Voices in Our Blood (28 page)

“Criticize?” I ask. “Criticize how?”

She turns her head a little, looks at the man with her behind the desk, then back at me. “You know,” she says, “just criticize.”

I see the eyes of the man behind the desk stray to the license of our car parked just beyond the glass front. It has a Tennessee license, a U-Drive-It from Memphis.

“Criticize?” I try again.

The man had been busy arranging something in the drawer behind the desk. Suddenly, very sharply, not quite slamming, he shoves the drawer shut. “Heck, you know,” he says.

“Didn't they make another movie over at Oxford?” I ask.

The man nods, the woman says yes. I ask what that one had been about. Nobody has seen it, not the woman, neither of the men. “It was by that fellow Faulkner,” the woman says. “But I never read anything he ever wrote.”

“I never did either,” the man behind the desk says, “but I know what it's like. It's like that fellow Hemingway. I read some of his writings. Gory and on the seedy side of life. I didn't like it.”

“That's exactly right,” the woman says, and nods. “On the seedy side of life. That fellow Faulkner, he's lost a lot of friends in Mississippi. Looking at the seedy side.”

“Does he criticize?” I ask.

She turns away. The man goes into a door behind the desk. The well-dressed young man has long since become engrossed in a magazine.

My Tennessee license, and Tennessee accent, hadn't been good enough credentials in Clarksdale, Mississippi. But on one occasion, the accent wasn't good enough even in Tennessee, and I remember sitting one evening in the tight, tiny living room (linoleum floor, gas heater, couch, one chair, small table with TV) of an organizer of a new important segregation group (one-time official of the Klan, this by court record) while he harangues me. He is a fat but powerful man, face fat but not flabby, the gray eyes squinty, set deep in the flesh, hard and sly by turns, never genial, though the grin tries to be when he has scored a point and leans forward at me, creaking the big overstuffed chair, his big hands crossed on his belly. He is a hill-man, come to town from one of the counties where there aren't too many Negroes, but he's now out to preserve, he says, “what you might name the old Southern way, what we was raised up to.”

He is not out for money. (“I just git one dollar ever fellow I sign, the other two goes to Mr. Perkins at headquarters, for expense. Hell, I lose money on hit, on my gasoline.”) No, he's not out for money, but something else. He is clearly a man of force, force that somehow has never found its way, and a man of language and leadership among his kind, the angry and ambitious and disoriented and dispossessed. It is language that intoxicates him now. He had been cautious at first, had thought I was from the FBI (yes, he had had a brush with them once, a perjury indictment), but now it seems some grand vista is opening before him and his eyes gleam and the words come.

He is talking too much, tangling himself. All the while his wife (very handsome, almost beautiful, in fact, bobbed, disordered black hair around a compact, smooth-chiseled, tanned face, her body under a flimsy dress tight and compact but gracefully made) has been standing in the deep shadow of the doorway to a room beyond, standing patiently, hands folded but tense, with the fingers secretly moving, standing like the proper hill-wife while the menfolks talk.

“Excuse me,” she suddenly says, but addressing me, not the husband, “excuse me, but didn't you say you were born down here, used to live right near here?”

I say yes.

She takes a step forward, coming out of the shadow. “Yes,” she says, “yes,” leaning at me in vindictive triumph, “but you never said where you're living now!”

And I remember sitting with a group of college students, and one of them, a law student it develops, short but strong-looking, dark-haired and slick-headed, dark bulging eyes in a slick, rather handsome, arrogant—no, bumptious—face, breaks in: “I just want to ask one question before anything starts. I just want to ask where you're from.”

Suspicion of the outlander, or of the corrupted native, gets tangled up sometimes with suspicion of the New York press, but this latter suspicion may exist quite separately, on an informed and reasoned basis. For instance, I have seen a Southern newspaperman of high integrity and ability (an integrationist, by the way) suddenly strike down his fist and exclaim: “Well, by God, it's just a fact, it's not in them not to load the dice in a news story!” And another, a man publicly committed to maintaining law and order, publicly on record against the Citizens Councils and all such organizations: “
Life
magazine's editorial on the Till case, that sure fixed it. If Till's father had died a hero's death fighting for liberty, as
Life
said, that would have been as irrelevant as the actual fact that he was executed by the American army for rape-murder. It sure makes it hard.”

