The Price of the Ticket, page 1
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Price of the Ticket
The Harlem Ghetto
Lockridge: “The American Myth”
Journey to Atlanta
Everybody’s Protest Novel
Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown
Princes and Powers
Many Thousands Gone
Stranger in the Village
A Question of Identity
The Male Prison
Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough
Equal in Paris
Notes of a Native Son
Faulkner and Desegregation
The Crusade of Indignation
A Fly in Buttermilk
The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American
On Catfish Row
Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South
The Northern Protestant
Fifth Avenue, Uptown
They Can’t Turn Back
In Search of a Majority
Notes for a Hypothetical Novel
The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King
East River, Downtown
Alas, Poor Richard
The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy
The New Lost Generation
The Creative Process
Color
A Talk to Teachers
The Fire Next Time: My Dungeon Shook
Nothing Personal
Words of a Native Son
The American Dream and the American Negro
White Man’s Guilt
A Report from Occupied Territory
Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White
White Racism or World Community?
Sweet Lorraine
No Name in the Street
A Review of Roots
The Devil Finds Work
An Open Letter to Mr. Carter
Every Good-Bye Ain’t Gone
If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?
An Open Letter to the Born Again
Dark Days
Notes on the House of Bondage
Here Be Dragons
First Published
INTRODUCTION
The Price of the Ticket
MY SOUL LOOKS BACK AND WONDERS HOW I GOT OVER—INDEED: but I find it unexpectedly difficult to remember, in detail, how I got started. I will never, for example, forget Saul Levitas, the editor of The New Leader, who gave me my first book review assignment sometime in 1946, nor Mary Greene, a wonderful woman, who was his man Friday: but I do not remember exactly how I met them.
I do remember how my life in Greenwich Village began—which is, essentially, how my career began—for it began when I was fifteen.
One day, a DeWitt Clinton H.S. running buddy, Emile Capouya, played hookey without me and went down to Greenwich Village and made the acquaintance of Beauford Delaney. The next day, he told me about this wonderful man he had met, a black—then, Negro, or Colored—painter and said that I must meet him: and he gave me Beauford Delaney’s address.
I had a Dickensian job, after school, in a sweat shop on Canal Street, and was getting on so badly at home that I dreaded going home: and, so, sometime later, I went to 181 Greene Street, where Beauford lived then, and introduced myself.
I was terrified, once I had climbed those stairs and knocked on that door. A short, round brown man came to the door and looked at me. He had the most extraordinary eyes I’d ever seen. When he had completed his instant X-ray of my brain, lungs, liver, heart, bowels, and spinal column (while I had said, usefully, “Emile sent me”) he smiled and said, “Come in,” and opened the door.
He opened the door all right.
Lord, I was to hear Beauford sing, later, and for many years, open the unusual door. My running buddy had sent me to the right one, and not a moment too soon.
I walked through that door into Beauford’s colors—on the easel, on the palette, against the wall—sometimes turned to the wall—and sometimes (in limbo?) covered by white sheets. It was a small studio (but it didn’t seem small) with a black potbellied stove somewhere near the two windows. I remember two windows, there may have been only one: there was a fire escape which Beauford, simply by his presence, had transformed, transmuted into the most exclusive terrace in Manhattan or Bombay.
I walked into music. I had grown up with music, but, now, on Beauford’s small black record player, I began to hear what I had never dared or been able to hear. Beauford never gave me any lectures. But, in his studio and because of his presence, I really began to hear Ella Fitzgerald, Ma Rainey, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Paul Robeson, Lena Horne, Fats Waller. He could inform me about Duke Ellington and W. C. Handy, and Josh White, introduce me to Frankie Newton and tell tall tales about Ethel Waters. And these people were not meant to be looked on by me as celebrities, but as a part of Beauford’s life and as part of my inheritance.
I may have been with Beauford, for example, the first time I saw Paul Robeson, in concert, and in Othello: but I know that he bought tickets for us—really, for me—to see and hear Miss Marian Anderson, at Carnegie Hall.
Because of her color, Miss Anderson was not allowed to sing at The Met, nor, as far as The Daughters of The American Revolution were concerned, anywhere in Washington where white people might risk hearing her. Eleanor Roosevelt was appalled by this species of patriotism and arranged for Marian Anderson to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. This was a quite marvellous and passionate event in those years, triggered by the indignation of one woman who had, clearly, it seemed to me, married beneath her.
By this time, I was working for the Army—or the Yankee dollar!—in New Jersey. I hitchhiked, in sub-zero weather, out of what I will always remember as one of the lowest and most obscene circles of Hell, into Manhattan: where both Beauford and Miss Anderson were on hand to inform me that I had no right to permit myself to be defined by so pitiful a people. Not only was I not born to be a slave: I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave-master. They had, the masters, incontestably, the rope—in time, with enough, they would hang themselves with it. They were not to hang me: I was to see to that. If Beauford and Miss Anderson were a part of my inheritance, I was a part of their hope.
