《notes of a native son 一个土生子的笔记》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《notes of a native son 一个土生子的笔记（5页珍藏版）》请在金锄头文库上搜索。
1、Notes of a Native Son By James Baldwin The year which preceded my fathers death had made a great change in my life. I had been living in New Jersey, working in defense plants, working and living among southerners, white and black.I knew about the south, of course, and about how southerners treated N
2、egroes and how they expected them to behave, but it had never entered my mind that anyone would look at me and expect me to behave that way. I learned in New Jersey that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of ones skin ca
3、used in other people. I acted in New Jersey as I had always acted, that is as though I thought a great deal of myself-I had to act that way-with results that were, simply, unbelievable. I had scarcely arrived before I had earned the enmity,which was extraordinarily ingenious, of all my superiors and
4、 nearly all my co-workers. In the beginning, to make matters worse, I simply did not know what was happening. I did not know what I had done, and I shortly began to wonder what anyone could possibly do, to bring about such unanimous, active, and unbearably vocal hostility. I knew about jim-crow but
5、I had never experienced it. I went to the same self-service restaurant three times and stood with all the Princeton boys before the counter, waiting fora hamburger and coffee; it was always an extraordinarily long time before anything was set before me; but it was not until the fourth visit that I l
6、earned that, in fact, nothing had ever been set before me: I had simply picked something up. Negroes were not served here, I was told, and they had been waiting for me to realize that I was the only Negro present. Once I was told this, I determined to go there all the time. But now they were ready f
7、or me and, though some dreadful scenes were subsequently enacted in that restaurant, I never ate there again. It was the same story all over New Jersey, in bars, bowling alleys, diners, places to live. I was always being forced to leave, silently, or with mutual imprecations. I very shortly became n
8、otorious and children giggled behind me when I passed and their elders whispered or shouted-they really believed that I was mad. And it did begin to work on my mind, of course; I began to beafraid to go anywhere and to compensate for this I went places to which I really should not have gone and wher
9、e, God knows, I had no desire to be. My reputation in town naturally enhanced my reputation at work and my working day became one long series of acrobatics designed to keep me out of trouble. I cannot say that these acrobatics succeeded. It began to seem that the machinery of the organization I work
10、ed for was turning over, day and night, with but one aim: to eject me. I was fired once, and contrived, with the aid of a friend from New York, to get back on the payroll; was fired again, and bounced back again. It took a while to fire me for the third time, but the third timetook. There were no lo
11、opholes anywhere. There was not even any way of getting back inside the gates. That year in New Jersey lives in my mind as though it were the year during which, having an unsuspected predilection for it, I first contracted some dread, chronic disease, the unfailing symptom ofwhich is a kind of blind
12、 fever, a pounding in the skull and fire in the bowel. Once this disease is contracted, one can never be really carefree again, for the fever without an instants warning, can recur at any moment. It can wreck more important things than race relations. There is not a Negro alive who does not have thi
13、s rage in his blood-one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, this feverhas recurred in me, and does, and will until the day I die. My last night in New Jersey, a white friend from New York took me to the nearest big town, Trenton, to go to the movie
14、s and have a few drinks. As it turned out, he also saved me from, at the very least, a violent whipping. Almost every detail of that night stands out very clearly in my memory. I even remember the name of the movie we saw because its title impressed me as being so partly ironical. It was a movie abo
15、ut the German occupation of France, starring Maureen O Hara and Charles Laughton and called This Land Is Mine. I remember the name of the diner we walked into when the movie ended: it was the American Diner. When we walked in the counterman asked what we wanted and I remember answering with the casu
16、al sharpness which had become my habit: We want a hamburger and a cup of coffee, what do you think we want? I do not know why, after a year of such rebuffs, I so completely failed to anticipate his answer, which was, of course, We dont serve Negroes here. This reply failed to discompose me, at least for the moment. I made some sardonic comment about the name of the diner and we walked out into the streets. This was the time of what was called the brown-out,
