More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Already he’s learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He’s invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your dreams, sir! The mechanical man!”
Mr. Norton stood abruptly. “Let us go, young man,” he said angrily. “No, listen. He believes in you as he believes in the beat of his heart. He believes in that great false wisdom taught slaves and pragmatists alike, that white is right. I can tell you his destiny. He’ll do your bidding, and for that his blindness is his chief asset. He’s your man, friend. Your man and your destiny. Now the two of you descend the stairs into chaos and get the hell out of here. I’m sick of both of you pitiful obscenities! Get out before I do you both the favor of bashing in your heads!”
“Who is he?” I whispered. He gave me a look of annoyance, almost of outrage. “Reverend Homer A. Barbee, Chicago,” he said.
“In the car up ahead, in the Pullman assigned him by the very president of the line, the Leader lay tossing. He had been struck with a sudden and mysterious sickness. And I knew in spite of the anguish within me that the sun goeth down, for the heavens themselves conveyed that knowledge.
And as we knelt there on the swaying floor our words were less prayers than sounds of mute and terrible sorrow. And it was then, as we pulled to our feet, staggering with the motion of that speeding train, that we saw the physician moving toward us.
And reaching out his hand to his friend and companion as I now stretch out my hand to you, he said, ‘Come closer. Come closer.’ And he moved closer, until he stood beside the berth, and the light slanting across his shoulder as he knelt beside him. And the hand reached out and gently touched him and he said, ‘Now, you must take on the burden. Lead them the rest of the way.’ And oh, the cry of that train and the pain too big for tears! “When the train reached the summit of the mountain, he was no longer with us. And as the train dropped down the grade he had departed.
But then with the black-draped coffin lying in state among them—inescapably reminding them—they felt the dark night of slavery settling once more upon them.
Why that Trueblood shack? My God, boy! You’re black and living in the South—did you forget how to lie?”
“But I was only trying to please him …” “Please him? And here you are a junior in college! Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie!
“Don’t you know we can’t tolerate such a thing? I gave you an opportunity to serve one of our best white friends, a man who could make your fortune. But in return you dragged the entire race into the slime!”
Who, Negroes? Negroes don’t control this school or much of anything else—haven’t you learned even that? No, sir, they don’t control this school, nor white folk either. True they support it, but I control it. I’s big and black and I say ‘Yes, suh’ as loudly as any burrhead when it’s convenient, but I’m still the king down here. I don’t care how much it appears otherwise. Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying.
“And I’ll tell you something your sociology teachers are afraid to tell you,” he said. “If there weren’t men like me running schools like this, there’d be no South. Nor North, either. No, and there’d be no country—not as it is today.
These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth; and if I tell them that you’re lying, they’ll tell the world even if you prove you’re telling the truth. Because it’s the kind of lie they want to hear …”
“You’re nobody, son. You don’t exist—can’t you see that?
How had I come to this? I had kept unswervingly to the path placed before me, had tried to be exactly what I was expected to be, had done exactly what I was expected to do—yet, instead of winning the expected reward, here I was stumbling along, holding on desperately to one of my eyes in order to keep from bursting out my brain against some familiar object swerved into my path by my distorted vision.
“Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don’t have to be a complete fool in order to succeed. Play the game, but don’t believe in it—that much you owe yourself.
Play the game, but play it your own way—part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate—I wish I had time to tell you only a fragment.
Don’t let no white man tell you his business, ’cause after he tells you he’s liable to git shame he tole it to you and then he’ll hate you. Fact is, he was hating you all the time …
“Identity! My God! Who has any identity anymore anyway?
I’m your friend. Some of the finest people I know are Neg—Well, you see, Mr. Emerson is my father.” “Your father!”
My dear Mr. Emerson: The bearer of this letter is a former student of ours (I say former because he shall never, under any circumstances, be enrolled as a student here again) who has been expelled for a most serious defection from our strictest rules of deportment. Due, however, to circumstances the nature of which I shall explain to you in person on the occasion of the next meeting of the board, it is to the best interests of the college that this young man have no knowledge of the finality of his expulsion. For it is indeed his hope to return here to his classes in the fall. However, it is
...more
that I gave in to the impulse to speak to you. Forget it; though that’s advice which I’ve been unable to accept myself, it’s still good advice. There is no point in blinding yourself to the truth. Don’t blind yourself …”
It’s a lie and you know it’s a lie. I had seen the letter and it had practically ordered me killed. By slow degrees …
“My dear Mr. Emerson,” I said aloud. “The Robin bearing this letter is a former student. Please hope him to death, and keep him running. Your most humble and obedient servant, A. H. Bledsoe …”
I sat on the bed and laughed. They’d sent me to the rookery, all right. I laughed and felt numb and weak, knowing that soon the pain would come and that no matter what happened to me I’d never be the same. I felt numb and I was laughing. When I stopped, gasping for breath, I decided that I would go back and kill Bledsoe. Yes, I thought, I owe it to the race and to myself. I’ll kill him.
“What kind of racket?” I said. “Oh, you know. The wise guys firing the regular guys and putting on you colored college boys. Pretty smart,” he said. “That way they don’t have to pay union wages.”
“Forget it, Mac,” he said. “It’s not your fault. You new guys don’t know the score. Just like the union says, it’s the wise guys in the office. They’re the ones who make scabs out of you—Hey! we better hurry.”
