Mind of an Outlaw

by Norman Mailer

  But I will always have love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets. And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war. When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever. Because he never had the ability most bullfighters, like most artists, possess to be false with their art, tasty yet phony, he taught something about life with every move he made, including the paradox that courage can be found in men whose conflict is caught between their ambition and their cowardice. He even taught me how to look for form in other places. Do you see the curve of a beautiful breast? It is not necessarily a gift of God—it may be the record life left on a lady of the balance of forces between her desire, her modesty, her ambition, her timidity, her maternity, and her sense of an impulse which cannot be denied. So go through the pictures which follow. If we were wise enough, bold enough, and scholars from head to motorcyclist’s boot, we could extract the real history of Europe from the forms elucidated between man and beast in the sequences soon to be glimpsed beneath your hand, torero de salon!

  Black Power

  (1968)

  ALLOW A SYMPOSIAST to quote from himself. The following is out of a new book called The Armies of the Night.

  Not for little humor had Negroes developed that odd humorless crack in their personality which cracked each other into laughter, playing on one side an odd mad practical black man who could be anything, wise chauffeur, drunken butler, young money-mad Pullman porter, Negro college graduate selling insurance—the other half was sheer psychopath, rocks in the ice cube, pocket oiled for the switchblade, I’ll kill you Whitey, burn baby, all tuned to a cool. These Blacks moved through the New Left with a physical indifference to the bodies about them, as if ten Blacks could handle any hundred of these flaccid Whites, and they signaled to each other across the aisles, and talked in quick idioms and out, an English not comprehensible to any ear which knew nothing of the separate meanings of the same word at separate pitch (Maoists not for nothing these Blacks!) their hair carefully brushed out in every direction like African guerrillas or huge radar stations on some lonely isle, they seemed to communicate with one another in ten dozen modes, with fingers like deaf and dumb, with feet, with their stance, by the flick of their long wrist, with the radar of their hair, the smoke of their will, the glide of their passage, by a laugh, a nod, a disembodied gesture, through mediums, seeming to speak through silent mediums among them who never gave hint to a sign. In the apathy which had begun to lie over the crowd as the speeches went on and on (and the huge army gathered by music, now was ground down by words, and the hollow absurd imprecatory thunder of the loudspeakers with their reductive echo—you must FIGHT … fight … fight … fite … ite …, in the soul-killing repetition of political jargon which reminded people that the day was well past one o’clock and they still had not started), the Blacks in the roped-in area about the speaker’s stand were the only sign of active conspiracy, they were up to some collective expression of disdain, something to symbolize their detestation of the White Left—yes, the observer was to brood on it much of the next day when he learned without great surprise that almost all of the Negroes had left to make their own demonstration in another part of Washington, their announcement to the press underlining their reluctance to use their bodies in a White War. That was comprehensible enough. If the Negroes were at the Pentagon and did not preempt the front rank, they would lose face as fighters; if they were too numerous on the line, they would be beaten half to death. That was the ostensible reason they did not go, but the observer wondered if he saw a better.

  There is an old tendency among writers of the Left when apologists for one indigestible new convulsion or another—they go in for a species of calculated reduction which attempts to introduce comfortable proportions into historic phenomena which are barbaric, heroic, monstrous, epic, and/or apocalyptic. (New Republic and Nation writers please stand!) So we may remember there was never much of a famine in the Ukraine, just various local dislocations of distribution; never real Moscow trials, rather the sort of predictable changing of the guard which accompanies virile epochs of history. The American labor unions were never really in danger of leaving the Left, just being led down the garden path by unscrupulous but limited leadership. Et cetera. So forth.

  Now, Black Power. We are bound to hear before we are done that Black Power is merely a long-due corrective for premature and administratively betrayed efforts at integration—an indispensable period of self-development which will result in future integrations at a real level.

  Like all such Left perspectives, it is wishful, pretty, programmatic, manipulable by jargon, and utterly stripped of that existential content which is indispensable to comprehending the first thing about Black Power.

  The first thing to say, pretty or no, is that the Negro (that is the active volatile cadres of every militant Negro movement, SNCC, Black Muslims, etc., plus those millions of latently rebellious black masses behind them—which is what we will refer to when we speak of the Negro), yes, this Negro does not want equality any longer, he wants superiority, and wants it because he feels he is in fact superior. And there is some justice on his side for believing it. Sufficiently fortunate to be alienated from the benefits of American civilization, the Negro seems to have been better able to keep his health. It would take a liberal with a psychotic sense of moderation to claim that whites and Negroes have equally healthy bodies; the Negroes know they have become on the average physically superior, and this against all the logic of America’s medical civilization—the Negroes get less good food ostensibly, no vitamins, a paucity of antibiotics, less medical care, less fresh air, less light and sanitation in living quarters. Let us quit the list—it is parallel to another list one could make of educational opportunities vs. actual culture (which is to say—real awareness of one’s milieu). The Negro’s relatively low rate of literacy seems to be in inverse relation to his philosophical capacity to have a comprehensive vision of his life, a large remark whose only support is existential—let us brood, brothers, on the superior cool of the Negro in public places. For the cool comes from a comprehensive vision, a relaxation before the dangers of life, a readiness to meet death, philosophy or amusement at any turn.

