was crying and hitting at the back of the coloured boy's hand with his fist and the coloured boy was screaming and cursing and jumping in at the white boy to slash at him with the knife; but he couldn't cut the white boy because the white boy kept ducking and dodging and hitting at the back of his hand. Finally the white boy hit the back of the coloured boy's hand that held the knife and made a slight cutting movement and the knife fell from the coloured boy's hand. When I saw the blood start flowing from the back of the coloured boy's hand I knew the white boy had a smallbladed knife gripped in his fist. The coloured boy picked up the knife with his left hand and began slashing again and the white boy kept on ducking and dodging until he hit the back of the coloured boy's left hand and cut the tendons in that one also. Then the white boy began chasing the coloured boy down the street stabbing him all about the head and neck with the tip of the small-bladed knife. Everybody standing around looking at the white boy chasing the coloured boy down the street thought he was beating him with his fist, but I knew he was digging a thousand tiny holes in the coloured boy's head and neck and that it was only a matter of time before the coloured boy fell to the street and bled to death; but the white boy wasn't crying any more and he wasn't in a hurry any more; he was just chasing the coloured boy and stabbing him to death with a quarter-inch blade and laughing like it was funny as hell.
I woke up and I couldn't move, could hardly breathe. The alarm was ringing but I didn't have enough strength to reach out and turn it off. My hangover was already with me and my body trembled all over as if I had the ague.
Somewhere in the back of my mind a tiny insistent voice kept whispering, Bob, there never was a nigger who could beat it. I blinked open my eyes, closed them tight again. But it kept on saying it. And I knew it was a fact. If I hadn't had the hangover I might have gotten it out my mind. But the hangover gave me a strange indifference, a weird sort of honesty, like a man about to die. I could see the whole thing standing there, like a great conglomeration of all the peckerwoods in the world, taunting me, Nigger, you haven't got a chance.
I agreed with it. That was the hell of it. With a strange lucid clarity I knew it was no lie. I knew with the white folks sitting on my brain, controlling my every thought, action, and emotion, making life one crisis after another, day and night, asleep and awake, conscious and unconscious, I couldn't make it. I knew that unless I found my niche and crawled into it, unless I stopped hating white folks and learned to take them as they came, I couldn't live in America, much less expect to accomplish anything in it.
It wasn't anything to know. It was obvious. Negro people had always lived on sufferance, ever since Lincoln gave them their freedom without any bread. I thought of a line I'd read in one of Tolstoy's stories once-'There never had been enough bread and freedom to go around.' When it came to us, we didn't get either one of them. Although Negro people such as Alice and her class had got enough bread-they'd prospered from it. No matter what had happened to them inside, they hadn't allowed it to destroy them outwardly; they had overcome their colour the only way possible in America-as Alice had put it, by adjusting themselves to the limitations of their race. They hadn't stopped trying, I gave them that much; they'd kept on trying, always would; but they had recognized their limit-a nigger limit.
From the viewpoint of my hangover it didn't seem a hard thing to do. You simply had to accept being black as a condition over which you had no control, then go on from there. Glorify your black heritage, revere your black heroes, laud your black leaders, cheat your black brothers, worship your white fathers (be sure and do that), segregate yourself; then make yourself believe that you had made great progress, that you would continue to make great progress, that in time the white folks would appreciate all of this and pat you on the head and say, 'You been a good nigger for a long time. Now we're going to let you in.' Of course you'd have to believe that the white folks were generous, unselfish, and loved you so much they wanted to share their world with you, but if you could believe all the rest, you could believe that too. And it didn't seem like a hard thing for a nigger to believe, because he didn't have any other choice.
But my mind kept rebelling against it. Being black, it was a thing I ought to know, but I'd learned it differently. I'd learned the same jive that the white folks had learned. All that stuff about liberty and justice and equality… All men are created equal… Any person born in the United States is a citizen… Learned it out the same books, in the same schools. Learned the song too: '… o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave…' I thought Patrick Henry was a hero when he jumped up and said, 'Give me liberty or give me death,' just like the white kids who read about it. I was a Charles Lindbergh fan when I was a little boy, and thought George Washington was the father of my country-as long as I thought I had a country.
