by Hilton Als
In writing this, I have become a cliché, another colored person writing about a nigger’s life. So doing, I’m feeding, somewhat, into what the essayist George W.S. Trow has called “white euphoria,” which is defined by white people exercising their largesse in my face as they say, Tell me about yourself, meaning, Tell me how you’ve suffered. Isn’t that what you people do? Suffer nobly, even poetically sometimes? Doesn’t suffering define you? I hate seeing this, and yet it is what I am meant to write, since I accepted the assignment, am “of the good,” and want to know why these pictures, let alone events, have caused me pain. I don’t know many people who wouldn’t feel like a nigger looking at these pictures, all fucked up and hurt, killed by eyes and hands that can’t stand yours. I want to bow out of this nigger feeling. I resent these pictures making me feel anything at all. For a long time, I avoided being the black guy, that is, being black-identified. Back then, I felt that adopting black nationalism would limit my world, my worldview. Now I know from experience that the world has been limited for me by people who see me as a nigger, very much in the way the dead eyes and flashbulb smiles of these photographs say: See what we do to the niggers! They are the fear and hatred in ourselves, murdered! Killed! All of this is painful and American. Language makes it trite, somehow. I will never write from this niggerish point of view again. This is my farewell. I mean to be courtly and grand. No gold watch is necessary as I bow out of the nigger business.
In my life as a city dweller, I have crossed dark nighttime streets so as not to make the white woman walking in front of me feel fear. I have deliberately not come up behind a neighbor opening the door to our apartment building, so as not to make him feel what colored people make him feel: robbed, violated, somehow. I have been arrested on my way to school, accused of truancy. Once, when I was coming out of a restaurant with a friend, four or five cops pinned me to a wall, pointed guns at my head, I looked just like someone else. This is not to be confused with the time I sat with the same friend in his car, chatting, me in the backseat leaning over my friend’s shoulder, and suddenly the car was flooded with white lights, police lights, and the lights on the hoods of their cars were turned on, and five or six cops, guns out of their holsters and pointed at me, were ordering me to get out of the car. We thought you were a carjacker, they said, as I stood in that white light which always reminds me of movie premiere lights, you know, where people look like all-dressed-up shadows as those lights hit them, getting out of their cars?
This is what makes me feel niggerish, I’m afraid: being watched. I go to parties with white people. Invariably, one of them will make a comment about my size. They say, We’d know you anywhere, you’re so big! I mean, you’re so distinctive!, when they mean something else altogether, perhaps this: We have been watching you become what our collective imagination says you are: big and black—niggerish—and so therefore what? Whatever. As long as it can be lynched, eventually.
Once or twice I thought I might actually get killed in my New York of cops and very little safety—a nigger casualty, not unlike the brilliant Negro short-story writer and poet, Henry Dumas, who was shot and killed in a subway station in Harlem, another case of “mistaken identity” in a colored village? He was thirty-three years old when he was killed in 1968, and had written at least one short story that I consider a masterpiece, “Ark of Bones,” a story made distinct by the number of lynchings that fill the air without being explicitly referred to. All those colored tragedies, even before you’ve had a chance to grow up, Dumas seems to say in this tale of two boys who are ignorant of their history, and then not. That is their rite of colored male passage: having to drag all those lynchings around with them, around their necks: those are their ancestors. Too bad when violent deaths define who you are. Here’s a little of the narrator, Fish, and his voice, which is all he has: “Headeye, he was followin’ me,” Fish begins. “I knowed he was followin’ me. But I just keep goin’, like I wasn’t payin’ him no mind.” What Headeye and Fish eventually see, walking through a wood where maybe a cousin was lynched, maybe not, is an ark floating on a river. The ark is filled with the bones of their black ancestors. The ark carrying those bruised bones is “consecrated” ground, but it is divine ground that can never settle, since its home is a stream. Those bones keep moving, like the dead nigger on these pages. Every time you turn a page, they move.
