by John Updike
Black Suicide began as an investigation of the anomaly that, though the overall Negro rate of suicide is lower in this country than the white rate, between the ages of twenty and thirty-five twice as many black males as white males kill themselves in New York City. The Negro homicide rate is in all age groups higher than the white rate. The interweave of destructiveness and self-destruction in black ghetto life is everywhere bared by Dr. Hendin’s case histories. “Peter Churney,” who has been thinking of suicide since the age of twelve, and at nineteen has survived three attempts, was present at his father’s violent death.
[Peter’s father’s] suspicions that Peter’s mother was having affairs led him to jealous rages. One night when he was beating her in a particularly savage way, the police were called. When they arrived, his father began shooting at them. Peter, who was seven at the time, was trapped in the room with his father, who had five guns and, although wounded, continued to fire until he was killed.… [Peter] was quite taken aback, however, at the suggestion that his father’s death might have been a form of suicide.
Peter, whose IQ is high for this group, admired Hitler as a boy and “says he had the idea of going on a rooftop and shooting people but adds lightly that this was before ‘that guy in Dallas’ did it.” His fantasies of mass murder, however, give him less pleasure now; Peter feels he is on a suicide course and nothing can stop him. “Harrison Eliot,” a man of thirty-three, lost his mother, “whose strictness and severe beatings he still recalls,” at the age of twelve; his father, a railroad chef, was robbed and beaten to death when Harrison was four. He has a savage temper, and twice has served jail sentences for fighting with policemen. He dreams of murdering his former wife and her boy friend, and drowns his rage in drink. “He mentions that several of his friends drank themselves to death but does not seem to be aware that he is following in their footsteps.” “Eddie Marker,” a boy of eighteen, is working toward the same goal via drugs; he is a forty-five-dollar-a-day heroin user who must rob to support his habit. A year ago his twenty-two-year-old sister killed his father, who she felt was trying to harm her baby. “Eddie does not believe in death, and thinks his father is alive and that he will meet him someday.… He has no plans for the future after he gets out of jail.… When Eddie was asked about his getting into so much trouble, he replied, ‘No more than most of the people I know.…’ Eddie uses his Muslim beliefs not simply to deny death but to deny the reality of life as he experiences it.”
What, then, the white reader may well ask himself as he gazes into this snake pit of lost lives, is to be done? First he might wonder how accurate a microcosm of Negro life in America these twenty-five failed suicides afford. Certainly this is a disadvantaged group within a disadvantaged group. Seven of the twenty to whom IQ tests were administered scored in the seventies, or on the border line of effective intelligence, and only four (including the wild Ina Tracy) above the standard median of 100. On the other hand, the geographic narrowness of the sample is more apparent than real; many of these Harlemites were born and raised in the South and experienced their formative traumas there. And a look at the graphs in the appendix discovers little change in violence statistics since the 1920’s; proportionally as many Negroes were killing themselves and each other in the days of Amos ’n’ Andy and the Cotton Club as in these days of summer riots and the Black Panthers. The birth dates of Hendin’s subjects span fifty years; after reading their histories one feels that Negro life in America has changed sadly little except that drugs have replaced drink as the cop-out, and that Islam and paranoid politics now share with Christianity the effort to restrain despair and institutionalize self-respect.
Three conclusions of Hendin’s study bear emphasis:
1. The black female, far from being a secondary victim of white racism, bears the brunt of it. As a girl she is exposed equally with her brothers to the psychological injuries inflicted by absentee or distracted parents; from her teens on she is vulnerable to pregnancy; as a woman she is the first and nearest recipient of the black man’s anger. And not merely in the form of beatings:
One senses that for many black men sex serves a double purpose. The children they father serve as living proof of their potency and also as a mark of their anger. Their abandonment of women, often when they are in the most helpless of conditions, may be a way of striking back at their mothers who rejected them or the succession of aunts, grandmothers, or cousins who raised them; of figuratively screwing womankind and lodging a protest against their own lives.
