The Man Who Cried I Am by John A. Williams

books, and they don’t always have bonfires. I love it like this; let there be a little danger to life, otherwise life is a lie.
    â€œI’m the way I am, the kind of writer I am, and you may be too, because I’m a black man; therefore, we’re in rebellion; we’ve got to be. We have no other function as valid as that one.” Harry grinned. “I’ve been in rebellion, and a writer, I guess, ever since I discovered that even colored folks wanted to keep me away from books so I could never learn just how bad it all was. Maybe, too, to keep me from laughing at them. For taking it. My folks had a deathly fear of books.”
    Harry took a deep drink of his beer and gazed moodily around the bar, then he said, “There’s something wrong with this ritual these people have here. Oh, hell, I like kicking it around all weekend, too, but that doesn’t mean I can’t see what’s going on. A writer worth his salt is not going to write about how damned lovely it is; it isn’t, that’s why so many people tell themselves it is. But they don’t want to hear what you’ve got to say if it isn’t the same thing they can see or believe, and that’s going to make you a target. Talk about sitting ducks! You against them, and all you’ve got is a beat-up typewriter and some cheap rag bond. And your head.
    â€œIf your first book is any indication, you’re a rebel, too, just as you should be. Don’t be guilty if you make it and Negroes themselves start shooting you down; your subject will always be America or Americans. You didn’t make the bed; you just have to lie in it. Even so, when my name is mentioned, I want people to jerk up and look for trouble; I want trouble to be my middle name when I write about America. I wouldn’t like it if a single person slept well. We—you, me, Warren and the others—have that function. I’ll tell you why.
    â€œIn our society which is white—we are intruders they say—there has got to be something inherently horrible about having the sicknesses and weaknesses of that society described by a person who is a victim of them; for if he, the victim, is capable of describing what they have believed nonexistent, then they, the members of the majority, must choose between living the truth, which can be pretty grim, and the lie, which isn’t much better. But at least they will then have the choice.
    â€œIt must be pretty awful for a white man to learn that one of the things wrong with this society is that it is not based on dollars directly or alone, but dollars denied men who are black so dollars can go into the pockets of men who are white. It must make white men ponder a kind of weakness that will make them deny work to black men so that work can be done by men who are white. How it must anger them to know finally that we know they deny women who are white to black men, while they have taken black women at will for generations.
    â€œAnd don’t they know or want to know that the absence of black voices in the state legislatures and in Congress, unheard since the Reconstruction, wounds them to the death? How painful would it be for them to admit that millions of acres of black men’s lands were ripped from them by night riders and county clerks, and are still being held by the descendants of the thieves? Very painful. They’d have to give back those lands, those dollars, that work.
    â€œAh yeah, there’s quite enough to be in rebellion about,” Harry said, morosely. “I quit the Party because I became damned sick and tired of white men telling me when I should suffer, where and how and what for. And, Max, I was suffering all the time! And I got tired of writing what I knew was wrong for me, our people, our time, our country. I got tired of seeing young Negroes, young , man! beat when they drifted into the Party looking for hope and found nothing but another version of white