My Heart Laid Bare

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Something slips off the edge of the wrought-iron table (they’re break-fasting on the terrace, this warm May morning) and shatters. Tabitha comes forward quickly to remedy the harm. “Millie darling, why are you so—nervous?” Warren asks in his kindly, exasperating way; and Millie, thrusting the newspaper from her, yawns and stretches and declares she isn’t nervous at all—“Only restless! Richmond is so finite.”

  IT’S REVEREND THURMOND Blichtman who has made up Millie’s mind for her. Like her eldest brother, she will bravely seek her destiny.

  Speaking to Warren of her longing to see her brother Darian and her sister Esther in upstate New York in such a wistful way that Warren will imagine it’s he who has thought of a train trip north for Millie—“To revive your spirits.” Millie will travel to Schenectady to visit Darian, and travel on to the west to visit Esther in Port Oriskany where her sister has become involved in what Richmond citizens would decry as an “immoral” movement . . . nurses, welfare workers, volunteers, nearly all female, crusading for a newly founded organization, the American Birth Control League. (Since becoming a well-to-do Richmond matron, Millie finds this title so coarse, so crude, she’d be embarrassed to utter it aloud in mixed company. Birth control! “Though it’s a very good thing of course, for the lower classes. And yet—think of the innocent children who would never have been born!”)

  At the Richmond station, Millie kisses her adoring husband, and Betsey and Maynard, good-bye. She’ll be gone, she promises, only two weeks. “Already I miss you, darlings,” Millie hears herself say, a lilting soprano voice, her eyes shining with happiness and audacity and something like terror; as if, stepping up into the train, gaily waving at her family only a few yards away, she has already stepped into a void, and will never return.

  IMAGINING AS THE train speeds relentlessly north he might be, he must be sensing my approach. My arrival. My return to his life.

  In Manhattan, Millicent Stirling loses no time checking into the Waldorf-Astoria, which is the only hotel she knows, the hotel in which she and Warren have stayed previously; next evening, she takes a taxi to Madison Square Garden for the rally, or rather to the vicinity of the Garden, for there’s so much traffic in the streets, so many vehicles and pedestrians, and mounted policemen shouting into the crowd, the driver can’t bring her within two blocks—“This is as far as I go, ma’am.” Millie smiles to see the man frowning and shaking his head in the rearview mirror. He wonders who I am, a white woman; wonders why I have a special invitation to such an event.

  This rally of 19 June 1929 will be, as newspapers promise, a “historic” event. Never have so many Negroes gathered together for such a purpose, in the very heart of a white metropolis; only Prince Elihu, leader of the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union, could draw such a crowd. Millie has costumed herself for the occasion, quite cleverly she thinks: to disguise, as best she can, the color of her skin, she’s wearing a stylish tunic dress of dove-gray silk with long sleeves, and a high lace collar; her stockings are of a matching hue, though sheer silk; she wears white eyelet gloves and a flat-crowned hat of Spanish style, made for her by the leading Richmond milliner, in glazed black straw with a black dotted swiss veil—“Both ladylike, Mrs. Stirling, and very ‘sexy,’” as the milliner has said. Now Mrs. Stirling, on foot, as rarely she’s on foot in such a place, wide city streets, avenues, an unfamiliar and inhospitable atmosphere, is breathless with excitement, like a young girl embarked upon an adventure unknown to her elders; finds herself carried along by the throng of noisy people, black faces on every side, pushing into the interior of Madison Square Garden by several doors. The marquee boasts FIRST ANNUAL NEGRO CONFRATERNITY RALLY. Everywhere are six-foot posters of PRINCE ELIHU, a fierce, handsome youngish Negro in a white caftan, wearing a helmet with a white ostrich plume, an amazing costume, a quite effective costume Millie thinks, like Prince Elihu’s fine, fierce, intelligent eyes, his clenched jaws, that expression both noble and truculent—“It is. ’Lisha.” Millie would know her lover anywhere, as he would know her, even in disguise.