Biology appoints the black woman custodian of order in a sub-society that has no great stake in order. As a mother, then, she transmits to her children her burden of shame, inadequacy, frustration, and fury. Dr. Hendin touches on the thesis, put forward by two black psychiatrists, that “black mothers reject and castrate their sons in order to prepare them better for the life they will encounter in a white world.” These same psychiatrists, William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs (in Black Rage) go on to recommend a psychological shift of anger from black mothers to white society. Hendin does not think much either of diagnosis or of remedy. While conceding a limited “useful social purpose” to identifying the institutional sources of black frustration and channelling rage toward corrective action, he insists that black mothers rear their children badly because they were reared badly. “Like all other children, those black children who have experienced the least rejection are best prepared to deal with the world, black or white.”
2. Racial discrimination inflicts its worst psychological damage out of sight of the white world, in the heart of the black family. White people are strangely absent from these narrated lives. The policemen with whom Harrison Eliot battles, and the employer of whom “Jean Wayne” complains, “He didn’t care how I am,” may be white; but the only white people given any individuality at all are Leroi Nifson’s Syrian mother and “Roger,” Benjamin Ellis’ Jewish lover. Racial self-consciousness seems remarkably faint; of the fifteen patients who executed drawings of human figures, none indicated skin color, and only one determinedly attempted to portray Negroid features—and he, “Owen James,” had the special problem of being so pale that all his life other Negroes had picked upon him as a white. But Dr. Hendin does not conclude from the rarity of an overt black self-image—as did an earlier investigator, Charles Prudhomme—that race is not a factor in black suicide.
The Negro usually needs to repress an awareness that he has so blanketed his entire race with his own self-hatred that he loathes all the characteristics of blackness. Over and over the subjects in this study try to deny racial motivations for their feelings or behavior, though such motives are apparent. Even the man who insisted on having an operation to make his lips thinner denied that he in any way connected the size of his lips with being black. In their most repetitive self-images the patients saw themselves as black bugs or black rats. While these images were often dreamed of as symbols linking sexuality, destructiveness, and blackness, it is no accident that the symbols that come to them originate in the most despised and unwanted living things in the Harlem tenements—the rats and the roaches.
3. Black poverty includes a poverty of motivational fantasy. Along with the low self-esteem goes an inability to imagine successful achievement. One looks almost in vain among the testimony of the young men for instances of heroes. “Luke Dellins,” a promising and athletic boy cruelly maimed by hospital maltreatment, has become a bitter black nationalist and admires only Jomo Kenyatta. Peter Churney, whose fascination with Hitler has been noted, wanted to be an archaeologist and now wishes he could make movies like Sergei Eisenstein. And when one tries to imagine how a ghetto child whose father was shot before his eyes is going to become an Eisenstein, or a Hitchcock, or a Mike Nichols, the plausibility of low aspirations sinks in.
In America the rate of white suicide continues to rise after the age of forty-five, and overtakes and exceeds the black rate. Hendin’s explanation for this is elegant and eloquent: the white person encounters, in late middle age
, the certainty of failure and disappointed hope that his black fellow citizen encountered in the prime of life. Luke Owens, at the age of twenty-nine, has concluded: “There is no place in the world for a fellow like me. I’ll always be on the same level; I’ll get nowheres.”
Little hope can be held for most of the subjects of this study. Yet Dr. Hendin’s description of the general black plight in this country is not entirely dispiriting. For one thing, it makes intelligible, as nothing else I have read does, the vehemence of black liberation rhetoric. The roaches and rats that run through these suicides’ dreams are close to such images as this one, dictated into a tape recorder by Eldridge Cleaver upon the death of Martin Luther King: “I think that America has already committed suicide and we who now thrash within its dead body are also dead in part and parcel of the corpse. America is truly a disgusting burden upon this planet.”
