Quote 1
“I’s
big and black and I say ‘Yes, suh’ as loudly as any burrhead when
it’s convenient, but I’m still the king down here. . . . The only
ones I even pretend to please are big white folk, and even those
I control more than they control me. . . . That’s my life, telling
white folk how to think about the things I know about. . . . It’s
a nasty deal and I don’t always like it myself. . . . But I’ve made
my place in it and I’ll have every Negro in the country hanging
on tree limbs by morning if it means staying where I am.”
Dr. Bledsoe speaks these words to the
narrator in Chapter 6 while rebuking him for taking Mr. Norton
to the less desirable parts of campus. Bledsoe explains how playing
the role of the subservient, fawning black to powerful white men
has enabled him to maintain his own position of power and authority
over the college. He mockingly lapses into the dialect of uneducated
Southern blacks, saying “I’s” instead of “I am.” By playing the
role of the “ignorant” black man, Bledsoe has made himself nonthreatening
to whites. Bledsoe claims that by telling white men what they want
to hear, he is able to control what they think and thereby control
them entirely. His chilling final statement that he would rather
see every black man in America lynched than give up his place of
authority evidences his single-minded desire to maintain his power.
This quote contributes to the larger development
of the novel in several ways. First, it helps to explain Bledsoe’s
motivation for expelling and betraying the narrator: the narrator
has upset Bledsoe’s strategy of dissimulation and deception by giving
Norton an uncensored peek into the real lives of the area’s blacks.
More important, this speech marks the first of the narrator’s many
moments of sudden disenchantment in the novel. As a loyal, naïve
adherent of the college’s philosophy, the narrator has always considered
Bledsoe an admirable exponent of black advancement; his sudden recognition
of Bledsoe’s power-hungry, cynical hypocrisy comes as a devastating
blow. This disillusionment constitutes the first of many that the
narrator suffers as the novel progresses, perhaps most notably at
the hands of the Brotherhood.
