Louise Bryant and Carmina did not like each other. The three of us were spending a convivial evening together and, feeling gallant, I tried to find something to praise in Louise's appearance. She had been to a hairdresser's that afternoon and her neatly shingled hair was gleaming black. I said, "Louise, your hair is very nice tonight." Louise smiled her appreciation. But Carmina said, in a loud whisper, "Can't you see it's dyed?" A blighting frost descended on the party.
It was a sweet relief to give up for awhile discussing problems of race and art for an atmosphere of pure sensuality and amorous intrigue. Carmina also had been fed up withtoo much race in the upper circles of Harlem, which was why she had fled to Paris. One night I was drunk and maudlin in Montparnasse and Louise Bryant shrieked at me in high intoxicated accents, shaking her forefinger at me, "Go away and write another book. Go home to Harlem or back to Africa, but leave Paris. Get a grip on yourself." She looked like the picture of an old emaciated witch, and her forefinger was like a broomstick. Perhaps it was her better unconscious self warning me, for she also could not get a grip on herself and get away from Paris.
I heeded the warning. I started off for Africa. But I lingered a long time in Spain. The weeks turned into months. From Madrid I went to Andalusia and visited Cordova and Granada again, then went back to Barcelona. A French radical friend wrote chidingly about my preference for Spain, so medieval and religion-ridden. I wrote him that I expected radical changes in medieval Spain sooner than in nationalistic France. That was no prophecy. The thing was in the air; students mentioned it to you on the café terraces; waiters spoke of it in the pensions and restaurants; chauffeurs spoke of their comrades murdered in Morocco by King Alfonso; bank clerks said a change was coming soon, and even guides had something to say. That was in the winter of 1929-30. I was in Spain early in 1930 when the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera collapsed. In the spring of 1931 I was in Spanish Morocco when King Alfonso abdicated, and in Tetuán I witnessed a wonderful demonstration of amity and fraternity between the native Moorish and civilian Spanish populations. There in Africa I hankered after Spain again and indited these three sonnets for Barcelona:
BARCELONA
1
In Barcelona town they dance the nightsAlong the streets. The folk, erecting standsUpon the people's pavements, come togetherFrom pueblo, barrio, in families,Lured by the lilting playing of the bands,Rejoicing in the balmy summer weather,In spreading rings they weave fine fantasiesLike rare mosaics of many-colored lights.Kindled, it glows, the magical Sardana,And sweeps the city in a glorious blaze.The garrison, the sailors from the ships,The workers join and block the city's ways,Ripe laughter ringing from intriguing lips,Crescending like a wonderful hosanna.
2
Oh admirable city from every range!Whether I stand upon your natural towers,—With your blue carpet spreading to their feet,Its patterns undulate between the bars,—Watching until the tender twilight hours,Its motion cradling soft a silver fleet;Or far descend from underneath the stars,Down—to your bottoms sinister and strange:The nights eccentric of the Barrio Chino,The creatures of the shadows of the walls,Gray like the savage caricatures of Goya,The chulos of the abysmal dancing halls,And, in the garish lights of La Criolla,The feminine flamenco of El Niño.
3
Oh Barcelona, queen of Europe's cities,From dulcet thoughts of you my guts are twistedWith bitter pain of longing for your sights,And for your hills, your picturesque glory singing,My feet are mutinous, mine eyes are misted.Upon my happy thoughts your harbor lightsAre shimmering like bells melodious ringingWith sweet cadenzas of flamenco ditties.I see your movement flashing like a knife,Reeling my senses, drunk upon the huesOf motion, the eternal rainbow wheel,Your passion smouldering like a lighted fuse,But more than all sensations oh, I feelYour color flaming in the dance of life.
I was ready to begin another book, and a Moorish friend had put his house in Fez at my disposal. But as soon as I landed in Fez, toward the end of 1930, the French police pounced upon me. I had arrived there a few days before the official visit of President Domergue of France. The police declared I should leave Fez immediately. They said British authorities had furnished proof that I was a political agent; that I had carried on propaganda among the British military forces and also visited Soviet Russia. I went to the British Consulate for further information. There I was told that they possessed no information about me, but that I must obey thelocal authority. They wanted to send me back to Europe. I refused to go. I said I would leave Fez if I were forced to, but I was determined to remain awhile in Africa. So I went to Casablanca and from there to Tangier.
Months later a merchant from Fez came to Tangier and hinted why I had been obliged to leave. He said that Moroccan custom permitted anyone who had a serious grievance to complain to the sultan in person when he made an official visit to a city. And as Morocco was a protectorate of France, any person who desired could present his complaint to the sultan of France during his official visit. But the police had a system of banishing real malcontents for a short period during the sultan's visit. The police had feared that I might seize an opportunity to complain to the French sultan, President Domergue, about the unjust treatment I received during my first visit to Fez! And so they had ordered me to leave.
