I speak only for myself for another reason also. From adolescence to death there is something very personal about being a Negro in America. It is like having a second ego which is as much the conscious subject of all experience as the natural self. It is not what the psychologists call dual personality. It is more complex and, I think, more morbid than that. In the state of which I speak, one receives two distinct impacts from certain experiences and one undergoes two distinct reactions—the one normal and intrinsic to the natural self; the other, entirely different but of equal force, a prodigy created by the accumulated consciousness of Negroness. An incident illustrates. At the college in Louisville where I taught during the depression, a white slum crawled to the western edge of the campus. I could see its dirt, its poverty and disease in any direction I cared to look from my classroom window. In the littered back yards, each with a pit toilet, snotty-nosed children with rickets played and lank-haired women shrilled obscenities at them all day long. I remember seeing a man only once—an ancient, senile man bent with a monstrous hernia. By the time autumn paled into winter the pity I felt for the people in the slum had been safely stacked away among other useless emotional lumber. One day as I stood by the window thinking of other things, I gradually became aware of movement in the yard directly below me. The college building was as quiet as a church, for it was a Saturday when we had no classes. There would have been no shock in seeing a woman of the neighborhood dressed only in a ragged slip, but a powdery snow had fallen the night before and the day was bitter cold. When I saw the woman, who seemed quite young, she was lurching and staggering in the rear of the yard. A dog must have followed her out of the house, for one stood by the open door watching and flicking its tail dubiously. The woman’s face was stiff and vacant, but in her efforts to walk her body and limbs jerked convulsively in progressive tremors. I could not tell whether she was drunk or sick as she floundered in the snow in the yard. Pity rose in me, but at the same time something else also—a gloating satisfaction that she was white. Sharply and concurrently felt, the two emotions were of equal strength, in perfect balance, and the corporeal I, fixed in a trance at the window, oscillated between them. When she was within a few steps of the outhouse, the poor woman lurched violently and pitched face downward in the snow. Somehow utterly unable to move, I watched her convulsive struggles for several minutes. The dog came down the yard meanwhile, whining piteously, and walked stiff-legged around the white and almost naked body. The woman made a mess in the snow and then lay still.