But back to the idea of being watched—primarily—by white editors and being lynched by eyes. What I mean is that so much care, so much care, is taken not to scare white people simply with my existence, and it’s as if they don’t want to deal with the care, either. It makes their seeing me as a nigger even more complicated. I know many, many colored people who exercise a similar sensitivity where white people are concerned, anything to avoid being lynched by their tongues or eyes. Certain colored people want to lynch you, too. They are competitive, usually, and stupid people who believe that if they work hard and sell out they can be just like most white people and hate niggers even more than they do since they “know” them. Those colored people are, in some ways, worse than white people, since they imagine that they are the sometimes-lynched class, as opposed to the always lynched. Fact is, if you are even halfway colored and male in America, the dead heads hanging from the trees in these pictures, and the dead eyes or grins surrounding them, it’s not too hard to imagine how this is your life, too. You can feel it every time you cross the street to avoid worrying a white woman to death or false accusations of rape, or every time your car breaks down anywhere in America, and you see signs about Jesus, and white people everywhere and your heart begins to race, and your skin becomes clammy, and the perspiration sticks to your flesh, just like Brock Peters in the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird, where he’s on trial for maybe “interfering” with a white woman; it’s her word against his but her word was weight, like the dead weight of a dead lynched body.
Once you’re strung up, as they say in The Ox-Bow Incident, or maybe the Maureen O’Hara version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, or maybe in In Cold Blood, or once they’ve fixed a pain in the neck for you, as they say in His Girl Friday (all these movies have lynchings in them, or make reference to lynchings), once that’s happened, what happens to your body? Did the families in these pictures stand at the periphery and wait for it all to be over, when someone, maybe the youngest among them, could climb the tree and cut Cousin or Mother or Father down? It’s hard to see if any of the lynched have anything but rope and eyes staring at them in these pictures. When they were lynched their humanity was taken from them, so why not their families? They have no names in these pictures—maybe addresses, I don’t know, since I couldn’t look past the pictures, really. What difference would it have made to get the facts of any of these lives, colored or white, right? Don’t we want this story to go away?
I’m ashamed that I couldn’t get into the history of these people. I saw these pictures through a strange light that my mind put up to obscure what I saw when I looked at all these dead niggers, their bodies reshaped by tragedy. I think the white light I saw was the white light those cops put on me. If you look at any number of old newsreel pictures taken at the big Hollywood premieres held at the Pantages, or Grauman’s Chinese, in the nineteen thirties, forties, or fifties, some of the guests walking past the movie lights—klieg lights—look like shadowy half people trying to fill their suits or dresses. People as penumbrae. That’s the light I saw when I looked at these pictures; it made the people in the pictures look less real. When I thought of that white light, I thought of my introduction to the South, where many of these niggers were killed: it was sitting in a darkened movie theater with my mother and little brother, watching the revival of Gone With the Wind, which some people called GWTW. We ignored the pitiful colored people in the film because we wanted to enjoy ourselves, and in Margaret Mitchell’s revisionist tale of the South, Vivien Leigh was so pretty. We couldn’t think of those dumb niggers hanging from the trees in some field or another in Atlanta, or outside of it
, even though we knew about that by then, I’m sure we did, though I don’t think I’d heard Billie Holiday sing “Strange Fruit,” about all those black bodies swinging in the Southern trees. At any rate, I didn’t like Billie Holiday for a long time: her voice didn’t make sense to me, nor did those black bodies, nothing so terrible was ever going to happen to me in Brooklyn, where I was considered cute and knew I would live forever. The world was going to love me forever. Whites and blacks. I could make them love me, just as Vivien Leigh made so many men fall in love with her before the fall of Atlanta, in a movie that came out around the time Billie Holiday was singing “Strange Fruit,” and perhaps that’s an interesting thing to try now, watching GWTW to the sound of Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit.” See her black bodies and weariness smeared all over Vivien Leigh’s beautiful face, and Hattie McDaniel’s—at times—calculated, inflexible one.
