by Studs Terkel
Consider this. Who have been more patriotic, more devoted to the service of our country in a pinch than those most often condemned by the righteous? Whom did the CIA call upon when, it was felt, our national security was endangered? When harsh measures were demanded, such as the doing in of Fidel Castro, it wasn’t your Boston Brahmin or Texas cowboy whose services were requested. It was Momo Giancana, one of the jewels in our city’s crown. That he failed was no fault of his disciplined upbringing. And whom did Mayor Daley most often call upon for political support on our city’s West Side? Aldermen and ward committeemen, of all ethnic groups, who are faithful mourners of the funerals of some of my more distinguished fellow alumni. And who can ever forget the moving plea of Al Capone, dying in Alcatraz: “Set me free and I’ll help you fight the Bolsheviks”? Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.
A profound sense of loyalty extends to friends as well as to country. When one is in trouble, whether with officialdom (something quite easily resolved; cash in hand, preferably brand-new bills, turneth away such wrath) or with matters of the heart (being cuckolded), he can depend on a small circle of friends.
So is it with Barney, outside Dreamland, on this night in 1924. As Ben calls out, “Kid!” I move toward him uncertainly. The back door of the automobile is open. The two strangers appear to be urging him in. “Hiya, Ben,” I say, for want of anything better. “How ya doin’?” The others see me for the first time. I have a natural tendency to blend into any background.
“Who’re you?” the big one says, slightly puzzled.
“I’m his brother.”
“Beat it.”
“He’s s’posed to be buyin’ me a malted.”
“He ain’t buyin’ ya nothin’.”
“It’s Friday night,” I say, apropos of nothing. I’m trembling.
“Yeah,” says Ben. His voice is shaking. “A chocolate malted at Liggett’s. It’s the best in town, fellas.”
The driver leans back against the seat. He sighs. “Are we goin’ or not?”
“Let’s take him too,” says the short one.
“Are you nuts?” counters the big one.
“Aw, Christ,” moans the chauffeur. “Make up your mind.”
“Where’s Barney?”
“He’s gone off with his pig.”
They look at one another. What’s to be done? Should I suggest we all go for a malted? Always, I’ve been in favor of peaceful solutions.
“My mother is sick,” I blurt out.
“Too bad,” says the big one.
“She’s callin’ for Ben. That’s why I came to get him.”
The big one turns to my brother. “Is that your name?” Ben nods quickly. About five times.
“OK, Ben. Get the fuck out of here. If we ever catch you foolin’ around with our women, you’re gonna wind up in the drainage canal. All wrapped in cement. Y’unnerstan’?”
Ben understands.
“Yer lucky you got a little brother.”
Ben nods.
“An’ yer lucky yer mother’s sick.”
Ben nods.
The big one reaches toward his inside pocket, smiles, and says, “Run!” Ben and I take off. We hear laughter as we run and run and run, without once looking back.
Exhausted, we lean against a fence gate. Ben touches my cheek. He pats me on the head. We walk. I reach for his hand. It is cold and sweaty. Mine is too. It is the final scene from The Bicycle Thief. He is the humiliated father and I am the small boy, Bruno Ricci.
Rome, 1962. Vittorio De Sica is seated in his office. His classic face betrays weariness. I observe we’re within hailing distance of the balcony from which Il Duce addressed multitudes. He smiles. He quotes Baudelaire on Napoleon: A dictator is not as dangerous alive as when he lives on after death.
“You had your sorry period,” he says. “McCarthyism. We had a bad one after the war.” Closet Fascists gave him a hard time. They were in high circles of government.
Once a matinee idol, he still acts in films, too many of which are bad ones. Reason: He must raise much of his own money to finance the ones he directs. It is better now, but in the beginning the government was intransigent. They abhorred his chosen themes.
Shoe Shine: homeless boys, rootless, roaming streets. The Bicycle Thief: unemployment. The Roof: housing. Umberto D: indigent old age. Miracle in Milan: a fable of the poor.
“I’ve lost all my money on these films. They are not commercial. But I’m glad to lose it this way. To have for a souvenir of my life pictures like Umberto D and The Bicycle Thief.”
The Bicycle Thief is one of my all-time favorites, I tell him. It has affected my life in ways I cannot quite explain. He tells how he chose a simple workingman, a non-actor, as the father. How he began filming without having cast the boy. He had auditioned scores. He was looking for a kid with “human” eyes and a strange, funny little face. As the shooting begins, a crowd gathers. “I see a boy near me. A miracle. ‘Why are you here?’ I say to him. ‘I’m watchin’,’ he says. ‘What is your name?’ ‘Enzo Staiola.’ How old are you?’ ‘Five.’ ‘Would you like to make a picture with me?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Enter. Go.’ ” De Sica laughs.
“Bruno Ricci,” I mumble. “That kid was marvelous.”
De Sica looks at me. His face softens. “You remember the name?”
“Sure.”
“I am so grateful. It is very emotional to me that an American can remember the name of a little boy like Bruno.”
