Voices in Our Blood (33 page)

“Yes, it's our own fault,” the rich businessman, active in segregation, says. “If we'd ever managed to bring ourselves to do what we ought to have done for the Negro, it would be different now, if we'd managed to educate them, get them decent housing, decent jobs.”

So I tell him what a Southern Negro professor had said to me. He had said that the future now would be different, would be hopeful, if there could just be “one gesture of graciousness” from the white man—even if the white man didn't like the Supreme Court decision, he might try to understand the Negro's view, not heap insult on him.

And the segregationist, who is a gracious man, seizes on the word. “Graciousness,” he says, “that's it, if we could just have managed some graciousness to the race. Sure, some of us, a lot of us, could manage some graciousness to individual Negroes, some of us were grateful to individuals for being gracious to us. But you know, we couldn't manage it for the race.” He thinks a moment, then says: “There's a Negro woman buried in the family burial place. We loved her.”

I believe him when he says it. And he sinks into silence, feeling the rub, for the moment anyway, between the man who can talk in terms of graciousness, in whatever terms that notion may present itself to him, and the man who is a power for segregation.

This is the same man who has said to me, earlier, that he knows integration to be inevitable, doesn't know why he is fighting it. But such a man is happier, perhaps, than those men, destined by birth and personal qualities to action and leadership, who in the face of what they take to be inevitable feel cut off from all action. “I am out of step with the times,” one such man says to me, and his wife says, “You know, if we feel the way we do, we ought to do something about it,” and he, in some deep, inward, unproclaimed bitterness, says, “No, I'm not going to get lathered up about anything.”

Yes, there are many kinds of rub, but I suppose that the commonest one is the moral one—the Christian one, in fact, for the South is still a land of faith. There is, of course, the old joke that after the Saturday night lynching, the congregation generally turns up a little late for church, and the sardonic remark a man made to me about the pro-integration resolution of the Southern Baptist Convention: “They were just a little bit exalted. When they got back with the home folks a lot of 'em wondered how they did it.”

But meanwhile, there are the pastors at Glendora and Hoxie and Oxford and other nameless places. And I remember a pastor, in Tennessee, a Southerner born and bred, saying to me: “Yes, I think the Court decision may have set back race equality—it was coming fast, faster than anybody could guess, because so quiet. But now some people get so put out with the idea of Negroes in church, they stop me on the street and say if I ever let one in, they won't come to church. So I ask about Heaven, what will they do in Heaven?

“ ‘Well,' one woman said, ‘I'll just let God segregate us.'

“ ‘You'll
let
God segregate you?' I said, and she flounced off. But I ask, where is Christianity if people can't worship together? There's only one thing to try to preach, and that is Christ. And there's only one question to ask, and that is what would Christ do?”

Will they go with him? I ask.

“They are good Christian people, most of them,” he says. “It may be slow, but they are Christians.”

And in a town in south Kentucky, in a “black county,” a Confederate county, where desegregation is now imminent in the high schools, the superintendent says to me: “The people here are good Christian people, trying to do right. When this thing first came up, the whole board said they'd walk out. But the ministers got to preaching, and the lawyers to talking on it, and they came around.”

I asked how many were influenced by moral, how many by legal, considerations.

About half and half, he reckons, then adds: “I'm a Rebel myself, and I don't deny it, but I'm an American and a law-abiding citizen. A man can hate an idea but know it's right, and it takes a lot of thinking and praying to bring yourself around. You just have to uncover the unrecognized sympathy in the white man for the Negro humiliation.”

Fifty miles away I shall sit in a living room and hear some tale of a Negro coming to somebody's front door—another house—and being admitted by a Negro servant and being found by the master of the house, who says: “I don't care if Susie did let you in. I don't care if Jesus Christ let you in. No black son-of-a-bitch is coming to my front door.”

After the tale, there is silence. All present are segregationist, or I think they are.

Then one woman says: “Maybe he did take a lot on himself, coming to the front door. But I can't stand it. He's human.”

