James Baldwin Centenary Audio Series

Sweet Lorraine. The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1985. 443-47. By James Baldwin

That’s the way I always felt about her, and so I won’t apologize for calling her that now. She
understood it: in that far too brief a time when we walked and talked and laughed and drank
together, sometimes in the streets and bars and restaurants of the Village, sometimes at her
house, gracelessly fleeing the houses of others; and sometimes seeming, for anyone who didn’t
know us, to be having a knock-down-drag-out battle. We spent a lot of time arguing about
history and tremendously related subjects in her Bleecker Street and, later, Waverly Place flats.
And often, just when I was certain that she was about to throw me out as being altogether too
rowdy a type, she would stand up, her hands on her hips (for these down-home sessions she
always wore slacks), and pick up my empty glass as though she intended to throw it at me.
Then she would walk into the kitchen, saying, with a haughty toss of her head, “Really, Jimmy.
You ain’t right, child!” With which stern put- down she would hand me another drink and launch
into a brilliant analysis of just why I wasn’t “right.” I would often stagger down her stairs as the
sun came up, usually in the middle of a paragraph and always in the middle of a laugh. That
marvelous laugh. That marvelous face. I loved her, she was my sister and my comrade. Her
going did not so much make me lonely as make me realize how lonely we were. We had that
respect for each other which perhaps is only felt by people on the same side of the barricades,
listening to the accumulating thunder of the hooves of horses and the heads of tanks.
The first time I ever saw Lorraine was at the Actors’ Studio, in the winter of ’58-’59. She was
there as an observer of the Workshop Production of Giovanni’s Room. She sat way up in the
bleachers, taking on some of the biggest names in the American theater because she had liked
the play and they, in the main, hadn’t. I was enormously grateful to her, she seemed to speak for
me; and afterward she talked to me with a gentleness and generosity never to be forgotten. A
small, shy, determined person, with that strength dictated by absolutely impersonal ambition:
she was not trying to “make it” – she was trying to keep the faith.
We really met, however, in Philadelphia, in 1959, when A Raisin in the Sun was at the beginning
of its amazing career. Much has been written about this play; I personally feel that it will demand
a far less guilty and constricted people than the present-day Americans to be able to assess it at
all; as an historical achievement, anyway, no one can gainsay its importance. What is relevant
here is that I had never in my life seen so many black people in the theater. And the reason was
that never in the history of the American theater had so much of the truth of black people’s lives
been seen on the stage. Black people ignored the theater because the theater had always
ignored them.
But, in Raisin, black people recognized that house and all the people in it – the mother, the son,
the daughter, and the daughter-in-law – and supplied the play with an interpretative element
which could not be present in the minds of white people: a kind of claustrophobic terror, created

not only by their knowledge of the streets. And when the curtain came down, Lorraine and I
found ourselves in the backstage alley, where she was immediately mobbed. I produced a pen
and Lorraine handed me her handbag and began signing autographs. “It only happens once,”
she said. I stood there and watched. I watched the people, who loved Lorraine for what she had
brought to them; and watched Lorraine, who loved the people for what they brought to her. It
was not, for her, a matter of being admired. She was being corroborated and confirmed. She
was wise enough and honest enough to recognize that black American artists are in a very
special case. One is not merely an artist and one is not judged merely as an artist: the black
people crowding around Lorraine, whether or not they considered her an artist, assuredly
considered her a witness. This country’s concept of art and artists has the effect, scarcely worth
mentioning by now, of isolating the artist from the people. One can see the effect of this in the
irrelevance of so much of the work produced by celebrated white artists; but the effect of this
isolation on a black artist is absolutely fatal. He is, already, as a black American citizen, isolated
from most of his white countrymen. At the crucial hour, he can hardly look to his artistic peers for
help, for they do not know enough about him to be able to correct him. To continue to grow, to
remain in touch with himself, he needs the support of that community from which, however, all of
the pressures of American life incessantly conspire to remove him. And when he is effectively
removed, he falls silent – and the people have lost another hope.
Much of the strain under which Lorraine worked was produced by her knowledge of this reality,
and her determined refusal to be destroyed by it. She was a very young woman, with an
overpowering vision, and fame had come to her early – she must certainly have wished, often
enough, that fame had seen fit to drag its feet a little. For fame and recognition are not
synonyms, especially not here, and her fame was to cause her to be criticized very harshly, very
loudly, and very often by both black and white people who were unable to believe, apparently,
that a really serious intention could be contained in so glamorous a frame. She took it all with a
kind of astringent good humor, refusing, for example, even to consider defending herself when
she was being accused of being a “slum lord” because of her family’s real-estate holdings in
Chicago. I called her during that time, and all she said – with a wry laugh – was, “My God,
Jimmy, do you realize you’re only the second person who’s called me today? And you know how
my phone kept ringing before!” She was not surprised. She was devoted to the human race, but
she was not romantic about it.
When so bright a light goes out so early, when so gifted an artist goes so soon, we are left with
a sorrow and wonder which speculation cannot assuage. One’s filled for a long time with a
sense of injustice as futile as it is powerful. And the vanished person fills the mind, in this or that
attitude, doing this or that. Sometimes, very briefly, one hears the exact inflection of the voice,
the exact timbre of the laugh – as I have, when watching the dramatic presentation, To Be
Young, Gifted and Black, and in reading through these pages. But I do not have the heart to
presume to assess her work, for all of it, for me, was suffused with the light which was Lorraine.
It is possible, for example, that The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window attempts to say too much;
but it is also exceedingly probable that it makes so loud and uncomfortable a sound because of
the surrounding silence; not many plays, presently, risk being accused of attempting to say too
much! Again, Brustein is certainly a very willed play, unabashed didactic: but it cannot, finally, be

