The Devil Finds Work (3 page)

I had read
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
compulsively, the book in one hand, the newest baby on my hipbone. I was trying to find out something, sensing something in the book of some immense import for me: which, however, I knew I did not really understand.

My mother got scared. She hid the book. The last time she hid it, she hid it on the highest shelf above the bathtub. I was somewhere around seven or eight. God knows how I did it, but I
somehow climbed up and dragged the book down. Then, my mother, as she herself puts it, “didn’t hide it anymore,” and, indeed, from that moment, though in fear and trembling, began to let me go.

I understood, as Bill had intended me to, something of revolution—understood, that is, something of the universal and inevitable human ferment which explodes into what is called a revolution.
Revolution:
the word had a solemn, dreadful ring: what was going on in Spain was a
revolution
. Revolution was the only hope of the American working class—the
proletariat:
and world-wide revolution was the only hope of the world. I could understand (or, rather, accept) all this, as it were, negatively. I could not see where I fit in this formulation, and I did not see where blacks fit. I don’t think that I ever dared pose this question to Bill, partly because I hadn’t yet really accepted, or understood, that
I
was black and also because I knew (and didn’t want her to know, although, of course, she did) how much my father distrusted and disliked her. My father was certainly a proletarian, but I had been sent downtown often to pay his union dues, and I knew how much he hated these greasy, slimy men—also proletarians—whom he called, quite rightly, robbers.

In the film, I was not overwhelmed by the guillotine. The guillotine had been very present for me in the novel because I already wanted, and for very good reasons, to lop off heads. But: once begun, how to distinguish one head from another, and how, where, and for what reason, would the process stop? Beneath the resonance of the word,
revolution
, thundered the word,
revenge
. But:
vengeance is mine, saith the Lord:
a hard saying, the identity of
the Lord
becoming, with the passage of time, either a private agony or an abstract question. And, to put it as simply as it can be
put, unless one can conceive of (and endure) an abstract life, there can be no abstract questions. A question is a threat, the door which slams shut, or swings open: on another threat.

I was haunted, for example, by Alexandre Manette’s document, in
A Tale of Two Cities
, describing the murder of a peasant boy—who, dying, speaks:
I say, we were so robbed, and hunted, and were made so poor, that our father told us it was a dreadful thing to bring a child into this world, and that what we should most pray for was that our women might be barren and our miserable race die out! (I had never before
, observes Dr. Manette,
seen the sense of being oppressed, bursting forth like a fire
.)

Dickens has not seen it at all. The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their only weapon against life, life is all that they have. This is why the dispossessed and starving will never be convinced (though some may be coerced) by the population-control programs of the civilized. I have watched the dispossessed and starving laboring in the fields which others own, with their transistor radios at their ear, all day long: so they learn, for example, along with equally weighty matters, that the Pope, one of the heads of the civilized world, forbids to the civilized that abortion which is being, literally, forced on them, the wretched. The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the
status quo;
are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their “vital interests” are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the “sanctity” of human life, or the “conscience” of the civilized world. There is a “sanctity” involved with bringing a child
into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it. Dreadful indeed it is to see a starving child, but the answer to that is not to prevent the child’s arrival but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the “vital interest” of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the child. However—I would not have said any of this then, nor is so absurd a notion about to engulf the world now. But we were all starving children, after all, and none of our fathers, even at their most embittered and enraged, had ever suggested that we “die out.” It was not
we
who were supposed to
die out:
this was, of all notions, the most forbidden, and we learned this from the cradle. Every trial, every beating, every drop of blood, every tear, were meant to be used by us for a day that was coming—for a day that was certainly coming, absolutely certainly, certainly coming: not for us, perhaps, but for our children. The children of the despised and rejected are menaced from the moment they stir in the womb, and are therefore sacred in a way that the children of the saved are not. And the children know it, which is how they manage to raise their children, and why they will not be persuaded—by their children’s murderers, after all—to cease having children.

But I was haunted, too, by the fact that it is Dr. Manette’s testimony, written in prison, and recuperated by Ernest Defarge upon the storming of the Bastille, which dooms his son-in-law to death. The Defarges seize and hide this document in order to use it against the son-in-law at the latter’s trial: at which trial, Dr. Manette is chief witness for the defense—or, in other words, in fact, his son-in-law’s only hope.

