MANY THOUSANDS GONE
673
of a myth. It is remarkable that, though we follow
him
step by step
from the tenement room to the death cell, we know as little about
him when this journey is ended as we did when it began; and, what
is even more remarkable, we know almost as little about the social
dynamic which we are to believe created him. Despite the details
of slum life which we are given, I doubt that anyone who has
thought about it, disengaging himself from sentimentality, can accept
this most essential premise of the novel for a moment. Those Negroes
who surround him, on the other hand, his hard-working mother,
his ambitious sister, his poolroom cronies, Bessie, might be con–
sidered as far richer and far more subtle and accurate illustrations
of the ways in which Negroes are controlled in our society and the
complex techniques they have evolved for their survival. We are
limited, however, to Bigger's view of them, part of a deliberate plan
which might not have been disastrous if we were not
also
limited to
Bigger's perceptions. What this means for the novel is that a neces–
sary dimension has been cut away; this dimension being the rela–
tionship that Negroes bear to one another, that depth of involvement
and unspoken recognition of shared experience which creates a way
of life. What the novel reflects-and at no point interprets-is the
isolation of the Negro within his own group and the resulting fury of
impatient scorn.
It
is this which creates its climate of anarchy and
unmotivated and unapprehended disaster; and it is this climate,
common to most Negro protest novels, which has led us
all
to
be–
lieve that in Negro life there exists no tradition, no field of man–
ners, no possibility of ritual or intercourse, such as may, for example,
sustain the Jew even after he has left his father's house. But the
fact is not that the Negro has no tradition but that there has as
yet arrived no sensibility sufficiently profound and tough to make
this tradition articulate. For a tradition expresses, after all, nothing
more than the long and painful experience of a people; it comes out
of the battle waged to maintain their integrity or, to put it more
simply, out of their struggle to survive. When we speak of the Jewish
tradition we are speaking of centuries of exile and persecution, of
the strength which endured and the sensibility which discovered in
it the high possibility of the moral victory.
This sense of how Negroes live and how they have so long en–
dured
is
hidden from us in part by the very speed of the Negro's
