James Baldwin
MANY THOUSANDS GONE
It
is only in his music, which Americans are able to
admire only because a protective sentimentality limits their under–
standing of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell
his
story.
It
is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no
American is prepared to hear.
As
is
the inevitable result of things
unsaid, we find ourselves until today oppressed with a dangerous and
reverberating silence; and the story is told, compulsively, in symbols
and signs, in hieroglyphics; it is revealed in Negro speech and in
that of the white majority and in their different frames of reference.
The ways in which the Negro has affected the American psychology
is betrayed in our popular culture and in our morality; in our
estrangement from
him
is the depth of our estrangement from our–
selves. We cannot ask: what do we
really
feel about him?-such a
question merely opens the gates on chaos. What we really feel about
him
is
involved with all that we feel about everything, about every–
one, about ourselves.
The story of the Negro
in
America is the story of America--or,
more precisely, it is the story of Americans.
It
is not a very pretty
story: the story of a people is never very pretty. The Negro in
America, gloomily referred to as that shadow which lies athwart
our national life, is far more than that. He is a series of shadows,
self-created, intertwining, which now we helplessly battle. One may
say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in the
darkness of our minds.
This
is why his history and
his
progress, his relationship to all
other Americans, has been kept in the social arena. He is a social
and not a personal or a human problem; to think of him is to think
of statistics, slums, rapes, injustices, remote violence; it is to be con-
