"Oh. . ."

"You work, don't you? How about Saturday monring?"

"Well..." He was overcome. "All right."

"You can get it over with in an hour and be right home."

She made a note in her book, extended her hand, and bounced from the porch, her face reflecting a controlled, anticipated satisfaction. A car full of whites passed. Necks crained. The driver turned around just in time to watch his car clatter noisily in and out of a shallow ditch.

"You see that?" she called, laughing, to the man she had just left.

But the door was closed. She was, without knowing it, a sort of miracle in the Georgia road--a mirage at first for whomever (black or white) saw her, then undeniable, and finally, damn it all, real enough, and a threat.

Inside his house, the prospective registrant scratched his car. He might have bought an insurance policy or a bottle of healing oil. Maybe she would forget to come back.

Whiteness is the problem of a tenacious if sometimes comical little minority within the American Negro Movement. It is not an insurmountable problem, as the cynics would insist, but it is difficult, three-like in its old deep roots and twisting ramifications, and, if not faced honestly and quickly by the afflicted, it can be crippling.

Julie, the dedicated young thing on the Georgia road, might go a week signing up registrants for Saturday, believing that she was identifying with the people and accepted and just like one of 'em. But come the big day, when not one in ten showed up, she would have to explain it--if only to herself.

The Explanation

Either they had forgotten or been detained (which ought to strike even Julie as implausible) or they had been plain-lying, and then why would they lie? If she were lazy or frightened enough, she just might accept the first explanation, hollow as it would sound. She might avoid the real problem (why did they lie?) as lesser people than she avoid so much by not seeing the Negro. And she might avoid it indefinitely if whatever she were running from in the North were sufficiently terrible, end up lying blatantly to herself and only step up the volume of romantic postcards sent home about the eufferin' and the new-found dignity--all set to turn cynical when expedient.

But if she were honest, she just might just try to figure out why it was that the Negroes had lied to her, and perhaps, sudden-like, she might see that it was the same old thing: White folks in this country have been demanding that Negroes lie to them for a long time. The lie and its anticipated consequence, a slight but noticeable and sometimes crucial lifting of the hob-nailed boot from a black neck, formed a principle of existence for a whole lot of people long before the Fathers signed their ambiguous document and still does. If you act white, you're going to be lied to. Or better, if you don't act black. Because skin is skin and it takes a heap of acting to get outside it.

Having gotten this far, Julie, if in were in her, might begin to grow--might master the old relationships in order to transcend them, become always sensitive to the gall of words, their effects, begin to learn a folklore, a new language, how to sing and dance. Liberals to the contrary, this would be a struggle in itself, and she would have to be very honest and sincere and have talent. This is the white problem: the cultural gap that does exist. The solution is to be black, and if few make it, some do--and are effective.

I remember a night in the Albany city jail. It was after a demonstration, the Negro cell block was crowded past humanity, and on the white side, two or three of us "white-niggers" were sprinkled among the drunks and hustlers. We had been singing freedom songs, loud and happy. It was very late. The booking section stands adjacent to the jail itself, and the night duty cops, who had been unable to work, but were trying to ignore us, finally stormed in, faces red, voices resping: