Taken from Chapter 3, “The Sleeping Volcano” as found n the Merton’s autobiography:
Here in the huge, dark, steaming slum, hundreds of thousands of Negroes are herded together
like cattle, most of them with nothing to eat and nothing to do. All the senses and imaginations and sensibilities and emotions and desires and hopes and ideas of a race with vivid feelings and deep emotional reactions are forced in upon themselves, bound inward by a ring of frustration: the prejudice that hems them in with its four insurmountable walls. In this huge cauldron, inestimable natural gifts, wisdom, love, music, science, poetry are stamped down and left to boil with the dregs of an elementally corrupted nature, and thousands upon thousands of souls are destroyed by vice and misery and degradation, obliterated, wiped out, washed from the register of the living, dehumanized.
What has not been devoured in your dark furnace, Harlem, by marihuana, by gin, by insanity, hysteria, syphilis?….
Now the terrifying paradox of the whole thing is this: Harlem itself, and every individual in it, is a
living condemnation of our so called “culture.” Harlem is there by way of divine indictment against New York City and the people who live downtown and make their money downtown. The brothels of Harlem, and all its prostitution, and its dope-rings, and all the rest are the mirror of the polite divorces and the manifold cultured adulteries of Park Avenue: they are God’s commentary on the whole of our society. Harlem is, in a sense, what God thinks of Hollywood. And Hollywood is all Harlem has, in its despair, to grasp at, by way of a surrogate for heaven.
The most terrible thing about it all is that there is not a Negro in the whole place who does not realize, somewhere in the depths of his nature, that the culture of the white man is not worth the dirt in Harlem’s gutters. They sense that the whole thing is rotten, that it is fake, that it is spurious, empty a shadow of nothingness. And yet they are condemned to reach out for it, and to seem to desire it, as if the whole thing were some kind of bitter cosmic conspiracy… What was heard in secret in the bedrooms and apartments of the rich and of the cultured and the educated and the white is preached from the housetops of Harlem and there declared, for what it is, in all its horror, somewhat as it is seen in the eyes of God, naked and frightful
No there is not a Negro in the whole place who can fail to know in the marrow of his bones, that the white man’s culture is not worth the jetsam in the Harlem River….