  As Millie stumblingly ascends a flight of steps, jostled by the hurrying crowd, she hears someone shout, “Ma’am? Ma’am!”—and turns guiltily to see, about ten feet away on the sidewalk, a helmeted policeman, white, eyes hidden by a tinted visor; but Millie pretends she hasn’t heard, and escapes inside.

  Inside, the air is far denser and warmer than in the street; for there are too many people; too many; the smells are beginning to define themselves to Millie’s sensitive nostrils; where she’d halfway imagined a kind of path cleared for her, as Mrs. Warren Stirling of Richmond, Virginia, a white woman known to Prince Elihu, even while knowing such an expectation was nonsense, she’s confused that she’s so . . . anonymous, even in her white skin.

  In the foyer, long lines press forward to the ticket counters, for there are many who haven’t purchased tickets beforehand, like Millie; the interior of the great, high-ceilinged building is dizzy with the ring and echo of thousands of voices; an air of intense excitement, expectation; here and there are pickets, enemies of the Negro Union?—pamphlets thrust rudely into Millie’s gloved hand, and Millie is too polite to refuse—All-Race League Protests Negro Zionism—Manifesto of the NAACP—Black Socialists Unite!—Why Did Jesus Die for You?—“Prince Elihu” Traitor to Race & Nation. There are raised voices, arguments; sudden scufflings and struggles; moments of eerie stillness when everyone in Millie’s vicinity freezes, to see what is happening; giant Negroes in uniforms sweated through beneath the arms, bearing the insignia of the Negro Union, are engaged in hauling protestors away, walking, or dragging, them swiftly and deftly against the incoming stream of people which parts to let them through.

  Millie’s beautiful, costly Spanish hat has been knocked askew on her head, and the veil, heated and dampened by her quickened breath, clings to her face. Millie adjusts the hat, blindly using her three-inch ebony hatpins; she imagines eyes glancing upon her, more curious than startled or disapproving. A white woman, a white lady—here? Millie has begun to think that she’s in foreign territory though still in the United States; perhaps she should have planned her strategy differently . . . a telegram to ’Lisha, notifying him of her arrival, instead of this planned surprise.

  Tickets are $1. Millie pays with shaking hands, her eyelet gloves already mysteriously soiled.

  Inside the vast hall, however, the atmosphere is less frantic. Earnest young Negro boys and girls, in navy blue suits and white shirts, are ushers; they pass out pamphlets titled The World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union: Salvation Here & Now, with the glorified likeness of Prince Elihu on the cover. From somewhere out of sight a brass band is playing loudly, quick-stepping military music. (Millie recognizes one of ’Lisha’s old favorites—“Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!”) Millie is escorted to a seat many rows from the stage, and a hard, uncushioned seat it is, so very different from seats in the Richmond Opera House; she’s imagined she came early to the rally, and might sit in the first row center so that, once she removed her veil, Elisha might notice her; but clearly she hasn’t come early enough.

  “’Lisha has become a master of The Game,” Millie thinks, glancing uneasily about.

  And what a variety of men, women, children: some of them dressed as if for Sunday, in colorful pastels, with snap-brim straw hats, patent leather shoes, vests, ties, enormous flowered hats, elbow-length gloves; others, the majority, in more ordinary workaday clothes, though clean and well groomed, like the reliable, devoted Negroes of the Stirlings’ household; others visibly poor, with mismatched clothing. Here and there Millie sees, not wishing to see, an obviously deranged person; one of them, an obese woman, sits only a few seats away, angrily fanning herself with a pamphlet and singing what sounds like “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood”—a hymn Millie has heard Tabitha sing in the kitchen. And here and there in the crowd Millie sees a Caucasian face—except, when she looks more closely, she decides that the individual is only just very light-skinned, in some cases c
reamy-skinned, with fair brown hair, or red hair; Caucasian features mixed with Negroid features; a ghost-blend of races that seems to her beautiful, haunting.

  Had we had a child together, ’Lisha and I, he would have looked like that.

  And yet—is it too late? Millie is not yet forty, and women have been known to have babies well into their forties. And how youthful, how young she is, scarcely changed from the girl she’d been twenty years before when she and ’Lisha were first lovers.

  THE RALLY IS scheduled to begin at 8 P.M. but the military band plays until 8:20 P.M. when the first of the speakers, the minister of state of the Negro Union, appears to welcome the throng. Following him is an impassioned minister of the treasury, and a Negro with the title of vice-regent; at last, as anticipation in the Garden has grown, at 9:10 P.M. there appears Prince Elihu himself—striding into the spotlights, magnificent in his white costume, gold braid, helmet and ostrich plume, his jewel-studded saber at his side. One hand is raised in triumph and the other extended to the cheering, screaming multitudes in a gesture Millie seems to recognize, the Buddha’s promise of peace? love? sympathy?—the palm of the hand open and the fingers outstretched. Yet how electric Prince Elihu is, charged with energy as a wild animal.

  Millie stares greedily. She has removed her hat, no matter if her white skin draws the attention of people around her, in fact no one notices her, for all are captivated by Prince Elihu as Millie is, captivated and dry-mouthed wondering Is this my ’Lisha . . . this fierce stalking angry Negro?

  Millie sits too stunned to move as on all sides people leap to their feet in a frenzy of welcome; awkwardly she tries to stand, but sinks back into her seat staring hungrily, desperately at the prancing figure on the stage. Prince Elihu? ’Lisha? His skin is much darker than she recalls; the set of his jaws harder, and the eyebrows more severe; his hair lifts in a fine dark woolly aureole; he’s taller, more muscular, though lean-bodied like a snake, with a quivering, flamelike energy. So tense! so angry!—why is this man, beloved by so many thousands, angry?—why doesn’t he smile to welcome them, instead of standing with booted feet apart, his clenched fist raised above his head and his handsome face uplifted, waiting with barely restrained impatience for the rapturous ovation to subside?

  Yes, it is Elisha; yet, simultaneously, this rabid furious Negro who has swallowed ’Lisha up. In his blinding white costume it’s almost hurtful to look at him. Yet Millie, too, gamely claps; raises her gloved hands to clap, that Prince Elihu might see her; until her hands smart with pain, and she’s obliged to give up.

  After how many prolonged minutes, the waves of noise begin to fade. And Prince Elihu begins to speak, with theatrical abruptness, his voice raised, raw, or raw-seeming, trembling with emotion; he will address the gathering for ninety minutes, nonstop, in an atmosphere ever more highly charged, and commingled with odors of hair, flesh, sweated clothing, rank animal passion. The Negro’s love of America has not been returned, my brothers and my sisters Elihu begins his chant. The Negro’s love of America has not been returned. At first Millie can’t make out Elihu’s words, she absorbs only the man’s ecstatic rage, and begins to feel a sense of helplessness and panic, as on all sides men and women murmur, moan, sob, sway their bodies in sympathy with his chant which they seem to know, words wholly alien to Millie.

  What is the tragic history of America cries Prince Elihu motionless as a pillar in the bright burning circle of light but the history of BROKEN PROMISES. OF LOVE NOT RETURNED.

  Of enslavement of BODY AND SPIRIT.

  Of enslavement to this day by FALSE FREEDOM.

  Of Negro women scorned as dirt by the white cannibal-devil BUT EVER VICTIMS OF HIS UNCONTROLLABLE LUST; and Negro men EVER THE VICTIMS OF HIS DEVIL-HATRED OF HIMSELF.

  And now, by way of Prince Elihu’s message, A TEARING ASIDE OF THE VEIL.

  A speaking-out of that WHICH HAS ONLY BEEN WHISPERED.

  And woe be to those WHO LACK COURAGE.

