McManus was one of the men who had gunned the hardest after Sylvia Pankhurst. He still felt venomous about her. "Intellectually dishonest," was his pet phrase for describing her. I said I thought Sylvia Pankhurst was as honest as any imperial Briton could be. And I really preferred Pankhurst to persons like Lansbury, and perhaps even to McManus himself. McManus shot up like a rabbit (he was a tiny man) and demanded in his remarkably beautiful Glasgow brogue if I meant to "insinuate" (that was the word he used) that he was an imperialist. I said that I had not said "imperialist," but "imperial," and that all Britons were imperial by birth and circumstances because of the nature of the political set-up of Britain. McManus asked if I did not believe that there were really radical Britons. I said that no man can be more radical than his system can stand. McManus said I was a bloody bigoted black nationalist, and hisb's had such a wonderful ring (he stammered a little) that it made me laugh and laugh until both of us fell into a prolonged fit of black-and-white laughter. It was a good satisfying feeling to see McManus laugh aloud, for there was a perpetually crucified expression on his countenance that all the Scotch whisky and Russian vodka in the world could not dispel.
McManus did not appear to like my O.G.P.U. friend and companion, Venko. It was well known among us that Venko was an interpreter and translator for the O.G.P.U., but had nothing to do with the department of investigations and arrests. Anyone with a little knowledge of police organization knows that a police clerk has nothing to do with the actual duties of policing. If Venko had been a secret agent of the O.G.P.U. we would never have known that he worked in that department. And I think I can nose out a secret agent whether he is red or white. I spent a year of my early youth in a police department in a position where I was in constant contact with all the branches of the department. For my part I liked to have Venko along whenever I was invited to a carousel among Communists. For Venko could beat anybody carousing and I thought that if any issue were raised about the affair afterward, Venko would be an excellent asset to have. Whenever I went on a drinking bout with comrades I always saw that they got drunker than myself.
It was necessary to do a little thinking while drinking and laughing. For sometimes funny things happened. Some of the foreign comrades seemed to enjoy playing at political intrigue, apparently without fully realizing that political intrigue, to the Russians, was a serious and dangerous thing. For instance, one of the youthful Indian delegates occupied a room next to mine, and we often went down to our meals and also over to the Comintern offices together. One morning when I called for him his room was locked and there was a seal on the door. The O.G.P.U. had arrested him during the night. Months later I met him in Berlin under the most unusual circumstances, which I shall relate in another place. There was also the young Whitechapel Jew whom I used to know slightly at the International Club in London. He had come to Russia as a youth delegate. But he wasn't functioning as anything when I saw him. He told me fretfully that he had been denounced. One evening he and I were on our way to a motion picture when a group of armed police dramatically pounced upon him. They said something in Russianand he must have answered satisfactorily, for they did not take him. But he was scared, and said, "I am always scared." Shortly after that incident he was gone too, and I never saw him again. When I reached Berlin the following spring I met William Gallacher (now Communist Member of Parliament) and asked him what had become of the boy. "He was a spy," Gallacher said, "and he was fixed."
I said angrily, "But what have you in the little British Communist Party for anybody to spy on?"
"More than you think," said Gallacher, with a mysterious nod of his friendly head.
One night in Moscow I was invited to a celebration given by a minor Communist official. The address had been written down for me and I had to take somebody along to find it, as I did not know my way around Moscow. So I asked Venko; but first we had to attend a meeting of women workers at which he interpreted for me and we did not get to the entertainment until very late. The large apartment was full of comrades when we got there. I think the man who was throwing the treat was a Finn and there were many Baltic types there, blonde and heavy of movement and impassive of spirit. There was plenty of hard drinking, but it was a dull atmosphere, nothing of the stimulating renascent effervescence of thebarishna'sevening. Venko stepped upon the scene with a burst of boisterous enthusiasm, and drinking a big glass of vodka, he took the center of the room and started speechifying, saying there was a time for good comrades to fight, a time to work, and that now was the time to be festive.
Venko was applauded, and from somewhere McManus came swaying like a tipsy little imp, and pointing at Venko cried in a chanting voice: "O.G.P.U.! O.G.P.U.! O.G.P.U.!"Venko laughed, and all of us. For he and the others thought that McManus was merely putting over a joke about his working for the O.G.P.U. But then McManus shouted in English, "Spy! Spy! I am not going to stay here, I am going home. Spy!"
"What do you mean, Comrade?" Venko asked in amazement. "Did I ever spy on you? Do you want to say that I am here spying on my comrades?" Venko said something in Russian and everybody looked serious. But McManus repeated "O.G.P.U. spy! O.G.P.U. spy!" A murderous look took possession of Venko's face. "Comrade," he cried in a terrible voice, "if you don't stop, I'll kill you; you hear? You're not drunk and irresponsible. If you don't stop, I'll hit you, as little as you are." But McManus shouted again: "O.G.P.U. spy! O.G.P.U.—"
Venko knocked McManus down with one blow and kicked him straight across the room, where he lay curled up like a half-dead snake. "You dirty little Englishman!" cried Venko. "Go back home and make your own revolution and don't stay in Russia to insult a real Communist." McManus picked himself up and began shouting: "I am not a Communist, I am an Anarchist! Anarchist! Anarchist!" A comrade clapped his hand over McManus' mouth, and lifting him up like a kid, carried him out of the room.
I couldn't understand the meaning of McManus' outburst, except perhaps that he, like some of the other visiting comrades, was afflicted with spy mania. The company settled down again to drinking and toasting and the singing of revolutionary songs.
The carousel ended with me again uplifted in glory. Venko had shed every vestige of the murderous brutality of a moment before and was acting like a commanding master ofceremonies. With strong exuberant gestures he toasted me to the company. Always a poet in action, he became a poet in words: "Comrade McKay, you must stay in Russia. We want you. All Russia loves you, not we Communists only, but even the damned bourgeoisie. Tell us, Comrade McKay, why is it you have bewitched us? Tell us, Comrade McKay, what is it? Is it the black magic we have heard about? Comrade McKay, we are bewitched, men, women and children. We all love you, we all want you. Oh, do stay with us forever! Comrade McKay, you must leave Moscow and see Russia. We want you everywhere.... Comrade McKay, my heart is bold"—here Venko brutally beat his breast with his enormous fist—"and my back is broad and strong"—Venko bent himself over. "Get up on my back and I will carry you all over Russia: from Moscow to Kazan, from Kazan to Samara and all the way down the Volga we will go until we reach the Caspian Sea...."
With a great shout I was hoisted up into the air. And McManus, awaking from his drunken anarcho-communist nightmare, came zigzagging into the room just as I was being carried out upon the shoulders of that gloriously tipsy crew down the stairs and into the street and put into adroshkyand conveyed to my hotel. My mind was too stimulated and excited to go to sleep, with Venko's picturesque phrases burning in my brain and creating a tumult of thought. I also had under consideration an invitation to join a caravan of comrades from different countries who were planning a tour of Russia with the Caucasus as the ultimate destination. Should I go? Although I had been only in Moscow and Petrograd, I had traveled already so extensively from triumph to triumph. Should I go further and risk anti-climax, or should I make my exit in éclat, cherishing always the richnessof my golden souvenir? The thought of leaving seemed to be the most logical. I knew myself enough to know that I was not of the stuff of a practical pioneer, who could become a link in that mighty chain of the upbuilding of the great Russian revolution. And also I reflected like a stoic poet that it was best not to be too popular. When I contemplated the overwhelming snow of Russia, it appeared not like snow anywhere else, but like a thing everlasting, petrified like an ocean of ivory. Yet soon even it would disappear when the season changed. And somewhere from far away beyond the cold Russian nights, glorious like fields of white lilies, another season was coming.
Soon after that, Sen Katayama sent me an invitation to visit the Eastern University. I spoke to a group of students, and then proceeded to visit the dormitories. The rooms, in which the students prepared light meals, appeared somewhat like those of Moslem students in themedersasof Morocco. Imagine my surprise, as I was passing through a dormitory, to hear a familiar voice call my name. I looked back and it was Mrs. Slova, reclining on a cot. Mrs. Slova had been charming to me when I was in London, frequently inviting me to her house for high tea. She was a seamstress and she and her three pretty daughters were always smartly dressed. Some of the captious comrades styled her the bourgeois lady. At that time she was wildly enthusiastic about Russia and just biding her time to get there.
"But what are you doing here?" I asked.
"Don't you know? I am a student going to school again," she said. Mrs. Slova had gone to Russia with her daughters immediately following my return to New York from London. She was glad once more to be in the land of her birth, where formerly she was ostracized because she belonged to theJewish group. But her three daughters, who were born and reared in comparative comfort in London, were frightened of the confusion of the new burgeoning society. Mrs. Slova quickly and expertly arranged amariage de convenancefor each of her daughters with English comrades visiting Russia and sent them back to London. But she remained in Moscow.
I asked if she did not miss her children. "I raised them right, until now they are of age to act for themselves," she said. "They couldn't fit into the new conditions here. Young people are not like us older heads." I said I thought the Communist movement was primarily the movement of youth, and if she in middle age could adapt herself to the changed life, it should have been easier for her daughters.
"Pooh!" Mrs. Slova exclaimed. "Youth is all right when guided and led by older heads. They act more from enthusiasm than from thinking and will rush headlong into anything when they are excited, for youth is the time of excitement. That is why they are preferred as soldiers. But they soon get sulky when there is no more excitement to feed on. All the great statesmen are middle-aged experienced men, even in Red Russia." I was amazed at Mrs. Slova. I never considered her bourgeois because she dressed well, but I always thought that she was oversentimental and romantic. But after all she was a wise person.
She had no desire to return to England. Communally living in a dormitory, sleeping on a cot with her belongings in a locker, she did not hanker after her comfortable middle-class home in London. She was studying languages in the Eastern University, with the intention of entering the eastern diplomatic service. She didn't think any revolution was going to take place in Western Europe for a long time, she said. TheBolshevik leaders would at last wake up to that fact. She believed in the East, the future of Russia in the East, and that was why she had become a student at the Eastern University.
XIX
A Great Celebration
Ofall the big Bolshevik leaders, I had desired most to have a personal word from Lenin. I had been amazed in 1920, when I received in London a message from John Reed informing me that Lenin had brought the Negro question before the Communist Congress and inviting me to visit Moscow.
I had not gone to Moscow then because I did not consider myself qualified to do what John Reed had asked, which was to represent the American Negro group. But now that I was there, I was anxious to get Lenin's opinion out of his own mouth. But Lenin apparently had become very ill again after his couple of speeches at the Communist and Soviet Congresses in the late fall of 1922. At one of the sessions of the Communist Congress I was seated directly behind Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, and I was introduced to her by Clara Zetkin (the first woman member of the Reichstag), who was very friendly and affectionate to me. I seized the chance to ask Krupskaya if it were possible to have an interview with Lenin. She said she would see. But nothing came of that. Some time after I visited the office ofPravdawith a Communist sympathizer. He was acquainted with Lenin's sister, who held a position on the staff, and he introduced me to her. I told her that I would like to have a word from Lenin himself and she said frankly that it was impossible, for Lenin was very sick.
Krupskaya was an extremely plain woman, really ugly.Max Eastman was so appalled when he saw her that he said, "Lenin would probably get well if he had a pretty girl!" So I said, "Like the Shunamite virgin, who warmed up King David of Israel in his old age, eh?" But we did not think that Lenin was that type of warrior.
I tried to reach some of the other leaders whom I had not yet met. One day as I was passing through the grounds of the Kremlin with Andreyev, one of the young officials of the Foreign Office, he pointed out to me a strikingly big man wearing high black boots. That, he said, was Stalin, who was chairman of the Committee on National Minorities. It was the first time I heard the name of Stalin, and the information was extremely important. I asked Andreyev if I could meet Stalin. Andreyev said that that was difficult, for Stalin was one of the big Bolsheviks and it was not easy to meet him. But he promised to approach Karakhan about it. Perhaps Andreyev was tardy or unsuccessful in hisdémarche; at any rate I heard no more of it, and my request vanished from my thoughts when I came in contact with the magnetic personality of Trotsky.
Trotsky, although apparently so formidable a character, was, with Bukharin, the most approachable of the big Bolsheviks. I was told that any message sent to Trotsky would be certain to receive his personal attention. So I sent in a request to meet the Commissar of War. In a couple of days I got an answer making an appointment and saying that an aide would call to convey me to the Commissary of War.
Exactly at the appointed hour the following day, as I descended the stairs of the hotel, an official automobile drove up with a military aide and I was escorted to the war department. I passed through a guard of Red sentries and was ushered immediately into Trotsky's office. Trotsky was wearing a commander's uniform and he appeared very handsome, genial and gracious sitting at his desk. He said he was learning English and would try to talk to me in that language.
