In New Orleans I lived with a black murderer named Nell. Like the other
murderers I have known or stayed with, he was quite an ordinary person who had
only become a murderer by accident or rather because of his social background.
Naturally, it took some time before he told me about his past, as he had
escaped from a prison in Nevada and was a wanted man; but like other criminals,
he had a need to share what was weighing on him with another human being whom
he could trust. No one can live alone with such a heavy burden. We lived with
some other people out in the eastern part of New Orleans, and Nell tried, as
much as circumstances would allow, to lead a normal, respectable life. Since he
knew he would be sent back to a life sentence in prison if he got involved in
anything, he tried as much as possible to stay away from crime, and made a
living primarily as a blood donor. I did not think his chances of remaining
free for the rest of his life were very great, but I tried hard to make his
breathing-space of freedom as happy and encouraging for him as possible. I felt
that he had already been punished enough before committing any crime by the
poverty and humiliation society had subjected him to in his childhood. It was
when I expressed this opinion during one of our nightly conversations that he
confided in me about his crime, and afterward we were bound even closer to each
other through this secret confidence. We often took walks or went to the blood
bank together. Mostly we could survive by selling blood plasma twice a week, as
the blood banks in New Orleans at that time were the highest-paying in the
U.S.: $6.10 a visit. Only rarely was I forced to steal cheese and other small
items from supermarkets in order to get full. I did not want Nell to do it, as
he could end up getting a life sentence for it, while I knew that I would be
able to talk my way out of such an embarrassing situation with the employees if
I got caught. Nell was always pursued by his fate in this way. But never did it
strike me so forcefully as on the evening I last saw him.
We had made the stupid mistake of walking down the street together in the black
neighborhood where we lived, and thereby attracted the attention of the police.
It is a mortal sin for a white man and a black man to walk together in a black
neighborhood, as they are immediately suspected of being dope dealers. But
being deep in conversation when we swung into the neighborhood, we forgot to
part. It was not long before a patrol car pulled up alongside us in one of the
dimly lit streets in the east ghetto. The cops were the nice jovial type who really only wanted to scare us,
and therefore said that we could go free if we just handed over our marijuana
cigarettes to them. I have seen the police use this method so many times in
black neighborhoods, since they don't have to report the confiscated grass but
can smoke it themselves. I did not carry anything myself, but knew that Nell
had one or two joints, like most others. But suddenly Nell was seized by his
fate's paranoia - the paranoia and distrust of his fellow man almost everyone
of his social background has - and he refused to hand over the joints.
For my own part I would not have hesitated a moment. I had complete confidence
in the cops. Nell's distrust of the cops made him jam up like a lock and act
irrationally. The police are trained to observe that kind of reaction in
criminals and they immediately got out of the car to search him. They only
found two small joints and his knife, but since he did not have any I.D. they
took him to the station for fingerprinting. I knew right off that I would never
see Nell again. He had been tripped up by the paranoia and sense of guilt
common to all poor blacks, regardless of whether they have committed a crime or
not. It was the same paranoia which had originally made him a murderer.
After Nell had gone from this world," New Orleans suddenly seemed like a ghost
town and I could no longer bear to stay in the same house. I wanted to leave
the city, so I tried hitch-hiking in the direction of Baton Rouge. New Orleans
is one of the hardest places in America to get a ride, and I waited on the
Interstate with my sign for hours, hoping to get picked up before the police
came. All of a sudden the only Rolls Royce I've ever gotten a lift with stopped
in the middle of the three-lane highway to pick me up. It was right in the rush
hour and we immediately created a big traffic jam of honking cars. Just as I
had gotten into the car, the police came wailing up behind us to give us a
ticket for this illegal stopping. The man who had picked me up said he would
take care of it, went back to the cops and without a word gave them his card.
When the police saw his name, they became all smiles and friendliness and
followed him back to his Rolls Royce, clapping him on the shoulder while
assuring him that it was only a trifle and that we shouldn't worry about it any
more. I naturally wondered who this guy could be who got off so lightly without
even a ticket. He told me that his name was Peter E. Stormgard, and that he had
picked me up because I was standing with my sign, "Touring USA from Denmark." He had never before
picked up a hitch-hiker, but he suddenly thought it might be f'un since he
himself was of Danish descent. Normally this information makes me clam up
instantly and get out of the car as fast as possible. I have long ago lost any
desire to be with Danish-Americans, who all too often give me only one feeling:
a sense of shame at being a Dane. To Danes visiting America I give this advice:
if you want to get a good impression of the country, stay away from this
population group, which in general represents one of the most racist and
reactionary white groups in the United States. 80 percent of them vote
Republican I have heard. All they can talk about is how wonderful it is to be
rid of the high taxes back in Denmark. They run away from every human
responsibility and would be willing to relegate blacks to a kind of
psychological concentration camp if they could get their taxes lowered that
way. I have met Danish-Americans who were red-hot Social Democrats back in
Denmark, but in the course of just five years had been transformed into the
worst reactionaries. Danish-Americans have about as much understanding of
blacks and poverty as a whip has of the master/ slave relation-ship. They stand
in glaring contrast to American Jews, who are the white group I generally feel
most at ease and in harmony with. This surprises me as I come from a country
where Jews seem to be assimilated to such a degree that I had never noticed or
even heard of anyone mentioned as being "Jewish" before I left Denmark, and
thus never felt any temptation to stereotype them like this. With my new
"Americanized" eyes I can only conclude that this group seems to have a deeper
understanding
of black people's situation and of those mechanisms in the system that made
them Europe's "niggers" for so many centuries.
