The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings

by James Baldwin

  What can we do? Well, I am tired. I personally am tired of the double-talk about Governor John Patterson’s* freedom to beat me up. Now it is time to create new standards. It is impossible to take seriously a country which will allow a hillbilly to overturn the government of the United States, at the very same time that this very government puts in jail people who take the Fifth Amendment. And really, it is scarcely a question whether Carl Braden,† for example, or John Patterson more menaces the future of this democracy.

  I don’t know how it will come about, but I know that no matter how it comes about, it will be bloody; it will be hard. I still believe that we can do with this country something that has not been done. We are misled here because we think of numbers. You don’t need numbers; you need passion. And this is proven by the history of the world.

  The tragedy of this country now is that most of the people who say they care about it do not care. What they care about is their safety and their profits. What they care about is not rocking the boat. What they care about is the continuation of white supremacy, so that white liberals who are with you in principle will move out when you move in. Now when this is challenged, bitter tears come to their eyes, and they say to you, “You sound as if you think white people don’t have any decency.” Well, this is much too simple. That is not the question. The question here is how long can Americans believe that the rest of the world, including me, will take the will for the deed. If the country means what it says, why is the question which ends every argument “Would you let your sister marry him?” Why would I want to marry her?

  I’m trying to suggest that in this long and terrifying history, something has happened to the country far worse than what has happened to the Negroes. People are always consoling me by pointing out that if one thinks of this country as an enormous hall, well, everybody got here, and they had to stand in line, and you know that by and by, standing in line, I’ll get to the banquet table too. Well, of course, I got here first, and I helped to cook the food. But leaving that question aside, it has not occurred to anyone yet that the people at the table are starving to death.

  People talk about what we can do to aid Africa, and this is, again, a kind of new paternalism. I don’t know what we can do to aid Africa or Latin America or Asia. But I do know what this source can do for us. They will survive with our help or without it. They are really our opportunity. We have been smothered, and really, let’s not talk about the public life which mirrors it, but only consider, consider the private life. Consider what is happening in those streets today to our young. To all our young. How is it that this country can only produce so demoralized a generation? And this generation is imitating its elders. They are doing what they have seen their elders do. And what their elders have been doing since they have been on earth is taking nothing seriously. Now there are some things which must be taken seriously. The nation that doesn’t take them seriously, the person who doesn’t take them seriously, can only perish.

  Now I’m here too. I am an American too. I would like to see this peculiar dialogue ended. I really would like to see Governor John Patterson, or the governor of Mississippi, told what to do and put in jail if he doesn’t do it. There is a great captive Negro population here, which is well publicized but not well known. And what is not publicized, and what is not known at all, is that there is a great captive white population here too. No one has pointed out yet with any force that if I am not a man here, you are not a man here. You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves. And furthermore, you give me a terrifying advantage.

  You give me this advantage: that whereas you have never had to look at me, because you’ve sealed me away along with sin and hell and death and all the other things you didn’t want to look at, including love, my life was in your hands, and I had to look at you. I know more about you, therefore, than you know about me. I’ve had to spend my life, after all—and all the other Negroes in the country have had to spend their lives—outwitting and watching white people. I had to know what you were doing before you did it. People talk about the new Negro, but he’s been coming for three hundred years. The country thinks he’s new because they’ve never had to look at him before. And they are looking at him now, not because there’s been a change of heart, but only because they must.

  It was never the intention of England or France or Portugal, or any of the colonial powers, to raise the colonial people to their level. No matter what they say now about highways and hospitals and penicillin, whatever was done in those colonies was not done for the natives. And the Belgians may not know this, but the natives do. What happened was very simple. You cannot walk into a country and stay there as long as the Europeans did and dig coal and iron and gold out of the earth and use it for yourself. Put all the natives in one place and have them working for you, and have a European sector where only Europeans live. By and by, it’s inevitable that someone will make a connection between the machines you have and the power you have. And from there, it’s just a matter of detail. Now the details can be bloody, or they can be less so; they will in any case be difficult.

  We in this country now—and it really is one minute to twelve—can really turn the tide because we have an advantage that Europe does not have, and we have an advantage that Africa does not have, if we could face it. Black and white people have lived together here for generations, and now for centuries. Now, on whether or not we face these facts everything depends.

  (1961)

  *Senator James Oliver Eastland (1904–1986) represented the state of Mississippi in the United States Senate briefly in 1941 and later from 1943 until 1978. He was a vocal opponent of civil rights legislation.

  *John Malcolm Patterson (b. 1921) was governor of Alabama from 1959 to 1963, some of the most turbulent years of the civil rights movement in Alabama.

  †Carl (1914–1975) and Anne (1924–2006) Braden were journalists and anti-segregation activists based in Kentucky. In 1958 Carl Braden refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was sentenced to a year in prison. He served nine months, and was released in 1962 after Martin Luther King Jr. pushed for clemency in his case.

