Voices in Our Blood

by Jon Meacham

  After the tale, there is silence. All present are segregationist, or I think they are.

  Then one woman says: “Maybe he did take a lot on himself, coming to the front door. But I can’t stand it. He’s human.”

  And another woman: “I think it’s a moral question, and I suffer, but I can’t feel the same way about a Negro as a white person. It’s born in me. But I pray I’ll change.”

  The successful businessman in Louisiana says to me: “I have felt the moral question. It will be more moral when we get rid of segregation. But I’m human enough—I guess it’s human to be split up—to want things just postponed till my children are out of school. But I can’t lift my finger to delay things.”

  But this man, privately admitting his division of feeling, having no intention of public action on either side, is the sort of man who can be trapped, accidentally, into action.

  There is the man who got the letter in the morning mail, asking him to serve as chairman of a citizens committee to study plans for desegregation in his county. “I was sick,” he says, “and I mean literally sick. I felt sick all day. I didn’t see how I could get into something like that. But next morning, you know, I did it.”

  That county now has its schedule for desegregation.

  There is another man, a lawyer, who has been deeply involved in a desegregation action. “I never had much feeling of prejudice, but hell, I didn’t have any theories either, and I now and then paid some lip service to segregation. I didn’t want to get mixed up in the business. But one night a telephone call came. I told the man I’d let him know next day. You know, I was sick. I walked on back in the living room, and my wife looked at me. She must have guessed what it was. ‘You going to do it?’ she asked me. I said, hell, I didn’t know, and went out. I was plain sick. But next day I did it. Well,” he says, and grins, and leans back under the shelves of lawbooks, “and I’m stuck with it. But you know, I’m getting damned tired of the paranoiacs and illiterates I’m up against.”

  Another man, with a small business in a poor county, “back in the shelf country,” he calls it, a short, strong-looking, ovoidal kind of man, with his belt cutting into his belly when he leans back in his office chair. He is telling me what he has been through. “I wouldn’t tell you a lie,” he says. “I’m Southern through and through, and I guess I got every prejudice a man can have, and I certainly never would have got mixed up in this business if it hadn’t been for the Court decision. I wouldn’t be out in front. I was just trying to do my duty. Trying to save some money for the county. I never expected any trouble. And we might not have had any if it hadn’t been for outsiders, one kind and another.

  “But what nobody understands is how a man can get cut up inside. You try to live like a Christian with your fellowman, and suddenly you find out it is all mixed up. You put in twenty-five years trying to build up a nice little business and raise up a family, and it looks like it will all be ruined. You get word somebody will dynamite your house and you in it. You go to lawyers and they say they sympathize, but nobody’ll take your case. But the worst is, things just go round and round in your head. Then they won’t come a-tall, and you lay there in the night. You might say, it’s the psychology of it you can’t stand. Getting all split up. Then, all of a sudden, somebody stops you on the street and calls you something, a so-and-so nigger-lover. And you know, I got so mad, not a thing mattered any more. I just felt like I was all put back together again.”

  He said he wished he could write it down, how awful it is for a man to be split up.

  Negroes, they must be split up, too, I think. They are human, too. There must be many ways for them to be split up. I remember asking a Negro schoolteacher if she thought Negro resentment would be a bar to integration. “Some of us try to teach love,” she says, “as well as we can. But some of us teach hate. I guess we can’t help it.”

  Love and hate, but more than that, the necessity of confronting your own motives: Do we really want to try to work out a way to live with the white people or do we just want to show them, pay off something, show them up, rub their noses in it?

  And I can imagine the grinding anger, the sense of outrage of a Negro crying out within himself: After all the patience, after all the humility, after learning and living those virtues, do I have to learn magnanimity, too?

  Yes, I can imagine the outrage, the outrage as some deep, inner self tells him, yes, he must.

  I am glad that white people have no problem as hard as that.

