Part 6

I do not wish to push this too far, but there can be little doubt that integration is a practical concern latent in our modern world. It is no preposterous idealism offered merely in contravention of a prevailing view and practices that are working for most men. The simple truth is that the prevailing practices are not working for most men. While at the same time his conscience is disturbed by this fact, Western man is so fixed in the once-comfortable conviction of his own superiority that he seems powerless to change the practices that support his conviction. This is a fault of his adolescence. It is a cavalier unconcern for his lack of knowledge of others. It is an inability to understand the world society of which he is a part. “World society” is no longer a metaphysical abstraction. It is very real, very concrete. It is real enough to have reduced the margin for national initiative in the conduct of internal affairs. It is no longer possible for the United States to keep the differences she has made between the races—and embedded in law and custom—without making a fundamental denial of what she professes before the world to stand for and to fight for, the entity of mankind.

12

Perhaps I make too much of this, and perhaps I am overwrought and unreasonable about it. I must confess that there flit across my mind, like stones skipped on the surface of water (only to sink into it), thoughts of my sons. There are moments when I am sentimental enough to hope that history is a necessary progress toward better things and that frustrations of the human spirit grow less and less. I know better. But I have such hopes when my sons are involved, and I am inclined to support them intemperately.

It does not serve merely to shrug one’s shoulders and carp about the psychic traumas that bedevil American man. At least it did not do seven years ago, when my older son was eight and my younger not yet born. And now that my younger is himself almost seven, it still will not do. Argument does not exactly serve either, although I think I argue for something eminently sane. It is simplicity. I argue the substitution of spontaneous, instinctive responses for the deliberate responses based, as I have said above, on unchanging ideas and ideals. It seems to me that the old rules—evoked as they were out of the utmost confusion of morality and social expedience, and deliberate ignorance—are not only unnecessarily complicated for modern times and people, but that they are progressively unsuitable to modern ways of living, to the advance of knowledge, to technology, and (surely everyone will allow this) to one-worldness. Make the rules simple enough and we can play the hardest game.

What happened to my older son (and also to my younger son just recently, though not in circumstances so distressing nor in details so graphic) was that while he was playing the game with all the exuberance of an eight-year-old, somebody “complicated up” the rules. I remember distinctly how it happened.

For several weeks while my wife was with child it was my unaccustomed duty to “make the marketing,” as it is so quaintly put in the upper South. Our market was a co-op on the highway just outside town, in the heart of one of those neat and monotonous residential communities that seemed to spring up everywhere in the 1940’s. My wife loved the place. It was convenient; its stock was excellent; and its prices generally somewhat lower than in the chain groceries. Besides, it had a Negro (a colleague and friend) on its board of directors, and, as a second novel attraction, it employed several Negroes—at least one as clerk and another as butcher. The co-op’s atmosphere, unlike that of the chain’s, was friendly, warm, leisurely. My wife supposed it was because of the neighborhood—a better-than-average middle-class neighborhood, segregated of course, of aircraft designers, engineers and other technological experts and a scattering of armed-service personnel (no one lower than a lieutenant in the Navy or a captain in the Army, it seemed) from the various military installations close by. As one of the charter stockholders, I was determined to love the place too.

Friday was market day. Until her condition prevented her going, my wife’s eager companion on these expeditions was our son. Sometime in the spring he had struck up a friendship at the co-op and he anticipated its weekly renewal with pleasurable excitement. The first time I took him there I saw the revival of the fraternity with quickened heart. My son burst through the door ahead of me, stopped, looked down the first aisle (fresh fruits and vegetables), ran to the second and looked, and then suddenly let out an Indian whoop—“Reggie!”—and got one for an answer—“Conway!” And then I saw a handsome dark-haired, dark-eyed boy of about Conway’s age break from the side of a young Negro girl and come bursting up the aisle between the high-stacked shelves of brightly packaged foods toward my son. They stood looking at each other for a moment, then they came together, each with an arm around the shoulder of the other, and exploded off to play outside among the cars until market was made. I looked at the uniformed Negro girl and she smiled and I smiled, and that was that.

It was that way for four or five weeks—Conway and Reggie met each other with what seemed the force of projectiles and went skyrocketing off. Leaving the market, I would find them outside, hot and happy playing at some impossible game.

Then one Friday, Reggie (we never learned his last name) was not there with the Negro maid. His guardian this time was a man—a tall, handsome person, about forty, I judged, who in spite of the Phi Beta Kappa key slung across his flat stomach, looked outdoorsy and virile. The boys came together as usual and went outside as usual, but the man’s marketing must have been nearly done, for before I could finish picking out the heaviest, juiciest oranges, Conway was back with me again. “Where’s Reggie?” I asked him. “He had to go,” he said. “His daddy was in a hurry.” But already he was looking forward to the next week.

