Black Like Me (12 page)

Finally, unable to trip him up, the white man asked, “Can you read and write?”

The applicant wrote his name and was then handed a newspaper in Chinese to test his reading. He studied it carefully for a time.

“Well can you read it?”

“I can read the headline, but I can’t make out the body text.”

Incredulous, the white man said: “You can read
that
headline?”

“Oh, yes, I’ve got the meaning all right.”

“What’s it say?”

“It says this is one Negro in Mississippi who’s not going to get to vote this year.”

East let me out of the car in downtown New Orleans, on Canal Street. I bought a meal of beans and rice in the nearby Negro café and then went to the bus station to purchase a ticket back into Mississippi, but this time to the coastal town of Biloxi. I did not see the lady who gave me the hate stare a few days earlier. With three hours to kill until bus time, I walked and window-shopped on Canal. The town was decorated for Christmas and I felt lost in the great crowds. A cool, sunlit afternoon. I looked at all the children coming and going in the stores, most of them excited to see Santa Claus, and I felt the greatest longing to see my own.

Once again I stopped men on the street and asked directions to the French Market or to some church, and once again each gave me courteous replies. Despite the inequalities, I liked New Orleans, perhaps because I dreaded so the prospect of leaving once more to go into the Deep South, perhaps because it was, after all, so much better here than in Mississippi - though I understand that the rest of Louisiana is scarcely any better.

At the Jesuit church, I picked up a booklet I had also noticed on Dean Gandy’s coffee table -
For Men of Good Will
, by Father Robert Guste. Penciled across the top in red were the words “Racial Justice.” I stood in the sunlight outside the church, noticing that passers by either lifted their hats or made a discreet sign of the cross on their chests as they came abreast the church. I flipped through the pages, noticing the dedication:

Father Guste, a parish priest of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, born and reared in the South, wrote the book to clarify the problems of racial justice for those “men of good will” who are sincerely alarmed by “the Problem.”

I glanced through quickly and promised myself a thorough reading. Suddenly it occurred to me that I made a strange and too obvious picture there - a large Negro, standing in front of a church, absorbed in a pamphlet on racial justice. I quickly dropped it into my jacket and walked to the Greyhound station to wait for my bus.

In the rest room, I saw the remains of a loaf of French bread lying on the floor beside the waste bin. It told the story of some poor devil who had come there, closed himself in the cubicle and eaten his meal of a half a loaf. The small room was perfectly clean except for a placard attached to the back of the door. I read the neatly typed NOTICE! until I saw that it was only another list of prices a white man would pay for various types of sensuality with various ages of Negro girls. The whites frequently walk into colored rest rooms, Scotch-tape these notices to the wall. This man offered his services free to any Negro woman over twenty, offered to pay, on an ascending scale, from two dollars for a nineteen-year-old girl up to seven fifty for a fourteen-year-old and more for the perversion dates. He gave a contact point for later in the evening and urged any Negro man who wanted to earn five dollars for himself to find him a date within this price category. He would probably have success, I thought, glancing at the butt of bread. To a man who had nothing to eat but bread and perhaps a piece of cheese in a public rest room, five dollars could mean a great deal. I wondered about the Negro who had left this trace of his passing. What sort of man was he? A derelict? No, a derelict would have left an empty wine bottle. Someone who could not find work and had grown too hungry to wait for something better? Probably. If the woman in the Catholic Book Store had not cashed my traveler’s
check, I might have been reduced to the same thing. What astonished me was that he had not carried the remains of the bread with him. Perhaps he, too, had seen the notice on the door and counted on five dollars for a decent supper.

A young man entered as I dried my hands. He nodded politely, with a quick, intelligent expression, glanced at the notice and snorted with amusement and derision. In these matters, the Negro has seen the backside of the white man too long to be shocked. He feels an indulgent superiority whenever he sees these evidences of a white man’s frailty. This is one of the sources of his chafing at being considered inferior. He cannot understand how the white man can show the most demeaning aspects of his nature and at the same time delude himself into thinking he is inherently superior.