dismissed or categorized in this way because of the astonishing life of its people. It positively
courts being dismissed as old-fashioned and banal and yet has the unmistakable power of
turning the viewer’s judgment in on himself. Is all this true or not true? the play rudely demands;
and, unforgivably, leaves us squirming before this question. One cannot quite answer the
question negatively, one risks being caught in a lie. But an affirmative answer imposes a new
level of responsibility, both of one’s conduct and for the fortunes of the American state, and one
risks, therefore, the disagreeable necessity of becoming “an insurgent again.” For Lorraine
made no bones about asserting that art has a purpose, and that its purpose was action: that it
contained the “energy which could change things.”
It would be good, selfishly, to have her around now, that small, dark girl, with her wit, her
wonder, and her eloquent compassion. I’ve only met one person Lorraine couldn’t get through
to, and that was the late Bobby Kennedy. And, as the years have passed since that stormy
meeting – Lorraine talks about it in these pages, so I won’t go into it here – I’ve very often
pondered what she then tried to convey – that a holocaust is no respecter of persons; that what,
today, seems merely humiliation and injustice for a few, can, unchecked, become Terror for the
many, snuffing out white lives just as though they were black lives; that if the American state
could not protect the lives of black citizens, then, presently, the entire state would find itself
engulfed. And the horses and tanks are indeed upon us, and the end is not in sight. Perhaps it
is just as well, after all, that she did not live to see with the outward eye what she saw so clearly
with the inward one. And it is not at all far-fetched to suspect that what she saw contributed to
the strain which killed her, for the effort to which Lorraine was dedicated is more than enough to
kill a man.
I saw Lorraine in her hospital bed, as she was dying. She tried to speak, she couldn’t. She did
not seem frightened or sad, only exasperated that her body no longer obeyed her; she smiled
and waved. But I prefer to remember her as she was the last time I saw her on her feet. We
were at, of all places, the PEN Club, she was seated, talking, dressed all in black, wearing a
very handsome wide, black hat, thin, and radiant. I knew she had been ill, but I didn’t know then,
how seriously. I said, “Lorraine, baby, you look beautiful, how in the world do you do it?” She
was leaving. I have the impression she was on a staircase, and she turned and smiled that
smile and said, “It helps to develop a serious illness, Jimmy!” and waved and disappeared.

Stranger in the Village
By James Baldwin
Oct. 1953
From Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955, 1984. pp. 159-175)

From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I
came. I was told before arriving that I would probably be a “sight” for the village; I took this to
mean that people of my complexion were rarely seen in Switzerland, and also that city people
are always something of a “sight” outside of the city. It did not occur to me-possibly because I
am an American-that there could be people anywhere who had never seen a Negro.
It is a fact that cannot be explained on the basis of the inaccessibility of the village. The village
is very high, but it is only four hours from Milan and three hours from Lausanne. It is true that it
is virtually unknown. Few people making plans for a holiday would elect to come here. On the
other hand, the villagers are able, presumably, to come and go as they please – which they do:
to another town at the foot of the mountain, with a population of approximately five thousand,
the nearest place to see a movie or go to the bank. In the village there is no movie house, no
bank, no library, no theater; very few radios, one jeep, one station wagon; and at the moment,
one typewriter, mine, an invention which the woman next door to me here had never seen.
There are about six hundred people living here, all Catholic- I conclude this from the fact that
the Catholic church is open all year round, whereas the Protestant chapel, set off on a hill a little
removed from the village, is open only in the summertime when the tourists arrive. There are
four or five hotels, all closed now, and four or five bistros, of which, however, only two do any
business during the winter. These two do not do a great deal, for life in the village seems to end
around nine or ten o’clock. There are a few stores, butcher, baker, epicerie, a hardware store,
and a money-changer-who cannot change travelers’ checks, but must send them down to the
bank, an operation which takes two or three days. There is something called the Ballet Haus,
closed in the winter and used for God knows what, certainly not ballet, during the summer.
There seems to be only one schoolhouse in the village, and this for the quite young children; I
suppose this to mean that their older brothers and sisters at some point descend from these
mountains in order to complete their education-possibly, again, to the town just below. The
landscape is absolutely forbidding, mountains towering on all four sides, ice and snow as far as
the eye can reach. In this white wilderness, men and women and children move all day, carrying
washing, wood, buckets of milk or water, sometimes skiing on Sunday afternoons. All week long
boys and young men are to be seen shoveling snow off the rooftops, or dragging wood down
from the forest in sleds. The village’s only real attraction, which explains the tourist season, is

the hot spring water. A disquietingly high proportion of these tourists are cripples, or semi-
cripples, who come year after year-from other parts of Switzerland, usually-to take the waters.

This lends the village, at the height of the season, a rather terrifying air of sanctity, as though it
were a lesser Lourdes. There is often something beautiful, there is always something awful, in
the spectacle of a person who has lost one of his faculties, a faculty he never questioned until it
was gone, and who struggles to recover it. Yet people remain people, on crutches or indeed on

deathbeds; and wherever I passed, the first summer I was here, among the native villagers or
among the lame, a wind passed with me-of astonishment, curiosity, amusement and outrage.
That first summer I stayed two weeks and never intended to return. But I did return in the winter,
to work; the village offers, obviously, no distractions whatever and has the further advantage of
being extremely cheap. Now it is winter again, a year later, and I am here again. Everyone in the
village knows my name, though they scarcely ever use it, knows that I come from America
though, this, apparently, they will never really believe: black men come from Africa-and
everyone knows that I am the friend of the son of a woman who was born here, and that I am
staying in their chalet. But I remain as much a stranger today as I was the first day I arrived, and
the children shout Neger! Neger! as I walk along the streets. It must be admitted that in the
beginning I was far too shocked to have any real reaction. In so far as I reacted at all, I reacted
by trying to be pleasant-it being a great part of the American Negro’s education (long before he
goes to school) that he must make people like him. This smile-and-the world-smiles-with-you
routine worked about as well in this situation as it had in the situation for which it was designed,
which is to of phenomenon which allowed them to see my teeth-they did not, really, see my
smile and I began to think that, should I take to snarling, no one would notice any difference. All
of the physical characteristics of the Negro which had caused me, in America, a very different
and almost forgotten pain were nothing less than miraculous-or infernal-in the eyes of the village
people. Some thought my hair was the color of tar, that it had the texture of wire, or the texture
of cotton. It was jocularly suggested that I might let it all grow long and make myself a winter
coat. If I sat in the sun for more than five minutes some daring creature was certain to come
along and gingerly put his fingers on my hair, as though he were afraid of an electric shock, or
put his hand on my hand, astonished that the color did not rub off. In all of this, in which it must
be conceded there was the charm of genuine wonder and in which there were certainly no
element of intentional unkindness, there was yet no suggestion that I was human: I was simply
a living wonder. I knew that they did not mean to be unkind, and I know it now; it is necessary,
nevertheless, for me to repeat this to myself each time that I walk out of the chalet. The children
who shout Neger! Have no way of knowing the echoes this sound raises in me. They are
brimming with good humor and the more daring swell with pride when I stop to speak with them.
Just the same, there are days when I cannot pause and smile, when I have no heart to play with
them; when, indeed, I mutter sourly to myself, exactly as I muttered on the streets of a city these
children have never seen, when I was no bigger than these children are now: Your mother was
a nigger. Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-but it may be the nightmare from which
no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. There is a
custom in the village- I am told it is repeated in many villages- of buying African natives for the
purpose of converting them to Christianity. There stands in the church all year round a small box
with a slot for money, decorated with a black figurine, and into this box the villagers drop their
francs. During the carnival which precedes Lent, two village children have their faces
blackened-out of which bloodless darkness their blue eyes shine like ice-and fantastic horsehair
wigs are placed on their blond heads; thus disguised, they solicit among the villagers for money
for the missionaries in Africa. Between the box in the church and blackened children, the IJ
village “bought” last year six or eight African natives. This was reported to me with pride by the
wife of one of the bistro owners and I was careful to express astonishment and pleasure at the
solicitude shown by the village for the souls of black folks. The bistro owner’s wife beamed with

a pleasure far more genuine than my own and seemed to feel that I might now breathe more
easily concerning the souls of at least six of my kinsmen.
I tried not to think of these so lately baptized kinsmen, of the price paid for them, or the peculiar
price they themselves would pay, and said nothing about my father, who having taken his own
conversion too literally never, at bottom, forgave the white world (which he described as
heathen) for having saddled him with a Christ in whom, to judge at least from their treatment of
him, they themselves no longer believed. I thought of white men arriving for the first time in an
African village, strangers there, as I am a stranger here, and tried to imagine the astounded
populace touching their hair and marveling at the color of their skin. But there is a great
difference between being the first white man to be seen by Africans and being the first black
man to be seen by whites. The white man takes the astonishment as tribute, for he arrives to
conquer and to convert the natives, whose inferiority in relation to himself is not even to be
questioned; whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose
culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in
anguish and rage than they will ever know, who yet do not even know of my existence. The
astonishment, with which I might have greeted them, should they have stumbled into my African
village a few hundred years ago, might have rejoiced their hearts. But the astonishment with
which they greet me today can only poison mine.
And this is so despite everything I may do to feel differently, despite my friendly conversations
with the bistro owner’s wife, despite their three-year-old son who has at last become my friend,
despite the saluts and bonsoirs which I exchange with people as I walk, despite the fact that I
know that no individual can be taken to task for what history is doing, or has done. I say that the
culture of these people controls me-but they can scarcely be held responsible for European
culture. America comes out of Europe, but these people have never seen America, nor have
most of them seen more of Europe than the hamlet at the foot of their mountain. Yet they move
with an authority which I shall never have; and they regard me, quite rightly, not only as a
stranger in the village but as a suspect latecomer, bearing no credentials, to everything they
have-however unconsciously-inherited. For this village, even were it incomparably more remote
and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely
grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the
world; they have made the modem world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most
illiterate among them is related, in away that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo,
Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them
which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State Building, should anyone
here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few
centuries and they are in their full glory-but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.
The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also absolutely inevitable: the rage,
so generally discounted, so little understood even among the people whose daily bread it is, is
one of the things that makes history. Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought
under the domination of the intelligence and is therefore not susceptible to any arguments
whatever. This is a fact which ordinary representatives of the Herrenvolk, having never felt this

