Voices in Our Blood (30 page)

Later on, he says: “For years, I thought I loved Negroes. And I loved their humor and other qualities. My father—he was a firster around here, first man to put glass windows in for them, first to give them a written monthly statement, first to do a lot to help them toward financial independence—well, my father, he used to look at me and say how it would be. He said, son, they will knock it out of you. Well, they did. I learned the grimness and the sadness.”

And later, as we ride down the long row of the houses of the hands, he points to shreds of screening at windows, or here and there a broken screen door. “One of my last experiments,” he says, dourly. “Three months, and they poked it out of the kitchen window so they could throw slops on the bare ground. They broke down the front door so they could spit tobacco juice out on the porch floor.”

We ride on. We pass a nicely painted house, with a fenced dooryard, with flower beds, and flower boxes on the porch, and good bright-painted porch furniture. I ask who lives there. “One of the hands,” he says, “but he's got some energy and character. Look at his house. And he loves flowers. Has only three children, but when there's work he gets it done fast, and then finds some more to do. Makes $4,500 to $5,000 a year.” Some old pride, or something from the lost days of idealism, comes back into his tone.

I ask what the other people on the place think of the tenant with the nice house.

“They think he's just lucky.” And he mimics, a little bitterly, without any humor: “Boss, looks lak Jefferson's chillen, they jes picks faster'n mine. Caint he'p it, Boss.”

I ask what Jefferson's color is.

“A real black man, a real Negro, all right. But he's got character.”

I look down the interminable row of dingy houses, over the interminable flat of black earth toward the river.

Now and then, I encounter a man whose argument for segregation, in the present context, has nothing to do with the Negro at all. At its simplest level its spokesman says: “I don't give a durn about the niggers, they never bother me one way or another. But I don't like being forced. Ain't no man ever forced me.”

But the law always carries force, you say.

“Not this law. It's different. It ain't our law.”

At another level, the spokesman will say it is a matter of constitutionality, pure and simple. He may even be an integrationist. But this decision, he will say, carries us one more step toward the power state, a cunningly calculated step, for this decision carries a moral issue and the objector to the decision is automatically put in the role of the enemy of righteousness. “But wait till the next decision,” he will say. “This will be the precedent for it, and the next one won't have the moral façade.”

Precedent for what? you ask.

“For government by sociology, not law,” he will say.

“Is it government by law,” one man asks me, “when certain members of the Supreme Court want to write a minority decision, and the great conciliator conciliates them out of it, saying that the thing is going to be controversial enough without the Court splitting? Damn it, the Court should split, if that's the honest reading of the law. We want the reading of the law, not the conciliation by sociology. Even if we don't happen to like the kind of law it turns out to be in a particular case.”

And another man: “Yes, government by sociology not law is a two-edged business. The next guy who gets in the saddle just picks another brand of sociology. And nothing to stop him, for the very notion of law is gone.”

Pridefulness, money, level of intelligence, race, God's will, filth and disease, power, hate, contempt, legality—perhaps these are not all the words that get mentioned. There is another thing, whatever the word for it. An eminent Negro scholar, is, I suppose, saying something about that other thing. “One thing,” he says, “is that a lot of people down here just don't like change. It's not merely desegregation they're against so much, it's just the fact of any change. They feel some emotional tie to the way things are. A change is disorienting, especially if you're pretty disoriented already.”

Yes, a lot of them are disoriented enough already, uprooted, driven from the land, drawn from the land, befuddled by new opportunities, new ambitions, new obligations. They have entered the great anonymity of the new world.

And I hear a college student in the Deep South: “You know, it's just that people don't like to feel like they're spitting on their grandfather's grave. They feel some connection they don't want to break. Something would bother them if they broke it.”

The young man is, I gather, an integrationist. He adds: “And sometimes something bothers them if they don't break it.”