I still remember Miss Anderson, at the end of that concert, in a kind of smoky yellow gown, her skin copper and tan, roses in the air about her, roses at her feet. Beauford painted it, an enormous painting, he fixed it in time, for me, forever, and he painted it, he said, for me.
Beauford was the first walking, living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist. In a warmer time, a less blasphemous place, he would have been recognized as my Master and I as his Pupil. He became, for me, an example of courage and integrity, humility and passion. An absolute integrity: I saw him shaken many times and I lived to see him broken but I never saw him bow.
His example operated as an enormous protection: for the Village, then, and not only for a boy like me, was an alabaster maze perched above a boiling sea. To lose oneself in the maze was to fall into the sea. One saw it around one all the time: a famous poet of the twenties and thirties grotesquely, shamelessly, cadging drinks, another relic living in isolation on opium and champagne, someone your own age suddenly strung out or going under a subway train, people you ate with and drank with suddenly going home and blowing their brains out or turning on the gas or leaping out of the window. And, racially, the Village was vicious, partly because of the natives, largely because of the tourists, and absolutely because of the cops.
Very largely, then, because of Beauford and Connie Williams, a beautiful black lady from Trinidad who ran the restaurant in which I was a waiter, and the jazz musicians I loved and who referred to me, with a kind of exasperated affection, as “the kid,” I was never entirely at the mercy of an environment at once hostile and seductive. They knew about dope, for example—I didn’t: but the pusher and his product were kept far away from me. I needed love so badly that I could as easily have been hit with a needle as persuaded to share a joint of marijuana. And, in fact, Beauford and the others let me smoke with them from time to time. (But there were people they warned me not to smoke with.)
The only real danger with marijuana is that it can lead to rougher stuff, but this has to do with the person, not the weed. In my own case, it could hardly have become a problem, since I simply could not write if I were “high.” Or, rather, I could, sometimes all night long, the greatest pages the world had ever seen, pages I tore up the moment I was able to read them.
Yet, I learned something about myself from these irredeemable horrors: something which I might not have learned had I not been forced to know that I was valued. I repeat that Beauford never gave me any lectures, but he didn’t have to—he expected me to accept and respect the value placed upon me. Without this, I might very easily have become the junky which so many among those I knew were becoming then, or the Bellevue or Tombs inmate (instead of the visitor) or the Hudson River corpse which a black man I loved with all my heart was shortly to become.
Shortly: I was to meet Eugene sometime between 1943 and 1944 and “run” or “hang” with him until he hurled himself off the George Washington Bridge, in the winter of 1946. We were never lovers: for what it’s worth, I think I wish we had been.
When he was dead, I remembered that he had, once, obliquely, suggested this possibility. He had run down a list of his girl friends: those he liked, those he really liked, one or two with whom he might really be in love , and, then, he said, “I wondered if I might be in love with you.”
I wish I had heard him more clearly: an oblique confession is always a plea. But I was to hurt a great many people by being unable to imagine that anyone could possibly be in love with an ugly boy like me. To be valued is one thing, the recognition of this assessment demanding, essentially, an act of the will. But love is another matter: it is scarcely worth observing what a mockery love makes of the will. Leaving all that alone, however: when he was dead, I realized that I would have done anything whatever to have been able to hold him in this world.
Through him, anyway, my political life, insofar as I can claim, formally, to have had one, began. He was a Socialist—a member of the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL) and urged me to join, and I did. I, then, outdistanced him by becoming a Trotskyite—so that I was in the interesting position (at the age of nineteen) of being an anti-Stalinist when America and Russia were allies.
My life on the Left is of absolutely no interest. It did not last long. It was useful in that I learned that it may be impossible to indoctrinate me; also, revolutionaries tend to be sentimental and I hope that I am not. This was to lead to very serious differences between myself and Eugene, and others: but it was during this period that I met the people who were to take me to Saul Levitas, of The New Leader, Randall Jarrell, of The Nation, Elliott Cohen and Robert Warshow, of Commentary, and Philip Rahv, of Partisan Review.
These men are all dead, now, and they were all very important to my life. It is not too much to say that they helped to save my life. (As Bill Cole, at Knopf, was later to do when the editor assigned Go Tell It On The Mountain had me on the ropes.) And their role in my life says something arresting concerning the American dilemma, or, more precisely, perhaps, the American torment.
I had been to two black newspapers before I met these people and had simply been laughed out of the office: I was a shoeshine boy who had never been to college. I don’t blame these people, God knows that I was an unlikely cub reporter: yet, I still remember how deeply I was hurt.
On the other hand, around this time, or a little later, I landed a job as messenger for New York’s liberal newspaper, PM. It is perhaps worth pointing out that PM had a man of about my complexion (dark) in the tower, under whom I worked, a coal black Negro in the cellar, whom nobody ever saw, and a very fair Negro on the city desk, in the window. My career at PM was very nearly as devastating as my career as a civilian employee of the US Army, except that PM never (as far as I know) placed me on a blacklist. If the black newspapers had considered me absolutely beyond redemption, PM was determined to save me: I cannot tell which attitude caused me the more bitter anguish.