  Theater: The Negro In and Out

  IT IS A SAD FACT that I have rarely seen a Negro actor really well used on the American stage or screen, or on television. I am not trying to start an artificial controversy when I say this, for in fact most American performers seem to find themselves trapped very soon in an “iron maiden” of mannerisms.

  Somehow, the achieved record falls below the promise. Henry Fonda, for example, is one of the most accomplished actors around, but I find it very difficult to watch him because most of the roles he plays do not seem to me to be worth doing.

  Moreover, it would seem to me that his impulse as an actor is very truthful; but the roles he plays are not. His physical attributes, and his quality of painful, halting honesty are usually at the mercy of some mediocre playwright’s effort to justify the bankruptcy of the American male, e.g., the nebbish with whom he so gallantly struggles in Two for the Seesaw.

  The point is that one can attend the Broadway theater, and most of the Off-Broadway theater all season long without ever being moved, or terrified, or engaged.

  The spectacle on the stage does not attempt to re-create our experience—thus helping us to deal with it. The attempt is almost always in the opposite direction: to justify our fantasies, thus locking us within them.

  Now, the figure of the Negro is at the very heart of the American confusion. Much of the American confusion, if not most of it, is a direct result of the American effort to avoid dealing with the Negro as a man. The theater cannot fail to reflect this confusion, with results which are unhealthy for the white actor, and disastrous for the Negro.

  The character a white actor is called on to play is usually a wishful fantasy: the person, not as he is, but as he would like to see himself. It need scarcely be said, therefore, that the situations the playwright invents f
or this person have as their principal intention the support of this fantasy.

  The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, A Majority of One, Tea and Sympathy, and Tall Story are all utterly untruthful plays. The entire purpose of the prodigies of engineering skill expanded on them is to make the false seem true. And this cannot fail, finally, to have a terrible effect on the actor’s art, for the depths out of which true inspiration springs are precisely the depths he is forbidden to reach.

  I am convinced that this is one of the reasons for the nerve-wracking busyness of our stage—“Keep moving, maybe nobody will notice that nothing’s happening”—and the irritating, self-indulgent mannerisms of so many of our actors. In search of a truth which is not in the script, they are reduced to what seem to be psychotherapeutic exercises.

  Listening to actors talk about the means they employ to “justify” this line, or that action, is enough to break the heart and set the teeth on edge. Sometimes the actor finds that no amount of skill will “justify” or cover up the hollowness or falsity of what he is called on to do. This is where the director comes in: it would seem that much of his skill involves keeping everything moving at such a clip, and to have so many things happening at once, that the audience will remain, in effect, safely protected from the play.

  If this is true for the white actor, it is unimaginably worse for the Negro actor. The characters played by white actors, however untruthful they may essentially be, do depend on the accumulation of small, very carefully observed detail. Thus, Chester Morris, playing a thoroughly unreal father in Blue Denim, yet mimics the type so well that it is easy to be misled into believing that you once knew someone like him. But the characters played by Negro actors do not have even this advantage. White people do not know enough about Negro life to know which details to look for, or how to interpret such details as may have been forced on their attention.

  To take one of the many possible examples: the scene in Reginald Rose’s Black Monday, in which Juano Hernández is beaten to death. Hernández plays a janitor in the Deep South, you will remember, who is opposed to integration. He does not believe—so he informs a marvelously mocking and salty Hilda Simms—in pushing himself in “where he is not wanted.” He is also telling this to his twelve-year-old grandson, who is beginning (somewhat improbably) to wonder if he is as good as white people.

  Now, of course, we have all met such janitors and such Negroes. But their tone is very different and their tone betrays what they really feel. However servile they may appear to be, there is always a murderous rage, or a murderous fear, or both, not quite sleeping at the very bottom of their hearts and minds. The truth is that they do not have any real respect for white people: they despise them and they fear them. They certainly do not trust them. And when such a man confronts his nephew or his grandson, no matter what he says, there cannot fail to be brought alive in him envy and terror and love and hate. He has always hated his condition, even though he feared to change it, even though he may no longer be able to admit it.

  If the playwright does not know this—as, on the evidence, I gather Mr. Rose did not—he cannot draw the character truthfully, and the actor who plays him is seriously handicapped.

  This shows very painfully in the scene in which Hernández meets his death. His reaction to the effigy of a hanged Negro, in spite of all Mr. Hernández’s skill, is false. This is not the first time he has seen such an effigy, and if he has been living in that town all his life, it is simply not possible for the white people there to surprise him—at least, they cannot surprise him by being wicked or by being afraid. They have always been that, and he knows that about them, if he knows nothing else. Any Negro facing, in such a town, three overheated white boys knows what he is in for.

