The Great Black and White Secret

By Roger Rosenblatt

In James Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952), there is a brief early scene in which Baldwin's 14-year-old black hero, John Grimes, takes a headlong run down a hill of melting snow: "At the bottom of the hill, where the ground abruptly leveled off onto a gravel path, he nearly knocked down an old white man with a white beard, who was walking very slowly and leaning on his cane. They both stopped, astonished, and looked at one another. John struggled to catch his breath and apologize, but the old man smiled. John smiled back. It was as though he and the old man had between them a great secret."

At least part of their great secret is that they both live in the same country. White and black have shared that secret for a long time now, and have done an efficient job of keeping it from each other. The smile that connected John Grimes and the old man, while pleasant enough for the occasion, was historically speaking a lapse of judgment, a slip of the heart. If Baldwin had been writing news instead of fiction, John might never have thought to apologize, and the old man might have swung his cane like a war club.

Now that would make a scene one could more easily believe in. After all, it repeats itself constantly one way or another these days--black and white giving each other the fish-eye in elevators; making great sudden arcs on the sidewalk; or even less subtle, the dinner party conversation between black and white that zeroes in on The Black and White Question like a surface-to-air missile. The lily-white athletic club. The coal-black radio station. It is odd to think that this is where the civil rights movement of the 1960s has wound up, or down. But as any strict constructionist will adjure, the civil rights laws were enacted to allow for equal chances, not equal smiles; so it should hardly shock the system to learn that, on the bulk of the evidence, official and personal, the American social scene is less mixed now than ever. In the March issue of FORTUNE, Roger Wilkins sees blacks and whites separated by a widening "social chasm." Recent reports of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and of the National Urban League concur.

The formal causes of this separation are no great secret to anyone--busing, housing, crime, the normal distances between the too rich and the too poor. Terms like white flight and steering have become so comfortable in the national argot that one almost forgets that they are weapons. Affirmative action has helped split black and white as well, particularly black and blue collar and black and Jew, on the issue of quotas. Then too there are the white lies told daily in the universities by fainthearted, if well-meaning, professors writing false recommendations for unprepared black students for jobs in which they are bound to fail; the professors then are lost in dismay when the students fail and resent the lie. All these things and more, including white racism, whose unredeemed resilience may be read in the revival of the Klan, or scrawled above the nation's urinals, where it belongs.

Yet, even if all the familiar impediments to social integration were suddenly to be lifted from the country, few nowadays believe that black and white would rush toward each other automatically, unhesitantly. The differences between black and white America run awfully deep. And the deepest of them are not found in surveys or in statistical studies, or even in the most open conversations. Where they do crop up, as they always have, is where they are taken least seriously: in the fiction and poems of black writers, where as art they may be both revealed and camouflaged simultaneously. That passage in Go Tell It on the Mountain, for instance. Moving as it is, it makes the point that despite their shared smile and great secret, the black boy and the white man do not speak or meet again.

A similar scene occurs in Chester Himes' If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945). Himes' hero, Bob Jones, takes his girlfriend to an exclusive restaurant, where the waiters stick them off in a corner and where other customers ogle the black couple as if they were birds in a zoo. Jones' girlfriend is mortified. He trembles between panic and rage. Looking around the room, he sees a white ensign and a "very blond girl" sitting with an older couple, evidently the parents of one of them. Jones and the ensign have been casually admiring each other's girlfriend, and when their eyes meet neither shows hostility, "only a mild surprise and a sharp interest." Forgetting his situation momentarily, Jones suddenly has a "wistful desire to be the young ensign's friend." Then he catches the "frosty glare" of one of the elders at the ensign's table, which kills the moment and restores reality. That scene could be written today.

To use art as evidence for arguments about the real world is a tricky business because artists are supreme individuals as well as supreme liars.

Yet if one surveys the body of black American writing from Reconstruction to the present, a remarkably consistent picture of black America, of America itself, springs to life. The mythology of that literature is a historical fact, the nation's worst--slavery. Besides the moral damage that slavery did the nation, it also created a cultural framework at once so distorted and solid that we live within it still.

Its central distortion was that the enslaved man was not a man; he was the opposite of a man, whatever that might be. His very color was a sign of deviation, a sign to be carried by generations after him, like the mark of Cain. There are a dozen scenes in black American novels where a child is going along happily until someone (often a schoolteacher) points out the "difference" in his life, which is also the difference of his future. At that revelation the child flees in panic to a mirror in order to stare at himself, to see himself for the first time as the white world sees him, as something "other," a vision of the negative.

From that point on, his life becomes a series of oppositions. A young black girl like Janie of Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) may see that she is beautiful, but how can black be beautiful if the standard of beauty is to be white, blond, fair? How can black be good if cleanliness (whiteness) is next to godliness, if Satan is the Prince of Darkness, if there are blackguards and blackmail, black thoughts and black deeds? To be in the dark is one thing, but to see the light is quite another. Images of whiteness can be terrible too, of course (the white whale, whited sepulchers, death on a pale horse), but these are fairly concrete things compared with the general designation of black as the color of evil or chaos. Young John Grimes is named for dirt. He observes the dirt around him, and recalls the book of Revelations (22: 11): "He who is filthy, let him be filthy still."