  And woe, woe! to OUR ENEMIES.

  For he who is fearful and holds back BETRAYS HIS RACE. And the sacred undeniable AFRICAN BLOOD BEATING IN HIS VEINS.

  For he who shrinks from acknowledging his kinship with all dark-skinned peoples, and his enmity toward all whites, BETRAYS HIS RACE. AND THE SACRED UNDENIABLE AFRICAN BLOOD BEATING IN HIS VEINS.

  He who withholds his soul’s fullest strength, in craven worship of the false gods of the white man, JESUS CHRIST and MAMMON, will not be forgiven; nor will he have a place in AFRICA GLORIFIED.

  He who aspires to a BLEACHING-OUT OF THE SOUL in denying the WISDOM OF THE FLESH must come to a tragic end.

  For there are numberless kinds of EVISCERATIONS, my brothers and sisters, numberless kinds of LYNCHINGS . . . CASTRATIONS . . . PUBLIC STONINGS . . . LIVE CREMATIONS . . . FLOGGING . . . TARRING . . . HANGING . . . DEATH. Numberless kinds of DEATH, my brothers and sisters, numberless kinds of DEATH.

  Fed screaming through a rock grinder in Bowman, Georgia, while a gathering of the Klan and fellow whites stand by, like a Negro male named Dale Scoggins in March of 1926, O my brothers and sisters THIS IS NOT THE ONLY OUTRAGE OUR RACE MUST ENDURE: DO YOU KNOW? DO YOU KNOW? DO YOU KNOW WHAT ELIHU TELLS YOU?

  For history is nearing its fiery conclusion; a second War is close at hand, to be fought by the white cannibal-devils in Europe, and very likely in America; and the long reign of DISEASE AND WICKEDNESS WILL BE OVER.

  And no black man must submit to the yoke of soldiery this time: THE LIE THAT THE WORLD IS TO BE MADE SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY. For we have seen, my brothers and sisters, since 1919 we have seen, ALL THAT DEMOCRACY IS, IS WHITE PRIVILEGE, WHITE POWER, WHITE INJURY, WHITE LOATHING OF ALL DARK-SKINNED PEOPLES. For we have seen, since 1919, in the decade following the Negro soldier’s return from the European War, ever more atrocities toward our race. A decade of BLOOD VENGEANCE AGAINST OUR VERY PATRIOTISM. A decade of RAGING SCORN AGAINST OUR VERY NOBILITY. A decade of SHAME, my brothers and sisters, SHAME THAT WE DARE NOT RISE TO STRIKE THE MURDERERS DOWN. In East St. Louis in the summer of 1919, forty Negroes massacred by a lynch mob . . . and no justice following. In Springfield, Illinois . . . in Los Angeles and San Francisco and Seattle and Philadelphia . . . the rise of the Ku Klux Klan . . . the privilege of the white lynchers . . . BEATING AND RAPING AND MURDERING AS THEY WISH. In Texas, nine Negro veterans hanged AND BESIDE THEM THE PREGNANT WIFE OF ONE OF THE VETERANS. In Macon County, Georgia, A LIVE FETUS RIPPED FROM THE WOMB OF A NEGRO WOMAN AND TRAMPLED UNDERFOOT BY WHITE-HOODED MEN. And no justice following. In ballparks in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, North Florida . . . in public fairgrounds . . . squares . . . before the very courthouse . . . LIVE CREMATIONS OF NEGROES FOR THE ENTERTAINMENT OF WHITES: PUBLIC HANGINGS . . . EVISCERATIONS . . . FLOGGINGS . . . TARRING AND FEATHERING . . . CASTRATION BLOODY AND FOUL . . . .And no justice following. And no justice ever to follow. And the rise, my brothers and sisters, of the Klan: and the many admirers of the Klan.

  For the Klan, now five million strong, is America: AMERICA HOODED AND TRUTHFUL IN ITS ANONYMITY.

