The Cross of Redemption (35 page)

Speaking as a man, as a Negro, as a citizen, it has seemed to me for a long time now that the really dreadful agony confronting Americans is this: the time has come for us to grow up. A man grows up when he looks back,
realizes
what has happened to him, accepts it all, and begins to
change himself. He cannot grow up until he reaches this moment and passes it. We are now at the end of our extraordinarily prolonged adolescence. A very great poet, an American, Miss Marianne Moore, wrote, many years ago, the following description of our terrors: “The weak overcomes its menace. The strong overcomes itself.”

That self-knowledge which matures a nation as well as a man presupposes free men and free minds. This book opens with a drawing by the great American artist Art Young, depicting Jesus Christ as wanted for sedition. It recalled for me another Christ—the “Black Christ” of Countee Cullen:

(1963)

·      ·     ·

I
’VE KNOWN
H
AROLD
N
ORSE
so long that I don’t remember when I met him. It was many years ago, anyway, in Greenwich Village, in New York.
It’s my impression that Harold was living then on Perry Street; the good Lord knows where I was living. We were quite incredibly, monstrously young, insanely confident—we were destined to do such things! Time passed—perhaps no time in the history of the world has passed so swiftly and so hideously—time passed, testing our assumptions, trying our confidence, breaking our hearts: and forcing us to work. For a very long time we saw each other not at all. But each knew that the other was somewhere around, and, in the peculiar way of poets, and to our peculiar gods, we prayed for each other.

All that I am equipped to recognize in the effort of any poet is whether or not the effort is genuine. The achieved performance, insofar as it is susceptible to contemporary judgment, can only be judged by this touchstone. And by “genuine effort” I do not mean good intentions, or hysterical verbosity, or frantic endeavor: the effort I am suggesting scours the poet’s life, reduces him, inexorably, to who he is; and who he is is what he gives us. But he gives us much more than that, for his giving is an example that contains a command: the command is for us to do likewise.

That this example and this command are terrifying is proved by the lives of all poets, and that the example and the command are valid is proved by the terror these evoke. One is commanded to look on each day as though it were the first day, to draw each breath in freedom, and to know that everything that lives is holy. Neither the state nor the church approves of such blasphemy, banks will never knowingly loan it money, and armies trample it underfoot. So be it. It is themselves they are trampling underfoot, their hope, and their continuity: and one day all of us will know this, and be able to love one another and learn to live in peace.

Until that day comes, the poet is in exile, as Harold is now. But if light ever enters the hearts of men, Harold will be one of those who have helped to set it there.

(1965)

THE NEGRO IN NEW YORK
is an unavoidably sketchy and uneven document, compiled by the Writers’ Program of New York City during that very brief period of the WPA when it was recognized that writers existed in our country and had to eat, and even had a certain utility—though, probably, no real value. The curator of the Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature and History, Jean Blackwell Hutson, points out that the material in this book has been sitting in the collection since 1940, with “publication deferred and prevented because information contained in it was too startling for conservative taste.” That the information in this book should be startling is an interesting comment on the conservative, that is to say, the prevailing, attitude toward American history. If so many people did not find the information in this book “startling,” they might be less at the mercy of their ignorance, and our present situation would be healthier than it is.

The book can be startling only to the brainwashed, in which category, alas, nearly all Americans are presently to be found, and, of course, it would be very hard to use it as a basis for a rousing television series. It strips the Americans of their fig leaves, as it were, and proves that Eden, if it ever
existed, certainly never existed here. It proves that anyone who contends that the Northern racial attitudes have not always been, essentially, indistinguishable from those of the South is either lying or is deluded. Of course, one has become deluded when one has believed a lie too long.

It is impossible to read this book and not realize how disastrous has been the effect, in so many millions of lives, of the Industrial Revolution—that same revolution which has been hailed as being so liberating a force. Indeed, it liberated peasants from the land, to say nothing of their lives, small children from their parents, women from their safety, and men from their honor. The tremendous amount of labor needed to cultivate the New World, and the enormous profits to be carried back to Europe as a result of this cultivation, meant that human flesh, any human flesh, became a source of profit. And there is nothing in European, or subsequent American, history to indicate that any consideration whatever deflected the new conquerors from this goal. Such uneasy consciences as we know to have been were as nothing compared to the heartening—yes, the virtuous—sound of money being made and of money making money. The Dutch, who ruled this city, and the Europeans who traded in this harbor, sought one freedom only, the freedom to make money, and in searching for this freedom they did not hesitate to use women and small children, as well as thieves and pirates and murderers. The poor Irish, God knows, fared no better at the hands of the industrialists than any captive African. The Irish situation began to change only after it was no longer necessary, or politic, to use the poor Irish laborer to cow the Negro laborer, or vice versa: no doubt, many Irishmen will find this information startling indeed. (But it is no more startling than the fact that during the potato famine of 1845, their English masters allowed the Irish to starve, in order to protect British merchants. This unhappy circumstance has produced many a virtuous, self-righteous Irish cop, as well as the winning folklore of, say,
The Bells of St. Mary’s.)

