I still don’t even know if the sheriff will let me see him. And suppose he did; what then? What do I say to him? Do I know what a man is? Do I know how a man is supposed to die? I’m still trying to find out how a man should live. Am I supposed to tell someone how to die who has never lived?
Now, about that mulatto teacher and me. There was no love there for each other. There was not even respect. We were enemies if anything. He hated me, and I knew it, and he knew I knew it. I didn’t like him, but I needed him, needed him to tell me something that none of the others could or would.
I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.
I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to say something about home.
I write with as much objectivity as I can.
The sharecropper may lower his eyes, but not because he’s less of a man. That’s just a condition of society that such things exist.
Today I must write a paragraph or a page better than I did yesterday.
What I miss today more than anything else – I don’t go to church as much anymore – but that old-time religion, that old singing, that old praying which I love so much. That is the great strength of my being, of my writing.
When I’m sitting in the church alone, I can hear singing of the old people. I can hear their singing and I can hear their praying, and sometimes I hum one of their songs.
If I were to give one piece of advice, I would say to never accept anything that you hear or see at face value. As a general rule of thumb, then the more you question, the better.
How do people come up with a date and a time to take life from another man? Who made them God?
I knew I wanted to be a writer and I knew if I had a wife and family, I would neglect something, and I was afraid it wouldn’t be the writing.
We looked at each other, and I could see in those big reddened eyes that he was not going to scream. He was full of anger – and who could blame him? – but he was no fool. He needed me, and he wanted me here, if only to insult me.
I had to see and feel and be with the thing that I wanted to write about.
In all my stories and novels, no one ever escapes Louisiana. Maybe that is because my soul never left Louisiana, although my body did go to California.
I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn’t novel.
A myth is an old lie that people believe in. White people believe that they’re better than anyone else on earth – and that’s a myth.
Only when the mind is free has the body a chance to be free. Yes, they must believe, they must believe. Because I know what it means to be a slave. I am a slave.
I want you to show them the difference between what they think you are and what you can be.
I have no more to say except this: We must live with our own conscience.