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The first time I was ever called nigger I was seven years old. It was a little white girl with long black curls. I used to leave the front of my house and go wandering by myself through town. This little girl was playing ball alone and as I passed her the ball rolled out of her hands into the gutter. I threw it back to her. “Let’s play catch,” I said. But she held the ball and made a face at me. “My mother don’t let me play with niggers,” she told me.
When I was sixteen I ran away. I left a note and told Mama not to worry, I’d come back one day and I’d be all right. But when I was twenty-two she died. I came back and put my mother in the ground.
I’m goddamn tired of battling every Tom, Dick, and Harry for what everybody else takes for granted. I’m tired, man, tired! Have you ever been sick to death of something? Well, I’m sick to death. And I’m scared. I’ve been fighting so goddamn long I’m not a person any more. I’m not Booker T. Washington. I’ve got no vision of emancipating anybody. I want to emancipate myself. If this goes on much longer, they’ll send me to Bellevue, I’ll blow my top, I’ll break somebody’s head. I’m not worried about that miserable little room. I’m worried about what’s happening to me, to me, inside. I don’t walk
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James Baldwin was raw. He was also very right.
I have never really understood Americans; I am an old man now, and I suppose I never will. There is something very nice about them, something very winning, but they seem so ignorant—so ignorant of life.
How did you feel when you come out the wilderness?
He watched his mother’s face. Her eyes were very bright, her mouth was open: she was more beautiful than he had ever seen her, and more strange. He began to feel a joy he had never felt before. He watched the hanging, gleaming body, the most beautiful and terrible object he had ever seen till then.
