A Year in America 1956–1957 85
already loved the city, ‘which has a “soul” by being so monstrously
beautiful, all on the outside, so “modern” it makes you feel uneasy,
and where you feel lonelier than anywhere else in the world’.^15 In
their room in the Hotel Martinique, Derrida tried to write ‘for
himself’, as he had not done for years, in notebooks which he seems,
unfortunately, to have lost a few years later.
With Margot Dinner and one of her female friends, a German
student, they also went to Cape Cod, very well preserved in those
days. On another occasion, they hired a car and drove as far as
Cape Hatteras, in North Carolina, a wild place whose beauty made
a great impression on them. It was on this trip into the heart of
America that they came up against the brutality of racial segrega-
tion. At the end of the 1950s, signs saying ‘Whites Only’ could
still be seen everywhere. Much later, Derrida would tell his friend
Peggy Kamuf about one episode that could have ended badly. They
had stopped to pick up a black hitchhiker. The man was amazed
that he’d been picked up by a couple of white people, and showed
clear signs of nervousness that Jackie and Marguerite could not
understand. The hitchhiker was probably imagining the problems
that would inevitably have arisen if they’d been stopped by the
police: this type of contact between races was at the time completely
prohibited. Luckily, the trip fi nished without incident.^16
When Derrida arrived in the United States, the result of the 1956
presidential campaign seemed like a foregone conclusion; it ended
in November with Eisenhower’s crushing victory over his Democrat
rival, Adlai Stevenson. Apart from that, international news was too
sparse for Derrida’s liking and he was soon missing the political
discussions he had enjoyed at Normale Sup. Bianco had bought him
a subscription to the weekly selection of Le Monde, but it reached
him only belatedly. In the letters Derrida received from his former
cothurne,* Bianco commented on the turbulent events of the day: the
Budapest uprising, the Khrushchev report and its repercussions, the
rise of Nasser and the nationalization of the Suez Canal.
What was of much greater concern to Bianco and Derrida was
the worsening of the situation in Algeria. Under the government of
Guy Mollet, military service had just been extended to twenty-four
months. In less than two years, the numbers of the French Army
had risen from 54,000 to 350,000 men, while tens of thousands of
young Algerians were now going underground. Robert Lacoste, the
new governor general, opted for an even more hard-line approach
than had Jacques Soustelle. On 7 January 1957, he entrusted the
‘pacifi cation’ of Algiers to General Massu, who was in command of
- Room-mate. – Tr.