Читать книгу The Forbidden Word - James Henry Harris - Страница 7

I was already angry, but by the end of the first class, I felt flayed by the sharp edges of a single word. It was like the serrated blade of a knife cutting away at my self-esteem. And, to make matters worse, we were all assigned chapters for the next class meeting. The process was simple enough. We had to count off, like children learning their numbers, starting with the person to the left of the professor. Your number was your chapter to discuss during the next few class meetings. Mine was chapter eight or what I call “Sunrise at Jackson Island.” I was eighth in a sequence that spread throughout the semester—responsible for chapters eight, sixteen, twenty-four, thirty-two, etc. We didn’t get to my chapter until the third class session—three weeks into the semester. Most of the language in that chapter is so elegant and beautiful—descriptive and picturesque from the very beginning. And, yet, I am tortured by my own feelings—vacillating between love and hate from one page to another. As this chapter opens, Twain sounds like a poet and prose master:

The sun was up so high when I waked, that I judged it was eight o’clock. I laid there in the grass and the cool shade, thinking about things and feeling rested and ruther comfortable and satisfied . . . There was freckled places on the ground where the light sifted down through the leaves, and the freckled places swapped about a little, showing there was little breeze up there. A couple of squirrels sat on a limb and jabbered at me very friendly.

I was captivated by the perfect picture of daybreak. I thought about the beauty of nature, how I love the fall and spring, and Twain as an environmentalist. I could see Huck lying in the woods on a bed of leaves and grass as the sunlight cascaded through the trees. But, it was the “thinking about things” in the opening lines of the chapter that sparked my own memory. This would be more evident as chapter eight began to unfold with Huck discovering that someone else was also sleeping on Jackson Island.

By and by I was close enough to have a look, and there laid a man on the ground. It most gives me the fantods. He had a blanket around his head, and his head was nearly in the fire. I set there behind a clump of bushes, in about six foot of him, and kept my eyes on him steady. It was getting gray daylight, now. Pretty soon he gapped, and stretched himself, and hove off the blanket, and it was Miss Watson’s Jim! I bet I was glad to see him, I says: “Hello, Jim!” and skipped out.

When I read that Jim “gapped and stretched himself,” I thought of my sweet momma who always used the same language. She would say, “the baby is gapping and must be tired; he need to take a nap.” That brief memory shook my consciousness and caused a momentary lapse in my thinking—a lapse that made me cry as I thought about my own dear mother. The emotion had come out of thin air. It fell upon me like a bucket of warm milk.

Like Huck, Jim had also run away. Huck wanted freedom from his father and Jim wanted freedom from slavery. He didn’t want to fall into the hands of a “nigger trader” because he had overheard Miss Watson’s plans to sell him down the river. “. . . I hear ole missus tell de widder she gwyne to sell me down to Orleans, but she didn’t want to, but she could git eight hund’d dollars for me.” Jim was no fool. He understood the meaning of chattel slavery. It was an evil system grounded in economics and commerce. Somebody needs to pay Black people for three hundred years of free and forced labor.

I thought to myself this is where the book really begins. The first seven chapters are all prologue. The situation and the story begin to merge right here in chapter eight, where Huck and Jim meet for the first time as runaways and form a pact that binds them together in the adventurous search for freedom. It was also the race issue. The nigger Jim and the white boy Huck on Jackson Island, an island that Huck had already said “I was boss of it,” speaking as a typical and privileged white American male. The boss.

This was the chapter where the use of nigger begins its ubiquitous forays into the story. And its use caused me to think about things in my own life—especially when I, as a child, was first called a nigger. I blurted out in class that I wore the marks and scars of America’s nigger, and Twain’s pelting use of the word felt more like the sharp jabs of a dagger than like the drops of rain winding down on the scalp of my bald head.

“Has anyone in here ever been called nigger?” I asked. The answer was a thundering silence so piercing that you could hear its palpable sounds only in the deep breaths that each body began to take. I knew before asking the question that silence was the only possible answer, so I felt guilty for making such a rhetorical flourish. It was a sophistry that I had mastered and grown to love although I knew it was probably unfair, and deceptive. My Black skin had, for once, given me the advantage to pose a question that not a single white person in the room could answer in the affirmative. While I took pleasure in the hovering silence, it provided no lasting consolation. This was my personal burden and my struggle, and I was not handling it too well. I had a long way to go and even further to grow to the point of recognizing how hurt and angry I had become. It was bad for my health because high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar ran in my family and at fifty-three-years-old I was already becoming a victim of them all. I was really a wreck. Race had played a major role in my health and while it was evident to me, no one else in the room had experienced the pressures of daily living in two worlds with two different consciences. Double consciousness was a state of being for me. I was a self divided. It is also the stuff that makes for some forms of depression, schizoid and paranoid behavior. And, at times, I’m a bona fide paranoid African American male thinking that everybody is out to get me—Black people included.