The uniformed maid was with Reggie again the next week, but this time when Conway let out his customary whoop, there was no vocal answer. Reggie turned, it seemed to me with momentary eagerness, but there was no yell and rush. He approached very slowly. He was smiling weakly, but that smile died as he came. Perhaps sensing that something was wrong, Conway himself now hesitated. “What’s the matter?” he asked Reggie. “Come on, man, let’s go. Don’t you want to play?”

“I can’t play with you,” Reggie said.

“What’s the matter, are you sick?” Conway wanted to know.

“I just can’t play with you any more,” Reggie said.

Conway moved a fraction closer to me, clutched the handle of the food cart I was pushing. The maid stood at some distance, pretending not to watch. The pleasant-voiced, pleasant-faced shoppers of the neighborhood flowed around us. Other children, younger, skittered and yelled up and down the aisles. The compacted odors of fresh pastry, of ground coffee, of fruits and vegetables, and the colors of all these were as ever. But a chill was beginning to form around my heart. Before Conway asked the next question, I knew the answer that was coming. I did not know the words of it, but I knew the feel—the iron that he would not be prepared for; the corrosive rust that it would make in his blood and that, unless I was skillful—as my father was not—I could never draw off. At that moment—no, before the moment of the answer I wanted to pick Conway up and hold him hard against me and ward off the demoralizing blow that might be struck for a lifetime. But I could not forfend it even by grasping my son by the hand and walking off in another direction. I was transfixed.

“Why?”

Reggie scowled then, a grimace that was not really ugly yet, because it was associated only with words and not with feeling. That would come later, and the word would be made flesh, and the flesh would be his forever. Now the scowl was only imitation.

“Because you’re a nigger, that’s why,” Reggie said.

Conway looked at me wonderingly, not feeling hurt, as they say a man knowing himself shot but still without pain will look with surprise.

“I’m better than you,” Reggie said, “’cause my father said so.”

“You are not,” Conway said, but I thought he shrank a little against me.

“No, son, he isn’t,” I said.

“I am so, too,” Reggie said, looking at both of us. Words were beginning to arouse emotion and link with emotion. The sneer was no longer imitation. He stood bearing his weight on his left foot, his hands in the pockets of his khaki shorts, the whiteness of him showing in a streak just below the hairline, the rest of him—bare trunk, bare legs—tanned almost to the color of my son.

“No, son,” I said, as much to the one as to the other. I think I felt sorry for Reggie too. I do now at any rate, thinking back.

“You are not,” Conway said, and straightened. “My daddy says you aren’t.”

“You don’t go to my school, you don’t go to my church, you don’t go to the movies I go to. I bet you never even seen Tim Holt,” he put in parenthetically, “and that’s because you’re not good enough. Yah-yah!” Reggie said. “Niggers work for us, niggers work for us, you’re a nigger and Trixie’s a nigger and Trixie works for us.” It was a shrilling singsong. “Yah-yah nigger nigger, go peddle your papers, nigger!” With this he ran off, back, I suppose, to Trixie, who worked for him because she was a nigger.

Conway did not cry, but in his eyes was the look of a wound, and I knew how it could grow, become infected and pump its poison to every tissue, to every brain cell. He stayed close to me while I made market. On the way home, he said savagely, “I hate this car!”

It did not seem like any kind of entree to what I knew I must talk about, and the sooner the better. When what happened to him happens it makes a nasty wound which demands immediate attention. You want a knife to do the job quickly, deftly, cleanly, but the only instruments in the surgery kit are words.

So when I wanted to know what was wrong with the car and why he hated it, and he said, “Why can’t we have a good car, a new one with a radio, and a bigger one—like Reggie’s?” I tried to explain to him that it was wartime, that cars were scarce and prices high, and that in order to get a new car you had to do something a little underhanded, something that was not much different from stealing or cheating.

“Did Reggie’s father steal?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” I said, “but I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s not a good man.”

“How do you know? You don’t know him, do you?”

“No,” I said, “but I don’t have to know him to know he’s not a good man.” I put it as simply as I could. I told him that parents are frequently reflected in their children. I made him laugh a little by reminding him of the time, when he was six, he had acutely embarrassed his mother and me by telling one of our friends, “I think you have store-bought teeth,” which was exactly what he had heard me say about the friend.

“Those things Reggie said today, his father said to him. That’s how I know Reggie’s father is not a good man.”

“He wasn’t telling the truth, was he?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head.

“I mean about him being better?”

“No,” I answered.

“Then why can’t I go to his school and to his movies?”

