This question was asked many years ago, by Malcolm X, at Harvard University. It had been put to a black professor there. And the black professor knew, although he might have, in the mixed and academic company of Harvard, refused to face, or to express the reality of his own position, still he knew the answer to Malcolm’s question. And he might have kept his silence because of his ambitiousness. He therefore could be expected to have been a man of some intellectual substance (why else would he be teaching at Harvard?) but not with enough guts in his aspirations for promotion at Harvard, to resent the question being put by someone like Malcolm X. So, he refused to answer the question.
“They call a Negro with a PhD, a nigger! A nigger!” Malcolm had answered it for him…Malcolm had spent quite a lot of time in and around Dorchester in Boston, and in that time, he certainly would have passed close enough to the campus at that time, to recognize it as a campus. But the Negro with the PhD was not the first black intellectual to have had his credentials questioned; although he might have been the first such one to have had them questioned by another black man, and one who did not have a PhD. W.E.B. Du Bois, the first black man to have graduated with a doctorate from Harvard, was asked during the presentation of a philosophical paper, by his colleagues, to sing a Negro spiritual. Du Bois, fortunately, for all black PhDs following him, did not oblige his colleagues. And it is doubtful whether Du Bois knew any Negro spirituals.
Black intellectuals who teach nowadays at Ivy League colleges like Yale and Harvard, are no longer asked to sing Negro spirituals, certainly the question is not put in such precise, if unsophisticated terms; but questions about their legitimacy and about the quality of their academic qualifications are still being asked, and with not much sophistication at all. And the fact that some version of the original question, as it had been put by Malcolm X, is still being asked of black intellectuals, which does tend to prove Malcolm’s point.
I had to load all of my bags into the taxi, without help from the taxi driver. Perhaps, this man knew what Yale called its black intellectuals. He refused even to touch my briefcase. And it was not a question that the briefcase might have contained explosives. He was not an intelligent man, with no erudition, not so sophisticated that he could have detected in me, the revolutionary beneath the sheep’s clothing of an Ivy League suit.
“I have a bad back,” he said. It was not so much an explanation, certainly not an excuse, as it was merely a statement intended to establish the bounds of our relationship. And straightaway, he seemed to be limping more pronouncedly; but it made him look as if he had a very bad leg.
I put all the bags into the trunk of one taxi, and when it was filled, I had to order another taxi. These taxis were waiting like locusts in front of the Park Plaza Hotel where the Connecticut limousine stops. It is one of the few places in New Haven where a taxi can be seen, parked. There were four of us. The first taxi driver with the bad back, had made sure there was a second taxi to accommodate us; and although the second taxi driver did not complain about a bad back, he too refused to touch our luggage.
“We are not supposed to.”
It was now up to me, left with two incapacitated taxi drivers, to decide which of the two gentlemen was the more helpful in forming this bad first impression of life in New Haven, and of the New Haven Yellow Cab Company … years ago, while on assignment in New York City for the CBC, as a freelance radio broadcaster, I had taken a Yellow Cab from the train station at Grand Central to Rockefeller Center, where the CBC studios were located. There was a black woman in the taxi with me. She was dressed in an American modification of an African costume, wearing large silver bangles and bracelets on her wrists, and a large Afro, in days when only the bravest, most secure, or most demented of black American women dared to manifest in this symbolical way, their cultural alienation from the rest of American life, a symbol which in those days was seen not only as an act of defiance, but also of some aspect of black rebelliousness and cultural separatism. My first stop was somewhere on Sixth Avenue, in the rich, tall, granite district of safety and harmony with American wealth and Rockefeller fortune in downtown New York. “Would you wait for a couple minutes?” There was no problem. The taxi driver even exchanged pleasantries with us, and offered his opinion of the chances that the New York Giants would win the World Series. We reached our destination. He stopped the cab. He let us out. And he waited until I went in and returned from the twenty-fifth floor, and he seemed quite pleased at the prospect that he might get a large tip for his courtesy. I got back into the cab. He smiled. I told him, “125th Street and Seventh Avenue.” His complexion changed. He became white. 125th Street and Seventh Avenue is black. In place of the New York Giants, he was now muttering about riots and stabbings and muggings and Negroes. The black woman in the cab, knew Harlem. She lived there all her life. “I’m not going up there!” the taxi driver said. She understood what he meant. And I suddenly became very frightened because I sensed that she was waiting for me to take a militant and black stand against his obstinacy. I was going to have to show this black Africanized woman, and prove to her satisfaction, that I was one West Indian who was also a black man, equally Africanized in the rhetoric of “black cultural nationalism” that I was a West Indian who was black, possessed of big black balls, that, in other words, “I had my shit together, Jack!” The driver remained parked. The driver remained adamant. The black woman and I were inside the taxi all this time. “I am not going up there. I am not taking you to Harlem.”
