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Book 10, pages 183-185
Dear Mom and Dad.
This is the most shocking Easter I have ever experienced.
I am now in Detroit,
which is nothing less than a night-mare. On the way from San Francisco I
stopped off in Chicago to visit Denia, the young black writer I lived with at
Christmas. Even there the horrors began. You remember the two girlfriends of
hers that she and I spent so much time with? She told me that one of them, Theresia - that tender, quiet nineteen-year-old girl - has since been murdered.
She was probably killed by someone she knew, since it seems she opened the door
to the murderers. She was found by her fiancé, shot and cut up with knives. She
was the second person I have known in America who has been murdered. Denia has
now bought a gun and has begun target-practicing. That night in Chicago I also
experienced my first big shoot-out, probably between police and criminals. We
were on a visit on Mohawk Street when it suddenly broke out down below in the
darkness. I tried to look out, but Denia pulled me away from the window.
Well, I have almost forgotten all that, compared with the things that have
happened here in Detroit. First I lived with a well-off automobile-worker's
family in one of the respectable black neighborhoods at the seven-mile limit,
way out there where the white areas begin. Their son had picked me up and
invited me home - the third black home I have lived in. Beautiful people.
Easter morning they took me to church. But then I moved into the ghetto itself
with three students, and since then it has been a nightmare. One of the first
days I was here, Thigpen, whom I had just been introduced to, was murdered. He
was a fantastic person, big as a bear, and a poet (I am sending you his
collection, Down Nigger Paved Streets).
Apparently for no other reason than
that he had written a harmless poem about the narcotics trade in the city, he
was found the other day executed by narcotics gangsters along with two of his
friends. They were tied up and laid on the floor and shot in the back of the
head. But what shocked me most was the reaction of the three I am living with.
One of them, Jeff, had known Thigpen for years and is photographed with him in
a book. But Jeff just came in calmly with the newspaper one morning saying,
"Hey, you remember this dude, Thigpen, you met the other day? Look, they blew
him away too." It made no greater impression. This is how they react to all of
the violence, which really is getting to me. But still, they are afraid
themselves. It is not only me who is trembling from fear here.
The nights are the worst. I'm beginning to get really down
from the lack of sleep. Jeff and the two others sleep upstairs, while I stay
down in the living room. Every night they shove the refrigerator in front of
the door and put some empty bottles on top, so that any attempt to open the
door will make the bottles fall and wake them up. One night the cat leaped upon
the refrigerator and knocked over the bottles with a crash, so I shot upstairs
to the others. I am a nervous wreck by now and constantly lie listening for
footsteps outside (nobody but robbers dares to go on foot at night in Detroit
as far as I can tell from here). Once in a while I hear shots outside. I have
never really trembled before, but now I sometimes get the same jelly-like
sensation as that night I was mugged in San Francisco. My heartbeat alone is
enough to keep me awake.
In fact, I really didn't think I had closed my eyes once the entire week, until
I suddenly woke up from a terrible nightmare.
I almost never dream now when I am traveling, but that night I dreamed about a sunny day when I was eleven,
lying on the living room floor at home in the parsonage. I was lying there
eating oranges, I remember, when the radio news announced the murder of Lumumba.
I didn't understand anything then, yet I remember it vividly. This scene I now
saw clearly before me in the nightmare, but it kept changing to another scene
somewhere in Africa, where I was lying on the ground while some Africans fired
one machine-gun burst after another at me. I shouted to them to stop, but the
bullets just kept on drilling into me, a terrible sensation. I woke up to this
real Detroit nightmare, which I now suddenly found quite peaceful in
comparison, and a bit later I managed to get a couple of hours of sleep.
But
the nightmares are not always over when day breaks. One of the first days I was
there, I ventured out in the streets on foot. Scarcely half an hour had gone by
before a police car with two white cops stopped short and they called me over
to the car. I was almost happy to see white faces again and walked over. They
asked to see my ID. You are constantly being stopped like this when you walk
around in the ghetto. I often ask myself what difference there really is
between being in the ghetto here and being a black in South Africa, when you
must constantly show your identity papers to white policemen. So almost
automatically I stuck my hand down into my shoulder bag to get out my passport.
Immediately the cops' pistols jumped out right into my face: "Hold it!" It is a
terrible experience to be looking into the muzzle of a gun, and I began trembling from fear. But nothing
happened, they were just afraid that I had a pistol in my bag. It felt like a
miracle that their guns had not gone off.
How can people live in such a world
where they have so little trust in each other? They gave me the usual warning:
"You better get yourself or of this neighborhood quick!" I had regained my
self-confidence and answered audaciously, "I live here!" The
longer I live here, the more I look at the whites with the eyes of the blacks,
and I can't help but harbor an ever-increasing hatred for them.
It is a strange sensation to live in a city like Detroit where you never see
anything but black faces around you. Little by little you undergo a slow
change. The black faces become close and familiar, and therefore warm, while
the white faces seem distant and unknown and therefore cold. In spite of all
the horrors, I certainly have no desire to go out into the cold icy wastes out
there where the ghetto stops. So you can probably understand the shock I get
each time I turn on the TV and suddenly see nothing but white faces.
