I had been taken in hand by a young white
schoolteacher named Bill Miller,
a beautiful woman,
very important to me.
She gave me books to read and talked to me
about the books,
and about the world:
about Ethiopia,
and Italy,
and the German Third Reich;
and took me to see plays and films, to which no one
else would have dreamed of taking a ten-year-old boy.
It is certainly because of Bill Miller,
who arrived in my terrifying life so soon,
that I never really managed to hate white people.
Though, God knows,
I have often wished to murder more than one or two.
Therefore, I begin to suspect that white people
did not act as they did because they were white,
but for some other reason.
I was a child of course,
and, therefore, unsophisticated.
I took Bill Miller as she was,
or as she appeared to be to me.
She too, anyway, was treated like a nigger,
And she had no love for landlords.
In these days, no one resembling my father has yet
made an appearance on the American cinema scene.
No, it is not entirely true.
There were, for example, Stepin Fetchit
and Willie Best and Mantan Moreland,
all of whom, rightly or wrongly, I loathed.
It seemed to me that they lied about the world
I knew, and debased it,
and certainly I did not know anybody like them—
as far as I could tell;
for it is also possible that their comic, bug-eyed terror
contained the truth concerning a terror
by which I hoped never to be engulfed.
Yet, I had no reservations at all concerning the terror
of the black janitor in They Won’t Forget.
I think that it was a black actor named
Clinton Rosemond who played this part,
and he looked a little like my father.
He is terrified because a young white girl,
in this small Southern town, has been raped
and murdered, and her body has been found
on the premises of which he is the janitor.
The role of the janitor is small,
yet the man’s face bangs in my memory until today:
the film’s icy brutality both
scared me and strengthened me.