Uncle Tom and Tiny Tim
Some Reflections on the Cripple as Negro
Copyright LEONARD KRIEGEL, 1969.
I find myself suddenly in the world and I recognize that I have one right alone: that of
demanding human behavior from the other.
- Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
It was Nietzsche who reminded the nineteenth century that man can only define himself when he
recognizes his true relation both to the self and to the other. When man accepts the umbilical
cord tying him to society, he does so with the knowledge that he must eventually destroy it if
only to re-tie it more securely. Nietzsche was not alone. The men who wrote the Old and New
Testaments, the Greek poets, indeed, almost all the saints and apocalyptic madmen who
embroider the history of Western civilization like so many flares in our darkness -- for them, as
for Freud, recognition of self is the first step toward recognition of the other. "I attack only those
things against which I find no allies, against which I stand alone," Nietzsche wrote. If such
sentiments have the uncomfortable ring of a rhetoric that might be better forgotten today, this is
only because the particular kind of inhumanity to which Nietzsche called attention has become
so much greater, so much more dense and impenetrable, than it was in his time.
What Nietzsche wrote is especially applicable to the cripple, and to those men and women who
inhabit, however partially, the cripple's world. It is noteworthy that, at a time when in virtually
every corner of the globe those who have been invisible to themselves and to those they once
conceived of as masters now stridently demand the right to define meaning and behavior in their
own terms, the cripple is still asked to accept definitions of what he is, and of what he should be,
imposed on him from outside his experience. In the United States alone, spokesmen for the
Negro, the Puerto Rican, the Mexican, the Indian have embarked upon an encounter with a
society that they believe has enriched itself at their expense, that has categorized them by
cataloguing their needs and desires, their hopes and fears, their anguish and courage, even their
cowardice. What all such encounters share is the challenge they offer to the very limited idea of
humanity that the oppressor society grants its victims. And, however insufficiently, the society
does respond in its ability to see its victims anew. Late-night television interviewers vie with one
another in the effort to titillate their viewers with "militant" after "militant" who rhetorically
massages whatever guilt resides in the collective consciousness of white America with threats to
burn Whitey's cities to the ground. It is a game that threatens to erupt into an industry, and the
nation eagerly watches while David Susskind battles Allen Burke for the privilege of leading
nightly sessions of ritual flagellation -- all of them no doubt, designed to enrich the national
psyche.
The cripple is conspicuous by his absence from such programs. And the reason for that absence
is not difficult to discover. The cripple is simply not attractive enough, either in his physical
presence, which is embarrassing to host and viewers, or in his rhetoric, which simply cannot
afford the bombastic luxuriance characteristic of confessional militancy. If a person who has had
polio, for example, were to threaten to burn cities to the ground unless the society recognized his
needs, he would simply make of himself an object of laughter and ridicule. The very
paraphernalia of his existence, his braces and crutches, make such a threat patently ridiculous.
Aware of his own helplessness, he cannot help but be aware. too, that whatever limited human
dimensions he has been offered are themselves the product of society's largesse. Quite simply, he
can take it or leave it. He does not even possess the sense of being actively hated or feared by
society, for society is merely made somewhat uncomfortable by his presence. It treats him as if
he were an errant, rather ugly, little schoolboy. The homosexual on public display titillates, the
gangster fascinates, the addict touches -- all play upon a nation's voyeuristic instincts. The
cripple simply embarrasses. Society can see little reason for recognizing his existence at all.
And yet, he asks, why should he apologize? My crutches are as visible as a black man's skin, and
they form a significant element, probably the most significant element, in the way in which I
measure myself against the demands of the world And the world itself serves as witness to my
sufferance. A few years ago, the mayor of New York decided to "crack down" on diplomats,
doctors and cripples who possessed what he described as "special parking privileges." I single
Mr. Lindsay out here because he is the very same mayor who has acted with a certain degree of
sensitivity and courage when dealing with the problems of blacks in the ghettos. He soon
rescinded the order preventing cripples from using their parking permits, but one notes with
interest his apparent inability to conceive of what such an order would inevitably do. Cripples
were instructed to drive to the police station nearest their place of work, leave their cars, and
wait until a police vehicle could drive them to their destination. One simply does not have to be
Freud to understand that a physical handicap carries with it certain decisive psychological
ramifications, chief among them the anxiety-provoking question of whether or not one can make
it -- economically, socially and sexually -- on one's own. Forcing a man who has great difficulty
in walking to surrender his car, the source of his mobility, is comparable to calling a black man
"boy" in a crowd of white onlookers. The mayor succeeded only in reminding me, and the
thousands of other cripples who live in New York, that my fate was in his hands and that he
controlled my destiny to an extent I did not wish to believe. He brought me once again
face-to-face with what Fanon means when he writes, "Fervor is the weapon of choice of the
impotent." Fanon, of course, was writing about being black in a psychologically white world, but
the analogy is neither farfetched nor unusual. Uncle Tom and Tiny Tim are brothers under the
skin.
