That is why he is called a poet. And his responsibility, which is also his joy and his strength and his life, is to defeat all labels and complicate all battles by insisting on the human riddle, to bear witness, as long as breath is in him, to that mighty, unnameable, transfiguring force which lives in the soul of man, and to aspire to do his work so well that when the breath has left him, the people—all people!—who search in the rubble for a sign or a witness will be able to find him there.
(1964)
The Uses of the Blues
THE TITLE “The Uses of the Blues” does not refer to music; I don’t know anything about music. It does refer to the experience of life, or the state of being, out of which the blues come. Now, I am claiming a great deal for the blues; I’m using them as a metaphor—I might have titled this, for example, “The Uses of Anguish” or “The Uses of Pain.” But I want to talk about the blues not only because they speak of this particular experience of life and this state of being, but because they contain the toughness that manages to make this experience articulate. I am engaged, then, in a discussion of craft or, to use a very dangerous word, art. And I want to suggest that the acceptance of this anguish one finds in the blues, and the expression of it, creates also, however odd this may sound, a kind of joy. Now joy is a true state, it is a reality; it has nothing to do with what most people have in mind when they talk of happiness, which is not a real state and does not really exist.
Consider some of the things the blues are about. They’re about work, love, death, floods, lynchings; in fact, a series of disasters which can be summed up under the arbitrary heading “Facts of Life.” Bessie Smith, who is dead now, came out of somewhere in the Deep South. I guess she was born around 1898, a great blues singer; died in Mississippi after a very long, hard—not very long, but very hard—life: pigs’ feet and gin, many disastrous lovers, and a career that first went up, then went down; died on the road on the way from one hospital to another. She was in an automobile accident and one of her arms was wrenched out of its socket; and because the hospital attendants argued whether or not they could let her in because she was colored, she died. Not a story Horatio Alger would write. Well, Bessie saw a great many things, and among those things was a flood. And she talked about it and she said, “It rained five days and the skies turned dark as night” and she repeated it: “It rained five days and the skies turned dark as night.” Then, “Trouble take place in the lowlands at night.” And she went on:
Then it thundered and lightnin’d and the wind began to blow
Then it thundered and lightnin’d and the wind began to blow
There’s thousands of people ain’t got no place to go
As the song makes clear, she was one of those people. But she ended in a fantastic way:
Backwater blues done caused me to pack my things and go
Because my house fell down
And I can’t live there no mo’.
Billie Holiday came along a little later and she had quite a story, too, a story which Life magazine would never print except as a tough, bittersweet sob story obituary—in which, however helplessly, the dominant note would be relief. She was a little girl from the South, and she had quite a time with gin, whiskey, and dope. She died in New York in a narcotics ward under the most terrifying and—in terms of crimes of the city and the country against her—disgraceful circumstances, and she had something she called “Billie’s Blues”: “My man wouldn’t give me no dinner/Wouldn’t give me no supper/Squawked about my supper and turned me outdoors/And had the nerve to lay a padlock on my clothes/I didn’t have so many, but I had a long, long way to go.”
And one more, one more—Bessie Smith had a song called “Gin House Blues.” It’s another kind of blues, and maybe I should explain this to you—a Negro has his difficult days, the days when everything has gone wrong and on top of it, he has a fight with the elevator man, or the taxi driver, or somebody he never saw before, who seems to decide to prove he’s white and you’re black. But this particular Tuesday it’s more than you can take— sometimes, you know, you can take it. But Bessie didn’t this time, and she sat down in the gin house and sang: “Don’t try me, nobody/’Cause you will never win/I’ll fight the Army and the Navy/Just me and my gin.”
Well, you know, that is all very accurate, all very concrete. I know, I watched, I was there. You’ve seen these black men and women, these boys and girls; you’ve seen them on the streets. But I know what happened to them at the factory, at work, at home, on the subway, what they go through in a day, and the way they sort of ride with it. And it’s very, very tricky. It’s kind of a fantastic tightrope. They may be very self-controlled, very civilized; I like to think of myself as being very civilized and self-controlled, but I know I’m not. And I know that some improbable Wednesday, for no reason whatever, the elevator man or the doorman, the policeman or the landlord, or some little boy from the Bronx will say something, and it will be the wrong day to say it, the wrong moment to have it said to me; and God knows what will happen. I have seen it all, I have seen that much. What the blues are describing comes out of all this.
“Gin House Blues” is a real gin house. “Backwater Flood” is a real flood. When Billie says, “My man don’t love me,” she is not making a fantasy out of it. This is what happened, this is where it is. This is what it is. Now, I’m trying to suggest that the triumph here—which is a very un-American triumph—is that the person to whom these things happened watched with eyes wide open, saw it happen. So that when Billie or Bessie or Leadbelly stood up and sang about it, they were commenting on it, a little bit outside it: they were accepting it. And there’s something funny—there’s always something a little funny in all our disasters, if one can face the disaster. So that it’s this passionate detachment, this inwardness coupled with outwardness, this ability to know that, all right, it’s a mess, and you can’t do anything about it … so, well, you have to do something about it. You can’t stay there, you can’t drop dead, you can’t give up, but all right, okay, as Bessie said, “picked up my bag, baby, and I tried it again.” This made life, however horrible that life was, bearable for her. It’s what makes life bearable for any person, because every person, everybody born, from the time he’s found out about people until the whole thing is over, is certain of one thing: he is going to suffer. There is no way not to suffer.