Trotsky asked me some straight and sharp questions about American Negroes, their group organizations, their political position, their schooling, their religion, their grievances and social aspirations and, finally, what kind of sentiment existed between American and African Negroes. I replied with the best knowledge and information at my command. Then Trotsky expressed his own opinion about Negroes, which was more intelligent than that of any of the other Russian leaders. He did not, like Steklov, the editor ofIzvestia, imagine Negroes as a great army for cannon fodder. And unlike Radek, he was not quick to make deductions about the causes of white prejudice against black. Indeed, he made no conclusions at all, and, happily, expressed no mawkish sentimentality about black-and-white brotherhood. What he said was very practical and might sound reformist in the ears of radical American Negroes.
Trotsky said in effect that the Negro people constituted a backward group, socially, politically and economically, in modern civilization. I remember distinctly that he used the word "backward." And he stressed the point that Negroes should be educated, should receive not merely academic education, but a broad spreading-out education in all phases of modern industrial life to lift themselves up as a group to a level of equality with the whites. I remember again that he used the word "lift" or "uplift." And he urged that Negroes should be educated about the labor movement. Finally, he said he would like to set a practical example in his own department and proposed the training of a group of Negroes as officers in the Red army.
Before I left, Trotsky asked me to make a summary of my ideas, in writing, for him. This I did, and he wrote out a commentary on it and published both either inIzvestiaor inPravda. Unfortunately I lost the original article and its English translation among other effects somewhere in France. But the gist of it all is given above.
Also, Trotsky gave me a permit to visit some of the training schools of the Soviet forces. I had not the slightest idea that that meant a passport to a series of inspections and elaborate receptions. I thought I was going to make perhaps a couple of quiet and unobtrusive visits to the military schools. What transpired was amazing, but also embarrassing, for, except for the martial music, I have never been vastly thrilled by military demonstrations.
For about a month I was fêted by the military forces. I was introduced to military and naval officers and experts. I was shown the mechanism of little guns and big guns. I did a little target practice. I passed through reviews, receptions and banquets, a glamorous parade of militant Red from Moscow to Petrograd.
It started in Moscow. First I was taken on a visit to the crack Kremlin military schools; then to an ordinary soldiers' barracks where the men were resting or on fatigue duty, and also to an extraordinary one where everything and everybody was shipshape as if for an inspection by the highest authorities. Next I visited the tactics school, the infantry school, the cavalry school, the artillery school. It was almost three weeks before I got through my Moscow military itinerary. There were intervals of days between the various visits, of course. And there was a continuous big feeding, until I thought my belly would burst. I ate in the soldiers' mess. I ate in the officers' mess. I ate with the military professors. I asked forkashaand was grandly served, with officers and Communist controllers, an elaborate and most appetizing dish comparable toarroz Valencianaor Moroccancous-cous. While I was eating it I remembered a long sentimental poem by Rose Pastor Stokes which we had published inThe Liberator, in which she sang of her desire to share the Russian peasant's bowl ofkasha. Yet as I remember, her first picturesque gesture in Moscow was the buying of a marvelous mink coat and cap, and she was the smartest woman in the Congress.... Thus I learned something new aboutkasha: that it wasn't only the peasant's staple food, but a national food, eaten by all kinds of people, and one which, like rice, may be served in many different and appetizing ways.
The experience of my military induction ended in a mighty students' celebration of the anniversary of the Red army. The vast audience flamed to the occasion as if it were charged through and lit up by one great electric current. Many notables appeared before the illuminated demonstration. And at last I was called to the stage. I made a brief martial speech and was applauded for more. But I hadn't the Russian genius for improvising great appropriate phrases. Someone demanded a poem, and I gave, "If We Must Die." I gave it in the same spirit in which I wrote it, I think. I was not acting, trying to repeat the sublime thrill of a supreme experience. I was transformed into a rare instrument and electrified by the great current running through the world, and the poem popped out of me like a ball of light and blazed.
Now, thought I, the amazing military sensation is ended. It was an enjoyable excitement, but it was also a pleasurable relief to be over and done with it. But this audacious adventurer had reckoned without the Red fleet. From Petrograd came an invitation from the Red fleet, which apparentlymeant to rival the Red army in its reception. And so I entrained for Petrograd, accompanied by a military cadet. That was my third going to Petrograd. And each time the city appeared better, revealing more of its grandeur. For, unlike Moscow, Petrograd does not start immediately with color and mazy movement and life compact with a suggestion of Oriental lavishness rioting and ringing upon the senses like the music of golden bells.
Petrograd is poised and proud, with a hard striking strength like the monument of Peter the Great, and a spaciousness like the Neva. In its somber might it appeared brooding and a little frowning of aspect at first. Many streets were desert stretches, and massive buildings still bore the gaping wounds of the revolution. But when one became a little more acquainted with the city, the great half-empty spaces became impressive with a lonely dignity and beauty. And the Petrograd people were splendid, too, in that setting, outlined more clearly than the Moscow folk. They were like clumps of trees growing together for protection at intervals in a vast plain.
We arrived in Petrograd on the eve of the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Russian Communist Party. That night I went to the Marinsky Theater to seePrince Igorfor the first time, and the thumping performance of the ballet stirred me like strokes of lightning with great claps of thunder. It was so much more wildly extravagant than the Eugen Onegin one I saw in Moscow. In New York I had attended two performances of the Pavlova ballet (I think in 1916), and now I compared them with this Petrograd magnificence. The Pavlova ballet was like birds flying with clipped wings, but the PetrogradPrince Igorwas like free birds in full flight. Although I did admire immenselythe dainty precious Pavlova herself, her company appeared so restrained. I never could work up any enthusiasm for the modernistic contempt of the Russian ballet. The technical excellencies alone thrum on the emotional strings of anyone who has a feeling for geometric patterns.
Isadora Duncan and I argued and disagreed on this subject for a whole evening at her studio in Nice. She said the Russian Revolution should have abolished the ballet and established the free-limbed dance. I said I preferred to see both schools of dancing have the same freedom for expression. Isadora was even more severe on Negro dancing and its imitations and derivations. She had no real appreciation of primitive folk dancing, either from an esthetic or an ethnic point of view. For her every movement of the dance should soar upward. She spoke beautifully about that uplifted upward movement, although it was all wrong. But when she danced for me it was all right. I had never seen her in her great glory and couldn't imagine that she could still be wonderful when she was so fat and flabby. But what she did that night was stupendous. I was the only audience besides the pianist. And she danced from Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Wagner and Beethoven. Her face was a series of different masks. And her self was the embodiment of Greek tragedy,un êtreendowed with divinity.