About six months after I arrived in the New York State Reconstruction Home in West
Haverstraw in 1944, a fellow patient, who had been in the home for more than a year, casually
remarked. "They got you by the hump. No matter which way you turn, they got you." At that
time, I was not yet twelve, and I took so bland an overture with all the suspicion and
self-righteousness of a Boy Scout who finds himself thrust into the center of a gang war. I, for,
one, knew that I had been born to be saved and I was concerned only with caking the shell of my
determination to succeed. I simply was not going to be a cripple. (I wouldn't even permit myself
to use the word then, not even to think it.) I was determined to do everything I had been told I
must do by doctors, nurses, physical therapists, by anybody who seemed to me an authority on
"my condition." However mysteriously, I was convinced that the task of restoring nerves to my
dead legs lay in obediently listening to my superiors, and I accepted anyone's claim to superiority
on the very simple and practical basis that he could walk. If I listened, if I obeyed without
questioning, I would someday once again lead "a normal life." The phrase meant living in the
way my superiors lived. I could virtually taste those words, and for years afterward I could be
sent off into a redemptive beatitude if anybody told me that I was on my way toward leading "a
normal life". For the cripple, the first girl kissed, the first money earned, the first restaurant
entered alone -- all are visible manifestations of redemption, symbolic of "a normal life."
In my ignorance, I did not understand that my fellow patient had simply unfolded what would
ultimately seem a truism. He understood something that I could not have admitted to myself,
even if I had been brave enough to recognize it. My life was not my own, and it would take
immense effort for me ever to control it -- even to the extent that anyone not crippled can control
his life. Whoever they were, they had got me, too. And no matter which way turned, they would
decide, in their collective wisdom, how my fate was to be carved out. Nor was it me as an
individual cripple alone whom they had got. I was soon to discover that, in varying degrees, they
had my family also. Disease is a sharing, a gray fringe of existence where man, however
protesting, remains if not at his most communal, then at his most familial. For the cripple, the
message of disability is invariably personal, and he carries with the physical reminder -- the eyes
that do not see, the limp, the rigid fear of undergoing an epileptic seizure in some strange corner
of the universe, the bitter dregs of a mind that he realizes works neither wisely nor too well -- the
knowledge is, in some remarkably fundamental way, the creator of those who have created him.
Perhaps it is not what Wordsworth in mind, but the cripple knows that the child is father to the
man -- and to the woman, too --, especially when that existence is conditioned by the peculiar
nature of his handicap. There is no choice. "No matter which way you turn, they got you." The
cripple, at least, has the immediacy of his own struggle to overcome. His parents have little more
than their obligation to his birth.
The cripple, then, is a social fugitive, a prisoner of expectations molded by a society that he
makes uncomfortable by his very presence. For this reason, the most functional analogy for the
life leads is to be found in the Negro. For the black man, now engaged in wresting an identity
from a white society apparently intent on mangling its own, has become in America a synonym
for that which insists on the capacity of its own being. At the risk demanding from Black
America more than it can yet give itself, let me suggest that here we have both analogy and
method. No one can teach the cripple, can serve as so authoritative a model in his quest for
identity, as can the black man. I say this in spite of knowledge that Black America may simply
be fed up with serving the society in any manner whatsoever. "To us," writes Fanon, "the man
who adores the Negro is as 'sick' as the man who abominates him." It is not the black who must
offer explanations. Far more than the cripple, he has been the victim of television interviewers,
of scientific sociologists of the soul, of those seemingly innumerable bearers of "truth," those
contemporary witch doctors intent on analyzing us all to death. For the cripple, the black man is
a model because he is on intimate terms with a terror that does not recognize his existence and is
yet distinctly personal. He is in the process of discovering what he is, and he has known for a
long time what the society conceives him to be. His very survival guarantees him the role of
rebel. What he has been forced to learn is how to live on the outside looking in. Until quite
recently, he was not even asked how he liked it. But this has been the essential fact of the black's
existence and it is with this very same fact that the cripple must begin, for he, too, will not be
asked how he likes it. He too, must choose a self that. is not the self others insist he accept. Just
as Uncle Tom, in order to placate the power of white America, learned to mask his true self until
he felt himself in a position of total desperation or rising hope (or some combination of the two),
so the cripple has the right, one is tempted to say the responsibility, to use every technique, every
subterfuge, every mask, every emotional climate -- no matter how false and seemingly put on --
to alter the balance in his relation to the world around him.