For another, Dr. Hendin’s book locates the need for revolution within the black psyche. I italicize this alarming and prevalent word because it is a stumbling block. Granted that the unmitigated capitalism special to America has at repeated historical moments—on the large plantations, during the North’s post-Reconstruction abandonment of the freedmen, in present-day technology’s devaluation of untrained labor—worked to sever the Negro from the general economic evolution, it is difficult to conceive an “overthrow” of the “system” that would not prove counter-productive for all races. Rather, the challenge to the white-dominated system would seem to be merely to make good the numerous statutes and public resolutions that already exist. But there can be no denying that the self-hatred impressed on the black man by three centuries of rope and shackle, low wages, and social insult must be overthrown. And, for all the recalcitrance of private neuroses, psychic revolutions can occur rather quickly, as one generation replaces another. Although it is tempting, as the abysmal statistics from the ghetto mount, to dismiss symbolic triumphs, what value can be given to, say, the disappearance of “conking” or the widespread use of black models in television commercials? Or to the appearance in the streets of African costumes? That whites ape such fashions and commercialize them seems to me the opposite of disheartening: it is one more step toward America’s recovery of what it early lost, a sense of itself as a multiracial nation, rather than as a white nation “holding” colored minorities.
The black race presently exists in America as a sunken, underdeveloped other country, exasperated and mocked by the highly developed country that surrounds and permeates it with its imagery of affluence and opportunity. As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1903, “To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.” No number of damage-mending programs from the white world can lift this black nation as a dead weight. Ambition and righteous pride must be ignited within the black community, and black artists, it seems to me, have an enviable part to play. In an art situation that is generally modish and frivolously nihilistic, the black artist (and the playwright, that natural didact, seems to be foremost) has a work of genuine resurrection before him, of supplying a self-image that though angry is also potent—of generating “motivational fantasies” to which the white world, of course, helps lend substance. As long as young black men cannot “envisage a future in which their situation would improve through work,” the black race draws nearer to being the instrument whereby, in Cleaver’s metaphor, America commits suicide.
Fool’s Gold
THE Loss OF EL DORADO, by V. S. Naipaul. 335 pp. Knopf, 1970.
Never ask an artist to do the ordinary. Some time ago, an American publisher asked V. S. Naipaul, the Anglo-Indian novelist from Trinidad, to write the Port of Spain volume in a series of historical handbooks on cities of the world. Naipaul produced a masterly anomaly that, under the title The Loss of El Dorado, has been brought out, garlanded with British praise, by another American publisher. The book, though minutely researched and presented in a factual prose that verges on the dry, seems less a work of history than a piece of poetry, a rather fevered meditation, a hypnotized concentration upon two focal points in Trinidad’s history: the founding of St. Joseph and its port, “which they call of Spain,” in 1592 by the “dispossessed conquistador” Antonio de Berrio; and, two hundred years later, the six-year rule of the city and the island by its first British governor, Thomas Picton, a blithe brute who was to die a hero at Waterloo. Both men suggest legendary figures: like Don Quixote, Berrio was old, tough, gallant, and bewitched; while Picton’s career seems a shadow of Wellingon’s and his final reputation has been “absorbed in Wellington’s more complex, nation-building myth.” Indeed, it was Wellington who pronounced Picton’s epitaph: “A rough foul-mouthed devil as ever lived.” Naipaul’s portraiture, closely based upon historical records hitherto scarcely tapped, mixes irony and sympathy somewhat enigmatically, yet he does seem to grant Berrio and Picton the stature of founders and a certain tenacity of purpose. In counterpoint stand his portraits of Sir Walter Raleigh and Francisco Miranda, two engaging and intelligent adventurers whom he condemns as—in the end—ineffectual and, oddly, quiescent; both ended in prison, and “prison was perhaps the setting that Miranda, like Raleigh, subconsciously required.” Behind these principal actors a host of lesser ones come swarming forward out of the colonial archives: henchmen and buccaneers, Spanish soldiers and French planters and English administrators, lawyers and torturers, agitators, mulattoes, and slaves. The richly detailed episodes of West Indian history hover, however, in a virtual vacuum; the matrix of world circumstances—not only the power struggles on the Continent but even the events on nearby islands—is so lightly indicated that the machinations on Trinidad appear as eerie as the motions of a sleepwalker. This quality would be a fault were it not at the heart of Mr. Naipaul’s attempt. He wishes, using his native Trinidad as a microcosm, to uncover the something strange in the entire New World, the something futile and cruel and—to use a word he repeatedly uses, as if re-coined with a more sinister meaning—“simple.”