  For the Klan shouts the truth that ALL NEGROES MAY HEAR; while the white cannibal-devil, unhooded, tells lies THAT NEGROES MAY BE DECEIVED.

  In West Virginia . . . in the Carolinas . . . in Ohio (boasting more than four hundred thousand members) . . . in New York State and New Jersey and Delaware and Maryland . . . in Illinois, in Michigan, in Indiana, in Tennessee and Kentucky and Arkansas . . . the rise of the Klan . . . AMERICA HOODED AND TRUTHFUL IN ITS ANONYMITY. Five million Klansmen, my brothers and sisters, but behind them wives and children, families, fellow citizens IN SUPPORT OF THE KLAN AND THE KLAN’S AVOWAL TO DESTROY THE NEGRO. Five million Klansmen, my brothers and sisters, and not yet one million Negroes in support of Prince Elihu WHO PREACHES RACE SALVATION AND AFRICA GLORIFIED. In Beaumont, Texas, where a twenty-two-year-old Negro named Willie Shelton was tied with barbed wire and dragged from the bumper of an automobile UNTIL SCREAMING IN AGONY HE DIED not five months ago to this day there is A KLANSMAN MAYOR . . .
A KLANSMAN DISTRICT ATTORNEY . . . A KLANSMAN EPISCOPAL MINISTER . . . AS WELL AS MANY THOUSANDS OF KLANSMEN AMONG ALL SOCIAL CLASSES . . . and no justice for Negroes: NO JUSTICE TO FOLLOW. And when Dale Scoggins was murdered in March 1926 in Bowman, Georgia, begging for his life, screaming and struggling in terror, fed in unspeakable agony through a rock grinder TO THE CHEERS AND ANIMAL DELIGHT OF MORE THAN ONE HUNDRED WHITE MEN AND A SCATTERING OF WHITE WOMEN was justice to follow: Is justice ever to follow? A KLANSMAN GOVERNOR OF GEORGIA . . . A KLANSMAN STATE ATTORNEY GENERAL . . . A KLANSMAN SUPREME COURT . . . A KLANSMAN COUNTY PROSECUTOR . . . A KLANSMAN SHERIFF: each and every one of them dedicated to NEGRO ANNIHILATION.

  While Prince Elihu is dedicated to NEGRO SALVATION; and AFRICA RECLAIMED.

  While Prince Elihu cries aloud the TRUTH THAT CANNOT BE DENIED: THE NEGRO’S LOVE OF AMERICA HAS NOT BEEN RETURNED.

  For the Democracy of America, for all dark-skinned races, DOES NOT EXIST; AND HAS NEVER EXISTED.

  And those Negroes who believe that it has, or will, ARE SELF-DECEIVED VICTIMS.

  For the Communists, Socialists, and their kind, who promise equality of the races in the class struggle, deliberately lie in declaring that THE VERY WORKINGMAN WHO BELONGS TO THE KU KLUX KLAN WILL BE YOUR BROTHER; and the Christians who preach of love, and charity, and the redemption of sin, and forgiveness of enemies, and the reward of Heaven, deliberately lie in exhorting that CHRISTIANITY IS A BLACK FAITH: FOR IT IS NOT: IT IS BUT A SNARE AND A DELUSION: THE MOST CYNICAL OF GAMES.

  For, only consider, in this Christian nation, in the decade following the War: the systematic reversal of government policies on the hiring of Negroes for civil service positions, public teaching positions, etc., BY SPECIFIC ORDER OF THE RACIST WOODROW WILSON. And this, after numberless speeches by Wilson and his fellow Democrats promising reform and equality of rights IF THE NEGRO WILL BUT SUPPORT THE WAR AND ENLIST IN THE ARMY (WHERE THE ARMY WOULD HAVE HIM). For the Negro’s love of America has not been returned. For all white men are our enemies, then and now. FOR AMERICA, FOR US, HAS NEVER EXISTED.