BOOKS

The Dark Challenge

BY GEORGE LAMMING MORE than anyone else the American Negro must have a very intimate understanding of the term, Cold War: that unholy reign of peace where tensions daily reverberate, and danger is a way of not doing what seems inevit- able. The enemy may be absent, but all your decisions are proof of his existence. Negotiation has its risks; for it is almost impossible at times to distinguish between cowardice and an honour- able self-restraint. But that is not all. There is, too, a kind of rage which sometimes threatens to undermine every effort of self-expression. The normal practice of language collapses. Every- thing gives way to a moment of blinding lucidity, and murder offers itself as the only decent answer to the assault on one's dignity. In every Ameri- can city, north or south of civilisation, the ex- perience of millions of Negroes would reveal a history of such moments. In his essay, The Fire Next Time,* James Baldwin makes this tempera- ture of feeling unbearably familiar. He assumes that everyone knows the facts by now; and it is their psychological content which he would like us to consider. By what miracle of 'patience has the Negro escaped his need for vengeance in this cold ancestral war with white America? And what distortions of personality have taken place in his process of retreat? For the challenge returns every long, breathing day of the year. Moreover, he cannot remember a time when life was different.

The ghetto is the child's first lesson in fron- tiers. Error has a specific geography; he learns the contours of danger by heart. Fire and flood are tolerable disasters beside the event of an ordinary day when an uncle met his end. The crime was, simply, that he had gone too far. His presence was harmless, but the white enemy saw in his act a freedom which was subversive. Elsewhere an aunt went mad when the enemy arrived to make inquiries. For her, each question carried a logical conclusion of guilt. The ghetto of Baldvvin's experience is a battleground where each family wages its own fearful and explosive peace. Some fathers may take refuge behind an exterior of domestic authority, mothers exercise an excessive caution, hoping to protect their off- spring. But their techniques of concealment are too slow. The child has already absorbed a know- ledge of what they do not want him to feel.

He is involved in a war that has its origin out- side the ghetto. The enemy scares hell out of his parents, making havoc of the confidence which they pretend at home. And this enemy whom the elders refer to as 'the man' is no other than America which birth allows this Negro child to claim as his country. It is left to the school with its chronicle of heroes and achievements to fill in the details and reinforce the point, the sig- nificance round which all his past and future *Tue Fuse Nerr Time. By James Baldwin. (Michael Joseph. 13s. 6d.) must revolve. Home is a place where he dare not take risks, a country which warns him against thinking of himself as a man. He is native to a soil where his freedom is officially decreed as a conspiracy against the land. In this atmosphere innocence withers up very quickly. School is a kind of password that there is trouble ahead; and forever after to be alive is to be in a state of emergency. This is the danger zone in which James Baldwin became aware of himself and the status of his surroundings. A child of Harlem, schooled in the codes of that crowded and cheer- less ghetto, his mind echoes today the resound- ing shock of the boy's first discovery: the unfor- giveableness of being born black in a country which believes itself to be the richest and freest in the world. Baldwin tries to reach to the bottom of this illusion by suggesting that the image white America has of itself is a reflection of the cruel sacrifice the Negro has had to make in order to ensure his survival.

In Baldwin's case, the earliest significant emo- tion was one of fear: the fear that he was per- sonally doomed in much the same way the ghetto appeared to be: a spectacle of ruin and defeat. The list of careers for which he could qualify indicates the kind of wall which white America had erected to cut short his range of expectations:

I could not became a prizefighter—many of us tried but very few succeeded. I could not sing. I could not dance. I had been well con- ditioned by the world in which I grew up, so I did not yet dare take the idea of becoming a writer seriously.

When the time comes to speculate on what he might become, the Negro realises that he will have to perform a swift and painful abortion on his ambitions. The codes of the ghetto have taught him the futility of trying to extend him- self beyond the limits imposed by his country. Ambition is a form of heresy, his vitality a positive source of danger. These are the fixed poles of reference by which he has to organise his activity and judge his conduct. He may sur- vive by granting assent to these terms, by making his life an example of acceptance.

The alternative was to declare war on the world and, consequently, on himself. Invariably the nerves gave way; his spirit was crushed by the weight and power of the force he had chal- lenged. A history of corpses, nameless and un- recorded, pave the way which many a Negro rebel risked in order to penetrate the barriers that sealed him off from any honourable future he had wished for.

Baldwin was fourteen when such a temptation, with its alarming possibilities, began to occupy his mind. And he was terrified. Some of his friends had already jumped school and taken to the streets. Overnight they had acquired a courageous and sordid maturity. They were graduates of the Avenue, that hard, sizzling