All this is kid stuff compared to the final opposition, which is to be dehumanized completely. Slavery at its worst did that job most efficiently, but when slavery was no longer available, something else evidently had to take its place. In his autobiography, Black Boy (1945), Richard Wright tells a story of himself as a teen-ager working in an optical factory in Memphis. Some local white men tried repeatedly to goad Wright and Harrison, another black boy who worked for a rival company, into a fight by telling each that the other hated him.

When that lie failed, the men offered the boys $5 apiece to step into the ring. The boys hesitated, but eventually accepted, for the money, agreeing between themselves to pull punches. On a Saturday afternoon in a basement before a frenzied white audience, Wright and Harrison went at each other, stripped to the waist.

They jabbed faintly at first; then one hit too hard; then the other. Finally they had to be pulled apart, having beaten each other to the point of exhaustion. After the fight, full of shame, they would not speak. What the white men had originally contended was so after all. The boys actually did hate each other. The lie became the truth.

When lies come true, there are not too many places where one can get a grip on life. The idea of time in black writing, for example, of time as an index of progress, or as a context of history, has either no meaning or a dangerous one (Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel, Invisible Man, struggles to escape from time).

The idea of Christianity is also suspect because the church, while an instrument of salvation, is also an instrument of social containment, a taming device. The idea of home is elusive and treacherous, with one's home being traced either to a ghetto or to a Southern plantation or, as in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), into the past, where there are more dreams than roots. Is the U.S. itself home? That is no easy problem for a people from whom much of the country's bounty has been withheld, yet who are far more native sons than most whites.

For its part, the white world, which both made and denied that home, has behaved within its own set of distortions. Out of its abiding guilt it has created a code of self-protecting lies, including a sexual phantasmagoria about blacks that has resulted in everything from cheap jokes to lynchings. (In black novels, heroes fear the accusation of rape far more than that of murder.) Guilt has also created stereotypes. In a poem on the comic actor Willie Best, LeRoi Jones listed the unlaughable characteristics: "Lazy/ Frightened/ Thieving/ Very potent sexually/ Scars/ Generally inferior/ But natural rhythms." White America has also created itself--a world that, when depicted in a novel like William Melvin Kelley's dem (1967), comes off as pallid, literally colorless, and trapped. In Drylongso, an oral history collected by John Langston Gwaltney and published last July, Jackson Jordan Jr., a nearly 90-year-old black North Carolinian, puts it to white people rather kindly: "Pretending to know everything or just pretending to be better than you know you are must be a terrible strain on anybody."

As for the strain on the black man and woman, it shows in various ways. Paul Laurence Dunbar, the black dialect poet, explained, "We Wear the Mask." That is one way of surviving; as a con man, a common figure in black fiction. Another way is to "disappear," to pass for white or otherwise become anonymous. The Invisible Man disappeared altogether, forging a life of an existential fact: since he was invisible to the white world anyway, why not go whole hog? The third way--separation--brings America back from fiction to reality. In a sense, separation often seems the most reasonable choice. After all, black Americans have a richly independent culture quite apart from the one that has been imposed upon them, a culture made up of its own music, language, a common past. With a history of such guilt and hate between them, why should black and white persist in a sham? Why should they not go their separate-but-equal ways?

In fact they should, if there were such a thing as being able to choose one's friends and lovers with absolute freedom. The lingering question, however, is: Are these choices actually made freely, or are they so encumbered by past associations and events that separatism is merely expedient? Certainly it is safer and more convenient for black and white to retain their color lines. But if these lines are retained not by choice but rather by fear, then the acts of division are not freely made. Indeed, they are as unnatural and distorted as anything that ever characterized the relationship.

Whether blacks and whites actually have something to gain from social integration is yet to be proved. It is all very well to mumble about the glorious prospect of cultural exchange, but no one is sure that such exchanges breed enhancement. A loftier argument is that the nation, as a whole, would be improved. Perhaps. The old democratic vista of Whitman and Emerson, the transcendentalist democracy of one for one and one for all sounds quite fine; it always has. Since that goal has never been achieved, however, one may argue that it is simply another tenet of American hypocrisy, or, less harshly, that it is a goal incompatible with the realities of human nature.

Still, it is also human nature to underestimate the realities of human nature. The fact is that fragments of social integration are achieved every day, like it or not. They occur every time black and white happen to catch each other without armor--white not wearing its white, nor black its black --in those elevators, at those dinner parties, at work--in careless stumbles into unguarded affection, like Baldwin's pair. Despite the "social chasm," those moments may now be occurring more frequently than ever, though they fail to be recorded. Eleanor Holmes Norton, former head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, calls ours the "crossover generation." Could be. The cross-over would certainly be worth a try.

Yet for that to happen, it will take not only time and patience but a certain alertness. A black boy smiles at a white man who smiles back. The moment is construed as accidental. It is not accidental. It is their essential relationship, only made to appear accidental by cruel history, fears and stupidity. The boy who smiles at the man recognizes him; recognizes the man recognizing the boy. Either they can choose to treat that act as a mere acknowledgment, as a separate-but-equal nod, or they can elaborate on it--dress it up, fill it out, talk. They know perfectly well what life is like when they do not do that; that is no great secret. The great secret is that they may need each other. --By Roger Rosenblatt

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