218
NORMAN MAILER
Norman Mailer
Allow a symposiast to quote from himself. The following is
out of a new book called
The Armies of the Night.
Not for little humor had Negroes developed that odd humor–
less crack in their personality which cracked each other into laughter,
playing on one side an odd mad practical black man who could
be
anything, wise chauffeur, drunken butler, young money-mad
Pullman Porter, Negro college graduate selling insurance - the
other half was sheer psychopath, rocks in the ice-cube, pocket oiled
for the switchblade, I'll kill you Whitey, burn baby, all tuned to a
cool. These Blacks moved through the New Left with a physical
indifference to the bodies about them, as if ten Blacks could handle
any hundred of these flaccid Whites, and they signaled to each
other across the aisles, and talked in quick idioms and out, an
Eng~
!ish not comprehensible to any ear which knew nothing of the
separate meanings of the same word at separate pitch (Maoists not
for nothing these Blacks!) their hair carefully brushed out in every
direction like African guerrillas or huge radar stations on some
lonely isle, they seemed to communicate with one another in ten
dozen modes, with fingers like deaf and dumb, with feet, with their
stance, by the flick of their long wrist, with the radar of their
hair, the smoke of their will, the glide of their passage,
by
a laugh,
a nod, a disembodied gesture, through mediums, seeming to speak
through silent mediums among them who never gave hint to a
sign. In the apathy which had begun to lie over the crowd as the
speeches went on and on, (and the huge army gathered by music,
now was ground down by words, and the hollow absurd imprecatory
thunder of the loudspeakers with their reductive echo - you must
FIGHT ...
fight
...
fight ... fite ... ite ... , in the soul-killing
repetition of political jargon which reminded people that the day
was well past one o'clock and they still had not started) the Blacks
in the roped-in area about the speaker's stand were the only sign
of active conspiracy, they were up to some collective expression of
disdain, something to symbolize their detestation of the White Left
- yes, the observer was to brood on it much of the next day when
he learned without great surprise that almost all of the Negroes had
left to make their own demonstration in another part of Washington,
their announcement to the press underlining their reluctance to use
their bodies in a White War. That was comprehensible enough.
If
the Negroes were at the Pentagon and did not preempt the front
rank, they would lose face as fighters; if they were too numerous
on the line, they would be beaten half to death. That was the
ostensible reason they did not go, but the observer wondered if he
saw a better.
There is an old tendency among writers of the Left when apologists for
one indigestible new convulsion or another - they go in for a species of
