Title: A long way from home
Author: McKay, Claude
Language: English
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A LONG WAY FROM HOME



BY CLAUDE McKAY

LEE FURMAN · INC · NEW YORK



 COPYRIGHT, 1937,

 BY LEE FURMAN, INC.


 Permission to reprint poems from "Harlem Shadows"
 was kindly granted by Harcourt, Brace and Co.


 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA



_To my friends everywhere_



CONTENTS


  PART ONE

  AMERICAN BEGINNING

  CHAPTER                                               PAGE

  I A GREAT EDITOR                                        3

  II OTHER EDITORS                                       26

  III WHITE FRIENDS                                      35

  IV ANOTHER WHITE FRIEND                                45


  PART TWO

  ENGLISH INNING

  V ADVENTURING IN SEARCH OF GEORGE BERNARD SHAW        59

  VI PUGILIST VS. POET                                  66

  VII A JOB IN LONDON                                   73

  VIII REGARDING REACTIONARY CRITICISM                  86


  PART THREE

  NEW YORK HORIZON

  IX BACK IN HARLEM                                     95

  X A BROWN DOVE COOING                                116

  XI A LOOK AT H.G. WELLS                              121

  XII "HE WHO GETS SLAPPED"                            130

  XIII "HARLEM SHADOWS"                                147


  PART FOUR

  THE MAGIC PILGRIMAGE

  XIV THE DOMINANT URGE                               153

  XV AN INDIVIDUAL TRIUMPH                            167

  XVI THE PRIDE AND POMP OF PROLETARIAN POWER         172

  XVII LITERARY INTEREST                              185

  XVIII SOCIAL INTEREST                               191

  XIX A GREAT CELEBRATION                             206

  XX REGARDING RADICAL CRITICISM                      226


  PART FIVE

  THE CYNICAL CONTINENT

  XXI BERLIN AND PARIS                                237

  XXII FRIENDS IN FRANCE                              253

  XXIII FRANK HARRIS IN FRANCE                        265

  XXIV CINEMA STUDIO                                  272

  XXV MARSEILLES MOTLEY                               277


  PART SIX

  THE IDYLLS OF AFRICA

  XXVI WHEN A NEGRO GOES NATIVE                       295

  XXVII THE NEW NEGRO IN PARIS                        306

  XXVIII HAIL AND FAREWELL TO MOROCCO                 324

  XXIX ON BELONGING TO A MINORITY GROUP               342



A LONG WAY FROM HOME



PART ONE

AMERICAN BEGINNING



I

A Great Editor


That run was the most exciting I ever made on the railroad. After three
days away from New York, our dining car was returning again, feeding
a morning train out of Philadelphia. A three-days' run was a long one
and our crew was in a happy getting-home mood. In the pantry cooks and
waiters joked mainly about women, as always, wives and sweethearts;
some chanted, "Someone else may be there when I'm gone."

But something more than the mere physical joy of getting back to the
city that was home had uplifted my heart. Like a potful of good stew a
mixed feeling of happiness, hope and eagerness was bubbling inside of
me. For in my pocket there was a letter from a great editor and critic
advising me that I should pay him a visit as soon as it was possible.
The letter had been delivered just as I was leaving on that three-days'
trip and there had been time only to telephone and make an appointment
for this day of our return.

Was ever a waiter more impatient for a run to end? And yet for all my
impatience it was my happiest railroad itinerary. For I had made it
buoyant with the hope that at last I was about to make my appearance
before an American audience. A first appearance on the American
stage--one important point of the vast stage of life upon which all of
us must appear, some to play in a big scene, some in a little scene,
and each preoccupied with the acting of his own particular part.

I was intent on my own rôle--I a waiter--waiting for recognition as
a poet. It was seven years since I had arrived in the States from
Jamaica, leaving behind me a local reputation as a poet. I came to
complete my education. But after a few years of study at the Kansas
State College I was gripped by the lust to wander and wonder. The
spirit of the vagabond, the daemon of some poets, had got hold of me.
I quit college. I had no desire to return home. What I had previously
done was done. But I still cherished the urge to creative expression. I
desired to achieve something new, something in the spirit and accent of
America. Against its mighty throbbing force, its grand energy and power
and bigness, its bitterness burning in my black body, I would raise my
voice to make a canticle of my reaction.

And so I became a vagabond--but a vagabond with a purpose. I was
determined to find expression in writing. But a vagabond without money
must live. And as I was not just a hard-boiled bum, it was necessary
to work. So I looked for the work that was easy to my hand while my
head was thinking hard: porter, fireman, waiter, bar-boy, houseman. I
waded through the muck and the scum with the one objective dominating
my mind. I took my menial tasks like a student who is working his way
through a university. My leisure was divided between the experiment of
daily living and the experiment of essays in writing. If I would not
graduate as a bachelor of arts or science, I would graduate as a poet.

So the years had sped by--five of them--like a rivulet flowing to feed
a river. I had accumulated much, and from the fulness of my heart I
poured myself out with passion of love and hate, of sorrow and joy,
writing out of myself, waiting for an audience. At last my chance had
come. My ambition was about to be realized.

The editor had written enthusiastically: "Come in to see me and let us
know one another...."

Wonderful day! Marvelous riding! Everybody happy, going home, but I
was the happiest. Steward and men commented on my exuberant spirit and
joked about the possible cause. But I kept it a sweet secret. None of
them knew that I was a scribbler. If they did, instead of my being just
one of them, "pal" and "buddy," they might have dubbed me "professor."

Roar louder and louder, rushing train and whistle, beautiful engine
whistle, carry me along, for I myself am a whistle timed to the wind
that is blowing through me a song of triumph....

Pennsylvania Station! It was early in the morning. Our steward
telephoned to the commissary for our next itinerary. We were ordered to
double out again that afternoon. Another diner had been switched from
its regular course, and ours was put in its place.

That was an extraordinary order, after a long and tiring trip. But in
those days of 1918, life was universally extraordinary and we railroad
men were having our share of it. The government was operating the
railroads, and Mr. McAdoo was Director-General. The lines were taxed
to their capacity and the trains were running in a different way.
Coaches and dining cars of one line were hitched up indiscriminately
to the engines of another. Even we waiters were all mixed up on the
same level! Seniority didn't count any more; efficiency was enough.
There were no special crews for the crack trains; new men replaced
the old-timers, expertly swinging trays to the rocking of the train
and feeding lawmakers to the amazement of the old élite of the crews.
The regular schedules were obsolete, for the dining cars were always
getting out of line, there were so many special assignments. One day
our dining car would be detailed to serve a group of Allied officers
going on a secret rendezvous. Another day it had to cater to a foreign
mission traveling to Washington. And other days there was the feeding
of detachment upon detachment of hungry soldiers.

"Why should a doubling-out be wished on us?" one waiter growled. "Ask
Mr. McAdoo, it's his business," another hilariously replied. In my
disappointment (for now I had no time to see the editor) I cursed my
luck and wished we were again working under the old régime. But that
was merely a momentary reaction, for under the new system we were
getting better wages and pay for overtime.

I telephoned the editor that I was obliged to work and could not keep
the appointment. He answered graciously: "Whenever you are free,
telephone me, and I'll see that we get together." And he gave me his
private telephone number and address.

That night our crew slept in Harrisburg. The next afternoon we were
in Pittsburgh, and free until the following morning. We went to the
sleeping quarters in Wylie Avenue and checked in for our beds, after
which the crew split up. A good distance from Wylie Avenue the colored
folk had managed to maintain a café and cabaret on the edge of a
section of the white district downtown. I decided to go there.

I wish I were one of those persons who have a sense of premonition, so
that I might have stuck to quarters that afternoon. But I had a desire
to be away from my fellows and off by myself, even if it were in a
crowd. My mind was full of the rendezvous with that editor in New York.
And as I couldn't talk to any of the fellows about it, it was better
to find elsewhere excitement that would keep me from thinking too much.

I found the café in a hectic state. The police had just combed it,
rounding up draft dodgers and vagrants. I learned that there was a
police net thrown around Pittsburgh that day, and many men who were not
slackers at all, but who had left their papers at home, had been picked
up. I had no papers, for I had lost my registration card, so I decided
to get back right away to the cover and protection of the crew's
quarters.

I hurried off, but two blocks away from the café a black man and a
white came across the street and straight at me. Bulls! Immediately I
was aware. As I had no papers, the detectives arrested me and started
for the jail. My protest that I was importantly employed on the
railroad was of no avail. The detectives wrote down my name, appearing
very wise and knowing, and I wondered if I had been listed as a draft
dodger. I had moved from the address from which I had registered and
had never received any notification.

At the jail I tried to get permission to telephone to the steward of
our dining car. But the perplexed officials had no time to give to the
personal requests of the host of prisoners. The police had corralled
more than they could handle. The jails were overcrowded, with more men
being brought in every minute and no place to accommodate them. Some of
the local prisoners had their papers at home. Relatives, learning of
their plight, brought them the papers and they were discharged. But all
the non-residents were held. Three of us, two colored, one white, were
put into a cell which was actually a water closet with an old-fashioned
fetid hole. It was stinking, suffocating. I tried to overcome the
stench by breathing through my mind all the fragrant verse I could
find in the range of my memory.

At last dawn came, bringing some relief. At nine o'clock we were
marched to the court, a motley gang of men, bums, vagrants, pimps,
and honest fellows, all caught in the same net. The judge handed out
five- and ten-day sentences like souvenirs. When my turn came, I told
the judge that my registration card was mislaid somewhere in New York,
but that I was working on the railroad, had arrived in Pittsburgh only
the day before, and should be working at that hour. I said that nearly
every day I was serving soldiers and that my being absent from the
dining car that morning would cripple the service, because I was the
chief waiter and we were running short of a full crew.

To my surprise, as soon as I had finished, the judge asked me if I were
born in Jamaica. I said, "Yes, Sir," and he commented: "Nice place.
I was there a couple of seasons ago." And, ignoring my case and the
audience, the judge began telling me of his trip to Jamaica and how he
enjoyed it, the climate, the landscape, and the natives. He mentioned
some of the beauty spots and I named those I knew. "I wish I were there
instead of here," he said. "I wish I were there too," I echoed him. I
could quite understand how he felt, for who would not like to escape
from a winter in steely, smoky, stone-faced Pittsburgh!

Turning to my case again, the judge declared that I was doing
indispensable work on the railroad and he reprimanded the black
detective who had pressed the charge and said the police should be more
discriminate in making arrests and endeavor to ascertain the facts
about their victims. My case was dismissed. I seized the opportunity
to tell the judge that, my dining car having already left, the local
railroad officials would have to send me back to New York, and asked
for a paper to show that I had been wrongfully detained by the police.
Very willingly the judge obliged me and dictated a statement to a
clerk, which he signed. As he handed me the slip, he smiled and said:
"You see, I could place you by your accent." I flashed back a smile
of thanks at him and resolved henceforth to cultivate more my native
accent. So excellent was the paper the judge gave me, I was able
to use it for the duration of the war without worrying about a new
registration card.

Hurrying to the railroad station, I found that my dining car was
already gone. I reported to the commissary department. Later in the
afternoon they put me on another dining car going to Harrisburg. The
next day I arrived in New York, and as soon as I got off the train
telephoned to the editor at his office. He invited me to his house that
evening.

       *       *       *       *       *

Frank Harris's friendly letter, warm with enthusiasm for my poetry, and
inviting me to visit him, was the kind of thing that might turn the
head of a young writer bitten by the bug of ambition, and sweep him off
his feet. But when a fellow is intoxicated with poetry and is yet able
to keep a sober head and steady feet to swing a tray among impatient
crowds of passengers in a rocking train, he ought to be able to hold
himself in under any other excitement.

Frank Harris appeared to me then as the embodiment of my idea of a
romantic luminary of the writing world. He stirred me sometimes like
Byron and Heine, Victor Hugo and Rimbaud. I had read his writings
avidly ever since he returned to America during the World War and
stamped his personality upon the pages of _Pearson's Magazine_. His
pronunciamento when he took over the editorship was impressed on my
memory. He had said that the purpose of _Pearson's_ was to reach and
discover the obscure talents of America who were perhaps discouraged,
engaged in uncongenial labor when they might be doing creative work. I
took his moving message personally, for I was one of those talents.

It was nine o'clock when I got to Frank Harris's house in Waverly
Place. Opening the door for me himself he said the butler had gone
home. I was surprised by his littleness. I knew that he was small of
stature, but did not expect him to be as diminutive as he was. But his
voice was great and growling like a friendly lion's with strength and
dignity and seemingly made him larger than he actually was. "You are
the poet," his voice rolled as he gripped my hand. He stepped back
and scrutinized me before indicating a seat. He explained that he was
speculating whether I reminded him of any special African type, for he
had traveled in South Africa, West Africa, East Africa and the Soudan.

The door opened and a woman, wearing a rich-looking rose-colored opera
cloak, stood poised on the threshold like a picture. I stood up and
Frank Harris said: "This is the Negro poet." She nodded slightly and
vanished.

"My wife is going to the opera," Harris explained. "She adores it but I
don't care a rap about the opera. Of all the arts of the theater it is
the tinseliest. A spectacle mainly for women." I said I liked the opera
rather well, such of it as I had seen, especially the chorus and the
dancing. Frank Harris said he was surprised that I should, because the
art of the opera was the most highly artificial of the civilized arts.

He excused himself to go downstairs for wine. He returned with two
bottles and glasses. It was my first taste of Rhenish wine and I
enjoyed the pleasure of sampling it even more than the actual taste.
Frank Harris glowed in praise of the wine. He was concerned about his
diminishing stock and said that because of the war, Rhine wine was
becoming difficult to get and more costly. Seeing that I was ignorant
of the qualities of Rhine wine, he proceeded to enlighten me, saying
that the grapes from which the wine was made could not be duplicated
elsewhere because of the original nature of the soil in which they
grew, and that even in the Rhine country the grapes grown in one
district produced a different brand from that of the grapes grown in
another, and that this was very important to the local viticulturists.
He recalled the pleasure he had experienced when traveling through the
Rhineland tasting the peculiar sourish grapes and testing the wine.
"Pour me a glass of any real Rhine wine," he said, "and I can tell
exactly from where it came without seeing the label."

As he filled the glasses again he said: "You are a real poet, my lad."
He sifted the group of poems I had sent to him and said: "You have some
excellent pieces here." He picked out "The Park in Spring" and "Harlem
Shadows." "These are excellent," he said. "You have the classical
feeling and a modern way of expressing it. But where did you get it?"
He strode over to me and pressed his fingers upon my forehead, as if
to take the measure of what was there: "Tell me, how did you begin
writing? What was your early influence?"

Briefly, I told the story of my West Indian background. My peasant
childhood in a mountain country of a few hundred villages widely
scattered over the hills. The missionary who built the first mission--a
Mr. Hathaway who claimed kinship to the Shakespeare Hathaways, and who
started my school-teacher brother (the eldest) on the road to college
and gave him his first complete set of Shakespeare. My boyhood spent
in various villages with that brother, spanned by the years between
the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria and her death: the indelible
years of my first reading of anything that was thrilling just for the
thrill--the Waverly novels; Dickens in small sardine-packed words,
bound in thin blue covers; the tomes of Mrs. Henry Wood, Charlotte M.
Braeme, Miss Braddon, Mrs. Southworth, Marie Corelli.... And suddenly
like a comet the discovery of the romance of science in Huxley's _Man's
Place in Nature_ and Haeckel's _The Riddle of the Universe_.

Frank Harris was a little surprised at my coming by free-thought at
such an early age--before I was fourteen. So I explained that my
brother was a free-thinker (although at the same time a denominational
school-teacher and lay preacher), and that when he became aware of my
omnivorous reading he put his free-thought literature in my way. Thus I
grew up without religious instruction at home, I told him. Also, I was
not free-thinking alone. In one high mountain village there were ten
of us boys in a free-thought band, and most of them were heathen from
their own primitive thinking, without benefit of books. Frank Harris
thought that that was a remarkable thing to happen in a remote and
backward colony.

"But when did you actually begin writing verses?" he asked. "When I was
ten, as I remember," I said, "the first was a rhymed acrostic for our
school gala."

After a while I made a gesture of going, for I was apprehensive of
trespassing upon the man's time and kindness. I felt it to be such a
genuine human kindness. That loud roar rising out of him seemed to
proclaim: My body may be little and insignificant, but my heart is
great and sincere.

Frank Harris laughed at my worrying about his time. He said that since
there had been so much difficulty about our getting together, we should
make the most of it now. He had a lot to say yet, he said. But first he
wanted to know how I got beyond the jingle-rhyme stage of verse-making.
He remarked upon the fact that though I began verse-writing early, I
had not been attracted by poetry in my early reading. It was the story
in the plays that had carried me through Shakespeare.

And I related to him the story of my adolescence: my meeting with
one Mr. Jekyll, an English gentleman who became my intellectual and
literary mentor and encouraged me to continue writing verses in the
Negro dialect. I told him something of this man who had gone among the
peasants and collected their field-and-yard songs (words and music)
and African folk tales and published them in a book called _Jamaica
Song and Story_; of how he became interested when he first saw my
verses--enthusiastic really--and said that they sounded like the
articulate consciousness of the peasants. I had corresponded with and
visited him over a period of five years and written many songs. His
interest in me was general at first. I was merely a literate phenomenon
among the illiterate peasants whose songs and tales he was writing.
Then in time there was a subtle change from a general to an individual
interest and he became keen about my intellectual development and also
in my verse as real poetry.

I told Harris how, with this man's excellent library at my disposal, I
read poetry: _Childe Harold_, _The Dunciad_, _Essay on Man_, _Paradise
Lost_, the Elizabethan lyrics, _Leaves of Grass_, the lyrics of Shelley
and Keats and of the late Victorian poets, and how he translated and
we read together pieces out of Dante, Leopardi, and Goethe, Villon
and Baudelaire. During those years also Mr. Jekyll was translating
Schopenhauer and I read a lot from his translation. Then he suggested
Spinoza's _Ethics_, which I read, skipping the mathematical hypotheses,
and for a time considered myself a pantheist. Also at that time the
Rationalist Press of London was publishing six-penny reprints of
Herbert Spencer's works, which I devoured greedily as they appeared.

I related to Frank Harris how I experienced a specially piquant human
interest in reading Herbert Spencer and also George Eliot, because Mr.
Jekyll had told me that he had seen them both, and that George Eliot
lived near the Jekyll country place. He or his people (I am not sure
which) made overtures to get acquainted with her. But she rejected
them, saying she preferred not to make any new friends.

Mr. Jekyll had also shown me a letter from Herbert Spencer, which he
regarded as a rare treasure. He (Mr. Jekyll) had discovered a mistake
in computation, which he considered important, in one of Spencer's
books and had written to him pointing it out. Herbert Spencer,
replying, acknowledged the mistake, but said that, since it was already
published, he did not think it was important enough to change. I am not
even sure if that was the exact nature of the reply. I was so immature
that I did not even grasp the significance of the matter, nor what
exactly it was about. What amazed me then was that a great philosopher
had permitted an error, which had been brought to his notice, to
remain--that he had not corrected it. For in those burgeoning days I
was a zealot for the truth as something absolute. But Mr. Jekyll had
smiled at my reaction. He was satisfied that Herbert Spencer had sent
him a private and courteous acknowledgment.

At this point Frank Harris exploded so hard that he frightened me.
"Exactly like Herbert Spencer," he cried. "I knew him well. You may
not know it, but the letter you mention is a key to his character. I
wish I had it in my hands. He was a narrow, bigoted, self-opinionated
and typical John-Bullish unscientific Englishman. Fancy his
acknowledging an error in his book and yet refusing to correct it!
Putting his personal vanity above scientific fact. A purely Anglo-Saxon
disregard for logic. No French intellectual would be capable of such a
thing!"

Frank Harris said that he had written, or was writing, a portrait of
Herbert Spencer. "And I wish I had that letter," he cried. "It would
illuminate my portrait and prove my point that he was an old humbug. He
was the philosopher of British Philistinism--self-righteous and smug.
I told him once that I thought that certain of his deductions were
untenable and he said he could not stand contradiction. Think of that!
He refused to listen. He did not want to be contradicted, not even by
the truth."

I mentioned Mr. Jekyll's joking about the matter and remarking that
it was better that the mistakes of the great should remain, so that
the world could see and know that the great are not infallible and are
subject to error like anybody else. How also he had pointed out Byron's
famous grammatical error in _Childe Harold_ as an example. Frank Harris
said the comparison was far-fetched, but he could not forbear to seize
the moment to make his own: "Byron was a great poet and a rebel to
boot, like myself, and he was hated and hunted by English society. But
they accepted a little man like Herbert Spencer as a great philosopher,
because he made a virtue of their lowest predatory instincts. The
survival of the fittest: a smug, mediocre, comfortable, middle-class
interpretation of Darwin's great theory, making it pleasant for the
Imperialist grabbers and the conscienceless British shopkeepers.
Survival of the fittest indeed! What would become of the better-class
litter if they were not sheltered and protected from birth? What if
they had to fend for themselves like the children of the have-nots?"

Becoming less violently emphatic, Frank Harris wondered if Mr. Jekyll
would be willing to furnish a copy of the Herbert Spencer letter. I
said I had no idea whether he would, but that I was willing to sound
him. And I pointed out again that at the time when Mr. Jekyll showed me
the letter he really thought more of Herbert Spencer's sending him a
private and courteous reply than of the importance of the mistake that
he had discovered.

"Just like an Englishman," said Frank Harris, "putting nice manners and
all its bloody ritual above veracity and logic." [Later I wrote to Mr.
Jekyll, stating Frank Harris's request and sending him some copies of
_Pearson's_. But he gave a flat refusal and said that although Frank
Harris's writings were "very clever," I should beware of him because he
was insincere and pro-German!]

I finished telling all I could about my reading and writing, and then
got my portfolio and showed Harris the little volume of my _Songs
of Jamaica_ that was published in 1912; also a bulky scrapbook full
of reviews from London and Manchester, Glasgow, Dublin and Cardiff,
Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland, Sierra Leone, Lagos, and even
Capetown--from all over the English-language world, excepting America.

Frank Harris opened the book and read the dedication, which was for
Governor Olivier of Jamaica [now Lord Olivier], and exclaimed: "Sydney
Olivier! Oh yes, he did become governor of some colony. I knew him
quite well--one of the most brilliant and practical of the Fabians.
Was he interested in you?" I said that Governor Olivier had become
interested in my verse through Mr. Jekyll, and had accepted the
dedication.

My scrapbook interested Frank Harris. It was crowded with the souvenirs
of adolescence: pictures of famous literati cut from English and
American magazines, unusual newspaper items, letters from Mr. Jekyll
about my verse.... He came upon a cutting from _T.P.'s Weekly_ with
a prize poem of mine. This prompted him to say that he was well
acquainted with T.P. O'Connor, whom he described as a successful
Irishman whom the English liked because he never possessed an idea.

There was also a letter from Lord Stamfordham, the private secretary
of King George, to Mr. Jekyll about my book. Mr. Jekyll and Lord
Stamfordham had been friends from their youth and Mr. Jekyll had told
me that he was trying to get a copy of _Songs of Jamaica_ on the
King's table. He said that even though the book was not read, if it
were mentioned in a London drawing-room of consequence and reviewed by
society, it might have a sale as a curiosity!

With his thumb on Lord Stamfordham's letter, Frank Harris said: "That's
big."

"What's big?" I asked.

"Bigge," said Frank Harris, spelling the name. "That's Stamfordham's
family name. I knew him quite well when he was just Bigge and secretary
to Queen Victoria. I suppose he was not smart enough for King Edward,
but he came back with King George, naturally. And did he do anything
for your book?" I said that I didn't think so. "I am sure it would not
have done you any good even if your poems had been put on the King's
table," said Frank Harris. "A literary talent is not like that of a
prima donna. Yet that Mr. Jekyll friend of yours is a remarkable person
in a way. A man that it must have been a great experience to know. I
can trace his influence in your poetry. Good, but you must go beyond
that, my lad. I should have liked to match my intellect against his.
I had also a great teacher-friend in Byron Smith." And Frank Harris's
noble roar was modulated by a fine note of tenderness as he spoke a
little about the teacher of his American university days. It interested
him that I also had gone to school in Kansas.

And now he began to talk of his beginnings in Kansas, monologuing,
launching out like a perfect little boat riding the great waves.
Frank Harris thundered and roared and boomed and trumpeted, striding
across the floor and creating action to match the color and vigor of
his outpouring. Like a god laying down the commandments of literature
and life he talked. Like a wizard he evoked the notable contemporary
figures of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth century and
paraded them in all their accoutrements, articulate, gesturing and
posturing like the personages of Madame Tussaud's.

When Mrs. Harris returned from the opera and looked in, Frank flung
her a darling phrase and she retired. Interrupted, he noticed that the
wine was finished, and went downstairs for more. And when he returned
he again gave his attention to my dialect verse and the scrapbook. "But
why have you been silent all these six years?" he demanded. "For six
years you were silent in the night, like James Thomson, who wrote _The
City of Dreadful Night_." He quoted from that great poem:

 _Because he seemed to walk with an intent
   I followed him; who shadow-like and frail,
 Unswervingly though slowly onward went,
   Regardless, wrapped in thought as in a veil;
 Thus step for step with lonely sounding feet
 We travelled many a long dim silent street._

And then the sonorous rich refrain like a fugue pouring through the
great pipes of an organ:

 _As I came through the desert, thus it was,
 As I came through the desert: Eyes of fire
 Glared at me throbbing with a starved desire;
 The hoarse and heavy and carnivorous breath
 Was hot upon me from deep jaws of death;
 Sharp claws, swift talons, fleshless fingers cold
 Plucked at me from the jungle, tried to hold;
     But I strode on austere,
     No hope could have no fear._

"A great poem; a sad sick poet," said Frank Harris. "I knew him. He was
a hopeless drunkard." His mention of James Thomson and quotation from
_The City of Dreadful Night_ moved me sadly. I remembered it was one of
the first book of poems that Mr. Jekyll presented to me and that for
a long time I was haunted by the spirit of the strange music of the
desert song and the pessimistic feeling of the whole poem, which acted
like a damper on my naturally happy disposition. Yet I did love the
poem, finding it as lyrically rich and totally beautiful even as _Omar
Khayyám_.

"Perhaps you too have a _City of Dreadful Night_ pent up in you as a
result of your six silent years?" Frank Harris asked. I said that I had
not been really silent at all. It had been necessary for me to do some
practical thing to exist. And it had been a big experience, finding
out about America and knowing the commonalty of American Negroes. I
had continued all along to write at intervals and rewrite to make my
writing better, I said.

"You must write prose," Frank Harris said. I demurred. "Yes, you must
and you will," he went on. "Now you must write something about yourself
to preface these poems. I am sure you will write prose some day. Poetry
comes first; prose follows with maturity. And this is an age of prose
and not of poetry. Poetry was the unique literary expression of the
feudal and semi-feudal age: the romantic periods. But this is the great
machine age, inventions upon inventions bringing a thousand new forces
and objectives into life. Language is loosening and breaking up under
the pressure of new ideas and words. It requires the flexibility of
prose to express this age."

"Now, tell me frankly," he said, turning the pages of my scrapbook,
"what was the real underlying urge that forced you to come to America,
after you had achieved a local success in your home? Was it merely
to study?" I admitted that back in my mind there had really been the
dominant desire to find a bigger audience. Jamaica was too small for
high achievement. There, one was isolated, cut off from the great
currents of life.

"I knew that," Frank Harris said triumphantly. "Your ambition was to
break into the larger literary world--a fine ambition. But literature
is the hardest career for a man without any competence. I think that if
I had chosen politics, as I was inclined to at first, I might have done
better. However, you have excellent stuff in you and deserve success.
And you can attain it if you work hard. You will get there. You have a
rare talent. I always pick a winner. I picked Bernard Shaw when he was
unknown and started him in the theater on the way to his great success.
I picked H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad and others. You are an African.
You must accomplish things, for yourself, for your race, for mankind,
for literature. But it must be literature. Now in this sonnet, 'The
Lynching,'[1] you have not given of your best. A sonnet like this,
after reading the report of the St. Louis Massacre, which I published
in _Pearson's_, sounds like an anti-climax. You should have risen to
the heights and stormed heaven like Milton when he wrote 'On the Late
Massacre in Piedmont':

 _Avenge, O Lord! thy slaughtered Saints whose bones
 Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold...._

There you have the sublime human cry of anguish and hate against man's
inhumanity to man. Some day you will rip it out of your guts."

It was nearly an all-night séance. We had drunk up the rest of the
wine. Frank Harris's hand had grown shaky as we drank, and he had
spilled some of it as he poured. But it seemed to me that it was more
with memories and words that he was intoxicated; that the wine was a
tonic only to them. At last he permitted me to go with these parting
words: "I think I have taught you more in five hours than your Mr.
Jekyll did in five years, but that was easy, for my experience is so
much greater. I have never retired from life, but have always been in
the thick of it, where it was most exciting. I have made enemies right
and left and they pursue me with hatred, but I have never been afraid,
I defy them as Byron:

 _I have not loved the world, nor the world loved me;
 I have not flatter'd its rank breath, nor bowed
 To its idolatries a patient knee...._"

I had no desire for sleep. I was too uplifted by Frank Harris's grand
voice, roaring like a waterfall in my head. I had listened to many
voices that were lovely before, but very often it was the association
of the individual with the speech that made the voice fine to me. With
Frank Harris it was different. It was the voice of itself only, like a
disembodied element.

Oh, what an amazing evening it was! I had gone expecting less than an
hour's interview, merely the formal thing that editors and publishers
consider it their business to grant sometimes. And this man had made
one splendid night of it, talking for the beauty of talking, talking
exquisitely, talking sensibly. Unforgettable experience. And certainly
it was not an attitude on his part, no selfish motive, no desire to
make an impression upon me, for there was really no reason. And the
extraordinary spontaneity and length of our conversation that night
was as surprising to Frank Harris as it was to me. Years later he said
so, after I had traveled abroad and we came together again at a little
party in Nice.

But then, that night, rather that early morning, returning to the
job again, exhilarated, feeling as though I could do the work of all
five waiters, with the stimulant of Frank Harris's voice agitating
me to action, my mind was a rare element (quite dissociated from
the technical work of my hands), savoring the essence of that great
conversation, estimating the personalities that had been evoked for me,
until I thought that it might have been someone like Frank Harris who
inspired Browning to say:

 _Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
 And did he stop and speak to you,
 And did you speak to him again?
 How strange it seems and new...._

Some weeks later I saw Frank Harris again at his office in Union
Square. He had inspired me toward a new achievement--the writing of
prose. And I was determined to accomplish it. I had labored through a
personal story that had taken me weeks to do it. It was much easier to
create and scribble a stanza of poetry in the interval between trains
than to write a paragraph of prose.

Frank Harris took me into his sanctum and sat down with me over the
sheets. He impressed me quite differently than he had on the night of
our memorable meeting: there was something boulevardier about his dress
and manner which seemed a little funny. I had no great confidence in
what I had written, and said so. He said that the fact that I was aware
was a good sign. He glanced over the sheets rapidly. His forehead grew
wrinkles and he shook his head. Then he said that what I had written
was like a boat full and sinking with water, but that when it was
baled out it would be sea-worthy enough. With a butt of red pencil he
underscored the essential. It was fascinating to watch him expertly,
quickly, picking out the salient facts.

Suddenly he said something like this: "I am wondering whether your
sensitivity is hereditary or acquired." I said that I didn't know, that
perhaps it was just human. He saw that I was ruffled. I really had a
sensation of spurs sprouting on my heels.

"Don't misunderstand me," he said. "Your sensitivity is the quality
of your work. Your 'The Park in Spring' sonnet is a remarkable
achievement. I read it to a very refined woman and she could not hold
back her tears. It takes me back to the humanists of the eighteenth
century, touching me like Hood or even something of Wordsworth's.
What I mean is, the stock from which you stem--your people--are not
sensitive. I saw them at close range, you know, in West Africa and the
Sudan. They have plenty of the instinct of the senses, much of which
we have lost. But the attitude toward life is different; they are not
sensitive about human life as we are. Life is cheap in Africa...."

I kept silent.

"Now please don't misunderstand me," he said again. "We have great
disparities in Europe also, despite more than a thousand years of
civilization. For example, the attitude toward life in Eastern Europe
is not the same as in Western Europe. And again, the French are by far
more highly cultured than the Teutons and Anglo-Saxons. But the French
have no poetry, so to speak. English and German poetry is infinitely
higher. Yet, the English are barbarians compared to the French. Heine
marveled that Shakespeare was an Englishman and Jesus a Jew. Ah Jesus,
Jesus! Our Lord and Master! That is the secret of the difference
between the peoples of Africa and of Asia and the people of Europe.
Jesus: it is his religion that makes the difference."

And, strangely to me, Frank Harris began preaching Jesus. Which
seemed so incongruous with his boulevardier dress and manner. He
did it beautifully, but unconvincingly. There was something about
the man's personality, so pugnacious (a fine pugnaciousness that I
admired when he expatiated upon his profane experiences and because he
was physically small and rebellious), that made him appear a little
ridiculous preaching the self-denialism of Jesus. When he paused I said
I thought the adoption of the Christ cult by Western civilization was
its curse: it gave modern civilization a hypocritical façade, for its
existence depended on force and positive exploitation, whereas Jesus
was weak and negative. Frank Harris said that there was a great deal
of truth in my point, but nevertheless he preferred Jesus above all
the great teachers, and thought civilization the better because of his
religion.

In his rôle as a Jesus preacher the stature of Frank Harris diminished
perceptibly before my mind; the halo around him that night when he
talked as a rationalist and rebel became less glamorous. Perhaps I
judged him too severely, because my childhood was so singularly free of
the influence of supernatural religion. I suppose that people who are
nurtured in revealed religion, even though they discard their god when
they are intellectually grown up, are prone to attribute more of the
godly qualities to their own deity than to the gods of other peoples.
And Frank Harris was raised an Irish Catholic.

Abruptly he said "Now to work," and called in his secretary. She was
a little blonde from a Western town. He said that she had written
imploring him to let her come to New York to serve "the master" in any
capacity. Every week he received dozens of such letters, which he had
to ignore, he said, but there had been something so original about hers
that he had invited her to come even without requesting her photograph
beforehand. And fortunately he had found in her a perfect disciple.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: This poem was published years later in _Harlem Shadows_.]



II

Other Editors


It was a great moment when my first poems were published in
_Pearson's_, although they were not actually the first to be published
in America. In December of 1917, _Seven Arts_, which was edited by
James Oppenheim and Waldo Frank, published two of my sonnets over
the nom de plume of Eli Edwards. The nom de plume was adapted from
my mother's name. I used it because at the time when the poems were
submitted, I was a waiter in a women's club. The members were students
of the arts. Some were literary aspirants and were always reading and
discussing the new and little magazines. As I was a good enough waiter
I did not care to be discovered as a poet there.

When my poems appeared in _Pearson's_ I received many letters of
encouragement and suggestion. And one of them started an interesting
correspondence which resulted in my traveling to Europe the following
year.

I was particularly excited about appearing in _Pearson's_, because
there was no doubt that Frank Harris was a truly great critic. And
many were my dismal disappointments in rejection slips and letters of
half-hearted praise, until he fortified me with his frank, hearty and
noble voice of encouragement. "The White Fiends," which _Pearson's_
published, had been rejected previously by _The Crisis_, a Negro
magazine.

Some months before, I had sent some poems to William Stanley
Braithwaite, who was highly placed as a critic on the Boston _Evening
Transcript_. Mr. Braithwaite was distinguished for his literary
dialogues in the Literary Supplement of the _Transcript_, in which the
characters were intellectual Bostonians with Greek names and conversed
in lofty accents that were all Greek to me.

In Mr. Braithwaite's writings there was not the slightest indication
of what sort of American he might be. And I was surprised one day to
read in the Negro magazine, _The Crisis_, that he was a colored man.
Mr. Braithwaite was kind enough to write me, a very interesting letter.
He said that my poems were good, but that, barring two, any reader
could tell that the author was a Negro. And because of the almost
insurmountable prejudice against all things Negro, he said, he would
advise me to write and send to the magazines only such poems as did not
betray my racial identity.

There was sincerity in Mr. Braithwaite's letter, a sincerity that
was grim and terrible to me. He was a poet himself, but I was
unacquainted with his poetry. I went in search of him in his poetry
at the Forty-second Street Library. I found a thin volume containing
some purely passionless lyrics, only one line of which I have ever
remembered (I quote from memory):

 _I kissed a kiss on a dead man's brow...._

So, I thought, that was what Boston made of a colored intellectual.
But thinking a little deeper, I thought that it was not Boston only.
Mr. Braithwaite perhaps stood for what almost any man of color who
possessed creative talent desired to be at that time. Mr. Braithwaite
is now a professor of literature in Atlanta University, one of the
leading Negro schools. In appreciation of him our foremost Negro
historian has written:

"The most remarkable writer of Negro blood since Dunbar is William
Stanley Braithwaite, who as a writer is not a Negro.... Mr. Braithwaite
has by his literary production and criticism ... his poems, his annual
publication, _The Anthology of Magazine Verse_, demonstrated that the
Negro intellect is capable of the same achievements as that of the
whites...."

Need I say that I did not entertain, not in the least, Mr.
Braithwaite's most excellent advice? I couldn't even if I had felt
certain about that mess of pottage that is such a temptation to all
poor scribblers. My poetic expression was too subjective, personal and
tell-tale. Reading a selection of it, a discerning person would become
immediately aware that I came from a tropical country and that I was
not, either by the grace of God or the desire of man, born white.

I felt more confidence in my own way because, of all the poets I
admire, major and minor, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Blake, Burns, Whitman,
Heine, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud and the rest--it seemed to me
that when I read them--in their poetry I could feel their race, their
class, their roots in the soil, growing into plants, spreading and
forming the backgrounds against which they were silhouetted. I could
not feel the reality of them without that. So likewise I could not
realize myself writing without conviction.

       *       *       *       *       *

Because of my eclectic approach to literature and my unorthodox idea
of life, I developed a preference for the less conservative literary
organs. _The Masses_ was one of the magazines which attracted me
when I came from out West to New York in 1914. I liked its slogans,
its make-up, and above all, its cartoons. There was a difference, a
freshness in its social information. And I felt a special interest in
its sympathetic and iconoclastic items about the Negro. Sometimes the
magazine repelled me. There was one issue particularly which carried
a powerful bloody brutal cover drawing by Robert Minor. The drawing
was of Negroes tortured on crosses deep down in Georgia. I bought the
magazine and tore the cover off, but it haunted me for a long time.
There were other drawings of Negroes by an artist named Stuart Davis.
I thought they were the most superbly sympathetic drawings of Negroes
done by an American. And to me they have never been surpassed.

I remember receiving a couple of "So sorry" rejection slips from _The
Masses_. _The Masses_ was crucified and had been resurrected as _The
Liberator_ before a poem was accepted. I received a note from the
managing editor, Crystal Eastman, inviting me to call at the office.
One afternoon when I was free in New York I telephoned _The Liberator_
and was asked to come down. Crystal Eastman was in conference with the
business manager when I got there, but she suspended it to talk to me.
The moment I saw her and heard her voice I liked Crystal Eastman. I
think she was the most beautiful white woman I ever knew. She was of
the heavy or solid type of female, and her beauty was not so much of
her features, fine as they were, but in her magnificent presence. Her
form was something after the pattern of a splendid draft horse and she
had a way of holding her head like a large bird poised in a listening
attitude.

She said she liked my poems in _Pearson's_ and some of those submitted
to _The Liberator_, but that she was not a poet or critic and therefore
not a good judge. She would arrange for me to meet her brother, Max
Eastman, who was the chief editor and had the final word on all
contributions. She chatted awhile with me. Was it difficult for me to
work on the railroad and write poetry? Did I have any regular time
to write? I told her that sometimes I carried lines in my thoughts
for days, waiting until I found time to write them down. But also it
wasn't always like that. And I related this incident: For many days
I was possessed with an unusually lyrical feeling, which grew and
increased into form of expression until one day, while we were feeding
a carload of people, there was a wild buzzing in my head. The buzzing
was so great that it confused and crowded out all orders, so much so
that my mechanical self could not function. Finally I explained to the
steward that I had an unbearable pain in my belly. He excused me and
volunteered to help the fourth waiter with my two tables. And hurrying
to the lavatory I locked myself in and wrote the stuff out on a scrap
of paper.

"Got rid of your birth pains," Crystal Eastman said, and we both
laughed. She had to resume her conference, but before leaving a
tentative appointment was made for me to get in touch with Max Eastman.
Just as I was going, Floyd Dell, who was assistant editor of _The
Liberator_, came in and we were introduced.

The rendezvous with Max Eastman was to be at his study-room, somewhere
in or near St. Luke's Place. I got there first and was about to ring
when my attention was arrested by a tall figure approaching with long
strides and distinguished by a flaming orange necktie, a mop of white
hair and a grayish-brown suit. The figure looked just as I had imagined
the composite personality of _The Masses_ and _The Liberator_ might
be: colorful, easy of motion, clothes hanging a little loosely or
carelessly, but good stuff with an unstylish elegance. As I thought, it
was Max Eastman.

We went up into a high room and he lounged lazily on a couch and
discussed my poems. I had brought a batch of new ones. Naturally I was
impressed at once by the contrast between Max Eastman and Frank Harris.
There was nothing of the "I" first person in Max Eastman's manner. Nor
did he question me to any extent about myself, my antecedents, and the
conditions under which I lived and wrote at the time. He was the pure
intellectual in his conversation and critical opinion.

Among my new poems there was a sonnet entitled "If We Must Die." It was
the most recent of all. Great events had occurred between the time when
I had first met Frank Harris and my meeting with Max Eastman. The World
War had ended. But its end was a signal for the outbreak of little
wars between labor and capital and, like a plague breaking out in sore
places, between colored folk and white.

Our Negro newspapers were morbid, full of details of clashes between
colored and white, murderous shootings and hangings. Traveling from
city to city and unable to gauge the attitude and temper of each one,
we Negro railroad men were nervous. We were less light-hearted. We did
not separate from one another gaily to spend ourselves in speakeasies
and gambling joints. We stuck together, some of us armed, going from
the railroad station to our quarters. We stayed in our quarters all
through the dreary ominous nights, for we never knew what was going to
happen.

It was during those days that the sonnet, "If We Must Die," exploded
out of me. And for it the Negro people unanimously hailed me as a poet.
Indeed, that one grand outburst is their sole standard of appraising
my poetry. It was the only poem I ever read to the members of my crew.
They were agitated. Even the fourth waiter--who was the giddiest and
most irresponsible of the lot, with all his motives and gestures
colored by a strangely acute form of satyriasis--even he actually
cried. One, who was a believer in the Marcus Garvey Back-to-Africa
Movement, suggested that I should go to Liberty Hall, the headquarters
of the organization, and read the poem. As I was not uplifted with his
enthusiasm for the Garvey Movement, yet did not like to say so, I told
him truthfully that I had no ambition to harangue a crowd.

That afternoon with Max Eastman was spent in a critical estimation of
my verse. He decided to publish a page of it. When I departed I left
some of the verses but took with others the "If We Must Die" sonnet. I
wanted Frank Harris, whom I had not seen for many months, to see it. I
had always remembered his criticism and rejection of "The Lynching,"
and now I wanted to know if in "If We Must Die" I had "risen to the
heights and stormed heaven," as he had said I should.

At that time _Pearson's Magazine_ had its office in the same building
as _The Liberator_. Frank Harris had me ushered in as soon as I was
announced. "And where have you been and what doing all this time,
my lad?" he roared, fixing me with a lowering look. All his high
exhibitionism could not conceal the frank friendliness and deep
kindliness that were the best of him. "Now what have you done to be
called a real poet, to join the ranks of the elect? Have you written
a GREAT poem yet?" I produced "If We Must Die." He read it at once.
Then he slapped his thigh and shouted, "Grand! Grand! You have done it.
That _is_ a great poem, authentic fire and blood; blood pouring from a
bleeding heart. I shall be proud to publish it in _Pearson's_."

I said that I was sorry, but the poem had already been accepted by _The
Liberator_. "What? It belongs to me," Frank Harris thundered. "_The
Liberator_ be damned! I gave you the inspiration to write that sonnet
and I want to have the credit of publishing it. In the next number of
_Pearson's_. I'll play it up big."

But I said I couldn't do that; I would have to ask Max Eastman's
permission. "No, you won't," roared Frank Harris. "Do you think I am
the kind of man to accept a favor from Max Eastman? Why did you bring
your poem here, after showing it to him?" Because I wanted him to
see what I had done, I said, because I valued his opinion so highly,
perhaps more than any other critic's, because his unforgettable words
that memorable night of our first meeting were like a fire alive in me,
because I so much desired to know if he considered what I had written
as an achievement. I was excited and spoke quickly and earnestly. Frank
Harris melted a little, for what I said had pleased him. But he was
none the less angry.

He informed me then that he had had a fight with _The Liberator_.
He had published in _Pearson's_ an article about Lenin in which the
Russian dictator was portrayed as a cosmopolitan _bon vivant_. It was a
very exaggerated and wrong picture, and _The Liberator_, which had more
accurate information about Lenin's private life from individuals who
knew him, had severely criticized Frank Harris. He was sore about the
criticism. He said that he and Max Eastman were both radical editors,
and if he had made a mistake, _The Liberator_ might have asked him to
correct it in _Pearson's_, instead of both editors denouncing each
other in public. He said he was so disgusted that he was seeking other
premises for his magazine, because he was uncomfortable housed in the
same building as _The Liberator_ and all the time meeting its editor,
even riding in the same elevator with him.

That incident alone was a revelation of the real Frank Harris under
the hard protective shell, and shows that he was not such a natural
buccaneer as some of his critics assert. He was so sensitive that he
could not stand being in the same building with another editor, because
they had quarreled.

I had not read the controversial articles then and knew nothing
about the quarrel, and so I was very embarrassed, realizing that
it was a mistake to show the poem to Frank Harris before it was
published in _The Liberator_. I was keen about that poem appearing
in _The Liberator_, because of that magazine's high literary and
social standard. Although I esteemed Frank Harris as a great critic,
_Pearson's_ was _his_ magazine only, a one-man magazine, smashingly
critical, daringly so about social problems, yet having no constructive
social program. But _The Liberator_ was a group magazine. The list
of contributing editors was almost as exciting to read as the
contributions themselves. There was a freeness and a bright new beauty
in those contributions, pictorial and literary, that thrilled. And
altogether, in their entirety, they were implicit of a penetrating
social criticism which did not in the least overshadow their novel and
sheer artistry. I rejoiced in the thought of the honor of appearing
among that group.

Nevertheless I deferred a little to Frank Harris, and when I mailed the
set of poems to Max Eastman a few days later, I kept back the "If We
Must Die" sonnet. I figured that if Max Eastman overlooked its absence,
I could conscientiously give it to Frank Harris. But Max Eastman
sent me a telegram requesting the immediate return of the sonnet.
The magazine had already gone to press and he wished to include it
in the selection. I sent it in and "If We Must Die" appeared in _The
Liberator_.



III

White Friends


The phrase "white friend" used by a Negro among Negroes is so
significant in color and emotion, in creating a subtle feeling of
social snobbery and superiority, that I have sometimes wondered what
is the exact effect of "colored friend" when employed by a white among
whites. I mean the sophisticated. I know the reactions and their
nuances must be very different within the two groups. An experiment
carried out in both groups to determine this would be as rarely
illuminating as a scientific discovery to this Negro. But alas, what
a pity that it is an impossibility, even as it is for a white reader
to share with a black reader the magic inhering in "white friend" with
all its implications. It may be partially understood only by comparing
it with certain social honors and class distinctions which make for
prestige, but it cannot be fully realized.

The peasants of Jamaica were always fond and faithful in friendships.
Every boy and every man had a best friend, from whom he expected
sympathy and understanding even more than from a near relative. Such a
friend shared in confidences which were not revealed even to a brother.
Early friendships were encouraged by our parents. And sometimes it was
the friendship of youngsters that developed a fraternal feeling among
the families of both.

There were few white friends in the social life of the peasants. The
white colony agglomerated in the towns and the peasants were 80 per
cent of a population of a million. And so the phrase "mah white folks"
could not have the significance for a Jamaica peasant that it has for
a southern Negro. There were a few settlements of poor whites in the
land. They were mainly of German descent. Like the natives, they eked
out a living as agriculturists and artisans, sharing in the common
community life. The blacks were not sycophantic to them because of
their pigmentation, nor did they treat them with contempt as "poor
white trash."

Those were the social conditions in the country. In our only city they
were different. In the city there were subtle social distinctions
between white and light-colored and between light-colored and black.
These distinctions were based upon real class differences which were
fixed by the distribution of positions. Generally the whites were the
ruling and upper class, the light-colored were the shop-keeping and
clerical class, the blacks were the working class.

A peasant would be proud of a white friend who was influential. But
from a social-asset point of view, he would place much more value upon
the friendship of a light-colored person of the wealthy and educated
class or of a black who had risen up out of the peasantry than he would
upon that of an undistinguished "poor white."

My father was the trusted friend of Mr. Hathaway, the missionary
who built up the first mission of our region. I remember my first
impression of my father: a tall, graying man with an impressive
luxuriantly kinky head. He was a prosperous enough peasant and settled
on his own land. He was senior deacon of the church and something of a
patriarch of the mountain country. My memory retains an unforgettable
picture of him, often sitting out upon our barbecue and endeavoring to
settle differences between the poorer peasants. For the peasants loved
litigation and enjoyed bringing one another into the white man's court
for very trivial offenses. My father always said: Try to settle your
differences out of court, for the courts cost more than the cases are
worth.

For the best part of my boyhood I was away from home going to school
under my school-teacher brother. And when I had grown up a little and
returned to the homestead I found my father estranged from the church.
For five years he had never set foot on the church premises. After Mr.
Hathaway there had been about five other missionaries, but the sixth, a
Scotchman, turned out a bad egg, after seeming white and good outside.
They said he was tricky and canny in petty things. He had falsified the
church accounts and appropriated money that was intended for foreign
missions. And he had discharged the native teacher and given the job to
his wife.

My father quit the church. It went down to the devil. And the mountain
country became a hell for that missionary. Even the children jeered
at him along the roads when he went riding by. One by one his fellow
missionaries turned from him, refusing to visit the mission, until he
was isolated. At last he was compelled to go. When he was leaving,
he came to my father's house and offered to shake hands. My father
refused. He said the missionary had not acknowledged his error and he
did not think his hands were clean just because they were white. But my
mother cried and went out to the gate to the missionary's wife and they
embraced.

I make this digression about white friendship and my father, because,
like him, I have also had some white friends in my life, friends from
the upper class, the middle class, the lower and the very lowest
class. Maybe I have had more white than colored friends. Perhaps I
have been impractical in putting the emotional above the social value
of friendship, but neither the color of my friends, nor the color
of their money, nor the color of their class has ever been of much
significance to me. It was more the color of their minds, the warmth
and depth of their sensibility and affection, that influenced me.

       *       *       *       *       *

Apropos of white friendship, way back in 1912, when my _Songs of
Jamaica_ was published, I received a letter from a man in Singapore
praising my effort. This person had been corresponding with Mr. Jekyll
about a scheme to establish an international utopian colony for
intellectuals and creative talents. Mr. Jekyll, an individualistic
aristocrat of the English squirearchy had rejected the idea for
himself, saying he had no faith in sentimental and visionary nostrums.
But he had carried on a correspondence with several persons who were
interested.

Six years later, when my poems appeared in _Pearson's Magazine_, I
heard from my Singapore correspondent again. He had arrived in San
Francisco from Japan. He was intending to come to New York and hoped
we would meet. In a few weeks he came and I was shocked out of my skin
by the appearance of the apostle of the international cultural life.
In my young romantic naïveté in the hill-top of Jamaica I had imagined
him to be the personification of a knight-errant of esthetics, lustily
fighting against conventionalism for a freer cultural and artistic
expression. But the apostle was lank and limp and strangely gray-eyed
and there was a grayness in his personality like the sensation of dry
sponge. He appeared like an object out of place in space, as if the
soul of existence had been taken out of his form and left him a kind of
mummy. His voice sounded as if it were trained to suppress all emotion.
And he walked like a conventionalized mannikin. I thought that man's
vanity must be vastly greater than his intelligence when such an
individual could imagine himself capable of being the inspirer of an
international colony of happy humanity.

Mr. Gray's parentage was international--a mixture of Italian, German
and other Nordic strains. He was born in the Orient. When the World War
broke, he and his inseparable sister were living in a utopian colony
of Europeans of different nationalities. But the colony had to be
disbanded because the territory belonged to one of the Allied powers
and some of the members were Germans, and there were national quarrels
over the cause of the war.

I invited the Grays up to Harlem. They were interested in seeing the
big Black Belt, but they did not like Harlem. They did not like New
York. Mr. Gray said he was glad to locate me through _Pearson's_, and
that he enjoyed the magazine as a whole. I said that Frank Harris would
be delighted to hear that and he said he would like to meet Frank
Harris. I promised him an introduction.

Mr. Gray praised me highly for my new poems. He thought them stronger
and riper than the Jamaican dialect rhymes. And also he thought I
should have enough leisure to write more. He thought it might be
salutary if I could get away from the Black Belt for awhile. And he
suggested a plan for me to make a trip abroad.

My surprise over the prompt proposal gave Mr. Gray a kind of
self-satisfied amusement. I could tell by his faint sophisticated
smile. From my background of hard routine realistic living, idealistic
actions did not appear as simple to me as they did to Mr. Gray,
who lived by them. His practical life was his lifelong interest in
creative talents, the world leadership of intellectual idealists and
the establishment of model colonies, out of which he expected a modern
Utopia to develop. The World War had confused and disillusioned him a
little, but he was still full of hope.

Yet much as I was ready for a holiday from Harlem and though the idea
was a vast surprise, I did not accept it right away. I was interested
to know the details. Mr. Gray's plan was that I should be the guest of
himself and his sister on a trip to Spain, where I could spend a year,
or even two, writing. They had lived in Spain before and thought that
living there after the war would be more agreeable than in any other
European country, because Spain had kept out of the World War.

Miss Gray's resemblance to her brother was striking. They looked like
twins. She was almost as tall, but she was physically stronger and more
prepossessing. Much as I wanted that holiday, I had my doubts that I
could be comfortable, much less happy, as their guest. So I said that I
would like some time to think the matter over. And they agreed that I
should first do a little thinking. But the tone of their voices and of
their faces seemed to show that they were certain that I would finally
say yes.

I had recently quit my job as waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad,
when the Grays arrived in New York. Thus I had plenty of time to spend
with them. I was fortunate in not needing to worry about the expense
of food. We ate in Harlem and downtown in the Automat restaurants. I
visited them in their rooms in their downtown hotel. When I appeared at
the desk, the clerk spoke before I did: "Oh, yes, you are the colored
visitor from abroad. Mr. Gray is expecting you, just step into the
elevator."

I had lots of time and opportunity to find out whether I would enjoy
being a long-time guest of the Grays. And reluctantly I came to the
conclusion that I couldn't. For their ideals I had the highest esteem
and I was touched by their generosity. But between them and me there
was a great disparity of temperament and outlook, a vast difference in
seeing and in feeling the colors of life. I felt convinced that a long
intimate association would strain disastrously, and perhaps break, our
friendship.

Yet I was tantalized by the thought of a vacation in Spain. For West
Indians it is the romantic European country, which gave the Caribbean
islands their early names and terribly exciting tales of caribs and
conquistadors, buccaneers and golden galleons and sugar-cane, rum and
African slaves.

I thought I would try taking a little advice. At that time I knew
nobody among the Negro intellectuals, excepting Hubert Harrison.
Hubert Harrison was a lecturer on the sidewalks of Harlem. He lectured
on free-thought, socialism and racialism, and sold books. He spoke
precisely and clearly, with fine intelligence and masses of facts. He
was very black, compact of figure, and his head resembled an African
replica of Socrates.

He came from one of the Virgin Islands. He used to lecture in Wall
Street. A group of Jews became interested and brought him to lecture
in a hall in One Hundred Twenty-fifth Street. For a time he was the
black hope of the Socialists. Then he gave up Socialism for the Garvey
pan-African movement.

I explained my dilemma to Harrison and he said I was a fool to
hesitate; that I was too conscientious. In civilized life it was not
necessary for one to like one's hosts, he pointed out. Harrison said he
would like to talk the plan over with me and Mr. Gray. So I got him and
Mr. Gray together at dinner at a little South Carolina cookshop which
was good for its special hog food.

Harrison talked to Mr. Gray mostly about the pan-African movement. He
had a similar idea, he said, but Garvey, being more spectacular, had
run away with it. He told Mr. Gray that he was performing a gracious
act by taking me to Europe; that he himself had lived abroad in Denmark
and Japan, and the experience had helped him in his later work. He
avoided any mention of my real feelings about taking the trip, and I
didn't know how to express what I really felt. Finally Harrison got a
personal donation of fifty dollars from Mr. Gray to help in the work of
black enlightenment.

I had to fall back upon myself in making a decision. When I did,
informing Mr. Gray of all my doubts about the project, he was as
surprised as I had been when he first mentioned the subject. Our
contacts were all so easy and pleasant, he had not reckoned on the
objections. I tried to make him see as I did that a close association
would be quite a different thing from polite social contact.

