180 – 196 Rest of Part One (old book 134-146)
Vincents text
Norsk oversættelse Ny dansk bog
|
216 In Georgia, where I lived with the Barnett family in an old plantation
home, I learned about a kind of racism based not on hatred but on a
historically conditioned paternalistic love for blacks. Mrs. Barnett spent
days taking me around to families her family had once owned—apparently a very
short time ago in her imagination (and, as I discovered, in the black
consciousness as well). Mrs. Barnett: This is the bill of
sale to my great- grandfather from Mr. Cadman for Lucinda, her children, and
her increase forever. The price was $1,400. Mrs. Barnett: The white people would
do anything for the niggers except get off their back, as they say.
(laughter) One thing is sure. We still miss them. Mrs. Hill: Yeah, we do miss them. When a “house slave” came in with afternoon tea, the talk, as always in
the Southern aristocracy, turned to the follies of their servants—a way of
maintaining their paternalistic attitude toward blacks and thus of giving
themselves the social distinction of previous times. What Mrs. Barnett misses isn’t slaves as a workforce or as property
but the former symbiotic dependence of slave and master. The fact that one
could lose a slave worth more than $1,400 through sickness instilled in the
white upper class a paternal concern and sense of responsibility for their
slaves. In Mrs. Barnett this love showed itself in her work on behalf of
blacks imprisoned for life—in other words, in a need to express love for a
group of blacks who, like the slaves, are not free. Was it this kind of condescending racism I myself was taking on in
America? How long could I hold onto the naïve notion that as a foreign
immigrant I’d be able to keep myself afloat in an ocean of racism that had
drowned everyone else? In the South I experienced two completely opposite white reactions
toward our oppressed: hatred and love. The more I saw these peculiar distress
patterns as products of a centuries-old system, the more value judgments,
such as good and evil, disintegrated. In spite of their trail of destruction,
I could no longer hate these whites. From the moment I showed them respect
and understanding, doors began to open everywhere: the doors of Southern
hospitality. When I later traveled among South African whites, I was met with
an even more overwhelming hospitality, which seemed directly proportional to
a greater class difference between blacks and whites. Just as in South
Africa, blacks in the South receive the traditional friendliness as long as
they have underclass status. They are not paid for their work so much as for
their servility and humility, for knowing “their place” and being dependent.
Their passive resistance to this subjugation is seen as “irresponsibility”
and “shiftlessness,” which further confirms the “necessity” of the paternal
relationship, thereby elevating white status. This artificially high status
adds to the psychic surplus displayed, for instance, in an exhuberant hospitality and friendliness toward the
individual but not the group, such as “negroes,” “Yankees,” or “communists.”
This hospitable class may not participate in white terrorist acts, but
it benefits directly from such policing. None of the plantation homes I lived
in were locked although they were filled with gold, silver, and expensive
paintings—right next to some of the poorest people on earth, whom I often saw
commit violent crimes against one another. One reason I could move around in even the most violent ghettos in the
South without fearing for my life was my realization that the slavery of the
1970s held its protective umbrella over me everywhere. And when you’re up
against a system so deeply ingrained that even your “Scandinavian blue-eyed
idealism” isn’t understood, you give up and become a participant. Thus, I
soon learned the self-crippling and uncomfortable art of having black maids
serve me breakfast in the canopied bed (in a separate room from the hostess)
while avoiding committing the crime of making my own bed. In Mississippi I
saw the servants spend days dressing up the white “belles” in antebellum
gowns so we could continue the old balls of the Confederacy, where blacks are
present only in the form of a white woman in blackface acting as “mammy.” I loved these seemingly stand-offish yet incredibly warm open and
charming belles, whose inviolable “white womanhood” was one of the sham
reasons for the deaths of thousands of black men in a terror caused solely by
the desire to perpetuate white supremacy. Yet the first time I returned to Natchez in 1978 and found the town
extremely upset about an article in the New York Times describing the
plantation homes as “decadent and promiscuous,” I had to laugh, having
experienced exactly that myself. The greatest freedom I know is to be able to say yes; the freedom to
throw yourself into the arms of every single person you meet. Especially as a
vagabond you have the freedom, energy, and time to be fully human toward
every individual you meet. The most fantastic lottery I can think of is
hitch-hiking. There is a prize every time. Every single person can teach you
something. I have never said no to a ride - even if there were pistols lying
on the front seat, or four sinister-looking men wearing sunglasses sitting in
the car. Every person is like a window through which the larger society can
be glimpsed. A man in New York asked me to drive a U-Haul trailer down to
Florida. He wouldn’t say what was inside. We agreed that I was to get sixty