Sitting in the movie theater, watching GWTW for the first time, I was in love with Vivien Leigh and not all those niggers, the most hateful among them being a brown-faced, oily-skinned carpetbagger who looks at our Vivien Leigh with some kind of lust and disgust. I hated him then because he intruded on the beautiful pink world. Leigh’s girlishness could have smothered me; I would have made her forget that I was colored and that she could lynch me if she wanted to because I knew I could make her love me. But how do you get people to ignore their history? I never thought of those things when I had love on my mind.
In the middle of the movie, Vivien Leigh as Scarlett suffers, and says she will never suffer again, and I loved her so much I didn’t want her to suffer. As I grew up, I retained that feeling toward women who looked like my first movie star love: I didn’t want them to suffer, even though they, like Vivien Leigh as Scarlett, could lynch a nigger to pay for all their hardship: God didn’t make people of her class and wealth and race to suffer. For sure, Scarlett, in real life, might have lynched a nigger in order to make that person pay for all the inexplicable pain she had gone through and eventually come out the other side of, a much better person. After that, her world might have looked different.
PHILOSOPHER OR DOG?
I SHOULD LIKE so much to begin with an idea, would you mind? This idea—it concerns the definition of one or two words. Some words—they are defined by the exigencies of time, right? And generally words defined by their epoch become very stupid words. The words currently defining our epoch are otherness and difference. Appropriate definitions of these words are “beside the point” and “never mind.” Those definitions—they must stick. And why? Because writers of a color who find their expression—so called—in their “otherness” and “difference” do so in a manner comfortable to the legions who buy their work not to read it, oh no, but because these writers confirm the nonideas stupid people assume about otherness and difference—two words that define privilege in the epoch of some.
If pressed by the thumb of thought, where does the idea of this otherness and difference come from? It is an acquired habit really. One learns it in infancy, sitting on the knee of someone—perhaps Mom—who may not be unlike oneself in a respect: her appearance. Appearances speak not of themselves but of preceding generations and the haunting of each subsequent one with: Because I appear not unlike you, we are each other. What folly! The belief that the dimensions of some mother’s mask, say, fitting—becoming—one’s physiognomy is oneself. What manipulation! To appropriate her mask of a different sex—if you are a boy—a different generation—if you are a child—so experientially different—if you are a person—because experience is an awful thing. Truly, who “loves” it? In order not to have it—experience—we do a number of things, chief among them speaking to stupid people who cannot possibly understand us. How slimily we creep toward them—on our bellies, masks intact, the better to make our way toward the inconvenient places their ignorant experience hides—in their armpit, in their speech, in their sex, the last being, for many, experience in toto.
The cowardly experience described previously—applying that mother’s mask, say, to protect oneself. How easily this is done! How easily this is done! We apply her mask to get us through a world we do not understand wherein we embrace the experience of people who cannot understand us. We accomplish this brand of retarded experience by nursing her words through the tit of her experience. Are we less lonely because of it? In X situation, Mother does exactly as I would have done. Mother says. And I am so much like her, et cetera. What if all this was simply untrue? What if one were to remove oneself from the lap of comfort—the comfort of identification with Mom? It is never done. One fears the isolation of one’s own language so much one upholsters Mom and others like her in the blind fabric of others-like-myself.
These others like myself. What does their mask of piety yield? For those who write but do not care to dissect the mask—let alone its expression of piety—it yields a career. This career is celebrated by very stupid people who define an epoch with one or two words. Their entire world comprises one or two words—in it they support writers of a color who do not challenge their privilege by writing against it. These writers are limited to becoming those one or two words—other and different. What can this mean? It does not mean writing. These writers are killed by stupid people and their acceptance. Their acceptance is a form of control, as it has always been, and for generations.
