The Cross of Redemption (26 page)

STUDENT 1:
—have money and are capable in general of being middlemen. I know as a Jew, there are a hell of a lot of poor Jews in the United States, and I think that most Jews realize that if they had dark skin or if they had corns or something, they’d be just as oppressed as anybody else and it’s just because they are white and because we’ve been able to change our names from something really Jewish-sounding that we’ve been able to have the ability to succeed. So I, as a Jew and as a woman, tend to vote for people who are … support all people who support blacks, because I am black-oriented, and I don’t see myself as being a middleman or being rich or anything else.

BALDWIN:
Well, I wasn’t accusing all Jews of being middlemen, and I certainly wasn’t accusing them of being rich.

STUDENT 1:
No, that’s not what I meant. It’s the whole idea here …

BALDWIN:
What’s the idea?

STUDENT 1:
I don’t know … that Jews do realize, I hope, more of them than a lot of people think, do realize they are minorities, but I hope that they do vote along the same lines that any other minority votes.

BALDWIN:
Well, I would hope so too. But I will tell you something else, which is … I will tell you very briefly: if you weren’t already a minority, you don’t really want to be part of another one.
[Laughter from audience.]
There is that, too.

STUDENT 1:
But you can form an alliance with—

BALDWIN:
You can form an alliance, but it is always at the mercy of another option.

STUDENT 1:
Yeah. Okay.

STUDENT:
Do you mind if I just answer that gentleman’s question back there—

BALDWIN:
Please stand up.

STUDENT:
Do you mind if I discuss a bit that question of that man back there about Jews and blacks and other minorities? Does Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition include Jews?

BALDWIN:
Of course. How could it not?

STUDENT:
In light of what he said …

BALDWIN:
In light of what he said …?

STUDENT:
… about Jews.

BALDWIN:
In light of what he’s allegedly said about Jews. What did he say about Jews?

STUDENT:
He called them “Hymies” and New York City “Hymietown.”

BALDWIN:
Yes.

STUDENT:
How should that be construed to mean …?

BALDWIN:
I can’t answer that. I know that the Rainbow—

STUDENT:
What does he then think about Jews being part of the Rainbow Coalition?

BALDWIN:
Well, until, until he said that, I had no reason to wonder about it; neither did you. Now that he has made an anti-Semitic remark, one has the right to question everything. It is a … it’s a very serious event, maybe a disastrous event. I can’t answer the question otherwise.

Yes, man.

STUDENT:
Yes. As far as I am concerned, I’d like to speak up, I’d like to express my life, my experience, growing up in Philadelphia, and from my experience I see alliance with a Jewish group very difficult because of
the experience I had. That is, the apartment that my family lives in, which has dozens of fire violations, is owned by a minority real estate lawyer. He knows this. The first lawyer, the first owner who was also there, he moved out. He moved out. He sold the building to another dude
[inaudible]
. And the violations still kept continuing, the fire violations. After three fires in one week
[inaudible]
still nothing happened. The fourth fire, we saw the people hanging out the windows screaming, almost to the point of jumping out and
[inaudible]
. Then the following day after the fire
[inaudible]
, a very serious fire
[inaudible]
because, in fact, the next day the owners come around, they look around, they pull up in their Mercedes-Benz, then they look around and they leave. And then the building manager comes up, he doesn’t even live in the building, he comes up and he says to me, “Oh, it’s not that bad—the fire wasn’t that bad.” He had no idea. I wanted right then to shoot that man. I would have … When these kinds of situations occur, it’s no way of getting around it
[inaudible]
.

P
ROFESSOR
J
OHN
B
RACEY:
^*
I don’t think this is going to get anywhere, but we’ve got one announcement from Ernie. But what’s remarkable to me in here is there’s a room full of white people and black people in a tremendously tense situation that has tremendous social ramifications, and people are sitting here trying to work out ways to make some sense out of it. Twenty years ago there would have been a fight breaking out. Black people would have said “To hell with it,” white people would have said … “I’m going back home to have some supper.” And what you have here is a rather remarkable attempt for people to actually make a coalition work. I think you ought to congratulate yourselves.
[Applause.]
Nobody said any kind of rainbow was going to be formed without some thunderstorms.
[Applause.]

(1984)

I
WAS A YOUNG EVANGELIST
, preaching in Harlem and other black communities for about three years: “young” means adolescent. I was fourteen when I entered the pulpit and seventeen when I left.

Those were very crucial years, full of wonder, and one of the things I most wondered about was the fellowship of Christians in the United States of America.

My father and I were both black ministers working exclusively in black churches, which was due primarily to the fact that white Christians considered black people to be less human than themselves and certainly unqualified to deliver God’s Word to white ears. (This fact was more vivid for my father than for me—at least in the beginning.)

Mountains of blasphemous rhetoric have been written to deny or defend this fact, but the white message comes across loud and clear: Jesus Christ and his Father are white, and the kingdom of heaven is no place for black people to start trying on their shoes.

White people justified this violation of the message of the Gospel by quoting Scripture (the Old Testament curse laid on the sons of Ham—
which curse, even if conceivable, had been obliterated by the blood of Christ) and the Pauline injunction concerning servants’ obeying their masters.

It was impossible not to sense in this a self-serving moral cowardice. This caused me to regard white Christians and, especially, white ministers with a profound and troubled contempt. And, indeed, the terror that I could not suppress upon finally leaving the pulpit was mitigated by the revelation that now, at least, I would not be compelled—allowed—to spend eternity in their presence. (And I told God this—I was young enough for that and wondered where He would be.)