dollars for doing it, but I never got the money. Through various sources I
found out that it was the Mafia I had worked for - they preferred to use a
naive foreigner for such illegal transport of narcotics, etc. Or maybe it was
weapons for the Cuban exiles in Miami? Another time, in Alabama, this poor
old woman of 87 asked me to drive her to Phoenix, Arizona. She wanted to go
there to die. I helped her board up the windows in her dilapidated shack
outside Notasulga, because although she knew very well she would never
return, she still didn’t want the local blacks moving into it. The whole way
out there she sat with a pistol in her hand. She was scared stiff of me
because of my long hair and beard, but she had no other way of getting to
Arizona. She was so weak that I had to carry her whenever she had to leave
the car, but in spite of this she continued to cling to her gun. The car was
so old that we could only drive at thirty miles an hour, so the trip took us
four days. She had saved for years in order to have enough money for gas, but
she had no money for food, so I had to get out several times and steal
carrots and other edible things along the road. For most of the journey she
talked about Governor Wallace and how she hoped he would become President
before she died. I learned more about Alabama on that trip than I could have
learned by reading for a lifetime. In Florida, two young women picked me up and offered me a brownie. As
I was very hungry and sitting in the back seat, I seized the opportunity and
ate four whole brownies. I always eat what people offer me, even if it is
pills, or dirt, or worse. And every time it gives me a certain insight into
society. And so, it was on this day. It turned out they were hash brownies
and I had eaten far too many. I got stoned out of my mind and could not
hitchhike any more that day, as I was incapable of communicating with the
drivers. I walked into Jacksonville and sat in a park waiting for the high to
wear off. Two harmless bums came over and sat next to me, but suddenly I
became tremendously frightened of them and rushed into the bus station. I did
not dare to be out on the street, even in daylight. (The hash made me
extremely paranoid, and it is exactly when you send out vibrations of fear to
other people that you get jumped). That day I understood the agonizing fear
most Americans carry around and can’t do anything about. Since that day I
have had more understanding of people’s reactions in America. Sometimes I,
too, feel afraid of other people. One night in New York I heard a voice
calling to me from a dark alley down in the sinister area near Ninth Avenue.
I was absolutely convinced that if I went into the alley I would be attacked.
But I was more afraid that if I did not do it, it would set a precedent, and
then I would be paralyzed, like so many others in America. I forced myself to
go in there. Of course, it turned out to be only a worn-out five-dollar
streetwalker. I gained insight into a kind of suffering I had never
encountered before, which proved to me once again that it never hurts to say
yes. As a rule, you are directly rewarded for it. In Detroit, a five-year-old boy persistently asked me to go home with
him and take some pictures of his mother. I didn’t have time that day but
decided to go with him anyway. When we got to his home, I saw that his mother
was sick, and four of his seven brothers and sisters had big rat-bites on
their backs and legs. In the beginning I perceived not being able to say no to people as a
weakness, since I have always been very yielding. But now I have become
convinced that it is a strength and have therefore made it a habit wherever I
go. Almost every day when I hitch-hike, at some point I get invited into a
restaurant by a driver. I get the menu but it is impossible for me to choose.
After an embarrassingly long pause the driver usually suggests something, and
I immediately say yes. I couldn’t care less what they serve me. Food is just
a means to keep going. I have discovered that even the inability to choose
has its advantages when you travel. When I was in the blood bank in New
Orleans and as usual fought my way through “the gay wall” out of this town
with many gays, on my way up to see the floods in the Mississippi delta I got
a lift with a fat antique dealer. He kept pressing me to come with him into
the dark woods with promises like “I will put you up with a rich white lady
afterwards”. I did not want to waste time with another “dirty old man”, but
couldn’t get myself to directly say no. So I ended up letting him follow his
lusts out in the woods and true enough, afterwards he drove me to one of the
large plantation homes in Natchez, where his friend, the owner, Emely Kelley,
immediately invited me to equally intimate experiences. I had long ago
learned that without saying yes to a little pain, you don’t get into heaven.
After weeks of hunger, it really felt like getting into heaven to have black
servants serve us on silver trays in the canopied beds. Yet it is important
to get down to earth again, so when after two weeks I left the mansion, I
ended up shacking together that same evening with a black pimp in Greenville,
in the poverty-stricken Delta area. We became good friends, and he said that
because of our friendship he would give me one of his prostitutes. I didn’t
say anything. He took me to a bar in which four of his “girls” were standing
around. “Choose what-ever pussy you want. You can have it for free,” he said.