There are many surprising facts, fascinating stories, and shrewd epigrammatic thrusts in these pages. Naipaul is very good on the Spaniards—their egoistic “simplicity,” the unreality to them of everything but God and gold, their disastrous inability to plant crops, the abstract accounts they left of their marvellous journeys (“The conquistador who found nothing had nothing to report. Believing in wonders, he had no gift of wonder”), their superstitious and murderous abhorrence of the heathen Indian, the mild legalism of their slave code. They experienced the New World as a “medieval adventure.” Antonio de Berrio became the last and least of the conquistadors. His wife, whom he married late, was the niece of one of the great ones, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada. Quesada had marched into the Colombian plateau, conquered the Chibcha Indians, and founded at Bogotá the kingdom of New Granada—an achievement sufficient to make him rich but not content. He wished to discover another Mexico or Peru and to become, after Cortés and Pizarro, the third marquis of the New World. The rumor of El Dorado—a tale the jungle Indians told, a confusion of the ritual gilding of a Chibchan chieftain with the opulent Inca empire the Spaniards had already seized—drew Quesada into the swamps of the Orinoco River; of the two thousand men in this expedition, twenty-five returned. When, some years later, Quesada died, his nephew-in-law inherited his fortune and his quest. The one consumed the other. Berrio, an old soldier of sixty, came from Spain to the Indies and for fifteen years devoted himself to the search for the gilded man and the city of gold. A collection of straw huts in Trinidad served as the capital of a jungle territory—Trinidad, Guiana, and eastern Venezuela—that for many decades was known in the Spanish colonial records as “these provinces of El Dorado.” The tangle of ruinous expeditions and English raids and Indian massacres defies summary; by one of those ironies whereby literature wags history, it was Sir Walter Raleigh—a timid cutthroat, in Naipaul’s narrative—who captured the El Dorado legend from its leading devotee, Berrio, by writing a book, The Discovery of the Large, Rich, an
d Beautiful Empire of Guiana. Though “really the story of a defeat and of a nervous six-day journey of exploration,” the book “catches part of the New World at that moment between the unseeing brutality of the discovery and conquest and the later brutality of colonization. It was the swiftly passing moment when romance could be apprehended.” Berrio’s own story has an end worthy not of romance but of an anti-romantic novel. After seizure and release by Raleigh, Berrio, now seventy-five and probably lunatic, was stranded, with a dozen men, on an island in the Orinoco. Meanwhile, Domingo de Vera, his “campmaster for El Dorado,” had wangled from the chronically bankrupt Spanish king a support expedition of twenty-eight ships and perhaps two thousand men and women. The New World was not ready to support such a population; unsheltered, unfed, cannibalized by Caribs, the expedition disintegrated and became, in the Spanish Indies, a “folk memory of horror.” And Berrio, when Vera got to him on his island, was not grateful. He said (and these are the only spoken words of his that have been recorded), “We are trying to do too much. If we try to do too much we will end by doing nothing at all.” So Don Quixote, invited to rise from his deathbed and resume the search for Dulcinea, replied, “No more of that, I beseech you. All the use I shall make of these follies at present is to heighten my repentance.” The New World as medieval adventure had ended.