In Tangier I rented a Dar Hassani (native house) and went to work onGingertown, a book of short stories. Mail for me had accumulated in Paris. When it arrived there was a little pile of letters from Carmina. She chided me for deserting her and said that she, too, wanted to go to Africa; that she was sick of Europe and growing worse. She had met all the leading bohemians, writers and artists, more than I ever met. She was a frequent visitor to the Rue Fleurus and was hooked up with one of Gertrude Stein's young men. But she was disgusted with him; he was just a poor white mouse, she said. She was sick of it all and wanted to come to me.
Come to me! I was exceeding flattered, forgetting all about "male conceit." The idea of Carmina leaving her white man for me was tantalizing. She had introduced him to me in Paris, and he had said, "J'ai le béguin pour toi." I said,"Merci, mais je n'ai pas." His bloodless white skin was nauseating. He had no color.
Carmina had been traveling around a lot herself and confided to me that she was keeping a diary of herrandonnée. She thought I might help her to publish it.
And so Carmina came to Morocco. It was just at the commencement ofl'Aïd El Kebir(the Big Feast), when the Moroccans cut the throats of thousands of lambs and the air is filled with their plaintive bleating and the crooked streets are running with their blood. We went to live in my little native house at that time of the Great Sacrifice. In the beginning it was nice, being together and working together. People liked Carmina. She was pretty. The Spanish liked the name Carmina because it had a little of Carmen in it. And the Moors liked Mina because it was a native name derived from the lovely sweet flower, Jasmine, which in Morocco is Yasmina, a name often given to Negresses and Mulattresses. And I liked her being so much admired.
I showed Carmina how to make Moroccan tea with mint and other flavorful shrubs. And a native woman friend cooked us big bowls ofcous-cousin olive oil with the tenderest pieces of lamb and chicken. The Aframerican honeymoon in Africa was quite happy, until Carmina announced that she desired to marry me. But I couldn't because I wasn't divorced and I expected some day to return to America.
And now there was no peace between us. Carmina insisted she had to marry, to satisfy her mother, who was a Christian church-loving woman. In anger I said indiscreetly: "Why didn't you marry your white man in Paris." She said she would show me she could marry him. And one day she announced that her former white lover was coming to Morocco to marry her. I said I thought that that wasn't a bad idea,since she had to be married. I meant it. But my attitude turned Carmina raging. She said the right kind of man would be jealous. She was right, I suppose. But even from the angle of pure passion only I couldn't imagine myself being jealous of Carmina's white lover. And frankly I was interested in seeing her marry her white man from a social point of view. Because the story of Negroes in civilization is one of white men loving black women and giving them mulatto children, while they preferred to marry their own white women. Carmina said she was a modern woman and that if I were truly a radical and bohemian, I would not have such reactionary ideas about marriage. I asked her why she was not modern enough to live with a black man as she had lived with a white man. Also I said I was thinking in black-and-white, and that as marriage has a social value and her white man was of the better class, I'd like to see her marry him. Mixed marriages were mostly one-sided, colored men marrying white women; I'd also like to see white men marrying colored women, I told her. White men must have some social reason for not marrying the Negro women in whose flesh they find delight.
My reasoning infuriated Carmina, and our relationship became intolerable. She left me. Perhaps Carmina's white mouse had his special white fascination. I have known women who used to be afraid of mice and who in later years made pets of rats. Carmina's Nordic came, but he didn't marry. After being surfeited with loving, he left her still a spinster. I suppose it is easier for some women (like some men) to have than to hold.
I have read white writers and heard white men who romantically said that Negro women will not be faithful to white men. And there are Negro writers who write vicarioustales of colored girls ditching rich white men for black sheiks. I wonder what actual experience such colored writers have. All bunk. And my experience is not limited to just one. I know that in the West Indies the black and brown women become the faithful mistresses of Europeans.
So Carmina left me for a white skin. I don't think because it was so hot and I so cold. But the white skin is a symbol of money and power. In North Africa the native social system holds out against the European assault simply because the native women are confined in their harems. To modern thinking minds this is objectionable. Yet it is the native fanaticism in sex and religion which makes North Africa a little more wholesome than the rest of that fatal continent.
Some folk's remedy for lost love is immediately to love again. But if it is a big love, that remedy is like swilling beer to get rid of a champagne hangover. For if one has a passionate love in his system, I don't think indulging in lesser and indiscriminate loving helps to rid one of it. At least not for me. My way is to face it and live it down in hard work, sweat it out of my system. And so to get rid of the feeling and the odor of lost love, I gave up the little house and went for a few months up in the mountain fastness of Xauen in Spanish Morocco. There I finished my book,Gingertown.