I agreed with the Hearst papers when they lauded the peoples of the conquered European countries for continuing their underground fight against 'Nazi oppression'; I always bought the Los Angeles Sunday Times too, and the Daily News; read the Saturday Evening Post and Reader's Digest sometimes out at Alice's house while I was waiting for her to dress; I even got taken in by Pegler plenty times. Like the guys said out at the yard, 'Ah believe it.'
That was the hell of it: the white folks had drummed more into me than they'd been able to scare out.
I knew the average overpatriotic American would have said a leaderman was justified in cursing out a white woman worker for refusing to do a job of work in a war industry in time of war-so long as the leaderman was white. Might have even called her a traitor and wanted her tried for sabotage.
It was just that they didn't think I ought to have these feelings. They kept thinking about me in connection with Africa. But I wasn't born in Africa. I didn't know anyone who was. I learned in history that my ancestors were slaves brought over from Africa. But I'd forgotten that, just like the aristocratic blue bloods of America have forgotten what they learned in history-that most of their ancestors were the riffraff of Europe-thieves, jailbirds, beggars, and outcasts.
So even though the solid logic of my hangover told me that Alice's way was my only out, I didn't have anything for it but the same contempt a white person has for a collaborator's out in France. I just couldn't help it. That much of the white folks' teaching was still inside of me.
I knew I could marry Alice-the chick loved me. Could marry her, go back to college and get a degree in law, go on to become a big and important Negro. I knew that most people would consider me a lucky black boy.
I knew I would be lucky too. Lying there with the hangover beating in my head like John Henry driving steel, I could see it from every angle-I couldn't keep from seeing it. I didn't have the strength to keep it from my mind.
In the first place my old man had been a steel-mill worker at National Malleable in Cleveland, Ohio, when I was born, and my mother had died when I was three. I had two brothers older than I, and we'd been poor boys. My old man had married again and had three other children by our stepmother and I lived in a cole attic room for twelve long years. Shep, my oldest brother, went East when he finished Central High and the last I heard of him he was in the rackets in Washington, D.C. Dick wanted to be an artist and fooled around with the group at Karamu; he's still in Cleveland, some sort of politician. I was the ambitious one, I'd wanted to be a doctor. I'd gotten my two years at Ohio State by washing dishes in the white fraternity houses about the campus. But when my old man took sick in '38 I had to stay home and dig in with the rest; and I never got back. I puttered about with pottery at Karamu and worked with the theatre group for a time-met some fine chicks, too, but none like Alice.
All I had when I came to the Coast was my height and weight and the fact I believed that being born in America gave everybody a certain importance. I'd never had two suits of clothes at one time in my life until I got in this war boom.
In the three years in L.A. I'd worked up to a good job in a shipyard, bought a new Buick car, and cornered off the finest coloured chick west of Chicago-to my way of thinking. All I had to do was marry her and my future was in the bag. If a black boy couldn't be satisfied with that he couldn't be satisfied with anything.
But what I knew about myself was that my desire for such a life was conditional. It only caught up with me on the crest of being black-when I could accept being black, when I could see no other out, such a life looked great.
But I knew I'd wake up someday and say to hell with it, I didn't want to be the biggest Negro who ever lived, neither Toussaint L'Ouverture nor Walter White. Because deep inside of me, where the white folks couldn't see, it didn't mean a thing. If you couldn't swing down Hollywood Boulevard and know that you belonged; if you couldn't make a polite pass at Lana Turner at Ciro's without having the gendarmes beat the black off you for getting out of your place; if you couldn't eat a thirtydollar dinner at an hotel without choking on the insults, being a great big 'Mister' nigger didn't mean a thing.
Anyone who wanted to could be nigger-rich, nigger-important, have their Jim Crow religion, and go to nigger heaven.
I'd settle for a leaderman job at Atlas Shipyard-if I could be a man, defined by Webster as a male human