Adolescence, as white people in this country appear to be beginning to remember—in somewhat vindictive ways—is not the most tranquil passage in anybody’s life. It is a virgin time,
the
virgin time, the beginning of the confirmation of oneself as
other
. Until adolescence, one is a boy or a girl. But adolescence means that one is becoming
male
or
female
, a far more devastating and impenetrable prospect.

Until adolescence, one’s body is simply there, like one’s shadow or the weather. With adolescence, this body becomes a malevolently unpredictable enemy, and it also becomes, for the first time, appallingly
visible
. Everybody sees it.
You
see it, though you have never taken any real notice of it before. You begin to hear it. And it begins to sprout odors, like airy invisible mushrooms. But this is not the worst. Other people also see it and hear it and smell it. You can scarcely guess what they see and hear and smell—can guess it dimly, only from the way they appear to respond to you.

But you are scarcely able to respond to the way people respond to you, concentrated as you are on the great war being waged in that awkward body, beneath those clothes—a secret war, as visible as the noonday sun.

It is not the best moment to be standing in the pulpit. Though, having said that, I must—to be honest—add that my ministry almost certainly helped me through my adolescence by giving me something larger than myself to be frightened about. And it preserved, as it were, an innocence that, in retrospect, protected me.

For, though I had been formed by sufficiently dire circumstance and moved in a severely circumscribed world, I was also just another curious, raunchy kid. I was able to see, later, watching other kids like the kid I had been, that this combination of innocence and eagerness can be a powerful aphrodisiac to adults and is perhaps the key to the young minister’s force.

Or, more probably, only one of many keys. Certainly the depth of his belief is a mighty force; and when I was in the pulpit, I believed. The personal anguish counts for something, too: it was the personal anguish that
made me believe that I believed. People do not know on what this anguish feeds, but they sense the anguish and they respond to it. My sexuality was on hold, for both women and men had tried to “mess” with me in the summer of my fourteenth year and had frightened me so badly that I found the Lord. The salvation I was preaching to others was fueled by the hope of my own.

I left the pulpit upon the realization that
my
salvation could not be achieved that way.

But it is worth stating this proposition in somewhat harsher terms.

An unmanageable distress had driven me to the altar, and once there, I was—at least for a while—cleansed. But at the same time, nothing had been obliterated: I was still a boy in trouble with himself and the streets around him. Salvation did not make time stand still or arrest the changes occurring in my body and my mind. Salvation did not change the fact that I was an eager sexual potential, in flight from the inevitable touch. And I knew that I was in flight, though I could not, then—
to save my soul!
—have told you from what I was fleeing.

And, at the same time, the shape of my terror became clearer and clearer: as hypnotic and relentless as the slow surfacing of characters written in invisible ink.

I threw all my anguish and terror into my sermons and I thus learned nearly all there was to know concerning my congregations. They trusted me because they sensed my anguish—and my anguish was the key to my love. I think I hoped to love them more than I would ever love any lover and, so, escape the terrors of this life.

It did not work out that way. The young male preacher is a sexual prize in quite another way than the female; and congregations are made up of men and women.

So, in time, a heavy weight fell on my heart. I did not want to become a liar. I did not want my love to become manipulation. I did not want my fear of my own desires to transform itself into power—into power, precisely, over those who feared and were therefore at the mercy of their own desires.

In my experience, the minister and his flock mirror each other. It demands a very rare, intrepid, and genuinely free and loving shepherd to challenge the habits and fears and assumptions of his flock and help them enter into the freedom that enables us to move to higher ground.

I was not that shepherd. And rather than betray the ministry, I left it.

It can be supposed, then, that I cannot take seriously—not, at least, as
Christian ministers—the present-day gang that calls itself the Moral Majority or its tongue-speaking relatives, such as follow the Right Reverend Robertson.

They have taken the man from Galilee as hostage. He does not know them and they do not know him.

Nowhere, in the brief and extraordinary passage of the man known as Jesus Christ, is it recorded that he ever upbraided his disciples concerning their carnality. These were rough, hard-working fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. Their carnality can be taken as given, and they would never have trusted or followed or loved a man who did not know that they were men and who did not respect their manhood. Jesus made wine at the wedding, for example, by way of a miracle or otherwise—anyone who has been to a black fish fry knows how miraculously wine can appear. He appears not to have despised Mary Magdalene and to have got on just fine with other ladies, notably Mary and Martha, and with the woman at the well. Not one of the present-day white fundamentalist preachers would have had the humility, the courage, the sheer presence of mind to have said to the mob surrounding the woman taken in adultery, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone,” or the depth of perception that informs “Neither do I condemn thee: Go, and sin no more.”

It is scarcely worth comparing the material well-being—or material aspirations—of these latter-day apostles with the poverty of Jesus. Whereas Jesus and his disciples were distrusted by the state largely because they respected the poor and shared everything, the fundamentalists of the present hour would appear not to know that the poor exist.

They are aided enormously in this blindness by the peculiar self-deception the American poor white applies to his own poverty. His poverty afflicts him with an eerie and paralyzing self-contempt, but he denies it: poverty is meant for niggers. And, at the same time, he is aware that the ministers he sees on TV and to whom he sends his nickels and dimes were once no better off than he: he recognizes each as kin, so to speak.

These ministers, however, are of no interest in themselves—at least of no more intrinsic interest than any Deep South sheriff. And, indeed, the ministers remind me of sheriffs and deputies I have encountered: the same lips, the same flat, slatelike eyes, the same self-righteous voices.

Now, I find it somewhat disturbing to mention the minister and the sheriff in the same breath, but I am black and they entered my life in the same breath. Both the white fundamentalist minister and the deputy are Christians—
hard-core
Christians, one might say. Both believe that they are
responsible, the one for divine law and the other for natural order. Both believe that they are able to define and privileged to impose law and order; and both, historically and actually, know that law and order are meant to keep me in my place.