Like a Tortoise Shell
Rudolph Lewis

The working class black folk tend to be oriented towards local interests of friends and family. The black underclass are cut-throat individualists. --Wilson

I admire greatly your sketch of Eugene Robinson's multiple facets of "black society" or its numerous black communities. We indeed may be like the back of a tortoise shell.

There's an interesting tale about how the tortoise's shell came about. You know the tortoise is known for his cunning but he's also greedy. He tricked a group of birds to allow him to join their feast in the sky. Each gave him a feather so he could join them. After which he convinced them each should change his name and he chose "all of you." And when the food was presented in the sky it was presented to "all of you." And the tortoise ate all of the food. The group of birds he was with realized they had been tricked and each took back his feather. It was a long ways down and he asked one of the birds to tell his wife he will be home shortly and that she should put all the soft things out in the yard. But she was told to put all the hard things. And when he fell from the sky he landed on all these hard objects and his shell cracked into pieces. But he found a magician or a mechanic to put his shell back together. But it no longer had its former uniformity and smoothness. But rather had these numerous facets.

Of course, there is a multigenerational black bourgeoisie. On the whole their influence on those classes below tends usually to be rather insignificant. Their concerns tend to be rather local and upward and we usually find them trying to catch up with that which cannot be ignored from below. That is, they claim more worth and value than truly deserving as leaders of their imaginary "we." They see a life membership in the NAACP as their racial card.

I've seen such families in which there were street walkers and crackheads and as you say, "cut-throat individualists." More typically is the interweaving of the "working class black folk" and the "cut-throat individualists," often in the same family. Our “cut-throat individualists” mirror more openly and accurately the underpinnings of the nation’s economic system, for good or ill. In one instance, I recall a wife as working class and the husband as dealer in stolen goods and drugs and then at other times as wage slave.

Both these "classes" tend to be non-literary-readers, as is the case among whites as well, except for maybe how-to or religious literature or on gender relationships or other faddish writings. If in prison the "cut-throat individualists" may have a keen interest in law books, and maybe then racial, political, or Islamic literature, or in the South, books about the successful, like Tavis Smiley. But all these go to the practical realities of survival.

As TV watchers or theater goers, as it has always been, it is low comedy, of a highly successful commercial nature. That is, these two classes are not that far apart in their cultural tastes. They may even join that segment of the lower bourgeoisie that has a taste for the more superficial aspects of African culture, like clothing or other ritual paraphernalia. But on the whole a rough approximation of the rich and famous is that which is admired and considered for reflection.

To be truthful as long as there are bogey men like Republican racialists who court the milder aspects of contemporary "white supremacists" (crude guardians of white privilege), as Bob Herbert points out in his recent "The Ugly Side of the G.O.P. " ( NYTtimes), there is indeed a "we." But it is a "we" like that of the tortoise shell.

We have still a modest need for each other; our usefulness for each other often is not the most noble, or sentimental, or romantic, as is the case of Herbert and many black columnists, Eugene Robinson as well as Stanley Crouch come to mind. Many of these “black” mouthpieces find the black working classes useful for their columns as well as their support of the Democratic Party, which as a whole is no more supportive of the black (or white) working classes than the Republicans.

In that the working classes and cut-throat individualists merely want to eat, drink and be merry and are little concerned if at all about the larger politics of the nation and the world, they treat the ballot with the same regard as the buying a lottery ticket. They are always being castigated from above by the “black mouthpieces.” On the whole the brothers and the sisters below possess the commonsense of their working class ancestors: This is a white man's country and he will do for his own first and foremost. Some headway might be made momentarily but it is difficult to impossible to sustain.

Yes, I am rather sentimental and romantic. It is not that difficult for certain old black and white films to bring me to tears. I do want my folks to be as Camara Laye’s rural kin:

"They were together!—united by the same task, the same song. It was as if the same soul bound them" (Dark Child).

With a website like ChickenBones, how could I be mistaken as anything other than a racial sentimentalist and racial romantic? In a society organized politically and economically as ours is, I do not think that black society will ever be more than the design of the tortoise shell. To think otherwise is indeed a delightful illusion. As Killens argued so long ago, an emphasis on property at the expense of human dignity national unity or of the races is impossible.—Rudy


Rudolph Lewis is founder and editor of ChickenBones: A Journal (www.nathanielturner.com