Black Power

by Richard Wright

  At the opposite end of our imaginary line, let us imagine another culture, such as the one in which we live. In contrast to entity, in which the personality is swallowed up, we have a constant striving for identity. Instead of pre-individualism, we have a strident individualism. Whereas French Quebec has holy days, we have holidays. Church bells toll the time of day in French Quebec; we look at our watches to see the hour. Fetes become festivals.

  The distance between these two cultures is the distance between feudal Europe and present-day, vibrant, nervous, industrial America. And it is the distance between the tribal African culture of the Negro and the place which he now occupies, against such great and constant odds, in American life.

  It will be along this imaginary line—between these two culture types—that I’ll string the Negro writers I’ll discuss. For the development of Negro expression—as well as the whole of Negro life in America—hovers always somewhere between the rise of man from his ancient, rural way of life to the complex, industrial life of our time. Let me sum up these differences by contrast; entity vs. identity; pre-individualism vs. individualism; the determined vs. the free.

  Now, with this idea in mind, let me read you a short passage from the work of a world-famous Negro writer, a writer whose identity I shall withhold from you for a moment:

  “Sire, I am sorry to tell your majesty a cruel fact; but the feeling in Dauphiné is far from resembling that of Provence. The mountaineers are all Bonapartists, Sire.”

  “Then,” murmured Louis XVIII, “he was well informed. And how many men had he with him?”

  “I do not know, Sire,” answered the minister of police.

  “What! You do not know? Have you neglected to obtain information of this circumstance? It is true this is of small importance,” the king added with a withering smile.

  “Sire, it was impossible to learn; the dispatch simply stated the fact of the landing and the route taken by the traitor.”

  “And how did this dispatch reach you?” inquired the king.

  The minister bowed his head, and while a deep color overspread his cheeks, he stammered, “By the telegraph, Sire.”

  Louis XVIII advanced a step, folded his arms over his chest as Napoleon would have done. “So, then,” he exclaimed, turning pale with anger, “seven allied armies overthrew that man. A miracle of Heaven replaced me on the throne after twenty-five years in exile…”

  Did a Negro write that? It does not sound Negroid. And were Negroes ever in this world so intimately associated with any culture that they could write of kings and ministers and battles involving Louis XVIII?

  Well, what I just quoted to you was a short passage from Alexander Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. Yes, it’s true that Dumas was a Negro according to American racial codes, but his being a Negro was the least important thing about him. Why? Because there were no laws or customs barring him from the society in which he lived. He could attend any school he wanted to; he could go to any church he wanted to; he could engage in any profession he wanted to; he could live where he wanted to; he could marry whom he wanted to; and if he had the mind and talent, he could win fame if he wanted to. He did win fame. He was at one with the culture in which he lived, and he wrote out of the commonly shared hopes and expectations of his age.

  Let me recall to you the imaginary, entity culture that we placed at one end of our line: a religious, tribal, feudal culture, a culture like that of French Quebec. I don’t mean that a culture of this sort is an ideal for which we must strive; I put that culture at the end of an imaginary line to serve us as a guide, as a yardstick against which we could measure how well or ill men adjusted themselves.

  We can say that Dumas was integrated with the culture of France and was a Frenchman.

  Let me read you yet another passage from another Negro writer, a world famous one too:

  The dawn was breaking. I was standing at my appointed place with my three seconds. With inexplicable impatience I awaited my opportunity. The spring sun rose, and it was already growing hot. I saw my opponent coming on foot, accompanied by just one second. We advanced to meet him. He approached holding his cap filled with cherries. The seconds measured twelve paces for us. I had to fire first, but my agitation was so great, that I could not depend upon the steadiness of my hands; and in order to give myself time to become calm, I ceded to my opponent the first shot. My adversary would not agree to this. It was decided that we should cast lots. The first number fell to him. He took aim and his bullet went through my cap….”

  Is this Negro writing? It does not sound like the expressions of Negroes who live in America today. Did Negroes ever engage in duels? Well, what I have just read to you is a passage from a short story by Alexander Pushkin, a Russian Negro who was more a Russian than a Negro. Like Alexander Dumas, he had no cause to lament that he was a Negro; his writing does not carry any of the bitter and wild echoes of hate, frustration, and revolt found in the writings of American Negroes. Pushkin wrote out of the rich tradition of Russian realism, and he helped to further and enrich that tradition. He was one with his culture; he went to the schools of his choice; he served in an army that was not Jim Crow; he worked where he wanted to; he lived where he wanted to; and there was no sense of psychological distance between him and the culture of the land in which he lived.

  Let me recall to you once again the concept we started with: Entity, men integrated with their culture; and identity, men who are at odds with their culture, striving for personal identification. The writings I’ve just read to you were the work of men who were emotionally integrated with their country’s culture; no matter what the color of their skins, they were not really Negroes. One was a Russian, the other was a Frenchman.

