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 cause both of what he knew of prosperity and of what he knew of calamity. This passionate involvement of his mind and character in all his acts becomes finally the intelligence of his speech, and makes it memorable.
I do not see how anybody could consider the depth and range of Shaw’s intelligence, the power, sensitivity, and precision of his speech, and doubt the superiority of this man. And yet, though Shaw knew his superiority, had carefully assembled and pondered its evidence, in a part of his mind he seems to have remained half in doubt of it. This uneasiness springs from his lack of formal education. The book has two themes—counter-themes—that will show what I am talking about.
Shaw’s pages are full of evidence that he was a farmer, not just by necessity of birth and condition, but by choice as well. It is luck, of course, when one loves to do what one has to do. But the fact remains that Shaw loved to farm. He had an exultant interest in it. He says so directly, and there is an implicit joy in all the passages about his work. And yet his lack of education obviously nags at him, forcing him to suspect that his farmer’s life was his limitation: “My boyhood days was my hidin place. I didn’t have no right to no education whatever. I was handicapped and handicapped like a dog.” And he says that the educational opportunities that followed the civil rights movement “brought light out of darkness.”
I assent wholeheartedly to the first theme and at least in principle to the second. But I feel an uncertainty, perhaps a conflict. This is one of the rare instances when Shaw exemplifies a problem that he does not illuminate. A powerful superstition of modern life is that people and conditions are improved inevitably by education. Within the limits of the life he lived, and of the evidence he gives, this proposition certainly seems to apply to Shaw: he would have been less at the mercy of employers, landlords, and creditors, for example, if he had been able to read. Or he might, maybe, have been a better farmer if he had had some schooling. Suppositions of this sort are blind, of course, but one has to suppose also that if Nate Shaw had been well enough educated, he might long ago have become a spokesman, perhaps for his race, perhaps for small farmers of his sort of both races.
My skepticism on this question comes from two directions. On one hand, I am aware of a powerful cultural inheritance—part of which Nate Shaw’s story represents and now joins—that rises from long before the civil rights movement or even emancipation, and that is perhaps not so much light out of darkness as light in darkness. A fact too easy to ignore in our climate of conventional pity for the “disadvantaged” is that Nate Shaw is not potentially admirable; he is admirable as he is. And to assume that he could have become so admirable without drawing on a strong, sustaining culture would be as fantastical as to pity him in light of what he might have been.
On the other hand, I am aware that such a man as Nate Shaw stands outside the notice, much less the aim, of the education system. From the standpoint of our social mainstream, the idea of a well-educated small farmer, of any race, has long been a contradiction in terms, and so of course our school systems can hardly be said to tolerate any such possibility. The purpose of education with us, like the purpose of society with us, has been, and is, to get away from the small farm—indeed, from the small everything. The purpose of education has been to prepare people to “take their places” in an industrial society, the assumption being that all small economic units are obsolete. And the superstition of education assumes that this “place in society” is “up.” “Up” is the direction from small to big. Education is the way up. The popular aim of education is to put everybody “on top.” Well, I think I hardly need to document the consequent pushing and trampling and kicking in the face. My point is that if the reader joins Nate Shaw in wishing that he might have been educated, he cannot safely assume that he is wishing only for an improved Nate Shaw; he may be wishing for a different kind of human creature altogether. With education—given his intelligence, his strong character, his local fidelities, and a good deal of luck—Shaw might have become a well-educated small farmer. But he might also have become a “farm expert,” and thus the natural enemy of his economic class. Or he might have become another big cat, “only lookin for money.”
What I am working toward is a definition of this book as a burden. It is a burden—in addition, of course, to being multifariously informative and delightful. At first I thought the burden would be Shaw’s indictment of racism and economic oppression. His testimony on these subjects is fierce and eloquent—and burdening too, Lord knows. But on these subjects Shaw is only one of many witnesses. His response to those conditions—his stand —is what is rare. And he made his stand “with the full consent of his mind.” I have called it an act of principle, but that is to give it the shallowest definition. It was the action of his character: it was prepared by his whole life up to that time. It was, as much as himself, native to his place in the world.
And that brings me in sight of what I want to say: Shaw burdens us with his character. Not just with his testimony, or with his actions, but with his character, in the fullest possible sense of that word. Here is a superior man who never went to school! What a trial that
