MANY THOUSANDS GONE
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eat at our tables or live in our houses. Moreover, those who do, do
so at the grave expense of a double alienation; from their own people,
whose fabled attributes they must either deny or, worse, cheapen
and bring to market; from us, for we require of them, when we
accept them, that they at once cease to be Negroes and yet not fail
to remember what being a Negro means: to remember, that is,
what it means to us. The threshold of insult is higher or lower, ac–
cording to the people involved, from the boot-black in Atlanta to
the celebrity in New York. One must travel very far, among saints
with nothing to gain or outcasts with nothing to lose, to find a
place where it does not matter-and perhaps a word or a gesture
or simply a silence will testify that it matters even there.
For it means something to be a Negro, after all, as it means
something to have been born in Ireland or in China, to live where
one sees space and sky or to live where one sees nothing but rubble
or nothing but high buildings. We cannot escape our origins, however
hard we try, those origins which contain the key-could we but
find it-to all that we later become. What it means to be a Negro
is
a good deal more than this essay can discover; what it means to
be a Negro in America can perhaps be suggested by an examination
of the myths we perpetuate about him.
Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom are dead, their places taken by
a group of amazingly well-adjusted young men and women, almost
as dark, but ferociously literate, well-dressed and scrubbed; who are
never laughed at, who are not likely ever to set foot in a cotton or
tobacco field or in any but the most modern of kitchens. There are
others who remain in our odd idiom, 'underprivileged'; some are
bitter and these come to grief; some are unhappy, but, continually
presented with the evidence of a better day soon to come, are speedily
becoming less so. Most of them care nothing whatever about race.
They want only their proper place in the sun and the right to be left
alone, like any other citizen of the republic. We may all breathe
more easily. Before, however, our joy at the demise of Aunt Jemima
and Uncle Tom approaches the indecent, we had better ask whence
they sprang, how they lived? Into what limbo have they vanished?
However inaccurate our portraits of them were, these portraits
do suggest, not only the conditions but the quality of their lives and
the impact of this spectacle on our consciences. There was no one