The rise of Northern industry, and the consolidation of this power, caused the racial lines of the North to be drawn up very differently, but not less severely, than those in the South: where the poor white, until this hour, has yet to comprehend what his bosses have always understood very well—that any coalition of himself and the black will destroy the system which has kept both black and white in ignorance and peonage for so long. And a marvelous foreshadowing of the scapegoat role the black was to play in American life is contained in Peter Stuyvesant’s explanation of his surrender to the British. The city could not withstand the British siege, he
explained, because three hundred slaves, brought in just before the British arrived in the harbor, had eaten all the surplus food. Scarcely any American politician has since improved on this extraordinarily convincing way of explaining American reverses.

What the Negro did in New York, and how, is the subject of the book before you, and not the subject of this foreword. But: “[The British] regulated servitude with the thoroughness of modern business methods—every step necessary for its protection and preservation was taken. Blacks were therefore set apart from whites on the theory that to permit them to mingle freely with white people would endanger the chances of keeping them enslaved. This policy was carried out in every straining detail; so much so that a law was passed ‘that no Negro shall be buried in Trinity church-yard.’” Nor would some of our more conservative political leaders find the following proclamation, issued in 1706 by Governor Lord Corn-bury, the cousin of Queen Anne, in the least startling:

Then, as now, Negroes were in the streets—and this is before the American War of Independence; then, as now, white people professed not to know the reason why; then, as now, it was the slave who was the wrongdoer and not the system which had made him a slave. And then, as now, the Negro’s hopes were used with the utmost cynicism by those who could use these hopes to perpetuate their own dominance. Thus, the Declaration of Independence terrified the slave owners, and they would never have armed their slaves if the British had not done so first, promising freedom to any Negro who joined the British lines. Thereupon, the soon-to-be-Americans armed two regiments of blacks, promising freedom to all who served three years, or who were honorably discharged (two interesting stipulations). That this cynical and treacherous pattern has not altered from that day to this is scarcely worth mentioning: but it is worth observing that whereas Americans profess not to know what the Negro wants, they always know what to promise him whenever they need his body.

And here, during the Depression, is a member of the New York City Realty Board: “I believe a logical section for Negro expansion in Manhattan is East Harlem. At present this district has reached such a point of deterioration that its ultimate residential pattern is most puzzling.—An influx of Negroes into East Harlem would not work a hardship on the present population of the area, because its present residents could move to any other section of New York without the attendant racial discrimination which the Negro would encounter if he endeavored to locate in other districts.”

Well, we know how the “puzzling” residential pattern of East Harlem eventually resolved itself: into a pattern which changes not. And we will not even discuss the shameful and brutal role played in all this by the churches, by the labor unions, and by revered corporations and utilities. Nor will we—in order to avoid startling our readers—observe that the economic pattern to be discerned in the pages which follow is so brutal, so utterly blind and selfish, and so irresponsible that Russian roulette, by comparison, seems safer than playing jacks.

Here is what Mayor La Guardia’s commission had to say about the Harlem race riot of 1935: “As a population of low income, [it] suffered from conditions that affected low income groups of all races, but the causes that kept Negroes in this class did not apply with the same force to whites. These conditions were underscored by discrimination against Negroes in all walks of life. The rumor of the death of a boy which spread throughout the community had
awakened the deep-seated sense of wrongs and denials and even memories of injustices in the South.”
(Italics mine: the pot is calling the kettle black.) The riot’s cause was “the smouldering resentments of the people of Harlem against racial discrimination and poverty in the midst of plenty.” The riot was “a spontaneous and an incoherent protest by Harlem’s population against a studied neglect of its critical problems.”

At least, no one said that the riot was Communist inspired. And what was done? “The Board of Education promoted Mrs. Gertrude E. Ayer to the principalship of Public School No. 24, Manhattan, in 1936, and she became the first Negro woman to advance to such a position.” (Also, as far as I know, and certainly until very lately, the last. That was my school, and my principal, and I loved and feared the lady—for she really was a lady, and a great one—with that trembling passion only twelve-year-olds can feel.) But let us continue this progress report:

The last words were written just before our entry into World War II. If—for those of you who are not too hopelessly startled—the show seems familiar, it is because the show has been running a very long time, and most of the actors have had no choice but to speak the lines and make the moves assigned to them. There is a rumor—striking terror and chaos in the heart of the box office—that some people have become so weary of the spectacle that they have sent for a new show, which is presently on the road. But not until the wheels of those wagons are on our children’s necks will we consider reading or revising or throwing away this script.