Voices in Our Blood (9 page)

It would have been better, but it would also have been intolerable, for Harlem had needed something to smash. To smash something is the ghetto's chronic need. Most of the time it is the members of the ghetto who smash each other, and themselves. But as long as the ghetto walls are standing there will always come a moment when these outlets do not work. That summer, for example, it was not enough to get into a fight on Lenox Avenue, or curse out one's cronies in the barber shops. If ever, indeed, the violence which fills Harlem's churches, pool halls, and bars erupts outward in a more direct fashion, Harlem and its citizens are likely to vanish in an apocalyptic flood. That this is not likely to happen is due to a great many reasons, most hidden and powerful among them the Negro's real relation to the white American. This relation prohibits, simply, anything as uncomplicated and satisfactory as pure hatred. In order really to hate white people, one has to blot so much out of the mind—and the heart—that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose. But this does not mean, on the other hand, that love comes easily: the white world is too powerful, too complacent, too ready with gratuitous humiliation, and, above all, too ignorant and too innocent for that. One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one's own reactions are always canceling each other out. It is this, really, which has driven so many people mad, both white and black. One is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene. Amputation is swift but time may prove that the amputation was not necessary—or one may delay the amputation too long. Gangrene is slow, but it is impossible to be sure that one is reading one's symptoms right. The idea of going through life as a cripple is more than one can bear, and equally unbearable is the risk of swelling up slowly, in agony, with poison. And the trouble, finally, is that the risks are real even if the choices do not exist.

“But as for me and my house,” my father had said, “we will serve the Lord.” I wondered, as we drove him to his resting place, what this line had meant for him. I had heard him preach it many times. I had preached it once myself, proudly giving it an interpretation different from my father's. Now the whole thing came back to me, as though my father and I were on our way to Sunday school and I were memorizing the golden text:
And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom you will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
I suspected in these familiar lines a meaning which had never been there for me before. All of my father's texts and songs, which I had decided were meaningless, were arranged before me at his death like empty bottles, waiting to hold the meaning which life would give them for me. This was his legacy: nothing is ever escaped. That bleakly memorable morning I hated the unbelievable streets and the Negroes and whites who had, equally, made them that way. But I knew that it was folly, as my father would have said, this bitterness was folly. It was necessary to hold on to the things that mattered. The dead man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one's own destruction. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.

It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one's own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair. This intimation made my heart heavy and, now that my father was irrecoverable, I wished that he had been beside me so that I could have searched his face for the answers which only the future would give me now.

A Pageant of Birds

The New Republic,
October 25, 1943

E
UDORA
W
ELTY

One summer evening on a street in my town I saw two Negro women walking along carrying big colored paper wings in their hands and talking and laughing. They proceeded unquestioned, the way angels did in their day, possibly, although anywhere else but on such a street the angels might have been looked back at if they had taken their wings off and carried them along over their arms. I followed them to see where they were going, and, sure enough, it was to church.

They walked in at the Farish Street Baptist Church. It stands on a corner in the Negro business section, across the street from the Methodist Church, in a block with the clothing stores, the pool hall, the Booker-T movie house, the doctor's office, the pawnshop with gold in the windows, the café with the fish-sign that says “If They Don't Bite We Catch 'em Anyhow,” and the barbershop with the Cuban hair styles hand-drawn on the window. It is a solid, brick-veneered church, and has no hollering or chanting in the unknown tongue. I looked in at the door to see what might be going on.

The big frame room was empty of people but ready for something. The lights were shining. The ceiling was painted the color of heaven, bright blue, and with this to start on, decorators had gone ahead to make the place into a scene that could only be prepared to receive birds. Pinned all around the walls were drawings of birds—bluebirds, redbirds, quail, flamingos, wrens, lovebirds—some copied from pictures, and the redbird a familiar cover taken from a school tablet. There was greenery everywhere. Sprigs of snow-on-the-mountain—a bush which grows to the point of complete domination in gardens of the neighborhood this time of year—were tied in neat bunches, with single zinnias stuck in, at regular intervals around the room, on the pews and along the altar rail. Over in the corner the piano appeared to be a large mound of vines, with the keyboard bared rather startlingly, like a row of teeth from ambush. On the platform where the pulpit had been was a big easy chair, draped with a red and blue robe embroidered in fleur-de-lys. Above it, two American flags were crossed over a drawing of an eagle copied straight off the back of a dollar bill.

As soon as people began coming into the church, out walked Maude Thompson from the rear, bustling and starched in the obvious role of church leader. She came straight to welcome me. Yes indeed, she said, there was to be a Pageant of Birds at seven o'clock sharp. I was welcome and all my friends. As she talked on, I was pleased to learn that she had written the Pageant herself and had not got it from some Northern YWCA or missionary society, as might be feared. “I said to myself, ‘There have been pageants about everything else—why not about birds?' ” she said. She told me proudly that each costume had been made by the bird who would wear it.

I brought a friend, and presently we were seated—unavoidably, because we were white—in the front row, with our feet turned sidewise by a large can of zinnias, but in the first of the excitement we were forgotten, and all proceeded as if we weren't there.

Maude Thompson made an announcement to the audience that everybody had better be patient. “Friends, the reason we are late starting is that several of the birds have to work late and haven't arrived yet. If there are any birds in the audience now, will they
kindly get on back here?
” Necks craned and eyes popped in delight when one girl in a dark-blue tissue-paper dress jumped up from a back pew and skittered out. Maude Thompson clapped her hands for order and told how a collection to be taken up would be used to pay for a piano—“not a new one, but a better one.” Her hand was raised solemnly: we were promised, if we were quiet and nice, the sight of even more birds than we saw represented on the walls. The audience fanned, patted feet dreamily, and waited.

