I CONSIDER IT A TRIBUTE to Warren Miller, whose name was unfamiliar to me, that I could not be certain, when I had read his book, whether he was white or black.* I was certain, however, that I had just read one of the finest novels about Harlem that had ever come my way. The author had obviously looked at something very hard. He had felt it very deeply and was trying to tell the truth about it.
The people in his book are Negroes, but they are handled with no condescension and with no self-pity. Because they are seen so clearly and made so real, the drama they act out contains implications which go far beyond the confines of the squalid, claustrophobic world which they inhabit.
This world is a world we have created, we, the American Republic; and its existence gives the lie to every one of the principles in which we say we believe. In fact, the most remarkable and valuable thing about this study of Negro children in Harlem is that it does not leave one thinking about race at all. It leaves one thinking about the moral state of this country.
I think that there is something suspicious about the way we cling to the concept of race, on both sides of the obsolescent racial fence. White men, when they have not entirely succumbed to their panic, wallow in their guilt, and call themselves, usually “liberals.” Black men, when they have not drowned in their bitterness, wallow in their rage, and call themselves, usually “militant.” Both camps have managed to evade the really hideous complexity of our situation on the social and personal level.
The Cool World is the story of Richard “Duke” Custis, who lives in a Harlem apartment with his mother and grandmother, and his mother’s procession of “husbands.” The “husbands,” of whom we glimpse, in passing, only one, are a sorry, irresponsible, embittered lot; the mother is not so much indifferent as defeated; and the grandmother has retired into the depths of the Old Testament.
Mr. Miller manages to convey, with a masterful economy, the atmosphere of this dreadful apartment, and the peculiarly desperate apathy which has overtaken this family—if, indeed, it can any longer be called a family. The grandmother can no longer reach her daughter, and neither of them can reach the boy. He has struck out to find his own identity according to the only standards he has ever seen honored: he is the War Lord of the Royal Crocadiles (his spelling), a street gang in mortal competition with the Wolves.
The Wolves have knifed Duke—who has been knifed seven times at the age of fourteen and is proud of it—and killed another member of the Crocadiles, and the Crocadiles are planning a vengeful “rumble.” In this “rumble,” one Wolf, Angel, and one Crocadile, Cowboy, are killed. Duke is sent away to a Youth Center, from which he tells us his story.
I confess that I do not really believe in his “rehabilitation,” there being nothing in the book and very little in my own experience to lead me to believe in it. But this somewhat perfunctory ending cannot really detract from the book’s great power.
Mr. Miller tells his story in the argot of the Harlem streets. He appears to be one of the very few people who have ever really listened to it and tried to understand what was being said. In his handling, it is not strange because it is exotic; it is strange, and it is frightening, because it conveys the children’s state of mind with such force.
And this state of mind is the American state of mind, seen from a peculiar angle, and in some relief: “Blood got one sister a nurse an a brother at Fisk University learnin to be a doctor or somethin. Man I dont see it * * *. No point workin like that when they can take it all away from you when ever they feel like it you know.”
This frightened and distrustful child has long since ceased believing a word we say—about honor, ideals, equality, hope. He watches what we do. He thinks of the world as a loveless place, of infinite evil, run by thieves and murderers.
Well, we are quick to insist, the world is not like that. We will have to prove this to him, though, for he lives in Harlem, that world we have created but do not have the honesty to visit nor the courage to change. Until we do this, he has no reason to believe us, nor have we the right to expect to be believed.
The “cool” world is a world in which children watch their contemporaries and their elders dying by the hour. And we ignore this world at our own very great peril, for as long as they are dying, we are dying, too.
(1959)
*Mr. Miller (who is white) is a versatile writer. He has published children’s books under his own name as well as an adult novel, The Way We Live Now. As “Amanda Vail” he is responsible for two spoofs of female boarding-school and college life, Love Me Little and The Bright Young Things. [This footnote was published with the essay.—Ed.]