I was also agitated by the sharpness of my own memory. I thought to myself in a language that was not really my own: Memory is an awful son-of-a-bitch full of content and past transgressions. Memory is an untold mystery. It is a scathing, hideous bringing back to life of all that was dead and buried. Memory is a terror, much like a resurrection of Satan—Dante’s Dite.

It is like the Apostle Paul’s omnipresent evil, which is always raising its ugly head in the presence of the good and the beautiful. Memory is full of tears and sorrow. Sometimes, even a joy unspeakable, but more often than not, it is painful and unshareable. And yet, there are some things that we can never forget. Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s statement that “the past has no content” is provocative but absurd to me. An absurdity that surpasses Albert Camus and Frederich Nietzsche: The Stranger and Beyond Good and Evil. My own past is full of content. A past without content is like a future without hope. It is like a violation of memory’s power to imagine a future. Allow me to speak for myself: There are certain things about the past that I can never forget. So, for me, there is no contentless past and for that matter “the past is never past.” It’s always just a thought away from rising up and speaking for itself—spilling its guts on the ground like a deer hit by a speeding Ford 350 pickup truck.

I am surprised by its clarity still lingering in my conscience. No, somewhat bitter, but not really surprised. I can still feel the sweltering sun shining bright in a cloudless sky on that particular Monday morning in late May. I was six years old about to turn seven. It was the spring of 1959 on a narrow road in Southern Chesterfield County, Virginia—just a half mile from our small two-room clapboard house in Matoaca. Across the road was a large white plantation house sitting almost a half mile off the road, perched on a bluff, surrounded by hundreds of acres of corn, wheat, and barley. I was a child, but I understood the meaning of stark difference. That side of the road was pale white and rich-looking. You could tell by the sight of several brown and white palomino horses grazing, of irrigation waters flowing over the crop fields and the manicured lawn. The white folk were driving their glistening new Pontiacs and Cadillacs. They were the Bricolls, whose houses, land, and jobs represented white privilege. On the other side of the same road, the side where we lived, you could tell the difference in a moment’s glance. We lived in a box; a two-room barnlike structure built by my father’s own hands.

Anyway, my cousin and I were walking to the corner store during the coolest part of the scorching hot day. In order to get there, we had to pass through a clump of houses where several white children were playing in their yards. We were always told to stay on the public road and not to veer onto anyone’s property because white folk didn’t need much of an excuse to shoot and kill you, or cause some bodily harm to a Black boy, not during those days of Jim Crow. This was only a few years after fourteen-year-old Emmett Till’s murder for saying “Hey Baby” to a white store owner’s wife in the Mississippi Delta. Two white men went on trial and were acquitted by a jury of their peers in less than an hour for a heinous crime that for much of the nation sparked the beginning of the modern civil rights movement. This was four months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and before Martin Luther King Jr. led the Montgomery Bus Boycott that helped to change the mind of the South and the nation. I remember these things because my daddy read the newspaper like it was the Bible, and he kept up with the evening news religiously. As a matter of fact, my daddy insisted that we not leave the “home place” while he was off at work. But, because boys will be boys, I was eager to join my cousin in our mile walk to Sadler’s country store. It was just over the hill at the end of the road. So close to where we lived; yet, it was a whole world away.

As soon as we reached the top of the hill we knew that we were in white folks’ territory. Over the hill was the danger-sign for us because it marked the clear boundary between leaving the area where Blacks lived and entering into the white zone. As we passed the little cluster of houses where poor whites lived, three little rascals, playing in the yard, saw us walking on the main road. They moved to the edge of their property to taunt and harass us: “Niggers, go home.” This was my first exposure to the word nigger. “Niggers, go home,” they yelled and stuck up their middle fingers as we slowly came in full view. A double insult, with hand and mouth racism and vulgarity, spoken with a unified voice that threatened us less than a half mile from where we lived. My cousin, who was a few years older than I, whispered to me, “Just don’t say a word. Ignore the little bastards, unless they come onto this road or hit us with rocks. And if they do try to hit us, then we will fight like hell. No white boy is going to get away with hitting me.” My older cousin was bad.

