Voices in Our Blood Read Free

fight them with all one’s strength. The fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair.”
    Battles of the heart are the fiercest, and most significant, of all. Robert Penn Warren sensed this when he left Connecticut to return South to report and write a little book,
Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South,
which was published in 1956. Warren’s opening lines give this collection its title: “I was going back to look at the landscapes and streets I had known—Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana—to look at the faces, to hear the voices, to hear, in fact, the voices in my own blood. A girl from Mississippi had said to me: ‘I feel it’s all happening inside of me, every bit of it. It’s all there.’ I know what she meant.” The hope is that, after reading this book, the rest of us will, too.

I
Before the Storm
    I n 1940, Richard Wright (1908–1960) published a novel,
Native Son,
to great acclaim. The next year, Viking Press asked him to draft a running text to accompany a series of photographs of black Americans from the archives of the Farm Credit Administration. The editors asked for 20 pages; after research trips to Chicago and the South, where Wright was forced to ride in a segregated railcar, he gave them more than 50. Wright, who would later tend to rush through his work, took pains with the manuscript, once withdrawing it from the publishers for yet more polishing. The result is an impressionistic survey of the prewar landscape, and Wright’s essay ends on a note signalling the beginning of the Great Migration, a historic shift that would take millions of African Americans to the North.
    They were leaving places like Mississippi. A child of Yazoo City, on the edges of the Delta, Willie Morris (1934–1999) offers a recollection of growing up white in the pre-movement South. Morris’s obsession with his homeland would serve the country well in the 1960s, when he became the youngest editor in the history of
Harper’s Magazine.
He used its pages to publish pieces on race and civil rights by writers ranging from Ralph Ellison to William Styron. The tone of the
Harper’s
coverage in those years—cold-eyed but passionate—gave readers a sophisticated place to come to for dispatches from the front.
    As James Baldwin (1924–1987) makes clear, life in the North—specifically in Harlem and New Jersey—was not entirely unlike that in the South. Baldwin (like Wright) had left the United States for Paris. He came home again at a critical hour in the movement: 1954, the year of the Brown school desegregation decision. A friend had suggested Baldwin collect his essays, and he agreed, writing
Notes of a Native Son
before returning to Europe.
    Eudora Welty (1909– ) is best known for her fiction, but in “A Pageant of Birds,” a snapshot of a black church in her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi (and one of her very few pieces of reporting), she fulfills the mission she once set for all of her work: “What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself.” A church pageant also serves as a jumping-off point for Maya Angelou (1928– ), who, in a piece that later gave her the title for her autobiography, describes the other side of the childhood Morris lived and Welty saw.
    Meanwhile, to many Americans, the old Confederacy was like another country, and in 1947 the English novelist Rebecca West (1892–1983) persuaded
The New Yorker
’s Harold Ross to let her cover a lynching case in Greenville, South Carolina. Fresh from writing about the Nuremberg trials, West saw the South’s troubles in a larger context and did not pass