The day following the performance ofPrince Igor, I paid my respects to the commander of the Baltic fleet. He was a kindly man, and presented me with his photograph. He took me around to the naval preparatory school, the naval gymnasium and the naval academy. The young cadets demanded that I say something. So I told them briefly that I felt singularly honored and happy that my first contact with any fleet should be with the first Red fleet of the world. And thatalthough it was a strange life of which I was entirely ignorant, I thought that, if I had to be a fighter, I would rather enlist in the navy than in the army.
The applause I received was astounding, since what I said was so brief and simple. But quite unwittingly I had stirred the traditional rivalry between army and navy, which may be a little different but no whit less even though they may be Red. But my military escort from Moscow (the only soldier among that fine body of proud and eager young sailors) was not enthusiastic about my quip. I suppose I should have been a little more tactful about the army, since it had first celebrated me as a guest.
That night started the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Russian Communist Party. The opening meeting was held in the Marinsky Theater. Zinoviev presided. The place was packed. As soon as I appeared in the entrance a group of young cadets bore down on me and, hoisting me upon their shoulders, carried me down the length of the aisle and onto the platform, while great waves of cheers rolled down from the jammed balconies and up from the pit. Zinoviev made a great show, greeting me demonstratively on the stage. The Russians are master showmen.
From then on the days of my official visit to Petrograd were a progress of processions and speeches and applause and reviews and banquets. The next day marked my visit to the naval base at Kronstadt. Early in the morning an aviator's fur-lined leather coat and cap and gloves—fit to protect one against the bitterest Siberian blizzard—were brought to my hotel. I breakfasted and togged myself out. Soon afterward a young Red commander called for me in an automobile and we drove to the Petrograd air field. Besides the naval and air officials and photographers, there was quite a crowd gatheredto see me take off. I posed for the photographers with some of the officers and sailors, with the pilot, and also with McManus, of the British Communist Party, who had come to Petrograd for the anniversary.
Then I climbed up into the airplane. The man who had once save Lenin's life (so I was informed) fixed me in place, and the plane sped over the vast field of snow and up into the air. A snowstorm was raging, but I was perfectly protected and felt no fear. Only I could not see anything. The pilot missed his bearings and got a little lost in the storm and we had to come down far from our landing place. The pilot and I got out of the plane and started to walk toward the naval base. The blizzard blew hard and we could see nothing. But it was a fine exhilarating tramp, and, warm in my great boots and fur clothes, I enjoyed the sensation of thinking I was doing a little Arctic stunt.
At last an automobile came rolling over the hard snow and took us to our landing place. They had been scouting for us, knowing that something must have happened when we did not arrive. At the landing place I found that a crack squad of sailors, fine handsome fellows, had been waiting for us for hours in the blizzard. They were not rigged out, like myself and the pilot, against the bad weather, and were cold. For the life of me I couldn't understand why a squad of men should have been detailed to await my arrival at the air base, when I was no kind of official. And I had been told that my visit was an informal thing. Right there I remembered my experience in the Pennsylvania railroad service—how often, in the cold steel car out on the track, our crew waited for hours in biting zero weather until the late train arrived and steamed us out. And sometimes we were frost-bitten.
My interpreter said that the sailors were expecting a speech. So I said that although I anticipated with joy my visit among them in Kronstadt, I felt sorry that it had been necessary for them to wait for me all those hours in the cold. All the official routine ceremonials were extremely tiresome to me. Even though they were the expression of the workers' and peasants' united authority and were therefore simplified, they were nevertheless tedious. I can work up no enthusiasm for official ritual, however necessary, whether it be red or pink or black or white. In Russia I was alertly aware that it was something different from anything that ever was, that officially it was the highest privilege I could have in the world, to be shown the inside working of the greatest social experiment in the history of civilization. I was fired and uplifted by the thundering mass movement of the people, their boisterous surging forward, with their heads held high, their arms outstretched in an eager quest for more light, more air, more space, more glory, more nourishment and comfort for the millions of the masses. But the bureaucratic control left me unmoved. Yet I was conscious that it was the axis of the mighty moving energy of the people, that without it their movement would be futile.
So I was actually in Kronstadt, the first fortress fired by the signal of the revolution. The features of the fort were covered up with snow, but the splendid men holding it showed me the inside of battleships and submarines, the loading of big guns, and I saw also the educational classes, Communist meetings, recreation halls with motion pictures and feats of gymnastics and dancing, the new revolutionary spirit animating men and officers alike, the simple dignified discipline of rank and precedence, organization and work.
After a strenuous day, that night I slept soundly on aflagship. The next day I motored back to Petrograd. In the afternoon I went to tea with Korney Chukovsky and his sympathetic wife. Chukovsky was a popular liberal journalist and author of the old régime, and was now an equally popular fellow-traveler with the new. He was a radical liberal in his political opinions, but consistently non-political in his writings. Under the old régime he was a contributor to the Moscow newspaper,Russky Slovo, which had a circulation of over a million. He had recently finished a book for children, calledCrocodile, which became a best-seller. Chukovsky was a member of a Russian intellectual mission to the Allied capitals, in 1916, I think. He exhibited a large souvenir book of interesting autographs of famous personages: Asquith, Lloyd George, Balfour, Churchill, Poincaré, Millerand, Anatole France, Kipling, H.G. Wells, and many more. I added mine. Chukovsky showed me also a couple of letters from Lenin to Gorky, which he prized highly, and some newspaper cuttings of a critical duel between him and Trotsky over the evaluation of the work of the poet Alexander Blok, who wrote the tragic poem, "The Twelve." This poem evoked in me something of the spiritual agony of "The Hound of Heaven." Chukovsky gave me the gist of the controversy between him and Trotsky. Chukovsky had done a fine literary critique of Blok. Trotsky had overemphasized an inoffensive literary reference to the revolution to score a political point. I thought that Chukovsky was right and Trotsky was wrong. Chukovsky went with me to the House of the Intellectuals and introduced me to some of the writers and artists. I remember the names of Metchnikov, son of the scientist and disciple of Pasteur, and the Princess X, who was rich before the revolution, but expropriated now and living with artistswhom she had befriended during the salad days of the bourgeoisie.
The next day was fine and clear as crystal. And to make up for what I had missed when we flew to Kronstadt, the aviator came and took me up for an hour's ride over Petrograd and suburbs. I ended that trip to Petrograd with affectionate farewells from the naval schools. One of them elected me an honorary officer. There, too, I talked with a very interesting officer. He was a graduate of an exclusive Czarist academy, young, exceeding handsome, with very sensitive features. We spoke with difficulty in a kind of lingua franca orpetit-negre, to be more precise. He informed me that he had an American wife and invited me to dinner with them. I said it might be an embarrassing matter to his wife, that he should first ask her. He said she knew all about me and had suggested the invitation.
