your number-you take over our jobs and spread VD through the schools and peddle drugs which you buy on your immoral earnings – oh yes, you don’t pass for white with me, you know – I’ve heard your slave songs, O’Hara, I’ve heard you all right and I’m not taken in I can tell you – Because I don’t think you’re so virile at all, it’s just a myth, O’Hara,and if you want to know what I think, I think your sense of rhythm is bloody awful – so get out and stop persecuting me, you’ve only come here for the National Health!’
Moon crawled weeping into the leather-smell dark of the coach, and huddled on the floor.
I clutch at straws but what good’s a brick to a drowning man?
After a while he stopped crying. He found his notebook under him. He put it in his pocket and climbed down into the cold air. When he tried to speak his voice cracked. He wiped his sleeve over his eyes and peered up at the coachman blotted against the dirty grey wash of the sky.
‘I say,’ he repented. ‘O’Hara.’
‘Hello.’ O’Hara sat up on his box piping smoke.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean – you caught me off my guard.’
‘All right already.’
‘I haven’t quite sorted out my opinions on the race question, you see. If I’d had time to prepare my words I would have given the other side too. I can see both sides… I think I must be frightened of Negroes,’ he finished hopelessly.
Well, who wouldn’t be? They might revert, like Alsatians, and attack you.
On the other hand he felt like that about almost everyone. And horses. It was subtler than colour, it went deeper than that. Negroes and Alsatians were what he was mainly afraid of, but a horse could bite you and all horses, he knew, were more or less killing time till they could get a chance to bite him. And he was afraid of all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time.
‘I think what it is,’ said Moon carefully, ‘I’m not brave, you see, without being consistent in my cowardice. How could I be? How can one be consistent about anything, since all the absolutes discredit each other?’ He paused for encouragement and found it in the sudden bloom of smoke from O’Hara’s pipe. ‘I distrust attitudes,’ he went on, ‘becausethey claim to have appropriated the whole truth and pose as absolutes. And I distrust the opposite attitude for the same reason. O’Hara…? You see, when someone disagrees with you on a moral point you assume that he is one step behind in his thinking, and he assumes that he has gone one step ahead. But I take both parts, O’Hara, leapfrogging myself along the great moral issues, refuting myself and rebutting the refutation towards a truth that must be a compound of two opposite half-truths. And you never reach it because there is always something more to say. But I can’t ditch it, you see O’Hara. I can’t just align myself with whatever view has the approved moral tone to it. I’m not against black people really, I only recoil from the simplicity of taking up a virtuous position in support of them regardless of the issue. There is nothing so simple as virtue and I distrust simplicity. Anyway,’ he added lamely, ‘I firmly believe in the equality and proportionate decency of all mankind regardless of race or colour. But I wouldn’t want my sister to marry a black man. Or a Chinaman or an Algerian. Or an Australian or a Rhodesian or a Spaniard. Or a Mexican or a prison warder or a Communist, though quite often I think that there is much to be said for Communism … And to tell you the truth, I haven’t got anything against anybody. Except perhaps Irishmen. I hate Irishmen.’
‘I’m from Dublin myself,’ said O’Hara and broke into an old man’s cackle.
‘The thing about people is,’ said Moon, ‘that hardly anyone behaves naturally any more, they all behave the way they think they are supposed to be, as if they’d read about themselves or seen themselves at the pictures.
Moon crawled weeping into the leather-smell dark of the coach, and huddled on the floor.
I clutch at straws but what good’s a brick to a drowning man?
After a while he stopped crying. He found his notebook under him. He put it in his pocket and climbed down into the cold air. When he tried to speak his voice cracked. He wiped his sleeve over his eyes and peered up at the coachman blotted against the dirty grey wash of the sky.
‘I say,’ he repented. ‘O’Hara.’
‘Hello.’ O’Hara sat up on his box piping smoke.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean – you caught me off my guard.’
‘All right already.’
‘I haven’t quite sorted out my opinions on the race question, you see. If I’d had time to prepare my words I would have given the other side too. I can see both sides… I think I must be frightened of Negroes,’ he finished hopelessly.
Well, who wouldn’t be? They might revert, like Alsatians, and attack you.
On the other hand he felt like that about almost everyone. And horses. It was subtler than colour, it went deeper than that. Negroes and Alsatians were what he was mainly afraid of, but a horse could bite you and all horses, he knew, were more or less killing time till they could get a chance to bite him. And he was afraid of all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time.
‘I think what it is,’ said Moon carefully, ‘I’m not brave, you see, without being consistent in my cowardice. How could I be? How can one be consistent about anything, since all the absolutes discredit each other?’ He paused for encouragement and found it in the sudden bloom of smoke from O’Hara’s pipe. ‘I distrust attitudes,’ he went on, ‘becausethey claim to have appropriated the whole truth and pose as absolutes. And I distrust the opposite attitude for the same reason. O’Hara…? You see, when someone disagrees with you on a moral point you assume that he is one step behind in his thinking, and he assumes that he has gone one step ahead. But I take both parts, O’Hara, leapfrogging myself along the great moral issues, refuting myself and rebutting the refutation towards a truth that must be a compound of two opposite half-truths. And you never reach it because there is always something more to say. But I can’t ditch it, you see O’Hara. I can’t just align myself with whatever view has the approved moral tone to it. I’m not against black people really, I only recoil from the simplicity of taking up a virtuous position in support of them regardless of the issue. There is nothing so simple as virtue and I distrust simplicity. Anyway,’ he added lamely, ‘I firmly believe in the equality and proportionate decency of all mankind regardless of race or colour. But I wouldn’t want my sister to marry a black man. Or a Chinaman or an Algerian. Or an Australian or a Rhodesian or a Spaniard. Or a Mexican or a prison warder or a Communist, though quite often I think that there is much to be said for Communism … And to tell you the truth, I haven’t got anything against anybody. Except perhaps Irishmen. I hate Irishmen.’
‘I’m from Dublin myself,’ said O’Hara and broke into an old man’s cackle.
‘The thing about people is,’ said Moon, ‘that hardly anyone behaves naturally any more, they all behave the way they think they are supposed to be, as if they’d read about themselves or seen themselves at the pictures.
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