The black man knew that Connecticut had a history of quiet wealth and comfortable retirement, and quieter liberalism in matters of social integration with Negroes; but that in these three characteristics, nothing was ever mentioned, certainly not in the same breath, about Connecticut’s Negro population, so much so, that one did not normally think of Negroes or black people when one mentioned the name Connecticut.
The black man in this white limousine going to Connecticut, sensed a certain judgment being made, silently behind the eyes and lips of these Southerned, tanned, healthy-looking young men and middle-aged men who sit like football players crowded on a bench, inhaling each other’s sweat and tension, waiting for their chance to explode in the violence of the game. He knows that it is one thing to sit in the first-class section of a plane leaving New York’s LaGuardia for Toronto, at eight o’clock on a Friday night, when businessmen go home for the weekend, and have some of their disquietude at his presumption and presence, wondering whether he is an African diplomat, or a jazz musician, or a star football player, or a very successful American pimp. Or a drug dealer, for he is wearing too much silk and gold chains. But he knows that it is something altogether different to sit so close to them in their limousine, which is not the same thing as a taxi, and which they know is not the normal method and manner of transportation of the lower-class members of Connecticut’s residents to get from LaGuardia Airport to New Haven; and he wonders what is going through their minds as they find him, when the limousine turns unexpectedly, touching them so intimately in the loins of their weaknesses and their strengths; and on their seersucker suits. Not even during their Sunday-afternoon football games on the television, or in the flesh, do they expect this closeness of skin on skin, closeness of suspicion on suspicion, and the roaring mighty black fullback has never challenged their own conception of their strength. O.J. Simpson and Jim Brown slipped through their tackles.
The black man has to reach over two persons in order to flick his ash from his Gauloises cigarette in the ashtray. But there is no ashtray. It could have been stolen when the limousine was parked on the wrong street in New Haven. And he might want to breathe in some rehabilitative Connecticut air, although it might not be prudent to ask any of these unspeaking strangers that the window be wound down so he might catch a breath, although he can see the need to cleanse the air of the walnut-and-brown-panelled prudity inside this limousine. And he becomes a frightening person of the prejudices of choice.
He is now I. So, I think that I would hate to be forcibly integrated in the sense in which the term is being used by the NAACP and by the 1968 version of white Connecticut liberals, integrated with all these white people in this limousine; condemned through that integration to travel any considerable distance, either in space or in time or in attitude, sitting beside them with the destination being the indictment of my desire to be integrated; or else being the beneficiary of that integration. I think that of all the moral arguments that black people in America have put forward to seek an end to segregated public transportation, there have been some significant humanitarian considerations that got crushed under the heel of the political liberalism of black and white Americans who feel that to place flesh on top of flesh in this closeness during travel has anything to do with justice. At best, that kind of reasoning is symbolic.
Now, I am in the position to say categorically, that most white people feel uncomfortable when they sit beside black people. And they feel something more than discomfort when they sit beside black people in a country they know to be a racist society. They do not usually express this discomfiture in an offensive manner, although their attitude might have a racialistic origin; for white Americans have been conditioned into a public behaviour of public manners. Except of course, in the dark Southern segregationist culture of governors. So that one might hardly think that the white man or the white woman sitting beside you today, or on a bus or on a plane, is the direct descendant of, or a witness to, the cultural and spiritual genocide of millions of blacks and reds and browns and other non-white peoples, perpetrated for so many years. And then again, it is with special wonder and with some peace of mind, to see the races integrating, on the most self-respecting level, when they attend ball games. But if the violence in the genes of white Americans expresses itself through their presence beside you, it also declares a silent war of conscience within themselves. For their history is now common international knowledge. And they tend to become inordinately uncomfortable and do all sorts of small uncomfortable things, like giving you too much space, or picking up your coat or your ticket from the floor; or like standing up and walking into the aisle of a cinema to allow you to pass and sit down (when in fact you might wish to brush against their legs, to see for yourself that they are human, too; or for you to experience some small sensual titillation, for you are human, too; and white people would do all these things that are damn uncomfortable for them to do, and which they tend not to do, when the “intruder” is white like themselves). Amongst them, in white circumstances, there is more casualness; although they understand that it is normal to be annoyed at intrusion; and therefore their behaviour in these circumstances is more natural and therefore more dignified. It is like entering upon a conversation that comes back to you and to them, black people and white people, and in voices of strained friendliness. A mountain of history explains them to you, which itself explains them and which explains you; and for you to remove this legacy with them sitting beside you, and for this absolution to be suggested merely through this suspicious closeness, is to demonstrate further an inferiority which has been the presumption of their first contact with you, in a history in which you saw them as rapacious and raping … and we are passing some names of places that have a distinct Native American cultural root. I do not know which tribe, which nation of Indians, for something in the arrangement of power has already caused me, a rather enlightened black man in spite of all, to spend less time learning and remembering things about Indians in Canada, in South America, in the West Indies, and in America, than I have spent, sitting on hard benches that have no back and no cushion, learning about King George the Sixth, and his other dead portraits of brothers and sisters, arranged along a wall of pomp and glorious history and majesty in a West Indian elementary school, in an endless chronicle of colonial conquest … but the names are now Indian, and with no great stretch of the imagination required, I can see myself as I would have been bound to travel this route in the company of white people, against my wish, forced, and decorated with iron chains; and the stagecoach going much faster than this burdened Connecticut limousine, even relatively speaking, faster; and the silent white people thinking of the drama of travel and civilization; of the chance that they might not reach home, which was merely an attitude of brutality and conquest, to sit beside a fireside of family life procured at that great expense of death, to have dinner, to breathe into their warmth of living their strange conclusions that Indians are savages.
