III
How, in 1962, does one begin to discuss this awareness? Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa? No, perhaps, the best observation to make at the outset is that the South, in general, feels no sharp sense of sin at its “treatment of the Negro.” The guilt hypothesis is vastly overdrawn. If wrong has been done (and doubtless wrong has been done), we reflect that within the human relationship wrong always has been done, by one people upon another, since tribal cavemen quarreled with club and stone. And whatever the wrongs may have been, the white South emphatically refuses to accept all the wrongs as her own. For the South itself has been wronged—cruelly and maliciously wronged, by men in high places whose hypocrisy is exceeded only by their ignorance, men whose trade is to damn the bigotry of the segregated South by day and to sleep in lily-white Westchester County by night. We are keenly aware, as Perry Morgan remarked in a telling phrase, of a North that wishes to denounce discrimination and have it too.
But let us begin gently. The Southerner who would grope seriously for understanding of his own perplexing region, and the non-Southerner who would seek in earnest to learn more than his textbooks would tell him, cannot make a start with Brown v. Board of Education on a May afternoon in 1954. Neither can he begin with Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, or with ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, or with Appomattox three years earlier. A start has to be made much earlier, in 1619, when the first twenty Negroes arrived from Africa aboard a Dutch slaver and fastened upon the South a wretched incubus that the belated penances of New Englanders have not expiated at all.
We of the South have been reared from that day in a strange society that only now—and how uncomfortably!—is becoming known at first hand outside the South. This is the dual society, made up of white and Negro coexisting in an oddly intimate remoteness. It is a way of life that has to be experienced. Children mask their eyes and play at being blind. Even so, some of my Northern friends mask their eyes and play at being Southern; they try to imagine what it must be like to be white in the South, to be Negro in the South. Novelist John Griffin dyed his skin and spent three weeks or so pretending to be Negro, looking for incidents to confirm his prejudices. But a child always knows that he can take his hands from his eyes, and see, that he is not really blind; and those who have not grown up from childhood, and fashioned their whole world from a delicately bounded half a world, cannot comprehend what this is all about. They wash the dye from their imaginations, and put aside The New York Times, and awake to a well-ordered society in which the Negroes of their personal acquaintance are sipping martinis and talking of Middle Eastern diplomacy. They form an image of “the Negro” (as men form an image of the French, or the British, or the Japanese) in terms of the slim and elegant Harvard student, the eloquent spokesman of a civil rights group, the trim stenographer in a publishing office: Thurgood Marshall on the bench, Ralph Bunche in the lecture hall. It is a splendid image, finely engraved on brittle glass, an object of universal admiration on the mantle of the New Republic. It is an image scarcely known in the South.
My father came from New Orleans. His father, a captain in the Confederate Army, returned from the War and established a prosperous business in ship chandlery there. And though I myself was born in Oklahoma, Father having moved there just prior to World War I, we children visited along the Delta in our nonage. We sailed on Pontchartrain, and crabbed at Pass Christian, and once or twice were taken from school in February to sit spellbound on Canal Street and watch the Mardi Gras go by. Our life in Oklahoma was New Orleans once removed; it was a life our playmates accepted as matter-of-factly as children of a coast accept the tides: The Negroes were; we were. They had their lives; we had ours. There were certain things one did: A proper white child obeyed the family Negroes, ate with them, bothered them, teased them, loved them, lived with them, learned from them. And there were certain things one did not do: One did not intrude upon their lives, or ask about Negro institutions, or bring a Negro child in the front door. And at five, or six, or seven, one accepted, without question, that Calline and Cubboo, who were vaguely the charges of a Negro gardener up the street, had their schools; and we had ours.
Does all this have the air of a chapter from William Gilmore Simms or a post-bellum romance by Thomas Nelson Page? I myself lived it, forty years ago; my own sons have lived it in this generation. My father lived it, and his father before him. For three hundred years, the South has lived with this subconsciousness of race. Who hears a clock tick, or the surf murmur, or the trains pass? Not those who live by the clock or the sea or the track. In the South, the acceptance of racial separation begins in the cradle. What rational man imagines this concept can be shattered overnight?
We had two Negroes who served my family more than twenty years. One was Lizzie. The other was Nash. Lizzie was short and plump and placid, and chocolate-brown; she “lived on,” in a room and bath over the garage, and her broad face never altered in its kindness. Nash was short and slim, older, better educated, more a leader; she was African-black; and as a laundress, she came in after church on Sundays, put the clothes down to soak in the basement tubs, gossiped with Lizzie, scolded her, raised Lizzie’s sights. On Monday, the two of them did the wash, hanging the clothes on heavy wire lines outside the kitchen door, and late in the afternoon Nash ironed. She pushed the iron with an economical push-push, thump; turn the shirt; push-push, thump. And I would come home from school to the smell of starch and the faint scorch of the iron and the push-push, thump, and would descend to the basement only to be ordered upstairs to wash my hands and change out of school clothes.
Toward the end of their lives, disaster came to both of them. Lizzie went slowly blind, through some affliction no surgeon could correct, and Nash lost the middle three fingers of one hand when her scarf tangled in the bellows of a church organ. Nevertheless, they stayed with us until age at last put them on the sidelines. And as far as love and devotion and respect can reach, they were members of the family. Yet I often have wondered, in later years, did we children know them? Did Mother and Father know them? I do not think we did.
