On the twenty-ninth of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born. Over a month before this, there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots of the century. A few hours after my father’s funeral, a race riot broke out in Harlem. On the morning of August third we drove him to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass.
The day of my father’s funeral had also been my nineteenth birthday. It seemed to me that God Himself had devised, to mark my father’s end, the most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas. And it seemed to me, too, that the violence which rose all about us as my father left the world had been devised as a corrective for the pride of his eldest son. I had inclined to be contemptuous of my father for the conditions of his life, for the conditions of our lives. When his life had ended I began to wonder about that life and also, in a new way, to be apprehensive about my own.
I had not known my father very well. We had got on badly, partly because we shared, in our different fashions, the vice of stubborn pride. When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. It seems to be typical of life in America, where nothing, as yet, is stratified, and where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first. No one, including my father, seems to have known exactly how old he was, but his mother had been born during slavery. He was of the first generation of free men. He, along with thousands of other Negroes, came North after 1919 and I was part of that generation which had never seen the landscape of what Negroes sometimes call the Old Country.
He had been born in New Orleans and had been a young man there during the time that Louis Armstrong, a boy, was running errands for the dives and honky-tonks of what was always presented to me as one of the most wicked of cities. He was, I think, very handsome. Handsome, proud, and ingrown, “like a toenail,” somebody said. But he looked to me, as I grew older, like pictures I had seen of African tribal chieftains: he really should have been naked, with warpaint on and barbaric mementos, standing among spears. He could be chilling in the pulpit and indescribably cruel in his personal life and he was certainly the most bitter man I have ever met; yet it must be said that there was something else buried in him, which lent him his tremendous power and, even, a rather crushing charm. It had something to do with his blackness, I think—he was very black—and his beauty, and the fact that he knew that he was black but did not know he was beautiful.
He claimed to be proud of his blackness but it had also been the cause of much humiliation. He was not a young man when we were growing up and he had already suffered many kinds of ruin; in his outrageously demanding and protective way he loved his children, who were black like him and menaced like him; and all these things sometimes showed in his face when he tried, never to my knowledge with any success, to establish contact with any of us.
When he took one of his children on his knee to play with them, they always became fretful and began to cry; when he tried to help one of us with our homework, the absolutely unabating tension which emanated from him caused our minds and our tongues to become paralyzed, so that he, scarcely knowing why, flew into a rage and the child, not knowing why, was punished. If it ever entered his head to bring a surprise home for his children, it was, almost unfailingly, the wrong surprise, and even the big watermelons he often brought home on his back in the summer led to the most appalling scenes.
I do not remember, in all those years, that a single one of his children was ever glad to see him come home. From what I was able to gather of his early life, it seemed that this inability to establish contact with other people had always marked him. There was something in him, therefore, groping and tentative, which was never expressed. One saw it most clearly when he was facing new people and hoping to impress them. But he never did, not for long. We went from church to smaller and more improbable church, he found himself in less and less demand as a minister, and by the time he died none of his friends had come to see him for a long time. He had lived and died in an intolerable bitterness of spirit and it frightened me, as we drove him to the graveyard through those unquiet, ruined streets, to see how powerful and overflowing this bitterness could be and to realize that it now was mine.
When he died I had been away from home for a little over a year. In that year I had had time to become aware of the meaning of all my father’s warnings, had discovered the secret of his proudly pursed lips and rigid carriage: I had discovered the weight of white people in the world.
He had been ill a long time—in the mind, as we now realized, reliving instances of his fantastic intransigence in the new light of his affliction and endeavoring to feel a sorrow for him which never, quite, came true. We had not known that he was being eaten up by paranoia, and the discovery that his cruelty, to our bodies and our minds, had been one of the symptoms of his illness was not, then, enough to enable us to forgive him. The younger children felt, quite simply, relief that he would not be coming home any more. My mother’s observation that it was he, after all, who had kept them alive all these years meant nothing because the problems of keeping children alive are not real for children. The older children felt, with my father gone, that they could invite their friends to the house without fear of insult.