When I told Hubert Harrison what I had done, he exclaimed that I was an
impossible poet. But soon after I received a letter from Mr. Gray. He
said that both he and his sister appreciated my frankness, especially
because of the duplicity they had experienced in their efforts to
found a community of free spirits. As an alternative he offered me
a brief vacation abroad, regretting that the decrease of his income
because of the war did not permit him to make it a long vacation. As
the Grays were going to Spain and I did not want to appear as if I were
deliberately avoiding traveling with them, I chose going to England.

I had promised Mr. Gray an introduction to Frank Harris, and we were
invited to his house one afternoon. Frank Harris in his sitting room
was obscured by the bulk of another visitor who resembled an enormous
slug. Every gesture he made, every word he uttered, was a gesture of
crawling at the feet of Harris, whom he addressed as "Master, Dear
Master." And Frank Harris appeared pleased like a little boy who takes
all the credit for a brave deed that others helped him to perform. The
scene disconcerted me. I could not understand how a man so forthright
in his opinion as Frank Harris could swallow all of that thick cloying
syrup of insincerity. But he certainly did, and with relish, rubbing
his hands and nodding his head. The phrases poured heavily out of the
huge man's boneless jaws, nauseating the atmosphere: "Dear master, you
are the world's greatest teacher and martyr since Jesus. The pharisees
are against you, Master, but your disciples are loyal." Frank Harris
said that he was quite aware of that. If he were in France he would be
called universally _cher maître_, like Anatole France, but a true king
had no honor among the Anglo-Saxon peoples.

Frank Harris then spoke of his long and unsuccessful fight against
injustice, and he emphasized the Boer War, the Oscar Wilde case, and
the World War. And whenever he paused the disciple filled in with "Yes,
Master ... dear Master."

The visit ended with Mr. Gray being sold a set of Frank Harris's books
and his taking out a year's subscription for _Pearson's_.

But before I left Frank Harris asked if there were anything he could do
for me in London. He could not do much by way of personal introduction
he said, because all his friends there had become enemies. I said the
only person I was keen about meeting was Bernard Shaw. Well chosen,
Frank Harris said, and gave me a letter introducing me to Bernard Shaw.



IV

Another White Friend


I had already bought my ticket, when a few days before the date of
sailing I received a letter containing a soiled scrap bearing one of
my poems, which had been reprinted in the New York _Tribune_. The
letter was from another white friend, quite different from those before
mentioned.

Ours was a curious friendship and this was the way it came about.
Coming off the dining car one night, I went with another waiter to his
home in one of the West Forties. His wife had company and we played
cards until a late hour.

When I left I went to eat in a Greek place on Sixth Avenue. While I was
waiting for the steak and looking at a newspaper, a young fellow came
in, sat down at my table, and taking my cap from the chair, put it on.
Before I could say a word about such a surprising thing, he said in a
low, nervous voice: "It's all right, let me wear your cap. The bulls
are right after me and I am trying to fool them. They won't recognize
me sitting here with you, for I was bareheaded."

The Greek came with my steak and asked what the fellow wanted. He said,
"A cup of coffee." He was twenty-three, of average height and size, and
his kitelike face was decent enough. I saw no bulls, but didn't mind
his hiding against me at all if he could get away that way. Naturally,
I was curious. So I asked where the bulls had got after him, and why.
He said it was down in the subway lavatory, when he was attempting to
pick a man's pocket. He was refreshingly frank about it. There were
three of them and he had escaped by a ruse that cannot be told.

He was hungry and I told him to order food. He became confidential. His
name was Michael. He was a little pickpocket and did his tricks most
of the time in the subways and parks. He got at his victims while they
were asleep in the park or by getting friendly with them. He told me
some illuminating things about the bulls, and so realistically that I
saw them like wild bulls driving their horns into any object.

When I was leaving the restaurant, Michael asked if he could come up to
Harlem, just to get away from downtown. I said that it was all right
with me. Thus Michael came to Harlem.

The next morning when Manda, my girl friend, pushed the door open and
saw Michael on the couch she exclaimed: "Foh the land's sake! I wonder
what will happen next!" That was the most excitable state I had ever
seen her in since our friendship began. I told her Michael was a friend
in trouble and I was helping him out for awhile. She accepted the
explanation and was not curious to know what the trouble was about.
Like most colored southerners, she was hostile to "poor white trash,"
and the situation must not have been to her liking, but she took it as
she did me. There was always a certain strangeness between Manda and
me. Perhaps that helped our getting along comfortably together.

Manda was a pleasant placid girl from the Virginia country. She also
was the result of a strange meeting. One late evening, when I got off
the train, I ran into two of the fellows (an elevator runner and a
waiter) who had worked with me at the women's club. We decided to give
an impromptu party. It was too late to get any nice girls. So we said,
"Let's go down to Leroy's and pick up some." Leroy's was the famous
cellar cabaret at the corner of One Hundred Thirty-fifth Street and
Fifth Avenue, and Harlem called it "The Jungle." Leroy's was one of the
cabarets where you could make friends. Fellows could flirt with girls
and change tables to sit with them. In those days the more decorous
cabarets would not allow visiting between tables.

We knew the kind of girls to approach. In the Harlem cabaret of that
time (before Van Vechten's _Nigger Heaven_ and prohibition made the
colored intelligentsia cabaret-minded) there were generally three types
of girls. There were the lady entertainers who flirted with the fellows
impersonally to obtain nice tips and get them to buy extra drinks
to promote the business of the house. Some of them were respectably
married and had husbands who worked in the cabarets as waiters or
musicians.

Another class of girls was more personally business-like in flirting.
They didn't make the fellows spend too much in the cabaret, and had a
preference for beer as a treat, for they expected them to spend on the
outside. They were easily distinguishable by the confederate looks that
passed between them and their protectors, who usually sat at separate
tables.

And there were the lonely girls, the kitchen maids, laundresses and
general day workers for New York's lower middle classes, who came for
entertainment and hoping to make a friend from some casual acquaintance
they might pick up.

Five of us went down to Leroy's. We noticed three girls of the
last-mentioned type sitting together, chummy over large glasses of
beer. We got their eyes. They were friendly, and we went over to their
table. A waiter brought more chairs. We ordered a round of drinks, and,
without palavering, we told the girls that we were seeking partners for
a party. They were willing to join us. As we got up to go, we noticed
at a neighboring table another girl all alone and smiling at us. She
had heard our overtures. She was different from the girls who were
going with us, not chic, brown with a plump figure, and there was a
domestic something about her which created the impression of a good hen.

The elevator operator, who was a prankish fellow, challenged the girl's
smile with a big grin and said: "Let's ask her too." The three girls
giggled. The other girl was so odd--her clothes were dated and the
colors didn't match. But she wanted to come, and that astonished them.
We thought she was a West Indian, and were surprised to find out that
she was from the South.

We all went to my room in One Hundred Thirty-first Street, where we
had a breakdown. In the party Manda was as different as she looked.
She lacked vivacity, and since the other fellows preferred the nimbler
girls, I had to dance with her most of the time. As host, I did not
want her to feel out of the fun. She made herself useful, though,
washing the glasses when they got soiled and mixed up, and squeezing
lemons for the gin.

By dawn we were tired and everybody was leaving. But Manda said she
would stay awhile and clean up. She wasn't going to work that day and I
wasn't either. From then on we became intimate friends. She was a real
peasant type and worked as a laundress in a boarding house. She always
came to look me up when I got in from a trip. She had a room in One
Hundred Thirty-third Street near Fifth Avenue, but I went there only
once. I didn't like its lacey and frilly baby-ribboned things and the
pink counterpane on the bed.

We didn't have a lot to say to each other. When she tidied the room
she was careful about the sheets of paper on which I was writing. And
if she came when I was writing or reading she would leave me alone and
go into the basement to cook. There is always an unfamiliar something
between people of different countries and nationalities, however
intimate they may become. And that something between me and Manda
helped rather than hindered our relationship. It made her accept little
eccentricities on my part--such as the friendship with Michael, for
instance. And so we sailed smoothly along for a couple of years. Manda
was a good balance to my nervous self.

The cabarets of Harlem in those days enthralled me more than any
theater downtown. They were so intimate. If they were lacking in
variety they were rich in warmth and native excitement. At that time
the hub of Harlem was One Hundred Thirty-fifth Street between Fifth
Avenue and Seventh. Between Seventh Avenue and Eighth the population
was still white. The saloons were run by the Irish, the restaurants by
the Greeks, the ice and fruit stands by the Italians, the grocery and
haberdashery stores by the Jews. The only Negro businesses, excepting
barber shops, were the churches and the cabarets. And Negro Harlem
extended from One Hundred Thirtieth to One Hundred Forty-fifth Streets,
bounded on the East by Madison Avenue and on the West by Seventh
Avenue. There, coming off the road like homing birds, we trainmen came
to rest awhile and fraternize with our friends in the city--elevator
runners and porters--and snatch from saloon and cabaret and home a few
brief moments of pleasure, of friendship and of love.

On the morning after my meeting with Michael, Manda said she had been
to see me twice the night before. She had telephoned the commissary
and was told that my dining car was in. She went to the kitchen in
the basement and prepared a big breakfast of ham and eggs and fried
potatoes with coffee. I asked Mr. Morris, my landlord, to join us, for
I wanted to introduce Michael to him.

He, too, had no liking for "poor white trash." He was a strapping
light-brown man and doing well with the lease of two private houses
and an interest in one of the few Negro-owned saloons. He came from
the South, but had been living many years in the North. When he was a
young man in the South, he had "sassed" a white man. And for that he
was struck. He struck back, and barely escaped with his life. He was a
kind landlord and a pleasant mixer, especially in saloons. But he could
be bitter when he got to talking about the South. He was decent to
Michael, who was a northerner, for my sake. I had been his tenant for
a long time and I exercised the freedom of a friend in that house. We
drank together and I got my friends sometimes to patronize his saloon
(thus contributing my little to help Negro business).

So Michael came to make Harlem his hideout, while he performed his
petty tricks downtown. I told Mr. Morris and Manda that he was the
ne'er-do-well son of a former boss, and had taken a liking to me.
Whatever they really thought of him I never knew, for they never said.
But they were aware that our relationship was not a literary one; they
knew that he was not one of those white folks who were interested in
the pattern of words I was always making. For Michael made no pretense
of being intellectual. However, they liked him, for there was a
disarming cleanliness and wholesomeness about his appearance, so that
they never imagined that he was what he was. And it would never have
occurred to them that I could be friendly with a crook. One never can
tell about appearances, and so we all make mistakes by it. For example,
when some of my strutting railroad friends came to know Manda, they
couldn't believe their eyes: seeing is less penetrating than feeling.

When I was away on the railroad, Michael used my place if he needed it.
He did not have a key, but I instructed Morris to let him in. I never
felt any concern about anything, although I had some dandy suits in
my closet and three Liberty Bonds in my trunk. Michael was profoundly
sentimental about friendship, the friends of his friend, and anyone who
had befriended him. He could even feel a little sorry for some of his
victims after he had robbed them. That was evident from the manner in
which he talked about their embarrassment. His deep hatred was directed
against the bulls, and his mind was always occupied with outwitting
and playing tricks on them. There were two classes of them, he said:
the burly-brute, heavy-jawed type, which was easy to pick out, and the
dapper college-student type, which was the more dangerous. He said
that the best victims to single out were men in spectacles, but that
sometimes the bulls disguised themselves and looked Harold Lloydish.

When Michael had no money he ate at the house. The landlord and Manda
were sympathetic. At least they could understand that a wild and
perhaps disinherited scion might be reduced to a state of hunger. The
tabloids often carried sentimental stuff about such personages. When
Michael had something he was extravagant. I remember one day when he
brought in a fine ham. Manda cooked it in delicious Virginia style,
thinking, as she said, that Michael's father had relented and that we
were eating a slice of his inheritance. Michael and I exchanged looks.
I felt like saying something impish to stir up Manda's suspicion. But
Michael was now well established as a disinherited son instead of a
"poor white trash" and I decided not to risk upsetting his position.

Also I was fond of Manda and had no desire to disturb her black Baptist
conscience. She was a good woman. When she did my shirt and things in
the laundry of the house where she worked, she bought her own soap
and utilized her own spare time. And she would never take home any
discarded rags or scraps of food that were not actually given to her.

Michael didn't hit it off so well with the fellows from the railroad,
though, except for the lackadaisical one, who liked everybody. Michael
was not a boozer, nor hard-boiled. In appearance he was like a nice
college student. He was brought up in a Catholic home for boys which
was located somewhere in Pennsylvania. He was put in there when he was
about nine and kept there for twelve years.... Oh yes, and besides
bulls, he hated priests and the Catholic Church.

I liked him most when he was telling about his escapades. There was
that big-time representative of an ancient business who had his bags
checked in the Grand Central Terminal. Michael managed to get the
ticket away from him and refused to give it back unless the man paid
twenty-five dollars. The man did not have the money on him and was
afraid of a scandal. He had to telephone a friend for it and was even
ashamed to do that. He walked along Broadway with Michael until they
found a drugstore from which he could telephone. And he begged the lad
to remain out of sight, so that his friend should not think the money
was for him. "Gee!" Michael said. "And I was scared crazy all the time,
thinking he would call a cop and have me arrested. But I faced it out
and got the dough. The big stiff."

And there was the circus performer who had all his money at home. So
Michael went along with him to get his. But when the actor got in, he
sent his wife out, and she chased Michael with a rolling pin.

One afternoon, as I was dressing to go to work, I was suddenly made
self-conscious by Michael remarking: "If I had your physique, I
wouldn't work."

"What would you be, then," I asked, "a boxer?"

"Hell, no, that's too much bruising work, and only the big fists are in
the money."

"Well, you should worry," I said, "if you haven't a swell physique. You
don't work anyway."

"Oh, I'm different; but you--well, it's queer, you liking a woman like
Manda."

"Why, I thought you liked her," I said. "She's nice to you."

"I know she is, and she's a fine one all right; but that's not what I
mean. I mean she's so homely, she couldn't do any hustling to help you
out. See what I mean?"

"Ugly is but lovely does," I said.

"That's nothing," he said.

"A whole lot more than you think," I said.

"Money is everything," he said. "When I have money I get me a pretty
woman."

"Every man has his style and his limit," I said. "I prefer my way to
yours."

"I know that without your saying so. Say, you don't like the way I
live, eh? Be frank."

"I never said anything about that," I said.

"But you wouldn't live the way I do, would you?"

"Perhaps because I can't. One must find a way somehow between the
possible and the impossible."

"But ain't it hell to be a slave on a lousy job?"

When I made no answer he went on: "Do you think you'll ever get a raise
out of your writing?"

"I don't know. I might. Anyway, my writing makes it possible for me to
stand being a slave on a lousy job."

Weeks passed sometimes and I never saw Michael, although he was often
in Harlem, for usually when I was in he was out. He was as busy at his
job as I was on mine, with shiploads of soldiers returning from Europe
and the railroad service engaged to its utmost capacity. Doubling-out
became like a part of the regular schedule, there was so much of it.

One day when I was in the city Michael dropped in. Seeing a revolver
on the table, he asked what was the meaning of it. I said that the
revolver had been in my possession for some years, ever since I used
to manage an eating place in a tough district of Brooklyn. But why was
I carrying it, he asked, when it might get me into trouble with the
police? He never carried one himself, although his was a dangerous
trade, for he was safer without it if he were picked up by the bulls.

I explained that I, like the rest of my crew, was carrying the revolver
for self-defense, because of the tightened tension between the colored
and the white population all over the country. Stopping-over in strange
cities, we trainmen were obliged to pass through some of the toughest
quarters and we had to be on guard against the suddenly aroused
hostility of the mob. There had been bloody outbreak after outbreak in
Omaha, Chicago, and Washington, and any crazy bomb might blow up New
York even. I walked over to a window and looked out on the back yard.

Michael said: "And if a riot broke in Harlem and I got caught up here,
I guess I'd get killed maybe."

"And if it were downtown and I was caught in it?" said I, turning round.

Michael said: "And if there were trouble here like that in Chicago
between colored and white, I on my side and you on yours, we might both
be shooting at one another, eh?"

"It was like that during the war that's just ended," I said, "brother
against brother and friend against friend. They were all flapped in it
and they were all helpless."

I turned my back again and leaned out of the window, thinking how in
times of acute crisis the finest individual thoughts and feelings
may be reduced to nothing before the blind brute forces of tigerish
tribalism which remain at the core of civilized society.

When I looked up Michael was gone.

There was nearly three months' silence between us after that. It was
broken at last by the pencilled scrawl and newspaper clipping which I
mentioned earlier. Immediately I wrote to Michael, telling him that I
had quit the railroad and was going abroad and that I would like to see
him before leaving.

He came one evening. Manda made a mess of fried chicken, and we had a
reunion with my landlord and Hubert Harrison, who was accompanied by a
European person, a radical or bohemian, or perhaps both.

Hubert Harrison entertained us with a little monologue on going abroad.
He was sure the trip would do me good, although it would have been
wiser for me to accept the original proposal, he said. He asked me to
send him articles from abroad for the _Negro World_ (the organ of the
Back-to-Africa Movement) which he was editing.

At first Michael was uneasy, listening to our literary conversation.
He had never heard me being intellectual. And he was quite awed by the
fact that it was pure poetry and not a fine physique that had given me
a raise so quickly. He thought that that poem in the New York _Tribune_
had had something to do with it. And with a little more liquor he
relaxed and amused us by telling of his sensations when he saw that
poem over my name in the newspaper. And then he surprised me by saying
that he was thinking about getting a job.

The European woman was charmed by the novel environment and she
idealized Michael as an American proletarian. She thought that Michael
was significant as a symbol of the unity of the white and black
proletariat. But when she asked Michael what division of the working
class he belonged to, he appeared embarrassed. After dinner we went for
awhile to Connor's Cabaret, which was the most entertaining colored
cabaret in Harlem at that time.

Michael came down to the boat the day I sailed. Mr. Gray also was at
the pier. I introduced them. Mr. Gray was aware that Michael was poor,
and whispered to me, asking if he might give him something. I said,
"Sure." He gave Michael ten dollars.

As the boat moved away from the pier, they were standing together. And
suddenly I felt alarmed about Mr. Gray and wondered if I should not
have warned him about Michael. I thought that if I were not on the
scene, Michael might not consider himself bound by our friendship not
to prey upon Mr. Gray. But my fear was merely a wild scare. Michael was
perfect all the way through and nothing untoward happened.



PART TWO

ENGLISH INNING



V

Adventuring in Search of George Bernard Shaw


When I was a lad I wrote a rhyme about wanting to visit England and my
desire to see the famous streets and places and the "factory chimneys
pouring smoke." Later, when I began reading the Bernard Shaw plays,
_Pleasant and Unpleasant_, and the sparkling prefaces, I added Shaw
to the list of people and things that I wanted to see. Shortly before
I left Jamaica for the United States, Shaw arrived in the island on a
visit to the Governor, the Fabian Socialist, Sydney (Lord) Olivier,
who was his friend. As my friend Mr. Jekyll was well acquainted with
the Governor, I urged him to invite the Governor to bring Bernard Shaw
up to Jekyll's cottage in the Blue Mountains. But Mr. Jekyll refused.
He said he was opposed to the pursuit of celebrities as if they were
public property, and that if Bernard Shaw was visiting Jamaica on a
quiet tropical holiday, he, Jekyll, wouldn't be the first Englishman to
attempt to intrude upon him. And so I had to be content with reading
Shaw's one interview in the local paper, in which he said that the
Governor was big and capable enough to boss the colony alone. Mr.
Jekyll was amused by that and remarked that when Socialists obtained
power, they would be more autocratic than capitalists.

Now that I had grown up in America and was starting off to visit
England, I realized that I wasn't excited any more about the items I
had named in my juvenile poem. Only the item that I had added mentally
remained of lasting interest--Bernard Shaw. With the passing years he
had grown vastly bigger in my eyes. I had read most of his published
works and seen two of his plays in New York. And my admiration had
increased. I considered Bernard Shaw the wisest and most penetrating
intellectual alive.

And so it was a spontaneous reply, when Frank Harris asked me what
person I would like most to meet in London, and I said "Bernard Shaw."
I really never thought of anybody else. Perhaps because the purpose
of my voyage was a poetical vacation and I hadn't been thinking about
meeting people.

In that season of 1919-20 in London, Shaw was triumphant in the
theater. There were three of his plays drawing full houses: _Arms and
the Man_, _You Never Can Tell_ and _Pygmalion_. After seeing _Arms and
the Man_, I forwarded Frank Harris's letter of introduction to Shaw.
Soon I received a reply inviting me to his house.

Besides knowing Frank Harris and _Pearson's Magazine_, Shaw was
acquainted with the old _Masses_ and also _The Liberator_, in which my
poems had been featured. Anything he had to say on any subject would
be interesting to me, as it would be to thousands of his admirers
everywhere. For Shaw was a world oracle. And the world then was a vast
theater full of dramatic events. The capital of the Empire was full of
British and Allied officers and soldiers. And they and the newspapers
impressed upon one the fact that the world was passing through a
universal upheaval.

Shaw received me one evening alone in his house in Adelphi Terrace.
There was an elegance about his reedlike black-clothed figure that I
had not anticipated, nor had I expected such a colorfully young face
and complexion against the white hair and beard. I told Shaw that Frank
Harris had been extremely kind to me and that when he gave me the
letter to him, he had said that Shaw was perhaps the only friend he had
left in London.

Shaw said that Harris was a remarkable man, but a difficult character,
that he chafed under the manners of ordinary society, and even his
voice seemed to have been trained as a protest. He then asked me how I
came to know Frank Harris. I told him, saying that Harris was the first
editor to introduce me to the public. Shaw said that Harris was a good
hand at picking possibilities.

I reminded Shaw of his visit to Jamaica. He said he had enjoyed
visiting his friend, Lord Olivier. Then he mentioned some of the
interesting exotic persons with whom he had come in contact. He told
me about a Chinese intellectual who had come all the way from China to
visit him, and wanted to talk only about Irish politics. He laughed,
thinking it was funny. And I laughed too, yet I could understand a
little why an educated Chinaman could have the Irish situation on his
subtle Oriental mind. Shaw also mentioned an Indian who had brought him
a play, which he said had a fine idea and excellent situations in it,
only it couldn't fit into the modern theater.

After Shaw had recalled his Indian and his Chinaman he turned to his
Negro visitor and said: "It must be tragic for a sensitive Negro to
be a poet. Why didn't you choose pugilism instead of poetry for a
profession?" he demanded. "You might have developed into a successful
boxer with training. Poets remain poor, unless they have an empire to
glorify and popularize like Kipling." I said that poetry had picked me
as a medium instead of my picking poetry as a profession.

As Shaw had mentioned the theater, I told him that I had seen his
plays and also two of Galsworthy's and one of Arnold Bennett's. Shaw
said that Galsworthy was a good playwright, a craftsman; but that
Arnold Bennett wasn't, and that he had no sense of the theater. "But,"
said I, "Arnold Bennett's play, _Sacred and Profane Love_, was a big
success." Shaw admitted that it was, but nevertheless it was not
excellent theater, he said, adding that the play was badly constructed.
I thought I understood. I remembered the most sentimental scene as the
most unreal--the one in which the hero plays the piano to the thrilled
woman. The actor could not play the piano, at least not enough for
anyone to consider him a pianist, and one felt that the scene did
not belong on the stage, although it might have been the _pièce de
résistance_ of a novel.

Shaw said that writing a play was much more difficult than writing a
novel, and I agreed, although I had not yet tried my hand at either.
But the technique of the theater seemed naturally harder to me. Shaw
said many writers thought it was easy until they tried to master it.
His friend, Lord Olivier, for example, who compiled excellent Socialist
treatises, once wrote a play and thought it was excellent. He showed it
to Shaw, who read it and said he could not understand what it was all
about. Yet Lord Olivier insisted that _anybody_ could understand it!

When Shaw discovered that I was not particularly interested in Irish or
world politics, because my social outlook was radical, and that I was
not expecting him to say something wise about the colored people in a
white-controlled world, he turned to an unexpected subject--cathedrals.
He spoke of their architectural grandeur, the poetry in their spires
and grand arches, and the prismatic beauty of their great windows. He
said there were fine cathedrals outside of London, structures full of
poetry and music, which I ought to see--Salisbury, Lincoln, Canterbury,
York, Winchester--as interesting in their style as St. Sophia, Rheims
and Cologne, although people did not talk so much about them. And he
informed me that the best way to get at the essential beauty of a
cathedral was to stand in the center and look up.

I was enchanted with this monologue on cathedrals. It was so different
from Shaw's hard direct hammering writing. It was soft, poetic. And
Shaw's voice is like a poem, it is so finely modulated. Once he
mentioned the World War, and let out a whinny which sounded exactly
like a young colt in distress or like an accent from his great drama,
_Heartbreak House_. I felt at once that in spite of his elegant
composed exterior, the World War must have had a shattering effect
on him. Perhaps, prior to 1914 he had thought, as did other Fabian
Socialists, that a wholesale war of slaughter and carnage between
the civilized nations was impossible; that the world was passing
gradually from the cutthroat competitive to a co-operative stage. I
myself, under the influence of the international idealistic thought of
that period, used to think that way. I remember when I was a school
boy in Jamaica that the local militia was disbanded by the Governor,
Lord Olivier, Shaw's friend and the most brilliant statistician of
the Fabian Socialists. The local paper printed his statement that
"such training for citizens is not necessary in an age of established
peace, and anyway the people of the West Indies could not be concerned
in any imaginary war of the future." Seven years later conscription
was declared in Jamaica, the most intensely British of West Indian
colonies, before it became effective in England, and West Indian
contingents served in France, Egypt, and Arabia.

I had read such a lot about Shaw's athletic appearance and his interest
in boxing, and his photographs made him look so strikingly vigorous
that I was surprised by his actual physique. Shaw looked healthy, but
not like the ordinary healthy rugged man. Under his fine white hair,
his complexion was as soft and rosy as a little child's. And there
was something about him that reminded me of an evergreen plant grown
indoors.

As an animal he suggested an antelope to my mind. And his physique
gave an impression of something brittle and frail that one would want
to handle with care, like chinaware. I thought that it was perhaps his
vegetarian diet that gave him that remarkably deceptive appearance.

Some time after my visit with Shaw I went to hear him lecture at
Kingsway Hall, where he unreservedly declared himself a believer in
Lenin. I was present with William Gallacher, now Communist member of
Parliament. At question time Gallacher said that it was all right for
Shaw to come out in theoretical praise of Lenin, but that the workers
needed practical action. Shaw replied that action was all right, but
that he was getting old and so he would have to leave action to younger
men like Gallacher. Yes, indeed, I had a vast admiration for the purely
animal cunning and cleverness that lay underneath that great Shavian
intellect.

Shaw was helpful in recommending me so that I could obtain a reader's
ticket for the British Museum. That may seem easy enough for an
ordinary person to acquire, but try, as a stranger in London, to find
the responsible householder to sponsor you according to the regulations!

Some months later, when I was getting out my little book of poetry,
_Spring in New Hampshire_, my publisher tried to get Shaw to write a
foreword for it. But he refused, saying that my poetry should stand on
its own. I did not mind, even though a short foreword by Shaw might
have helped the selling of the book. But I could never visualize Shaw
as a poet or a subtle appreciator of the nuances of profound poetry.
As a poet, I preferred the prefatory note which was contributed by
Professor I.R. Richards of Cambridge University.

However, that Bernard Shaw discourse on cathedrals was an exceptional
thing. I haven't discovered anything like it in any of his writings.
The only writing of his with which I could compare it is the play,
_Candida_. It is pregnant with poetry. As different from his other
writings as the innumerable caricatures of Shaw are from his real self.
I like to look at a great piling cathedral from the outside. And also I
love the vast spaciousness of the inside when it is empty. During the
many years I spent on the continent of Europe, I never stopped in a
cathedral town without visiting the cathedral. I have spent hours upon
hours meditating about modern movements of life in the sublime grandeur
of cathedral silence. And as I stood in the nave of those concrete
miracles of the medieval movement of belief and faith, transported by
the triumphant arches of Gothic glory, often I felt again the musical
vibrations of Shaw's cathedral sermon.



VI

Pugilist vs. Poet


Had I been a black Diogenes exploring the white world with my African
lamp, I could have proclaimed: I saw Bernard Shaw! Otherwise I did not
get a grand thrill out of London. And I felt entirely out of sympathy
with the English environment. There was the climate, of course, which
nobody likes. In my young poetic exuberance in the clean green high
hills of Jamaica, I had chanted blithely and naïvely of "chimney
factories pouring smoke."

But after working in a factory in New York and getting well acquainted
with the heat and smoke of railroad kitchens and engines, I was no
longer romantic about factory smoke. And London was enveloped in smoke
most of the time. When I was a boy in the tropics I always rejoiced in
the periodic fogs which rose up out of the rivers like grand masses of
fine fleecy clouds coming out of the belly of the earth and ascending
to the sky. But the fog of London was like a heavy suffocating shroud.
It not only wrapped you around but entered into your throat like
a strangling nightmare. Yet the feeling of London was so harshly
unfriendly to me that sometimes I was happy in the embrace of the
enfolding fog. London was the only great northern city in which I was
obliged to wear an overcoat all the year round.

However, it was more than the climate that made London uncongenial. I
lived for months in Brittany and it rained all the time, unceasingly.
Yet I loved the environment, because the Bretons were such a
sympathetic people. Like the quiet brown fields and the rugged coasts,
even like the unending fishermen's nets everywhere, the unceasing rain
was a charming part of the whole harmony of their way of living. But
the English as a whole were a strangely unsympathetic people, as coldly
chilling as their English fog.

I don't think I could have survived the ordeal of more than a year's
residence in London if I had not had the freedom of two clubs. The
membership of both clubs was overwhelmingly foreign. And perhaps that
was why I felt most of the time that I was living on foreign instead of
English soil.

One club was for colored soldiers. It was situated in a basement in
Drury Lane. There was a host of colored soldiers in London, from the
West Indies and Africa, with a few colored Americans, East Indians,
and Egyptians among them. A West Indian student from Oxford introduced
me to the club. I went often and listened to the soldiers telling
tales of their war experiences in France, Egypt, and Arabia. Many were
interested in what American Negroes were thinking and writing. And so I
brought to the club copies of American Negro magazines and newspapers:
_The Crisis_, _The Messenger_, _The Negro World_, the Pittsburgh
_Courier_ and the Chicago _Defender_. A soldier from Jamaica invited me
on a holiday trip to the camp at Winchester.

I wrote a series of articles about the colored soldiers and their club,
which Hubert Harrison featured in the _Negro World_, the organ of the
Garvey Back-to-Africa Movement. In due time the _Negro World_ with
the first article arrived at the Drury Lane club. The Englishwoman
in charge of the club took exception to the article. I think she was
the widow of a sergeant major who had served England in India. She
had given me an interview, telling about her "colored boys" and their
virtues, if white people knew how to manage them. And I had quoted
her and said she had a patronizing white maternal attitude toward her
colored charges. The Englishwoman did not like that. And so, being
_persona non grata_, I transferred most of my attention to the other
club.

The International Club was full of excitement, with its dogmatists and
doctrinaires of radical left ideas: Socialists, Communists, anarchists,
syndicalists, one-big-unionists and trade unionists, soap-boxers,
poetasters, scribblers, editors of little radical sheets which flourish
in London. But foreigners formed the majority of the membership. The
Jewish element was the largest. The Polish Jews and the Russian Jews
were always intellectually at odds. The German Jews were aloof. There
were also Czechs, Italians, and Irish nationalists, and rumors of spies.

For the first time I found myself in an atmosphere of doctrinaire and
dogmatic ideas in which people devoted themselves entirely to the
discussion and analysis of social events from a radical and Marxian
point of view. There was an uncompromising earnestness and seriousness
about those radicals that reminded me of an orthodox group of persons
engaged in the discussion of a theological creed. Only at the
International Club I was not alienated by the radicals as I would have
been by the theologians. The contact stimulated and broadened my social
outlook and plunged me into the reading of Karl Marx.

There was so much emphasis placed upon Marxian intellects and
un-Marxian minds, the Marxian and non-Marxian way of approach to
social organization, that I felt intellectually inadequate and decided
to educate myself. One thing seemed very clear to me: the world was
in the beginning of passing through a great social change, and I was
excited by the possibilities. These people believed that Marx was the
true prophet of the new social order. Suppose they were not wrong! And
if not altogether right, suppose they were nearly right? History had
taught me that the face of the world had been changed before by an
obscure prophet. I had no reason to think that the world I lived in was
permanent, solid and unshakable: the World War had just come to a truce.

So I started reading Marx. But it wasn't entertaining reading. Much of
it was like studying subjects you dislike, which are necessary to pass
an examination. However, I got the essential stuff. And a Marx emerged
from his pages different from my former idea of him as a torch-burning
prophet of social revolution. I saw the picture of a man imprisoned by
walls upon walls of books and passionately studying the history and
philosophy and science of the world, so that he might outline a new
social system for the world. I thought that Marx belonged even more to
the institutions of learning than to the street corners from which I
had so often heard his gospel preached. And I marveled that any modern
system of social education could ignore the man who stood like a great
fixed monument in the way of the world.

If there was no romance for me in London, there was plenty of
radical knowledge. All the outstanding extreme radicals came to the
International Club to lecture and I heard most of them--Walton Newbold,
the first Communist Member of Parliament; Saklatvala, the Indian Parsee
and first unofficial Communist Member of Parliament; A.J. Cook of the
Miners' Federation, who later became its secretary; Guy Aldred, an
anarchist editor; Jack Tanner, a shop steward committee leader; Arthur
McManus and William Gallacher, the agitators from the Clyde; George
Lansbury, the editor of the _Daily Herald_; and Sylvia Pankhurst, who
had deserted the suffragette for the workers' movement.

I was the only African visiting the International Club, but I soon
introduced others: a mulatto sailor from Limehouse, a West Indian
student from Oxford, a young black minister of the Anglican church, who
was ambitious to have a colored congregation in London, a young West
Indian doctor from Dulwich, three soldiers from the Drury Lane club,
and a couple of boxers. The minister and the doctor did not make a
second visit, but the others did.

The club had also its social diversions and there was always dancing.
The manager, desiring to offer something different, asked the boxers to
put on an exhibition match. The boxers were willing and a large crowd
filled the auditorium of the club to see them.

One was a coffee brown, the other bronze; both were strapping
broad-chested fellows. Their bodies gleamed as if they were painted in
oil. The darker one was like a stout bamboo, smooth and hairless. They
put on an entertaining act, showing marvelous foot and muscle work,
dancing and feinting all over the stage.

Some weeks later the black boxer gave me a ticket for his official
fight, which was taking place in Holborn. His opponent was white and
English. I was glad of the opportunity to see my friend in a real
fight. And it was a good fight. Both men were in good form, possessing
powerful punches. And they fully satisfied the crowd with the brutal
pleasure it craved. In the ninth round, I think, the black man won with
a knockout.

Some fellows from the Drury Lane club had come to encourage their
comrade. After the match we grouped around him with congratulations. We
proposed to go to a little colored restaurant off Shaftesbury Avenue
to celebrate the event. At that moment, a white man pushed his way
through to the boxer and putting out his hand said: Shake, Darkey, you
did a clean job; it was a fine fight. The boxer shook hands and thanked
his admirer quietly. He was a modest type of fellow. Then he turned to
a little woman almost hidden in the group--a shy, typically nondescript
and dowdy Englishwoman, with her hat set inelegantly back on her
head--and introduced her to his white admirer: "This is my wife." The
woman held out her hand, but the white man, ignoring it, exclaimed:
"You damned nigger!" The boxer hauled back and hit him in the mouth and
he dropped to the pavement.

We hurried away to the restaurant. We sat around, the poor woman among
us, endeavoring to woo the spirit of celebration. But we were all wet.
The boxer said: "I guess they don't want no colored in this damned
white man's country." He dropped his head down on the table and sobbed
like a child. And I thought that that was _his_ knockout.

I thought, too, of Bernard Shaw's asking why I did not choose pugilism
instead of poetry for a profession. He no doubt imagined that it would
be easier for a black man to win success at boxing than at writing
in a white world. But looking at life through an African telescope I
could not see such a great difference in the choice. For, according to
British sporting rules, no Negro boxer can compete for a championship
in the land of cricket, and only Negroes who are British subjects are
given a chance to fight. These regulations have nothing to do with the
science of boxing or the Negro's fitness to participate. They are made
merely to discourage boxers who are black and of African descent.

Perhaps the black poet has more potential scope than the pugilist. The
literary censors of London have not yet decreed that no book by a Negro
should be published in Britain--not yet!



VII

A Job in London


Yet London was not wholly Hell, for it was possible for me to compose
poetry some of the time. No place can be altogether a God-forsaken
Sahara or swamp in which a man is able to discipline and compose his
emotions into self-expression. In London I wrote "Flame-heart."

  _So much I have forgotten in ten years,
      So much in ten brief years! I have forgot
  What time the purple apples come to juice,
      And what month brings the shy forget-me-not.
  I have forgot the special, startling season
      Of the pimento's flowering and fruiting;
  What time of year the ground doves brown the fields
      And fill the noonday with their curious fluting.
  I have forgotten much, but still remember
  The poinsettia's red, blood-red in warm December._

  _I still recall the honey-fever grass,
      But cannot recollect the high days when
  We rooted them out of the ping-wing path
      To stop the mad bees in the rabbit pen.
  I often try to think in what sweet month
      The languid painted ladies used to dapple
  The yellow by-road mazing from the main,
      Sweet with the golden threads of the rose-apple.
  I have forgotten--strange--but quite remember
  The poinsettia's red, blood-red in warm December._

  _What weeks, what months, what time of the mild year
      We cheated school to have our fling at tops?
  What days our wine-thrilled bodies pulsed with joy
      Feasting upon blackberries in the copse?
  Oh some I know! I have embalmed the days,
      Even the sacred moments when we played,
  All innocent of passion, uncorrupt,
      At noon and evening in the flame-heart's shade.
  We were so happy, happy, I remember,
  Beneath the poinsettia's red in warm December._

And then I became acquainted with Sylvia Pankhurst. It happened thus.
The _Daily Herald_, the organ of British organized labor and of the
Christian radicals, had created a national sensation by starting
a campaign against the French employment of black troops in the
subjection of Germany.

The headlines were harrowing:

"Black Scourge in Europe," "Black Peril on the Rhine," "Brutes in
French Uniform," "Sexual Horrors Let Loose by France," "Black Menace of
40,000 Troops," "Appeal to the Women of Europe."

The instigator of the campaign was the muckraker E.D. Morel, whose pen
had been more honorably employed in the exposure of Belgian atrocities
in the Congo. Associated with him was a male "expert" who produced
certain "facts" about the physiological peculiarities of African sex,
which only a prurient-minded white man could find.

Behind the smoke screen of the _Daily Herald_ campaign there were a
few significant facts. There was great labor unrest in the industrial
region of the Rhineland. The Communists had seized important plants.
The junkers were opposing the Communists. The Social-Democratic
government was impotent. The French marched in an army. The horror
of German air raids and submarine warfare was still fresh in the mind
of the British public. And it was not easy to work up and arouse the
notorious moral righteousness of the English in favor of the Germans
and against the French. Searching for a propaganda issue, the Christian
radicals found the colored troops in the Rhineland. Poor black billy
goat.

I wrote a letter to George Lansbury, the editor of the _Daily Herald_,
and pointed out that his black-scourge articles would be effective in
stirring up more prejudice against Negroes. I thought it was the duty
of his paper as a radical organ to enlighten its readers about the
real reasons why the English considered colored troops undesirable
in Europe, instead of appealing indirectly to illogical emotional
prejudices. Lansbury did not print my letter, but sent me a private
note saying that he was not personally prejudiced against Negroes. I
had no reason to think that Lansbury was personally prejudiced. The
previous summer, when colored men were assaulted by organized bands
of whites in the English ports and their bedding and furniture hurled
into the streets and burned, Lansbury had energetically denounced the
action. But I didn't consider the matter a personal issue. It was the
public attitude of the _Daily Herald_ that had aroused me. An English
friend advised me to send the letter to Sylvia Pankhurst, who was very
critical of the policies of the _Daily Herald_. I did, and Sylvia
Pankhurst promptly printed my letter in her weekly, the _Workers'
Dreadnought_.

Maybe I was not civilized enough to understand why the sex of the black
race should be put on exhibition to persuade the English people to
decide which white gang should control the coal and iron of the Ruhr.
However, it is necessary to face the fact that prejudices, however
unreasonable they may be, are real--individual, national and racial
prejudices. My experience of the English convinced me that prejudice
against Negroes had become almost congenital among them. I think the
Anglo-Saxon mind becomes morbid when it turns on the sex life of
colored people. Perhaps a psychologist might be able to explain why.

Sylvia Pankhurst must have liked the style of my letter, for she wrote
asking me to call at her printing office in Fleet Street. I found a
plain little Queen-Victoria sized woman with plenty of long unruly
bronze-like hair. There was no distinction about her clothes, and on
the whole she was very undistinguished. But her eyes were fiery, even a
little fanatic, with a glint of shrewdness.

She said she wanted me to do some work for the _Workers' Dreadnought_.
Perhaps I could dig up something along the London docks from the
colored as well as the white seamen and write from a point of view
which would be fresh and different. Also I was assigned to read the
foreign newspapers from America, India, Australia, and other parts
of the British Empire, and mark the items which might interest
_Dreadnought_ readers. In this work I was assisted by one Comrade Vie.
Comrade Vie read the foreign-language papers, mainly French and German.

The opportunity to practice a little practical journalism was not to be
missed. A little more schooling, a few more lessons--learning something
from everything--keeping the best in my mind for future creative work.

The association with Pankhurst put me in the nest of extreme radicalism
in London. The other male-controlled radical groups were quite hostile
to the Pankhurst group and its rather hysterical militancy. And the
group was perhaps more piquant than important. But Pankhurst herself
had a personality as picturesque and passionate as any radical in
London. She had left the suffragette legion for the working-class
movement, when she discovered that the leading ladies of the legion
were not interested in the condition of working women.

And in the labor movement she was always jabbing her hat pin into the
hides of the smug and slack labor leaders. Her weekly might have been
called the Dread Wasp. And wherever imperialism got drunk and went wild
among native peoples, the Pankhurst paper would be on the job. She was
one of the first leaders in England to stand up for Soviet Russia. And
in 1918 she started the Russian Information Bureau, which remained for
a long time the only source of authentic news from Russia.

Comrade Vie was a very young foreigner with a bare bland innocent face.
He read and spoke several languages. I did not know his nationality and
refrained from asking. For the Pankhurst organization, though small,
was revolutionary, and from experience the militant suffragettes knew
a lot about conspiracy. However, I suspected that Comrade Vie was a
foreign revolutionist. The Pankhurst secretary, a romantic middle-class
young woman, had hinted to me that Comrade Vie was more important than
he appeared to be.

Comrade Vie wrote also and we often compared articles. I criticized his
English and he criticized my point of view, showing me how I could be
more effectively radical.

Soon after I became associated with the _Workers' Dreadnought_, a
sawmill strike broke out in London. Most of the sawmills were in the
East End, where also the publishing office of the _Dreadnought_ was
located. One mill was directly opposite the _Dreadnought_ office. I was
assigned to do an article on the strike. A few of the sawmill workers
were sympathetic to the _Dreadnought_ organization, and one of the
younger of them volunteered to take me round.

There were some sixty sawmills in London, one of the most important of
which was either owned or partly controlled by George Lansbury, Labor
Member of Parliament and managing editor of the _Daily Herald_. Some
of the strikers informed me that the Lansbury mill had in its employ
some workers who were not members of the sawmill union and who were not
striking. Technically, such workers were scabs. The strikers thought it
would make an excellent story for the militant _Dreadnought_. So did I.

The name of Lansbury was symbolic of all that was simon-pure, pious
and self-righteous in the British Labor movement. As the boss of the
_Daily Herald_, he stood at the center like an old bearded angel of
picturesque honesty, with his right arm around the neck of the big
trade-union leaders and Parliamentarians and his left waving to the
Independent Labor partyites and all the radical Left. Like a little cat
up against a big dog, the _Workers' Dreadnought_ was always spitting at
the _Daily Herald_.

I thought the story would give the _Dreadnought_ some more fire to
spit. Here was my chance for getting even with the _Daily Herald_ for
its black-scourge-in-Europe campaign. Comrade Vie helped me put some
ginger into my article. When I showed the article to Miss Smyth, the
upper-middle-class person who was Pankhurst's aid, she gasped and said:
"But this is a scoop." Her gentle-lady poker face was lit as she read.

Finally the article reached Sylvia Pankhurst. She summoned me and
said: "Your article is excellent but I'm so sorry we cannot print it."
"Why?" I asked. "Because," said she, "we owe Lansbury twenty pounds.
Besides, I have borrowed paper from the _Daily Herald_ to print the
_Dreadnought_. I can't print that."

It is possible that Miss Pankhurst acted more from a feeling of
personal loyalty. Although Lansbury was centrist and she was extreme
leftist, they were personal friends, ever since they had been
associated in the suffrage cause. And after all, one might concede that
there are items which the capitalist press does not consider fit to
print for capitalist reasons, and items which the radical press does
not consider fit to print for radical reasons.

That summer Sylvia Pankhurst made the underground trip to Russia to
attend the Second Congress of the Third International.

Early in September, 1920, I was sent down to Portsmouth to report the
Trades Union Congress for the _Dreadnought_. There were gathered at the
Congress some of the leaders who later became members of the British
Labor Government: J.H. Thomas, J.R. Clynes, Arthur Henderson, A.A.
Purcell, Herbert Morrison, Frank Hodges, and Margaret Bonfield. The
most picturesque personage of them all was Frank Hodges, the secretary
of the Miners' Federation, who in his style and manner appeared like a
representative of the nobility. I mentioned this to A.J. Cook, who was
a minor official of the Federation, and he informed me that Hodges was
always hunting foxes with the lords.

At the press table I met Scott Nearing, who, after listening to clever
speeches by the labor leaders, whispered to me that England would soon
be the theater of the next revolution. The speeches were warm; Labor
was feeling its strength in those times. Even J.H. Thomas was red,
at least in the face, about Winston Churchill, who had declared that
"Labor was not fit to govern."

As a _Dreadnought_ reporter, I had been instructed to pay little
attention to the official leaders, but to seek out any significant
rank-and-filers and play them up in my story. I was taken up by
delegates from the Rhondda Valley in South Wales, which was the extreme
leftist element of the Miners' Federation. One of them, A.J. Cook, was
exceptionally friendly and gave me interesting information about the
British Labor movement. He was very proud that it was the most powerful
in the world and included every class of worker. He said he believed
the labor movement was the only hope for Negroes because they were in
the lowest economic group. He pointed out that J.R. Clynes' General
Union of Workers consisted of the lowest class of people (domestic
servants and porters and hotel workers) and yet it was extremely
important in the councils of the Trades Union Congress.

At that time I could not imagine Cook becoming a very influential
official. He was extremely loquacious, but his ideas were an odd mix-up
of liberal sentiment and socialist thought, and sentimental to an
extreme. He was also a parson, and divided his time between preaching
and the pit. However, the radical miners told me they were going to
push Cook forward to take the place of Hodges, whom they could no
longer stomach. And sure enough, in a few brief years Cook became the
radical secretary of the Miners' Federation.

But the labor official at the Congress who carried me away with him
was Robert Smillie, the president of the Miners' Federation. Crystal
Eastman had given me a note to him and he had said a few wise words to
me about the necessity of colored labor being organized, especially
in the vast European colonies, for the betterment of its own living
standard and to protect that of white organized labor. Smillie was
like a powerful ash which had forced itself up, coaxing nourishment
out of infertile soil, and towering over saplings and shrubs. His
face and voice were so terribly full of conviction that in comparison
the colleagues around him appeared theatrical. When he stood forth
to speak the audience was shot through with excitement, and subdued.
He compelled you to think along his line whether or not you agreed
with him. I remember his passionate speech for real democracy in the
Congress, advocating proportional representation and pointing out that
on vital issues the united Miners' Federation was often outvoted by a
nondescript conglomeration like J.R. Clynes' General Union of Workers
for example. You felt that Smillie had convinced the Congress, but when
the vote was taken it went against him.

I wrote my article on the Trades Union Congress around Smillie
because his personality and address were more significant in my
opinion than any rank-and-filer's. It was featured on the front page
of the _Dreadnought_. But when Pankhurst returned from Russia, she
sharply reproved me for it, saying that it wasn't the policy of the
_Dreadnought_ to praise the official labor leaders, but to criticize
them. Naturally, I resented the criticism, especially as Pankhurst had
suppressed my article on Lansbury.

Just before leaving for the Trade Union Congress I was introduced to
a young English sailor named Springhall. He was a splendid chap. He
had been put into the British navy as a boy and had developed into a
fine man, not merely physically, but intellectually. Springhall was
a constant reader of the _Dreadnought_ and other social propaganda
literature and he said that other men on his ship were eager for more
stuff about the international workers' movement. At that time there
was a widespread discontent and desire for better wages among the rank
and file of the navy. Springhall came to the _Dreadnought_ publishing
office in the Old Ford Road and we gave him many copies of the
_Dreadnought_. The _Dreadnought_ was legally on sale on the newsstands,
so he had the legal right to take as many as he desired. Before he left
he promised to send me some navy news for the paper.

When I returned to London I found a letter from the young sailor,
Springhall, with some interesting items for the paper and the
information that he was sending an article. The article arrived in a
few days and it was a splendid piece of precious information. But its
contents were so important and of such a nature that I put it away and
waited for Pankhurst to return and pass it.

Pankhurst returned late in September. I turned over Springhall's
document to her. She was enthusiastic, edited the document, and decided
to give it the front page. We used a nom de plume and a fictitious name
for a battleship. Only Pankhurst and myself knew who the author was.
The intelligence of the stuff was so extraordinary that she did not
want to risk having the youth's identity discovered by the authorities.
And she thought he could serve the social cause more excellently by
remaining at his post.

A couple of days after the issue appeared, the _Dreadnought_ office
was raided by the police. I was just going out, leaving the little
room on the top floor where I always worked, when I met Pankhurst's
private secretary coming upstairs. She whispered that Scotland Yard
was downstairs. Immediately I thought of Springhall's article and I
returned to my room, where I had the original under a blotter. Quickly
I folded it and stuck it in my sock. Going down, I met a detective
coming up. They had turned Pankhurst's office upside down and descended
to the press-room, without finding what they were looking for.

"And what are you?" the detective asked.

"Nothing, Sir," I said, with a big black grin. Chuckling, he let me
pass. (I learned afterward that he was the ace of Scotland Yard.) I
walked out of that building and into another, and entering a water
closet I tore up the original article, dropped it in, and pulled the
chain. When I got home to the Bow Road that evening I found another
detective waiting for me. He was very polite and I was more so. With
alacrity I showed him all my papers, but he found nothing but lyrics.

Pankhurst was arrested and charged with attempting to incite
dissatisfaction among His Majesty's Forces. She was released on bail
and given time to straighten out her affairs before she came up for
trial. She received many messages of sympathy and among them was a
brief telegram from Bernard Shaw asking: "Why did you let them get you?"

Pankhurst's arrest was the beginning of a drive against the Reds.
For weeks the big press had carried on a campaign against Red
propaganda and alien agitators and Bolshevik gold in Britain. Liberal
intellectuals like Bertrand Russell and Mrs. Snowden had visited
Russia, and labor men like Robert Williams and George Lansbury. There
was an organized labor and liberal demand to end the Russian blockade.
And when the press broadcast the fact that $325,000 of Bolshevik
capital had been offered to the _Daily Herald_, it must have struck
Scotland Yard like a bomb.

Within a week of Pankhurst's arrest, Comrade Vie was seized just
as he was leaving England to go abroad. He was arrested as he was
departing from the house of a member of Parliament who was a Communist
sympathizer. The police announced that he was a Bolshevik courier. They
discovered on his person letters from Pankhurst to Lenin, Zinoviev and
other members of the Bolshevik Politbureau; also notes in cipher,
documents of information about the armed forces, the important
industrial centers, and Ireland, a manual for officers of the future
British Red army and statements about the distribution of money.
Comrade Vie was even more important than I had suspected.

One evening when I got back home from Fleet Street I was surprised to
find Springhall, the sailor, there. He had come up to London to see
Pankhurst. He said his ship was leaving England and he would like to
talk to her. He was on one of the crack battleships. I begged him for
God's sake to leave at once, that he could not see Pankhurst, who had
been enjoined from political activity by the court and was undoubtedly
under police surveillance. Also, as editor of the _Dreadnought_, she
had taken the full responsibility for his article, and her difficult
situation in the movement would be made worse if the police should get
him too.

Springhall returned to his ship. But he was bold with youthful zeal
and extremely incautious. I remember his actively participating in
his uniform in the grand demonstration in Trafalgar Square for the
hunger-striking and dying mayor of Cork. And he marched with the
crowds upon the prison and fought with the police and got severely
beaten up. He wanted to quit the navy, believing that he could be a
better agitator outside. But his friends on the outside thought that
he could be of more importance at his post. Anyway he must have acted
indiscreetly and created suspicion against himself, for when his ship
arrived at its next port, he was summarily dismissed. However, his
revolutionary ardor did not handicap him in being clever enough to
maneuver his dismissal and steer clear of a court-martial. A few years
after he visited Russia, and later I was informed that he subsequently
became an active leader of the British Communist Youth Movement.

Comrade Vie was convicted under the simple charge of alien
non-registration. He was sentenced to six months' imprisonment and
to pay the costs of his trial and deportation. Upon his release,
Pankhurst's secretary followed him to Russia, where they were married.
Apparently it was his preoccupation with his love affair that enabled
the detectives to trap Comrade Vie. Three years later I saw them again
in Moscow, but he did not seem to be importantly employed.



VIII

Regarding Reactionary Criticism


My little brown book of verse, _Spring in New Hampshire_, appeared
in the midst of the radical troubles in the fall of 1920. I had not
neglected the feeling of poetry, even while I was listening to Marxian
expositions at the International Club and had become involved in
radical activities. A little action was a nice stimulant for another
lyric.

C.K. Ogden, the author of _Basic English_ and _The Foundation of
Esthetics_, besides steering me round the picture galleries and being
otherwise kind, had published a set of my verses in his _Cambridge
Magazine_. Later he got me a publisher.

But I was so anxious about leaving London for America that I hardly
felt the excitement I should about the first book I had done since I
left Jamaica. The Pankhurst group had been disrupted by the police
raids. Many of the members were acquainted with Comrade Vie, but
unaware of his real identity. His unexpected arrest and the disclosures
of the police that he was a Bolshevik agent had started lots of
rubberneck gossip. Some asserted that Comrade Vie had been deliberately
betrayed. And members accused other members of being spies and
traitors. A dissident group, headed by Edgar Whitehead, the secretary
of the organization, desired to bring Pankhurst herself to a private
trial and I also had to give an accounting of my activities.

One evening, when I visited the International Club the secretary showed
me an anonymous letter he had received, accusing me also of being a
spy. I declare that I felt sick and was seized with a crazy craving
to get quickly out of that atmosphere and far away from London. But
I had used up all of my return fare. All I had received from the
_Dreadnought_ was payment for my board. The organization was always in
need of money.

My little book had brought me no money. I hadn't been banking on it. I
had stopped writing for the _Negro World_ because it had not paid for
contributions. An English friend, and I.W.W. who had lived in America
(I think he had been deported thence), undertook to find a group of
friends to put up the fare to get me back there.

While I was hotly preparing my departure, Sylvia Pankhurst was
sentenced to six months' imprisonment. Pankhurst was a good agitator
and fighter, but she wasn't a leader. She possessed the magnetism to
attract people to her organization, but she did not have the power to
hold them. I remember a few of them: William Gallacher, Saklatvala
(the Indian M.P.), A.J. Cook, who became the secretary of the Miners'
Federation, and that very brilliant and talented writing couple, Eden
and Cedar Paul. And I was informed that before my time there had been
others even more brilliant among the Left literary and artistic set. I
remember saying to Springhall that it was a pity the organization was
too small for him. It was a one-woman show, not broad-based enough to
play a decisive rôle in the labor movement.

At last, when I was safely fixed in my third-class bunk, I had time to
read and ponder over the English reviews of my book. If it is difficult
to ascertain the real attitude of the common people of any country
regarding certain ideas and things, it should be easy enough to find
out that of the élite by writing a book. The reviews will reveal more
or less the mind of the better classes.

In most of the reviews of my poems there was a flippant note, either
open or veiled, at the idea of a Negro writing poetry. After reading
them I could understand better why Bernard Shaw had asked me why I
did not go in for pugilism instead of poetry. I think I got as much
amusement out of reading them from my own angle as the reviewers had in
writing from theirs.

But more than all there was one that deserves special mention. It was
the review published in the _Spectator_, the property, I think, of the
Strachey family, and the organ of the Tory intellectuals. There can be
little doubt that the _London Spectator_ represents the opinion of that
English group, which, because of its wealth and power, its facilities
for and standards of high education, and its domination of most of the
universe, either directly or indirectly, is the most superior in the
world.

Said the _Spectator_ critic: "_Spring in New Hampshire_ is
extrinsically as well as intrinsically interesting. It is written by
a man who is a pure-blooded Negro.... Perhaps the ordinary reader's
first impulse in realizing that the book is by an American Negro is to
inquire into its good taste. Not until we are satisfied that his work
does not overstep the barriers which a not quite explicable but deep
instinct in us is ever alive to maintain can we judge it with genuine
fairness. Mr. Claude McKay never offends our sensibilities. His love
poetry is clear of the hint which would put our racial instinct against
him, whether we would or not."

