thought about her going out with Leighton the night before, and while it didn't exactly bother me, I had to say something about it.
'Did you have a-nice time last night?' I asked politely, and the next instant I could have bitten off my tongue.
She gave me a curious sidewise look and her face went sober. 'Yes,' she said. 'Did you?'
I winced and all of a sudden the pressure was back on me. 'Baby, let's don't do this to each other,' I said, but I knew that wasn't enough. I had to tell her why we shouldn't. After a moment I said simply, 'I love you.'
She turned slowly to face me and her eyes were like misty stars. 'That's the first time you've ever said that without any qualifying remarks,' she said with a look on her face that made her really beautiful.
'I've never meant to qualify it,' I said. 'You know us cullud folks just talk that way.'
After a moment she murmured, 'But yours comes from a lack of self-restraint, really.'
I watched the fluid motion of her long slender fingers as she absently fiddled with the steering wheel and thought wonderingly that I'd never noticed before how beautiful they were. Then I thought of what they said about being able to tell a Negro by the half-moons in their finger-nails, and reflected half laughingly on what they'd have to do if the nails were painted.
Finally I said seriously, 'I know. I wonder what's the matter with me, myself. Everything I do or say seems wrong. But I don't do it deliberately, it just turns out that way.'
'Your only trouble is maladjustment, darling,' she said. 'Please don't think I'm trying to rub it in, but there're simply no other words to express it. You don't try to adjust your way of thinking to the actual conditions of life.'
The waitress brought our orders and we were silent while she served them. But now both of us had lost our appetites.
'When I do try to get pushed around,' I said, beginning to tighten up inside again. 'Sometimes I get to feeling that I don't have anything at all to say about what's happening to me. I'm just like some sort of machine being run by white people pushing buttons. Every white person who comes along pushes some button or other on me and I react accordingly.' I turned to look at her. 'Do you ever get that feeling?'
She was looking at me too, not critically as I'd expected, but with a strange deep sympathy. She didn't answer, but there was something in her look that just drew me right on out.
'Take for instance doing something as simple as going downtown to a moving picture show. Every white person I come into contact with, every one I have to speak to, even those I pass on the street-every goddamn one of them has got the power of some kind of control over my own behaviour. Not only that but they use it-use it in every way. Say if I ride the streetcar, the conductor can make me stand there waiting for my change or he can make me ask two or three times for a transfer. Then when I get off and walk down the street the pedestrians can make me step aside to let them pass. The cashier at the theatre can sell me loge seats when she knows there aren't any, and the doorman can send me on up to the balcony, knowing that there aren't any loge seats, then the usher will find the worst possible seat for me. And there's the picture-it's almost certain to offend me in some kind of way. If there're Negro actors in it the roles they play will be offensive; and if it's a play with no part at all for Negroes, if you get to thinking about it, you resent the fact of seeing the kind of life shown you'll never be able to live. The hell of it is, it's not just one little thing-say if I bought the wrong ticket I could take it back and have it exchanged, but it's selling me the ticket and making me go through all the rigmarole. But it's not only that, it's the pressure they put on you of being able to do these things to you…'
My throat began feeling dry and I paused to take a swallow of milk. 'I don't mind some of it,' I went on. 'I know that most people don't have too much to say about the way they live. But I don't have anything at all to say about the way I live-nothing. Take my job-I've never been anything but a flunkey for Kelly, a go-between for him and the coloured workers. Many a time I've been standing down in the tool crib with the other leadermen discussing a new job with Kelly, but whenever I made any kind of suggestion or said anything at all, no matter how sound it was, Kelly just brushed it aside as if I hadn't spoken. I never did have any real authority. Sometimes Kelly'd even have other leadermen give me my assignments. And then the very first time I tried to use a little authority I got slapped down.'
'I understand, darling,' she said. 'But you shouldn't feel too badly about it. That is typical of most Negroes working in a supervisory capacity where white and coloured are employed. Many Negroes whom we think are in top positions are actually no more than figureheads and are much more frustrated than you. I can't give direct orders on my job either, although I am classified as a supervisor. Only suggestions. It almost drives me mad to see cases handled incorrectly and have no power to correct them. Oft-times I have the feeling that I haven't earned two cents since I've been on my job-that I'm just there, keeping someone else out of a job.' She sighed. 'But that is simply one of the conditions of life.'
'I know,' I said. 'But it rankles just the same. I don't like to be pushed around all the time. A guy wants to feel he can control at least some of his life. All this morning-' I caught myself about to tell her how my resentment toward Madge had built up to the place where all that morning it had been controlling me like a puppet on a string. Instead I said, 'I don't want to always be thinking about my race either. I get awful goddamn tired of it. But the white people make me think about it in every way. I never get a chance to think like an ordinary guy.'
'I must tell you again, Bob darling,' she said. 'You need some definite aim, a goal that you can attain within the segregated pattern in which we live.' When I started to interrupt she stopped me. 'I know that sounds like compromise. But it isn't, darling. We are Negroes and we can't change that. But as Negroes, we can accomplish many things, achieve success, live our own lives, own our own homes, and have happiness. There is no reason a Negro cannot control his destiny within this pattern. Really, darling, it is not cowardly. It is simply a form of self- preservation.'
'Listen, baby, it's not that I want to argue. I don't want to ever argue with you any more. And I've already made up my mind to conform-so it isn't that. But please don't tell me I can control my destiny, because I know I can't. In any incident that might come up a white person can use his colour on me and turn it into a catastrophe and I won't have any protection, any out, nothing I can do about it but die. And if that's controlling my destiny-'
'That isn't true, Bob,' she said patiently. 'I will admit that we are restricted and controlled in our economic security, that we have to conform to the pattern of segregation in order to achieve any manner of financial success. And I will grant you that we are subject to racial control in securing education, in almost all public facilities, welfare, health, hospitalization, transportation, in the location of our dwellings, in all the component parts of our existence that stem directly or indirectly from economy.
'But, darling, all of life is not commercial. The best parts of it are not commercial. Love and marriage, children and homes. Those we control. Our physical beings, our personal integrity, our private property-we have as much protection for these as anyone. As long as we conform to the pattern of segregation we do not have to fear the seizure of our property or attack upon our persons.
'And there are many other values that you are not taking into consideration-spiritual values, intrinsic values, which are also fundamental components of our lives. Honesty, decency, respectability. Courage-it takes courage to live as a Negro must. Virtue is our own, to nurture or destroy.
'After all, darling, these are the important things in life. These things that are within us that make us what we are. And we can control them. Every person, no matter of what race, creed, or colour, is the captain of his soul. This is much more important, really, than being permitted to eat in exclusive restaurants, dwell in exclusive neighbourhoods, or even to compete economically with people of other races. It depends, darling, on our own sense of values.'
For a long time after she'd stopped talking I didn't say anything at all because I was just getting it. If somebody had told me this a long time ago, made me see it in just this way, it would have saved me a lot of trouble. Because I was seeing it then for the first time. No matter what the white folks did to me, or made me do just in order to live, Alice and I could have a life of our own, inside of all the pressure, away from it, separate from it, that no white person could ever touch. I saw that then, and I turned to her, tense and serious.
'Will you marry me, Alice?'
I never saw her mouth go so tender as when she said, 'Yes, Bob. Didn't you know that I would?'
I went all buttery inside. 'When?'
'Whenever you want.'
'Next month?'