His illness was beyond all hope of healing before anyone realized that he was ill. He had always been so strange and had lived, like a prophet, in such unimaginably close communion with the Lord that his long silences, punctuated by moans and hallelujahs and snatches of old songs while he sat at the living-room window, never seemed odd to us. It was not until he refused to eat because, he said, his family was trying to poison him that my mother was forced to accept as a fact what had, until then, been only an unwilling suspicion. When he was committed, it was discovered that he had tuberculosis, and the disease of his mind allowed the disease of his body to destroy him. For the doctors could not force him to eat, either, and, though he was fed intravenously, it was clear from the beginning that there was no hope for him.
In my mind’s eye I could see him sitting at the window, locked up in his terrors; hating and fearing every living soul, including his children who had betrayed him too, by reaching toward the world which had despised him. There were nine of us. I began to wonder what it could have felt like for such a man to have had nine children whom he could barely feed. He spent great energy keeping us away from the people who surrounded us, people who had all-night rent parties to which we listened when we should have been sleeping, people who cursed and drank and flashed razor blades on Lenox Avenue. He could not understand why, if they had so much energy to spare, they could not use it to make their lives better. He treated almost everybody on our block with a most uncharitable asperity and neither they, nor, of course, their children were slow to reciprocate.
The only white people who came to our house were welfare workers and bill collectors. It was clear that my father felt their very presence in his home to be a violation: this was conveyed by his carriage, almost ludicrously stiff, and by his voice, harsh and vindictively polite. When I was around nine or ten I wrote a play which was directed by a young, white schoolteacher named Orilla Miller, who then took an interest in me, gave me books to read, and decided to take me to see what she somewhat tactlessly referred to as “real” plays. Theater-going was forbidden in our house, but, with the really cruel intuitiveness of a child, I suspected that the color of this woman’s skin would carry the day for me. When, at school, she suggested taking me out, I agreed that she should pick me up at my house one evening. I then, very cleverly, left all the rest to my mother, who suggested to my father, as I knew she would, that it would not be very nice to let such a kind woman make the trip for nothing. Also, since it was a schoolteacher, I imagine that my mother countered the idea of sin with the idea of “education,” which word, even with my father, carried a kind of bitter weight.
Before the teacher came, my father took me aside to ask why she was coming, what interest she could possibly have in a boy like me. And I understood that my father was waiting for me to say something—I didn’t quite know what; perhaps that I wanted his protection against this teacher and her “education.”
I said none of these things and the teacher came and we went out. It was clear, during the brief interview in our living-room, that my father would have refused permission if he had dared. The fact that he did not dare caused me to despise him; I had no way of knowing that he was facing in that living-room a wholly unprecedented and frightening situation.
Later, when my father had been laid off from his job, this woman went to a great deal of trouble to be of help to us. My mother called her by the highest name she knew: she said she was a “Christian.” My father could scarcely disagree but during the four or five years of our relatively close association he never trusted her. In later years, particularly when it began to be clear that this “education” of mine was going to lead me to perdition, he became more explicit and warned me that my white friends in high schoolwere not really my friends and that I would see,when I was older, how white people would do anything to keep a Negro down. Some of them could be nice, he admitted, but none of them were to be trusted. I did not feel this way and I was certain, in my innocence, that I never would.
But the year which preceded my father’s death had made a 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 how Southerners treated Negroes and expected them to 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 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 I 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; it was always an extraordinarily long time before anything was set before me; but it was not until the fourth visit that I learned that, in fact, nothing had ever been 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.
It was the same story all over New Jersey, in bars, bowling alleys, diners, places to live. 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 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.
That year in New Jersey lives in my mind as though it were the year during which my veins were, daily, pumped full of poison. Or as though it were the year in which, having an unsuspected predilection for it, I first contracted some dread, chronic disease, the unfailing symptoms of which are a kind of blind fever, a pounding in the skull, and fire in the bowels. Once this disease is contracted, it can, without an instant’s warning, recur at any moment. 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 took me to the nearest big town, Trenton. 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 aptly ironical. It was about the German occupation of France, and it was called “This Land Is Mine.” I remember the name of the diner we walked into when the movie ended: the American Diner. The counterman asked what we wanted and I remember answering with the casual sharpness which has become my 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 completely failed to anticipate his answer, which was, of course, ”We don’t serve Negroes here.” I made some sardonic comment about the name of his diner, and we walked out into the streets.
