Nation: The Root of the Negro Problem

STROLLING down a quiet street in a small town, James Baldwin came upon a scene that has since haunted his dreams. From a sunlit patch of grass came the singing laughter of a child. Baldwin looked —and saw a white man swinging his little daughter in the air. “It didn’t last for more than a second,” recalls Baldwin, “but it was an unforgettable touch of beauty, a glimpse of another world. Then I looked down and saw a shadow. The shadow was a nigger—me.”

To Author James Baldwin, 38, this parable reveals everything worth knowing about the black man’s view of himself in 20th century white America. It also reveals much about James Baldwin himself. He is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a Negro leader. He tries no civil rights cases in the courts, preaches from no pulpit, devises no stratagems for sit-ins, Freedom Riders or street marchers. He published an essay in 1959 called Nobody Knows My Name, and four years later, in Birmingham and Harlem, and in all the Birminghams and Harlems in the nation and the world, most Negroes still do not know his name. He is a nervous, slight, almost fragile figure, filled with frets and fears. He is effeminate in manner, drinks considerably, smokes cigarettes in chains, and he often loses his audience with overblown arguments. Nevertheless, in the U.S. today there is not another writer—white or black—who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South.

Last week Baldwin was in California, hopping from city to city to talk to college and high school students. Thrust from typewriter to rostrum by virtue of a widely acclaimed, blistering essay in The New Yorker (TIME, Jan. 4), now in book form under the title The Fire Next Time, Baldwin spared his audiences nothing. He spoke not for himself but for all Negroes to all whites. “I hoed a lot of cotton,” he said. “I laid a lot of track. I dammed a lot of rivers. You wouldn’t have had this country if it hadn’t been for me … When I was going to school. I began to be bugged by the teaching of American history, because it seemed that history had been taught without cognizance of my presence. It is my responsibility now to give you as true a version of your history as I can.”

Identity & Myths. The history, as Baldwin sees it, is an unending story of man’s inhumanity to man, of the white’s refusal to see the black simply as another human being, of the white man’s delusions and the Negro’s demoralization. The theme floods his novels and essays. The white man, he writes, is guilt-ridden and sex-ridden, and he has managed over the years to delude himself by transferring his own failures onto the Negro. “At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself. And the history of this problem can be reduced to the means used by Americans—lynch law and law, segregation and legal acceptance, terrorization and concession—either to come to terms with this necessity, or to find a way around it, or (most usually) to find a way of doing both these things at once … In this long battle, the white man’s motive was the protection of his identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an identity.” And this has led to a polarization of deep passions: the Negro’s rage and the white man’s terror.

“I think,” writes Baldwin, “if one examines the myths which have proliferated in this country concerning the Negro, one discovers beneath these myths a kind of sleeping terror of some condition which we refuse to imagine. In a way, if the Negro were not here, we might be forced to deal within ourselves and our own personalities with all those vices, all those conundrums, and all those mysteries with which we have invested the Negro race. Uncle Tom is, for example, if he is called Uncle, a kind of saint. He is there, he endures, he will forgive us, and this is a key to that image. But if he is not Uncle, if he is merely Tom, he is a danger to everybody. He will wreak havoc on the countryside. When he is Uncle Tom, he has no sex—when he is Tom, he does—and this obviously says much more about the people who invented this myth than it does about the people who are the object of it.” The Negro is thus penalized for “the guilty imagination of the white people who invest him with their hates and longings, and is the principal target of their sexual paranoia.”

Fear & Acceptance. And what of the Negro’s rage? It grows, says Baldwin, from the white man’s “sleeping terror.” “We would never, never allow Negroes to starve, to grow bitter, and to die in ghettos all over the country if we were not driven by some nameless fear that has nothing to do with Negroes. We would never victimize, as we do, children whose only crime is color, and keep them, as we put it, in their place. We wouldn’t drive Negroes mad as we do by accepting them in ballparks, and on concert stages, but not in our homes, and not in our neighborhoods, and not in our churches.”

Negro rage is provoked, furthermore, by the white man’s insistence on his own superiority, by his demand that the Negro, to achieve equality, must be accepted according to the white man’s own definition of acceptability. “I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be ‘accepted’ by white people,” writes Baldwin, “still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet.