So there it bobbed up again. As it was among the élite of the
class-conscious working class, so it was among the aristocracy of the
upper class: the bugaboo of sex--the African's sex, whether he is a
poet or pugilist.

Why should a Negro's love poetry be offensive to the white man, who
prides himself on being modern and civilized? Now it seems to me that
if the white man is really more civilized than the colored (be the
color black, brown or yellow), then the white man should take Negro
poetry and pugilism in his stride, just as he takes Negro labor in
Africa and fattens on it.

If the critic of the organ of British aristocracy had used his
facilities for education and knowledge and tolerance (which the average
black student has not) to familiarize himself with the history and
derivations of poetry he might have concluded that the love poetry of
a Negro might be in better taste than the gory poetry of a civilized
British barbarian like Rudyard Kipling.

It seems to me that every European white lover of lyric and amatory
poetry should be informed that one of the greatest, if not the
greatest, poets of love, was a Negro named Antar. And that European or
white man's love poetry today probably owes much of its inspiration to
Antar, who was the son of a Negro woman and an Arabian chieftain.

One of the big surprises of my living in North Africa was the discovery
that even the illiterate Moor is acquainted with the history and the
poetry of Antar. Often in the Arab cafés (which I haunted like a
_loco_, because of the native music), when I was especially enthralled
by the phrasing of a song, I was informed that it was an _Antari_ (a
song from Antar). When I was introduced as a poet there was not a
suspicion of surprise among the natives. Instead I was surprised by
their flattering remarks: "A poet! _Mezziane! Mezziane!_ Our greatest
poet, Antar, was a Negro."

W.A. Clouston, who writes with authority on Arabian poetry, says: "It
is far from impossible that the famous romance of Antar produced the
model for the earliest of the romances of chivalry." Certainly it was
the Arabian poets who, upon the Arab conquest of Spain, introduced
lyric feeling into the rude and barbaric accents of the Europeans. The
troubadours of southern Europe stem directly from the Arabian poets.
The Arab poets and musicians were the original troubadours. And happily
they exist today exactly as they did thirteen centuries ago, wherever
Moslem culture holds sway.

Says Sismondi, the famous scholar: "It is from them that we have
derived that intoxication of love, that tenderness and delicacy of
sentiment and that reverential awe of woman, by turns slaves and
divinities, which have operated so powerfully on our chivalrous
feelings."

But it should not be necessary for me in this place to attempt to
enlighten the English gentlemen. I am not a scholar and this book is
not scholarly. The English gentleman has the means and the material to
educate himself that no Negro has. If he does not make the proper use
of them it must be because he is spoiled by his modern civilization.
The story of Antar was translated from the Arabian into English way
back in 1820, and by an Englishman named Terrick Hamilton.

Antar is as great in Arabian literature as Homer in Greek. Said the
founder of Islam: "I have never heard an Arab described whom I should
like to have seen so much as Antar." In the universal white system of
education the white school boy learns about Homer and Virgil and their
works, even if he does not read Greek and Latin. He learns nothing of
Antar, although it is possible that European poetry derives more from
Antar than from Homer. Yet the white child is so rich in its heritage
that it may not be such a great loss to him if he grows up in ignorance
of the story and poetry of Antar. The Negro child, born into an
inferior position in the overwhelming white world, is in a different
category. He should know something of the Antar who was born a slave,
who fought for his liberation, who loved so profoundly passionately and
chastely that his love inspired and uplifted him to be one of the poets
of the Arabian pleiades.

 _Behold the sport of passion in my noble person!
 But I have thanked my forebearance, applauded my resolution.
 And the slave has been elevated above his master;
 For I have concealed my passion and kept my secret,
 I will not leave a word for the railers, and I will not ease the hearts
 of my enemies by the violation of my honor.
 I have borne the evils of fortune, till I have discovered its secret
 meaning ...
 I have met every peril in my bosom,
 And the world can cast no reproach on me for my complexion:
 My blackness has not diminished my glory._

        *       *       *       *       *

 _My mother is Zebeeda,
 I disavow not her name and I am Antar,
 But I am not vainglorious ...
 Her dark complexion sparkles like a sabre in the shades of night
 And her shape is like the well-formed spear...._

To me these verses of Antar written more than twelve centuries ago are
more modern and full of meaning for a Negro than is Homer. Perhaps if
black and mulatto children knew more of the story and the poetry of
Antar, we might have better Negro poets. But in our Negro schools and
colleges we learn a lot of Homer and nothing of Antar.



PART THREE

NEW YORK HORIZON



IX

Back in Harlem


Like fixed massed sentinels guarding the approaches to the great
metropolis, again the pyramids of New York in their Egyptian majesty
dazzled my sight like a miracle of might and took my breath like the
banging music of Wagner assaulting one's spirit and rushing it skyward
with the pride and power of an eagle.

The feeling of the dirty steerage passage across the Atlantic was swept
away in the immense wonder of clean, vertical heaven-challenging lines,
a glory to the grandeur of space.

Oh, I wished that it were possible to know New York in that way
only--as a masterpiece wrought for the illumination of the sight, a
splendor lifting aloft and shedding its radiance like a searchlight,
making one big and great with feeling. Oh, that I should never draw
nearer to descend into its precipitous gorges, where visions are broken
and shattered and one becomes one of a million, average, ordinary,
insignificant.

At last the ship was moored and I came down to the pavement. Ellis
Island: doctors peered in my eyes, officials scrutinized my passport,
and the gates were thrown open.

The elevated swung me up to Harlem. At first I felt a little fear and
trembling, like a stray hound scenting out new territory. But soon I
was stirred by familiar voices and the shapes of houses and saloons,
and I was inflated with confidence. A wave of thrills flooded the
arteries of my being, and I felt as if I had undergone initiation as a
member of my tribe. And I was happy. Yes, it was a rare sensation again
to be just one black among many. It was good to be lost in the shadows
of Harlem again. It was an adventure to loiter down Fifth and Lenox
avenues and promenade along Seventh Avenue. Spareribs and corn pone,
fried chicken and corn fritters and sweet potatoes were like honey to
my palate.

There was a room for me in the old house on One Hundred Thirty-first
Street, but there was no trace of Manda. I could locate none of my
close railroad friends. But I found Sanina. Sanina was an attractive
quadroon from Jamaica who could pass as white. Before prohibition she
presided over a buffet flat. Now she animated a cosy speakeasy. Her
rendezvous on upper Seventh Avenue, with its pink curtains and spreads,
created an artificial rose-garden effect. It was always humming like
a beehive with brown butterflies and flames of all ages from the West
Indies and from the South.

Sanina infatuated them all. She possessed the cunning and fascination
of a serpent, and more charm than beauty. Her clients idolized her
with a loyalty and respect that were rare. I was never quite sure what
was the secret of her success. For although she was charming, she was
ruthless in her affairs. I felt a congeniality and sweet nostalgia in
her company, for we had grown up together from kindergarten. Underneath
all of her shrewd New York getting-byness there was discernible the
green bloom of West Indian naïveté. Yet her poise was a marvel and kept
her there floating like an imperishable block of butter on the crest of
the dark heaving wave of Harlem. Sanina always stirred me to remember
her dominating octoroon grandmother (who was also my godmother) who
beat her hard white father in a duel they fought over the disposal
of her body. But that is a West Indian tale.... I think that some of
Sanina's success came from her selectiveness. Although there were many
lovers mixing up their loving around her, she kept herself exclusively
for the lover of her choice.

I passed ten days of purely voluptuous relaxation. My fifty dollars
were spent and Sanina was feeding me. I was uncomfortable. I began
feeling intellectual again. I wrote to my friend, Max Eastman, that
I had returned to New York. My letter arrived at precisely the right
moment. The continuation of _The Liberator_ had become a problem. Max
Eastman had recently resigned the editorship in order to devote more
time to creative writing. Crystal Eastman also was retiring from the
management to rest and write a book on feminism. Floyd Dell had just
published his successful novel, _Moon Calf_, and was occupied with the
writing of another book.

Max Eastman invited me to Croton over the week-end to discuss the
situation. He proposed to resume the editorship again if I could manage
the sub-editing that Floyd Dell did formerly. I responded with my
hand and my head and my heart. Thus I became associate editor of _The
Liberator_. My experience with the _Dreadnought_ in London was of great
service to me now.

The times were auspicious for the magazine. About the time that I was
installed it received a windfall of $11,000 from the government, which
was I believe a refund on mailing privileges that had been denied the
magazine during the war.

Soon after taking on my job I called on Frank Harris, I took along
an autographed copy of _Spring in New Hampshire_, the book of verses
that I had published in London. The first thing Frank Harris asked was
if I had seen Bernard Shaw. I told him all about my visit and Shaw's
cathedral sermon. Harris said that perhaps Shaw was getting religion at
last and might die a good Catholic. Harris was not as well-poised as
when I first met him. _Pearson's Magazine_ was not making money, and he
was in debt and threatened with suspension of publication. He said he
desired to return to Europe where he could find leisure to write, that
he was sick and tired of the editor business. He did not congratulate
me on my new job. The incident between him and _The Liberator_ was
still a rancor in his mind. He wasn't a man who forgot hurts easily.

But he was pleased that I had put over the publication of a book of
poems in London. "It's a hard, mean city for any kind of genius," he
said, "and that's an achievement for you." He looked through the little
brown-covered book. Then he ran his finger down the table of contents
closely scrutinizing. I noticed his aggressive brow become heavier and
scowling. Suddenly he roared: "Where is the poem?"

"Which one?" I asked with a bland countenance, as if I didn't know
which he meant.

"You know which," he growled. "That fighting poem, 'If We Must Die.'
Why isn't it printed here?"

I was ashamed. My face was scorched with fire. I stammered: "I was
advised to keep it out."

"You are a bloody traitor to your race, sir!" Frank Harris shouted.
"A damned traitor to your own integrity. That's what the English and
civilization have done to your people. Emasculated them. Deprived them
of their guts. Better you were a head-hunting, blood-drinking cannibal
of the jungle than a civilized coward. You were bolder in America. The
English make obscene sycophants of their subject peoples. I am Irish
and I know. But we Irish have guts the English cannot rip out of us.
I'm ashamed of you, sir. It's a good thing you got out of England. It
is no place for a genius to live."

Frank Harris's words cut like a whip into my hide, and I was glad to
get out of his uncomfortable presence. Yet I felt relieved after his
castigation. The excision of the poem had been like a nerve cut out
of me, leaving a wound which would not heal. And it hurt more every
time I saw the damned book of verse. I resolved to plug hard for the
publication of an American edition, which would include the omitted
poem. "A traitor," Frank Harris had said, "a traitor to my race." But I
felt worse for being a traitor to myself. For if a man is not faithful
to his own individuality, he cannot be loyal to anything.

I soon became acquainted and friendly with _The Liberator_
collaborators and sympathizers: Art Young, Boardman Robinson, Stuart
Davis, John Barber, Adolph Dehn, Hugo Gellert, Ivan Opfer, Maurice
Becker, Maurice Sterne, Arturo Giovanitti, Roger Baldwin, Louis
Untermeyer, Mary Heaton Vorse, Lydia Gibson, Cornelia Barnes, Genevieve
Taggard. William Gropper and Michael Gold became contributing editors
at the same time that I joined _The Liberator_ staff.

       *       *       *       *       *

_The Liberator_ was frequently honored by visitors, many of them women,
some beautiful and some strange. Of course they all wanted to see the
handsome editor-in-chief. But Max Eastman was seldom in the office. He
usually came in when it was nearly time to make up the magazine for
publication. Then he worked quickly with devilish energy, sifting and
scrapping material, titling articles and pictures. And the magazine was
always out on time. Eastman had a lazy manner and there was a general
idea (which apparently pleased him) that he was more of a playboy than
a worker. But he was really a very hard and meticulous worker. I know
of no other writer who works so sternly and carefully, rewriting,
chiseling and polishing his phrases.

There were amusing incidents. One day a wild blonde of unkempt frizzly
hair dashed into the office and declared she had an urgent desire to
see Max Eastman. We said he wasn't there, but she wouldn't believe us.
So she went hunting all over the building, upstairs and downstairs,
opening every door and peeping behind them and even into drawers.
Finally she invaded the washroom, and when she left she locked it up
and carried away the key.

But we had more composed visitors, also. Crystal Eastman brought
Clare Sheridan. They were a striking pair to look at. Two strapping
representatives of the best of the American and English types. They
were interesting to contrast, the one embodying in her personality that
daring freedom of thought and action--all that was fundamentally fine,
noble and genuine in American democracy; the other a symbol of British
aristocracy, a little confused by the surging movement of new social
forces, but sincerely trying to understand.

In 1920 Clare Sheridan had accompanied Kamenev, the Bolshevik
emissary in London, to Russia. She was the first woman of the British
aristocracy to visit that country after the revolution. She had
published a series of articles from her diary in the London _Times_.
I had read them eagerly, for they were like a romance, while I was in
London. Her incisive etchings of the Bolshevik leaders stuck in my
memory. She had summed up Zinoviev, "fussy and impatient, with the
mouth of a petulant woman," and when I went to Russia and met Zinoviev,
each time I heard him prate in his unpleasant falsetto voice, I thought
of Clare Sheridan's deft drawing of him.

Clare Sheridan had a handsome, intelligent and arrogant face. She was
curious about _The Liberator_, its staff and contributors and free
radical bohemian atmosphere. I asked her why a similar magazine could
not exist in London with the same free and easy intercourse between
people of different classes and races. She said that social conditions
and traditions in London were so different. And I knew from experience
that she was telling me the truth. (She did not know that I had
recently returned from London.)

She said that she would like to sculpt my head. But she never got
around to it. Instead she wrote in her _American Diary_ (after seeing
_The Emperor Jones_ with Crystal Eastman, Ernestine Evans, _et al._):
"I see the Negro in a new light. He used to be rather repulsive to me,
but obviously he is human, has been very badly treated.... It must be
humiliating to an educated colored man that he may not walk down the
street with a white woman, nor dine in a restaurant with her.... I
wonder about the psychology of the colored man, like the poet, McKay,
who came to see me a few days ago and who is as delightful to talk to
as any man one could meet...."

Unexpectedly, Elinor Wylie was ushered into my little office one
afternoon. She was accompanied by her sister and I rushed out to find
an extra chair. Mrs. Wylie's eyes were flaming and I was so startled
by her enigmatic beauty and Park Avenue elegance that I was dumb with
confusion. She tried to make me feel easy, but I was as nervous as a
wild cat caught indoors. I knew very little about her, except that she
had published a little book of verse. I had read some of her pieces in
_The New Republic_, and I remembered one memorable thing called, "The
Lion and the Lamb," which was infused with a Blakelike imagery and
beauty. She promised to send _The Liberator_ a poem, but I don't think
she ever did. Perhaps I did not show enough enthusiasm. I had no idea,
at the time, that I was speaking to one of the few great women poets of
the English language.

I always felt that the real object of these visits was Max Eastman, who
was an ikon for the radical women. And so I acted like a black page,
listening a lot and saying very little, but gratefully acknowledging
all the gifts of gracious words that were offered to _The Liberator_.

Lewis Gannett called one day and invited me to lunch with Carl Van
Doren, somewhere down around Park Row. Mr. Van Doren was then one
of the editors of _The Nation_. He did most of the talking. He was
very practical-minded in the pleasant canny Yankee way. For one who
was a college professor he was remarkably well informed about the
different phases of American social and industrial life. He said that
the Italians and the Negroes were interesting to him as the two most
special groups of workers in America. He considered the Italians a
hardier and a harder-working group. His idea was thought-provoking and
I was struck by the comparison he made between Italians and Negroes.
It was fresh and novel, especially as Negroes themselves generally
compare their status with that of the Jews. I thought myself that the
comparison frequently made between the Jewish group and the Negro group
was mainly psychological, while the point that Mr. Van Doren scored was
sociological.

One day I had sorted and read until my brain was fagged and I hadn't
found a single startling line. Then I picked up a thin sheaf and
discovered some verses which stimulated me like an elixir. They were
mostly sonnets, a little modernistic, without capitals, a little
voluptuous, yet restrained and strangely precise, with a flavor of
Latin eroticism and decadence. They were signed, E.E. Cummings.

I didn't know anything about the author, but I wrote a note asking him
to come in and see Max Eastman. He dropped by one day, a stripling in
a fawn-colored suit and resembling a fawn, with his head cocked up to
one side and a smile which looked like a curiously-wrought icicle.

Max Eastman was not in. He had not been in the office since I had
written to the author, nor had he seen the poems. So I talked to
Cummings and dared to argue with him about a couple of the sonnets. I
was particularly excited by one called "_Maison_." It created something
like an exquisite miniature palace of Chinese porcelain. The palace was
so real that it rose up out of the page, but the author had also placed
in it a little egg so rotten that you could smell it. I argued about
that egg, but Cummings said that that was exactly what he wanted to do.
I understood and apologized.

I wanted to make a spread of the verses in _The Liberator_, but Robert
Minor was substituting as editor-in-chief that month and he had a
violent reaction against the verses. I remember Minor's saying to me
that if I liked such poems I was more of a decadent than a social
revolutionist. I protested that the verses were poetry, and that in
any work of art my natural reaction was more for its intrinsic beauty
than for its social significance. I said that my social sentiments were
strong, definite and radical, but that I kept them separate from my
esthetic emotions, for the two were different and should not be mixed
up.

Robert Minor said he could not visualize me as a real Negro. He thought
of a Negro as of a rugged tree in the forest. Perhaps Minor had had
Negro playmates like that in Texas and he could not imagine any other
type. Minor himself always gave me the impression of a powerful
creature of the jungle. His personality seemed to exude a kind of
blind elemental brute force. He appeared to me like a reincarnation of
Richard Cœur de Lion--a warrior who had found the revolutionary road to
heaven and who would annihilate even the glorious ineffectual angels
if he found them drifted and stranded on his warpath.

I kept the Cummings verses for the following month when the editorship
was resumed by Max Eastman. Eastman recognized their distinctive
quality, but not in my enthusiastic way. So we didn't make a special
spread of them as we often did with unusual verse. We printed a couple
or more--but not very prominently.

The delirious verses of the Baroness Von Freytag Loringhoven titillated
me even as did her crazy personality. She was a constant visitor
to see me, always gaudily accoutred in rainbow raiment, festooned
with barbaric beads and spangles and bangles, and toting along her
inevitable poodle in gilded harness. She had such a precious way of
petting the poodle with a slap and ejaculating, "Hund-bitch!"

She was a model, and in marvelous German-English she said: "_Mein_
features not same, schön, but _mein_ back, _gut_. The artists love to
paint it." The Baroness's back was indeed a natural work of art.

One day she entertained me by reading, in her masculine throaty voice,
a poem she called "_Dornröschen_":

 _Stab for me
 lip set intensity.
 press to my bower--
 my nook, my core
 I wait for thee
 numb breathlessly
 messir
 since yore...._

I liked the thing so much, I appropriated it for _The Liberator_.
Down in Greenwich Village they made a joke of the Baroness, even the
radicals. Some did not believe that she was an authentic baroness,
listed in Gotha. As if that really mattered, when she acted the part so
magnificently. Yet she was really titled, although she was a working
woman. The ultra-moderns of the Village used to mock at the baroness's
painted finger nails. Today all American women are wearing painted
finger nails.

How shockingly sad it was to meet Frau Freytag a few years later in the
Kurfurstendamm in Berlin, a shabby wretched female selling newspapers,
stripped of all the rococo richness of her clothes, her speech, her
personality. She went from Berlin to Paris and death. Poor brave
Baroness von Freytag Loringhoven.

       *       *       *       *       *

Our bookkeeper was an Englishman named Mylius. He was an equivocal
type, soft and sinister, with a deceptive deferential manner. Dickens
would have found him admirable for the creation of Uriah Heep. Mylius
had won international notoriety as the man who was prosecuted for
libeling His Majesty, King George of England. He had circulated a story
that George V had contracted a morganatic marriage. Mylius liked to
come into my office to talk. He was a money-fool. He presented me with
a copy of a worthless book he had written called, _The Socialization
of Money_. He seemed to think that money was entirely the invention of
governments and bankers, an evil thing having no relationship to other
commodities. I got it out of Mylius that his father, who was I believe
a Greek Jew, was a banker and had left him a fortune when he died. And
he had gambled away every penny of that fortune at Monte Carlo.

One day Mylius pushed into my office with a fake frightened
expression. He said there was a criminal-looking man outside who
wanted to see me. I went downstairs and found Michael. I brought him
up to my office. Michael had read in a newspaper that I was working
on _The Liberator_ and he had looked up the address and called to see
me. In two years Michael had changed almost beyond recognition. The
college-lad veneer had vanished. A nasty scar had spoiled his right
eyebrow and his face was prematurely old, with lines like welts. After
I went abroad he had landed a job as a street-car conductor. He had
worked a few months and becoming disgusted, he drifted back to petty
banditry. He was copped and jailed in a local prison, where he made
criminal friends more expert than himself. Now he was in with a gang.

We chatted reminiscently. I related my radical adventures in London.
I exhibited what I had accomplished by way of literature on the side.
And I presented him with a signed copy of the book. Michael looked with
admiration at the frontispiece (a photograph of myself) and at me.

"Jeez," he said, "you did do it, all right. You're a bird."

"What species?" I asked.

Michael laughed. "What are you wanting me to say? You are an eagle?"

"Oh no," I said, "that's a white folk's bird. Blackbird will do."

"There you're starting again," Michael said. "You know I haven't been
in Harlem since you left."

I said that I was living in the same place and invited him to come up.
I told him that my landlord, Mr. Morris, had asked after him.

Michael shook his head. "It ain't like before. I'm in with a rotten
gang. We'se all suspicious of one another. If I came around to see
you, they'd soon get wise to it and want to mess around there, thinking
there was something to make."

I said I wouldn't care, since there was nothing. And knowing them might
be another exciting diversion, I thought.

Michael's face became ugly. "No, you're better off without knowing
that gang. They couldn't understand you like me. They're just no good.
They're worse than me. And lookit that guy what send you out to me. He
was looking at me as if I wasn't human. I know that my mug ain't no
angel's since that wop bastard gashed me, but all the same I ain't no
gorilla."

"Couldn't you find another job and start working again?" I asked.

He shook his head. "It's too late now. I can't get away or escape. I'm
not like you. Perhaps if I had had some talent, like you."

I knew that he was doomed. I had a pocket edition of Francis Thompson's
"Hound of Heaven" on my desk. It was one of my favorite things. Michael
looked at it. I said that Thompson was an Irish poet.

"I read a lot, whenever I get a chance," he said, "newspapers and
magazines."

I read a little from "The Hound":

  _I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
  I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
  I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
  Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
  I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
        Up vistaed hopes I sped;
        And shot, precipitated,
  Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
  From those strong Feet that followed, followed after...._

  _In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
  I shook the pillaring hours
  And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
  I stand amid the dust o' the moulded years--
  My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap._...

I told Michael something of the writer's way of living. And I gave him
the book.

"Can you spare it?" he asked. I said I was always "sparing" books,
dropping them everywhere, because they were too heavy to tote.

"I guess when the gang sees me with these here," said Michael, "they'll
be thinking that I'm turning queer."

As I opened the door to let him out, I saw Mylius acting as if he
were just passing by on the way upstairs to his office. He had been
listening at the keyhole. Michael went on out. Mylius said, "I was
scared he was going to assassinate you in there."

"He isn't a criminal," I said. "He's just an old college friend down
on his luck." Mylius was interested and wanted to talk some more, but
I was seized by such a loathsome feeling for the big white reptile, I
turned my back and shut my door.

I never saw Michael again. Just before I left for Europe the following
year I received a pathetic scrawl informing me that he had been caught
in a hold-up and sentenced to prison for nine years....


THE HARLEM INTELLIGENTSIA

I had departed from America just after achieving some notoriety as a
poet, and before I had become acquainted with the Negro intellectuals.
When I got the job of assistant editor on _The Liberator_, Hubert
Harrison, the Harlem street-corner lecturer and agitator, came down to
Fourteenth Street to offer his congratulations.

I introduced him to Robert Minor, who was interested in the activities
of the advanced Negro radicals. Harrison suggested a little meeting
that would include the rest of the black Reds. It was arranged to
take place at the _Liberator_ office, and besides Harrison there were
Grace Campbell, one of the pioneer Negro members of the Socialist
Party; Richard Moore and W.A. Domingo, who edited _The Emancipator_, a
radical Harlem weekly; Cyril Briggs, the founder of the African Blood
Brotherhood and editor of the monthly magazine, _The Crusader_; Mr.
Fanning, who owned the only Negro cigar store in Harlem; and one Otto
Huiswood, who hailed from Curaçao, the birthplace of Daniel Deleon.
Perhaps there were others whom I don't remember. The real object of
the meeting, I think, was to discuss the possibility of making the
Garvey Back-to-Africa Movement (officially called the Universal Negro
Improvement Association) more class-conscious.

I remember that just as we ended our discussion, Max Eastman
unexpectedly popped in to see how the _Liberator_ office was running.
Jokingly he said: "Ah, you conspirators," and everybody laughed except
Robert Minor. Minor had recently renounced his anarchism for Communism
and he was as austere-looking as a gaunt Spanish priest.

It was interesting to meet also some of the more conservative Negro
leaders, such as the officials of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People. Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, the author of _The
Souls of Black Folk_ and editor of _The Crisis_, had me to luncheon at
the Civic Club. Of Dr. DuBois I knew nothing until I came to America.
It was a white woman, my English teacher at the Kansas State College,
who mentioned _The Souls of Black Folk_ to me, I think. I found it in
the public library in Topeka. The book shook me like an earthquake. Dr.
DuBois stands on a pedestal illuminated in my mind. And the light that
shines there comes from my first reading of _The Souls of Black Folk_
and also from the _Crisis_ editorial, "Returning Soldiers," which he
published when he returned from Europe in the spring of 1919.

Yet meeting DuBois was something of a personal disappointment. He
seemed possessed of a cold, acid hauteur of spirit, which is not
lessened even when he vouchsafes a smile. Negroes say that Dr. DuBois
is naturally unfriendly and selfish. I did not feel any magnetism in
his personality. But I do in his writings, which is more important.
DuBois is a great passionate polemic, and America should honor and
exalt him even if it disagrees with his views. For his passion is
genuine, and contemporary polemics is so destitute of the pure flame of
passion that the nation should be proud of a man who has made of it a
great art.

Walter White, the present secretary of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People, possessed a charming personality,
ingratiating as a Y.M.C.A. secretary. One felt a strange, even comic,
feeling at the sound of his name and the sight of his extremely white
complexion while hearing him described as a Negro.

The White stories of passing white among the crackers were delightful.
To me the most delectable was one illustrating the finger-nail theory
of telling a near-white from a pure-white. White was traveling on a
train on his way to investigate a lynching in the South. The cracker
said, "There are many yaller niggers who look white, but I can tell
them every time."

"Can you really?" Walter White asked.

"Oh sure, just by looking at their finger nails." And taking White's
hand, he said, "Now if you had nigger blood, it would show here on your
half-moons."

That story excited me by its paradox as much as had the name and
complexion of Walter White. It seemed altogether fantastic that whites
in the South should call him a "nigger" and whites in the North, a
Negro. It violates my feeling of words as pictures conveying color and
meaning. For whenever I am in Walter White's company my eyes compose
him and my emotions respond exactly as they do in the case of any
friendly so-called "white" man. When a white person speaks of Walter
White as a Negro, as if that made him a being physically different
from a white, I get a weird and impish feeling of the unreality of
phenomena. And when a colored person refers to Walter White as colored,
in a tone that implies him to be physically different from and inferior
to the "pure" white person, I feel that life is sublimely funny. For
to me a type like Walter White is Negroid simply because he closely
identifies himself with the Negro group--just as a Teuton becomes a
Moslem if he embraces Islam. White is whiter than many Europeans--even
biologically. I cannot see the difference in the way that most of the
whites and most of the blacks seem to see it. Perhaps what is reality
for them is fantasy for me.

James Weldon Johnson, song writer, poet, journalist, diplomat and
professor, was my favorite among the N.A.A.C.P. officials. I liked
his poise, suavity, diplomacy and gentlemanliness. His career reveals
surprises of achievement and reads like a success story. When a Negro
makes an honorable fight for a decent living and succeeds, I think
all Negroes should feel proud. Perhaps a day will come when, under
a different social set-up, competent Negroes will be summoned like
other Americans to serve their country in diplomatic posts. When that
time comes Negroes may proudly cite as a precedent the record of James
Weldon Johnson, Negro pioneer of the American diplomatic service, who
performed his duties conscientiously and efficiently under unusually
difficult conditions.

Jessie Fauset was assistant editor of _The Crisis_ when I met her.
She very generously assisted at the Harlem evening of one of our
_Liberator_ prayer meetings and was the one fine feature of a bad
show. She was prim, pretty and well-dressed, and talked fluently
and intelligently. All the radicals liked her, although in her
social viewpoint she was away over on the other side of the fence.
She belonged to that closed decorous circle of Negro society, which
consists of persons who live proudly like the better class of
conventional whites, except that they do so on much less money. To
give a concrete idea of their status one might compare them to the
expropriated and defeated Russian intelligentsia in exile.

Miss Fauset has written many novels about the people in her circle.
Some white and some black critics consider these people not interesting
enough to write about. I think all people are interesting to write
about. It depends on the writer's ability to bring them out alive.
Could there be a more commendable prescription for the souls of colored
Americans than the bitter black imitation of white life? Not a Fannie
Hurst syrup-and-pancake hash, but the real meat.

But Miss Fauset is prim and dainty as a primrose, and her novels are
quite as fastidious and precious. Primroses are pretty. I remember the
primroses where I lived in Morocco, that lovely melancholy land of
autumn and summer and mysterious veiled brown women. When the primroses
spread themselves across the barren hillsides before the sudden summer
blazed over the hot land, I often thought of Jessie Fauset and her
novels.

What Mary White Ovington, the godmother of the N.A.A.C.P., thought of
me was more piquant to me perhaps than to herself. Her personality
radiated a quiet silver shaft of white charm which is lovely when it's
real. She was gracious, almost sweet, when she dropped in on _The
Liberator_. But as I listened to her talking in a gentle subjective way
I realized that she was emphatic as a seal and possessed of a resolute
will.

She told me about her reaction to Booker T. Washington, the officially
recognized national leader of the Negroes. Miss Ovington had visited
Tuskegee informally. Booker T. Washington had disregarded her,
apparently under the impression that she was a poor-white social
worker. When he was informed that she originated from a family of
high-ups, he became obsequious to her. But she responded coldly. By her
austere abolitionist standard she had already taken the measure of the
universally popular and idolized Negroid leader.

I repeated the story to my friend Hubert Harrison. He exploded in his
large sugary black African way, which sounded like the rustling of
dry bamboo leaves agitated by the wind. Hubert Harrison had himself
criticized the Negro policy of Booker T. Washington in powerful
volcanic English, and subsequently, by some mysterious grapevine
chicanery, he had lost his little government job. He joined the
Socialist Party. He left it. And finally came to the conclusion that
out of the purgatory of their own social confusion, Negroes would
sooner or later have to develop their own leaders, independent of white
control.

Harrison had a personal resentment against the N.A.A.C.P., and
nick-named it the "National Association for the Advancement of Certain
People." His sense of humor was ebony hard, and he remarked that it was
exciting to think that the N.A.A.C.P. was the progeny of black snobbery
and white pride, and had developed into a great organization, with
DuBois like a wasp in Booker Washington's hide until the day of his
death.

And now that I was legging limpingly along with the intellectual gang,
Harlem for me did not hold quite the same thrill and glamor as before.
Where formerly in saloons and cabarets and along the streets I received
impressions like arrows piercing my nerves and distilled poetry from
them, now I was often pointed out as an author. I lost the rare feeling
of a vagabond feeding upon secret music singing in me.

I was invited to meetings in Harlem. I had to sit on a platform and
pretend to enjoy being introduced and praised. I had to respond
pleasantly. Hubert Harrison said that I owed it to my race. Standing
up like an actor to repeat my poems and kindle them with second-hand
emotions. For it was not so easy to light up within me again the
spontaneous flames of original creative efforts for expectant
audiences. Poets and novelists should let good actors perform for them.

Once I was invited to the Harlem Eclectic Club by its president,
William Service Bell. Mr. Bell was a cultivated artistic New England
Negro, who personally was very nice. He was precious as a jewel. The
Eclectic Club turned out in rich array to hear me: ladies and gentlemen
in _tenue de rigueur_. I had no dress suit to wear, and so, a little
nervous, I stood on the platform and humbly said my pieces.

What the Eclectics thought of my poems I never heard. But what they
thought of me I did. They were affronted that I did not put on a dress
suit to appear before them. They thought I intended to insult their
elegance because I was a radical.

The idea that I am an enemy of polite Negro society is fixed in the
mind of the Negro élite. But the idea is wrong. I have never had the
slightest desire to insult Harlem society or Negro society anywhere,
because I happen not to be of it. But ever since I had to tog myself
out in a dress suit every evening when I worked as a butler, I have
abhorred that damnable uniform. God only knows why it was invented.
My esthetic sense must be pretty bad, for I can find no beauty in it,
either for white or colored persons. I admire women in bright evening
clothes. But men! Blacks in stiff-starched white façades and black
uniforms like a flock of crows, imagining they are elegant--oh no!



X

A Brown Dove Cooing


_The Liberator_ staff had an extra extraordinary moment one afternoon
when Max Eastman walked in with Charlie Chaplin. The great little man
gave his hand to all of us and touched our hearts. And after looking
over the place he perched like a Puck atop of a desk.

Chaplin informed me that he liked some of my poems which had appeared
in _The Liberator_. I was glad, and gave him a copy of _Spring in
New Hampshire_. In his book, _My Trip Abroad_, he put this one, "The
Tropics in New York":

 _Bananas ripe and green and ginger-root,
 Cocoa in pods and alligator pears,
 And tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit,
 Fit for the highest prize at country fairs._

 _Set in the window, bringing memories
 Of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills.
 And dewy dawns and mystical blue skies
 In benediction over nun-like hills._

 _My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze;
 A wave of longing through my body swept,
 And, hungry for the old, familiar ways,
 I turned aside and bowed my head and wept._

Chaplin came up to Croton one evening of a week-end when I was there
with Max Eastman, Crystal Eastman, Eugen Boissevain, Boardman
Robinson, and the danseuse, Tamiris. He astounded us with some marvels
of comedian tricks. They were swift and sure like the sharp lines
of Goya. Not a suggestion in them of that clowning which he uses so
lavishly on the screen. With an acute gesture of hands and feet he
performed a miracle. With one flick of his hair and a twist to his
face, his features were entirely translated into another person's.
Deftly manipulating a coat, he transformed his dapper little self until
he looked like a weirdly tall undertaker hanging against the wall. The
only thing of Charlie Chaplin on the screen, which suggested anything
like his magnificent spontaneous personal appearance that night is
the incomparable "Shoulder Arms." Pictures like "The Kid" and "The
Gold Rush" are great, but elaborate and lavish. "Shoulder Arms" is a
feat of rapid economical design, as startling as the best of Goya's
grotesqueries.

Another evening when I was at Croton, Chaplin drove up unexpectedly.
He was accompanied by Neysa McMein, an exotic person and a fashionable
artist. She possessed an archaic beauty and poise which were strangely
arresting in those days when women were cultivating a more athletic
style in beauty. Miss McMein was very popular among the smart set of
New York's literati. She was a southerner, and she was shocked cold
when she realized that I was a guest and not a servant in Max Eastman's
house. I must record to her honor that she did not precipitate a
crisis. She merely acted like a perfect _grande dame_ who was not
amused. But our party was frost-bitten. It was a relief when she
departed.

Some time after, Max Eastman seized an opportunity to read some of my
poems to Miss McMein, without disclosing my identity. She expressed
great appreciation and a desire to buy a book of them. Max Eastman
then revealed that I was the author. She was surprised. But she did
not like the verses any less or the idea of my equal association with
whites any more.

However, I did assist at one unforgettable and uninhibited
little-brown-jug-from-down-home party with Charlie Chaplin. It was in
Greenwich Village at the house of Eugen Boissevain. It was a small
gathering with Max and Crystal Eastman, Dudley Field Malone and Doris
Stevens, a leader of the Woman's Movement, William Gropper, myself
and a couple of others. Charlie Chaplin had met Hubert Harrison at my
office and admired his black Socratic head and its precise encyclopedic
knowledge. He had expressed a desire that Harrison should be included
in the party.

I thought it was a happy idea to have another Negro. Hubert Harrison
asked if I was thinking of taking a colored girl. I said I didn't think
I would, for the only girls in Harlem I knew intimately were Sanina's
maids of honor and I was afraid they wouldn't fit in. Harrison agreed
and I suggested that, as he was acquainted with the élite of Harlem, he
might bring down a beautiful brown. Harrison promised to do that.

The party was warming up with Jamaica rum cocktails and snatches of
radical gossip when Harrison arrived. Clinging coyly to his arm was
an old brown girl who was neither big nor little, short nor fat,
or anything. Nothing about her was exciting, voice, or clothes, or
style--simply nothing. I was amazed, and wondered why of all Harlem
Harrison had chosen her. If she were his wife or his mistress I could
understand, but the lady herself quickly announced that she was nothing
to Harrison at all. And so she was introduced round the room. Harrison
never explained why he brought that kind of woman. Erotically he was
very indiscriminate and I suppose that descending from the soap-box,
he remembered the party and invited the first pick-up he met to
accompany him.

At this intimate little party there was no white shadow and no black
apprehension, no complexes arising out of conscious superiority
or circumstantial inferiority. We were all in a spirit of happy
relaxation, like children playing merrily together and, absorbed in the
games, forgetful of themselves. Harrison was a little stiff at first
with his starched bosom--his was the only dress suit in the group--but
his simple Sudanese soul soon came up laughing in spite of it.

Suddenly I was excited. I saw Charlie Chaplin hopping from one end of
the room to the other, and I thought he was about to improvise some
treat again, as he had up at Croton. But no, it wasn't that. He was
trying to escape. Harrison's brown dove was fluttering in pursuit of
Chaplin and filling the room with a crescendo of coo-coo-cooing, just
as if she were down home in the bushes. She had at last discovered
that the Mr. Chaplin to whom she had been introduced was indeed the
authentic Charlie Chaplin, lord of the cinema. And importunately she
was demanding his autograph, "so I kin tell it in Harlem about my
adventure."

But Chaplin was determined not to turn our informal little soirée into
an autograph evening. And oh, it was delicious to see the king of the
comics skipping hither and thither and declaring he had no pen. The
brownie flew into the anteroom and returned triumphant with her vanity
case containing card and pencil and announced that she always kept
herself provided with the right things for her customers.

I diverted her attention from her quarry by pouring her a tumbler of
Jamaica rum, and we started a game. Soon the little brown jug was full
and running over and chasing everybody. She said that she was aware
that I was the contact man between Harlem and the Village. And I felt
so flattered to be taken as a sweetman that I tried to imitate the
famous Harlem strut. To Crystal Eastman, who was acting as hostess and
who was as usual distinctively dressed, the brown jug confided that she
would like to exchange visitors between Harlem and Greenwich Village.
And soon she was passing out her cards. But I noticed that the address
was crossed out. She explained that she was rooming temporarily, but
said she would let us have her new address as soon as she was fixed up.
Her last place had recently been raided by the police!

Well, that was one evening, a surprise party that nobody had dreamed
about, something really different and delightful. Parties are so often
tediously the same thing: swilling and scrappy unsatisfactory smart
talk. I had a good time, which stirred me to thoughts of Philadelphia
when I was railroading. I felt sure that none of the whites there had
ever before had the pleasure of a brown madam at a bohemian party.

When I told the story of the party to some of the élite of Harlem, I
was simply dumbfounded by their violent reaction. They insisted that
the Negro race had been betrayed, because a little brown jug from
Harlem had provided a little innocent diversion in Greenwich Village.

I didn't know what to say. So I hummed an old delicious ditty of my
pre-blasé period: "Little brown jug, don't I love you...."



XI

A Look at H.G. Wells


When H.G. Wells came over here to the Naval Conference as a star
reporter for the liberal New York _World_ and the neo-Tory London
_Daily Mail_, his restless curiosity urged him to find time from his
preoccupation with high international politics to bestow a little
attention on _The Liberator_. Max Eastman had him to dinner at his home
in Greenwich Village, and later there was an informal reception for the
_Liberator_ staff and collaborators.

I had stumbled upon Wells at about the same time that I began reading
Bernard Shaw. While I admired Shaw for the hammering logic of his
prefaces and his sparkling wit, I liked in H.G. Wells those qualities I
like in Dickens--the sentimental serving of his characters with a vast
sauce of provincial humor.

During my residence in London I had followed Wells's popular _Outline
of History_ as it appeared in instalments, and upon returning to
America I read in the published volume the instalments that I had
missed.

If it is worth recording, I may say here that I took a violent
prejudice against Mr. Wells's _History_. I felt something flippant
in the style and I did not like Mr. Wells's attitude toward colored
people in general and Africa and Negroes in particular. In the League
of Free Nations book he put out in 1918 he said: "Africa is the great
source upon which our modern comforts and conveniences depend.... The
most obvious danger of Africa is the militarization of the black....
The Negro makes a good soldier, he is hardy, he stands the sea and he
stands the cold...."

I suppose the average white reader will exclaim: "And what's wrong with
that? It is wise and sane and humanitarian." But he should remember
that I am Negro and think that the greatest danger of Africa is not
the militarization of the black, but the ruthless exploitation of the
African by the European. There is also something to be said in favor of
native comforts and conveniences. Before the arrival of the European
with gunpowder the African was accustomed to protecting his rights
with arrow and spear. Now, against modern civilization, he must needs
learn the use of modern methods and weapons. The liberal apologists
of the European grip on Africa may be very unctious and sentimental
about native rights. But the conditions indicate that if the natives
must survive, they must themselves learn and practice the art of
self-protection.

Mr. Wells always seems to be shouting about his unusually scientific
mind. Yet I must confess that I was shocked by the plan of his large
tome outlining world history. Because it appears there as if Africa
and Africans have not been of enormous importance in world history.
Mr. Wells mentions Africa in his language-formation section and leaves
Africa there as if nothing more developed. One learns more of Africa
from earlier historians than Mr. Wells, who did not know so much
about science. Herodotus gives us some remarkable information that
he acquired by traveling four hundred years before Jesus Christ. And
Ptolemy, the Egyptian geographer, has rendered a remarkable description
of Central Africa in the second century after Christ, although I
learned as a school boy that it was discovered by David Livingstone.
And as late as the fifteenth century, in the high tide of the European
renaissance, Leo the African adventured below the Sahara to give the
world historical facts about the Negro nations.

Mr. Wells gives a large outline of the nations of Europe and a
not-so-large one of the nations of Asia. He makes no mention of the
great Negro nations of Western Africa and the Western Sudan before and
after the Moslem invasion; of the Negroid nations of Songhoy and Ghana,
Fezzan and Timbuctu, Yoruba and Benin, Ashanti and Dahomey, which were
arrested in their growth and finally annihilated by the slave traffic
and European imperialism, nor of the Senegalese who played a dominant
part in the history of Morocco and the conquest of Spain.

Yes indeed, Africa and its blacks are of foundational importance in
the history of the world, ancient and modern, and in the creating of
European civilization. However, Mr. Wells's ignoring of the African
civilizations in his _Outline of History_ may be deliberate. In his
marvelous _World of William Clissold_, he speculates whether the Negro
could participate in "common citizenship in a world republic." Says he:
"The Negro is the hardest case ... yet ... in the eighteenth century he
was the backbone of the British navy...." It is entirely too funny to
think--seven years after the appallingly beastly modern white savagery
of 1914-18--of Mr. Wells naïvely wondering whether the Negro is capable
of becoming a civilized citizen of a world republic. He cites the
precedent of Negroes in his British navy. He might have gone farther
back and mentioned the Negro contingent in the army of Xerxes the Great
(when Britons were savages) and about which Herodotus so glowingly
writes.

But even if Mr. Wells likes to take a popular crack at history, he
is none the less a first-rate novelist in the tradition of Charles
Dickens and I don't think he imagines himself a historian any more than
I do, so one must be tolerant if his _Outline_ has the earmarks of a
glorified _Research Magnificent_.

Also, I did not like Mr. Wells's inspired articles on the Naval
Conference. Paradoxically, I found myself sympathizing with the _Daily
Mail_, which rebuked him for his offensive against Japan. Mr. Wells
injected much violent prejudice into what should have been unbiased
reporting. While Mr. Wells was outlining history, he might have
reserved a little of his English sentimentality for Japan, from the
knowledge that Japan might not have been a "yellow peril" today if the
white powers hadn't broken open her door and forced their civilization
upon her.

Wells's little _Liberator_ reception was a question-time picnic for the
_Liberator_ collaborators--especially for the ladies, to whom Wells is
exceptionally attractive. They asked him many questions about the war
and the peace and the aftermath, about Russia and Europe, Japan and
America and universal peace. Mr. Wells smilingly and slickly disposed
of all problems to the satisfaction of all.

William Gropper, the artist, and I had concocted a plan to ask some
impish questions. But everybody was very pleasant. It was a nice party.
So we said nothing. I was standing, leaning against the mantelpiece,
and Mr. Wells approached me in a sly way as if he desired a close-up
scrutiny of me without my knowing it. I seized the opportunity to take
a good quick look at Mr. Wells's eyes. Journalists always write about
the jolly twinkle in Mr. Wells's eyes. I didn't like them. They made me
think of a fox.

Some years later, after my trip to Russia and returning to France, I
met Frank Harris in Nice. I was in the company of a brilliant American
writer who was meeting Frank Harris for the first time. We went to the
Taverne Alsacienne for our drinks. Mr. Wells had recently published his
William Clissold, which we had all read and were discussing.

Frank Harris said that what amazed him about H.G. Wells was the fact
that the more he tried consciously to expand his writings on a world
scale, the more provincial they became. I said, "The higher a monkey
climbs, the more he shows his tail." Frank Harris roared. Then he said
that perhaps Wells himself was not aware that his early novels of
fantasy and sentiment were his most universal things.

The American writer, said that an English gentleman had remarked to
him in London that Wells as a writer was a cockney. I didn't like the
reference to class, especially as I had at least two very dear cockney
friends. Harris said that Wells wasn't a cockney as a writer; that
he was a fifth-form public school boy, the same as Kipling. I said I
always thought of Kipling as the bugler of the British Empire, and that
perhaps Wells was the sub-officer.

It was interesting, after another little lot of years had passed along,
to read what Wells had to say about Harris in his _Experiment in
Autobiography_. Wells's first encounter with Frank Harris interested
me, especially because of the fact that my own meeting with Harris was
one of the high spots of my life. But it appears as if Wells could
not forgive Harris for once being a big and successful editor and
discovering him a poor and unknown writer. He writes of Harris's roar
receding with the years until it sounded something like a bark. But
a lion may lose its voice through age and worry. Wells mentions one
interesting fact, which must be one of the reasons why Harris was such
a great editor. The first story he sent to Harris was excellent; the
second, Wells admits, was bad. And Harris summoned and gave him a loud
talking to over the bad one. Yet when Harris became editor of another
magazine, he remembered only the good story and wrote to Wells asking
him to become one of his special contributors. And that gave Wells his
real start. The point is that many editors wouldn't remember at all, or
if they did, they would remember only that the second contribution was
bad.

The American writer left us for Cannes, and Harris invited me to drink
champagne with him. We went to the terrace of a café on the Promenade.
Harris was not a steady free drinker as he was when I had known him
seven years before in New York. His skilful hands trembled under the
weight and accumulated cares of three-score years. His hair was dyed,
and from the heat of the Midi and of alcohol some of the color had
dissolved and mixed with the perspiration oozing from the deep lines of
his face, which resembled an antique many-grooved panel with some of
the paint peeled off.

Again Frank Harris talked reminiscently and interestingly as always of
his acumen in perceiving greatness in Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells and
getting them to write for him when they were unknown. "But I am prouder
of Shaw," he said. "Shaw is really a great genius. I don't always agree
with what he says, and he went wrong about the War, but his 'Common
Sense' was a great piece of polemic. Shaw has intellectual integrity.
But I don't think Wells understands what intellectual integrity means.
He is too full of vanity to be a serious intellect. He is a modernistic
fiction writer who is discontented with his talent and wants to be a
social philosopher. But he is impossible because he has never learned
to think."

I said I thought it was a marvelous thing, something like second-sight,
for a man to pick a genius by his first inadequate efforts. Harris
said that it took a genius like himself to discover geniuses, and that
as an editor, he never played favorites. When he found good stuff he
accepted it. But he didn't go back-slapping and printing bad verses
by pretty women. He had had great temptations, but he never let his
desires interfere with his intellectual judgment.

His manner was boastful but not offensively so, for I think Frank
Harris had something to boast about. After all, he was Gaelic, and I
preferred his manner to the hypocritical English way of boasting by
studied understatement. And when he spoke of the enormous financial as
well as artistic success of Shaw and Wells, there was no envy, but I
could detect a shade of personal defeat and frustration in his voice.

Frank Harris's phrase, "intellectual integrity," kept agitating my
thoughts like a large blue-bottle against a window pane. For a long
long time I had carried something on my mind which I had hesitated to
get off. But now, with the champagne working in my head and a warm and
mellow feeling suffusing me, and with Frank Harris's features softening
a little, I was emboldened to let go.

During my second year as assistant editor on _The Liberator_ a woman
called to see me one day bringing a little book of poems. She offered
me ten dollars if I would review it in _The Liberator_. I said that
_The Liberator_ did not accept money for printing reviews, but if her
poems seemed worth while, we would review them. She said that she had
paid Frank Harris a thousand dollars to get the book printed, yet he
hadn't even reviewed it in _Pearson's_. And afterward, she said, she
had seen a literary agent who informed her that the cost of printing
was about two hundred dollars. She thought that Frank Harris had
swindled her. I did not review the verses, because to my mind, they
were not worth while.

Also, I had heard stories of Frank Harris posing as an art connoisseur
and palming off fake pictures as old masters, and of his getting
material for his magazine from writers who thought they would be paid
and then not paying them--tales of petty racketeering that were more
funny than vicious. And so, being champagne drunk with Harris on a café
terrace looking out on the calm blue Mediterranean, and feeling elastic
and free, I, who admired the extraordinary ways of Frank Harris more
than any other intellectual of my acquaintance, was interested to hear
from himself the truth. I told him the story of that woman who had
visited _The Liberator_ and complained about him.

Frank Harris was wonderful to look at under the influence of the
champagne, his lion-roaring, his face like a pirate's, yet with a
sublime gleam of genuine kindliness in his eyes! What I said he did
not affirm or deny. He just exploded with a mighty sermon about
the artist and intellectual integrity. He said that the way of the
artist was hard, for if he had a talent that appealed to popular
imagination, everybody desired to use him--women and men, politicians,
philanthropists, reformers, revolutionists, organizations, governments.
Many artists won success by sacrificing their intellectual integrity.
He himself had had large success. But whenever he felt the urge and the
bounden duty to declare his opinion, he could not restrain himself,
and so he had not remained successful. He had not been a puritan about
life. Perhaps he had done things that Jesus would not have done. But he
had not given his soul entirely to Mammon. Perhaps he had taken gifts
from persons who thought they had been swindled and who were better off
perhaps, if they were. But whatever he did he had reserved intact his
intellectual integrity.

It was a great sermon and I felt that Frank Harris was greater because
of it. He was no hypocrite. He had no social pretensions, although he
delighted in the company of smart and fashionable people. He was aware,
that there was plenty of dross inseparable from the gold of life, and
he embraced the whole. Nobody could deny that he was indeed a follower
of the Jesus who dominated his mind, that he sincerely believed in sin
and redemption.



XII

"He Who Gets Slapped"


My radical days on _The Liberator_ were sometimes rosy with romance.
Friends vied with friends in giving me invitations to their homes for
parties and car rides and in offering tickets for plays and concerts.
And even more. I remember I had a pressing debt of honor to settle.
And one day a staunch friend of _The Liberator_, Elizabeth Sage Hare,
handed me a check for five hundred dollars. She also invited me to tea
at her house in Park Avenue or Fifth, I don't quite remember, but it
was somewhere in the exclusive Faubourg Bourgeoisie.

_Liberator_ friends introduced me to a few of those Greenwich Village
tearooms and gin mills which were not crazy with colorphobia. And I
reciprocated by inviting some of them up to the cabarets and cozy flats
of Harlem. I did not invite my friends to the nice homes of the Negro
élite, simply because I did not have an entrée.

Once Sanina condescended to entertain I think four friends--all men.
When we arrived we found Sanina set in a circle of dark-brown girls,
all cunningly arranged to heighten her quadroon queenliness. It was an
exciting tableau, with a couple of sweetmen decorating the background.

But Sanina knew that I held a genteel position, sitting in an editor's
chair among the whites downtown. (She was a faithful reader of _True
Stories_.) So more than ever that night Sanina invested her unique
position in Harlem with majesty. She was the antithesis of the Little
Brown Jug of Charlie Chaplin's party. She brought out a bottle of rum
for the glory of Jamaica, and holding it like a scepter, she poured
royally. I believe my friends were thinking that they also would have
to pay royally. But the evening was Sanina's affair. She provided
everything free and formally and with the air of a colored queen of
respectability and virtue. Meanwhile her shrewd brown eyes seemed to be
saying: "I'll show you white folks!" She was a different Sanina to me.
Indeed, she was a creature of two races that night, with the blood of
both warring in her veins.

Our editor-in-chief possessed none of the vulgar taste for cellar
cabarets. Yet one evening Max Eastman said he would like to go on a
cabaret party to Harlem. He was accompanied by another friend. We
were welcomed at Barron's, where white people were always welcome and
profitable business. Barron was a big man in Tammany politics. But
I wanted particularly to go with my white friends to Ned's Place on
Fifth Avenue. Ned and I had been friends when I had run a restaurant
in Brooklyn some years previously. He was living in Brooklyn and often
dropped in at my place to eat. Then my business went bankrupt and we
lost sight of each other. A few years later, when I was waitering on
the railroad, I discovered Ned operating a cabaret on Fifth Avenue in
Harlem. I introduced all of my railroad friends to the place. Our crew
used to rendezvous there and unload ourselves of our tips.

Ned's Place was a precious beehive of rare native talent and customers.
A big black girl from Brooklyn with a mellow flutelike voice was the
high feature. And there was an equivocal tantalizing boy-and-girl
dancing team that I celebrated in _Home to Harlem_. When that boy and
girl started to shake together they gave everybody the sweet shivers.
The place was small and Ned was his own master of ceremonies. With a
few snappy flashes he could start everybody swaying together in a merry
mood, like a revival leader warming up his crowd.

Ned's was one place of amusement in Harlem in which white people were
not allowed. It was a fixed rule with him, and often he turned away
white slummers. This wasn't entirely from pride-of-race feeling,
but because of the white unwritten law which prohibits free social
intercourse between colored and white. The big shots of the amusement
business in Harlem, such as Barron, got by the law, for they were
Tammany men. But even they were surprised and messed up sometimes
by the vice squads. Ned said he preferred to run a "small and clean
business" rather than to start treading in the quicksands of bribes.

However, I had become so familiar with Max Eastman, and his ideas
and ways were so radically opposed to the general social set-up of
white-without-black, that it was impossible to feel about him as a
black does about a white alien. And I was such a good and regular
customer of Ned's that I thought he would waive his rule for me. But I
thought wrong that time.

We arrived at the door of the cabaret, from where Max Eastman could
get a glimpse inside. He was highly excited by the scene, and eager
to enter. But the doorman blocked the way. I beckoned to Ned, but his
jovial black face turned ugly as an aard-vark's and he acted as if I
was his worst enemy. He waved his fist in my face and roared: "Ride
back! Ride back, or I'll sick mah bouncers on you-all!"

Max Eastman and his friend and I made a quick retreat. Eastman didn't
mind. He said he was happy that there was one place in Harlem that
had the guts to keep white people out. There are no such places left
today. Harlem is an all-white picnic ground and with no apparent gain
to the blacks. The competition of white-owned cabarets has driven the
colored out of business, and blacks are barred from the best of them in
Harlem now.

       *       *       *       *       *

Always I was inflamed by the vision of New York as an eye-dazzling
picture. Fascinated, I explored all points in my leisure moments, by
day and by night. I rode all the ferries. I took long trips, from the
Battery to the Bowery, from Broadway through Harlem to the Bronx. I
liked to walk under the elevated tracks with the trains clashing and
clanging overhead. There was excitement when the sudden roaring of the
train abruptly blotted out conversation. Even the clothes suspended in
the canyon tenements appeared endowed with a strange life of their own.
In the stampeding hours of morning, noon, and evening, when the crowds
assumed epic proportions, I was so exalted by their monster movement
that I forgot that they were white.

I particularly remember some nocturnal wanderings with Adolf Dehn,
the artist, spanning blocks upon blocks along the East River, and the
vast space-filling feeling of the gigantic gas tanks. One loves in New
York its baroque difference from the classic cities, the blind chaotic
surging of bigness of expression. I remember how, when I worked in the
West Eighties and spent my rest time loitering along Riverside Drive,
the black giants of the New York Central, belching flame and smoke and
dust along the façades of the fine palaces, created a picture like a
caravan of modern pirates coming home in a rolling cloud of glory. The
grim pioneer urge of the great pragmatic metropolis was a ferment in my
feeling.

