HE6RO LITERATURE
199
"G'on. But don' stop nowheres. Don' even breathe hard," the guard
said, grinning.
"No, suh, Cap'n. I ain't much of a breever noway. Jus' 'nough ter
live on. No, suh. I don' want no mo'
0'
white folks' air den I just
got ter have."
One of the memorable characters in Richard Wright's auto–
biography,
Black Boy,
is a Memphis elevator operator called Shorty,
who specializes in playing what Wright calls "the role of a clown
of the most debased and degraded type." Shorty gets quarters from
white passengers by an obsequious clown act that culminates in
his
inviting the white man to kick his rump. When Wright, full of "dis-–
gust and loathing," asks him, "How in God's name can you do that?"
Shorty answers simply, "Listen, nigger, my ass is tough and quarters
is
scarce." Wright's fictional use of the stereotype constitutes some–
thing like Shorty's revenge. In Wright's recent novel,
The Outsider,
the
hero, Cross Damon, is a Negro intellectual and existentialist
criminal of terrifying literacy and paranoia. At one
point
in
his
criminal career he needs a false birth certificate and gets
it
by the
same darky act. Cross thinks: "He would have to present to the
officials a Negro so scared and ignor.ant that no white American
would ever dream that he was up to anything deceptive." He does
so, batting
his
eyes stupidly, asking for "the paper that say I was
born," explaining in answer to every question only that his white
boss
said he had better have it right away. Of course he gets it
. The novel explains:
as he stood there manipulating their responses, Cross knew exactly
kind of man he would pretend to be to kill suspicion if he ever
into trouble. In
his
role of an ignorant, frightened Negro, each
man---execept those few who were free from the race bias of their
.mroU1O---WOUld
leap to supply him with a background and an identity;
white man would project out on him his own conception of the
and he could safely hide behind it.... He knew that deep in
hearts those two white clerks knew that no human being on earth
as
dense as he had made himself out to be, but they wanted, needed
believe it of Negroes and it helped them to feel racially superior.
were pretending, just as he had been pretending.
A
comically related use of the darky act appears in Rudoph
s
The Conjure-Man
Dies,
which so far as I know
is
the only
