Now I’ll recite an experience in Negro life—an experience that exists on a non-religious plane—that cancels out my grandmother’s way of life, or, perhaps I should say, merges with it and becomes, in essence, one. I shall call both of these ways of living—my grandmother’s and the one I shall now relate—the “abstract.” Perhaps “abstract” is not the right word for it, but I think it will serve the purpose if I define it. What I mean by “abstract” living is simply any way of life that does not derive its meaning and sanction from the context of experience, a way of life that is lived distantly from the environment even though it subsists on the environment, a way of living that allows or enables or forces the organism to superimpose judgments and values upon their experiences borrowed from somewhere else.

Perhaps I can best express it in another way. Let’s imagine a man cast alone upon a small, unpopulated desert island with, say, a dictaphone, a pair of skates, a million dollars in gold currency, three thousand copies of The New York Times, a Chicago telephone directory, a sack of marbles, a doorknob, and a bouquet of red roses. . . . At once we can see that these items have no use or real meaning for him, for they were snatched from the context of another way of life. Yet, let’s imagine that our castaway is doomed to live the balance of his natural life with these items and at once we get an inkling of the state of mind of my grandmother (and, incidentally, of the millions of Negroes in America who are surrounded with daily items of civilization to which they cannot react frontally). The only way in which our castaway can get along with these items is to either ignore them altogether or impose upon them a meaning alien to them, a meaning which they do not possess intrinsically or in relation to anything else.

And such was what my grandmother did with her religion; she took concepts from the Old Testament and tagged the items in her environment which did not fit and gave them other names and other meanings. Hence, she ordered me to destroy the first radio I brought into the house. She refused to believe that the music and the voices were coming over the air; she branded it an evil thing of the devil. I doubt seriously if, outside of the daily things which she was forced to use for the sake of keeping life going, she ever linked any of the important segments to each other to make meaning, or if she ever detected any causal relations between the segments. I imagine her world must have looked something like a surrealistic painting. . . . (More on this later.)

I hasten to add that my grandmother’s refusal to attempt to see meanings or relationships around her did not flow from any personal weakness on her part. Being a Negro woman, she had more than her share of handicaps to keep the daily, meaningful world in which the majority of people lived from her; and, knowing that such a world was not for her, she gave it up. But, having once surrendered the things of this world, she had perforce to keep it from her. She had created a world in which to live and whenever the world before her eyes intruded into her created world, she drove it out with all of the savage vehemence of one who felt that life itself was endangered.