Voices in Our Blood

by Jon Meacham

  It is a bright, sunny, crisp day outside. The coffee is bubbling cheerfully. Out the window I see a little Negro girl, about ten years old, with a pink bow in her hair, an enormous bow, come out of a small pink house with aquamarine trim and shutters, and a dull blue roof. She stands a moment with the pink bow against the aquamarine door, then moves through the opening in the clipped privet hedge, a very tidy, persnickety hedge, and picks her way down the muddy street, where there is no sidewalk.

  One of the journalists is instructing a Negro who is to be interviewed, a tall, well-set-up, jut-nosed, good-looking dark-brown man in a blue suit. He has a good way of holding his head. “Now, you’re supposed to tell them,” the journalist is saying, “what a lot of hogwash this separate but equal stuff is. What you said to me last night.”

  Pedagogical and irritable, one of the technicians says: “Quiet, quiet!”

  They take a voice level. The dark-brown man is very much at ease, saying: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.”

  The interview begins. The dark-brown man, still very much at ease, is saying: “. . . and we’re not disturbed. The only people disturbed are those who have not taken an unbiased look. We who have taken our decision, we aren’t disturbed.” He goes on to say the Negroes want an interracial discussion on the “how” of desegregation—but with the background understanding that the Court decision is law.

  The journalist cuts in: “Make it simple and direct. Lay it on the line.”

  The tall brown man is unruffled. There is sweat on his face now, but from the lamps. He wipes his face, and patiently, condescendingly, smiles at the journalist. “Listen,” he says, “you all are going back to New York City. But we stay here. We aren’t afraid, but we live here. They know what we think, but it’s a way of putting it we got to think about.”

  He says it is going to take some time to work things out, he knows that, but there is a chorus from the Negroes crowded back out of range of the camera: “Don’t put no time limit—don’t put any time on it—no ten or fifteen years!”

  The dark-brown man doesn’t put any time on it. He says all they want is to recognize the law and to sit down in a law-abiding way to work out the “how” and the “when.”

  “That’s good, that’s all right!” the chorus decides.

  Leave the “how” in detail up to the specialists in education. As for the “when”—the dark-brown, jut-nosed man hesitates a second: “Well, Negroes are patient. We can wait a little while longer.”

  The dark-brown man gets up to his considerable height, wipes the sweat off his face, asks the journalist: “You got your playback?”

  The chorus laughs. It is indulgent laughter of human vanity and such. Sure, any man would like to hear his voice played back, hear himself talking.

  There is no playback. Not now, anyway.

  The dark-brown man is receiving the handshakes, the shoulder-slaps, of his friends. They think he did well. He did do well. He looks back over his shoulder at the white men, grins. “When I got to leave,” he says, “who’s going to give me that job as chauffeur? I see that nice Cadillac sitting out front there.”

  There are the quick, deep-throated giggles.

  I turn to a Negro beside me. “Ten years ago,” I ask, “would this have been possible?”

  “No,” he says.

  Then there is another house, the tangle of wires, the jumble of rig and lights, and another Negro being arranged for an interview. There is no air of decorous festivity here, just a businesslike bustle, with the Negro waiting. This one will be knocked off quick. It’s getting on to lunch.

  This one, one of the journalists told me, is supposed to be the Uncle Tom. He is a middle-aged man, fair-sized, tallish, medium brown, with a balding, rather high forehead. He is wearing a good dark suit. His manner is dignified, slow, a little sad. I have known him before, know something about him. He had begun life as waterboy on a plantation, back in the times when “some folks didn’t think a thing of bloodying a Negro’s head, just for nothing, and I have seen their heads bloodied.” But a white man on the plantation had helped him (“Noticed I was sort of quick and took an interest in things, trying to learn”), and now he is a preacher. For a voice level, he does not say: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.” He says: “Jesus wept, Jesus wept, Jesus wept.”

  The journalist tells him he is supposed to say some good things for segregation.

  The Negro doesn’t answer directly to that. “If you have some opinions of your own,” he says, “your own people sometimes call you a son-of-a-gun, and sometimes the white people call you a son-of-a-gun.”

  Your own people. And I remember that the men at the last house had said: “Don’t tell him you’ve seen us, don’t tell him that or you won’t get him to talk.”

  Is integration a good thing? the journalist asks him, and he says: “Till Negro people get as intelligent and self-sustaining they can’t mix.” But he flares up about discrimination along with segregation: “That’s what makes Negroes bitter, wage differentials, no good jobs, that and the ballot.” As for the Court decision, he says: “It’s something for people to strive for, to ascertain their best.”

  I break in—I don’t think the machinery is going yet—and ask about humiliation as a bar to Negro fulfillment.

  “Segregation did one thing,” he says. “No other race but the Negroes could build up as much will to go on and do things. To get their goals.”

  What goals? I ask.

  “Just what anybody wants, just everything people can want to be a citizen,” he says.

  This isn’t what the journalist has come for.

  Things aren’t promising too well. Uncle Tom is doing a disappearing act, Old Black Joe is evaporating, the handkerchief-head, most inconveniently, isn’t there. The genie has got out of the bottle clearly labeled: Negro segregationist.

  But maybe the genie can be coaxed back into the bottle. The sad-mannered man is, the journalist suggests, a pro-segregationist in that he thinks segregation built a will to achieve something.

  The machinery gets going, the mike is lifted on its rod, the slow, sad voice speaks: “For segregation has test steel into the Negro race and this is one valuable point of segregation—segregation has proven that Negroes in the South, where it’s practiced most, have done a fine job in building an economic strength beyond that of many other sections in the United States of America. Negroes own more farmland in Mississippi than any other state in the United States that is engaged in agriculture.”

  He goes along, he says, “with the idea you should have a moderate approach. You will never be able to integrate children on the school campus, the mothers holding a lot of bitterness in their hearts against each other white and colored.”

  It will take time, he says. “It is absurd otherwise, it’s just foolish thinking for people to believe you can get the South to do in four or five years what they have been doing in the North for one hundred years. These people are emotional about their tradition, and you’ve got to have an educational program to change their way of thinking and this will be a slow process.”

  Yes, the genie is safely back in the labeled bottle. Or is he?

  For the slow, sad voice is saying: “. . . has got to outthink the white man, has got to outlive the white man . . .”

  Is saying: “. . . no need of saying that the South won’t ever integrate . . .”

  Is saying: “. . . not ultimate goal just to go to white schools and travel with white people on conveyances over the country. No, the Negro, he is a growing people and he will strive for all the equalities belonging to any American citizen. He is a growing people.”

  Yes, Uncle Tom is gone again, and gone for good. Too bad for the program. I wondered if they got this last part on tape.

  The Negro turns to the journalist and asks if he has interviewed other people around.

  “Yes, saw Mr. So-and-so of the Citizens Council.”

  Had we
interviewed any other Negroes?

  “Oh, some,” after a shade of hesitation.

  Had we seen So-and-so and So-and-so?

  “No—why, no. Well, we want to thank you . . .”

  We leave the sad-mannered, slow man and we know that he knows. He isn’t a big enough fool not to know. White men have lied to him before. What is one more time after all the years?

  Besides, what if you do tell him a lie?

  There are, as a matter of fact, in Arkansas, Negroes who go from door to door collecting money to fight integration. There are Uncle Toms.

  So it all evens out.

  I ask my question of the eminent Negro scholar. His reply is immediate: “It’s not so much what the Negro wants as what he doesn’t want. The main point is not that he has poor facilities. It is that he must endure a constant assault on his ego. He is denied human dignity.”

  And I think of the yellow girl wearing the salmon sweater and slacks, in the shack in the sea of mud, at dusk, the girl whose husband has been shot, and she says: “It’s how yore feelings git tore up all the time. The way folks talk, sometimes. It ain’t what they say sometimes, if they’d jes say it kind.”

  She had gone to a store, in another town, for some dress goods, and had requested a receipt for the minister who manages the fund raised in her behalf. By the receipt the saleswoman identifies her and asks if “that man up yonder is still in jail for killing a nigger.”

  “Well,” the girl had said, “if you want to put it that a-way.”

  “They can’t do anything to a man for something he does drunk,” the saleswoman has said.

  The girl has laid the package down on the counter. “If you want it that a-way,” she has said, “you kin take back yore dress goods. They’s other places to buy.”

  She tells me the story.

  And I think of another woman, up in Tennessee, middle-aged, precise, the kind of woman who knows her own competent mind, a school inspector for county schools, a Negro. “We don’t want to socialize. That’s not what we want. We do everything the white folks do already, even if we don’t spend as much money doing it. And we have more fun. But I don’t want to be insulted. If somebody has to tell you something, about some regulation or other, they could say it in a low, kind voice, not yell it out at you. And when I go to a place to buy something, and have that dollar bill in my hand, I want to be treated right. And I won’t ride on a bus. I won’t go to a restaurant in a town where there’s just one. I’ll go hungry. I won’t be insulted at the front door and then crawl around to the back. You’ve got to try to keep some respect.”

  And in Tennessee again, the Negro at the biracial committee meeting says: “My boy is happy in the Negro school where he goes. I don’t want him to go to the white school and sit by your boy’s side. But I’d die fighting for his right to go.” “We don’t want to socialize,” the woman in Tennessee says.

  The college student, a Negro, in Tennessee, says: “The Negro doesn’t want social equality. My wife is my color. I’m above wanting to mix things up. That’s low class. Low class of both races.”

  The Negro man in Mississippi says: “Take a Negro man wanting a white woman. A man tends to want his own kind, now. But the white folks make such an awful fuss about it. They make it seem so awful special-like. Maybe that’s what makes it sort of prey on some folks’ mind.”

  And I remember the gang rape by four Negroes of a white woman near Memphis last fall, shortly after the Till killing. “One of our boys was killed down in Mississippi the other day and we’re liable to kill you,” one of the Negroes said as they bludgeoned the man who was with the woman and told him to get going.

  This is a question for Negroes only. Is there any difference between what the Negro feels at the exclusions of segregation, and what a white man feels at the exclusions which he, any man, must always face at some point?

  “Yes, it’s different,” the Negro college administrator says, “when your fate is on your face. Just that. It’s the unchangeableness. But a white man, even if he knows he can’t be President, even if he knows the chances for his son are one in many millions—long odds—still there’s an idea there.”

  And the Negro lawyer: “Yes, it’s different. But it’s not easy to name it. Take how some unions come in and make some plant build nice rest rooms, one for white, one for Negroes, but same tile, same fixtures and all. But off the white ones, there’s a little lounge for smoking. To make ’em feel superior to somebody. You see what I mean, how it’s different?”

  He thinks some more. “Yes,” he says, “I got my dreams and hopes and aspirations, but me, I have to think what is sort of possible in the possibilities and probabilities. Some things I know I can’t think on because of the circumstances of my birth.”

  And he thinks again, looking out of the window, over Beale Street. “Yes, there’s a difference,” he says. “A Negro, he doesn’t really know some things, but he just goes walking pregnant with worries, not knowing their name. It’s he’s lost his purpose, somewhere. He goes wandering and wondering, and no purpose.”

  I look out the window, too, over Beale Street. It is late afternoon. I hear the pullulation of life, the stir and new tempo toward evening, the babble of voices, a snatch of laughter. I hear the remorseless juke boxes. They shake the air.

  What’s coming?

  “Whatever it is,” the college student in the Deep South says, “I’d like to put all the Citizens Council and all the NAACP in one room and give every man a baseball bat and lock ’em in till it was over. Then maybe some sensible people could work out something.”