When I came back I leased a little house in the country by the sea, about three miles out of Tangier. I found a little brown native girl to take care of the house. She brought her mother along, so that she could look her own people in the face without flinching. There also was a boy on a bicycle to run errands. And we all cultivated the garden and lived comfortably on twenty-five dollars each month.
One day when I was not at home, Carmina rode out there and pushed herself into the house. Both mother and daughter were very nonplussed by the American brown girl, who looked exactly like their own people, yet did not dress like them nor talk their language. Nevertheless, undaunted, they barred the way to my workroom. Carmina fired a volley of Americanisms and departed. Some days later it was reported to me in the Petit Socco of Tangier that she said she had told the woman she ought to be horsewhipped. Also, she had read a great book calledMother Indiaabout those awfully uncivilized Asiatics, and she wished somebody would write a Mother Morocco about the barbarous Africans.
Twice a week I tramped into town and spent the night in the native cafés listening to the alluring singing of Andalusian songs to the accompaniment of lute and mandolin. It was interesting to note that Spanish and French words and musical phrases were slipping into the native melodies. Some day a wonderful new music is destined to come out of North Africa.
The life was a little lazy. I did not plunge deep enough down into the native ways to touch the depths of that tribal opposition to other opposing groups which gave strength and meaning to their common existence.
So I lived on the edge of the native life, among them, but not one of them. I could have become a member by marrying into a family, as my two Senegalese friends had done. But religion was an obstacle. I did not want to take a backward step in that direction. I had interesting conversations with my friend Sidi Abdallah, a poet, who was educated in Egypt and was conceded by the natives to be the most highly educated and broad-minded Moroccan of the town. He assured me that Islam was all-embracing and could accommodate free-thinkers. It was he who started me off on the great story of Antar, informing me of the high-lights thatwere not hinted of in the Encyclopedia Britannica. He told me too that the father of free-thought was the Moslem, Averrhoës, who lived in Spain in the twelfth century; that he was the real founder of pantheism and of modern European free thought. And he told me his story, how he was imprisoned and flogged by the Caliph of Cordova, because he had said that the Caliph had no divine authority.
Sidi Abdallah was very eloquent. He resented the Christian representation of Islam as the religion of the sword. It was the religion of social equality, for all humanity, he said. It was the liberal and liberating religion, when the orthodox Christians were persecuting dissident Christians and pagans. Arabia was a land of refuge for the dissident Christians and Jews and pagans fleeing Christian persecution. "Our great Prophet dreamed of a religion of reconciliation in a world where all men would be like brothers, worshipping the same God," he said. "Take the Guinea fetishists, for example; they are primitive magicians and steeped in superstition, yet we accept and tolerate them as Moslems because they acknowledge Mohammed as the prophet."
All that Sidi Abdallah said was fine and vastly illuminating. I had a better conception of Islam after knowing him. The philosophy was all right, but the fact was that Islam, as it was practiced in North Africa when I observed it, was intolerant and fanatic. The Moors frankly admitted that perhaps Morocco was the most fanatically Islamic country in the West.
It was better, I thought, to live as I did without getting too deeply involved, and thinking too much, because I experienced more of purely physical happiness than at any time in my life.
When Carmina and I separated she circulated the reportthat I disliked white people. The natives were puzzled about that, because large numbers of them are as white as some Spanish and French. In the Riff and other mountain regions there are blue-eyed and blonde-haired types resembling Nordics, except that they are rather bronzed. But they are all remarkably free of any color obsessions or ideas of discrimination. They are Africans. The others areroumior Europeans. So they thought that Carmina meant that I did not like theroumior Europeans. And that did not displease them. They opened their doors wider for me. And I did not mind the report, for I was not particularly interested in European society in North Africa.
But I did have "white" friends (if the Moors do not object to the use of that phrase) from the white colony. They were all Americans, some of whom are interestingly friendly to colored people abroad. They delighted in flaunting their intimacy with colored persons in the face of the smug European colony. Also there were visitors from Europe.
My first and oldest French friend, Pierre Vogein, came to see me in 1932. He and his wife had come over the previous summer, but I was away in Xauen. Also Max Eastman and his wife, Eliena Krylenko, visited me the same year. And there came some of the Gertrude Stein young men. Carmina's young man had been a kind of protégé of Gertrude Stein. Carmina said she had been welcome at Gertrude Stein's at first. But when she and the young man became seriously enamored of each other, Gertrude Stein grew cold to them. Carmina said she could not understand Gertrude Stein being a novelist, for she seemed almost incapable of understanding life. She said Miss Stein saw black as black and white as white, without any shades, and so it was impossible to understand one like herself, for she was neither black nor white.She said Miss Stein did not seem to realize that chameleon was a fundamental feature of life; that serpents shed their skins and even the leopard might change its spots for a woman. But Miss Stein was reactionary: she did not believe in change.