There is the Baptist minister, an educated and intelligent man, who, when I show him an article in the
Reader's Digest,
an article mentioning that the Southern Baptist Convention had voted overwhelmingly for support of the Supreme Court decision, stiffens and says to me: “Look—look at that title!”

I didn't need to look. I knew what it was: “The Churches Repent.”

But there is another suspicion story. A Negro told me this. A man from New Haven called on him, and upon being asked politely to take a chair, said: “Now, please, won't you tell me about the race problem.”

To which the Negro replied: “Mister, I can't tell you a thing about that. There's nothing I could tell to you. If you want to find out, you better just move down here and live for a while.”

That is the something else—the instinctive fear, on the part of black or white, that the massiveness of experience, the concreteness of life, will be violated; the fear of abstraction. I suppose it is this fear that made one man, a subtle and learned man, say to me: “There's something you can't explain, what being a Southerner is.” And when he said that, I remembered a Yankee friend saying to me: “Southerners and Jews, you're exactly alike, you're so damned special.”

I had said it for a joke.

But had I?

In the end people talked, even showed an anxiety to talk, to explain something. Even the black Southerners, a persecuted minority, too, would talk, for over and over, the moment of some sudden decision would come: “All right—all right—I'll tell it to you straight. All right, there's no use beating around the bush.”

But how fully can I read the words offered in the fullest efforts of candor?

It is a town in Louisiana, and I am riding in an automobile driven by a Negro, a teacher, a slow, careful man, who puts his words out in that fashion, almost musingly, and drives his car that way, too. He has been showing me the Negro business section, how prosperous some of it is, and earlier he had said he would show me a section where the white men's cars almost line up at night. Now he seems to have forgotten that sardonic notion in the pleasanter, more prideful task. He has fallen silent, seemingly occupied with his important business of driving, and the car moves deliberately down the street. Then, putting his words out that slow way, detachedly as though I weren't there, he says: “You hear some white men say they know Negroes. Understand Negroes. But it's not true. No white man ever born ever understood what a Negro is thinking. What he's feeling.”

The car moves on down the empty street, negotiates a left turn with majestic deliberation.

“And half the time that Negro,” he continues, “he don't understand, either.”

I know that the man beside me had once, long back, had a bright-skinned, pretty wife. She had left him to be set up by a well-off white man (placée is the old word for it). The Negro man beside me does not know that I know this, but I have known it a long time, and now I wonder what this man is thinking as we ride along, silent again.

Just listening to talk as it comes is best, but sometimes it doesn't come, or the man says, “You ask me some questions,” and so, bit by bit, a certain pattern of questions emerges, the old obvious questions, I suppose—the questions people respond to or flinch from.

What are the white man's reasons for segregation?

The man I am talking to is a yellow man, about forty years old, shortish, rather fat, with a very smooth, faintly Mongolian face, eyes very shrewd but ready to smile. When the smile really comes, there is a gold tooth showing, to become, in that gold face, part of the sincerity of the smile. His arms seem somewhat short, and as he sits very erect in a straight chair, he folds his hands over his stomach. He gives the impression of a man very much at home in himself, at peace in himself, in his dignity, in his own pleasant, smooth-skinned plumpness, in some sustaining humorousness of things. He owns a small business, a shoe-shop with a few employees.

“What does the white man do it for?” he rephrases the question. He pauses, and you can see he is thinking, studying on it, his smooth yellow face compressing a little. All at once the face relaxes, a sort of humorous ripple, humorous but serious too, in a sort of wry way, before the face settles to its blandness. “You know,” he says, “you know, years and years I look at some white feller, and I caint never figure him out. You go long with him, years and years, and all of a sudden he does something. I caint figure out what makes him do the way he does. It is like a mystery, you might say. I have studied on it.”