Often I was possessed with the desire to see New York as when I first
saw it from the boat--one solid massive mammoth mass of spiring steel
and stone. And I remember one week-end when Eugen Boissevain offered
a ride over to Jersey, whence one could see New York in that way. Max
Eastman was with us. We drove up to a summit commanding a grand view
of the city. We stood there a long time drinking in the glory of the
pyramids. Afterward we drove aimlessly around the country. Finally we
became hungry. We stopped at several hotels and restaurants, but none
would serve the three of us together. At last one place offered to
serve us in the kitchen. So, being hungry, all three of us went into
the kitchen. The cooks were frying and roasting at the stove. Kitchen
help were peeling potatoes, washing dishes, cleaning up garbage. We sat
down at the servants' table, where a waiter served us.

It was one of the most miserable meals I ever ate. I felt not only my
own humiliation, but more keenly the humiliation that my presence had
forced upon my friends. The discomfort of the hot bustling kitchen, the
uncongenial surroundings--their splendid gesture, but God! it was too
much. I did not want friends to make such sacrifices for me. If I had
to suffer in hell, I did not want to make others suffer there too. The
physical and sensual pleasures of life are precious, rare, elusive. I
have never desired to restrict the enjoyment of others. I am a pagan; I
am not a Christian. I am not white steel and stone.

On many occasions when I was invited out by white friends I refused.
Sometimes they resented my attitude. For I did not always choose to
give the reason. I did not always like to intrude the fact of my
being a black problem among whites. For, being born and reared in
the atmosphere of white privilege, my friends were for the most part
unconscious of black barriers. In their happy ignorance they would
lead one into the traps of insult. I think the persons who invented
discrimination in public places to ostracize people of a different race
or nation or color or religion are the direct descendants of medieval
torturers. It is the most powerful instrument in the world that may
be employed to prevent _rapproachement_ and understanding between
different groups of people. It is a cancer in the universal human body
and poison to the individual soul. It saps the sentiment upon which
friendliness and love are built. Ultimately it can destroy even the
most devoted friendship. Only super-souls among the whites can maintain
intimate association with colored people against the insults and
insinuations of the general white public and even the colored public.
Yet no white person, however sympathetic, can feel fully the corroding
bitterness of color discrimination. Only the black victim can.

It was at this time that I wrote a series of sonnets expressing my
bitterness, hate and love. Some of them were quoted out of their
context to prove that I hate America. Mr. Lothrop Stoddard was the
chief offender in his _The Rising Tide of Color_.

Here are the sonnets:


_BAPTISM_

 _Into the furnace let me go alone;
 Stay you without in terror of the heat.
 I will go naked in--for thus 'tis sweet--
 Into the weird depths of the hottest zone.
 I will not quiver in the frailest bone,
 You will not note a flicker of defeat;
 My heart shall tremble not its fate to meet,
 My mouth give utterance to any moan.
 The yawning oven spits forth fiery spears;
 Red aspish tongues shout wordlessly my name.
 Desire destroys, consumes my mortal fears,
 Transforming me into a shape of flame.
 I will come out, back to your world of tears,
 A stronger soul within a finer frame._


_THE WHITE CITY_

 _I will not toy with it nor bend an inch.
 Deep in the secret chambers of my heart
 I brood upon my hate, and without flinch
 I bear it nobly as I live my part.
 My being would be a skeleton a shell,
 If this dark Passion that fills my every mood,
 And makes my heaven in the white world's hell,
 Did not forever feed me vital blood.
 I see the mighty city through a mist--
 The strident trains that speed the goaded mass,
 The fortressed port through which the great ships pass,
 The tides, the wharves, the dens I contemplate,
 Are sweet like wanton loves because I hate._


_THE WHITE HOUSE_

 _Your door is shut against my tightened face,
 And I am sharp as steel with discontent;
 But I possess the courage and the grace
 To bear my anger proudly and unbent.
 The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet,
 And passion rends my vitals as I pass,
 A chafing savage down the decent street,
 Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass.
 Oh I must search for wisdom every hour,
 Deep in my wrathful bosom sore and raw,
 And find in it the superhuman power
 To hold me to the letter of your law!
 Oh I must keep my heart inviolate,
 Against the poison of your deadly hate!_


_AMERICA_

 _Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
 And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth,
 Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
 I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
 Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
 Giving me strength erect against her hate.
 Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
 Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state,
 I stand within her walls with not a shred
 Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
 Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
 And see her might and granite wonders there,
 Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand,
 Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand._

       *       *       *       *       *

_The Liberator_ was gaining strength in its stride. We were always
receiving praiseful letters and faithful promises of support. And we
were preparing to celebrate our struggling through to a happy New Year.
But suddenly the magazine was knocked off its feet. Our bookkeeper,
Mylius, disappeared, and with him went the four thousand dollars left
from _The Liberator's_ government bonds. Unfortunately Mylius had been
intrusted with the key to the bank's vault in which they were kept. I
always felt that I could have trusted my friend, Michael, the gangster,
with my life, while I wouldn't have trusted Mylius with my shadow.

Max Eastman was discouraged. Always worried about the raising of money
to run the magazine, he had never had the necessary leisure for his
own creative writing. Most of the money he raised came from liberal
_rentiers_. And now that the magazine editorially had taken a stand
for Lenin and Trotsky and the Bolshevik revolution, it was less easy
to obtain money from these _rentiers_, whose class had been ruthlessly
expropriated in Russia.

Max Eastman wanted to relinquish the editorship and go abroad to live
and write as he desired. We called a meeting of _Liberator_ artists
and writers and sympathizers. All of us wanted to carry on with the
magazine. But money mocked at us. None of us had Eastman's combination
of talents for the money-raising job. That had been no picnic for
him, either, in spite of his fine platform personality and attractive
presence.

The only person at that meeting who felt that _The Liberator_ could
carry on without Max Eastman was Michael Gold. Gold was always
critical about the way in which the magazine was run. He thought that
Eastman was too much of an esthete, too Baudelaire-like in his poetic
expression. He maintained that _The Liberator_ should express more of
the punch and the raw stuff of life and labor. Max Eastman had made up
his mind to get out from under. We decided that all the collaborators
should endeavor to keep the magazine going as a collective enterprise.
And upon Eastman's suggestion, Michael Gold and myself were appointed
executive editors. There could have been no worse combination, because
personally and intellectually and from the first time we met, Michael
Gold and I were opposed to each other.

Michael Gold's idea of _The Liberator_ was that it should become a
popular proletarian magazine, printing doggerels from lumberjacks
and stevedores and true revelations from chambermaids. I contended
that while it was most excellent to get material out of the forgotten
members of the working class, it should be good stuff that could
compare with any other writing.

I knew that it was much easier to talk about real proletarians
writing masterpieces than to find such masterpieces. As a peasant and
proletarian aspirant to literary writing I had come in contact with
reams of stuff, pathetic attempts of working people toward adequate
literary expression. My sympathy was with them, but my attitude was not
mawkish. Because I was also an ordinary worker, without benefit of a
classic education. And I had had the experience of the hard struggle
and intellectual discipline and purposefulness that were necessary to
make a fine stanza of verse or a paragraph of prose. And Michael Gold
also knew. He was still intellectually battling up from the depths
of proletarian starvation and misery. And like myself he was getting
hard criticism and kind encouragement from Max Eastman. But Michael
Gold preferred sentimentality above intellectuality in estimating
proletarian writing and writers.

I preferred to think that there were bad and mediocre, and good and
great, literature and art, and that the class labels were incidental.
I cannot be convinced of a proletarian, or a bourgeois, or any special
literature or art. I thought and still think that it is possible to
have a proletarian _period_ of literature, with labor coming into its
heritage as the dominating social factor, exactly as we have had a
Christian period, a Renaissance period, and the various pagan periods.
But I believe that whenever literature and art are good and great they
leap over narrow group barriers and periods to make a universal appeal.

The intelligentsia of our southern states may boycott a Negro's book
or a Negro's painting. Hitler may burn the creative work of Jews,
liberals and radicals, Mussolini may proscribe literature and art that
he considers anti-Fascist, the Pope may index works that he interprets
as anti-Catholic, and the Communists may damn works of literature and
art that appear to them unfavorable to international Communism. I don't
minimize the danger of the obstruction of talent and the destruction of
art. But if the works are authentic they will eventually survive the
noise and racket of the times, I think.

Michael Gold and I on _The Liberator_ endeavored to team along.
But that was impossible. Gold's social revolutionary passion was
electrified with personal feeling that was sometimes as acid as
lime-juice. When he attacked it was with rabbinical zeal, and often his
attacks were spiteful and petty. One day I was informed that he had
entered the Civic Club (a rendezvous of liberals and radicals) in his
shirt sleeves and with an insulting attitude. I remarked that I didn't
see any point in doing that to the pacifist Civic Club; that he might
have gone instead to the Union League Club.

Someone repeated my comment, and one evening when I was dining with
Marguerite Tucker at John's Italian restaurant in Twelfth Street,
Gold came in and challenged me to box. He had been a champion of some
note on the East Side. I shrugged and said the difference between us
was intellectual and not physical, but that I was willing to box, if
he thought that would settle it. So we laughed the matter off and
drank a bottle of dago red together. However, I saw clearly that our
association could not continue. Shortly after that we called a meeting
of _Liberator_ editors and I resigned.

Meanwhile I had been devoting most of my time to dramatic criticism.
Happy Harlem had come down to Broadway in a titillating musical piece
called _Shuffle Along_. The metropolitan critics dismissed it casually
at first. There were faults. Technically the piece was a little too
rhythmically lazy and loose-jointed. But there were some luscious
songs and singing: "Shuffle Along," "Love Will Find a Way," and
"Bandanna Land." And there was Florence Mills. Florence Mills was so
effortless in her perfect mimicry and elfin brown voice that the Negro
impressarios were not even aware that they possessed in her a priceless
gold star. For they had given her a secondary rôle in the revue.

Never had I seen a colored actress whose artistry was as fetching as
Florence Mills's. After the show I went backstage to see her. I said:
"You're the star of the show." No, she said, the stars were Lottie Gee
and someone else whose name I don't remember. I said, "You're the star
for me, and I'm going to say so in my review." She laughed deliciously.

I thought I'd feature _Shuffle Along_ in _The Liberator_. I wanted
especially to do this because the Negro radicals of those days were
always hard on Negro comedy. They were against the trifling, ridiculous
and common side of Negro life presented in artistic form. Radical
Negroes take this attitude because Negroes have traditionally been
represented on the stage as a clowning race. But I felt that if Negroes
can lift clowning to artistry, they can thumb their noses at superior
people who rate them as a clowning race.

I asked William Gropper, the cartoonist, to go along with me to see
_Shuffle Along_ and make some drawings. Gropper made some excellent
things, but they were too savagely realistic for the airy fairy
fascination of Negro comedy. Gropper realized this, and didn't mind
my asking Hugo Gellert to take a stroke at them, because I thought
Gellert's style more suitable to the kind of thing I wanted. I did not
rate Gellert's talent anywhere near Gropper's. But Gellert possessed
a more receptive mind and cunning hand for illustrative work. Gellert
made some clever drawings with a modernistic accent. We printed them
with my article, and that issue of _The Liberator_ was a sensation
among the theatrical set of Harlem.

Florence Mills ran away with the show, mimicking and kicking her
marvelous way right over the heads of all the cast and sheer up to the
dizzying heights until she was transformed into a glorious star.

_Shuffle Along_ was conceived, composed and directed by Negroes.
There had been nothing comparable to it since the Williams and Walker
Negro shows. It definitely showed the Negro groping, fumbling and
emerging in artistic group expression. When its best artists were
bought out by white producers and it was superseded by such elaborate
super-productions as _Blackbirds_, which was projected and directed by
a white impresario, there was no artistic gain for the Negro group. But
the Negro _artistes_ made more money, and thoughtless Negroes, like all
good Americans, think that the commercially successful standard is the
only standard by which Negro artistic achievement may be judged.

I have no prejudice against white persons leading and directing Negroes
artistically and otherwise, if they can do it with more than merely
technical competence. Negroes using the technique of the white peoples
to express themselves must necessarily have to go to school to the
whites. But it is no easy achievement for any outsider to get on the
inside of a segregated group of people and express their hidden soul.
Many white people see Negroes from a white point of view and imagine
that they know all about the Negro soul and can express it even better
than the blacks themselves. When I saw the white man's _Blackbirds_ in
Paris and remembered _Shuffle Along_ I was very sad. The _Blackbirds_
flashed like a whip from beginning to end, rushing the actors through
their parts like frightened animals. There was not a suggestion in it
of the inimitably lazy tropical drawl that characterizes Negro life
even in the coldest climate. And that was the secret of the success of
the charming _Shuffle Along_.

In the midst of my career as a dramatic critic I bumped into one of
those acute snags which remain in the memory even as the scar of a bad
wound that has been healed remains in the body. It wasn't because I
was thin-skinned. When I went to work on _The Liberator_ I knew that I
would have to face social problems even greater than before, but I was
determined to face them out. But what happened to me hurt more because
it came from an unexpected source.

I think that instead of rewriting it, I will let the article I wrote at
the time (for _The Liberator_ of May, 1922) tell the story for me:

"Wouldn't your dramatic critic like to see _He Who Gets Slapped?_" So,
very graciously, wrote the Theater Guild's publicity agent to _The
Liberator_. Our sometime dramatic critic, Charles W. Wood, having
deserted us for the season, I elected myself dramatic critic by
acclamation. It would be pleasant to sit in a free front-row parquet
seat along with "The Press," instead of buying a ticket for the second
balcony. And as for the other seat--free seats come in pairs--I decided
to take along William Gropper, _Liberator_ artist of the powerful
punch and vindictive line, and master of the grotesque.

So on the appointed night we presented ourselves at the box office of
the Fulton. It was with keen pleasure that I anticipated seeing this
fantastic play of Leonid Andreyev's, _He, the One Who Gets Slapped_. A
curious and amusing theme!

The stubs were handed to Gropper and we started toward the orchestra.
But the usher, with a look of quizzical amazement on his face, stopped
us. Snatching the stubs from Gropper and muttering something about
seeing the manager, he left us wondering and bewildered. In a moment
he returned, with the manager. "The--the wrong date," the manager
stammered and, taking the stubs marked "orchestra," he hurried off to
the box office, returning with others marked "balcony." Suddenly the
realization came to me. I had come here as a dramatic critic, a lover
of the theater, and a free soul. But--I was abruptly reminded--those
things did not matter. The important fact, with which I was suddenly
slapped in the face, was my color. I am a Negro--_He, the One Who Gets
Slapped_....

Gropper and I were shunted upstairs. I was for refusing to go, but
Gropper, quite properly, urged compromise. So, brooding darkly, madly,
burnt, seared and pierced, and over-burdened with hellish thoughts,
I, with Gropper beside me half-averting his delicate pale face, his
fingers, run through his unkempt mop of black hair, shading his
strangely child-like blue eyes, sat through Leonid Andreyev's play.

Andreyev's masterpiece, they call it. A masterpiece? A cleverly
melodramatic stringing together of buffoonery, serio-comic philosophy,
sensational love-hungriness and doll-baby impossibilism, staged to
tickle the mawkish emotions of the bourgeois mob! So I thought. I sat
there, apart, alone, black and shrouded in blackness, quivering in
every fiber, my heart denying itself and hiding from every gesture of
human kindliness, hard in its belief that kindliness is to be found
in no nation or race. I sat inwardly groaning through what seemed a
childish caricature of tragedy. Ah! if the accident of birth had made
Andreyev a Negro, if he had been slapped, kicked, buffeted, pounded,
niggered, ridiculed, sneered at, exquisitely tortured, near-lynched
and trampled underfoot by the merry white horde, and if he still
preserved through the terrible agony a sound body and a mind sensitive
and sharp to perceive the qualities of life, he might have written a
real play about being slapped. I had come to see a tragic farce--and I
found myself unwillingly the hero of one. He who got slapped was I. As
always in the world-embracing Anglo-Saxon circus, the intelligence, the
sensibilities of the black clown were slapped without mercy.

       *       *       *       *       *

Poor, painful black face, intruding into the holy places of the
whites. How like a specter you haunt the pale devils! Always at their
elbow, always darkly peering through the window, giving them no
rest, no peace. How they burn up their energies trying to keep you
out! How apologetic and uneasy they are--yes, even the best of them,
poor devils--when you force an entrance, Blackface, facetiously,
incorrigibly, smiling or disturbingly composed. Shock them out of
their complacency, Blackface; make them uncomfortable; make them
unhappy! Give them no peace, no rest. How can they bear your presence,
Blackface, great, unappeasable ghost of Western civilization!

       *       *       *       *       *

Damn it all! Goodnight, plays and players. The prison is vast, there
is plenty of space and a little time to sing and dance and laugh and
love. There is a little time to dream of the jungle, revel in rare
scents and riotous colors, croon a plantation melody, and be a real
original Negro in spite of all the crackers. Many a white wretch,
baffled and lost in his civilized jungles, is envious of the toiling,
easy-living Negro.



XIII

"Harlem Shadows"


Meanwhile I was full and overflowing with singing and I sang in all
moods, wild, sweet and bitter. I was steadfastly pursuing one object:
the publication of an American book of verse. I desired to see "If We
Must Die," the sonnet I had omitted in the London volume, inside of a
book.

I gathered together my sheaf of songs and sent them to Professor
Spingarn. He was connected with a new publishing firm. Many years
before I had read with relish his little book, entitled _Creative
Criticism_. I wrote to him then. He introduced me to James Oppenheim
and Waldo Frank of _The Seven Arts_, and they published a couple of my
poems under a nom de plume. That was way back in 1917. Now, five years
later, I asked Professor Spingarn to find me a publisher.

I had traveled over many other ways besides the railroad since those
days. Professor Spingarn was appreciative of me as a Negro poet, but
he did not appreciate my radicalism, such as it was! Paradoxically,
Professor Spingarn supported and advocated Negro racial radicalism and
abhorred social radicalism. Professor Spingarn preferred my racial
jeremiads to my other poems. Well, I was blunt enough to tell Professor
Spingarn that he was a bourgeois. He didn't like it. Nevertheless he
found me a publisher.

When I told a Yankee radical about myself and Professor Spingarn,
this radical said that it was impossible for any man to be pro-Negro
and anti-radical. He said, he believed that Professor Spingarn was
pro-Negro not from broad social and humanitarian motives, but because
he was a Jew, baffled and bitter. I said, "But Oswald Garrison Villard
is also pro-Negro, and he is not a radical nor a Jew." The radical
said, "Oh, Villard is an abolitionist by tradition." And I said, "Isn't
it possible that Professor Spingarn is also an abolitionist, and by
even a greater tradition?"

If only individual motives were as easy to categorize and analyze as
they appear to be! Anyway, Professor Spingarn got Harcourt Brace and
Company to accept my poems. Max Eastman wrote a splendid preface, and
the book was published in the spring of 1922.

_Harlem Shadows_ was a _succès d'estime_. The reviews were
appreciative, some flattering, flattering enough to make a fellow
feel conceited about being a poet. But I was too broke and hungry and
anxious about the future to cultivate conceit. However, I was not
discouraged. The publication of my first American book uplifted me
with the greatest joy of my life experience. When my first book was
published in Jamaica, I had the happy, giddy feeling of a young goat
frolicking over the tropical hills. The English edition of my poems had
merely been a stimulant to get out an American book. For to me America
was the great, difficult, hard world. I had gone a long, apparently
roundabout way, but at least I had achieved my main purpose.

The last _Liberator_ affair in which I actively participated was an
international dance. The winter had been cold on our spirits and
our feelings warmed currently to celebrate the spring. We trumpeted
abroad our international frolic and the response was exhilarating. All
shades of radicals responded, pink and black and red; Left liberals,
Socialists, Anarchists, Communists, Mayflower Americans and hyphenated
Americans, Hindus, Chinese, Negroes. The spirit of _The Liberator_
magnetized that motley throng. There was a large freedom and tolerance
about _The Liberator_ which made such a mixing possible. (How
regrettable that nothing like the old _Liberator_ exists today! Social
thinking is still elastic, even chaotic, in America. Class lines and
ideas here are not crystallized to such an extent as to make impossible
friendly contact between the different radical groups.)

Our spring frolic brought that international-minded multitude into
Forty-second Street. But the metropolitan police resented the invasion.
They were aghast at the spectacle of colored persons mixed with white
in a free fraternal revel. So they plunged in and broke it up, hushed
the saxophones, turned the crowd out of the hall, and threw protesting
persons downstairs, lamming them with their billies.

       *       *       *       *       *

After leaving _The Liberator_ I took a holiday from work. I had not had
one for over a year. I was in a small circle of friends and we convived
together, consuming synthetic gin. Meanwhile I was thinking about a
job. Perhaps I would return to the railroad. James Weldon Johnson
advised me to make a tour of the South and read my verses. But I never
anticipated with gusto the prospect of appearing as a poet before
admiring audiences.

I was often in the company of a dancer who was making a study of
African masks for choreographic purposes. One evening while he,
my friend, Gladys Wilson, and I were together in my diggings in
Fourteenth Street, a woman walked in to whom I had been married seven
years before. A little publicity, even for a poor poet, might be an
embarrassing thing. The dancer exclaimed in a shocked tone, "Why, I
never knew that you were _married!_" As if that should have made any
difference to _him_. I said that nobody knew, excepting the witnesses,
and that there were many more things about me that he and others didn't
know.

All my planning was upset. I had married when I thought that a domestic
partnership was possible to my existence. But I had wandered far and
away until I had grown into a truant by nature and undomesticated in
the blood. There were consequences of the moment that I could not face.
I desired to be footloose, and felt impelled to start going again.

Where? Russia signaled. A vast upheaval and a grand experiment. What
could I understand there? What could I learn for my life, for my work?
Go and see, was the command. Escape from the pit of sex and poverty,
from domestic death, from the cul-de-sac of self-pity, from the hot
syncopated fascination of Harlem, from the suffocating ghetto of color
consciousness. Go, better than stand still, keep going.



PART FOUR

THE MAGIC PILGRIMAGE



XIV

The Dominant Urge


I went to Russia. Some thought I was invited by the Soviet government;
others, that I was sent by the Communist Party. But it was not so easy
to have the honor of an invitation or the privilege of being sent.
For I was not one of the radicals abroad, important to the Soviet
government; and I was not a member of the Communist Party. All I had
was the dominant urge to go, and that discovered the way. Millions of
ordinary human beings and thousands of writers were stirred by the
Russian thunder rolling round the world. And as a social-minded being
and a poet, I too was moved.

But money was necessary so that I could go to Russia. I had none.
I mentioned my object to James Weldon Johnson, then secretary of
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He
suggested I might raise some money by selling special copies of my
book of poems with signed photographs. And very kindly he placed at
my disposal a select list of persons connected with the N.A.A.C.P. In
that way a small number of copies of _Harlem Shadows_ was sold. The
price asked was five dollars. I remember that about six persons sent
checks for ten dollars. One check was signed by Mrs. Henry Villard.
Eugen Boissevain sent me one hundred dollars. Crystal Eastman gave
me a letter as one of the editors of _The Liberator_, asking any
radical who could to facilitate my getting to Russia. Just before
I sailed James Weldon Johnson gave me a little farewell party at
his residence in Harlem. A few of Harlem's élite came: Dr. DuBois,
Walter White, Jessie Fauset, Rosamond Johnson, and from among downtown
liberal intellectuals, Heywood Broun and F.P.A. of the New York
_World_, John Farrar, who was then editor of _The Bookman_, and Ruth
Hale. It was a pleasant evening and the first of the bohemian-élite
interracial parties in Harlem which became so popular during the highly
propagandized Negro renaissance period.

I signed on as a stoker on a slow freighter going to Liverpool. Just as
that time, Crystal Eastman also had booked passage on another boat to
go with her children to London to join her husband. We had arranged to
have a last meal together on the eve of my sailing. But I waited until
near midnight and she didn't appear. So I went out alone in Harlem,
visiting the speakeasies and cabarets and drinking a farewell to the
illegal bars.

In one joint I met Hubert Harrison and we had together a casual drink.
But I did not inform him or any of my few familiars that I was sailing
for Europe the next day. Sentimental adieux embarrass me. I took a
look in at Sanina's for a brief moment. Late that night, when I got
home with just enough liquor to fill me with a mellow mood for my next
adventure, I found a tiny scrap of paper thrust into my keyhole:

 Claude dear:

 I just dashed in to give you a hug and say goodbye--Bon Voyage, dear
 child!

 Crystal

I tucked the little note in a corner of my pocket book and have carried
it with me all these years, through many countries, transferring it,
when one pocket book was worn out, to another.

Six years later, when I was in Spain, I received a copy of _The Nation_
containing the announcement of beautiful Crystal Eastman's death. It
was sudden and shocking to me. I took her farewell note out of my
pocket book and read it and cried. Crystal Eastman was a great-hearted
woman whose life was big with primitive and exceptional gestures. She
never wrote that Book of Woman which was imprinted on her mind. She
was poor, and fettered with a family. She had a grand idea for a group
of us to go off to write in some quiet corner of the world, where
living was cheap and easy. But it couldn't be realized. And so life was
cheated of one contribution about women that no other woman could write.

       *       *       *       *       *

At Liverpool I left the freighter and went straight to London. There
was a reunion with a few intimates of the International Socialist Club.
Many of the members had left for Russia the year before to live there
permanently. Also a number of British Communists were preparing to
travel to Russia for the Fourth Congress of the Communist International.

Arthur McManus, one of the Left labor men from the Clyde, was one
of them. I asked if he could assist me to go to Russia. He was not
enthusiastic, especially since I was once connected with the Pankhurst
group, which was now out of favor at Moscow. McManus said that I
should have been recommended by the American Communist Party. The
more difficult it seemed, the more determined I was to make my way to
Russia. One evening in a barroom, I heard a group of English comrades
facetiously discussing Edgar Whitehead, the former secretary to the
Pankhurst Group, saying that he was always landing something good in
the movement. I heard them mention that Whitehead was in Berlin. He was
liaison agent and interpreter for the English-speaking radicals who
were traveling to Russia. Whitehead had studied German in Berlin when
he was a schoolmaster. He had been a leader of conscientious objectors
during the last war. He was also my friend, and I thought I'd take a
chance on his helping.

The next day I took the channel boat to Ostend. Arriving in Berlin,
I made inquiries and found Whitehead. He promised to get me through
to Russia. That I was not indorsed by any Communist party did not
matter to him. He was not a fanatic or dogmatist. In the days of our
association together in London we often waxed satirical about Communist
orthodoxy and we had often discussed the idea of a neo-radical magazine
in which nothing in the universe would be held sacred.

Whitehead started working for me. The intervening time I spent
visiting the theaters. Expressionism was setting the pace. I saw the
revolving stage for the first time and admired it. Also I visited
many of the cabarets, which had sprung up like mushrooms under the
Socialist-Republican régime, some of which seemed to express the
ultimate in erotomania. The youngsters of both sexes, the hectic
pleasure-chasers of the Berlin of that epoch (before Poincaré grabbed
the Ruhr), were methodically exploiting the nudist colony indoors,
which was perhaps more exciting than the outdoor experiments.

One evening Whitehead announced that all was ready. The next day we
drove in a taxicab to a rendezvous. We entered a house and passed
into a large room in which there was a group of men. Four of them I
identified as Russians. Whitehead introduced me as a _kamarad und neger
dichter_. One sitting at a table spoke with a kindly smile. He asked a
few questions in effortful English which I promptly answered. I said
that I was not a member of the American Communist Party, but that I
was in sympathy with the purpose of the great Russian revolution. I
said that it was primarily as a writer that I was interested in Soviet
Russia and that I intended to write about it for the Negro press.

I received back my passport and Crystal Eastman's recommendation,
which I had consigned to Whitehead. A visa for Russia was attached to
the passport. I was told to prepare to travel at once. The next day I
traveled with an English-speaking German to Stettin. There I slept that
night at a hotel. The following morning I was taken to a pier, whence I
embarked for Leningrad.

       *       *       *       *       *

Petrograd! Leningrad! When I think of that great city like a mighty
tree shaken to its roots by a hurricane, yet still standing erect,
and when I think of the proud equestrian statue of Peter the Great,
proclaiming that dictator's mighty achievement, I feel that the world
has lost the poetry and the color rising like a rainbow out of a
beautiful name since Petrograd was changed to Leningrad.

Lenin is mightier than Peter the Great. But there is no magic in the
name of Leningrad. There is magic in the name of Lenin, as there is
splendor in the word Moscow. And perhaps Lenin himself, whose life
was devoted to the idea of creating a glorious new world, might have,
in appreciation of the will of Peter the Great to remake a nation,
preferred Petrograd to remain Petrograd. Perhaps the spirit of Lenin
might have been more adequately expressed in the erection of a
brand-new city, rising out of that system to which he dedicated his
life. Lenin without any suffix--like a perfect ball of pure gold--a
city called Lenin.

       *       *       *       *       *

I saw Petrograd! Like a great tree, shaken to its roots by a hurricane
and struck by lightning and somehow still standing. Petrograd, half
empty of its population and somewhat sad in the autumn. I saw the
monuments of czars and nobles tumbled in the dirt by the proletarian
masses. But intact and untouched they had left the beautifully proud
monument of Peter the Great, a mighty symbol of individual will and
majesty.


_MOSCOW_

 _Moscow for many loving her was dead ...
 And yet I saw a bright Byzantine fair,
 Of jewelled buildings, pillars, domes and spires
 Of hues prismatic dazzling to the sight;
 A glory painted on the Eastern air,
 Of amorous sounding tones like passionate lyres;
 All colors laughing richly their delight
 And reigning over all the color red._

 _My memory bears engraved the strange Kremlin,
 Of halls symbolic of the tiger will,
 Of Czarist instruments of mindless law ...
 And often now my nerves throb with the thrill
 When, in that gilded place, I felt and saw
 The simple voice and presence of Lenin._

I felt almost ashamed in those lean hungry years of 1922, when Russia
was just emerging from a great famine, that Moscow should have stirred
me in the way I have expressed it in this sonnet. Yes, I will admit
that my senses were stirred by the semi-oriental splendor and movement
of Moscow even before my intellect was touched by the forces of the
revolution.

After the war, the revolution and the famine, one's mind had created a
picture of a grim, harsh melancholy atmosphere. But it was all like a
miracle, all that Byzantine conglomeration of form and color, shedding
down its radiance upon the proletarian masses. It was like an _Arabian
Nights_ dream transforming the bleak white face of an Arctic waste.

And the crowds tramping and sleighing through the deep snow spreading
over all the land were really happier and friendlier than the crowds
of New York and London and Berlin. Yet the people in Moscow were
generally so poorly clad. There was so much of that Oriental raggedness
that one does not see in New York and London and Berlin--at least
not on the surface. The scenes were so unexpected and strange that
I even doubted at first whether they were not created by Communist
discipline and Bolshevik propaganda. But when I mingled with the people
I soon perceived that many did not even comprehend the true nature of
Communism. Some of them could understand only that Lenin was in the
place of the Czar and that he was a greater Little Father.

I was soon brought down out of the romantic feeling of the atmosphere
to face the hard reality of the American Communist delegation. Brazenly
and bravely I had journeyed to Russia with some members of the British
group. But now the American delegation had arrived with a Negroid
delegate, a light mulatto. My presence was resented. The American
delegation did not want me there. The delegation represented America,
and as I had been passed with other Communists as a visitor to the
Fourth Communist Congress, it was necessary that I should be indorsed
by the delegation as an unofficial visitor. This the chairman refused
to do. Instead, he desired that I should be sent out of Russia, back
home.

A fight was raging inside of the American delegation. A minority led
by James Cannon wanted a legal American Communist party, to carry
on open propaganda among all the American workers. The majority, led
by the chairman, was fighting to keep the American party illegal and
underground.

Rose Pastor Stokes was the main prop of the chairman. When she arrived
in Moscow, still pretty and purring and sly as a puss, she immediately
engaged me in conversation and casually asked if I did not think that
an illegal Communist party was the best suited for America. I answered
no, emphatically. At the time I did not know that the difference in the
ranks of the American group was serious. Not being a party member, I
was unaware of what was going on inside of the organization.

Rose Pastor Stokes was one of the delegates who had just escaped from
Bridgman, Michigan, during the police raid of August, 1922, when the
illegal Communist Party held its convention in the open there in a
beautiful romantic valley. Some of us of _The Liberator_ thought that
the Communists, being tired of staying underground, were feeling so
pastoral and poetic that they couldn't do better than hold their secret
convention in the open air of the lovely Michigan country.

Rose Pastor Stokes had said to me that it was necessary for Communists
to take to the woods in summer to escape the iron heel of the
capitalists. She was the wife of a millionaire, and perhaps knew more
about the iron heel than poor proletarians. She admired that romantic
novel of Jack London's, _The Iron Heel_, and once told me that radicals
could use it as a textbook of revolutionary organization in America.
She was shocked and hurt that a few of us regarded the convention and
the raid in Michigan as something like a comic opera.

I remembered Mrs. Stokes's spy mania, when I was on _The Liberator_.
She was doing secret radical work. She used to tell me stories of
being followed by detectives, and of how she fooled them by taking
refuge in the Hotel Plaza and the Hotel Astor; because the dicks
wouldn't imagine that a guest of such places was red. She was also
working with a radical Negro group, and thought she was followed by
Negro detectives in Harlem. One night I was at the apartment of my
friend, Grace Campbell, when Mrs. Stokes came in to attend a meeting.
She was breathless, and sank into a chair, exhausted. She asked for
water, and Comrade Campbell hurried to get a glassful. Then Mrs. Stokes
explained that a colored man had been watching her suspiciously while
she was riding up on the subway, and when she got off the train he
had attempted to follow her. She had hurried and dodged through the
insouciant Harlem crowd and gone round many blocks to evade the spy.

Said Comrade Campbell, "But Comrade Stokes, there aren't any Negroes
spying on radicals in Harlem. That colored man, maybe he was
attempting--kind of--to get friendly with you."

Mrs. Stokes jumped right up out of her exhaustion: "What, Comrade?
You _shock_ me!" In her voice, and her manner, was the most perfect
bourgeois expression of the superior person. Comrade Campbell said:
"Why Comrade Stokes, I didn't mean to insinuate anything, but any
person is likely to be mistaken for something else."

So now in Moscow, before I was fixed in place as an unofficial
observer, Rose Pastor Stokes had got it from me that I was opposed to
the majority of the American delegation, and that was bad. Mrs. Stokes
really believed that we were living through the period of the new
Inquisition against radicals in America, and that those who did not
believe that were traitors to the cause. She hinted even that there
was something suspicious about my use of my real name in Moscow. For
all the American delegates had secret names. Mrs. Stokes's own was
Sasha. But some of us unorthodox comrade sympathizers preferred to
identify her as The Red Red Rose.

Meanwhile, the committee appointed to seat all delegates to the
Fourth Congress was sifting credentials. It was headed by a repulsive
type of strutting Prussian whose name is now forgotten, lost in the
radical scramble for place and the shuffling and cutting of Communist
cards--and Leninist purges. Greater Red names than his have gone like
the melted snows of yesterday.

I was soon aware that the Prussian person had his severe blue eye fixed
on me, as if I had been specially pointed out to him. I pretended that
I had not seen that evil eye, but soon I was being bedeviled. I was
thrown out of the Lux Hotel and found myself in a dilapidated house in
a sinister _pereulok_. My room was bare excepting for an army cot, and
cold like the steppes because of a broken window pane through which
poured a Siberian draught. My first thought was to protect myself
against pneumonia, and so I hurried to a store and purchased two
blankets and a pair of the cheap warm and comfortable felt boots that
reach to the thighs--the kind the Russian peasants wear.

In the room next to mine there was a Russian couple. The man spoke
a little English. I complained about the state of my room and he
agreed that the window should be fixed; but, said he, "Thousands of
Russians are living in worse places." It was a quiet, gentle, perhaps
unintentional, rebuke, but immediately I felt confused and altogether
ashamed. I became aware of the implications of my grievance, so petty
in the eyes of the "thousands in worse places" who had just come
through an eight-year siege of war, revolution, counter-revolution and
famine, with fields and farms devastated, factories wrecked, houses in
ruins, no time and few funds for repairs.

I remembered breakfasting on the train in Germany a few weeks
previously. The countryside, misty brown in the early morning, was
peaceful and beautiful; the train ran precisely on time; the coaches
and dining car were in elegant shape, the passengers well dressed, the
waiters in neat uniform. The breakfast was fine, but the cream that
came with the coffee was barely whitened water. I had just come from
America, where cream with coffee is a commonplace. And so, without
thinking, I asked the waiter for cream. I said I would pay extra for it.

The waiter said: "But Mister, we have no cream at all. They have taken
away all our cows from us, and what little milk we have we must give to
our babies." Then I remembered that I had read somewhere that under the
Treaty of Versailles the Germans had had to give up thousands of heads
of cattle to the Allies. But I had never fully grasped the significance
of that until I asked for cream with my coffee in Germany. (We are, the
majority of us, merely sentimental about the suffering of others. Only
when direct experience twists our own guts out of place are we really
able to understand. I remember once hearing a nice comfortable bohemian
noblewoman ecstatically exclaim: "_J'aime la souffrance! J'aime la
souffrance!_" Yes! She loved vicariously the suffering of others.)

" ... Thousands in worse places." A good room was as much of a luxury
in Moscow in 1922 as a car is in America. A good room was the chief
non-political topic of conversation. People greeted one another and
said: "Do you have a good room?" in the same way we say, "How is
your health?" One of the tidbits of those times was the joke that
Mrs. Trotsky and Mrs. Zinoviev were at odds because one had a better
apartment in the Kremlin than the other.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now my position was precarious. I wanted by all means to stay in Moscow
and to attend the meetings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist
International. But would-be delegates and visitors who were unwanted
and undesirable were being ruthlessly dealt with. Some were accused
as spies and counter-revolutionists. To the Russians, spying was a
real menace. It meant sabotage of revolutionary property, attempted
assassination of officials, and working to overthrow the Soviets. They
could not understand that when an English or an American Communist
accused certain persons of being spies, his idea of spying was romantic
and akin to eavesdropping.

Aware of the way in which things were going against radical dissidents,
I acted quickly. I had a friend high up in Bolshevik circles in the
person of Sen Katayama. Sen Katayama was _the_ Japanese revolutionist.
He had been a member of the Second International and knew all the big
men of the conservative British and continental labor movement. He was
an old friend of Lenin, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Radek, and had gone over
to the Third International at its inception.

Sen Katayama had been a student at Fisk University, the southern Negro
school. He was small, dark-brown, with intensely purposeful features
which were nevertheless kindly. I met him when I was working on _The
Liberator_. He dropped in one day and introduced himself. He took me
to lunch at a Japanese restaurant, and at another time to a Chinese,
and introduced me to the Indian rendezvous restaurant in the theatrical
district. His personality was friendly but abounding in curiosity--a
sort of minute methodical curiosity. He made me think of a fearless
and faithful little hunting dog. When he came up to my office, his
little eyes, like brilliant beads, darted rapidly over everything.
And like a permanent surprise he invaded my rooms at all hours and
talked in his squeaky grandmotherly voice about Negro problems. He
demonstrated a vast interest and sympathy for the Negro racialists and
their organizations. I liked Sen Katayama immensely. I was fascinated
by his friendly ferreting curiosity. I had associated with many Chinese
at home in the West Indies and in London, but Sen Katayama was my first
Japanese friend. It was exciting to contrast Chinese and Japanese by
the types I had known. Sen Katayama was eager and extrovert, almost too
much so, while the Chinese, however friendly, seemed aloof and secret.

Sen Katayama was in his glory in Red Russia. He was an honorary colonel
of the Red army and always appeared at mass meetings in his uniform.
The crowds adored him and applauded frantically. He appeared to me
somewhat like a harbinger, a symbol of the far eastern element in the
new heart of Russia.

Sen Katayama warmly welcomed me in Moscow and invited me to tea in his
nice room in the Lux Hotel. He held an important post in the Eastern
Department of the Communist International and because of his extensive
traveling and his education and contact with American Negroes he was
regarded as an authority on all colored peoples' affairs. He had more
real inside and sympathetic knowledge and understanding of American
Negroes than many of the white American Communists who were camping in
Moscow.

When I explained to Sen Katayama how and why I had come to Russia and
of the difficulties I was encountering because of the opposition of the
American delegation, he said: "You leave everything to me and we'll
see if they can get you out of here and prevent your attending the
Congress. I'll talk to the Big Four[2] about you."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 2: Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Radek.]



XV

An Individual Triumph


Meanwhile, all the Russian folk unwittingly were doing their part for
me. Whenever I appeared in the street I was greeted by all of the
people with enthusiasm. At first I thought that this was merely because
of the curiosity which any strange and distinctive type creates in any
foreign environment, such as I had experienced in Holland and Belgium
and Germany. But no! I soon apprehended that this Russian demonstration
was a different thing. Just a spontaneous upsurging of folk feeling.

The Bolsheviks had nothing at all to do with it. The public
manifestation for me took them unawares. But the Bolsheviks have nerves
subtly attuned to the currents of opinion and a sense of propaganda
values in which they are matched only by French officialdom. So, as
soon as they perceived the trend of the general enthusiasm for me,
they decided to use it. And I was not averse to that. Never before
had I experienced such an instinctive sentiment of affectionate
feeling compelling me to the bosom of any people, white or colored.
And I am certain I never will again. My response was as sincere as
the mass feeling was spontaneous. That miraculous experience was so
extraordinary that I have never been able to understand it.

Even the Russian comrades, who have a perfect pat social-economic
explanation for all phenomena, were amazed. The comrade who conducted
me around (when I hadn't wandered off by myself, which was often) was
as intelligent as a fox and as keen and cold as an icicle. Although
a mere youth, he held important positions, open and secret, and
today, still young, he holds a most important position in the Soviet
government and in the Russian Communist Party. This comrade said: "I
don't quite understand. Some of the Indian delegates are darker than
you--quite black--yet the people don't carry on about them that way.
But there is something very different in your features and that is what
the people see."

Never in my life did I feel prouder of being an African, a black, and
no mistake about it. Unforgettable that first occasion upon which I was
physically uplifted. I had not yet seen it done to anybody, nor did I
know that it was a Russian custom. The Moscow streets were filled with
eager crowds before the Congress started. As I tried to get through
along the Tverskaya I was suddenly surrounded by a crowd, tossed into
the air, and caught a number of times and carried a block on their
friendly shoulders. The civilians started it The soldiers imitated
them. And the sailors followed the soldiers, tossing me higher than
ever.

From Moscow to Petrograd and from Petrograd to Moscow I went
triumphantly from surprise to surprise, extravagantly fêted on every
side. I was carried along on a crest of sweet excitement. I was like a
black ikon in the flesh. The famine had ended, the Nep was flourishing,
the people were simply happy. I was the first Negro to arrive in Russia
since the revolution, and perhaps I was generally regarded as an omen
of good luck! Yes, that was exactly what it was. I was like a black
ikon.

The attitude of the non-Bolshevist population was even more
interesting. I had been told to be careful about going places alone.
But bourgeois persons on the street implored me just to enter their
homes for a glass of tea. I went. I had no fear of even the "whitest"
Russians in Russia, although in Paris and Berlin I would not have
trusted them. The only persons that made me afraid in Russia were the
American Communists. Curiously, even Russian bourgeois persons trusted
me. They knew that I was in sympathy with the Communists--was their
guest. Yet some of them told me frankly and naïvely that they did not
like the Bolsheviks and didn't think their régime would last. The
women chattered like parrots, happy that the shops were opened. They
wanted to hear about the shops in New York and London and Berlin. When
I visited a college with an interpreter, who was certainly a member of
the O.G.P.U., one of the language teachers explained the difficulties
of working under the new régime. She said she ought to travel abroad to
keep up with the languages she taught, and that was impossible now. She
said the proletarian students were dull and kept the brighter bourgeois
students back. She said that one of her brightest students was the
son of a former governor, and that she would not reveal his identity,
for if it were known, he could not stay in the college. She said, "I
can't let even you know who he is, for you might tell about him." But
before I left she introduced me to the lad, explaining that he had
specially asked for an introduction. In Petrograd, Chorny Chukovsky,
the popular author, introduced me to a princess and a countess who
were his friends, and to the intellectual élite, who were mainly
anti-Bolsheviks. But they crowded a hall to hear me read my poems.
One of the professors, who had studied in England and France, was so
excited that he invited me to the national library the next day. And
what did he do? There was a rare Pushkin book with a photograph of
him as a boy which clearly showed his Negroid strain. (The Negroid
strain is not so evident in the adult pictures of Pushkin.) I coveted
the book, and told the Professor so. He said he was sorry that he
could not make me a present of the volume. But he actually extracted
that photograph of Pushkin and gave it to me. Mark you, that professor
was no Bolshevik, contemptuous of bourgeois literature. He was an
old classic scholar who worshipped his books and was worried about
the future of literature and art under the Bolshevik régime. Yet he
committed that sacrilege for me: "To show my appreciation of you as a
poet," he said. "Our Pushkin was also a revolutionist." Like Crystal
Eastman's farewell note, that photograph of Pushkin is one of the few
treasures I have.

       *       *       *       *       *

Oh, I remember that magnificent cartoon in colors, picturing me sailing
on a magic carpet over the African jungles to Moscow. The artist
made me a gift of the original. An imp swiped it. It was the perfect
interpretation of my adventure in Russia. An _Arabian Nights_ fantasy
transformed into reality. I had been the despised brother, unwelcome
at the gorgeous fête in the palace of the great. In the lonely night
I went to bed in a cold bare room. But I awoke in the morning to
find myself the center of pageantry in the grand Byzantine city. The
photograph of my black face was everywhere among the most highest
Soviet rulers, in the principal streets, adorning the walls of the
city. I was whisked out of my unpleasant abode and installed in one of
the most comfortable and best-heated hotels in Moscow. I was informed:
"You may have wine and anything extra you require, and at no cost to
you." But what could I want for, when I needed a thousand extra mouths
and bellies for the importunate invitations to feast? Wherever I wanted
to go, there was a car at my disposal. Whatever I wanted to do I did.
And anything I felt like saying I said. For the first time in my life
I knew what it was to be a highly privileged personage. And in the
Fatherland of Communism!

Didn't I enjoy it! The American comrades were just too funny with envy
and chagrin. The mulatto delegate who had previously high-hatted me now
began to cultivate my company. It was only by sticking close to me that
he could be identified as a Negroid.

I was photographed with the popular leaders of international Communism:
Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek, Clara Zetkin, Sen Katayama, Roy; with
officers of the Soviet fleet, the army and the air forces; with the Red
cadets and the rank and file; with professors of the academies; with
the children of Moscow and of Petrograd; with delegates from Egypt,
India, Japan, China, Algeria.



XVI

The Pride and Pomp of Proletarian Power


The Bolshoi Theater in Moscow presented a pageantry of simple
proletarian pride and power on the night of the opening of the Congress
of the Communist International. The absence of the primitive appeal of
gilded pomp made the manifestation even more sublime and awe-inspiring.

I had received a pass to attend the great opening of the Congress.
When I succeeded in getting into the vast Bolshoi auditorium, Martin
Anderson Nexö, the author of _Pelle, the Conqueror_, waved to me to
come and sit beside him. He was seated in the center front of the
hall. But an usher grabbed me, and before I could realize where I was
going, I was being handed from usher to usher like an object that was
consigned to a special place. At first I thought I was going to be
conducted to the balcony, but instead I was ushered onto the platform
to a seat beside Max Eastman and just behind Zinoviev. It seems as if
the curious interest of the crowd focused upon me had prompted Zinoviev
to hoist me up there on the platform.

Zinoviev asked me to speak and I refused. Max Eastman pleaded: "Do
speak! See how the people are looking at you; they want to hear you." I
said that if they had given me notice beforehand I might have prepared
a few phrases, although speaking was not my specialty. But I wouldn't
stand up before the Bolshevik élite and that vast eager crowd, without
having something prepared to say. Eastman said: "Just tell them you
bring greetings from the Negro workers of America."

"But," said I, "I have no mandate from any American Negro workers to
say that. There is an official mulatto delegate; perhaps he has a
message from the Negro workers."

I said to Eastman, "Why don't you speak?" He said he would like to
if they would ask him. Certainly the American Communists had in Max
Eastman the finest platform personality to present. Unlike me, he was
as pure a Marxist as any of them there and had given the best of his
intellect to serve the cause of Communism and extoll the Soviets in
America. But because of petty jealousy they cold-shouldered Eastman
in Moscow. Perhaps if they had been a little diplomatic about him, he
probably would be one of them instead of a Trotskyist today.

I told Zinoviev that I came to Russia as a writer and not as an
agitator. When his messenger interpreted what I said, Zinoviev's
preacher face turned mean. He was most angry. But I did not mind.
My personal triumph had made me aware that the Russians wanted a
typical Negro at the Congress as much as I wanted to attend the
Congress. The mulatto delegate was a washout. He was too yellow. I
had mobilized my African features and won the masses of the people.
The Bolshevik leaders, to satisfy the desires of the people, were
using me for entertainment. So why should I worry about Zinoviev's
frown? Even though he was president of the great Third International,
I knew that there was no special gift I could get from Zinoviev after
the entertainment was over and ended. I could never be a radical
agitator. For that I was temperamentally unfit. And I could never be a
disciplined member of any Communist party, for I was born to be a poet.

And now I was demanded everywhere. Sometimes I had to participate
in three different meetings in one day: factory meetings, meetings
of soviets, youth meetings, educational conferences in colleges
and schools, the meetings of poets and writers, and theatrical
performances. I was introduced to interesting sections of the new
social and cultural life of Moscow and Petrograd.

I was always asked to speak, and so I prepared a few phrases. The
Russians adore long speeches, which it did not interest me to make. And
so they lengthened mine by asking a lot of questions. I had listened
to the American delegates deliberately telling lies about conditions
in America, and I was disgusted. Not only the Communist delegates, but
radical American intellectuals really thought it was right to buoy
up the Russians with false pictures of the American situation. All
the speeches of the American delegates, the tall rhetoric, the purple
phrases, conveyed fundamentally a common message, thus: "Greetings
from America. The workers of America are groaning under the capitalist
terror. The revolutionary organizations have been driven underground.
But the American Communist Party is secretly organizing the masses. In
a few years we will overthrow American capitalism and join our forces
with the Russian Communists. Long live the Revolution...." I heard the
chairman of the American delegation say: "In five years we will have
the American revolution."

The Russians from these speeches pictured the workers of America as
denied the right to organize and the rights of free assembly and
free speech, as denied representation in Congress, as ridden down by
American cossacks, banished in droves from their homes to the Siberias
of the Far West, with their imprisoned and exiled leaders escaping to
Canada and Mexico and working underground to overthrow the capitalist
system. Briefly, the American situation, as they understood it, was
similar to that of Russia under the Czarist régime just before the
revolution.

The police raid on the illegal Communist party meeting in the beautiful
woods of Michigan had been spread all over the Russian newspapers.
Everything about that funny raid was so Czarist-Russian-like that the
Russians really believed that it was typical of American conditions.

Truly, I could not speak such lies. I knew that the American workers
in 1922 were generally better off than at the beginning of the World
War in 1914. I was aware, of course, that labor organization in this
country was far below the standard of labor organization in England,
Germany and France, that American labor was not organized as a
political weapon, that in some sections of the country and in certain
industries labor was even denied the right to organize, and that
radicals were always baited. But Leavenworth was not Siberia. And by
no stretch of the imagination could the United States be compared to
Czarist Russia.

How, then, could I stand before the gigantic achievement of the Russian
revolution and lie? What right had I to tell these people, who had gone
through a long death struggle to conquer their country for themselves,
that the American revolution was also in travail? What could _I_
presume to tell them? I told them that it was a great honor for me to
be there to behold the triumph of their great revolution. I told them
that I felt very insignificant and dumb before that wonderful thing. I
said that I had come to Russia to learn something, to see with my own
eyes and try to write a little of what I had seen.

Invariably I was questioned: "And what about the American revolution?"
When I replied I think it was a long way off, the audiences did not
like me to say that. I must admit that the Russians in those days were
eager to be deceived. I remember that I was asked to attend a large
and important meeting of Young Communists. When I had finished talking
the president got up and said: "Comrade, we appreciate what you feel
about our revolution, but we want you to tell us about the American
revolution. When will there be the American revolution?"

It was a direct question and I answered directly. I said that I
could not prophesy about an American revolution; but that perhaps if
the American ruling class started a wholesale suppression of labor
organizations, if the people had to read radical literature in secret,
if the radicals had to hold all their meetings in secret, if the
liberals and radicals who agitated for more civil liberties and the
rights of the working class were deported to the Philippines, then
possibly in ten or fifteen years America might develop a situation
similar to that in Russia in 1905.

The interpreter, a comrade commander in the navy, asked if he should
translate me literally. I said "Word for word." And when he had
finished there was no sound of applause. That was the first time that I
was not applauded when I spoke, but I preferred that.

The young president of the Young Communists took the platform:
"Comrade," he said, "you are a defeatist. The American revolution
cannot be so far away. But if that is your opinion, we command you
at once to do your part and help make the revolution." I said to the
interpreter: "Tell the young comrade that I am a poet."

After the meeting my friend Comrade Venko said to me: "You should
have told them the American revolution is right around the corner.
That's what they want to hear." (He had lived many years in England
and had acquired some Anglicisms.) I said, "You know I read somewhere
that Lenin said that it is necessary to face facts and tell the truth
always."

"Yes, Comrade," said Venko, "but Lenin is Lenin and we are just
ordinary mortals."

Yet in spite of my obstinacy I was still everywhere demanded. When the
American Negro delegate was invited to attend meetings and my mulatto
colleague went, the people asked: "But where is the _chorny_ (the
black)?" The mulatto delegate said: "Say, fellow, you're all right for
propaganda. It's a pity you'll never make a disciplined party member."

"Bigger shots than you have said the same thing," I replied. Zinoviev
had referred to me as a non-partisan. "My destiny is to travel a
different road."

We were sitting in on the discussions as to whether there should be
an illegal or legal Communist party in America, and on the Negro in
American life. I was there not only as a writer, but I was given
the privileges of a special delegate. One thing sticks in my memory
about that American delegation in Moscow. It had the full support of
the Finnish Federation and the Russian Federation of America. The
representatives of these organizations voted _en bloc_, rallying to the
support of an illegal party. The argument of the Yankee representatives
of the legal group was unanswerable, but they were outvoted every time
by the foreign federations. The Finnish and the Russian federations
were not only the most highly organized units of the American party,
but, so I was informed, they contributed more than any other to the
party chest. They controlled because they had the proper organization
and the cash.

I said to the mulatto delegate: "That's what Negroes need in American
politics--a highly organized all-Negro group. When you have that--a
Negro group voting together like these Finns and Russians--you will
be getting somewhere. We may feel inflated as _individual_ Negroes
sitting in on the councils of the whites, but it means very little if
our people are not organized. Otherwise the whites will want to tell
us what is right for our people even against our better thinking.
The Republicans and the Democrats do the same thing. They give a few
plum places to leading Negroes as representatives of the race and our
people applaud vicariously. But we remain politically unorganized.
What we need is our own group, organized and officered entirely by
Negroes, something similar to the Finnish Federation. Then when you
have your own group, your own voting strength, you can make demands
on the whites; they will have more respect for your united strength
than for your potential strength. Every other racial group in America
is organized as a group, except Negroes. I am not an organizer or an
agitator, but I can see what is lacking in the Negro group."

       *       *       *       *       *

I listened to James Cannon's fighting speeches for a legal Communist
party in America. Cannon's manner was different from Bill Haywood's or
Foster's. He had all the magnetism, the shrewdness, the punch, the bag
of tricks of the typical American politician, but here he used them in
a radical way. I wondered about him. If he had entered Democratic or
Republican politics, there was no barrier I could see that could stop
him from punching his way straight through to the front ranks.

I think Trotsky was the first of the big Russians to be convinced that
there should be a legal Communist party in America, then Rakovsky and
finally Zinoviev, a little reluctantly. Bukharin was for the illegal
group. He said: "Remember what Jack London has told us about the terror
and secret organization in America in his _Iron Heel_." That was so
rare that I had to smile. While Cannon was informing the Russians about
actual conditions in America, Bukharin was visualizing the America of
Jack London's _Iron Heel_. Bukharin always did make me think of that
line about some men having greatness thrust upon them. I believe that
Lenin said of Bukharin, as Frank Harris said of H.G. Wells, that he
could not think. Yet Bukharin was the author of the A B C of Communism,
which once had a big vogue among the radicals.

At last even I was asked my opinion of an illegal Communist party
in America. I tried to get excused, saying that as I was not an
official delegate or a politician, but merely a poet, I didn't think
my opinion was worth while. But as my colleague the mulatto was for
the illegal party, I suppose they needed a foil. So then I said that
although I had no experience of the actual conditions of social life
in Czarist Russia, I believed there was no comparison between them and
American conditions today. There were certain democratic privileges
such as a limited freedom of the press and a limited right of free
speech that our governing classes had had to concede because they
were the necessary ingredients of their own system of society. And
American radicals could generally carry on open propaganda under those
democratic privileges. Our Upton Sinclairs, Eugene Debs's, Max Eastmans
and Mother Jones's might be prosecuted and imprisoned for a specific
offense against the law, but they were not banished for their radical
ideas to an American Siberia. And I said I thought that the only place
where illegal and secret radical propaganda was necessary was among
the Negroes of the South.