This was the deeper infection, and I did not know how to deal with it. Words were poultices to seal the infection in. I could recall them from my own childhood in answer to a “why?” For children are not born with answers. Words spoken by my parents, my teachers, my friends. Words could seal in the infection and seal in also the self that might never break through again except with extreme luck. But I had no choice save to use them. I told him about prejudice. No one has ever made the anatomy of prejudice simple enough for children.

“And the reason you don’t go to Reggie’s school,” I remember saying, “is because there are people like Reggie’s father.”

“It’s all complicated up,” Conway answered.

It was a relief to laugh at his child’s expression, but I noticed he was not laughing, and at home some minutes later, when I had finished storing the groceries in the pantry, I found him pressed against his mother’s rounded bosom crying without restraint. But even that did not end it. “He cried it all out,” his mother said. She was wrong.

Seven years afterward, in the late spring of 1950, we had a letter from the headmaster of Conway’s New England preparatory school: “We have been unable to reach him.... He seems to prefer to be alone and will not participate even in those activities for which he has undoubted talents. Naturally this attitude has given us serious concern, for an important part of our educational program is training in citizenship and co-operative living....”

Perhaps there is only a slight connection, but I would be hard to convince.

13

I am well aware that there is supposed to be something reprehensible in advocating marriage between races—enough, were I a faculty member in a public-supported college in the South, to bring about my dismissal for advocacy of it. In some metaphysical corner of the white man’s mind intermarriage is identified with immorality, biological peculiarity and perversion. This identification is partly a matter of conscience and, as Gunnar Myrdal exhaustively explains, partly a matter of jealousy. The unrestricted use of the Negro woman as sex mate and mammy during slavery did a strange thing to the white man’s mind. It filled it with anxiety, guilt, and a grotesque exaggeration of the Negro male’s sexual equipment—an equipment from which the white male has felt compelled to protect white womanhood ever since. In Myrdal’s words, “The necessity to ‘protect’ the white female against this fancied prowess of the male Negro [is] a fixed constellation in the ethos” of America.

The common belief runs that the white girl who marries a Negro is morally depraved and certainly sexually abnormal, for no _normal_ white woman could possibly enjoy the average Negro’s savage sexual potency. As for the white man who marries a Negro woman, he will soon “tire of her extraordinary sensuality and return to the safer, saner sex practices” of his own kind. Such assertions, made by the majority race with all the blatant insistence of an uneasy conscience, have conditioned the Negro sufficiently to prevent his speaking out in favor of intermarriage. But no one has bothered to validate the declarations of sexual incompatibility between the races with scientific investigations. (No one, so far as I know, has made a study, for instance, of the comparative sexuality of the Negro American and the white American.) That such incompatibility exists between normal individuals of the two races is an emotion-based assumption which finds sanction and support in statutes prohibiting intermarriage. Such statutes seem to me to be the most fundamental expression of the human inequality to which the Negro is subjected. They strike at the deepest roots of personal dignity and self-respect. It is one thing, and a very good thing, to be acknowledged as a first-class citizen: it is another and a better thing to be acknowledged a first-class human being. This is the ultimate civility.

But if the assumption of sexual incompatibility is based in emotion, the beliefs about miscegenation are founded on pure mythology. The myths about Negro-white blood mixture are a curious interweaving of the biological, the moral and the social. The myths are contradictory enough to be mutually exclusive, but emotionalism absorbs the contradictions. In the first place, quite contrary to all other blood-group designations, in America anyone having a single drop of Negro blood is classed as a Negro. In as much as this practice was thought to place a restraint on interracial concubinage (though during slavery its real purpose was to increase the number of human chattels), it once had a kind of left-handed moral sanction. Since that time it has become a national habit and is solidified by law in the Southern states. It has engendered beliefs as irrational and as inexplicable as nightmares.

White men have won libel suits for mistakenly being called Negro, yet there is a strong belief among the majority of whites that for the Negro to have white blood is to adulterate his highest and best potentials. But the matter is even crazier than that, for another belief is simultaneously held: only Negroes with white blood begin to approach the white man’s biological, mental and moral standards. At the same time that the Rev. Thomas Dixon, Jr., was setting forth in his best-selling novel (_The Leopard’s Spots_) and his smash-hit drama (_The Clansman_) the proposition that the offspring of mixed parentage were degenerate, crafty, vicious and depraved, the superior attainments of Booker T. Washington were being accounted for by the fact that his father was white. The kind, gentle, loyal Negro mammies were always pure black; but all the colored tarts that ever lured white men to Lethean beds were “high yaller.”

