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.
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 backstabbing 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 relation-ships, 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.
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 hack,
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 back-ground
watching the whole thing. The thing was that she had felt she might as well
take a hit 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.