This was the time of 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. 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, were moving toward me, against me, and that everyone was white. I remember how their faces gleamed. And I felt, like a physical sensation, a click at the nape of my neck as though some interior 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 until I came to an enormous, glittering 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 for two, and waited.
I rather wonder what I could possibly have looked like. Whatever I looked like, I frightened the waitress who shortly appeared, and the moment she appeared all of my fury flowed toward her. 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 her pad, and repeated the formula: “… don’t serve Negroes here.”
Somehow, with the repetition of that phrase, I realized that she would never come any closer. There was nothing on the table but an ordinary mug, half full of water, and I picked this up and hurled it at her. She ducked and it shattered against the mirror behind the bar. With that sound, my frozen blood abruptly thawed, I returned from wherever I had been, I saw, for the first time, the restaurant, the people, with their mouths open, already, as it seemed to me, rising as one man, and I realized what I had done, and I was frightened. I rose and began running for the door. A round, potbellied man grabbed me by the nape of the neck 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. I do not know what I said to him when he came to my room that night. I felt, in the oddest, most awful way, that I had somehow betrayed him. I lived it over and over and over again. 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. 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.
II
I returned home around the second week in June—in great haste because it seemed that my father’s death and my mother’s confinement were both but a matter of hours. In the case of my mother, it soon became clear that she had simply made a miscalculation. I don’t believe that a single one of us arrived in the world, or has since arrived anywhere else, on time. But none of us dawdled so intolerably about the business of being born as did my baby sister. We sometimes amused ourselves, during those endless stifling weeks, by picturing the baby sitting in the safe, warm dark, bitterly regretting the necessity of becoming a part of our chaos and stubbornly putting it off as long as possible.
Death, however, sat as purposefully at my father’s bedside as life stirred within my mother’s womb, and it was harder to understand why he so lingered in that long shadow. It seemed that he had bent, and for a long time, too, all of his energies toward dying. Now death was ready for him but my father held back.
All of Harlem, indeed, seemed to be infected by waiting. I had never before known it to be so violently still. Racial tensions throughout this country were exacerbated during the early years of the war, partly because the labor market brought together hundreds of thousands of ill-prepared people and partly because Negro soldiers, regardless of where they were born, received their military training in the South. What happened in defense plants and Army camps had repercussions, naturally, in every Negro ghetto. The Harlem police force had been augmented in March, and the unrest grew. Perhaps the most revealing news item, out of the steady parade of reports of muggings, stabbings, shootings, assaults, gang wars, and accusations of police brutality, was the item about six Negro girls who set upon a white girl in the subway because, as they all too accurately put it, she was stepping on their toes. Indeed she was, all over the nation.
I had never before been so aware of policemen, on foot, on horseback, on corners, everywhere, always two by two. Nor had I ever been so aware of small knots of people. Never, when I passed these groups, did the usual sound of a curse or a laugh ring out. Neither did there seem to be any hum of gossip. There was certainly, on the other hand, occurring between them communicating extraordinarily intense.
Another thing that was striking was the unexpected diversity of the people who made up these groups. Usually one would see a group of sharpies standing on the street corner, or a group of older men, usually, for some reason, in the vicinity of a barber shop, discussing baseball scores, or the numbers, or the women they had known. Women, in a general way, tended to be seen less often together—unless they were church women, or very young girls, or prostitutes. But that summer I saw the strangest combinations: large, respectable, churchly matrons standing on the stoops or the corners with their hair tied up, together with a girl in sleazy satin whose face bore the marks of gin and the razor, or heavy-set, abrupt, no-nonsense older men in company with the most disreputable and fanatical “race” men, or these same ”race” men with the sharpies, or these sharpies with the churchly women. And on each face there seemed to be the same strange, bitter shadow.