Let us give a name now to whatever it is that the eminent Negro scholar and the young white college boy were talking about. Let us, without meaning to be ironical, call it piety.

What does the Negro want?

The plump yellow man, with his hands folded calmly over his belly, the man who said it is the white man's “pridefulness,” thinks, and answers the new question. “Opportunity,” he says. “It's opportunity a man wants.”

For what? I ask.

“Just to get along and make out. You know, like anybody.”

“About education, now. If you got good schools, as good as anybody's, would that satisfy you?”

“Well—” the yellow man begins, but the black, intense-faced man breaks in. “We never had them, we'd never have them!”

“You might get them now,” I say, “under this pressure.”

“Maybe,” the yellow man agrees, “maybe. And it might have satisfied once. But”—and he shakes his head—“not now. That doctrine won't grip now.”

“Not now,” the intense-faced man says. “Not after the Supreme Court decision. We want the law.”

“But when?” I ask. “Right now? Tomorrow morning?”

“The Supreme Court decision says—” And he stops.

“It says deliberate speed,” I say, “or something like that.”

“If a Negro wants to study medicine, he can't study it. If he wants to study law, he can't study it. There isn't any way in this state for him to study it.”

“Suppose,” I say, “suppose professional and graduate schools got opened. To really qualified applicants, no funny business either way. Then they began some sort of staggered system, a grade or two at a time, from either top or bottom. Would something like that satisfy you? Perhaps not all over the state at the same time, some place serving as a sort of pilot for others where the going would be rougher.”

The yellow man nods. The intense-faced man looks down at his new and newly polished good black shoes. He looks across at the wall. Not looking at me, he says: “Yes, if it was in good faith. If you could depend on it. Yes.”

He hates to say it. At least, I think he hates to say it. It is a wrench, grudging.

I sit in another room, in another city, in the Deep South, with several men, two of them Negroes. One Negro is the local NAACP secretary, a man in build, color and quality strangely like the black, intense-faced man. I am asking again what will satisfy the Negroes. Only this time the intense-faced man does not as readily say, yes, a staggered system would be satisfactory. In fact, he doesn't say it at all. I ask him what his philosophy of social change is, in a democracy. He begins to refer to the law, to the Court, but one of the white men breaks in.

This white man is of the Deep South, born, bred and educated there. He is a middle-aged man, tall, rather spare but not angular, the impression of the lack of angularity coming, I suppose, from a great deliberation in voice and movement, a great calmness in voice and face. The face is an intellectual's face, a calm, dedicated face, but not a zealot's. His career, I know, has been identified with various causes of social reform. He has sat on many committees, has signed many things, some of them things I personally take to be nonsense. What he says now, in his serene voice, the words and voice being really all that I know of him, is this: “I know that Mr. Cranford here”—and he nods toward this black, intense-faced man—“doesn't want any change by violence. He knows—we know—that change will take time. He wants a change in a Christian way that won't aggravate to violence. We have all got to live together. It will take time.”

Nobody says anything. After a moment I go back to my question about the philosophy of social change. Wearily the intense-faced man says something, something not very relevant, not evasive, just not relevant. I let the matter drop. He sits with his head propped on his right hand, brow furrowed. He is not interested in abstractions. Why should he be?

Again, it is the Deep South, another town, another room, the bright, new-sparkling living room of the house of a Negro businessman, new furniture, new TV, new everything. There are several white men present, two journalists, myself (I've just come along to watch, I'm not involved), some technicians, and about ten Negroes, all in Sunday best, at ease but slightly formal, as though just before going in to a church service. Some of the Negroes, I have heard, are in the NAACP.

The technicians are rigging up their stuff, lights and cameras, etc., moving arrogantly in their own world superior to human concerns. In the background, in the dining room, the wife of our host, a plump fortyish mulatto, an agreeable-looking woman wearing a new black dress with a discreet white design on it, stands watching a big new electric percolator on a silver tray. Another silver tray holds a bottle of Canadian whiskey, a good whiskey, and glasses. When someone comes out of the kitchen, I catch a glimpse of a gray-haired Negro woman wearing a maid's uniform.