“I’ll kick their ass,” my cousin said, bold with anger and determination. I was empowered by his blind courage. I didn’t wear my feelings on my shirt sleeve, but internally I was just as angry as he. I think. Maybe even a bit more scared. The fact is Blacks were made to stand in fear by custom and by law, and I was a child. The sad truth is I was only six years old and didn’t know what all the angst was about.

“Niggers, Black niggers, go back to Africa,” they said over and over again until we got out of their sight and hearing range. We were now almost at the corner store, where Matoaca Road intersected with River Road. This was the heart of Ku Klux Klan country. I later learned that their local headquarters was just up the road a piece and off the beaten path about a half mile down a long foot path. We had twelve empty Coca-Cola bottles to redeem for one or two cents each. This was enough for us to purchase some candy and to buy ourselves a soda. At the time, a bottled Coke was six cents and most of the candy, like a jawbone breaker or a sugar daddy or lollipop, was one or two cents each. A dollar could purchase a lot back then. For a poor boy like me, a dollar might as well have been a hundred. On that day I certainly did walk a mile for a dollar, although it cost me more than it was worth. It cost me my childhood innocence. After that experience of being called “nigger,” my life would never be the same because I have not been able to forget it—fifty years later.

We made our purchases and then headed back down what seemed like the long road toward home. We had almost forgotten that we again had to pass by the same little white boys until one of them yelled, “Niggers, go home,” and began to spit at us and throw rocks at us. All we could do was speed up and walk faster as we held on to our sodas and candy. God knows we didn’t want to do anything to make us drop our goodies.

I got a terrible butt whipping that night because my daddy was adamant about us staying put when he was at work. My mother told him about my little adventure of mischief and disobedience. I can hear her even today as she told Daddy, “Richard, James Henry walked to the store today. He knew he was supposed to stay in the yard, but he was hard headed.” Hard headedness was the name for any disobedience. My daddy was furious and, without asking any questions, ordered me to get the “strap”—or was it a “switch?”—so that I could receive my just punishment. Daddy was a big man with large wide hands and broad shoulders. He was too big and strong to whip a six year old boy. After that awful whipping, I seldom disobeyed Mother and Daddy again. But I could not figure out why such harsh punishment was rendered for such a small, insignificant infraction. In my eyes, the punishment far outweighed the crime. What could I possibly know at such a young age about America? If I didn’t know anything else, there is one thing I did know: That was the day when I was first called a nigger.

That day I learned one of life’s worst lessons—that Black people are hated by some because of the color of their skin. And my learning it so early was tragic, yet profound. To come to self-consciousness by realizing that otherness can never be escaped because of one’s dark skin slapped me squarely in the face that very day. Talk of diversity and equality is always suspect to me. It sounds like Orwellian doublespeak. Propaganda. “It just don’t seem equal if you are Black.” It might eventually come to be. So, I still refuse to be too cynical or too hopeless. Beautiful Black chocolate—colored skin, smooth as a milkshake, and yet, so hated. For what reason? I appeal to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. I appeal to the daughters of Zeus. No, I state my case to Zeus himself. I appeal to YHWH. To Elohim. To Adonai. I appeal to Moses and to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Please tell me it isn’t so. It’s an illusion. It’s a dream. An awful dream. I ask myself, Why? What drives this insanity? What propels this irrationality by the architects of Enlightenment’s rationalism and empiricism? Tell me. Please tell me. I ask Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad: Why do you use the word nigger so much? So flippantly. So cavalier-like. So wrenchingly and unashamedly. Somebody tell me. Explain it to me so that, maybe, I too can understand. Is that too much to ask for? To hope for?

There was more to think about. My mind kept vectoring toward the past. I thought of the struggles of my childhood and youth. I thought about being bullied in high school and how it did not stop me from loving school. I thought about the year I graduated and got my first job that summer in the tobacco factory. I thought of everything in a way that would help me keep my sanity. The struggles of life are not linear. Life goes up and down, back and forth in a single moment. Some days I travel for fifty-three years through mountains of memories and regrets. And some days I travel nowhere at all, just sitting in class with my mind somewhere else.