On Being Negro in America

by J. Saunders Redding

16

Although I am not a very religious person, I do not see how I can leave God out of consideration in these matters. God has been made to play a very conspicuous part in race relations in America. At one time or another, and often at the same time, He has been the protagonist for both sides. He has damned and blessed first one side and then the other with truly godlike impartiality. His ultimate intentions, revealed to inspired sages, are preserved in a thousand volumes. Anyone who reads the literature of race cannot but be struck by the immoderate frequency with which God is invoked, and by the painstaking consideration that is given, even by social scientists, to race relations as a problem of Christian ethics.

God, of course, is an implicit assumption in the thought of our age. He is one of those beliefs so spontaneous and ineluctable and taken so much as a matter of course that they operate with great effectiveness (though generally on a level of subconsciousness) in our society. He is a belief that operates just by being, like a boulder met in the path which must be dealt with before one can proceed on his journey. God is a complex composed entirely of simple elements—mediator, father, judge, jury, executioner, and also love, virtue, charity—each of which generates a very motley collection of often contradictory ideas. God is a catalyst, and He is also a formulated doctrine inertly symbolized in the ritual and the dogma of churches called Christian. God is the Absolute Reality, but this does not prevent His being ostentatiously offered as the excuse for our society’s failure to come to grips with big but relative realities. God and the Christian religion must be reckoned with.

I do not know how long I have held both God and the Christian religion in some doubt, though it must have been since my teens. Nor do I know exactly how this came about. My father was (and is) very religious, of great and clear and unbending faith. My mother was less so, but the family went regularly to church, where we were all active, and I used occasionally to see my mother so deeply touched by a religious feeling that she could not keep back the tears. What inspired it in that chill atmosphere it is impossible to say. I can only think that it came as a result of some very personal communion with God, established perhaps by a random thought, a word, or a certain slant of light through the yellow and rose and purple windows. There was never any shouting or “getting happy” among us, or in our church; none of that ecstatic abandon that set men and women jumping and dancing and screaming in the aisles. After the northward migration following the First World War, a few people who may have had a natural tendency to such transports found their way to our church, but they were frustrated by the mechanical expertness of the uninspired sermons, the formalized prayers, and by the choirmaster’s preference for hymns translated from fifteenth-century Latin. Never did I hear a spiritual sung in our church, and only rarely a common-meter Calvinist hymn.

Sometime during my teens I became aware that for most Negroes God was a great deal more than a spirit to be worshiped on Sundays. He had a terrifying immediacy as material provider and protector. Once a group of us teen-agers went on a Sunday evening (our own church worshiped only in the morning) to a mission church deep in the Bridge District where the Negro population was concentrated. We went to mock, as some of us had heard our parents do, at the malapropisms of the illiterate minister and his ignorant flock, the crazy singing and shouting, and the uninhibited behavior of members in religious ecstasy. We did not remain to pray, but I was struck by what I saw and heard, and afterward my natural curiosity led me to go occasionally alone. The service did not resemble, either in ritual or content (both of which were created spontaneously), the service to which I was used. Any member of the church could stand up and pray. A whole evening might be given over to these impulsive outbursts. The prayers impressed me with their concreteness, their concern for the everyday. I heard one distraught mother, whose daughter evidently was sitting beside her, beseech God: “Now here’s Idabelle, an’ she’s gone and got herself bigged, an’ I’m askin’ you, God, to make the young rascal who done it marry her. His name’s Herbie Washington, an’ he stays on the street nex’ to me.” They prayed for bread, not in a general, symbolic “give us this day our daily bread” sense, but for specific bread and meat for specific occasions. “Aunt Callie Black’s laying up there sick, Lord, an’ when I seen her, she tol’ me her mouth was watering for some hot biscuit, an’ that’s the reason I’m asking You to give her some hot biscuit ‘fore I go to see her again nex’ Tuesday.” They wanted clothes and they asked for them. They wanted pitiful but specific sums of money. They wanted protection from their real enemies. “Lord Jesus, don’t let that mean nigger, Joe Fisher, stick me with no knife.”

Negroes made irrational claims on God which they expected Him to fulfill without any help from them and without any regard for the conditions under which they could be fulfilled, and I suppose that when their claims failed, there was some sort of psychological mechanism that produced satisfactory excuses. It was all very simple and direct, but God just did not work that way—not the white folk’s God I was taught to worship.

I do not believe that this incongruity set me thinking until at the small and rather exclusive (though public) high school I attended, a science teacher pointed it up. He was a bitter, frustrated man, full of self-hatred and of contempt for his race. Often staggering drunk outside the classroom, he was said to spend his week ends in an alcoholic fog of hatred writing scurrilous anti-Negro letters to the “people’s opinion” column of the local paper. (Such letters did appear there with persistent regularity.) Our science teacher was certainly no good for us. Monday mornings were invariably void of science instruction.

“How many of you went hat-in-hand to God yesterday and asked him to get your chemistry for you this week?” he would begin. “He won’t, and you can take my word for that. The trouble with niggers—” what malevolent contempt he put into the word!—“is that they look to God to do for them. That’s why they’re like they are—not only ignorant, but stupid; not only inferior, but debased. ‘You can take all this world, but give me Jesus,’ the song says, and that’s just what the white people have been doing—taking the world and giving you Jesus. God, if there is a God, which I doubt, helps those who help themselves. Now study your chemistry!”

(How he managed to stay on with his drunkenness and his fundamental corruption, of which everyone was aware, is not beyond my comprehension so much as it is beyond my belief. He was one of the “big,” upper-class mulatto families with members thriving in the professions up and down the Eastern seaboard. They were not a powerful family, having neither money, nor political influence, nor potent white patrons; but they had social prestige because of their antiquity, their relatively long tradition of freedom, their education, and their considerable infusion of white blood. In those days the feeling was that such a family must not be disgraced by the derelictions of one of its members. The black sheep must be protected, if he could not be hidden, and pitied because he could not be punished.)

Such assertions were almost daily fare. It was not hard to find support for them. I could see that most Negroes were poor and ignorant and inferior. Every year on the last Sunday in August one of the Negro religious denominations held a “quarterly meeting” in my home town. People from a half dozen states poured in the day before and roamed the streets all night, or slept anywhere they could—on the courthouse lawn, in the wagons and trucks that brought them, in alleys and doorways. But on the Sunday, what excitement! What noisy exuberance! Six city blocks, just below the main street, were inundated with the germinal tide of their living. Preachers exhorted; food vendors shouted; choirs sang; bands played; lost children bawled; city prostitutes pushed brazenly for trade among the young men from the country; people prayed and went into transports.