Carmina was considered one of the most intellectual women in Harlem. Carmina said that Gertrude Stein reproached her young man, telling him that if he were seriously interested in Negroes he should have gone to Africa to hunt for an authentic one. Carmina said she did not know what more authentic than herself Miss Stein desired. For besides having some of the best white blood mingled with black in her veins, which were blue, she came from the best Negroid middle-class stock, and Gertrude Stein was also only middle-class.
An interesting couple of visitors from Paris was Monsieur Henri Cartier-Bresson, and his friend, an American colored woman. He was a Norman, and a painter and photographer. He had studied at Oxford and had a suggestion of upper-class English something about him. He had a falsetto voice which was not unpleasant, but it wasn't so pleasant to listen to it reiterating that its possessor could fancy only Negro women because he preferred the primitive. That falsetto voice just did not sound authentic and convincing to me.
And if a white man is fond of black women, why should he be declaring his liking tome! The penchant of white men for black women is nothing new. It has given the world an arresting new type of humanity, generally known as mulatto. M. Bresson had hunted all over West Africa in search of the pure primitive. And he had returned to Paris to find an American brown woman nearly twice his age and as sophisticated as Carmina, but not so pretty.
M. Bresson brought his lady over to lunch at my house. I was living alone then like an ascetic, which I found necessary to the completion of a new book. But I asked Mr. Charles Ford over to meet my guests. He came in his bathing suit, walking his way down the peninsular strip which lay between the river and the bay, and swimming over to my house. He took one look at the pair and left. The lady said, "He smells like a down-home." I said, "Yes, but he's not a cracker." Later Ford explained that his precious artistic sense of the harmony of form and rhythm had suffered too great a shock.
Our conversation turned upon M. Bresson's unwillingness to carry on with his father the business of an industrialist. M. Bresson's colored lady thought that he would be more interesting as a business man than as a modern photographer. She said he was not so artistic as he was plain lazy; that he was so lazy he wouldn't even pick up his pajamas from the floor.
I said that there at the head of Africa in Morocco, hard by the ancient civilized Mediterranean, the natives did not worry about pajamas. Going to bed was an effortless thing. And I asked M. Bresson whether among the pure primitives (if there were any left) in the middle or the bottom of Africa, one had to worry about pajamas. Or if one might be satisfied with a broad banana leaf. M. Bresson was not so sure. He had returned all the way to Paris to find his pure primitive and bring her to Morocco to show me. Well, in less than a couple of years I heard of M. Bresson in Mexico with a Mexican girl. Perhaps when his protracted period of adolescence has passed he will finally finish like a cool Norman and practical Frenchman by marrying a woman of his country and his class.
I am a little tired of hearing precious bohemian white menprotesting their admiration and love for Negro women and the rest. Yet many of them are shocked at the idea of intimacy between a black man and a white woman, because of their confused ideas of erotic attraction. Perhaps I am hypercritical in detecting a false accent in their enthusiasm. But it strikes me as being neither idealistic or realistic. I know it is a different thing from the sympathy and friendship that the humane and tolerant members of one group or nation or race of people feel for the members of another. And I know it is different from that blind urge of sexual desire which compelled white men to black women during the age of black slavery in the Occident (and perhaps in Africa today), and created an interesting new type of humanity. The performance of such men was not actuated by false and puerile theories of sex. I have a certain respect for them. But these nice modern faddists—they give me a feeling of white lice crawling on black bodies.
The most interesting visitor of them all was the American writer and protégé of Gertrude Stein, Charles Henri Ford, who published a queer book of adolescence in Paris under the rather puritan title ofThe Young and Evil. Young Mr. Ford suddenly dropped in upon me one day when a group of tribesmen were killing a steer in my garden. They cooked the liver in the yard and roasted some of the meat on skewers and invited him to join us in the feast. He was like a rare lily squatting in among the bearded and bournoused natives, and he enjoyed it. When he left in the evening I gave him a chunk of meat from what had been given to me.
He had been in Italy with a Cuban girl. When they came to Madrid she found a young Spanish lover and the three of them came on to Tangier. He came to see me soon againand I invited some of the younger Moors and a few fatmahs to meet him. They all rather liked him. They said he looked wonderfully like the cinema portraits of Marlene Dietrich.