To the Negro who sees this element of the white man’s nature - and he sees it much more often than any other - the white man’s comments about the Negro’s alleged “immorality” ring maddeningly hollow.

I
arrived by bus
in Biloxi too late to find any Negroes about, so I walked inland and slept, half-freezing, in a tin-roofed shed with an open south front. In the morning I found breakfast in a little Negro café - coffee and toast - and then walked down to the highway to begin hitching. The highway ran for miles along some of the most magnificent beaches I have ever seen - white sands, a beautiful gulf; and opposite the beach, splendid homes. The sun warmed me through, and I took my time, stopping to study the historic markers placed along the route.

For lunch, I bought a pint of milk and a ready-wrapped bologna sandwich in a roadside store. I carried them to the walk
that runs along the shallow sea wall and ate. A local Negro stopped to talk. I asked him if the swimming was good there, since the beaches were so splendid. He told me the beaches were “man-made,” the sand dredged in; but that unless a Negro sneaked off to some isolated spot, he’d never know how the water was, since Negroes weren’t permitted to enjoy the beaches. He pointed out the injustice of this policy, since the upkeep of the beaches comes from a gasoline tax. “In other words, every time we buy a gallon of gas, we pay a penny to keep the beach up so the whites can use it,” he said. He added that some of the local Negro citizens were considering a project to keep an account of the gasoline they purchased throughout the year and at the end of that time demand from the town fathers either a refund on their gasoline tax or the privilege of using the beaches for which they had paid their fair part.

After a time I walked again on legs that grew weak with weariness. A car pulled up beside me and a young, redheaded white man told me to “hop in.” His glance was friendly, courteous, and he spoke with no condescension. I began to hope that I had underestimated the people of Mississippi. With that eagerness I grasped at every straw of kindness, wanting to give a good report.

“Beautiful country, isn’t it?” he said.

“Marvelous.”

“You just passing through?”

“Yes, sir … I’m on my way to Mobile.”

“Where you from?”

“Texas.”

“I’m from Massachusetts,” he said, as though he were eager for me to know he was not a Mississippian. I felt the keenest disappointment, and mentally erased the passages I had composed about the kindness of the Mississippian who gave the Negro a ride. He told me he had no sympathy for the “Southern attitude.”

“That shows,” I said.

“But you know,” he added, “these are some of the finest people in the world about everything else.”

“I’m sure they are.”

“I know you won’t believe it - but it’s really the truth. I just don’t ever talk to them about the race question.”

“With your attitude, I can understand that,” I laughed.

“They can’t discuss it,” he said. “It’s a shame but all they do is get mad whenever you bring it up. I’ve lived here over five years now - and they’re good neighbors; but if I mention race with any sympathy for the Negro, they just tell me I’m an ‘outsider’ and don’t understand about Negroes. What’s there to understand?”

I walked what - ten, fifteen miles? I walked because one does not just simply sit down in the middle of the highway, because there was nothing to do but walk.

Late in the afternoon, my mind hazed to fatigue. I concentrated all my energy in putting one foot in front of the other. Sweat poured down into my eyes and soaked my clothes and the heat of the pavement came through my shoes. I remember I stopped at a little custard stand and bought a dish of ice cream merely to have the excuse to sit at one of the tables under the trees - none of which were occupied. But before I could take my ice cream and walk to one of them some white teenagers appeared and took seats. I dared not sit down even at a distant table. Wretched with disappointment I leaned against a tree and ate the ice cream.

Behind the custard stand stood an old unpainted privy leaning badly to one side. I returned to the dispensing window of the stand.

“Yes, sir,” the white man said congenially. “You want something else?”

“Where’s the nearest rest room I could use?” I asked.

