Black Power

by Richard Wright

  “Who’s to time this development?” I asked.

  We had reached an impasse. As we ate I looked past his shoulder and he looked past mine. We were still friendly, but we knew that we could not agree. It was not ideology that separated us, but fundamental attitudes toward life.

  “I like Americans,” he said as he left the table; there was something wistful in his eyes.

  Four

  We were in the Bay of Biscay and the ship pitched and rolled; I liked that, for it made me feel that I was really on the ocean. Heaving seas and tossing ships never made me ill. I always pictured in my mind the ship lurching forward and I could see the prow dipping, churning the sea, throwing up spray and foam as it lunged forward; and then I knew that the stern had to lift and, at the same moment, I knew that the huge ship had to roll to the right and I could feel it tilting—seeing it in my mind’s eye—and then feeling the weight of the water of the ocean resisting and forcing it back into an upright position which it would hold for a moment, perilously balancing itself in the sliding waters; and I would wait for the ship to roll in the opposite direction, to the left; and I’d know that this same motion would have to be repeated endlessly, and I agreed with it, identifying myself with the ship and visualizing all of its motions as being necessary and natural, even when the pitching and rolling accompanied each other….

  That afternoon the sun came out for the first time and the sea turned from slaty gray to green; we were getting into deep waters.

  It was my first voyage on a ship so purely English. With the exception of a Syrian or two, a German, some Africans, and a few vague Mediterranean nationalities, the ship’s passengers were mostly men and women going to Africa to assume civil service jobs or returning from a few months’ leave in England. Dull, repressed, stolidly English, they spent most of their days playing cards, ping-pong, or drinking. They were a mediocre lot to administer the destinies of millions of blacks….

  Each morning on deck, each Englishman had a cheery “Good morning,” but evidently such a greeting exhausted him, for he’d remain taciturn for the rest of the day. It was just as well, for it was the Africans that I really wanted to talk to.

  When I went up on deck Sunday morning for a stroll, I passed the forward foyer and heard that Anglo-Saxon, nasalized singing of psalms that had been so long familiar to my ears. A Church of England service was being conducted and, discreetly peering through the half-transparent curtains, I could see rows of white and black faces, heads lifted, mouths opened, giving praises to God. Several times I traversed the deck in order to observe without offending; I was curious as to how Africans and Englishmen served the same God.

  I saw black faces well mixed with the white, which meant that, in confronting God, they drew no color line. I’d always accepted a Jim Crow Holy Ghost as being rather natural, indeed, inevitable; for, if God had entrusted the running of this earth to the white man, then He did so to prepare us all for the Jim Crow social stratification of life beyond the grave. Heaven had a color line and that was why white men, staunch Christians, reflected so much racial bias in their daily dealing with their fellow blacks….

  But why had the British drawn no color line in matters mystical and metaphysical? Upon reflection, however, I discovered that the British could not, in a black continent, draw a color line in religious matters and prove that God was a common Father. Jim Crow religious services would surely defeat the aims, economic, cultural, and political of Pax Britannica. So, on Sundays, the redeemed infidels stood shoulder to shoulder with their white masters to sing praises to “Him from whom all blessings flow…”

  Upon the ship as a whole there was no color line, and yet it was strange how the English and Africans, after having closed ranks to acknowledge God on Sundays, kept more or less to themselves on weekdays. I didn’t detect any desire on the part of the British to avoid the Africans; indeed, it was the other way around. The Africans, mostly returning students, were distant, reserved with the British. I learned later in Africa that they not only didn’t yearn for the company of the British, but wanted them as far away from Africa as possible; they spoke their white tutors’ language with an accent, entertained British values with self-consciousness, and seemed definitely to prefer the company of their own tribal folk to that of their alien overseers.

  At lunch the judge remarked casually:

  “I didn’t see you at service this morning.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Everyone is welcome, you know.”

  “I don’t profess any religion,” I said.

