MANY THOUSANDS GONE
675
But there is a complementary faith among the damned which
involves their gathering of the stones with which those who walk
in the light shall stone them; or there exists among the intolerably
degraded the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of
the actual those fantastic crimes of which they have been accused,
achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through mak–
ing the nightmare real. The American image of the Negro lives also
in the Negro's heart; and when he has surrendered to this image
life has no other possible reality. Then he, like the white enemy
with whom he will be locked one day in mortal struggle, has no
means save this of asserting his identity. This is why Bigger's murder
of Mary can be referred to as an "act of creation" and why, once
this murder has been committed, he can feel for the first time that
he
is
living fully and deeply as a man was meant to live. And there
is,
I should think, no Negro living in America who has not felt,
briefly or for long periods, with anguish sharp or dull, in varying
degrees and to varying effect, simple, naked and unanswerable
hatred; who has not wanted to smash any white face he may en–
counter in a day, to violate, out of motives of the cruelest vengeance,
their women, to break the bodies of all white people and bring them
low, as low as that dust into which he himself has been and is being
trampled; no Negro, finally, who has not had to make his own
precarious adjustment to the 'nigger' who surrounds him and to
the 'nigger' in himself.
Yet the adjustment must be made- rather, it must be attempted,
the tension perpetually sustained- for without this he has sur–
rendered his birthright as a man no less than his birthright as a
black man. The entire universe is then peopled only with his enemies,
who are not only white men armed with rope and rifle, but his own
far-flung and contemptible kinsmen. Their blackness is his degrada–
tion and it is their stupid and passive endurance which makes his
end inevitable.
Bigger dreams of some black man who will weld all blacks
together into a mighty fist, and feels, in relation to his family, that
perhaps they had to live as they did precisely because none of them
had ever done anything, right or wrong, which mattered very much.
It
is
only he who, by an act of murder, has burst the dungeon cell.
He has made it manifest that
he
lives and that his despised blood
nourishes the passions of a man. He has forced his oppressors to