When these writers of a color are embraced—it is wrong. The world is too quick to celebrate their wearing of the mask of piety, behind which they sit, writing nothing. These writers of a color often center on the figure of Mom, say, as a symbol of piety—she of an oppressed race, depressed sex, and the bad men who didn’t love her and how meek and self-sacrificing she was and what shape her mask of piety took and just how big her lap was—which the child, the writer, knew the measure of because of crapping in it. Once Mom is crapped upon, she is never wondered about or cared for again because she’s beside the point, she’s Mom and a symbol of all one would like to get away from in this common world. Which is one reason a career as an author, and authorship, is crazily struggled for in the first place: to get away from all the true and infinitely more horrible stories Mom could tell about how she came to wear the mask of piety in the first place. The mask of piety—it is the one thing standing between her children and death. Yes sir, yes ma’am, she says from behind the mask. And, with eyes lowered, Please, sir, do not kill my children. And with breasts exposed, We will not take too much. And in the bile of a tearful farewell: Children, please do not reach toward the world that despises you because it despises me.
Regardless of what Mother says, everyone reaches toward the world, everyone, and when it burns the only thing standing between you and this burning death is the idea of others like myself—a wall that protects. Writers of a color write stupidly on this wall of race for the approval of very stupid people who, in granting their approval, may decide not to kill you. If these stupid people decide not to kill you, something must be compromised, given up. Generally, what is compromised is one’s voice. That voice—it is all a writer has. Stupid people do not ask to claim this voice outright—one way in which they are not stupid. They acquire it slowly: at drinking parties and over the telephone to discuss the drinking party of the night before and at dinner and the walk following dinner under the glare of gossip dinner chat generates, and in the feigned intimacy of shared experience. That experience—it is found in the armpit and has been described at length before. It is so dreary, the scenario people of a color follow as they live an experience they believe to be intimate. This experience generally amounts to: Let me wear the mask of my mother, the mask of piety, generosity, and forbearance, for you. The “you” to whom all this is addressed—it is almost never to another person of a color. That would be too much. If the mask of piety were understood, one would be forced to speak from behind it, and the fake piety, generosity, and forbearance one has used to get what one needs: feigned intimacy, the armpit not of a color.
Perhaps Mom knows all of this. What Mom knows:
in reaching toward the world, her child of a color will eventually have to wear the mask of piety, too. What Mom knows: very stupid people look upon this mask with affection, especially as it stutters: Yes, sir, Yes, ma’am. This bowing down—it is so familiar and colored one kills oneself in it, speaking to people who cannot understand us, hoping they are not colored beneath all that ignorance.
Does Mom protect and nurture this child so that the child remains “open” to experience? Or to a career? Or to fill her lap? In the end, no one can say, but I should like to so much anyway: What Mom wants is for her child’s life not to be loveless and to have some fortitude and be capable of calling a thing stupid if it is so, not behind a mask, oh no, and without fear of death.
But I digress.
Past the ostensible subject, Mrs. Louise Little.
In writing “Mrs. Louise Little,” I digress even further. For in writing her name do you not see my intention? To become a writer of a color complicit with another—Malcolm X—who will compromise any understanding of her for a career. This career—it is a handful of dust in the end. One may fixate on it as if it were not. Presumably this career safeguards one from having to regard one’s face and the mask behind it, which reveals, truly, what is in the mind and the quality of what is in the mind. When this mask cracks—underneath it, that is writing. How rarely does that happen? Is The Autobiography of Malcolm X on Mrs. Little writing? “My mother, who was born in Grenada, in the British West Indies, looked like a white woman. Her father was white. She had straight black hair, and her accent did not sound like a Negro’s.” What beauty in the sentence “She had straight black hair, and her accent did not sound like a Negro’s”! Enough beauty undoubtedly to provoke nonthought in the mind of very stupid people: no complexity whatsoever, just Mom as the symbol of her son’s career-to-be: reverence of people not of a color.