What I said about the Negroes of the South was more important than I
imagined, and precipitated the Negro question. The Negro question came
under the division of the Eastern Bureau, of which Sen Katayama was an
active official. Because of his American experience and his education
among Negroes, Sen Katayama was important as a kind of arbiter between
black and white on the Negro question. It was an unforgettable
experience to watch Katayama in conference. He was like a little brown
bulldog with his jaws clamped on an object that he wouldn't let go. He
apparently forgot all about nice human relationships in conference.
Sen Katayama had no regard for the feelings of the white American
comrades, when the Negro question came up, and boldly told them so. He
said that though they called themselves Communists, many of them were
unconsciously prejudiced against Negroes because of their background.
He told them that really to understand Negroes they needed to be
educated about and among Negroes as he had been.

Think not that it was just a revolutionary picnic and love feast in
Moscow in the fifth year of Lenin! One of the American delegates
was a southerner or of southern extraction. An important Bolshevik
facetiously suggested to him that to untangle the Negro problem, black
and white should intermarry. "Good God!" said the American, "if Jesus
Christ came down from Heaven and said that in the South, he would be
lynched." The Bolshevik said: "Jesus Christ wouldn't dare, but Lenin
would."

Also I remember Walton Newbold who was the first Communist candidate
elected to the British House of Commons. Saklatvala, the Indian Parsee,
had announced himself a Communist only after he had been elected as an
independent, but Walton Newbold was the first candidate of the British
Communist Party. Just after his election to Parliament Newbold came to
Moscow, while the Fourth Congress of International Communism was in
session. For any reader who might not understand why a Communist member
of the British Parliament should go to Moscow, I may explain that by
the parallel of a cardinal going to Rome after receiving his hat.
It was a big day for the little insignificant delegation of British
Communists when Newbold arrived in Moscow. Of that triumphant arrival,
one incident sticks more in my memory. I was informed that a member
of the Chinese Young Communists, who was attending the Congress, met
Newbold in the lobby of the Lux Hotel. He went up to Comrade Newbold to
congratulate him and began: "Comrade Newbold--"

"Hello, Chink," Newbold cut in.

"But Comrade Newbold, I am not a Chink."

"Who told you that you weren't?" said Comrade Newbold as he turned away.

In a little while the incident had flashed like an arrow through
Communist circles in Moscow. The young Chinese was a member of an old
Chinese clan and had been educated in America. At that time Bolshevik
eyes were fixed on China. Chinese soldiers made up some of the crack
units of the Red army when Great Britain was supporting the White war
against the Reds and tightening the blockade against Russia. I remember
Radek's saying to me: "We are pinning our hopes on China more than any
other country. If we can make China Red, we will conquer the world."

I don't know if that incident of the young Chinese and the first
Communist member of the British Parliament ever reached the ears of the
big Bolsheviks. I do know, however--I got it from a good source--that
the big Bolsheviks gave Newbold a hell of a skating over the Communist
ice of Moscow. Newbold returned to the Parliament of British gentlemen
and finally drifted over to the capitalist side.

I was asked to write a series of articles on the Negro group for
_Izvestia_, the Moscow organ of the Soviets. Thus I came to meet
Steklov, the editor-in-chief. Steklov was a huge man with a leonine
head, more picturesque than intelligent. He told me that he was
interested in Negroes being won over to the cause of Communism
because they were a young and fresh people and ought to make splendid
soldiers. I didn't relish that remark out of the mouth of a Communist.
So many other whites had said the same thing--that Negroes make good
cannon fodder when they were properly led--led by whites to the black
slaughter. That filled me with resentment. The head of the French
General Staff had proclaimed to the world the same thing, that France
with its African empire had an army of a hundred millions. When
Trotsky, the chief of all the Bolshevik fighting forces talked to me
about Negroes he spoke wisely. Trotsky was human and universal in his
outlook. He thought of Negroes as people like any other people who were
unfortunately behind in the march of civilization.

Karl Radek was one of the Big Five of the Politbureau, which
decided Bolshevik policy in those days. He invited me to dinner at
his apartment in the Kremlin along with the Negro delegate of the
American C.P. Radek wanted to know if I had a practical policy for the
organization of American Negroes. I said that I had no policy other
than the suggestion of a Negro _Bund_, that I was not an organizer or
an agitator and could not undertake or guarantee any practical work of
organization.

The Negro delegate said that I was a poet and a romantic. I said I was
not as romantic as he and his illegal party with their secret names
and their convention in the wilds of Michigan. Radek laughed, and as I
looked at his face set in a thick circle of hair I thought how much he
resembled a red spider. Radek said that the Communists should adopt a
friendly attitude to all writers who were in sympathy with the soviets.
For example, Upton Sinclair, he thought, would be a valuable asset to
the revolution if the Communists knew how to handle and use him. The
mulatto said that Upton Sinclair was a bourgeois Socialist.

"Oh, no, no," said Radek, "I insist that is not the attitude to take.
Upton Sinclair is a powerful writer with an enormous influence, and
the American Communists should make use of his influence, even though
Sinclair is not a Communist. Now with our Gorky--" At this point an
infant wailed and Radek said, "My baby comes first." He left the room,
to return a few minutes later with the maid, who brought in the baby.
Radek and Mrs. Radek kissed and fondled the child. The maid then
brought the child to the mulatto, who touched its hand and patted its
hair. From the mulatto she brought the child to me, but it shrank away,
hid its face, and began to cry. Radek was interested and told the maid
to take the child to the mulatto again. The mulatto took the child in
his arms and it stopped crying, but when the maid tried me again, the
child hid its face and cried. The maid retired with the child, and
Radek said: "Now I understand the heart of the difference between white
and black in America. It is fear. The Americans are like children,
afraid of black complexion, and that is why they lynch and burn the
Negro." I told Radek that his deduction was wrong; that in the South,
where Negroes were lynched and burned, the black complexion was not a
strange thing to the whites, and that the majority of the children of
the better classes of the South were nursed from their birth by black
women, and that those children were extremely fond of their black
foster mothers. Radek said that that was a strange thing.



XVII

Literary Interest


The Congress ended and with a happy relief I turned from political
meetings to social and literary affairs. The majority of the delegates
had left, but I remained in Moscow writing. I was magnificently paid
for poems and articles and became a front-page feature. Sometimes what
I received in rubles for an article amounted when I figured it out to
fifty American dollars. I had plenty of money to spend for food and
cigarettes and even to frequent the cabarets. And besides, I was saving
my fare to return to America.

I had no idea that I was being paid as a literary celebrity until one
afternoon when I went to a newspaper office to receive my check. There
I met an interesting Russian journalist. He was a titled person, a
Count Something. After the revolution he had discarded his title, but
since the Nep he had resumed it and signed himself Count. He remarked
to me facetiously that perhaps his title of the old economic policy
might help him to a better place under the New Economic Policy.

When I drew my check he looked at it and said: "Why, if they paid me
one-tenth of what they pay you I would be rich. I could go to the
casino and gamble and the cabarets to dance and wine."

"Why," I said, "I thought you got as much as I got."

"No," he said, "I couldn't, for you are a guest writer, a big
writer--_bolshoi! bolshoi! bolshoi!_" The interpreter who accompanied
me was annoyed and he said something to the Count, who immediately
clamped up. That, _bolshoi! bolshoi! bolshoi!_ (big! big! big!) was
sweet music in my ears and an inspiration. But it also stirred up a
hell of discontent within me. Why should I be "big" translated into
Russian? It was because I was a special guest of the Soviets, a good
subject for propaganda effect, but inflated beyond my actual literary
achievement. That was not enough for me. I felt that if I were to be
_bolshoi_ as a literary artist in a foreign language, I should first
make a signal achievement in my native adopted language, English.

I met some of the notable Russian writers: Chukovsky, Boris Pilnyak,
Eugene Zamiatin, Mayakovsky. I was invited to read at literary
gatherings. My audiences were always enthusiastic and applauding, and
also sometimes critical. "_Tovarish_," I was often told, "your poems
are not proletarian." I replied, "My poetry expresses my feelings." I
shocked the pure proletarian intellectuals and I was proud that I was
a privileged person in Russia, and in a position to shock them. One
night I was invited to the Arbat to hear the proletarian poets read and
discuss their compositions. Without understanding the language I was
able to appreciate certain poems from their swing and movement and the
voice of the reciter. And I had a good interpreter who rendered some
into English for me. After each poem was delivered there was a general
discussion of it. I was particularly pleased with the poem of a slim
young man in a coarse peasant smock buttoned up to his chin, and with
a worried, unhappy expression in his sensitive features. I knew at
once that he was a peasant become proletarian like myself. He gave a
charming poem. Even before translation I knew from its communicative
color tone and the soft threne running through it like a silver chord
that it expressed an individual longing for the life of the country,
perhaps the ways that nevermore would be.

As soon as the poet had done I clapped my hands heartily. His poem and
personality had unusually excited me, because I rarely applaud. I liked
that poet with the intellectual anxiety of his face showing clearly
that he was a little bewildered by that world-moving social shake-up.
That expression was real, more real to me than the automatic enthusiasm
of his fellow poets which seemed to me less sincere. They all jumped
on him. "Alexis, you are not a proletarian poet!" And they criticized
his subject matter. So I asked my interpreter to let me say a word. I
said I thought it was natural for a man who had lived in the country to
express his longing for it, whether he was a bourgeois or a proletarian.

Mayakovsky was then the premier proletarian poet. Chukovsky, the
popular author of _Crocodile_ and other children's books, did not
have the highest opinion of Mayakovsky. He told me that before the
revolution Mayakovsky had been a futurist and that he used to wear
fantastic clothes and had proclaimed his poems at the court of the
Czar. Now Mayakovsky was a thundering proletarian poet. He recited one
of his poems for me. It sounded like the prolonged bellow of a bull. He
very kindly presented me with a signed copy of his latest book. Also
he presented me to his wife, and said that she desired to dance a jazz
with me. She was a handsome woman of an Arctic whiteness and appeared
as if she had just stepped proudly out of a Dostoyevsky novel. We went
to a gypsy cabaret and danced a little, but I am afraid that I did not
measure up to the standard of Aframerican choreography. Mayakovsky told
me that his great ambition was to visit America. I said I thought he
would be a big success there in Russian costume, declaiming his poems
in his trumpet voice.

The contemporary Russian poetry of the period which I liked best
was that of the peasant poet Yessenin. His intimate friend, Zonov,
translated some of his poems, and I was enchanted by their lyric
simplicity and profundity. Zonov was always hoping that Yessenin and I
would meet, but we never did. Just about the time when I disembarked at
Petrograd, Yessenin and Isadora Duncan were landing in New York. And
Yessenin did not return to Russia until after I had left in June of
1923.

Zonov held a place either executive or artistic at the Meyerhold
Theater, which I visited frequently, for there was a congenial gang
there. He often invited me to a private little feast in his den, where
he served sweet Caucasian wine and caviar and sometimes champagne.
Always with him was a little actress whom he fancied, but who did
not seem to love him too much. Zonov looked like a tired professor,
and he was always bewailing the absence of Yessenin. He exhibited a
snapshot of Yessenin that he carried in his pocket book, and I was
startled by its resemblance to the strange dancer I had known in New
York. Zonov said unlovely things of Isadora Duncan, because she had
married Yessenin and taken him from his friends. He said that Yessenin
had proclaimed to them all that he did not love Isadora. But he had
married her to get out of Russia, to see Europe and America. I said I
did not consider love as always necessary, and that sometimes it might
be expedient for a woman to save a man from his male friends. Zonov
translated what I said to the actress and she screamed with laughter.

Meyerhold's was the revolutionary constructivist theater, which did the
most daring things in dramatic production. There were no curtains.
The audience saw clear through to backstage and watched the actors
waiting to take their parts and come up to and retire from the front
of the stage. The plan was novel. Meyerhold himself was a fanatic
crusader in his ardor to make a great revolutionary theater express
the revolutionary social system. All the symbols of the machine system
were assembled on the stage: dynamos, cranes, scaffolding and turbines,
until it resembled a regular workshop. Meyerhold said to me: "We need
now great revolutionary plays and playwrights to make my theater
the unique dramatic expression of the revolution." I had to talk to
Meyerhold through an interpreter, but he impressed me as being more
romantic than practical with his idea of making the stage the unique
expression of the factory. I felt that after all the worker's life is
not limited to the factory and should never be.

I was interested in the Moscow workers' attitude to the Meyerhold
Theater. Whole blocks of seats were given to the factories and the
barracks, but the theater, which was not very large, was never
full. Yet the plays which Meyerhold put on were technically highly
interesting. Vastly exciting to me was the presentation of _The
Inspector General_, by Gogol. And unforgettable was one realistic scene
of another play, in which the Czar was sitting on his chamber pot, with
the imperial crown painted big upon it. But the workers and soldiers
really preferred the ballet of the Bolshoi theater, the Moscow art
theaters, the expressionist theater and the ordinary vulgar theaters.
Whenever the workers received free tickets for the above-named theaters
they never missed; workers and soldiers always filled them. But the
audience of the Meyerhold Theater was of the intelligentsia--students
and professional people. While the workers and soldiers showed a
distinct preference for the straight familiar entertainment, it was
the intelligentsia that was avid of revolutionary drama. The situation
made me think of a Frenchman's saying that most of the work of the
experimental artists was not intended to enlighten the working class,
but to "_épater la bourgeoisie_."

I was invited to dinner by Lunarcharsky, the Commissar of Education
and of Arts. He was one of the most flamboyant orators of the Soviet
Union and also a talented playwright. I told him a little of the little
I knew about education in general in America and Negro education in
particular, and I seized the opportunity to mention the Russian theater
and the theater of Meyerhold. I remarked that it was interesting that
the workers and soldiers seemed to prefer the old ballet to the new
experimental theater. Lunarcharsky said that in the early days of the
revolution some had desired to suppress the ballet, but he had held
out against it. He considered the ballet a great form of art and what
he did was to give the workers and peasants and soldiers the chance to
enjoy it, which they hadn't had under the old régime. He had conserved
and subsidized the best of the classical theaters for the entertainment
of the people. But also he had granted subsidies to the experimental
theaters to give them their chance to experiment in creating their
best. Lunarcharsky was a wise mediator. It is related that when the
Moscow masses, excited to high resentment against the Russian Orthodox
Church, attempted to destroy the wonderful Cathedral of Vasilly
Blazhenny, they were stopped by the intervention of Lunarcharsky. There
was not a day of my stay in Moscow that my eyes failed to be glad in
contemplation of Ivan the Terrible's super-byzantine burnt offering to
humanity. And Lunarcharsky in Moscow appeared like a guardian angel to
me because he had made it possible for my eyes to see that glory.



XVIII

Social Interest


My constant companion and interpreter was Venko, a big, strong,
gloriously boisterous and comparatively young Russian. He had lived
for years in an English Midland town and had left an English wife
and children there to come to Russia after the revolution. The only
sentimental thing in his mind was his family in England. Sometimes he
was perplexed thinking about them. He said he was sure they wouldn't
like living in Russia and he had no desire to return to England. He
was not sentimental about his substitute Russian wife. He said she had
married him only to get good food and a good apartment to live in. He
was of peasant origin and she seemed to be from the poor professional
class. Their living room constantly reminded me of that of the poor
officer in _The Brothers Karamozov_. It was like a seamstress's place,
with a sewing machine installed and scraps of cloth lying carelessly
about, from which one's clothes picked up bits of thread, and it had a
peculiar odor like that of clothes being washed with brown soap. But
she was a good wife. Sometimes I stayed at Venko's house, after we
had finished at a meeting and resorted to a café to drink vodka. And
however late we got there, his wife would get up to serve food.

Venko was an interpreter in the O.G.P.U. He was not connected with
the intelligence work. He didn't like office work. He preferred to
agitate crowds. He was a marvelously gesticulating, noisy and frothy
agitator, but there was not much substance in his phrases. And if you
don't give Russians some meat to chew on when you talk to them, they
soon tire of you, however brilliant your fireworks may be. If you have
something to say they will listen for long hours upon hours, as patient
as sheep, even if you are speaking in a strange language. And afterward
they will ruminate on it with satisfaction through more long hours of
interpreting. Venko was a good enough interpreter. My stay in Moscow
was a vacation for him, of which we made a picnic. He was unorthodox
about life, whether it was old or new, even as I, and he made the most
unguarded and biting criticisms of things and personalities in his
profane and boisterous Russian way.

The Moscow Soviet made me an honorary member at one of its meetings. A
few days later Venko accompanied me to the office of the Soviet, where
I was to receive the little red book that would make me even a more
privileged personage than I was. The card was made out by a comrade
clerk and my photograph was affixed. Then Venko and I were ushered into
the presence of Commissar Kamenev, the president of the Moscow Soviet,
for him to affix his signature.

Kamenev was extremely dignified and perfectly attired in black, with
white collar and black tie, the best-dressed Bolshevik official
(according to the smart European standard) that I had met. He welcomed
me with a courteous smile, signed my card, shook my hand, and said he
was proud to deliver it to me in the name of the Moscow Soviet. Venko
translated. The simplicity of Kamenev's official dignity moved me
very much, for in his fine-fitting conventional clothes, I might have
mistaken him for a responsible banker, or a Protestant clergyman, or a
high-ranking continental diplomat, anything but what Venko startled me
by suggesting.

For as we got outside Venko exploded: "Good God, Comrade! I have seen
the Czar!"

"What do you mean, the Czar?" I said.

"Kamenev in the place of the Czar. The same clothes, the same manner of
wearing his beard! Good God, Comrade, a Jew in the place of the Czar!"
Kamenev's features were indeed remarkably like the Czar's.

"Why, don't you like Jews?" I asked in astonishment. It was the first
anti-Jewish sentiment I had heard from a Russian Communist.

"No, Comrade, I won't lie to you; I don't like Jews."

"Are you a pogromist?" I asked.

"Good God, Comrade, no. I fought the White-guard pogromists in the
Ukraine and was wounded. The White guards started pogroms against the
Jews. I fought them and fought the pogroms too, for pogroms are a crime
against our Communist party. But I don't like the Jews, Comrade. All
the Nep men are Jews."

"All?" I exclaimed.

"Well, if not all, nearly all. And all the money changers of the Black
Bourse are Jews."

I record this conversation because it was one of the impressive
and unforgettable things I heard from a Communist in Russia. I was
particularly impressed because, as a member of a minority group
in America that was the victim of blind and bitter prejudice, I
was interested to know if the prejudice against the Jews had been
automatically swept away with the Czarist régime.

I was interested, because I did not hold to the sentimental idea that
the deep-rooted prejudices of a people could be eradicated overnight.
What the Bolsheviks had accomplished was to put a stop to the vicious
political exploitation of group and race prejudice. I don't think the
saintliest human being could ask more. Individual prejudice is one
of the most natural sentiments. It is easy enough for an individual
prejudice to become a family prejudice, for family ties are real. And
it is also easy for such prejudice to spread to a group, for groups
exist and the majority of human beings are fundamentally tribal.

I was not at all shocked by Venko's revelation. I was merely
enlightened. If he were an intellectual Communist, he could not have
spoken to me as he did. I preferred to go around with him, because I
could learn more.

One evening Zonov invited me to a party which he did not want Venko to
know about, for it was a bourgeois party. The guests were celebrating a
holiday of the old régime which had been abolished by the Bolsheviks.

The party of that little remnant of the Russian bourgeoisie was
something not to be missed. It was even more Russian, noisy, and
elastic than the proletarian parties, for these people did not have to
bother about correct Communist conduct. Maybe there was a flickering
note of futility, of despair, which made them more reckless, because,
unlike the Communists, they had no future. The limited luxury of the
Nep for the moment was theirs to enjoy. And they were giving themselves
to the moment unforgettably, as you might give yourself to a page of
Chekhov.

Russian life seems to blow through space like a big breeze, and this
remnant of a bourgeois society was no less a part of that big breeze.
How they ate and danced and chattered in loud harmony! Two huge fruit
cakes reared themselves like wedding cakes on a sideboard, and there
were platters of caviar, sturgeon, salads, cheeses, every delicious
food to tickle the palate, and gallons of Caucasian wine and vodka to
wash it down.

I was introduced all round as a guest of Russia. They all knew that I
was a guest of the Soviets, and if they wanted to make it a guest of
Russia instead, I had no objection to the added distinction. One very
beautiful and proud-looking young woman got the back of her hand up to
my lips with one of those exquisite gestures that only people who are
born to them can make, I guess.

I made the best bow that was natural to me for that honor. But the
young woman was not satisfied with my bow. She stamped her foot
petulantly, though not unkindly, and rubbed my nose with the perfumed
back of her hand. I was convinced that something more was expected of
me, so I reached up my hand and took hers.

She led me to a seat and said rapidly in a voice that sounded like fine
tinkling glass: "Why did you refuse to kiss my hand? Do you think it
is degrading for a Communist to kiss a lady's hand?" She spoke lovely
English.

"No, _Tovarish_--"

"Please don't call me by that disgusting name," she interrupted. "I am
a _barishna_."

"Well, _Barishna_, then, if that is your preference, I did not kiss
your hand simply because I don't know how to do it well. Nobody I know
kisses hands in America."

The _Barishna_ conceded an indulgent smile. "Tell me," she said, "do
you like our Russia--Moscow and Petrograd?" I said that I did.

"As much as London and Paris and Berlin?" she asked.

I said, "More than London and Berlin. But I do not know Paris."

"I believe you," she said. "I know London and Paris and Berlin, but I
love Petrograd more. Now there is no Petrograd." "But you have Moscow.
Moscow is more beautiful," I said. "Oh, but Petrograd was magnificent
before the revolution." I could never imagine Petrograd being more
beautiful than Moscow, but so many Russians said it was.

Said the _barishna_, "I tell you, I don't like the foreign Communists.
You come here to gaze at us as if we were strange animals in a zoo, to
mock at and insult us in our distress. That is hateful."

"_Barishna_," I said, "I don't understand. What do you mean? The
foreign Communists come here bringing greetings from the workers abroad
to the workers of Russia. They do not come here to mock and insult, but
to praise and learn about the revolution."

"Oh, they do mock at us," she insisted. "My young brother works in one
of the important departments and he heard a foreign Communist boasting
that he had slept all night with a lady of title for ten cents. Now
isn't that a mean and despicable thing to say? If a real man could buy
a lady of quality for ten cents, shouldn't he be ashamed to mention it?"

"I guess so, _Barishna_," I said. "I don't care anything about the
difference between titled and untitled loving."

"But you do think it was an unspeakable thing for a _civilized_ man
to say, don't you?" She stressed the word _civilized_ as if I were a
savage in her sight and she was eager to hear the opinion of a savage
upon a civilized person.

"But, _Barishna_," I said, "the men of your class used to do worse
things than that to the women of the class of the man who said he
possessed a titled lady for ten cents. They did it to weak and ignorant
girls and often didn't even pay the price of ten cents."

"Oh no," said the _barishna_, "no _gentleman_ does that."

"But they do, _Barishna_. Many of your gentlemen still exercise even
the medieval _droits de seigneur_ in a different way. That's what
Tolstoy's _Resurrection_ is all about."

"So you read our Tolstoy? You like our Russian literature? Oh, I am
glad that you do. They have destroyed everything, but they cannot
destroy our Russian literature."

I was very embarrassed. Most of the bourgeois people I had met had
refrained from saying anything against the Communists, even though they
did not praise them. Suddenly the _barishna_ said, "I want to leave
Russia; I have friends in England. Would you marry me so that I could
leave the country with you--just a formal arrangement?" I hesitated and
said that I didn't know that I could.

"But many of the foreigners have married Russian girls and got them
through to Berlin," she said.

"Communists too?" I asked.

"Yes, Communists too."

"_Barishna_," I said, "I am sorry. I couldn't shoulder even the formal
responsibility. And besides, I am not a Communist. I don't even know
yet how I am going to get out of Russia myself."

In my rare contacts with members of the expropriated classes I felt
the weirdest sensations, as if pages out of Tolstoy, Turgenieff,
Dostoyevsky, Artzybashev and Chekhov were suddenly patterned and
peopled with actual life.

       *       *       *       *       *

Many of the people I knew from the International Club in London were
in Russia, some as visiting delegates, while others were permanently
settled. Arthur McManus was one of the English-speaking delegates whose
company I found congenial, and we were often together, although I found
it difficult to keep up with his gargantuan boozing, which perhaps
finally knocked him out dead. Both of us were guests of the Soviet
fleet at Kronstadt and were photographed together. McManus and I had
our points of difference, and sometimes when we were vodka-heated, our
tongues flew sharply at each other.

McManus was one of the men who had gunned the hardest after Sylvia
Pankhurst. He still felt venomous about her. "Intellectually
dishonest," was his pet phrase for describing her. I said I thought
Sylvia Pankhurst was as honest as any imperial Briton could be. And I
really preferred Pankhurst to persons like Lansbury, and perhaps even
to McManus himself. McManus shot up like a rabbit (he was a tiny man)
and demanded in his remarkably beautiful Glasgow brogue if I meant to
"insinuate" (that was the word he used) that he was an imperialist.
I said that I had not said "imperialist," but "imperial," and that
all Britons were imperial by birth and circumstances because of the
nature of the political set-up of Britain. McManus asked if I did not
believe that there were really radical Britons. I said that no man
can be more radical than his system can stand. McManus said I was a
bloody bigoted black nationalist, and his _b_'s had such a wonderful
ring (he stammered a little) that it made me laugh and laugh until both
of us fell into a prolonged fit of black-and-white laughter. It was a
good satisfying feeling to see McManus laugh aloud, for there was a
perpetually crucified expression on his countenance that all the Scotch
whisky and Russian vodka in the world could not dispel.

McManus did not appear to like my O.G.P.U. friend and companion,
Venko. It was well known among us that Venko was an interpreter and
translator for the O.G.P.U., but had nothing to do with the department
of investigations and arrests. Anyone with a little knowledge of
police organization knows that a police clerk has nothing to do
with the actual duties of policing. If Venko had been a secret agent
of the O.G.P.U. we would never have known that he worked in that
department. And I think I can nose out a secret agent whether he is
red or white. I spent a year of my early youth in a police department
in a position where I was in constant contact with all the branches of
the department. For my part I liked to have Venko along whenever I was
invited to a carousel among Communists. For Venko could beat anybody
carousing and I thought that if any issue were raised about the affair
afterward, Venko would be an excellent asset to have. Whenever I went
on a drinking bout with comrades I always saw that they got drunker
than myself.

It was necessary to do a little thinking while drinking and laughing.
For sometimes funny things happened. Some of the foreign comrades
seemed to enjoy playing at political intrigue, apparently without fully
realizing that political intrigue, to the Russians, was a serious and
dangerous thing. For instance, one of the youthful Indian delegates
occupied a room next to mine, and we often went down to our meals and
also over to the Comintern offices together. One morning when I called
for him his room was locked and there was a seal on the door. The
O.G.P.U. had arrested him during the night. Months later I met him in
Berlin under the most unusual circumstances, which I shall relate in
another place. There was also the young Whitechapel Jew whom I used
to know slightly at the International Club in London. He had come to
Russia as a youth delegate. But he wasn't functioning as anything when
I saw him. He told me fretfully that he had been denounced. One evening
he and I were on our way to a motion picture when a group of armed
police dramatically pounced upon him. They said something in Russian
and he must have answered satisfactorily, for they did not take him.
But he was scared, and said, "I am always scared." Shortly after that
incident he was gone too, and I never saw him again. When I reached
Berlin the following spring I met William Gallacher (now Communist
Member of Parliament) and asked him what had become of the boy. "He was
a spy," Gallacher said, "and he was fixed."

I said angrily, "But what have you in the little British Communist
Party for anybody to spy on?"

"More than you think," said Gallacher, with a mysterious nod of his
friendly head.

One night in Moscow I was invited to a celebration given by a minor
Communist official. The address had been written down for me and I had
to take somebody along to find it, as I did not know my way around
Moscow. So I asked Venko; but first we had to attend a meeting of
women workers at which he interpreted for me and we did not get to
the entertainment until very late. The large apartment was full of
comrades when we got there. I think the man who was throwing the treat
was a Finn and there were many Baltic types there, blonde and heavy of
movement and impassive of spirit. There was plenty of hard drinking,
but it was a dull atmosphere, nothing of the stimulating renascent
effervescence of the _barishna's_ evening. Venko stepped upon the scene
with a burst of boisterous enthusiasm, and drinking a big glass of
vodka, he took the center of the room and started speechifying, saying
there was a time for good comrades to fight, a time to work, and that
now was the time to be festive.

Venko was applauded, and from somewhere McManus came swaying like a
tipsy little imp, and pointing at Venko cried in a chanting voice:
"O.G.P.U.! O.G.P.U.! O.G.P.U.!" Venko laughed, and all of us. For he
and the others thought that McManus was merely putting over a joke
about his working for the O.G.P.U. But then McManus shouted in English,
"Spy! Spy! I am not going to stay here, I am going home. Spy!"

"What do you mean, Comrade?" Venko asked in amazement. "Did I ever spy
on you? Do you want to say that I am here spying on my comrades?" Venko
said something in Russian and everybody looked serious. But McManus
repeated "O.G.P.U. spy! O.G.P.U. spy!" A murderous look took possession
of Venko's face. "Comrade," he cried in a terrible voice, "if you don't
stop, I'll kill you; you hear? You're not drunk and irresponsible.
If you don't stop, I'll hit you, as little as you are." But McManus
shouted again: "O.G.P.U. spy! O.G.P.U.--"

Venko knocked McManus down with one blow and kicked him straight
across the room, where he lay curled up like a half-dead snake. "You
dirty little Englishman!" cried Venko. "Go back home and make your
own revolution and don't stay in Russia to insult a real Communist."
McManus picked himself up and began shouting: "I am not a Communist, I
am an Anarchist! Anarchist! Anarchist!" A comrade clapped his hand over
McManus' mouth, and lifting him up like a kid, carried him out of the
room.

I couldn't understand the meaning of McManus' outburst, except perhaps
that he, like some of the other visiting comrades, was afflicted with
spy mania. The company settled down again to drinking and toasting and
the singing of revolutionary songs.

The carousel ended with me again uplifted in glory. Venko had shed
every vestige of the murderous brutality of a moment before and was
acting like a commanding master of ceremonies. With strong exuberant
gestures he toasted me to the company. Always a poet in action, he
became a poet in words: "Comrade McKay, you must stay in Russia. We
want you. All Russia loves you, not we Communists only, but even
the damned bourgeoisie. Tell us, Comrade McKay, why is it you have
bewitched us? Tell us, Comrade McKay, what is it? Is it the black
magic we have heard about? Comrade McKay, we are bewitched, men, women
and children. We all love you, we all want you. Oh, do stay with us
forever! Comrade McKay, you must leave Moscow and see Russia. We
want you everywhere.... Comrade McKay, my heart is bold"--here Venko
brutally beat his breast with his enormous fist--"and my back is broad
and strong"--Venko bent himself over. "Get up on my back and I will
carry you all over Russia: from Moscow to Kazan, from Kazan to Samara
and all the way down the Volga we will go until we reach the Caspian
Sea...."

With a great shout I was hoisted up into the air. And McManus, awaking
from his drunken anarcho-communist nightmare, came zigzagging into
the room just as I was being carried out upon the shoulders of that
gloriously tipsy crew down the stairs and into the street and put into
a _droshky_ and conveyed to my hotel. My mind was too stimulated and
excited to go to sleep, with Venko's picturesque phrases burning in my
brain and creating a tumult of thought. I also had under consideration
an invitation to join a caravan of comrades from different countries
who were planning a tour of Russia with the Caucasus as the ultimate
destination. Should I go? Although I had been only in Moscow and
Petrograd, I had traveled already so extensively from triumph to
triumph. Should I go further and risk anti-climax, or should I make my
exit in éclat, cherishing always the richness of my golden souvenir?
The thought of leaving seemed to be the most logical. I knew myself
enough to know that I was not of the stuff of a practical pioneer, who
could become a link in that mighty chain of the upbuilding of the great
Russian revolution. And also I reflected like a stoic poet that it was
best not to be too popular. When I contemplated the overwhelming snow
of Russia, it appeared not like snow anywhere else, but like a thing
everlasting, petrified like an ocean of ivory. Yet soon even it would
disappear when the season changed. And somewhere from far away beyond
the cold Russian nights, glorious like fields of white lilies, another
season was coming.

Soon after that, Sen Katayama sent me an invitation to visit the
Eastern University. I spoke to a group of students, and then proceeded
to visit the dormitories. The rooms, in which the students prepared
light meals, appeared somewhat like those of Moslem students in the
_medersas_ of Morocco. Imagine my surprise, as I was passing through a
dormitory, to hear a familiar voice call my name. I looked back and it
was Mrs. Slova, reclining on a cot. Mrs. Slova had been charming to me
when I was in London, frequently inviting me to her house for high tea.
She was a seamstress and she and her three pretty daughters were always
smartly dressed. Some of the captious comrades styled her the bourgeois
lady. At that time she was wildly enthusiastic about Russia and just
biding her time to get there.

"But what are you doing here?" I asked.

"Don't you know? I am a student going to school again," she said. Mrs.
Slova had gone to Russia with her daughters immediately following
my return to New York from London. She was glad once more to be in
the land of her birth, where formerly she was ostracized because she
belonged to the Jewish group. But her three daughters, who were
born and reared in comparative comfort in London, were frightened of
the confusion of the new burgeoning society. Mrs. Slova quickly and
expertly arranged a _mariage de convenance_ for each of her daughters
with English comrades visiting Russia and sent them back to London. But
she remained in Moscow.

I asked if she did not miss her children. "I raised them right, until
now they are of age to act for themselves," she said. "They couldn't
fit into the new conditions here. Young people are not like us older
heads." I said I thought the Communist movement was primarily the
movement of youth, and if she in middle age could adapt herself to the
changed life, it should have been easier for her daughters.

"Pooh!" Mrs. Slova exclaimed. "Youth is all right when guided and led
by older heads. They act more from enthusiasm than from thinking and
will rush headlong into anything when they are excited, for youth is
the time of excitement. That is why they are preferred as soldiers.
But they soon get sulky when there is no more excitement to feed
on. All the great statesmen are middle-aged experienced men, even
in Red Russia." I was amazed at Mrs. Slova. I never considered her
bourgeois because she dressed well, but I always thought that she was
oversentimental and romantic. But after all she was a wise person.

She had no desire to return to England. Communally living in a
dormitory, sleeping on a cot with her belongings in a locker, she did
not hanker after her comfortable middle-class home in London. She
was studying languages in the Eastern University, with the intention
of entering the eastern diplomatic service. She didn't think any
revolution was going to take place in Western Europe for a long time,
she said. The Bolshevik leaders would at last wake up to that fact.
She believed in the East, the future of Russia in the East, and that
was why she had become a student at the Eastern University.



XIX

A Great Celebration


Of all the big Bolshevik leaders, I had desired most to have a personal
word from Lenin. I had been amazed in 1920, when I received in London
a message from John Reed informing me that Lenin had brought the Negro
question before the Communist Congress and inviting me to visit Moscow.

I had not gone to Moscow then because I did not consider myself
qualified to do what John Reed had asked, which was to represent the
American Negro group. But now that I was there, I was anxious to get
Lenin's opinion out of his own mouth. But Lenin apparently had become
very ill again after his couple of speeches at the Communist and Soviet
Congresses in the late fall of 1922. At one of the sessions of the
Communist Congress I was seated directly behind Krupskaya, Lenin's
wife, and I was introduced to her by Clara Zetkin (the first woman
member of the Reichstag), who was very friendly and affectionate to
me. I seized the chance to ask Krupskaya if it were possible to have
an interview with Lenin. She said she would see. But nothing came of
that. Some time after I visited the office of _Pravda_ with a Communist
sympathizer. He was acquainted with Lenin's sister, who held a position
on the staff, and he introduced me to her. I told her that I would like
to have a word from Lenin himself and she said frankly that it was
impossible, for Lenin was very sick.

Krupskaya was an extremely plain woman, really ugly. Max Eastman was
so appalled when he saw her that he said, "Lenin would probably get
well if he had a pretty girl!" So I said, "Like the Shunamite virgin,
who warmed up King David of Israel in his old age, eh?" But we did not
think that Lenin was that type of warrior.

I tried to reach some of the other leaders whom I had not yet met. One
day as I was passing through the grounds of the Kremlin with Andreyev,
one of the young officials of the Foreign Office, he pointed out to
me a strikingly big man wearing high black boots. That, he said, was
Stalin, who was chairman of the Committee on National Minorities. It
was the first time I heard the name of Stalin, and the information was
extremely important. I asked Andreyev if I could meet Stalin. Andreyev
said that that was difficult, for Stalin was one of the big Bolsheviks
and it was not easy to meet him. But he promised to approach Karakhan
about it. Perhaps Andreyev was tardy or unsuccessful in his _démarche_;
at any rate I heard no more of it, and my request vanished from my
thoughts when I came in contact with the magnetic personality of
Trotsky.

Trotsky, although apparently so formidable a character, was, with
Bukharin, the most approachable of the big Bolsheviks. I was told that
any message sent to Trotsky would be certain to receive his personal
attention. So I sent in a request to meet the Commissar of War. In a
couple of days I got an answer making an appointment and saying that an
aide would call to convey me to the Commissary of War.

Exactly at the appointed hour the following day, as I descended the
stairs of the hotel, an official automobile drove up with a military
aide and I was escorted to the war department. I passed through a
guard of Red sentries and was ushered immediately into Trotsky's
office. Trotsky was wearing a commander's uniform and he appeared
very handsome, genial and gracious sitting at his desk. He said he was
learning English and would try to talk to me in that language.

Trotsky asked me some straight and sharp questions about American
Negroes, their group organizations, their political position, their
schooling, their religion, their grievances and social aspirations
and, finally, what kind of sentiment existed between American and
African Negroes. I replied with the best knowledge and information at
my command. Then Trotsky expressed his own opinion about Negroes, which
was more intelligent than that of any of the other Russian leaders.
He did not, like Steklov, the editor of _Izvestia_, imagine Negroes
as a great army for cannon fodder. And unlike Radek, he was not quick
to make deductions about the causes of white prejudice against black.
Indeed, he made no conclusions at all, and, happily, expressed no
mawkish sentimentality about black-and-white brotherhood. What he said
was very practical and might sound reformist in the ears of radical
American Negroes.

Trotsky said in effect that the Negro people constituted a backward
group, socially, politically and economically, in modern civilization.
I remember distinctly that he used the word "backward." And he stressed
the point that Negroes should be educated, should receive not merely
academic education, but a broad spreading-out education in all phases
of modern industrial life to lift themselves up as a group to a level
of equality with the whites. I remember again that he used the word
"lift" or "uplift." And he urged that Negroes should be educated about
the labor movement. Finally, he said he would like to set a practical
example in his own department and proposed the training of a group of
Negroes as officers in the Red army.

Before I left, Trotsky asked me to make a summary of my ideas, in
writing, for him. This I did, and he wrote out a commentary on it and
published both either in _Izvestia_ or in _Pravda_. Unfortunately I
lost the original article and its English translation among other
effects somewhere in France. But the gist of it all is given above.

Also, Trotsky gave me a permit to visit some of the training schools
of the Soviet forces. I had not the slightest idea that that meant
a passport to a series of inspections and elaborate receptions. I
thought I was going to make perhaps a couple of quiet and unobtrusive
visits to the military schools. What transpired was amazing, but also
embarrassing, for, except for the martial music, I have never been
vastly thrilled by military demonstrations.

For about a month I was fêted by the military forces. I was introduced
to military and naval officers and experts. I was shown the mechanism
of little guns and big guns. I did a little target practice. I passed
through reviews, receptions and banquets, a glamorous parade of
militant Red from Moscow to Petrograd.

It started in Moscow. First I was taken on a visit to the crack Kremlin
military schools; then to an ordinary soldiers' barracks where the men
were resting or on fatigue duty, and also to an extraordinary one where
everything and everybody was shipshape as if for an inspection by the
highest authorities. Next I visited the tactics school, the infantry
school, the cavalry school, the artillery school. It was almost three
weeks before I got through my Moscow military itinerary. There were
intervals of days between the various visits, of course. And there was
a continuous big feeding, until I thought my belly would burst. I ate
in the soldiers' mess. I ate in the officers' mess. I ate with the
military professors. I asked for _kasha_ and was grandly served, with
officers and Communist controllers, an elaborate and most appetizing
dish comparable to _arroz Valenciana_ or Moroccan _cous-cous_. While
I was eating it I remembered a long sentimental poem by Rose Pastor
Stokes which we had published in _The Liberator_, in which she sang
of her desire to share the Russian peasant's bowl of _kasha_. Yet as
I remember, her first picturesque gesture in Moscow was the buying of
a marvelous mink coat and cap, and she was the smartest woman in the
Congress.... Thus I learned something new about _kasha_: that it wasn't
only the peasant's staple food, but a national food, eaten by all kinds
of people, and one which, like rice, may be served in many different
and appetizing ways.

The experience of my military induction ended in a mighty students'
celebration of the anniversary of the Red army. The vast audience
flamed to the occasion as if it were charged through and lit up by one
great electric current. Many notables appeared before the illuminated
demonstration. And at last I was called to the stage. I made a brief
martial speech and was applauded for more. But I hadn't the Russian
genius for improvising great appropriate phrases. Someone demanded
a poem, and I gave, "If We Must Die." I gave it in the same spirit
in which I wrote it, I think. I was not acting, trying to repeat the
sublime thrill of a supreme experience. I was transformed into a rare
instrument and electrified by the great current running through the
world, and the poem popped out of me like a ball of light and blazed.

Now, thought I, the amazing military sensation is ended. It was an
enjoyable excitement, but it was also a pleasurable relief to be over
and done with it. But this audacious adventurer had reckoned without
the Red fleet. From Petrograd came an invitation from the Red fleet,
which apparently meant to rival the Red army in its reception. And so
I entrained for Petrograd, accompanied by a military cadet. That was
my third going to Petrograd. And each time the city appeared better,
revealing more of its grandeur. For, unlike Moscow, Petrograd does not
start immediately with color and mazy movement and life compact with a
suggestion of Oriental lavishness rioting and ringing upon the senses
like the music of golden bells.

Petrograd is poised and proud, with a hard striking strength like the
monument of Peter the Great, and a spaciousness like the Neva. In its
somber might it appeared brooding and a little frowning of aspect
at first. Many streets were desert stretches, and massive buildings
still bore the gaping wounds of the revolution. But when one became
a little more acquainted with the city, the great half-empty spaces
became impressive with a lonely dignity and beauty. And the Petrograd
people were splendid, too, in that setting, outlined more clearly than
the Moscow folk. They were like clumps of trees growing together for
protection at intervals in a vast plain.

We arrived in Petrograd on the eve of the celebration of the
twenty-fifth anniversary of the Russian Communist Party. That night I
went to the Marinsky Theater to see _Prince Igor_ for the first time,
and the thumping performance of the ballet stirred me like strokes
of lightning with great claps of thunder. It was so much more wildly
extravagant than the Eugen Onegin one I saw in Moscow. In New York I
had attended two performances of the Pavlova ballet (I think in 1916),
and now I compared them with this Petrograd magnificence. The Pavlova
ballet was like birds flying with clipped wings, but the Petrograd
_Prince Igor_ was like free birds in full flight. Although I did admire
immensely the dainty precious Pavlova herself, her company appeared so
restrained. I never could work up any enthusiasm for the modernistic
contempt of the Russian ballet. The technical excellencies alone thrum
on the emotional strings of anyone who has a feeling for geometric
patterns.

Isadora Duncan and I argued and disagreed on this subject for a whole
evening at her studio in Nice. She said the Russian Revolution should
have abolished the ballet and established the free-limbed dance. I
said I preferred to see both schools of dancing have the same freedom
for expression. Isadora was even more severe on Negro dancing and its
imitations and derivations. She had no real appreciation of primitive
folk dancing, either from an esthetic or an ethnic point of view.
For her every movement of the dance should soar upward. She spoke
beautifully about that uplifted upward movement, although it was all
wrong. But when she danced for me it was all right. I had never seen
her in her great glory and couldn't imagine that she could still be
wonderful when she was so fat and flabby. But what she did that night
was stupendous. I was the only audience besides the pianist. And she
danced from Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Wagner and Beethoven. Her face was a
series of different masks. And her self was the embodiment of Greek
tragedy, _un être_ endowed with divinity.

The day following the performance of _Prince Igor_, I paid my
respects to the commander of the Baltic fleet. He was a kindly man,
and presented me with his photograph. He took me around to the naval
preparatory school, the naval gymnasium and the naval academy. The
young cadets demanded that I say something. So I told them briefly
that I felt singularly honored and happy that my first contact with
any fleet should be with the first Red fleet of the world. And that
although it was a strange life of which I was entirely ignorant, I
thought that, if I had to be a fighter, I would rather enlist in the
navy than in the army.

The applause I received was astounding, since what I said was so brief
and simple. But quite unwittingly I had stirred the traditional rivalry
between army and navy, which may be a little different but no whit less
even though they may be Red. But my military escort from Moscow (the
only soldier among that fine body of proud and eager young sailors) was
not enthusiastic about my quip. I suppose I should have been a little
more tactful about the army, since it had first celebrated me as a
guest.

That night started the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary
of the Russian Communist Party. The opening meeting was held in the
Marinsky Theater. Zinoviev presided. The place was packed. As soon as I
appeared in the entrance a group of young cadets bore down on me and,
hoisting me upon their shoulders, carried me down the length of the
aisle and onto the platform, while great waves of cheers rolled down
from the jammed balconies and up from the pit. Zinoviev made a great
show, greeting me demonstratively on the stage. The Russians are master
showmen.

From then on the days of my official visit to Petrograd were a progress
of processions and speeches and applause and reviews and banquets. The
next day marked my visit to the naval base at Kronstadt. Early in the
morning an aviator's fur-lined leather coat and cap and gloves--fit to
protect one against the bitterest Siberian blizzard--were brought to my
hotel. I breakfasted and togged myself out. Soon afterward a young Red
commander called for me in an automobile and we drove to the Petrograd
air field. Besides the naval and air officials and photographers,
there was quite a crowd gathered to see me take off. I posed for the
photographers with some of the officers and sailors, with the pilot,
and also with McManus, of the British Communist Party, who had come to
Petrograd for the anniversary.

Then I climbed up into the airplane. The man who had once save Lenin's
life (so I was informed) fixed me in place, and the plane sped over
the vast field of snow and up into the air. A snowstorm was raging,
but I was perfectly protected and felt no fear. Only I could not see
anything. The pilot missed his bearings and got a little lost in the
storm and we had to come down far from our landing place. The pilot
and I got out of the plane and started to walk toward the naval base.
The blizzard blew hard and we could see nothing. But it was a fine
exhilarating tramp, and, warm in my great boots and fur clothes, I
enjoyed the sensation of thinking I was doing a little Arctic stunt.

At last an automobile came rolling over the hard snow and took us
to our landing place. They had been scouting for us, knowing that
something must have happened when we did not arrive. At the landing
place I found that a crack squad of sailors, fine handsome fellows, had
been waiting for us for hours in the blizzard. They were not rigged
out, like myself and the pilot, against the bad weather, and were cold.
For the life of me I couldn't understand why a squad of men should have
been detailed to await my arrival at the air base, when I was no kind
of official. And I had been told that my visit was an informal thing.
Right there I remembered my experience in the Pennsylvania railroad
service--how often, in the cold steel car out on the track, our crew
waited for hours in biting zero weather until the late train arrived
and steamed us out. And sometimes we were frost-bitten.

My interpreter said that the sailors were expecting a speech. So I said
that although I anticipated with joy my visit among them in Kronstadt,
I felt sorry that it had been necessary for them to wait for me all
those hours in the cold. All the official routine ceremonials were
extremely tiresome to me. Even though they were the expression of the
workers' and peasants' united authority and were therefore simplified,
they were nevertheless tedious. I can work up no enthusiasm for
official ritual, however necessary, whether it be red or pink or black
or white. In Russia I was alertly aware that it was something different
from anything that ever was, that officially it was the highest
privilege I could have in the world, to be shown the inside working
of the greatest social experiment in the history of civilization. I
was fired and uplifted by the thundering mass movement of the people,
their boisterous surging forward, with their heads held high, their
arms outstretched in an eager quest for more light, more air, more
space, more glory, more nourishment and comfort for the millions of
the masses. But the bureaucratic control left me unmoved. Yet I was
conscious that it was the axis of the mighty moving energy of the
people, that without it their movement would be futile.

So I was actually in Kronstadt, the first fortress fired by the signal
of the revolution. The features of the fort were covered up with snow,
but the splendid men holding it showed me the inside of battleships and
submarines, the loading of big guns, and I saw also the educational
classes, Communist meetings, recreation halls with motion pictures and
feats of gymnastics and dancing, the new revolutionary spirit animating
men and officers alike, the simple dignified discipline of rank and
precedence, organization and work.

After a strenuous day, that night I slept soundly on a flagship.
The next day I motored back to Petrograd. In the afternoon I went to
tea with Korney Chukovsky and his sympathetic wife. Chukovsky was a
popular liberal journalist and author of the old régime, and was now
an equally popular fellow-traveler with the new. He was a radical
liberal in his political opinions, but consistently non-political in
his writings. Under the old régime he was a contributor to the Moscow
newspaper, _Russky Slovo_, which had a circulation of over a million.
He had recently finished a book for children, called _Crocodile_, which
became a best-seller. Chukovsky was a member of a Russian intellectual
mission to the Allied capitals, in 1916, I think. He exhibited a large
souvenir book of interesting autographs of famous personages: Asquith,
Lloyd George, Balfour, Churchill, Poincaré, Millerand, Anatole France,
Kipling, H.G. Wells, and many more. I added mine. Chukovsky showed me
also a couple of letters from Lenin to Gorky, which he prized highly,
and some newspaper cuttings of a critical duel between him and Trotsky
over the evaluation of the work of the poet Alexander Blok, who wrote
the tragic poem, "The Twelve." This poem evoked in me something of the
spiritual agony of "The Hound of Heaven." Chukovsky gave me the gist
of the controversy between him and Trotsky. Chukovsky had done a fine
literary critique of Blok. Trotsky had overemphasized an inoffensive
literary reference to the revolution to score a political point. I
thought that Chukovsky was right and Trotsky was wrong. Chukovsky went
with me to the House of the Intellectuals and introduced me to some of
the writers and artists. I remember the names of Metchnikov, son of the
scientist and disciple of Pasteur, and the Princess X, who was rich
before the revolution, but expropriated now and living with artists
whom she had befriended during the salad days of the bourgeoisie.

The next day was fine and clear as crystal. And to make up for what I
had missed when we flew to Kronstadt, the aviator came and took me up
for an hour's ride over Petrograd and suburbs. I ended that trip to
Petrograd with affectionate farewells from the naval schools. One of
them elected me an honorary officer. There, too, I talked with a very
interesting officer. He was a graduate of an exclusive Czarist academy,
young, exceeding handsome, with very sensitive features. We spoke with
difficulty in a kind of lingua franca or _petit-negre_, to be more
precise. He informed me that he had an American wife and invited me
to dinner with them. I said it might be an embarrassing matter to his
wife, that he should first ask her. He said she knew all about me and
had suggested the invitation.

I wondered about this American wife of the Russian officer. I had been
warned to beware of English-speaking bourgeois persons, who might try
to pump things out of me. But as I possessed no secrets of any kind
and as I desired to experience all the sensations of the new order
struggling to extricate itself from the old, I never turned aside from
anything or anybody that might possibly add something to the fulness of
my exciting adventure.

I had already met some extraordinary people of the old régime. Besides
the Russians, I had encountered a most wonderful Englishwoman, who
reminded me of a character out of H.G. Wells's _Food of The Gods_.
This woman had been an English governess in Russia under the old
régime and had married a second-or third-class Russian official. She
had a nice apartment in Petrograd. Her beautiful daughter was a clerk
in one of the Soviet departments, and sometimes the mother herself
was requisitioned as an interpreter. In her sitting room there was a
photograph of the late Czar and Czarina, with the Czarina smudged out.
It was a bold thing to have the photograph of the Czar in your sitting
room in 1922. But she was an Englishwoman first, even though she had
been married to a Russian and was now a Soviet citizen. She said to me:
"I preserve the photograph of the Czar because he is the cousin of King
George. He was a good man, but his wife was a bad German woman." Also
she had the picture of King George alongside that of Lenin on another
wall. "They are the two big men in the world," she said to me, "and I
make my curtsy to them every morning: the ruler of England, my native
land, and the ruler of Russia, my adopted country."

She was very proud and pleased with my notorious self because I was
born a British subject and had lived in London. She didn't even mind
when I said that I did not like the English people as a whole, but
admired some individuals. Indeed, she liked it, because that also was
her feeling. I spent a long evening in her house and ate very English
roast beef and plum pudding. Perhaps too much. For later it was
necessary for me to go to the w. c. There I was amazed to see, placed
prominently upon the wall, a hand-printed card bearing the motto:
"Cleanliness is next to Godliness." When I returned to the sitting room
I complimented her on her nice old English calligraphy, but said that
I wondered why she had put up the notice in English, when most of her
visitors must be Russians, who did not know the English language. She
said, "When the Russians don't understand, they will ask, because they
are a curious people. I have to have these English hints around to
remind them that we are a superior people."

Eliminating my military aide from Moscow and my officer-interpreter
of the Baltic fleet, I went alone to the officer's apartment. His
American wife turned out to be a Latin-American. She was unmistakably
an octoroon. She was pretty, and, if she had been taller, would have
been a great beauty. Nevertheless she had had a pretty time under
the old régime and had been celebrated as an exotic flower in smart
and expensive bohemian circles. When the revolution overwhelmed the
Capital, this exotic creature of the smart set married the young
officer who had worshipped her in the hectic pre-revolutionary period,
and who had decided, when the revolution came, to serve under the
Bolsheviks.

She spoke nice English. Also, she had prepared a good dinner, with
that Russian pink cold soup that isn't so good to look at, but most
excellent to taste, caviar, ham, some sort of boiled meat, and
Caucasian wine. She talked a lot about herself and her husband and
their son. His son, really, by a first marriage. He was a lad going
to high school, and they were worried about him. They said that the
boy would never have a chance under the Bolshevik régime. And the
officer said that he himself was having only half a chance, that he was
absolutely loyal to the Communists, because he was convinced that they
were in Russia to stay and that nothing now could take the power away
from them. But the Communists did not trust him because he had been a
former Czarist officer. They were training the proletarian youths to
become officers, and as soon as the proletarian cadets were trained,
the old officers would be superseded. I asked him if he were certain
that the Czarist officers who had come over wholeheartedly to the
revolution would really be kicked out of their positions when the young
proletarian officers were trained to take their place. He said that
that was positively true, for it was a Communist policy which had been
stated publicly. I said that I was going to find out, without quoting
him. He said that I might.

However, I did not mention the subject right away to anyone in
Petrograd. After ten fleeting days with the glorious Red fleet, seeing
and hearing all and believing that all was a dream, I returned to
Moscow for the third time. Only when I came back to Petrograd a month
later and for the last time, to get a boat for Germany, did I speak
about the officer's case to my friend the Red officer, member of the
Communist Party and of the Petrograd Soviet. A young man he was, small,
quiet, ordinary-looking and so unobtrustive that you wouldn't imagine
his importance in the Red navy and in the higher Communist councils
unless you could appreciate the power of his clear, cold blue and
all-seeing eyes. I was interested in what the officer had said because
a high-school teacher in Moscow had said the same thing to me, as had
also a lady of the old régime who was acting as interpreter when I
visited one of the Petrograd courts during a trial.

I wanted to ascertain whether the members of the defeated bourgeoisie
who were working for the Soviets could not be guaranteed the security
of their jobs if they were loyal to the Soviets. For it seemed to me
that if they felt their positions were insecure and that there was no
future for their children under the new régime, they naturally would
sabotage the Soviets. The Red officer confirmed the statement of the
former Czarist officer: that the bourgeois officers would be superseded
as soon as the proletarian cadets could be trained to take their place.
I said I thought such a procedure unfair, and that it would make the
bourgeois workers enemies of the Soviet system instead of friends, and
force them into sabotage. The Red commander said that the Communist
controllers were alert to detect any tendency toward sabotage on
the part of bourgeois employees of the Soviets, and he accused me of
bourgeois sentimentality.

I said that if he had said intellectual sentimentality, he might have
been perhaps right, but that I couldn't have the sentiments of a class
I was not born into or educated with. I did not think that there was
any such thing as intellectual equality, I told him, and that radicals
had a sentimental way of confusing social with intellectual equality. I
said further, that I did not believe that talent could spring up easily
out of a people, like grass under one's feet.

The officer asked who had been talking to me about the matter. I
said that nobody in particular, but different persons in Moscow and
Petrograd had spoken of it. Which was strictly true. There was a
sequel. A year later I was in Paris one afternoon, waiting to cross
from the Place de l'Opéra to the Café de la Paix, when I was suddenly
touched on the shoulder. I turned and found myself face to face with
the officer. We went to the café for a drink. The officer had arrived
in France with other officers to recover some Czarist ships which the
French government held somewhere down on the North African coast. We
reminisced about the splendid Red days we had enjoyed together in
Petrograd and Moscow. We talked about our friends of the foreign office
and the Comintern. I had already met some of them in Berlin and Paris.
And he said, "Do you remember that officer you had dinner with in
Petrograd?"