It is a bright, sunny, crisp day outside. The coffee is bubbling cheerfully. Out the window I see a little Negro girl, about ten years old, with a pink bow in her hair, an enormous bow, come out of a small pink house with aquamarine trim and shutters, and a dull blue roof. She stands a moment with the pink bow against the aquamarine door, then moves through the opening in the clipped privet hedge, a very tidy, persnickety hedge, and picks her way down the muddy street, where there is no sidewalk.

One of the journalists is instructing a Negro who is to be interviewed, a tall, well-set-up, jut-nosed, good-looking dark-brown man in a blue suit. He has a good way of holding his head. “Now, you're supposed to tell them,” the journalist is saying, “what a lot of hogwash this separate but equal stuff is. What you said to me last night.”

Pedagogical and irritable, one of the technicians says: “Quiet, quiet!”

They take a voice level. The dark-brown man is very much at ease, saying: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.”

The interview begins. The dark-brown man, still very much at ease, is saying: “. . . and we're not disturbed. The only people disturbed are those who have not taken an unbiased look. We who have taken our decision, we aren't disturbed.” He goes on to say the Negroes want an interracial discussion on the “how” of desegregation—but with the background understanding that the Court decision is law.

The journalist cuts in: “Make it simple and direct. Lay it on the line.”

The tall brown man is unruffled. There is sweat on his face now, but from the lamps. He wipes his face, and patiently, condescendingly, smiles at the journalist. “Listen,” he says, “you all are going back to New York City. But we stay here. We aren't afraid, but we live here. They know what we think, but it's a way of putting it we got to think about.”

He says it is going to take some time to work things out, he knows that, but there is a chorus from the Negroes crowded back out of range of the camera: “Don't put no time limit—don't put any time on it—no ten or fifteen years!”

The dark-brown man doesn't put any time on it. He says all they want is to recognize the law and to sit down in a law-abiding way to work out the “how” and the “when.”

“That's good, that's all right!” the chorus decides.

Leave the “how” in detail up to the specialists in education. As for the “when”—the dark-brown, jut-nosed man hesitates a second: “Well, Negroes are patient. We can wait a little while longer.”

The dark-brown man gets up to his considerable height, wipes the sweat off his face, asks the journalist: “You got your playback?”

The chorus laughs. It is indulgent laughter of human vanity and such. Sure, any man would like to hear his voice played back, hear himself talking.

There is no playback. Not now, anyway.

The dark-brown man is receiving the handshakes, the shoulder-slaps, of his friends. They think he did well. He did do well. He looks back over his shoulder at the white men, grins. “When I got to leave,” he says, “who's going to give me that job as chauffeur? I see that nice Cadillac sitting out front there.”

There are the quick, deep-throated giggles.

I turn to a Negro beside me. “Ten years ago,” I ask, “would this have been possible?”

“No,” he says.

Then there is another house, the tangle of wires, the jumble of rig and lights, and another Negro being arranged for an interview. There is no air of decorous festivity here, just a businesslike bustle, with the Negro waiting. This one will be knocked off quick. It's getting on to lunch.

This one, one of the journalists told me, is supposed to be the Uncle Tom. He is a middle-aged man, fair-sized, tallish, medium brown, with a balding, rather high forehead. He is wearing a good dark suit. His manner is dignified, slow, a little sad. I have known him before, know something about him. He had begun life as waterboy on a plantation, back in the times when “some folks didn't think a thing of bloodying a Negro's head, just for nothing, and I have seen their heads bloodied.” But a white man on the plantation had helped him (“Noticed I was sort of quick and took an interest in things, trying to learn”), and now he is a preacher. For a voice level, he does not say: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.” He says: “Jesus wept, Jesus wept, Jesus wept.”