Some nights I'd sit back, hands behind my head, and just listen. Other nights I'd push the men to keep looking at some contradiction they'd stumbled upon, holding both sides in tension until something changed. Still there were barriers between us, and the strongest to surface that autumn in Boston was racism.
What can I say? Sleezy arguments, innuendos, inflated anecdotes--and legitimate complaints about abuses in preferential hiring and busing. Racial tensions had increased, I argued, because of scarce jobs and deteriorating schools for both black and white working class families. Our economy has always permitted blacks some exit from chronic unemployment in times of plenty, but it has found them easiest to fire when times are hard. If blacks refuse to bear the brunt of the current depression, they become scapegoats for white workers unwilling to share it. That keeps the heat off employers and the upper class. Take away racism, "heroic" wars and pacification programs like welfare or unemployment compensation, and the corporate profit system has to admit it can't make room for everyone; then it must resort to outright repression, using techniques and technology developed since the sixties to cope with future uprisings.
That made some sense to the men but it hurt, and seemed to them, ironically, to come from "ultra-liberal" Harvard. Baldwin spoke to "Harvard types" too, didn't he? I felt angry and isolated--from the class, because, despite my sympathy with the men, I couldn't stomach the bitter mistrust and racism; and from "liberal" (really "corporate") Harvard where I'd never felt at home. As I left St. Mary's one night, a police siren warbled and the ground beneath me seemed to swim. Is there no peace?
Of course, I reflected biterly, I could "stabilize" my relationship to students like these simply by trading upon my assets and employing or managing them, learning the habits and subtleties of command; their racism need not concern me. My present teaching is impotent, naive; why beat my head against the wall?
The question never really deserved an answer; when I saw that Baldwin was coming to Harvard, I decided on a field trip intead of a retreat. I considered my worst fears: we might find an effete writer regaling black undergraduates whom my students would think had edged out their own kids to get to Harvard. Worse, the Harvard audience might greet the men with raised eyebrows, even with a conjecture that Buildings and Grounds had turned out for the evening. But it was an opportunity, a risk the men would never take outside our class. I suggested a vote, everyone abiding by the outcome.
My fears came down to earth in group discussion. Most of these life-long Boston area residents had never seen Harvard, and wanted to leave St. Mary's for an evening. Those who were strongly opposed had little to say; I asked for the "yes" votes first to spare them embarrassment, and they frowned at the floor as a large majority of the hands went up. But they earned my respect by showing on the night of the trip.
* * *
"What does it cost to go here, Jimmy?" they asked as we strolled around the Yard. "How smart d'ya have to be?" They were my guests now, and I was almost embarrassed as we wound through the campus toward Quincy House, looking through windows at undergraduates sprawled on leather couches set against "real" oak panneling hung with oil portraits.
Four hundred and fifty people had come to hear Baldwin, about eighty per cent of them black. The feeling was lively and warm, but my students at first sat quite stiffly. Soon a small, grinning figure was leaning over the podium talking to us. I glanced at my "guests" again and knew that a lot was now in Baldwin's hands.
He said the American Dream is over. He said we had all better know our pasts, and learn the truth about American history, because if we can't face that much about ourselves, we'll never know one another for real. He said we have to be honest for the sake of our children--"a-a-all our children," he repeated, smiling warmly around the room. He said black people have lived with suffering before, and so have something to teach the rest of America in the years ahead.
Later that night I sat quietly at 33 Dunster with a few of my students. Most had heard him with respect, some with faces I hadn't seen before. One said it was "nothing new;" another admitted he'd felt "like a mouse set into a box with a cat" but had warmed considerably during the talk; another said his mind "had been blown." "You know," Dan mused as I walked him to the bus, "I've missed out on a lot. I'm the same age as you, but I never had this college life. I wish had time to sit and talk these things over with people, know what I mean? I learned a lot tonight, but these people at Harvard kinda scare me, y'know?"
We stood on the curb, hands jammed into our pockets, staring at our feet pawing the ground. Then he went home to East Somerville, to his wife and three kids and a quality control job at Polaroid; I turned back into the Yard, where the lamplight of a hundred thousand campus and suburban bedrooms revealed the faces of young dreamers starting into books or at cracks in the ceiling, heads encased in earphones, wired to their stereos in a kind of emotional intravenous.
* * *
Do you ever wonder why we have been imported to this enclave surrounded by clusters of old three-deckers and empty lots where our age-mates, back from the service, are pounding the pavements, where young women strangely haggard work the night shift and Dunkin Donuts, where men with lunchpails punch in at Finast and Fenton Shoe, where old women on their way to our dining halls slip off gaseous buses onto the ice before dawn? What are we doing here? How shall we live? Are we somehow part of their burden? Will we always stand over against them?
Pitting working-class whites against blacks keeps the "white heat" off us, but it keeps a lot of the warmth away as well. That absence of social peace--however "refined," however accepted--is hurting us more than we know: those at the top, for all their sophistication, become wedding-cake figures, deprived and innocent of the world around them; those in the middle barter themselves daily, hustling and striving and somehow always missing the point. Baldwin says that blacks still "free" of those maladies become not only victims of whites' hatred and fear, but, ironically, furtively, sources of the love they inhibit among themselves.
Two nights after his words first focused the confrontation between my students and me--two nights into "no-man's land"--I dreamed I went to the elderly black woman who came each week to clean my childhood home, and we embraced and wept together for the sadness of an affluent family in the suburbs. That won't get me very far with most blacks, and Dan and the rest of the class will probably never hear about it