I NEVER BELIEVED IT—the American Dream—or so I say now. That I didn’t believe it, if I didn’t, wasn’t due to my extraordinary powers of perception. It does not demand perception to realize that you are poor: nor do you need to be gifted in order to realize that you are despised. (But it helps.)
So: the people who hurt me most at the beginning of what we must now, somewhat helplessly, call my professional life—my late teens, when I was aspiring to become a journalist—were not white. They were black. They laughed at me. I stank of the ghetto, this pop-eyed little black boy, who had barely managed high school, could certainly never go further, and was an (undeserved) handicap to the Race.
I put it this way because I hate to put it this way. I’m telling you like it is because that’s the way it was; but it is very important to let you know that I can now begin to allow myself to remember that dreadful, distant pain because Roger Wilkins has written A Man’s Life. Or, in other words: it may still be as it was, but angels have been troubling the waters and Roger Wilkins, praise the Lord, has now accepted that he was born into that same disreputable category.
And, in a way, if life were different, I’d sign off here, and urge you to drop whatever you are doing right now and loot the nearest bookstore.
Life, however, being what it is, and A Man’s Life being so unprecedented a performance, I am obliged to suggest to you some of the reasons that I consider it to be indispensable reading.
Wilkins has written a most beautiful book, has delivered an impeccable testimony out of that implacable private place where a man either lives or dies.
It says a great deal about this country that, black like each other, legally at least, Roger Wilkins, living on the Hill, and I, born in the Hollow, should have had to undergo so many forms of death in order to realize that our life was the anonymity dictated by the Republic, an institution which could always find a way to use us, though it has yet to find a way to respect us.
What is implicit in this confession—no, this is testimony, far more noble than a mere confession: Mr. Wilkins is not a whining boy—is the extent to which black Americans have been, perhaps still are, the accomplices to our captivity. We both tried to be white: he on the Hill, myself in the Hollow. We both tried not to stink. This is because we recognized that the gleaming Republic associated our color and our odor with the color and the odor of shit. We were treated like shit. And we were determined to overcome. Or, in other words, to prove to a people who had to believe, and who, indeed, proclaimed us less than cattle, that we had a title to the tree of life.
And let the record show, we went the route—were much nicer, for example, when the chips were down, to Bobby Kennedy than Bobby Kennedy ever was, or could have dreamed of being, to us. Let us scuttle the Camelot legend. I am weary of Lincoln Memorials, of the American piety, which is nothing less than a Sunday-school apology for genocide.
I have earned the right, from the moment of my own stupendous performance on the auction block, to tell you that this Republic is a total liar and has never contained the remotest possibility, let alone desire, to let my people go. (I know that that offends grammar, but it be’s that way sometimes.) The Lincoln Memorial is a pious fraud. Lincoln freed those slaves not because he had the remotest interest in human liberty, still less in the freedom of the slave (a freedom which no one dared, or dares, imagine), but because—to paraphrase him—he was determined to preserve the Union. Which, indeed, for what it’s worth, he did.
Blacks have never had a President, in these yet to be United States, who cared whether they lived or died. (Roosevelt didn’t dare pass an antilynch bill, as he explained to Walter White of the NAACP, because the Congress would have prevented him from doing “great things” for America and, said the most “liberal” President in American history, “I just can’t take that chance.”)
And as for Bobby and his brother JFK, they were millionaire sons of a Boston-Irish adventurer, who made his money through one of the American Puritanical convulsions, Prohibition. Well, when Bobby K. decided to channel the black discontent into voter registration, he was doing exactly what Lincoln had done, a century before: he was immobilizing, with the promise of freedom, those slaves he could not buy.
To be a black American is much worse than being in love with, tied to, inexorably, mysteriously, responsible for, someone whom you don’t like, don’t respect, and don’t dare trust.
Read Roger Wilkins’s record of how it is. Few documents will, in your lifetime, equal it. Do not read it as a missionary. Do not imagine that anyone is asking you to do anything at all. You have done quite enough already.
Read it, if you have the courage to love your children. This book is an act of love, written by a lover and a father and one of the only friends your children have.
(1982)