Many Thousands Gone

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.  It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear.  As is the inevitable result of things unsaid, we find ourselves until today oppressed with a dangerous and reverberating silence; and the story is told, compulsively, in symbols and signs, in hieroglyphics; it is revealed in Negro speech and in that of the white majority and in their different frames of reference.  The ways in which the Negro has affected the American psychology are betrayed in our popular culture and in our morality; in our estrangement from him is the depth of our estrangement from ourselves.  We cannot ask: what do we really feel about him--such a question merely opens the gates on chaos.  What we really feel about him is involved with all that we feel about everything, about everyone, about ourselves.

The story of the Negro in America is the story of America--or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans.  It is not a very pretty story:  the story of a people is never very pretty.  The Negro in America, gloomily referred to as that shadow which lies athwart our national life, is far more than that.  He is a series of shadows, self-created, intertwining, which now we helplessly battle.  One may say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in the darkness of our minds.

This is why his history and his progress, his relationship to all other Americans, has been kept in the social arena.  He is a social and not a personal or a human problem; to think of him is to think of statistic, slums, rapes, injustices, remote violence; it is to be confronted with an endless cataloguing of losses, gains, skirmishes; it is to feel virtuous, outraged, helpless, as though his continuing status among us were somehow analogous to disease--cancer, perhaps, or tuberculosis--which must be checked, even though it cannot be cured.  In this arena the black man acquires quite another aspect from that which he has in life.  We do not know what to do with him in life; if he breaks our sociological and sentimental image of him we are panic-stricken and we feel ourselves betrayed.  When he violates the image, therefore, he stands in the greatest danger (sensing which, we uneasily suspect that he is very often playing a part for our benefit); and, what is not always so apparent but is equally true, we are then in some danger ourselves--hence our retreat or our blind and immediate retaliation.

Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.  Time and our own force act as our allies, creating an impossible, a fruitless tension between the traditional master and slave.  Impossible and fruitless because, literal and visible as this tension has become, it has nothing to do with reality.

Time has made some changes in the Negro face.  Nothing has succeeded in making it exactly like our own, though the general desire seems to be to make it blank if one cannot make it white.  When it has become blank, the past as thoroughly washed from the black face as it has been from ours, our guilt will be finished -- at least it will have ceased to be visible, which we imagine to be much the same thing.  But, paradoxically, it is we who prevent this from happening; since it is we, who, every hour that we live, reinvest the black face with our guilt; and we do this -- by a further paradox, no less ferocious--helplessly, passionately, out of an unrealized need to suffer absolution.

Today, to be sure, we know that the Negro is not biologically or mentally inferior; there is not truth in those rumors of his body odor or his incorrigible sexuality; or no more truth than can be easily explained or even defended by the social sciences.  Yet, in our most recent war, his blood was segregated as was, for the most part, his person.  Up to today we are set at a division, so that he may not marry our daughters or our sisters, nor may he--for the most part--eat at our table or live in our houses.  Moreover, those who do, do so at the grave expense of a double alienation:  from their own people, whose fabled attributes they must either deny or, worse, cheapen and bring to market; from us, for we require of them, when we accept them, that they at once cease to be Negroes and yet not fail to remember what being a Negro means--to remember, that is, what it means to us.  The threshold of insult is higher or lower, according to the people involved, from the bootblack in Atlanta to the celebrity in New York.  One must travel very far, among saints with nothing to gain or outcasts with nothing to lose, to find a place where it does not matter--and perhaps a word or a gesture or simply a silence will testify that it matters even there.

For it means something to be a Negro, after all, as it means something to have been born in Ireland or in China, to live where one sees space and sky or to live where one sees nothing but rubble or nothing but high buildings,  We cannot escape our origins, however hard we try, those origins which contain the key--could we but find it--to all that we later become.  What it means to be a Negro is a good deal more than this essay can discover; what it means to be a Negro in America can perhaps be suggested by an examination of the myths we perpetuate about him.

Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom are dead, their places taken by a group of amazingly well-adjusted young men and women, almost as dark, but ferociously literate, well-dressed and scrubbed, who are never laughed at, who are not likely ever to set foot in a cotton or tobacco field or in any but the most modern of kitchens.  There are others who remain, in our odd idiom, "underprivileged"; some are bitter and these come to grief; some are unhappy, but, continually presented with the evidence of a better day soon to come, are speedily becoming less so.  Most of them care nothing whatever about race.  They want only their proper place in the sun and the right to be left alone, like any other citizen of the republic.  We may all breathe more easily.  Before, however, our joy at the demise of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom approaches the indecent, we had better ask whence they sprang, who they lived?  Into what limbo have they vanished?

