THE MOB AND THE GHOST
Smith, Lillian
the Mob and the Ghost by LILLIAN SMITH The South is a heavy word, dark with misunderstandings, edged with defenses, streaked with love and hate. I shall not begin with it. I shall instead return...
...My first concern with it was because it affected me, not because it affected Negroes...
...Some of the most interesting and daring and skillful youngsters in town were my colored friends to whom I secretly attached myself...
...I did not like being restricted to members of the white race...
...This was another ambiguity I was learning to live with...
...I doubted God, yet at the same time I feared Him...
...I love its climate, its strange and beautiful jungles, swamps, beaches, forests, hills, mountains...
...I learned my lessons early, those the existentialists have been reminding us of in recent decades...
...Their families told them they were members of the white race arid that was enough for anybody to be...
...The illness is by no means limited to the South or to our country...
...Faces took on a bleak surety which frightened me as a child more than even the ghosts I could not name...
...I wanted the people I loved to come through the front door...
...And because of this retreat, this peaceful cloister, I never accepted "the Southern way of life...
...How can our people be so blind...
...It was this that hurt me, this knowledge that racial separation does not belong in the category of the archetypal and unchangeable separations: birth, death, a universe which we can never know save in small fragments, a God whose existence we can never prove, a why was I born...
...Kierkegaard would have felt at home in my region...
...and my Sunday school teacher said if I asked about eternity again she would not let me come to her class...
...and to understand the emptiness we must understand their basic, often unverbalized, rejection of God and the terrible hunger that is a consequence of this rejection...
...they feel by casting a vote or taking part in a riot they can "do something about the Negro," but they can't do anything about those missile bases...
...And yet, others seemed to accept it as unchangeable...
...I do not remember when I first heard the word segregation, but I knew its meaning from babyhood...
...The racists dehumanize the man, Negro, into the thing, Negro...
...Who will be our new God...
...There were other fabulous things: a river that, now and then, disappeared into the earth and came up thirty miles away...
...but it can also create art and poetry by careful addition of heart and intelligence and the proper use of symbols and ghosts...
...I know face-saving is sometimes expedient—I did not live in China for three years without learning this— but in a time of deep stress and spiritual turmoil, to try to settle for a half-lie is dangerous...
...It is not the truth but a half-lie, and we shall suffer from it...
...The wound is unhealed in all of us, but we cover it with sweet-smelling salve and pretend the stench comes from somewhere else...
...Neither Negroes nor whites have fully realized that segregation is a two-edged sword, that it cuts both ways and cuts to kill...
...they heard nothing of the myths and poetry by which Western man has become great...
...The poet, therefore, is the demagogue's mortal enemy—for he and he alone can overcome the evil state of men's minds...
...For decades, demagogues have fattened on this powerful bit of knowledge...
...Many others are so glazed over, so frozen by fear, so toughened by this third skin of ours that they obey the demagogues and run from the ghosts, or chase them, as ordered...
...The third skin has had its uses even for the best of us in the South (as well as in Germany...
...One could weep...
...As a child, before going to sleep, I used to travel down, down with those who had gone under...
...but my spine ached with the burden of silence as I asked: Where did I come from...
...I got used to being split apart inside, conscience segregated from reality, body segregated from heart, mind separated from the knowledge it craved...
...I knew things that were here and not here...
...so he uses incantation and hypnotic gestures to loosen the ghosts from the mythic level of men's minds where they ordinarily stay...
...and yes, let me say it: in those Northern cities where few of the privileged have ever visited their dark ghettos...
...If this could once be seen clearly, if white people could for one hour stare at the faces around them, could peer even for one minute into the hollow souls they work with and play with, they could not say, "It must come slowly...
...And yet, many do...
...if fish didn't have it, why should I? And there were the sinks: a piece of land, ordinary land, was there today, with perhaps a house on it...
...They love the demagogue's ghost stories...
...Or those deaths at Oxford, Mississippi...
...There has been a small minority of mute dissenters since the Civil War...
...Ghosts are, of course, breathing symbols...
...It comes not primarily from racism (racism is a symptom, not the disease itself...
...our culture has fed them lies—not folk wisdom...