Now, this brings us to two things. It brings us to the American Negro’s experience of life, and it brings us to the American dream or sense of life. It would be hard to find any two things more absolutely opposed. I want to make it clear that when I talk about Negroes in this context I am not talking about race; I don’t know what race means. I am talking about a social fact. When I say “Negro,” it is a digression; it is important to remember that I am not talking about a people, but a person. I am talking about a man who, let’s say, was once seventeen and who is now, let’s say, forty, who has four children and can’t feed them. I am talking about what happens to that man in this time and during this effort. I’m talking about what happens to you if, having barely escaped suicide, or death, or madness, or yourself, you watch your children growing up and no matter what you do, no matter what you do, you are powerless, you are really powerless, against the force of the world that is out to tell your child that he has no right to be alive. And no amount of liberal jargon, and no amount of talk about how well and how far we have progressed, does anything to soften or to point out any solution to this dilemma. In every generation, ever since Negroes have been here, every Negro mother and father has had to face that child and try to create in that child some way of surviving this particular world, some way to make the child who will be despised not despise himself. I don’t know what “the Negro problem” means to white people, but this is what it means to Negroes. Now, it would seem to me, since this is so, that one of the reasons we talk about “the Negro problem” in the way we do is in order precisely to avoid any knowledge of this fact. Imagine Doris Day trying to sing:
&nb
sp; Papa may have, Mama may have,
But God bless the child that’s got his own.
People talk to me absolutely bathed in a bubble bath of self-congratulation. I mean, I walk into a room and everyone there is terribly proud of himself because I managed to get to the room. It proves to him that he is getting better. It’s funny, but it’s terribly sad. It’s sad that one needs this kind of corroboration and it’s terribly sad that one can be so self-deluded. The fact that Harry Belafonte makes as much money as, let’s say, Frank Sinatra, doesn’t really mean anything in this context. Frank can still get a house anywhere, and Harry can’t. People go to see Harry and stand in long lines to watch him. They love him onstage, or at a cocktail party, but they don’t want him to marry their daughters. This has nothing to do with Harry; this has everything to do with America. All right. Therefore, when we talk about what we call “the Negro problem” we are simply evolving means of avoiding the facts of this life. Because in order to face the facts of a life like Billie’s or, for that matter, a life like mine, one has got to—the American white has got to—accept the fact that what he thinks he is, he is not. He has to give up, he has to surrender his image of himself, and apparently this is the last thing white Americans are prepared to do.
But anyway, it is not a question now of accusing the white American of crimes against the Negro. It is too late for that. Besides, it is irrelevant. Injustice, murder, the shedding of blood, unhappily, are commonplace. These things happen all the time and everywhere. There is always a reason for it. People will always give themselves reasons for it. What I’m much more concerned about is what white Americans have done to themselves; what has been done to me is irrelevant simply because there is nothing more you can do to me. But in doing it, you’ve done something to yourself. In evading my humanity, you have done something to your own humanity. We all do this all the time, of course. One labels people; one labels them “Jew,” one labels them “fascist,” one labels them “Communist,” one labels them “Negro,” one labels them “white man.” But in the doing of this, you have not described anything—you have not described me when you call me a nigger or when you call me a Negro leader. You have only described yourself. What I think of you says more about me than it can possibly say about you. This is a very simple law, and every Negro who intends to survive has to learn it very soon. Therefore, the Republic, among other things, has managed to create a body of people who have very little to lose, and there is nothing more dangerous in any republic, any state, any country, any time, than men who have nothing to lose.
Because you have thus given him his freedom, the American Negro can do whatever he wills; you can no longer do anything to him. He doesn’t want anything you’ve got; he doesn’t believe anything you say. I don’t know why and I don’t know how America arrived at this peculiar point of view. If one examines American history, there is no apparent reason for it. It’s a bloody history, as bloody as everybody else’s history, as deluded, as fanatical. One has only to look at it from the time we all got here. Look at the Pilgrims, the Puritans—the people who presumably fled oppression in Europe only to set up a more oppressed society here—people who wanted freedom, who killed off the Indians. Look at all the people moving into a new era, and enslaving all the blacks. These are the facts of American history as opposed to the legend. We came from Europe, we came from Africa, we came from all over the world. We brought whatever was in us from China or from France. We all brought it with us. We were not transformed when we crossed the ocean. Something else happened. Something much more serious. We no longer had any way of finding out, of knowing who we were.
