78
PARTISAN REVIEW
can be acted out here; over this fence, behind that tree, in the darkness,
there; and no one will see, no one will ever know. Only the night is
watching and the night was made for desire. Protestantism
is
the wrong
religion for people in such climates ; America is perhaps the last nation
in which such a climate belongs. In the Southern night everything
seems possible, the most private, unspeakable longings; but then arrives
the Southern day, as hard and brazen as the night was soft and dark.
It
brings what was done in the dark to light. It must have seemed some–
thing like this for those people who made the region what it
is
today.
It must have caused them great pain. Perhaps the master who had
coupled with his slave saw his guilt in his wife's pale eyes in the morning.
And the wife saw his children in the slave quarters, saw the way
his
concubine, the sensual-looking black girl, looked at her- a woman,
after all, and scarcely less sensual, but white. The youth, nursed and
raised by the black Mammy whose arms had then held all that there
was of warmth and love and desire, and still confounded by the dread–
ful taboos set up between himself and her progeny, must have wondered,
after his first experiment with black flesh, where, under the blazing
heavens, he could hide. And the white man must have seen his guilt
written somewhere else, seen it all the time, even if his sin was merely
lust, even if his sin lay in nothing but his power: in the eyes of the
black man. He may not hav.e stolen his woman, but he had certainly
stolen his freedom-this black man, who had a body like his, and pas–
sions like his, and a ruder, more erotic beauty. How many times has
the Southern day come up to find that black man, sexless, hanging
from a tree!
It was an old black man in Atlanta who looked into my eyes and
directed me into my first segregated bus. I have spent a long time
thinking about that man. I never saw him again. I cannot describe the
look which passed between us, as I asked him for directions, but it
made me think, at once, of Shakespeare's "the oldest have borne most."
It made me think of the blues:
Now, when a woman gets the blues,
Lord, she hangs her head and cries. But when a man gets the blues,
Lord, he grabs a train and rides.
It
was borne in on me, suddenly, just
why these men had so often been grabbing freight trains as the evening
sun went down. And it was, perhaps, because I was getting on a
segregated bus, and wondering how Negroes had borne this, and other
indignities for so long, that this man so struck me. He seemed to know
what I was f.eeling. His eyes seemed to say that what I was feeling
he had been feeling, at much higher pressure, all his life. But my eyes
would never see the hell his eyes had seen. And this hell was, simply,
