Notes From the Blue Period
For no particular reasonâor for a reason I can not articulate right nowâI want to share something with you.
At the end of the Civil War, when the United States was considering selling homesteads to black freedman, some number of white Southerners decided to turn to fraud. Whites would sell them painted sticks claiming that gave them possession of a particular parcel of land. Theyâd also sell them âdeedsâ to the land.
One such deed reads as follows:
Know all men by these presents, that a naught is a naught, and a figure is a figure; all for the white man and none for the nigure. And whereas Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so also have I lifted this damned old nigger out of four dollars and six bits. Amen. Selah!
Given under my hand and seal at the Corner Grocery in Granby, some time between the birth of Christ and the death of the devil.
The recipient of this deed was a black man who could not read. His money was taken, and then he was mocked. The mockery is almost a show of cause. His illiteracy is a weakness and that weakness makes him worthy of contempt and suitable for plunder.
When I was a child in West Baltimore it was a hobby to jump people whoâd somehow wandered through your neighborhood. But you could not jump them for the hell of itâeven if thatâs what you were actually doing. You had to make up some fraudulent reason for plunderââYo, ainât that the dude that was messing with your cousin?â or some other nakedly false show of cause. We could not accept the fact we were behaving thuggishly, that we had embraced villainy. Even in total cowardice we had to make ourselves heroic.
I learned this. It was not natural to me. I was a tender boy, until I wasnât. And then I learned to despise weakness and to mask that contempt behind narrative and myth.
More: Notes From the Blue Period - Ta-Nehisi Coates - the Atlantic