by Studs Terkel
It’s this love, hatred, love, hatred. I hate to think of what the spiritual state of the South would be if all the Negroes moved out of it. The white people there don’t want them—you know, want to keep them, want them in their place—but would be terrified if they left. I really think the bottom of their world would have fallen out.
In the case of Faulkner in “Dry September” and Light in August, or even in The Sound and the Fury, he can really get, you know, as you put it, to the bone. He can get at the truth of what the black-white relationship is in the South, and what a dark force it is in the southern personality. But at the same time, Faulkner as a citizen, as a man, as a citizen of Mississippi, is committed to what Mississippians take to be their past. And it’s one thing for Faulkner to deal with the Negro in his imagination where he can control him, and quite another one for him to deal with him in life, where he can’t control him. And in life, obviously, the uncontrollable Negro is simply—is determined to overthrow everything in which Faulkner imagined himself to believe.
It’s one thing to demand justice in literature and another thing to face the price that one’s got to pay for it in life. And I think another thing about southerners—and I think it’s also true of the nation—is that now no matter how they deny it or what kind of rationalizations they cover it up with, they know the crimes they’ve committed against black people, and they’re terrified of these crimes being committed against them.
The element of guilt, then, is here, too.
Yes.
There’s a point you make, and very beautifully, somewhere in the book Nobody Knows My Name. I forget which one of the essays is involved. In the South, the white man is continuously bringing up the matter of the Negro; in the North, never. So obsessed in one case, and so ignored in the other.
It’s very funny. It’s very funny especially because the results turn out to be, in the case of the Negro’s lot in the world, so very much the same.
But it seems to me it must be absolute torment to be a southerner if you imagine that these people—that one day, you know, one day even Faulkner himself was born, and certainly, when he was born, he was raised by a black woman, probably the model of Dilsey. And one fine day, the child of three or four or five who has been involved with black people on the most intense level and at the most important time in anybody’s life—it suddenly breaks on him like a thundercloud that it’s all taboo. And, of course, since we know that nobody ever recovers, really, from his earliest impressions, the torment that goes on in a southerner who is absolutely forbidden to excavate his beginnings, you know, it seems to me is a key to those terrifying mobs. It isn’t hatred that drives those people in the streets; it’s pure terror.
And perhaps a bit of schizophrenia here, too.
Well, by this time it’s absolutely schizophrenic. And obviously not only in the South, but the South is a very useful example on a personal and social level of what is occurring really in the country. And the sexual paranoia, you know.
Again it is very important to remember what it means to be born in a Protestant, Puritan country with all the taboos which are placed on the flesh, and to have, at the same time, in this country, such a vivid example of a decent imagination, of paganism and the sexual liberty with which white people invest Negroes, you know, and penalize them for.
The very nature of the American heritage. You seem to be just digging into it right now, the combination of Puritanism and paganism both, and the conflict—
Yes, yes, and the terrible tension—
And the tensions that come as a result.
It’s a guilt about the flesh, and in this country the Negro pays for that guilt that white people have about the flesh.
Since you bring up this point—the Negro pays for the guilt that white people have about the flesh—we think, too, about the position of the Negro woman and the Negro man—
My God.
And in this article—you wrote a beautiful article for Tone magazine—you were saying something about the mistress of the house, the white mistress who admires her maid very much. But she speaks of the no-account husband.
No-account husband.
So this brings to mind the matter of what it means to be a Negro male.
It connects with that old, old phrase that Negroes are the last to be hired and the first to be fired. And this does not apply to the Negro maid, particularly, though it can. But it absolutely applies without exception and with great rigor to Negro men.
And one’s got to consider, especially when one begins to talk about this whole theory, the whole tension between violent and nonviolent. The dilemma and the rage and the anguish of a Negro man, who in the first place is forced to accept all kinds of humiliations in his working day; whose power in the world is so slight that he cannot really protect his home, his wife, his children, you know; and then who finds himself out of work, and watches his children growing up menaced in exactly the same way that he has been menaced. When a child is fourteen—when a Negro child is fourteen—he knows the score already. There’s nothing you can do.... And all you can do about it is try—is pray, really, that this will not destroy him.
But the tension this creates within the best of men is absolutely unimaginable—and something this country refuses to imagine—and very, very dangerous. And again, it complicates the sexuality of the country and of the Negro in a hideous way exactly because all Negroes are raised in a kind of matriarchy, since, after all, the wife can go out and wash the white lady’s clothes, and steal little things from the kitchen, you know, and this is the way we’ve all grown up.