Manette wrote his testimony in agony and silence, never expecting to see his daughter again, and unable, of course, to imagine that his daughter would marry one of the descendants of the
house which had condemned him to a living death. His testimony ends:
them and their descendants, to the last of their race, I … denounce them to Heaven and to earth
. His son-in-law is the descendant of the “race” which had imprisoned him, and the “last” of that race, denounced by him, is flesh of his flesh, his granddaughter. Which connected for me, horribly, with the testimony of Madame Defarge, sister of the murdered boy:
that brother was my brother, that father was my father, those dead are my dead and that summons to answer for all those things descends to me!
Her husband reluctantly agrees that this is so, whereupon Madame Defarge says,
Then tell wind and fire where to stop, but don’t tell me!

I understood
that:
I had seen it in the face, heard it in the voice of many a black man or woman, sweeping the pavement, wrestling with the garbage cans, men and women whose children were dying faster than those MGM extras dropping from the drawbridge.
If I love you, I love you, and I don’t give a damn. You my nigger, nigger, if you don’t
get
no bigger. I will cut your
dick
off, I will cut your balls out. I ain’t
got
to do nothing but stay black and die and I’m black already! Honey. Don’t be like that. Honey. Don’t do me like that. We in this shit together, and you need me and I need you, now ain’t that so?
Who
going to take care of us if we don’t take care of each other?

I feared, feared—like a thief in the night, as one of my brothers would put it—to connect all this with my father and mother and everyone I knew, and with myself, and to connect all this with black Uncle Tom: no more than I had wished to be that fleeing fugitive on that moving train did I desire to endure his destiny or meet his end. Uncle Tom really believed
vengeance is mine, saith the Lord
, for he believed in the Lord, as I flattered myself
I did not: this inconvenient faith (described, furthermore, by a white woman) obscured the fact that Tom allowed himself to be murdered for refusing to disclose the road taken by the runaway slave. Because Uncle Tom would not take vengeance into his own hands, he was not a hero for me. Heroes, as far as I could then see, were white, and not merely because of the movies but because of the land in which I lived, of which movies were simply a reflection: I despised and feared those heroes because they
did
take vengeance into their own hands. They thought that vengeance was theirs to take. This difficult coin did not cease to spin, it had neither heads nor tails: for what white people took into their hands could scarcely even be called vengeance, it was something less and something more. The Scottsboro boys, for example—for the Scottsboro Case has begun—were certainly innocent of anything requiring vengeance. My father’s youngest son by his first marriage, nine years older than I, who had vanished from our lives, might have been one of those boys, now being murdered by my fellow Americans on the basis of the rape charge delivered by two white whores: and I was reading Angelo Herndon’s
Let Me Live
. Yes. I understood
that:
my countrymen were my enemy, and I had already begun to hate them from the bottom of my heart.

Angelo Herndon was a young, black labor organizer in the Deep South, railroaded to prison, who lived long enough, at least, to write a book about it—the George Jackson of the era. No one resembling him, or anyone resembling any of the Scottsboro Boys, nor anyone resembling my father, has yet made an appearance on the American cinema scene. Perhaps to compensate for this, Bill now takes me to See Sylvia Sidney and Henry Fonda in the Walter Wanger production of Fritz Lang’s
You Only Live
Once
. I, also, either with her or without her, I don’t remember, see the Warner Brothers production (or
screen rendition
, which pompous formulation I adored) of a novel I had read, Ward Greene’s
Death in the Deep South
, brought to the screen by (I think) Mervyn LeRoy, as
They Won’t Forget
, starring Claude Rains; and Samuel Goldwyn’s production of William Wyler’s
Dead End
, again starring Sylvia Sidney. Who also starred in the film version of a play Bill took me to see, the WPA Living Newspaper production,—
one third of a nation
—.