He came again and again, evidently liking my little isolated house on the river. He was likable enough, and we gave a few native parties for him. The young men brought their lutes and mandolins and sang Andalusian melodies, and the girls danced. One evening Mr. Ford came over early and excitedly told me that the young men were bringing a very beautiful fatmah—prettier than any he had seen at my place. I said I couldn't think of any pretty girl of that class whom Mr. Ford knew and I had not seen before. He said he felt certain I hadn't seen her. So we waited expectantly until the carriages arrived with the party. When the girl unveiled she turned out to be the first little one who had worked for me when I arrived in Tangier. We were both very surprised. She had lost the quaint native freshness of our earlier acquaintanceship and already she had developed like a fine and hardened cashew-nut. She was not aware that the joy-makers were bringing her to my new place. But she was not in the slightest embarrassed. She established herself as temporary hostess as well as guest and was just as charming in the rôle as she had been efficient as a little housekeeper.... Our fiesta lasted two days. The Moroccans are a magical barbaric people, if one isn't too civilized to appreciate the subtlety and beauty of their barbaresques. When at last I decided to return to America, in homage to them I indited: "A Farewell to Morocco."
Oh wistful and heartrending earth, oh landOf colors singing symphonies of life!Myself is like a stone upon my spirit,Reluctant, passing from your sunny shore.Oh native colors,Pure colors aglowWith magic light.Mysterious atmosphere whose elements,Like hands inspired by a magnetic force,Touched so caressingly my inmost chords,How strangely I was brought beneath your spell!But willinglyA captive IRemained to be.Oh friends, my friends! When Ramadan returnsAnd daily fast and feasting through the night,With chants and music honey-dripping sweets,And fatmahs shading their flamenco feet,My thoughts will wingThe waves of airTo be with you.Oh when the cannon sounds to breaks the fast,The children chorus madly their relief,And you together group to feast at last,You'll feel my hungry spirit there in your midst,Released from meA prisoner,To fly to you.And when you go beneath the orange trees,To mark and serenade the crescent growth,With droning lute and shivering mandolinAnd drop the scented blossoms in your cups!Oh make one tune,One melodyOf love for me.Keeping your happy vigil through the night,With tales and music whiling by the hours,You may recall my joy to be with you,Until the watchers passed from house to houseAnd bugle callAnd muffled drumProclaimed the day!When liquid-eyed Habeeb draws from the luteA murmur golden like a thousand bees,Embowelled in a sheltering tropic tree,With honey brimming in the honeycomb,The tuneful airWill waft the soundAcross to me.Notes soared with the dear odor of your soilAnd like its water cooling to my tongue,Haunting me always like a splendid dream,Of vistas opening to an infinite wayOf perfect loveThat angels makeIn Paradise.Habeeb, Habeeba, I may never returnAnother sacred fast to keep with you,But when your Prince of months inauguratesOur year, my thoughts will turn to Ramadan,Forgetting neverIts tokensUnforgettable.
—Mektoub.
XXIX
On Belonging to a Minority Group
Itwas in Africa that I was introduced to Nancy Cunard—an introduction by mail. Years before, when I saw her at a studio in Paris, she had been mentioned as a personage, but I had not been introduced. In Africa I received a pamphlet from Miss Cunard entitledBlack Man and White Ladyship. The interesting pamphlet gave details about the Cunard daughter establishing a friendship with a Negro musician, of which the Cunard mother had disapproved.
Miss Cunard wrote that she was making a Negro anthology to dedicate to her Negro friend, and asked me to be a contributor. I promised that I would as soon as I found it possible to take time from the novel I was writing. That started an interesting correspondence between us.
Although I considered the contents of the Nancy Cunard pamphlet of absorbing interest and worthy of publication, I did not admire the style and tone of presentation.
After some months, Miss Cunard informed me that she was traveling to New York, and from there to the West Indies, including Jamaica. She asked me if I could introduce her to anybody in Jamaica who could put her in touch with the natives. I addressed her to my eldest brother, who is well-placed somewhere between the working masses and the controlling classes of Jamaica and has an excellent knowledge of both. From Jamaica Miss Cunard wrote again that she had landed in paradise after the purgatory of New York, where she was put in the spotlight by the newspapers, when it wasdiscovered that she was residing in Harlem among the Negroes. My brother invited her to his home in the heart of the banana, chocolate, and ginger region of Jamaica, and she stayed there two weeks with her Negro secretary. Both she and her secretary wrote extolling my brother's hospitality and the warmth and kindliness of the peasants. Miss Cunard said she particularly liked my brother's face, and she sent me a snapshot of him.
Meanwhile I had come to the point of a breakdown while working on my novel in Morocco; and besides I was in pecuniary difficulties. Nevertheless I wrote an article for Miss Cunard's anthology and forwarded it to her on her return to France. Miss Cunard extravagantly praised the article and said it was one of the best and also that I was one of the best, whatever that "best" meant. She said she would use it with a full-page photograph of myself which was done by a friend of ours, the photographer, Berenice Abbot.
However, she did not accompany her praise by a check, and I requested payment. I was in need of money. Miss Cunard replied that she was not paying contributors and that my article was too long after all. She was doing the book for the benefit of the Negro race and she had thought that every Negro would be glad to contribute something for nothing. She had suffered and sacrificed a fortune for Negroes, she said.