  Has any American Negro ever written like Dumas or Pushkin? Yes, one. Only one. As though in irony, history decided that the first Negro who was to express himself with any degree of competence on the soil of America should strike a universal note. Before the webs of slavery had so tightened as to snare nearly all Negroes in our land, one was freed by accident to give utterance in poetry to what she felt, to give in clear, bell-like, limpid cadences the hope of freedom in the New World.

  One day, in 1761, a slave ship, having made the horrible voyage from Africa to America, dropped anchor in Boston harbor. As usual an auction was held, with the slaves stripped naked and made to stand in public upon blocks. Would-be purchasers probed their fingers about the bodies of the black men and women to determine if they were sound of limb. Finally, all the slaves, except a delicate twelve-year-old black girl, were sold. Because she seemed too frail to render a good day’s hard work, no one wanted her. But a Boston tailor by the name of Wheatley bought her and took her home, where she was trained to be the personal servant of Mrs. Wheatley.

  This nameless black child was given the name of Phyllis and was accepted into the Wheatley home as one of the family, enjoying all the rights of the other Wheatley children. She displayed a remarkable talent for learning and she was taught to read and write. Need I point out that this African-born child possessed dim recollections of her mother pouring out water to the rising sun, no doubt a recollection of some kind of tribal, African ceremony? Slavery had not yet cast its black shadow completely over the American scene, and the minds of white people were not so warped at that time as they are now regarding the capacities of the Negro. Hence, the Wheatley family was quite free of inhibitions about educating Phyllis; they proceeded to educate her in the so-called classical manner; that is, she got the kind of education that the white girls of her time received.

  At an early age she was writing verse, influenced by the heroic couplets of Pope, the reigning English poet of that time. Closely bound to the Wheatley family, absorbing the impulses of the Christian community in which she lived, sharing the culture of her country in terms of home and school and church, her poetry showed almost no traces of her being a Negro or having been born in Africa. Indeed, so closely integrated was she with the passions and hopes of America tha
t, in the War of 1776, she wrote a poem about George Washington. She was received by Washington at his military headquarters and the Father of Our Country complimented her upon her poetic utterances. In praise of Washington and in rebuke to imperialistic England, Phyllis Wheatley wrote:

  Ah! cruel blindness to Columbia’s state!

  Lament thy thirst of boundless power too late.

  Proceed great chief, with virtue on thy side,

  Thy ev’ry action let the goddess guide.

  A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,

  With gold unfading, Washington, be thine.

  There is a note of irony embedded in the life of this girl who wrote revolutionary poetry though her skin was black and she was born in Africa; she made a trip to England where the Countess of Huntingdon wanted to present her to the Court of George III, and only ill health robbed her of that honor. (This was, of course, after the Revolutionary War.)

  Again let me recall to you the concept I mentioned before. Phyllis Wheatley was at one with her culture. What a far cry this is from the Negro Seabees who staged a sit-down strike a few years ago on the Pacific Coast when the war against Japan was at its hardest! What makes for this difference in loyalty? Are the three excerpts I’ve read to you the writing of Negroes? No, not by present-day American standards. Then, what is a Negro? What is Negro writing?

  Being a Negro has to do with the American scene, with race hate, rejection, ignorance, segregation, discrimination, slavery, murder, fiery crosses, and fear. But we will examine that when we come to it.

  At last we have found on the American scene, in the writing of Phyllis Wheatley, someone whom we can establish at the head of our imaginary line. Now we can use her as a guide, a yardstick to measure the degree of integration of other Negro writers.

  Suppose the personalities of many Phyllis Wheatleys of America had been allowed to develop? What a different nation we might have been! What a different literary utterance the American Negro might have given voice to! But, as we move on to other Negro literary figures, a queer spell at once comes over the scene. We cannot examine other Negro literary figures without taking into account something terrible that was happening to Negroes in the United States.

  Even though we had won the War of Independence, there was a reaction against the ideals of Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson; the cotton gin was invented and vast new lands were opened up in the South. Slavery grew from a tentative gesture into the greatest single aggregate of political power in the nation. There followed decades of killings and burnings and lynchings and beatings and futile hope on the part of the Negroes. Stripped of his tribal African culture and not allowed to partake of the culture of the New World, the Negro was consistently brutalized, reduced to a creature of impulse who worked in the fields. Again and again he tried to revolt, hurling himself against his foes who outnumbered him, but in vain. It was but natural then that the nature of Negro literary utterance would change.

  The next Negro literary figure I want to call to your attention is that of George Moses Horton, born in 1797 and died in 1883. The dates of his birth and death are important, for they span the bloodiest period of the history of the Negro in America. Born in North Carolina, he was a slave of the Horton family; but his relationship to that family differed greatly from that of the Phyllis Wheatley relationship to the Boston family in which she was reared. Horton was passed around from one member of the Horton family to another; finally, in 1865, his master allowed him to hire himself out. While working around the home of a university president, he learned to read and write; for years he was a village character, regarded with amusement by the white students. He hired himself out as a writer of verse, charging twenty-five and fifty cents for a poetic job.

  Finally some of his verse crept into print; not too much is known about this obscure wanderer’s life, but we can guess at what he really felt from the following lines:

  Alas! and am I born for this,

  To wear this slavish chain?

