The Book 
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Luke 7:36-50 

The only time I managed to talk somebody out of a robbery was through a strange combination of circumstances in Greensboro, North Carolina. I was living with a black social worker, Tony, whose father owned one of the worst bars in the black ghetto. I used to hang out at the bar at night. 


Man killed by pool player, New Orleans

One night I met two young black women of the criminal type there and we decided that I should go home with them. First we stole some wine in a store and dashed right out into a waiting taxi. When we were in the back seat and had started off, I asked them how they intended to pay the cab, as I knew they had no money. 

"Don't worry," they said, "just wait. Let us take care of  it. When we get there, we'll just knock him down and take all his money." This took me a bit by surprise since I had never tried mugging a taxi driver before, but I kept quiet, which is one of the first things I learned to do in America. 
 

'It is a powerful book'    Alex Haley, author of Roots
 

Then suddenly the black driver turned around to ask something, and I realized that I knew him. He was the social worker's grandfather, who owned the biggest black  taxi company in town. I very rarely take matters into my own hands in America, but I certainly did then. I shouted "Stop!" to the driver and said that he could get the fare the next day through his grandson. Then I tore the purse with the gun in it from the one woman's hands and pushed them both out the car door, while they gaped at me just like the taxi driver. 

Out on the street I shouted at them "That was Tony's grandfather, you idiots!" Though they knew Tony, this fact would naturally not have stopped them, but when they were out of the car and the taxi had driven off, they had at least no chance of hurting him. 

Often the brutality of such women shocked me. I saw them time and again do the most revolting things to both men and women. For that very reason it was such an overwhelming experience when a relationship could arise between us, and I had an opportunity to get a glimpse of the warm humanity under the hard shell of viciousness and back stabbing which this violent system had given them. 

Human beings who are enslaved to such a degree by violence cherish a deep longing for freedom and a more  human way of dealing with each other. But this yearning is never able to bloom as it is constantly stifled by the violent responses it encounters from the other prisoners of the ghetto. This yearning never makes contact with the whites or the better-off blacks with their "culture," since these "cultured" types have only contempt for the ghetto culture -- a contempt which is constantly felt and perceived in the ghetto, and which seems to me to be directly responsible for the ghetto becoming more and more violent. 

That tenderness I so often found in our relationships, which could so easily have taken root under a more humane social system, had such an inexpressibly strong and painful effect on me precisely because I saw again and again how the system made it more natural for these women to behave in a pattern of viciousness rather than tenderness. 
 

Praying junkie in Florida

Another night in Jacksonville, Florida, I had met a nice black woman who promised to find me a place to stay. We went to see her friend who was a prostitute, but she was having problems with her boyfriend, so we couldn't stay there. We walked around all evening trying this possibility and that. The prostitute got more and more interested in trying to get us a place to stay. The two of them then agreed that she should "turn a trick" with a white taxi driver while I sat waiting in a cafe. 

After a while they came running back, looking very upset, and said that I should come quick. We got a room in a motel and I discovered that they had far more than the ten dollars you usually get for a "blow job" on the street. I asked them how they got it, but they wouldn't say. 

Only later did they tell me about it. It turned out that one of them had lured the white man into a dark alley, where she did the "job." But then she had suddenly grabbed a big brick at her side and hit the man over the head. As he didn't fall down unconscious immediately, she had taken a steel pipe and hit him in the head again and again until apparently he was dead. 

Then she took his wallet and ran back to the other woman, who had stood in the background watching the whole thing. The thing was that she had felt she might as well take a bit more than the ten dollars so she could enjoy the night with a shot of heroin. 

But as we all three lay there in a double bed in the motel, they were obviously in anguish; it turned out they were both very religious. For several hours they prayed, "Oh God, God, please don't let him die!" It was a nervous, stammering prayer, in between attempts to find a vein to shoot up in. 

By the next morning they had already forgotten the whole thing. They worried more about having overslept so that they were late for church, where they should have been singing in the choir. 
 

Letter to a friend 

 


 

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