1THE accidental visit of Aunt Maggie to Memphis formed a practical basis for my planning to go north. Aunt Maggie’s husband, the “uncle” who had fled from Arkansas in the dead of night, had deserted her; and now she was casting about for a living. My mother, Aunt Maggie, my brother, and I held long conferences, speculating on the prospects of jobs and the cost of apartments in Chicago. And every time we conferred, we defeated ourselves. It was impossible for all four of us to go at once; we did not have enough money.

2Finally sheer wish and hope prevailed over common sense and facts. We discovered that if we waited until we were prepared to go, we would never leave, we would never amass enough money to see us through. We would have to gamble. We finally decided that Aunt Maggie and I would go first, even though it was winter, and prepare a place for my mother and brother. Why wait until next week or next month? If we were going, why not go at once?

3Next loomed the problem of leaving my job cleanly, smoothly, without arguments or scenes. How could I present the fact of leaving to my boss? Yes, I would pose as an innocent boy; I would tell him that my aunt was taking me and my paralyzed mother to Chicago. That would create in his mind the impression that I was not asserting my will; it would block any expression of dislike on his part for my act. I knew that southern whites hated the idea of Negroes leaving to live in places where the racial atmosphere was different.

4It worked as I had planned. When I broke the news of my leaving two days before I left—I was afraid to tell it sooner for fear that I would create hostility on the part of the whites with whom I worked—the boss leaned back in his swivel chair and gave me the longest and most considerate look he had ever given me.

5“Chicago?” he repeated softly.

6“Yes, sir.”

7“Boy, you won’t like it up there,” he said.

8“Well, I have to go where my family is, sir,” I said.

9The other white office workers paused in their tasks and listened. I grew self-conscious, tense.

10“It’s cold up there,” he said.

11“Yes, sir. They say it is,” I said, keeping my voice in a neutral tone.

12He became conscious that I was watching him and he looked away, laughing uneasily to cover his concern and dislike.

13“Now, boy,” he said banteringly, “don’t you go up there and fall into that lake.”

14“Oh, no, sir,” I said, smiling as though there existed the possibility of my falling accidentally into Lake Michigan.

15He was serious again, staring at me. I looked at the floor.

16“You think you’ll do any better up there?” he asked.

17“I don’t know, sir.”

18“You seem to’ve been getting along all right down here,” he said.

19“Oh, yes, sir. If it wasn’t for my mother’s going, I’d stay right here and work,” I lied as earnestly as possible.

20“Well, why not stay? You can send her money,” he suggested.

21He had trapped me. I knew that staying now would never do. I could not have controlled my relations with the whites if I had remained after having told them that I wanted to go north.

22“Well, I want to be with my mother,” I said.

23“You want to be with your mother,” he repeated idly. “Well, Richard, we enjoyed having you with us.”

24“And I enjoyed working here,” I lied.

25There was silence; I stood awkwardly, then moved to the door. There was still silence; white faces were looking strangely at me. I went upstairs, feeling like a criminal. The word soon spread through the factory and the white men looked at me with new eyes. They came to me.

26“So you’re going north, hunh?”

27“Yes, sir. My family’s taking me with ’em.”

28“The North’s no good for your people, boy.”

29“I’ll try to get along, sir.”

30“Don’t believe all the stories you hear about the North.”

31“No, sir. I don’t.”

32“You’ll come back here where your friends are.”

33“Well, sir. I don’t know.”

34“How’re you going to act up there?”

35“Just like I act down here, sir.”

36“Would you speak to a white girl up there?”

37“Oh, no, sir. I’ll act there just like I act here.”

38“Aw, no, you won’t. You’ll change. Niggers change when they go north.”

39I wanted to tell him that I was going north precisely to change, but I did not.

40“I’ll be the same,” I said, trying to indicate that I had no imagination whatever.

41As I talked I felt that I was acting out a dream. I did not want to lie, yet I had to lie to conceal what I felt. A white censor was standing over me and, like dreams forming a curtain for the safety of sleep, so did my lies form a screen of safety for my living moments.

42“Boy, I bet you’ve been reading too many of them damn books.”

43“Oh, no, sir.”

44I made my last errand to the post office, put my bag away, washed my hands, and pulled on my cap. I shot a quick glance about the factory; most of the men were working late. One or two looked up. Mr. Falk, to whom I had returned my library card, gave me a quick, secret smile. I walked to the elevator and rode down with Shorty.

45“You lucky bastard,” he said bitterly.

46“Why do you say that?”

47“You saved your goddamn money and now you’re gone.”

48“My problems are just starting,” I said.

49“You’ll never have any problems as hard as the ones you had here,” he said.

50“I hope not,” I said. “But life is tricky.”

51“Sometimes I get so goddamn mad I want to kill everybody,” he spat in a rage.

52“You can leave,” I said.

53“I’ll never leave this goddamn South,” he railed. “I’m always saying I am, but I won’t.... I’m lazy. I like to sleep too goddamn much. I’ll die here. Or maybe they’ll kill me.”

54I stepped from the elevator into the street, half expecting someone to call me back and tell me that it was all a dream, that I was not leaving.

55This was the culture from which I sprang. This was the terror from which I fled.

