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PARTISAN REVIEW
more forbearing than Aunt Jemima, no one stronger or more pious
or more loyal or more wise; there was, at the same time, no one
weaker or more faithless or more vicious and certainly no one more
immoral. Uncle Tom, trustworthy and sexless, needed only to drop
the title "Uncle" to become violent, crafty and sullen, a menace to
any white woman who passed by. They prepared our feast tables
and our burial clothes; and if we could boast that we understood
them, it was far more to the point and far more true that they
understood us. They were, moreover, the only people in the world
who did; and not only did they know us better than we knew our–
selves, but they knew us better than we knew them. This was the
piquant flavoring to the national joke, it lay behind our uneasiness
as it lay behind our benevolence: Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom, our
creations, at the last evaded us; they had a life-their own, per–
haps a better life than ours-and they would never tell us what it
was. At the point where we were driven most privately and painfully
to conjecture what depths of contempt, what heights of indifference,
what prodigies of resilience, what untamable superiority allowed them
so vividly to endure, neither perishing, nor rising up in a body to
wipe us from the earth, the image perpetually shattered and the
word failed. The black man in our midst carried murder in his
heart, he wanted vengeance. We carried murder too, we wanted
peace.
In our image of the Negro breathes the past we deny, not dead
but living yet and powerful, the beast in our jungle of statistics.
It is this which defeats us, which continues to defeat us, which lends
to inter-racial cocktail parties their rattling, genteel, nervously smiling
air: in any drawing room at such a gathering the beast may spring,
filling the
air
with flying things and an unenlightened wailing.
Wherever the problem touches there is confusion, there is danger.
Wherever the Negro face appears a tension is created, the tension of
a silence filled with things unutterable. It is a sentimental error,
therefore, to believe that the past is dead; it means nothing to say
that it is all forgotten, that the Negro himself has forgotten it.
It
is
not a question of memory. Oedipus did not remember the thongs
that bound his feet, nevertheless the marks they left testified to
that doom toward which his feet were leading him. The man does
not remember the hand that struck
him,
the darkness that frightened