Well, all the same, to a Danish-American in a Rolls Royce 1 could not say no,
and right away I started entertaining him with travel stories so that he would
invite me home. I especially emphasized my experiences with Rockefeller,
Kennedy, etc., since all little millionaires look up to the big millionaires
and therefore I knew he would ask me home with a feeling of thus being brought
a little closer to the Rockefellers. (Like many young Scandinavians shocked
upon their first visit to the U.S. at the enormous discrepancy between the rich
and the poor, I still had a strong dislike of the rich.) It worked, and I ended
up heading back toward New Orleans. He owned the city's 16
finest and most expensive hotel, right in the heart of the French Quarter.
Everyone in town knew him, and later I was told that he owned a large part of
the French Quarter and was a housing speculator (slumlord). A fabulous suite in
his hotel, "Hotel de Paris," was put at my disposal and I was told to just ring
the bell whenever I wanted anything. Black waiters in freshly pressed uniforms
brought everything to me on silver trays, with unbelievable servility. I sat
out in the garden of the hotel and let a black waiter bring me one thing after
another in an attempt to get him to open up, but it was impossible. He probably
felt his whole existence threatened when I addressed him as a normal human
being. I sat pondering how strange it was that at this moment Nell was being
"served" by white prison guards in hell, while I was being served by black
waiters in heaven. It was as if everything in our lives had, in a natural way,
brought us each to his own place, and our short friendship had only been a
utopia. But it struck me that Nell, as a black, had actually come further, for
wasn't he more free than this broken servant who was only able to hold his head
up by learning to enjoy his own oppression here in this rich Dane's
sadomasochistic universe? Wasn't Stormgard a murderer and annihilator, while at
the same time seemingly a tender, quiet and unhappy human being who had learned
to exploit to the utmost the mechanisms given him in this society? Furthermore,
people said he was the richest homosexual in town, which meant he himself was
part of an oppressed minority group. The security in these surroundings was
nauseating. I felt restless and lonesome. It was a favorite hotel of the
richest and most glamorous film stars, but there was no human contact. Should I
go out in the street and find a poor person to share my luxurious suite and a
bottle of wine? No, one should not buy friendship with wealth, I thought. Not
even borrowed wealth. It didn't occur to me at the time that per-haps I had
tried to buy his friendship with my stories. I only stayed there one night, a
terribly lonely night.
For years I had shared home and bed with people, and it came as
a shock to suddenly be lying there all alone. After my silver-tray breakfast
the next day, I rushed headlong back to freedom, determined to find some people
to live with. On Bourbon Street two young girls came running up to me to get my
autograph. Being tourists, they had gone into the famous hotel out of curiosity
and had seen me sitting there at breakfast under the palm trees and therefore
assumed I was a movie star. For a moment I felt tempted to play "movie star"
and maybe get to stay with them, but then chose to tell the truth. They lost
all interest in me, and I realized that I was back down to earth again. Because of
the many tourists, it is impossible for a vagabond to find a place to stay in
New Orleans. Towards evening I was very hungry and recalled Bonnie's Grill on
Decatur Street, which Nell had once shown me. Bonnie was an enormously fat
white woman who ran a dingy little coffee bar. Bonnie was the type who could
only speak to people in coarse, bad-tempered words and was always bawling them
out, but the more harshly she talked to people, the more she loved them. She
could easily have made good money from the cafe, but instead she was always
broke because the place was frequented by the poorest street-people, and Bonnie
gave free meals all day long to people who had no money. Bonnie remembered me
all right, and knew I had no money, so right away she shoved a big bowl of
grits in front of me, and later on hamburgers and other good things. She stood
there in all her immensity with her hands on her hips and watched me without a
word, but I knew she liked me be-cause I had known Nell. Without mentioning
Nell she said after a long silence: "You can come and live with me now." So I
moved into Bonnie's cheap, messy apartment. There were lice and fleas and
several inches of dust everywhere.
What happened in the next few days was peculiar, for although
we could barely communicate with each other and did not have a sexual
relationship we quickly became closer than I have been to any other person on my journey. When we realized that we were probably the only ones Nell
had confided his past to, we be-came inseparably bound to one another. Living
with Bonnie was like living on a volcano of human warmth. She is the only one I
know of who is still running the "under-ground railroad". To live with her was
to be woken up almost every night by some black man on the run from the law.
Here they all found a place of refuge. Bonnie loved black men, especially those
who in one way or another had revolted against the master-slave relationship.
She had always been that way. Earlier, she had live( in Jacksonville, Florida,
but had been beaten up and driven out of town by the whites. She had gone to
New Orleans, which is considered a freer Southern town.
Actually, her own two
children were neglected and needed clothes, healthy food, and vitamins; but on
the other hand they had, through their mother's actions, been brought up not to
hate, and were far healthier in their own way than most white children.
Throughout their childhood they had seen murderers, thieves, rapists junkies,
and other felons take the place of their father in their mother's bed, but they
had experienced them all as human beings because they saw them through the eyes
of their mother, who refused to accept this as their real identity and who thus,
through this faith in human beings, actually created human beings. For these
children terms such as "murderer" and "nigger" had no meaning, since in
Bonnie's home the men all behaved as then "Daddy," and this was how the
children saw them. There was always rejoicing when a "Daddy" had come out of
prison. Bonnie sighed a bit because they would never see Nell again, but she
was already prepared to take in a nee Nell. Bonnie and I developed a quiet
understanding and affection for each other which over the years grew into such
a strong love-relationship that time and again I returned to New Orleans to
live with her. Bonnie doesn't know whether she is Jewish or Danish or Irish or
Polish. She is just American, she says.