The churchly women and the matter-of-fact no-nonsense men had children in the Army. The sleazy girls they talked to had lovers there; the sharpies and the ”race” men had friends and brothers there. It would have demanded an unquestioning patriotism, happily as uncommon in this country as it is undesirable, for these people not to have been disturbed by the letters they received, by the newspaper stories they read. It was only the ”race” men, to be sure, who spoke ceaselessly of being revenged—how this vengeance was to be exacted was not clear—for the indignities and dangers suffered by Negro boys in uniform; but everybody felt a directionless, hopeless bitterness, as well as that panic which can scarcely be suppressed when one knows that a human being one loves is beyond one’s reach, and in danger. Perhaps the best way to sum all this up is to say that the people I knew felt, mainly, a peculiar kind of relief when they knew that their boys were being shipped out of the South, to do battle overseas. Now, even if death should come, it would come with honor and without the complicity of their countrymen. Such a death would be, in short, a fact with which one could hope to live.
It was on the twenty-eighth of July that I visited my father for the first time during his illness and for the last time in his life. The moment I saw him I knew why I had put off this visit so long. I had told my mother that I did not want to see him because I hated him. But this was not true. It was only that I had hated him and I wanted to hold on to this hatred. I did not want to look on him as a ruin; it was not a ruin I had hated. I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is that they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.
We traveled out to him, his older sister and myself, to what seemed to be the very end of Long Island. It was hot and dusty and we wrangled all the way out over the fact that I had recently begun to smoke and, as my aunt said, to give myself airs. But I knew that she wrangled with me because she could not bear to face the fact of her brother’s dying. Neither could I endure the reality of her despair, her unstated bafflement as to what had happened to her brother’s life, and her own. From time to time she fell into a heavy reverie. Covertly, I watched her face, which was the face of an old woman; soon she would be dying, too.
In my childhood—it had not been so long ago—I had thought her beautiful. At one time one of my brothers and myself had thought of running away to live with her. Now she made me feel pity and revulsion and fear; it was awful to realize that she no longer caused me to feel affection.
She began to cry the moment we entered the hospital room and she saw him lying there, all shriveled and still, like a little black monkey. The great, gleaming apparatus which fed him and would have compelled him to be still even if he had been able to move brought to mind, not beneficence, but torture; the tubes entering his arm made me think of colored pictures I had seen when a child of Gulliver tied down by the pygmies. My aunt wept and wept, there was a whistling sound in my father’s throat; nothing was said; he could not speak.
I wanted to take his hand, to say something. But I do not know what I could have said, even if he could have heard me. He was not really in that room with us, he had at last really embarked on his journey; and though my aunt told me that he said he was going to meet Jesus, I did not hear anything except that whistling in his throat.
In the morning came the telegram saying that he was dead. Then the house became absolutely hideous with relatives, friends, hysteria, and confusion, and I left my mother and the children to the care of those impressive women who, in Negro communities at least, automatically appear at times of bereavement armed with lotions, proverbs, and patience, and an ability to cook. I went downtown. By the time I returned, later the same day, my mother had been carried to the hospital and the baby had been born.
III
For my father’s funeral, I had nothing black to wear and this posed a nagging problem all day long. It was one of those problems to which the mind insanely clings in order to avoid the mind’s real trouble. I spent most of that day at the downtown apartment of a girl I knew, celebrating my birthday with whisky and wondering what to wear that night. This girl had anticipated taking me out for a big dinner and a night club afterward. Sometime during the course of that long day we decided that we would go out anyway, when my father’s funeral service was over. I imagine I decided it, since, as the funeral hour approached, it became clearer and clearer to me that I would not know what to do with myself when it was over. The girl found a black shirt for me somewhere and ironed it, and, dressed in the darkest pants and jacket I owned, and slightly drunk, I got to my father’s funeral.
The chapel was full, but not packed, and very quiet. There were, mainly, my father’s relatives, and his children, and here and there I saw faces I had not seen since childhood, the faces of my father’s friends. Chief among the mourners was my aunt, who had quarreled with my father all his life. I suppose that she was one of the few people in the world who had loved him, and their incessant quarreling proved, precisely, the strength of the tie that bound them. The only other person in the world, as far as I knew, whose relationship to my father rivaled my aunt’s in depth was my mother, who was not there.
It seemed to me that it was a very long funeral. But it was, if anything, a rather shorter funeral than most, nor, since there were no overwhelming, uncontrollable expressions of grief, could it be called—if I dare use the word—successful. The minister who preached my father’s funeral sermon was one of the few my father had still been seeing as he neared his end. He presented to us in his sermon a man whom none of us had ever seen—a man thoughtful, patient, and forbearing, a Christian inspiration to all who knew him, and a model for his children. And no doubt children, in their disturbed and guilty state, were almost ready to believe this; he had been remote enough to be anything.
His sister moaned and this was taken as corroboration.The other faces held a dark, noncommittal thoughtfulness. This was not the man they had known, but they had scarcely expected to be confronted with him; this was, in a sense deeper than questions of fact, the man they had not known, and the man they had not known may have been the real one. The real man, whoever he had been, had suffered and now he was dead: this was all that was sure and all that mattered now.
While the preacher talked and I watched the children—years of changing their diapers, scrubbing them, slapping them, taking them to school, and scolding them had had the perhaps inevitable result of making me love them, though I am not sure I knew this then—my mind was busily breaking out with a rash of disconnected impressions. Snatches of popular songs, indecent jokes, bits of books I had read, movie sequences, faces, voices, political issues—I thought I was going mad; all these impressions suspended, as it were, in the solution of the faint nausea produced in me by the heat and liquor. For a moment I had the impression that my alcoholic breath, inefficiently disguised with chewing gum, filled the entire chapel. Then someone began singing one of my father’s favorite songs and, abruptly, I was with him, sitting on his knee, in the hot, enormous, crowded church which was the first church we attended. It was the Abyssinia Baptist Church on 138th Street. We had not gone there long.
With this image, a host of others came. I had forgotten, in the rage of my growing up, how proud my father had been of me when I was little. Apparently, I had a voice and my father had liked to show me off before the members of the church. I had forgotten what he had looked like when he was pleased but now I remembered that he had always been grinning with pleasure when my solos ended. I even remembered certain expressions on his face when he teased my mother—had he loved her? I would never know. And when had it all begun to change? For now it seemed that he had not always been cruel. I remembered being taken for a haircut and scraping my knee on the foot-rest of the barber’s chair and I remembered my father’s face as he soothed my crying and applied the stinging iodine. Then I remembered our fights, fights which had been of the worst possible kind because my own technique had been silence.
I remembered the one time in all our life together when we had ever really spoken to each other.
It was on a Sunday and it must have been shortly before I left home. We were walking, just the two of us, in our usual silence, to or from church. I was in high school and had been doing a lot of writing. But I had also been a Young Minister and had been preaching from the pulpit. Lately, I had been taking fewer engagements and preached as rarely as possible.
My father asked me abruptly, “You’d rather write than preach, wouldn’t you?”
I was astonished at his question—because it was a real question. I answered, “Yes.”
That was all we said. It was awful to remember that that was all we had ever said.
The casket now was opened and the mourners were being led up the aisle to look for the last time on the deceased. The assumption was that the family was too overcome with grief to make this journey alone. I disapproved of forcing the children to look on their dead father, considering that the shock of his death, or, more truthfully, the shock of death as a reality, was already a little more than a child could bear, but my Judgment in this matter had been overruled and there they were, bewildered and frightened and very small, being led, one by one, to the casket. But there is also something very gallant about children at such moments. It has something to do with their silence and gravity and with the fact that one cannot help them. Their legs, somehow, seem exposed, so that it is at once incredible and terribly clear that their legs are all they have to hold them up.
I had not wanted to go to the casket myself and I certainly had not wished to be led there, but there was no way of avoiding either of these forms. One of the deacons led me up and I looked on my father’s face. I cannot say that it looked like him at all. His blackness had been equivocated by powder and there was no suggestion in that casket of what his power had, or could have been. He was simply a corpse, and it was hard to believe that he had ever given anyone either joy or pain. Yet his life filled that room. Further up the avenue his wife was holding his new-born child. Life and death so close together, and love and hatred, and right and wrong, said something to me which I did not want to hear concerning man, concerning the life of man.
After the funeral, while I was downtown, desperately celebrating my birthday, a Negro soldier in the lobby of the Hotel Braddock got into a fight with a white policeman over a Negro girl. This was certainly not the first time such an incident had occurred. It was destined, however, to receive an unprecedented publicity, for it ended with the shooting of the soldier. Rumor, flowing immediately to the streets outside, stated that the soldier had been shot in the back, and that he had died protecting a Negro woman. The facts were somewhat different—the soldier had not been shot in the back, and was not dead—but no one was interested in the facts. They preferred the invention because it expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly. It is just as well to remember that people are always doing this. Perhaps many of those legends, including Christianity, to which the world clings, began their conquest of the world with just some such concerted surrender to distortion. The effect, in Harlem, of this particular legend was like the effect of a litmatch in a tin of gasoline. The mob gathered before the doors of the Hotel Braddock simply began to swell and to spread in every direction, and Harlem exploded.
The mob did not cross the ghetto lines. It seems to have been mainly interested in something more potent and real than the white face, that is, in white power, and the principal damage was to white business establishments in Harlem. It might have been a far bloodier story, of course, if, at the hour the riot began, these establishments had still been open. Bars, stores, pawnshops, restaurants, even little luncheonettes were smashed open and looted-looted, it might be added, with more haste than efficiency. Cans of beans and soup and dog food, along with toilet paper, corn flakes, sardines, and milk, tumbled every which way, and abandoned cash registers and cases of beer leaned crazily out of the splintered windows and were strewn along the avenues. Sheets, blankets, and clothing of every description formed a kind of path, as though people had dropped them while running. I truly had not realized that Harlem had so many stores until I saw them all smashed open; the first time the word wealth ever entered my mind in relation to Harlem was when I saw it scattered in the streets. But one’s first, incongruous impression of plenty was countered immediately by an impression of waste. It would have been better to have left the plate glass as it had been and the goods lying in the stores.
It would have been better, but it would also have been intolerable, for Harlem had needed something to smash. To smash something is the ghetto’s chronic need—most of the time it is the members of the ghetto who smash each other, and themselves. But as long as the ghetto walls are standing there will always come a moment when these outlets do not work. If ever, indeed, the violence which fills Harlem’s churches, pool-halls, and bars erupts outward in a more direct fashion, Harlem and its citizens are likely to vanish in an apocalyptic flood.
That this is not likely to happen is due to a great many reasons, most hidden and powerful among them the Negro’s real relation to the white American. This relation prohibits, simply, anything as uncomplicated and satisfactory as pure hatred. In order really to hate white people, one has to blot so much out of the mind—and the heart—that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose. But this does not mean that love comes easily: the white world is too powerful, too complacent, too ready with gratuitous humiliation, and, above all, too ignorant and too innocent for that. One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one’s own reactions are always canceling each other out. It is this, really, which has driven so many people mad, both white and black. One is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene. Amputation is swift but time may prove that the amputation was not necessary—or one may delay the amputation too long. Gangrene is slow, but it is impossible to be sure that one is reading one’s symptoms right. The idea of going through life as a cripple is more than one can bear, and equally unbearable is the risk of swelling up slowly, in agony, with poison. And the trouble, finally, is that the risks are real even if the choices do not exist.
But “As for me and my house,” my father had said, “we will serve the Lord.” I wondered, as we drove him to his resting place, what this line had meant for him. I had heard him preach it many times. I had preached it once myself, proudly giving it an interpretation different from my father’s. Now the whole thing came back to me, as though my father and I were on our way to Sunday school and I were memorizing the golden text: And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side at the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
I suspected in these familiar lines a meaning which had never been there for me before. All of his texts and songs, which I had decided were meaningless, were arranged before me at his death like empty bottles, waiting to hold the meaning which life would give them for me. This was his legacy: nothing is ever escaped. That bleakly memorable morning I hated the unbelievable streets and the Negroes and whites who had, equally, made them that way. But I knew that it was folly, as my father would have said, this bitterness was folly. It was necessary to hold on to the things that mattered. The deadman mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one’s own destruction.
It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart, and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair. This intimation made my heart heavy and, now that he was irrecoverable, I wished that my father had been beside me so that I could have searched his face for the answers which only the future would give me now.
