Book 6, pages 76-83
Every time I have had that kind of small hope I have been disappointed. I guess I still have to be content with selling blood and with the small gifts of money I get on the road by entertaining people with my pictures and experiences. Last week I had an income of nine dollars, which is the best ever: five dollars from an interested salesman who picked me up, two dollars from a black woman in Tony's father's grill, and two dollars from a guy in West Virginia who found my picture of the junkies with the Capital in the background interesting and bought it. Included in the deal was his lunch bag which contained three chicken legs. Now, since I have had these prints made, it makes me so happy every time I experience that kind of positive reaction. But it also scares me a little sometimes. In one place a woman started crying when she saw my pictures, and I didn't know what in the world to do. It is strange with Americans. They have lived in the midst of this suffering all their lives without giving it a thought, and then suddenly, when they see it frozen in a photograph, they can begin crying. Some accuse me of beautifying the blacks, though if anything most people here in the South probably admire my pictures for that reason. I just don't understand it; I photograph them exactly the way I see them, and a photograph doesn't lie, does it? But the more I ponder over it, the more I come to realize that this parallax shift in the way we see blacks must be due to the fact that they have lived in this master-slave relationship for such a long time that they simply are not capable of seeing blacks as human beings, but can only see those sides in them which confirm their "slave nature." But when Southern whites nevertheless react positively to my pictures, I believe it is because in reality they are unhappy about seeing with these "master"-eyes. They are longing to become human, and the moment I can "prove" to them that blacks are human and not slaves, eternal children, or subhuman (or what have you), this makes them themselves human and no longer masters or super-humans or whatever. If I don't interpret it this way, how then should I explain that even the worst racists down here give me money once in a while, although mumbling something or other about how they think "it is funny how I run around photographing niggers." I have to admit that it often seems difficult when I try to depict the master-slave relationship as an institution not to end up depicting it as if people in this system really have this "nature." Often I feel that my own
view becomes contaminated by this sneaking poison in the South, because I put
great emphasis on respecting the dignity of these people, especially the older
people. They have lived in this master-slave tradition all their lives, and
both for the blacks and for the whites I feel that it would do violence to them
to try to tear them out of this tradition (though the coming generations
absolutely must avoid this crippling of the mind). I, therefore, never try to
impose my views on them, but try to understand theirs and to learn from them.
Precisely because from the beginning I respect their dignity, I often build up
such strong friendships with them that through these friendships I can get
them to respect and to learn from my point of view. As a vagabond in the South
it is absolutely essential to be able to communicate through friendship instead
of inciting hostility and confrontation. But if you are able to do that - and
even receive constant love and admiration, as I am fortunate enough to, or
almost daily hear sentences like "I envy you" or "Do you know that you are a
very lucky person?" - then you are walking a thin line where you easily get
mired down in the mud. This gap between my utopian reality and my actual
reality (which we have talked about before) is just as difficult to bridge as a
river that constantly grows wider and wider, so that you slowly lose sight of
the other bank, while you little by little drown in mud on your own bank.
However, it seems that if you interpret "the mud" on this side of the river
correctly (that is, if you dig down to people's deepest longings, even if they
still do not see the connections between it all), then they will allow you to
build an ivory tower so tall and beautiful that you can sit up there and tell
people down on the bank below you how nice the other bank looks. But since you
yourself do not have any personal contact with the other shore - a contact
which could have changed your own character and entire soul - there is no way
you can communicate your vision to the people below, since they see no evidence
that you yourself have actually been "touched" or changed. Besides, they are
busy enough just trying to keep their heads above the mud. They therefore soon
forget the message of your story, but find the story itself so interesting,
that they allow you to build the ivory tower even higher and to reinforce it
and beautify it. In frustration and depression at not being able to communicate
your message down to them, you get more and more insecure and have a greater
need for recognition and admiration of the ivory tower you have built - even
more than for their recognition of why you originally wanted to build it.
