Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

So finally the expected happened, anticipated by everyone except her apparently, maybe because of the deafness, the isolation, the solitude of living not enclosed with sound but merely surrounded by gestures. Or maybe she did anticipate it but, having been through a war, she just didn’t give a damn. Anyway, she bulled right ahead with her idea. Which was to establish a kind of competitive weekly test, the winners, who would be the top students for that week in each class, to spend the following week in a kind of academy she would establish, with white teachers, details to be settled later but for temporary they would use her sitting room in her father’s house for a sort of general precept, the winners of each week to be replaced by next week’s winners; these to embrace the whole school from kindergarden to seniors, her theory being that if you were old enough to be taught at eighteen you were old enough at eight too when learning something new would be even easier. Because she couldn’t hear, you see, not just the words but the tones, over-and under-tones of alarm, fright, terror in which the black voice would have to say Thank you. So it was the principal himself who finally came to see Uncle Gavin at the office—the intelligent dedicated man with his composed and tragic face.

“I’ve been expecting you,” Uncle Gavin said. “I know what you want to say.”

“Thank you,” the principal said. “Then you know yourself it wont work. That you are not ready for it yet and neither are we.”

“Not many of your race will agree with you,” Uncle Gavin said.

“None of them will,” the principal said. “Just as none of them agreed when Mr Washington said it.”

“Mr Washington?”

“Booker T.,” the principal said. “Mr Carver too.”

“Oh,” Uncle Gavin said. “Yes?”

“That we have got to make the white people need us first. I the old days your people did need us, in your economy if not your culture, to make your cotton and tobacco and indigo. But that was the wrong need, bad and evil in itself. So it couldn’t last. It had to go. So now you dont need us. There is no place for us now in your culture or economy either. We both buy the same installment-plan automobiles to burn up the same gasoline in, and the same radios to listen to the same music and the same iceboxes to keep the same beer in, but that’s all. So we have got to make a place of our own in your culture and economy too. Not you to make a place for us just to get us out from under your feet, as in the South here, or to get our votes for the aggrandisement of your political perquisites, as in the North, but us to make a place for ourselves by compelling you to need us, you cannot do without us because nobody else but us can fill that place in your economy and culture which only we can fill and so that place will have to be ours. So that you will not just say Please to us, you will need to say Please to us, you will want to say Please to us. Wdl you tell her that? Say we thank her and we wont forget this. But to leave us alone. Let us have your friendship all the time, and your help when we need it. But keep your patronage until we ask for it.”

“This is not patronage,” Uncle Gavin said. “You know that too.”

“Yes,” the principal said. “I know that too. I’m sorry. I am ashamed that I …” Then he said: “Just say we thank her and will remember her, but to let us alone.”

“How can you say that to someone who will face that much risk, just for justice, just to abolish ignorance?”

“I know,” the principal said. “It’s difficult. Maybe we cant get along without your help for a while yet, since I am already asking for it.—Good day, sir,” he said, and was gone. So how could Uncle Gavin tell her either. Or anybody else tell her, everybody else tell her, white and black both. Since it wasn’t that she couldn’t hear: she wouldn’t listen, not even to the unified solidarity of No in the Negro school itself—that massive, not resistance but immobility, like the instinct of the animal to lie perfectly still, not even breathing, not even thinking. Or maybe she did hear that because she reversed without even stopping, from the school to the board of education itself: if she could not abolish the ignorance by degrees of individual cases, she would attempt it wholesale by putting properly educated white teachers in the Negro school, asking no help, not even from Gavin, hunting down the school board then, they retreating into simple evaporation, the county board of supervisors in their own sacred lair, armed with no petty ivory tablet and gold stylus this time but with a vast pad of yellow foolscap and enough pencils for everybody. Evidently they committed the initial error of letting her in. Then Gavin said it went something like this: