LETTER FROM THE SOUTH
n
very often tempted to believe that this illusion is all thatl is left of the
great dream that was to have become America; whether this is so
or not,
this
illusion certainly prevents us from making America what
we say we want it to be.
But let us put aside, for the moment, these subversive speculations.
In the fall of last year, my plane hovered over the rust-red! earth of
Georgia. I was past thirty, and I had never seen this land before. I
pressed my face against the window, watching the earth come closer;
soon we were just above the tops of trees. I could not suppress the
thought that this earth had acquired its color from the blood that
had dripped down from these trees. My mind was filled with the image
of a black man, younger than I, perhaps, or my own age, hanging
from a tree, while white men watched him and cut his sex from him
with a knife.
My father must have seen such sights--he was very old when he
died-or heard of them, or had this danger touch
him.
The Negro
poet I talked to in Washington, much younger than my father, perhaps
twenty years older than myself, remembered such things very vividly,
had a long tale to tell, and counselled me to think back on those days
as a means of steadying the soul. I was to remember that time, whatever
else it had failed to do, nevertheless had passed, that the situation,
whether or not it was better, was certainly no longer the same. I was
to remember that Southern Negroes had endured
things
I could not
imagine; but this did not really place me at such a great disadvantage,
since they clearly had been unable to imagine what awaited them in
Harlem. I remembered the Scottsboro case, which I had followed as
a child. I remembered Angelo Herndon and wondered, again, whatever
had become of him. I remembered the soldier in uniform blinded by
an enraged white man, just after the Second World War. There had
been many such incidents after the First War, which was one of
the
reasons I had been born in Harlem. I rememberd Willie McGhee,
Emmett Till, and the others. My younger brothers had visited Atlanta
some years before. I remembered what they had told me about it.
One
of my brothers, in uniform, had had his front teeth kicked out by a
white officer. I remembered my mother telling us how she had wept
and prayed and tried to kiss the venom out of her suicidally embittered
son. (She managed to do it, too; heaven only knows what she herself
was
feeling, whose father and brothers had lived and died down here.)
I remembered myself, as a very small boy, already so bitter about
the
pledge of allegiance that I could scarcely bring myself to say it, and
never, never believed it.
