The Cross of Redemption (30 page)

I ought to add, for this also affects any estimate of any black star, that the popular culture certainly does not reflect the truth concerning the lives led by white people, either; but white Americans appear to be under the compulsion to dream, whereas black Americans are under the compulsion to awaken. And this fact is also sinister.

I am not a television fan, either, and I very much doubt that future generations will be vastly edified by what goes on on the American television screen. TV commercials drive me up the wall. And yet, as long as there is
that screen
and there are
those commercials
, it is important to hip the American people to the fact that black people also brush their teeth and shave and drink beer and smoke cigarettes—though it may take a little more time for the American people to recognize that we also shampoo our hair. It is of the utmost importance that a black child see on that screen
someone who looks like him
. Our children have been suffering from the lack of identifiable images for as long as our children have been born.

Yet, there’s a difficulty, there’s a rub, and it’s precisely the nature of this difficulty that has brought Sidney under attack. The industry is compelled, given the way it is built, to present to the American people a self-perpetuating fantasy of American life. It considers that its job is to entertain the American people. Their concept of entertainment is difficult to distinguish from the use of narcotics, and to watch the TV screen for any length of time is to learn some really frightening things about the American sense of reality.
And the black face, truthfully reflected, is not only no part of
this dream, it is antithetical to it
. And this puts the black performer in a rather grim bind. He knows, on the one hand, that if the reality of a black man’s life were on that screen, it would destroy the fantasy totally. And on the other hand, he really has no right
not
to appear, not only because he must work, but also for all those people who need to see him. By the use of his own person, he must smuggle in a reality that he knows is not in the script. A celebrated black TV actor once told me that he did an entire show for the sake of
one line
. He felt that he could convey something very important with that
one line
. Actors don’t write their scripts, and they don’t direct them. Black people have no power in this industry at all. Furthermore, the actor may be offered dozens of scripts before anything even remotely viable comes along.

Sidney is now a superstar. This must baffle a great many people, as, indeed, it must baffle Sidney. He is an extraordinary actor, as even his detractors must admit, but he’s been that for a long time, and that doesn’t really explain his eminence. He’s also extraordinarily attractive and winning and virile, but that could just as easily have worked against him. It’s something of a puzzle. Speaking now of the image and not of the man, it has to do with a quality of pain and danger and some fundamental impulse to decency that both titillates and reassures the white audience. For example, I’m glad I didn’t write
The Defiant Ones
, but I liked Sidney in it very much. And I suppose that his performance has something to do with what I mean by smuggling in reality. I remember one short scene, in close-up, when he’s talking about his wife, who wants him to “be nice.” Sidney’s face, when he says, “She say, ‘Be nice. Be nice,’” conveys a sorrow and humiliation rarely to be seen on our screen. But white people took that film far more seriously than black people did. When Sidney jumps off the train at the end because he doesn’t want to leave his buddy, the white liberal people downtown were much relieved and joyful. But when black people saw him jump off the train, they yelled, “Get back on the train, you fool.” That didn’t mean that they hated Sidney: they just weren’t going for the okey-doke. And if I point out that they were right, it doesn’t mean that Sidney was wrong. That film was made to say something to white people. There was really nothing it
could
say to black people—except for the authority of Sidney’s performance.

Black people have been robbed of everything in this country, and they don’t want to be robbed of their artists. Black people particularly disliked
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
, which I made a point of seeing, because they felt that Sidney was, in effect, being used against them. I’m now on very
delicate ground, and I know it, but I can’t really duck this issue, because it’s been raised so often. I can’t pretend that the movie meant anything to me. It seemed a glib, good-natured comedy in which a lot of able people were being wasted. But, I told myself, this movie wasn’t made for
you
. And I really don’t know the people for whom it
was
made. I moved out of their world, insofar as this is ever possible, a long time ago. I remember the cheerful English lady in a wine shop in London who had seen this movie and adored it and adored the star. She was a nice lady, and certainly not a racist, and it would simply have been an unjust waste of time to get angry with her for knowing so little about black people. The hard fact is that most people, of whatever color, don’t know much about each other, because they don’t care much about each other. Would the image projected by Sidney cause that English lady to be friendly to the next West Indian who walked into her shop? Would it cause her to
think
, in any real way, of the
reality
, the presence, the simple human
fact
of black people? Or was Sidney’s black face simply, now, a part of a fantasy—the fantasy of her life, precisely—which she would never understand? This is a question posed by the communications media of the twentieth century, and it is not a question anyone can answer with authority. One is gambling on the human potential of an inarticulate and unknown consciousness—that of the people. This consciousness has never been of such crucial importance in the world before. But one knows that the work of the world gets itself done in very strange ways, by means of very strange instruments, and takes a very long time. And I also thought that
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
may prove, in some bizarre way, to be a milestone, because it is really quite impossible to go any further in that particular direction. The next time, the kissing will have to start.

I thought of something else, something very difficult to convey. I remember a night in London, when Diana Sands was starring in
The Owl and the Pussycat
. There were about four or five of us, walking to some discotheque, and with us was a very angry, young, black cat. Across the street from us was Sidney’s name in lights in some movie I’ve not seen. Now, I understand the angry, young, black cat, and he was right to be angry. He was not angry at Sidney, but at the world. But I knew there was no point in saying that, at the time I was born, the success of a Sidney Poitier or a Diana Sands was not to be imagined. I don’t mean to congratulate the American people on what they like to call progress, because it certainly isn’t. The careers of all black artists in this country prove that. Time passes and phenomena occur in time. The
presence
of Sidney, the precedent set, is
of tremendous importance for people coming afterward. And perhaps that’s what it’s really all about—just that.

