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Footnotes 1193
d white Southerner. The author has unusual insight, even for one who has abandoned
his racial beliefs. “It was less than a year ago when I saw for the first time in my life
a Negro newspaper. Before that time 1 had not known that Negroes had papers of their
own. They were not to be seen in the places 1 frequented, though I often went as a
boy into the homes of Negro tenants. I do not believe I ever heard one of the Negroes
that I then knew say, I read thus and so in the newspaper. If they read at all, it was
not of their reading that they talked to white folks.
“I was in college before I read a book written by a Negro. I had been to Negro
churches and heard their preachers. Probably the first singing I ever heard was that of
Negroes. But I had never associated them with writing, or veVy much with reading.
I’hose were things, like our Boy Scout troop and school picnics, in which they had no
part. 1 remember the surprise I felt at finding DuBois’ Soul of the Black Folk, my first
contact with Negro writing, not different in outward respects from other books I had
read. I don’t know what 1 expected Negro writing to look like; certainly I knew that
it would not be white ink on black paper. But I did feel that there would be something
physical to show that this was done by a Negro. The Negroes that I knew worked in the
cotton fields. Around the towns they did all kinds of odd jobs, for small pay. The
women washed and cooked and kept house for the white folks. None of them wrote
anything that 1 knew of.
“There must have been more Negroes in the little South Georgia community in
which I grew up than whites, for though there were only three or four white boys in
the group with which I used to play, there were a half dozen or more Negroes, We did
chores together there on the farm, and went ‘
’possum huntin’ ’
and to the swimming
hole down on the creek and played ball and did all of those things that boys do in rural
Georgia.
“We did them together, and yet the Negroes were always a little apart. If we were
swimming, they kept downstream. If we were playing ball, they were in the outfield and
wc did the batting. If we were gathering plums, the Negroes always left us the best
bushes. There was no ill feeling in this. Negroes were different. They knew it, and we
knew it. In the fields we all drank from the same jug, but at the pump the Negroes
cupped their hands and drank from them and would never have dared to use the cup
hanging there. I never knew a Negro to come to the front door of my home, and I am
sure that if one had done so, someone would have asked him if he minded stepping
around to the back. At the age of ten I understood full well that the Negro had to be
kept in his place, and I was resigned to my part in that general responsibility.
“As we grew to adolescence, the relationship with Negro boys became less intimate.
We began then to talk of things which the Negro could not understand—of what we
were going to do in life, of our little love affairs, of school life, of our hopes for the
future. In such things the Negro had no part, and gradually we played together less
and less. We were more often with grown Negroes, and 1 think now that we were
always closer to the men than we were to the boys of our own age. They knew where
rabbits were, how to tell when a dog had treed, when the wind was too high for
squirrels to stir, where it was best to set a trap, I don’t know how Southern white boys
on the farm would learn anything without Negroes. And they sang a lot too and
strummed guitars and were almost always in good humor. They never talked very
much about their own affairs, and they never told things on other Negroes. I have
never known a Negro to lead a white boy into anything vicious. I knew some of these
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