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LOOK HOMEWARD BABY          HARRINGTON

more than an hour in the Select while the sky darkened and the rain slashed down, groaning, "That's what the dirty bastards have did to poor old Harris!"

In the twenty-two years of what some people insist on calling "self-exile" I've lived, or made long visits to many places, from the southern tip of Sicily to the hauntingly beautiful north of Sweden. And in all that time and in all those places I've never felt that I was an exile.  Or perhaps one might say that Black people are all exiles unless they're African people living in Africa. I'm fairly well convinced that one is an exile only when one is not allowed to live in reasonable peace and dignity as a human being among other human beings. Where one can give love and respect and receive the same from one's neighbors one is no exile. Where one can even get pissed off with the god damned neighbors just as the neighbors will get pissed off with us at times - because we're humans and not angels. I remember expressing something similar late one night in a place called the Mars Club in Paris, when Beauford Delaney said, "Brothers, who knows. Maybe the angels get pissed off with one another too. After all, we don't know what goes on on the other side." And pianist Art Simmons banged his whiskey glass down and solemnly intoned, "You know something else brother, I DON'T WANT TO KNOW!"

Whenever I rap with myself over this question of exile I remember Harris' theory about the SS and the airborne cats giving him a hard time IF he'd goofed and returned to Mississippi to flunkey out at the country club. Who would be the exile, the now naturalized SS cat - or Harris? Do I hear you say it's a set-up example? Okay. Let's just drop the SS part and select a less abstract example. Let's say Wernher Von Braun, now a solidly integrated part of the Establishment (Alabama section). Do you think for one moment that Hitler's monstrously effective V-bomb expert has ever been barred from any Alabama country club, or got busted in the mouth by a sadistic sheriff like ANY Black American who fought on OUR side? Hell no! And do you think that Herr Von This and Herr Von That don't have thousands of Harrises to serve them hand and foot - and maybe get their heads rubbed for luck in the bargain? Isn't THIS the American Dream? Well who in the hell is the exile? Certainly not Von Braun. He's among his own having a ball. And not Harris either. He's still in Paris, selling a drawing now and then, or working out at the Renault automobile plant occasionally, and living among PEOPLE who love him because he's a thoroughly lovable human being.

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