Many people have said in various tones of voice, meaning various things, that the most unlucky thing that happened in America was the presence of the Negro. Freud said, in a kind of rage, that the black race was the folly of America and that it served America right. Well, of course, I don’t quite know what Freud had in mind. But I can see that, in one way, it may have been the most unlucky thing that happened to America, since America, unlike any other Western power, had its slaves on the mainland. They were here. We had our slaves at a time, unluckily for us, when slavery was going out of fashion. And after the Bill of Rights. Therefore, it would seem to me that the presence of this black mass here as opposed to all the things we said we believed in and also at a time when the whole doctrine of white supremacy had never even been questioned is one of the most crucial facts of our history. It would be nightmarish now to read the handbooks of colonialists a hundred years ago; even ten years ago, for that matter. But in those days, it was not even a question of black people being inferior to white people. The American found himself in a very peculiar position because he knew that black people were people. Frenchmen could avoid knowing it—they never met a black man. Englishmen could avoid knowing it. But Americans could not avoid knowing it because, after all, here he was, and he was, no matter how it was denied, a man, just like everybody else. And the attempt to avoid this, to avoid this fact, I consider one of the keys to what we can call loosely the American psychology. For one thing, it created in Americans a kind of perpetual, hidden, festering, and entirely unadmitted guilt. Guilt is a very peculiar emotion. As long as you are guilty about something, no matter what it is, you are not compelled to change it. Guilt is like a warm bath or, to be rude, it is like masturbation: you can get used to it, you can prefer it, you may get to a place where you cannot live without it, because in order to live without it, in order to get past this guilt, you must act. And in order to act, you must be conscious and take great chances and be responsible for the consequences. Therefore, liberals, and people who are not even liberals, much prefer to discuss “the Negro problem” than to try to deal with what this figure of the Negro really means personally to them. They still prefer to read statistics, charts, Gallup polls, rather than deal with the reality. They still tell me, to console me, how many Negroes bought Cadillacs, Cutty Sark, Coca-Cola, Schweppes last year; how many more will buy Cadillacs, Cutty Sark, Coca-Cola, and Schweppes next year. To prove to me that things are getting better. Now, of course, I think it is a very sad matter if you suppose that you or I have bled and suffered and died in this country in order to achieve Cadillacs, Cutty Sark, Schweppes, and Coca-Cola. It seems to me if one accepts this speculation about the luxury of guilt that the second reason must be related to the first. That has to do with the ways in which we manage to project onto the Negro face, because it is so visible, all of our guilts and aggressions and desires. And if you doubt this, think of the legends that surround the Negro to this day. Think, when you think of these legends, that they were not invented by Negroes, but they were invented by the white Republic. Ask yourself if Aunt Jemima or Uncle Tom ever existed anywhere and why it was necessary to invent them. Ask yourself why Negroes until today are, in the popular imagination, at once the most depraved people under heaven and the most saintly. Ask yourself what William Faulkner really was trying to say in Requiem for a Nun, which is about a nigger, whore, dope addict, saint. Faulkner wrote it. I never met Nancy, the nun he was writing about. He never met her either, but the question is, why was it necessary for him and for us to hold on to this image? We needn’t go so far afield. Ask yourself why liberals are so delighted with the movie The Defiant Ones. It ends, if you remember, when Sidney Poitier, the black man, having been chained interminably to Tony Curtis, the white man, finally breaks the chain, is on the train, is getting away, but no, he doesn’t go, doesn’t leave poor Tony Curtis down there on the chain gang. Not at all. He jumps off the train and they go buddy-buddy back together to the same old Jim Crow chain gang. Now this is a fable. Why? Who is trying to prove what to whom? I’ll tell you something. I saw that movie twice. I saw it downtown with all my liberal friends, who were delighted when Sidney jumped off the train. I saw it uptown with my less liberal friends, who were furious. When Sidney jumped off that train they called him all kinds of unmentionable things. Well, their reaction was at least more honest and more direct. Why is it neces
sary at this late date, one screams at the world, to prove that the Negro doesn’t really hate you, he’s forgiven and forgotten all of it? Maybe he has. That’s not the problem. You haven’t. And that is the problem:
I love you, baby,
But can’t stand your dirty ways.
There’s one more thing I ought to add to this. The final turn of the screw that created this peculiar purgatory which we call America is that aspect of our history that is most triumphant. We really did conquer a continent; we have made a lot of money; we’re better off materially than anybody else in the world. How easy it is as a person or as a nation to suppose that one’s well-being is proof of one’s virtue; in fact, a great many people are saying just that right now—you know, “We’re the best nation in the world because we’re the richest nation in the world.” The American way of life has proven itself, according to these curious people, and that’s why we’re so rich. This is called “Yankee virtue” and it comes from Calvin, but my point is that I think this has again something to do with the American failure to face reality. Since we have all these things, we can’t be so bad, and since we have all these things, we are robbed, in a way, of the incentive to walk away from the TV set, the Cadillac, and go into the chaos out of which and only out of which we can create ourselves into human beings.