His first step is obvious. He must accept the fact that his existence is a source of discomfort to
others. This is not to say that he is not permitted to live with comfort and security; these, in fact,
are the very gifts his society is most willing to grant him. The price he is expected to pay,
however, is the same price the black man has been expected to pay, at least until very recently:
he must accept his "condition," which implies not that he accept his wound but that he never
show more of that wound than society thinks proper. He is incapable of defining what selfhood
is. His needs will be met, but not as he might wish to meet them.
I was thirteen when I returned to the city after almost two years of life in a rehabilitation home.
A rather valiant attempt to rehabilitate me had been made there. I had been taught a number of
interesting ways in which to mount a bus; I had been taught to walk on crutches with the least
possible strain on my arms. I was a rather lazy patient who lived in the corridors of his own
fantasy, but I cannot deny that a great deal of effort was expended upon me by a number of
people who were truly interested in my welfare. Looking back, I can do little but acknowledge
this and voice my gratitude.
Unfortunately, those people whose task it was to rehabilitate me had also made certain
assumptions about me and the world I was to inhabit after I left the home. The assumption about
me was; simple: I should be grateful for whatever existence I could scrape together. After all,
there had been a time when my life itself had been forfeit and, compared to many of my peers in
the ward, I was relatively functional. About the world, the assumption was equally simple --
although here, perhaps, less forgivable. Society existed. Whatever it meted out to the cripple, the
cripple accepted. The way of the world was not to be challenged.
I did not know what to expect when I arrived back home in the Bronx, although I sensed that my
relationship to others was bound to be that of an inferior to a superior. But I did not know what
form that inferiority would take. No one had bothered to teach me -- no one had even bothered
to mention -- the position I would occupy in the world outside the ward. No one had told me the
extent to which I would find myself an outsider. And no one had told me about the fear, anguish
and hatred that would swirl through my soul as I was reminded every day that I was a supplicant.
The experience that scars must be lived through before it can be absorbed. Which is why therapy
can only soothe and art can create. The reality remains the thing itself. One can go so far as to
suggest that the very existence of language creates a barrier between the reality the cripple faces
when he returns home and what has been suggested to him about that reality. Even if those
responsible for rehabilitating me had been more forthright, more honest, it would have made
little difference. Only the situation itself could absorb my energy and interests, not a description
or an explanation of that situation. Once again, the analogy to the black condition is appropriate:
the first time the word nigger is hurled at a black child by a representative of white America
becomes his encounter with the thing itself, the world as it is.
In my own case, I was rather lucky. Looking back, withdrawal and/or paranoia seem to have
been distinct possibilities, neither of which has been my fate. Perhaps what saved me was that I
found myself too numbed to be shocked. There were two possible outs, which, in a sense,
complemented each other. The first was to fantasize. Both fantasy and dreams are left to the
cripple -- and there is a great deal to be said for any possession of one's own. The other was to
compete in the world of the "normals."* Obviously, such competition was bound to be false, but
it served to make the fantasies somewhat more real in that it fed my illusions of potency. I recall
one incident in particular, perhaps my most vivid recollection of the strange sort of humiliation I
encountered. I had been arguing -- forget about what -- with a friend. Enraged at something he
said, I challenged him to fight. He agreed, but most reluctantly. Fighting a cripple would not
reflect creditably on him in the neighborhood, but, true to the obligations of adolescence, he
knew that not to have accepted would be a sign of weakness and sentimentality. His compromise
was to insist that we wrestle on the ground. We did, and, naturally, he wound up on top of me
until his mother arrived to pull him off. Although brief, the fight itself had been highly
satisfying. It enabled me to forget momentarily the fact that I was a cripple. We met if not as
equals then at least as combatants on the same battleground. But then I heard his mother's shrill
scolding as she escorted him away, "You are not to fight with a cripple!" And I knew that, once
again, my vulnerability had been seen by all. It had not been a fight between two adolescents. It
had been, instead, a fight between a normal and a cripple. I could live with the fight. In fact,
until I heard her voice, it supplied me with an illusion of potency I would have cherished. But
her words were my reality.
