The Savages

Why shouldn't I want to strive and achieve a home in the suburbs? What's wrong with this, what are we supposed to do, turn America topsy-turvy? Shall we take every person who makes more than so much money and take it away from him like he was a criminal? You want to go out directly and take half his paycheck and find some poor Negro down together and say here take out my paycheck? What shall we all do, eliminate ambition, eliminate a striving for something better? And it is wrong to try to come down to their level or anyone's level, but on the other hand, a Negro owes it to himself to try to better himself. Now he could could learn to to dress properly, to to talk properly to keep himself in a situation that will not say, well, he's like a wild savage, look at it. He ought to go back to the jungle. [tire screeching] If you grew up in Venice or if you were forced to come to Venice and live, if you don't know, if you don't know it before you get here, you find it pretty soon that you you're coming right into nothing. Some people, they don't want to live in Venice. I mean this is either Venice or Watts is the only choice you have. If the guy's even got a job, I mean he's just barely making it, you know, that it's not the fact that he don't want to do, it's the fact that he can't do any better. Opportunities that have been opened to some people with, say, my same background just a [...] whether you were aware of it or not. I mean I could even possibly, possible, have gone farther, in other word, get a better job position. I could've even went further in school to go into a different educational background. I mean they're dead, I'll admit they're just as dead as any community of people I've ever seen. My wife is the quiet type, she likes things just quiet and peaceful. She doesn't like Venice too much. She would like to move away from it, in a sense. I mean, the thing that she doesn't like is the living conditions of the people around. So things like this, is the reason why she felt like, well, to run away from this and be someplace else, well, it would be better. But you don't have no assurance that it's better. But my wife supports me, I mean, she don't agree with everything that I do, but she still supports me and this is very important, this is very important. But the two little boys, as they grew up, I mean, you can educate them beyond what they are living in, to give them the assurance, well, I can come back to dad and he'll be there. And some people just can bear it. I mean, they take it for so long and there's no money in the house and some people can take this longer than others, but unless you've got an awful lot of stability about you and a good strong constitution, this will break you down. Hate, they still hate, and they sent me to jail. I've been going ever since then. Every time I think about them years is hatred. You're like, it was up to my ancestors and so forth I was [...] and if there's any way that I can split and it'll keep your world happy and make my world happy, then I'll be ready to split. Today, tomorrow, right now. The United States, I'm speaking of the United States, this United States of ours. It's it's cold blooded. They don't care, they don't care, what the hell they got to care for. Every time a nigga gets shot is another nigga dead, we don't have to worry about it, they don't care. We ain't got none, we ain't never had none, so we just stay like this and don't get nothin'. The pains of life, things that don't... that kind of goes against your grain, that everything's [...] Discrimination, some people call it. I don't understand, but it's the blues and the truth. The kids that hang around on the corner up there, at one time they had high hopes, I mean, hopes as high as Jackie Robinson. What they hope were killed, and I mean, to have to live in these conditions, and it ain't nothing you can do about it, and you listen to the news and watch the TV and the reports that... about our Great Society, you just drop down and go down further, you lose your zest. You you don't want to continue. I can remember feeling like that myself. I mean, when I was going to school I felt like wanting to quit but I was old enough to realize that it was going to hurt me in the long run. I'm from Texas, a little town will call Wortham, Texas. And my father, he was a sharecropper there. He owned his own stock and tools and whatnot, but he worked on what you call third and fourth. This works something like, you raise a crop and you get to keep a third of one item and a fourth of the other, but you work the land that belongs somebody to else. The schools that I went to were all segregated. In fact, every day when I went to school I walked right past the white school about a mile to go to the Negro school. And all of my school days up through high school, I saw a red, big, beautiful brick school for the whites. When I went on down to my school, it was just a little frame building there, it's the elementary school on one side and then built into the same building, was the high school. We used to get some of the old books from the white schools, I mean, we very seldom got new books. Then some of the books that we got, I mean, it was preparing you like you were a white man that you trained for one thing that you'll never attain, that you'll never get. There wasn't too much I guess we do, I mean, it was left up to our parents at that time and they weren't exactly all educated to the extent that they knew how to go about changing the situation, so they just made the best out of the situation as it was. I have to work and go to school, too, and from time to time I felt just about like I think that those boys up on the corner feel, that maybe I should either go to school or work and quit one of the other. This tractor that I was driving for this guy while I was going to school, I would let the water out, I would drive it until it just burned up, just ran so hot until it wouldn't even pull it own self. Said, well, it won't work and I have to take off and go to school. So this seemed to work pretty good, I felt like just quitting one or the other, and my parents insisted, well, you need to work to help out with expenses. I mean, there were ten children and my dad and mother and I used to think my dad was doing a pretty poor job. But the older I got, seems like the smarter he got, you know, he was wise enough on what to do to make things a little better. I think my father and mother were the greatest people in the world, regardless of what we said or what we did, they were there. And which, later in life, I start to turn a little sour at nineteen, eighteen, nineteen, living in a way that I knew it wasn't right, but I just kind of didn't care and I was revengeful to me, because I knew I was breaking the law, I kept thinking more and more that if I didn't stop, that something was gonna happen to me. I start feeling like this, that I was going to get caught and the older I got, the more mature I got, the more I felt like, well you better stop it otherwise it's gonna really become a part of you and you can't stop it. I mean the only way you're gonna stop is that you're gonna be in trouble, you're gonna be locked up some place to where somebody's gonna stop it for you. So then I decided, well, I'll just find the right girl and I'll just get married then I'll have to live a good life like my dad, always wanted to, you know, eventually decide to try to live a good life like I felt my dad lived. The guys on the corner, they don't have nothing to be hold to at all. No job, no family, no nothing. Nothing to feel proud of as a reason that he just should stop doing the things that he's doing. Take it off godamnit, show me your belly. You don't have anything to do, I mean, nowhere to go, nothing. And people always talk about hanging up on the corner, the older people you know, talking their stuff. "Boys, get off the corner." Where they gonna go? [...] 'cause after they call you, they can't go nowhere, there's nowhere to go. It's pretty bad. It's up to you, what you want to do, you know. You can make life miserable, I mean, boring, you know, same old day, you know, you got to live, you know, next day, nothing to do. It's not good, standing up there, you know. Nothing to do but stand up there all day, go home. Look at television, listen to radio, go out on the corner. You know, nothing. I should be working. I filled out a lot of applications and things like that, but, well, I kind of almost give up. I don't know what it is, just, you know, some people just have more drive than other people. In the position I'm in today, well, you know, that's nobody's fault, you know, except mine. It seemed like, you know, life comes to a sudden stop and you can't just seem to move or something. I don't know what it is. If I knew what it was, I'd be in good shape. But there's just something holding, I mean, something holding me to a dead stop, you know what I mean? But he cannot ask the majority to change its entire system to suit him because he can't seem to make what they want him to make. Slavery, exploitation, how can you eliminate exploitation? I mean, I am against exploitation, fine, so am I! Show me a better system. Well, of course, people have been talking about utopias for centuries, and nobody has yet come up with one. I think that suffering and unpleasantness can be held down to a minimum but I don't believe you're ever gonna have heaven on earth. I don't think nobody really just wants to be poor. People who are doing alright for themselves, I mean living good, they see other people who are living poor and for the most part, they don't bother to look, but if they really go and take a close-up look, you'll find, why, he really doesn't want to live like this. So I feel we should take another look at ourselves and to bring about the kind of America that I read about in a book as a child, only to find when I grew up, that it wasn't really as the book had stated.