Therefore, though it may have cost Saul Levitas nothing to hurl a book at a black boy to see if he could read it and be articulate concerning what he had read, I took it as a vote of confidence and swore that I would give him my very best shot. And I loved him—the old man, as I sometimes called him (to his face) and I think—I know—that he was proud of me, and that he loved me, too.
It was a very great apprenticeship. Saul required a book review a week, which meant that I had to read and write all the time. He paid me ten or twenty dollars a shot: Mary Greene would sometimes coerce him into giving me a bonus. Then he would stare at her, as though he could not believe that she, his helper, could be capable of such base treachery and look at me more tragically than Julius Caesar looked at Brutus and sigh—and give me another five or ten dollars.
As for the books I reviewed—well, no one, I suppose, will ever read them again. It was after the war, and the Americans were on one of their monotonous conscience “trips”: be kind to niggers, for Christ’s sake, be kind to Jews! A high, or turning point of some kind was reached when I reviewed Ross Lockridge’s sunlit and fabulously successful Raintree County. The review was turned in and the author committed suicide before the review was printed. I was very disagreeably shaken by this, and Saul asked me to write a postscript—which I did. That same week I met the late Dwight MacDonald, whom I admired very much because of his magazine, Politics, who looked at me with wonder and said that I was “very smart.” This pleased me, certainly, but it frightened me more.
But no black editor could or would have been able to give me my head, as Saul did then: partly because he would not have had the power, partly because he could not have afforded—or needed—Saul’s politics, and partly because part of the price of the black ticket is involved—fatally—with the dream of becoming white.
This is not possible, partly because white people are not white: part of the price of the white ticket is to delude themselves into believing that they are. The political position of my old man, for example, whether or not he knew it, was dictated by his (in his case) very honorable necessity not to break faith with the Old World. One may add, in passing, that the Old World, or Europe, has become nothing less than an American superstition, which accounts, if anything can, for an American vision of Russia so Talmudic and self-serving that it has absolutely nothing to do with any reality occurring under the sun.
But the black American must find a way to keep faith with, and to excavate, a reality much older than Europe. Europe has never been, and cannot be, a useful or valid touchstone for the American experience because America is not, and never can be, white.
My father died before Eugene died. When my father died, Beauford helped me to bury him and I then moved from Harlem to the Village.
This was in 1943. We were fighting the Second World War.
We: who was this we?
For this war was being fought, as far as I could tell, to bring freedom to everyone with the exception of Hagar’s children and the “yellow-bellied Japs.”
This was not a matter, merely, of my postadolescent discernment. It had been made absolutely clear to me by the eighteen months or so that I had been working for the Army, in New Jersey, by the anti-Japanese posters to be found, then, all over New York, and by the internment of the Japanese.
At the same time, one was expected to be “patriotic” and pledge allegiance to a flag which had pledged no allegiance to you: it risked becoming your shroud if you didn’t know how to keep your distance and stay in your “place.”
And all of this was to come back to me much later, when Cassius Clay, a.k.a. Muhammad Ali, refused to serve in Vietnam because he was a Muslim—in other words, for religious reasons—and was stripped of his title, while placards all over New York trumpeted, Be true to your faith!
I have never been able to convey the confusion and horror and heart-break and contempt which every black person I then knew felt. Oh, we dissembled and smiled as we groaned and cursed and did our duty. (And we did our duty.) The romance of treason never occurred to us for the brutally simple reason that you can’t betray a country you don’t have. (Think about it.) Treason draws its energy from the conscious, deliberate betrayal of a trust—as we were not trusted, we could not betray. And we did not wish to be traitors. We wished to be citizens.
We: the black people of this country, then, with particular emphasis on those serving in the Armed Forces. The way blacks were treated in, and by, an American Army spreading freedom around the globe was the reason for the heartbreak and contempt. Daddy’s youngest son, by his first marriage, came home, on furlough, to help with the funeral. When these young men came home, in uniform, they started talking: and one sometimes trembled, for their sanity and for one’s own. One trembled, too, at another depth, another incoherence, when one wondered—as one could not fail to wonder—what nation they represented. My brother, describing his life in uniform, did not seem to be representing the America his uniform was meant to represent—: he had never seen the America his uniform was meant to represent. Had anyone? did he know, had he met, anyone who had? Did anyone live there? judging from the great gulf fixed between their conduct and their principles, it seemed unlikely.
Was it worth his life?
For he, certainly, on the other hand, represented something much larger than himself and something in him knew it: otherwise, he would have been broken like a match-stick and lost or have surrendered the power of speech. A nation within a nation: this thought wavered in my mind, I think, all those years ago, but I did not know what to make of it, it frightened me.