Now, this creates another social, psychological problem in what we like to refer to as a subculture, which is a part of the bill which the country’s going to have to pay.
I’m thinking . . .
Bills always do come in; one always has to pay.
There’s always a . . . there’s a phrase Sandburg uses: “Slums always seek their revenge.” In other ways, they do, too.
Yes, they do; yes, they do indeed.
I’m thinking about the matriarchal setup of the Negro family, the Negro life. Even back in the slave days, the underground railway leaders, Harriet Tubman, were the women.
Yeah, yeah. It’s a terrible thing. Negro women have, for generations, raised white children, who sometimes lynched their children, and tried to raise their child like a man, and yet in the full knowledge that if he really walks around like a man, he’s going to be cut down. It’s a terrible kind of dilemma. It’s a terrible price to ask anybody to pay. And in this country Negro women have been paying it for three hundred years, and for a hundred of those years, when they were legally and technically free.
When people talk about time, therefore, you know, I really can’t help but be absolutely, not only impatient, but bewildered. Why should I wait any longer? And in any case, even if I were willing to—which I’m not—how?
The point, you mean, about go slow.
Go slow. Yes.
Go slow; take it easy. Again, there’s a last sentence you have in the Faulkner chapter about how a change—about whatever approach to humanity, to being human beings—it must be now. The moment, you speak of—
It’s always now.
The world we’re living in. We have to make it over, the world we live in. We made the world we live in, but you speak of now; it’s always now.
Time is always now. I think everybody who’s thought about his own life knows this. You know you don’t make resolutions about something you’re going to do next year. No. You decide to write a book? No. The book may be finished twenty years from now, but you’ve got to start it now.
I’m thinking of the subtitle of your book and the position of the Negro woman–Negro man—Notes of a Native Son. Naturally, I immediately think of Richard Wright, who has meant so much to you as an artist and as a man.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
And his short story, you refer to this beautifully here in the chapter “Alas Poor Richard”—one of the t
hree chapters on Richard Wright—“Man of All Work,” in which the husband, to get a job, dresses himself up in his wife’s clothes and hires himself as a cook.
Yeah. It’s a beautiful, terrifying story. And it really gets at something which has been hidden for all these generations, which is the ways in which—It really suggests, more forcibly than anything I’ve read, really, the humiliation the Negro man endures. And it’s this which the country doesn’t want to know.
And therefore, when people talk about the “noble savage,” you know, and the greater sexuality of Negroes and all that jazz, you know—Whereas I know I could name, if we were not on the air, six people who I know, with whom I grew up, six men who are on the needle, just because there is really no . . . the demoralization is so complete. In order to make the act of love, there’s got to be a certain confidence, a certain trust. Otherwise it degenerates into nothing but desperate and featureless brutality.
You’ve spoken of the needle now, and we think, of course, of junkies and we think of narcotics, and here again, perhaps for some the only means of escape from the brutal reality.
Yes, that’s right. That’s right. I knew a boy very well once, who told me, almost in just that many words, that he wasn’t trying to get high he was just trying to hold himself together, you know. He also said, talking about himself walking through one of our cities one morning and the way people looked at him . . . And he said to himself, he told me: You ought to be able to bear me if I can bear you.
What is most appalling about it is that all of these things might not be so terrible if, when facing well-meaning white people, one didn’t realize that they don’t know anything about this at all and don’t want to know. And this, somehow, really is the last drop in a very bitter cup. Because if they don’t know and don’t want to know, then what hope is there?
When people talk to me about the strides that have been made and—all these dreary movies Hollywood keeps turning out about be kind to Negroes today, and isn’t this a good sign, well, of course they’ve never seen these movies with a Negro audience watching them.
What is the reaction?
Well, for example, in The Defiant Ones, a movie which I really cannot say anything about. [Laughs] At the end of that movie, when Sidney, who was very brilliant in it, and who does his best with a rather dreary role—there’s something with it which I wouldn’t believe could have been done. Anyway, at the end of that movie, when Sidney jumps off that train to rescue Tony Curtis—Downtown, I saw it twice deliberately. I saw it downtown in front of a white, liberal audience—I suppose they’re liberal—there was a great sigh of relief and clapping, and I felt that this was a very noble gesture on the part of a very noble black man. And I suppose in a way it was.
I saw it uptown, and Sidney jumps off the train, and there’s a tremendous roar of fury from the audience, with which I must say I agreed, you know. They told Sidney to “get back on the train, you fool.” And in any case, why would he go back to the chain gang when they’re obviously going to be separated again?—a silly Jim Crow chain gang. What’s the movie supposed to prove? What the movie is designed to prove really, to white people, is that Negroes are going to forgive them for their crimes, and that somehow they’re going to escape scot-free.