Yes, in a
strange way the white faces become a substantial part of the Detroit nightmare.
For it is not only the crime which keeps me awake at night. It's just as much
the television and the radio. Everywhere in the ghettos of Detroit and Chicago
it's a habit among the blacks to leave the television and the radio on
throughout the night to make robbers think you are still awake. Another thing
is that they have gradually become so accustomed to sleeping with the TV and
radio on that it has become a kind of narcotic; many of them simply cannot fall
asleep without this noise.
I discovered this one day when Denia and I wanted to
take a nap in Chicago and she automatically turned on the TV so as to fall
asleep. It is shocking how early some people become addicted to this
noise-narcotic. When lived a young black mother in Jackson, fifty miles outside
Detroit, I discovered that it was almost impossible for us to live together.
When we went to bed she always turned the radio. I then lay there waiting for
her to fall asleep, after which I slowly tried to turn down the volume, as
otherwise it was absolutely impossible for me to fall asleep. But every time I
got the volume down to a certain level, it made her two children, two and three
years old, wake up and start crying, so I immediately had to turn, the volume
again. I could only take it for two nights, after which I had to move. We were
simply, as the woman said "culturally incompatible."
But I think there are
terrifying implications if so many blacks in the urban ghettos are equally
dependent on this noise. You quite simply cannot imagine in Denmark how
primitive American radio is: the constant boom-boom music interrupted every
other minute by what they call "messages". All the time you hear the soporific
message, "Leave the driving to us." It all feels like one big white conspiracy
against the blacks. Just as they bombed the South Vietnamese population into
"strategic villages" in order to brainwash it, so it almost seems as if in the
USA they have forced the blacks away from the small villages into these big
psychic concentration camps, where they can better control them with the mass
media.
It is incredible how as a result of this oppression they conform almost to
the letter to every view of their oppressors. In the South you could at least
think, but here you are constantly bombarded with what others want you to think
- or rather, you are prevented from thinking. Doesn't all this music and noise
stifle a person' capacity for independent and intellectual development? Is it
strange that many of these people seem like zombies, as they themselves
jokingly call it?
The three I live with are some of the few politically active
people in Detroit. Jeff has given me some books about Cuba that he wants me to
read. But it is impossible for me to read in these surroundings, with all the
noise, nervousness, trembling, and fear of something, though you don't even
know what that something is. Jeff is one of the increasing number of blacks who
have traveled illegally to Cuba through Canada. He tells me so many fantastic
things about it, and I listen, but much of it seems so irrelevant in these
cruel surroundings. He says that Cuba is the first place he has been able to
breathe freely. All the Cubans are armed, just as here in Detroit, but
nevertheless he was never afraid in Cuba. The only thing which disappointed him
was that the Cuban blacks don't yet have Afro hairstyles.
Jeff was so happy in
Cuba that he tried everything possible to avoid being sent back to the U.S., but he was not allowed to stay. Now, after the trip, he has
had problems with the FBI, who twice visited his parents. His student aid was
suddenly cut off and he was expelled from college. He has therefore become a
taxi driver, and goes around in his own dream world reading books about Cuba in
the taxi. He told me laughing one day that he "held himself up" a few weeks
ago. Since taxi drivers are always being mugged he "stole" $50 from himself,
called the police, and said the robber was black, looked so and so, and ran in
that direction. Then he did not have to work any more that day and drove out to
Belle Isle to read his books on Cuba.
Unfortunately, he does not want to use
his experiences to work politically here in Detroit; the system is so massive
and oppressive that it's no use, he says. So now he is just working to get back
to Cuba. He does, however, want to go to Washington in two days to demonstrate
against the Vietnam war. One million are expected. We will drive down together.
I can hardly wait to get out of this hell, and only hope it is more peaceful in
Washington so I can get some rest. But I have to come back to Detroit. Just as
in Chicago, I have met such warm people here that I simply cannot fathom their
goodness toward me. I cannot understand how two such cruel and oppressive
cities can contain such exceptional people. It has to be possible for me to
learn to live with the ghetto, for I must come back to these people. But it
will take me a long time to get used to the conditions. Just a trip to the
corner store in the evening requires that we take the car. Jeff and the two
others simply do not dare to walk one-and-a-half blocks!
I will remember
Detroit as an endless gliding drive through a ghost-town to the sound of the
car radio's newest black hit, "For god's sake, give more power to the people,"
which is being pounded into my head. And then every day the newest murder
statistics. Since it's Easter week, only 26 people were murdered. They expect
to reach 1,000 before Christmas! More lives are lost in one year in the civil
war here than in six years in Northern Ireland. Yet in the newspapers, "five
people killed in yesterdays violence in Detroit" merit only a notice on page
18, while the front page headlines decry the loss of two lives in Northern
Ireland's "tragic" civil war. By the way, did the Danish papers write about
the stigmatized black girl, who was bleeding during Easter? Anyway, I hope you
have had a more peaceful Easter.
With love, Jacob
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