This relationship, loving but unknowing, has characterized the lives of thousands of Southern children on farms and in the cities too. White infants learn to feel invisible fences as they crawl, to sense unwritten boundaries as they walk. And I know this much, that Negro children are brought up to sense these boundaries too. What is so often misunderstood, outside the South, is this delicate intimacy of human beings whose lives are so intricately bound together. I have met Northerners who believe, in all apparent seriousness, that segregation in the South means literally that: segregation, the races stiffly apart, never touching. A wayfaring stranger from the New York Herald Tribune implied as much in a piece he wrote from Virginia after the school decision. His notion was that whites and Negroes did not even say “good morning” to each other. God in heaven!
In plain fact, the relationship between white and Negro in the segregated South, in the country and in the city, has been far closer, more honest, less constrained, than such relations generally have been in the integrated North. In Charleston and New Orleans, among many other cities, residential segregation does not exist, for example, as it exists in Detroit or Chicago. In the country, whites and Negroes are farm neighbors. They share the same calamities—the mud, the hail, the weevils—and they minister, in their own unfelt, unspoken way, to one another. Is the relationship that of master and servant, superior and inferior? Down deep, doubtless it is, but I often wonder if this is more of a wrong to the Negro than the affected, hearty “equality” encountered in the North. In the years I lived on a farm, I fished often with a Negro tenant, hour after hour, he paddling, I paddling, sharing the catch, and we tied up the boat and casually went our separate ways. Before Brown v. Board of Education, it never occurred to me that in these peaceful hours I was inflicting upon him wounds of the psyche not likely ever to be undone. I do not believe it occurred to Robert either. This is not the way one goes fly-casting on a millpond, with Gunnar Myrdal invisibly present on the middle thwart. We fish no more. He has been busy in recent years, and I too; and when I came across the flyrod recently, I found the line rotted and the ferrules broken.
I say this relationship “has been,” and in the past perfect lies a melancholy change that disturbs many Southerners deeply. In my observation, a tendency grows in much of the white South to acknowledge and to abandon, with no more than a ritual protest, many of the patent absurdities of “Jim Crow.” Many of these practices, so deeply resented in recent years by the Negro, may have had some rational basis when they were instituted in the post-Reconstruction period. When the first trolleys came along, the few Negroes who rode them were mostly servants; others carried with them the fragrance of farm or livery stable. A Jim Crow section perhaps made sense in those days. But in my own nonage, during the 1920s, and in the years since then, few Southerners ever paused to examine the reasons for segregation on streetcars. We simply moved the little portable sign that separated white from Negro as a car filled up, and whites sat in front of the sign and Negroes sat behind it. This was the way we rode streetcars. After Brown v. Board of Education, when the abiding subconsciousness of the Negro turned overnight into an acute and immediate awareness of the Negro, some of these laws and customs ceased to be subject to reason anyhow; they became, confusingly, matters of strategy; they became occupied ground in an undeclared war, not to be yielded lest their yielding be regarded as needless surrender. Many aspects of our lives have gone that way since. The unwritten rules of generations are now being, in truth, unwritten; in their place, it is proposed by the apostles of instant integration that there be no rules at all. It seems so easy: “What difference does the color of a man’s skin make?” “Why not just treat them as equals?” “There is no such thing as race.”
Ah, but it is not so easy. The ingrained attitudes of a lifetime cannot be jerked out like a pair of infected molars, and new porcelain dentures put in their place. For this is what our Northern friends will not comprehend: The South, agreeable as it may be to confessing some of its sins and to bewailing its more manifest wickednesses, simply does not concede that at bottom its basic attitude is “infected” or wrong. On the contrary, the Southerner rebelliously clings to what seems to him the hard core of truth in this whole controversy: Here and now, in his own communities, in the mid-1960s, the Negro race, as a race, plainly is not equal to the white race, as a race; nor, for that matter, in the wider world beyond, by the accepted judgment of ten thousand years, has the Negro race, as a race, ever been the cultural or intellectual equal of the white race, as a race.
This we take to be a plain statement of fact, and if we are not amazed that our Northern antagonists do not accept it as such, we are resentful that they will not even look at the proposition, or hear of it, or inquire into it. Those of us who have ventured to discuss the issues outside the South have discovered, whenever the point arises, that no one is so intolerant of truth as academicians whose profession it is to pursue it. The whole question of race has become a closed question: the earth is a cube, and there’s an end to it; Two and two are four, the sun rises in the east, and no race is inferior to any other race. Even the possibility of a conflicting hypothesis is beyond the realm of sober examination. John Hope Franklin, chairman of the history department at Brooklyn College, sees Southern attitudes on race as a “hoax.” Their wrongness is “indisputable.” To Ashley Montagu, race is a myth. A UNESCO pamphlet makes the flat, unqualified statement that “modern biological and psychological studies of the differences between races do not support the idea that one is superior to another as far as innate potentialities are concerned.” And when one inquires, why, pray, has it taken so long for the Negro’s innately equal potentialities to emerge, the answers trail off into lamentations on the conditions under which the Negro has lived. Thus, the doctrine of environment, like the principle of charity, is trotted out to conceal a multitude of sins. The fault, if there be any fault, is held to be not in men’s genes, but in their substandard housing.
All this is to anticipate some of the points this brief is intended to develop, but it is perhaps as well to know where the argument is going. The South does not wish to be cruel, or unkind, or intolerant, or bigoted; but in this area it does not wish to be unrealistic either. We do not agree that our “prejudice” in this regard is prejudice at all, in the pejorative sense in which the word is widely used. The man who wakes up ten times with a hangover, having had too much brandy the night before, is not “prejudiced” against brandy if on the eleventh occasion he passes the brandy by; he has merely learned to respect its qualities. And what others see as the dark night of our bigotry is regarded, in our own observation, as the revealing light of experience. It guides our feet. As Patrick Henry said, we know no other light to go by.