A Writer's World Read Online Free Page A

Atlantic liner slipping away to sea. It is a majestic sight, with no Wordsworth at hand to honour it, only a man with a loudspeaker or a fifty-cent guide book.
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    So leaving Manhattan is like retreating from a snow summit. The very air seems to relax about you. The electric atmosphere softens, the noise stills, the colours blur and fade, the pressure eases, the traffic thins. Soon you are out of the city’s spell, pausing only to look behind, over the tenements and marshes, to see the lights of the skyscrapers riding the night.
    Of course Manhattan greatly changed in the course of the century, from its cab drivers to its crime rate, but the responses it sparked in me in 1953 did not much alter, and I have been there every single year since.
The South
    My first experiences of the American South left me less buoyant. I happened to be in Atlanta the day after the Supreme Court in Washington declared, in the seminal Brown v. Board of Education decision, that racial segregation in state schools was illegal.
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    When the decision was announced all the simmering discontent of the white Southerners boiled over in bitter words. I spent the day listening to angry men and women. The abuse they used was at once so theatrical and so repetitive that I could scarcely believe it had not been plucked wholesale from some common phrase-book of prejudice. I joined a conversation, in a coffee-shop, with the manager of the place and a man who told me he was a senior officer of the police. They spent some minutes reminiscing about race riots of the past, talking comfortably of ‘niggers’ baited and beaten in the streets, and of one especially, hounded by the mob, who had thrown himself into the doorway of that very coffee-shop, only to be pushed back on to the pavement. ‘The only place for a nigger,’ said the manager with finality, ‘is at the back door, with his hat in his hand.’
    Other, gentler Atlantans, as horrified as anyone by these expressions of brutality, advocated other ways of sustaining white supremacy. Drugged by the sentimentality of the Old South, they would say, like sanctimonious jailers: ‘Leave the matter to us. We understand the Negroes, and they understand and respect us. After all, we’ve lived together for a long time. We know them through and through, and believe me, their minds are different from ours. Leave it all to us. The South takes care of its own .’ If I were a Southern Negro, I think I would prefer, on the whole, the loud-mouthed to the soft-spoken.
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    As to the country Negroes, they seem identical still with those pictures in old prints of the slave-owning times; still toiling half-naked in the fields, still addicted to colour and gaudy ornaments, still full of song, still ignorant and unorganized; a people of bondage, infinitely pitiful. Few of them appear to think deeply about their social status, but they reflect it often enough in a sad apathy. I talked once with a Negro farmer in Alabama, and asked him if things were getting any better for the coloured people. ‘Things ain’t gettin’ no better, suh,’ he said, ‘and things ain’t gettin’ no worse. They jess stay the same. Things can’t ever get no better for the coloured people, not so long as we stay down here.’
    The nature of the region itself contributes to the oppressive quality of the South. It is, generally speaking, a wide, dry, dusty, spiritless country; sometimes hauntingly beautiful, but usually melancholy; lacking robustness, good cheer, freshness, animation; a singularly un-Dickensian country. As you drive through South Carolina (for example) on a summer day the endless cotton fields engulf you. Here and there are shabby villages, dusty andderelict, with patched wooden buildings and rusting advertisements, and with a few dispirited people, white and black, gathered around the stores. Outside the unpainted houses of the poor whites there are often decrepit cars, and washing machines stand among the cluttered objects