17 Now that I come to the end of this essay I realize that I have not done for myself all that I had hoped to do. I am not purged: I am not cured of my sickness. Perhaps it is not of the sort that can be cured by individual home remedies. I thought that in the writing of this essay I could pour myself out, in the manner of a Job or a Jeremiah, or through a kind of free recall achieve the liberation and inner peace which seemed so desirable. But even as I wrote I discovered that the very fact of being Negro limited the freedom to pour myself out. I discovered depths of self-consciousness and facets of experience that I simply could not expose and that gave me feelings of shame to recognize as my own. Not to write out these things was cowardly, of course, but no man can tell the whole truth about himself, and the charge of cowardice is easier to take than the traditional, detrusive charges of “Negro” insensitivity, emotionalism, abandonment and self-pity. Moreover, what I had to say about myself, if it made me appear bad and unprincipled, would be taken as typical of the whole Negro race, and I found myself being very conscious of this as I wrote. I doubt that race-consciousness operates in this way in the work of white writers. I like to think that I made a clear choice between telling the whole truth and thus saving myself (which was my avowed original intent) and not telling the whole truth and thus protecting the Negro race against the prejudiced opinions which the whole truth would generate. But I know this is pure rationalization. What I have done in this regard was not the result of voluntary decision; it was, rather, evidence of the relentless warping by a neurotic web of coercions, by the need to feel responsible, by the need to have, even disingenuously and even though limited, a sense of belonging and integration. I have never wanted to be free of this need. I have never wanted to be isolated or alienated, for my belief is that a commitment to something outside oneself is necessary to human and humanistic development. I expressed it long ago in another way: “I did not want sanctuary,” I wrote, “a soft nest protected from the hard, strengthening winds that blow hot and cold through the world’s teeming, turbulent valley. I wanted to face the wind. I wanted the strength to face it to come from some inexpressibly deep well of feeling of oneness with the wind, of belonging to something, some soul-force outside myself, bigger than myself, but yet a part of me. Not family merely, or institution, or race; but a people and all their topless strivings; a nation and its million destinies.”[14]