I didn’t know what in the world to do. I have come to love such black
prostitutes with their fantastic mixture of violent brutality and intense
tenderness. You can learn more about society from a black prostitute in one
day than from ten university lectures. But it was just impossible for me to
choose.*) Then Ed, as he was called, took me home again. From then on he
became more open and it turned out that he had put me to a test. He was very
interested in the things I had told him, but he had never met a white he
could trust, and now wanted to see if I was like the other whites in
Mississippi. That night became one of the most intense experiences I had ever
had. We both lay in the bed he normally used for his business and all night
he told me about his childhood. It all came as a revelation to me. It was the
first time I had ever been in Mississippi, and it probably had a particularly
strong effect on me because I’d just spent two weeks living in huge
plantation homes with those enormous antebellum gowns and gold and glitter
everywhere. He told me about the hunger, about how he had had to pick cotton
ever since he was five years old for two dollars a day, about how he had
never really gone to school because he had to pick cotton, and about all the
humiliations he had constantly had to put up with from the whites. Then he
just wouldn’t take it any more. “Hell no,” he
repeated again and again. He wanted out of that cotton hell. So he had become
a pimp. Both he and his girls agreed that it was better to prostitute
themselves in this way than to prostitute themselves in the cotton fields. It
is the white man who reaps the profit in both cases, but they made more money
this way: fifteen dollars a night per girl. He had studied the white man all
his life, every single gesture and thought. He felt that he knew the white
man better than he knew himself - and yet he didn’t understand him. But his
experiences had made him a good pimp, though he was only nineteen years old.
He knew precisely how to get white men in contact with his girls. But it hurt
him to do it. It left a deep wound. He felt he was selling both his race and
his pride; but that he had no choice. He hated the white man with all his
heart, but he never dared to show it. That night I came to realize that if
many blacks in Mississippi felt like Ed, there would come a day when things
would not look good for the whites. I was so shaken after that night that for
the next few days I was unable to look whites in the eye. I had been lucky
that day in that someone had given me batteries for my tape recorder. I was
therefore able to record a lot of what he said that night. Now when I travel
around among the whites in Mississippi and live with them I often play that
tape for myself in the evening. I want to avoid identifying too strongly with
their point of view. With their charming accents and great human warmth, it
is hard not to let yourself be seduced. The trick is to keep a cool head in
the midst of the boiling witch’s-cauldron of the South. I saw it as a coincidence that Ed opened himself up to me, for I had
really felt more like being with the prostitutes. But now I’m beginning to
believe it was not just chance. It is as if there is always something that
leads me into the right situations. Letter to an American friend * (I have since found that these unsophisticated sentences from this
original letter about my love for prostitutes as an oppressed group in the
U.S. and Britain, are often misunderstood in a sexual rather than a political
way. For a clearer understanding of my relationship to prostitutes, see page
381). 174 The worst damage occurs when the victim begins to believe the
oppressor’s prejudices. I frequently hear cruel invalidations, such as “You ain’t shit, nigger” reverberating in underclass families.
They instill in each other our deep racist feelings for them along with the
gloomy prospect of being permanently banished to the shadows of white
society. The hope I once found among blacks in the ’70s I’ve since seen being
replaced everywhere by self-blame. |
|
108 Fru Barnett: – Dette er
salgsbeviset til min tipoldefar for negerkvinden Lucinda samt hendes børn og
afkom til evig tid. Prisen var 1400 dollars. Fru Hills (hendes veninde i
et andet plantagehjem): Men som du ser, da de kom her, var de vilde, og i
stedet for at bebrejde Syden som Norden gjorde det, synes jeg vi burde have
ros. De solgte dem til os og de vidste godt at de solgte os vilde dyr. Og de
blev bare ved med at komme. Og så begyndte de at snakke om at vi mishandlede
dem, men det manglede bare, når vi gjorde alt det for dem, gav dem mad,
klæder og husly og passede dem godt. Blev de hvide måske pludseligt onde, da
slaverne kom? Fru Barnett: – Ja, som de
så morsomt siger: De hvide vil gøre alt muligt for niggerne undtagen at stå
af deres skuldre. (latter) Men en ting er sikkert, vi savner slaverne. Fru Hills, sukkende: –
Ja, vi savner dem virkelig... Da
en ”husslave” kom ind med eftermiddagsteen, drejede samtalen som altid i det
sydlige aristokrati over på tjenestefolkenes dårskab – en måde for dem at
opretholde deres paternalistiske holdning til de sorte på og derved give sig
selv tidligere tiders sociale distinktion tilbage. Var
det denne form for nedladende racisme jeg selv var ved at udvikle i dette
samfund? Eller hvor længe kunne jeg holde fast i en naiv forestilling om, at
jeg som udenlandsk indvandrer ville kunne holde mig selv oven vande i dette
racismens hav, som havde druknet alle andre?
Alligevel måtte jeg grine, da jeg første
gang jeg vendte tilbage til Natchez i 1978 og fandt byen ekstremt oprørt over
en artikel i New York Times, der beskrev plantagehjemmene som "dekadente
og promiskuøse" – nøjagtig hvad
jeg selv havde oplevet der.
166 I Florida samlede to piger mig op og bød
mig en brownie. Da jeg var meget sulten og sad på bagsædet, benyttede jeg
lejligheden til at spise hele fire kager. Jeg spiser altid, hvad folk giver
mig, om det så er piller eller jord, eller det, der er værre. Og hver gang
giver det mig et vist indblik i samfundet. Således også denne dag. Det viste
sig, at det var hashkager, og at jeg altså havde spist alt for mange. Jeg
blev drønskæv og kunne ikke blaffe mere den dag, da jeg var ude af stand til
at kommunikere med chaufførerne. Jeg gik ind i Jacksonville og satte mig i en
park for at vente på, at rusen skulle aftage. To harmløse bumser kom og satte
sig ved siden af mig. Men jeg blev pludselig enormt bange for dem og styrtede
ind på busstationen. Jeg turde ikke være ude på gaden selv i dagslys. Hashen
gjorde mig nemlig enormt paranoid, og netop når man sender frygtvibrationer
ud mod andre mennesker, sker det, at man bliver slået ned. Jeg erkendte den
dag den rystende angst, et flertal af amerikanere går rundt med, og at man
intet kan stille op over for den. Sidenhen har jeg haft mere forståelse for
folks reaktioner i Amerika. Det sker også, at jeg føler angst over for andre
mennesker. En nat i New York hørte jeg en stemme kalde mig inde fra en mørk
port nede i de uhyggelige områder omkring 9th Avenue. Jeg var fuldstændig
overbevist om, at hvis jeg gik derind, ville jeg blive slået ned; men jeg var
mere bange for, at hvis jeg ikke gjorde det, kunne det skabe præcedens, og så
ville jeg være lige så lammet som så mange andre i Amerika. Jeg tvang mig
selv til at gå derind. Det viste sig naturligvis, at det blot var en nedslidt
5-dollars gadeluder. Dette overbeviste mig endnu en gang om, at man aldrig
tager skade af at sige ja. I reglen bliver man direkte belønnet for det. I Detroit bad en 5-årig dreng mig i lang
tid, om jeg ikke ville komme hjem og tage nogle billeder af hans mor. Jeg
havde dårligt tid den dag, men besluttede mig alligevel for at gå med ham. Da
vi kom til hans hjem, lå moderen syg, og fire af hans syv søskende havde
store rottebid på ryggen og benene. Jeg opfattede det som en tilfældighed, at
han åbnede sig for mig, for jeg havde jo haft mest lyst til at være sammen med
de prostituerede. Men nu begynder jeg at tro, at det ikke var noget tilfælde.
Det er, som om der hele tiden er noget, der leder mig ind i de rigtige
situationer. Brev til en amerikansk
veninde * (Jeg har siden fundet ud af, at disse usofistikerede sætninger fra dette oprindelige brev om
min kærlighed til prostituerede som en undertrykt gruppe i USA og
Storbritannien, ofte misforstås på en seksuel snarere end en politisk måde.
For en klarere forståelse af mit forhold til prostituerede, se side 381).
179 Ingen hvide, føler jeg, kan fuldt forstå det enorme psykiske pres, det er, konstant at blive
bombarderet med, at man er mindre værd end hvide. Den værste skade sker, når
ofret begynder at tro på og indvendiggøre undertrykkerens fordomme. Grusomme nedvurderinger som ”Du er ikke
andet end skidt, nigger”, hører jeg konstant genlyde mellem sorte
familiemedlemmer. De
indgyder hinanden vores dybe racistiske følelser for dem sammen med den
dystre udsigt til at være
bandlyst til en permanent tilværelse på det hvide samfunds skyggeside. Det
håb, som jeg engang fandt blandt sorte i 70’erne, er i dag overalt blevet afløst
af en destruktiv selvbebrejdelse. |
216 |