by Jon Meacham
It is like this: suddenly, while we are chopping at the clods of clay with a heavy hoe, the riding boss gallops up and says: “Hurry up there, nigger!”
Perhaps for the first time in our lives we straighten our backs, drop the hoe, give a fleeting glance at the white man’s face, and walk off.
“Hey, where the hell you going, nigger?”
“I’m shaking the dust of the South off my feet, white man.”
“You’ll starve up north, nigger.”
“I don’t care. I’m going to die some day anyhow.”
But so many of us are leaving that the Lords of the Land begin to worry.
“Don’t go,” they say.
“We’re already going,” we say, and keep leaving.
If we have no money, we borrow it; if we cannot borrow it, we beg it. If the Bosses of the Buildings do not furnish us with a train, we walk until we reach a railroad and then we swing onto a freight. There develops such a shortage of labor in the South that the Lords of the Land order us rounded up and threatened with jail sentences unless we consent to go to the fields and gather the waiting crops. Finally they persuade men of our own race to talk to us.
“Let down your buckets where you are,” our black leaders say.
“We’re leaving,” we answer.
“The white man of the South is your friend,” they say.
“How much are they paying you to say that?” we ask.
“You’ll freeze up north.”
“We don’t care.”
The Lords of the Land say: “You niggers are going north because you think you’ll mix with whites.”
“Look at all the half-white boys and girls on the plantations,” we answer. “We black men did not do that.”
“Don’t talk fresh, nigger!”
“We ain’t talking; we’re leaving!”
“Come on; we’ll build you a big school!”
“We’d rather be a lamppost in Chicago than the president of Dixie!”
While we are leaving, our black boys come back from Flanders, telling us of how their white officers of the United States Army had treated them, how they had kept them in labor battalions, how they had jim-crowed them in the trenches even when they were fighting and dying, how the white officers had instructed the French people to segregate them. Our boys come back to Dixie in uniform and walk the streets with quick steps and proud shoulders. They cannot help it; they have been in battle, have seen men of all nations and races die. They have seen what men are made of, and now they act differently. But the Lords of the Land cannot understand them. They take them and lynch them while they are still wearing the uniform of the United States Army.
Our black boys do not die for liberty in Flanders. They die in Texas and Georgia. Atlanta is our Marne. Brownsville, Texas, is our Château-Thierry.
It is a lesson we will never forget; it is written into the pages of our blood, into the ledgers of our bleeding bodies, into columns of judgment figures and balance statements in the lobes of our brains.
“Don’t do this!” we cry.
“Nigger, shut your damn mouth!” they say.
“Don’t lynch us!” we plead.
“You’re not white!” they say.
“Why don’t somebody say something?” we ask.
“We told you to shut your damn mouth!”
We listen for somebody to say something, and we still travel, leaving the South. Our eyes are open, our ears listening for words to point the way.
From 1890 to 1920, more than 2,000,000 of us left the land.
North Toward Home
1967
WILLIE MORRIS
One summer morning when I was twelve, I sighted a little Negro boy walking with a girl who must have been his older sister on the sidewalk a block from my house. The little boy could not have been more than three; he straggled along behind the older girl, walking aimlessly on his short black legs from one edge of the sidewalk to the other.
I hid in the shrubbery near the sidewalk in my yard, peering out two or three times to watch their progress and to make sure the street was deserted. The older girl walked by first, and the child came along a few yards behind. Just as he got in front of me, lurking there in the bushes, I jumped out and pounced upon him. I slapped him across the face, kicked him with my knee, and with a shove sent him sprawling on the concrete.
The little boy started crying, and his sister ran back to him and shouted, “What’d he do to you?” My heart was beating furiously, in terror and a curious pleasure; I ran into the back of my house and hid in the weeds for a long time, until the crying drifted far away into niggertown. Then I went into the deserted house and sat there alone, listening to every noise and rustle I heard outside, as if I expected some retribution. For a while I was happy with this act, and my head was strangely light and giddy. Then later, the more I thought about it coldly, I could hardly bear my secret shame.
Once before, when I had been a much smaller boy, I had caught a little sparrow trapped on my screen porch, and almost without thinking, acting as if I were another person and not myself, I had fetched a straight pin, stuck it through the bird’s head, and opened the door to let him fly away. My hurting the Negro child, like my torturing the bird, was a gratuitous act of childhood cruelty—but I knew later that it was something else, infinitely more subtle and contorted.
For my whole conduct with Negroes as I was growing up in the 1940s was a relationship of great contrasts. On the one hand there was a kind of unconscious affection, touched with a sense of excitement and sometimes pity. On the other hand there were sudden emotional eruptions—of disdain and utter cruelty. My own alternating affections and cruelties were inexplicable to me, but the main thing is that they were largely assumed and only rarely questioned. The broader reality was that the Negroes in the town were there: they were ours, to do with as we wished. I grew up with this consciousness of some tangible possession, it was rooted so deeply in me by the whole moral atmosphere of the place that my own ambivalence—which would take mysterious shapes as I grew older—was secondary and of little account.
One fact I took for granted was that Negro adults, even Negro adults I encountered alone and had never seen before, would treat me with generosity and affection. Another was some vague feeling for a mutual sharing of the town’s past. (I remember going with one of my friends and her parents to take some food to an old Negro woman who lived alone in a cabin in the woods. The old woman told us about growing up in Yazoo, and of the day she saw the Yankee soldiers coming down the road in a cloud of dust. “I looked out the window,” she said, “and there was the War, comin’ at me from down the road.”) Another assumption was that you would never call a Negro woman a “lady” or address her as “ma’am,” or say “sir” to a Negro man. You learned as a matter of course that there were certain negative practices and conditions inherently associated with being a nigger. “Keeping a house like a nigger” was to keep it dirty and unswept. A “nigger car” was an old wreck without brakes and with squirrel tails on the radio aerial. “Behaving like a nigger” was to stay out at all hours and to have several wives or husbands. A “nigger street” was unpaved and littered with garbage. “Nigger talk” was filled with lies and superstitions. A “nigger funeral” meant wailing and shouting and keeping the corpse out of the ground for two weeks. A “white nigger store” was owned by a white man who went after the “nigger trade.” There were “good niggers” and “bad niggers,” and their categories were so formalized and elaborate that you wondered how they could live together in the same town.
Yet in the midst of all this there was the ineluctable attraction of niggertown, which enclosed the white town on all sides like some other world, and the strange heart-pounding excitement that Negroes in a group generated for me. I knew all about the sexual act, but not until I was twelve years old did I know that it was performed with white women for pleasure; I had thought that only Negro women engaged in the act of love with white men just for fun, because they
were the only ones with the animal desire to submit that way. So that Negro girls and women were a source of constant excitement and sexual feeling for me, and filled my day-dreams with delights and wonders.
Whenever I go back there and drive through niggertown, it is as if I had never left home. Few of the old shabby vistas seem changed, and time has not moved all these years for me: the strong greasy smells are the same, and the dust in the yards swirling around the abandoned cars, and the countless children with their glazed open eyes on the porches and in the trees and in the road. The Negro grocery stores, the ones my dog and I drove past in the summers, are still patched and covered with advertisements, and the little boys still wait in front for a white man with his golf clubs to drive up and shout, “Caddy!” The farther one goes into niggertown, up Brickyard or down nearer the town dump, the more dank and lean-to the structures: at first there will be the scattering of big, almost graceful houses, wholly painted or partially so, suggesting a slightly forbidding affluence as they always had for me—but back along the fringes of the town there remains that dreadful forlorn impoverishment, those dusty and ruined wooden façades which as a child would send me back toward Grand Avenue as fast as I could get there.
In a small town like this one in the lower South, where the population ran close to half and half, one of the simplest facts of awareness was that Negroes were everywhere: they ambled along the sidewalks in the white neighborhoods, they mowed the grass and clipped the hedges in the broad green lawns, they rode down the streets in their horse-drawn wagons, they were the janitors and cleaning-women in the churches and schools and the laundry-women coming to the back doors for the week’s wash. On the main street especially, on Saturdays, the town was filled with them, talking in great animated clusters on the corners, or spilling out of the drugstores and cafés at the far end of the narrow street. Their shouts and gestures, and the loud blare of their music, were so much a part of those Saturdays that if all of them had suddenly disappeared the town would have seemed unbearably ghostly and bereft. The different shades of color were extraordinary, for they ranged from the whitest white to the darkest black, with shades in between as various and distinct as yellows and browns could be. One woman in particular, whom we saw walking through the crowds on Main Street on Saturday nights, could have passed for a member of the women’s choir in the white Baptist church. “There’s that white nigger again,” someone would say. “I wonder what the others think of her?” Not until I was fourteen or fifteen did it begin to occur to me to ask myself, “Are we related?” And it was about then that I began hearing the story of the two white men who had Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner every year with three Negroes, who were the white men’s half-brothers.
There was a stage, when we were about thirteen, in which we “went Negro.” We tried to broaden our accents to sound like Negroes, as if there were not enough similarity already. We consciously walked like young Negroes, mocking their swinging gait, moving our arms the way they did, cracking our knuckles and whistling between our teeth. We tried to use some of the same expressions, as closely as possible to the way they said them, like: “Hey, ma-a-a-n, whut you doin’ theah!,” the sounds rolled out and clipped sharply at the end for the hell of it.
My father and I, on Sundays now and then, would go to their baseball games, sitting way out along the right field line; usually we were the only white people there. There was no condescension on our part, though the condescension might come later, if someone asked us where we had been. I would say, “Oh, we been to see the nigger game over at Number Two.”
“Number Two” was the Negro school, officially called “Yazoo High Number Two” as opposed to the white high school, which was “Yazoo High Number One.” We would walk up to a Negro our age and ask, “Say, buddy, where you go to school?” so we could hear the way he said, “Number Two!” Number Two was behind my house a block or so, a strange eclectic collection of old ramshackle wooden buildings and bright new concrete ones, sprawled out across four or five acres. When the new buildings went up, some of the white people would say, “Well, they won’t be pretty very long.”
