Free Voices in Our Blood by Jon Meacham

in my ass.”
    . . . I was walking up Grand Avenue to school. Just as I crossed the railroad track I heard a loud crash several hundred yards to the north. Looking in that direction I saw the early morning freight out of Memphis pushing the remnants of a car along the track on its cowguard. I ran up the track. The train had crashed into a Negro taxicab with a full load of passengers. Blood was everywhere; two people lay mangled and still inside the wrecked car. A third, a woman, straddled the car and the train. A carload of high school boys on their way to school screeched around the corner and the boys got out to look at the wreckage. The woman slowly regained consciousness, looked around her, and asked, “Where’s the train?” One of the high school boys, the star tailback, replied: “Nigger, you sittin’ right on it.”
    . . . One morning I awoke to hear that a neighbor had shot a Negro burglar. I ran down to his house, and a large crowd milled around on the porch and in the front room. Inside, the man was telling what had happened. He pointed to a bullet hole in the wall, and another in the leg of a table. He had awakened in the night and saw the nigger in the hallway. He pulled out his automatic and shot twice, and he heard a moan and saw the nigger running away. When he telephoned the police, all they had to do was follow the trail of blood to a house in niggertown. That morning we followed the blood ourselves, little drops and big ones in the dust of the alley and onto the concrete pavement. Then we came back and congratulated our neighbor on his aim. More people came in to hear the story, and he told them: “If that second shot had been two inches to the left, that woulda been one
good
nigger.”
    As we grew older, beyond puberty into an involvement with girls, it seemed as if our own acts took on a more specific edge of cruelty. On Canal Street, across from the old Greyhound station at the Bayou, there was a concrete bannister where the Negroes would sit waiting for the busses. On Saturday nights we would cruise down the street in a car, and the driver would open his door and drive close to the curb. We would watch while the Negroes, to avoid the car door, toppled backward off the bannister like dominoes. And the taunts and threats to the isolated Negroes we saw, on country roads and deserted white streets, were harder and more cruel than anything we had done as children.
    Deeply involved with the unthinking sadism, and with the sudden curious affection, were the moments of pity and sorrow. One Fourth of July afternoon when we were in high school, we went in a large group to one of the lakes in the delta for swimming and a picnic. A Negro shack on the bank of the lake had burned to the ground the night before. The father had taken his wife and his several small children into a bare, floorless cabin nearby, alive with crawling things that came out of the rotten wood in the walls. All they had saved was the clothes on their backs. They sat around all day in front of their shack, watching us eat and swim; for hours, it seemed, they hardly moved. Finally my girlfriend and I walked over to them. We discovered that the children had eaten practically nothing in two days. The children sat there listlessly, not saying a word; the father said even the fish wouldn’t bite for him. My girl started crying. We went back and told the others, and took up a collection that must have come to fifteen dollars, and gave them our hotdogs and cokes. The Negro family ate the food and continued to look at us down by the lake. Under their stolid gaze I felt uncomfortable; I wanted to head back to Grand Avenue again. We packed our things and went to the car, drove through the flat cotton country to town, and resumed our picnic on the back lawn of one of the big houses in our neighborhood.

Notes of a Native Son
    1955
    J AMES B ALDWIN
    On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day,