  The taxi drew up in front of the apartment house, and I got out, but the driver and I talked on for a moment. I stood there in the rain, then paid him, and ran for the door. It wasn’t that I wanted to get out of the rain. I had an umbrella. I wanted to get in and write down what he had said.

  He was a local man, born near Nashville, up near Goodlettsville, “raised up with niggers.” He had been in the army, with lots of fighting, Africa, Sicily, Italy, but a lot of time bossing work gangs. In Africa, at first, it had been Arabs, but Arabs weren’t “worth a durn.” Then they got Negro work battalions.

  But here are the notes:

  Niggers a lot better than Arabs, but they didn’t hurt themselves—didn’t any of ’em git a hernia for Uncle Sam—race prejudice—but it ain’t our hate, it’s the hate hung on us by the old folks dead and gone. Not I mean to criticize the old folks, they done the best they knew, but that hate, we don’t know how to shuck it. We got that God-damn hate stuck in our craw and can’t puke it up. If white folks quit shoving the nigger down and calling him a nigger, he could maybe get to be a asset to the South and the country. But how stop shoving?

  We are the prisoners of our history.

  Or are we?

  There is one more interview I wish to put on record. I shall enter it by question and answer.

  Q. You’re a Southerner, aren’t you?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Are you afraid of the power state?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Do you think the Northern press sometimes distorts Southern news?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Assuming that they do, why do they do it?

  A. They like to feel good.

  Q. What do you think the South ought to do about that distortion?

  A. Nothing.

  Q. Nothing? What do you mean, nothing?

  A. The distortion—that’s the Yankees’ problem, not ours.

  Q. You mean they ought to let the South work out a way to live with the Negro?

  A. I don’t think the problem is to learn to live with the Negro.

  Q. What is it, then?

  A. It is to learn to live with ourselves.

  Q. What do you mean?

  A. I don’t think you can live with yourself when you are humiliating the man next to you.

  Q. Don’t you think the races have made out pretty well, considering?

  A. Yes. By some sort of human decency and charity, God knows how. But there was always an image of something else.

  Q. An image?

  A. Well, I knew an old lady who grew up in a black county, but a county where relations had been, as they say, good. She had a fine farm and a good brick house, and when she got old she sort of retired from the world. The hottest summer weather and she would lock all the doors and windows at night, and lie there in the airless dark. But sometimes she’d telephone to town in the middle of the night. She would telephone that somebody was burning the Negroes out there on her place. She could hear their screams. Something was going on in her old head which in another place and time would not have been going on in her old head. She had never, I should think, seen an act of violence in her life. But something was going on in her head.

  Q. Do you think it is chiefly the redneck who causes violence?

  A. No. He is only the cutting edge. He, too, is a victim. Responsibility is a seamless garment. And the northern boundary of that garment is not the Ohio River.

  Q. Are you for desegregation?

  A. Yes.

  Q. When will it
come?

  A. Not soon.

  Q. When?

  A. When enough people, in a particular place, a particular county or state, cannot live with themselves any more. Or realize they don’t have to.

  Q. What do you mean, don’t have to?

  A. When they realize that desegregation is just one small episode in the long effort for justice. It seems to me that that perspective, suddenly seeing the business as little, is a liberating one. It liberates you from yourself.

  Q. Then you think it is a moral problem?

  A. Yes, but no moral problem gets solved abstractly. It has to be solved in a context for possible solution.

  Q. Can contexts be changed?

  A. Sure. We might even try to change them the right way.

  Q. Aren’t you concerned about possible racial amalgamation?

  A. I don’t even think about it. We have to deal with the problem our historical moment proposes, the burden of our time. We all live with a thousand unsolved problems of justice all the time. We don’t even recognize a lot of them. We have to deal only with those which the moment proposes to us. Anyway, we can’t legislate for posterity. All we can do for posterity is to try to plug along in a way to make them think we—the old folks—did the best we could for justice, as we could understand it.

