It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.
I don’t give a damn if there’s any hope for them or not. But I know that I am not about to be bugged by any more white jokers who still can’t figure out whether I’m human or not. If they don’t know, baby, sad on them, and I hope they drop dead slowly, in great pain.
Her long narrow eyes darkened with whatever it was they were beginning to see.
Hope? The word seemed to bang from wall to wall. Hope? No, I don’t think there’s any hope. We’re too empty here... She touched her heart. This isn’t a country at all, it’s a collection of football players and Eagle Scouts. Cowards. We think we’re happy. We’re not. We’re doomed.
The fear that I heard in my father’s voice... when he realized that I really believed I could do, anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down the stairs or strayed too far from the house. It was another fear, a far that the child, in challenging the white world’s assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction.
Well, I may or may not be bitter, but if I were I would have good reasons for it: chief among them that American blindness, or cowardice, which allows us to pretend that life presents no reasons for being bitter.
It was as though I were yelling up to Heaven and Heaven would not hear me. And if Heaven would not hear me- to wash me, to make me clean- then utter disaster was my portion.
I wish I had heard him more clearly: an oblique confession is always a plea.
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others. One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion. This energy is all that one finds in the rubble of vanished civilizations, and the only hope for ours.
My novel’s about Brooklyn.” “The tree? Or the kids or the murderers or the junkies?” Vivaldo swallowed. “All of them.” “That’s quite an assignment. And if you don’t mind my saying so, it sounds just a little bit old fashioned.” He put his hand before his mouth and burped. “Brooklyn’s been done. And done.
It was another fear, a fear that the child, in challenging the white world’s assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction.
Folks can change their ways much as they want to. But I don’t care how many times you change your ways, what’s in you is in you, and it’s got to come out.
So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next – one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next.
The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.
The sunlight came into the room with the peacefulness one remembers from rooms in one’s early childhood – a sunlight encountered later only in one’s dreams.
White people were, and are, astounded by the holocaust in Germany. They did not know that they could act that way. But I very much doubt whether black people were astounded – at least, in the same way.
Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.
The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope and I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet, as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.
Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him – he may be forced to – but nothing will efface his origins, the marks of which he carries with him everywhere. I think it is important to know this and even find it a matter for rejoicing, as the strongest people do, regardless of their station. On this acceptance, literally, the life of a writer depends.
You might feel different out there, with all the sunshine and oranges and all.