P.S. (5 page)

 

I’m afraid it’s one of the great dilemmas, one of the great psychological hazards of being an American Negro. And in fact it’s much more than that. I’ve seen a great many people go under, and everyone, every Negro in America, is in some way, one way or another, menaced by it.

One’s born in a white country, in a white, Protestant, Puritan country, where one was once a slave; where all the standards and all the images that you open your—When you open your eyes in the world, everything you see—none of it applies to you. You go to white movies, you know, and like everybody else you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the good guys who are killing off the Indians. And it comes as a great psychological collision when you begin to realize all of these things are really metaphors for your oppression and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish.

I was born in a church, for example, and my father was a very religious and righteous man. But, of course we were in Harlem. We lived in a terrible house, and downstairs from us there were, you know, all these, what my father called “goodtime” people. There was a prostitute and all of her paramours and all that jazz. I remember I loved this woman. She was very nice to us. But we weren’t really allowed to go to her house, and if we went there we were beaten for it. And when I was older, that whole odor of gin, you know, homemade gin, really, and pig’s feet and chitterlings and poverty, and the basement.

All of this got terribly mixed up together in mind with the
whole holy roller–white God business, and I really began to go a little out of my mind, because I obviously wasn’t white, and it wasn’t even a question so much of wanting to
be
white, but I didn’t quite know anymore what being black meant. I couldn’t accept what I’d been told. And all you’re ever told in this country about being black is that it’s a terrible, terrible thing to be.

Now, in order to survive this you have to really dig down into yourself and re-create yourself, really, according to no image which yet exists in America, you know. You have to impose, in fact—this may sound very strange—you have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you and not this
idea
of you.

 

 

Who you are. And that pressure, the question of being black or white, is robbed of its power. I mean you can still, of course, be beaten up on the South Side by . . . anybody. The social menace does not lessen. But in some way it is a world now which perhaps can destroy you physically, but the danger of your destroying yourself has not vanished, but is minimized.

 

The name of the book, if we may—this is directly connected—
Nobody Knows My Name
. For years, you, when I think of you, are known as James. Never known as James Baldwin. Home James, sometimes called George—In the old days Sam—

 

Boy.

 

 

Sometimes. [Small laugh]

 

Nobody Knows My Name
. Why did you choose that title?

 

Well, at the risk of sounding pontifical, it’s at once . . . I suppose it’s a fairly bitter title, but it’s also meant as a kind of warning to my country. In the days when people—well, in the days when people called me boy, those days haven’t passed, except that I didn’t answer then, and I don’t answer now.

To be a Negro in this country is really just . . . never to be looked at. And what white people see when they look at you is not really you . . .

 

 

You’re invisible. What they do see in you when they look at you is what they have invested you with. And what they have invested you with is all the agony, and the pain, and the danger, and the passion, and the torment, you know, sin, death, and hell, of which everyone in this country is terrified. You represent a level of experience which Americans deny. And I think—this may sound mystical—but I think it is very easily proven, you know.

It’s proven in great relief in the South when you consider the extraordinary price, the absolutely prohibitive price, the South has paid to keep the Negro in his place. And they have not succeeded in doing that, but have succeeded in having what is almost certainly a most bewildered and demoralized white population in the Western World. And on another level you can see in the life of the country, not only in the South, what a terrible price the country has paid for this effort to keep a distance between themselves and black people.

It was . . . In the same way, for example, it is very difficult, it is hazardous, psychologically—personally hazardous—for a Negro in this country really to hate white people, because he is too involved with them, not only socially, but historically. And no matter who says what, in fact, Negroes and whites in this country are related to each other. You know, half the black families of the South are related to the judges and the lawyers and the white families of the South. They are cousins, and kissing cousins at that, at least kissing cousins. Now, this is a terrible, terrible depth of involvement.

It’s easy for an African to hate the invader and drive him out of Africa. But it is very difficult for an American Negro to do this—obviously cannot do this with white people; there’s no place to drive them. This is a country which belongs equally to us both. And one’s got to learn to live together here or else there won’t be any country.

 

 

It’s this love, hatred, love, hatred. I hate to think of what the spiritual state of the South would be if all the Negroes moved out of it. The white people there don’t want them—you know, want to keep them, want them in their place—but would be terrified if they left. I really think the bottom of their world would have fallen out.

