“Listen, then,” said Logan to the angels who were putting on their wings by now, as it was near curtain time, “if we can’t make it a real strike, then let’s make it a general walk-out on the opening night. Strike for one performance anyhow. At least show folks that we won’t take it lying down. Show those Washington Negroes we hack them up — theoretically, anyhow.”
“One day ain’t so bad,” said a skinny black angel. “I’m with you on a one-day strike.”
“Me, too,” several others agreed as they crowded into the corridor at curtain time. The actor who played God was standing in the wings in his frock coat.
“Shss-ss!” he said.
Monday in Washington. The opening of that famous white play about black life in a scenic heaven. Original New York cast. Songs as only Negroes can sing them. Uncle Tom come back as God.
Negro Washington wanted to picket the theater, but the police had an injunction against them. Cops were posted for blocks around the playhouse to prevent a riot. Nobody could see God. He was safely housed in the quiet home of a conservative Negro professor, guarded by two detectives. The papers said black radicals had threatened to kidnap him. To kidnap God!
Logan spent the whole day rallying the flagging spirits of his fellow actors, talking to them in their hotel rooms. They were solid for the one-day strike when he was around, and weak when he wasn’t. No telling what Washington cops might do to them if they struck. They locked Negroes up for less than that in Washington. Besides, they might get canned, they might lose their pay, they might never get no more jobs on the stage. It was all right to talk about being a man and standing up for your race, and all that — but hell, even an actor has to eat. Besides, God was right. It was a great play, a famous play! They ought Co hold up its reputation. It did white folks good to see Negroes in such a play. Logan must be crazy!
“Listen here, you might as well get wise. Ain’t nobody gonna strike tonight,” one of the men told him about six o’clock in the lobby of the colored Whitelaw Hotel. “You’d just as well give up. You’re right. We ain’t got no guts.”
“I won’t give up,” said Logan.
When the actors reached the theater, they found it surrounded by cops and the stage was full of detectives. In the lobby there was a long line of people — white, of course — waiting to buy standing room. God arrived with motorcycle cops in front of his car. He had come a little early to address the cast. With him was the white stage manager and a representative of the New York producing office.
They called everybody together on the stage. The Lord wept as he spoke of all his race had borne to get where Negroes are today. Of how they had struggled. Of how they sang. Of how they must keep on struggling and singing — until white folks see the light. A strike would do no good. A strike would only hurt their cause. With sorrow in his heart — but more noble because of it — he would go on with the play. He was sure his actors — his angels — his children — would continue, too.
The white men accompanying God were very solemn, as though hurt to their souls to think what their Negro employees were suffering, but far more hurt to think that Negroes had wanted to jeopardize a week’s box-office receipts by a strike! That would really harm everybody!
Behind God and the white managers stood two big detectives.
Needless to say, the Negroes finally went downstairs to put on their wings and makeup. All but Logan. He went downstairs to drag the cast out by force, to make men of darkies, to carry through the strike. But he couldn’t. Not alone. Nobody really wanted to strike. Nobody wanted to sacrifice anything for race pride, decency, or elementary human rights. The actors only wanted to keep on appearing in a naive dialect play about a quaint, funny heaven full of niggers at which white people laughed and wept.
The management sent two detectives downstairs to get Logan. They were taking no chances. Just as the curtain rose they carted him off to jail — for disturbing the peace. The colored angels were all massed in the wings for the opening spiritual when the police took the black boy out, a line of tears running down his cheeks.
Most of the actors wanted to think Logan was crying because he was being arrested — but in their souls they knew that was not why he wept.
The man who killed a shadow
by Richard Wright
(Originally published in 1946)
National Cathedral
It all began long ago when he was a tiny boy who was already used, in a fearful sort of way, to living with shadows. But what were the shadows that made him afraid? Surely they were not those beautiful silhouettes of objects cast upon the earth by the sun. Shadows of that kind are innocent and he loved trying to catch them as he ran along sunlit paths in summer. But there were subtler shadows which he saw and which others could not see: the shadows of his fears. And this boy had such shadows and he lived to kill one of them.
Saul Saunders was born black in a little Southern town, not many miles from Washington, the nation’s capital, which means that he came into a world that was split in two, a white world and a black one, the white one being separated from the black by a million psychological miles. So, from the very beginning, Saul looking timidly out from his black world, saw the shadowy outlines of a white world that was unreal to him and not his own.
It so happened that even Saul’s mother was but a vague, shadowy thing to him, for she died long before his memory could form an image of her. And the same thing happened to Saul’s father, who died before the boy could retain a clear picture of him in his mind.
People really never became personalities to Saul, for hardly had he ever got to know them before they vanished. So people became for Saul symbols of uneasiness, of a deprivation that evoked in him a sense of the transitory quality of life, which always made him feel that some invisible, unexplainable event was about to descend upon him.
He had live brothers and two sisters who remained strangers to him. There was, of course, no adult in his family with enough money to support them all, and the children were rationed out to various cousins, uncles, aunts, and grandparents.
It fell to Saul to live with his grandmother who moved constantly from one small Southern town to another, and even physical landscapes grew to have but little emotional meaning for the boy. Towns were places you lived in for a while, and then you moved on. When he had reached the age of twelve, all reality seemed to him to be akin to his mother and father, like the white world that surrounded the black island of his life, like the parade of dirty little towns that passed forever before his eyes, things that had names but not substance, things that happened and then retreated into an incomprehensible nothingness.
Saul was not dumb or lazy, but it took him seven years to reach the third grade in school. None of the people who came and went in Saul’s life had ever prized learning and Saul did likewise. It was quite normal in his environment to reach the age of fourteen and still be in the third grade, and Saul liked being normal, liked being like other people.
Then the one person — his grandmother — who Saul had thought would endure forever, passed suddenly from his life, and from that moment on Saul did not ever quite know what to do. He went to work for the white people of the South and the shadowlike quality of his world became terribly manifest, continuously present. He understood nothing of this white world into which he had been thrown; it was just there, a faint and fearful shadow cast by some object that stood between him and a hidden and powerful sun.