But this is a very particular and peculiar hell. It is not built foursquare. It is hard to convey the quality of the inhabitants. Every system involves a hierarchy, so perhaps I could suggest a system of this hell by observing that those who meet there manage to meet because they know where they are. The others—the minority in your country, the majority in mine—never meet, because they imagine that hell is a place for others. They also imagine that they control this system.
It will be considered offensive—unpatriotic—to compare the South African situation to the American situation: nor will I, in fact, make such a comparison, because I do not know enough about your country (I may not know enough about my own). Yet, you must have sometimes been struck, as I have been, by the vehemence of the Western leaders (my own nominal representative in France en tête) concerning global freedom and democracy: deep concern over Polish freedom, the determination of the American government to bring freedom to South America and the Philippines by any means whatever, and the ineffable gallantry of the British prime minister’s insistence on freedom for the islands off Argentina.
But none of this bellicosity is exhibited in the case of South Africa.
To backtrack, and in order to make my point clear: I am certainly concerned about the freedom of the Poles in Warsaw; but the Poles in Chicago are whites who hate blacks. I am certainly concerned about Ireland: but the Irish in Boston are whites who hate niggers. I may be ambivalent concerning the physical purposes of the state of Israel, but American Jews are, in the main, indistinguishable from American white Christians: and I would not like to be an Arab in Jerusalem. And Israel is, also, an ally of South Africa—which Western nation, indeed, is not? (And it is worth pointing out that the ANC [African National Congress] is as homeless as the PLO, for the same reasons.)
And finally, to discuss—I dismiss—“the Russian menace”: I have known very few black Communists; black Americans, on the whole, are far less romantic than white Americans. The Russian menace has been invented by the West in order to distract attention from the moral and actual chaos in the West. People one day ahead of death by starvation do not huddle before their campfires (assuming that they have any fire at all) reading Marx or arguing about dialectical materialism. And it is worth pointing out that my country, which accuses Cuba of exporting revolution, is the most notorious exporter of revolution of this century. Neither Havana nor Moscow has the remotest interest in each other—why on earth should they have? What could they have hoped to do for each other? No. It was expected that the U.S.A., “the last best hope of earth,” a country itself born of a revolution, would be their hope and their friend.
But there are revolutions and revolutions—to leave it at that. They are glorified in the past. They are dreaded and, insofar as possible, destroyed in the present.
Now, I do not know if what is happening in South Africa is a revolution (but perhaps each revolution redefines the word), but I do know this: the moral pretensions of the West are being tested and exposed, and the real meaning of the “civilizing mission” revealed.
You are, yourself, incontestably, one of the products of this mission, and so was the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and so was Harry Belafonte, and my mother and myself. Yet, we do not owe our presence to the Civilized. We are here in spite of the Civilized. And nowhere is this clearer than in South Africa now, and in the reaction of the Civilized to this slaughter. We are not white, we are black, and we exist therefore, in this system, this hierarchy, on another, quite literally unspeakable level.
No one wishes to admit this, for it would be to admit something else. Africa fed itself, for generations, long before the Civilized arrived. As of that moment, Africa was forced to feed the world. There is not a single diamond mine, as far as I know, in England; nor, as it turns out, enough coal to keep the English warm. My grandfather, perfectly capable of feeding his family and keeping them warm, was forced instead to pick cotton to keep white families warm. The wealth of England and my country, the wealth of the Western world, in short, is based on slave labor, and the intolerable guilt thus engendered in hearts and minds of the Civilized is the root of what we call racism. From this root spring the legends concerning—proving—the inferiority of black people. One must justify the appalling action of turning a man into a thing. To turn a human being into a moneymaking beast of burden and, by this action, believe—or make oneself believe—that one is “civilizing” this creature is to have surrendered one’s morality and imperiled one’s sense of reality.
“The problem of the twentieth century,” [said] W. E. B. DuBois, in 1903, “is the problem of the color line.” And this problem begins to arrive now in an unanswerable dénouement, in Africa, where white men—or perhaps white power—began it.
Finally, it is exceedingly hypocritical for the West to pretend that it will not apply sanctions against South Africa, nor disinvest, because this would hurt black people. This pretension is scarcely worth noting, much less answering. The morality of the West and its economic self-interest are allied, as they always were. Now, as the dungeon in which we were meant to be used forever shakes, one sees how little the free world trusts the possibility of freedom.
But you believe in this possibility—and so do I. Our assassinations and our funerals testify to the absolute truth that the world’s present social and economic arrangements cannot serve the world’s needs: and racism is the cornerstone and principal justification of these arrangements. And I am sure that you believe, with me, this paradox: black freedom will make white freedom possible. Indeed, our freedom, which we have been forced to buy at so high a price, is the only hope of freedom that they have.
