“What!” It must have been a yawp of horror and disbelief. The boy had sat in my class not five hours before.
“Lynched by some goddamned drunken crackers. The Negroes out in East Atlanta are getting together, and we’re going to get together too. We’re not going to take this lying down. Those crackers might come out here any time.”
I could not follow his thinking, even after he reminded me that a relative—either an uncle or a cousin—of the murdered boy was on the college faculty; but the dangerous possibilities of “those crackers” coming bloomed in my imagination like poisonous flowers.
“And if they come, then what?” I said.
“That’s what we’re having the meeting for. Come on.”
And I went. We were only a few, mostly younger instructors, and we tried to appear disciplined and resolute, but hysteria was abroad, and I was caught up in it long enough to pledge to buy a gun through the underground means we had to employ; and long enough to be thrilled by the possession of it when it was delivered in great secrecy the next day; and even long enough to wish to use it on any skulking white man that offered.
The college environs and, I suppose, all the Negro sections of the city, were like alerted camps. There were many false alarms: cars loaded with white men were prowling the neighborhood; another student had been murdered; some white youths had caught a Negro girl coming from work, stripped her of her clothes and chased her naked through the downtown streets. And to match these were the heroics, like guarding the house of the college president and of the Hubert relative who was on the faculty. Every few days for a month Negroes held meetings, but after a time I did not go to them any more. They came to seem like public displays of very private emotions, in the same unbecoming taste of those obscene religious services in which worshipers handle snakes.
One day I took my gun and the box of bullets that came with it and rode out into the country and fired at a dead tree. Wrapped in greased, gray flannel in a cardboard box, the gun is still somewhere among my possessions, but I have not seen it since.
4
Many Negroes will deny that the force which I have described as daemonic has operated in their lives. If asked about it, they will take quick offense, as if it were of the same stripe as an unnatural sex drive which, of course, is wisely kept secret by those who possess it. They will aver that they live normal, natural, wholesome lives, even in the South. They will point out their “normal” interests in their professional lives and in their home lives. They will tick off the list of their white friends. They will say, truthfully enough, “Oh, there are ways to avoid prejudice and segregation.” I have no quarrel with them (nor with any others): it is simply that I do not believe them. Having to avoid prejudice and segregation is itself unwholesome, and the constant doing of it is skating very close to a psychopathic edge. My experience has been that no two or three Negroes ever come together for anything—even so unracial a thing as, say, a Christmas party—but that the principal subject of conversation is race. One grows mortally sick of it.