Finally you become so confused and insecure that only their recognition of the
tower itself, its beauty and form, counts for
you. And you build it higher and higher, until you get up to those cynical
heights where you can no longer really see either your own or the opposite
bank, and they begin to look alike. Moreover, you have now reached such a
height that you lose touch with the people on your own bank as well and decide
to send your ivory tower out in book form so people have something to entertain
them-selves with there in the mud. Though what you
really started out to do was build a bridge to the opposite bank, you end up
building a tower on your own bank. Instead of helping people out of the mud,
you are in reality making their situation worse in that you have now given them
something either to be happy about or to cry over right where they are and thus
reinforced this muddy river bank. Moreover, your ivory tower is morally
reprehensible precisely because it is built on a foundation of mud: your
artwork is the direct result of the exploitation of the people you originally
had it in mind to help, and the higher your tower becomes, the further you
remove yourself from their suffering. It is thoughts like these which
have made me increasingly depressed in the last months. I constantly hear
people saying, "How I envy you that you can travel among the blacks like that,"
or the like, and I realize that I have already distanced myself so far from the
mud puddle. And it is when I realize, in spite of this yearning, the
impossibility of fashioning a bridge, that I can become so desperate that I
feel that the gun ought to be my real weapon rather than the camera. But
immediately then the question arises as to which direction I would shoot, since
I - as you know - feel that everyone is equally mired in this river bank. Where
is the rainmaker who created the mud puddle? And therefore I keep on wading
here in the mud, trying only to keep my camera clean enough that it can
register the victims - without really believing myself that it will ever be of
any use. Well, but what I really wanted to tell you was a little about what has happened since we parted. One of the first people, who picked me up was a well-off Jewish businessman (Jews are always picking me up to thank me because Denmark saved a number of Jews during the war, though I wasn't even born at that time and though I increasingly feel myself just as much American as Danish). He did not really feel like taking me home, since he was completely knocked out, partly because his business was going badly and partly because his brother was dying of cancer. He was strongly under the influence of tranquilizers, but he realized that he needed someone to talk to and therefore took me home to his wife. It was a very powerful experience for me. Completely shaken, they waited from moment to moment for a call from the hospital saying that the brother was dead, and against this gloomy background my pictures made an enormously strong impression on them. When I took off the next morning, they thanked me very much and he tried to give expression to the experience with tears running down his cheeks by quoting "I used to cry because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet." Before I left, he gave me a bag with 15 rolls of film. From Philadelphia I then went to Norfolk to stay overnight on my way south. I walked around the ghetto looking for a place to stay and talked with some of the old women who were going around with their little handcarts to collect firewood in the ghetto's ruins. One of them told me that she could now afford only four pig's tails a day instead of five because of inflation. It was strange to hear that in the shadow of the world's largest naval base. I ended up staying with a 32-year-old single black mother. She was not the type who normally invites me in, but her uncle had taken me to her apartment to show me how her ceiling was leaking, in the hope that I was a journalist who could get the city to repair it.
When he left, I got on with the woman so well that
she let me stay. She had just had her first child and it was a wonderful
experience to see her spend almost every minute tending it. I sat for hours
watching. She was also deeply religious, and when the baby was sleeping, we sat
praying together or she would read aloud to me from the Bible while she held my
hand. She would sit there for a long time staring up at a picture of Jesus
right under the dripping ceiling with a look so intense and full of love that I
was very moved. After a couple of days in town, I went down to Washington,
North Carolina, arriving just after nightfall. I walked around all evening
looking for shelter for the night, but everyone was scared of me, thinking that
I was a "bustman" (plainclothes cop). First a man said I could stay in his
uncle's house on the sofa. He took me to an old red-painted shack which was
filthy and without light. His uncle came out with an oil lamp in his hand and
was extremely angry and used his stick to demonstrate it with, but we managed
to get in and I got some old chicken legs on a dirty plate in that corner of
the shack which served as the kitchen, although there was no running water. But
the old man was still mad and it got worse and worse, and finally he threw me
out with his stick. He wasn't going to have any whites in his house, he
thundered. Then he took big boards and planks and nailed them up in front of
the windows and doors for fear that I would break in, and walked off into the
darkness, still screaming and yelling. He had no trust in whites. Further down
the street a woman called from a porch, offering to share a can of beer. Later,
while I was sitting trying to converse with her sick husband, who was in a
wheelchair and was not able to talk, I noticed her gazing at a picture of
Christ on the wall. A while later she indicated that I should come into the
incredibly messy bedroom in the back. I wondered what the husband was thinking
about that, unable to make a move. In there she first embraced me, staring at
me with big watery eyes. Then suddenly she fell down at my feet, and while she
