72
DOTSON RADER
and
decides
he going to give us our nation. No more this being a nigger
c.olony in the Mother Country for the Man. No more. We wants .our
own nation and we fight 'til we gets it. Ain't going to have my little
brother, no more black babies, grows up to live in this
filth.
This is
filth,
man,
pig
filth! What would you do, white boy, what would you do?
You'd take up a gun, sure you would, you'd take up a gun if you
was
living like this shit. Yes, sir, yes you would." Shaking her head, angry,
frustrated, beyond herself, "I tells you something," she said, grabbing my
wrist, staring at me, "the brothers and the sisters is going to get them–
selves guns. Already got some. But we ain't g.oing for no war. We just
use them in self-defense. Defending .ourselves from the
pohlice.
The
pigs.
Ain't g.oing to sho.ot like cowboys around this town, those pigs, or they's
going to get shot back."
"Do you think very many other blacks in high school, do you think
they agree with you?"
"Most. Most do. Just you look around you, just you look around at
where the Man makes us live. Stupid question, man, dumb, stupid
question."
I stayed that night at Thelma's. I never saw her mother. As she
had predicted all night long the trains passed by beneath the windows,
the whistles blaring, sleep impossible.
* * *
I have spoken with many other high school radicals, many of them
not as articulate nor as revolutionary as Hank or Anne or Thelma.
Among the youths I have spent time with are four working-class white
boys in Erie, whom I interviewed at a public pool. They admitted to a
bias against, or at least a suspicion of, the blacks, but, more significantly,
they shared with the blacks a terror of the war in Vietnam and a sense
of futility over the future of their lives. Three of the boys planned on
quitting public school when they reached seventeen years of age, the
following year. I asked them what they would do then. They answered
that they would join one of the armed services since it was a choice
between that and going to work in a factory, neither of which they
wanted, but they had no other choice, their lives reduced to those op–
tions. It seems obvious to me that in time, unless the war is ended
quickly and the division between competing values of the generations
is
bridged
-
a conflict in cultures of enormous, violent potential- unless
the shape of things gives way before the young, allows them greater access
to power and, therefore, to meaning, unless something radical is done
to end poverty and injustice consistent with three decades of declared
and unenforced public policy, then in time, a majority of the youne,