However inaccurate our portraits of them were, these portraits do suggest, not only the conditions, but the quality of their lives and the impact of this spectacle on our consciences.  There was no one more forbearing than Aunt Jemima, no one stronger or more pious or more loyal  or more wise; there was, at the same time, no one weaker or more faithless or more vicious and certainly no one more immoral.  Uncle Tom, trustworthy and sexless, needed only to drop the title "Uncle" to become violent, crafty, and sullen, a menace to any white woman who passed by.  They prepared our feast tables and our burial clothes; and, if we could boast that we understood them, it was far more to the point and far more true that they understood us.  They were, moreover, the only people in the world who did; and not only did they know us better than we knew ourselves, but they knew us better than we knew them.  This was the piquant flavoring to the national joke, it lay behind our uneasiness as it lay behind our benevolence:  Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom, our creations, at the last evaded us; they had a life--their own, perhaps a better life than ours--and they would never tell us what it was.  At the point where we were driven most privately and painfully to conjecture what depths of contempt, what heights of indifference, what prodigies of resilience, what untamable superiority allowed them so vividly to endure, neither perishing nor rising up in a body to wipe us from the earth, the image perpetually shattered and the word failed.  The black man in our midst carried murder in his heart, he wanted vengeance.  We carried murder too, we wanted peace.

In our image of the Negro breathes the past we deny, not dead but living yet and powerful, the beast in our jungle of statistics.  It is this which defeats us, which continues to defeat us, which lends to interracial cocktail parties their rattling, genteel, nervously smiling air: in any drawing room at such a gathering the beast may spring, filling the air with flying things and an unenlightened wailing.  Wherever the problem touches there is confusion, there is danger.  Wherever the Negro face appears a tension is created, the tension of a silence filled with things unutterable.  It is a sentimental error, therefore, to believe that the past is dead; it means nothing to say that it is all forgotten, that the Negro himself has forgotten it.  It is not a question of memory.  Oedipus did not remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless marks they left testified to that doom toward which his feet were leading him.  The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him, as a child; nevertheless, the hand and the darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to take flight.

The making of an American begins at that point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.  This problem has been faced by all Americans throughout our history-- in a way it is our history--and it baffles the immigrant and sets on edge the second generation until today.  In the case of the Negro the past was taken from him whether he would or no; yet to forswear it was meaningless and availed him nothing, since his shameful history was carried, quite literally, on his brow.  Shameful; for he was heathen as well as black and would never have discovered the healing blood of Christ had not we braved the jungles to bring him these glad tidings.  Shameful; for , since our role as missionary had not been wholly disinterested, it was necessary to recall the shame from which we had delivered him in order more easily to escape our own.  As he accepted the alabaster Christ and the bloody cross--in the bearing of which he would find his redemption, as, indeed, to our outraged astonishment, hw sometimes did--he must, henceforth, accept that image we then gave him of himself:  having no other and standing, moreover, in danger of death should he fail to accept the dazzling light thus brought into such darkness.  It is this quite simple dilemma that must be borne in mind if we wish to comprehend his psychology.

However we shift the light which beats so fiercely on his head, or prove, by victorious social analysis, how his lot has changed, how we have both improved, our uneasiness refuses to be exorcized.  And nowhere is this more apparent than in our literature on the subject--"problem" literature when written by whites, "protest" literature when written by Negroes--and nothing is more striking than the tremendous disparity of tone between the two creations.  Kingsblood Royal bears, for example, almost no kinship to If He Hollers Let Him Go, though the same reviewers praised them both for what were, at bottom, very much the same reasons.  These reasons may be suggested, far too briefly but not at all unjustly, by observing that the presupposition is in both novels exactly the same: black is a terrible color with which to be born into the world.

Now the most powerful and celebrated statement we have yet had of what it means to be a Negro in America is unquestionably Richard Wright's Native Son.  The feeling which prevailed at the time of its publication was that such a novel, bitter, uncompromising, shocking, gave proof, by its very existence, of what strides might be taken in a free democracy, and its indisputable success, proof that Americans were now able to look full in the face without flinching the dreadful facts.  Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.  Such a book, we felt with pride, could never have been written before--which was true.  Nor could it be written today.  It bears already the aspect of a landmark; for Bigger and his brothers have undergone yet another metamorphosis; they have been accepted in baseball leagues and by colleges hitherto exclusive; and they have made a most favorable appearance on the national screen.  We have yet to encounter, nevertheless, a report so indisputably authentic, or one that can begin to challenge this most significant novel.

