On Being Negro in America

by J. Saunders Redding

The first who came was a moist, sleazy fellow, fat and asthmatic. I had often seen him in the little restaurant where I took dinner. Frequently he would be there in low-voiced conversation with various people—men and women—when I entered. He always sat at the round, family table back in the corner at an angle from the door, and my glance would fall there first. There would be beer before him (it was just legal again) and a dish of olives and olive pits and a plate of fried potatoes which he ate with his fingers. Though I did not think he was aware of me, no one could be unaware of him. Even from my table by the window and with my back squarely toward him, I was conscious of his presence. In lulls of dish rattling and conversation, his wheeze could be heard all over the tiny restaurant.

One evening when I went there later than usual, because I had waited for a cold rain to stop, and took my place, Eric, the German waiter, told me that “Philip” wanted to talk to me. He indicated the fat man at the big table. There was little possibility of Eric’s having made a mistake. The restaurant had only a dozen tables and it catered to a limited and steady patronage of unimportant executives, clerks and apprentices from the jewelry manufacturies and a few plebeian graduate students like myself. I do not remember ever seeing another Negro there. Even though Eric had made no mistake, I was sure that I did not want to talk to “Philip.” But before I could put my thoughts into words and summon the courage to utter them, Philip was standing there. He looked at me expressionlessly as he pulled the chair far out—to allow for his pendulous belly—and sat down.

“This rain. My friends are all late tonight,” he said. “You’ll excuse me.” There was nothing questioning, or tentative, or apologetic in the way he spoke. I was acutely embarrassed. He took a piece of potato out of the dish he had brought with him and carried it to his mouth. It was a small, full-lipped mouth. His hands, too, I noticed, were small and very white, though the nails and the knuckles were dirty, in contrast to his moist, flushed face.

“What does the ‘J’ in your name represent?” he asked. I was taken by surprise and must have shown it, for he blew out an indulgent laugh. “You wouldn’t think I would know your name.” This was not a question either. “I do.” And he spoke it.

The sound of it coming from a complete stranger seemed to establish some kind of power over me. I felt a twinge of fright even, as if I were suddenly vulnerable in ways I knew not of.

“How do you know?”

He swung his head from side to side and his face smiled at me. “I know. And I know more,” he said. He called off items of biographical fact as if he were reading from a file card—the year and place of my birth, my father’s name, my brother’s name, my schooling, an attack of scarlet fever I had had. Momentarily I half expected him to go into an account of monstrous crimes I had committed in some other and unremembered character. It seems silly now, for I know that to get such information as he had was an easy matter, but then I felt that for some dark purpose I could not guess a million pairs of eyes had followed me since birth.

I do not wish to play up this episode nor to dramatize my reaction to it, for what followed was ridiculous emotional anticlimax. Through the next talk Philip had with me a week or so later, his efforts to get on terms of easy familiarity dissipated my sense of being mysteriously overpowered and exposed. I did not respond to the first-name camaraderie. Not knowing his last name, I avoided calling him anything. I think my formal civility frustrated him, and I think this is why, in a kind of desperation during the third or fourth meeting, he pulled out a folder of very detailed obscene photographs and handed them to me. He laughed when he asked in pretended casualness (for I could feel him watching me sharply) whether I had seen anything like them before. And weren’t they the most amusing things, and one in particular, because he knew the girl in it—a student at the art school. He had some “delicious” friends, he said, and he would like me to meet them. He said that there was one “bonnie brunette especially, from ‘way down in Georgia—but completely, and I mean completely, emancipated” and without prejudice. They lined up fast enough once they were really free, he said, and it only went to show what would happen to the race problem all over the country were it not for the strength and pressure of reaction. “There just wouldn’t be any if it were left to the women.”

I think Philip was running ’way ahead of his timetable. Or, to change the figure, he had cast his net on the wrong tide. There was not enough weight to it in any case. I knew later that there was quite a potential catch of assorted fish, including a young college student who wore very thick glasses, a French-descended politician who had considerable power in local labor circles, and a very wealthy widow in her late thirties. Even then the widow was contributing generously to the cell, and some years later she became nationally known as pro-Communist. There were others too, but I do not know how they had been approached, nor how many were caught. Perhaps Philip and those who joined him in subsequent weeks fumbled the assignment badly. At least this one got away. The approach to my intellect is not through my gonads.

One approach perhaps is through my curiosity, and it was curiosity that teased me into going here and there with Philip. I wanted to see what kind of people these were. I had listened to soapbox Communists on the streets of New York, but they had aroused nothing in me save vague speculations over such questions as were bruited about in those days. What was wrong with our government? Did the rich and powerful think only to gain more power and reap more benefits from the exploitation of the working class? What should the government do? What could it do? What was Hoover doing that he should not do, and vice versa? I felt a certain shallow contempt for the emotionalism, the unreasoning bitterness and the actless anger of the soapbox radicals.