Nielsen’s Nook

Embedded in  me was a notion of the suffering in life, but none of it seemed like the consequences of original sin to me; I simply could not feel weak and lost in a cosmic manner. Before I had been made to o to church, I had given God's existence a sort of tacit assent, but after having seen His creatures serve Him first hand, I had my doubts. My faith, such as it was, was welded to the common realities of life, anchored in the sensations of m body and in what my mind could grasp, and nothing could ever shake this faith, and surely not my fear of an in visible power.

I was now with boys and girls who were studying, fighting, talking; it revitalized my being, whipped my senses to a high, keen pitch of receptivity. I knew that my life was revolving about a world that I had to encounter and fight when I grew up. Suddenly the future loomed tangibly for me, as tangible as a future can loom for a black boy in Mississippi.

Wherever I found religion in m life I found strife, the attempt of one individual or group to rule another in the name of God. The naked will to power seemed always to walk in the wake of a hymn.

This business of saving souls had no ethics; every human relationship was shamelessly exploited. In essence, the tribe was asking us whether we shared its feelings; if we refused to join the church, it was equivalent to saying no, to placing ourselves in the position of moral monsters.

...how could one live in a world in which one's mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything? There were no answers.

I was building up in me a dream which the entire educational system of the South had been rigged to stifle. I was feeling the very thing that the state of Mississippi had spent millions of dollars to make sure that I would never feel; I was becoming aware of the thing that the Jim Crow laws had been drafted and passed to keep out of my consciousness; I was acting on impulses that southern senators in the nations capital had striven to keep out of Negro life; I was beginning to dream the dreams that the state had said were wrong, that the schools had said were taboo.

I tried not to think of a tomorrow that was neither real nor wanted, for all tomorrows held questions that I could not answer.

It was as though I was continuously reacting to the threat of some natural force whose hostile behavior could not be predicted. I had never in m life been abused by whites, but I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings.

We need not covet money, for we shall always have our God, and God is better than gold, His favour is better than fortune.

I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others is also making it for himself.