Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and the Case of Angelo Herndon

2001; Saint Louis University; Volume: 35; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2903285

1945-6182

Frederick T. Griffiths, Angelo Herndon,

Cultural History and Identity Formation

judge interrupted me angrily. All right, said he, that's enough, I want no speeches from you. What I want to know is whether you'll work if you'll get a job? Yes, your honor, if you have a job to give me I'll surely judge wrote something on a piece of paper and sealed it an envelope.... No sooner had I walked out of the court room when I tore open the letter and saw it was addressed to the Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan. It read as follows: Dear Mr. Murphy: I'm sending Angelo Herndon to you. He was arrested for vagrancy a few weeks ago and wants to work. Will you please care of him? (Signed) Judge I immediately re-addressed the letter and mailed it to the Daily Worker, the Communist newspaper New York, which played it up prominently on its front page. Upon publication I clipped the story and autographed it for the judge with the following words: Compliments. Yours truly, Angelo Herndon. A few days later I collided with the judge on the street. There was no avoiding him this time. As soon as he saw me he grew red as a beet, and glared at me furiously. (Herndon, Live 112-13) In his 1937 autobiography Let Me Live, Angelo Herndon recounts this incident from his first months the Communist Party (CP) Birmingham 1930. Arrested for attending a Labor Day rally, he had spent eleven days the dog house, the mental ward of the county jail. Sure, they thought I was crazy. Why not, wasn't I a Red? (110). Finally he was brought, caged like a monkey the zoo, before the wizened, tobacco-spitting judge, H. B. Abernathy. Herndon at first let the scene play as comedy. When the court attendant asked, Is Angelo Herndon here? he raised a laugh by replying, Yes, I'm over here the cage. Getting nowhere with his argument the real charge was Communism, not vagrancy, he went along with the judge's ruse of sending him off with a letter of introduction that, not surprisingly, signaled to the Klan to take care of him. As a seventeen-year-old recruiter for the National Miners' Union 1930, Herndon knew what Alabama courts and the KKK had store for that freak monster, a Red (100). Another judge had let the knights chant The bastards should be lynched! from the front benches (101). Though still playing the wide-eyed innocent, Herndon had lost his father to miner's pneumonia at age nine and had been down the mines himself since age thirteen. To get publicity would keep the Klan at bay, Angelo, more literate than the judge suspected, readdressed this deadly ticket to his Northern allies. This tale about a street-smart orphan who outfoxes the judge and the Klan has timeless appeal. With disarming modesty Herndon goes on to wish he had also been smart enough to leave town at moment, for the police later arrested and beat him just for showing his face Birmingham. Trickster monkey slips his cage, but later pays. Beaten but never beating, the idealistic Angelo is proof against the hysteria about Negro Reds and is heir to a noble legacy. His trick involves only the power of his own literacy, a power judges, bosses, and slaveholders have traditionally underestimated black youths, especially future autobiographers. In writing his own ticket, he replicates the heroic deception of Frederick Douglass, who forged protection passes for the Run-Away Plot 1835. Where the word abolition summoned bondsmen to freedom a century earlier, Angelo heard Communism, and his life was changed. But he was still not free. To the admiring eyes of William Lloyd Garrison on Nantucket 1841 , the eloquent Douglass was in soul manifestly 'created but a little lower than the angels'--yet a slave, ay, a fugitive slave (Preface to Douglass, Narrative 4). aptly named Angelo recounts his escapes only the understanding that, even 1937, he remains subject to being snatched southward to chains and early death. …