  Commend us, while we are on lists, to the ability of the Negro to police himself, as opposed to the ability of the White to police others. At the Civil Rights March on Washington in 1963 with over a hundred thousand Negroes in town, no episodes of violence were reported—in the riots in the years which followed, fascinating patterns of cooperation among the rioters emerge. One may look, as government commissions do, for patterns of a plot; or one may do better to entertain the real possibility that the Negroes have psychic powers of mass impromptu collaboration which are mysterious, and by that measure, superior to the White.

  What the Negro may have decided at this point, as Black Power emerges, is that he has gotten the worst and the least of civilization, and yet has been able to engage life more intensely. It is as if the cells of his body now know more than the white man—so his future potentiality is greater. Whether this is true, half true, or a species of madness is beyond anyone’s capacity to know in this year, but the psychological reality is that breaking through his feelings of vast inferiority, a feeling of vast superiority is beginning to arise in the black man, and the antennae of this superiority lead not to developing the Negro to a point where he can live effectively as an equal in white society, but rather toward developing a viable modern culture of his own, a new kind of civilization. This is the real and natural intent of Black Power; not to get better schools, but to find a way to educate their own out of textbooks not yet written; not to get fair treatment from the police, but grapple instead with the incommensurable problem of policing one’s own society—what will black
justice be? Ergo, not to get a fair share of hospitals, but an opportunity to explore black medicine, herbs in place of antibiotics, witchcraft for cancer cures, surgical grace with the knife in preference to heart transfers. In parallel: not to get into unions, but to discover—it is far off in the distance—black notions of labor, cooperation, and the viability of Hip in production methods; not housing projects, but a new way to build houses; not shuttle planes, but gliders; not computers—rather psychic inductions.

  Black Power moves then, obviously, against the technological society. Since the Negro has never been able to absorb a technological culture with success, even reacting against it with instinctive pain and distrust, he is now in this oncoming epoch of automation, going to be removed from the technological society anyway. His only salvation, short of becoming a city brigand or a government beggar, is to build his own society out of his own culture, own means, own horror, own genius. Or own heroic, tragic, or evil possibilities. For there is no need to assume that the black man will prove morally superior to the white man. Schooled in treachery, steeped in centuries of white bile, there are avalanches and cataracts of violence, destruction, inchoate rage and promiscuous waste to be encountered—there is well a question whether he can build his own society at all, so perverse are the conduits of his crossed emotions by now. But the irony is that the White would do well to hope the Black can build a world, for those well-ordered epochs of capitalism which flushed the white wastes down into the black heart are gone—the pipes of civilization are backing up. The irony is that we may even yet need a black vision of existence if civilization is to survive the death chamber it has built for itself. So let us at least recognize the real ground of Black Power—it is ambitious, beautiful, awesome, terrifying, and has to do with nothing so much as the most important questions of us all—What is man? Why are we here? Will we survive?

  Looking for the Meat and Potatoes—Thoughts on Black Power

  (1969)

  “You don’t even know who you are,” Reginald had said. “You don’t even know, the white devil has hidden it from you, that you are of a race of people of ancient civilizations, and riches in gold and kings. You don’t even know your true family name, you wouldn’t recognize your true language if you heard it. You have been cut off by the devil white man from all true knowledge of your own kind. You have been a victim of the evil of the devil white man ever since he murdered and raped and stole you from your native land in the seeds of your forefathers.”

  —The Autobiography of Malcolm X

  IN NOT TOO MANY YEARS, we will travel to the moon, and on the trip, the language will be familiar. We have not had our education for nothing—all those sanitized hours of orientation via high school, commercials, corporations, and mass media have given us one expectation: no matter how beautiful, insane, dangerous, sacrilegious, explosive, holy, or damned a new venture may be, count on it, fellow Americans, the language will be familiar. Are you going in for a serious operation, voting on the political future of the country, buying insurance, discussing nuclear disarmament, or taking a trip to the moon? You can depend on the one great American certainty—the public vocabulary of the discussion will suggest the same relation to the resources of the English language that a loaf of big-bakery bread in plastic bag and wax bears to the secret heart of wheat and butter and eggs and yeast.

  Your trip to the moon will not deal needlessly with the vibrations of the heavens (now that man dares to enter eschatology) nor the metaphysical rifts in the philosophical firmament; no poets will pluck a stringed instrument to conjure with the pale shades of the white lady as you move along toward the lunar space. Rather, a voice will emerge from the loudspeaker, “This is your pilot. On our starboard bow at four o’clock directly below, you can pick out a little doojigger of land down there like a vermiform appendix, and that, as we say goodbye to the Pacific Coast, is Baja California. The spot of light at the nub, that little bitty illumination like the probe bulb in a cystoscope or comparable medical instrument, is Ensenada, which the guidebooks call a jeweled resort.”