  Q. Are you a gradualist on the matter of segregation?

  A. If by gradualist you mean a person who would create delay for the sake of delay, then no. If by gradualist you mean a person who thinks it will take time, not time as such, but time for an educational process, preferably a calculated one, then yes. I mean a process of mutual education for whites and blacks. And part of this education should be in the actual beginning of the process of desegregation. It’s a silly question, anyway, to ask if somebody is a gradualist. Gradualism is all you’ll get. History, like nature, knows no jumps. Except the jump backward, maybe.

  Q. Has the South any contribution to make to the national life?

  A. It has made its share. It may again.

  Q. How?

  A. If the South is really able to face up to itself and its situation, it may achieve identity, moral identity. Then in a country where moral identity is hard to come by, the South, because it has had to deal concretely with a moral problem, may offer some leadership. And we need any we can get. If we are to break out of the national rhythm, the rhythm between complacency and panic.

  This is, of course, an interview with myself.

  Travels with Charley

  1962

  JOHN STEINBECK

  While I was still in Texas, late in 1960, the incident most reported and pictured in the newspapers was the matriculation of a couple of tiny Negro children in a New Orleans school. Behind these small dark mites were the law’s majesty and the law’s power to enforce—both the scales and the sword were allied with the infants—while against them were three hundred years of fear and anger and terror of change in a changing world. I had seen photographs in the papers every day and motion pictures on the television screen. What made the newsmen love the story was a group of stout middle-aged women who, by some curious definition of the word “mother,” gathered every day to scream invectives at children. Further, a small group of them had become so expert that they were known as the Cheerleaders, and a crowd gathered every day to enjoy and to applaud their performance.

  This strange drama seemed so improbable that I felt I had to see it. It had the same draw as a five-legged calf or a two-headed foetus at a sideshow, a distortion of normal life we have always found so interesting that we will pay to see it, perhaps to prove to ourselves that we have the proper number of legs or heads. In the New Orleans show, I felt all the amusement of the improbable abnormal, but also a kind of horror that it could be so.

  At this time the winter which had been following my track ever since I left home suddenly struck with a black norther. It brought ice and freezing sleet and sheeted the highways with dark ice. I gathered Charley from the good doctor. He looked half his age and felt wonderful, and to prove it he ran and jumped and rolled and laughed and gave little yips of pure joy. It felt very good to have him with me again, sitting up right in the seat beside me, peering ahead at the unrolling road, or curling up to sleep with his head in my lap and his silly ears available for fondling. That dog can sleep through any amount of judicious caresses.

  Now we stopped dawdling and laid our wheels to the road and went. We could not go fast because of the ice, but we drove relentlessly, hardly glancing at the passing of Texas beside us. And Texas was achingly endless—Sweetwater and Balinger and Austin. We bypassed Houston. We stopped for gasoline and coffee and slabs of pie. Charley had his meals and his walks in gas stations. Night did not stop us, and when my eyes ached and burned from peering too long and my shoulders were side hills of pain, I pulled into a turnout and crawled like a mole into my bed, only to see the highway writhe along behind my closed lids. No more than two hours could I sleep, and then out into the bitter cold night and on and on. Water beside the road was frozen solid, and people moved about with shawls and sweaters wrapped around their ears.

  Other times I have come to Beaumont dripping with sweat and lusting for ice and air-conditioning. Now Beaumont with all its glare of neon signs was what they called froze up. I went through Beaumont at night, or rather in the dark well after midnight. The blue-fingered man who filled my gas tank looked in at Charley and said, “Hey, it’s a dog! I thought you had a nigger in there.” And he laughed delightedly. It was the first of many repetitions. At least twenty times I heard it—“Thought you had a nigger in there.” It was an unusual joke—always fresh—and never Negro or even Nigra, always Nigger or rather Niggah. That word seemed terribly important, a kind of safety word to cling to lest some structure collapse.

  And then I was in Louisiana, with Lake Charles away to the side in the dark, but my lights glittered on ice and glinted on diamond frost, and those people who forever trudge the roads at night were mounded over with cloth against the cold. I dogged it on through La Fayette and Morgan City and came in the early dawn to Houma, which is pronounced Homer and is in my memory one of the pleasantest places in the world. There lives my old friend Doctor St. Martin, a gentle, learned man, a Cajun who has lifted babies and cured colic among the shell-heap Cajuns for miles around. I guess he knows more about Cajuns than anyone living, but I remembered with longing other gifts of Doctor St. Martin. He makes the best and most subtle martini in the world by a process approximating magic. The only part of his formula I know is that he uses distilled water for his ice and distills it himself to be sure. I have eaten black duck at his table—two St. Martin martinis and a brace of black duck with a burgundy delivered from the bottle as a baby might be delivered, and this in a darkened house where the shades have been closed at dawn and the cool night air preserved. At that table with its silver soft and dull, shining as pewter, I remember the raised glass of the grape’s holy blood, the stem caressed by the doctor’s strong artist fingers, and even now I can hear the sweet little health and welcome in the singing language of Acadia which once was French and now is itself. This picture filled my frosty windshield, and if there had been traffic would have made me a dangerous driver. But it was pale yellow frozen dawn in Houma and I knew that if I stopped to pay my respects, my will and my determination would drift away on the particular lotus St. Martin purveys and we would be speaking of timeless matters when the evening came, and another evening. And so I only bowed in the direction of my friend and scudded on toward New Orleans, for I wanted to catch a show of the Cheerleaders.

  Even I know better than to drive a car near trouble, particularly Rocinante, with New York license plates. Only yesterday a reporter had been beaten and his camera smashed, for even convinced voters are reluctant to have their moment of history recorded and preserved.

  So, well on the edge of town I drove into a parking lot. The attendant came to my window. “Man, oh man, I thought you had a nigger in there. Man, oh man, it’s a dog. I see tha
t big old black face and I think it’s a big old nigger.”

  “His face is blue-gray when he’s clean,” I said coldly.

  “Well I see some blue-gray niggers and they wasn’t clean. New York, eh?”

  It seemed to me a chill like the morning air came into his voice. “Just driving through,” I said. “I want to park for a couple of hours. Think you can get me a taxi?”

  “Tell you what I bet. I bet you’re going to see the Cheerleaders.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, I hope you’re not one of those troublemakers or reporters.”

  “I just want to see it.”

  “Man, oh man, you going to see something. Ain’t those Cheerleaders something? Man, oh man, you never heard nothing like it when they get going.”

  I locked Charley in Rocinante’s house after giving the attendant a tour of the premises, a drink of whisky, and a dollar. “Be kind of careful about opening the door when I’m away,” I said. “Charley takes his job pretty seriously. You might lose a hand.” This was an outrageous lie, of course, but the man said, “Yes, sir. You don’t catch me fooling around with no strange dog.”

  The taxi driver, a sallow, yellowish man, shriveled like a chickpea with the cold, said, “I wouldn’t take you more than a couple of blocks near. I don’t go to have my cab wrecked.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “It ain’t is it. It’s can it get. And it can get that bad.”

  “When do they get going?”

  He looked at his watch. “Except it’s cold, they been coming in since dawn. It’s quarter to. You get along and you won’t miss nothing except it’s cold.”

  I had camouflaged myself in an old blue jacket and my British navy cap on the supposition that in a seaport no one ever looks at a sailor any more than a waiter is inspected in a restaurant. In his natural haunts a sailor has no face and certainly no plans beyond getting drunk and maybe in jail for fighting. At least that’s the general feeling about sailors. I’ve tested it. The most that happens is a kindly voice of authority saying, “Why don’t you go back to your ship, sailor? You wouldn’t want to sit in the tank and miss your tide, now would you, sailor?” And the speaker wouldn’t recognize you five minutes later. And the Lion and Unicorn on my cap made me even more anonymous. But I must warn anyone testing my theory, never try it away from a shipping port.