by Jon Meacham
“Yessir, an’ I hope I can answer it.”
“Question number one! Who was the first President of the United States?”
“Why, George Washington was.”
“That’s absolutely correct, Mrs. McGee,” as my fellow conspirators applauded in the background. “Now for question number two, and if you answer it correctly you get a chance to answer our big break-the-bank question. What is the capital of the United States?”
“Washington, D.C. is.”
“Very good!” (applause) “Now, Mrs. McGee, are you ready down there in Yazoo for the big jackpot question?”
“Yessir!”
“Here it is. . . . How many miles in the world?”
“How many miles in the world?”
“That’s right.”
“The whole thing?”
“All of it.”
“Oh Lord, I’ll just have to guess. . . . One million!”
“One million? Mrs. McGee, I’m afraid you just missed! The correct answer should have been one million and three.”
Several times I recall my father saying, when I was a small boy, “I don’t know why they treat these niggers so bad. They pay taxes just like everybody else. If they pay taxes they oughta get to vote. It’s as simple as that. If they don’t get to vote they ought not to have to pay any taxes.”
But one day the police finally caught Willie Johnson, a Negro who had broken into a number of white houses on our street and stolen everything he could carry away with him. He stole my mother’s engagement ring from our house, and several pieces of family silver that the Harpers had buried in the dirt floor of their smokehouse before the federal troops had arrived in Raymond. The police brought Willie Johnson to the city hall for questioning, and telephoned all the men whose houses had been broken into to come down and question him. My father took me with him.
It was a stifling hot summer day, so hot that all you had to do was walk into the sun and your armpits and the hair on your head would soon be soaking wet. The room at the city hall was a small one; it was crowded with white men, and several others peered through the open door from the hallway. The police chief was sitting behind a desk, and when he saw my father he shouted, “Come on in and let’s talk to this boy.” I found a place on the floor next to my father’s chair, and then I saw the Negro, sitting in a straight chair, trussed up and sweating as much as I was. The other white men were looking at him, glowering hard and not saying a word. The police chief asked the Negro a few questions, and as I sat there taking it all in I heard a man I knew turn to Willie Johnson and say, in a strangely subdued voice, sounding not at all like himself: “Nigger, I just want to tell you one thing, and you better get it straight, because I ain’t gonna repeat it. . . . If I so much as see you walkin’ down the sidewalk in front of our house, I’ll blow your head off.”
A young boy grew up with other things: with the myths, the stories handed down. One of them concerned one of the town’s policemen, a gnarled and skinny old man by the time I was growing up, who had shot a Negro on the sidewalk on the lower end of Main Street and stood over him with his pistol to prevent anyone from taking him away while he bled to death. Whether it was apocryphal or not was almost irrelevant, for the terror of that story was quite enough; we saw the policeman almost everyday, making his rounds of the parking meters. “Don’t fool with ol’ ——,” someone would say. “He’d just as soon shoot you as look at you,” and then recount the legend in gory detail. There was the tale of the white planter, who owned one of the big plantations in the delta. When one of his Negro hands looked too closely at his wife one day, the man got his gun and killed him, and there was no trial.
There were a boy’s recurring sense impressions of a hovering violence, isolated acts that remained in my memory long afterward, as senseless and unpatterned later as they had been for me when they happened:
. . . Some white men came to see my father, when I was six or seven years old. I heard them talking at the front door. “We hear the niggers might cause trouble tonight,” one of them said. My father went to town to buy some extra shotgun shells, and we locked all our doors and windows when the sun went down.
. . . A Negro shot and killed a white man at the honky-tonk near the town dump. When the time came for him to be executed, they brought the state’s portable electric chair in a big truck from Jackson. We drove by and saw it parked in the back yard of the jail. The next day some older boys told me they had stayed up until midnight, with the lights on in their house, to watch all the lights dim when the nigger got killed.
. . . I was playing with some older boys behind the Church of Christ chapel. Three barefooted Negro children appeared in the alley and began rifling through the garbage can. One of them found a rotten apple core and started eating it. The other two stuck their heads inside the can looking for things. We stopped our game to look at them. One of the older boys I was playing with whispered, “Damn little bastards,” then said in a loud voice, “What you boys doin’?” Before they could answer he ran at them and shouted, “Get outa here, you little coons!” and we all chased them away down the alley.
. . . One rainy night in September one of the Negro shacks in the river bottom near Mound Street toppled over. The shack belonged to a garrulous old Negro named Henry who worked on odd jobs for several white families. When my friends and I found out what had happened, we walked across town to take a look. One of the four stilts had broken, and the whole house had simply flopped down at an angle. Henry and his family had been listening to the radio in the front room, and had slid right into the kitchen. The family had moved out, but there was the house, tilted over at an impossible angle, its backside splintered and broken. A light drizzle was falling, and the more we looked through the rain at that crippled old house the less we could help laughing. The image of Henry, the radio, and the whole family sliding into the kitchen was too much. We laughed all the way home, and more the next day when we saw Henry and asked after his condition, and he said: “I picked up fifty splinters in my ass.”
