But learning the lesson--being told that we had unwittingly adopted the habits of authority and paternalism--only complicated our relations with Shaw students. We found ourselves caught in a maze of psychological dilemmas created simply by our being there, by our having to interact with the students. Eager to drop our roles as White Liberals, we found it difficult not to be liberal and impossible not to be White.

How could we not participate in a racial contest? One of my tutees engaged me daily in a battle of wits. First she got me to acknowledge my guilt, as a white, for the American Negro's condition. When she had me where she wanted me, she accused me of showing pity for the Negro. She systematically blocked my efforts to assuage my guilt by refusing to let me be nice to her.

"I think you're a sensitive girl. You're too sensitive. I don't want you to feel sorry for me." I object weakly. She is patronizing me and I, because I want to please, allow her to: She has reversed the color roles and now I am the one who smiles and submits. She continues, oblivious: "You really don't know what it's like to be black. You. couldn't stand it. You couldn't stand it for a week." Now she has something I can't have because I'm the wrong color--the strength that comes from being Negro in America, the strength that means she doesn't need my sympathy. The game goes on, every afternoon during our German lessons, always concluded with her friendly but inscrutable smile "Don't you see that I'm manipulating you?"

No one was sure who was manipulating whom. "Every Negro American," writes James Baldwin, "risks having the gates of paranoia close on him." They closed on everyone at Shaw. Shaw Negroes felt agonizing doubts as to whether the affronts they were attributing to us were real or imaginary. I began to feel the same doubts.

If I assigned The Fire Next Time to a student, would he feel that I regarded him only as part of the Negro Problem? If, on the other hand, I avoided books dealing with race, would he feel that I was treating him like a psychological invalid, trying not to upset him? Or was the problem mine--was I being over-sensitive?

Still another level of complication was added to our relations with students by their own contradictory behavior. Our being there produced a psychic split in many of them: as Negroes, they hated us; as people, they wanted to like us.

One student who particularly sought out our company was a militant who told us he wanted to see Raleigh burn. "I feel hate," he told us, "I could kill a white man." A penetrating look, then a broad grin: "Not you, man!" He let us know he wasn't just being friendly to please us. His decision to be friendly (and it was his decision, not ours) was an act of generosity.

Why's everybody talking about hate? I don't hate anyone, I don't care if he's purple or green or what. We just have to understand each other. If white people just got to know black people, just sat down and talked with them, that's all you need.

Although we recognized that we were accomplishing little aside from producing dilemmas by our presence, there was no feasible way out. Several students suggested that we "pack our bags." That would have been too easily interpreted as a show of hostility and for most of us it would have been an impossible admission of failure.

We were, of course, doing a little in providing drill. Tedious afternoons working out chemistry problems, dictating passages in German, and diagramming sentences meant that a few tutees passed final exams who might have failed.

The word Christianity screams through the foggy room over the music phrases. What about it. Why Christianity It's nothing to it. I don't want to talk about Christianity. I'm sitting in my room with my red light on. There's heavy smokum in the air. A smell you only get on Saturday. Music by Mingus, Roach, Blakey, Morgan, Shorten, there notes dancing on the clouds of smokum that's riding through the air.

THERE was a reason for our being at Shaw that we didn't know at the time, a reason that had nothing to do with tutoring. If we had understood it earlier we might have understood Shaw.

Last January an article on Negro colleges by David Riesman and Christopher Jencks appeared in the Har-

"I feel hate," he told us. "I could KILL a white man." A penetrating look, then a broad grin. "Not you, man!"

"The program here is to produce white back Americans to live in a white society." vard Educational Review. The article condemned Negro colleges across the board as being "purveyors of super-American, ultra-bourgeois prejudices and aspirations," "academic disaster areas," and "fourth-rate institutions at the tail end of the academic procession."