412
ROBERT COLES
flogged, as a race, for their historical crimes, whether by Negroes or at
their own behest, when will racism stop?
"Man, worse than the cops in Mississippi is finding what' s hap–
pened to us after all these years. They've made those people so scared,
and they keep them so scared that I get more discouraged with my own
people than the local whites." For me it might just have been an inter–
view,
but for him, a young Negro college student, a freedom rider, a
veteran of an appalling number of arrests after countless sit-ins, these
were the hard facts of life: that large numbers of Negroes in the South,
as a result of the very plundered bondage and daily terror described
by Baldwin, are dispirited, worn people, and, from a doctor's viewpoint,
very often sick; sick with vitamin deficiencies and their sequelae; sick
with a high incidence of venereal disease, hypertension, alcoholism, para–
noid schizophrenia, tuberculosis, undiagnosed or wrongly treated fungal
diseases, parasitic diseases, bacterial diseases-diseases of the poor, the
ignorant, of the wayward and backward. Failing to register to vote in
cities and towns is for many of them less a considered policy than merely
a consequence of their being deadened, apathetic, almost silly and sense–
less, so far have fear and hunger and misery overtaken them and genera–
tions before them. "They've been killed, that's what," to quote my stu–
dent friend again. Not fear always, certainly not everywhere, and fear
that is often reversed by glimmers of hope and of new possibilities. But
hope comes rarely
to
these grim settlements of shanties with littered
yards along frowzy, unpaved streets, the inhabitants barely literate, really
illiterate, with ragged, unsightly, outlandish clothes and
ill
made, taste–
Jess furniture. The people in these settlements can be among Baldwin's
aristocrats only if suffering is his criterion, but for most of those I know
life is instead an endless matter of merely automatic or sometimes wanton
twitches and exertions.
Nor is this the end of the chronicle of disaster which in one way
or another the entire nation,
all
its people, must overcome. The problem
is not merely that of crushed and forlorn people in rural or urban slums
eating fatback, though this is a millstone enough. The cumulative rav–
ages of oppression affect even the apparently comfortable, if numerically
skimpy, Negro middle class, persisting in the psychological structure of
many Negroes of all classes and regions.
It
is true the young child
can survive a mob for reasons that have nothing to do with race or
ideology. However, his older, more self-conscious racial brothers, fac–
ing similar threats, are ironically susceptible to maneuvers of the mind
by which the oppressed, in their self-contempt, look at themselves just
as their oppressors do.