  He stared at me. I don’t think that he quite knew how to accept that; I doubted if he’d ever heard anybody say anything like that before in his life.

  “You are an atheist then?”

  “I couldn’t even qualify for that. I’m nothing in matters religious.”

  “What reasons do you give for rejecting God?”

  “I don’t reject or accept Him.”

  “Who do you think made the world?”

  “I don’t know. Must I know that?”

  “But how do you account for all of this—” He waved his hand to include the ship and the vast ocean beyond it.

  “Look, Mr. Justice, please don’t tell me that this universe is a kind of watch and that somebody just had to make it,” I chided him, laughing.

  “No; I wasn’t going to say that,” he smiled.

  “I’m not proud, scornful, or anything like that. I just don’t know and I don’t feel compelled to say that I know about God,” I told him.

  “You have attended church services?”

  “How could I have ever escaped such in my youth?”

  “I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t pray to God sometimes,” he said.

  “What do you tell God in your prayers?” I asked him.

  “About myself, my worries—”

  “Did you ever discuss the white man with God?”

  He laughed.

  “You are funny!” he said.

  “You’re funny too,” I said. “If I prayed to God, that would be the first thing I’d take up with Him. Especially if I were an African. You see, I’m practical—”

  “But don’t you think that the African has been improved by accepting Christianity?”

  “He’s certainly more docile,” I said.

  That shook him, but he managed to confess:

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  Five

  As we sailed from Freetown I saw my first real tropical sunset. From the blue-gray waters of the sea and the hills of Sierra Leone there rose a purplish mist that melted into the yellow and red and gold of the clouds that spread themselves for miles along the horizon. The dropping sun proclaimed itself in a majestic display of color that possessed an unearthly and imperious nobility, inducing the feeling that one had just finished hearing the dying, rolling peal of a mighty organ whose haunting chords still somehow lingered on in the form of those charged and spangled lances of somber fire. The ship sliced its way through a sea that was like still, thick oil, a sea that stretched limitless, smooth, and without a break toward a murky horizon. The ocean seemed to possess a quiet but persistent threat of terror lurking just beneath the surface, and I’d not have been surprised if a vast tidal wave had thrust the ship skyward in a sudden titanic upheaval of destruction.

  As I watched the sea and the sky I knew that it was from feelings such as these floating in me now that man had got his sense of God, for, when such feelings stated themselves in him, he felt that some powerful but invisible spirit was speaking to him; and he fell on his face, asking to be saved from the emotion that claimed him, afraid, not so much of the sea or the sky, but of the fantastic commotion that bubbled in his heart. But I stood still, detached, watching the sea and the sky and at the same time hearing the echoing declarations that they roused in me….

  These feelings I do not deny, and I’ve not been the first to feel them. I do not know why they are such as they are, what they really mean, but I stand
before them with the same attention that I stand before this sea and this sky. I refuse to make a religion out of that which I do not know. I too can feel the limit of my reactions, can feel where my puny self ends, can savor the terror of it; but it does not make me want to impose that sense of my terror on others, or rear it into a compulsive system. Detached, I contain my terror, look at it and wonder about it in the same way that I marvel about this sea and sky.

  The sunset dies and is gone; I can no longer see it; I can only feel the feeling of wonder that still lives in me.

  I admit the reality of the feeling; but I would not rig up devious forms of sacrifice to rid myself of it, for that would be the surest way of stifling it, killing it for all time.

  At last, tropic weather. A blue horizon. Balmy breezes. A hot sun. The rustle of water filled the air as the ship glided forward through southern seas.

  Night fell swiftly and overhead the stars, huge and chaste, glimmered faintly. One could now smell the sea.

  I awakened one morning and looked out of my porthole and saw, looming through a warm mist, the Canary Islands. I shaved, showered, dressed, and went up on deck. Mr. Justice sauntered smilingly toward me, attired in tropic finery.

  “Good morning!” he boomed. “Let’s go ashore….”

  “Do you know Las Palmas?” I asked.

  “Like the palm of my hand.”

  “All right,” I said.

  After breakfast the ship docked and the judge and I descended the gangplank.

  “Once, when I was passing through Las Palmas,” the judge rambled, “somebody offered to take me to a house of prostitution.”

  “Did you go?”

  “I refused,” Mr. Justice said with moral indignation. “I never let anybody take me to places like that. Things like that are to be found by yourself. I pity the man who can’t find a woman.”

  I blinked, trying to keep abreast of his strange moral notions. Another African passenger joined us; he lived in the Gold Coast, but he’d been born in Togoland. I noticed that he was intimidated in the august presence of Mr. Justice, but he didn’t seem to mind me. I was an American and he knew that I drew no class lines. This chap—I’ll call him Mr. Togoland—was careful at all times to walk just a few steps behind Mr. Justice, not to interrupt him as he handed down his lofty opinions, and to pay deference to his every move. We hired a taxi.

  “Where’re we going?” Mr. Togoland asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  The driver turned and jabbered in Spanish, then grinned and drew with his palms the imaginary outlines of a plump woman-shape.

  “Gurrls?” he asked in a thick accent.

  “What do you say, Mr. Justice?” I asked.

  Mr. Justice turned to Mr. Togoland and asked:

  “You want to meet some girls?”

  “Where?” Mr. Togoland asked.

  “In a house,” the judge said.

  Mr. Togoland was a YMCA official and he looked at me and grinned.

  “I’d like to see some,” he ventured timidly. “Just to look at.”

  “I’ll accompany you gentlemen,” I said. “But I’m only looking. I didn’t come thousands of miles to pick up diseases from Spanish women in the Canary Islands.”

  “Let’s go then!” the judge shouted.

  He was uneasy; he had changed his role and he was not certain as to how I was taking it. He placed his hand in a fatherly manner on my shoulder as the taxi bumped along in the bright sunshine.

  “You know,” the judge floated on, “my father used to make many trips here for business. In those days it was usual for a man to leave his calling card with the madam in a house of prostitution.”

  “Leave his calling card? Why?” I asked.

  “That was to show other customers that only men of distinction went there,” Mr. Justice explained.

  “But I don’t have any calling cards,” I told him.

  “You don’t understand. Let me tell you a personal story,” Mr. Justice said, relaxing, smiling. “Years ago, when I was a young man, I went into one of those houses. When I presented my card, the madam said: ‘Why, your name is familiar to me. Wait a moment; I’ll find a card with a name on it like yours….’ The madam pulled out from a closet a big glass bowl in which calling cards were kept. She fished around in it and a few minutes later she pulled out my father’s calling card, all yellow and dusty—”

  “No kidding,” I protested.

  “On my honor, she did,” Mr. Justice swore. “Boy, oh, boy, was I proud!”

  “A kind of following in your father’s footsteps,” I suggested.

  “Yes! That’s it exactly,” he said and went into guffaws of laughter.

  The taxi pulled up in front of a pale green cement house; the driver got out and rapped twice on a door panel—that, no doubt, was a signal. Well, I told myself, I’m a stranger, but I feel pretty safe in the presence of a judge of the Nigerian Supreme Court. No one will dare to pick my pocket in there; if they do, they’ll find themselves tangling with the majesty of British jurisprudence….

  We were admitted by a squat, ugly woman. Nobody in our group spoke Spanish and I tried French.

  “We want to drink some beer and talk to the girls,” I told her.

  She was more than agreeable; she let us in and ran down a dim hallway, knocking on doors and calling out girls’ names. Mr. Justice, Mr. Togoland, and I sat down. In fifteen minutes twenty girls of all ages and sizes and personalities filed in sleepily, ranged themselves obligingly along the walls and looked at us with detached and casual eyes. I saw white matter at the edges of their eyelids and their faces appeared as though in dire need of a good wash. They yawned, but when our eyes caught theirs, they smiled shyly. The linoleum floor was littered with cigarette butts and a stale odor hung in the air. Some of the girls squatted on the floor; they wore thin pajamas but had no brassières. They asked for cigarettes and we passed some around. We drank, talked, joked, the madam doing the translating.

