The Cross of Redemption by James Baldwin Read Free Book Online

handicapped.
    This shows very painfully in the scene in which Hernández meets his death. His reaction to the effigy of a hanged Negro, in spite of all Mr. Hernández’s skill, is false. This is not the first time he has seen such an effigy, and if he has been living in that town all his life, it is simply not possible for the white people there to surprise him—at least, they cannot surprise him by being wicked or by being afraid. They have always been that, and he knows that about them, if he knows nothing else. Any Negro facing, in such a town, three overheated white boys knows what he is in for.
    He can try to outwit, flatter, cajole them, put them at their ease by humiliating himself—though at this point, the spectacle of his humiliation is probably not enough to set them at their ease; or if the chips are really, at last, thank heaven, down, he can resolve to take one of them with him. And even if all the foregoing guesswork is wrong, one thing remains indisputable: once attacked, he would certainly not be trying to get past his attackers in order to go to work. Not on that morning, not in that school, not with death staring at him out of the eyes of three young white men.
    All of the training, therefore, all of the skill which Mr. Hernández has acquired, to say nothing of his talent—for it took a vast amount of talent to bring Lucas, in
Intruder in the Dust
, alive—is here not merely wasted, which would be bad enough; it is subverted, sabotaged, put at the mercy ofa lie; for the wellspring on which the actor must draw, which is his own sense of life, and his own experience, is precisely, here, what Mr. Hernández cannot use. If he had, it would have torn the scene to pieces, and altered the course of the play. For the play’s real intention, after all, is to say something about the integration struggle without saying anything about the root of it.
    If you will examine the play carefully, you will find that the only really wicked people in the play are wicked because they are insane. They are covered, therefore, and the crimes of the Republic are hidden. If we get rid of all these mad people, the play seems to be saying, “We’ll get together and everything will be all right.” The realities of economics, sex, politics, and history are thus swept under the rug.
    Now the Negro actor, after all, is also a person and was not born two seconds before he enters the casting office. By the time he gets to that office, he has probably been an elevator boy, a cab driver, a dishwasher, a porter, a longshoreman. His blood is already thick with humiliations, and if he has any sense at all, he knows how small are his chances of making it in the theater. He does a great deal of acting in the casting office—more, probably, than he will ever be allowed to do onstage. And, whatever his training, he is not there to get a role he really wants to play: he is there to get a role which will allow him to be seen.
    It is all too likely that he has seen actors inferior to himself in training and talent rise far above him. And now here he is, once more, facing an essentially ignorant and uncaring white man or woman, who
may
allow him to play a butler or a maid in the show being cast. He dissembles his experience in the office, and he knows that he will probably be lying about it onstage. He also knows why; it is because nobody wants to know the story. It would upset them. To begin analyzing all of his probable reactions would take all of the space of this magazine, and then some. But resentment is compounded by the fact, as a Negro actress once observed to me, that not only does the white world impose the most intolerable conditions on Negro life, they also presume to dictate the mode, manner, terms, and style of one’s reaction against these conditions.
    Or, as a Negro playwright tells it, explaining how Ketti Frings came to adapt Richard Wright’s
Long Dream
for the stage: “She was sitting by this swimming pool, see, and