watering for some hot biscuit, an’ that’s the reason I’m asking You to give her some hot biscuit ‘fore I go to see her again nex’ Tuesday.” They wanted clothes and they asked for them. They wanted pitiful but specific sums of money. They wanted protection from their real enemies. “Lord Jesus, don’t let that mean nigger, Joe Fisher, stick me with no knife.” Negroes made irrational claims on God which they expected Him to fulfill without any help from them and without any regard for the conditions under which they could be fulfilled, and I suppose that when their claims failed, there was some sort of psychological mechanism that produced satisfactory excuses. It was all very simple and direct, but God just did not work that way—not the white folk’s God I was taught to worship. I do not believe that this incongruity set me thinking until at the small and rather exclusive (though public) high school I attended, a science teacher pointed it up. He was a bitter, frustrated man, full of self-hatred and of contempt for his race. Often staggering drunk outside the classroom, he was said to spend his week ends in an alcoholic fog of hatred writing scurrilous anti-Negro letters to the “people’s opinion” column of the local paper. (Such letters did appear there with persistent regularity.) Our science teacher was certainly no good for us. Monday mornings were invariably void of science instruction. “How many of you went hat-in-hand to God yesterday and asked him to get your chemistry for you this week?” he would begin. “He won’t, and you can take my word for that. The trouble with niggers—” what malevolent contempt he put into the word!—“is that they look to God to do for them. That’s why they’re like they are—not only ignorant, but stupid; not only inferior, but debased. ‘You can take all this world, but give me Jesus,’ the song says, and that’s just what the white people have been doing—taking the world and giving you Jesus. God, if there is a God, which I doubt, helps those who help themselves. Now study your chemistry!” (How he managed to stay on with his drunkenness and his fundamental corruption, of which everyone was aware, is not beyond my comprehension so much as it is beyond my belief. He was one of the “big,” upper-class mulatto families with members thriving in the professions up and down the Eastern seaboard. They were not a powerful family, having neither money, nor political influence, nor potent white patrons; but they had social prestige because of their antiquity, their relatively long tradition of freedom, their education, and their considerable infusion of white blood. In those days the feeling was that such a family must not be disgraced by the derelictions of one of its members. The black sheep must be protected, if he could not be hidden, and pitied because he could not be punished.)