Page 193 - BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK

154 BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

the foot of the tree white, the strength of the bark cries out from
beneath the paint. . . .”
Then, once he had laid bare the white man in himself, he killed
him:

We broke down the doors. The master’s room was wide open. The master’s
room was brilliantly lighted, and the master was there, quite calm . . . and
we stopped. . . . He was the master. . . . I entered. “It is you,” he said to me,
quite calmly. . . . It was I. It was indeed I, I told him, the good slave, the
faithful slave, the slavish slave, and suddenly his eyes were two frightened
cockroaches on a rainy day . . . I struck, the blood fl owed: That is the only
baptism that I remember today. 56
“After an unexpected and salutary internal revolution, he now
paid tribute to his own revolting ugliness.” 57
What more is there to add? After having driven himself to
the limit of self-destruction, the Negro is about to leap, whether
deliberately or impetuously, into the “black hole” from which
will come “the great Negro cry with such force that the pillars
of the world will be shaken by it.”
The European knows and he does not know. On the level of
refl ection, a Negro is a Negro; but in the unconscious there is the
fi rmly fi xed image of the nigger-savage. I could give not a dozen
but a thousand illustrations. Georges Mounin said in Présence
Africaine: “I had the good luck not to discover the Negroes through
Lévy-Bruhl’s Mentalité primitive read in a sociology course; more
broadly, I had the good luck to discover the Negroes otherwise
than through books—and I am grateful for it every day. . . .” 58
Mounin, whom it would be impossible to take for an average
Frenchman, added, and thus rose inestimably in my opinion: “I
profi ted perhaps by learning, at an age when one’s mind has not
yet been prejudiced, that Negroes are men like ourselves. . . . I as
a white man thus gained, perhaps, the possibility of always being
natural with a Negro—and never, in his presence, to fall stupidly

56. Ibid., p. 136.
57. Ibid., p. 65.
58. Premières réponses à l’enquête sur le “Mythe du nègre,” Présence Africaine,
No. 2.

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