It is not entirely true that no one from the world I knew had yet made an appearance on the American screen: there were, for example, Stepin Fetchit and Willie Best and Manton Moreland, all of whom, rightly or wrongly, I loathed. It seemed to me that they lied about the world I knew, and debased it, and certainly I did not know anybody like them—as far as I could tell; for it is also possible that their comic, bug-eyed terror contained the truth concerning a terror by which I hoped never to be engulfed.

Yet, I had no reservations at all concerning the terror of the black janitor in
They Won’t Forget
. I think that it was a black actor named Clinton Rosewood who played this part, and he looked a little like my father. He is terrified because a young white girl, in this small Southern town, has been raped and murdered, and her body has been found on the premises of which he is the janitor. (Lana Turner, in her first movie, is the raped and murdered girl, which is, perhaps, a somewhat curious beginning for so gold-plated a career.) The role of the janitor is small, yet the man’s face hangs in my memory until today: and the film’s icy brutality both scared me and strengthened me. The Southern politician (Rains) needs an issue on which to be re-elected. He decides,
therefore, that to pin the rape and murder of the white girl on a black man is insufficiently sensational. He very coldly frames a white Northern schoolteacher for this crime, and brings about his death at the hands of a lynch mob. (And I knew that this was exactly what would have happened to Bill, if such a mob had ever got its hands on her.) Unlike the later
Ox-Bow Incident
, in which a similar lynching is partially redeemed by the reading of a letter, which, presumably, will cause the members of the mob to repent the horror of what they have done and resolve to become better men and women, and also unlike the later
Intruder in the Dust
, which suggests the same hopeful improbability,
They Won’t Forget
ends with the teacher dead and the politician triumphantly re-elected. As he watches the widow walk down the courthouse steps, he mutters, seeming, almost, to stifle a yawn,
I wonder if he really did it, after all
.

And, yes: I was beginning to understand
that
.

Sylvia Sidney was the only American film actress who reminded me of a colored girl, or woman—which is to say that she was the only American film actress who reminded me of reality. All of the others, without exception, were white, and, even when they moved me (like Margaret Sullavan or Bette Davis or Carole Lombard) they moved me from that distance. Some instinct caused me profoundly to distrust the sense of life they projected: this sense of life could certainly never, in any case, be used by me, and, while
His
eye might be on the sparrow, mine had to be on the hawk. And, similarly, while I admired Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney (and, on a more demanding level, Fredric March), the only actor of the era with whom I identified was
Henry Fonda. I was not alone. A black friend of mine, after seeing Henry Fonda in
The Grapes of Wrath
, swore that Fonda had colored blood. You could tell, he said, by the way Fonda walked down the road at the end of the film:
white men don’t walk like that!
and he imitated Fonda’s stubborn, patient, wide-legged hike away from the camera. My reaction to Sylvia Sidney was certainly due, in part, to the kind of film she appeared in during that era—
Fury; Mary Burns, Fugitive; You and Me; Street Scene
(I was certain, even, that I knew the meaning of the title of a film she made with Gene Raymond, which I never saw,
Behold My Wife
). It was almost as though she and I had a secret: she seemed to know something I knew.
Every street in New York ends in a river:
this is the legend which begins the film,
Dead End
, and I was enormously grateful for it. I had never thought of that before. Sylvia Sidney, facing a cop in this film, pulling her black hat back from her forehead:
One of you lousy cops gave me that
. She was always being beaten up, victimized, weeping, and she should have been drearier than Tom Mix’s girl friends. But I always believed her—in a way, she reminded me of Bill, for I had seen Bill facing hostile cops. Bill took us on a picnic downtown once, and there was supposed to be ice cream waiting for us at a police station. The cops didn’t like Bill, didn’t like the fact that we were colored kids, and didn’t want to give up the ice cream. I don’t remember anything Bill said. I just remember her face as she stared at the cop, clearly intending to stand there until the ice cream all over the world melted or until the earth’s surface froze, and she got us our ice cream, saying
Thank you
, I remember, as we left.
You Only Live Once
was the most powerful movie I had seen until that moment. The only other film to hit me as hard, at that time of my life, was
The Childhood of Maxim Gorky
, which, for me, had not
been about white people. Similarly, while
20,000 Years in Sing Sing
had concerned the trials of a finally somewhat improbable white couple,
You Only Live Once
came much much closer to home.