The term “half white,” forever loosely used, covers all degrees of blood mixture and all kinds of contrarieties. If there were rationality in the matter, then in keeping with the implication of the dominance of Negro blood over white blood in the accepted definition of Negro, the term would be “half black.” It makes no kind of sense that “half white” should mean an endowment of all the criminal tendencies _and_ a prodigy like Philippa Schuyler (whose mother is white) and Walter White (who is more than a quarter white) and the novelist Frank Yerby (who is perhaps an eighth) and Ralph Bunche (who is a thirty-second). It makes no kind of sense that an intelligent white woman on first seeing Paul Robeson, whose reputation was international and then unsmirched, should remark to her companion, “Why, I expected him to be black! I thought, you know, if they had white blood they generally turned out badly.”

If that were the case, at least ten million of the fourteen million American Negroes would be bad ones. And if all those who have a drop of Negro blood confessed to it, there would be uncountable numbers more. For the fact is that many miscegenates pass over into the white race every day. A conservative estimate is that four million Negroes, with all their spermatozoa and ova, genes and chromosomes, have been absorbed into the white American blood stream in the last two decades. They have left scarcely a trace. Negroes throw up a protective wall of silence around individual passing. Thus it is well known among colored people that a certain famous moving picture star is the daughter of a Negro woman. The white but not the Negro public was shocked four or five years ago when a prominent New York lawyer made a courtroom confession of his tarbrushed parentage in order to clear himself for a share in a rich bequest. Many “white” people eminent in public life, in industry, in government, and the arts are known by Negroes to be Negro.

And if there were truth in the myths, passing would be all but impossible. The black blood would tell in real life as it is so frequently made to do in fiction. Industrialists and other employers would detect it in absenteeism, gold-bricking and general shiftlessness. Psychologists would spot it by behavior indexes—unmodulated speech, flashy clothes and other forms of exhibitionism. Physiologists would detect it in the shape and tincture of the fingernails and in the thickness of the skull. Anatomists would see it in “the curious heel structure” (which was supposed to account for the speed of Jesse Owens, Ralph Metcalfe, _et al._!) of the Negro male and in the peculiar “ovoid shape of the [Negro] female’s buttocks.”[11] Psychiatrists would mark it in overt aggressive tendencies, or in other forms of emotional infantilism, or in a total absence of emotional response. And everyone would detect it in the “rusty,” “acrid,” “unbearable” odor that Negroes give off.

14

While I am in a petulant mood, let me say that I am race-conscious enough to be shocked and irritated frequently by what even professed white friends do not know, on both the personal and historical level, about Negroes. There is a glaring case in point.

During her husband’s administration, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt became acquainted with a black, bosomy and intensely dynamic woman named Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune. The Negro woman was then Deputy Administrator of NYA, and through her the President’s wife, a sincere and fearless woman, got closely involved with the race problem. The white South fretted over the spectacle of Mrs. Roosevelt being shepherded through the intricate mazes of racial and interracial affairs. It was alleged (and the South, as did Negroes everywhere, took it for truth) that Mrs. Bethune, through Mrs. Roosevelt, had special rights to the President’s ear. She certainly seemed to have such rights to the ear of F.D.R.’s wife. More than one photograph shows the two women in earnest conversation in what seem to be intimate circumstances.

Mrs. Bethune is very much alive. She is frequently mentioned and pictured in the colored press. She is ex-president of the National Federation of Colored Women. She took a dominant part in a conference on old age at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington in 1950. She spoke at perhaps a half dozen major college commencements in 1951. But in her book _This I Remember_, written in 1949, Mrs. Roosevelt, after words of heartening warmth for the black woman, refers to her as “the late [dead, deceased!] Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune.” Mrs. Roosevelt’s reputation (earned at the cost of great personal criticism) for knowledge about and interest in Negroes, for liberalism, for social intelligence and tact is as a broad pen stroke underscoring the pattern of false belief and cavalier know-nothing-about-the-Negro attitude to which the majority conforms. Yet even she could make this error!

As an ideal, of course, I am all for the deletion of racial designations in newspaper stories and the like. But the ideal is nowhere near attainment. It seems that it is still a general practice in newsrooms in a large part of the country to specify race when Negroes are involved in crime, and it is still usual to omit, except from feature stories and special articles, racial designation in news copy that would reflect credit on the colored people. When Ralph Bunche stepped in as mediator of the Jewish-Arab dispute, the fact that he was an American Negro first broke in the foreign press. In spite of hundreds of front-page news stories from competent war correspondents, it is even now not generally known that the 24th Infantry, which fought so hard and bought with its life (it was almost totally destroyed) the time General MacArthur needed in the early fighting in Korea, was a Negro outfit in the segregated United States Army.