A few months after I returned, I began going twice weekly to the Joint Disease Hospital on
Madison Avenue and 124th Street. The fusion of cripple and Negro crystallized in my mind
during my forays into that alien country. I like to think the Joint Disease Hospital was in Harlem
by design rather than by accident. As I surveyed the dingy streets surrounding it or waited in that
antiseptic lobby, I had ample opportunity to observe the life surrounding me. More than half the
patients were black. And they seemed uniformly solemn, hostile, nursing a hard-core resistance
to all the social workers, doctors and nurses who first-named them. While those in authority
were themselves a fairly liberal mixture
_________________________________________________________________
*I have taken this term from Erving Goffman's remarkably stimulating little book, Notes In the
Management of Spoiled Identity (Prentice-Hall, 1963). I would like to acknowledge also what is
an obvious debt to Norman Mailer's The White Negro, which like so much of Mailer's work,
forces the reader to confront himself. And I should also state that David Riesman was kind
enough to read this essay and to ask me the kind of questions that I needed to be asked.
_________________________________________________________________
of black and white, the power they represented went beyond pigmentation. They were flesh-and
blood embodiments of society's virtue and charity; they were ready, willing and, to the extent
they were capable, eager to cure the leper of his sores, if for no other reason than that they
recognized, as we lepers ourselves recognize, that the world for which they stood as subalterns
needed both the leper and his sores. What, after all, are faith, hope charity to a man who claims
to be civilized, except insofar as they are demonstrable and serve to create individual virtue?
One sometimes wonders whether the ultimate epitaph for Western civilization will not be, "I
gave."
On my first visit to the Joint Disease Hospital, my mother accompanied me. A new perspective
thus unfolded: the victim as victimizer. I already knew what my getting polio had done to her.
But as long as I was away from home, her weekly visits did little more than embarrass me. Here,
however, her presence was a very tangible confirmation of my guilt. On the long ride from the
northeast Bronx to Harlem, she had been extremely nervous. When we arrived at the hospital's
outpatient clinic, she seated herself -- before the social worker assigned to her -- with the
particular aggressive hesitancy so characteristic of the eastern European immigrant. She had
learned that one dealt with those in power with respect, humility and firmness. After the
interview we seated ourselves as conspicuously as possible in the front row of the waiting room.
All around us, people were waiting to be called into the inner sanctum, most of them staring
glumly at the yellow curtains that guarded each cubicle like a mask for pain. My mother grew
increasingly uncomfortable. To be the mother of a cripple, I began to understand, was to be the
victim of something one simply could not understand. While I had to wrestle with my knowledge
that those whose legs functioned were my superiors, she had to wrestle with her suspicion that
she had somehow done something to create her fate. Neither God nor his justice are blind. One
received in life what one deserved.
The hospital, the waiting in the lobby, the sullen faces around us, the forbidding presence of
doctors and nurses gloved by a silence broken only by their occasional whispers to one another --
all depicted a world she was henceforth to inhabit. I myself was relatively at ease. This was more
or less the way things had been for two years. For my mother, it was original, a slow-motion film
of what lay in wait for her, chipping into whatever sense of security she had been able to muster
before we left the apartment. To her credit, she refused to panic. When my name was finally
called by the receptionist, she entered the inner sanctum and answered questions with honesty
and even with pride in her capacity to endure the intimate disclosure of her suffering. Then a
doctor examined me, murmured something about "doing our best," and the ordeal was over. My
mother glowed. It was as if she had come through some terrible ordeal, marked but not scarred.
My mother did not need Harem as I did. She knew enough about endurance; that Faulknerian
virtue so apparent in those brittle streets. She came through what was, for her, an ordeal and a
humiliation, and she came through far more intact than I would come through. She possessed the
endurance of her instincts. And she herself was as alien to this America as anyone walking the
streets of Harlem, for the kind of endurance I am speaking about here is as much a matter of
geography as it is of culture.