“Mr. De Sica,” I say, “I saw the movie twelve times, for God’s sake.” And for mine, too.
As a farewell token, he offers a poem by the Neapolitan Salvatore di Giacomo. He shuts his eyes and recites. It is a letter to a lost youth and lost love. I don’t understand a word. Why then do I weep?
Ben and I stumble toward Dixieland. The vacant room is not occupied that night; nor for many nights to follow. At least, not by Ben.
JAMES BALDWIN, 1961
[OPENS WITH PIANO and Bessie Smith singing]When it rained five days and the sky turned dark as night, Then trouble’s taking place in the low lands at night.
I woke up this morning, can’t even get out of my door. There’s enough trouble to make a poor girl wonder where she wanna go.
Then they rowed a little boat about five miles ’cross the pond.
Then they rowed a little boat about five miles ’cross the pond.
I packed all my clothes so the men, they rolled me along.
When it thunders and lightning and the wind begins to blow.
When it thunders and lightning and the wind begins to blow.
There’s thousands of people ain’t got no place to go.
Then I went and stood up on some high old lonesome hill.
Then I went and stood up on some high old lonesome hill.
Then looked down on the house where I used to live.
Backwater blues done caused me to pack my things and go.
Backwater blues done caused me to pack my things and go.
’Cause my house fell down and I can’t live there no more.
Mmmm . . . I can’t move no more.
Mmmm . . . I can’t move no more.
There ain’t no place for a poor old girl to go.
Of course, Miss Bessie’s song is a familiar one today, in the year 2008. Though it was written in 1927, and brought here in 1961 by Baldwin, it’s telling us about the recent catastrophe Katrina. We know what happened to the lowlands, Gentilly, and the Lower Ninth Ward in August of 2005. It’s an old story with a new refrain.
Bessie sang of it years ago, and Baldwin remembered it in the Swiss Alps, to which he had exiled himself for several years. Bessie Smith, of course, the em press of the blues, singing of a disaster, of a flood.
Sitting with me, hearing Bessie Smith on this recording, is James Baldwin, one of the rare men in the world who seems to know who he is today. As you listen to this record of Bessie Smith, what’s your feeling?
It’s ve
ry hard to describe that feeling. Um . . . [He sighs.] It’s a—
The first time I ever heard this record was in Europe, under very different circumstances than I’d ever listened to Bessie in New York. And what struck me was the fact that she was singing, as you say, about a disaster that had almost killed her. And she’d accepted it and was going—beyond it. It’s a fantastic kind of understatement in it. It’s the way I want to write, you know. When she says, “My house fell down and I can’t live there no more.” It’s a great—sentence; it’s a great—achievement.
The way you want to write, you say. I’m looking now at page five of your new book, and it’s a remarkable one: Nobody Knows My Name. It’s a series of essays, articles, opinions of James Baldwin. More Notes of a Native Son, the subtitle.
And on page five—the reason I’ve chosen the Bessie Smith record—because on page five you write of your being in Europe; you were in Switzerland.
Yes.
And you said you came armed with two Bessie Smith records and a typewriter: “And I began to try to re-create the life that I had first known as a child and from which I’d spent so many years in flight. And it was Bessie Smith who, through her tone and her cadence, helped me dig back to the way I myself must have spoke when I was little. And I remember the things I had heard and seen and felt; I buried them deep.” “I had never”—and here’s the part—“I had never listened to Bessie Smith in America (in the same way that, for years, I never touched watermelon). But in Europe, I reconciled myself.”
Yes, well, how can I put that? That winter in Switzerland, I was working on my first novel, which I thought I would never be able to finish. And I finally realized, in Europe, that one of the reasons that I couldn’t finish this novel was that I was ashamed of where I’d come from and where I’d been. And ashamed of life in the church, and ashamed of my father, and ashamed of the blues, and ashamed of jazz, and of course ashamed of watermelon. Because it was, you know, all of these stereotypes that the country afflicts on Negroes: that we all eat watermelon; that we all do nothing but sing the blues and all that.
Well, I was afraid of all that and I ran from it. And when I say I was trying to dig back to the way I myself must have spoken when I was little, I realized that I had acquired so many affectations, I had told myself so many lies, that I really had buried myself beneath a whole fantastic image of myself which wasn’t mine, but white people’s image of me. And I realized that I had not always talked—obviously I hadn’t always talked the way I had forced myself to learn how to talk. And I had to find out what I had been like in the beginning. And in order, just technically then, to re-create Negro speech, I realized it was a cadence, it was a beat much more than . . . It was not a question of dropping Ss or Ns or Gs, but a question of the beat, really. And Bessie had the beat, you know.
And in this icy wilderness, as far removed from Harlem as anything you can imagine, with Bessie Smith and me, I began—
And white snow.
And white snow, and white mountains, and white faces who really thought I was—I had been sent by the devil. It was a very strange . . . They had never seen a Negro before. And in this kind of isolation—it’s very hard to describe—I managed to finish the book. And I played Bessie every day. And really, literally—this may sound strange—a lot of the book is in dialogue, and I corrected things according to . . . what I was able to hear when Bessie . . . sang and when James P. Johnson played. It’s that tone and that sound, you know, jazz, which is in me.
The point you made a moment ago—the point you were speaking of—the sense of shame. Did you sense this? The sense of shame of a heritage that is so rich, in accepting the white man’s stereotype of yourself.
I’m afraid it’s one of the great dilemmas, one of the great psychological hazards of being an American Negro. And in fact it’s much more than that. I’ve seen a great many people go under, and everyone, every Negro in America, is in some way, one way or another, menaced by it.
One’s born in a white country, in a white, Protestant, Puritan country, where one was once a slave; where all the standards and all the images that you open your—When you open your eyes in the world, everything you see—none of it applies to you. You go to white movies, you know, and like everybody else you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the good guys who are killing off the Indians. And it comes as a great psychological collision when you begin to realize all of these things are really metaphors for your oppression and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish.
I was born in a church, for example, and my father was a very religious and righteous man. But, of course we were in Harlem. We lived in a terrible house, and downstairs from us there were, you know, all these, what my father called “goodtime” people. There was a prostitute and all of her paramours and all that jazz. I remember I loved this woman. She was very nice to us. But we weren’t really allowed to go to her house, and if we went there we were beaten for it. And when I was older, that whole odor of gin, you know, homemade gin, really, and pig’s feet and chitterlings and poverty, and the basement.
All of this got terribly mixed up together in mind with the whole holy roller–white God business, and I really began to go a little out of my mind, because I obviously wasn’t white, and it wasn’t even a question so much of wanting to be white, but I didn’t quite know anymore what being black meant. I couldn’t accept what I’d been told. And all you’re ever told in this country about being black is that it’s a terrible, terrible thing to be.
Now, in order to survive this you have to really dig down into yourself and re-create yourself, really, according to no image which yet exists in America, you know. You have to impose, in fact—this may sound very strange—you have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you and not this idea of you.
You have to decide who you are, whether you are black or white. Who you are.
Who you are. And that pressure, the question of being black or white, is robbed of its power. I mean you can still, of course, be beaten up on the South Side by . . . anybody. The social menace does not lessen. But in some way it is a world now which perhaps can destroy you physically, but the danger of your destroying yourself has not vanished, but is minimized.
The name of the book, if we may—this is directly connected—Nobody Knows My Name. For years, you, when I think of you, are known as James. Never known as James Baldwin. Home James, sometimes called George—In the old days Sam—
Boy.
Or sometimes boy.
Sometimes. [Small laugh]
Nobody Knows My Name. Why did you choose that title?
Well, at the risk of sounding pontifical, it’s at once . . . I suppose it’s a fairly bitter title, but it’s also meant as a kind of warning to my country. In the days when people—well, in the days when people called me boy, those days haven’t passed, except that I didn’t answer then, and I don’t answer now.
To be a Negro in this country is really just . . . never to be looked at. And what white people see when they look at you is not really you . . .
Invisible—
You’re invisible. What they do see in you when they look at you is what they have invested you with. And what they have invested you with is all the agony, and the pain, and the danger, and the passion, and the torment, you know, sin, death, and hell, of which everyone in this country is terrified. You represent a level of experience which Americans deny. And I think—this may sound mystical—but I think it is very easily proven, you know.
It’s proven in great relief in the South when you consider the extraordinary price, the absolutely prohibitive price, the South has paid to keep the Negro in his place. And they have not succeeded in doing that, but have succeeded in having what is almost certainly a most bewildered and demoralized white population in the Western World. And on another level you can see in the life of the country, not only in the South, what a terrible price the country has paid for this effort to keep a distance betw
een themselves and black people.
It was . . . In the same way, for example, it is very difficult, it is hazardous, psychologically—personally hazardous—for a Negro in this country really to hate white people, because he is too involved with them, not only socially, but historically. And no matter who says what, in fact, Negroes and whites in this country are related to each other. You know, half the black families of the South are related to the judges and the lawyers and the white families of the South. They are cousins, and kissing cousins at that, at least kissing cousins. Now, this is a terrible, terrible depth of involvement.
It’s easy for an African to hate the invader and drive him out of Africa. But it is very difficult for an American Negro to do this—obviously cannot do this with white people; there’s no place to drive them. This is a country which belongs equally to us both. And one’s got to learn to live together here or else there won’t be any country.
This matter of living together, or this ambivalent attitude that the South has toward the Negro, and the ambivalence perhaps is most eloquently expressed, tragically expressed in the life, the sayings of William Faulkner, the brilliant American novelist who writes a remarkable stor y, “Dry September,” in which he seems to analyze the malaise. At the same time, he himself makes comments that are shocking. You have a chapter in your book dealing with Faulkner and desegregation. And is it this ambivalence too, that—
