Hayes-Bickford

"Nobody in the North understands this business." The drawl was unmistakable, straight from South Carolina. "You all seem to think integratin' niggers is like mixin' paint. You just pour in two pots and stir long enough and it comes out another color. And you can't understand why we'd object to the color of a man's skin, so you think we're all hypocrites. You act like you thought if you just talked long enough, and maybe sent some paratroopers to help talk, eventually we'd start getting' along with the niggers. You don't understand there's a lot more to begin' a nigger than just havin' dark skin."

The girl across the table from him started up and her voice twanged sharply. "But anthropologists have shown there's no difference between ..." She didn't get to finish.

"I know all that. I'm not saying they're naturally inferior. I'm just sayin' they live different, they think different, they act different. They look different, too, but that's not it. A redhead looks different, but no kid over ten holds that against her. Maybe in the North that's all there is to it. Just black skin. Maybe that's why Northerners talk so much about tolerance. Maybe that's why a Northerner can't understand the South, because he's never known a Southern nigger."

They must have both been freshmen, probably on a first date. The girl sounded Midwestern. She tried again. "But they're all human beings like us."

"Yeah, but there's human beings and there's human beings. There's some people you want to send kids to school with, and some you don't. Like I say, I don't know how it is here, but down home a nigger's just different. I don't know why, but they are. First place, they're stupider. Maybe it's the background, never havin' books or talk around home but they get lower marks on IQ tests. Nobody in the North can deny that, either. Second place, they don't work in school. That makes it hard to get the white kids working. Niggers just don't care about school. When they integrated 'em in Nashville, most of the niggers were a year behind the white kids. Sure, they're some bright ones. But you can see nobody wants to have his kid held back in school for some nigger."

The girl was very intent now. "But if they went to the same schools for a while they wouldn't get behind, and everybody would be better off."

"You can't change a nigger a few hours a day in school. Their families are the same way. Dirty, lazy, sick. More venereal disease, more rapes, more murders, more drinking, more crime, just plain more trouble than whites, all the time. That's statistics, too. You can look it up. It may be our fault they're that way. Maybe the whites should feel responsible. I don't say we're not. I guess most of the trouble is that they're all so poor you folks up here couldn't understand it, and they've always been poor, and they don't ever expect to be anything but poor. If they don't like it, they can go North, where there's lots of money and everybody loves'em. A lot go. A lot come back, too."

He sipped his coffee, made a crinkly face like a rotting pear, and continued his monologue. "You take my country. There's two niggers for every white. That means when you talk about integrating, you're not talking about sending the niggers to the nice white school, like in Little Rock. You're talking about sending whites to a nigger school with nigger teachers. And we just won't go. Maybe in Baltimore, or Little Rock, but not down home.

"It's a damn shame the Court had to stir all this up. The Klan was dead till this happened. Nobody talked lynching, and between the Court and the legislature they were even trying to help the niggers some, what we could afford. Now everybody's scared, black and white. They don't talk to you any more. And the shame is that most of those niggers don't want to go to school with white people any more than we do with them. They want good schools, sure. But where the schools are the same, they'll stick together mostly. It's not integration they want. They want to be as good as white folk. And I say fine. The sooner the better. But 'till then, let's keep them out of the schools."

He gave her a look of triumph, gulped his coffee, and then added more soberly, "But you wouldn't understand. You've never lived down there, and you've never known a nigger the way we know 'em." He rose, held her coat for her, and followed her out into the rain.

I'd never heard it said so well.