I speak only for myself for another reason also. From adolescence to death there is something very personal about being a Negro in America. It is like having a second ego which is as much the conscious subject of all experience as the natural self. It is not what the psychologists call dual personality. It is more complex and, I think, more morbid than that. In the state of which I speak, one receives two distinct impacts from certain experiences and one undergoes two distinct reactions—the one normal and intrinsic to the natural self; the other, entirely different but of equal force, a prodigy created by the accumulated consciousness of Negroness.

An incident illustrates.

At the college in Louisville where I taught during the depression, a white slum crawled to the western edge of the campus. I could see its dirt, its poverty and disease in any direction I cared to look from my classroom window. In the littered back yards, each with a pit toilet, snotty-nosed children with rickets played and lank-haired women shrilled obscenities at them all day long. I remember seeing a man only once—an ancient, senile man bent with a monstrous hernia. By the time autumn paled into winter the pity I felt for the people in the slum had been safely stacked away among other useless emotional lumber.

One day as I stood by the window thinking of other things, I gradually became aware of movement in the yard directly below me. The college building was as quiet as a church, for it was a Saturday when we had no classes. There would have been no shock in seeing a woman of the neighborhood dressed only in a ragged slip, but a powdery snow had fallen the night before and the day was bitter cold. When I saw the woman, who seemed quite young, she was lurching and staggering in the rear of the yard. A dog must have followed her out of the house, for one stood by the open door watching and flicking its tail dubiously. The woman’s face was stiff and vacant, but in her efforts to walk her body and limbs jerked convulsively in progressive tremors. I could not tell whether she was drunk or sick as she floundered in the snow in the yard. Pity rose in me, but at the same time something else also—a gloating satisfaction that she was white. Sharply and concurrently felt, the two emotions were of equal strength, in perfect balance, and the corporeal I, fixed in a trance at the window, oscillated between them.

When she was within a few steps of the outhouse, the poor woman lurched violently and pitched face downward in the snow. Somehow utterly unable to move, I watched her convulsive struggles for several minutes. The dog came down the yard meanwhile, whining piteously, and walked stiff-legged around the white and almost naked body. The woman made a mess in the snow and then lay still.

Finally I turned irresolutely and went into the corridor. There was the entrance door and near it the telephone. I could have gone out and a few steps would have brought me to the yard where the woman lay and I could have tried to rouse someone or myself taken her into the house. I went to the telephone and called the police.

“There’s a drunken woman lying in the back yard of a house on Eighth Street, seven-hundred block,” I said.

“You say drunk? In her own yard? Then leave her lay.”

“But there doesn’t seem to be anyone there, and she may not be drunk.”

“You said she was drunk,” the voice said. “Now what’s the story?” There was a pause. “And who’re you anyway?”

“She could freeze to death,” I said, and hung up. Thus I washed my hands of it.

The woman was still lying there and the dog sat quivering and whining near her when a lone policeman arrived almost an hour later. The next morning I read on a back page of the local paper that the woman, aged twenty-six, had died of exposure following an epileptic seizure suffered while alone.

One can wash his hands, but the smudges and scars on the psyche are different.

I offer no excuses for my part in this wretched episode. Excuses are unavailing. The experiences of my Negroness, in a section where such experiences have their utmost meaning in fear and degradation, canceled out humaneness. How many times have I heard Negroes mutter, when witness to some misfortune befallen a white person, “What the hell! He’s white, isn’t he?” What the exact psychological mechanism of this is, I cannot say, but certainly the frustration of human sympathy and kindness is a symptom of a dangerous trauma. Never having been white, I do not know whether Southern white people feel a similar reaction to Negroes, but, considering their acts and their words, it can hardly be judged otherwise. Actions speak for themselves; printed words not always.

For there is this about books on the “race question” (how weary one grows of the phrase!) by Southern whites: they have no detachment. They may seem to have. Within what has always seemed to me a questionable frame of reference, there may be brilliant exposition, analysis, interpretation, and even history. They may roar, as do the writings of David L. Cohn; they may purr lyrically and graciously in the manner of Archibald Rutledge and the late William Alexander Percy; they may remonstrate and apologize with unobtrusive erudition, as Virginius Dabney’s and Hodding Carter’s editorials do; or they may bristle with the flinty phraseology of Howard Odum’s scholarship—but nearly all of them elaborate an argument that is certainly not derived from self-knowledge and that cannot be effective as an instrument of self-control.

The reasoning in them is very subtle, not to say metaphysical, and it runs like this: History is an imperative creative force (from Hegel again!) and man is its vassal. It is beyond the reach and the control of conscience and also beyond direction and prophecy. It created slavery, the southwestward migration, the Civil War, Ku-Kluxism. History does not conform to man’s will; it compels conformity, and under this compulsion man and his society and his institutions are shaped into what they are and into what they become by categorical directives as potent as the word of God. History is above moral judgment and history’s errors are beyond redress. Man’s world is mechanistic.

This is not mere error; it, too, is symptomatic of a trauma all the more dangerous because this concept of history is what most Southern whites believe when they are being reasonable about the race question; when they are writing books about it, or talking quietly in their living rooms; or when they come together and “gladly agree to co-operate... in any sound program aimed at the improvement of race relations.” This reasoning, at once defensive and defiant, expresses itself in clichÉs, which are the hardened arteries through which thought flows. “The white South is inexorably conditioned by cultural complexes.” “In both the physical and cultural heritage of the South there are certain cumulative and tragic handicaps that represent overpowering factors in the situation.” There are “legal and customary patterns of race relations in the South, whose strength and age we recognize.”^[2] The idealism of these people of good will is negated by the meanings of their own phrases.

The pattern of reason these phrases express has been the most influential factor in race relations for nearly a hundred years. And if Hodding Carter, one of the young Southern liberals, is representative (“The spirit [of which these stories are symbols] is harmless enough; a little pathetic perhaps, and naÏve and provincial. Let alone, it will, of course, wear itself out some day. Not tomorrow or next year or the next year. But some day.”^[3]), it promises to remain so for another century.

And that thorny prospect brings me to yet another reason for the personal slant of this essay. I do not wish to live with the race problem for the next one hundred years—though of course I shall not live so long. I do not wish to die knowing that my children and theirs to the third generation must live with it. I have known it too long and too intimately already. It has itself been an imperative, channelizing more of my energies than I wished to spare through the narrow gorge of race interest. Yet I have felt myself in no sense a crusader. I have not been uplifted with the compensatory afflatus of the inspired leader. Let me be quite frank. I have done what I have, not because I wanted to, but because, driven by a daemonic force, I had to. The necessity has always been a galling affliction to me and the root of my personal grievance with American life. This should not be hard to understand.

Connected with all this, of course, has been a sense of impersonal obligation which I like to think of as growing out of a decent regard for the common welfare. This civic sense has not expressed itself widely in group and racial activities and organizations, for I am not that kind of person. If it is a fault, I am sorry for it. I tried to be that kind of person. At one time or another I have been a member of most of the racial uplift groups, and am still a member of some, and when I was in my early twenties I thought I had taken fire from the mass and that if need be I could exhort and harangue and make public protest with the best of them. But I did not know myself so well then. What I felt was merely the exuberant, youthful need for self-losing identification. It gives me sad amusement to recall that in those days a friend of mine used teasingly to call me “Marcus Garvey”—a name that was the very apotheosis of blatant race chauvinism. But I had no real chance to be blatant—a habit, I suppose, like any other—and no natural inclination. Nor could I really lose myself in the mass.