Only by existing does the black man remain black and the cripple remain a cripple. A singular,
most unfunny lesson. But the cripple could profit from it. The condition of the Negro is imposed
from outside. Obviously this is not altogether true of the cripple. But while his physical
condition is not imposed from outside, the way in which he exists in the world is. His
relationship to the community is, by and large, dependent upon the special sufferance the
community accords him. And whether he wishes to or not, the cripple must view himself as part
of an undefined community within the larger community. But there is no sense of shared
relationships or pride. Cripples do not refer to each other "soul brothers." And regardless of how
much he may desire to participate in the larger community, the cripple discovers that he has
been offered a particular role that society expects him to play. He is expected to accede to that
role's demands. And just as it is considered perfectly legitimate to violate a black man's privacy
to bolster assumptions that the nonblack world makes, so it is perfectly legitimate to question the
cripple about virtually any aspect of his private life. The normal possesses the right to his
voyeurism without any obligation to involve himself with its object. He wants the picture drawn
for him at the very moment that he refuses to recognize that the subject of his picture is, like
him, a human being. "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" asks Shylock of his persecutors. The
cripple's paraphrase might well be, "If you wish to see my wound, can you deny me the right to
show you my self?" But voyeurism is the normal's form of non-involvement. The experience of
being the recipient of unasked-for attention is as common to cripples as it is to blacks. Each is
asked to show those aspects of his "condition" that will reinforce the normal's assumptions about
what the cripple (or black) feels like, what he wants, and what he is.
I can remember my neighbors, on my return home, praying for me, inquiring about my health,
quoting for my benefit the words of Christ, St. Francis, Akiba and F. D. R.* I can remember their
lecturing me, advising me, escorting me. Drunks voluntarily shared their wisdom with me.
Almost everyone did things for me -- except, of course, to see me. For to have seen me would
have entailed recognizing my existence as an individual me, that kind have of personal
encounter that results in a stripping away of stereotype and symbol and a willingness to accept
the humanity of the other, at whatever personal cost.
One can object that this view simply distorts the problem of the cripple. It is not the black man
and the cripple alone who suffer from invisibility in America. The proliferation of books on
alienation and anxiety, the increasing sense of disaffiliation from which our younger people
suffer, the seemingly endless number of fads, pseudo religions, life sciences, and spiritual
hobbyhorses that clutter the landscape of life in these United States all testify to this. Ultimately,
such an objection contains great validity. But one must first see it within the particular situation
in which
_________________________________________________________________
*Roosevelt's ability to "beat" polio was for me, as well as for most of the boys in ward with me,
what Kenneth Burke speaks of as a " symbolic action." Burke, of course. is dealing with literary
criticism and his categories are derived from the study of literature and are all verbal. But an
icon living within the boundaries of one's memory may serve a similar function to that which
Burke had in mind.
_________________________________________________________________
the cripple exists: the possibilities affording relief to others are not usually open to the cripple.
There is no way, of course, to define degrees of alienation and invisibility with any sense of
accuracy. But one can suggest that if most persons are only half-visible, then the cripple, like the
black man until recently, is wholly invisible. Stereotypes persist long after reality fades away; for
us, Uncle Tom still prays on bent knees while Tiny Tim hobbles through the world on huge
gushes of sentiment and love. But let us see the world as it is, for the world itself has perfected
the ability to see what it wishes to see and only what it wishes to see. Those stolid burghers who
lived only a few miles from the death camps in Germany possessed a vague idea of what was
taking place within those camps, but they never permitted the vagueness to make itself concrete,
to push itself forward onto the individual consciousness.
The community, then, makes certain assumptions about the cripple. Whether verifiable or not, it
behaves on the basis of those assumptions. The cripple is judged (as are the members of his
family in terms of their relation to him), but the judgments are rendered by those for whom
neither the cripple nor his family possess any meaningful reality. His "condition" is an
abstraction; he himself is not quite real. Who is going to recognize me? asks the cripple. But
society has already called into question the very existence of that me for it refuses to look at that
which makes it uncomfortable. And so it leaves the cripple, doubting his potency, not quite
ready to face his primary obligation -- to extend understanding to himself, to accept the fact that
his problems exist now, here, in this world, that they are problems for which relief must be
sought, and that his "condition" is arbitrary but not absolute. Choices, as well as obligations,
exist within the boundaries of his possibilities.