It is, in a certain American tradition, the story of an unremarkable youth in battle with the force of circumstance; that force of circumstance which plays and which has played so important a part in the national fables of success or failure.  In this case the force of circumstance is not poverty merely but color, a circumstance which plays and which has played so important a part in the national fables of success or failure.  In this case the force of circumstance is not poverty merely which the protagonist battles for his life and loses.  It is, on the surface, remarkable that this book should have enjoyed among Americans the favor it did enjoy; no more remarkable, however, than that it should have been compared, exuberantly, to Dostoevsky, though placed a shade below Dos Passos, Dreiser, and Steinbeck; and when the book is examined, its impact does not seem remarkable at all, but becomes, on the contrary, perfectly logical and inevitable. 

We cannot, to begin with, divorce this book from the specific social climate of that time; it was one of the last of all through the thirties, dealing with the inequities of the social structure of America.  It was published one year before our entry into the last world war--which is to say, very few years after the dissolution of the WPA and the end of the New Deal and at time when bread lines and soup kitchens and bloody industrial battles were bright in everyone's memory.  The rigors of that unexpected time filled us not only with a genuinely bewildered and despairing idealism--so that, because there at least was something to fight for, young men went off to die in Spain--but also with a genuinely bewildered self-consciousness.  The Negro, who had been during the magnificent twenties a passionate and delightful primitive, now became, as one of the things we were most self-conscious about, our most oppressed minority.  In the thirties, swallowing Marx whole, we discovered the Worker and realized--I should think with some relief--that the aims of the Worker and the aims of the Negro were one.  This theorem to which we shall return--seems now to leave rather too much out of account; it became, nevertheless, one of the slogans of the "class struggle" and the gospel of the New Negro.

As for this New Negro, it was Wright who became his most eloquent spokesman; and his work, from its beginning, is most clearly committed to the social struggle.  Leaving aside the considerable question of what relationship precisely the artist bears to the revolutionary, the reality of man as a social being is not his only reality and that artist is strangled who is forced to deal with human beings solely in social terms; and who has, moreover, as Wright had, the necessity thrust on him of being the representative of some thirteen million people.  It is a false responsibility (since writers are not congressmen) and impossible, by its nature, of fulfillment.  The unlucky shepherd soon finds that, so far from being able to feed the hungry sheep, he has lost the wherewithal for his own nourishment;  having not been allowed-- so fearful was his burden, so present his audience!--to recreate his own experience.  Further, the militant men and women of the thirties were not, upon examination, significantly emancipated from their antecedents, however bitterly they might consider themselves estranged or however gallantly they struggle to build a better world.  However they might extol Russia, their concept of a better world.  However they might extol Russia, their concept of a better world was quite helplessly American and betrayed a certain thinness of imagination, a suspect reliance on suspect and badly digested formulae, and a positively fretful romantic haste.  Finally, the relationship of the Negro to the Worker cannot be summed up, nor even greatly illuminated, by saying that their aims are one.  It is true only insofar as they both desire better working conditions and useful only insofar as they unite their strength as workers to achieve these ends.  Further than this we cannot in honest go.

In this climate Wright's voice first was heard and the struggle which promised for a time to shape his work and give it purpose also fixed it in an ever more unrewarding rage.  Recording his days of anger he has also nevertheless recorded, as no Negro before to, had ever done, that fantasy Americans hold in their minds when they speak of the Negro:  that fantastic and fearful image which we have lived with since the first slave fell beneath the lash.  This is the significance of Native Son and also, unhappily, its overwhelming limitation.

Native Son begins with the Bring! of an alarm clock in the squalid Chicago tenement where Bigger and his family live.  Rats live there too, feeding off the garbage, and we first encounter Bigger in the act of killing one.  One may consider that the entire book, from the harsh Bring! to Bigger's weak "Good-by" as the lawyer, Max, leaves him in the death cell, is an extension, with the roles inverted, of this chilling metaphor.  Bigger's situation and Bigger himself exert on the mind the same sort of fascination.  The premise of the book is, as I take it, clearly conveyed in these first pages: we are confronting a monster created by the American republic and we are, through being made to share his experience, to receive illumination as regards the manner of his life and to feel both pity and horror at his awful and inevitable doom.  This is an arresting and potentially rich idea and we would be discussing a very different novel if Wright's execution had been more perceptive and if he had not attempted to redeem a symbolical monster in social terms.