“White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow, and may very well be never —the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

“The Negro’s experience of the white world cannot possibly create in him any respect for the standards by which the white world claims to live. His own condition is proof that white people do not live by these standards. Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people … In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand.”

Watermelon & Images. The Negro no longer can be controlled by white America’s image of him. “This fact,” says Baldwin, “has everything to do with the rise of Africa in world affairs. At the time that I was growing up, Negroes in this country were taught to be ashamed of Africa. They were taught it bluntly, as I was, for example, by being told that Africa had never contributed ‘anything’ to civilization.”

The lengths to which Harlem-born Baldwin, the son of a Baptist preacher, tried to escape the association with Africans—with Negroes, really—was pathetic. Baldwin himself avoided eating watermelon for years. At home, “one’s hair was always being attacked with hard brushes and combs and Vaseline; it was shameful to have ‘nappy’ hair. One’s legs and arms and face were always being greased, so that one would not look ‘ashy’ in the wintertime. One was always being mercilessly scrubbed and polished, as though in the hope that a stain could thus be washed away . . . The women were forever straightening and curling their hair, and using bleaching creams. And yet it was clear that none of this would release one from the stigma of being a Negro; this effort merely increased the shame and rage. There was not, no matter where one turned, any acceptable image of oneself, no proof of one’s existence. One had the choice, either of ‘acting just like a nigger’ or of not acting just like a nigger—and only those who have tried it know how impossible it is to tell the difference.”

North & South. White liberals are often unable to see the Negro in human terms, and the sensitive Negro antenna can read that fact deep in the liberal’s mind (“Let the liberal white bastard squirm,” broods a Negro character in Baldwin’s Another Country). Baldwin cites a passage from Beatnik Author (On the Road) Jack Kerouac to make his point: “At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching . . . wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, music . . .” Says Baldwin: “I would hate to be in Kerouac’s shoes if he should ever be mad enough to read this aloud from the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theatre.”

Baldwin perceives curious differences in white attitudes in the North and South. Negroes, he writes, represent nothing to the Northerner personally, “except perhaps the dangers of carnality. He never sees Negroes. Southerners see them all the time. Northerners never think about them, whereas Southerners are never really thinking of anything else. Negroes are, therefore, ignored in the North and are under surveillance in the South, and suffer hideously in both places … It seems to be indispensable to the national self-esteem that the Negro be considered either as a kind of ward, or as a victim. They are two sides of the same coin, and the South will not change—cannot change —until the North changes.”

Change. Baldwin offers no easy answers for an end to the rage and the terror. The Black Muslims, with their philosophy of separatism, frighten him. “I consider them really irresponsible in the most serious way—irresponsible in terms of what I consider to be their obligations to the Negro community, as all racists are irresponsible. They batten on the despair of black men.”

Not law, but morality is the basis of Baldwin’s hopes. He says: “It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love—and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths—change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power.” The Negro can achieve the nation’s destruction, says Baldwin, through “the abdication by Americans of any effort really to be free. The Negro can precipitate this abdication because white Americans have never, in all their long history, been able to look on him as a man like themselves.

“White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption —which, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards—is revealed in all kinds of striking ways, from Bobby Kennedy’s assurance that a Negro can become President in 40 years to the unfortunate tone of warm congratulation with which so many liberals address their Negro equals . . . The only way that the white man can be released from the Negro’s tyrannical power over him is to consent, in effect, to become black himself, to become a part of that suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully from the heights of his lonely power and, armed with spiritual traveler’s checks, visits surreptitiously after dark . . . The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks—the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind.”

Fire & Pain. In the same terms, thanks to his newly assumed role of reluctant lecturer. Author Baldwin has now begun to exhort his own people to accept the past and learn to live with it. “I beg the black people of this country,” said he last week, “to do something which I know to be very difficult: to be proud of the auction block, and all that rope, and all that fire, and all that pain.”

Whenever he walks onstage to address a crowd of whites or blacks, James Baldwin takes the microphone and cries: “Can you hear me? . . . Can you all hear me?” If he can make himself heard—in depths far beyond the capacity of the human ear —everybody will know his name. And it won’t be “Boy,” and it won’t be “Nigger.”