Sidney, as a black artist, and a man, is also up against the infantile, furtive sexuality of this country. Both he and Harry Belafonte, for example, are sex symbols, though no one dares admit that, still less to use them as any of the Hollywood he-men are used. In spite of the fabulous myths proliferating in this country concerning the sexuality of black people, black men are still used, in the popular culture, as though they had no sexual equipment at all. This is what black men, and black women, too, deeply resent.

I think it’s important to remember, in spite of the fact we’ve been around so long, that Sidney is younger than I, and I’m not an old man yet. It takes a long time in this business, if you survive in it at all, to reach the eminence that will give you the power to change things. Sidney has that power now, to the limited extent that
anyone
in this business has. It will be very interesting to see what he does with it. In my mind, there’s no limit to what he might become.

But Sidney, like all of us, is caught in a storm. Let me tell you one thing about him, which has to do with how black artists particularly need each other. Sidney had read
Another Country
before it came out. He liked it, and he knew how frightened I was about the book’s reception. I’d been in Europe, and I came back for the publication because I didn’t want anyone to think I was afraid to be here. My publisher gave a party at Big Wilt’s Smalls Paradise in Harlem. Sidney came very early. I was ready to meet the mob, but I was scared to death, and Sidney knew it, and he walked me around the block and talked to me and helped me get myself together. And then he walked me back, and the party was starting. And when he realized that I was all right, he split. And I realized for the first time that he had only come for that. He hadn’t come for the party at all.

And the following may also make a small, malicious point. There’s speculation that the central figure of my new novel, who is a black actor, is based on Sidney. Nothing could be further from the truth, but people naturally think that, because when they look around them, Sidney’s the only black actor they see. Well, that fact says a great deal more about this country than it says about black actors, or Sidney, or me.

(1968)

·      ·     ·

Paris, September
15, 1961

I feel very strange and naked, but I guess that’s good. Appetite seems to be returning, and I’m able to work. And Paris is still beautiful, in spite of its danger and sorrow and age.

Pray for me.

Israel, October 5

This is almost the only night I’ve had since I got here when it’s been possible to write letters. Being a guest of the government really involves becoming an extremely well-cared-for parcel post package. But the visit seems, so far, to have been a great success: Israel and I seem to like each other. I’ve been trying, as usual, to do too many things at once and I’ve been keeping a diary of sorts of things as they happen—places I’ve been, people I’ve talked to—every night, when I come home. But I come home late and I get up early (the phone rings, and it’s the hotel manager informing me that “my” car has arrived) and off I and the government go—tomorrow morning, for example, to the Negev and the Dead Sea. I am always worried about wearing out my welcome, and imagined I’d be gone by now: but no, they keep saying “Please don’t hurry.” Still, I’m leaving Monday morning.

I must say, it’s rather nice to be in a situation in which I haven’t got to count and juggle and sweat and be responsible for a million things that I’m absolutely unequipped to do. All I’m expected to do is observe, and, hopefully, to write about that which I’ve observed. This is not going to be easy; and yet, since this trip is clearly my prologue to Africa, it has become very important to me to assess what Israel makes me feel. In a curious way, since it really
does
function as a homeland, however beleaguered, you can’t walk five minutes without finding yourself at a border, can’t talk to anyone for five minutes without being reminded first of the mandate (British), then of the war—and of course the entire Arab situation, outside the country, and, above all, within, causes one to take a view of human life and right and wrong almost as stony as the land in which I presently find myself—well, to bring this thoroughly undisciplined sentence to a halt, the fact that Israel
is
a homeland for so many Jews (there are great faces here; in a way the whole world is here) causes me to feel my own homelessness more keenly than ever. (People say, “Where are you from?” And it causes me a tiny and resentful effort to say “New York”—what did
I
ever do to deserve so ghastly a birthplace?—and their faces fall.)

But just because my homelessness is so inescapably brought home to me, it begins, in some odd way, not only to be bearable, but to be a positive opportunity. It must be, must be made to be. My bones know, somehow, something of what waits for me in Africa. That is one of the reasons I have dawdled so long—I’m afraid. And, of course, I am playing it my own way, edging myself into it; it would be nice to be able to dream about Africa, but once I have been there, I will not be able to dream anymore. The truth is that there is something unutterably painful about the end of oppression—not that it
has
ended yet, on a black-white basis, I mean, but it
is
ending—and one flinches from the responsibility, which we all now face, of judging black people solely as people. Oh, well. I think of the poor Negroes of the U.S. who identify themselves with Africa, or imagine that they identify themselves with Africa—and on what basis? It would seem to be clear, but it is not: Africa has been black a long time, but American Negroes did not identify themselves with Africa until Africa became identified with power. This says something about poor human nature which indeed one would rather not be forced to see—enough of this. And at the same time, the continuing situation of the black people of this world, my awareness of the blandness with which white people commit and deny and defend their crimes, fill me with pain and rage. Well. This promises to be an extremely valuable journey.