held my ankles she kissed my dirty shoes, whispering, "Jesus, Jesus." He was what you might call a "dirty old man" with stubble and slobber, but that was not the reason. I have been through far worse things than that. I had probably just gotten to the point where I was tired of being used by homosexual men. I hate to hurt people, but I suppose that this night I was trying to prove to myself that I had at least some willpower left. So I lay on my side with my face to the wall. But he was clawing and tearing so hard at my pants that I was afraid they were going to rip, and since it is the only pair I have, I couldn't afford to sacrifice them. So I turned around with my face toward him, but he kept at it and pressed his big hard-on against my ribs and began to kiss me all over – kisses that stunk of Boone's Farm apple wine. The worst was that he kept whispering things in my ear like, "I love you. I love you. Oh, how I love you." Well that was maybe true enough at that moment, but it drove me crazy to listen to it. As you know, I feel that especially among black men this word has been overused. I don't think it is something you can say the first night you go to bed with someone. The only thing missing was him saying, "Oh, you just don't like me because I am black." But luckily I was spared that one. Well, he finally got his pacifier, hut that did not satisfy him, as he was the kind of homosexual who goes for the stern. He just became more and more excited and finally became so horny that I felt really guilty, but still I didn't give another inch. He tried and tried. Finally he destroyed the beautiful leather belt you gave me that time when I couldn't keep my pants up anymore. It made me so damned mad that I grabbed his big cannon with both hands and turned it hard toward the other guy who was snoring like a steamship. "Why don't you two have fun with each other and leave me in peace. I want to sleep." But it didn't help, so the struggle continued all night with me every five minutes turning the cannon in the other direction (about four times between each new load of firewood). Finally the guy left around eight o'clock and I got a couple of hours of sleep. Later in the day I met him in the local coffee bar. He came over and asked if I was mad at him. I said, "Of course not, we are still good friends. I was just so damn tired last night." He was so glad that he began to dance around, making everybody there laugh at him. He was one of those who are outcast among both blacks and whites. I was very sad, because I felt that I had destroyed something inside myself. I felt a deep irritation that I had not been able to give him love. In his eyes, I was a kind of big-shot and it would have made him happy if I had given myself fully. There was just something or other inside me that went "click" that night, so the whole next day I felt a deep loathing of myself. I am constantly finding many shortcomings in my relationships with people, but the worst thing is when my shortcomings hurt such people, who are already hurt and destroyed in every possible way by the society surrounding them.
If I could not constantly give such losers a little love, I simply would not be
able to stand traveling as long as I have. Well, I will tell you more about
Washington, N.C., in a later letter and just finish off by saying that I am now
on the way out of the depression I was in over you back then, though the memory
of you still hangs like a heavy dark cloud over my journey. It is still a
mystery to me how I could be so hurt by our relationship, and why it took the
direction it did. Although you are younger than me, it nevertheless developed
into something of a mother-son relationship, which I in no way could have
imagined at the beginning of my love for you. Your strength and wisdom did not
let you be seduced into a relationship as unrealistic as ours would have
become. You belong to the black bourgeoisie, and though I loved to fling myself
in your luxurious upholstered furniture, I ought to have realized right away
that it wasn't my world.
You were fascinated by my vagabond life and supported
me in my project from a feeling of black pride, but your pride was nevertheless
threatened by the world I represented. Right hack from when your ancestors were
given an education by the slave master, your family has kept up this class
difference, and I can't help feeling that this mile-wide psychological gap you
have been brought up to feel between yourself and that ghetto I normally move
around in, was what actually destroyed our relationship. But no matter how I
analyze it and try to understand it, it is hard for me to accept that it should
end like that between us. The suffering I went through in your house, I never
wish to experience again, but as a vagabond, I have nevertheless become so much
of a fatalist that I believe it has been good for something, and that it will
make it easier for me to identify with and become one with other people's
suffering, though of course the suffering I see around me in this society is of
a far more violent nature than what I experienced with you. Even so, I will
still use the word "suffering" to describe the process I went through with you.
Without this suffering you couldn't have knocked me so much off balance.
From
the moment you realized that we weren't right for each other, and your love
cooled down to a certain aloofness, I experienced a growing desperation in
myself. I am by nature not very aggressive, as you know, and not even very
self-protective, but confronted with your beginning rejection, I experienced an increasing aggression which became
more and more
unbearable. With all your psychological insight, you probably sensed it. At any
rate, it blazed up that night when I moved into your bed without being invited,
thereby breaking my fixed principle of traveling: never violate people's
hospitality. But if I am really to illustrate the psychological desperation I
felt over you in my love, a desperation stronger than any I have ever felt
toward a woman, then I can't do it better than by letting W.E.B. Dubois'
well-known quotation describe my frame of mind:
Copyright © 2005 AMERICAN PICTURES; All rights reserved. |
|
||||||||