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 onThe 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 theAdvancement 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 intenue 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. Theythought 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 Liberatorstaff 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 inThe Liberator. I was glad, and gave him a copy ofSpring 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 memoriesOf fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills.And dewy dawns and mystical blue skiesIn 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 perfectgrande damewho 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 wasthe 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 Isuppose 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 thelittle 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
WhenH.G. Wells came over here to the Naval Conference as a star reporter for the liberal New YorkWorldand the neo-Tory LondonDaily Mail, his restless curiosity urged him to find time from his preoccupation with high international politics to bestow a little attention onThe Liberator. Max Eastman had him to dinner at his home in Greenwich Village, and later there was an informal reception for theLiberatorstaff 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 popularOutline of Historyas 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'sHistory. 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.... TheNegro 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 tideof 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 hisOutline of Historymay be deliberate. In his marvelousWorld 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 traditionof Charles Dickens and I don't think he imagines himself a historian any more than I do, so one must be tolerant if hisOutlinehas the earmarks of a glorifiedResearch Magnificent.
Also, I did not like Mr. Wells's inspired articles on the Naval Conference. Paradoxically, I found myself sympathizing with theDaily 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 littleLiberatorreception was a question-time picnic for theLiberatorcollaborators—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 Harrisfor 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 hisExperiment 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 loudtalking 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 inadequateefforts. 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 onThe Liberatora woman called to see me one day bringing a little book of poems. She offered me ten dollars if I would review it inThe Liberator. I said thatThe Liberatordid 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 inPearson'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 visitedThe Liberatorand 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 wasgreater 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"
Myradical days onThe Liberatorwere 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 ofThe 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.
Liberatorfriends 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 ofTrue 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 CharlieChaplin'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 inHome to Harlem. When that boy and girl started to shake together they gave everybody the sweet shivers. Theplace 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 peopleout. 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 aswhen 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 blackbarriers. 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 preventrapproachementand 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 hisThe 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 heartI brood upon my hate, and without flinchI 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 graceTo 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 powerTo 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 confessI 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 shredOf 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 Liberatorwas 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 fromThe Liberator'sgovernment bonds. Unfortunately Mylius had been intrusted with the key to the bank's vaultin 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 liberalrentiers. 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 theserentiers, 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 ofLiberatorartists 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 thatThe Liberatorcould 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 thatThe Liberatorshould 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 ofThe Liberatorwas 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 proletarianperiodof literature, with labor coming into its heritage as the dominating social factor, exactly as we have had a Christian period, aRenaissance 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 onThe Liberatorendeavored 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 dranka bottle of dago red together. However, I saw clearly that our association could not continue. Shortly after that we called a meeting ofLiberatoreditors 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 calledShuffle 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 featureShuffle AlonginThe 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 withme to seeShuffle Alongand 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 ofThe Liberatorwas 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 Alongwas 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 asBlackbirds, which was projected and directed by a white impresario, there was no artistic gain for the Negro group. But the Negroartistesmade 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 easyachievement 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'sBlackbirdsin Paris and rememberedShuffle AlongI was very sad. TheBlackbirdsflashed 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 charmingShuffle 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 onThe LiberatorI 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 (forThe Liberatorof May, 1922) tell the story for me:
"Wouldn't your dramatic critic like to seeHe Who Gets Slapped?" So, very graciously, wrote the Theater Guild's publicity agent toThe 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 takealong William Gropper,Liberatorartist 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 thebourgeois 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 anddance 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"
MeanwhileI 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, entitledCreative Criticism. I wrote to him then. He introduced me to James Oppenheim and Waldo Frank ofThe 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 socialand 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 Shadowswas asuccès 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 lastLiberatoraffair 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 ofThe Liberatormagnetized that motley throng. There was a large freedom and tolerance aboutThe Liberatorwhich made such a mixing possible. (How regrettable that nothing like the oldLiberatorexists 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 leavingThe LiberatorI 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 weremarried!" As if that should have made any difference tohim. 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 wentto 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 ofHarlem Shadowswas 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 ofThe 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 YorkWorld, John Farrar, who was then editor ofThe 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
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 ofThe Nationcontaining 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.