corridor of pavement and street where the whores and pimps of Harlem collected. They had changed; and yet they remained an inseparable part of himself. It was as though they were waiting for him; for it was not their fall from virtue which alarmed him. It was rather his awareness, even the conviction, that he, too, was a candidate for the Avenue. He had begun to feel a loosening of his own inhibitions, and he knew that his body was aching to participato. But the Avenue was also evidence of a terrible human wreckage And he fled. Into the Church, Baldwin offers his own religious conversion as a key to the psychological defences of the Negro ghetto in this Northern city. His father was a minister, but this was not a major factor in the son's choice. Rivalry had already weakened his father's influence at home. It had become so acute that the Avenue would have been the perfect rebuke, the right symbol of distance which the boy wanted to put between himself and his father. His conversion suggests a different origin. It was a means of protection against himself, against the possibilities which had begun to make their weight felt within him. The Church was a refuge which helped to reduce his chances of capitulating to the Avenue. And the Avenue was not merely the shortest road to hell. It was visible proof, for the white man. that the Negro was a worthless and degraded being. Ordinarily, there might be some comfort in the judgment that all men are born in sin. For the Negro it was a personal condemnation. The turbulence of the Negro's faith was a measure of the daily terror in which white America held him. The record of brutality is long and almost incredible; and so the question of inferiority, unutterably wicked in all its im- plications, is irrelevant when one tries to follow with Baldwin how the Negro, in these circum- stances, became vulnerable to the belief that the white man's judgment might be true. For it is precisely this enforced concession, this tem- porary separation from himself which devours the spirit of many Negroes. In an introductory letter, Baldwin warns a young nephew of the predicament into which white America had plunged the boy's grandfather : Well, he is dead, he never saw you, and he had a terrible life; he was defeated long before he died, because at bottom of his heart he really believed what white people said about him. This is one of the reasons he became so holy. . . . And I know, which is much worse, and this is a crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither f nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.

But the Church also evolved a community which gave strength to the creative impulse of the Negro. Music rescued him from a total despair. If God wasn't cheating—and no Negro, could afford to entertain such a doubt—then the wages of his historic suffering on earth would be awaiting him elsewhere.

Baldwin himself became a preacher, and spent some three years soothing the agony of the faithful with his doctrine of redemption. This period is crucial to all his later development. When he recalls it, it is to explain that the Church may have been an example of the gim- mick which serves any Negro who would risk a break with the past he inherited. Baldwin maY have travelled a long way from the circum- stances of the ghetto and its Church, but he is forever married to that meaning which they gave his childhood and adolescence in Harlem. It includes a profound distrust of the white man's intentions as they affect the Negro in America, and a submerged hatred of those who regard their acceptance of the Negro as proof of their good faith.

The Negro's encounter with white America is essentially an American experience; but it also serves as an example of a paradox at the heart of Western civilisation. Christian philosophy sponsors a doctrine of equality and love which has been contradicted throughout the centuries by the complicity of the Church in the political crimes of Western Europe. Not least among these is the ancestral principle of white superior- ity. It is a disease which has afflicted every white nation in its intercourse with the non-white World. Often bloodily, but also with subtlety and a righteous certainty of purpose, Europe has butchered the souls of men whose single and hereditary crime was their racial difference.

In America and elsewhere, the Negro's skin Was a ready-made excuse, a symbolic reflection of his human deformity. In the process of his enslavement or redemption, any strategy was Permissible. But four centuries has been a long term to serve in this kind of prison, a long and corrosive silence to have to endure. To know that always and everywhere your cell is where You stand, your presence a contagion, and your future acknowledged as a universal offence. To learn the humility of cattle, and finally to perish, Unheard and patient as the dirt which shares Your colour.

It is in this context that the religious fantasy of the Black Muslim Movement achieves some validity. In a moving passage,, Baldwin describes his meeting with the leader, Elijah Muhammad. And the experience returns him to his first years in Harlem, to the contradiction of the Church in the Negro's life in America. The Muslim Movement has concocted a mythology which Would restore some sense to the Negro's religious commitment; for Elijah teaches that the white Man's heaven is and has always been the black man's hell. It doesn't require any effort of per- suasion to put this across, for experience has taught the Negro that the statement is literally true. The other article of faith claims that God is black, and the white man is a devil. If Elijah's following can't check the complexion of God, they do feel, nevertheless, that the white man is their nearest and most acute experience of what a devil would do to human beings. Beside the liberal non-violence of Dr. Martin Luther King, this message carries an ,explosive truth. It corre- sponds to facts which no one—least of all the Negro—can avoid; and it serves as a warning of the fire that is to come if the Negro revolt ever goes out of gear.

As a minority the Negro lacks the numerical strength which would enable him td capture the citadels of influence, to become an agent of power in his country. But he is an organic part of American life, and his numbers are large enough to be the source of unending chaos.

In the meantime we have witnessed a profound change in the temper of the American Negro. This unprecedented eruption of grievances marks a new kind of development. The results have been at once speetacular and truly noble. Anicrican history can provide no episodes of bravery to surpass the incredible defiance of those Negro children who walk towards their new school through a crowd of delinquent white faces howling insanely for black blood. They have set a criterion of honour from which the Negro revolt dare not retreat without an unspeak- able sense of failure. And the season of failure in the Negro's bid for freedom has come to an end.

A continent of black men beyond the shores of America provides the Negro with evidence that his triumph is inevitable. Let the President find ways of reconciling the mission of his Peace Corps in Africa with the misery of Negro citizens in Mississippi. But no American Negro can now'accept compromise as a solution to this particular crisis of conscience in the nation.

It is part of Baldwin's thesis that the Negro assertion has made a crack in the façade of cosiness which has dulled the white American sense of reality. There is a kind of gangrene in the very guts of the nation, polluting the whole social and .political structure from which the individual derives his sense of values. There is not much room for comfort in Baldwin's mes- sage; yet he insists that the country is capable of achieving the change which is necessary for its liberation from the racial myths which still obscure and limit its vision of a creative free- dom for all its citizens. The challenge for America is enormous; but it also offers an op- portunity for self-renewal which is unique.