“That’s it, as white as George Washington’s Sunday-go-to-meetin’ wig and as sound as the all-mighty dollar! That’s paint!” he said proudly. “That’s paint that’ll cover just about anything!” He looked as though I had expressed a doubt and I hurried to say, “It’s certainly white all right.”
“That damn union,” he cried, almost in tears. “That damn union! They after my job! I know they after my job! For one of us to join one of them damn unions is like we was to bite the hand of the man who teached us to bathe in a bathtub! I hates it, and I mean to keep on doing all I can to chase it outta the plant. They after my job, the chickenshit bastards!”
“But what have I to do with that?” I said, feeling suddenly the older. “ ’Cause them young colored fellers up in the lab is trying to join that outfit, that’s what! Here the white man done give ’em jobs,” he wheezed as though pleading a case. “He done give ’em good jobs too, and they so ungrateful they goes and joins up with that backbiting union! I never seen such a no-good ungrateful bunch. All they doing is making things bad for the rest of us!”
here and there through the room of tanks and machines and up the stairs so far away and hearing the clear new note arising while I seemed to run swiftly up an incline and shot forward with sudden acceleration into a wet blast of black emptiness that was somehow a bath of whiteness.
Bright metal bars were between us and when I strained my neck around I discovered that I was not lying on an operating table but in a kind of glass and nickel box, the lid of which was propped open. Why was I here?
“The machine will produce the results of a prefrontal lobotomy without the negative effects of the knife,” the voice said. “You see, instead of severing the prefrontal lobe, a single lobe, that is, we apply pressure in the proper degrees to the major centers of nerve control—our concept is Gestalt—and the result is as complete a change of personality as you’ll find in your famous fairy-tale cases of criminals transformed into amiable fellows after all that bloody business of a brain operation.
“Absolutely of no importance!” the voice said. “The patient will live as he has to live, and with absolute integrity. Who could ask more? He’ll experience no major conflict of motives, and what is even better, society will suffer no traumata on his account.”
There was a pause. A pen scratched upon paper. Then, “Why not castration, doctor?” a voice asked waggishly, causing me to start, a pain tearing through me. “There goes your love of blood again,” the first voice laughed. “What’s that definition of a surgeon, ‘A butcher with a bad conscience’?” They laughed. “It’s not so funny. It would be more scientific to try to define the case. It has been developing some three hundred years—”
“Look, he’s dancing,” someone called. “No, really?” An oily face looked in. “They really do have rhythm, don’t they? Get hot, boy! Get hot!” it said with a laugh.
But somehow the pulse of current smashing through my body prevented me. Something had been disconnected. For though I had seldom used my capacities for anger and indignation, I had no doubt that I possessed them; and, like a man who knows that he must fight, whether angry or not, when called a son of a bitch, I tried to imagine myself angry—only to discover a deeper sense of remoteness.
I seemed to have lost all sense of proportion. Where did my body end and the crystal and white world begin? Thoughts evaded me, hiding in the vast stretch of clinical whiteness to which I seemed connected only by a scale of receding grays.
Then he scribbled something on a large card and thrust it before my eyes: WHAT IS YOUR NAME? A tremor shook me; it was as though he had suddenly given a name to, had organized the vagueness that drifted through my head, and I was overcome with swift shame. I realized that I no longer knew my own name.
“It’s the factory hospital,” she said. “Now be quiet.”
trying to do?” “A Death on the City Pavements—that’s the title of a detective story or something I read somewhere …” He laughed. “I only mean meta-phor-ically speaking. They’re living, but dead. Dead-in-living … a unity of opposites.” “Oh,” I said. What kind of double talk was this?
“The old one, they’re agrarian types, you know. Being ground up by industrial conditions. Thrown on the dump heaps and cast aside. You pointed it out very well. ‘Eighty-seven years and nothing to show for it,’ you said. You were absolutely correct.”
“Yes, of course. And you made an effective speech. But you mustn’t waste your emotions on individuals, they don’t count.” “Who doesn’t count?” I said.
They’re dead, you see, because they’re incapable of rising to the necessity of the historical situation.”
“Oh, no, brother; you’re mistaken and you’re sentimental. You’re not like them. Perhaps you were, but you’re not any longer. Otherwise you’d never have made that speech. Perhaps you were, but that’s all past, dead. You might not recognize it just now, but that part of you is dead! You have not completely shed that self, that old agrarian self, but it’s dead and you will throw it off completely and emerge something new. History has been born in your brain.”
“Sure, we’re both black,” I said, beginning to laugh. He smiled, his eyes intense upon my face. “Seriously, are they your relatives?” “Sure, we were burned in the same oven,” I said. The effect was electric. “Why do you fellows always talk in terms of race!” he snapped, his eyes blazing. “What other terms do you know?”
Just call this number and ask for Brother Jack. You needn’t give me your name, just mention our conversation.
That girl in the apartment had said that the longer I remained unseen the longer I’d be effective, which didn’t make much sense either. But perhaps that was why he had run. He wanted to remain unseen and effective. Effective at what? No doubt he was laughing at me. I must have looked silly hurtling across the roofs, and like a black-face comedian shrinking from a ghost when the white pigeons shot up around me.
“Don’t come bothering me with your little troubles, boy. You’ll git something bye and bye”—
surprise for you.” “Won’t nothing surprise me,” she said. “And you hurry on back here and git something hot in your stomach.” Going