Till we meet, then, sir, and with my deepest respect,
Yours in the faith,
(1985)
FOREWORDS AND AFTERWORDS
A Quarter-Century of Un-Americana
A Quarter-Century of Un-Americana, 1938–1963: A Tragico-Comical Memorabilia of HUAC is a scrapbook of sorts, chronicling and critiquing the United States House of Representatives’ House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). The committee was renamed the House Committee on Internal Security in 1969; a vestige of this committee still remains as the House Judiciary Committee. The committee concerned itself with investigating everything from Communist activity to Nazis in America to the Ku Klux Klan. It had a hand in the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans and the Hollywood blacklists. HUAC is often confused with Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which, perforce, was a part of the Senate. Both organizations were criticized by former President Harry Truman as being “the most Un-American thing in the country today” in 1959.
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WE ARE LIVING THROUGH the most crucial moment of our history, the moment which will result in a new life for us, or a new death. I am not being in the least metaphorical about this. When I say “a new life,” I mean a new vision of America, a vision which will allow us to face, and begin to change, the facts of American life; and when I say “death,” I mean Carthage. This seems a grim view to take of our situation, but it is scarcely grimmer than the facts. Our honesty and our courage in facing these facts is all that can save us from disaster. And one of these facts is that there has always been a segment of American life, and a powerful segment, too, which equated virtue with mindlessness.
In this connection, the House Un-American Activities Committee is one of the most sinister facts of the national life. It is not merely that we do not need this committee; the truth is, we cannot afford it. It always reminds me of a vast and totally untrustworthy bomb shelter in which groups of frightened people endlessly convince one another of its impregnability, while the real world outside—by which, again, I mean the facts of our private and public lives—calmly and inexorably prepares their destruction. It is perhaps because I am an American Negro that I have always felt white Americans, many if not most of them, are experts in self-delusion—they usually speak as though I were not in the room. “I,” here, do
es not refer so much to the man called Baldwin as it does to the reality which produced me, a reality with which I live, and from which most Americans spend all their time in flight. People in flight never can grow up, which means they can never, really, become citizens—and we simply must not surrender this great country to those people. We must not allow their fear to control us, and, indeed, we must not allow it to control them. Rather, we should attempt to release them from their panic and their unadmitted sorrow. We ought to try, by the example of our own lives, to prove that life is love and wonder and that that nation is doomed which penalizes those of its citizens who recognize and rejoice in this fact. We must dare to take another view of majority rule, disengaging it from anything resembling a popularity contest; taking it upon ourselves to become the majority by changing the moral climate. For it is upon this majority that the life of any nation really depends.
Speaking as a man, as a Negro, as a citizen, it has seemed to me for a long time now that the really dreadful agony confronting Americans is this: the time has come for us to grow up. A man grows up when he looks back, realizes what has happened to him, accepts it all, and begins to change himself. He cannot grow up until he reaches this moment and passes it. We are now at the end of our extraordinarily prolonged adolescence. A very great poet, an American, Miss Marianne Moore, wrote, many years ago, the following description of our terrors: “The weak overcomes its menace. The strong overcomes itself.”
That self-knowledge which matures a nation as well as a man presupposes free men and free minds. This book opens with a drawing by the great American artist Art Young, depicting Jesus Christ as wanted for sedition. It recalled for me another Christ—the “Black Christ” of Countee Cullen:
Men may not bind the summer sea,
Nor set a limit to the stars;
The sun seeps through all iron bars;
The moon is ever manifest.
And more than this (and here’s the crown)
No man, my son, can batter down
The star-flung ramparts of the mind.
(1963)
Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: A Fifty-Year Literary and Erotic Odyssey by Harold Norse
Harold Norse (1916–2009) was a poet and writer often associated with the Beat poets, a friend and contemporary of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Tennessee Williams, William Carlos Williams, and many others. He was openly gay, a native New Yorker, and a friend of James Baldwin. He lived abroad in Europe and North Africa from the early 1950s until 1968, when he moved to the West Coast. The author of many volumes of poems, he wrote of his relationship with Baldwin in his 1989 Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: A Fifty-Year Literary and Erotic Odyssey. The preface for that book was this piece written by Baldwin originally for a special Harold Norse issue of the journal Ole.
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I’VE KNOWN HAROLD NORSE so long that I don’t remember when I met him. It was many years ago, anyway, in Greenwich Village, in New York. It’s my impression that Harold was living then on Perry Street; the good Lord knows where I was living. We were quite incredibly, monstrously young, insanely confident—we were destined to do such things! Time passed—perhaps no time in the history of the world has passed so swiftly and so hideously—time passed, testing our assumptions, trying our confidence, breaking our hearts: and forcing us to work. For a very long time we saw each other not at all. But each knew that the other was somewhere around, and, in the peculiar way of poets, and to our peculiar gods, we prayed for each other.
