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A few months after I returned, I began going twice weekly to the Joint Disease Hospital on Madison Avenue and 124th Street. The fusion of cripple and Negro crystallized in my mind during my forays into that alien country. I like to think the joint Disease Hospital was in Harlem by design rather than by accident. As I surveyed the dingy streets surrounding it or waited in that antiseptic lobby, I had ample opportunity to observe the life surrounding me. More than half the patients were black. And they seemed uniformly solemn, hostile, nursing a hard-core resistance to all the social workers, doctors and nurses who first-named them. While those in authority were themselves a fairly liberal mixture of black and white, the power they represented went beyond pigmentation. They were flesh-and-blood embodiments of society's virtue and charity; they were ready, willing and, to the extent they were capable, eager to cure the leper of his sores, if for no other reason than that they recognized, as we lepers ourselves recognize, that the world for which they stood as subalterns needed both the leper and his sores. What, after all, are faith, hope charity to a man who claims to be civilized, except insofar as they are demonstrable and serve to create individual virtue? One sometimes wonders whether the ultimate epitaph for Western civilization will not be, "I gave."

On my first visit to the joint Disease Hospital, my mother accompanied me. A new perspective thus unfolded: the victim as victimizer. I already knew what my getting polio had done to her. But as long as I was away from home, her weekly visits did little more than embarrass me. Here, however, her presence was a very tangible confirmation of my guilt. On the long ride from the northeast Bronx to Harlem, she had been extremely nervous. When we arrived at the hospital's outpatient clinic, she seated herself -- before the social worker assigned to interview her -- with the particular aggressive hesitancy so characteristic of the eastern European immigrant. She had learned that one dealt with those in power with respect, humility and firmness. After the interview we seated ourselves as conspicuously as possible in the front row of the waiting room. All around us, people were waiting to be called into the inner sanctum, most of them staring glumly at the yellow curtains that guarded each cubicle like a mask for pain. My mother grew increasingly uncomfortable. To be the mother of a cripple, I began to understand, was to be the victim of something one simply could not understand. While I had to wrestle with my knowledge that those whose legs functioned were my superiors, she had to wrestle with her suspicion that she had somehow done something to create her fate. Neither God nor his justice are blind. One received in life what one deserved.

The hospital, the waiting in the lobby, the sullen faces around us, the forbidding presence of doctors and nurses gloved by a silence broken only by their occasional whispers to one another -- all depicted a world she was henceforth to inhabit. I myself was relatively at ease. This was more or less the way things had been for two years. For my mother, it was original, a slow-motion film of what lay in wait for her, chipping into whatever sense of security she had been able to muster before we left the apartment. To her credit, she refused to panic. When my name was finally called by the receptionist, she entered the inner sanctum and answered questions with honesty and even with pride in her capacity toto endure the inimate disclosure of her suffering. Then a doctor examined me murmured something about "doing our best," and the ordeal was over. My mother glowed. It was as if she had come through some terrible ordeal, marked but not scarred.

My mother did not need Harlem as I did. She knew enough about endurance; that Faulknerian virtue so apparent in those brittle streets. She came through what was, for her, an ordeal and a humiliation, and she came through far more intact than I would come through. She possessed the endurance of her instincts. And she herself was as alien to this America as anyone walking the streets of Harlem, for the kind of endurance I am speaking about here is as much a matter of geography as it is of culture.

Only by existing does the black man remain black and the cripple remain a cripple. A singular unfunny lesson. But the cripple could profit from it. The condition of the Negro is imposed from outside. Obviously this is not altogether true of the cripple. But while his physical condition is not imposed from outside, the way in which he exists in the world is. His relationship to the community is, by and large, dependent upon the special sufferance the community accords him. And whether he wishes to or not, the cripple must view himself as part of an undefined community within the larger community. But there is no sense of shared relationships or pride. Cripples do not refer to each other "soul brothers." And regardless of how much he may desire participate in the larger community, the cripple discovers that he has been offered a particular role that society expects him to play. He is expected to accede to that role's demands. And just as it is considered perfectly legitimate to violate a black man's privacy to bolster assumptions that the nonblack world makes, so it is perfectly legitimate to question the cripple about virtually any aspect of his private life. The normal possesses the right to his voyeurism without any obligation to involve himself with its object. He wants the picture drawn for him at the very moment that he refuses to recognize that the subject of his picture is, like him, a human being. "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" asks Shylock of his persecutors. The cripple's paraphrase might well be, "If you wish to see my wound, can you deny me the right to show you my self?" But voyeurism is the normal's form of non-involvement. The experience of being the recipient of unasked-for attention is as common to cripples as it is to blacks. Each is asked to show those aspects of his "condition" that will reinforce the normal's assumptions about what the cripple (or black) feels like, what he wants, and what he is.