MANY THOUSANDS GONE
679
we most dread. Moreover, the courtroom, judge, jury, witnesses and
spectators, recognize immediately that Bigger is their creation and
they recognize this not only with hatred and fear and guilt and the
resulting fury of self-righteousness but also with that morbid fullness
of pride mixed with horror with which one regards the extent and
power of one's wickedness. They know that death is
hi~
portion,
that he runs to death; coming from darkness and dwelling in dark–
ness, he must be, as often as he rises, banished, lest the entire planet
be engulfed. And they know, finally, that they do not wish to forgive
him and that he does not wish to be forgiven; that he dies, hating
them, scorning that appeal which they cannot make to that
irre–
coverable humanity of his which cannot hear it; and that he
wants
to die because he glories in his hatred and prefers, like Lucifer,
rather to rule in hell than serve in heaven.
For, bearing in mind the premise on which the life of such a man
is based,
i.e.,
that black is the color of damnation, this is his only
possible end. It is the only death which will allow him a kind of
dignity or even, however horribly, a kind of beauty. To tell this story,
no more than a single aspect of the story of the 'nigger,' is inevitably
and richly to become involved with the force of life and legend,
how each perpetually assumes the guise of the otheir, creating that
dense, many-sided and shifting reality which is the world we live in
and the world we make. To tell his story is to begin to liberate us
from his image and it is, for the first time, to clothe this phantom
with flesh and blood, to deepen, by our understanding of him and
his relationship to us, our understanding of ourselves and of all men.
But this is not the story which
Native Son
tells, for we find here
merely, repeated in anger, the story which we have told in pride.
Nor, since the implications of this anger are evaded, are we ever
confronted with the actual or potential significance of our pride;
which is why we fall, with such a positive glow of recognition, upon
Max's long and bitter summing up. It is addressed to those among
us of good will and it seems to say that, though there are whites and
blacks among us who hate each other, we will not; there are those
who are betrayed by greed, by guilt, by blood lust, but not we; we
will set our faces against them and join hands and walk together into
that dazzling future when there will be no white or black.
This
is
the dream of all liberal men, a dream not at
all
dishonorable, but,