"Yes," I said, "I remember, but I wasn't aware that you knew about my
having dinner with him."

"Well, he is sitting in prison now."

"What for?" I asked.

"Sabotage."

When I returned from Petrograd to Moscow I told Sen Katayama that I
wanted to go home. It was the beginning of April. Sen Katayama said
that, as an unofficial delegate, I would be given my return fare. He
was very pleased with my success and the part he had played in making
it possible. He said: "I welcome all the Japanese and Chinese who come
here. Some are not Communists, but I see that they are treated right,
for I want to make them all Communists." He said it had been decided
that I should not go back by way of Poland, since some of the delegates
had had trouble in passing through. A Japanese had been put in prison
and lost all his papers. It was considered better for me to go as I had
come, by boat.

I bade my friends goodbye and returned to Petrograd. But the harbor
was ice-locked and I had to wait six weeks before a boat could sail. I
was put up in the house of the former Grand Duke Alexander, who was a
patron of arts. I had the Duke's own bedroom and study, and his valet
to wait on me. The valet was a nice old fellow, but he was like a ghost
wandering through the palace. He lived entirely in the past and spoke
of the sumptuous days in Berlin and Paris with the Grand Duke. He
spoke fluently in French and English. He was shocked at the state of
my wardrobe. The only thing in it that he thought fitting for a Grand
Duke's closet was a fine pair of boots which had been given to me by
Eugen Boissevain.

I did not like the palace rooms, especially the study. It reminded me
of a cathedral altar. All the walls were rococo, carved and painted in
inharmonious brick red. But the cadet who had made himself my orderly
thought the rooms very grand. The cadet wanted to do everything, so I
dispensed with the valet's services, but tipped him every week.

I got to know Petrograd thoroughly during those weeks. I was shown
all the works, among them the great Putilov iron and steel plant and
the rubber factory. I liked the visits, but I thought it must have
been rather bothersome to the managers of factories who were always
pestered by having to take visitors over the plants. I went down into
the dungeon of the prison of Sts. Peter and Paul to see the cell in
which Prince Kropotkin had been confined. I visited the Department of
Nationalities, and Rayeva, the secretary, explained the status of the
minority peoples under the Soviets. Also I visited the Department of
Woman's Work at the Smolny Institute, where Nicolayeva, the secretary,
told me all about the new regulations concerning marriage and divorce
and joint individual property, and how the factory workers were cared
for during the period of pregnancy and childbirth. She sent me to a
meeting of enthusiastic women workers, who passed a resolution asking
that a group of colored working girls visit Russia.

May Day in Petrograd was a mighty celebration of workers and soldiers
and sailors. Never before or since have I seen such a demonstration.
Half-empty Petrograd was filled with the shouting of millions who
peopled the streets, marching and singing and holding high their red
banners of hope. For hours I stood with Zinoviev and other Petrograd
leaders in the reviewing stand in the Uritsky Square. And the
demonstration so tremendously swept me along that after attending the
People's Theater that night, I could not sleep. I sat down at the table
of the Grand Duke Vladimir Alexander, looking out on the Neva, with the
gorgeous silver of the beautiful white night of Petrograd shining upon
its face, and wrote until dawn. I was happy. Petrograd had pulled a
poem out of me.

The poem was published in the Petrograd _Pravda_ and reprinted all over
Russia. It was the last thing I wrote in Russia. I was overwhelmed with
praise. The praise of the Communists was expected. I was their guest.
But I was gratified most by the praise of the Petrograd literati. For
they were a proud lot, cold or passive to the revolution. The Russian
translator of Walt Whitman said that I had composed a classic. But
they had it in translation. I think it should be exhibited here in the
original.


_PETROGRAD: MAY DAY, 1923_

  _The Neva moves majestically on,
  The sun-rays playing on her breast at seven,
  From her blue bosom all winter's snow-slabs gone.
  Now ripples curl where yesterday lay riven
  Great silver oblongs chiselled by the hand
  Of Spring that bellies through Earth's happy womb,
  To glad and flower the long, long pregnant land!
  Where yesternight a veil of winter gloom
  Shrouded the city's splendid face,--today
  All life rejoices for the First of May._

  _The Nevsky glows ablaze with regal Red,
  Symbolic of the triumph and the rule
  Of the new Power now lifting high its head
  Above the place where once a sceptered fool
  Was mounted by the plunderers of men
  To awe the victims while they schemed and robbed.
  The marchers shout again! again!! again!!!
  The stones, where once the hearts of martyrs sobbed
  Their blood, are sweet unto their feet today,
  In celebration of the First of May._

  _Cities are symbols of man's upward reach,
  Man drawing near to man in close commune,
  And mighty cities mighty lessons teach
  Of man's decay or progress, late or soon,
  And many an iron-towered Babylon,
  Beneath the quiet golden breath of Time
  Has vanished like the snow under the sun,
  Leaving no single mark in stone or rhyme
  To flame the lifted heart of man today,
  As Petrograd upon the First of May._

  _Oh many a thoughtful romance-seeking boy,
  Slow-fingering the leaves of ancient glory,
  Is stirred to rapture by the tales of Troy,
  And each invigorate, vein-tingling story
  Of Egypt and of Athens and of Rome,
  Where slaves long toiled for knights and kings reap.
  But in the years, the wondrous years to come,
  The heart of youth in every land will leap
  For Russia that first made national the day--The
  embattled workers' day--The First of May._

  _Jerusalem is fading from men's mind,
  And sacred cities holding men in thrall,
  Are crumbling in the new thought of mankind--The
  pagan day, the holy day for all!
  Oh, Petrograd, oh proud triumphant city,
  The gateway to the strange, awakening East,
  Where warrior-workers wrestled without pity
  Against the power of magnate, monarch, priest--
  World Fort of Struggle, hold from day to day
  The flaming standards of the First of May!_



XX

Regarding Radical Criticism


Thus ended my adventure in Russia. This detailed account should clear
up any "mystery" that is entertained about my going and remaining
there. I left Russia with one determination and one objective: to
write. I was not received in Russia as a politician, but primarily as
a Negro poet. And the tremendous reception was a great inspiration and
urge to write more. I often felt in Russia that I was honored as a poet
altogether out of proportion to my actual performance. And thus I was
fired with the desire to accomplish the utmost.

Excepting for the handicap of lack of money, there was nothing to
side-track me from my purpose. I had no radical party affiliations,
and there was no reason why I should consider myself under any special
obligations to the Communists. I had not committed myself to anything.
I had remained a free agent.

But recently in an issue of _The New Masses_, the literary organ of
the American Communists, I was singled out for a special attack in
an article about Negro novelists. The article, under the guise of a
critique, was merely a piece of personal spite and slander.

I take these extracts from that article: (1) I had "written an
indignant poem, attacking lynching, wholly lacking in working-class
content." (2) I "disappeared mysteriously to the Soviet Union and had
retired exhausted to the sidewalk cafés of Montmartre." (3) "The
retired radical had grown fat and ill and indifferent in Paris."

Against the Communist attack my poem still remains my strong defense:


_IF WE MUST DIE_

 _If we must die, let it not be like hogs
 Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
 While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
 Making their mock at our accursed lot.
 If we must die, Oh let us nobly die,
 So that our precious blood may not be shed
 In vain; then even the monsters we defy
 Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!_

 _Oh, kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
 Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
 And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
 What though before us lies the open grave?
 Like men we'll face the murderous cowardly pack,
 Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!_

First published in Max Eastman's magazine _The Liberator_, the poem was
reprinted in every Negro publication of any consequence. It forced its
way into the Negro pulpit (a most interesting phenomenon for this black
heretic). Ministers ended their sermons with it, and the congregations
responded, Amen. It was repeated in Negro clubs and Negro schools and
at Negro mass meetings. To thousands of Negroes who are not trained
to appreciate poetry, "If We Must Die" makes me a poet. I myself was
amazed at the general sentiment for the poem. For I am so intensely
subjective as a poet, that I was not aware, at the moment of writing,
that I was transformed into a medium to express a mass sentiment.

The critic also asserted that my novel, _Home to Harlem_, had no
"class-conscious action." When Jake in _Home to Harlem_ refused to
scab, wasn't that class-conscious? And when he refused to pimp, didn't
he demonstrate a high sense of social propriety? Perhaps a higher sense
than many of us critical scribblers.

I did not come to the knowing of Negro workers in an academic way, by
talking to black crowds at meetings, nor in a bohemian way, by talking
about them in cafés. I knew the unskilled Negro worker of the city
by working with him as a porter and longshoreman and as waiter on
the railroad. I lived in the same quarters and we drank and caroused
together in bars and at rent parties. So when I came to write about the
low-down Negro, I did not have to compose him from an outside view. Nor
did I have to write a pseudo-romantic account, as do bourgeois persons
who become working-class for awhile and work in shops and factories to
get material for writing dull books about workers, whose inner lives
are closed to them.

I created my Negro characters without sandpaper and varnish. If the
Communists can create a Negro casual better than Jake in _Home to
Harlem_--a man who works, lives and loves lustily and even thinks a
little for himself, why in the infernal regions don't they?

Jake leaves Europe for America and Harlem and swings through the Black
Belt with a clean manly stride. The Communist critic states that the
story of Jake was autobiographical, "dilating upon my own love life."
The peeping critic seems to know more about my love life than I do
myself. Perhaps it is necessary to inform him that I have not lived
without some experience. And I have never wanted to lie about life,
like the preaching black prudes wrapped up in the borrowed robes of
hypocritical white respectability. I am entirely un-obsessed by sex. I
am not an imitator of Anglo-Saxon prudery in writing. I haven't arrived
at that high degree of civilized culture where I can make a success
of producing writing carefully divorced from reality. Yet I couldn't
indulge in such self-flattery as to claim Jake in _Home to Harlem_ as
a portrait of myself. My damned white education has robbed me of much
of the primitive vitality, the pure stamina, the simple unswaggering
strength of the Jakes of the Negro race.

The critic declares that I "disappeared mysteriously to the Soviet
Union and had retired exhausted to the sidewalk cafés of Montmartre."
The statement is untrue, but perhaps truth is not vital to the new
criticism that they say must replace the old.

Perhaps the Communist critic, who may be closer to the sources of
information than others, may have some inside knowledge of just what
exhausted me in Soviet Russia. Of course, I had a hell-raising good
time in Russia. I was constantly occupied in visiting factories and all
kinds of institutions, making speeches and writing, besides enjoying
the relaxation of cabarets and parties. Perhaps I was fatigued, as any
person is likely to be after a passionate spell of any great thing. But
as for my being exhausted--hell! It is fifteen years since then, and I
am still going strong, if the head-in-the-butt Communist critic doesn't
know. Exhausted indeed!

I came out of Russia with my head on my shoulders and my pen in my
pocket and determined to write at all costs, so long as I had a piece
of bread to bite and a room in which I could think and scribble. And in
ten years I wrote five books and many poems. Perhaps too many!

I never thought there was anything worth while for me in the bohemian
glamor of Montparnasse. "The sidewalk cafés of Montmartre" held no
special attraction for me. Attractive as Paris is, I have never stayed
there for a considerable length of time. The longest period was over
three months, when I was in a hospital. Montmartre I visited when I
was invited by generous Americans who had money to treat themselves
and their friends to a hectic time. The Montmartre of the cabarets and
music halls never excited me. It is so obviously a place where the very
formal French allow foreigners who can pay to cut up informally. It has
no character of its own. Paris, away from Montmartre and Montparnasse,
seemed to me to be the perfect city of modern civilization. It was the
only city I knew which provided quiet and comfortable clubs in the form
of cafés for all of its citizens of every class. I appreciated, but was
not specially enamored of Paris, perhaps because I have never had the
leisure necessary to make an excellent clubman. If I had to live in
France, I would prefer life among the fisherfolk of Douarnenez, or in
the city of Strassburg, or in sinister Marseilles, or any of the coast
towns of the department of the Var.

The Communist critic further states that I "had grown fat, and ill, and
indifferent in Paris...." I regret that here I am obliged to become
clinical. But the clinic is an important department of life, and the
fact about it is that I got _well_ instead of _ill_ in Paris.

In 1922 I left America in perfect health and more completely whole than
the day on which I was born. My first accident of illness occurred in
Russia. Sanitary conditions were not ideal in Petrograd and Moscow in
1922. No intelligent person expected them to be after eight years of
unremitting international war, revolution and civil war. I remember
that every time I received my linen from the laundry I invariably
found lice in it. The linen itself was very clean. But the revolution,
sweeping away the privileged classes, also had carried along most of
their servants. And of the peasants fresh from the country who replaced
them, many were neither competent nor clean.

It was very near the end of my visit that I experienced a sort of
deadness in my left side and once my face gradually became puffed
up like an enormous chocolate soufflé. I have photographs in my
possession, taken in Moscow, which authenticate my condition at the
time. There was also an American acquaintance who was unable to turn
his head; it was cocked stiff to one side like a macabre caricature,
as if it were skewered to his shoulder. I consulted a doctor. He
thought the climate had affected me and advised me to get heavy
woolen underwear. Later, in Petrograd, I became quite ill and had a
tooth extracted for the first time in my life, under the most painful
conditions.

I arrived in Germany in the early summer of 1923. Three months spent
there were an interval of intermittent fevers and headaches. It was
hard labor to concentrate upon a series of articles about Russia for
a Negro magazine. In the late fall I arrived in Paris. I consulted a
French specialist, who advised me to enter a hospital immediately.
While I was convalescing in the hospital I wrote this poem, "The
Desolate City." The poem was largely symbolic: a composite evocation of
the clinic, my environment, condition and mood.


_THE DESOLATE CITY_

 _My spirit is a pestilential city,
 With misery triumphant everywhere,
 Glutted with baffled hopes and human pity.
 Strange agonies make quiet lodgement there:
 Its sewers bursting ooze up from below
 And spread their loathsome substance through its lanes,
 Flooding all areas with their evil flow
 And blocking all the motions of its veins:
 Its life is sealed to love or hope or pity,
 My spirit is a pestilential city._

 _Above its walls the air is heavy-wet,
 Brooding in fever mood and hanging thick
 Round empty tower and broken minaret,
 Settling upon the tree tops stricken sick
 And withered under its contagious breath.
 Their leaves are shrivelled silver, parched decay,
 Like wilting creepers trailing underneath
 The chalky yellow of a tropic way.
 Round crumbling tower and leaning minaret,
 The air hangs fever-filled and heavy-wet._

 _And all its many fountains no more spurt;
 Within the damned-up tubes they tide and foam,
 Around the drifted sludge and silted dirt,
 And weep against the soft and liquid loam.
 And so the city's ways are washed no more,
 All is neglected and decayed within,
 Clean waters beat against its high-walled shore
 In furious force, but cannot enter in:
 The suffocated fountains cannot spurt,
 They foam and rage against the silted dirt._

 _Beneath the ebon gloom of mounting rocks
 The little pools lie poisonously still,
 And birds come to the edge in forlorn flocks,
 And utter sudden, plaintive notes and shrill,
 Pecking at strangely gray-green substances;
 But never do they dip their bills and drink.
 They twitter, sad beneath the mournful trees,
 And fretfully flit to and from the brink,
 In little gray-brown, green-and-purple flocks,
 Beneath the jet-gloom of the mounting rocks._

 _And green-eyed moths of curious design,
 With gold-black wings and rarely silver-dotted,
 On nests of flowers among those rocks recline,
 Bold, burning blossoms, strangely leopard-spotted,
 But breathing deadly poison from their lips.
 And every lovely moth that wanders by,
 And of the blossoms fatal nectar sips,
 Is doomed to drooping stupor, there to die;
 All green-eyed moths of curious design
 That on the fiercely-burning blooms recline._

 _Oh cold as death is all the loveliness,
 That breathes out of the strangeness of the scene,
 And sickening like a skeleton's caress,
 Of clammy clinging fingers, long and lean.
 Above it float a host of yellow flies,
 Circling in changeless motion in their place,
 That came down snow-thick from the freighted skies,
 Swarming across the gluey floor of space:
 Oh cold as death is all the loveliness,
 And sickening like a skeleton's caress._

 _There was a time, when, happy with the birds,
 The little children clapped their hands and laughed;
 And midst the clouds the glad winds heard their words
 And blew down all the merry ways to waft
 The music through the scented fields of flowers.
 Oh sweet were children's voices in those days,
 Before the fall of pestilential showers,
 That drove them forth far from the city's ways:
 Now never, nevermore their silver words
 Will mingle with the golden of the birds._

 _Gone, gone forever the familiar forms
 To which the city once so dearly clung,
 Blown worlds beyond by the destroying storms
 And lost away like lovely songs unsung.
 Yet life still lingers, questioningly strange,
 Timid and quivering, naked and alone,
 Against the cycle of disruptive change,
 Though all the fond familiar forms are gone,
 Forever gone, the fond familiar forms;
 Blown worlds beyond by the destroying storms._

More than three years after "The Desolate City" was written, it was
published for the first time in the Negro magazine, _Opportunity_. But
by then I was a stout black animal, splashing and floating in the blue
Mediterranean. The French specialist had said: "You are young, with
a very wonderful constitution, and you will recover all right if you
will live quietly and carefully away from the temptations of the big
cities." I certainly did follow that good advice.



PART FIVE

THE CYNICAL CONTINENT



XXI

Berlin and Paris


At last the soft breath of spring warmed and conquered the great
harbor of frozen ice and our ship cleaved through. The first of June
we arrived in Hamburg. Nothing here of the fortress-like austerity of
Petrograd. Hamburg was big and full and busy with the business of free
unhampered commerce. Flocks of ships were loading and unloading their
rich cargoes. Sailors reeled through the low-down streets in drunken
irresponsibility, and there were many Negroes showing their white teeth
against all that white wealth.

I spent three days among the docks and the Negroes of different
nationalities and languages and then entrained for Berlin. Startlingly
changed was the spirit of Berlin after an interval of nine months.
In the fall of 1922 a dollar was worth about a thousand marks. There
appeared to be plenty of money in circulation among all classes, and
lots of new and stylish clothes were in evidence. Berlin was by a long
way brisker and brighter than London. I had a comfortable room with a
middle-class family. Said the head to me: "The workers are better off
than we. We have lost three-quarters of our investments and incomes.
But the workers are well paid and can buy new clothes, while we of the
middle class must wear the old. And the workers have money to go to the
theaters; they ride second-class in the trains, and we must ride third."

But now all was changed. Premier Poincaré had seized the Ruhr early
in 1923 and the mark had skyrocketed. I cannot even recall how many
thousands I got for my dollar when I returned to Berlin in the summer
of 1923. For every minute the dollar became dearer and dearer. But
this fact sticks in my skull: From New York, Eugen Boissevain cabled
me twenty-five dollars to Berlin in October, 1922. I was to receive
payment (I don't know why) in marks. But just before the amount
arrived, I was obliged to leave Berlin for Russia. When I returned to
Berlin in June, 1923, my twenty-five dollars was worth only twenty-five
cents.

Speculation in dollars and pounds and francs and other foreign moneys
was mad. The corners of the principal streets were dotted with
money-changing kiosks. Many who possessed foreign money developed a
close-fisted psychosis. They didn't want to change their bills into
marks until obliged to. And when they had to, it was with regret, for
the next minute the dollar would be worth a few marks more. A German
Communist friend told me about a certain Anglo-American comrade who
would delay paying his bills even though long overdue until the dollar
climbed to a new high. By that method he paid about one-half only of
the cost of what he actually owed. Said the German Communist bitterly:
"Even the foreign comrades are exploiting the German people." Nearly
everybody was doing it. I remember a so-called radical publisher who
had worked out a profitable plan of printing American books in Germany,
because labor and material there were so cheap, and exporting them to
sell in America.

My Japanese friend, Sen Katayama, had warned me against returning to
Germany. He thought I would be molested because for a couple of years
the press of Europe and America had been carrying atrocity stories
about the doings of the French black soldiers on the Rhine. But I
said I would go back to Germany. Personally, I had not sensed any
feeling against me as a Negro in the fall of 1923 because of the black
troops on the Rhine. Everywhere I had been treated much better and
with altogether more consideration than in America and England. Often
when I stepped into a café there were friendly greetings--"_Schwartz'
Mohr_"--and free drinks. And now I felt that if Negroes were hated and
mistreated by the Germans because of the black troops on the Rhine, I
wanted to authenticate the changed sentiment for myself. I did not want
to report by hearsay that the Germans were mistreating Negroes. And
that was why I went from the free port of Hamburg to Berlin, instead of
going directly to Paris.

Well, everywhere in hotels, cafés, dancing halls, restaurants and
trains, on the river boats and in the streets, I met with no feeling
of hostility. In spite of the French black troops on the Rhine I was
treated even better in Berlin in 1923 than in 1922. Of course, Berlin
was mightily depressed because of the French occupation of the Ruhr. In
the hotel where I stayed there was posted a sign asking the guests not
to speak the French language. The spirit of depression was expressed
more eloquently in the exchanges than anywhere. The working people were
not as prosperous and happy as in the fall of 1922, because the new
inflation caused by the French occupation had cut down their wages to
the bone. If Poincaré of Lorraine, consumed by an overwhelming fear and
hatred of the Germans, had desired to perpetuate the hatred between the
Germans and the French forever, he could not have devised a better way.

There was something sullen and bitter, hostile and resentful in the
atmosphere of Berlin. And I believe Berlin expressed the resentful
spirit of all of Germany. There were _Wandervögel_ everywhere like a
plague of flies. They had lost their romantic flavor. More imitation
than real _Wandervögel_, with their knapsacks slung over their
shoulders, casually taking to the streets as nature lovers take to the
woods, and they gave one a strange impression of Berlin as a futuristic
forest.

I do not know of anything that has rendered so perfectly the
atmosphere, temper and tempo of the Berlin of that period than George
Grosz's _Ecce Homo_. For me that book of drawings is a rare and
iconoclastic monument of this closing era even as Rabelais is of the
Renaissance. I had the unique and unforgettable honor and pleasure of
knowing George Grosz in Moscow. His photograph and two pages of his
drawings had appeared in the special pictorial section of _Pravda_,
which also carried a photograph of myself. It was the first time I had
seen any of Grosz's drawings. They gripped me. I sought an opportunity
to meet him in the Congress Hall of the Kremlin.

When I returned to Berlin I hunted him up to ask him to sign a copy
of _Ecce Homo_, which I had bought privately. The book was banned by
the government of the Social Democracy. Grosz's remarkable personality
gave not the slightest hint of the artistic type. And in his little
apartment, his pretty and pleasant _frau_ had surrounded him with the
neatest of bourgeois comforts. He fitted respectably into the frame,
and if you did not know he was an artist, you might have taken him for
a responsible bank clerk. Yet there was a charming felicity and harmony
in the _ménage_. It gave the impression that Grosz needed just that
kind of domestic background from which he could swing up and out with
his powerful artistic punches.

Grosz in his appearance seemed the perfect type of a conservative
Prussian. But a careful study of his nervous-boyish and whimsical eyes
revealed the revolutionary artist in him. He was a real inspiration
to other artists. I heard many lyrical appreciations of his work, a
fine tribute to the man, for the breed of artists (judging from my
experience on _The Liberator_ and among the cosmopolites in France)
are hell-hard on their contemporaries. They are liberal and lavish
in praise of the dead only or the great. Writers are perhaps more
generous. Marsden Hartley, whom I happened across in Berlin, was
ecstatic in praise of Grosz's work. But the two artists had never
met, so I introduced them. Physically, Grosz was as impressive as
his amazingly ruthless drawings, and Marsden Hartley was equally as
ecstatic in praise of his person.

I met also Pierre Loving, the writer and critic, who spoke German and
kindly hunted me up a large room, exactly right to live and work in.
He introduced me to Josephine Herbst, who was very kind and helpful in
a practical and also artistic way. Soon after I met again the Baroness
von Freytag-Loringhoven, selling newspapers in the street. Our meeting
surprised both of us. We talked a little, but she had to sell her
newspapers, for she said her rent was overdue. So we made a rendezvous
for the next evening at the Romanisher Café.

It was a sad rendezvous. The Baroness in Greenwich Village, arrayed in
gaudy accoutrements, was a character. Now, in German homespun, she was
just a poor pitiful _frau_. She said she had come to Germany to write
because the cost of living was cheap there. But she complained that she
had been ditched. She didn't make it clear by whom or what. So instead
of writing she was crying news. She wished that she was back in New
York, she said. I was accompanied by an American student lad whom I had
met at the American Express office. He came from one of the western
cities. He professed a liking for me, because of my poetry, he said.
He had plenty of money and was always treating me to more drinks than
were good for me. I told him that the Baroness was a real poet and that
he might give her a couple of dollars. He generously produced five, and
we were all very happy for it.

I had completed my plans to go to Paris when, curiously, I began
meeting a number of the comrades whom I had known in Moscow. One day
in the Unter den Linden I bumped up against the Hindu youth who had
vanished so strangely from the Lux Hotel in Moscow. "I thought you were
dead!" I cried.

"And I thought I was going to die," he said. He related the story of
his arrest by the O.G.P.U. because he had been denounced as a spy by
the head of the Indian delegation in Moscow. He said the O.G.P.U.
endeavored to get him to confess, but he had insisted that he was not a
spy. He had had differences with the head of the Indian delegation and
had thought of giving up revolutionary work and returning to student
life. (His father had sent him to Europe to study.) He was kept in
O.G.P.U. custody for months. Finally he was sent to some place up
Archangel way, and from there he had escaped across the border into
Finland. He had always been a thin enough fellow; now he looked like a
mosquito. I told him I didn't think he had "escaped," as he thought,
but that he had simply been allowed to escape. He asked me why, whether
I had had any inside information. But I merely nodded my head and
looked mysterious. Poor chap! He was so down in spirits, I didn't want
to tell him that I thought the O.G.P.U. were convinced that he was not
a spy, but merely a perfect specimen of a moron.

The next day, again on the Unter den Linden, I met Roy, the leader of
the Indian delegation. Roy was editing a propaganda paper in Berlin,
which was distributed in India. He invited me up to his office and
asked me to contribute an article to his paper about Communism and
the Negro. I consulted an English friend, a Communist sympathizer, and
he advised me to keep away from the Indian movement because it was too
"complicated." The advice was just the kind I was fishing for and I
didn't write the article or see Roy again before I left Berlin.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was interesting in Paris to mix in among the cosmopolitan
expatriates. The milieu was sympathetic. It was broader than the
radical milieu of Greenwich Village. The environment was novel and
elastic. It was like taking a holiday after living in the atmosphere of
the high pressure propaganda spirit of the new Russia. There in Paris,
radicals, esthetes, painters and writers, pseudo-artists, bohemian
tourists--all mixed tolerantly and congenially enough together.

Frankly to say, I never considered myself identical with the white
expatriates. I was a kind of sympathetic fellow-traveler in the
expatriate caravan. The majority of them were sympathetic toward me.
But their problems were not exactly my problems. They were all-white
with problems in white which were rather different from problems in
black.

There were the expatriates who were lured to Europe because life was
riper, culture mellower, and artistic things considered of higher worth
than in America.

There were those who argued that a florescence of art and literature
was impossible in America: the country was too new.

There were those who were in revolt against the puritan conscience and
the denial of artistic freedom in America; the lack of public respect
for creative art and artists.

There were those who were harassed by complicated problems of sex.

But when I got right down to a ruthless analysis of myself, to
understand the urge that had sent me traveling abroad, I discovered
that it was something very different from that which actuated the white
expatriates.

For I was in love with the large rough unclassical rhythms of
American life. If I were sometimes awed by its brutal bigness, I was
nevertheless fascinated by its titanic strength. I rejoiced in the
lavishness of the engineering exploits and the architectural splendors
of New York.

I never could agree that literature and art could not flourish in
America. That idea was altogether contrary to my historical outlook.
I believed that there would be an American art and culture mainly
derived from Europe and augmented by the arts and cultures of other
countries precisely as there had been a distinct Roman art and culture
mainly derived from Greece, but augmented by the arts and cultures
of the countries that Rome had conquered. For America appeared to me
preeminently a vast outpost of European civilization, being, in its
relation to Europe, what Northern Europe was to Rome under the empire.
When Europeans said to me: "The Americans, they are barbarians," it
stirred up a romantic sensation, and I thought that that was exactly
the manner in which the ancient Romans spoke of the inhabitants of
Iberia and Gaul and Germany and Britain.

Again, I was not oversensitive about the American public taking the
writer and artist like the average person instead of isolating him in
an ivory tower. I am partial to the idea of an artist being of and
among the people, even if incognito. The puritan atmosphere of America
was irritating, but it was not suffocating. I had written some of my
most vigorous poems right through and straight out of the tumult and
turbulence of American life.

And lastly, sex was never much of a problem to me. I played at sex as
a child in a healthy harmless way. When I was seventeen or eighteen
I became aware of the ripe urge of potency and also the strange
manifestations and complications of sex. I grew up in the spacious
peasant country, and although there are problems and strangenesses
of sex also in the country, they are not similar to those of the
city. I never made a problem of sex. As I grew up I was privileged
to read a variety of books in my brother's library and soon I became
intellectually cognizant of sex problems. But physically my problems
were reduced to a minimum. And the more I traveled and grew in age and
experience, the less they became.

What, then, was my main psychological problem? It was the problem of
color. Color-consciousness was the fundamental of my restlessness.
And it was something with which my white fellow-expatriates could
sympathize but which they could not altogether understand. For they
were not black like me. Not being black and unable to see deep into
the profundity of blackness, some even thought that I might have
preferred to be white like them. They couldn't imagine that I had no
desire merely to exchange my black problem for their white problem.
For all their knowledge and sophistication, they couldn't understand
the instinctive and animal and purely physical pride of a black person
resolute in being himself and yet living a simple civilized life like
themselves. Because their education in their white world had trained
them to see a person of color either as an inferior or as an exotic.

I believe that I understood more about the expatriates than they
understood of me, as I went along in the rhythm of their caravan; yet,
although our goal was not the same, I was always overwhelmingly in
sympathy with its purpose. From conventional Americans visiting Europe
I used to hear severe criticisms directed at the expatriate caravan.
The critics thought that the expatriates were wasting their time and
that American creative artists should stay at home and explore American
life. Some of them made an exception of me. They said that because the
social life of the Negro was strictly limited in America, it might
be better for a Negro who is a creative artist to seek more freedom
abroad. But I was not taken in by that specious form of flattery.
As I have indicated before, I was aware that if there were problems
specifically black, also there were problems specifically white.

I liked the spectacle of white American youngsters of both sexes
enjoying the freedom of foreigners with money on the café terraces
of Continental Europe. I liked to watch their feats of unprohibited
drinking and listen to their elastic conversations and see them
casually taking in their stride the cosmopolitan world of people of
different races and colors. Even if they were not all intent upon or
able to create works of art, I did not see them as idlers and wasters,
but as students of life.

My English friend, Mr. Jekyll, had informed me that it was a custom of
the English bourgeoisie and aristocracy to let their sons travel by
themselves abroad for a year or so after they had finished college.
The British Empire must have gained much from that practice. So I felt
that America also could gain something from its youngsters circulating
abroad and mingling with foreigners on their own ground. Certainly,
whatever they were before, they could not be worse Americans after that
experience.

James Joyce's _Ulysses_ was published when I arrived in Paris. And
Ernest Hemingway's first little book of miniature stories _In Our Time_
came out that same year. A good friend gave me a copy of _Ulysses_. A
bad friend swiped it.

James Joyce incomparably and legitimately was _le maître_ among the
moderns. I cannot imagine any modern and earnest student of literary
artistry of that period who did not consider it necessary to study
James Joyce. I was privileged to have a few acquaintances of radical
sympathies among the moderns, and they all advised me to read Joyce
before I started to write. So I did. Some of them thought, as I, that
_Ulysses_ was even greater as a textbook for modern writers than as a
novel for the general public.

Yet after reading _Ulysses_ I said to my friends, as I had previously
said to Frank Budgen, one of Joyce's early admirers in London, that
D.H. Lawrence was the modern writer I preferred above any. I thought
_Ulysses_ a bigger book than any one of Lawrence's books, but I
preferred Lawrence as a whole. I thought that D.H. Lawrence was more
modern than James Joyce. In D.H. Lawrence I found confusion--all of the
ferment and torment and turmoil, the hesitation and hate and alarm, the
sexual inquietude and the incertitude of this age, and the psychic and
romantic groping for a way out.

But in James Joyce I found the sum of two thousand years, from the
ending of the Roman Empire to the ending of the Christian age. Joyce
picked up all the ends of the classical threads and wove them into the
ultimate pattern in _Ulysses_. There is no confusion, no doubt, no
inquiry and speculation about the future in James Joyce. He is a seer
and Olympian and was able to bring the life of two thousand years into
the span of a day. If I were to label James Joyce I would say that he
was (in the classic sense of the word) a great Decadent.

Some of my friends thought I showed a preference for D.H. Lawrence
because he was something of a social rebel. But it was impossible for
me seriously to think of Lawrence as a social thinker, after having
studied the social thinking of creative writers like Ruskin, William
Morris, Tolstoy and Bernard Shaw, and other social propagandists.
In fact, Lawrence's attitude toward his subject matter, his
half-suppressed puritanism, often repelled me. What I loved was the
Laurentian language, which to me is the ripest and most voluptuous
expression of English since Shakespeare.

If Joyce was _le maître_ of the ultra-moderns, Gertrude Stein was the
_madame_, and her house was open to all without discrimination. Even
Negroes. I cannot remember how often people said to me: "Haven't you
been to Gertrude Stein's?" ... "Everybody goes to Gertrude Stein's."
... "I'll take you to Gertrude Stein's." ... "Gertrude Stein does not
mind Negroes." ... "Gertrude Stein has written the best story about
Negroes, and if you mean to be a modern Negro writer, you should meet
her...."

I never went because of my aversion to cults and disciples. I liked
meeting people as persons, not as divinities in temples. And when I
came to examine "Melanctha," Gertrude Stein's Negro story, I could
not see wherein intrinsically it was what it was cracked up to be. In
"Melanctha," Gertrude Stein reproduced a number of the common phrases
relating to Negroes, such as: "boundless joy of Negroes," "unmorality
of black people," "black childish," "big black virile," "joyous Negro,"
"black and evil," "black heat," "abandoned laughter," "Negro sunshine,"
all prettily framed in a tricked-out style. But in the telling of
the story I found nothing striking and informative about Negro life.
Melanctha, the mulattress, might have been a Jewess. And the mulatto,
Jeff Campbell--he is not typical of mulattoes I have known anywhere. He
reminds me more of a type of white lover described by colored women.
"Melanctha" seemed more like a brief American paraphrase of Esther
Waters than a story of Negro life. The original Esther Waters is more
important to me.

Ernest Hemingway was the most talked-about of young American
writers when I arrived in Paris. He was the white hope of the
ultra-sophisticates. In the motley atmosphere of Montparnasse, there
was no place for the cult of little hero worship. James Joyce was
worshipped, but he had won out with a work that took men's eyes like
a planet. But in Montparnasse generally writers and artists plunged
daggers into one another. That atmosphere in its special way was like a
good tonic, if you didn't take too much of it. Good for young creative
artists who have a tendency to megalomania. And many of them do. And
also it was an antidote for the older ones who have already arrived and
are a little haughty, expecting too much homage from the young.

It was therefore exciting that Ernest Hemingway had won the regard
and respect of the younger creative artists and even of the older. I
remember Nina Hamnett pointing him out to me at the Dôme and remarking
ecstatically that Hemingway was a very handsome American and that he
had a lovely son. But it was long after that before I met him for a
moment through Max Eastman.

_In Our Time_, that thin rare book of miniature short stories, was
published, and it was the literary event among the young expatriates.
I cherish an unforgettable memory of it and of Montparnasse at that
time. A cultivated and distinguished American, liberal of attitude and
pocket to unpopular causes, was sitting at the Dôme, reading a copy of
_In Our Time_. He invited me to his table and offered a drink. He read
aloud Chapter III, and wondered whether there was a _double entendre_
in that last sentence: "It rained all through the evacuation." I said
I did not know and did not think it mattered, and I asked the _garçon_
to bring me a double cognac. My friend and host said: "They are talking
in a big way about this Hemingway, but I just can't get him. I like
the young radical crowd and what they are aiming to do. But this thing
here"--he pointed to _In Our Time_--"I don't like it. It is too brutal
and bloody."

"But so is life," I ventured to say, and not too aggressively, because
I was expecting my host to come across with a gift of money.

"The only thing I admire about this book is the cover," he said. "That
sure is in our time all right. If you like it you can have it." My hand
trembled to take it. The book was worth something between thirty and
fifty francs, which was more than I could afford. I have it still. It
became so valuable that I once consigned it for a loan. But I redeemed
it and, excepting my typewriter, I hardly ever trouble to redeem the
things I pawn.

Yet I would be lying if I should say here that when I read _In Our
Time_ in 1924 I thought the author soon would be one of the famous
American writers. I liked the style of the book, but I thought more of
it as a literary rarity, and that the author would remain one of the
best of the little coterie writers.

I must confess to a vast admiration for Ernest Hemingway the writer.
Some of my critics thought that I was imitating him. But I also am a
critic of myself. And I fail to find any relationship between my loose
manner and subjective feeling in writing and Hemingway's objective
and carefully stylized form. Any critic who considers it important
enough to take the trouble can trace in my stuff a clearly consistent
emotional--realist thread, from the time I published my book of dialect
verse (_Songs of Jamaica_) in 1912, through the period of my verse and
prose in _The Liberator_, until the publication of _Home to Harlem_.

But indeed, yes, I was excited by the meteor apparition of Ernest
Hemingway. I cannot imagine any ambitious young writer of that time who
was not fascinated in the beginning. In Paris and in the Midi, I met a
few fellows of the extreme left school, and also a few of the moderate
liberal school and even some of the ancient fossil school--and all
mentioned Hemingway with admiration. Many of them felt that they could
never go on writing as before after Hemingway.

The irritating pseudo-romantic style of writing about contemporary
life--often employed by modernists and futurists, with their
punctuation-and-phraseology tricks, as well as by the dead
traditionalists--that style so admirably parodied in _Ulysses_; had
reached its conventional climax in Michael Arlen's _The Green Hat_.
When Hemingway wrote, _The Sun Also Rises_, he shot a fist in the face
of the false romantic-realists and said: "You can't fake about life
like that."

Apparently Hemingway today is mainly admired by a hard-boiled and
unsophisticated public whose mentality in a curious way is rather
akin to that of the American who contemptuously gave away Hemingway's
first book to me. I don't think that that is any of Hemingway's fault.
And what excites and tickles me to disgust is the attitude of the
precious coteries toward Hemingway. One is not certain whether they
hate Hemingway because of his success or because of his rough handling
of some precious idols. The elect of the coteries could not possibly
object to the Hemingway style and material. For the Hemingway of _In
Our Time_ is the same Hemingway of _The Sun Also Rises_, _A Farewell
to Arms_, and the masterpiece of _Death in the Afternoon_. The only
difference I see is that whereas Hemingway is a little cryptic in the
earlier work, he is clear, unequivocal and forthright in his full-sized
books. _In Our Time_ contains the frame, the background, and the
substance of all of Hemingway's later work. The hard-boilism--the
booze, blood and brutality are all there. The key to _A Farewell to
Arms_ may be found in _In Our Time_. The critics whose sensibilities
were so shocked over _Death in the Afternoon_ will find its foundation
in the six miniature classics of the bull ring in _In Our Time_,
developed and enlarged with riper experience in the big book.

I find in Hemingway's works an artistic illumination of a certain
quality of American civilization that is not to be found in any other
distinguished American writer. And that quality is the hard-boiled
contempt for and disgust with sissyness expressed among all classes of
Americans. Now this quality is distinctly and definitely American--a
conventionalized rough attitude which is altogether un-European.
It stands out conspicuously, like the difference between American
burlesque shows and European music-hall shows. Mr. Hemingway has taken
this characteristic of American life from the streets, the barrooms,
the ringsides and lifted it into the realm of real literature.
In accomplishing this he did revolutionary work with four-letter
Anglo-Saxon words. That to me is a superb achievement. I do not know
what Mr. Hemingway's personal attitude may be to the material that he
has used, and I care less. All I can say is that in literature he has
most excellently quickened and enlarged my experience of social life.



XXII

Friends in France


I had been posing naked in Paris studios to earn my daily bread
and that undermined my health. The studios were badly heated. My
body reacted against the lack of warmth after being for many years
accustomed to the well-heated houses of America. I came down with
pneumonia. My French friend, Pierre Vogein, looked after me. Josephine
Bennett brought me fruit and ordered proper food. Louise Bryant sent a
doctor. Clive Weed had told her that I was in Paris.

Louise Bryant was aware that I wanted to write above all things. I
first saw her when she returned from Russia after the death of John
Reed. I think it was at Romany Marie's in Greenwich Village and she
was encircled by a group of nice young men, collegiate-like. At that
time she was a pretty woman with unforgettably beautiful eyebrows. She
had sent _The Liberator_ a pathetic poem about her sorrow, and we had
published it. I told her that the poem had moved me more than anything
that was written about John Reed's death. For the dead was dead, but
I felt that the living who really mourn are the sorriest thing about
death.

Louise Bryant and I came together again, I think at Max Eastman's. We
talked about John Reed. I asked if she knew that he had invited me to
go to Moscow in 1920, when I was in London. She said she didn't know
that, but was aware that Reed had become excited about the social
problems of the Negro group shortly before he fell ill.

At that time she was doing a brilliant set of articles about Russia
for a Hearst newspaper. We talked about writing. I was interested
in her opinion of so-called "bourgeois" and so-called "proletarian"
literature and art. Externally her tastes were bourgeois enough. She
liked luxurious surroundings and elegant and expensive clothes and
looked splendid in them. But her fine tastes had not softened her will
or weakened her rebel spirit.

Louise Bryant thought, as I did, that there was no bourgeois writing
or proletarian writing as such; there was only good writing and bad
writing. I told her of my great desire to do some Negro stories,
straight and unpolished, but that Max Eastman had discouraged me and
said I should write my stories in verse. But my thinking in poetry
was so lyric-emotional that I could not feel like writing stories in
that vein. She said Max Eastman was too romantic about poetry and
that I should write prose. She said she also could never get into her
poetry certain things that she got into prose. John Reed had written
some early stories about ordinary people with no radical propaganda in
them, she said, and suggested that I should do the same about my Negro
stories--just write plain tales.

And so now again in Paris, when she was sending me off to southern
France for my health, Louise Bryant warned me: "Remember our
conversation in New York, and don't try to force your stories with
propaganda. If you write a good story, that will be the biggest
propaganda." She gave me a check big enough to keep me living simply
and working steadily for three months.

I went to Marseilles, and from there visited some of the little towns
of the littoral. Finally I chose La Ciotat, a place about midway
between Marseilles and Toulon, having some eight thousand folk.
Boatmaking and fishing were the two main industries. The bay was fine,
and beautiful in the morning sunshine. But on the quay, where the
houses and hotels were, the morning sunshine didn't fall. There was no
kind of heat, not even fireplaces. My hotel was cold but I contrived
to work, wrapping myself from chest to feet in my Russian blanket and
leaving only my hands free.

After a month of it I went down to Toulon to hear Carmen by the Opéra
Comique Company from Paris. In a _bistro_ after the opera I met a girl
who spoke English. She was a little strange, different from the average
that one meets in sailor bars. She was friendly to me. I found out that
she had once been a little friend of artists and writers in Montmartre
and Montparnasse. She was the type of girl that seemed more suitable
for friendship with younger officers than with common sailors, but she
preferred the sailors. She worked too, in a store. She promised to find
me a room with a fireplace in Toulon, which she did, and sent me a note
about it the following week. But I had already paid another month's
rent in advance in La Ciotat.

When that month was ended, I took up residence in Toulon. The girl--her
name was Marcelle--had a sailor friend named Lucien, and all three of
us became very close friends. Lucien was more than an average sailor.
There are many such in the French navy, lads from middle-class and
lower middle-class families who choose the navy instead of the army to
do their compulsory service. The service is longer in the navy than
in the army. Also it is harder, without the privileges offered by the
army, in which the educated sons of the better classes can do their
compulsory service as cadets.

Lucien had been a cadet, studying to enter the navy as a career, but he
had failed his examinations and then decided to do his military service
in the navy. He read lots of books, but he wasn't literary. He gave
me my first French lessons. He said I should read Anatole France for
good French. He said he read everything of Anatole France's because he
wrote the purest and clearest French of any contemporary writer. But
he didn't get any kick out of the novels as novels. For stories about
French life he preferred Zola and Maupassant. I wondered if there were
many French readers who felt about Anatole France as Lucien did. He
assured me that there were many who liked Anatole France merely because
he wrote classical French.

Lucien was on the battleship "Provence." He invited me to go aboard and
introduced me to many of his friends. As Lucien had formerly been a
cadet, he had a few extra privileges. Very often he slept in town. And
he, Marcelle and I were always together. He loved to walk, and together
we explored the environs of Toulon. We hiked to La Seyne, Tamaris,
Bandol and Ollioules. I love the Var country more than any part of
France, excepting Brittany. Lucien was a Breton and he loved those
wonderful bare rugged rocks towering to the skies that make the Var
so dramatically picturesque. I told Lucien that I loved those rearing
rocks because they somewhat suggested the skyscrapers of New York.
But Lucien did not like the comparison; he could not imagine anything
American resembling anything French.

When his pals got their week-end vacation from the "Provence" we all
went bathing out at Cap Negre in the afternoon, and in the evening we
got together for a good time in the _bistros_ and _mancebías_. The
_mancebías_ of Toulon are like recreation halls for the sailors. Many
of the sailors who, like Lucien, had their girls in town, went to the
_mancebías_ to dance and meet their friends for a good time. Sometimes
they took their girls with them. There are dancing halls in Toulon,
but these are frequented mostly by the officers. The sailors find it
embarrassing to mix with the officers, so they prefer the _mancebías_,
where they are freer. The managers of the _mancebías_ are a pretty good
lot. They are friendly and cater to the whims of the sailors, as if
they were aware that they were entertaining a mixed group of the best
of the country's youth.

Toulon is dominated by the naval aristocracy, and its administration
seemed to me the best of any of the French provincial towns I visited.
To a casual observer, the civil administration seems subordinate to the
maritime administration. The sailors are protected much more than they
are aware. In Toulon there is nothing of that rotten civil complaisance
in the exploitation of the sailors which is a revolting feature of life
in Marseilles.

Soon after I went to reside in Toulon I received a letter from the
secretary of the Garland Fund. It informed me that the officers of the
Fund had heard that I was unwell and in need and that they desired to
help me for a time, while I was writing. Thus assured of fifty dollars
a month, I knuckled down to writing. It was grand and romantic to have
a grant to write, and I got going on a realistic lot of stuff. I was
sure about what I wanted to write, but I wasn't so sure about the form.
My head was full of material in short pieces, but I wanted to write a
long piece--a novel.

I returned to Paris toward the end of summer with a heavy portfolio.
I met a couple of publishers' scouts who didn't discover anything in
my lot. Clive Weed introduced me to Harold Stearns. Stearns's strange
tired eyes didn't want to look at me. Remembering something, he excused
himself, got up and went to the bar, and there forgot all about me. I
wondered why Stearns acted so strangely, as if over there in Paris
I had reminded him too much of civilization in the United States!
Another Yankee said that I should not worry about Harold Stearns for I
had nothing to offer him, and he had nothing to offer me but tips on
horses and booze. While I remained in Paris I saw Harold Stearns again
many times and always at the bar. He was something of an institution
in Montparnasse, and often I saw him pointed out to American students
who were discovering civilization in Europe as the man who had edited
_Civilization in the United States_.

Also in Paris I found Eugen Boissevain, who had previously helped me
much with encouraging praise of my poetry and with gifts of money. He
had been recently married to Edna St. Vincent Millay. I saw them both
together at their hotel and she gave me a book of her poems. There was
a happy feeling in his face that I never had seen there before he was
married, and I felt happy for it because I was fond of him. Miss Millay
I saw for the first time. In Greenwich Village I had often heard praise
of her, but we had never met, and when I arrived in Paris she had
recently left. In the literary circles of Montparnasse I heard her name
on the lips of foreigners and Americans, and all in praise of her--a
reverent worshipful praise. It was extraordinary: he-men, mere men, and
others--all used identical phrases in praising Miss Millay's elusive
personality. The only other white woman I knew who was so unreservedly
esteemed by all kinds of men was Isadora Duncan. I was puzzled and
skeptical of all that chorus of praise. But when I did set eyes on
Miss Millay I understood it. There was something in her personality
which was Elizabethan--as I imagine the Elizabethans to have been from
Shakespeare and history. And I saw her as a Shakespearean woman deftly
adapted to the modern machine age. When I searched for an Anglo-Saxon
word to fix her in my mind I could think of "elfin" only.

Sinclair Lewis was in Paris also, and he was very kind. He read some of
my stuff. He had been generous to many radically-inclined writers since
his first success with _Main Street_, and he hadn't seen any results.
But he gave me a sum of money, took me to dinner in a small quiet
place, and talked to me a whole long evening. In a shrewd American way
(chastising me and making me like it), Sinclair Lewis gave me a few
cardinal and practical points about the writing of a book or a novel.
Those points were indicative and sharp like newspaper headlines. I
did not forget them when I got down to writing _Home to Harlem_. I
remembered them so well that some critics saw the influence of Sinclair
Lewis in my novel. Scott Fitzgerald, in a note, said that the scenes
seemed in the Zola-Lewis line.

I left Paris again for Toulon to see what better I could do. About the
time I got back Lucien was just finishing his service and getting ready
to leave for Brittany. Marcelle was very sad, and I also. For I had
been looking forward to our spending much of our leisure time together
as formerly.

On the evening of Lucien's departure a gang of sailors from the
"Provence" and some from other boats and a few girls all crowded into
my room. Out of their small wages they had eked enough to buy many
bottles of ordinary white and red wine. I bought some cognac. My
landlady and her husband joined us and we had a great good time.

My friends knew that I was writing, but they knew nothing of my ideas.
I never told them that I had been in Soviet Russia. The French friend
whom I had met in Moscow had advised me that so long as I was staying
in France I should never do or say anything to let the authorities
think that I was making political propaganda. If I followed that line,
he said, I would never be bothered. I kept that advice, along with
Louise Bryant's, in my head and followed the line.

But toward the end of the evening, when we all began kissing one
another on both cheeks, Frenchwise, bidding Lucien a last farewell, a
sailor started singing the "Internationale." We all joined our voices
with his and heartily sang, I singing in English. One sailor jumped up
on my writing table and said: "After the world revolution there will
be no more white and black and yellow; we shall all be one fraternity
of men." My sense of the distinctive in the difference of color was
outraged, and I said, "We can still remain a fraternity of men and
guard our complexions." One of the girls said: "That's all well! We
wouldn't like you to change your color either."

But the next day I had the honor of a visit from two police officers
in plain clothes. They were very courteous. They first satisfied
themselves that my French was not worth much and one of them spoke
to me in English, which was worth just a little more than my French.
I told them all they desired to know about me, except the fact that
I had visited Soviet Russia. I explained that the sailors had come
to my place to give Lucien a farewell party. "And they sang the
'Internationale'!" commented my inquisitor. I am not sure, but I think
there is a government ruling which forbids French sailors and soldiers
from singing the "Internationale." "They sang the Marseillaise too," I
said, "and I prefer the words and music of the Marseillaise to those
of the 'Internationale'." The English-speaking inspector smiled and
asked me whether I was a Communist. I said that I was a poet and a
great admirer of Victor Hugo. He said, "Well, I wouldn't wonder if a
Negro-American had advanced ideas." He excluded the Negro-French of
course. But I was courteously left alone and for the ensuing months I
lived happily and as I pleased in Toulon. In the restaurants and cafés
that I frequented I was treated even better than before.

Lucien wrote, asking if I could visit Brittany in the summer, because
his parents wanted to know me. I replied in ungrammatical French,
telling him that I would if I could. I finished a novel and mailed
it to New York. I had a group of short stories, which I forwarded to
Louise Bryant. I received an enthusiastic letter from Louise Bryant,
who said that Robert McAlmon wanted to use one of the stories.

Lucien and I kept up a regular correspondence. He wrote that he had
fallen ill, but that it was not serious. In the early summer I left
Toulon for Marseilles. There I met Marcelle. I told her that I was
expecting to go to Brest to visit Lucien and his people. She thought
that was fine, and I asked her why she didn't come along too. That
was impossible, she said, because a girl of her sort could not think
of visiting the family of her lover. Girls like her, she said, were
outside friends for outside purposes, and had no desire to intrude
themselves upon their friends' families.

In the company of a white American artist I spent a couple of weeks
in low-down Marseilles; then I decided to go to Bordeaux to visit a
British West Indian Negro friend and his French West Indian wife before
going on to Brittany. I got my ticket and boarded a night train. And
while I was waiting for my train to pull out, another pulled in, and
there in the next car right up against mine was Max Eastman and his
Russian wife!

I got out and asked the station master to make my ticket good for the
next day. Max Eastman had just published his book, _Since Lenin Died_.
I had left him in Russia before Lenin's death, and we had plenty to
talk about. So we spent the larger split of the night talking, and the
next day drove round the Corniche and ate _bouillabaisse_ on the quay.
In the evening I entrained for Bordeaux.

I wrote from Bordeaux informing Lucien that I would arrive soon in
Brest, and was surprised to find the answering letter addressed in a
strange handwriting. It was from Lucien's father, stating that his son
had died the week before. Lucien had contracted tuberculosis in the
navy, and unaware of his serious illness, had not taken any treatment.
In Toulon I had noticed that he was rather frail, and, compared to
his comrades, unusually quiet, but I never heard him cough, and his
physique showed no strain when we went hiking in the country.

In his letter, Lucien's father invited me still to come to St. Pierre.
He said his son had talked about my visit up to the moment of his
death, and thought that I would like Brittany more than Provence. For
the first time in my life I was shocked with the sensation of what "a
living dead" might mean. I had seen persons sicken and die after a long
illness. I had seen sudden death. But Lucien's passing was weird, like
a ghost story. All the time he was regularly writing those healthy
letters about the picturesqueness of the wild Breton coast, of the
fields full of larks singing in the summertime, of the quaint costumes
which the old people still wore naturally, he was actually wasting
rapidly away. They say consumptive persons are like that: always
optimistic and hopeful of their health. But I had never had any close
contact with one.

I wondered if Marcelle had known of the real state of Lucien's health.
When I told him that I had come to the Midi mainly for the effect
of the sun on my health, he said: "Why should the young think about
health? Just live, and that is health." I lingered on in Bordeaux,
hesitating about going to Brittany. But I received another letter,
from Lucien's mother, urging me to come, "because Lucien wanted you
to be his guest, and now that he is dead we want to receive you for
him." I decided to go. I had met many French in cafés, restaurants and
other places. And I had been invited to a couple of parlor parties in
Montparnasse, but I wasn't sure whether my hosts were really French
or what the French call _métèque_. I had never been a guest in a real
French family. The French are exclusive in their ideas of family life
and seldom invite strangers to their homes.

Lucien's family, which was small, belonged to the prosperous peasant
class or the small bourgeoise. It was not a café-or restaurant-owning
family. The old father used to be an artisan, of what trade I don't
remember. He was a big man, robust, friendly, and loved to play
_boule_. The mother was small and compact and resembled a picture of a
South European immigrant arriving in New York. There were two daughters
and an older son, all married. The son had a clerical position in the
maritime service. I noticed that they read _Le Quotidien_, which was a
Left liberal paper at that time.

The family possessed a small two-storey stone house in St. Pierre. It
was furnished in antique and modern stuff. The father and mother still
used the chest-like Breton beds which are now so highly valued by
connoisseurs. The dining table also was a large, heavy massive thing,
occupying the one large room that served for dining and cooking. But
Lucien had modernized his room, so that it was like a room anywhere,
even in the Congo, I guess.

I stayed in a hotel in Brest and went often to eat with Lucien's
family. After the shock of meeting over Lucien's death, it was a nice
visit. I liked the Breton folk more than any other of the French. I
spent the summer wandering all over Finistère. I lay in the gray-green
fields and watched the brown larks suddenly soar and sing. I knew then
why Lucien loved the Breton fields so dearly, and I understood more of
what Shakespeare felt when he wrote:

 _Hark, hark the lark at Heaven's gate sings...._

Lovely are the fields and charming are the towns of Finistère: Brest,
Morlaix, Camarat, Plougastel, Morgat, Quimper, Concarneau, Le Pouldu
over to Lorient and back to Douarnenez _le Rouge_ above all! How I
loved Douarnenez with its high wall falling sheerly into the green
waters and the big shipping boats with their tall masts hung with nets
like blue veils against the misted gray-blue sky, and the fishermen in
red dungarees and red-hearted.

I loved the quiet green and subdued grays and browns of Brittany, and
although it rained a lot I did not miss the grand sun of Provence.
Perhaps because I was sad and felt the need of solitude.



XXIII

Frank Harris in France


Late in the autumn I went south again to Nice. I needed a job and found
one as valet to an American.

