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But what he can do is to learn one of the fundamental lessons of American Negro history, a lesson that probably accounts for the growing tension between white and black: he can create his individual presence out of the very experience of his rejection. The black man in America is an obvious model for him, not be cause of any inherent Faulknerian virtue but because he has spent three hundred and fifty years learning how to deal with his to mentors. Without romanticizing him, we recognize that he earned his status. It has made him, at one and the same time, both tougher and more paranoid than white America. And a certain amount of toughness as well, perhaps, as a certain amount of paranoia might serve to change the cripple's own conception of self. There is no formula that can force Tiny Tim to stand on his own two crutches. But the cripple can certainly make a start by refusing the invisibility thrust over him by the culture. He can insist on being seen.

In the folklore of white America, Harlem has long been considered exotic as well as dangerous territory. Perhaps it is both exotic and dangerous. But from 1946 to 1951, the years during which I was an outpatient at the Joint Disease Hospital, it was one of the more comfortable places in New York for me. I do not mean to voice that old ploy about those who themselves suffer being more sympathetic, more receptive to the pain of others (although there is probably a certain limited truth here, too). All I mean is that in Harlem I first became conscious of how I could out manipulate that in society which was trying to categorize me. It is probably a slum child's earliest lesson, one that he learns even before he sets foot in a school, for it is a lesson that carries with it the structure of his survival. Normals begin to appear not as particularly charitable human beings but rather as individuals able to band together for purposes of mutual self-interest. They possess their environment, and the environment itself (which for the black child and for the cripple is part of the enemy's world) is for them a visible symbol of their success.

The normals are a tangible presence in Harlem, or at least they were during my tenure as an outpatient at the Joint Disease Hospital. The normals are they, the people in authority -- police for the black child, nurses, doctors and social workers for me. It was in this confrontation with the normals that I first noticed what is now called the Negro's "marginality" to the kind of existence tile rest of America is supposed to lead. On the short strolls on my crutches through the streets surrounding the hospital, the single fact I constantly confronted was the way in which the non-Harlem world imposed its presence on the community. Individuals walking the streets simply froze in its presence. One was always aware of a potential breaking out, an explosion of amassed raw frustration and distorted energy. I can remember stiffening with tension when a patrol car cruised past. Now it must membered that I was white, that I was an adolescent, that I moved with great difficulty on braces and crutches, and that I was probably the last person in Harlem who had anything to fear from the police. But none of this changed the fact that in Harlem a patrol car was simply the most decisive presence of the normals one could conceive of -- and whether it was because I felt comfortable in those streets or because the air smelled differently or because the tension that seemed to surround me was part of the very manner, the very life, of the community, I remember stiffening with fear and guilt and anxiety. Had I been a black adolescent with legs that functioned, I probably would have run, assuming my guilt as a corollary of my birth, just as such a boy was a victim, so I knew that I was already a victim: the truth was that I was already on short-term loan to the needs of the outside world. I could exist as an individual only insofar as I could satisfy those needs. At least, this is what I had absorbed. For anything else, I would have to struggle. And at that time ( I was not yet sixteen ), I was not only not smart enough to resist but I still had fantasies of leaving the world of the cripple. That, too, was part of the legacy. To choose hope rather than despair is natural enough. But it had been five years since the embrace of my virus and I still could bring myself to admit that my condition was permanent.

The cripple's struggle to call himself I, which is, I take what we mean by a struggle for identity, is always with him. He can be challenged in his illusions of sufficiency by the most haphazard event. I used to drop into a drugstore across the street from the Joint Disease Hospital while I waited for the car that was to take me back to the Bronx. It was the kind of drugstore one still saw before 1960. Despite its overstuffed dinginess, perhaps even because of it, the drugstore seemed portentously professional. Somehow, its proximity to the hospital gave it a certain dignity. The man who ran its operations was short and heavy, courteous and solicitous. I remember that his hair was thinning and that he smoked cigarettes in a manner that made smoking itself seem an act of defiance. He would occasionally join me as I sat as the counter drinking coffee and, more often than not he would inform me of what the Negro wanted. I have an image of him, smoke, blowing through flared nostrils, staring at the door as he spoke. At such times, he seemed oblivious to the presence of black customers and the black counterman alike. "They want to be accepted. They would like the white man to give them a chance to show what they can do." I had heard the words for years and I could even nod in rhythmical agreement. And then one day he added, in a voice as casual and well-intentioned as when he told me what they wanted, "Why don't you plan to get yourselves a nice store? Like a greeting card store. Or something like that where you don't have to work so hard but you could earn your own living. That's what you should do."