I Am Not Your Negro Page #2

I am about seven.

I'm with my mother, or my aunt.

The movie is

Dance, Fools, Dance.

I was aware that Joan Crawford

was a white lady.

Yet, I remember being sent

to the store sometime later,

and a colored woman who, to me,

looked exactly

like Joan Crawford,

was buying something.

She was incredibly beautiful.

She looked down at me

with so beautiful a smile

that I was not even embarrassed,

which was rare for me.

By this time,

I had been taken in hand

by a young white schoolteacher

named Bill Miller,

a beautiful woman,

very important to me.

She gave me books to read and

talked to me about the books,

and about the world:

about Ethiopia, and Italy,

and the German Third Reich,

and took me to see

plays and films,

to which no one else

would have dreamed

of taking a ten-year-old boy.

It is certainly

because of Bill Miller,

who arrived

in my terrifying life so soon,

that I never really managed

to hate white people.

Though, God knows,

I've often wished to murder

more than one or two.

Therefore, I begin to suspect

that white people

did not act as they did

because they were white,

but for some other reason.

I was a child of course,

and therefore unsophisticated.

I took Bill Miller as she was,

or as she appeared to be to me.

She too, anyway,

was treated like a n*gger,

especially by the cops,

and she had no love

for landlords.

Richard!

Can't get him up!

Richard!

Can't get him up!

Richard!

Can't get him up!

Lazy Richard!

Can't get him up!

Richard!

In these days,

no one resembling my father

has yet made an appearance

on the American cinema scene.

Can't get him up!

We'll try to get him

on the phone

I was laying down

dreamin'...

No, it's not entirely true.

There were, for example,

Stepin Fetchit and Willie Best

and Mantan Moreland,

all of whom, rightly or wrongly,

I loathed.

It seemed to me that they lied

about the world I knew,

and debased it,

and certainly I did not know

anybody like them,

as far as I could tell.

For it also possible that

their comic, bug-eyed terror

contained the truth

concerning a terror

by which I hoped

never to be engulfed.

Yet, I had no reservations

at all concerning the terror

of the Black janitor

in They Won't Forget.

Give me police!

Give me police!

Give me...

Give me police!

I think that it was

a black actor

named Clinton Rosemond

who played this part,

and he looked

a little like my father.

I didn't do it. I didn't do it!

I didn't do it! I didn't do it!

He is terrified

because a young white girl

in this small Southern town

has been raped and murdered,

and her body has been found

upon the premises

of which he is the janitor.

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