...The choice is hard to make for all these things will dehumanize the child...
...Otherwise, how could we have had Little Rock...
...and they will not give up their "white powder" without a nasty struggle...
...I love the softness of voice...
...Like the old Greek warriers one could lift one's face to the sky and weep...
...I knew chasms...
...Supreme Court as the mortal enemy...
...others blame "the North" or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or the Communists...
...where dignity was acted out by my parents in , their relationships with their children...
...But the point that few have seen is that the mob was not attacking a real girl named Charlayne Hunter but a symbol, a ghost into which they had stuffed noisome memories, guilts, and words from the white supremacy ritual...
...some name our own U.S...
...Of course, those questions curled up in my head shot like rockets through the dis-crepancies in this intertwining mesh of family lessons and church lessons and street lessons and school lessons...
...that no one could have civil rights in this country unless his skin was white...
...Above all else, they are powerful, for they can turn men into things and things into men...
...and only the poetic truth can subdue the inner turmoil...
...I asked about time and eternity...
...We look around...
...In a world full of not only spiritual but physical ambiguities, each casting a shadow on the other...
...The small acts of grace can sometimes blind you to the large cruelties...
...they both understand that "holy" can be the holiness of devils or the holiness of God...
...My earth was trembling—not only out near Big Swamp but in the bigger swamp of my interior life...
...I heard him pray and ever since it has haunted me with its pathos and its truth...
...Ghosts are on the loose and one somehow knows it...
...there has been a small minority of soft speakers since 1925...
...A mind deadened to knowledge, or a body shut out of a decent school...
...I am not certain that physical lynching of the few is worse than the spiritual lynching of many white children by their own parents and school and church...
...How can we, with gentlemanly decorum, accept for one minute the philosophical implications of "gradualism" and the caution of racial "moderates...
...Now, suddenly, they are told to obey the law...
...Now, the new slogan is, "Even though we despise the Supreme Court's decision, we must obey...
...give them tears...
...I was also taught to go to church, to listen carefully and to believe what the preachers said...
...Reason must do its work before the crisis conies...
...And now, most men no longer believe that there is something bigger than a man, that spiritual laws exist which no one can disregard without destroying himself...
...When we see this kind of thing happening, when we see a governor of a state act like a mad fool, when we watch students go berserk as if they were in psychotic flight, when we see responsible men of a community turn dumb and mute as if they were cowed animals, when suddenly crowds of people begin to lie, to blame on mythic outsiders what they themselves brought to pass— when such outbursts occur, we can be sure we are not dealing with reasonable problems such as poverty or a one-party political system or the memories of a war fought a century ago which no living man knows anything about from personal experience, or an outmoded peonage system of sharecropping...
...For the cruelties keep distance...
...Or those jeering women persecuting children- in New Orleans...
...Suddenly it happened: the fish were feeling secure and comfortable, then whsst...
...They need and must have something to worship...
...Only physical force can control the external violence...
...I wanted to know when eternity ended...
...The demagogue knows he can force people into this primitive state by the skilled use of the ghosts and by the freeing of demonic impulses from the restrictive covenants of conscience...
...which even a man's vocation does not answer in full...
...They felt they must kill Something, Something that had haunted them a long time, Something that kept them split and torn and confused...
...And now, our leaders are once more offering them only face-saving subterfuges...
...I learned it the hard way, for I was separated from people I loved by death...
...they both know how to change a person into a thing or a thing into a person...
...what the poets do is to change straw into gold...
...These people heard nothing about dignity, human growth, relationships...
...They became solid with certainty...
...Who will be our new priests...
...their purpose is different, their grasp of knowledge is different, their procedures are different, but they use the, same magic...
...What segregation has actually done is to destrqy spiritually and mentally millions of its children of both races...
...Most white Southerners have never seen a lynching, have never seen a Negro wounded or whipped, have never heard a dark scream of pain, never come close to the awful humiliation which colored women endured for so long from many white men...
...I shall instead return to my childhood where one little white girl can be watched as she runs into ghosts, as she asks unanswerable questions, as she searches for the poet and shies away from the demagogue and the mob that hover on the edge of White Town...