Now, I myself am not being vengeful when I say this at all, because I would hate to see the nightmare begin all over again with the shoe on the other foot. But I’m talking about a human fact, and the human fact is this: that one can’t escape anything that one’s done. One’s got to pay for it. And you either pay for it willingly or you pay for it unwillingly.
As you say this—and I was thinking of the Negro audience, and “get back on the train, you fool”—we think of two movements happening simultaneously with the Negro in America today: the black Muslim movement and Martin Luther King. And here it seems to be directly connected, doesn’t it?
Yes, precisely. And I must admit that there is a great ambivalence in myself. For example, I’m devoted to King and I’ve worked with CORE and tried to raise money for the freedom riders. And I adore those children; I have tremendous respect for them. And yet, at the same time, in talking to very different people, and somewhat older, and also talking to excellent students who said I simply can’t take it anymore . . . I don’t know.
Let me put it another way. King’s influence is tremendous, but his influence in the North is slight. And the North doesn’t talk about the South. Chicagoans talk about Mississippi as though they had no South Side, and, you know, white people in New York talk about Alabama as though they had no Harlem. And it’s a great device on the part of white people to ignore what’s happening in their own backyard. Now whether, let us say, I were for or against violence, this is absolutely irrelevant.
The question which really obsesses me today is that whether or not I like it, and whether or not you like it, unless this situation is ameliorated, and very, very quickly, there will be violence. There will be violence—and I am as convinced of this as I am that I’m sitting in this chair—one day in Birmingham. And it won’t be the fault of the Negroes in Birmingham; it’s the fault of the administration in Birmingham and the apathy of Washington. It is an intolerable situation, which has been intolerable for one hundred years.
I really cannot tell my nephew or my brother—my nephew is fourteen; my brother is a grown man—I can’t really tell my nephew that when someone hits him he shouldn’t hit back. I really cannot tell him that. Still less can I tell my brother that if someone comes to his house with a gun he should let him in—no—and allow him to do what he wants with his children and his wife. But the point is, even if I were able to tell my brother that he should, there’s absolutely no guarantee that my brother will, and I can’t blame him.
It’s too easy, in another way, for the country to sit in admiration before the sit-in students, because it doesn’t cost them anything. And they have no idea what it costs those kids to go through that, to picket a building, for example, when people upstairs in the building are spitting down on your head or trying to vomit down on you. This is a tremendous amount to demand of people who are technically free, in a free country, which is supposed to be the leader of the West. It seems to me a great cowardice on the part of the public to expect that it’s going to be saved by a handful of children for whom they refuse to be responsible.
And so it is so much more difficult, then, so much more easy, I should say, for a black Muslim speaker to win followers than for Martin Luther King, who is asking so much.
It is always much easier, obviously, to . . . How can I put this? Well, in Harlem, there are meetings every Saturday night; those people are there, listening to those speeches and all kinds of other speeches, because they are in despair, and they don’t believe. And this is the most dangerous thing that has happened. They don’t believe. They’ve been betrayed so often and by so many people, not all of them white, they don’t believe that the country really means what it says, and there is nothing in the record to indicate the country means what it says.
Now, when they’re told that they are better than white people, it is a perfectly inevitable development. You know, if for all these hundreds of years white people are going around saying that they’re better than anybody else, sooner or later they’re bound to create a counterweight to this, especially with Africa on the stage of the world now, which is simply to take the whole legend of Western history, the entire theology, changing one or two pronouns, and transferring from Jerusalem to Islam, and just this small change can turn it all against the white world. And the white world can’t do anything about this, can’t call the Muslim leaders or anybody else on this, until they’re willing to face their own history.
How does all this then connect with a Negro artist, a Negro writer, specifically you, coming out, and to a man who meant so much to you, Richard Wright? That is, again, coming back to Wright’s chapter, he escaped. He spoke of Paris as a refuge, but you looked upon it as a sort of way station for yourself.
W
ell, in the beginning, I looked upon Paris as a refuge, too; I never intended to come back to this country.
I lived there so long, though, and I got to know a great deal about Paris, and I suppose that several things happened to me. One of them was watching American Negroes there who had dragged Mississippi, so to speak, across the ocean with them, and are operating now in a vacuum. I myself, you know, carried all my social habits to Paris with me, where they were not needed, where it took me a long time to learn how to do without them. And this complex frightened me very much.
