The Gulf
From MURRAY KEMPTON WASHINGTON THE. Attorney-General of the United States told a guest at lunch the other day that he had rather hoped to go to Birmingham during its trouble, but had at last surrendered to the advice that the peace would be better kept if he stayed away. He would like also to sit down with a group of representative American Negroes and find out just what they want. But his one attempt at that turned out a shocking confrontation of
estrangement. guess,' said Robert Kennedy, that we are being shut out everywhere.'
A political order which so far in its history has had only to think, of the Negro as voter must now confront him as marcher. The voter can only choose between contending interests; to vote is to be resigned. The marcher asserts an absolute right; to march is to rebel. Robert Ken- nedy must sense the difference; when he turned for instruction on what the Negro has so sud- denly become, he sought out not a politician or a sociologist but a novelist.
James Baldwin is, of course, a figure of fashion; official culture has that standard for choosing instructors. But there is something strange and new in a time that would have made Baldwin a figure of fashion: he is a Negro, a Pacifist, probably, if it matters " to him, a socialist. He is lot yet forty; he fled Harlem for Pans, and he fled Paris again for what has be-
come his America—a waiting-room between Harlem and the official America. We see in him the change in the American Negro as image of public fashion: Marian Anderson was endurance and calm; Baldwin is exhaustion and tension. He looks like a rag doll pulled on the one hand by a child who hates and pulled on the other by a child who loves.
His fashion reflects the sense that millions of Americans suddenly have that the Negro is neither God nor clown, but a mystery to be ex- plained. No one can explain, but Baldwin does begin by embodying; it is to his lasting credit and the temporary credit of his listeners that he offers them nothing comfortable. A nation fed on lecturers who amuse and soothe turns to a figure who can only torment himself and his audience. But only the figure of this waif is extra- ordinary; Baldwin's progress upward has other- wise covered all the accepted steps: the painful memoir of his childhood in Harlem for the New Yorker, last year, the Time cover profile, this year, and now the call to counsel the Attorney- General of the United States.
In the middle May, Baldwin sent the Attor- ney-General a telegram of agony at the police dogs in Birmingham. It was an uncalculated act which happened to coincide with his certification by Time; Robert Kennedy responded by inviting Baldwin to breakfast at his house in Virginia on May 23. At breakfast, the Attorney-General ex- plained what the Justice Department had been doing and suggested that Baldwin gather to- gether a group of representative Negroes who could hear the explanations and answer what more they wanted.
Baldwin went out and called the friends who occurred to his first thought : Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte, whose status is senior to his, having been permissible earlier, because they are entertainers; Kenneth Clark, the psychologist, as a resource on Harlem: Edward Berry, a social worker, as a resource on Chicago; Lorraine Hansberry, the playwright; Rip Torn, the actor, because Baldwin wanted a white Southerner; Baldwin's younger brother, David; and last and most consequential of all. Jerome Smith, of New Orleans, an exhausted veteran of the South's non-violent itinerant vanguard, who, Baldwin says, just happened to be in town. The time be- tween the meeting's conception and its execution' was barely a day and a half; Baldwin's group met together for the first time in the lobby of Robert Kennedy's New York apartment house. There was no malice in the Attorney-General's assumption that they came rehearsed; it is that difficult for Americans to conceive of a group planning to petition its government without caucusing on tactics in advance. But each Mem- ber of the group seems to have assumed that each other member would say exactly what he would say, and, for the simplest of reasons: they were all Negroes.
`Wilson's Patent Leveller: The Establishment Machine.' Upstairs, the Attorney-General had the brief comfort of recognising the familiar faces of Harry Belafonte and Lena Home; and then, with no amenities, someone said, 'Let's start,' and they began. The Attorney-General and James Baldwin, remembering what was said, sound like entirely honest men talking about two different meetings. Still each talks from shock—the Attor- ney-General from shock at how bitter his visi- tors were, and the Negroes from the shock of recognising again that innocence which they remembered in white America since they grew up but which they had hardly expected at the centre of power.
Afterwards both sides talked not of mere difference but of a 'gulf.' The Attorney-General seems to have talked of the difficulties of adjust- ment and of how hard the opposition is. Jerome Smith answered that he could not understand how a government which thinks to protect free- dom in Cuba could not protect him in Alabama. Smith went on to talk about what had happened to him on his voyages through the South. And the Attorney-General answered, 'A lot of people have had a hard time.' The witnesses from the official America remember that Smith's response was an 'hysterical' laugh; the Negroes present remember not seeing someone else's hysteria but feeling their own.
The sense of -people talking together does not seem to have survived that moment. Baldwin and Clark think that the Attorney-General then turned from Smith as if to appeal to persons older, more experienced, to join him in reason- ing with a difficult problem; we describe the gulf between them when we say that no one present can testify persuasively whether Robert Kennedy made that gesture or not; there is just no way of knowing whether his life in America has made the Negro's nerves acutely sensitive or only raw. `Lena Horne said then,' Baldwin remembers, `that if the Attorney-General couldn't listen to Jerome, he couldn't listen to anyone else there, because Jerome was the most important person there.' There were complaints about what a poor job the FBI has done with civil rights cases. A Justice official offered a defence; Lena Home answered: `Mr. Attorney-General, you've never been a Negro questioned by the FBI.'
The Justice official said that, after all, people had been arrested for beating up Negroes trying to register to vote. 'Were they punished?' Lor- raine Hansberry asked. Baldwin laughed at the recollection of that shot and the silence that followed it.
`Suddenly:Kenneth Clark said, 'I looked at the Attorney-General and understood that he did not understand and then I was very sorry for him. We were, after all, saying something quite un-American. We were talking against tinker- ing. We were saying that even effective political manipulation is basically unacceptable. It was not enough for him to say that this administra- tion had done more than any other administra- tion. We were asking him to stop thinking about this as the special problem of a particular group of people and to think about it as an American problem.'
They were saying something else which the Attorney-General may be beginning to hear. There are no spokesmen for Negroes any longer. There is only every Negro. Success- and fashion have little to do with how Negroes feel; they all came to success the same hard way; Lena Home, who began in the chorus of the Cotton Club, has the same need, when her chance comes, to speak to the Attorney-General of the United States from a wound as intimate and fresh from her past as Jerome Smith's from his present. Official America cannot call two Negroes together and expect to hear words of comfort from either, because each knows that a lie-detector sits beside him in the other.
From the parting after those two and a half hours, not one of the Negroes present can think of any word except despair. Still, as so often happens with them, it is a harsher word than the Negroes may mean. 'Oh,' said Baldwin with a laugh five days later, 'I'll see the Attorney- General again one way or another.' As for the Attorney-General, he seems to have talked about his disappointments and about the bad manners which are often an excuse for Americans to dis- regard the substance of what a man says; but those examples do not come to his lips like ex- cuses but rather as occasions for puzzlement. After a hundred years, the Department of Justice has just commenced to learn. Painful as it was, Mr. Kennedy and all of us needed this con- frontation. Only from failures this close to the reality can any hope of success be horn.
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