The Pageant, decidedly worth waiting for, began with a sudden complete silence in the audience, as if by mass intuition. Every head turned at the same time and all eyes fastened upon the front door of the church.

Then came the entrance of the Eagle Bird. Her wings and tail were of gold and silver tin foil, and her dress was a black and purple kimono. She began a slow pace down the aisle with that truly majestic dignity which only a vast, firmly matured physique, wholly unselfconscious, can achieve. Her hypnotic majesty was almost prostrating to the audience as she moved, as slowly as possible, down the aisle and finally turned and stood beneath the eagle's picture on the wall, in the exact center of the platform. A little Eaglet boy, with propriety her son, about two and a half feet tall, very black, entered from the Sunday School room and trotted around her with a sprightly tail over his knickers, flipping his hands dutifully from the wrist out. He wore bows on each shoulder. No smiles were exchanged—there was not a smile in the house. The Eagle then seated herself with a stifled groan in her chair, there was a strangled chord from the piano, where a Bird now sat, and with the little Eaglet to keep time by waving a flag jutting out from each wing, the congregation rose and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Then the procession of lesser Birds began, and the music—as the pianist watched in a broken piece of mirror hidden in the vines—went gradually into syncopation.

The Birds would enter from the front door of the church, portentously, like members of a bridal party, proceed in absolute and easily distinguishable character down the aisle, cross over, and take their places in a growing circle around the audience. All came in with an assurance that sprang from complete absorption in their roles—erect in their bright wings and tails and crests, flapping their elbows, dipping their knees, hopping and turning and preening to the music. It was like a dance only inasmuch as birds might dance under the circumstances. They would, on reaching the platform, bow low, first to the Eagle Bird, who gave them back a stern look, and then to the audience, and take their positions—never ceasing to fly in place and twitter now and then, never showing recognition or saying one human word to anyone, even each other. There were many more Birds of some varieties than of others; I understood that “you could be what you want to.” Maude Thompson, standing in a white uniform beside the piano, made a little evocation of each variety, checking down a list.

“The next group of Birds to fly will be the Bluebirds,” she said, and in they flew, three big ones and one little one, in clashing shades of blue crepe paper. They were all very pleased and serious with their movements. The oldest wore shell-rimmed glasses. There were Redbirds, four of them; two Robin Redbreasts with diamond-shaped gold speckles on their breasts; five “Pink-birds”; two Peacocks who simultaneously spread their tails at a point halfway down the aisle; Goldfinches with black tips on their tails, who waltzed slowly and somehow appropriately; Canary birds, announced as “the beautiful Canaries, for pleasure as well as profit,” who whistled vivaciously as they twirled, and a small Canary who had a yellow ostrich plume for a crest. There was only one “beautiful Blackbird, alone but not lonesome,” with red caps on her wings; there was a head-wagging Purple Finch, who wore gold earrings. There was the Parrot-bird, who was a man and caused shouts—everyone's instant favorite; he had a yellow breast, one green trouser-leg, one red; he was in his shirt sleeves because it was hot, and he had red, green, blue and yellow wings. The lady Parrot (his wife) followed after in immutable seriousness—she had noticed parrots well, and she never got out of character: she ruffled her shoulder feathers, she was cross, she pecked at her wings, she moved her head rapidly from side to side and made obscure sounds, not quite words; she was so good she almost called up a parrot. There was loud appreciation of the Parrots—I thought they would have to go back and come in again. The “Red-headed Peckerwood” was a little boy alone. The “poor little Mourning Dove” was called but proved absent. “And last but not least, the white Dove of Peace!” cried Maude Thompson. There came two Doves, very sanctimonious indeed, with long sleeves, nurse's shoes and white cotton gloves. They flew with restraint, almost sadly.

When they had all come inside out of the night, the Birds filled a complete circle around the congregation. They performed a finale. They sang, lifting up their wings and swaying from side to side to the mounting music, bending and rolling their hips, all singing. And yet in their own and in everybody's eyes they were still birds. They were certainly birds to me.

“And I want TWO wings

To veil my face

And I want TWO wings

To fly away,

And I want TWO wings

To veil my face,

And the world can't do me no harm.”

That was their song, and they circled the church with it, singing and clapping with their wings, and flew away by the back door, where the ragamuffins of the alley cried “Oooh!” and jumped aside to let them pass.

I wanted them to have a picture of the group to keep and offered to take it. Maude Thompson said, “Several of the Birds could meet you in front of the church door tomorrow afternoon at four.”

There turned out to be a number of rendezvous; but not all the Birds showed up, and I almost failed to get the Eagle, who has some very confining job. The Birds who could make it were finally photographed, however, Maude Thompson supervising the poses. I did not dare interfere. She instructed them to hold up their necks, and reproached the Dove of Peace for smiling. “You ever see a bird smile?”

Since our first meeting I have chanced on Maude Thompson several times. Every time I would be getting on a train, I would see her in the station; she would be putting on a coffin, usually, or receiving one, in a church capacity. She would always tell me how the Pageant was doing. They were on the point of taking it to Forrest or Mount Olive or some other town. Also, the Birds have now made themselves faces and beaks.

“This is going to be one of those things going to grow,” said Maude Thompson.