One watched the lives [white people] led and the excuses they gave themselves, and if a white man was really in trouble, it was to the Negro's door that he came...The Negro came to the white man for five dollars or a letter to the judge; the white man came to the Negro for love. But he was not often able to give what he came seeking; he had too much to lose. And the Negro knew this. When one knows this about a man, it is impossible for one to hate him, but unless he becomes a man--becomes equal--it is also impossible to love him. Ultimately, one tends to avoid him... James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

To put it mildly, the thirty-odd white, middle-aged working men in my class at the Veterans' Division of Newbury Junior College did not agree. "He's a bitter man!" "A Communist!" "A fag" they'd cried when I'd read them the excerpt in our classroom at St. Mary's High School in Central Square, and for a while their venom threatened to dissolve fragile bonds of trust built with their Harvard graduate-student teacher over six short weeks.

Baldwin had moved me too, but differently, and as the epithets flew I was getting hot under the collar. I was ready to let fly, to call them names, and the strength of my feeling surprised me. Too much was at stake; I held back, took to the board, talked about racism and capitalism, tried to get them to stay with the possibility that black working people raising families have hopes and fears like their own. And when Baldwin spoke at Quincy House later that month I challenged them to confront two of their demons--blacks and Harvard--face to face. The undertaking thrust me instantly into a social "no-man's land" and taught me something about what it is like to be raised comfortably "above the battle" in an America where working whites and blacks are fighting it out.

* * *

Money had brought our class together; I'm paid by Newbury, while the Veteran's Administration pays the students' tuition and an additional cash stipend for regular attendance. Most of the men are in school primarily for the extra cash--an inauspicious beginning I felt sure we'd transcend as the group took on a life of its own.

"The purpose of this course," I said on opening night, "isn't to 'teach' you academic sociology. Our society is in turmoil--some would say falling apart--and yet most sociologists seem to be trying to keep abreast of the action as if they were referees in a fast sport. History doesn't have any referees; everyone is a player. It doesn't have fixed rules, so Nixon's football analogies don't really hold. You have to learn to call the shots for yourselves. Social scientists may help, but ultimately they can't do it for you. There's already a lot of knowledge in this room, about working, about raising families, about the armed forces--knowledge I don't have. But it won't do you much good unless you bring it out, find its main themes together, and begin to explain why things are as they are. I see this class as a good chance to do that; let me pick somebody at random and we'll give it a try."

They shifted uncomfortably as my gaze rested on one of the younger men. "Would you tell me your name, sir, and describe the kind of work you do?"

Larry was scared, but now the heat was off everyone else; a buddy quipped, "He don't do nothin' much at work!" and we all laughed. As Larry offered a short, self-deprecating sketch of his stock-sorting job at the Finast warehouse in Somerville, I realized that most of the men hadn't been in a classroom for years. I felt presumptuous; these were adult lives I was confronting, not data, and their faces told me more than I wanted to know as glimmers of interest struggled across features usually stolid, blown out, confused, or pugnacious because of the Blackboard, the Teacher, the Drill Sargeant, the Foreman. For me, that night the niceties of clinical description blurred into the broad strokes of oppression.

But the features were thawing, and others joined in. When six had spoken of their jobs, I asked, "Has anyone noticed a difference between the comments of the older men and those of the younger ones?"

"Yeah, us older guys are prouder of our work."

"That's just 'cause you bastards 've got seniority!"

"Naw, listen--when a guy learned to work twenty years ago he picked up different values than today, right?"

Agreement was unanimous that times have changed; the men told me and each other about changes in unions and production which have undermined pride in work. "And that," I said almost triumphantly, "is the start of real sociology. Now perhaps we can compare that with what other observers have said, and ask how things might be changed."

I was happy, yet haunted by premonitions of difficulty which took shape the following week as the inevitable testing began. Men twenty years my senior approached me with pointless jokes about decorum, schoolboy excuses about absence, and fears of their ability to give me "what you want." These charades wouldn't help us to face our real differences, and that was precisely their point--to protect us from the embarrassment of assuming equality and then having to confront the sociological truth.

The truth emerged anyway in essays they wrote about their jobs. A man's fifty years would flow by on two sides of a page: