“The boys that were brought up as I was, in shacks beside cricks where dead dogs and human waste floated, shacks without even a privy, where the plantation storekeepers or the cotton-buyers all stole from us and wouldn’t even let us look at our accounts—some of these boys steal back. What a haunt you whites have built up!
“Segregated! John and Mary, Ash and Martha, segregated just as much as an old boot like me. Segregated! Told that we’re like hogs, not fit to mix with human beings, and then your military gumshoe friend expects us to be obedient—and chummy!
“Segregated! ‘Separate but equal accommodations’—new coaches for the whites and pest-houses on wheels for the happy jigs! New brick schools for your kids—see pictures in the Atlanta Sunday paper—and unpainted barns for us, and benches without backs and no desks, no desks at all, for our pickaninnies, as you would call ‘em. Let the little bastards write on their knees, if they have to write—which sensible folks gravely question.
“Segregated! School buses for your darling chicks, but ours can hoof it five miles. Marble-floored hospitals for you and slaughterhouses for us. No jobs except the hard work, the dirty work, the dangerous work, and the white cops making their own laws to use against us and acting as provocateurs and our judges and our executioners all put together. And then your classmate complains that we won’t whisper our secrets in his dainty ears! I’ll say!”
And Clem yelled with laughter and looked at Neil affectionately. And affectionately Martha Davis crooned at Neil:
“Mr. Kingsblood, the Southern white man invariably tells you that when he was a boy, his best friend was a lil black rascal who was his guide and bootlegger and pimp and pal. Good Ole Jim! He never tells you he was friendly with a black boy who was studious and sober. He didn’t know there were any colored boys like that—he still doesn’t!
“And really kind, sweet Southern women who give the tenderest care to a cullud wench if she takes typhoid but are offended if she takes psychology.
“It isn’t merely the major horrors that oppress us in the South—the fear of being lynched, burnt, beaten. We can forget those things, except on sultry nights with heat lightning like the flash of guns. Then you lie rigid in the dark and listen and you’re terrified when you hear a car, a footstep, a whisper, terrified that the whites may be coming, and they never come for any good.
“But it’s not that fear so much as the constant, quiet slaps. It’s the little things, in a South that cherishes the little things—roses and Grandfather’s sword and Lanier’s verses and the joyful controversy between bruising and crushing the mint for a julep. It’s the signs ‘For colored only,’ that tell a pretentious Negro female like me that she’s unclean.