...And until recently, they pulled the silence tight around their hearts and made like they felt nothing...
...And yet, there were rich experiences, fine glimpses of knowledge and art and poetry...
...where no man was considered less than a human being...
...Reason cannot undo magic tricks once they have been performed...
...and yet, there was always the quiet, gentle, back door treatment of the dark people we loved...
...The mythic mind is, above all else, highly creative: it can create lies and demons and mobs and riots...
...My family taught me these things...
...it could be changed...
...People must change their ways and their values, but to do so without breaking to pieces physically and spiritually they must change inside...
...Mobs and demagogues, riots and hate slogans, are also symptoms of a collective illness...
...There were things I wanted to know which no one would tell me...
...Why should a thing be protected by the Supreme Court and the Department of Justice...
...But beneath it all were not only the unchangeable uncertainties on which the human condition is based, but another uncertainty that need not be...
...Then came another question, more and more often, that concerned me every day: the question about race and its ritual of segregation...
...it comes from two centuries of Western man's misunderstanding of science and over-esteem of proof and from his unnecessary subjection to the machine he created...
...I had felt ghosts pull at me, let go, pull again...
...he is excited...
...have never asked what happens to Negroes when they get sick...
...a little token sanity, yes, but not too much sanity, not too much compassion, not too much fairness—just a moderate amount...
...A poet by his "tricks" builds bridges among those people, separating them a little so they can feel their own edge, yet drawing them closer by the new relationship to truth he gives them...
...The ignorant, the culturally stunted, and a small but noisy group of psychotics are the demagogue's natural audience...
...I love the South not for its sins but because it is home, where my memories hover...
...I still cherish the easy kindnesses, even though I know that many of these "kind" people have cared little about Negroes' rights or welfare...
...This is the moment when only truth can kill the lie, when only love can weaken hate: reason cannot do it, nor common sense, nor logic...
...I wanted to be free to ask questions, free to seek answers, free to learn about the mysteries of birth, death, the human body and soul...
...This is the heart of the matter...
...hard, undifferentiated in their mystique of whiteness...
...What is death...
...There is a spiritual lynching of black children, too...
...We cannot bear our anguish if we know it springs from our own hearts...
...And because of the release he gives them, they give him obedience...
...The ignorant white can take the truth, if the truth is spoken in kindness...
...What the demagogues do is to change gold into straw...
...How could a deeply religious person feel anything but anguish at the springing up of idolatries not only in this South of ours but throughout the country and the world...
...I think what impressed me most was this: On that trembling earth of the Great Swamp, although a child could scarcely walk on it, heavy trees and jungled growth were supported by it...
...It was not surprising to many Georgians when a mob of two thousand students (helped by the Klan) attacked one girl...
...The strain of living in both a spiritual vacuum and a scientific world which is totally beyond their comprehension is eased by this frank regression to more primitive ways...
...I say in reply, "How under God's heaven could a sane, observant, sensitive human being be less than disturbed over a region that has sacrificed its children to a white Moloch...
...In this slave condition, reason won't work...
...I wanted also—a want closer to my consciousness—to choose my own friends...
...But gradually I "adjusted" better...
...These were my first lessons in segregation...
...Science was just creeping into our town...
...On this mythic level where the reason's categories and logical processes are never found, it is easy to ask why the Negro (now a fetish, a symbol) should have human rights...
...Now they are told to obey: to obey not because the laws are good and right but because they are The Law...
...I have never been sure that racial segregation has hurt the Negro more than the white...
...But—and this we need to remember—the ghosts could not have done the bloody, grisly business alone...
...I got used to seeing an all-white congregation in our church, although I asked questions before I grew silent...
...They had to have a witch doctor to free them—for ordinarily ghosts are segregated—and then direct them to do their work...
...Combined, these have caused him to misinterpret religion, have pushed him toward the facts of the laboratory and away from the truth found in poetry...
...I learned early not to stake much on security...
...The South is suffering from such a malaise...
...This separation was different...
...But all children want to know what cannot be known, what words cannot say...
...Where am I going...
...there they were, left wriggling on white hot sand with no water within miles...
