I’m not worried about the Southern problem; that will work itself loose into another problem. And the bomb. That will, slovenly thing, solve itself. You know the ol’ hack—we cure the obvious and the subtle takes over, and if it’s subtle enough some grow fat and happy and others grow mad. I know this woman (pretty well), she marches on City Hall, the protest thing, either the black or the bomb, and she asks me, why don’t you do something? and I don’t say it, but I think I AM DOING SOMETHING, I am fucking you and you seem to like it a lot more than I do.

But I tell her, down where I work at night, I know plenty for there are 4 thousand people in this building and three thousand five hundred of them are black or mostly black, and I get along solidly with those I like, but here the problem is in being WHITE, and I have faced the problem in the factories and the slaughterhouses, I have been the WRONG color most of the time, but I can’t expect sensibility when they nailed christ on the cross for pulling miracles, I don’t go around pulling rabbits out of the hat. I have gotten close to their women and I have seen a black walk up to these women with a piece of white chalk in his hand and draw a line of white on his skin and ask one of these women, now will you have ME?

The fact that he was a sloppy strutting egocentric bastard, he did not take into consideration, only the fact that he was black. It’s hard being black. It’s even hard being white. It’s hard being alive.

She listens to this and says, At the meeting today I saw the most beautiful thing. This girl, she took this man’s shoes and stockings off and washed his feet in a pan of water, and then, after carefully and tenderly washing his feet, she kissed his feet, she was so young and beautiful and had this long hair and it fell over her face, and she kissed his feet, kissed his feet, and then she put his stockings on and then she put his shoes on.