Sometimes we would run across a group of Negro boys our age, walking in a pack through the white section, and there would be bantering, half-affectionate exchanges: “Hey, Robert, what you doin’ theah!” and we would give them the first names of the boys they didn’t know, and they would do the same. We would mill around in a hopping, jumping mass, talking baseball or football, showing off for each other, and sounding for all the world, with our accentuated expressions and our way of saying them, like much the same race. Some days we organized football games in Lintonia Park, first black against white, then intermingled, strutting out of huddles with our limbs swinging, shaking our heads rhythmically, until one afternoon the cops came cruising by in their patrol car and ordered us to break it up.
On Friday afternoons in the fall, we would go to see “the Black Panthers” of Number Two play football. They played in the discarded uniforms of our high school, so that our school colors—red, black, and white—were the same, and they even played the same towns from up in the delta that our high school played. We sat on the sidelines next to their cheering section, and sometimes a couple of us would be asked to carry the first-down chains. The spectators would shout and jump up and down, and even run onto the field to slap one of the players on the back when he did something outstanding. When one of the home team got hurt, ten or twelve people would dash out from the sidelines to carry him to the bench; I suspected some injuries might not have been as painful as they looked.
The Panthers had a left-handed quarterback named Kinsey, who could throw a pass farther than any other high school passer I had ever seen. He walked by my house every morning on the way to school, and I would get in step with him, emulating his walk as we strolled down to Number Two, and talk about last Friday’s game or the next one coming up. We would discuss plays or passing patterns, and we pondered how they could improve on their “flea-flicker” which had backfired so disastrously against Belzoni, leading to a tackle’s making an easy interception and all but walking thirty yards for a touchdown. “Man, he coulda crawled for that touchdown,” Kinsey bemoaned. Once I said, “You got to get another kicker,” and Kinsey replied, “Lord don’t I know it,” because in the previous game the Yazoo punter had kicked from his own twenty-yard-line, a high cantankerous spiral that curved up, down, and landed right in the middle of his own end zone. But this was a freak, because Kinsey and many of his teammates were not only superb athletes, they played with a casual flair and an exuberance that seemed missing in the white games. A long time after this, sitting in the bleachers in Candlestick Park in San Francisco, I saw a batter for the New York Mets hit a home run over the centerfield fence; the ball hit a rung on the bleachers, near a group of little boys, and then bounced back over the fence onto the outfield grass. Willie Mays trotted over and gingerly tossed the ball underhanded across the wire fence to the boys, who had been deprived of a free baseball, and that casual gesture was performed with such a fine aristocracy that it suddenly brought back to me all the flamboyant sights and sounds of those Friday afternoons watching Number Two.
On Friday nights, when the Yazoo Indians of Number One played, you could see the Number Two boys, watching with their girl friends from the end-zone seats, talking plays and pointing out strategy. One night my father and I went to the hot-dog stand at halftime and saw Dr. Harrison, the Negro dentist who refereed the Number Two games, standing on the fringes of the crowd eating a hot-dog. My father drifted over his way and said, “How’re you, Doc?” though not shaking hands, and they stood there until the second half started, talking about the virtues and shortcomings of the Yazoo Indians and the Yazoo Black Panthers.
Co-existing with all this, in no conflict, were the hoaxes we would play on the Negroes, who were a great untapped resource. We would hide in the hedges in my back yard and shoot Negro men who were walking down the sidewalk, aiming BB’s at their tails. W
e would throw dead snakes from the trees into their path, or dead rats and crawfish, or attach a long thread to a dollar bill on the sidewalk and, when the man stooped to pick it up, pull it slowly back into the bushes.
I took to phoning the Negro undertakers, talking in my flawless Negro accent, and exchanges like this would take place:
“Hello, this the undertaker?”
“Yes’m.”
“This here’s Miss Mobley, from out at Bentonia. I got me a problem.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, my cousin just died, and I wonder if I can bury him under the house.”
“Bury him under the house?”
“That right. He never amounted to much to us, and we just want him out of the way quick.”
“You can’t do it. It’s against the law.”
“But what if we don’t tell nobody? Ain’t nobody gonna miss him noway.”
“Naw, you can’t do it. You got to get a death certificate and things like that.”
“Well, we still gonna put him under the house. Is Johnson’s Baby Powder a good thing to sprinkle him with?”
“Johnson’s Baby Powder? Lord no!”
“But it says on the can it’s good for the body.”
“Lady, you got to have your cousin buried right.” So I would give the undertaker the address, and then we would dash to the corner and watch the big black hearse come by on the way to Bentonia.
Or I would pick a Negro number at random from the telephone book, and phone it and say I was Bert Parks, calling from New York City on the Break-the-Bank program. Their number had been chosen out of all the telephones in the United States, and if they could answer three questions they would win $1000. “But I must warn you, Mrs. McGee, you are now on the air, and your voice is going into every home in America. Mrs. J. D. McGee, of Yazoo, Mississippi, are you ready for question number one?”