rage and being unable to imagine, quite fail to understand. Also, rage cannot be hidden, it can
only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds,
to rage, contempt. There are, no doubt, as many ways of coping with the resulting complex of
tensions as there are black men in the world, but no black man can hope ever to be entirely
liberated from this internal warfare-rage, dissembling, and contempt having inevitably
accompanied his first realization of the power of white men. What is crucial here is that since
white men represent in the black man’s world so heavy a weight, white men have for black men
a reality which is far from being reciprocal; and hence all black men have toward all white men
an attitude which is designed, really, either to rob the white man of the jewel of his naiveté, or
else to make it cost him dear.
The black man insists, by whatever means he finds at his disposal, that the white man cease to
regard him as an exotic rarity and recognize him as a human being. This is a very charged and
difficult moment, for there is a great deal of will power involved in the white man’s naiveté. Most
people are not naturally reflective any more than they are naturally malicious, and the white man
prefers to keep the black man at a certain human remove because it is easier for him thus to
preserve his simplicity and avoid being called to account for crimes committed by his
forefathers, or his neighbors. He is inescapably aware, nevertheless, that he is in a better
position in the world than black men are, nor can he quite put to death the suspicion that he is
hated by black men therefore.
He does not wish to be hated, neither does he wish to change places, and at this point in his
uneasiness he can scarcely avoid having recourse to those legends which white men have
created about black men, the most usual effect of which is that the white man finds himself
enmeshed, so to speak, in his own language which describes hell, as well as the attributes
which lead one to hell, as being as black as night.
Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to
control the universe by describing it. It is of quite considerable significance that black men
remain, in the imagination, and in overwhelming numbers in fact, beyond the disciplines of
salvation; and this despite the fact that the West has been “buying” African natives for centuries.
There is, I should hazard, an instantaneous necessity to be divorced from this so visibly
unsaved stranger, in whose heart, moreover , one cannot guess what dreams of vengeance are
being nourished; and, at the same time, there are few things on earth more attractive than the
idea of the unspeakable liberty which is allowed the unredeemed. When, beneath the black
mask, a human being begins to make himself felt one cannot escape a certain awful wonder as
to what kind of human being it is. What one’s imagination makes of other people is dictated, of
course, by the Master race laws of one’s own personality and it’s one of the ironies of
black-white relations that, by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the
black man is enabled to know who the white man is.
I have said, for example, that I am as much a stranger in this village today as I was the first
summer I arrived, but this is not quite true. The villagers wonder less about the texture of my
hair than they did then, and wonder rather more about me. And the fact that their wonder now

exists on another level is reflected in their attitudes and in their eyes. There are the children who
make those delightful, hilarious, sometimes astonishingly grave overtures of friendship in the
unpredictable fashion of children; other children, having been taught that the devil is a black
man, scream in genuine anguish as I approach. Some of the older women never pass without a
friendly greeting, never pass, indeed, if it seems that they will be able to engage me in
conversation; other women look down or look away or rather contemptuously smirk. Some of
the men drink with me and suggest that I learn how to ski-partly, I gather, because they cannot
imagine what I would look like on skis and want to know if I am married, and ask questions
about my metier. But some of the men have accused le sale negre-behind my back-of stealing
wood and there is already in the eyes of some of them that peculiar, intent, paranoiac
malevolence which one sometimes surprises in the eyes of American white men when, out
walking with their Sunday girl, they see a Negro male approach.
There is a dreadful abyss between the streets of this village and the streets of the city in which I
was born, between the children who shout Neger! today and those who shouted Nigger!
yesterday-the abyss is experience, the American experience. The syllable hurled behind me
today expresses, above all, wonder: I am a stranger here. But, I am not a stranger in America
and the same syllable riding on the American air expresses the war my presence has
occasioned in the American soul. For this village brings home to me this fact: that there was a
day, and not really a very distant day, when Americans were scarcely Americans at all but
discontented Europeans, facing a great unconquered continent and strolling, say, into a
marketplace and seeing black men for the first time. The shock this spectacle afforded is
suggested, surely, by the promptness with which they decided that these black men were not
really men but cattle. It is true that the necessity on the part of the settlers of the New World of
reconciling their moral assumptions with the fact -and the necessity-of slavery enhanced
immensely the charm of this idea, and it is also true that this idea expresses, with a truly
American bluntness, the attitude which to varying extents all masters have had toward all
slaves.
But between all former slaves and slave-owners and the drama which begins for Americans
over three hundred years ago at Jamestown, there are at least two differences to be observed.
The American Negro slave could not suppose, for one thing, as slaves in past epochs had
supposed and often done, that he would ever be able to wrest the power from his master’s
hands. This was a supposition which the modern era, which was to bring about such vast
changes in the aims and dimensions of power, put to death; it only begins in unprecedented
fashion, and with dreadful implications, to be resurrected, today. But even had this supposition
persisted with undiminished force, the American Negro slave could not have used it to lend his
condition dignity, for the reason that this supposition rests on another: that the slave in exile yet
remains related to his past, has some means-if only in memory-of revering and sustaining the
forms of his former life, is able, in short, to maintain his identity.
This was not the case with the American Negro slave. He is unique among the black men of the
world in that his past was taken from him, almost literally, at one blow. One wonders what on
earth the first slave found to say to the first dark child he bore. I am told that there are Haitians