  He can try to outwit, flatter, cajole them, put them at their ease by humiliating himself—though at this point, the spectacle of his humiliation is probably not enough to set them at their ease; or if the chips are really, at last, thank heaven, down, he can resolve to take one of them with him. And even if all the foregoing guesswork is wrong, one thing remains indisputable: once attacked, he would certainly not be trying to get past his attackers in order to go to work. Not on that morning, not in that school, not with death staring at him out of the eyes of three young white men.

  All of the training, therefore, all of the skill which Mr. Hernández has acquired, to say nothing of his talent—for it took a vast amount of talent to bring Lucas, in Intruder in the Dust, alive—is here not merely wasted, which would be bad enough; it is subverted, sabotaged, put at the mercy of a lie; for the wellspring on which the actor must draw, which is his own sense of life, and his own experience, is precisely, here, what Mr. Hernández cannot use. If he had, it would have torn the scene to pieces, and altered the course of the play. For the play’s real intention, after all, is to say something about the integration struggle without saying anything about the root of it.

  If you will examine the play carefully, you will find that the only really wicked people in the play are wicked because they are insane. They are covered, therefore, and the crimes of the Republic are hidden. If we get rid of all these mad people, the play seems to be saying, “We’ll get together and everything will be all right.” The realities of economics, sex, politics, and history are thus swept under the rug.

  Now the Negro actor, after all, is also a person and was not born two seconds before he enters the casting office. By the time he gets to that office, he has probably been an elevator boy, a cab driver, a dishwasher, a porter, a longshoreman. His blood is already thick with humiliations, and if he has any sense at all, he knows how small are his chances of making it in the theater. He does a great deal of acting in the casting office—more, probably, than he will ever be allowed to do onstage. And, whatever his training, he is not there to get a role he really wants to play: he is there to get a role which will allow him to be seen.

  It is all too likely that he has seen actors inferior to himself in training and talent rise far above him. And now here he is, once more, facing an essentially ignorant and uncaring white man or woman, who may allow him to play a butler or a maid in the show being cast. He dissembles his experience in the office, and he knows that he will probably be lying about it onstage. He also knows why; it is because nobody wants to know the story. It would upset them. To begin analyzing all of his probable reactions would take all of the space of this magazine, and then some. But resentment is compounded by the fact, as a Negro actress once observed to me, that not only does the white world impose the most intolerable conditions on Negro life, they also presume to dictate the mode, manner, terms, and style of one’s reaction against these conditions.

  Or, as a Negro playwright tells it, explaining how Ketti Frings came to adapt Richard Wright’s Long Dream for the stage: “She was sitting by this swimming pool, see, and reading this book, and she thought, ‘This would make a perfectly darling play.’

  “So she wrote the first few scenes and called out her Negro butler, chauffeur, and maid, and read it to them and asked, ‘Now, isn’t that the way you poor, downtrodden colored people feel about things?’ ‘Why, yes, Miss Frings,’ they answered; and ‘I thought so,’ says the playwright.”—And so we go on. And on and on.

  The point of this introductory column—for the readers of the Urbanite will be hearing a great deal from me—is that the theater is perishing for the lack of vitality. Vitality, humanly and artistically speaking, has only one source, and that source is life. Now, the life actually being led on this continent is not the life which we pretend it is. White men are not what they take themselves to be, and Negroes are very different—to say the very least—from the popular image of them.

  This image must be cracked, not only if we are to achieve a theater—for we do not really have a theater now, only a series of commercial speculations which result in mammoth musicals, and “daring” plays like Compulsion and Inherit the Wind, which are about as daring as a spayed tomcat—this image must be cracked if we intend to s
urvive as a nation. The Negro-in-America is increasingly the central problem in American life, and not merely in social terms, in personal terms as well.

  I intend, from time to time, in discussing the theater, to return to this point, for I think the time has come to begin a bloodless revolution. Only by a more truthful examination of what is really happening here can we realize the real aims of the theater, which are to instruct through terror and pity and delight and love. The only thing we can now do for the “tired businessman” is to scare the living daylights out of him.

  Both the Albee plays at the York Theatre—The Death of Bessie Smith and The American Dream—left me rather waiting for the other shoe to fall. Both plays seemed to promise more than they delivered; but I am not at all certain that I know what it is that they promised. This is not, by the way, meant as a complaint or as a joke. I don’t mind—in the theater, at any rate—having my cozy expectations swept out from under me; and I’m the type that enjoys being forced to ask myself just what the author had in mind. I was hardly ever moved “to the heart,” as we say, by either of the Albee plays, but I was mystified, enraged, amused, and horrified. I don’t know if you will like them or not, but I think you ought to see them.

  To take the plays in the order in which they were presented: The Death of Bessie Smith takes place in the Deep South, much of it in a thoroughly demoralizing hospital. There is not a single attractive person in this play, unless one excepts the offstage Bessie Smith, and the good-natured but simple-minded type who takes her on the journey which ends in her death.