Rochester, Jersey City, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Roy
Wilkins, John Lewis, Rosa Parks, Whitney Young, and
Jackson, Mississippi. The purpose is to change and
thereby save the country, not to help the “poor
downtrodden colored man.”
Reconstruction is the purpose. Ours has been a
racist-oriented country from the beginning. Even in the
days of slavery, the vaunted North was Southern country.
The slaves knew this—or found it out very soon. A
fugitive slave learned he was never really free until he
crossed over into Canada. If he had not known this
beforehand, the Dred Scott decision made everything very
clear. The Supreme Court said, in essence: “No black man
had a right that nay white man need respect.” This is
the brutal truth of our history which we must transcend.
We are, black and white, still the slaves of our
history, of the myths as against the historical reality.
Up
South in New York City, in Chicago and Detroit and Los
Angeles, in all the Northern urban centers, black folk
face de facto segregation and discrimination and other
denials of basic humanity. These denials are sharp and
hard and fast and real. They all spell human
exploitation; economic, political, social, cultural.
This harsh reality is all the crueler for the millions
of words of lip service paid by Northern mouths to
equality and brotherhood. In the Deep South they do not
celebrate “Brotherhood Week.” In the North they invented
“brotherhood Week,” and that is one of the basic
differences between New York and Atlanta.
Dick
Gregory has said: “The only difference between the Negro
in the North and the Negro in the South is that the
Negro is a little safer (physically) in the North.”
Well, at least he’s safer from the whims of the average
white civilian. In New York his most obvious adversary
is often the “Finest.” I suspect that the police play a
similar role in most Northern cities. Only the most
brainwashed of Negroes in Harlem or other Northern
ghettos really believe that the police are in
their community to protect them. The age-old cry in
Harlem is: “Who will protect us from the representatives
of law and order?” let’s face it. We Negroes did not
invent the “myth of police brutality.”
If this
be paranoia, it evolves from our black reality. To most
Negroes the “friendly cop” is a contradiction in terms.
To most of us the police in the black ghetto are the
army of occupation, Storm Troopers, U.S.A., protectors
of the status quo which has always been anathema
to our black existence. The point is: Whether Colonel
Penn was gunned to death on a Georgia highway by the
K.K.K., or fifteen-year-old Powell shot by one of New
York’s “Finest,” the fact is, neither killer will be
brought to task by the enforcers of law and order.
Everybody knows it. And almost everybody accepts it.
There is the sickness.
Where
are your law and order that you ask the “hoodlums” of
Harlem to respect? Where is your boasted justice, when I
can say, and honestly, that so far as I know no white
man has ever been capitally punished for
murdering a negro in America. Repeat more calmly: No
white man has ever paid the supreme penalty for killing
one of us, North, South, East, or West, so far as I have
been able to determine.
The
ghettoes of the North are as firmly entrenched in the
urban centers as they are in any Southern city. They are
citadels of black despair, a despair that expresses
itself in dope addiction, alcoholism, the numbers
racket, school drop-outs, juvenile delinquency, teen-age
gang warfare, crime and prostitution, and more
positively in occasional riots. It is a curious thing
the way most Northern newspapers designated the Harlem
rioters as hoodlums, while the rioters on the beaches of
New Hampshire and Oregon were merely pranksters,
students, high-spirited youngsters. Psychologists were
quoted in The New York Times as saying that the young
people who ran amuck on the fancy beaches of America
last Labor day were in “quest of their identity.” Well,
is there a youth who has been more deprived of his
identity than the youth of Harlem? I honestly believe,
though I say this with all kinds of trepidation, that
the Harlem riot was a healthy thing for the country and
for Harlem. The wonder is that it took so long for our
patience to wear thin.
The
fight for this country’s emancipation must be successful
in the northern cities if the struggle Jackson,
Mississippi, and St. Augustine, Florida, is to have any
real significance. What are we fighting for in the
South? Merely to become like the North?
We, as
a people, at this moment in the twentieth century, must
determine once and for all which shall have primacy in
our land, the sanctity of private property or the
dignity of man. This is the question colored peoples all
over the world are posing for the 20th century. This is
the truer, deeper meaning of the Negro Revolt. The Negro
is the conscience of the Western world. There can be no
American morality without affirmation of black human
dignity. There can be only immorality and decadence.
Of
course one must say now emphatically, the North is not
the South. New York is not Mississippi. Negroes can sit
at the front of the Northern buses and eat hot dogs at
Nedick’s or Chock Full o’ Nuts counter. Black men and
women can register and vote without imminent danger to
life or limb, and only disenchantment and hopelessness
keep black folk from flocking to the polls in greater
numbers. In the final analysis, we Negroes must pool our
strength and turn our despair into hope and human
dignity. We have too often put the car before the horse.
Moving into a white neighborhood cannot be the solution
for the mass of black city dwellers. Negroes themselves,
against overwhelming odds, must make the ghetto livable,
a fitting place to raise our children. We must make the
Harlems of the U.S.A. sources of black strength,
political and otherwise. For as my son, Chuck, wrote me
after exposure to the Negro community of Washington: “I
suddenly realized that the Negro ghetto is not a ghetto.
It is home.”
It is
time for black folk to de-brainwash themselves. Too long
we have accepted the psychology that anything that was
all black was ipso facto inferior. It is a psychology of
self-hatred and self-destruction.
Harlem
is home to hundreds of thousands of black folk. Harlem
is many things other than dope addiction and
prostitution. Harlem is people; freedom-loving people,
loving freedom so fiercely because of their denial of
it. Hard-working, unemployed; alert, apathetic; hopeful,
despairing; proud, lazy, and industrious people;
Democrats, Republicans; radicals, liberals, even one or
two reactionaries.
Harlem
is E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie in
Lennox Terrace and in Riverton, respectable and
striving. Harlem has recently been the protagonist of
many a book and magazine article, and invariably it has
turned out to be the antagonist, the eternal anti-hero.
More often than not, Harlem is pictured as one vast
“jungle” unsafe for human habitation; the established
Western image being that a jungle is inhabited by wild
animals and savages, plus a few courageous white men,
missionaries and such, who brave the jungle at their own
peril to “civilize and Christianize the natives.” And
the worst of it was, that what was said of Harlem by
outsiders, many Harlemites believed. But Harlem is,
among other things, a City of True Believers, including
striving, middle-class believers in the sanctity of free
enterprise and church-going, God-fearing people who
forsee a better life for their children and still buy
the American dream. Harlem is the 135th
Street Y.M.C.A. and the new Y.W. on 125th
Street. Harlem is the Countee Cullen Library and the
famed Schomburg Collection. Harlem is raw black anger,
black frustration, disillusionment. Harlem is HARYOU,
which could spell hope for Harlem children. Harlem is
Black nationalism. Harlem is Muslims. Harlem is bars and
funeral parlors and black laughter and Langston Hughes
and Malcolm X and Nipsey Russell and Adam Clayton Powell
and Jesse Gray and Percy Sutton. Harlem is way up North,
the Promised Land. Carl Van Vechten once called it
“Nigger Heaven.”
Yet
Harlem is, for all that, essentially Dixie accents and
Southern attitudes, like every acre of the North,
shackled forever to the South. Abe Lincoln once said
that “no nation can remain half-free and half-slave.’ No
can a country remain half-North and half-South. That is
why we must all get down to business. And un-South the
entire nation. Now is the Time.
Source: John
Oliver Killens.
The Black Man's Burden.
Simon & Schuster (Pocket Book), 1969. pp. 61-96.
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posted 22 September 2007
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updated 4 November 2007 /
updated 12 June 2008 |