56The next day when I was already in full flight—aboard a northward bound train—I could not have accounted, if it had been demanded of me, for all the varied forces that were making me reject the culture that had molded and shaped me. I was leaving without a qualm, without a single backward glance. The face of the South that I had known was hostile and forbidding, and yet out of all the conflicts and the curses, the blows and the anger, the tension and the terror, I had somehow gotten the idea that life could be different, could be lived in a fuller and richer manner. As had happened when I had fled the orphan home, I was now running more away from something than toward something. But that did not matter to me. My mood was: I’ve got to get away; I can’t stay here.

57But what was it that always made me feel that way? What was it that made me conscious of possibilities? From where in this southern darkness had I caught a sense of freedom? Why was it that I was able to act upon vaguely felt notions? What was it that made me feel things deeply enough for me to try to order my life by my feelings? The external world of whites and blacks, which was the only world that I had ever known, surely had not evoked in me any belief in myself. The people I had met had advised and demanded submission. What, then, was I after? How dare I consider my feelings superior to the gross environment that sought to claim me?

58It had been only through books—at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions—that I had managed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way. Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books; consequently, my belief in books had risen more out of a sense of desperation than from any abiding conviction of their ultimate value. In a peculiar sense, life had trapped me in a realm of emotional rejection; I had not embraced insurgency through open choice. Existing emotionally on the sheer, thin margin of southern culture, I had felt that nothing short of life itself hung upon each of my actions and decisions; and I had grown used to change, to movement, to making many adjustments.

59In the main, my hope was merely a kind of self-defence, a conviction that if I did not leave I would perish, either because of possible violence of others against me, or because of my possible violence against them. The substance of my hope was formless and devoid of any real sense of direction, for in my southern living I had seen no looming landmark by which I could, in a positive sense, guide my daily actions. The shocks of southern living had rendered my personality tender and swollen, tense and volatile, and my flight was more a shunning of external and internal dangers than an attempt to embrace what I felt I wanted.

60It had been my accidental reading of fiction and literary criticism that had evoked in me vague glimpses of life’s possibilities. Of course, I had never seen or met the men who wrote the books I read, and the kind of world in which they lived was as alien to me as the moon. But what enabled me to overcome my chronic distrust was that these books—written by men like Dreiser, Masters, Mencken, Anderson, and Lewis—seemed defensively critical of the straitened American environment. These writers seemed to feel that America could be shaped nearer to the hearts of those who lived in it. And it was out of these novels and stories and articles, out of the emotional impact of imaginative constructions of heroic or tragic deeds, that I felt touching my face a tinge of warmth from an unseen light; and in my leaving I was groping toward that invisible light, always trying to keep my face so set and turned that I would not lose the hope of its faint promise, using it as my justification for action.

61The white South said that it knew “niggers,” and I was what the white South called a “nigger.” Well, the white South had never known me—never known what I thought, what I felt. The white South said that I had a “place” in life. Well, I had never felt my “place”; or, rather, my deepest instincts had always made me reject the “place” to which the white South had assigned me. It had never occurred to me that I was in any way an inferior being. And no word that I had ever heard fall from the lips of southern white men had ever made me really doubt the worth of my own humanity. True, I had lied. I had stolen. I had struggled to contain my seething anger. I had fought. And it was perhaps a mere accident that I had never killed.... But in what other ways had the South allowed me to be natural, to be real, to be myself, except in rejection, rebellion, and aggression?

62Not only had the southern whites not known me, but, more important still, as I had lived in the South I had not had the chance to learn who I was. The pressure of southern living kept me from being the kind of person that I might have been. I had been what my surroundings had demanded, what my family—conforming to the dictates of the whites above them—had exacted of me, and what the whites had said that I must be. Never being fully able to be myself, I had slowly learned that the South could recognize but a part of a man, could accept but a fragment of his personality, and all the rest—the best and deepest things of heart and mind—were tossed away in blind ignorance and hate.

63I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown, to meet other situations that would perhaps elicit from me other responses. And if I could meet enough of a different life, then, perhaps, gradually and slowly I might learn who I was, what I might be. I was not leaving the South to forget the South, but so that some day I might understand it, might come to know what its rigors had done to me, to its children. I fled so that the numbness of my defensive living might thaw out and let me feel the pain—years later and far away—of what living in the South had meant.

64Yet, deep down, I knew that I could never really leave the South, for my feelings had already been formed by the South, for there had been slowly instilled into my personality and consciousness, black though I was, the culture of the South. So, in leaving, I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns, and, perhaps, to bloom... And if that miracle ever happened, then I would know that there was yet hope in that southern swamp of despair and violence, that light could emerge even out of the blackest of the southern night. I would know that the South too could overcome its fear, its hate, its cowardice, its heritage of guilt and blood, its burden of anxiety and compulsive cruelty.

65With ever watchful eyes and bearing scars, visible and invisible, I headed North, full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity, that the personalities of others should not be violated, that men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame, and that if men were lucky in their living on earth they might win some redeeming meaning for their having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars.

66Set in Linotype Fairfield

67Format by A. W. Rushmore

68Manufactured by Kingsport Press

69Published by Harper & Brothers

70New York and London