Another Negro, a very black man, small-built and intense, leans forward in his chair. He says it is money, so the white man can have cheap labor, can make the money. He is a bookish man, has been to a Negro college, and though he has never been out of the South, his speech surprises me the way my native ear used to be surprised by the speech of a Negro born and raised, say, in Akron, Ohio. I make some fleeting, tentative association of his speech, his education, his economic interpretation of things; then let the notion slide.

“Yeah, yeah,” the yellow man is saying, agreeing, “but—” He stops, shakes his head.

“But what?” I ask.

He hesitates, and I see the thumbs of the hands lightly clasped across his belly begin to move, ever so slowly, round and round each other. “All right,” he says, “I might as well say it to you.”

“Say what?”

“Mongrelization,” he says, “that's what a white man will say. You ask him and he'll say that. He wants to head it off, he says. But—” He grins, the skin crinkles around his eyes, the grin shows the gold tooth. “But,” he says, “look at my face. It wasn't any black man hung it on me.”

The other man doesn't seem to think this is funny. “Yes,” he says, “yes, they claim they don't want mongrelization. But who has done it? They claim Negroes are dirty, diseased, that that's why they want segregation. But they have Negro nurses for their children, they have Negro cooks. They claim Negroes are ignorant. But they won't associate with the smartest and best-educated Negro. They claim . . .” And his voice goes on, winding up the bitter catalogue of paradoxes. I know them all. They are not new.

The smooth-faced yellow man is listening. But he is thinking, too, the yellow blandness of his face creaming ever so little with his slow, humorous intentness. I ask him what he is thinking.

He grins, with philosophic ruefulness. “I was just studying on it,” he says. “It's all true, what Mr. Elmo here says. But there must be something behind it all. Something he don't ever say, that white feller. Maybe . . .” He pauses, hunting for the formulation. “Maybe it's just pridefulness,” he says, “him being white.”

Later, I am talking with the hill-man organizer, the one with the handsome wife who asks me where I live now, and he is telling me why he wants segregation. “The Court,” he says, “hit caint take no stick and mix folks up like you swivel and swull eggs broke in a bowl. Naw,” he says, “you got to raise 'em up, the niggers, not bring the white folks down to nigger level.” He illustrates with his pudgy, strong hands in the air before him, one up, one down, changing levels. He watches the hands, with fascination, as though he has just learned to do a complicated trick.

How would you raise the level? I ask.

“Give 'em good schools and things, yeah. But”—and he warms to the topic, leaning at me—“I'd 'bolish common-law marriage. I'd put 'em in jail fer hit, and make 'em learn morals. Now, a nigger don't know how to treat no wife, not even a nigger wife. He whup her and beat her and maybe carve on her jaw with a pocketknife. When he ought to trick and pet her, and set her on his knee like a white man does his wife.”

Then I talk with a Negro grade-school teacher, in the country, in Tennessee. She is a mulatto woman, middle-aged, with a handsome aquiline face, rather Indian-looking. She is sitting in her tiny, pridefully clean house, with a prideful bookcase of books beyond her, talking with slow and detached tones. I know what her story has been, years of domestic service, a painfully acquired education, marriage to a professional man, no children (“It was a cross to bear, but maybe that's why I love 'em so and like to teach 'em not my own”).

I ask her why white people want to keep segregation.

“You ought to see the schoolhouse I teach in,” she says, and pauses, and her lips curl sardonically, “set in the mud and hogs can come under it, and the privies set back in the mud. And see some of the children that come there, out of homes with nothing, worse than the schoolhouse, no sanitation or cleanness, with disease and dirt and no manners. You wouldn't blame a white person for not wanting the white child set down beside them.” Then with a slow movement of the shoulders, again the curl of the lips: “Why didn't the Federal government give us money ten years ago for our school? To get ready, to raise us up a little to integrate. It would have made it easier. But now—”