  Deprived of all created bliss,

  Through hardship, toil and pain!

  Oh, Heaven! and is there no relief

  This side the silent grave—

  To soothe the pain—to quell the grief

  And anguish of a slave?

  The poem runs on, lamenting, fighting, imploring. Something has happened since Phyllis Wheatley wrote. Entity has turned into a kind of sullen, raging sense of rebellious identity. Horton certainly was not at one with his culture, but neither had he completely broken away. He writes in English and tries to express himself in the poetic traditions of his time, but there is now a sense of psychological distance between him and the land in which he lives. Horton was an emotionally trapped man; he lived in a culture of which he was not really a part; he was a split man, believing and feeling something which he could not live; he was an agonizingly self-conscious man, always longing to perform an act against which there existed a dreadful taboo!

  We are now, it seems, approaching the literature of the American Negro and I think that you can readily see what it is that makes the difference between American Negro writing and just plain American writing. Horton’s writing does not stem from racial feeling, but from a social situation; and Horton’s cry for freedom was destined to become the tradition of Negro literature in the United States. Almost unbrokenly this tradition of lament was to roll down the decades, swelling, augmenting itself, becoming a vast reservoir of bitterness and despair and infrequent hope. This tradition of bitterness was to become so complex, was to assume such a tight, organic form, that most white people would think, upon examining it, that all Negroes had embedded in their flesh and bones some peculiar propensity toward lamenting and complaining.

  From now on we plunge into a welter of crude patterns of surging hate and rebellion; from Horton’s time on but few Negroes would even possess the opportunity to live in stable family units.

  Another Negro poet, James M. Whitfield, born in 1830 and died in 1870, was a barber by trade. Whitfield was born in Boston, then moved to Buffalo, New York; and not too much is known about how he came to write. His first poetic utterances were so favorably received that he quit barbering and took to the public platform; and his poems continue the tradition of Horton:

  America, it is to thee,

  Thou boasted land of liberty,—

  It is to thee that I raise my song,

  Thou land of blood, and crime, and wrong.

  It is to thee my native land,

  From which has issued many a band

  To tear the black man from his soil

  And force him here to delve and toil

  Chained on your blood-bemoistened sod,

  Cringing beneath a tyrant’s rod…

  As you see, the fact of separation from the culture of his native land has now sunk home into the Negro’s heart; the Negro loves his land, but that land rejects him. Here we can witness the slow emergence of a new type of personality; here is the beginning of insecurity as a way of life; of violence as a daily companion.

  The next Negro poet to attract attention in America was a woman, Frances Ellen Harper; living from 1825 to 1911, her life spanned slavery, war, emancipation, and freedom; and when she put her pen to paper her eyes were filled with more scenes of violence than perhaps many of our soldiers saw in the war just ended. In a poem entitled “Bury Me in a Free Land,” she says:

  Make me a grave where’er you will

  In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill;

  Make it among the earth’s humblest graves,

  But not in a land where men are slaves.

  I could not rest if around my grave

  I heard the steps of a trembling slave;

  His shadow above my silent tomb

  Would make it a place of fearful gloom.

  Truly, you must now know that the word Negro in America means something not racial or biological, but something purely social, something made in the United States. Poems such as the above seem to imply that the eyes of the A
merican Negro were fastened in horror upon something from which he could not turn away. The Negro could not take his eyes off the auction block: he never had a chance to; he could not stop thinking of lynching: he never had a chance to. The Negro writer had no choice in his subject matter; he could not select his experiences. Hence, the monotonous repetition of horror that rolls in verse from one generation to another.

  Let us pursue this melancholy tale.

  Albery A. Whitman, born 1851 and died 1902, spanning with his life slavery, war, freedom, also spoke a tongue that denied him, belonged to a culture that rejected him, walked upon a soil that mocked him, and lived and labored among men who hated him.

  In his poem “The Rape of Florida,” he says:

  So fared the land where slaves were groaning yet—

  Where beauty’s eyes must feed the lusts of men!

  ’Tis as when horrid dreams we half forget,

  Would then relate, and still relate again—

  Ah! cold abhorrence hesitates my pen!

  The heavens were sad, and hearts of men were faint;

  Philanthropy implored and wept, but then

  The Wrong, unblushing trampled on Restraint,

  While feeble Law sat by and uttered no complaint.

  In the verse of Whitman we see the beginnings of complexity; he too wrote of wrong, but there was in his rhymes a desire to please. But the split in Negro personality deepened despite the fact that men like Whitman strove to weave color and drama and movement into their poems. A tradition of bitterness has set in; the basic theme is now set, and there is no escape from it. All black lips that now sing pay tribute to the power of oppression. It is true that there was an urge in some black singers to write so that the whites would buy their poems; but in them no less than in others this sense of distance could not be ignored. So, self-consciously, while hiding what they saw and knew to be true, knew to be the real meaning of their lives, some Negro poets deliberately put forth the lighter, the more lyrical, side for white consumption.