The Glass Teat by Harlan Ellison

Author:Harlan Ellison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1969-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

30: 16 MAY 69

TEXAS PART II

In which your humble columnist, himself a man of peace, was pressed into unwitting service during a lecture tour at Texas A&M University as a spokesman for dissent, moral and intellectual freedom, awareness, and equality. You may recall some of this from part one of this two-part triptych through the Country of the TV Blinded.

After discussing the growing role of the black man in television—and noting Julia was only Julie Andrews with Man-Tan—I discussed some of the more blatant ways in which television had misrepresented the realities of the race/class struggle in America today. After I had done riffs all too familiar to readers of this newspaper, a young lady in the class raised her hand. All through the class lecture, this young woman had sat quietly, staring at me with that expressionless immobility night club comics fear. It means not only are you not hipping them, amusing them, stimulating them…you are not even penetrating through the bone and flesh walls of their prejudices. When, earlier in the class, I’d asked her if she wanted to ask me anything, she informed me that she would listen, and then at the end of the period she would “make her comment.” I somehow felt I was going to be asked to take a test, but I didn’t know what notes to make.

So now, as I finished, she raised her hand, to make her summing-up comment. We all waited breathlessly. And this, approximately, is what she said:

“I live in Marion County, where there’s a lot of nig-er-ahs; I ride my horse in the woods there. We had a white girl raped by a nig-er-ah out there. And the other nig-er-ahs came to our house and told my mother and father I shouldn’t ride my horse there any more. I believe, that most nig-er-ahs are happy the way they are, that it’s only a trouble-making few who are causing all this trouble.”

I waited. Surely she would not fail to add that if the “nig-er-ahs” were given sufficient quantities of watermelon, were allowed to dance with their natural rhythm on “de lebee,” and were not whipped by “massa,” they would settle back into a pre-Confederacy happiness of idyllic cotton-plucking and baby-birthing.

There was no response possible to this gross theory. But I was overjoyed to hear the groans of disbelief from other members of the class, among whom this new-generation blind one had been sitting, without ever having previously revealed herself.

Yet how many others in that class, in that University, in that state, in this country, thought as she did? Were there still so many of them? Had we lulled ourselves, we who take black-as-noble as a matter of course? Or was the poison still being passed on by the dying old ones? As the dirt was being shoveled in over their faces, did they still reach up from the grave, in one final ghoulish act, and say, “Heah, mah child, take this heah wisdom with y’all…it’s mah legacy…”?

Knowing this, as

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