On Being Negro in America

by J. Saunders Redding

What happened to my older son (and also to my younger son just recently, though not in circumstances so distressing nor in details so graphic) was that while he was playing the game with all the exuberance of an eight-year-old, somebody “complicated up” the rules. I remember distinctly how it happened.

For several weeks while my wife was with child it was my unaccustomed duty to “make the marketing,” as it is so quaintly put in the upper South. Our market was a co-op on the highway just outside town, in the heart of one of those neat and monotonous residential communities that seemed to spring up everywhere in the 1940’s. My wife loved the place. It was convenient; its stock was excellent; and its prices generally somewhat lower than in the chain groceries. Besides, it had a Negro (a colleague and friend) on its board of directors, and, as a second novel attraction, it employed several Negroes—at least one as clerk and another as butcher. The co-op’s atmosphere, unlike that of the chain’s, was friendly, warm, leisurely. My wife supposed it was because of the neighborhood—a better-than-average middle-class neighborhood, segregated of course, of aircraft designers, engineers and other technological experts and a scattering of armed-service personnel (no one lower than a lieutenant in the Navy or a captain in the Army, it seemed) from the various military installations close by. As one of the charter stockholders, I was determined to love the place too.

Friday was market day. Until her condition prevented her going, my wife’s eager companion on these expeditions was our son. Sometime in the spring he had struck up a friendship at the co-op and he anticipated its weekly renewal with pleasurable excitement. The first time I took him there I saw the revival of the fraternity with quickened heart. My son burst through the door ahead of me, stopped, looked down the first aisle (fresh fruits and vegetables), ran to the second and looked, and then suddenly let out an Indian whoop—“Reggie!”—and got one for an answer—“Conway!” And then I saw a handsome dark-haired, dark-eyed boy of about Conway’s age break from the side of a young Negro girl and come bursting up the aisle between the high-stacked shelves of brightly packaged foods toward my son. They stood looking at each other for a moment, then they came together, each with an arm around the shoulder of the other, and exploded off to play outside among the cars until market was made. I looked at the uniformed Negro girl and she smiled and I smiled, and that was that.

It was that way for four or five weeks—Conway and Reggie met each other with what seemed the force of projectiles and went skyrocketing off. Leaving the market, I would find them outside, hot and happy playing at some impossible game.

Then one Friday, Reggie (we never learned his last name) was not there with the Negro maid. His guardian this time was a man—a tall, handsome person, about forty, I judged, who in spite of the Phi Beta Kappa key slung across his flat stomach, looked outdoorsy and virile. The boys came together as usual and went outside as usual, but the man’s marketing must have been nearly done, for before I could finish picking out the heaviest, juiciest oranges, Conway was back with me again. “Where’s Reggie?” I asked him. “He had to go,” he said. “His daddy was in a hurry.” But already he was looking forward to the next week.

The uniformed maid was with Reggie again the next week, but this time when Conway let out his customary whoop, there was no vocal answer. Reggie turned, it seemed to me with momentary eagerness, but there was no yell and rush. He approached very slowly. He was smiling weakly, but that smile died as he came. Perhaps sensing that something was wrong, Conway himself now hesitated. “What’s the matter?” he asked Reggie. “Come on, man, let’s go. Don’t you want to play?”

“I can’t play with you,” Reggie said.

“What’s the matter, are you sick?” Conway wanted to know.

“I just can’t play with you any more,” Reggie said.

Conway moved a fraction closer to me, clutched the handle of the food cart I was pushing. The maid stood at some distance, pretending not to watch. The pleasant-voiced, pleasant-faced shoppers of the neighborhood flowed around us. Other children, younger, skittered and yelled up and down the aisles. The compacted odors of fresh pastry, of ground coffee, of fruits and vegetables, and the colors of all these were as ever. But a chill was beginning to form around my heart. Before Conway asked the next question, I knew the answer that was coming. I did not know the words of it, but I knew the feel—the iron that he would not be prepared for; the corrosive rust that it would make in his blood and that, unless I was skillful—as my father was not—I could never draw off. At that moment—no, before the moment of the answer I wanted to pick Conway up and hold him hard against me and ward off the demoralizing blow that might be struck for a lifetime. But I could not forfend it even by grasping my son by the hand and walking off in another direction. I was transfixed.