I RECEIVED A QUESTIONNAIRE the other day—democracy prides itself on its questionnaires, just as it is endlessly confirmed and misled by its public opinion polls—and the first question was “Why do you continue to write?” Writers do not like this question, which they hear as “Why do you continue to breathe?” but sometimes one can almost answer it by pointing to the work of another writer. There! one says, triumphantly. Look! That’s what it’s about—to make one see—to lead us back to reality again.
The streets, tenements, fire escapes, the elders, and the urgent concerns of childhood—or, rather, the helpless intensity of anguish with which one watches one’s childhood disappear—are rendered very vividly indeed by Louise Meriwether, in her first novel, Daddy Was a Number Runner. We have seen this life from the point of view of a black boy growing into a menaced and probably brief manhood; I don’t know that we have ever seen it from the point of view of a black girl on the edge of a terrifying womanhood. And the metaphor for this growing apprehension of the iron and insurmountable rigors of one’s life are here conveyed by that game known in Harlem as the numbers, the game which contains the possibility of making a “hit”—the American dream in blackface, Horatio Alger revealed, the American success story with the price tag showing! Compare the heroine of this book—to say nothing of the landscape—with the heroine of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and you will see to what extent poverty wears a color—and also, as we put it in Harlem, arrives at an attitude. By this time, the heroine of Tree (whose name was also Francie, if I remember correctly) is among those troubled Americans, that silent (!) majority which wonders what black Francie wants, and why she’s so unreliable as a maid.
Shit, says Francie, sitting on the stoop as the book ends, looking outward at the land of the free, and trying, with one thin bony black hand, to stem the blood which is beginning to rush from a nearly mortal wound. That monosyllable resounds all over this country, all over the world: it is a judgment on this civilization rendered the more implacable by being delivered by a child. The mortal wound is not physical; the book, so far from being a melodrama, is very brilliantly understated. The wound is the wound made upon the recognition that one is regarded as a worthless human being, and, further, in the case of this particular black girl, upon the recognition that the men, one’s only hope, have also been cut down and cannot save you. Louise Meriwether wisely ends her book before confronting us with what it means to “jump the broomstick!”—to have a black man and a black woman jump over a broomstick is the way slave masters laughingly married their slaves to each other, those same white people who now complain that black people have no morals. At the heart of this book, which gives it its force, is a child’s growing sense of being one of the victims of a collective rape—for history, and especially and emphatically in the black-white arena, is not the past, it is the present. The great, vast, public, historical violation is also the present, private, unendurable insult, and the mighty force of these unnoticed violations spells doom for any civilization which pretends that the violations are not occurring or that they do not matter or that tomorrow is a lovely day. People cannot be—and, finally, will not be—treated in this way. This book should be sent to the White House, and to our earnest attorney general, and to everyone in this country able to read—which may, however, alas, be a most despairing statement. We love—the white Americans, I mean—the notion of the little woman behind the great man: perhaps one day, Louise Meriwether will give us her version of What Every Woman Knows.
Until that hoped-for hour, because she has so truthfully conveyed what the world looks like from a black girl’s point of view, she has told everyone who can read or feel what it means to be a black man or woman in this country. She has achieved an assessment, in a deliberately minor key, of a major tragedy. It is a considerable achievement, and I hope she simply keeps on keeping on.
(1970)