And another woman: “I think it's a moral question, and I suffer, but I can't feel the same way about a Negro as a white person. It's born in me. But I pray I'll change.”

The successful businessman in Louisiana says to me: “I have felt the moral question. It will be more moral when we get rid of segregation. But I'm human enough—I guess it's human to be split up—to want things just postponed till my children are out of school. But I can't lift my finger to delay things.”

But this man, privately admitting his division of feeling, having no intention of public action on either side, is the sort of man who can be trapped, accidentally, into action.

There is the man who got the letter in the morning mail, asking him to serve as chairman of a citizens committee to study plans for desegregation in his county. “I was sick,” he says, “and I mean literally sick. I felt sick all day. I didn't see how I could get into something like that. But next morning, you know, I did it.”

That county now has its schedule for desegregation.

There is another man, a lawyer, who has been deeply involved in a desegregation action. “I never had much feeling of prejudice, but hell, I didn't have any theories either, and I now and then paid some lip service to segregation. I didn't want to get mixed up in the business. But one night a telephone call came. I told the man I'd let him know next day. You know, I was sick. I walked on back in the living room, and my wife looked at me. She must have guessed what it was. ‘You going to do it?' she asked me. I said, hell, I didn't know, and went out. I was plain sick. But next day I did it. Well,” he says, and grins, and leans back under the shelves of lawbooks, “and I'm stuck with it. But you know, I'm getting damned tired of the paranoiacs and illiterates I'm up against.”

Another man, with a small business in a poor county, “back in the shelf country,” he calls it, a short, strong-looking, ovoidal kind of man, with his belt cutting into his belly when he leans back in his office chair. He is telling me what he has been through. “I wouldn't tell you a lie,” he says. “I'm Southern through and through, and I guess I got every prejudice a man can have, and I certainly never would have got mixed up in this business if it hadn't been for the Court decision. I wouldn't be out in front. I was just trying to do my duty. Trying to save some money for the county. I never expected any trouble. And we might not have had any if it hadn't been for outsiders, one kind and another.

“But what nobody understands is how a man can get cut up inside. You try to live like a Christian with your fellowman, and suddenly you find out it is all mixed up. You put in twenty-five years trying to build up a nice little business and raise up a family, and it looks like it will all be ruined. You get word somebody will dynamite your house and you in it. You go to lawyers and they say they sympathize, but nobody'll take your case. But the worst is, things just go round and round in your head. Then they won't come a-tall, and you lay there in the night. You might say, it's the psychology of it you can't stand. Getting all split up. Then, all of a sudden, somebody stops you on the street and calls you something, a so-and-so nigger-lover. And you know, I got so mad, not a thing mattered any more. I just felt like I was all put back together again.”

He said he wished he could write it down, how awful it is for a man to be split up.

Negroes, they must be split up, too, I think. They are human, too. There must be many ways for them to be split up. I remember asking a Negro schoolteacher if she thought Negro resentment would be a bar to integration. “Some of us try to teach love,” she says, “as well as we can. But some of us teach hate. I guess we can't help it.”

Love and hate, but more than that, the necessity of confronting your own motives:
Do we really want to try to work out a way to live with the white people or do we just want to show them, pay off something, show them up, rub their noses in it?

And I can imagine the grinding anger, the sense of outrage of a Negro crying out within himself:
After all the patience, after all the humility, after learning and living those virtues, do I have to learn magnanimity, too?

Yes, I can imagine the outrage, the outrage as some deep, inner self tells him, yes, he must.

I am glad that white people have no problem as hard as that.

The taxi drew up in front of the apartment house, and I got out, but the driver and I talked on for a moment. I stood there in the rain, then paid him, and ran for the door. It wasn't that I wanted to get out of the rain. I had an umbrella. I wanted to get in and write down what he had said.