To strike out on his own in the face of a society whose smugness seems, at times, conspiratorial
is difficult. As an attitude, smugness goes beyond indifference. And it is far more harmful.
Smugness is the asset of the untouched, the virtue of the oblivious, and the badge of the
unthreatened. It is the denial of the existence of that which threatens one's comfort, the right to
judge whatever and whenever the smug believe judgment is called for. Smugness is the constant
reminder of the line that exists between those who have not been touched by the world's terror
and those who have. Smugness is a denial of the motion of the universe, an assumption that time
stands still and that mortality itself can be conquered. The cripple knows better; for him, it is
time an motion together that form the dialectic of rage.
What the cripple must face is being pigeonholed by the smug. Once his behavior is assumed
from the fact that he is a cripple, it doesn't matter whether he is viewed as holy or damned.
Either assumption is made at the expense of his individuality, his ability to say "I." He is
expected to behave in such-and-such a way; he is expected to react in the following manner to
the following stimulus. And since that which expects such behavior is that which provides the
stimulus, his behavior is all too often Pavlovian. He reacts as he is expected to react because he
does not really accept the idea that he can react in any other way. Once he accepts, however
unconsciously, the images of self that his society presents him, then the guidelines for his
behavior are clear-cut and consistent.
This is the black man's conflict, too. And it is exactly here that black militancy has confronted
the enmity of white society. White America is probably willing to absorb the black American;
what it may not be willing to do is to permit the black American to absorb himself. Negro
anxiety, rage and anger are seen only as threats to the primacy of white America when they
probably should be seen as the black man's effort to rid himself of all sorts of imposed
definitions of his proper social "role." The black view must be total. Given the experience of
having been born black in a white world, it is difficult for the black man to think about his life in
terms other than color or race. The totality of his experience gives him no edge. And what he
witnesses is forced into the mold of what he has known. I once received an essay from a black
student describing Canova's Perseus Holding the Head of Medusa in the Metropolitan Museum
of Art as a depiction of "the temporary black crisis." When I questioned what she had seen, I
discovered that most of the other black students in the class believed that one had the right,
perhaps even the obligation, to see that statue and everything else in terms of "the black crisis."
If one calls this confusion, it is a confusion that the cripple shares. For one thing, the cripple is
not sure of just who is and who isn't his enemy; for another, he must distrust the mask of
language just as the black man does; for a third, he cannot help but see the world itself as the
source of his humiliation. He is "different" at the very moment he desires to be created in
another's image. And he must feel shame at the expression of such a desire. If anything, his
situation is even more difficult than the black's, at least as far as his ability to find relief is
concerned. If the black man's masculinity is mangled, he can still assert it in certain ways. Black
actors assuage his hunger for a heroic identity; black athletes help him forget, however
temporarily, the mutilation of his being; and a worldwide renascent political movement,
convinced that it represents the wave of the future, teaches him that his blackness -- the very
aspect of his existence that he has been taught to despise -- is "beautiful" and is to become the
foundation of the new life he will create for himself.
Whether this assessment of his situation is accurate is of no immediate concern, for what we are
interested in is its validity as an analogy for the life of the cripple. Black Americans now believe
that they possess choices and that they need not live as victims. They are now engaged in the
struggle to force society to accept, or at the least to accommodate itself to, the black conception
of how blacks are to live. The cripple's situation is more difficult. If it exists at all, his sense of
community with his fellow sufferers is based upon shame rather than pride. Nor is there any
political or social movement that will supply him with a sense of solidarity. If anything it is
probably more difficult for the cripple to relate to "his own" than to the normals. Louis Battye,
an English novelist born with muscular dystrophy, has graphically expressed how the cripple
sees himself not merely as the symbol of what society thinks he is but of what he actually is.
Somewhere deep inside us is the almost unbearable knowledge that the way the able-bodied
world regards us is as much as we have the right expect. We are not full members of that world,
and the vast majority of us can never hope to be. If we think otherwise we are deluding
ourselves. Like children and the insane, we inhabit a special sub-world, a world with its own
unique set of referents.
