II
Shaw’s vocabulary and usage will sometimes seem strange to readers not familiar with his region and way of life, but it will never seem empty or inert. When he speaks of “correspondin” a girl or says that his son “got stout enough to accomplish a place,” we have no trouble understanding what he means, and we are also aware that his words convey insight beyond the reach of conventional usage. He speaks always in reference to a real world, thoroughly experienced and understood. His words keep an almost physical hold on “what I have touched with my hands and what have touched me. . . ” Surely this is the power that we have periodically sensed in what is called (vulgarly) “the vulgar tongue.” It is a language under the discipline of experience, not of ideas or rules. Shaw’s words, always interposed between experience and intelligence, have the exactitude of conviction, whereas the words of an analyst or theorist can have only the exactitude of definition.
In a recent issue of Saturday Review/World, R. Buckminster Fuller has an article called “Cutting the Metabilical Cord,” which is based on a virtually unqualified assumption that humanity has begun a process of unlimited improvement by way of technological progress. “Humanity knew very little when I was young,” he says. And he recalls the “skilled craftsmen” he worked with on his first jobs; these people “had vocabularies of only about 100 words, many of which were blasphemous or obscene.” Thanks to radio and television, however, this lamentable ignorance has been corrected by a “historic information-education explosion and its spontaneous edifying of humans in general.” This “explosion” of edification “completely changed the speech pattern of world-around humanity from that of an illiterate ignoramus to that of a scholar.” These and many similar assertions culminate in a sort of Creed for Modern Times: “The great intellectual integrity of universe has cut the metabilical cord of tradition and parental authority—putting youth on its own thinking responsibility.” And then occurs the essay’s only note of caution, which is immediately buried beneath another avalanche of technological mysticism: the young people of 1974, “whose metabilical cord of tradition has been cut, now need a few years time to develop competence to take over the world affairs initiative, and that is exactly what universe is apparently about to do next.”
It may be that Mr. Fuller’s language can be put to some good use. I hope so. It could certainly be used to promote the sale of television sets. Should his jargon catch on with the public, it could also be useful to any politician whose designs required a fit of public optimism. This gobbledygook of “universe” is representative of a lot of the sub-tongues spoken now by people who lead “awesome intellectual lives.” It is speech so abstract, so far removed from anybody’s experience, that it is virtually out of control; anything can be said in it that the speaker has the foolishness or the audacity to say.
There is not a phrase in Nate Shaw’s story so abstract, naive, ignorant, insipid, or tasteless as this language of Buckminster Fuller. An “uneducated” man whose speech was formed long before radio, Shaw is nevertheless well able to say whatever he thinks, and he thinks whatever he needs to think as a man of exceptional competence, both practical and moral. In moments of joy or grief, he is capable of a sort of poetry. The burden—and so the discipline—of Shaw’s language is what he knows from experience. For that reason nothing he says, if correctly quoted, will ever be useful to a salesman or a political propagandist. There is not a single slogan in this book. He has no talk of “education explosions” or “metabilical cords.” He does not say “Freedom now” or “Black is beautiful” or “Power to the people.” He says: “My color, the colored race of people on earth, goin to shed theirselves of these slavery ways. But it takes many a trip to the river to get clean.” He says: “They goin to win! They goin to win! But it’s goin to take a great effort . . . . It won’t come easy. Somebody got to move and remove . . . . It’s goin to take thousands and millions of words, thousands and millions of steps . . . . And I hope to God that I won’t be one of the slackers that would set down and refuse to labor to that end.”
That is eminently responsible language. And it is deeply moving—especially when we realize that the man speaking almost in the same breath of faith, doubt, difficulty, and his own willingness to labor is eighty-six or-seven years old. The movement here is characteristic: the swiftly defined hope or vision or ambition, followed by the recognition of difficulty, the implication of labor. And these passages occur among stories that reveal the nature and the difficulty of effort and the characters of people, black and white. What this responsibility rests on is the knowledge of tragedy. Shaw’s mind has dwelt upon his own limits, both cultural and human; it has dwelt upon loss and upon solitude. Buckminster Fuller writes, “Obviously, humanity if properly cooperative and scientifically coordinated can do anything it needs to do”—acknowledging neither the enormous ifs that cling to “properly cooperative” nor the political portent of “scientifically coordinated.” Nate Shaw, a more unified man, who can speak of acting “with the full consent of my mind,” has done what he thought, and so he knows the solitude of the man who acts on principle. When he “stood up against this southern way of life,” he had to stand alone; the other members of the union fled. He knew the exultation of his stand: “That made me merry in a way. I done what was right . . . ”But he also knew its tragedy: “When they shot me it didn’t shake me, when they arrested me it didn’t shake me. But it shook me to see my friends was but few.”
If Shaw’s language is never far from experience, it is also never far from judgment, another of his qualities that will make him useless to propagandists. The amplitude of his experience, the energy of his intelligence, his great courage simply will not permit him to withhold his judgment. It is always working, and it can be fierce. But the same qualities that bring it into play give it the dignity of freedom from prejudice and special pleading. One must assume, having no evidence but Shaw’s, that he may sometimes be wrong, but it could rarely be argued that he is partial. He is as hard on blacks as on whites. He finds good people in both races. He knew people of both races who were partly good and partly bad. And this intelligence of judgment aligns him with the best men who have taken the stand he took: he knows that what he stands for, what he asks for himself, is a human and not a racial good. He knows that white people also stand to gain from what he has hoped to gain for himself and for his race. And he makes a careful distinction between white men and white money-men: “Color don’t boot with the big white cats: they only lookin for money. O, it’s plain as your hand. The poor white man and the poor black man is sittin in the same saddle today . . .”
III
Every page of this book is resonant with Shaw’s intelligence, with his delight in the use of his mind. And this is a conscious delight: “I’ve learned many a thing that’s profitable to me, and I’ve learned a heap that ain’t profitable, but to learn anything at all is a blessin.” A few pages later he says: “And I treasures what I know and I so often think about it . . . ”
Similarly, his pride, his moral pride, is both an explicit theme and a quality implicit in every word. From childhood Shaw’s life was governed by self-respect, love of work, pride in accomplishment, high standards for his own work and behavior. “I depends on myself to act just suchaway,” he says. And: “If I has anything to do I must do all I can at it; I just feels terrible if I don’t.” And from the first he seems to have had an indomitable impulse to be independent: “I was dependin on the twist of my own wrist.” “I was a poor young colored man but I had the strength of a man who comes to know himself.” These virtues were the direct