“I’m going to report you to the, to the … Human Rights! I’m going to report you to the N-double-A-CP! The taxicab company. What’s your licence number …?”
He shrugged off his disregard of my threats, quite calmly took out his wallet and, without looking back at us, pushed the licence into our faces. He didn’t seem worried about the loss of his livelihood; that his taxi licence would be taken away; that he would be chastised by his supervisor; because he was being reported for an act of racial discrimination by a foreign black man, who could pass for a diplomat. And he did not seem worried simply because he knew that he had behind him, substantiating in full argument, his callous disregard of the wound he had inflicted upon us: behind him was arrayed the entire taxi system, perhaps also the New York Police; for it is obvious that if his supervisors had had no knowledge either of the meaning of Harlem to white people, or the meaning of racialism in their country, then he could not now be reflecting their corporate response and attitude.
And then, this taxi driver did something that was very strange for the type of stubborn man he had made himself out to be. He pulled out his short sweater and then his shirt, and exposed to us a scar as ugly as raw beef, and as long as the mark left on his skin by the elastic in the waist of his underwear. The scar stretched from the left rib cage to the right rib cage. I wondered how he had survived such a slash.
“I got this in Harlem. And Jesus himself couldn’t get me to go back to Harlem!”
We fell silent. The black woman born in Harlem probably understood more about the cause of this scar than I did; than the man did. For she had lived there all her life. She was the first to suggest getting out of the taxi before she was confronted with more ugly and damaging testimony of this man’s experience in Harlem and of the meaning of its black ghetto life which she was to say to me, later, was more than broken ribs and broken bottles, drugs and black rage, and the black violence inflicted upon black people by black people, and the psychology that explains it, according to Franklin Frazier, who knew Harlem.
I tried to put myself in this man’s place, suppose I was a taxi driver and I was in a white exclusive district and I was slashed in this way, and …
“Fucking cracker!” the black woman said.
But it was spoken more like an apology for her people, than as a rebuke.
This was the kind of powerlessness that has absolutely nothing to do with the political kind of powerlessness; for that kind may be exploited by factors which are subject to change: this kind,
on the other hand, leaves the nasty taste of futility in the mouth and in the groin, and is felt more deeply for its racialism than as an act of racialism itself. The black woman and I were neutralized on the hard concrete of the sidewalk, and we could have beaten our brains out on that slab of insensibility which ironically we could still walk on, step on, trample, but which was, in its hardhearted characteristic, much like the unemotional taxi driver.
This black woman and I waited there until we saw a black man, whom she called “a Brother,” behind the wheel, driving a taxi, and she waved him down. He stopped for us, and he called her “Sister,” and called me “my Brother”; and then we knew we were going home. It was one hour and thirty minutes later.
But by then, with all this time wasted, and feeling comfortable in the back seat with the “Brother” driving us, I felt relaxed although there was no logical nor racialistic reason why I should more willingly entrust my safety, if not my peace of mind, to a taxi driver simply because he was black (for he was equally strange to me!), I did somehow feel I was in more understandable hand. For I was going “home to Harlem.” And so, we both reclined in the back seat, and enjoyed Aretha Franklin singing “R-e-s-p-e-c-t!” Something in our bodies had permitted this trust.
The more bitter taste of the experience with the white brutalized taxi driver had by now evaporated in the Harlem air, but the strain of personal injury had already been mixed into the sensibilities of our castration. It was not a political powerlessness; and defeat was its consequence. It was deeper than that. And much more lasting and absolute. The heat in New Haven on this air-less afternoon, with two taxis at my service, but with no more assurance of service and no injury, I found to be very little different from that New York experience.
I had been told before I arrived that “New Haven niggers aren’t like New York niggers”; and I can’t remember who gave me this advice; but I had not been told exactly what New York niggers were like; that the city hadn’t been burned down — yet; that every person who lived and worked in New Haven, which is to say, every person who worked at Yale University, held the university firmly etched in his mind, with an awesome respectability. Because of the smallness of the town, in all senses of that term, these two taxi drivers weren’t expressing bravery or liberalism in taking me to 228 Park Street, for everybody knew that Park Street was safe, and opposite Pierson College, whose master was John Hersey, the novelist. I was therefore on university turf. And even the New Haven Police Department is aware of the limitations of their physical jurisdiction when it is a matter of arresting someone who is connected to Yale. In some cases, the police department does not have to be reminded, in the course of their duty and their desire, that this enthusiasm for law and order might carry them within the boundaries of Yale University’s jurisdiction, which is a jurisdiction with bigger balls.
Yale University in the year 1968, is an unreal society. The people associated with it make it that; and in turn, if not before this institution has made its mark upon the constituents, the inter-relationship of its members to the university contributes to making the Yale community an unreal one. For the black person at Yale, student, faculty member, or worker who lives within the power of its employment, grasp and iron gates, it is the most adhesive college community in America. The white members of the faculty do not escape this influence; for although their position is not circumscribed by the restrictions of colour, still the fierce competitiveness and the fatalities to career that are consequent upon that, plus the politics of their respective departments into which they are thrown, against will and tactic, all these factors create the condition of a one-way allegiance that Yale expects from its employees. And in this respect, their fate is no different from that of the black faculty member. Only the most misguided or deluded black man on the faculty of Yale University, would think that either Yale College or the administration of the university could add one whit to the damage already done to his sensibilities; for he ought to have realized that the damage would have been done already, at the precise moment that he had stepped on the property of Yale University.
I sensed this from the beginning, that Yale somehow manages to regulate the lives of old and young faculty members. It exerts a loyalty that one does not usually regard as a healthy working relationship between administration and faculty member. And this has nothing to do with the loyalty of an employee. God knows, and so too does the New Haven black community that surrounds the university like so many outhouses of poverty and deprivation on a plantation; God knows and so does the cleaning staff and the janitorial staff — predominantly black people — that the university’s history and attitude as employer is not a romantic one; and that it has absolutely nothing congruent with the ivy running up the walls of the twelve colleges built against time and against reason and against utility, by an equally incongruent architecture and social planning. I am talking about a kind of hidden, unspoken, but very powerful “something” that keeps the white faculty in some form of academic neurosis, a kind of official patriotism, which when it conflicts with their personal principles as men (and women), those principles tend to be conveniently subordinated in such a way as to promote their true feelings that Yale University is God, and they themselves, are mammon.
One could say, and perhaps this would be to hit the problem in the guts, that all Yale faculty members learn, very quickly, how to be diplomatic: but to be diplomatic is nothing more than to be a liar; the kind of liar whose “facts” are superimposed upon a structure of respectability and power, both of which are derived from the particular institution which he represents and which stands behind him.
One example of the diplomatic is the decision of a young Fellow of Berkeley College who tried to ensure his promotion from assistant professor to associate professor, and the chance to live in a Fellow’s suite in the college, by giving a record album to the master of the college. This young man, not particularly brilliant and outstanding in his field (twentieth-century English literature), also knew a fact that everyone in his field knew, that he discovered slowly, after a few weeks sitting at luncheon with the master of the college, that the master had a passion for the poetry of Dylan Thomas. The young Fellow, quite simply putting two and two together, and by professing an institutional interest in the college, feathered the nest of the Fellow’s suite he had his eyes on with the purchase of an impressive and most expensive edition of The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas. He sweetened the pot of his calculation with a recorded version of the poet reading his poems. And somehow, since I was a witness at the high table at luncheon, I became a contributor at the purchase. The young Fellow’s financial aspirations, probably like his academic ones, were temporarily beyond his means.
I am not saying that the Fellow bought off the master. I am saying that the Fellow’s comprehension of the fierce competition for college suites, for free living accommodation, and for promotion within his department, this thoughtfulness on his part might have been the feather that tilted the decision in his favour, and against the other Fellow, perhaps more brilliant than he, but who had neglected to consider this act of calculated graciousness, which after all, is a very noticeable stone in the foundation of sophistication and culture that Yale University stands for. Whatever the reason, this young Fellow is now permanently entrenched at Berkeley College, in a free suite, and probably is a full professor.
But graciousness is not the only weapon used. Verbal and intellectual calisthenics are used more effectively. Sometimes, they border on obscur-ity or on contradiction. An example of this verbal and intellectual game as it is played by the university itself, comes from the highest source of power, the president of the university, himself.
The context to bring out the significance of the matter, is May 1970, the day Yale devotes to delicious frivolity: barbecues and draught beer and Frisbees and beautiful women from Connecticut College, from Smith, from Wellesley, and from Howard and Clark and Brandeis Universities — we are living still in a segregated society where blacks date
blacks, and whites date whites — to be with the black students; all this suddenly became no longer important — the Black Panthers were coming. They would invade, and “occupy” Yale University; and they would close down the university. Bobby Seale was to be tried for murder in New Haven. There is anger, fear, myth, speculation, and violence in the air like the smoke coming from the kitchens of colleges, when the skies are clear. But the greatest concern is the safety of the black women students: where to hide them from the dark clouds of tear gas, and possible brutality at the hands of the New Haven police, who have a reputation as brutes toward the black New Haven residents.
So, the president, like all presidents in the country during this time, was confused; and in some cases rendered inoperative; but he did not want to capitulate to an “extremist” bunch of Black Panthers and shut down his university. What would the Board of Governors say? What would the black professors and the black students — and where are their loyalties, with the university or with the Black Panthers? — say? But of course, their opinion was not calculated to be essential to the “action” to be taken. And I am not sure if they were asked: if we were asked.
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