I wondered about this American wife of the Russian officer. I had been warned to beware of English-speaking bourgeois persons, who might try to pump things out of me. But as I possessed no secrets of any kind and as I desired to experience all the sensations of the new order struggling to extricate itself from the old, I never turned aside from anything or anybody that might possibly add something to the fulness of my exciting adventure.
I had already met some extraordinary people of the old régime. Besides the Russians, I had encountered a most wonderful Englishwoman, who reminded me of a character out of H.G. Wells'sFood of The Gods. This woman had been an English governess in Russia under the old régime and had married a second-or third-class Russian official. She had a nice apartment in Petrograd. Her beautiful daughter was a clerk in one of the Soviet departments, and sometimes themother herself was requisitioned as an interpreter. In her sitting room there was a photograph of the late Czar and Czarina, with the Czarina smudged out. It was a bold thing to have the photograph of the Czar in your sitting room in 1922. But she was an Englishwoman first, even though she had been married to a Russian and was now a Soviet citizen. She said to me: "I preserve the photograph of the Czar because he is the cousin of King George. He was a good man, but his wife was a bad German woman." Also she had the picture of King George alongside that of Lenin on another wall. "They are the two big men in the world," she said to me, "and I make my curtsy to them every morning: the ruler of England, my native land, and the ruler of Russia, my adopted country."
She was very proud and pleased with my notorious self because I was born a British subject and had lived in London. She didn't even mind when I said that I did not like the English people as a whole, but admired some individuals. Indeed, she liked it, because that also was her feeling. I spent a long evening in her house and ate very English roast beef and plum pudding. Perhaps too much. For later it was necessary for me to go to the w. c. There I was amazed to see, placed prominently upon the wall, a hand-printed card bearing the motto: "Cleanliness is next to Godliness." When I returned to the sitting room I complimented her on her nice old English calligraphy, but said that I wondered why she had put up the notice in English, when most of her visitors must be Russians, who did not know the English language. She said, "When the Russians don't understand, they will ask, because they are a curious people. I have to have these English hints around to remind them that we are a superior people."
Eliminating my military aide from Moscow and my officer-interpreter of the Baltic fleet, I went alone to the officer's apartment. His American wife turned out to be a Latin-American. She was unmistakably an octoroon. She was pretty, and, if she had been taller, would have been a great beauty. Nevertheless she had had a pretty time under the old régime and had been celebrated as an exotic flower in smart and expensive bohemian circles. When the revolution overwhelmed the Capital, this exotic creature of the smart set married the young officer who had worshipped her in the hectic pre-revolutionary period, and who had decided, when the revolution came, to serve under the Bolsheviks.
She spoke nice English. Also, she had prepared a good dinner, with that Russian pink cold soup that isn't so good to look at, but most excellent to taste, caviar, ham, some sort of boiled meat, and Caucasian wine. She talked a lot about herself and her husband and their son. His son, really, by a first marriage. He was a lad going to high school, and they were worried about him. They said that the boy would never have a chance under the Bolshevik régime. And the officer said that he himself was having only half a chance, that he was absolutely loyal to the Communists, because he was convinced that they were in Russia to stay and that nothing now could take the power away from them. But the Communists did not trust him because he had been a former Czarist officer. They were training the proletarian youths to become officers, and as soon as the proletarian cadets were trained, the old officers would be superseded. I asked him if he were certain that the Czarist officers who had come over wholeheartedly to the revolution would really be kicked out of their positions when the young proletarian officers were trained to take their place. He said that that was positively true, for it was a Communist policy which had been statedpublicly. I said that I was going to find out, without quoting him. He said that I might.
However, I did not mention the subject right away to anyone in Petrograd. After ten fleeting days with the glorious Red fleet, seeing and hearing all and believing that all was a dream, I returned to Moscow for the third time. Only when I came back to Petrograd a month later and for the last time, to get a boat for Germany, did I speak about the officer's case to my friend the Red officer, member of the Communist Party and of the Petrograd Soviet. A young man he was, small, quiet, ordinary-looking and so unobtrustive that you wouldn't imagine his importance in the Red navy and in the higher Communist councils unless you could appreciate the power of his clear, cold blue and all-seeing eyes. I was interested in what the officer had said because a high-school teacher in Moscow had said the same thing to me, as had also a lady of the old régime who was acting as interpreter when I visited one of the Petrograd courts during a trial.
I wanted to ascertain whether the members of the defeated bourgeoisie who were working for the Soviets could not be guaranteed the security of their jobs if they were loyal to the Soviets. For it seemed to me that if they felt their positions were insecure and that there was no future for their children under the new régime, they naturally would sabotage the Soviets. The Red officer confirmed the statement of the former Czarist officer: that the bourgeois officers would be superseded as soon as the proletarian cadets could be trained to take their place. I said I thought such a procedure unfair, and that it would make the bourgeois workers enemies of the Soviet system instead of friends, and force them into sabotage. The Red commander said that the Communist controllers were alert to detect any tendency toward sabotageon the part of bourgeois employees of the Soviets, and he accused me of bourgeois sentimentality.
I said that if he had said intellectual sentimentality, he might have been perhaps right, but that I couldn't have the sentiments of a class I was not born into or educated with. I did not think that there was any such thing as intellectual equality, I told him, and that radicals had a sentimental way of confusing social with intellectual equality. I said further, that I did not believe that talent could spring up easily out of a people, like grass under one's feet.
The officer asked who had been talking to me about the matter. I said that nobody in particular, but different persons in Moscow and Petrograd had spoken of it. Which was strictly true. There was a sequel. A year later I was in Paris one afternoon, waiting to cross from the Place de l'Opéra to the Café de la Paix, when I was suddenly touched on the shoulder. I turned and found myself face to face with the officer. We went to the café for a drink. The officer had arrived in France with other officers to recover some Czarist ships which the French government held somewhere down on the North African coast. We reminisced about the splendid Red days we had enjoyed together in Petrograd and Moscow. We talked about our friends of the foreign office and the Comintern. I had already met some of them in Berlin and Paris. And he said, "Do you remember that officer you had dinner with in Petrograd?"
"Yes," I said, "I remember, but I wasn't aware that you knew about my having dinner with him."
"Well, he is sitting in prison now."
"What for?" I asked.