Battye also speaks of the cripple's "irrelevance to the real business of living." His observations
are acute and courageous. One suspects that most cripples feel this about themselves, although
few have the courage to admit it. A cripple must see himself as an anachronism, for virtually
everything his culture offers him is designed to reinforce his sense of inferiority, to point out to
him that he is tolerated in spite of his stigma and that he had best keep his distance if he wishes
society's approval. But Tiny Tim is, with whatever modern variations, still his image. He may
insist that Tiny Tim is not his true self. But it frames society's picture of him. It is still the model
for his behavior.
Self-hatred, then, must be the legacy he derives from his consciousness of what society thinks of
him. With what else can he confront a society that values physical strength and physical beauty?
( Regardless of how bizarre that sense of beauty may times seem, it remains outside the cripple's
range of possibilities. ) If growing old is a threat to modern Americans, how much greater a
threat is physical deformity or mental retardation?
And what are the cripple's options? Most of the options traditionally available to the "gifted" or
"exceptional" Negro are not available to him, since his restrictions are almost invariably
functional and rather severely limit the territory he can stake out as his own. He cannot become a
movie idol; he cannot become an athlete; he cannot even become a soldier and risk his life in
defense of that which has rejected him. His choices are simply far more limited than are the
choices of a black man.
But what he can do is to learn one of the fundamental lessons of American Negro history, a
lesson that probably accounts for the growing tension between white and black: he can create his
individual presence out of the very experience of his rejection. The black man in America is an
obvious model for him, not because of any inherent Faulknerian virtue but because he has spent
three hundred and fifty years learning how to deal with his tormentors. Without romanticizing
him, we recognize that he has earned his status. It has made him, at one and the same time, both
tougher and more paranoid than white America. And a certain amount of toughness as well,
perhaps, as a certain amount of paranoia might serve to change the cripple's own conception of
self. There is no formula that can force Tiny Tim to stand on his own two crutches. But the
cripple can certainly make a start by refusing the invisibility thrust over him by the culture. He
can insist on being seen.
In the folklore of white America, Harlem has long been considered exotic as well as dangerous
territory. Perhaps it is both exotic and dangerous. But from 1946 to 1951, the years during which
I was an outpatient at the Joint Disease Hospital, it was one of the more comfortable places in
New York for me. I do not mean to voice that old ploy about those who themselves suffer being
more sympathetic, more receptive to the pain of others ( although there is probably a certain
limited truth here, too ). All I mean is that in Harlem I first became conscious of how I could
outmanipulate that in society which was trying to categorize me. It is probably a slum child's
earliest lesson, one that he learns even before he sets foot in a school, for it is a lesson that
carries with it the structure of his survival. Normals begin to appear not as particularly charitable
human beings but rather as individuals able to band together for purposes of mutual self-interest.
They possess their environment, and the environment itself ( which for the black child and for
the cripple is part of the enemy's world ) is for them a visible symbol of their success.
The normals are a tangible presence in Harlem, or at least they were during my tenure as an
outpatient at the Joint Disease Hospital. The normals are they, the people in authority -- police
for the black child, nurses, doctors and social workers for me. It was in this confrontation with
the normals that I first noticed what is now called the Negro's "marginality" to the kind of
existence the rest of America is supposed to lead. On the short strolls I took on my crutches
through the streets surrounding the hospital, the single fact I constantly confronted was the way
in which the non-Harlem world imposed its presence on the community. Individuals walking the
streets simply froze in its presence. One was always aware of a potential breaking out, an
explosion of amassed raw frustration and distorted energy. I can remember stiffening with
tension when a patrol car cruised past. Now it must be remembered that I was white, that I was
an adolescent, that I moved with great difficulty on braces and crutches, and that I was probably
the last person in Harlem who had anything to fear from the police. But none of this changed the
fact that in Harlem a patrol car was simply the most decisive presence of the normals one could
conceive of -- and whether it was because I felt comfortable in those streets or because the air
smelled differently or because the tension that seemed to surround me was part of the very
manner, the very life, of the community, I remember stiffening with fear and guilt and anxiety.
Had I been a black adolescent with legs that functioned, I probably would have run, assuming
my guilt as a corollary of my birth. Just as such a boy was a victim, so I knew that I was already
a victim: the truth was that I was already on short-term loan to the needs of the outside world. I
could exist as an individual only insofar as I could satisfy those needs. At least, this is what I had
absorbed. For anything else, I would have to struggle. And at that time ( I was not yet sixteen ), I
was not only not smart enough to resist but I still had fantasies of leaving the world of the
cripple. That, too, was part of the legacy. To choose hope rather than despair is natural enough.
