Posterity Read Online Free PDF

yourselves—Daddy must have said that to me a thousand times. And by that I think he meant we shouldn't cling to each other out of habit or fear, or use protective coloration to evade the risks of living like any other human being, or use clannishness as a cop-out for exploring ourselves and possibly making new selves, forged in the crucible of integration. Your black ass, he'd laugh, is integrated already.
    But there are other reasons that people distrust the reflex—the nod, the glance, the murmured greeting.
    One reason is a resentment at being lumped together with thirty million African Americans whom you don't know and most of whom you will never know. Completely by the accident of racism, we have been bound together with people with whom we may or may not have something in common, just because we are “black.” Thirty million Americans are black, and thirty million is a lot of people. One day you wonder: What do the misdeeds of a Mike Tyson have to do with me? So why do I feel implicated? And how can I not feel racial recrimination when I can feel racial pride?
    Then, too, there were Negroes who were embarrassed about
being
Negroes, who didn't want to be bothered with race and with other black people. One of the more painful things about being colored was being colored in public around other colored people, who were embarrassed to be colored and embarrassed that we
both
were colored and in public together. As if to say: “Negro, will you
pul-lease
disappear so that I can get my own white people?” As if to say: “I'm not a Negro like other Negroes.” As if to say: “I am a human being—let me be!”
    For much of my adolescence and adulthood, I thought of these people as having betrayed the race. I used to walk up to them and call them
Brother
or
Sister
, loud and with a sardonic edge, when they looked like they were trying to “escape.” When I went off to college, I would make the “conversion” of errant classmates a serious project, a political commitment.
    I used to reserve my special scorn for those Negroes who were always being embarrassed by someone else in the race. Someone too dark, someone too “loud,” someone too “wrong.” Someone who dared to wear red in public. Loud and wrong: we used to say that about each other. Nigger is loud and wrong. “Loud” carried a triple meaning: speaking too loudly, dressing too loudly, and just
being
too loudly.
    I do know that, when I was a boy, many Negroes would have been the first to censure other Negroes once they were admitted into all-white neighborhoods or schools or clubs. “An embarrassment to the race”—phrases of that sort were bandied about. Accordingly, many of us in our generation engaged in strange antics to flout those strictures. Like eating watermelon in public, eating it loudly and merrily, and spitting the seeds into the middle of the street, red juice running down the sides of our cheeks, collecting under our chins. Or taking the greatest pride in the Royal Kink. Uncle Harry used to say he didn't
like
watermelon, which I knew was a lie because I saw him wolf down slices when I was a little kid, before he went off to seminary at Boston University. But he came around, just like he came around to painting God and Jesus black, and all the seraphim and the cherubim, too. And I, from another direction, have gradually come around, also, and stopped trying to tell other Negroes how to be black.
    Do you remember when your mother and I woke you up early on a Sunday morning, just to watch Nelson Mandela walk out of prison, and how it took a couple of hours for him to emerge, and how you both wanted to go back to bed and, then, to watch cartoons? And how we began to worry that something bad had happened to him on the way out, because the delay was so long? And when he finally walked out of that prison, how we were so excited and teary-eyed at Mandela's nobility, his