All that I am equipped to recognize in the effort of any poet is whether or not the effort is genuine. The achieved performance, insofar as it is susceptible to contemporary judgment, can only be judged by this touchstone. And by “genuine effort” I do not mean good intentions, or hysterical verbosity, or frantic endeavor: the effort I am suggesting scours the poet’s life, reduces him, inexorably, to who he is; and who he is is what he gives us. But he gives us much more than that, for his giving is an example that contains a command: the command is for us to do likewise.
That this example and this command are terrifying is proved by the lives of all poets, and that the example and the command are valid is proved by the terror these evoke. One is commanded to look on each day as though it were the first day, to draw each breath in freedom, and to know that everything that lives is holy. Neither the state nor the church approves of such blasphemy, banks will never knowingly loan it money, and armies trample it underfoot. So be it. It is themselves they are trampling underfoot, their hope, and their continuity: and one day all of us will know this, and be able to love one another and learn to live in peace.
Until that day comes, the poet is in exile, as Harold is now. But if light ever enters the hearts of men, Harold will be one of those who have helped to set it there.
(1965)
The Negro in New York: An Informal Social History, 1626–1940, edited by Roi Ottley and William J. Weatherby
THE NEGRO IN NEW YORK is an unavoidably sketchy and uneven document, compiled by the Writers’ Program of New York City during that very brief period of the WPA when it was recognized that writers existed in our country and had to eat, and even had a certain utility—though, probably, no real value. The curator of the Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature and History, Jean Blackwell Hutson, points out that the material in this book has been sitting in the collection since 1940, with “publication deferred and prevented because information contained in it was too startling for conservative taste.” That the information in this book should be startling is an interesting comment on the conservative, that is to say, the prevailing, attitude toward American history. If so many people did not find the information in this book “startling,” they might be less at the mercy of their ignorance, and our present situation would be healthier than it is.
The book can be startling only to the brainwashed, in which category, alas, nearly all Americans are presently to be found, and, of course, it would be very hard to use it as a basis for a rousing television series. It strips the Americans of their fig leaves, as it were, and proves that Eden, if it ever existed, certainly never existed here. It proves that anyone who contends that the Northern racial attitudes have not always been, essentially, indistinguishable from those of the South is either lying or is deluded. Of course, one has become deluded when one has believed a lie too long.
It is impossible to read this book and not realize how disastrous has been the effect, in so many millions of lives, of the Industrial Revolution—that same revolution which has been hailed as being so liberating a force. Indeed, it liberated peasants from the land, to say nothing of their lives, small children from their parents, women from their safety, and men from their honor. The tremendous amount of labor needed to cultivate the New World, and the enormous profits to be carried back to Europe as a result of this cultivation, meant that human flesh, any human flesh, became a source of profit. And there is nothing in European, or subsequent American, history to indicate that any consideration whatever deflected the new conquerors from this goal. Such uneasy consciences as we know to have been were as nothing compared to the heartening—yes, the virtuous—sound of money being made and of money making money. The Dutch, who ruled this city, and the Europeans who traded in this harbor, sought one freedom only, the freedom to make money, and in searching for this freedom they did not hesitate to use women and small children, as well as thieves and pirates and murderers. The poor Irish, God knows, fared no better at the hands of the industrialists than any captive African. The Irish situation began to change only after it was no longer necessary, or politic, to use the poor Irish laborer to cow the Negro laborer, or vice versa: no doubt, many Irishmen will find this information startling indeed. (But it is no more startling than the fact that during the potato famine of 1845, their English masters allowed the Irish to starve, in order to protect British merchants. This unhappy circumstance has produced many a virtuous, self-righteous Irish cop, as well as the winning folklore of, say, The Bells of St. Mar
y’s.)
The rise of Northern industry, and the consolidation of this power, caused the racial lines of the North to be drawn up very differently, but not less severely, than those in the South: where the poor white, until this hour, has yet to comprehend what his bosses have always understood very well—that any coalition of himself and the black will destroy the system which has kept both black and white in ignorance and peonage for so long. And a marvelous foreshadowing of the scapegoat role the black was to play in American life is contained in Peter Stuyvesant’s explanation of his surrender to the British. The city could not withstand the British siege, he explained, because three hundred slaves, brought in just before the British arrived in the harbor, had eaten all the surplus food. Scarcely any American politician has since improved on this extraordinarily convincing way of explaining American reverses.
What the Negro did in New York, and how, is the subject of the book before you, and not the subject of this foreword. But: “[The British] regulated servitude with the thoroughness of modern business methods—every step necessary for its protection and preservation was taken. Blacks were therefore set apart from whites on the theory that to permit them to mingle freely with white people would endanger the chances of keeping them enslaved. This policy was carried out in every straining detail; so much so that a law was passed ‘that no Negro shall be buried in Trinity church-yard.’” Nor would some of our more conservative political leaders find the following proclamation, issued in 1706 by Governor Lord Corn-bury, the cousin of Queen Anne, in the least startling: