The souls of white folks

by David Benjamin

“… De Crawfishes, honey. Dey bo’d inter de groun’ en kep’ on bo’in twel dey onloost de fountains er de yeth; en de waters squirt out, en riz higher twel de hills wuz kivvered en de creeturs wuz all drowned; en all bekaze dey let on ‘mong deyselves dat dey wuz bigger dan de Crawfishes…”

— Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus’ explanation of the Deluge

 

MADISON, Wis.—The police murder of Tyre Nichols focuses a reality that most white people struggle—or refuse—to appreciate: Black folks live different lives. Vastly, disturbingly, richly different.

I blundered into this reality through a dubious medium. The Disney movie, Song of the South, which I saw at the Erwin Theater when I was perhaps seven years old, is set in the postbellum South. Released in 1946, it has been long shelved for “racist content” that elides the Civil War and overlooks the destitution, exclusion and oppression of the Jim Crow era during which it was filmed.

Judged by current standards, the film’s sins are evident. But I didn’t notice any of that then. I was a little kid. What I saw was what has been true since the first slave ships docked in America. The lovable and voluble, but alien Uncle Remus who filled the screen at the Erwin confirmed my sense that black folks were completely different from the palefaces all around me in Tomah.

At that age, I harbored a racial innocence that freed me to perceive the difference between black folks and white me with a sense of wonder. They sang, they danced, they were one with nature, they told tales that made me laugh and fired my imagination. They enticed me toward the same vocation as Uncle Remus. He was a storyteller, a yarn-spinner, a spellbinder. That’s what I wanted to be.

Thanks to Walt Disney, B’rer Rabbit and the tar baby, my first and lasting impression of black folks’ lives was a romance. Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, indeed!

From there, I embarked on a lifelong fascination. Scouring the shelves of the Tomah Public Library, I replaced Disney’s sanitary abridgment of The Tales of Uncle Remus with Joel Chandler Harris’ 840-pages of black folklore. I didn’t read it all. It was hard. Harris, who learned the origins of the Uncle Remus tales from the slaves he knew on a Georgia plantation, painstakingly transliterated a lyrical dialect that bore little resemblance to Massah’s demure English.

Nowadays, Harris is often deemed a literary thief who purloined the legends of black folks without understanding their trials or feeling their pain. He’s accused of having fun with language while his research subjects were being whipped, lynched and raped. This twentieth-century verdict stands in contrast to Harris’ unique contribution to American culture. By recording stories told to him by Uncle George, Old Harbert, and Aunt Crissy, Harris transliterated into written prose an argot difficult to decipher but musical on the tongue and magical in both the ear and the imagination. Black talk has always been different from white talk. Joel Chandler Harris was the first to codify the distinction.

Reading Uncle Remus inspired me to begin a novel about Negroes in the South. Of course, I had to give up after two pages. Despite the limitations of an intellect barely eight years old, it dawned on me that I could not limn this Negro romance because not only do black people talk different from white folks. They live different lives.

I knew no black folks. I knew nothing of their lives. What I knew was that the difference between their lives and mine was crystal clear and immense. By then, however, I was hooked, on black mythology and literature, especially black music—from minstrelsy to Mikes Davis. I’ve never flattered myself with the conceit that I fully grasp the difference between my life and those of black Americans who have been subject, since the 17th century, to the reign of an army of occupation—in their diaspora, in their violable homes, in their perpetually haunted minds.

They live under the feudal rule of white lords, many of them “liberal” and well-meaning, who subconsciously and emotionally regard black folks, even today in the 21st century, as noble savages who can be entertaining when they behave, and should be locked up—or, if necessary, killed—when they don’t. The masters let on, among themselves, that they’re bigger than the crawfishes. Anyone who cannot acknowledge the innate, implicit bigotry of the most powerful white men in America is, in the words of Heather Heyer, not paying attention.

The prevalent white delusion that racism is a relic of the past (call it the Justice Roberts Syndrome) is why black folks live lives so heartrendingly different. It’s why Tyre Nichols, if he’d only been white, would be alive today. It’s why Kyle Rittenhouse, a vigilante whose proud heritage is the Klan, Byron De La Beckwith and the Greenwood massacre, is a race hero walking free.

Since my discovery of Uncle Remus, I’ve striven to understand the breadth and complexity of the gap between white lives and black. I explored this dilemma in a novel published in 2019, Summer of ‘68. My protagonist is a white kid named Cribbsy, just out of high school and working as a counselor in a Wisconsin summer camp whose population is from the neighborhoods of Chicago.

Cribbsy faces his racial dilemma unexpectedly, after he sets free several turtles that had been captured by Cliff, a fellow—black—counselor.

Cliff’s response to the presumptuous liberation of his turtles is to call Cribbsy a racist. I formulated Cribbsy’s confession as follows.

“… A black guy had called me a racist, a declaration as irrevocable as a tattoo on my forehead. Once it’s said, that’s what you are. Insisting you’re not a racist makes it worse, because denial only proves that you’re a bigot blind to your own prejudice.

“Every white person is a racist at heart. If I learned anything from all that reading—Eldridge and Malcolm and Richard Wright—that was it. Racism is in my culture, in my psyche, in my blood and in my snow-white bones.

“It’s not that I want to be a racist. I’m trying not to be. I’m against prejudice, bigotry, discrimination and Jim Crow with all my heart and soul. But there it was. My racist instincts had stripped away my egalitarian gloss. I had freed Cliff’s turtles, not out of compassion for the wretched beasts—for, after all, didn’t my own cruelty to turtles dwarf the trivial unkindness inflicted by Cliff?—but out of an inbred conviction that a black man’s personal possessions deserve no reverence from a white man. I had treated Cliff like a field hand undeserving of even the rags on his back.

“I was a racist…

“… Cliff had sensibilities, cultivated in an alien universe, that I couldn’t understand, or even—I realized—accept. Yeah, so I was a smart kid, well-read and well-meaning. I harbored deep progressive convictions. I was overflowing with Christian compassion and I was desperate to learn. I was eager, above all, to be with-it, to be cool, subcultural, multicultural and countercultural. But here was Cliff, representing the coolest subculture in American life, telling me I didn’t get it.

“He was right.

“I’m a racist…”

Cribbsy’s clash with Cliff reminds him that every white person’s very bones are marbled with a racial consciousness—seen usually through a glass, darkly—older than our republic. It carries a dizzying mixture of fear and romance, guilt and denial, Christianity and deviltry, blues, jazz, gospel, rock and roll. If we’re ever going to stop our cops murdering black folks and getting away with it, white folks have to do more than reform police departments and march for voting rights. We have to admit and accept the moral handicap that nestles in our souls.

We have to get it.