Requiring and commanding [all officers] to take all proper methods for the seizing and apprehending of all such Negroes as shall be found to be assembled—and if any of them refuse to submit, then fire upon them, kill or destroy them, if they cannot otherwise be taken—I am informed that several Negroes in Kings County [Brooklyn] have assembled themselves in a riotous manner, which if not prevented may prove of ill consequence.
Then, as now, Negroes were in the streets—and this is before the American War of Independence; then, as now, white people professed not to know the reason why; then, as now, it was the slave who was the wrongdoer and not the system which had made him a slave. And then, as now, the Negro’s hopes were used with the utmost cynicism by those who could use these hopes to perpetuate their own dominance. Thus, the Declaration of Independence terrified the slave owners, and they would never have armed their slaves if the British had not done so first, promising freedom to any Negro who joined the British lines. Thereupon, the soon-to-be-Americans armed two regiments of blacks, promising freedom to all who served three years, or who were honorably discharged (two interesting stipulations). That this cynical and treacherous pattern has not altered from that day to this is scarcely worth mentioning: but it is worth observing that whereas Americans profess not to know what the Negro wants, they always know what to promise him whenever they need his body.
And here, during the Depression, is a member of the New York City Realty Board: “I believe a logical section for Negro expansion in Manhattan is East Harlem. At present this district has reached such a point of deterioration that its ultimate residential pattern is most puzzling.—An influx of Negroes into East Harlem would not work a hardship on the present population of the area, because its present residents could move to any other section of New York without the attendant racial discrimination which the Negro would encounter if he endeavored to locate in other districts.”
Well, we know how the “puzzling” residential pattern of East Harlem eventually resolved itself: into a pattern which changes not. And we will not even discuss the shameful and brutal role played in all this by the churches, by the labor unions, and by revered corporations and utilities. Nor will we—in order to avoid startling our readers—observe that the economic pattern to be discerned in the pages which follow is so brutal, so utterly blind and selfish, and so irresponsible that Russian roulette, by comparison, seems safer than playing jacks.
Here is what Mayor La Guardia’s commission had to say about the Harlem race riot of 1935: “As a population of low income, [it] suffered from conditions that affected low income groups of all races, but the causes that kept Negroes in this class did not apply with the same force to whites. These conditions were underscored by discrimination against Negroes in all walks of life. The rumor of the death of a boy which spread throughout the community had awakened the deep-seated sense of wrongs and denials and even memories of injustices in the South.” (Italics mine: the pot is calling the kettle black.) The riot’s cause was “the smouldering resentments of the people of Harlem against racial discrimination and poverty in the midst of plenty.” The riot was “a spontaneous and an incoherent protest by Harlem’s population against a studied neglect of its critical problems.”
At least, no one said that the riot was Communist inspired. And what was done? “The Board of Education promoted Mrs. Gertrude E. Ayer to the principalship of Public School No. 24, Manhattan, in 1936, and she became the first Negro woman to advance to such a position.” (Also, as far as I know, and certainly until very lately, the last. That was my school, and my principal, and I loved and feared the lady—for she really was a lady, and a great one—with that trembling passion only twelve-year-olds can feel.) But let us continue this progress report:
That same year, the Department of Hospitals appointed Dr. John West … the director of the new Central Harlem Health Center which had been built at a cost of $250,000. At the same time, the Mayor reported that 435 buildings were torn down in the Harlem slum area. New schools, a housing project, a large recreational center, with a swimming pool, sports fields, tennis courts, and a band concert stadium known as the Colonial [!] Recreation Center, situated at 145th Street on Bradhurst Avenue, have been part of the city’s acknowledgment of the needs of the Negro people … Throughout his long American history, the Negro’s faith has been in the ultimate triumph of democracy. At no time has his goal been as visible as it is today.
The last words were written just before our entry into World War II. If—for those of you who are not too hopelessly startled—the show seems familiar, it is because the show has been running a very long time, and most of the actors have had no choice but to speak the lines and make the moves assigned to them. There is a rumor—striking terror and chaos in the heart of the box office—that some people have become so weary of the spectacle that they have sent for a new show, which is presently on the road. But not until the wheels of those wagons are on our children’s necks will we consider reading or revising or throwing away this script.
In the meantime, ladies and gentlemen, after a brief intermission—time out for one or two committee reports, time out for an antipoverty pep talk, time out to make a Vietnamese child an orphan and then lovingly raise him to love all our works, time out for a White House conference, time out to brief and augment the police forces, time out to buy some Negroes, jail some, club some, and kill some—after a brief intermission, ladies and gentlemen, the show begins again in the auction room. And you will hear the same old piano, playing the blues.
(1967)
Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether
I RECEIVED A QUESTIONNAIRE the other day—democracy prides itself on its questionnaires, just as it is endlessly confirmed and misled by its public opinion polls—and the first question was “Why do you continue to write?” Writers do not like this question, which they hear as “Why do you continue to breathe?” but sometimes one can almost answer it by pointing to the work of another writer. There! one says, triumphantly. Look! That’s what it’s about—to make one see—to lead us back to reality again.
The streets, tenements, fire escapes, the elders, and the urgent concerns of childhood—or, rather, the helpless intensity of anguish with which one watches one’s childhood disappear—are rendered very vividly indeed by Louise Meriwether, in her first novel, Daddy Was a Number Runner. We have seen this life from the point of view of a black boy growing into a menaced and probably brief manhood; I don’t know that we have ever seen it from the point of view of a black girl on the edge of a terrifying womanhood. And the metaphor for this growing apprehension of the iron and insurmountable rigors of one’s life are here conveyed by that game known in Harlem as the numbers, the game which contains the possibility of making a “hit”—the American dream in blackface, Horatio Alger revealed, the American success story with the price tag showing! Compare the heroine of this book—to say nothing of the landscape—with the heroine of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and you will see to what extent poverty wears a color—and also, as we put it in Harlem, arrives at an attitude. By this time, the heroine of Tree (whose name was also Francie, if I remember correctly) is among those troubled Americans, that silent (!) majority which wonders what black Francie wants, and why she’s so unreliable as a maid.
Shit, says Francie, sitting on the stoop as the book ends, looking outward at the land of the free, and trying, with one thin bony black hand, to stem the blood which is beginning to rush from a nearly mortal wound. That monosyllable resounds all over this country, all over the world: it is a judgment on this civilization rendered the more implacable by being delivered by a child. The mortal wound is not physical; the book, so far from being a melodrama, is very brilliantly understated. The wound is the wound made upon the recognition that one is regarded as a worthless human being, and, further, in the case of this particular black girl, upon the recognition that the men, one’s only hope, have also been cut down and cannot save you. Louise Meriwether wisely ends her book before co
nfronting us with what it means to “jump the broomstick!”—to have a black man and a black woman jump over a broomstick is the way slave masters laughingly married their slaves to each other, those same white people who now complain that black people have no morals. At the heart of this book, which gives it its force, is a child’s growing sense of being one of the victims of a collective rape—for history, and especially and emphatically in the black-white arena, is not the past, it is the present. The great, vast, public, historical violation is also the present, private, unendurable insult, and the mighty force of these unnoticed violations spells doom for any civilization which pretends that the violations are not occurring or that they do not matter or that tomorrow is a lovely day. People cannot be—and, finally, will not be—treated in this way. This book should be sent to the White House, and to our earnest attorney general, and to everyone in this country able to read—which may, however, alas, be a most despairing statement. We love—the white Americans, I mean—the notion of the little woman behind the great man: perhaps one day, Louise Meriwether will give us her version of What Every Woman Knows.
Until that hoped-for hour, because she has so truthfully conveyed what the world looks like from a black girl’s point of view, she has told everyone who can read or feel what it means to be a black man or woman in this country. She has achieved an assessment, in a deliberately minor key, of a major tragedy. It is a considerable achievement, and I hope she simply keeps on keeping on.
(1970)
A Lonely Rage by Bobby Seale
Bobby Seale (b. 1936) cofounded the Black Panther Party along with Huey P. Newton in 1966. Raised largely in Oakland, California, he would spend three years in the Air Force before receiving a dishonorable discharge for disobeying orders. He met Newton while at the Oakland City College after joining the Afro-American Association. They both were looking for more radical civil rights involvement. Seale became the first chairman of the Black Panther Party. He would become involved in two famous trials, one as a member of the 1968 Chicago Eight (where, famously, he was bound and gagged for outbursts in the courtroom), and again in 1970 in New Haven, Connecticut, where nineteen-year-old Alex Rackley, a suspected FBI informant, had been killed by fellow members of the Panther Party. Seale stood accused of having ordered the “execution.” The trial became a cause célèbre, centering around Yale University and the courthouse, where literally thousands descended, including famous radical celebrities; the spectacle turned into an indictment of the Nixon administration, the FBI, the notorious Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), and J. Edgar Hoover. The trial ended in a hung jury.
A Lonely Rage was Seale’s second memoir, after Seize the Time (1970).
Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998)—who joined the Panthers after being released from prison in 1966, after serving nine years for rape and intent to commit murder—possessed conflicted and complicated feelings about Baldwin. On one hand he championed Baldwin’s work as an inspiration, but he would go on to say demeaning and homophobic things against him, particularly in his 1968 memoir, Soul on Ice. Nonetheless, Baldwin always seemed to treat him with respect.
· · ·
I WISH I’D KEPT MY NOTES concerning Bobby Seale and Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, so many years ago. It was, actually, only a little over ten years ago, but it seems much longer than that. Everyone was so young—except Eldridge, there was always something of the deacon about that one. Huey was the dedicated poet, and strategist. Bobby was the firebrand.
I first met Huey in San Francisco, but don’t remember meeting either Bobby or Eldridge then. My first recollection of Eldridge is in Hollywood, at the Beverly Hills Hotel; he was part of the Black Panther escort for Betty Shabazz. As for Bobby Seale, I first met him, if memory serves, with Marlon Brando, in Marlon’s hotel suite, in Atlanta, the day of Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral. He had been sleeping, was still groggy—was as tense and quiet as the air becomes when a storm is about to break. This was certainly due, in part, to the climate of that momentous day, but it was also due to a kind of intelligence of anguish living behind Bobby’s smoky eyes.
This intelligence is unsparing—Bobby certainly does not spare Bobby—and informs this modest, restrained, and passionate book. I feel completely inept, almost presumptuous, in attempting to write a foreword to it. I did not go through what Bobby, and his generation, went through. The time of my youth was entirely different and the savage irony of hindsight allows me to suggest that the time of my youth was far less hopeful. I speak of this savage irony because the political and spiritual currents of my very early youth involved a return to Africa, or a rejection of it; either choice would lead to suicide, or madness, for, in fact, neither choice was possible. Though the American Communist Party, as it was then constituted, anyway, never made any very great impact on the bulk of the black population; its presence, strategies, and mercurial shifts in moral judgment disseminated, at the very least, confusion. Our most visible heroes were Father Divine and Joe Louis—we in the ghetto then knew very little about Paul Robeson. We knew very little about anything black, in fact, and this was not our fault. Those of us who found out more than the schools were willing to teach us did so at the price of becoming unmanageable, isolated, and, indeed, subversive.
The South was simply the hell which our parents had survived, and fled. Harlem was our rat-and-roach-infested haven: Nigger Heaven, a vastly successful novel about Harlem, was published around the time that I was born.