But it had been five years since the embrace of my virus and I still could not bring myself to
admit that my condition was permanent.
The cripple's struggle to call himself I, which is, I take it, what we mean by a struggle for
identity, is always with him. He can be challenged in his illusions of sufficiency by the most
haphazard event. I used to drop into a drugstore across the street from the Joint Disease Hospital
while I waited for the car that was to take me back to the Bronx. It was the kind of drugstore one
still saw before 1960. Despite its overstuffed dinginess, perhaps even because of it, the drugstore
seemed portentously professional. Somehow, its proximity to the hospital gave it a certain
dignity. The man who ran its operations was short and heavy, courteous and solicitous. I
remember that his hair was thinning and that he smoked cigarettes in a manner that made
smoking itself seem an act of defiance. He would occasionally join me as I sat as the counter
drinking coffee and, more often than not he would inform me of what the Negro wanted. I have
an image of him, smoke blowing through flared nostrils, staring at the door as he spoke. At such
times, he seemed oblivious to the presence of black customers and the black counterman alike.
"They want to be accepted. They would like the white man to give them a chance to show what
they can do." I had heard the words for years and I could even nod in rhythmical agreement. And
then one day he added, in a voice as casual and well-intentioned as when he told me what they
wanted, "Why don't you plan to get yourselves a nice store? Like a greeting card store. Or
something like that. Where you don't have to work so hard but you could still earn your own
living. That's what you should do."
And so I learned that I existed for him as an abstraction, that he saw through me as if I, too, were
smoke he was blowing through his nostrils. The cripple had been linked to the Negro. A new
they had been born. As a man of the world, who did not need to move beyond abstraction, he
assumed that he had every right in the world to decide what the cripple or the Negro wanted. He
knew what I "should do" because he possessed two good legs and I didn't. Not being a cripple
makes one an expert on the cripple, just as not being black makes one an expert on the Negro. It
was another example of the normal deciding how that which dared not to be normal should live.
In his conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon discovers that the final myth he must
destroy is the myth of a "black world," for such a myth is ultimately dependent upon an equally
inhuman a "white world." "There are," Fanon insists, "in every part of the world men who
search." This seems to me one of the few workable reasons one can accept, despite the fact that I
know that, for the cripple even the act of surrendering himself to the ranks of those who search
is enveloped by potential disaster. The cripple must recognize this and he must face it. For no
matter how limited his functioning in the society of normals may be, there are certain guidelines
that he is offered. Once he has accepted being pigeonholed by society, he finds that he is safe as
long as he is willing to live within the boundaries of his categorization. To break out of its
confines calls for an act of will of which he may already be incapable. Should he choose to
resist, he will probably discover that he has inflamed those who see themselves as kind and
tolerant. My inability to tell that man to mind his own business was an act of spiritual
acquiescence. Had I told him where to get off, I would have undoubtedly been guilty of an
unpardonable sin in his eyes. But I would have moved an inch forward toward personal
emancipation. Cripples, though, simply did not address normals in such a way. Tiny Tim was
still my image of the cripple. And Tiny Tim had always been grateful for the attention conferred
upon him by his betters -- any kind of attention. My inability to defy that man was more than a
reflection of my weakness: it was also the embodiment of his success, the proof of the
legitimacy of his assumption. On my next visit to the Joint Disease Hospital, I dropped in once
again for another cup of coffee and another quick chat.
And so the task of the cripple is to re-create a self, or rather to create a true self, one dependent
upon neither fantasy nor false objectivity. To define one's own limitations is as close as one can
come to meaningful independence. Not to serve is an act of courage in this world, but if it leaves
one merely with the desire for defiance then it ultimately succumbs to a different form of
madness. The black man who rejects "white culture" must inevitably reject his own humanity,
for if all he can see in Bach or Einstein is skin color then he has become what his tormentors
have made of him. The only true union remains with those "who search." For the cripple, too,
there are no others. To embrace one's braces and crutches would be an act of the grotesque; but
to permit one's humanity to be defined by others because of those braces crutches is even more
grotesque. Even in Dachau and Buchenwald, the human existed. It was left to the searchers to
find it.