able to trace their ancestry back to African kings, but any American Negro wishing to go back so
far will find his journey through time abruptly arrested by the signature on the bill of sale which
served as the entrance paper for his ancestor. At the time-to say nothing of the
circumstances-of the enslavement of the captive black man who was to become the American
Negro, there was not the remotest possibility that he would ever take power from his master’s
hands. There was no reason to suppose that his situation would ever change, nor was there,
shortly, anything to indicate that his situation had ever been different. It was his necessity, in the
words of E. Franklin Frazier, to find a “motive for living under American culture or die.” The
identity of the American Negro comes out of this extreme situation, and the evolution of this
identity was a source of the most intolerable anxiety in the minds and the lives of his masters.
For the history of the American Negro is unique also in this: that the question of his humanity,
and of his rights therefore as a human being, became a burning one for several generations of
Americans, so burning a question that it ultimately became one of those used to divide the
nation. It is out of this argument that the venom of the epithet: Nigger! is derived. It is an
argument which Europe has never had, and hence Europe: quite sincerely fails to understand
how or why the argument arose in the first place, why its effects are frequently disastrous and
always so unpredictable, why it refuses until today to be entirely settled. Europe’s black
possessions remained and do remain-in Europe’s colonies, at which remove they represented
no threat whatever to European identity. If they posed any problem at all for the European
conscience, it was a problem which remained comfortingly abstract: in effect, the black man, as
a man, did not exist for Europe.
But in America, even as a slave, he was an inescapable part of the general social fabric and no
American could escape having an attitude toward him. Americans attempt until today to make
an abstraction of the Negro, but the very nature of these abstractions reveals the tremendous
effects the presence of the Negro has had on the American character. When one considers the
history of the Negro in America it is of the greatest importance to recognize that the moral
beliefs of a person, or a people, are never really as tenuous as life-which is not moral-very often
causes them to appear; these create for them a frame of reference and a necessary hope, the
hope being that when life has done its worst they will be enabled to rise above themselves and
to triumph over life. Life would scarcely be bearable if this hope did not exist. Again, even when
the worst has been said, to betray a belief is not by any means to have put oneself beyond its
power; the betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so
there would be no moral standards in the world at all. Yet one must also recognize that morality
is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous-dangerous because ideas can only lead to
action and where the action leads no man can say. And dangerous in this respect: that
confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility
of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses. The ideas on which
American beliefs are based are not, though Americans often seem to think so, ideas which
originated in America. They came out of Europe. And the establishment of democracy on the
American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which
Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.

This was, literally, a hard necessity. It was impossible, for one thing, for Americans to abandon
their beliefs, not only because these beliefs alone seemed able to justify the sacrifices they had
endured and the blood that they had spilled, but also because these beliefs afforded them their
only bulwark against a moral chaos as absolute as the physical chaos of the continent it was
their destiny to conquer. But in the situation in which Americans found themselves, these beliefs
threatened an idea which, whether or not one likes to think so, is the very warp and woof of the
heritage of the West, the idea of white supremacy.
Americans have made themselves notorious by the shrillness and the brutality with which they
have insisted on this idea, but they did not invent it; and it has escaped the, world’s notice that
those very excesses of which Americans have been guilty imply a’ certain, unprecedented
uneasiness over the idea’ s life and power, if not, indeed, the idea’ s validity .The idea of white
supremacy rests simply on the fact that white men are the creators of civilization (the present
civilization, which is the only one that matters; all previous civilizations are simply contributions”
to our own) and are therefore civilization’s guardians and defenders. Thus it was impossible for
Americans to accept the black man as one of themselves, for to do so was to jeopardize their
status as white men. But not so to accept him was to deny his human reality, his human weight
and complexity, and the strain of denying the overwhelmingly undeniable forced Americans into
rationalizations so fantastic that they approached the pathological.
At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a
way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself. And the history of this
problem can be reduced to the means used by Americans-lynch law: and law, segregation and
legal acceptance, terrorization and concession-either to come; to terms with this necessity , or to
find a way around it, or (most usually) to find away of doing both these things at once. The
resulting spectacle, at once foolish and dreadful, led someone to make the quite accurate
observation that “the Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men.”
In this long battle, a battle by no means finished, the unforeseeable effects of which will be felt
by many future generations, the white man’s motive was the protection of his identity; the black
man was motivated by the need to establish an identity .And despite the terrorization which the
Negro in America endured and endures sporadically until today, despite the cruel and totally
inescapable ambivalence of his status in his country, the battle for his identity has long ago been
won. He is not a visitor to the West, but a citizen there, an American; as American as the
Americans who despise him, the Americans who fear him, the Americans who love him-the
Americans who became less than themselves, or rose to be greater than themselves by virtue
of the fact that the challenge he represented was inescapable. He is perhaps the only black
man in the world whose relationship to white men is more terrible, more subtle, and more
meaningful than the relationship of bitter possessed to uncertain possessors. His survival
depended, and his development depends, on his ability to turn his peculiar status in the Western
world to his own advantage and, it may be, to the very great advantage of that world. It remains
for him to fashion out of his experience that which will give him sustenance, and a voice. The
cathedral at Chartres, I have said, says something to the people of this village which it cannot
say to me; but it is important to understand that, this cathedral says something to me which it

cannot say to them. Perhaps they are struck by the power of the spires, the glory of the
windows; but they have known God, after all, longer than I have known him, and in a different
way, and I am terrified by the slippery bottomless well to be found in the crypt, down which
heretics were hurled to death, and by the obscene, inescapable gargoyles jutting out of the
stone and seeming to say that God and the devil can never be divorced. I doubt that the
villagers think of the devil when they face a cathedral because they have never been identified
with the devil.
But I must accept the status which myth, if nothing else, gives me in the West before I can hope
to change the myth. Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the
absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion
that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which
black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make. The identity they
fought so hard to protect has, by virtue of that battle, undergone a change: Americans are as
unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be. I do not think, for example, that
it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world-which allows so little reality,
generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint
moral issues in glaring black and white-owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to
maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged. It
is only now beginning to be borne in on us-very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very
much against our will–that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly
useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our
grasp of reality. People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and
anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns
himself into a monster. The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the
American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too.
No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white
men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer
for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that
no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This
fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem
is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has
been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