I comprehended Miss Cunard's way of reasoning. Yet in spite of the penalty she had to pay for her interest in the Negro, I did not consider it my bounden duty to write for her without remuneration. Miss Cunard would have been shocked at the idea of asking the printers and binders to print and bind her charitable book without remuneration. But in spite of her ultra-modern attitude toward life, apparently she still clung to the antiquated and aristocratic and very British idea that artists should perform for noble and rich people for prestige instead of remuneration.
I might say that I too have suffered a lot for my knowledge of, and contact with, the white race. Yet if I were composing an anthology of the white hell, it never would have occurred to me that all sympathetic white writers and artists owed me a free contribution. I suppose it takes a modern white aristocrat to indulge in that kind of archaic traditional thinking.
As Miss Cunard would not pay for my article, I requested its return. She said she was going to take extracts from it. I forbade her to touch it. That made her mad,comme une vache enragée. My brother also was supposed to do an article on the Jamaica banana industry for Miss Cunard. He decided not to. And suddenly Miss Cunard did not like his face any more. She wrote that he was big and fat.
In her pamphletBlack Man and White Ladyshipthe reader gets the impression that the Cunard daughter enjoys taking a Negro stick to beat the Cunard mother. Miss Cunard seemed to have been ultra-modern in ideas and contacts without alarming Lady Cunard, who was a little modern herself. Then Miss Cunard became aware of the Negro by way of jazz in Venice. And soon also she was made aware that her mother would not accept her friendship with a Negro. Other white women have come up against that problem. It is not merely a problem of people of different races; people of different religions and of different classes know the unreasonableness and the bitterness of it. The mother Cunard drastically reduced the income of the daughter Cunard. The daughter replied with the pamphletBlack Man and White Ladyship, which was not published for sale but probably for spite. In telling the story of her friendship, Miss Cunardamong other things ridicules her mother's American accent. Yet the American Negroes she professes to like speak the same language as her mother, with slight variations.
Writing in her strange, heavy and ineffectual giant of a Negro anthology, Miss Cunard has this to say of me: "His people [the characters of my novels] and himself have also that wrong kind of race-consciousness; they ring themselves in."
The statement is interesting, not so much from the narrow personal as from the broader social angle of a minority group of people and its relationship to friends who belong to the majority group. It leaves me wondering whether it would be altogether such a bad thing if by ringing itself in closer together, a weak, disunited and suppressed group of people could thereby develop group pride and strength and self-respect!
It is hell to belong to a suppressed minority and outcast group. For to most members of the powerful majority, you are not a person; you are a problem. And every crusading crank imagines he knows how to solve your problem. I think I am a rebel mainly from psychological reasons, which have always been more important to me than economic. As a member of a weak minority, you are not supposed to criticize your friends of the strong majority. You will be damned mean and ungrateful. Therefore you and your group must be content with lower critical standards.
A Fannie Hurst who is a best seller is interested in Negro literature. She is nice to Negro writers and artists. She visits among Negroes. She engages a Negro secretary. And finally she writes a trashy novel of Negro life. Negro critics do not like the novel. Fannie Hurst thinks they are ungrateful. I suppose the only way Negro critics could get around thedilemma would be to judge Fannie Hurst by social and sentimental instead of artistic standards. But that wouldn't help the Negro literature that Fannie Hurst desires to promote. I think Negro writers might benefit more by the forthright criticism of such southern gentlemen as H.L. Mencken and Joseph Wood Krutch than by the kindness of a Fannie Hurst.
A southern white woman who is married to a black journalist says, in a critique entitled,Don'ts for My Daughter, that she would not "want her to readHome to Harlem, which overemphasizes the carnal side of the Aframerican." I will confess that I may fall short of that degree of civilization which perfects the lily-white state of mind of the gentle southern lady. And that was why as a creative writer I was unable to make nice distinctions between the carnal and the pure and happened perhaps to sin on the side of the carnal inHome to Harlem.
Yet I once read in a Negro magazine some stanzas entitled, Temptation, by a certain Young Southern White Lady, and attributed to my pure critic, which sound like a wild jazz page out ofNigger Heaven. I remember some of those stanzas:
I couldn't forgetThe banjo's whangAnd the piano's bangAs we strutted the do-do-do'sIn Harlem!That pansy sealA-tossing meAll loose and free, O, lily me!In muscled armsOf Ebony!I couldn't forgetThat black boy's eyesThat black boy's shakeThat black boy's sizeI couldn't forgetO, snow white me!
Now to the mind of this black sinner this piece of sophisticated lily-white lyricism is more offensively carnal than the simple primitive erotic emotions of the characters ofHome to Harlem. But I reiterate it is possible that I am not civilized white enough to appreciate the purity of the mind which composed the above stanzas and to whichHome to Harlemis carnal.
The white lady is raising her mulatto daughter on a special diet and periodically the child is featured as a prodigy in the New YorkHerald Tribune. But it is possible that when that child has grown up out of the state of being a prodigy she might prefer a plain fare, includingHome to Harlem. I have not had the time to be an experimentalist about life, because I have been occupied always with facing hard facts. And this I know to be a fact: Right here in New York there are children of mixed parentage, who have actually hated their white mother after they had grown up to understanding. When they came up against the full force of the great white city on the outside and went home to face a helpless white mother (a symbol of that white prejudice) it was more than their Negroid souls could stand.
I think it would be illuminating to know the real feelings of that white mother, who was doubtlessly devoted to her colored children.... I myself have had the experience of a fine friendship with a highly cultured white woman, whenI first arrived in the United States—a friendship which was turned into a hideous nightmare because of the taboos of the dominant white community. I still retain a bitter memory of my black agony, but I can only try to imagine the white crucifixion of that cultured woman....
I do not think the author ofDon'ts for My Daughter, felt personally antagonistic to me, when she wrote in the leading Negro magazine that she did not want her child to read my novel. It is possible that like myself she has faith in literary and artistic truth. Perhaps she even desires to contribute something to the growing literature of Negro life. I have read an interesting article by her on "America's Changing Color Line," which emphasizes the idea that America is steadily growing darker in complexion, and is informing about the increasing numbers of white Negroids who are absorbed by the white group.
Without the slightest feeling of antagonism to my critic, I would suggest to her that vicarious stories of "passing white" are merely of slight importance to the great group of fifteen millions who are obviously Negroes. I would suggest to her that if she really desires to make a unique contribution to American literature, she has a chance of doing something that no Negro can—something that might be worthwhile for her daughter to read: she might write a sincere account of what it means for an educated and sensitive white woman to be the wife of a Negro in America.
Gertrude Stein, the high priestess of artless-artful Art, identifies Negro with Nothingness. When the eternal faddists who exist like vampires on new phenomena become fed up with Negro art, they must find a reason for their indifference. From being disappointed in Paul Robeson, Gertrude Steinconcludes that Negroes are suffering from nothingness. In the ineffable Stein manner she decided to take Paul Robeson astherepresentative of Negro culture. Similarly, any other faddist could arbitrarily make Chaliapin or Al Jolson or Maurice Chevalier or Greta Garbo the representative of Russian, Jewish, French and Swedish culture respectively. When Gertrude Stein finds that Paul Robeson knows American values and American life as only one in it and not of it could, when she discovers that he is big and naïve, but not quite naïve enough to please Gertrude Stein, she declares: "The African is not primitive; he has a very ancient but a very narrow culture and there it remains. Consequently nothing can happen." Not long after she published this, something was happening: Negro Americans were rendering her operaFour Saints in Three Actsto sophisticated New York audiences.
Well, whatever the white folks do and say, the Negro race will finally have to face the need to save itself. The whites have done the blacks some great wrongs, but also they have done some good. They have brought to them the benefits of modern civilization. They can still do a lot more, but one thing they cannot do: they cannot give Negroes the gift of a soul—a group soul.
Wherever I traveled in Europe and Africa I was impressed by the phenomenon of the emphasis on group life, whether the idea behind it was Communist co-operative or Fascist collective or regional autonomy. I lived under a Communist dictatorship in Russia, two Fascist dictatorships in Europe, and the French colonial dictatorship in Morocco. I don't like any dictatorship.
Yet even the dictatorships were making concessions to the strong awakened group spirit of the peoples. Soviet Russiawas hard at work on the social problems of its many nationalities. Primo de Rivera in Spain had organized two grand exhibitions: one for discontented Catalonia and another for unhappy Andalusia. Regional groups such as that in Brittany and in the Basque country were reviving their ancient culture. Labor groups and radical groups were building up their institutions and educating their children in opposition to reactionary institutions.
But there is very little group spirit among Negroes. The American Negro group is the most advanced in the world. It possesses unique advantages for development and expansion and for assuming the world leadership of the Negro race. But it sadly lacks a group soul. And the greatest hindrance to the growth of a group soul is the wrong idea held about segregation. Negroes do not understand the difference between group segregation and group aggregation. And their leaders do not enlighten them, because they too do not choose to understand. Negro institutions and unique Negro efforts have never had a chance for full development; they are haunted by the fear of segregation. Except where they are forced against their will, Negroes in general prefer to patronize white institutions and support white causes in order to demonstrate their opposition to segregation.
