The year which preceded my father’s
death made great change in my life. I had been living in New Jersey, working in
defense plants, working and living among southerners, white and black. I knew
about the south, of course, and about how southerners treated Negroes and how
they expected them m behave, but it had never entered my mind that anyone would
look at me and expect me to behave that way. I learned in New Jersey that to be
a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the
mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people. I acted in
New Jersey as I had always acted, that is--as though I thought a great deal of
myself--I had to act that way--with results that were, simply, unbelievable. I
had scarcely arrived before I had earned the enmity, which was extraordinarily
ingenious, of all my superiors and nearly all my co-workers. In the beginning,
to make matters worse, I simply did not know what was happening. I did not know
what had done, and I shortly began to wonder what anyone could possibly do, to
bring about such unanimous, active, and unbearably vocal hostility. I knew about
Jim-crow but I had never experienced it. I went to the same self-service
restaurant three times and stood with all the Princeton boys before the counter,
waiting for a hamburger and coffee. It was always an extraordinarily long time
before anything was set before me: I had simply picked something up. Negroes
were not served there, I was told, and they had been waiting for me to realize
that I was always the only Negro present. Once I was told this, I determined to
go there all the time. But now they were ready for me and, thought some dreadful
scenes were subsequently enacted in that restaurant, I never ate there
again.
It was same story all over New Jersey, in bars, bowling
alleys, diners, and places to live. I was always being forced to leave,
silently, or with mutual imprecations. I very shortly became notorious and
children giggled behind me when I passed and their elders whispered or
shouted--they really believed that I was mad. And it did begin to work on my
mind, of course.
I began to be afraid to go anywhere and to
compensate for this I went places to which I really should not have gone and
where, God knows, I had no desire to be. My reputation in town naturally
enhanced my reputation at work and my working day became one long series of
acrobatics designed to keep me out of trouble. I cannot say that these
acrobatics night, with but one aim: to eject me. I was fired once, and
contrived, with the aid of a friend from New York, to get back on the payroll;
was fired again, and bounced back again. It took a while to fire me for the
third time, but the third time took me. There were no loopholes anywhere. There
was not even any way of getting back inside the gates.
That year
in New Jersey lives in my mind as though it were the year during which, having
an unsuspected predilection for it, I first contracted some dread, chronic
disease, the unfailing symptom of which is a kind of blind fever, a pounding in
the skull and fire in the bowels. Once this disease is contracted, one can never
be really carefree again, for the fever, without an instant’s warning, can recur
at any moment. It can wreck more important race relations. There is not a Negro
alive who does not have this rage in his blood---one has the choice, merely, of
living with it consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, this fever has
recurred in me, and does, and will until the day I die.
My last
night in New Jersey, a white friend from New York took me to the nearest big
town, Trenton, to go to the movies and have a few drinks. As it turned out, he
also saved me from, at the very least, a violent whipping. Almost every detail
of that night stands out very clearly in my memory. I even remember the name of
the movie we saw because its title impressed me as being so pertly ironical. It
was a movie about the German occupation of France, starring Maureen O’Hara and
Charles Laughton and called This Land Is Mine. I remember the name of the diner
we walked into when the movie ended: it was the" American Diner." When we walked
in the counterman asked what we wanted and I remembered answering with the
casual sharpness which had become nay habit:" We want a hamburger and a cup of
coffee, what do you think we want" I do not know why, after a year of such
rebuffs, I so completely failed to anticipate his answer, which was, of course,"
We don’t serve Negroes here." This reply failed to discompose me, at least for
the moment. I made some sardonic comment about the name of the diner and we
walked out into the streets.
This was the time of what was
called the" brown-out", when the lights in all American cities were very dim.
When we re-entered the streets something happened to me which had the force of
an optical illusion, or a nightmare. The streets were very crowded and I was
facing north. People were moving in every direction but it seemed to me, in that
instant, that all of the people I could see, and many more than that, were
moving toward me, against me, and that everyone was white.
I
remember how their faces string connecting my head to my body had been cut. I
began to walk. I heard my friend call after me, but I ignored him. Heaven only
knows what was going on in his mind, but he had the good sense not to touch
me--- I don’t know what would have happened if he had--and to keep me in sight.
I don’t know what was going on in my mind, either; I certainly had no conscious
plan. I wanted to do something to crush these white faces, which were crushing
me. I walked for perhaps a block or two until I came to an enormous, glittering,
and fashionable restaurant in which I knew not even the intercession of the
Virgin would cause me to be served. I pushed through the doors and took the
first vacant seat.
I saw, at a table or two, and waited. I do
not know how long I rather wonder, until today, what I could possibly have
looked like. Whatever I looked towards her. I hated her for her white face, and
for her great, astounded, frightened eyes. I felt that if she found a black man
so frightening I would make her fright worthwhile.
She did not
ask me what I wanted, but repeated, as though she had learned it somewhere," We
don’t serve Negroes here." She did not say it with the blunt, derisive hostility
to which I had grown so accustomed, but, rather, with a note of apology in her
voice, and fear. This made me colder and more murderous than ever. I felt I had
to do something with my hands. I wanted her to come close enough for me to get
her neck between my hands.
So I pretended not to have understood
her, hoping to draw her closer. And she did step a very short step closer, with
her pencil poised incongruously over pad, and repeated the formula:" ... don’t
serve Negroes here." Somehow, with the repetition of that phrase, which was
already ringing in my head like a thousand bells of a nightmare, I realized that
she would never come any closer and that I would have to strike from a distance.
There was nothing on the table but an ordinary water-mug half full of water, and
I picked this up and hurled it with all my strength at her. She ducked and it
missed her and shattered against the mirror behind the bar. And with that sound,
my frozen blood abruptly thawed. I returned from wherever I had been, I rose and
began running for the door. A round, pot-bellied man grabbed me by the nape of
the neck just as I reached the doors and began to beat me about the face. I
kicked him and got loose and ran into the streets. My friend whispered," Run!"
and I ran. My friend stayed outside the restaurant long enough to misdirect my
pursuers and the police, who arrive, he told me, at once. I do not know what I
said to him when he came to my room that night. I could not have said much, I
felt, in the oddest, most awful way, that I had somehow betrayed him, I lived it
over and over and over again, the way one relives an automobile accident after
it has happened and one finds oneself alone and safe. I could not get over two
facts, both equally difficult for the imagination to grasp, and one was that I
could have been murdered. But the other was that I had been ready to commit
murder. I saw nothing clearly but I did see this: that my life, my real life,
was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I
carried in my own heart. |