A Letter to My Nephew
By James Baldwin
January 1, 1962

Dear James:
I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also
the face of your father and my brother. I have known both of you all your lives and have carried
your daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed him and spanked him and watched him
learn to walk. I don’t know if you have known anybody from that far back, if you have loved
anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man. You gain a strange
perspective on time and human pain and effort.
Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father’s face, for behind your
father’s face as it is today are all those other faces which were his. Let him laugh and I see a
cellar your father does not remember and a house he does not remember and I hear in his
present laughter his laughter as a child. Let him curse and I remember his falling down the cellar
steps and howling and I remember with pain his tears which my hand or your grandmother’s
hand so easily wiped away, but no one’s hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly
today which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs.
I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it and I know,
which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen
and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and
are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.
One can be–indeed, one must strive to become–tough and philosophical concerning
destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of
war; remember, I said most of mankind, but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation
should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.
They have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and
do not want to know it.
Now, my dear namesake, these innocent and well meaning people, your countrymen, have
caused you to be born under conditions not far removed from those described for us by Charles
Dickens in the London of more than a hundred years ago. I hear the chorus of the innocents
screaming, “No, this is not true. How bitter you are,” but I am writing this letter to you to try to tell
you something about how to handle them, for most of them do not yet really know that you exist.
I know the conditions under which you were born for I was there. Your countrymen were not
there and haven’t made it yet. Your grandmother was also there and no one has ever accused
her of being bitter. I suggest that the innocent check with her. She isn’t hard to find. Your
countrymen don’t know that she exists either, though she has been working for them all their
lives.

Well, you were born; here you came, something like fifteen years ago, and though your father
and mother and grandmother, looking about the streets through which they were carrying you,
staring at the walls into which they brought you, had every reason to be heavy-hearted, yet they
were not, for here you were, big James, named for me. You were a big baby. I was not. Here
you were to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard at once and forever to strengthen you against the
loveless world. Remember that. I know how black it looks today for you. It looked black that day
too. Yes, we were trembling. We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each
other, none of us would have survived, and now you must survive because we love you and for
the sake of your children and your children’s children.
This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should
perish. Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that for the heart of the matter is here and the
crux of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and faced the future
that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits to your ambition
were thus expected to be settled. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal
clarity and in as many ways as possible that you were a worthless human being. You were not
expected to aspire to excellence. You were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever
you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could
go and what you could do and how you could do it, where you could live and whom you could
marry.
You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were
black and for no other reason.
I know your countrymen do not agree with me here and I hear them. saying, “You exaggerate.”
They do not know Harlem and I do. So do you. Take no one’s word for anything, including mine,
but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is
really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately
constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that
what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your
inferiority, but to their inhumanity and fear.
Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head
today, about the reality which lies behind the words “acceptance” and “integration.” There is no
reason for you to try to become like white men and there is no basis whatever for their
impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that
you must accept them, and I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them
with love, for these innocent people have no other hope. They are in effect still trapped in a
history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from
it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are
inferior to white men.

They are trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they
cannot be released from it.
Many of them indeed know better, but as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on
what they know. To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case
the danger in the minds and hearts of most white Americans is the loss of their identity. Try to
imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shivering and all the
stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in
the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well,
the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar,
and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.
You don’t be afraid. I said it was intended that you should perish, in the ghetto, perish by never
being allowed to go beyond and behind the white man’s definition, by never being allowed to
spell your proper name. You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention and by a terrible
law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe
are losing their grasp of reality. But these men are your brothers, your lost younger brothers,
and if the word “integration” means anything, this is what it means, that we with love shall force
our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it,
for this is your home, my friend. Do not be driven from it. Great men have done great things
here and will again and we can make America what America must become.
It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy peasant stock, men who picked cotton,
dammed rivers, built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an
unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the
greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, “The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon
shook and my chains fell off.”
You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred
years too early. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you, James, and Godspeed.
Your uncle,

James

A Talk to Teachers
By James Baldwin
Dec. 21, 1963

Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is
in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how
unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately
menaced, not by Khrushchev, but from within. To any citizen of this country who figures himself
as responsible – and particularly those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young
people – must be prepared to “go for broke.” Or to put it another way, you must understand that
in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not
only in the classroom but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the
most determined resistance. There is no point in pretending that this won’t happen.
Since I am talking to schoolteachers and I am not a teacher myself, and in some ways am fairly
easily intimidated, I beg you to let me leave that and go back to what I think to be the entire
purpose of education in the first place. It would seem to me that when a child is born, if I’m the
child’s parent, it is my obligation and my high duty to civilize that child. Man is a social animal.
He cannot exist without a society. A society, in turn, depends on certain things which everyone
within that society takes for granted. Now the crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the
whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the
aims of society. Thus, for example, the boys and girls who were born during the era of the Third
Reich, when educated to the purposes of the Third Reich, became barbarians. The paradox of
education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the
society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person
the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is
black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask
questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his
own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies
really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds
in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as
responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it – at no matter what risk.
This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.
Now, if what I have tried to sketch has any validity, it becomes thoroughly clear, at least to me,
that any Negro who is born in this country and undergoes the American educational system
runs the risk of becoming schizophrenic. On the one hand he is born in the shadow of the stars
and stripes and he is assured it represents a nation which has never lost a war. He pledges
allegiance to that flag which guarantees “liberty and justice for all.” He is part of a country in
which anyone can become president, and so forth. But on the other hand he is also assured by
his country and his countrymen that he has never contributed anything to civilization – that his
past is nothing more than a record of humiliations gladly endured. He is assumed by the