. . . I was walking up Grand Avenue to school. Just as I crossed the railroad track I heard a loud crash several hundred yards to the north. Looking in that direction I saw the early morning freight out of Memphis pushing the remnants of a car along the track on its cowguard. I ran up the track. The train had crashed into a Negro taxicab with a full load of passengers. Blood was everywhere; two people lay mangled and still inside the wrecked car. A third, a woman, straddled the car and the train. A carload of high school boys on their way to school screeched around the corner and the boys got out to look at the wreckage. The woman slowly regained consciousness, looked around her, and asked, “Where’s the train?” One of the high school boys, the star tailback, replied: “Nigger, you sittin’ right on it.”
. . . One morning I awoke to hear that a neighbor had shot a Negro burglar. I ran down to his house, and a large crowd milled around on the porch and in the front room. Inside, the man was telling what had happened. He pointed to a bullet hole in the wall, and another in the leg of a table. He had awakened in the night and saw the nigger in the hallway. He pulled out his automatic and shot twice, and he heard a moan and saw the nigger running away. When he telephoned the police, all they had to do was follow the trail of blood to a house in niggertown. That morning we followed the blood ourselves, little drops and big ones in the dust of the alley and onto the concrete pavement. Then we came back and congratulated our neighbor on his aim. More people came in to hear the story, and he told them: “If that second shot had been two inches to the left, that woulda been one good nigger.”
As we grew older, beyond puberty into an involvement with girls, it seemed as if our own acts took on a more specific edge of cruelty. On Canal Street, across from the old Greyhound station at the Bayou, there was a concrete bannister where the Negroes would sit waiting for the busses. On Saturday nights we would cruise down the street in a car, and the driver would open his door and drive close to the curb. We would watch whil
e the Negroes, to avoid the car door, toppled backward off the bannister like dominoes. And the taunts and threats to the isolated Negroes we saw, on country roads and deserted white streets, were harder and more cruel than anything we had done as children.
Deeply involved with the unthinking sadism, and with the sudden curious affection, were the moments of pity and sorrow. One Fourth of July afternoon when we were in high school, we went in a large group to one of the lakes in the delta for swimming and a picnic. A Negro shack on the bank of the lake had burned to the ground the night before. The father had taken his wife and his several small children into a bare, floorless cabin nearby, alive with crawling things that came out of the rotten wood in the walls. All they had saved was the clothes on their backs. They sat around all day in front of their shack, watching us eat and swim; for hours, it seemed, they hardly moved. Finally my girlfriend and I walked over to them. We discovered that the children had eaten practically nothing in two days. The children sat there listlessly, not saying a word; the father said even the fish wouldn’t bite for him. My girl started crying. We went back and told the others, and took up a collection that must have come to fifteen dollars, and gave them our hotdogs and cokes. The Negro family ate the food and continued to look at us down by the lake. Under their stolid gaze I felt uncomfortable; I wanted to head back to Grand Avenue again. We packed our things and went to the car, drove through the flat cotton country to town, and resumed our picnic on the back lawn of one of the big houses in our neighborhood.
Notes of a Native Son
1955
JAMES BALDWIN
On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born. Over a month before this, while all our energies were concentrated in waiting for these events, there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots of the century. A few hours after my father’s funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker’s chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. On the morning of the 3rd of August, we drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass.
The day of my father’s funeral had also been my nineteenth birthday. As we drove him to the graveyard, the spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent, and hatred were all around us. It seemed to me that God himself had devised, to mark my father’s end, the most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas. And it seemed to me, too, that the violence which rose all about us as my father left the world had been devised as a corrective for the pride of his eldest son. I had declined to believe in that apocalypse which had been central to my father’s vision; very well, life seemed to be saying, here is something that will certainly pass for an apocalypse until the real thing comes along. I had inclined to be contemptuous of my father for the conditions of his life, for the conditions of our lives. When his life had ended I began to wonder about that life and also, in a new way, to be apprehensive about my own.
I had not known my father very well. We had got on badly, partly because we shared, in our different fashions, the vice of stubborn pride. When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had. It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first. No one, including my father, seems to have known exactly how old he was, but his mother had been born during slavery. He was of the first generation of free men. He, along with thousands of other Negroes, came North after 1919 and I was part of that generation which had never seen the landscape of what Negroes sometimes call the Old Country.
He had been born in New Orleans and had been a quite young man there during the time that Louis Armstrong, a boy, was running errands for the dives and honky-tonks of what was always presented to me as one of the most wicked of cities—to this day, whenever I think of New Orleans, I also helplessly think of Sodom and Gomorrah. My father never mentioned Louis Armstrong, except to forbid us to play his records; but there was a picture of him on our wall for a long time. One of my father’s strong-willed female relatives had placed it there and forbade my father to take it down. He never did, but he eventually maneuvered her out of the house and when, some years later, she was in trouble and near death, he refused to do anything to help her.