...Who am I besides a name...
...Today, solid fact...
...Of all our Southern sins—and we have plenty—the persistent, blind ignoring of the needs of our poor and ignorant whites is perhaps the worst...
...How could Hitler have killed millions of Jews had not the Nordic ghosts helped him turn them into things...
...These deprived people were once pitiable, but with the vote, with jobs, with spending power, they grow dangerous...
...The demagogue understands this...
...But I dared not say them aloud...
...I kept worrying the idea of time and eternity as a kitten plays with a ball of yarn—getting myself more and more entangled in it...
...and so my loyalties never became too tied up with "the South...
...I learned of the segregation that cuts one off from knowledge...
...We must say with Aeschylus: "Cry sorrow—and let the good prevail...
...But besides ourselves, we can blame the immediate trouble today only on the demagogues (the racist politicians) and the ghosts which the demagogues whistle back— those old guilts and memories, the consciences we killed but which never died, the children we maimed, the souls we destroyed...
...the "old forms are breaking," and we are beginning to "feel the new things"—but much too slowly, Our leaders have not yet faced the truth that we, too, must hurt, we must suffer with the poor white and the Negro, not only to be redeemed from our past but to find the wisdom to create our future...
...And we let them...
...There was Shaky Pond where we had picnics: the edge of that pond, extending back twenty, thirty feet from the water, trembled if a child stepped on it...
...What now—if God is dead...
...I would run to the security of a home where such racial hate talk never took place, though my family were long-time Southerners...
...In this mythic and surreal place I lived as a child...
...too disturbed...
...Arrogance, or shame— which do you prefer that your child feel...
...When the sharecroppers in Arkansas were thrown out in snow and ice by the plantation owners, an old Negro prayed, "Break their hearts, O God...
...They both know the power of metaphor...
...The poet can do this not only because he, too, uses ghosts—"the good ghosts"—but because he has power over the poetic, truth-seeking levels of the mythic mind...
...How could part of me question the existence of God and another part be aware of His presence...
...There were other ponds with no bottom...
...never whispered the sorrow and shame of a love without esteem...
...Other lessons came quickly...
...Love without dignity: the thought chilled me...
...Eyes and muscles and heart knew them long before I heard that word...
...As a child, I walked on earth that trembled...
...dangerous because a large group of them are addicts who for years have given themselves kicks with the drug, white supremacy...
...I just did not like to be segregated...
...And no one answered...
...Can you not see that "rational man" with his logic and his scrupulously collected facts does not have much chance with the people in crisis who are chasing ghosts, who are acting symbolically...
...I laughed at the absurd whenever I saw it, as all children do...
...their demagogues told them this superiority gave them the right to treat Negroes like things and animals and they need not listen when their conscience did not agree...
...I grew the third skin which all white Southerners finally grow, and it shut off the quick pain, the sudden glimpse of horror, the ever-pressing whispers of conscience...
...I moved freely for days in my town, my culture, then suddenly ran head-on into Something, was bruised by it, yet never knew its name...
...An indifference to the suffering of others, or suffering itself...
...And worst of all, the dreadful silence of the good, the respectable, the prominent: the collapse of the poet in each of us...
...The demagogue, speaking with the authority of a priest, tells the crowd they are justified in doing anything in the name of white supremacy...
...I needed to know but no one could explain it...
...I knew at six years that space has no edge and journeys sometimes never end...
...there was love, there was compassion...
...and men, listening, react to this mythic situation as though it were literally real...
...it helps them forget the atom bomb...
...I was born on the rim of that mysterious terrain which spills over from Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp into Florida...
...Everything contradicting everything else, and I knew it...
...our power structure, instead of giving jobs, gave them for decades a false and ridiculous sense of superiority, teaching them that excellence lay simply in possessing a white skin...
...I had seen invisible walls...
...but poetic truth spoken to people with compassion and beauty has the strange power to arouse their good feelings and desires...
...We shall more likely find the answer in lower depths of personality, lower—and higher...
...In the South he repeats words that are close to men's bodies, words that have taken on symbolic meanings: blood, white, black, monace, mixing, mingling, white, black, and with these words he creates, actually makes, a new situation that does not exist in terms of facts but exists, nevertheless...