Travelling now, years ahead of this present year, 1968, their necks are stiff with the expectation of arrows and spears with the heads fixed on them in the correct intention to kill (not like the secretary in the U.S. Consulate in Toronto had affixed her spear on her yellow notepad!), and as chance would have it, actually stiffened by the actual arrow and the spear, and I, or perhaps some duplicate of me, a model of me made from clay, a house nigger, a freed slave, a black cowboy, somebody like me, black, sitting in this fiery furnace and having to suffer the same judgment as the Indian, because I had entered a house of prostitution. I had had very little claim of moral rectitude, no chance of impressing the policeman who raids the brothel, precisely because I was caught inside a house of no repute. But I might have just this small chance of impressing the policeman that I had been carrying out a personal sociological study of the ways of whores, and that I was not really after certain joys of the flesh, seeking carnal knowledge. And for me to think of that excuse, is certainly more obscene than if I had swallowed my fate of cir
cumstantial death, notwithstanding that it had been caused and brought about by the stronger force of circumstantial evidence. For I had enjoyed some mobility, vicariously, even if only it was thought, on deeper analysis, to be nothing more than motion, caused by being in the same moving white Connecticut limousine, by being a passenger in a coach: not that I was moving.
So, the Indians in the names of exits and towns rush to meet me, and I feel more comfortable because history has cleaned this passage through time and through murder and rape, decimation, pointing in a certain direction, which if I could return to this limousine and this route, three hundred years later, I might see the names of black Americans, slaves, like statues in bronze and in stone, identifying both the journey I would take then, and commemorating in ironic American thoroughness for devastation, the fact that black people had once lived in this country, and are now successfully silenced, buried by name only on signposts and exits; or in the struck faces of an American penny, or a dime, like the Indian face on certain billboards, on certain restaurants in resort areas, on certain life insurance letterhead stationery. I am living in the year 1963, which is the year of great paranoia of genocide taking grip in America, in the minds of blacks: and Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) has told me as early as 1964 that he suspects that America has constructed and have renovated concentration camps to house black Americans. Was Leroi being paranoid?
Many white Americans cannot face this possibility, although they had previously gone through it during the Second World War with the Japanese in California; and their humour about this denial of human rights does not permit them to look at this chapter in their history in quite the same way as I am forced to see it; for I must see it this way, even at the risk of being paranoid, if I must cling to the remaining dot of sanity within me, a sanity which juxtaposes my psychical dualism.
An Indian with feathers flaming out of his head, like a frightening diadem, or like a halo proclaiming his sovereignty over this Connecticut land, jumped out from a small precipice into the road before us: the billboards stood in our way for a few seconds, like a fort blocking our passage; and then, just as quickly, it was gone. The billboard faded, into insignificance, for we have ignored its history lesson, just as we might have ignored the waves of attacking Indians, two hundred years ago, through the superiority of our blunderbusses, since we had already made the blunder of having ignored their presence on the land, and any right that they might have had to it; and so we are accustomed to cutting them down in a pioneering determination to expand and to justify the land and all that was found in the land, for conquest of rape, in the name of various justifications based upon dogma, prejudice, concept, and many economic needs. I quote from To Serve the Devil, by Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau, with Eve Pell:
The colonizers came to the New World believing that coloured people were inferior, and used that ideology to justify the enslavement of blacks, the killing of Indians and Mexicans and the importation of Oriental labour for work considered unfit for whites.
But the descendants of the colonizers driving this Friday afternoon in the Connecticut limousine with me, on this beautiful autumn afternoon, with the colours of gold and brown and red, on either side of the highway, so many years after those killings (in the markets and in the marketplaces), did not understand why certain exits and towns bore the names of Indians; Indian names; did not understand it, or if they understood it, were indifferent to it, through the passage of time and history which had now settled itself into a comfortableness and an acceptance of superiority and power which they might have thought to be inherent. They saw only the comfort and the power and the beauty in the trees along this highway, all of which made the passage so appealing to the eye and so palatable. Again, from To Serve the Devil :
The identification of coloured skin, with the devil, with inferiority, infused the entire culture of the Anglo-Saxon during the first centuries of colonisation.In each case, the racialism coincided with economic need for slave labour and for land. At the same time, racist attitudes were institutionalized as laws, religion and everyday practices. Each school learned, along with the principles of republicanism and democracy, about the inferiority of the coloured peoples.