I have suggested that Bobby’s time was more hopeful than my own: but I do not wish to be misunderstood concerning the nature, the meaning, and the cruelty of that hope. I do not mean to suggest that the bulk of the American people had undergone a “change of heart” as concerns their relationship to their darker brothers by the time Bobby Seale came down the pike. They hadn’t, and it is very much to be doubted that they ever will. Most people cling to their guilts and terrors and crimes, compounding them hour by hour and day by day, and are more likely to be changed from without than from within. No: the world in which we found ourselves at the end of World War II, and, more particularly, the brutal and gratuitous folly with which we ushered in the atomic age, brought into focus, as never before, the real meaning of the American social contract and exposed the self-serving nature of the American dream. And one of the results of this exposure was that the celebrated “Negro problem” became a global instead of a merely domestic matter.
It is in this sense that Seale’s era is to be considered more hopeful: in spite of the horrors which he recounts, with such restraint, in these pages. The beacon lit, for his generation, in 1956, in Montgomery, Alabama, by an anonymous black woman, elicited an answering fire from all the wretched, all over the earth, signaled the beginning of the end of the racial nightmare—for it will end; no lie endures forever—and helped Stagolee, the black folk hero Bobby takes for his model, to achieve his manhood. For it is that tremendous journey which Bobby’s book is about: the act of assuming and becoming oneself.
(1978)
BOOK REVIEWS
Best Short Stories by Maxim Gorky
IN GORKY’S MASTERWORK, The Lower Depths, his greatest gifts shine most clearly: his immense—but not quite profound—perception, his concern for the wretchedness of people, his almost romantic preoccupation with nature. And here, above all, is a carefully controlled rage at the lot of men and an insistence on their noble destiny.
Insofar as one can tell from this translation, however—which, by the way, seems most uneven—he is far from a careful writer and by no means a great one. He is almost always painfully verbose and frequently threatens to degenerate into simple propaganda.
But though this wordiness persists in every story in the book, in such pieces as “Creatures That Once Were Men,” in “Cain and Artyom,” and in such shorter pieces as “Red,” “Twenty-six Men and a Girl,” and “Chums,” the power of Gorky’s sympathy almost succeeds in reducing his flaws to unimportance. There is ironic penetration and great tenderness h
ere which none of the contemporary realists whom Gorky helped to father have yet managed to match. But having said that he is tender, ironic, and observant, and that most of his descendants are not, it must also be admitted that he is also quite frequently sentimental—as are his offspring—and that regardless of how well they succeed as outraged citizens, they are incomplete as artists.
Gorky’s range is narrow and in intention and effect alike he can scarcely be called subtle. He reiterates: men can be gods and they live like beasts; this he relates, quite legitimately, indeed necessarily, to a particular and oppressive society. (“And the men, too, the first source of all that uproar, were ludicrous and pitiable: their little figures dusty, tattered, nimble, bent under the weight of goods that lay on their backs, under the weight of cares that drove them hither and thither … were so trivial and small in comparison with the colossal iron monsters … and all that they had created. Their own creation had enslaved them and taken away their individuality.”) This is a disquieting and honest report. Its only limitation, and it is a profound one, is that it remains a report. Gorky does not seem capable of the definitive insight, the shock of identification. Again and again we recognize a type, with his human attributes sensitively felt and well reported but never realized. For this reason Gorky’s sympathy is often mawkish, his dénouements a brutal and self-consciously sardonic trick. He is concerned, not with the human as such, but with the human being as a symbol; and this attitude is basically sentimental, pitying, rather than clear, and therefore—in spite of the boast of realism—quite thoroughly unreal. There can be no catharsis in Gorky, in spite of the wealth of action and his considerable powers of observation; his people inspire pity and sometimes rage but never love or terror. Finally we are divorced from them; we see them in relation to oppression but not in relation to ourselves. In the short story “The Hermit,” the lack of psychological acuteness he brings to a story intended to show the power of virtue (Love) and the roads taken to attain it make for a devastating and characteristic failure.