Chapter IV: Part THREE: New York Horizon (1)

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.