Free Blues for Mister Charlie by James Baldwin

eighteen and she was only seventeen. I was still a virgin. I don’t know if she was, but I think she was. A lot of the other kids in school used to drive over to niggertown at night to try and find black women. Sometimes they bought them, sometimes they frightened them, sometimes they raped them. And they were proud of it, they talked about it all the time. I couldn’t do that. Those kids made me ashamed of my own body, ashamed of everything I felt, ashamed of being white—
    JO : Ashamed of being white.
    PARNELL : Yes.
    JO : How did you meet—this colored girl?
    PARNELL : Her mother worked for us. She used to come, sometimes, to pick up her mother. Sometimes she had to wait. I came in once and found her in the library, she was reading Stendhal.
The Red and The Black.
I had just read it and we talked about it. She was funny—very bright and solemn and very proud—and she was
scared
, scared of me, but much too proud to show it. Oh, she was funny. But she was bright.
    JO : What did she look like?
    PARNELL : She was the color of gingerbread when it’s just come out of the oven. I used to call her Ginger—later. Her name was really Pearl. She had black hair, very black, kind of short, and she dressed it very carefully. Later, I used to tease her about the way she took care of her hair. There’s a girl in this town now who reminds me of her. Oh, I loved her!
    JO : What happened?
    PARNELL : I used to look at her, the way she moved, so beautiful and free, and I’d wonder if at night, when she might be on her way home from someplace, any of those boys at school had said ugly things to her. And then I thought that I wasn’t any better than they were, because I thought my own thoughts were pretty awful. And I wondered what she thought of me. But I didn’t dare to ask. I got so I could hardly think of anyone but her. I got sick wanting to take her in my arms, to take her in my arms and love her and protect her from all those other people who wanted to destroy her. She wrote a little poetry, sometimes she’d show it to me, but she really wanted to be a painter.
    JO : What happened?
    PARNELL : Nothing happened. We got so we told each other everything. She was going to be a painter, I was going to be awriter. It was our secret. Nobody in the world knew about her
inside
, what she was like, and how she dreamed, but me. And nobody in the world knew about
me
inside, what I wanted, and how I dreamed, but her. But we couldn’t look ahead, we didn’t dare. We talked about going North, but I was still in school, and she was still in school. We couldn’t be seen anywhere together—it would have given her too bad a name. I used to see her sometimes in the movies, with various colored boys. She didn’t seem to have any special one. They’d be sitting in the balcony, in the colored section, and I’d be sitting downstairs in the white section. She couldn’t come down to me, I couldn’t go up to her. We’d meet some nights, late, out in the country, but—I didn’t want to take her in the bushes, and I couldn’t take her anywhere else. One day we were sitting in the library, we were kissing, and her mother came in. That was the day I found out how much black people can hate white people.
    JO : What did her mother do?
    PARNELL : She didn’t say a word. She just looked at me. She just looked at me. I could see what was happening in her mind. She knew that there wasn’t any point in complaining to my mother or my father. It would just make her daughter look bad. She didn’t dare tell her husband. If he tried to do anything, he’d be killed. There wasn’t anything she could do about me. I was just another horny white kid trying to get into a black girl’s pants. She looked at me as though she were wishing with all her heart that she could raise her hand and wipe me off the face of the earth. I’ll never forget that look. I still see it. She walked over to Pearl and I thought she was going to slap her. But she didn’t. She