PEN America 2: Home and Away
This
talk was originally presented at a Twentieth-Century Masters Tribute to
James Baldwin, sponsored by the PEN American Center and Lincoln Center,
with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and The New Yorker.
On the Avenue
I didn’t know him, but he
knew me. He knew Harlem, he knew poetry, he knew Jesus, and he knew my
mother. He knew sin. I did not know him, but when I first read him, he
knew me. This excerpt comes from “The Fire Next Time”:
I became during my fourteenth year, for the first time in my life,
afraid—afraid of the evil within me, and the evil without. What I saw
around me that summer in Harlem was what I had always seen; nothing had
changed. But now, without any warning, the whores and pimps and
racketeers on the Avenue had become a personal menace. It had not
before occurred to me that I could become one of them, but now I
realized that we had been produced by the same circumstances. Many of
my comrades were clearly headed for the Avenue, and my father said that
I was headed that way too….
One did not have to be very bright to realize how little one could do
to change one’s situation; one did not have to be abnormally sensitive
to be worn down to a cutting edge by the incessant and gratuitous
humiliation and danger one encountered every working day, all day long.
The humiliation did not apply merely to working days, or workers; I was
thirteen and was crossing Fifth Avenue on my way to the Forty-second
Street library, and the cop in the middle of the street muttered as I
passed him, “Why don’t you niggers stay uptown where you belong?” When
I was ten, and didn’t look, certainly, any older, two policemen amused
themselves with me by frisking me, making comic (and terrifying)
speculations concerning my ancestry and probable sexual prowess, and
for good measure, leaving me flat on my back in one of Harlem’s empty
lots. Just before, and then during the Second World War, many of my
friends fled into the service, all to be changed there, and rarely for
the better, many to be ruined, and many to die. Others fled to other
states and cities—that is, to other ghettos. Some went on wine or
whiskey or the needle, and are still on it. And others, like me, fled
into the church.
For the wages of sin were visible everywhere, in every wine-stained and
urine-splashed hallway, in every clanging ambulance bell, in every scar
on the faces of the pimps and their whores, in every helpless, newborn
baby being brought into this danger, in every knife and pistol fight on
the Avenue, and in every disastrous bulletin: a cousin, mother of six,
suddenly gone mad, the children parcelled out here and there; an
indestructible aunt rewarded for years of hard labor by a slow,
agonizing death in a terrible, small room; someone’s bright son blown
into eternity by his own hand; another turned robber and carried off to
jail. It was a summer of dreadful speculations and discoveries, of
which these were not the worst. Crime became real, for example—for the
first time—not as a possibility, but as the possibility. One would
never defeat one’s circumstances by working and saving one’s pennies;
one would never, by working, acquire that many pennies, and, besides,
the social treatment accorded even the most successful Negroes proved
that one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank
account. One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear. It
was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as
long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else—housewives,
taxi-drivers, elevator boys, dishwashers, bartenders, lawyers, judges,
doctors, and grocers—would never, by the operation of any generous
feeling, cease to use you as an outlet for his frustrations and
hostilities. Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause
any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be
treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to
do that, or to seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough. There
seems to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know
many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less
to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t want to be beaten
over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this
planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in
learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when
they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be
never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be
needed.
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