Paul Robeson and I met on the Promenade des Anglais. He read one of
my stories and said he liked it. I said I would like to do a play
for him to act in. Paul asked me if I knew Gertrude Stein. I said I
didn't, that I hadn't gone to her place. Paul said he had visited
Gertrude Stein and that she was all right. I shouldn't neglect such an
opportunity, as she knew all the literary people who counted, he told
me. I told Paul that although I couldn't abide cliques, I wasn't averse
to contact, but from my estimation of Gertrude Stein I felt that she
had nothing to offer.

I lived in a spacious room with a French-Italian family. It gave on
the old port of Nice, and was cheap. Paul Robeson was staying in
Villefranche in the same hotel in which Glenway Westcott lived. I wrote
to Paul asking if he could come to Nice on a certain evening, when Max
Eastman and his wife would be visiting me. The reply came from Mrs.
Robeson. She wrote that she and Paul were coming together, because they
just couldn't breathe without each other. Paul Robeson came late with
his formidable wife and the more formidable Frank Harris. Robeson and
his wife had had either lunch or dinner with Frank Harris at Cimiez and
had mentioned that they were coming to see me afterward. Frank Harris
hadn't seen me in years, didn't know I was in Nice, and insisted on
coming along with the Robesons.

Max Eastman and his wife were already there when the Robesons and Frank
Harris arrived. It was a most piquant scene, for I had never seen Max
Eastman and Frank Harris together, and I knew how they detested each
other. If Frank Harris's dislike was boisterously aggressive, Max
Eastman's dislike of him was none the less real because it was veiled
and soft.

Frank Harris greeted me with a loud: "You rascal, catting your way
through Europe and not letting me know you were in Nice! I knew you
would come back to Europe after that first trip. Now give an account of
yourself." But before I could get in a word of any account about myself
Frank Harris was teasing Max Eastman about his book, _Since Lenin
Died_. He said he hoped that Eastman would realize now that politicians
are politicians whether they are red or white, that there were certain
types of men who were successful politicians and always would be
forever and forever. He, Frank Harris, was one of the first to hail
the Russian Revolution and he still believed in it. But he had never
regarded Lenin and Trotsky or any Bolshevik as a god, but as men with
the faults of men. Max Eastman could not reply because Frank Harris did
not give him a chance.

I had a case of dry _Graves_ under my bed. (I had accompanied a casual
acquaintance one day to a big shop in Nice, and in an excess of feeling
for my poetry or personality he offered me the case of _Graves_ and I
accepted it right away before his sentiment had time to change.) So I
brought out two bottles. Frank Harris said he was not drinking. But
when he saw the _Graves_ he examined the bottle and exclaimed: "Oh,
it's an excellent brand. I cannot resist trying it." And he grabbed
the bottle from me and opened it himself. I got the glasses ready and
Frank Harris poured the wine. Soon he became mellow, and started to
tell stories of life and himself. He told us a story of his traveling
from London to Rome by the Paris-Rome express train. There was an
Italian couple sitting beside him, he said, and the man knew English
and started a conversation. The passenger was cultivated, and they
passed the time discussing politics and headline news. But the woman
got bored. She could not talk English. And suddenly, tigerishly, she
turned on Frank Harris, accusing him of monopolizing her husband's
interest. Harris was sitting next to Paul Robeson and he gave a
dramatic interpretation of the incident, now imitating the man, now the
woman, beside portraying his own rôle. And while he was interpreting
the woman's part he acted the thing out on Paul Robeson, making him
the man. It was all very interesting, but when he had finished, Mrs.
Robeson said aside to me: "He was so realistic that I felt afraid for
my husband." Frank Harris was also such a great actor that in his talk
he actually became the character he was portraying. And that is why
some of the readers of his marvelous biography of Oscar Wilde imagine
that there was something more than a platonic friendship between the
two men.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Robesons invited the Eastmans and myself to dinner in Villefranche.
Glenway Westcott also was their dinner guest. Mrs. Robeson wore a
pretty red frock and Paul sang a couple of spirituals. Now that Frank
Harris wasn't there, the women had their chance to luxuriate in
talking. It was the first time Mrs. Eastman had heard the American
Negro voice. Mrs. Eastman (_nee_ Eliena Krylenko) was like a
reincarnation of Chekhov's, The Darling. She whispered to me that she
was fascinated, and like a happy, eager child she engaged Mrs. Robeson
in conversation. Presently Mrs. Robeson exclaimed to Mrs. Eastman,
"But Darling, _where did_ you get that _accent_? Oh, I do _adore_ your
way of using our English language. It is just _lovely_!"

Frank Harris and I met very often in Nice. He lived in Cimiez, but came
into Nice almost every day for his mail at the office of the American
Express Company. Often we sat in the Taverne Alsacienne to talk. He
asked me how my prose was getting along. I told him I thought I had
done some good short stories, but failed of my real objective--a novel.
I told him my difficulty was devising a plot.

"Don't worry about a plot," he said. "Just get a central idea or a
person interesting enough and write around that. Make your writing
strong and loose and try to get everything in it."

Once he saw me with a very striking girl at the American Express and
he asked me if I would like to bring her to dinner with him. I said,
"Very willingly," and we arranged a rendezvous for a few days later.
The dinner was in one of the best restaurants. Harris had published
his _Life and Loves_ and was selling it privately. He told us he
had received orders from the United States, England, Germany, the
Scandinavian countries and France. It was his practice to send the book
and collect afterward, he said, and all the buyers had paid promptly
excepting the French.

I said, "Our guest is French." (She spoke perfect English.) Frank
Harris was astonished: "_Vraiment! vraiment!_" he said, "_Vous êtes
française?_" The girl said, "Yes, but that is nothing." But Frank
Harris regretted the _faux pas_, for English enemies, he informed
me, were attacking him and working to get him expelled from France
for writing a dirty book. Some French journalists of the Left were
defending him. He began telling us of his troubles with the English and
that he was banned from visiting England again, ostensibly because of
his _Life and Loves_, but he knew that he was being persecuted actually
because he had taken a stand against England during the war.

We had a leisurely dinner: aperitifs and excellent white wine with
the fish and red wine with the meat. And topping all, a bottle of
champagne. Frank Harris told many _Life and Loves_ stories, as
salacious as possible. The last long one was about his first strange
affair in Greece. The French girl said, cryptically, "It had to be
Greece."

Outside, while we were walking through the Albert the First Park, Frank
Harris declared that although he had passed seventy he was still young
and active in every way. To demonstrate this he started to skip and
fell down in the first movements. I picked him up. The girl lived about
forty minutes down the littoral, and as the last train was due in a few
minutes, I said that I had to take her to the station.

Frank Harris said: "Why don't you take her home in a taxicab?" I said
that we couldn't afford it, but that if he chose to, there was no
objection. Immediately he took up the challenge and called a taxicab.
I put the girl in and he said to me: "You, too, get in." I said no,
that one escort was enough and we could trust him. And besides, I had
to sleep the liquor out of my head to go to work the next morning. So
Frank Harris got in beside the girl and they drove off.

I saw him again before I saw her. "Did you have a nice ride?" I asked.
An embarrassed look came into his face and he broke out, "You black
devil, why didn't you tell me we were riding to the destination of
Lesbos?" "Because I thought any destination was a destination for an
eclectic person like you," I said, and added that we had warned him
that he could be trusted.

"I didn't even have any money left to pay the taxicab," he said, "and
had to give the chauffeur a promissory note."

One day Frank Harris told me he had been thinking about doing a book
of contemporary portraits of Negroes only, and he could not think of
any Negroes but Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson and myself. At that time
Paul Robeson was aspiring, but had not achieved his greater fame. And
without being unduly modest, but with my mind on the bull's-eye of
achievement, I said I thought I would have to do another book first.

Truth to tell, I have always been a little dubious about anthologies of
Negro poets and all that kind of stuff. Because there is a tendency to
mix up so much bad with the good, that the good is hard to pick out. Of
that kind of thing, some critics will say: "Good enough for a Negro,"
and there is a feeling among some Negro writers and artists that they
should be contented with that sort of criticism. It gives us prestige
in Negro society. We have been praised by critics and the critics are
all white. If I resent that kind of patronizing criticism, and the fact
that Negro artists are satisfied with it, it is because I am inspired
with a great hope for the Negro group. And I am certain that it cannot
find artistic self-reliance in second-hand achievement. Though because
of lack of common facilities and broad cultural contacts a Negro's work
may lack the technical perfection of a white person's, intrinsically
it must be compared with the white man's achievement and judged by the
same standards. I think that that is the only standard of criticism
that Negro artists can aim at.

Frank Harris and I went to the Taverne Alsacienne to talk over his
project. He said that if he wrote a book of contemporary portraits of
Negroes, he would expect it to sell. I said that I hoped it would.
I wrote down some names: Marcus Garvey, Florence Mills, Madam Walker
of Black Beauty Culture fame, W.C. Handy, composer of the St. Louis
Blues. W.E.B. DuBois was the only Negro intellectual who appeared
outstanding for that sort of thing. There were quite a few, but none of
them glamorous enough for Frank Harris's style. I mentioned Professor
Carver, the Luther Burbank type of scientist who had been my beloved
teacher at Tuskegee, but Frank Harris objected. He said that he wanted
a Negro scientist of the caliber of Thomas Huxley. He said that Booker
Washington was inflated as a philosopher, and he hadn't found any
system of philosophy in his books. He thought it would be interesting
if American Negroes could throw up a full-sized philosopher special to
their needs and times--a kind of Aframerican Herbert Spencer. Herbert
Spencer, he said, didn't mean anything to him, but meant a lot to the
smug English bourgeoisie, and so he had to be reckoned with as an
intellectual.

Not long after my conversation with Frank Harris I left Nice for
Marseilles. And suddenly bloomed the exotic flower of the Negro
renaissance. I never heard what became of Frank Harris's idea. Perhaps
Paul Robeson could tell. Frank Harris said he had talked or was going
to talk to Paul Robeson, as he intended him to be the big personality
of the book.



XXIV

Cinema Studio


I had visited Rex Ingram's cinema studio in Nice to dance with a group
for one of his pictures. Max Eastman introduced my poems to Rex Ingram.
Rex Ingram liked my poems. He had written some poetry himself and a few
of some that he showed me were good poems. Rex Ingram has a sympathetic
mind and an insatiable curiosity about all kinds of people and their
culture. He is especially interested in North Africa, has friends among
the natives, and has even learned to read Arabic.

Rex Ingram gave me a job. It was a nice, congenial and easy job. I read
a lot of fiction and made a summary of any interesting plots. Not only
did Mr. Ingram give me a job, but he had the temerity to invite me to
dinner at his private table, before the resentful eyes of his American
employees. And there were some hard-boiled eggs among the technical
staff who were as mean as Satan. A French friend said he heard them
muttering threats and that the general manager of the studio had said
that perhaps Mr. Ingram was intent upon precipitating a riot.

I went about my business and gave no mind to anybody. For none of the
Americans had said anything to me personally. But I could feel the
hot breath of their hellish hate. It was vastly interesting to study
a group of average white Americans who had carried abroad and were
sowing the seeds of their poisonous hate. The young Frenchman enjoyed
repeating to me the phrases he overheard. He did not have a profound
understanding of the vileness of some of those phrases in English.
"_Ils sont incompréhensible, ces Américains_," said the Frenchman.
"_Ils sont les vrais barbares._"

The general manager of the cinema studio did not enjoy complicated
situations. I had come up against him before I met Mr. Ingram, when I
was dancing with the group. The leading dancer had told me that the
manager had said I could not continue in the dance, because the motion
picture was being made for American consumption.

Said the manager to me one day: "You know, I knew Julius Rosenwald, and
he has recently left a pile of money for Negro education and culture.
Now don't you think that it is better to have a fortune to give to
improve another race under capitalism than to have no fortune under
Bolshevism?" The manager had heard about my visit to Russia. I said I
thought it was all right to give money for Negro culture, because Negro
workers had helped to make Jewish as well as other American capital.
The manager was a Jew.

The movie establishment was like a realistic dream of my romantic
idea of a great medieval domain. There were gangs of workers engaged
in manual work, building up, tearing down and clearing away. Motor
cars dashed in and out with important persons and motor buses carried
the crowds. Gentlemen and ladies with their pages went riding by on
caparisoned horses. The eager extras swarmed like bees together, many
costumed and made up like attendants at a medieval banquet. The leading
ladies, on the scene or off, were attired and treated like princesses,
and the director was the great lord in the eyes of all. I used to think
that Negroes lacked organized-labor consciousness more than did any
other group. But it was much worse on that movie lot. I saw the worst
sort of sycophancy in the world among the extras crowd, each one
hoping that some affected way of acting or speaking might recommend him
for a privileged place.

Rex Ingram's inviting me to eat at his table created a little problem.
I was literally besieged by employees, extras and aspirants. Some
desired to get in personal touch with the director through me: "Oh, the
director had you to dinner, and over at his house! What a beautiful
gesture, and how proud you must be!" The news reached the café that
I frequented in Nice, and the proprietor, waiters and customers all
treated me with particular attention. They all thought that I had
achieved something marvelous, something special. And as none of them
knew anything about the difference between poetry and piggery, it was
hard to convince them that Rex Ingram had honored me only because I was
a poet; that all I had was an ordinary job and that I was not specially
placed to further their ambitions.

Rex Ingram held some very advanced ideas on world politics. He was
interested in the life and thought and achievements of minority groups,
and whenever he ran into me he had something interesting to say. And
each time, as soon as his back was turned, the sycophants besieged me
to learn what he had talked about. As that was embarrassing, I did my
work and avoided the director as much as possible.

Among the employees there was an Italian who was specially troublesome.
He had lived somewhere in America and acquired a smattering of English.
He sensed the undercurrent of feeling against me among the American
element and desired to show in what direction his sympathy was slanted.
The Italian was in charge of the transportation of employees from St.
Augustine to Nice. He often had a special remark for me: "Having a good
time over here, eh?--_les jolies jeunes filles_. It would be different
in America." Two Polish girls, a Frenchman and myself were rather
friendly and always went down together. The Italian always tried to
separate us, finding some reason to hold one or two of us behind by
putting somebody before and between. The Frenchman hated the Italian
and called him the _petit caïd_.

One evening the Italian not only held me back, but kept me waiting and
waiting until I lost patience. He let one of the buses go, although
there were vacant places. I said, "What's the idea? What game are you
playing?" He said, "You know in America, you'd have to wait for the
last and ride by yourself." I said, "Yes, you--you have sucked off so
much America, that you need some fascist castor oil to purge you." He
said, "I think you'll want to box next; all Negroes are boxers." I
said, "Look here, I won't defile my hands with your dirty dago skin,
but I'll cut your gut out." I went suddenly mad and pulled my knife and
he ran around the bus, crying that the Negro was after him with a knife.

In a moment sanity flashed back into me as quickly as it had fled and I
put the knife in my pocket. It was a fine clean blade. Lucien had given
it to me in Toulon. A friendly fellow took me up on his motorcycle and
we dashed away from the damned place. It was the first time I had ever
drawn a blade in a fight, and I was ashamed. The Frenchman said: "What
are you ashamed of, when you didn't do it? You should have stuck him in
his belly and made one Italian less. Italy and France are certain to go
to war, and I think they should start right now." That was ten years
ago.

The business manager made much trouble for me over the incident. He
talked a lot about an intelligent Negro not being able to control
himself. And if I had to use a weapon, he wanted to know, why should it
be a knife? For it was a general idea that the Negro race was addicted
to the use of the knife. Even though I was on trial, with the judge
prejudiced against me, I could not resist saying, "When bad traits are
wished upon a whole group of people, it isn't so surprising if the best
of us sometimes unconsciously exhibit some of the worst traits."

I thought that when the final decision was handed down, I would
surely lose my job. But Rex Ingram's face revealed that he possessed
an intuitive understanding of poets. He is Irish. He knew that I had
suffered enough from the incident, and didn't punish me further.
So I stayed at work all that spring until summer, when the studio
closed. Then I decided to go to Marseilles. I had kept out of Rex
Ingram's sight most of the rest of the time, because, as I said, I
was thoroughly ashamed. But when I was going I sought him out to
say goodbye and he encouraged me to go on with my writing, told his
bookkeeper to give me a free ticket to Marseilles, and gave me a gift
of six hundred francs.



XXV

Marseilles Motley


It was a relief to get to Marseilles, to live in among a great gang of
black and brown humanity. Negroids from the United States, the West
Indies, North Africa and West Africa, all herded together in a warm
group. Negroid features and complexions, not exotic, creating curiosity
and hostility, but unique and natural to a group. The odors of dark
bodies sweating through a day's hard work, like the odor of stabled
horses, were not unpleasant even in a crowded café. It was good to feel
the strength and distinction of a group and the assurance of belonging
to it.

The Africans came mainly from Dahomey and Senegal and Algeria. Many
were dockers. Some were regular hard-working sailors, who had a few
days in port between debarking and embarking. Others were waiting for
ships--all wedged in between the old port and the breakwater, among
beachcombers, guides, procurers, prostitutes of both sexes and _bistro_
bandits--all of motley-making Marseilles, swarming, scrambling and
scraping sustenance from the bodies of ships and crews.

I rented a room in the Vieux Port and worked rapidly revising my
stories. Louise Bryant had written asking me to get all my stories
ready, for she was sailing soon to New York, and would take them
herself to a publisher. Sometimes I did a little manual work. The
Senegalese foreman of the Negro dockers was my friend, and when he
had a lot of work of the lighter kind, such as unloading peanuts or
cocoanuts, he gave me an easy job.

There was always excitement in the Vieux Port: men's fights and
prostitutes' brawls, sailors robbed, civilian and police shooting. One
Senegalese had a big café on the quay and all the Negroes ganged there
with their friends and girls. The Senegalese was a remarkable type,
quiet, level-headed, shrewd. He had served in France during the World
War and had been a sergeant. He went to the United States as soon as he
could after the armistice. He got a job such as the average Negro works
at and at the same time he ran a rooming house for Africans and Negroid
Moslems in New York. He amassed a tidy sum of money, returned to France
after six years, and bought the bar in the Vieux Port. His family in
Goree was old, large and important. He had a relative in Paris, who was
a small functionary in the municipal system. A sister was a graduate
nurse in Dakar, and I met in Casablanca a first-class mechanic who was
his cousin.

In his social outlook the café owner was an African nationalist. He
introduced me to one of his countrymen named Senghor. This Senghor
also was a war veteran and a Negro leader among the Communists. He was
a tall, lean intelligent Senegalese and his ideas were a mixture of
African nationalism and international Communism. Senghor was interested
in my writing and said he wished I would write the truth about the
Negroes in Marseilles. I promised him that I would some day.

He gave me a little pamphlet he had written about the European
conquest of Africa. The sentiment was quaint and naïve, like the human
figures stamped on old-fashioned plates.... Senghor took me to the
international building for seamen in Marseilles. It was newly opened
by Communists--a vast place, complete with bar, kitchen, theater
and recreation room. In the reading room there were newspapers in
nearly all of the occidental and oriental languages. There were a few
seamen, Scandinavian, French, Annamites, Spanish, but no Negroes,
present. Senghor talked to the manager and said it was their job to
get the Negroes to come to the International Seamen's building. But
the building was far out of the center of the town and the Negroes
preferred the international beehive of the Vieux Port. Yet the Negroes
had hard industrial problems to face in Marseilles. On the boats they
were employed as stokers only, and they were not employed on those
boats making the "good" runs: that is, the short runs, which the white
seamen preferred. Also as dockers they were discriminated against
and given the hardest and most unpleasant jobs, such as loading and
unloading coal and sulphur. The Negroes complained against the unions:
Senghor told them the unions were Socialist unions and that they should
become Communists.

One afternoon I listened in on a conversation in black and white
between Senghor and the café owner. I think it is worth recording here.
Senghor had been gassed in the war and he was consumptive. He was
married to a Frenchwoman who was devoted to and was dutifully taking
care of him.

Said the café owner to Senghor: "But say, listen: I don't see how you
can become a great Negro leader when you are married to a white woman."
Senghor replied that he felt even more bitterly about the condition of
Negroes because he was married to a white woman; and as Communism was
international, it was an international gesture for him to be married
to a white woman, especially since white chauvinists objected to
intermarriage. "And what about you," Senghor asked the café owner,
"aren't you living with a white woman?"

"Yes, but I am not aiming to be a leader," said the café owner. "But
you are aiming to be. If you are a real true leader, if the Negroes see
it on the outside and feel it on the inside, they will surely follow
you, and if the men follow you, their women must follow them. For
you can't uplift men without uplifting women. And colored women will
not follow Negro leaders who are married to white women. Especially
when white women everywhere have more social freedom and privileges
than colored women. How many white leaders are there anywhere who are
married to colored women? They couldn't be and remain leaders. They
love our women, but they don't marry them.

"Now take our Deputy Diagne. Before Diagne, all our leaders used to
be mulattoes. But the mulattoes did everything for the whites and
nothing at all for the blacks. So we blacks, being more than they, we
got together and said: 'Let's elect a black man; he might do better.'
But as soon as we elected Diagne and sent him to Paris, right away
he married a white woman. Now his mulatto children despise us black
Senegalese. Now if Deputy Diagne had a colored wife for his hostess in
Paris, wouldn't that be propaganda helping our women and our race? But
I think the French preferred Diagne to have a white wife, rather than
have a colored woman as a political hostess in Paris. Soon as we tried
to do something for ourselves as a group, they did something else to
make our action ineffective."

Senghor closed his eyes and scratched his head and opened his eyes and
said that his countryman's idea was interesting and he would have to
think the subject over from another point of view.

"It's not just a color problem, but a human problem," said the café
owner. "Why, suppose all the big Frenchmen took English wives and
disregarded the French women! I tell you there would be another French
Revolution."

At that moment the French companion of the proprietor entered the
café. Embarrassed, the two Senegalese shut up. The woman went over
to the proprietor and leaned affectionately upon his shoulder. He
reached up and patted her. It was a strange scene, after that strange
conversation, and it made me feel queer. Sentimentally, I was confused;
intellectually, I was lost.

       *       *       *       *       *

My stories finished, I mailed them to Louise Bryant who received
them on the very morning she was leaving for America. Summer was at
its meridian in Marseilles. It was hot, and that was good for me,
a straight dry heat and sweet to the skin. Nothing of the sticky,
uncomfortable and oppressive summer heat of New York and London and
Paris. One gets into the warmth of Marseilles as a West Indian boy
burrows into a heap of dried sugar cane after the liquor has been
pressed out, and feels sweet and comfortable lying down deep in it.

I took a holiday from thinking out stories and writing and took to
the water. Way down at the end of the great Marseilles breakwater,
with the black sailors on French leave, dockers and beachcombers, we
went in bathing. But I discovered a better bathing place in l'Estaque,
fifteen minutes by trolley from Marseilles, and went out there with an
American friend for the rest of the summer. Formerly l'Estaque was a
fishing village with a big beautiful clean and sheltered bay. Cézanne
loved to paint there. But now it is a squalid factory town and the
center of the cement and tile industries. In its population there
are many foreigners: Poles, Italians, Russians, North Africans, even
some Germans who call themselves Austrians. They live in ugly cabins
on the hill and work in the factories and on the new Rhône canal. All
the dirty water of the cementing and tiling flows into the bay. But a
little outside the town, a little out beyond where the canal enters the
bay, there still remains a wonderful wide sheet of splendid deep clean
water. There I went every day for the rest of the summer, floating for
hours upon my back with the healing sun holding me up in his embrace.

Suddenly there came three days of mistral, and it was fall. I don't
like the mistrals of Marseilles. Happily just then I received an
invitation from Max Eastman to visit him at Antibes. Soon after I got
that letter another came from Louise Bryant. She said she had found a
publisher who was interested in printing my stories and that I should
soon hear from her again.

I went to Antibes. The next interesting thing was a letter from William
Aspenwall Bradley of Paris, telling of his coming down to Antibes to
see me about my work. When Bradley arrived he said my stories were
accepted for publication as Harlem stories and he suggested that I
should do a novel of Harlem instead, because a novel would bring me
more prestige and remuneration than a book of short stories.

I seized upon the suggestion, and with the story, "Home to Harlem,"
as the design I built up a book upon scenes of Harlem life. They were
scenes of the Harlem I knew during the many years I lived there and
worked as a porter in New York buildings and clubs and as a waiter on
the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Many persons imagine that I wrote _Home to Harlem_ because Carl
Van Vechten wrote _Nigger Heaven_. But the pattern tale of the book
was written under the tide of "Home to Harlem" in 1925. When Max
Eastman read it he said, "It is worth a thousand dollars." Under the
same title it was entered in the story contest of the Negro magazine
_Opportunity_. But it did not excite the judges. _Nigger Heaven_ was
published in the fall of 1926. I never saw the book until the late
spring of 1927, when my agent, William Aspenwall Bradley, sent me a
copy. And by that time I had nearly completed _Home to Harlem_.

I lived a hermit and ascetic in Antibes and achieved _Home to Harlem_.
I finished it in the summer of 1927 and fled to Marseilles. The Negroid
colony of the Vieux Port was greatly changed. Many of the foreign
Negroes were deported. Some had died of disease.

Also, I had an opportunity to see the Vieux Port from a different
angle, from the inside out. Jules Pascin, the painter, had sent me a
letter of introduction to his friend, Le Corse, of the Vieux Port. I
had seen Pascin in Paris with his Negro model, Aicha. I never care for
letters of introduction when I am visiting a new place for the first
time, for I like the sensation of being a total stranger in a strange
place and sampling the strangeness of it until I find myself a little
and get acquainted.

Now, however, as I had already approached Marseilles independently
in my own way, and as it was one of those places which stirred me up
to creative expression, I was glad to make use of Pascin's letter.
Perhaps it would be a means of providing something complementary to my
impressions.

I looked up Le Corse and found his wine shop not far from the Rue de la
Bouterie, one of the most sordid streets of _mancebías_ in the world.
Le Corse was a solid man, built like a bull, with the head of a hog.
He read Pascin's letter and was immediately friendly. He poured me a
big glass of good red wine and we drank together. He said that any
friend of Pascin's was his also, and that I could have all that the
Vieux Port had to offer, as much as was in his power--anything I liked.

We talked awhile. I told him a little about my background and the
ground I had covered in Europe. He said that Pascin had informed
him that I was a writer and he hoped I would find something good in
Marseilles to write about. He was a friend of painters and writers.
He left his shop in charge of a young man and went around with me,
dropping into _bistro_ cafés and _mancebías_ and introducing a few
types of both sexes. He was surprised that I was cordially greeted in a
few of the places. I told him I had been in Marseilles before.

Le Corse possessed a _mancebía_ of his own and we went there. Also he
protected through his gang a number of girls who had their private
holes in the walls of the alleys. After going through the Vieux Port,
he invited me to his home. His home was ten paces distant from the
wineshop. It was a well-furnished apartment with plenty of bric-à-brac,
and very noticeable was the cheap Roman Catholic statuary. Le Corse's
wife warmly wished me welcome. "Any friend of Pascin is our friend,"
she also said. She was rather stout, although less formidable than her
husband, and all the fingers of her hands, excepting the thumbs, were
full of rings of all kinds.

Le Corse entertained me with more wine, and then he proceeded to show
me what Pascin meant to him. We went into his front room. On the walls
there were many fine Pascin paintings: portraits, scenes and tableaux
of girls of the _mancebías_ in different attitudes. There was one very
fine thing of the girls: a large canvas with a group of them deftly
fixed in tired disgusted ungainly attitudes. The only other painting of
that profession that ever impressed me so much was one of a café girl
by Picasso which I had seen some years before.

Le Corse knew the value of the picture. He said: "That's a masterpiece."

"Yes," I agreed.

"It's worth about twenty thousand francs in New York," said Le Corse.
"Pascin is in the first class. When he invited me to visit Paris, I
went to a dealer there and found out what price he could command as a
painter. I have collected every scrap of paper he made a drawing on,
and made him sign them. Look here!" Le Corse opened a portfolio and
displayed a lot of Pascin drawings. Besides Pascin, he had paintings
and drawings by other artists, all inscribed to Le Corse in a fine
fervor of friendship. And poets also had dedicated their verses to him.

While Le Corse was exhibiting his art treasures, his two daughters
entered and he introduced them. They left the room immediately after
being introduced. Le Corse said: "I don't allow my daughters to powder
and paint and smoke. I am bringing them up in the right way. They go
to a convent school. My son goes to a commercial college. We keep our
family clear and clean of our business.

"When Pascin and his wife and their friends come to Marseilles, I look
out for them," he went on. "They are artists and visit the bordels for
material, so I protect them in their business as I protect my boys and
the girls in their business. One time Pascin brought a Frenchman here
with a Russian lady, and the lady started to dance with one of the
bordel girls. I stopped it. I said, 'Pascin's friends are _my_ friends
and can't afford to lower themselves.' They are my guests and I treat
them like guests, not as customers. I don't like degenerates. Of
course, if rich people want to indulge a fantasy, I arrange privately
for them, for rich people can afford to be fantastic. But I have no use
for plain poor people being fantastic unless they are making money by
it."

Le Corse and I went walking along the quay. We passed a group of
Senegalese. He said: "They're no good," with a deprecating gesture.

"Why?" I asked. "I am just like them."

"No, you're American. Why should you imagine yourself like them because
you are of the same complexion? The Spaniards and Portuguese around
here are the same complexion as myself, but I am not in their class!
The Senegalese are savages and stupid. They don't understand our system
with the girls; the same goes for the Arabs."

The bawdy battle between black and white was sharp in Marseilles. The
Negroes and Arabs who had settled in large numbers in the city since
the armistice had developed a problem for the European apaches. There
was a tendency among the Africans to take the girls out of their
business and set up housekeeping with them. That, of course, diminished
the income of the procurers.

Said Le Corse: "Do you know an artist whose name is Ivan Opfer?"

"Yes," I said.

"He is also Pascin's friend," said Le Corse. "Is he a big painter? I
mean, does he sell for big money?" I said that Opfer was successful and
had done portraits of celebrated persons in America and Europe, even
titled ones.

A shadow fell upon Le Corse's hog face. He shook his head and said,
"Ivan Opfer offered me a large portrait of myself, but I refused it.
I couldn't take it," he said sadly. "Why?" I asked, surprised and
interested. "It is worth money. Opfer is not as big a man as Pascin,
but he is good."

"I couldn't take it," said Le Corse, "because he made me look so
terribly like an apache and I don't really look like that. I couldn't
stand it. Pascin and the other artists painted me nice."

"I wish you had kept it," I said. "I should have liked to see it. It's
years since I saw any work of Ivan Opfer's."

"It is at the Hôtel Nautique," said Le Corse. "I'll take you there and
ask the proprietor to show it, and you'll see for yourself that it is a
painting of a criminal."

We went to the Nautique and the friendly proprietor sent a _garçon_
with us up to an attic to show us the picture. I had known Ivan Opfer
when I was an assistant editor of _The Liberator_. The magazine staff
used to be divided in opinion about his work. Some thought it had
striking merit; others, that it was tricky. Most of his work that I saw
were portraits with a strong caricature element in them. But never had
I seen anything by him so gripping as his large portrait of Le Corse.
When I saw it I recoiled as if I had been thrust into the presence of
an incarnate murderer. It was Le Corse all right--a perfect picture.
Opfer had painted it without mercy. Pascin and the other artists had
done romantic studies of the man, making him like a picturesque retired
sailor of the Marseilles bottoms. But Opfer had penetrated straight
into his guts and seized his soul to fix it on that canvas. It was a
triumph of achievement, it was so real, so exactly true. And suddenly I
felt a little sympathy for Le Corse, a slight kinship of humanity, for
I became aware that he was afraid of his real self.

When Le Corse took me into his house and exhibited the pictorial and
literary tributes--those bouquets and wreaths that a vanguard of modern
artists and writers had laid at his conquering feet, I felt a sickness
in the pit of me, a paralysis of all the fibers of fine feeling. For
there was no doubt about the genuine talent of those artists: some
of the stuff was high genius. And also there was no doubt about the
_intention_ of their tribute to Le Corse. They meant a sincere homage
to this hero, exalted by the taxes paid for freedom of action by the
poor vampires of the waterfront. But I felt better, more hopeful, when
I saw Ivan Opfer's portrait of Le Corse, so strangely abandoned there
in a little hotel on the Marseilles waterfront.

I said goodbye to Le Corse. "Remember," he said, "if you ever want
anything, if you are ever in trouble in Marseilles, just let me know,
for you are Pascin's friend." I thanked Le Corse, but I thought that
whatever happened to me in Marseilles, I could never bring myself to
ask any help of _him_. "I hope you'll write a successful book," he
said, as we parted.

I said I'd like to do a good book. And right then I remembered Senghor,
the Senegalese, begging me to write the truth. I settled down to work
and began _Banjo_.

In the beginning of _Banjo_ I was surprised by Bull-frog, who burst
into my den one afternoon accompanied by Isadora Duncan. I must go back
a little on the trail to pick up and explain Bull-frog. He was a slav
adventurer. We had met in Berlin. A student friend who loathed his
way of life called him the Bull-frog. Later in Paris we came together
again. He was always traveling between Paris and the Midi and sometimes
we met for a brief moment in Nice or Monte Carlo or some other tourist
spot. We carried on a regular correspondence. He had to write many
letters in his clandestine business and as his English was bad, he
often asked me to write important ones for him: those that he didn't
want anybody else to know about.

Bull-frog was making better progress with his contacts in France than
in Germany. Most of his correspondence was kittenish letters from old
ladies who were apparently amused by a jumping frog. But one day he
surprised me at Monte Carlo. He introduced me into a really smart set:
an English lady with a high title and an enormous amount of money, a
Christian Scientist from New England who had gone Gurdgieff, a futurist
poet from Oxford, a cosmopolitan _rentier_ and three student-like
youngsters. And I heard Bull-frog saying very gravely that humanity had
produced only six great men and they were all poets and artists. He
named them: the Founder of Christianity, Aristotle, Dante, Shakespeare,
Beethoven, Tolstoy. Bull-frog was getting by also intellectually.

I went to Bull-frog's hotel to write a letter for him. As he opened a
valise to look for a letter I noticed many other letters in the valise
that were not addressed to him. I passed my hand over them. A few
were addressed to prominent persons. Some were unopened. I exclaimed
in surprise. Bull-frog laughed: "I don't steal money or jewelry from
them," he said, "for if you steal you'll get caught some day and
lose everything. But I get their letters and find out their private
business. And if there's anything bad, I'll know how to make them give
money without wasting the energy which I must conserve for the building
of my Temple." Bull-frog had informed me in Berlin that his big idea
was to build an international Temple of Love.

"But if you steal the letters," I said, "it is equally dangerous.
Suppose there is money in them!"

"But I don't steal the letters," he said. "When I am going to visit
people and I notice mail for them at the desk, I say to the clerk,
'I'll take the mail,' and he hands it over in all confidence, because
he is informed that I am an invited guest. So--I slip in my pocket a
letter I think important. If it were discovered, I could say I forgot."

A few weeks before Bull-frog arrived in Marseilles, he had sent me a
letter from a Nordic person, and his answer to it, which he asked me to
render into correct English.

The Nordic letter began: "My dear little big Bullsy--At last I am
terribly excited about your plans, because of Isadora Duncan's interest
in you. Certainly, if she believes in you, I must also. For I do
believe in Isadora Duncan and her dancing, which brings a new beauty
and meaning into life. I shall do all in my power to help to finance
your plans. I wish I was rich. Nevertheless I have influence. I shall
send you the money you need. Then you must come quickly to me, my sweet
little lamb."

I corrected the English of the letter and returned it to Bull-frog
in Nice. Shortly after he and Isadora Duncan arrived in Marseilles.
Bull-frog was impeccably dressed in a style befitting an international
businessman. He had a brand-new car and loads of money. I had not seen
Isadora Duncan since that night when she danced so tragically and
beautifully and for me alone in her studio at Nice. I was not surprised
that Isadora Duncan was with Bull-frog. For Isadora Duncan was like
a great flowing river through which the traffic of the world could
pass. I remember, at a café in Nice, overhearing a chauffeur among
his equivocal companions: "Oh, I saw the great dancer, Madame Duncan,
on the promenade and I spoke to her and said I knew she was the great
dancer. And she invited me to come to the studio and bring my friends
to see her dance."

I asked Isadora what she thought of Bull-frog. She smiled and said
he was at least amusing, and that if the rich folks would not give
her money to build a temple of the dance for beautiful children, they
could do worse than give it to Bull-frog. Isadora was interested in the
_décor_ of my Marseilles book, so we visited the Vieux Port. And as we
three went wandering through the garbage-strewn alleys, the old girls
in their shifts and tights in their holes in the walls were so startled
by the picture of Isadora Duncan and her long Grecian scarf floating
over the muck and misery of Marseilles, that they forgot their business
of snatching hats. Shortly after that, Isadora Duncan was strangled by
her ancient Grecian scarf in a modern automobile.



PART SIX

THE IDYLLS OF AFRICA



XXVI

When a Negro Goes Native


In the Senegalese Bar in Marseilles I was figuring out the ways and
means of a holiday somewhere in Africa. Said a Senegalese: "If I had
money to go any place, I'd go straight to Paris, where one can amuse
himself." I said I didn't feel attracted to Paris, but to Africa. As I
wasn't big and white enough to go on a big game hunt, I might go on a
little one-man search party.

A Martinique sailor, whose boat had just arrived from Casablanca, said
that Africa was all right and Morocco was the best place. He said he
had visited every big port in Africa, and he preferred Morocco. He
lived there. He said: "If you're going to Africa, come to Morocco."

"What are the harems like?" I asked.

"I've got a harem; I'll show you when you come," he laughed. The
Martiniquan spoke Arab and Senegalese, French, Spanish and some English
words. He had been a sailor since he was fourteen and had sailed all
the seas. He was settled in Casablanca, where, he said, he had two
wives. He was illiterate, but full of all kinds of practical knowledge.
He looked like a friendly gorilla.

However, instead of Morocco, I went to Barcelona with my friend the
Senegalese boxer, who had a bout there. Barcelona took my sight and
feelings so entirely that it was impossible for me to leave when the
boxer was returning to Marseilles. The magnificent spectacle of the
sporting spirit of the Spaniards captured my senses and made me an
_aficionado_ of Spain. I had never been among any white people who
gave such a splendid impression of sporting impartiality, and with such
grand gestures. Whether it was boxing between a white and a black or a
duel between man and beast in the arena, or a football match between
a Spanish and a foreign team, the Spaniards' main interest lay in the
technical excellencies of the sport and the best opponent winning. I
pursued the Spanish sporting spirit into the popular theaters, where
the _flamenco_ is seen and the Andalusian melodies are heard. In no
other country have I seen a people's audience so exigent in demanding
the best an artist can give, so ruthless in turning thumbs down on a
bad artist, and so generous in applauding an excellent performance.

The three days I had intended to spend in Barcelona were increased
to over three months in Spain. Then one night, when I was doing the
amusement spots of the amazing Barrio Chino in company with a Moslem
Negro who claimed to be a Prince of Zanzibar, I met the Martinique
sailor again. His boat had brought a cargo from Morocco to Barcelona.
He urged me to pay him that visit.

I had lingered long enough in Spain to become aware of the strong
African streak in its character. Therefore the second invitation to
Morocco was even more interesting. The Prince from Zanzibar wanted to
explore more of Europe and Europeans, and so we parted company.

At last I arrived in Casablanca. On the afternoon when the Martiniquan
took me to his house in a native quarter, some Guinea sorcerors (or
Gueanoua, as they are called in Morocco) were performing a magic rite.
The first shock I registered was the realization that they looked and
acted exactly like certain peasants of Jamaica who give themselves up
to the celebrating of a religious sing-dance orgy which is known as
Myalism. The only difference was in their clothing.

The Gueanoua were exorcising a sick woman and they danced and whirled
like devils. In the Moorish yard men and boys squatted in a wide
circle around them, and women and girls covered up in white haiks sat
looking down from the low flat roofs of the dilapidated cabins. The
music was made by a single lute and a big bass drum and sounded like
muffled thunder in the belly of the earth. I watched them dance a kind
of primitive rhumba, beat their heads against posts, and throw off
their clothing in their excitement. But I did not see the end, when the
devils would be driven forth, because a dancing woman frightened me by
throwing herself in a frenzy upon me. They said I was a strange spirit
and a hindrance to the magic working. So I had to get out.

The members of the Gueanoua are all pure black. They are the only
group of pure Negroes in Morocco. Men and women marry black, and it is
the only religious order that has women members. If one is not a pure
black he cannot belong to the Gueanoua. They say the strict keeping of
this rule makes the Gueanoua magic powerful. The fetish rites are West
African and are transmitted from generation to generation. They have a
special place in the social life of Morocco. The wealthiest as well as
the poorest families have them in to exorcise devils. Often they are
protected by powerful sherifian families, and sultans have consulted
them.

The harem of the Martiniquan was not such a hot spot, as I saw when I
peeped behind the curtain. Just a long spacious room curtained in two,
and two women, one old enough to be his mother and one young, brown and
buxom. We all had tea together, because, said the Martiniquan, he did
not believe in hiding his women from men. However, the male friends
that he admitted into his harem were French West Indian soldiers and
Senegalese, but not Moors. He was the only person in that quarter who
could afford two women. This was because, as a French citizen, he was
rated as a European worker and received between forty and fifty francs
a day--about six times what the native doing the same work got. Thus
the black sailor was really living "white" in Africa.

I enjoyed the Martiniquan Moroccan hospitality for awhile. Then,
feeling the overwhelming European atmosphere of Casablanca, I departed
for Rabat.

Rabat-Salé was delightfully different. Here the native life was the big
tree with solid roots and spreading branches, and the European city
was like an imported garden, lovely and carefully tended. At Shellah
I visited the tomb of the Black Sultan, who, according to the native
legend, was the greatest ruler of Morocco, having united all of North
Africa under his rule, conquered Spain, built the great monuments of
the Giralda at Seville, the Koutabia at Marrakesh, and the Hassan Tower
at Rabat.

I stopped long enough in Rabat to finish _Banjo_. Some Moroccan
students had said to me: "In Fez you will find the heart of Morocco. It
is our capital city. You haven't seen Morocco until you see Fez."

Fez was indeed the heart of Morocco and even more to me. In Moscow they
had published a cartoon of me sailing upon a magic carpet over the
African jungles to see the miracle of the Soviet. In Fez I felt that
I was walking all the time on a magic carpet. The maze of _souks_ and
bazaars with unfamiliar patterns of wares was like an oriental fantasy.
In Fez I got into the inside of Morocco. Hitherto I had been merely a
spectator. But the Fassis literally took me in. There I had my first
native meal of _cous-cous_ in a native house, and the first invitation
was the prelude to many.

I was invited to princely marriage feasts, to eat _cous-cous_ from a
common dish with stately old "turbans," to drink _thé à la menthe_
in cool gardens, to the intimate _flamenco_ dancing of fatmas in the
_garçonnières_ of _fondouks_ and to the profane paradise of Moulay
Abdallah.

Moulay Abdallah is the unique recreation quarter of the young Fassis.
It is a separate little walled town with its own shops and police and
musicians. Arrayed in richly flowered and loose robes held in place
by enormously broad embroidered belts and squatting with the dignity
of queens, the young females who take up residence there charmingly
dispense mint tea and witty conversation to circles of eager young men.
I thought that that antique African city was the unaware keeper of the
cup of Eros containing a little of the perfume of the flower of the
passion of ancient Greece.

I liked the Moroccan mosaic, which is beautiful and bright everywhere
like a symbol of the prismatic native mind. And nowhere is it so lavish
and arresting as in Fez. The Spanish mosaics were interesting, but they
did not appear as warm and inevitable and illuminating as the Moroccan.

The mosaics of Morocco went to my head like rare wine. Excited and
intoxicated and fascinated by the Fassis and their winning and welcome
ways, I went completely native. I was initiated into the practice of
living native and cheaply. I moved from my expensive hotel and parked
my things in a cheaper one. But I hardly lived in it. For my days
were fully occupied in sampling the treasures of the city and its
environments; in picking up the trails of the peasants bringing their
gifts to the town; following the Afro-Oriental bargaining; feeling the
color of the accent of the story-tellers in the market places. And in
the evening there was always _divertissement_: a marriage ceremony and
feast, an invitation to a _fondouk_, where a young man would permit
the pretty _fatmah_ of his profane love-making to dance; and Moulay
Abdallah. And I was never tired of listening to the native musicians
playing African variations of the oriental melodies in the Moroccan
cafés.

For the first time in my life I felt myself singularly free of
color-consciousness. I experienced a feeling that must be akin to the
physical well-being of a dumb animal among kindred animals, who lives
instinctively and by sensations only, without thinking. But suddenly I
found myself right up against European intervention and proscription.

A _chaoush_ (native doorman and messenger) from the British Consulate
had accosted me in a _souk_ one day and asked whether I was American.
I said I was born in the West Indies and lived in the United States
and that I was an American, even though I was a British subject, but I
preferred to think of myself as an internationalist. The _chaoush_ said
he didn't understand what was an internationalist. I laughed and said
that an internationalist was a bad nationalist. He replied gravely:
"All the Moors call you an American, and if you are British, you should
come and register at the Consulate." I was amused at his gravity,
reinforced by that African dignity which is so impressive in Morocco,
especially as I had said I was an internationalist just by way of a
joke without thinking of its radical implications. But I wasn't aware
then of how everybody in Morocco (European and native) was looking
for hidden meanings in the simplest phrases. The natives imagine (and
rightly enough) that all Europeans are agents of their respective
countries with designs upon their own, and the European colonists are
suspicious and censorious of visitors who become too sympathetic and
friendly with the natives. I saw a local French newspaper which had
turned all the batteries of ridicule on a European when he started to
wear a fez. I myself had gravitated instinctively to the native element
because physically and psychically I felt more affinity with it. I did
not go to register at the Consulate. I thought that it was enough that
my passport was in perfect order. While scrupulously complying with
official regulations regarding passports, identity cards and visas,
etc., in all my traveling in strange places, I have always relied on
my own personality as the best passport. Not that I was always such
a circumspect and model traveler! I got into little difficulties all
right. But without claiming special privileges or asking assistance as
a foreigner, I submitted to the local authority and always came out on
top.

For nearly a week I had not been in my hotel. One morning, after an
all-night session of lute-playing and dancing with Andalusian melody
makers in a native house, I went to my hotel for a change of clothes.
There I found a French police inspector waiting for me. He had been
there before. He asked me to show him my passport and other papers.
I did. He looked through them and said I must accompany him to the
British Consulate. I wondered what I could possibly have done. I had
been passing such a jolly time, with no shadow of any trouble. The
only thing I could think of was that I had obtained some wine for
native friends, because they were not allowed openly to purchase. Then
I thought of the _chaoush's_ warning and wondered if my failure to
register had anything to do with it. I asked the French inspector if
he had any charges against me. He said I would hear everything at the
British Consulate.

So I went along to the lion's den. As I entered, the Consul greeted
me with a triumphant, "I knew you were here!" As if I had been hiding
from anything or anybody in Morocco. The charge against me was that
I had left my hotel and was sleeping in native houses. I said I
hadn't imagined that it was necessary to ask special permission to
stay among people who had voluntarily invited me; that I thought it
my right to sleep where I was inclined, since I was not a minor. And,
standing there (he did not have even the formal courtesy to offer me
a chair), I laughed over the Consul's repulsive pink bald head that
was like a white buzzard's. His pink-streaked face turned red, and
it was amusing also to watch the mean expression of irritation on
the cat face of the little French official. He said: "Let us expel
him." I said that I would willingly submit to expulsion on a specific
charge, but that, since they said that it was a native affair, they
should get a native to make the charge. The petty bureaucrats exchanged
embarrassed glances. The Consul said that it was hinted that I was a
radical propagandist. I said they could search my effects, and that no
one could stand up and accuse me of making any verbal propaganda. The
Consul said the colonial people were being actively propagandized by
Bolshevik agents since the Russian Revolution. I said that I was not a
Bolshevik agent. Finally I was permitted to leave.

The personal unpleasantness opened my eyes a little to the undercurrent
of social unrest and the mistakes of mixed authority in Morocco. I'd
been so absorbed in the picturesque and exotic side of the native life
that I was unaware until authority stepped on my sore toe. I discovered
that although the French have established a protectorate over Morocco,
many of the natives are also protected by other European powers, mainly
Great Britain, Spain and Italy. The British possess unique privileges
under a system of capitulations. British subjects, whether they are
born British, naturalized or protected, are not liable to local arrest
and trial in the French and native courts. If a British subject has
committed any offense he must be taken before a British consul.

The privilege of immunity is sometimes abused by morons, and obviously
the French local authority is irritated by the idea of a divided
authority. Therefore the local atmosphere is infested with petty
intrigues.

The specially-protected natives have certain privileges that the
subjects of the Sultan, who are protected by the French, cannot enjoy.
For example, the specially-protected ones can buy and drink liquor with
impunity. But because of a traditional law the subjects of the Sultan
cannot. Therefore they drink surreptitiously, and contemptible European
bootleggers secretly sell them the vilest stuff imaginable. The young
Moroccans generally are afflicted with a pathetic _malaise_. They're
always whining: "I wish I were American or specially protected." And
when you ask why, they say: "So that we could have the freedom of men
to drink in a bar like the Europeans and the Algerians." The _malaise_
is similar to the prohibition pestilence which plagued the spirit of
the youth of America.

That incident spoiled my native holiday. I thought back to Europe,
of that most miserable of years I spent in London. I remembered my
difficulties, when I was studying at the British Museum, to get
lodgings in that quarter. The signs were shouting: "Rooms for rent,"
but when I inquired I was invariably informed that all rooms were
rented. Yet when I passed that way again the signs were still there. I
became suspicious. I asked English friends from the International Club
to make inquiries. They found that the rooms were for rent. But when
they took me along and declared the rooms were for me, we were told
that Negroes were not desired as guests. When I left my London hotel
I found rooms with an Italian family, and later, a German. And the
nearest I got to living quarters close to the British Museum was when I
found lodgings with a French family in Great Portland Street.

I felt helpless and wobbly about that black boycott in London. For
England is not like America, where one can take refuge from prejudice
in a Black Belt. I had to realize that London is a cold white city
where English culture is great and formidable like an iceberg. It is
a city created for English needs, and admirable, no doubt, for the
English people. It was not built to accommodate Negroes. I was very
happy when I could get out of it to go back to the Negro pale of
America.

And now even in Africa I was confronted by the specter, the white
terror always pursuing the black. There was no escape anywhere from the
white hound of Civilization.

When I finally left Fez I proceeded to Marrakesh in the far south, the
hot city of the plains, vast and wild. The Senegalese in Marseilles
often mentioned Marrakesh as the former great _caravansérai_ for the
traders traveling between West Africa and North Africa, and so I had to
see that monumental city, which was founded by a Senegalese conqueror.
Marrakesh moved me. It was like a big West Indian picnic, with flags
waving and a multitude of barefoot black children dancing to the
flourish of drum, fiddle and fife.

When I was going to Morocco, some Europeans on the boat had remarked
facetiously that Morocco was not a Negro country. Themselves divided
into jealous cutthroat groups, the Europeans have used their science to
make such fine distinctions among people that it is hard to ascertain
what white is a true white and when a Negro is really a Negro. I found
more than three-quarters of Marrakesh Negroid. There were unimaginably
strange contrasts. The city is like an immense cradle of experiment in
the marriage of civilized life and primitive life. Here the sun-baked
ebony Sudanese and the rude brown Berbers of the Atlas meet and
mingle with the refined, learned and skilled city Moors of the north.
Marrakesh appeared to be the happiest city of the French Protectorate.
The people seemed more contented than in Fez, although they were
generally poorer. But poverty in a torrid climate is not anything like
poverty in a cold climate. I might say, without poetic license, that in
Marrakesh the sun, blazing without being murderous, seemed to consume a
lot of the wretchedness and ugliness of poverty.



XXVII

The New Negro in Paris


I finished my native holiday in Marrakesh. In Casablanca I found a huge
pile of mail awaiting me. The handsomest thing was a fat envelope from
a New York bank containing a gold-lettered pocket book. The pocket book
enclosed my first grand from the sale of _Home to Harlem_.

There were stacks of clippings with criticisms of my novel; praise
from the white press, harsh censure from the colored press. And a lot
of letters from new admirers and old friends and associates and loves.
One letter in particular took my attention. It was from James Weldon
Johnson, inviting me to return to America to participate in the Negro
renaissance movement. He promised to do his part to facilitate my
return if there were any difficulty. And he did.

The Johnson letter set me thinking hard about returning to Harlem.
All the reports stressed the great changes that had occurred there
since my exile, pictured a Harlem spreading west and south, with
splendid new blocks of houses opened up for the colored people. The
reports described the bohemian interest in and patronage of Harlem,
the many successful colored shows on Broadway, the florescence of
Negro literature and art, with many promising aspirants receiving
scholarships from foundations and patronage from individuals.
Newspapers and magazines brought me exciting impressions of a more
glamorous Harlem. Even in Casablanca a Moor of half-German parentage
exhibited an article featuring Harlem in an important German
newspaper, and he was eager for more information.

But the resentment of the Negro intelligentsia against _Home to Harlem_
was so general, bitter and violent that I was hesitant about returning
to the great Black Belt. I had learned very little about the ways
of the Harlem élite during the years I lived there. When I left the
railroad and the companionship of the common blacks, my intellectual
contacts were limited mainly to white radicals and bohemians. I was
well aware that if I returned to Harlem I wouldn't be going back to the
_milieu_ of railroad men, from whom I had drifted far out of touch. Nor
could I go back among radical whites and try to rekindle the flames of
an old enthusiasm. I knew that if I did return I would have to find a
new orientation among the Negro intelligentsia.

One friend in Harlem had written that Negroes were traveling abroad _en
masse_ that spring and summer and that the élite would be camping in
Paris. I thought that it might be less unpleasant to meet the advance
guard of the Negro intelligentsia in Paris. And so, laying aside my
experiment in wearing bags, bournous and tarboosh, I started out.

First to Tangier, where four big European powers were performing their
experiment of international government in Africa upon a living corpse.
Otherwise Tangier was a rare African-Mediterranean town of Moors and
progressive Sephardic Jews and Europeans, mostly Spanish.

Through Spanish Morocco I passed and duly noted its points of interest.
The first was Tetuán, which inspired this sonnet:


_TETUÁN_

 _Morocco conquering homage paid to Spain
 And the Alhambra lifted up its towers!
 Africa's fingers tipped with miracles,
 And quivering with Arabian designs,
 Traced words and figures like exotic flowers,
 Sultanas' chambers of rare tapestries,
 Filigree marvels from Koranic lines,
 Mosaics chanting notes like tropic rain._

 _And Spain repaid the tribute ages after:
 To Tetuán, that fort of struggle and strife,
 Where chagrined Andalusian Moors retired,
 She brought a fountain bubbling with new life,
 Whose jewelled charm won even the native pride,
 And filled it sparkling with flamenco laughter._

In all Morocco there is no place as delicious as Tetuán. By a kind of
magic instinct the Spaniards have created a modern town which stands up
like a happy extension of the antique Moroccan. The ancient walls merge
into the new without pain. The Spanish Morisco buildings give more
lightness to the native Moroccan, and the architectural effect of the
whole is a miracle of perfect miscegenation.

I loved the colored native lanterns, illuminating the archways of
Larache. I liked Ceuta lying like a symbolic hand-clasp across the
Mediterranean. And I adored the quaint tile-roofed houses and cool
watered gardens in the mountain fastness of Xauen. From Gibraltar I was
barred by the British. But that was no trouble to my skin, for ever
since I have been traveling for the sheer enjoyment of traveling I have
avoided British territory. That was why I turned down an attractive
invitation to visit Egypt, when I was living in France.

Once again in Spain, I inspected the great Moorish landmarks. And more
clearly I saw Spain outlined as the antique bridge between Africa and
Europe.

       *       *       *       *       *

After the strong dazzling colors of Morocco, Paris that spring appeared
something like the melody of larks chanting over a gray field. It was
over three years since I had seen the metropolis. At that time it had
a political and financial trouble hanging heavy round its neck. Now it
was better, with its head up and a lot of money in every hand. I saw
many copies of my book, _Banjo_, decorating a shop window in the Avenue
de l'Opéra and I was disappointed in myself that I could not work up to
feeling a thrill such as I imagine an author should feel.

I took a fling at the cabarets in Montparnasse and Montmartre, and I
was very happy to meet again a French West Indian girl whom I knew as a
_bonne_ in Nice when I was a valet. We ate some good dinners together
and saw the excellent French productions of _Rose Marie_ and _Show
Boat_ and danced a little at the Bal Negre and at Bricktop's Harlem
hang-out in Montmartre.

I found Louise Bryant in Paris. It was our first meeting since she
took my manuscript to New York in the summer of 1926. The meeting was
a nerve-tearing ordeal. About two years previously she had written of
a strange illness and of doctors who gave her only six months to live
and of her determination to live a long time longer than that. She had
undergone radical treatment. The last time I had seen her she was plump
and buxom. Now she was shrunken and thin and fragile like a dried-up
reed. Her pretty face had fallen like a mummy's and nothing was left
of her startling attractiveness but her eyebrows.

She embarrassed me by continually saying: "Claude, you won't even look
at me." Her conversation was pitched in a nervous hysterical key and
the burden was "male conceit." I told her that the female was largely
responsible for "male conceit." Often when I had seen her before she
had been encircled by a following of admirably created young admirers
of the collegiate type. Now she was always with an ugly-mugged woman.
This woman was like an apparition of a male impersonator, who was
never off the stage. She had a trick way of holding her shoulders
and her hands like a gangster and simulating a hard-boiled accent. A
witty Frenchman pronounced her a _Sappho-manqué_. The phrase sounded
like a desecration of the great glamorous name of Sappho. I wondered
why (there being so many attractive women in the world) Louise Bryant
should have chosen such a companion. And I thought that it was probably
because of the overflow of pity pouring out of her impulsive Irish
heart.

I remembered, "Aftermath," the beautiful poem which she sent us for
publication in _The Liberator_ after John Reed died. Now it seemed of
greater significance:


_AFTERMATH_

  _Dear, they are singing your praises,
  Now you are gone.
  But only I saw your going,
  I ... alone ... in the dawn._

  _Dear, they are weeping about you,
  Now you are dead,
  And they've placed a granite stone
  Over your darling head._

  _I cannot cry any more,
  Too burning deep is my grief....
  I dance through my spendthrift days
  Like a fallen leaf._

  _Faster and faster I whirl
  Toward the end of my days.
  Dear, I am drunken with sadness
  And lost down strange ways._

  _If only the dance could finish
  Like a flash in the sky.... Oh, soon,
  If only a storm could come shouting--
  Hurl me past stars and moon._

And I thought if I could not look frankly with admiration at Louise
Bryant's face, I could always turn to the permanently lovely poem which
she had created.

       *       *       *       *       *

I had spruced myself up a bit to meet the colored élite. Observing that
the Madrileños were well-tailored, I had a couple of suits made in
Madrid, and chose a hat there. In Paris I added shoes and shirts and
ties and gloves to my wardrobe.

The cream of Harlem was in Paris. There was the full cast of
_Blackbirds_ (with Adelaide Hall starring in the place of Florence
Mills), just as fascinating a group off the stage as they were
extraordinary on the stage. The _Porgy_ actors had come over from
London. There was an army of school teachers and nurses. There were
Negro Communists going to and returning from Russia. There were
Negro students from London and Scotland and Berlin and the French
universities. There were presidents and professors of the best Negro
colleges. And there were painters and writers and poets, of whom the
most outstanding was Countee Cullen.

I met Professor Alain Locke. He had published _The Anthology of the
New Negro_ in 1925 and he was the animator of the movement as well as
the originator of the phrase "Negro renaissance." Commenting upon my
appearance, Dr. Locke said, "Why, you are wearing the same kind of
gloves as I am!" "Yes," I said, "but my hand is heavier than yours."
Dr. Locke was extremely nice and invited me to dinner with President
Hope of Atlanta University. The dinner was at one of the most expensive
restaurants in the _grands boulevards_. President Hope, who was even
more Nordic-looking than Walter White, was very affable and said I did
not look like the boxer-type drawings of me which were reproduced with
the reviews of _Home to Harlem_. President Hope hoped that I would
visit his university when I returned to America.

There had been an interesting metamorphosis in Dr. Locke. When we met
for the first time in Berlin in 1923, he took me for a promenade in the
Tiergarten. And walking down the row, with the statues of the Prussian
kings supported by the famous philosophers and poets and composers on
either side, he remarked to me that he thought those statues the finest
ideal and expression of the plastic arts in the world. The remark was
amusing, for it was just a short while before that I had walked through
the same row with George Grosz, who had described the statues as "the
sugar-candy art of Germany." When I showed Dr. Locke George Grosz's
book of drawings, _Ecce Homo_, he recoiled from their brutal realism.
(Dr. Locke is a Philadelphia blue-black blood, a Rhodes scholar and
graduate of Oxford University, and I have heard him described as the
most refined Negro in America).

So it was interesting now to discover that Dr. Locke had become the
leading Negro authority on African Negro sculpture. I felt that there
was so much more affinity between the art of George Grosz and African
sculpture than between the Tiergarten insipid idealization of Nordic
kings and artists and the transcending realism of the African artists.

Yet I must admit that although Dr. Locke seemed a perfect symbol of the
Aframerican rococo in his personality as much as in his prose style, he
was doing his utmost to appreciate the new Negro that he had uncovered.
He had brought the best examples of their work together in a pioneer
book. But from the indication of his appreciations it was evident that
he could not lead a Negro renaissance. His introductory remarks were
all so weakly winding round and round and getting nowhere. Probably
this results from a kink in Dr. Locke's artistic outlook, perhaps due
to its effete European academic quality.

When he published his _Anthology of the New Negro_, he put in a number
of my poems, including one which was originally entitled "The White
House." My title was symbolic, not meaning specifically the private
homes of white people, but more the vast modern edifice of American
Industry from which Negroes were effectively barred as a group. I
cannot convey here my amazement and chagrin when Dr. Locke arbitrarily
changed the title of my poem to "White Houses" and printed it in his
anthology, without consulting me. I protested against the act, calling
Dr. Locke's attention to the fact that my poem had been published under
the original title of "The White House" in _The Liberator_. He replied
that he had changed the title for political reasons, as it might be
implied that the title meant the White House in Washington, and that
that could be made an issue against my returning to America.

I wrote him saying that the idea that my poem had reference to
the official residence of the President of the United States was
ridiculous; and that, whether I was permitted to return to America or
not, I did not want the title changed, and would prefer the omission of
the poem. For his title "White Houses" was misleading. It changed the
whole symbolic intent and meaning of the poem, making it appear as if
the burning ambition of the black malcontent was to enter white houses
in general. I said that there were many white folks' houses I would not
choose to enter, and that, as a fanatical advocate of personal freedom,
I hoped that all human beings would always have the right to decide
whom they wanted to have enter their houses.

But Dr. Locke high-handedly used his substitute title of "White Houses"
in all the editions of his anthology. I couldn't imagine such a man
as the leader of a renaissance, when his artistic outlook was so
reactionary.

The Negroid élite was not so formidable to meet after all. The
financial success of my novel had helped soften hard feelings in some
quarters. A lovely lady from Harlem expressed the views of many. Said
she: "Why all this nigger-row if a colored writer can exploit his own
people and make money and a name? White writers have been exploiting us
long enough without any credit to our race. It is silly for the Negro
critics to holler to God about _Home to Harlem_ as if the social life
of the characters is anything like that of the respectable class of
Negroes. The people in _Home to Harlem_ are our low-down Negroes and we
respectable Negroes ought to be proud that we are not like them and be
grateful to you for giving us a real picture of Negroes whose lives we
know little about on the inside." I felt completely vindicated.

My agent in Paris gave a big party for the cast of _Blackbirds_,
to which the lovely lady and other members of the black élite were
invited. Adelaide Hall was the animating spirit of the _Blackbirds_.
They gave some exhibition numbers, and we all turned loose and had a
grand gay time together, dancing and drinking champagne. The French
guests (there were some chic ones) said it was the best party of the
season. And in tipsy accents some of the Harlem élite admonished me
against writing a _Home-to-Harlem_ book about _them_.

Thus I won over most of the Negro intelligentsia in Paris, excepting
the leading journalist and traveler who remained intransigent. Besides
Negro news, the journalist specialized in digging up obscure and
Amazing Facts for the edification of the colored people. In these
"Facts" Beethoven is proved to be a Negro because he was dark and
gloomy; also the Jewish people are proved to have been originally a
Negro people!

The journalist was writing and working his way through Paris. Nancy
Cunard's _Negro Anthology_ describes him as a guide and quoted him
as saying he had observed, in the flesh market of Paris, that white
southerners preferred colored trade, while Negro leaders preferred
white trade. Returning to New York, he gave lectures "for men only" on
the peep-holes in the walls of Paris.

The journalist was a bitter critic of _Home to Harlem_, declaring it
was obscene. I have often wondered if it is possible to establish a
really intelligent standard to determine obscenity--a standard by which
one could actually measure the obscene act and define the obscene
thought. I have done lots of menial work and have no snobbery about
common labor. I remember that in Marseilles and other places in Europe
I was sometimes approached and offered a considerable remuneration
to act as a guide or procurer or do other sordid things. While I was
working as a model in Paris a handsome Italian model brought me
an offer to work as an occasional attendant in a special _bains de
vapeur_. The Italian said that he made good extra money working there.
Now, although I needed more money to live, it was impossible for me
to make myself do such things. The French say "_On fait ce que on
peut_." I could not. The very idea of the thing turned me dead cold.
My individual morale was all I possessed. I felt that if I sacrificed
it to make a little extra money, I would become personally obscene. I
would soon be utterly unable to make that easy money. I preferred a
menial job.

Yet I don't think I would call another man obscene who could do what
I was asked to do without having any personal feeling of revulsion
against it. And if an artistic person had or was familiar with such
sordid experiences of life and could transmute them into literary or
any other art form, I could not imagine that his performance or his
thought was obscene.

The Negro journalist argued violently against me. He insisted that
I had exploited Negroes to please the white reading public. He said
that the white public would not read good Negro books because of race
prejudice; that he himself had written a "good" book which had not
sold. I said that Negro writers, instead of indulging in whining and
self-pity, should aim at reaching the reading public in general or
creating a special Negro public; that Negroes had plenty of money to
spend on books if books were sold to them.

I said I knew the chances for a black writer and a white writer were
not equal, even if both were of the same caliber. The white writer had
certain avenues, social and financial, which opened to carry him along
to success, avenues which were closed to the black. Nevertheless I
believed that the Negro writer also had a chance, even though a limited
one, with the great American reading public. I thought that if a Negro
writer were sincere in creating a plausible Negro tale--if a Negro
character were made credible and human in his special environment with
a little of the virtues and the vices that are common to the human
species--he would obtain some recognition and appreciation. For Negro
writers are not alone in competing with heavy handicaps. They have
allies among some of the white writers and artists, who are fighting
formalism and classicism, crusading for new forms and ideas against the
dead weight of the old.

But the journalist was loudly positive that it was easy for a Negro
writer to make a sensational success as a writer by "betraying" his
race to the white public. So many of the Negro élite love to mouth that
phrase about "betraying the race"! As if the Negro group had special
secrets which should not be divulged to the other groups. I said I did
not think the Negro could be betrayed by any real work of art. If the
Negro were betrayed in any place it was perhaps in that Negro press, by
which the journalist was syndicated, with its voracious black appetite
for yellow journalism.

Thereupon the journalist declared that he would prove that it was easy
for a Negro to write the "nigger stuff" the whites wanted of him and
make a success of it. He revealed that he was planning a novel for
white consumption; that, indeed, he had already written some of it.
He was aiming at going over to the white market. He was going to stop
writing for Negroes, who gave him so little support, although he had
devoted his life to the betterment of the Negro.

I was eager to see him prove his thesis. For he was expressing the
point of view of the majority of the colored élite, who maintain that
Negroes in the arts can win success by clowning only, because that is
all the whites expect and will accept of them. So although I disliked
his type of mind, I promised to help him, I was so keen about the
result of his experiment. I introduced him to my agent in Paris, and my
agent introduced him to a publisher in New York.

Our Negro journalist is very yellow and looks like a _métèque_ in
France, without attracting undue attention. Yet besides his "Amazing
Facts" about Negroes he has written in important magazines, stressing
the practical nonexistence of color prejudice in Europe and blaming
Negroes for such as exists! Also he wrote in a white magazine about
Africa and the color problem under a nom de plume which gave no
indication of the writer's origin.

He might have thought that as he had "passed white" a little in
complexion and in journalism, it would be just as easy "passing white"
as a creative writer. Well, the Negro journalist deliberately wrote
his novel as a "white" novelist--or as he imagined a white man would
write. But the sensational white novel by a Negro has not yet found its
publisher.

The last time I heard about him, he was again a Negro in Ethiopia,
interviewing Haile Selassie and reporting the white rape of Ethiopia
from an African point of view for the American Negro press.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Nigger Heaven_, the Harlem novel of Carl Van Vechten, also was much
discussed. I met some of Mr. Van Vechten's Negro friends, who were
not seeing him any more because of his book. I felt flattered that
they did not mind seeing me! Yet most of them agreed that _Nigger
Heaven_ was broadly based upon the fact of contemporary high life in
Harlem. Some of them said that Harlemites should thank their stars
that _Nigger Heaven_ had soft-pedaled some of the actually wilder
Harlem scenes. While the conventional Negro moralists gave the book
a hostile reception because of its hectic bohemianism, the leaders of
the Negro intelligentsia showed a marked liking for it. In comparing
it with _Home to Harlem_, James Weldon Johnson said that I had shown a
contempt for the Negro bourgeoisie. But I could not be contemptuous of
a Negro bourgeoisie which simply does not exist as a class or a group
in America. Because I made the protagonist of my novel a lusty black
worker, it does not follow that I am unsympathetic to a refined or
wealthy Negro.

My attitude toward _Nigger Heaven_ was quite different from that of
its Negro friends and foes. I was more interested in the implications
of the book. It puzzled me a little that the author, who is generally
regarded as a discoverer and sponsor of promising young Negro writers,
gave Lascar, the ruthless Negro prostitute, the victory over Byron, the
young Negro writer, whom he left, when the novel ends, in the hands of
the police, destined perhaps for the death house in Sing Sing.

Carl Van Vechten also was in Paris in the summer of 1929. I had been
warned by a white non-admirer of Mr. Van Vechten that I would not like
him because he patronized Negroes in a subtle way, to which the Harlem
élite were blind because they were just learning sophistication! I
thought it would be a new experience to meet a white who was subtly
patronizing to a black; the majority of them were so naïvely crude
about it. But I found Mr. Van Vechten not a bit patronizing, and
quite all right. It was neither his fault nor mine if my reaction was
negative.

One of Mr. Van Vechten's Harlem sheiks introduced us after midnight
at the Café de la Paix. Mr. Van Vechten was a heavy drinker at that
time, but I was not drinking liquor. I had recently suffered from a
cerebral trouble and a specialist had warned me against drinking, even
wine. And when a French doctor forbids wine, one ought to heed. When
we met at that late hour at the celebrated rendezvous of the world's
cosmopolites, Mr. Van Vechten was full and funny. He said, "What will
you take?" I took a soft drink and I could feel that Mr. Van Vechten
was shocked.

I am afraid that as a soft drinker I bored him. The white author and
the black author of books about Harlem could not find much of anything
to make conversation. The market trucks were rolling by loaded with
vegetables for Les Halles, and suddenly Mr. Van Vechten, pointing to a
truck-load of huge carrots, exclaimed, "How I would like to have all
of them!" Perhaps carrots were more interesting than conversation.
But I did not feel in any way carroty. I don't know whether my looks
betrayed any disapproval. Really I hadn't the slightest objection to
Mr. Van Vechten's enthusiasm for the truck driver's raw carrots, though
I prefer carrots _en casserole avec poulet cocotte_. But he excused
himself to go to the men's room and never came back. So, after waiting
a considerable time, I paid the bill with some _Home to Harlem_ money
and walked in the company of the early dawn (which is delicious in
Paris) back to the Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Mr. Van Vechten's sheik friend was very upset. He was a precious,
hesitating sheik and very nervous about that introduction, wondering
if it would take. I said that all was okay. But upon returning to New
York he sent me a message from Mr. Van Vechten. The message said that
Mr. Van Vechten was sorry for not returning, but he was so high that,
after leaving us, he discovered himself running along the avenue after
a truck load of carrots.

Among the Negro intelligentsia in Paris there was an interesting group
of story-tellers, poets and painters. Some had received grants from
foundations to continue work abroad; some were being helped by private
individuals; and all were more or less identified with the Negro
renaissance. It was illuminating to exchange ideas with them. I was an
older man and not regarded as a member of the renaissance, but more as
a forerunner. Indeed, some of them had aired their resentment of my
intrusion from abroad into the renaissance set-up. They had thought
that I had committed literary suicide because I went to Russia.

For my part I was deeply stirred by the idea of a real Negro
renaissance. The Arabian cultural renaissance and the great European
renaissance had provided some of my most fascinating reading. The
Russian literary renaissance and also the Irish had absorbed my
interest. My idea of a renaissance was one of talented persons of an
ethnic or national group working individually or collectively in a
common purpose and creating things that would be typical of their group.

I was surprised when I discovered that many of the talented Negroes
regarded their renaissance more as an uplift organization and a vehicle
to accelerate the pace and progress of smart Negro society. It was
interesting to note how sharply at variance their artistic outlook
was from that of the modernistic white groups that took a significant
interest in Negro literature and art. The Negroes were under the
delusion that when a lady from Park Avenue or from Fifth Avenue,
or a titled European, became interested in Negro art and invited
Negro artists to her home, that was a token of Negroes breaking into
upper-class white society. I don't think that it ever occurred to them
that perhaps such white individuals were searching for a social and
artistic significance in Negro art which they could not find in their
own society, and that the radical nature and subject of their interest
operated against the possibility of their introducing Negroes further
than their own particular homes in coveted white society.

Also, among the Negro artists there was much of that Uncle Tom attitude
which works like Satan against the idea of a coherent and purposeful
Negro group. Each one wanted to be the first Negro, the one Negro, and
the only Negro _for the whites_ instead of for their group. Because
an unusual number of them were receiving grants to do creative work,
they actually and naïvely believed that Negro artists as a group would
always be treated differently from white artists and be protected by
powerful white patrons.

Some of them even expressed the opinion that Negro art would solve the
centuries-old social problem of the Negro. That idea was vaguely hinted
by Dr. Locke in his introduction to _The New Negro_. Dr. Locke's essay
is a remarkable chocolate _soufflé_ of art and politics, with not an
ingredient of information inside.

They were nearly all Harlem-conscious, in a curious synthetic way, it
seemed to me--not because they were aware of Harlem's intrinsic values
as a unique and popular Negro quarter, but apparently because white
folks had discovered black magic there. I understood more clearly why
there had been so much genteel-Negro hostility to my _Home to Harlem_
and to Langston Hughes's primitive Negro poems.

I wondered after all whether it would be better for me to return to
the new _milieu_ of Harlem. Much as all my sympathy was with the Negro
group and the idea of a Negro renaissance, I doubted if going back to
Harlem would be an advantage. I had done my best Harlem stuff when I
was abroad, seeing it from a long perspective. I thought it might be
better to leave Harlem to the artists who were on the spot, to give
them their chance to produce something better than _Home to Harlem_. I
thought that I might as well go back to Africa.



XXVIII

Hail and Farewell to Morocco


I suppose every man who achieves something worthwhile naturally
attracts some woman. I was interested in Carmina, who had a white
lover. Carmina was a pretty colored lady who had recently deserted
the best circles of Harlem for Paris. I liked Carmina. She had lived
her life a lot, even as I, and neither of us could reproach the other
about the past. But when Louise Bryant saw us together she scolded me.
"That girl is not your type," she said. "Why don't you go on living
as you always did? Why do you have to go around with a female on your
arm, simply because you have written a successful novel?" I said that
perhaps it was nothing more than "male conceit." Louise Bryant laughed
and said, "Take care you don't spoil yourself by doing the thing that
every man thinks he ought to do because of male conceit."

Louise Bryant and Carmina did not like each other. The three of us were
spending a convivial evening together and, feeling gallant, I tried
to find something to praise in Louise's appearance. She had been to a
hairdresser's that afternoon and her neatly shingled hair was gleaming
black. I said, "Louise, your hair is very nice tonight." Louise smiled
her appreciation. But Carmina said, in a loud whisper, "Can't you see
it's dyed?" A blighting frost descended on the party.

It was a sweet relief to give up for awhile discussing problems of race
and art for an atmosphere of pure sensuality and amorous intrigue.
Carmina also had been fed up with too much race in the upper circles
of Harlem, which was why she had fled to Paris. One night I was drunk
and maudlin in Montparnasse and Louise Bryant shrieked at me in high
intoxicated accents, shaking her forefinger at me, "Go away and write
another book. Go home to Harlem or back to Africa, but leave Paris. Get
a grip on yourself." She looked like the picture of an old emaciated
witch, and her forefinger was like a broomstick. Perhaps it was her
better unconscious self warning me, for she also could not get a grip
on herself and get away from Paris.

I heeded the warning. I started off for Africa. But I lingered a long
time in Spain. The weeks turned into months. From Madrid I went to
Andalusia and visited Cordova and Granada again, then went back to
Barcelona. A French radical friend wrote chidingly about my preference
for Spain, so medieval and religion-ridden. I wrote him that I expected
radical changes in medieval Spain sooner than in nationalistic France.
That was no prophecy. The thing was in the air; students mentioned it
to you on the café terraces; waiters spoke of it in the pensions and
restaurants; chauffeurs spoke of their comrades murdered in Morocco
by King Alfonso; bank clerks said a change was coming soon, and even
guides had something to say. That was in the winter of 1929-30. I
was in Spain early in 1930 when the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera
collapsed. In the spring of 1931 I was in Spanish Morocco when King
Alfonso abdicated, and in Tetuán I witnessed a wonderful demonstration
of amity and fraternity between the native Moorish and civilian Spanish
populations. There in Africa I hankered after Spain again and indited
these three sonnets for Barcelona:


_BARCELONA_


1

 _In Barcelona town they dance the nights
 Along the streets. The folk, erecting stands
 Upon the people's pavements, come together
 From pueblo, barrio, in families,
 Lured by the lilting playing of the bands,
 Rejoicing in the balmy summer weather,
 In spreading rings they weave fine fantasies
 Like rare mosaics of many-colored lights._

 _Kindled, it glows, the magical Sardana,
 And sweeps the city in a glorious blaze.
 The garrison, the sailors from the ships,
 The workers join and block the city's ways,
 Ripe laughter ringing from intriguing lips,
 Crescending like a wonderful hosanna._


2

 _Oh admirable city from every range!
 Whether I stand upon your natural towers,--
 With your blue carpet spreading to their feet,
 Its patterns undulate between the bars,--
 Watching until the tender twilight hours,
 Its motion cradling soft a silver fleet;
 Or far descend from underneath the stars,_

 _Down--to your bottoms sinister and strange:
 The nights eccentric of the Barrio Chino,
 The creatures of the shadows of the walls,
 Gray like the savage caricatures of Goya,
 The chulos of the abysmal dancing halls,
 And, in the garish lights of La Criolla,
 The feminine flamenco of El Niño._


3

 _Oh Barcelona, queen of Europe's cities,
 From dulcet thoughts of you my guts are twisted
 With bitter pain of longing for your sights,
 And for your hills, your picturesque glory singing,
 My feet are mutinous, mine eyes are misted.
 Upon my happy thoughts your harbor lights
 Are shimmering like bells melodious ringing
 With sweet cadenzas of flamenco ditties._

 _I see your movement flashing like a knife,
 Reeling my senses, drunk upon the hues
 Of motion, the eternal rainbow wheel,
 Your passion smouldering like a lighted fuse,
 But more than all sensations oh, I feel
 Your color flaming in the dance of life._

I was ready to begin another book, and a Moorish friend had put his
house in Fez at my disposal. But as soon as I landed in Fez, toward the
end of 1930, the French police pounced upon me. I had arrived there a
few days before the official visit of President Domergue of France.
The police declared I should leave Fez immediately. They said British
authorities had furnished proof that I was a political agent; that I
had carried on propaganda among the British military forces and also
visited Soviet Russia. I went to the British Consulate for further
information. There I was told that they possessed no information about
me, but that I must obey the local authority. They wanted to send me
back to Europe. I refused to go. I said I would leave Fez if I were
forced to, but I was determined to remain awhile in Africa. So I went
to Casablanca and from there to Tangier.

Months later a merchant from Fez came to Tangier and hinted why I had
been obliged to leave. He said that Moroccan custom permitted anyone
who had a serious grievance to complain to the sultan in person when
he made an official visit to a city. And as Morocco was a protectorate
of France, any person who desired could present his complaint to the
sultan of France during his official visit. But the police had a system
of banishing real malcontents for a short period during the sultan's
visit. The police had feared that I might seize an opportunity to
complain to the French sultan, President Domergue, about the unjust
treatment I received during my first visit to Fez! And so they had
ordered me to leave.

In Tangier I rented a Dar Hassani (native house) and went to work on
_Gingertown_, a book of short stories. Mail for me had accumulated in
Paris. When it arrived there was a little pile of letters from Carmina.
She chided me for deserting her and said that she, too, wanted to go to
Africa; that she was sick of Europe and growing worse. She had met all
the leading bohemians, writers and artists, more than I ever met. She
was a frequent visitor to the Rue Fleurus and was hooked up with one of
Gertrude Stein's young men. But she was disgusted with him; he was just
a poor white mouse, she said. She was sick of it all and wanted to come
to me.

Come to me! I was exceeding flattered, forgetting all about "male
conceit." The idea of Carmina leaving her white man for me was
tantalizing. She had introduced him to me in Paris, and he had said,
"_J'ai le béguin pour toi_." I said, "_Merci, mais je n'ai pas_." His
bloodless white skin was nauseating. He had no color.

Carmina had been traveling around a lot herself and confided to me that
she was keeping a diary of her _randonnée_. She thought I might help
her to publish it.

And so Carmina came to Morocco. It was just at the commencement of
_l'Aïd El Kebir_ (the Big Feast), when the Moroccans cut the throats of
thousands of lambs and the air is filled with their plaintive bleating
and the crooked streets are running with their blood. We went to live
in my little native house at that time of the Great Sacrifice. In the
beginning it was nice, being together and working together. People
liked Carmina. She was pretty. The Spanish liked the name Carmina
because it had a little of Carmen in it. And the Moors liked Mina
because it was a native name derived from the lovely sweet flower,
Jasmine, which in Morocco is Yasmina, a name often given to Negresses
and Mulattresses. And I liked her being so much admired.

I showed Carmina how to make Moroccan tea with mint and other
flavorful shrubs. And a native woman friend cooked us big bowls of
_cous-cous_ in olive oil with the tenderest pieces of lamb and chicken.
The Aframerican honeymoon in Africa was quite happy, until Carmina
announced that she desired to marry me. But I couldn't because I wasn't
divorced and I expected some day to return to America.

And now there was no peace between us. Carmina insisted she had to
marry, to satisfy her mother, who was a Christian church-loving woman.
In anger I said indiscreetly: "Why didn't you marry your white man in
Paris." She said she would show me she could marry him. And one day she
announced that her former white lover was coming to Morocco to marry
her. I said I thought that that wasn't a bad idea, since she had to
be married. I meant it. But my attitude turned Carmina raging. She
said the right kind of man would be jealous. She was right, I suppose.
But even from the angle of pure passion only I couldn't imagine myself
being jealous of Carmina's white lover. And frankly I was interested
in seeing her marry her white man from a social point of view. Because
the story of Negroes in civilization is one of white men loving black
women and giving them mulatto children, while they preferred to marry
their own white women. Carmina said she was a modern woman and that if
I were truly a radical and bohemian, I would not have such reactionary
ideas about marriage. I asked her why she was not modern enough to live
with a black man as she had lived with a white man. Also I said I was
thinking in black-and-white, and that as marriage has a social value
and her white man was of the better class, I'd like to see her marry
him. Mixed marriages were mostly one-sided, colored men marrying white
women; I'd also like to see white men marrying colored women, I told
her. White men must have some social reason for not marrying the Negro
women in whose flesh they find delight.

My reasoning infuriated Carmina, and our relationship became
intolerable. She left me. Perhaps Carmina's white mouse had his special
white fascination. I have known women who used to be afraid of mice and
who in later years made pets of rats. Carmina's Nordic came, but he
didn't marry. After being surfeited with loving, he left her still a
spinster. I suppose it is easier for some women (like some men) to have
than to hold.

I have read white writers and heard white men who romantically said
that Negro women will not be faithful to white men. And there are Negro
writers who write vicarious tales of colored girls ditching rich white
men for black sheiks. I wonder what actual experience such colored
writers have. All bunk. And my experience is not limited to just one.
I know that in the West Indies the black and brown women become the
faithful mistresses of Europeans.

So Carmina left me for a white skin. I don't think because it was so
hot and I so cold. But the white skin is a symbol of money and power.
In North Africa the native social system holds out against the European
assault simply because the native women are confined in their harems.
To modern thinking minds this is objectionable. Yet it is the native
fanaticism in sex and religion which makes North Africa a little more
wholesome than the rest of that fatal continent.

Some folk's remedy for lost love is immediately to love again. But if
it is a big love, that remedy is like swilling beer to get rid of a
champagne hangover. For if one has a passionate love in his system,
I don't think indulging in lesser and indiscriminate loving helps to
rid one of it. At least not for me. My way is to face it and live it
down in hard work, sweat it out of my system. And so to get rid of
the feeling and the odor of lost love, I gave up the little house and
went for a few months up in the mountain fastness of Xauen in Spanish
Morocco. There I finished my book, _Gingertown_.

When I came back I leased a little house in the country by the sea,
about three miles out of Tangier. I found a little brown native girl to
take care of the house. She brought her mother along, so that she could
look her own people in the face without flinching. There also was a boy
on a bicycle to run errands. And we all cultivated the garden and lived
comfortably on twenty-five dollars each month.

One day when I was not at home, Carmina rode out there and pushed
herself into the house. Both mother and daughter were very nonplussed
by the American brown girl, who looked exactly like their own people,
yet did not dress like them nor talk their language. Nevertheless,
undaunted, they barred the way to my workroom. Carmina fired a volley
of Americanisms and departed. Some days later it was reported to me
in the Petit Socco of Tangier that she said she had told the woman
she ought to be horsewhipped. Also, she had read a great book called
_Mother India_ about those awfully uncivilized Asiatics, and she wished
somebody would write a Mother Morocco about the barbarous Africans.

Twice a week I tramped into town and spent the night in the native
cafés listening to the alluring singing of Andalusian songs to the
accompaniment of lute and mandolin. It was interesting to note that
Spanish and French words and musical phrases were slipping into the
native melodies. Some day a wonderful new music is destined to come out
of North Africa.

The life was a little lazy. I did not plunge deep enough down into
the native ways to touch the depths of that tribal opposition to
other opposing groups which gave strength and meaning to their common
existence.

So I lived on the edge of the native life, among them, but not one of
them. I could have become a member by marrying into a family, as my
two Senegalese friends had done. But religion was an obstacle. I did
not want to take a backward step in that direction. I had interesting
conversations with my friend Sidi Abdallah, a poet, who was educated
in Egypt and was conceded by the natives to be the most highly
educated and broad-minded Moroccan of the town. He assured me that
Islam was all-embracing and could accommodate free-thinkers. It was he
who started me off on the great story of Antar, informing me of the
high-lights that were not hinted of in the Encyclopedia Britannica. He
told me too that the father of free-thought was the Moslem, Averrhoës,
who lived in Spain in the twelfth century; that he was the real founder
of pantheism and of modern European free thought. And he told me his
story, how he was imprisoned and flogged by the Caliph of Cordova,
because he had said that the Caliph had no divine authority.

Sidi Abdallah was very eloquent. He resented the Christian
representation of Islam as the religion of the sword. It was the
religion of social equality, for all humanity, he said. It was the
liberal and liberating religion, when the orthodox Christians were
persecuting dissident Christians and pagans. Arabia was a land of
refuge for the dissident Christians and Jews and pagans fleeing
Christian persecution. "Our great Prophet dreamed of a religion of
reconciliation in a world where all men would be like brothers,
worshipping the same God," he said. "Take the Guinea fetishists, for
example; they are primitive magicians and steeped in superstition,
yet we accept and tolerate them as Moslems because they acknowledge
Mohammed as the prophet."

All that Sidi Abdallah said was fine and vastly illuminating. I had a
better conception of Islam after knowing him. The philosophy was all
right, but the fact was that Islam, as it was practiced in North Africa
when I observed it, was intolerant and fanatic. The Moors frankly
admitted that perhaps Morocco was the most fanatically Islamic country
in the West.

It was better, I thought, to live as I did without getting too deeply
involved, and thinking too much, because I experienced more of purely
physical happiness than at any time in my life.

When Carmina and I separated she circulated the report that I disliked
white people. The natives were puzzled about that, because large
numbers of them are as white as some Spanish and French. In the Riff
and other mountain regions there are blue-eyed and blonde-haired types
resembling Nordics, except that they are rather bronzed. But they are
all remarkably free of any color obsessions or ideas of discrimination.
They are Africans. The others are _roumi_ or Europeans. So they thought
that Carmina meant that I did not like the _roumi_ or Europeans. And
that did not displease them. They opened their doors wider for me. And
I did not mind the report, for I was not particularly interested in
European society in North Africa.

But I did have "white" friends (if the Moors do not object to the use
of that phrase) from the white colony. They were all Americans, some
of whom are interestingly friendly to colored people abroad. They
delighted in flaunting their intimacy with colored persons in the face
of the smug European colony. Also there were visitors from Europe.

My first and oldest French friend, Pierre Vogein, came to see me in
1932. He and his wife had come over the previous summer, but I was away
in Xauen. Also Max Eastman and his wife, Eliena Krylenko, visited me
the same year. And there came some of the Gertrude Stein young men.
Carmina's young man had been a kind of protégé of Gertrude Stein.
Carmina said she had been welcome at Gertrude Stein's at first. But
when she and the young man became seriously enamored of each other,
Gertrude Stein grew cold to them. Carmina said she could not understand
Gertrude Stein being a novelist, for she seemed almost incapable of
understanding life. She said Miss Stein saw black as black and white as
white, without any shades, and so it was impossible to understand one
like herself, for she was neither black nor white. She said Miss Stein
did not seem to realize that chameleon was a fundamental feature of
life; that serpents shed their skins and even the leopard might change
its spots for a woman. But Miss Stein was reactionary: she did not
believe in change.

Carmina was considered one of the most intellectual women in Harlem.
Carmina said that Gertrude Stein reproached her young man, telling him
that if he were seriously interested in Negroes he should have gone to
Africa to hunt for an authentic one. Carmina said she did not know what
more authentic than herself Miss Stein desired. For besides having some
of the best white blood mingled with black in her veins, which were
blue, she came from the best Negroid middle-class stock, and Gertrude
Stein was also only middle-class.

An interesting couple of visitors from Paris was Monsieur Henri
Cartier-Bresson, and his friend, an American colored woman. He was a
Norman, and a painter and photographer. He had studied at Oxford and
had a suggestion of upper-class English something about him. He had
a falsetto voice which was not unpleasant, but it wasn't so pleasant
to listen to it reiterating that its possessor could fancy only Negro
women because he preferred the primitive. That falsetto voice just did
not sound authentic and convincing to me.

And if a white man is fond of black women, why should he be declaring
his liking to _me_! The penchant of white men for black women is
nothing new. It has given the world an arresting new type of humanity,
generally known as mulatto. M. Bresson had hunted all over West Africa
in search of the pure primitive. And he had returned to Paris to find
an American brown woman nearly twice his age and as sophisticated as
Carmina, but not so pretty.

M. Bresson brought his lady over to lunch at my house. I was living
alone then like an ascetic, which I found necessary to the completion
of a new book. But I asked Mr. Charles Ford over to meet my guests. He
came in his bathing suit, walking his way down the peninsular strip
which lay between the river and the bay, and swimming over to my house.
He took one look at the pair and left. The lady said, "He smells like a
down-home." I said, "Yes, but he's not a cracker." Later Ford explained
that his precious artistic sense of the harmony of form and rhythm had
suffered too great a shock.

Our conversation turned upon M. Bresson's unwillingness to carry on
with his father the business of an industrialist. M. Bresson's colored
lady thought that he would be more interesting as a business man than
as a modern photographer. She said he was not so artistic as he was
plain lazy; that he was so lazy he wouldn't even pick up his pajamas
from the floor.

I said that there at the head of Africa in Morocco, hard by the ancient
civilized Mediterranean, the natives did not worry about pajamas. Going
to bed was an effortless thing. And I asked M. Bresson whether among
the pure primitives (if there were any left) in the middle or the
bottom of Africa, one had to worry about pajamas. Or if one might be
satisfied with a broad banana leaf. M. Bresson was not so sure. He had
returned all the way to Paris to find his pure primitive and bring her
to Morocco to show me. Well, in less than a couple of years I heard of
M. Bresson in Mexico with a Mexican girl. Perhaps when his protracted
period of adolescence has passed he will finally finish like a cool
Norman and practical Frenchman by marrying a woman of his country and
his class.

I am a little tired of hearing precious bohemian white men protesting
their admiration and love for Negro women and the rest. Yet many of
them are shocked at the idea of intimacy between a black man and a
white woman, because of their confused ideas of erotic attraction.
Perhaps I am hypercritical in detecting a false accent in their
enthusiasm. But it strikes me as being neither idealistic or realistic.
I know it is a different thing from the sympathy and friendship that
the humane and tolerant members of one group or nation or race of
people feel for the members of another. And I know it is different from
that blind urge of sexual desire which compelled white men to black
women during the age of black slavery in the Occident (and perhaps in
Africa today), and created an interesting new type of humanity. The
performance of such men was not actuated by false and puerile theories
of sex. I have a certain respect for them. But these nice modern
faddists--they give me a feeling of white lice crawling on black bodies.

       *       *       *       *       *

The most interesting visitor of them all was the American writer and
protégé of Gertrude Stein, Charles Henri Ford, who published a queer
book of adolescence in Paris under the rather puritan title of _The
Young and Evil_. Young Mr. Ford suddenly dropped in upon me one day
when a group of tribesmen were killing a steer in my garden. They
cooked the liver in the yard and roasted some of the meat on skewers
and invited him to join us in the feast. He was like a rare lily
squatting in among the bearded and bournoused natives, and he enjoyed
it. When he left in the evening I gave him a chunk of meat from what
had been given to me.

He had been in Italy with a Cuban girl. When they came to Madrid she
found a young Spanish lover and the three of them came on to Tangier.
He came to see me soon again and I invited some of the younger Moors
and a few fatmahs to meet him. They all rather liked him. They said he
looked wonderfully like the cinema portraits of Marlene Dietrich.

He came again and again, evidently liking my little isolated house on
the river. He was likable enough, and we gave a few native parties
for him. The young men brought their lutes and mandolins and sang
Andalusian melodies, and the girls danced. One evening Mr. Ford came
over early and excitedly told me that the young men were bringing a
very beautiful fatmah--prettier than any he had seen at my place. I
said I couldn't think of any pretty girl of that class whom Mr. Ford
knew and I had not seen before. He said he felt certain I hadn't seen
her. So we waited expectantly until the carriages arrived with the
party. When the girl unveiled she turned out to be the first little
one who had worked for me when I arrived in Tangier. We were both very
surprised. She had lost the quaint native freshness of our earlier
acquaintanceship and already she had developed like a fine and hardened
cashew-nut. She was not aware that the joy-makers were bringing her
to my new place. But she was not in the slightest embarrassed. She
established herself as temporary hostess as well as guest and was
just as charming in the rôle as she had been efficient as a little
housekeeper.... Our fiesta lasted two days. The Moroccans are a magical
barbaric people, if one isn't too civilized to appreciate the subtlety
and beauty of their barbaresques. When at last I decided to return to
America, in homage to them I indited: "A Farewell to Morocco."

  _Oh wistful and heartrending earth, oh land
  Of colors singing symphonies of life!
  Myself is like a stone upon my spirit,
  Reluctant, passing from your sunny shore.
              Oh native colors,
              Pure colors aglow
              With magic light._

  _Mysterious atmosphere whose elements,
  Like hands inspired by a magnetic force,
  Touched so caressingly my inmost chords,
  How strangely I was brought beneath your spell!
              But willingly
              A captive I
              Remained to be._

  _Oh friends, my friends! When Ramadan returns
  And daily fast and feasting through the night,
  With chants and music honey-dripping sweets,
  And fatmahs shading their flamenco feet,
              My thoughts will wing
              The waves of air
              To be with you._

  _Oh when the cannon sounds to breaks the fast,
  The children chorus madly their relief,
  And you together group to feast at last,
  You'll feel my hungry spirit there in your midst,
              Released from me
              A prisoner,
              To fly to you._

  _And when you go beneath the orange trees,
  To mark and serenade the crescent growth,
  With droning lute and shivering mandolin
  And drop the scented blossoms in your cups!
              Oh make one tune,
              One melody
              Of love for me._

  _Keeping your happy vigil through the night,
  With tales and music whiling by the hours,
  You may recall my joy to be with you,
  Until the watchers passed from house to house
              And bugle call
              And muffled drum
              Proclaimed the day!_

  _When liquid-eyed Habeeb draws from the lute
  A murmur golden like a thousand bees,
  Embowelled in a sheltering tropic tree,
  With honey brimming in the honeycomb,
              The tuneful air
              Will waft the sound
              Across to me._

  _Notes soared with the dear odor of your soil
  And like its water cooling to my tongue,
  Haunting me always like a splendid dream,
  Of vistas opening to an infinite way
              Of perfect love
              That angels make
              In Paradise._

  _Habeeb, Habeeba, I may never return
  Another sacred fast to keep with you,
  But when your Prince of months inaugurates
  Our year, my thoughts will turn to Ramadan,
              Forgetting never
              Its tokens
              Unforgettable._

 --_Mektoub._



XXIX

On Belonging to a Minority Group


It was in Africa that I was introduced to Nancy Cunard--an introduction
by mail. Years before, when I saw her at a studio in Paris, she had
been mentioned as a personage, but I had not been introduced. In Africa
I received a pamphlet from Miss Cunard entitled _Black Man and White
Ladyship_. The interesting pamphlet gave details about the Cunard
daughter establishing a friendship with a Negro musician, of which the
Cunard mother had disapproved.

Miss Cunard wrote that she was making a Negro anthology to dedicate to
her Negro friend, and asked me to be a contributor. I promised that I
would as soon as I found it possible to take time from the novel I was
writing. That started an interesting correspondence between us.

Although I considered the contents of the Nancy Cunard pamphlet of
absorbing interest and worthy of publication, I did not admire the
style and tone of presentation.

After some months, Miss Cunard informed me that she was traveling to
New York, and from there to the West Indies, including Jamaica. She
asked me if I could introduce her to anybody in Jamaica who could put
her in touch with the natives. I addressed her to my eldest brother,
who is well-placed somewhere between the working masses and the
controlling classes of Jamaica and has an excellent knowledge of both.
From Jamaica Miss Cunard wrote again that she had landed in paradise
after the purgatory of New York, where she was put in the spotlight by
the newspapers, when it was discovered that she was residing in Harlem
among the Negroes. My brother invited her to his home in the heart of
the banana, chocolate, and ginger region of Jamaica, and she stayed
there two weeks with her Negro secretary. Both she and her secretary
wrote extolling my brother's hospitality and the warmth and kindliness
of the peasants. Miss Cunard said she particularly liked my brother's
face, and she sent me a snapshot of him.

Meanwhile I had come to the point of a breakdown while working on
my novel in Morocco; and besides I was in pecuniary difficulties.
Nevertheless I wrote an article for Miss Cunard's anthology and
forwarded it to her on her return to France. Miss Cunard extravagantly
praised the article and said it was one of the best and also that I was
one of the best, whatever that "best" meant. She said she would use it
with a full-page photograph of myself which was done by a friend of
ours, the photographer, Berenice Abbot.

However, she did not accompany her praise by a check, and I requested
payment. I was in need of money. Miss Cunard replied that she was not
paying contributors and that my article was too long after all. She was
doing the book for the benefit of the Negro race and she had thought
that every Negro would be glad to contribute something for nothing. She
had suffered and sacrificed a fortune for Negroes, she said.

I comprehended Miss Cunard's way of reasoning. Yet in spite of the
penalty she had to pay for her interest in the Negro, I did not
consider it my bounden duty to write for her without remuneration. Miss
Cunard would have been shocked at the idea of asking the printers and
binders to print and bind her charitable book without remuneration.
But in spite of her ultra-modern attitude toward life, apparently she
still clung to the antiquated and aristocratic and very British idea
that artists should perform for noble and rich people for prestige
instead of remuneration.

I might say that I too have suffered a lot for my knowledge of, and
contact with, the white race. Yet if I were composing an anthology of
the white hell, it never would have occurred to me that all sympathetic
white writers and artists owed me a free contribution. I suppose it
takes a modern white aristocrat to indulge in that kind of archaic
traditional thinking.

As Miss Cunard would not pay for my article, I requested its return.
She said she was going to take extracts from it. I forbade her to touch
it. That made her mad, _comme une vache enragée_. My brother also was
supposed to do an article on the Jamaica banana industry for Miss
Cunard. He decided not to. And suddenly Miss Cunard did not like his
face any more. She wrote that he was big and fat.

In her pamphlet _Black Man and White Ladyship_ the reader gets the
impression that the Cunard daughter enjoys taking a Negro stick to
beat the Cunard mother. Miss Cunard seemed to have been ultra-modern
in ideas and contacts without alarming Lady Cunard, who was a little
modern herself. Then Miss Cunard became aware of the Negro by way
of jazz in Venice. And soon also she was made aware that her mother
would not accept her friendship with a Negro. Other white women have
come up against that problem. It is not merely a problem of people of
different races; people of different religions and of different classes
know the unreasonableness and the bitterness of it. The mother Cunard
drastically reduced the income of the daughter Cunard. The daughter
replied with the pamphlet _Black Man and White Ladyship_, which was
not published for sale but probably for spite. In telling the story of
her friendship, Miss Cunard among other things ridicules her mother's
American accent. Yet the American Negroes she professes to like speak
the same language as her mother, with slight variations.

Writing in her strange, heavy and ineffectual giant of a Negro
anthology, Miss Cunard has this to say of me: "His people [the
characters of my novels] and himself have also that wrong kind of
race-consciousness; they ring themselves in."

The statement is interesting, not so much from the narrow personal as
from the broader social angle of a minority group of people and its
relationship to friends who belong to the majority group. It leaves me
wondering whether it would be altogether such a bad thing if by ringing
itself in closer together, a weak, disunited and suppressed group of
people could thereby develop group pride and strength and self-respect!

It is hell to belong to a suppressed minority and outcast group. For to
most members of the powerful majority, you are not a person; you are a
problem. And every crusading crank imagines he knows how to solve your
problem. I think I am a rebel mainly from psychological reasons, which
have always been more important to me than economic. As a member of a
weak minority, you are not supposed to criticize your friends of the
strong majority. You will be damned mean and ungrateful. Therefore you
and your group must be content with lower critical standards.

A Fannie Hurst who is a best seller is interested in Negro literature.
She is nice to Negro writers and artists. She visits among Negroes.
She engages a Negro secretary. And finally she writes a trashy novel
of Negro life. Negro critics do not like the novel. Fannie Hurst
thinks they are ungrateful. I suppose the only way Negro critics could
get around the dilemma would be to judge Fannie Hurst by social and
sentimental instead of artistic standards. But that wouldn't help the
Negro literature that Fannie Hurst desires to promote. I think Negro
writers might benefit more by the forthright criticism of such southern
gentlemen as H.L. Mencken and Joseph Wood Krutch than by the kindness
of a Fannie Hurst.

A southern white woman who is married to a black journalist says, in
a critique entitled, _Don'ts for My Daughter_, that she would not
"want her to read _Home to Harlem_, which overemphasizes the carnal
side of the Aframerican." I will confess that I may fall short of that
degree of civilization which perfects the lily-white state of mind of
the gentle southern lady. And that was why as a creative writer I was
unable to make nice distinctions between the carnal and the pure and
happened perhaps to sin on the side of the carnal in _Home to Harlem_.

Yet I once read in a Negro magazine some stanzas entitled, Temptation,
by a certain Young Southern White Lady, and attributed to my pure
critic, which sound like a wild jazz page out of _Nigger Heaven_. I
remember some of those stanzas:

  _I couldn't forget
  The banjo's whang
  And the piano's bang
  As we strutted the do-do-do's
  In Harlem!_

  _That pansy seal
  A-tossing me
  All loose and free, O, lily me!
  In muscled arms
  Of Ebony!_

  _I couldn't forget
  That black boy's eyes
  That black boy's shake
  That black boy's size
  I couldn't forget
  O, snow white me!_

Now to the mind of this black sinner this piece of sophisticated
lily-white lyricism is more offensively carnal than the simple
primitive erotic emotions of the characters of _Home to Harlem_. But
I reiterate it is possible that I am not civilized white enough to
appreciate the purity of the mind which composed the above stanzas and
to which _Home to Harlem_ is carnal.

The white lady is raising her mulatto daughter on a special diet and
periodically the child is featured as a prodigy in the New York _Herald
Tribune_. But it is possible that when that child has grown up out of
the state of being a prodigy she might prefer a plain fare, including
_Home to Harlem_. I have not had the time to be an experimentalist
about life, because I have been occupied always with facing hard facts.
And this I know to be a fact: Right here in New York there are children
of mixed parentage, who have actually hated their white mother after
they had grown up to understanding. When they came up against the full
force of the great white city on the outside and went home to face a
helpless white mother (a symbol of that white prejudice) it was more
than their Negroid souls could stand.

I think it would be illuminating to know the real feelings of that
white mother, who was doubtlessly devoted to her colored children....
I myself have had the experience of a fine friendship with a highly
cultured white woman, when I first arrived in the United States--a
friendship which was turned into a hideous nightmare because of the
taboos of the dominant white community. I still retain a bitter memory
of my black agony, but I can only try to imagine the white crucifixion
of that cultured woman....

I do not think the author of _Don'ts for My Daughter_, felt personally
antagonistic to me, when she wrote in the leading Negro magazine that
she did not want her child to read my novel. It is possible that like
myself she has faith in literary and artistic truth. Perhaps she even
desires to contribute something to the growing literature of Negro
life. I have read an interesting article by her on "America's Changing
Color Line," which emphasizes the idea that America is steadily growing
darker in complexion, and is informing about the increasing numbers of
white Negroids who are absorbed by the white group.

Without the slightest feeling of antagonism to my critic, I would
suggest to her that vicarious stories of "passing white" are merely
of slight importance to the great group of fifteen millions who are
obviously Negroes. I would suggest to her that if she really desires to
make a unique contribution to American literature, she has a chance of
doing something that no Negro can--something that might be worthwhile
for her daughter to read: she might write a sincere account of what it
means for an educated and sensitive white woman to be the wife of a
Negro in America.

       *       *       *       *       *

Gertrude Stein, the high priestess of artless-artful Art, identifies
Negro with Nothingness. When the eternal faddists who exist like
vampires on new phenomena become fed up with Negro art, they must
find a reason for their indifference. From being disappointed in Paul
Robeson, Gertrude Stein concludes that Negroes are suffering from
nothingness. In the ineffable Stein manner she decided to take Paul
Robeson as _the_ representative of Negro culture. Similarly, any other
faddist could arbitrarily make Chaliapin or Al Jolson or Maurice
Chevalier or Greta Garbo the representative of Russian, Jewish, French
and Swedish culture respectively. When Gertrude Stein finds that Paul
Robeson knows American values and American life as only one in it and
not of it could, when she discovers that he is big and naïve, but not
quite naïve enough to please Gertrude Stein, she declares: "The African
is not primitive; he has a very ancient but a very narrow culture and
there it remains. Consequently nothing can happen." Not long after she
published this, something was happening: Negro Americans were rendering
her opera _Four Saints in Three Acts_ to sophisticated New York
audiences.

Well, whatever the white folks do and say, the Negro race will finally
have to face the need to save itself. The whites have done the blacks
some great wrongs, but also they have done some good. They have brought
to them the benefits of modern civilization. They can still do a lot
more, but one thing they cannot do: they cannot give Negroes the gift
of a soul--a group soul.

Wherever I traveled in Europe and Africa I was impressed by the
phenomenon of the emphasis on group life, whether the idea behind
it was Communist co-operative or Fascist collective or regional
autonomy. I lived under a Communist dictatorship in Russia, two Fascist
dictatorships in Europe, and the French colonial dictatorship in
Morocco. I don't like any dictatorship.

       *       *       *       *       *

Yet even the dictatorships were making concessions to the strong
awakened group spirit of the peoples. Soviet Russia was hard at work
on the social problems of its many nationalities. Primo de Rivera
in Spain had organized two grand exhibitions: one for discontented
Catalonia and another for unhappy Andalusia. Regional groups such
as that in Brittany and in the Basque country were reviving their
ancient culture. Labor groups and radical groups were building up their
institutions and educating their children in opposition to reactionary
institutions.

But there is very little group spirit among Negroes. The American Negro
group is the most advanced in the world. It possesses unique advantages
for development and expansion and for assuming the world leadership
of the Negro race. But it sadly lacks a group soul. And the greatest
hindrance to the growth of a group soul is the wrong idea held about
segregation. Negroes do not understand the difference between group
segregation and group aggregation. And their leaders do not enlighten
them, because they too do not choose to understand. Negro institutions
and unique Negro efforts have never had a chance for full development;
they are haunted by the fear of segregation. Except where they are
forced against their will, Negroes in general prefer to patronize white
institutions and support white causes in order to demonstrate their
opposition to segregation.

Yet it is a plain fact that the entire world of humanity is more or
less segregated in groups. The family group gave rise to the tribal
group, the tribal group to the regional group, and the regional group
to the national group. There are groups within groups: language groups,
labor groups, racial groups and class groups. Certainly no sane group
desires public segregation and discrimination. But it is a clear
historical fact that different groups have won their social rights only
when they developed a group spirit and strong group organization.

There are language groups and religious groups in this country that
have found it necessary to develop their own banks, co-operative
stores, printing establishments, clubs, theaters, colleges, hotels,
hospitals and other social service institutions and trade unions. Yet
they were not physically separated from other white groups as much as
are Negroes. But they were in a stronger position to bargain and obtain
social and political privileges by virtue of the strength of their own
institutions.

But Negro institutions in general are developed only perfunctorily and
by compulsion, because Negroes have no abiding faith in them. Negroes
wisely are not wasting thought on the chimera of a separate Negro state
or a separate Negro economy within the United States, but there are a
thousand things within the Negro community which only Negroes can do.

There are educated Negroes who believe that the color line will be
dissolved eventually by the light-skinned Negroids "passing white,"
by miscegenation and final assimilation by the white group. But even
if such a solution were possible in the future, it is certainly not a
solution for the great dark body of Negroids living in the present.
Also if the optimistic Negro advocates of futility would travel and
observe or study to learn something of the composition and distribution
of white racial, national and regional groups that are more assimilable
than Negroes, and of their instinctive and irrational tenacity, they
might be less optimistic and negative about the position of their own.

The Negro intelligentsia cannot hope to get very far if the Negro
masses are despised and neglected. However poor it may be, the Negro
intelligentsia gets its living directly from the Negro masses. A few
Negro individuals who obtain important political and social positions
among whites may delude themselves into thinking they got their jobs by
individual merit alone against hungry white competitors who are just as
capable.

But the fact is that the whites in authority give Negroes their jobs
because they take into consideration the potential strength of the
Negro group. If that group were organized on the basis of its numerical
strength, there would be more important jobs and greater social
recognition for Negroes.

And Negroes will have to organize themselves and learn from their
mistakes. The white man cannot organize Negroes as a group, for Negroes
mistrust the motives of white people. And the Negro whom they consider
an Uncle Tom among the whites, whose voice is the voice of their white
master, cannot do it either, even though he may proclaim himself a
radical!

Many years ago I preserved a brief editorial from the _Nation_ on the
Woman's Party which seemed to me to be perfectly applicable to the
position of the Negro--if the word Negro were substituted for "woman"
and "whites" for men. It said in part: "We agree that no party, left to
itself, will allow women an equal chance. Neither labor nor the farmer
nor the business man nor the banker is ready to assume executive and
political ability in women. They will steadily, perhaps instinctively,
resist any such belief. They will accede to women's demands only
so far as they wish to please or placate the woman vote. For every
party job, for every political office, for every legal change in the
direction of equality, women will have to fight as women. Inside the
party organizations, the women will have to wage their own battle for
recognition and equal rights....

"After all, women are an indivisible part of this country's
population; they cannot live under a women's Congress and a special set
of feminine laws and economic conditions. They, as well as men, suffer
when our government is prostituted, and lose their employment when
economic hardship sweeps the country. They, like men, have a vote, and
like men they will in the long run tend to elect people and parties who
represent their whole interest. To be sure, apart from men they have a
special group interest...."

       *       *       *       *       *

It would be altogether too ludicrous to point out that white women
are by far more an indivisible part of this country's population than
Negroes! Yet the advance guard of white women realize that they have a
common and special group interest, different from the general interests
of their fathers and brothers and their husbands and sons.

It goes without saying that the future of the Negro is bound up with
the future system of world economy. And all progressive social trends
indicate that that system will be based on the principle of labor for
communal instead of private profit. I have no idea how the new system
will finally work out. I have never believed in the infallibility
of the social prophets, even though some of their predictions and
calculations have come true. It is possible that in some countries some
of the captains of capitalist industry might become labor leaders and
prove themselves more efficient than many reactionary labor leaders.
Who knows?

Anyway, it seems to me that if Negroes were organized as a group and as
workers, whatever work they are doing (with or without the whites), and
were thus getting a practical education in the nature and the meaning
of the labor movement, it might even be more important and worthwhile
than for them to become members of radical political parties.

A West Indian charlatan came to this country, full of antiquated social
ideas; yet within a decade he aroused the social consciousness of the
Negro masses more than any leader ever did. When Negroes really desire
a new group orientation they will create it.

Such is my opinion for all that it may be worth. I suppose I have a
poet's right to imagine a great modern Negro leader. At least I would
like to celebrate him in a monument of verse. For I have nothing to
give but my singing. All my life I have been a troubadour wanderer,
nourishing myself mainly on the poetry of existence. And all I offer
here is the distilled poetry of my experience.



BOOKS BY CLAUDE McKAY


 Songs of Jamaica
 Spring in New Hampshire
 Harlem Shadows
 Home to Harlem
 Banjo
 Gingertown
 Banana Bottom
 A Long Way from Home





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