...This is supposed to be a clever way out, a face-saver for politicians and the power structure and for certain editors who have exclaimed editorially for years that nobody but a fool would question segregation...
...I knew someday it could be changed...
...There are people who actually cannot grasp the fact that a Negro is not an object but a human being...
...Eight years old: hugging great questions which burned as they touched me...
...People told me to go play dolls...
...only in this way can they master their ordeal as men...
...What law, they ask in astonishment—for they had been told they could break any law that protected a Negro...
...This is why the silence of the poet in all of us is so dread a thing when the mob begins to merge...
...Although all have their effect and all exacerbate the situation, the cause for such turmoil is not on rational levels of men's thinking...
...A demagogue by his tricks melts a thousand people into a mob...
...different, but perhaps no more terrible than that of the white children...
...I was close to the mob at Athens, Georgia...
...They believe him...
...they are guilts that have never asked forgiveness...
...They had never met Charlayne Hunter, would not have recognized her on the streets, yet their rage was tremendous and uncontrolled...
...Things are changing, but much too slowly...
...Most knew these terrors only remotely, never letting them creep into consciousness...
...Substituting a spurious menace for a real one and promising security plays a big part in the demagogue's success...
...They blamed the worst of them on "outsiders" even though the outsiders might live on their street...
...I got used to playing with them on my way home from school but never inviting them to my house...
...they are symbols with a half-life...
...To hear thoughtful men speak of postponing decency, postponing excellence, postponing the return of rights they have stolen from Negroes and from their own children, leaves me gasping in astonishment...
...They thought of them, often, as "exaggerations"—or lies...
...there have been more and more who have spoken and written clearly, persuasively, in recent decades, but the maenads torment them: tongues lash, houses are burned or dynamited, friends shun, critics destroy not only books but status, reviewers sneer (not only in the South but in the North, too), saying, "This writer is angry...
...never looked hard at a starving-face or a crippled mind...
...they are memories that cannot end their story and in restlessness keep haunting men's minds with unfinished business...
...I was taught to love freedom, to love the dignity of men, to consider other people's comfort and rights, to rer spect the human being, to believe in Christian brotherhood, to admit mistakes, and to speak the honest word...
...free to question God, free to love Him, free to run away from Him and deny Him...
...tomorrow, emptiness...
...questions no one would answer...
...You can know the wisdom of the poets without reading poetry if other men will speak of this wisdom, but the uncultivated white Southerner, for eighty years, has heard nothing except lies about white superiority, skin color, mongrelization...
...new doubts were blowing even in that small place...
...I got used to my colored friends living in shacks on the edge of town while I lived in a big, fine, house on the "best" street...
...We need someone to blame...
...A look at the charismatic power of the demagogue should warn any observer that depths, not surfaces, are being stirred...
...The churches let them, the preachers let them, the businessmen let them, the unions let them...
...Now they are sent forth as maenads by the demagogues to cut the head off of every Orphic truth, to whip and lash every one who dares to disagree, to speak what is right, to measure and examine reality...
...Each of us in our own way has to struggle to step back a few inches and look, really look, at our home town and its cruelties and blindnesses and pitiful, tragic lies...
...have never visited a Negro school...
...the threat of "the Negro" is more titillating than terrifying...
...No wonder men in a bi-racial situation have seized upon color (their own) and made of it a fetish...
...tomorrow, sunk into the earth forty feet down...
...the only way it could be done was to run fast, never look anywhere, and get to solid ground as quick as you could...
...not in the town but close enough to watch it build (even a year before it exploded...
...This hurt: the secrecy hurt, the fact that they were not welcomed on our street...
...To understand the compulsive fury of people caught in racial stress, we must understand not only the mechanisms they use but their emptiness...
...Or those students mobbing one lone girl at the University of Georgia...
...My childhood landscape could have been designed for Fear and Trembling...
...They must fill the hollowness with the full Orphic truth...
...Is it not a superb image of civilization: all that men have dreamed and created, springing out of and supported by massive uncertainties...
Vol. 26 • December 1962 • No. 12