republic that he, his father, his mother, and his ancestors were happy, shiftless,
watermelon-eating darkies who loved Mr. Charlie and Miss Ann, that the value he has as a
black man is proven by one thing only – his devotion to white people. If you think I am
exaggerating, examine the myths which proliferate in this country about Negroes.
All this enters the child’s consciousness much sooner than we as adults would like to think it
does. As adults, we are easily fooled because we are so anxious to be fooled. But children are
very different. Children, not yet aware that it is dangerous to look too deeply at anything, look at
everything, look at each other, and draw their own conclusions. They don’t have the vocabulary
to express what they see, and we, their elders, know how to intimidate them very easily and
very soon. But a black child, looking at the world around him, though he cannot know quite what
to make of it, is aware that there is a reason why his mother works so hard, why his father is
always on edge. He is aware that there is some reason why, if he sits down in the front of the
bus, his father or mother slaps him and drags him to the back of the bus. He is aware that there
is some terrible weight on his parents’ shoulders which menaces him. And it isn’t long – in fact it
begins when he is in school – before he discovers the shape of his oppression.
Let us say that the child is seven years old and I am his father, and I decide to take him to the
zoo, or to Madison Square Garden, or to the U.N. Building, or to any of the tremendous
monuments we find all over New York. We get into a bus and we go from where I live on 131st
Street and Seventh Avenue downtown through the park and we get in New York City, which is
not Harlem. Now, where the boy lives – even if it is a housing project – is in an undesirable
neighborhood. If he lives in one of those housing projects of which everyone in New York is so
proud, he has at the front door, if not closer, the pimps, the whores, the junkies – in a word, the
danger of life in the ghetto. And the child knows this, though he doesn’t know why.
I still remember my first sight of New York. It was really another city when I was born – where I
was born. We looked down over the Park Avenue streetcar tracks. It was Park Avenue, but I
didn’t know what Park Avenue meant downtown. The Park Avenue I grew up on, which is still
standing, is dark and dirty. No one would dream of opening a Tiffany’s on that Park Avenue, and
when you go downtown you discover that you are literally in the white world. It is rich – or at
least it looks rich. It is clean – because they collect garbage downtown. There are doormen.
People walk about as though they owned where they are – and indeed they do. And it’s a great
shock. It’s very hard to relate yourself to this. You don’t know what it means. You know – you
know instinctively – that none of this is for you. You know this before you are told. And who is it
for and who is paying for it? And why isn’t it for you?
Later on when you become a grocery boy or messenger and you try to enter one of those
buildings a man says, “Go to the back door.” Still later, if you happen by some odd chance to
have a friend in one of those buildings, the man says, “Where’s your package?” Now this by no
means is the core of the matter. What I’m trying to get at is that by the time the Negro child has
had, effectively, almost all the doors of opportunity slammed in his face, and there are very few
things he can do about it. He can more or less accept it with an absolutely inarticulate and
dangerous rage inside – all the more dangerous because it is never expressed. It is precisely

those silent people whom white people see every day of their lives – I mean your porter and
your maid, who never say anything more than “Yes Sir” and “No, Ma’am.” They will tell you it’s
raining if that is what you want to hear, and they will tell you the sun is shining if that is what you
want to hear. They really hate you – really hate you because in their eyes (and they’re right) you
stand between them and life. I want to come back to that in a moment. It is the most sinister of
the facts, I think, which we now face.
There is something else the Negro child can do, to. Every street boy – and I was a street boy, so
I know – looking at the society which has produced him, looking at the standards of that society
which are not honored by anybody, looking at your churches and the government and the
politicians, understand that this structure is operated for someone else’s benefit – not for his.
And there’s no reason in it for him. If he is really cunning, really ruthless, really strong – and
many of us are – he becomes a kind of criminal. He becomes a kind of criminal because that’s
the only way he can live. Harlem and every ghetto in this city – every ghetto in this country – is
full of people who live outside the law. They wouldn’t dream of calling a policeman. They
wouldn’t, for a moment, listen to any of those professions of which we are so proud on the
Fourth of July. They have turned away from this country forever and totally. They live by their
wits and really long to see the day when the entire structure comes down.
The point of all this is that black men were brought here as a source of cheap labor. They were
indispensable to the economy. In order to justify the fact that men were treated as though they
were animals, the white republic had to brainwash itself into believing that they were, indeed,
animals and deserved to be treated like animals. Therefor it is almost impossible for any Negro
child to discover anything about his actual history. The reason is that this “animal,” once he
suspects his own worth, once he starts believing that he is a man, has begun to attack the entire
power structure. This is why America has spent such a long time keeping the Negro in his place.
What I am trying to suggest to you is that it was not an accident, it was not an act of God, it was
not done by well-meaning people muddling into something which they didn’t understand. It was
a deliberate policy hammered into place in or4der to make money from black flesh. And now, in
1963, because we have never faced this fact, we are in intolerable trouble.
The Reconstruction, as I read the evidence, was a bargain between the North and South to this
effect: “We’ve liberated them from the land – and delivered them to the bosses.” When we left
Mississippi to come North we did not come to freedom. We came to the bottom of the labor
market, and we are still there. Even the Depression of the 1930’s failed to make a dent in
Negroes’ relationship to white workers in the labor unions. Even today, so brainwashed is this
republic that people seriously ask in what they suppose to be good faith, “What does the Negro
want?” I’ve heard a great many asinine questions in my life, but that is perhaps the most asinine
and perhaps the most insulting. But the point here is that people who ask that question, thinking
that they ask it in good faith, are really the victims of this conspiracy to make Negroes believe
they are less than human.
In order for me to live, I decided very early that some mistake had been made somewhere. I
was not a “nigger” even though you called me one. But if I was a “nigger” in your eyes, there