  Goodbye to earth, hello the moon! We will skip the technological dividend in the navigator’s voice as he delivers us to that space station which will probably look like a breeding between a modern convention hall and the computer room at CBS. Plus the packaged air in the space suits when the tourists, after two days of acclimation in air-sealed moon motels, take their first reconnoiter outside in the white moon dust while their good American bowels accommodate to relative weightlessness.

  All right, bright fellow, the reader now may say—what does all this have to do with Black Power? And the author, while adept at dancing in the interstices of a metaphor, is going to come back nonetheless straight and fast with this remark—our American mass-media language is not any more equipped to get into a discussion of Black Power than it is ready to serve as interpreter en route to the moon. The American language has become a conveyer belt to carry each new American generation into its ordained position in the American scene, which is to say the corporate technological world. It can deal with external descriptions of everything which enters or leaves a man, it can measure the movements of that man, it can predict until such moment as it is wrong what the man will do next, but it cannot give a spiritual preparation for our trip to the moon any more than it can talk to us about death, or the inner experiences of real sex, real danger, real dread. Or Black Power.

  If the preface has not been amusing, cease at once to read, for what follows will be worse: the technological American is programmed to live with answers, which is why his trip to the moon will be needlessly god-awful; the subject of Black Power opens nothing but questions, precisely those unendurable questions which speak of premature awakenings and the hour of the wolf. But let us start with something comfortable, something we all know, and may encounter with relaxation, for the matter is familiar:

  think of that black slave man filled with fear and dread, hearing the screams of his wife, his mother, his daughter being taken—in the barn, the kitchen, in the bushes! … Think of hearing wives, mothers, daughters, being raped! And you were too filled with fear of the rapist to do anything about it! … Turn around and look at each other, brothers and sisters, and think of this! You and me, polluted all these colors—and this devil has the arrogance and the gall to think we, his victims should love him!

  —The Autobiography of Malcolm X

  “Okay,” you say, “I know that, I know that already. I didn’t do it. My great-grandfather didn’t even do it. He was a crazy Swede. He never even saw a black skin. And now for Chrissake, the girls in Sweden are crazy about Floyd Patterson. I don’t care. I say more power to him. All right,” goes the dialogue of this splendid American now holding up a hand, “all right, I know about collective responsibility. If some Scotch-Irish planter wanted to tomcat in the magnolias, then I’ll agree it’s easier for me than for the victim to discern subtle differences between one kind of WASP and another, I’ll buy my part of the ancestral curse for that Scotch-Irish stud’s particular night of pleasure, maybe I’m guilty of something myself, but there are limits, man. All right, we never gave the Negro a fair chance, and now we want to, we’re willing to put up with a reasonable amount of disadvantage, in fact, discomfort, outright inequality and inefficiency. I’ll hire Negroes who are not as equipped in the productive scheme of things as whites; that doesn’t mean we have to pay iota for iota on every endless misdemeanor of the past and suffer a vomit bag of bad manners to boot. Look, every student of revolution can tell you that the danger comes from giving the oppressed their first liberties. A poor man who wins a crazy bet always squanders it. The point, buddy, is that the present must forgive the past, there must be forgiveness for old sins, or else progress is impossible.” And there is the key to the first door: progress depends upon anesthetizing the past. What if, says Black Power, we are not interested in progress, not your progress with packaged food for soul food, smog for air, hypodermics for roots, air-conditioning for breeze—wh
at if we think we have gotten strong by living without progress and your social engineering, what if we think an insult to the blood is never to be forgotten because it keeps your life alive and reminds you to meditate before you urinate. Who are you to say that spooks don’t live behind the left ear and ha’nts behind the right? Whitey, you smoke so much you can’t smell, taste, or kiss—your breath is too bad. If you don’t have a gun, I can poke you and run—you’ll never catch me. I’m alive ’cause I keep alive the curse you put in my blood. Primitive people don’t forget. If they do, they turn out no better than the civilized and the sick. Who are you, Whitey, to tell me to drop my curse, and join your line of traffic going to work? I’d rather keep myself in shape and work out the curse, natural style. There’s always white women, ahem! Unless we decide they’re too full of your devil’s disease, hypocritical pus-filled old white blood, and so we stay black with black, and repay the curse by drawing blood. That’s the life-giving way to repay a curse.”

  “Why must you talk this way?” says the splendid American. “Can’t you see that there are white and whites, whites I do not begin to control? They wish to destroy you. They agree with your values. They are primitive whites. They think in blood for blood. In a war, they will kill you, and they will kill me.”