From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came. I was told that I would probably be a "sight" for the village ; I took this to mean that people of my complexion were rarely seen in Switzerland, and also that city people are always something of a "sight" outside the city. It did not occur to me - possibly because I am an American - that there could be people anywhere who had never seen a Negro. (...) In the village there is no movie house, no bank, no library, no theater ; very few radios, one jeep, one station wagon ; and, at the moment, one typewriter, mine, an invention which the woman next door to me had never seen. (...) The landscape is absolutely forbidding, mountains towering on all four sides, ice and snow as far as the eye can reach. In this white wilderness, men and women and children move all day, carrying washing, wood, buckets of milk or water, sometimes skiing on Sunday afternoons. (...) Everyone in the village knows my name, though they scarcely ever use it, knows that I come from America-this, apparently, they will never believe : black men come from Africa. But I remain as much a stranger today as I was the first day I arrived, and the children shout Neger! Neger! as I walk along the streets. (...) I thought of white men arriving for the first time in an African village, strangers there, as I am a stranger here, and tried to imagine the astounded populace touching their hair and marveling at the color of their skin. But there is a great difference between being the first white man to be seen by Africans and being the first black man to be seen by Whites. The white man takes the astonishment as tribute, for he arrives to conquer and to convert the natives, whose inferiority in relation to himself is not even to be questioned ; whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know. The astonishment with which I might have greeted them, should they have stumbled into my African village a few hundred years ago, might have rejoiced their hearts. But the astonishment with which they greet me today can only poison mine.