was something about you – there was something you needed. I had to realize when I was very
young that I was none of those things I was told I was. I was not, for example, happy. I never
touched a watermelon for all kinds of reasons that had been invented by white people, and I
knew enough about life by this time to understand that whatever you invent, whatever you
project, is you! So where we are no is that a whole country of people believe I’m a “nigger,” and I
don’t , and the battle’s on! Because if I am not what I’ve been told I am, then it means that you’re
not what you thought you were either! And that is the crisis.
It is not really a “Negro revolution” that is upsetting the country. What is upsetting the country is
a sense of its own identity. If, for example, one managed to change the curriculum in all the
schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this
culture, you would be liberating not only Negroes, you’d be liberating white people who know
nothing about their own history. And the reason is that if you are compelled to lie about one
aspect of anybody’s history, you must lie about it all. If you have to lie about my real role here, if
you have to pretend that I hoed all that cotton just because I loved you, then you have done
something to yourself. You are mad.
Now let’s go back a minute. I talked earlier about those silent people – the porter and the maid –
who, as I said, don’t look up at the sky if you ask them if it is raining, but look into your face. My
ancestors and I were very well trained. We understood very early that this was not a Christian
nation. It didn’t matter what you said or how often you went to church. My father and my mother
and my grandfather and my grandmother knew that Christians didn’t act this way. It was a
simple as that. And if that was so there was no point in dealing with white people in terms of
their own moral professions, for they were not going to honor them. What one did was to turn
away, smiling all the time, and tell white people what they wanted to hear. But people always
accuse you of reckless talk when you say this.
All this means that there are in this country tremendous reservoirs of bitterness which have
never been able to find an outlet, but may find an outlet soon. It means that well-meaning white
liberals place themselves in great danger when they try to deal with Negroes as though they
were missionaries. It means, in brief, that a great price is demanded to liberate all those silent
people so that they can breathe for the first time and tell you what they think of you. And a price
is demanded to liberate all those white children – some of them near forty – who have never
grown up, and who never will grow up, because they have no sense of their identity.
What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors. It’s
astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country
was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What
happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn’t stay there any longer and
had to go someplace else to make it. That’s all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were
convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower.
That’s how the country was settled. Not by Gary Cooper. Yet we have a whole race of people, a
whole republic, who believe the myths to the point where even today they select political
representatives, as far as I can tell, by how closely they resemble Gary Cooper. Now this is

dangerously infantile, and it shows in every level of national life. When I was living in Europe, for
example, one of the worst revelations to me was the way Americans walked around Europe
buying this and buying that and insulting everybody – not even out of malice, just because they
didn’t know any better. Well, that is the way they have always treated me. They weren’t cruel;
they just didn’t know you were alive. They didn’t know you had any feelings.
What I am trying to suggest here is that in the doing of all this for 100 years or more, it is the
American white man who has long since lost his grip on reality. In some peculiar way, having
created this myth about Negroes, and the myth about his own history, he created myths about
the world so that, for example, he was astounded that some people could prefer Castro,
astounded that there are people in the world who don’t go into hiding when they hear the word
“Communism,” astounded that Communism is one of the realities of the twentieth century which
we will not overcome by pretending that it does not exist. The political level in this country now,
on the part of people who should know better, is abysmal.
The Bible says somewhere that where there is no vision the people perish. I don’t think anyone
can doubt that in this country today we are menaced – intolerably menaced – by a lack of vision.
It is inconceivable that a sovereign people should continue, as we do so abjectly, to say, “I can’t
do anything about it. It’s the government.” The government is the creation of the people. It is
responsible to the people. And the people are responsible for it. No American has the right to
allow the present government to say, when Negro children are being bombed and hosed and
shot and beaten all over the Deep South, that there is nothing we can do about it. There must
have been a day in this country’s life when the bombing of the children in Sunday School would
have created a public uproar and endangered the life of a Governor Wallace. It happened here
and there was no public uproar.
I began by saying that one of the paradoxes of education was that precisely at the point when
you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your
responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person. And on the basis
of the evidence – the moral and political evidence – one is compelled to say that this is a
backward society. Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school, and I was dealing
with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day and would then return
to their homes and to the streets, children who have an apprehension of their future which with
every hour grows grimmer and darker, I would try to teach them – I would try to make them know
– that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded,
are criminal. I would try to make each child know that these things are the result of a criminal
conspiracy to destroy him. I would teach him that if he intends to get to be a man, he must at
once decide that his is stronger than this conspiracy and they he must never make his peace
with it. And that one of his weapons for refusing to make his peace with it and for destroying it
depends on what he decides he is worth. I would teach him that there are currently very few
standards in this country which are worth a man’s respect. That it is up to him to change these
standards for the sake of the life and the health of the country. I would suggest to him that the
popular culture – as represented, for example, on television and in comic books and in movies –

is based on fantasies created by very ill people, and he must be aware that these are fantasies
that have nothing to do with reality. I would teach him that the press he reads is not as free as it
says it is – and that he can do something about that, too. I would try to make him know that just
as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than
anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and
more terrible, but principally larger – and that it belongs to him. I would teach him that he doesn’t
have to be bound by the expediencies of any given administration, any given policy, any given
morality; that he has the right and the necessity to examine everything. I would try to show him
that one has not learned anything about Castro when one says, “He is a Communist.” This is a
way of his not learning something about Castro, something about Cuba, something, in time,
about the world. I would suggest to him that his is living, at the moment, in an enormous
province. America is not the world and if America is going to become a nation, she must find a
way – and this child must help her to find a way to use the tremendous potential and tremendous energy which this child represents. If this country does not find a way to use that
energy, it will be destroyed by that energy.