Yet it is a plain fact that the entire world of humanity is more or less segregated in groups. The family group gave rise to the tribal group, the tribal group to the regional group, and the regional group to the national group. There are groups within groups: language groups, labor groups, racial groups and class groups. Certainly no sane group desires public segregation and discrimination. But it is a clear historical fact that different groups have won their social rights only when they developed a group spirit and strong group organization.
There are language groups and religious groups in this country that have found it necessary to develop their own banks, co-operative stores, printing establishments, clubs, theaters, colleges, hotels, hospitals and other social service institutions and trade unions. Yet they were not physically separated from other white groups as much as are Negroes. But they were in a stronger position to bargain and obtain social and political privileges by virtue of the strength of their own institutions.
But Negro institutions in general are developed only perfunctorily and by compulsion, because Negroes have no abiding faith in them. Negroes wisely are not wasting thought on the chimera of a separate Negro state or a separate Negro economy within the United States, but there are a thousand things within the Negro community which only Negroes can do.
There are educated Negroes who believe that the color line will be dissolved eventually by the light-skinned Negroids "passing white," by miscegenation and final assimilation by the white group. But even if such a solution were possible in the future, it is certainly not a solution for the great dark body of Negroids living in the present. Also if the optimistic Negro advocates of futility would travel and observe or study to learn something of the composition and distribution of white racial, national and regional groups that are more assimilable than Negroes, and of their instinctive and irrational tenacity, they might be less optimistic and negative about the position of their own.
The Negro intelligentsia cannot hope to get very far if the Negro masses are despised and neglected. However poor it may be, the Negro intelligentsia gets its living directly from the Negro masses. A few Negro individuals who obtain important political and social positions among whites may delude themselves into thinking they got their jobs by individual merit alone against hungry white competitors who are just as capable.
But the fact is that the whites in authority give Negroes their jobs because they take into consideration the potential strength of the Negro group. If that group were organized on the basis of its numerical strength, there would be more important jobs and greater social recognition for Negroes.
And Negroes will have to organize themselves and learn from their mistakes. The white man cannot organize Negroes as a group, for Negroes mistrust the motives of white people. And the Negro whom they consider an Uncle Tom among the whites, whose voice is the voice of their white master, cannot do it either, even though he may proclaim himself a radical!
Many years ago I preserved a brief editorial from theNationon the Woman's Party which seemed to me to be perfectly applicable to the position of the Negro—if the word Negro were substituted for "woman" and "whites" for men. It said in part: "We agree that no party, left to itself, will allow women an equal chance. Neither labor nor the farmer nor the business man nor the banker is ready to assume executive and political ability in women. They will steadily, perhaps instinctively, resist any such belief. They will accede to women's demands only so far as they wish to please or placate the woman vote. For every party job, for every political office, for every legal change in the direction of equality, women will have to fight as women. Inside the party organizations, the women will have to wage their own battle for recognition and equal rights....
"After all, women are an indivisible part of this country'spopulation; they cannot live under a women's Congress and a special set of feminine laws and economic conditions. They, as well as men, suffer when our government is prostituted, and lose their employment when economic hardship sweeps the country. They, like men, have a vote, and like men they will in the long run tend to elect people and parties who represent their whole interest. To be sure, apart from men they have a special group interest...."
It would be altogether too ludicrous to point out that white women are by far more an indivisible part of this country's population than Negroes! Yet the advance guard of white women realize that they have a common and special group interest, different from the general interests of their fathers and brothers and their husbands and sons.
It goes without saying that the future of the Negro is bound up with the future system of world economy. And all progressive social trends indicate that that system will be based on the principle of labor for communal instead of private profit. I have no idea how the new system will finally work out. I have never believed in the infallibility of the social prophets, even though some of their predictions and calculations have come true. It is possible that in some countries some of the captains of capitalist industry might become labor leaders and prove themselves more efficient than many reactionary labor leaders. Who knows?
Anyway, it seems to me that if Negroes were organized as a group and as workers, whatever work they are doing (with or without the whites), and were thus getting a practical education in the nature and the meaning of the labor movement, it might even be more important and worthwhile than for them to become members of radical political parties.
A West Indian charlatan came to this country, full of antiquated social ideas; yet within a decade he aroused the social consciousness of the Negro masses more than any leader ever did. When Negroes really desire a new group orientation they will create it.
Such is my opinion for all that it may be worth. I suppose I have a poet's right to imagine a great modern Negro leader. At least I would like to celebrate him in a monument of verse. For I have nothing to give but my singing. All my life I have been a troubadour wanderer, nourishing myself mainly on the poetry of existence. And all I offer here is the distilled poetry of my experience.
BOOKS BY CLAUDE McKAY
Songs of JamaicaSpring in New HampshireHarlem ShadowsHome to HarlemBanjoGingertownBanana BottomA Long Way from Home