The Devil Finds Work Read Online Free

drawbridge.
If I love you, I love you, and I don’t give a damn. You my nigger, nigger, if you don’t
get
no bigger. I will cut your
dick
off, I will cut your balls out. I ain’t
got
to do nothing but stay black and die and I’m black already! Honey. Don’t be like that. Honey. Don’t do me like that. We in this shit together, and you need me and I need you, now ain’t that so?
Who
going to take care of us if we don’t take care of each other?
    I feared, feared—like a thief in the night, as one of my brothers would put it—to connect all this with my father and mother and everyone I knew, and with myself, and to connect all this with black Uncle Tom: no more than I had wished to be that fleeing fugitive on that moving train did I desire to endure his destiny or meet his end. Uncle Tom really believed
vengeance is mine, saith the Lord
, for he believed in the Lord, as I flattered myselfI did not: this inconvenient faith (described, furthermore, by a white woman) obscured the fact that Tom allowed himself to be murdered for refusing to disclose the road taken by the runaway slave. Because Uncle Tom would not take vengeance into his own hands, he was not a hero for me. Heroes, as far as I could then see, were white, and not merely because of the movies but because of the land in which I lived, of which movies were simply a reflection: I despised and feared those heroes because they
did
take vengeance into their own hands. They thought that vengeance was theirs to take. This difficult coin did not cease to spin, it had neither heads nor tails: for what white people took into their hands could scarcely even be called vengeance, it was something less and something more. The Scottsboro boys, for example—for the Scottsboro Case has begun—were certainly innocent of anything requiring vengeance. My father’s youngest son by his first marriage, nine years older than I, who had vanished from our lives, might have been one of those boys, now being murdered by my fellow Americans on the basis of the rape charge delivered by two white whores: and I was reading Angelo Herndon’s
Let Me Live
. Yes. I understood
that:
my countrymen were my enemy, and I had already begun to hate them from the bottom of my heart.
    Angelo Herndon was a young, black labor organizer in the Deep South, railroaded to prison, who lived long enough, at least, to write a book about it—the George Jackson of the era. No one resembling him, or anyone resembling any of the Scottsboro Boys, nor anyone resembling my father, has yet made an appearance on the American cinema scene. Perhaps to compensate for this, Bill now takes me to See Sylvia Sidney and Henry Fonda in the Walter Wanger production of Fritz Lang’s
You Only Live
Once
. I, also, either with her or without her, I don’t remember, see the Warner Brothers production (or
screen rendition
, which pompous formulation I adored) of a novel I had read, Ward Greene’s
Death in the Deep South
, brought to the screen by (I think) Mervyn LeRoy, as
They Won’t Forget
, starring Claude Rains; and Samuel Goldwyn’s production of William Wyler’s
Dead End
, again starring Sylvia Sidney. Who also starred in the film version of a play Bill took me to see, the WPA Living Newspaper production,—
one third of a nation
—.
    It is not entirely true that no one from the world I knew had yet made an appearance on the American screen: there were, for example, Stepin Fetchit and Willie Best and Manton 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 Rosewood who played this part, and