"Sabotage."
When I returned from Petrograd to Moscow I told Sen Katayama that I wanted to go home. It was the beginning of April. Sen Katayama said that, as an unofficial delegate, I would be given my return fare. He was very pleased with my success and the part he had played in making it possible. He said: "I welcome all the Japanese and Chinese who come here. Some are not Communists, but I see that they are treated right, for I want to make them all Communists." He said it had been decided that I should not go back by way of Poland, since some of the delegates had had trouble in passing through. A Japanese had been put in prison and lost all his papers. It was considered better for me to go as I had come, by boat.
I bade my friends goodbye and returned to Petrograd. But the harbor was ice-locked and I had to wait six weeks before a boat could sail. I was put up in the house of the former Grand Duke Alexander, who was a patron of arts. I had the Duke's own bedroom and study, and his valet to wait on me. The valet was a nice old fellow, but he was like a ghost wandering through the palace. He lived entirely in the past and spoke of the sumptuous days in Berlin and Paris with the Grand Duke. He spoke fluently in French and English. He was shocked at the state of my wardrobe. The only thing in it that he thought fitting for a Grand Duke's closet was a fine pair of boots which had been given to me by Eugen Boissevain.
I did not like the palace rooms, especially the study. It reminded me of a cathedral altar. All the walls were rococo, carved and painted in inharmonious brick red. But the cadet who had made himself my orderly thought the rooms very grand. The cadet wanted to do everything, so I dispensed with the valet's services, but tipped him every week.
I got to know Petrograd thoroughly during those weeks. I was shown all the works, among them the great Putilov iron and steel plant and the rubber factory. I liked the visits, but I thought it must have been rather bothersome to the managers of factories who were always pestered by having to take visitors over the plants. I went down into the dungeon of the prison of Sts. Peter and Paul to see the cell in which Prince Kropotkin had been confined. I visited the Department of Nationalities, and Rayeva, the secretary, explained the status of the minority peoples under the Soviets. Also I visited the Department of Woman's Work at the Smolny Institute, where Nicolayeva, the secretary, told me all about the new regulations concerning marriage and divorce and joint individual property, and how the factory workers were cared for during the period of pregnancy and childbirth. She sent me to a meeting of enthusiastic women workers, who passed a resolution asking that a group of colored working girls visit Russia.
May Day in Petrograd was a mighty celebration of workers and soldiers and sailors. Never before or since have I seen such a demonstration. Half-empty Petrograd was filled with the shouting of millions who peopled the streets, marching and singing and holding high their red banners of hope. For hours I stood with Zinoviev and other Petrograd leaders in the reviewing stand in the Uritsky Square. And the demonstration so tremendously swept me along that after attending the People's Theater that night, I could not sleep. I sat down at the table of the Grand Duke Vladimir Alexander, looking out on the Neva, with the gorgeous silver of the beautiful white night of Petrograd shining upon its face, and wrote until dawn. I was happy. Petrograd had pulled a poem out of me.
The poem was published in the PetrogradPravdaand reprinted all over Russia. It was the last thing I wrote in Russia. I was overwhelmed with praise. The praise of the Communists was expected. I was their guest. But I was gratified most by the praise of the Petrograd literati. For they were a proud lot, cold or passive to the revolution. The Russian translator of Walt Whitman said that I had composed a classic. But they had it in translation. I think it should be exhibited here in the original.
PETROGRAD: MAY DAY, 1923
The Neva moves majestically on,The sun-rays playing on her breast at seven,From her blue bosom all winter's snow-slabs gone.Now ripples curl where yesterday lay rivenGreat silver oblongs chiselled by the handOf Spring that bellies through Earth's happy womb,To glad and flower the long, long pregnant land!Where yesternight a veil of winter gloomShrouded the city's splendid face,—todayAll life rejoices for the First of May.The Nevsky glows ablaze with regal Red,Symbolic of the triumph and the ruleOf the new Power now lifting high its headAbove the place where once a sceptered foolWas mounted by the plunderers of menTo awe the victims while they schemed and robbed.The marchers shout again! again!! again!!!The stones, where once the hearts of martyrs sobbedTheir blood, are sweet unto their feet today,In celebration of the First of May.Cities are symbols of man's upward reach,Man drawing near to man in close commune,And mighty cities mighty lessons teachOf man's decay or progress, late or soon,And many an iron-towered Babylon,Beneath the quiet golden breath of TimeHas vanished like the snow under the sun,Leaving no single mark in stone or rhymeTo flame the lifted heart of man today,As Petrograd upon the First of May.Oh many a thoughtful romance-seeking boy,Slow-fingering the leaves of ancient glory,Is stirred to rapture by the tales of Troy,And each invigorate, vein-tingling storyOf Egypt and of Athens and of Rome,Where slaves long toiled for knights and kings reap.But in the years, the wondrous years to come,The heart of youth in every land will leapFor Russia that first made national the day—Theembattled workers' day—The First of May.Jerusalem is fading from men's mind,And sacred cities holding men in thrall,Are crumbling in the new thought of mankind—Thepagan day, the holy day for all!Oh, Petrograd, oh proud triumphant city,The gateway to the strange, awakening East,Where warrior-workers wrestled without pityAgainst the power of magnate, monarch, priest—World Fort of Struggle, hold from day to dayThe flaming standards of the First of May!
XX
Regarding Radical Criticism
Thusended my adventure in Russia. This detailed account should clear up any "mystery" that is entertained about my going and remaining there. I left Russia with one determination and one objective: to write. I was not received in Russia as a politician, but primarily as a Negro poet. And the tremendous reception was a great inspiration and urge to write more. I often felt in Russia that I was honored as a poet altogether out of proportion to my actual performance. And thus I was fired with the desire to accomplish the utmost.
Excepting for the handicap of lack of money, there was nothing to side-track me from my purpose. I had no radical party affiliations, and there was no reason why I should consider myself under any special obligations to the Communists. I had not committed myself to anything. I had remained a free agent.
But recently in an issue ofThe New Masses, the literary organ of the American Communists, I was singled out for a special attack in an article about Negro novelists. The article, under the guise of a critique, was merely a piece of personal spite and slander.
I take these extracts from that article: (1) I had "written an indignant poem, attacking lynching, wholly lacking in working-class content." (2) I "disappeared mysteriously to the Soviet Union and had retired exhausted to the sidewalk cafésof Montmartre." (3) "The retired radical had grown fat and ill and indifferent in Paris."
Against the Communist attack my poem still remains my strong defense:
IF WE MUST DIE
If we must die, let it not be like hogsHunted and penned in an inglorious spot,While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,Making their mock at our accursed lot.If we must die, Oh let us nobly die,So that our precious blood may not be shedIn vain; then even the monsters we defyShall be constrained to honor us though dead!Oh, kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!What though before us lies the open grave?Like men we'll face the murderous cowardly pack,Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
First published in Max Eastman's magazineThe Liberator, the poem was reprinted in every Negro publication of any consequence. It forced its way into the Negro pulpit (a most interesting phenomenon for this black heretic). Ministers ended their sermons with it, and the congregations responded, Amen. It was repeated in Negro clubs and Negro schools and at Negro mass meetings. To thousands of Negroes who are not trained to appreciate poetry, "If We Must Die" makes me a poet. I myself was amazed at the general sentiment for the poem. For I am so intensely subjective as a poet, thatI was not aware, at the moment of writing, that I was transformed into a medium to express a mass sentiment.
The critic also asserted that my novel,Home to Harlem, had no "class-conscious action." When Jake inHome to Harlemrefused to scab, wasn't that class-conscious? And when he refused to pimp, didn't he demonstrate a high sense of social propriety? Perhaps a higher sense than many of us critical scribblers.
I did not come to the knowing of Negro workers in an academic way, by talking to black crowds at meetings, nor in a bohemian way, by talking about them in cafés. I knew the unskilled Negro worker of the city by working with him as a porter and longshoreman and as waiter on the railroad. I lived in the same quarters and we drank and caroused together in bars and at rent parties. So when I came to write about the low-down Negro, I did not have to compose him from an outside view. Nor did I have to write a pseudo-romantic account, as do bourgeois persons who become working-class for awhile and work in shops and factories to get material for writing dull books about workers, whose inner lives are closed to them.
I created my Negro characters without sandpaper and varnish. If the Communists can create a Negro casual better than Jake inHome to Harlem—a man who works, lives and loves lustily and even thinks a little for himself, why in the infernal regions don't they?
Jake leaves Europe for America and Harlem and swings through the Black Belt with a clean manly stride. The Communist critic states that the story of Jake was autobiographical, "dilating upon my own love life." The peeping critic seems to know more about my love life than I do myself. Perhaps it is necessary to inform him that I have not lived withoutsome experience. And I have never wanted to lie about life, like the preaching black prudes wrapped up in the borrowed robes of hypocritical white respectability. I am entirely un-obsessed by sex. I am not an imitator of Anglo-Saxon prudery in writing. I haven't arrived at that high degree of civilized culture where I can make a success of producing writing carefully divorced from reality. Yet I couldn't indulge in such self-flattery as to claim Jake inHome to Harlemas a portrait of myself. My damned white education has robbed me of much of the primitive vitality, the pure stamina, the simple unswaggering strength of the Jakes of the Negro race.
The critic declares that I "disappeared mysteriously to the Soviet Union and had retired exhausted to the sidewalk cafés of Montmartre." The statement is untrue, but perhaps truth is not vital to the new criticism that they say must replace the old.
Perhaps the Communist critic, who may be closer to the sources of information than others, may have some inside knowledge of just what exhausted me in Soviet Russia. Of course, I had a hell-raising good time in Russia. I was constantly occupied in visiting factories and all kinds of institutions, making speeches and writing, besides enjoying the relaxation of cabarets and parties. Perhaps I was fatigued, as any person is likely to be after a passionate spell of any great thing. But as for my being exhausted—hell! It is fifteen years since then, and I am still going strong, if the head-in-the-butt Communist critic doesn't know. Exhausted indeed!
I came out of Russia with my head on my shoulders and my pen in my pocket and determined to write at all costs, so long as I had a piece of bread to bite and a room in which I could think and scribble. And in ten years I wrote five books and many poems. Perhaps too many!
I never thought there was anything worth while for me in the bohemian glamor of Montparnasse. "The sidewalk cafés of Montmartre" held no special attraction for me. Attractive as Paris is, I have never stayed there for a considerable length of time. The longest period was over three months, when I was in a hospital. Montmartre I visited when I was invited by generous Americans who had money to treat themselves and their friends to a hectic time. The Montmartre of the cabarets and music halls never excited me. It is so obviously a place where the very formal French allow foreigners who can pay to cut up informally. It has no character of its own. Paris, away from Montmartre and Montparnasse, seemed to me to be the perfect city of modern civilization. It was the only city I knew which provided quiet and comfortable clubs in the form of cafés for all of its citizens of every class. I appreciated, but was not specially enamored of Paris, perhaps because I have never had the leisure necessary to make an excellent clubman. If I had to live in France, I would prefer life among the fisherfolk of Douarnenez, or in the city of Strassburg, or in sinister Marseilles, or any of the coast towns of the department of the Var.
The Communist critic further states that I "had grown fat, and ill, and indifferent in Paris...." I regret that here I am obliged to become clinical. But the clinic is an important department of life, and the fact about it is that I gotwellinstead ofillin Paris.
In 1922 I left America in perfect health and more completely whole than the day on which I was born. My first accident of illness occurred in Russia. Sanitary conditions were not ideal in Petrograd and Moscow in 1922. No intelligent person expected them to be after eight years of unremitting international war, revolution and civil war. I remember that every time I received my linen from the laundry I invariably found lice in it. The linen itself was very clean. But the revolution, sweeping away the privileged classes, also had carried along most of their servants. And of the peasants fresh from the country who replaced them, many were neither competent nor clean.
It was very near the end of my visit that I experienced a sort of deadness in my left side and once my face gradually became puffed up like an enormous chocolate soufflé. I have photographs in my possession, taken in Moscow, which authenticate my condition at the time. There was also an American acquaintance who was unable to turn his head; it was cocked stiff to one side like a macabre caricature, as if it were skewered to his shoulder. I consulted a doctor. He thought the climate had affected me and advised me to get heavy woolen underwear. Later, in Petrograd, I became quite ill and had a tooth extracted for the first time in my life, under the most painful conditions.
I arrived in Germany in the early summer of 1923. Three months spent there were an interval of intermittent fevers and headaches. It was hard labor to concentrate upon a series of articles about Russia for a Negro magazine. In the late fall I arrived in Paris. I consulted a French specialist, who advised me to enter a hospital immediately. While I was convalescing in the hospital I wrote this poem, "The Desolate City." The poem was largely symbolic: a composite evocation of the clinic, my environment, condition and mood.