He brushed his white, brimless cook’s cap back and rubbed his forefinger against his sweaty forehead. “Let’s see. You can go on up there to the bridge and then cut down the road to the left … and just follow that road. You’ll come to a little settlement - there’s some stores and gas stations there.”

“How far is it?” I asked, pretending to be in greater discomfort than I actually was.

“Not far - thirteen, maybe fourteen blocks.”

A locust’s lazy rasping sawed the air from the nearby oak trees.

“Isn’t there anyplace closer?” I said, determined to see if he would not offer me the use of the dilapidated outhouse, which certainly no human could degrade any more than time and the elements had.

His seamed face showed the concern and sympathy of one human for another in a predicament every man understands. “I can’t think of any …” he said slowly.

I glanced around the side toward the outhouse. “Any chance of me running in there for a minute?”

“Nope,” he said - clipped, final, soft, as though he regretted it but could never permit such a thing. “I’m sorry.” He turned away.

“Thank you just the same,” I said.

By dark I was away from the beach area and out in the country. Strangely, I began getting rides. Men would pass you in daylight but pick you up after dark.

I must have had a dozen rides that evening. They blear into a nightmare, the one scarcely distinguishable from the other.

It quickly became obvious why they picked me up. All but two picked me up the way they would pick up a pornographic photograph or book - except that this was verbal pornography. With a Negro, they assumed they need give no semblance of self-respect or respectability. The visual element entered into it. In a car at night visibility is reduced. A man will reveal himself in the dark, which gives the illusion of anonymity, more than he will in the bright light. Some were shamelessly open, some shamelessly subtle. All showed morbid curiosity about the sexual life of the Negro, and all had, at base, the same stereotyped image of the Negro as an inexhaustible sex-machine with oversized genitals and a vast store of experiences, immensely varied. They appeared to think that the Negro has done all of those “special” things they themselves have never dared to do. They carried the conversations into depths of depravity.

I note these things because it is harrowing to see decent-looking men and boys assume that because a man is black they need to show him none of the reticence they would, out of respect,
show the most derelict white man. I note them, too, because they differed completely from the “bull sessions” men customarily have among themselves. These latter, no matter how frank, have generally a robust tone that says: “We are men. This is an enjoyable thing to do and to discuss, but it will never impugn the basic respect we give one another; it will never distort our humanity.” In this, the atmosphere, no matter how coarse, has a verve and an essential joviality that casts out morbidity. It implies respect for the persons involved. But all that I could see here were men shorn of their respect either for themselves or their companion.

In my grogginess and exhaustion, these conversations became ghoulish. Each time one of them let me out of his car, I hoped the next would spare me his pantings. I remained mute and pleaded my exhaustion and lack of sleep.

“I’m so tired, I just can’t think,” I would say.

Like men who had promised themselves pleasure, they would not be denied. It became a strange sort of hounding as they nudged my skull for my sexual reminiscences.

“Well, did you ever do such-and-such?”

“I don’t know …” I moaned.

“What’s the matter - haven’t you got any manhood? My old man told me you wasn’t really a man till you’d done such-and-such.”

Or the older ones, hardened, cynical in their lechery. “Now, don’t try to kid me. I wasn’t born yesterday. You know you’ve done such-and-such, just like I have. Hell, it’s good that way. Tell me, did you ever get a white woman?”

“Do you think I’m crazy?” I tacitly denied the racist’s contention, for he would not hesitate to use it against the Negroes in his conversations around town: “Why, I had one of them admit to me just last night that he craves white women.”

“I didn’t ask if you was crazy,” he said. “I asked if you ever had one - or ever really wanted one.” Then, conniving, sweet-toned, “There’s plenty white women would like to have a good buck Negro.”

“A Negro’d be asking for the rope to get himself mixed up with white women.”

“You’re just telling me that, but I’ll bet inside you think differently. …”

“This is sure beautiful country through here. What’s the main crop?”

“
Don’t
you? You can tell me. Hell, I don’t care.”