He was a local man, born near Nashville, up near Goodlettsville, “raised up with niggers.” He had been in the army, with lots of fighting, Africa, Sicily, Italy, but a lot of time bossing work gangs. In Africa, at first, it had been Arabs, but Arabs weren't “worth a durn.” Then they got Negro work battalions.

But here are the notes:

Niggers a lot better than Arabs, but they didn't hurt themselves—didn't any of 'em git a hernia for Uncle Sam—race prejudice—but it ain't our hate, it's the hate hung on us by the old folks dead and gone. Not I mean to criticize the old folks, they done the best they knew, but that hate, we don't know how to shuck it. We got that God-damn hate stuck in our craw and can't puke it up. If white folks quit shoving the nigger down and calling him a nigger, he could maybe get to be a asset to the South and the country. But how stop shoving?

We are the prisoners of our history.

Or are we?

There is one more interview I wish to put on record. I shall enter it by question and answer.

Q. You're a Southerner, aren't you?

A. Yes.

Q. Are you afraid of the power state?

A. Yes.

Q. Do you think the Northern press sometimes distorts Southern news?

A. Yes.

Q. Assuming that they do, why do they do it?

A. They like to feel good.

Q. What do you think the South ought to do about that distortion?

A. Nothing.

Q. Nothing? What do you mean, nothing?

A. The distortion—that's the Yankees' problem, not ours.

Q. You mean they ought to let the South work out a way to live with the Negro?

A. I don't think the problem is to learn to live with the Negro.

Q. What is it, then?

A. It is to learn to live with ourselves.

Q. What do you mean?

A. I don't think you can live with yourself when you are humiliating the man next to you.

Q. Don't you think the races have made out pretty well, considering?

A. Yes. By some sort of human decency and charity, God knows how. But there was always an image of something else.

Q. An image?

A. Well, I knew an old lady who grew up in a black county, but a county where relations had been, as they say, good. She had a fine farm and a good brick house, and when she got old she sort of retired from the world. The hottest summer weather and she would lock all the doors and windows at night, and lie there in the airless dark. But sometimes she'd telephone to town in the middle of the night. She would telephone that somebody was burning the Negroes out there on her place. She could hear their screams. Something was going on in her old head which in another place and time would not have been going on in her old head. She had never, I should think, seen an act of violence in her life. But something was going on in her head.

Q. Do you think it is chiefly the redneck who causes violence?

A. No. He is only the cutting edge. He, too, is a victim. Responsibility is a seamless garment. And the northern boundary of that garment is not the Ohio River.

Q. Are you for desegregation?

A.
Yes.

Q. When will it come?

A. Not soon.

Q. When?

A. When enough people, in a particular place, a particular county or state, cannot live with themselves any more. Or realize they don't have to.

Q. What do you mean, don't have to?

A. When they realize that desegregation is just one small episode in the long effort for justice. It seems to me that that perspective, suddenly seeing the business as little, is a liberating one. It liberates you from yourself.

Q. Then you think it is a moral problem?

A. Yes, but no moral problem gets solved abstractly. It has to be solved in a context for possible solution.

Q. Can contexts be changed?

A. Sure. We might even try to change them the right way.

Q. Aren't you concerned about possible racial amalgamation?

A. I don't even think about it. We have to deal with the problem our historical moment proposes, the burden of our time. We all live with a thousand unsolved problems of justice all the time. We don't even recognize a lot of them. We have to deal only with those which the moment proposes to us. Anyway, we can't legislate for posterity. All we can do for posterity is to try to plug along in a way to make them think we—the old folks—did the best we could for justice, as we could understand it.

Q. Are you a gradualist on the matter of segregation?

A. If by gradualist you mean a person who would create delay for the sake of delay, then no. If by gradualist you mean a person who thinks it will take time, not time as such, but time for an educational process, preferably a calculated one, then yes. I mean a process of mutual education for whites and blacks. And part of this education should be in the actual beginning of the process of desegregation. It's a silly question, anyway, to ask if somebody is a gradualist. Gradualism is all you'll get. History, like nature, knows no jumps. Except the jump backward, maybe.