In the case of Faulkner in “Dry September” and
Light in
August
, or even in
The Sound and the Fury
, he can really get, you know, as you put it, to the bone. He can get at the truth of what the black-white relationship is in the South, and what a dark force it is in the southern personality. But at the same time, Faulkner as a citizen, as a man, as a citizen of Mississippi, is committed to what Mississippians take to be their past. And it’s one thing for Faulkner to deal with the Negro in his imagination where he can control him, and quite another one for him to deal with him in life, where he can’t control him. And in life, obviously, the uncontrollable Negro is simply—is determined to overthrow everything in which Faulkner imagined himself to believe.

It’s one thing to demand justice in literature and another thing to face the price that one’s got to pay for it in life. And I think another thing about southerners—and I think it’s also true of the nation—is that now no matter how they deny it or what kind of rationalizations they cover it up with, they know the crimes they’ve committed against black people, and they’re terrified of these crimes being committed against them.

 

 

Yes.

There’s a point you make, and very beautifully, somewhere in the book
Nobody Knows My Name
. I forget which one of the essays is involved. In the South, the white man is continuously bringing up the matter of the Negro; in the North, never. So obsessed in one case, and so ignored in the other.

 

It’s very funny. It’s very funny especially because the results turn out to be, in the case of the Negro’s lot in the world, so very much the same.

 

But it seems to me it must be absolute torment to be a southerner if you imagine that these people—that one day, you know, one day even Faulkner himself was born, and certainly, when he was born, he was raised by a black woman, probably the model of Dilsey. And one fine day, the child of three or four or five who has been involved with black people on the most intense level and at the most important time in anybody’s life—it suddenly breaks on him like a thundercloud that it’s all taboo. And, of course, since we know that nobody ever recovers, really, from his earliest impressions, the torment that goes on in a southerner who is absolutely forbidden to excavate his beginnings, you know, it seems to me is a key to those terrifying mobs. It isn’t hatred that drives those people in the streets; it’s pure terror.

 

 

Well, by this time it’s absolutely schizophrenic. And obviously not only in the South, but the South is a very useful example on a personal and social level of what is occurring really in the country. And the sexual paranoia, you know.

Again it is very important to remember what it means to be born in a Protestant, Puritan country with all the taboos which are placed on the flesh, and to have, at the same time, in this country, such a vivid example of a decent imagination, of paganism and the sexual liberty with which white people invest Negroes, you know, and penalize them for.

 

 

Yes, yes, and the terrible tension—

 

 

It’s a guilt about the flesh, and in this country the Negro pays for that guilt that white people have about the flesh.

 

 

My God.

 

And in this article—you wrote a beautiful article for
Tone
magazine—you were saying something about the mistress of the house, the white mistress who admires her maid very much. But she speaks of the no-account husband.

 

No-account husband.

 

 

It connects with that old, old phrase that Negroes are the last to be hired and the first to be fired. And this does not apply to the Negro maid, particularly, though it can. But it absolutely applies without exception and with great rigor to Negro men.

And one’s got to consider, especially when one begins to talk about this whole theory, the whole tension between violent and nonviolent. The dilemma and the rage and the anguish of a Negro man, who in the first place is forced to accept all kinds of humiliations in his working day; whose power in
the world is so slight that he cannot really protect his home, his wife, his children, you know; and then who finds himself out of work, and watches his children growing up menaced in exactly the same way that he has been menaced. When a child is fourteen—when a Negro child is fourteen—he knows the score already. There’s nothing you can do.... And all you can do about it is try—is pray, really, that this will not destroy him.

But the tension this creates within the best of men is absolutely unimaginable—and something this country refuses to imagine—and very, very dangerous. And again, it complicates the sexuality of the country and of the Negro in a hideous way exactly because all Negroes are raised in a kind of matriarchy, since, after all, the wife can go out and wash the white lady’s clothes, and steal little things from the kitchen, you know, and this is the way we’ve all grown up.

Now, this creates another social, psychological problem in what we like to refer to as a subculture, which is a part of the bill which the country’s going to have to pay.

 

 

Bills always do come in; one always has to pay.

 

 

Yes, they do; yes, they do indeed.

 

 

Yeah, yeah. It’s a terrible thing. Negro women have, for generations, raised white children, who sometimes lynched their children, and tried to raise their child like a man, and yet in the full knowledge that if he really walks around like a man, he’s going to be cut down. It’s a terrible kind of dilemma. It’s a terrible price to ask anybody to pay. And in this country Negro women have been paying it for three hundred years, and for a hundred of those years, when they were legally and technically free.

When people talk about time, therefore, you know, I really can’t help but be absolutely, not only impatient, but bewildered. Why should I wait any longer? And in any case, even if I were willing to—which I’m not—
how
?

 

 

Go slow. Yes.