  What’s coming? I say it to the country grade-school superintendent. He is a part-time farmer, too, and now he is really in his role as farmer, not teacher, as we stand, at night, under the naked light of a flyspecked 200-watt bulb hanging from the shed roof, and he oversees two Negroes loading sacks of fertilizer on a truck. “I know folks round here,” he says, and seeing his hard, aquiline, weathered face, with the flat, pale, hard eyes, I believe him.

  “They aren’t raised up to it,” he says. “Back in the summer now, I went by a lady’s house to ask about her children starting to school. Well, she was a real old-timey gal, a gant-headed, barefoot, snuff-dipping, bonnet-wearing, hard-ankled old gal standing out in the tobacco patch, leaning on her hoe, and she leaned at me and said, ‘Done hear’d tell ’bout niggers gonna come in,’ and before I could say anything, she said, ‘Not with none of my young ’uns,’ and let out a stream of ambeer.”

  “Would you hire a Negro teacher?” I asked.

  “I personally would, but folks wouldn’t stand for it, not now, mostly those who never went much to school themselves. Unless I could prove I couldn’t get white.” He paused. “And it’s getting damned hard to get white, I tell you,” he says.

  I ask if integration will come.

  “Sure,” he says, “in fifty years. Every time the tobacco crop is reduced, we lose just that many white sharecroppers and Negroes. That eases the pain.”

  What’s coming? And the Methodist minister, riding with me in the dusk, in the drizzle, by the flooded bayou, says: “It’ll come, desegregation and the vote and all that. But it will be twenty-five, thirty years, a generation. You can preach love and justice, but it’s a slow pull till you get the education.” He waves a hand toward the drowned black cotton fields, stretching on forever, toward the rows of shacks marshaled off into the darkening distance, toward the far cypresses where dusk is tangled. “You can see,” he says. “Just look, you can see.”

  What’s coming? I ask the young lawyer in a mid-South city, a lawyer retained by one of the segregation outfits. “It’s coming that we got to fight this bogus law,” he says, “or we’ll have a lot of social dis-tensions. The bogus law is based on social stuff and progress and just creates dis-tension. But we’re gaining ground. Some upper-class people, I mean a real rich man, is coming out for us. And we get rolling, a Southern President could repack the Court. But it’s got so a man can’t respect th
e Supreme Court. All this share-the-wealth and Communist stuff and progress. You can’t depend on law any more.”

  What can you depend on? I ask.

  “Nothing but the people. Like the Civil War.”

  I suggest that whatever the constitutional rights and wrongs of the Civil War were, we had got a new Constitution out of it.

  “No,” he said, “just a different type of dog saying what it is.”

  I ask if, in the end, the appeal would be to violence.

  “No, I don’t believe in violence. I told Mr. Perkins, when we had our mass meeting, to keep the in-ci-dents down. But you get a lot of folks and there’s always going to be in-ci-dents.”

  I ask if at Tuscaloosa the mob hadn’t dictated public policy.

  “Not dictate exactly.” And he smiles his handsome smile. “But it was a lot of people.”

  He has used the word progress, over and over, to damn what he does not like. It is peculiar how he uses this laudatory word—I can imagine how he would say it in other contexts, on public occasions, rolling it on his tongue—as the word now for what he hates most. I wonder how deep a cleavage the use of that word indicates.

  What’s coming? I ask the handsome, aristocratic, big gray-haired man, sitting in his rich office, high over the city, an ornament of the vestry, of boards of directors, of club committees, a man of exquisite simplicity and charm, and a member of a segregation group.

  “We shall exhaust all the legal possibilities,” he says.

  I ask if he thinks his side will win. The legal fight, that is.

  He rolls a cigarette fastidiously between the strong, white, waxy forefinger and thumb. “No,” he says. “But it is just something you have to do.” He rolls the cigarette, looking out the window over the city, a city getting rich now, “filthy rich,” as somebody has said to me. There is the undertone and unceasing susurrus of traffic in the silence of his thoughts.

  “Well,” he says at last, “to speak truth, I think the whole jig is up. We’ll have desegregation right down the line. And you know why?”