One may object that it was precisely Wright's intention to create in Bigger a social symbol, revelatory of social disease and prophetic of disaster.  I think, however, that it is this assumption which we ought to examine more carefully.  Bigger has no discernible relationship to himself, to his own life, to his own people, nor to any other people--in this respect, perhaps, he is most American--and his force comes, not from his significance as a social (or anti-social) unit, but from his significance as the incarnation of a myth.  It is remarkable that, though we follow him step by step from the tenement room to the death cell, we know as little about him when this more remarkable, we know almost as little about the social dynamic which we are to believe created him.  Despite the details of slum life which we are given.  I doubt that anyone who has thought about it, disengaging himself from sentimentality, can accept this most essential premise of the novel for a moment.  Those Negroes who surround him, on the other hand, his hard-working mother, his ambitious sister, his poolroom cronies, Bessie, might be considered as far richer and far more subtle and accurate illustrations of the ways in which Negroes are controlled in our society and the complex techniques they have evolved for their survival.  We are limited, however, to not have been disastrous if we were not also limited to Bigger's perceptions.  What this means for the novel is that a necessary dimension has been cut away; this dimension being the relationship that Negroes bear to one another, the depth of involvement and unspoken recognition of shared experience which creates a way of life.  What the novel reflects--and at no point interprets--is the isolation of the Negro within his own group and the resulting fury of impatient scorn.  It is this which creates its climate of anarchy and unmotivated and un-apprehended disaster; and it is this climate, common to most Negro protest novels, which has led us all to believe that in Negro life there exists no tradition, no field of manners, no possibility of ritual or intercourse, such as may, for example, sustain the Jew even after he has left his father's house.  But the fact is not that the Negro has no tradition but that there has as yet arrived no sensibility sufficiently profound and tough to make this tradition articulate.  For a tradition expresses, after all, nothing more than the long and painful experience of a people; it comes out of the battle waged to maintain their integrity or, to put it more simply, out of their struggle to survive.  When we speak of the Jewish tradition we are speaking of centuries of exile and persecution, of the strength which endured and the sensibility which discovered in it the high possibility of the moral victory.

This sense of how Negroes live and how they have so long endured in hidden from us in part by the very speed of the Negro's public progress, a progress so heavy with complexity, so bewildering and kaleidoscopic, that he dare not pause to conjecture on the darkness which lies behind him; and by the nature of the American psychology which, in order to apprehend or be made able to accept it, must undergo a metamorphosis so profound as to be literally unthinkable and which there is no doubt we will resist until we are compelled to achieve our own identity by the rigors of a time that has yet to come.  Bigger, in the meanwhile, and all his furious kin, serve only to whet the notorious national taste for the sensational and to reinforce all that we now find it necessary to believe.  It is not Bigger whom we fear, since his appearance among us makes our victory certain.  It is the others, who smile, who go to church, who give no cause for complaint, whom we sometimes consider with amusement, with pity, even with affection--and in whose faces we sometimes surprise the merest arrogant hint of hatred, the faintest, with easy; who we cajole, threaten, flatter, fear; who to us remain unknown, though we are not (we feel with both relief and hostility and with bottomless confusion) unknown to them.  It is out of our reaction to these hewers of wood and drawers of water that our image of Bigger was created.

It is this image, living yet, which we perpetually seek to evade with good works; and this image which makes of all our good works an intolerable mockery.  The "nigger," black, benighted, brutal, consumed with hatred as we are consumed with guilt, cannot be thus blotted out.  He stands at our shoulders when we give our maid her wages, it is his hand which we fear we are taking when struggling to communicate with the current "intelligent" Negro, his stench, as it were, which fills out mouths with salt as the monument is unveiled in honor of the latest Negro leader.  Each generation has shouted behind him, Nigger! as he walked our streets; it is he whom we would rather our sisters did to marry; he is banished into the vast and wailing outer darkness whenever we speak of the purity of our women, of the sanctity of our homes, of American ideals.  What is more, he knows it.  He is indeed the native son he is the nigger.  Let us refrain from inquiring at the moment whether or not he actually exists; for we believe that he exists.  Whenever we encounter him amongst us in the flesh, our faith is made perfect and his necessary and bloody end is executed with a mystical ferocity of joy.

But there is a complementary faith among the damned which involves their gathering of the stones with which those who walk in the light shall stone them; or there exists among the intolerably degraded the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual those fantastic crimes of their own destruction through making the nightmare real.  The American image of the Negro lives also in the Negro's heart; and when he has surrendered to this image life has no other possible reality.  Then he, like the white enemy with whom he will be locked one day in mortal struggle, has no means save this of asserting his identity.  this is why Bigger's murder of Mary can be referred to as an "act of creation and why, once this murder has been committed, he can feel for the first time that he is living fully and deeply as a man was meant to live.