He was, I think, very handsome. I gather this from photographs and from my own memories of him, dressed in his Sunday best and on his way to preach a sermon somewhere, when I was little. Handsome, proud, and ingrown, “like a toe-nail,” somebody said. But he looked to me, as I grew older, like pictures I had seen of African tribal chieftains: he really should have been naked, with war-paint on and barbaric mementos, standing among spears. He could be chilling in the pulpit and indescribably cruel in his personal life and he was certainly the most bitter man I have ever met; yet it must be said that there was something else in him, buried in him, which lent him his tremendous power and, even, a rather crushing charm. It had something to do with his blackness, I think—he was very black—with his blackness and his beauty, and with the fact that he knew that he was black but did not know that he was beautiful. He claimed to be proud of his blackness but it had also been the cause of much humiliation and it had fixed bleak boundaries to his life. He was not a young man when we were growing up and he had already suffered many kinds of ruin; in his outrageously demanding and protective way he loved his children, who were black like him and menaced, like him; and all these things sometimes showed in his face when he tried, never to my knowledge with any success, to establish contact with any of us. When he took one of his children on his knee to play, the child always became fretful and began to cry; when he tried to help one of us with our homework the absolutely unabating tension which emanated from him caused our minds and our tongues to become paralyzed, so that he, scarcely knowing why, flew into a rage and the child, not knowing why, was punished. If it ever entered his head to bring a surprise home for his children, it was, almost unfailingly, the wrong surprise and even the big watermelons he often brought home on his back in the summertime led to the most appalling scenes. I do not remember, in all those years, that one of his children was ever glad to see him come home. From what I was able to gather of his early life, it seemed that this inability to establish contact with other people had always marked him and had been one of the things which had driven him out of New Orleans. There was something in him, therefore, groping and tentative, which was never expressed and which was buried with him. One saw it most clearly when he was facing new people and hoping to impress them. But he never did, not for long. We went from church to smaller and more improbable church, he found himself in less and less demand as a minister, and by the time he died none of his friends had come to see him for a long time. He had lived and died in an intolerable bitterness of spirit and it frightened me, as we drove him to the graveyard through those unquiet, ruined streets, to see how powerful and overflowing this bitterness could be and to realize that this bitterness now was mine.
When he died I had been away from home for a little over a year. In that year I had had time to become aware of the meaning of all my father’s bitter warnings, had discovered the secret of his proudly pursed lips and rigid carriage: I had discovered the weight of white people in the world. I saw that this had been for my ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to live with and that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me.
He had been ill a long time—in the mind, as we now realized, reliving instances of his fantastic intransigence in the new light of his affliction and endeavoring to feel a sorrow for him which never, quite, came true. We had not known that he was being eaten up by paranoia, and the discovery that his cruelty, to our bodies and our minds, had been one of the symptoms of his illness was not, then, enough to enable us to forgive him. The younger children felt, quite simply, relief that he would not be coming home anymore. My mother’s observation that it was he, after all, who had kept the
m alive all these years meant nothing because the problems of keeping children alive are not real for children. The older children felt, with my father gone, that they could invite their friends to the house without fear that their friends would be insulted or, as had sometimes happened with me, being told that their friends were in league with the devil and intended to rob our family of everything we owned. (I didn’t fail to wonder, and it made me hate him, what on earth we owned that anybody else would want.)
His illness was beyond all hope of healing before anyone realized that he was ill. He had always been so strange and had lived, like a prophet, in such unimaginably close communion with the Lord that his long silences which were punctuated by moans and hallelujahs and snatches of old songs while he sat at the living-room window never seemed odd to us. It was not until he refused to eat because, he said, his family was trying to poison him that my mother was forced to accept as a fact what had, until then, been only an unwilling suspicion. When he was committed, it was discovered that he had tuberculosis and, as it turned out, the disease of his mind allowed the disease of his body to destroy him. For the doctors could not force him to eat, either, and, though he was fed intravenously, it was clear from the beginning that there was no hope for him.
In my mind’s eye I could see him, sitting at the window, locked up in his terrors; hating and fearing every living soul including his children who had betrayed him, too, by reaching towards the world which had despised him. There were nine of us. I began to wonder what it could have felt like for such a man to have had nine children whom he could barely feed. He used to make little jokes about our poverty, which never, of course, seemed very funny to us; they could not have seemed very funny to him, either, or else our all too feeble response to them would never have caused such rages. He spent great energy and achieved, to our chagrin, no small amount of success in keeping us away from the people who surrounded us, people who had all-night rent parties to which we listened when we should have been sleeping, people who cursed and drank and flashed razor blades on Lenox Avenue. He could not understand why, if they had so much energy to spare, they could not use it to make their lives better. He treated almost everybody on our block with a most uncharitable asperity and neither they, nor, of course, their children were slow to reciprocate.