  I watched Mr. Justice’s eyes roving greedily among the girls.

  “Don’t let me cramp your style, Mr. Justice,” I whispered to him.

  “Oh, I’m happy,” he said, laughing.

  “Do what you want to do,” I told him.

  In comparison with the self-conscious stodginess of the British ship, this whorehouse was a citadel of simplicity, honesty, and straightforwardness. How relaxed everyone was! Even the haunting specter of Communism was absent. Since there was no need here of pretense or lying, one could afford to allow one’s human impulses to come to the fore. It occurred to me that this shabby whorehouse was perhaps the only calm and human spot in this strongly entrenched Catholic city of Las Palmas where Franco’s Fascism was in blatant evidence on so many billboards…. And perhaps these lost and sinful girls, pretty and always receptive, were the only free people in the entire islands…. Without doubt they were the only real democrats within reach. They were genial and they accepted everybody regardless of race, creed, or color; that is, for a price…. While we were talking and drinking, a black sailor came in and one of the girls rose promptly to serve him, taking him down the hall to a room.

  Mr. Justice was nervous; he crossed and uncrossed his long legs. He drummed his tense fingers on the arm of the sofa. Too many wheat germs, I thought. At times he gazed thoughtfully at the ceiling, as though pondering some tricky point of law. Mr. Togoland’s eyes shone as he looked from girl’s face to girl’s face, then glanced at their breasts which were like dim shadows under their sheer pajama tops. We ordered another round of beer and, as Mr. Justice tilted back his head to drink, I glanced shyly at him. When my eye caught his, he bent suddenly forward and laughed so loud and long that he spluttered beer spray across the room.

  The girls were excited at his odd behavior and wanted to know what he was laughing at. I shook my head, knowing that moral subtleties of that genre were much too abstruse for prostitutes, no matter how generous they were.

  “You are a knockout,” Mr. Justice sa
id to me, simpering.

  “You are a killerdiller,” I told him.

  “It’s wonderful being with you,” he said.

  “The pleasure is all mine,” I said.

  I knew that he was hotly longing to make a serious approach to one of the girls, but, out of deference to me—or was it the moral attitudes with which he had hemmed himself in during the past few days that was inhibiting him?—he was afraid to act and be himself. I could have easily put him at his ease, could have spoken a sentence and released him from the high-flown sentiments of honor and Christianity and he could have done what he wanted to do, but I was perverse enough to make him sit there on top of his platitudes and grin nervously. After all, I thought, it would certainly boost his chances in the other world if he could find enough self-control to forgo his impulse toward animal pleasure. And, if he persisted in building up his façade of pretense, if he must continuously fling Christianity and imperialism in my face, then let him squirm and wriggle a bit on the hook of his own hypocrisy—and that’s exactly what he did. Every time he worked up enough spunk to start pawing one of the dusty-skinned Spanish girls, I’d look at him intently, reminding him with a reproving glance of his august position as a defender of British and Christian values, and he’d throw himself back on the sofa, slap his thighs, and let out a storm of embarrassed laughter. And I joined in his laughter, laughing at his predicament. Mr. Togoland looked from one to the other of us, wondering what was happening.

  “What a life,” Mr. Justice said, sheepishly wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “You can say that again,” I assured him.

  The girls chatted among themselves and threw out a few English words, urging us to drink. The squat madam hustled in with bottles of cold beer, anxious to drum up trade of a more solid nature. I drank and kept my eye on Mr. Justice, grimly determined not to give him a break. If he wanted a girl badly enough, he’d have to show me what a staunch individualist he was, how morally independent the British had taught him to be. But it was he who finally sighed and said: