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Footnotes 1195
can see how foolish is the thought, I wonder that we talked of it at all. But we had it
from our elders. They taught us early to keep the Negro in his place, whatever the cost
might be.
‘‘
1*11 never forget one of my first lessons. It was on a very quiet Sunday afternoon,
and a group of white boys were lying on the grass beside the road eating peaches. One
of the boys was a good deal older than the rest of us, and we looked to him as a leader.
I think it was he who made some suggestive remarks to a Negro girl who passed along
the road, and certainly it was he who stood up to answer a young Negro man who came
to protest when the girl told him what had happened. I think the girl would have been
more flattered than annoyed had the remarks been addressed to her privately, for she was
a bad sort; but there on the road in the presence of us all, she resented it. The Negro
man was mad, and he said more than I have ever heard a Negro say in defense of his
women, or for any other cause. We all knew him, and it was not the first time that he
had shown a disposition to argue with white folks. Our leader said nothing for a few
minutes, and then he walked slowly up to my house, which was not far away, and came
back with a shotgun. The Negro went away, and as the white boy lay down beside us
and began eating peaches again, he remarked, ‘You have to know how to handle Negroes.’
I knew then, on that quiet Sunday afternoon almost twenty years ago, and I know now,
that he was ready to use that gun, if it were necessary, to keep a Negro in his place.
Such incidents were not common, and few white boys would have done a thing like that.
But still that was one way.
“I am looking back to the things that I knew. In cities perhaps it was different. It may
be a little diflferent in the country now, though I don’t think there has been much
change. I have known Negroes who were happy, despite poverty and squalid surroundings.
I have known whites who were miserable, despite wealth and culture of a kind. Old
Negroes have told me, most any kind of Negro gets more out of life any day than a real,
high-class white man; and I believe them. We say here in the South that we know the
Negro. We believe that we have found for him a place in our culture. Education and
the passing of years may change everything, but I know that there are in my community
now many white people who will die perpetuating the order as they found it, the
scheme of things to which they belong.” (Rollin Chambliss, What Negro Newsfafers
of Georgia Say about Some Social Problemsy 1955, published thesis submitted in partial
fulfillment of requirements for Master’s Degree, University of Georgia [1934], pp.
4-8 .)
The independent role of the author should not be exaggerated. James Weldon
Johnson writes:
“The greater part of white America thinks of us in stereotypes; most of these stereo-
types coming to them second-hand by way of the representation of Negro life and
character on the stage and in certain books. In the main they are exaggerated, false,
and entirely unlike our real selves.” {Negro Americans^ What Now? [1934], p. 52.)
Against this opinion, which is common among intellectual Negroes, it should be
pointed out that ordinarily the stereotypes are already in the white society, and that
their appearance in the literature is derived rather than vice versa. But the latter fix
and sometimes magnify the former. This is true in the South. In the North, and par-
ticularly in those regions where personal relations to Negroes are scarce or totally absent,
Johnson is probably more right: there the literary representations build up the stereo-
types. And in the fractical problem of strategy it is possible to think of fiction as a
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