THE DESOLATE CITY
My spirit is a pestilential city,With misery triumphant everywhere,Glutted with baffled hopes and human pity.Strange agonies make quiet lodgement there:Its sewers bursting ooze up from belowAnd spread their loathsome substance through its lanes,Flooding all areas with their evil flowAnd blocking all the motions of its veins:Its life is sealed to love or hope or pity,My spirit is a pestilential city.Above its walls the air is heavy-wet,Brooding in fever mood and hanging thickRound empty tower and broken minaret,Settling upon the tree tops stricken sickAnd withered under its contagious breath.Their leaves are shrivelled silver, parched decay,Like wilting creepers trailing underneathThe chalky yellow of a tropic way.Round crumbling tower and leaning minaret,The air hangs fever-filled and heavy-wet.And all its many fountains no more spurt;Within the damned-up tubes they tide and foam,Around the drifted sludge and silted dirt,And weep against the soft and liquid loam.And so the city's ways are washed no more,All is neglected and decayed within,Clean waters beat against its high-walled shoreIn furious force, but cannot enter in:The suffocated fountains cannot spurt,They foam and rage against the silted dirt.Beneath the ebon gloom of mounting rocksThe little pools lie poisonously still,And birds come to the edge in forlorn flocks,And utter sudden, plaintive notes and shrill,Pecking at strangely gray-green substances;But never do they dip their bills and drink.They twitter, sad beneath the mournful trees,And fretfully flit to and from the brink,In little gray-brown, green-and-purple flocks,Beneath the jet-gloom of the mounting rocks.And green-eyed moths of curious design,With gold-black wings and rarely silver-dotted,On nests of flowers among those rocks recline,Bold, burning blossoms, strangely leopard-spotted,But breathing deadly poison from their lips.And every lovely moth that wanders by,And of the blossoms fatal nectar sips,Is doomed to drooping stupor, there to die;All green-eyed moths of curious designThat on the fiercely-burning blooms recline.Oh cold as death is all the loveliness,That breathes out of the strangeness of the scene,And sickening like a skeleton's caress,Of clammy clinging fingers, long and lean.Above it float a host of yellow flies,Circling in changeless motion in their place,That came down snow-thick from the freighted skies,Swarming across the gluey floor of space:Oh cold as death is all the loveliness,And sickening like a skeleton's caress.There was a time, when, happy with the birds,The little children clapped their hands and laughed;And midst the clouds the glad winds heard their wordsAnd blew down all the merry ways to waftThe music through the scented fields of flowers.Oh sweet were children's voices in those days,Before the fall of pestilential showers,That drove them forth far from the city's ways:Now never, nevermore their silver wordsWill mingle with the golden of the birds.Gone, gone forever the familiar formsTo which the city once so dearly clung,Blown worlds beyond by the destroying stormsAnd lost away like lovely songs unsung.Yet life still lingers, questioningly strange,Timid and quivering, naked and alone,Against the cycle of disruptive change,Though all the fond familiar forms are gone,Forever gone, the fond familiar forms;Blown worlds beyond by the destroying storms.
More than three years after "The Desolate City" was written, it was published for the first time in the Negro magazine,Opportunity. But by then I was a stout black animal, splashing and floating in the blue Mediterranean. The French specialist had said: "You are young, with a very wonderful constitution, and you will recover all right if you will live quietly and carefully away from the temptations of the big cities." I certainly did follow that good advice.
PART FIVE
THE CYNICAL CONTINENT
XXI
Berlin and Paris
Atlast the soft breath of spring warmed and conquered the great harbor of frozen ice and our ship cleaved through. The first of June we arrived in Hamburg. Nothing here of the fortress-like austerity of Petrograd. Hamburg was big and full and busy with the business of free unhampered commerce. Flocks of ships were loading and unloading their rich cargoes. Sailors reeled through the low-down streets in drunken irresponsibility, and there were many Negroes showing their white teeth against all that white wealth.
I spent three days among the docks and the Negroes of different nationalities and languages and then entrained for Berlin. Startlingly changed was the spirit of Berlin after an interval of nine months. In the fall of 1922 a dollar was worth about a thousand marks. There appeared to be plenty of money in circulation among all classes, and lots of new and stylish clothes were in evidence. Berlin was by a long way brisker and brighter than London. I had a comfortable room with a middle-class family. Said the head to me: "The workers are better off than we. We have lost three-quarters of our investments and incomes. But the workers are well paid and can buy new clothes, while we of the middle class must wear the old. And the workers have money to go to the theaters; they ride second-class in the trains, and we must ride third."
But now all was changed. Premier Poincaré had seized the Ruhr early in 1923 and the mark had skyrocketed. I cannoteven recall how many thousands I got for my dollar when I returned to Berlin in the summer of 1923. For every minute the dollar became dearer and dearer. But this fact sticks in my skull: From New York, Eugen Boissevain cabled me twenty-five dollars to Berlin in October, 1922. I was to receive payment (I don't know why) in marks. But just before the amount arrived, I was obliged to leave Berlin for Russia. When I returned to Berlin in June, 1923, my twenty-five dollars was worth only twenty-five cents.
Speculation in dollars and pounds and francs and other foreign moneys was mad. The corners of the principal streets were dotted with money-changing kiosks. Many who possessed foreign money developed a close-fisted psychosis. They didn't want to change their bills into marks until obliged to. And when they had to, it was with regret, for the next minute the dollar would be worth a few marks more. A German Communist friend told me about a certain Anglo-American comrade who would delay paying his bills even though long overdue until the dollar climbed to a new high. By that method he paid about one-half only of the cost of what he actually owed. Said the German Communist bitterly: "Even the foreign comrades are exploiting the German people." Nearly everybody was doing it. I remember a so-called radical publisher who had worked out a profitable plan of printing American books in Germany, because labor and material there were so cheap, and exporting them to sell in America.
My Japanese friend, Sen Katayama, had warned me against returning to Germany. He thought I would be molested because for a couple of years the press of Europe and America had been carrying atrocity stories about the doings of the French black soldiers on the Rhine. But I said I would go back to Germany. Personally, I had not sensed any feelingagainst me as a Negro in the fall of 1923 because of the black troops on the Rhine. Everywhere I had been treated much better and with altogether more consideration than in America and England. Often when I stepped into a café there were friendly greetings—"Schwartz' Mohr"—and free drinks. And now I felt that if Negroes were hated and mistreated by the Germans because of the black troops on the Rhine, I wanted to authenticate the changed sentiment for myself. I did not want to report by hearsay that the Germans were mistreating Negroes. And that was why I went from the free port of Hamburg to Berlin, instead of going directly to Paris.