… we are travelling over Indian graves, over Indian bodies, over the bodies of slaves and Asians, over the bodies of the ancestors of the same people travelling inside the limousine with me; but nobody in the limousine is thinking about them now, or about how they got here; for America to them, is a land made precisely in the dimensions of their mental parameters and in the shape of our present comfort, because every white man has made a claim to having civilized America, and the indigenous peoples they found in America.
If this limousine with the twelve passengers that we are, were leaving the Seawell International Airport, in Barbados, where I was born, and if it contained only four white persons among its other passengers, who might have been strangers to the country, it is most likely that the Barbadian “natives” would exchange some words of pleasantry with the visitors; they would boast or otherwise disclose to the visitors their knowledge of world affairs and their sophisticated familiarity with world travel. “… England, Spain once; overnight Latin-America, and I saw Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Bridge, once. But I never went more South than Washington, D.C.!” … and the Barbadian would point out some historical landmark, and most certainly would offer to help these American strangers with their hotel accommodations, and give them the entire history of the island, in the space of time it takes to drive the nine miles from the airport to the area of the tourist hotels on the west coast.
The journey from LaGuardia to New Haven is longer than it is from Seawell Airport to Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados. Because I was brought up with this sense of hospitality, strong as a moral obligation to be polite to strangers, I can say that the silence in which a small minority of black people travelling in America in these days, and who is able to exert upon the majority of white passengers (and this does not apply only to America), is a silence that is more significant than what could have been spoken, and that is something altogether different from what is sometimes called British reservation at the meeting of strangers. Perhaps there was a better system of travel, if not a more comfortable one, for both races of people, when public transportation was completely segregated. But I won’t like to press this point to any other conclusion.
I do not think that I, a black man in America, a West Indian in any other country, was like the black American, harnessed by a sense of history that was like a responsibility upon the senses, a history of the dead Indian, and that I was so obsessed by this history that I could not enjoy some aspect of the technological beauty of barrenness of the landscape over which these efficient highways had been gouged out. I could see that these highways did not only mean that I was travelling over the macadam of Indians’ skulls and bones. I was aware of the comfort of good roads. No, it was not that: it was, merely, that in the silence of the white limousine, with the unspeaking white Americans, that I was forced through lack of conversation to conduct a dialogue with myself, and notice certain meanings and implications in the names of exits and on billboards rushing towards me. And these names seemed to insinuate to me that something dramatic had happened along these highways before they were highways, tragedy and drama had been staged along this journey and the fact of their history is now the names of Indians littering the landscape of these highways, which are nothing more than dried tar and congealed gravel, before these had coalesced into a new highway which was in essence merely a mixture of the Indian dead with their ashes and blown-out brains and the spreading of asphalt. It was a recognition of this history that I felt I had to face before I could assume, with ease of conscience, my appointment to teach the very first classes of Afro-American literature at Yale University; for this course, as I had conceived it, would have to take notice of, if only in passing, of the physical absence of the Indian from the literature of the country as a whole, especially from the curriculum of Yale’s
Department of English. And I would have to try to explain this absence in terms of the symbolical presence upon the conscience of the nation, in the form of a historical artifact: on the country’s billboards, and on some American coins.
Why was the Indian’s face on the printed stationery and letterheads of certain insurance companies, and on some American coins? And why was he absent from the social infrastructure of America? I would have to explain this, because the black American, like the Indian, was absent also, even although the black man’s absence was rationalized as cultural invisibility. So far, no Negro head, no head of a black nationalist, no head of a “politically controversial” West Indian, no head of a Black Panther has so far, adorned an American dollar bill, or a five-cent coin. I was to discover later, that the black man in America, regarded as a psychic imposition upon the minds of white Americans, was very conspicuous on the walls of the gentlemen’s washrooms at Yale. These washrooms were emblazoned with symbols and graffiti literature of the black man’s sexual prowess!
But the absence of any kind of symbolic representation of the Negro’s face from the face of the American dollar bill, is perhaps, a cause for present celebration. This absence can be taken to mean that the Negro (or the black man), is still alive and flourishing in the society, even although his eradication from the infrastructure of society, and from the white American’s psychic concern of humanity, might still be a matter of some serious consideration. White Americans, at this time, were not quite yet dressing themselves in the fashions of Negroes, or like Black Panthers; and the costume parties of white Americans, at Halloween and at Christmas did not show them dressed as slaves on cotton plantations, or at “revolutionary” meetings, and dancing the “boogaloo.” The Negro was still safe. His face had not yet been struck on the face of a coin. He is still alive. And he has not yet been featured in American “Westerns” as the unheroic suicidal impulse to white American manhood. He is invisible from certain aspects of American culture, mass-communications media, in a way that the Indian is, ironically, not invisible; and this invisibility, which is in some quarters lamented, such as the adherents of black cultural nationalism, yet it is an indication that the Negro does exist in some way, deep down in the wood work of the psyche of white Americans.
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