ARGUMENTS
411
of it they were a handful, four little Negro girls and about six white
boys and girls. The streetwalkers, mouthing threats and acting out
some of them, wanted a boycott by a united white population. A Negro
mother's words on one of my tapes will be sufficient to describe what
happened: "We had it bad all right, but those white kids got it worse
than us because they were after them more than us."
These aristocratic children were white and Negro alike, and that
they managed so well is a mystery that has nothing to do with color.
During the second World War Anna Freud noticed that under severe
bombings, even with separation from or loss of parents, children sur–
vived quite handily, given certain conditions. These conditions were not
always very apparent but they were very real and important to the
child. The National Academy of Sciences in Washington has published
studies of children in a vivid assortment of disasters or crises such as
tornadoes, floods and fires. All these investigations reveal that successful
survival (there are, sadly, other kinds) may be discriminatingly indis–
criminate, oftentimes ignoring social, cultural, or economic categories–
and racial ones, too-in order to draw upon certain nuances of family
life, of an internal, private, seemingly trivial nature. These psychological
factors, here so significant, may, of course, be largely irrelevant in other
crises of survival (in concentration camps for instance) demanding
physical strength or what might be most properly called "ethical"
strength.
Is it heartless to deny the special claims to aristocracy of these Ne–
gro girls in New Orleans? On the contrary, such claims are more likely
to be unfair to them, to be a way actually of segregating them. We can
be proud of them without turning them into martyrs. A martyr "wins"
by losing. These girls have not lost. Others have-millions of Negroes
over several centuries of time. Baldwin's case is strongest when he
emphasizes how many people-they include in my experience Negroes
as well as whites-still refuse even to recognize the conditions which he
exposes. Moral decadence, a devious network of rationalizations and
denials, obscure the blunt horror of what it means for one race to bru–
talize another.
If
these Negro children and others like them throughout the South
are not to be stripped of their humanity the highest honor we can grant
them is the truth of their lives. Anger for past hurts is inevitable, nor
can we completely avoid fresh outbursts of fury caused by new sins in–
flaming past sins. We can, however, try to spare these children by giving
them this measure of freedom-to be themselves: not the white man's
nigger nor the Negro's whiplash. And if Baldwin's whites need to be
