away in the immense wonder of clean, vertical heaven-challenging lines,
a glory to the grandeur of space.
Oh, I wished that it were possible to know New York in that way
only--as a masterpiece wrought for the illumination of the sight, a
splendor lifting aloft and shedding its radiance like a searchlight,
making one big and great with feeling. Oh, that I should never draw
nearer to descend into its precipitous gorges, where visions are broken
and shattered and one becomes one of a million, average, ordinary,
insignificant.
At last the ship was moored and I came down to the pavement. Ellis
Island: doctors peered in my eyes, officials scrutinized my passport,
and the gates were thrown open.
The elevated swung me up to Harlem. At first I felt a little fear and
trembling, like a stray hound scenting out new territory. But soon I
was stirred by familiar voices and the shapes of houses and saloons,
and I was inflated with confidence. A wave of thrills flooded the
arteries of my being, and I felt as if I had undergone initiation as a
member of my tribe. And I was happy. Yes, it was a rare sensation again
to be just one black among many. It was good to be lost in the shadows
of Harlem again. It was an adventure to loiter down Fifth and Lenox
avenues and promenade along Seventh Avenue. Spareribs and corn pone,
fried chicken and corn fritters and sweet potatoes were like honey to
my palate.
There was a room for me in the old house on One Hundred Thirty-first
Street, but there was no trace of Manda. I could locate none of my
close railroad friends. But I found Sanina. Sanina was an attractive
quadroon from Jamaica who could pass as white. Before prohibition she
presided over a buffet flat. Now she animated a cosy speakeasy. Her
rendezvous on upper Seventh Avenue, with its pink curtains and spreads,
created an artificial rose-garden effect. It was always humming like
a beehive with brown butterflies and flames of all ages from the West
Indies and from the South.
Sanina infatuated them all. She possessed the cunning and fascination
of a serpent, and more charm than beauty. Her clients idolized her
with a loyalty and respect that were rare. I was never quite sure what
was the secret of her success. For although she was charming, she was
ruthless in her affairs. I felt a congeniality and sweet nostalgia in
her company, for we had grown up together from kindergarten. Underneath
all of her shrewd New York getting-byness there was discernible the
green bloom of West Indian naïveté. Yet her poise was a marvel and kept
her there floating like an imperishable block of butter on the crest of
the dark heaving wave of Harlem. Sanina always stirred me to remember
her dominating octoroon grandmother (who was also my godmother) who
beat her hard white father in a duel they fought over the disposal
of her body. But that is a West Indian tale.... I think that some of
Sanina's success came from her selectiveness. Although there were many
lovers mixing up their loving around her, she kept herself exclusively
for the lover of her choice.
I passed ten days of purely voluptuous relaxation. My fifty dollars
were spent and Sanina was feeding me. I was uncomfortable. I began
feeling intellectual again. I wrote to my friend, Max Eastman, that
I had returned to New York. My letter arrived at precisely the right
moment. The continuation of _The Liberator_ had become a problem. Max
Eastman had recently resigned the editorship in order to devote more
time to creative writing. Crystal Eastman also was retiring from the
management to rest and write a book on feminism. Floyd Dell had just
published his successful novel, _Moon Calf_, and was occupied with the
writing of another book.
Max Eastman invited me to Croton over the week-end to discuss the
situation. He proposed to resume the editorship again if I could manage
the sub-editing that Floyd Dell did formerly. I responded with my
hand and my head and my heart. Thus I became associate editor of _The
Liberator_. My experience with the _Dreadnought_ in London was of great
service to me now.
The times were auspicious for the magazine. About the time that I was
installed it received a windfall of $11,000 from the government, which
was I believe a refund on mailing privileges that had been denied the
magazine during the war.
Soon after taking on my job I called on Frank Harris, I took along
an autographed copy of _Spring in New Hampshire_, the book of verses
that I had published in London. The first thing Frank Harris asked was
if I had seen Bernard Shaw. I told him all about my visit and Shaw's
cathedral sermon. Harris said that perhaps Shaw was getting religion at
last and might die a good Catholic. Harris was not as well-poised as
when I first met him. _Pearson's Magazine_ was not making money, and he
was in debt and threatened with suspension of publication. He said he
desired to return to Europe where he could find leisure to write, that
he was sick and tired of the editor business. He did not congratulate
me on my new job. The incident between him and _The Liberator_ was
still a rancor in his mind. He wasn't a man who forgot hurts easily.
But he was pleased that I had put over the publication of a book of
poems in London. "It's a hard, mean city for any kind of genius," he
said, "and that's an achievement for you." He looked through the little
brown-covered book. Then he ran his finger down the table of contents
closely scrutinizing. I noticed his aggressive brow become heavier and
scowling. Suddenly he roared: "Where is the poem?"
"Which one?" I asked with a bland countenance, as if I didn't know
which he meant.
"You know which," he growled. "That fighting poem, 'If We Must Die.'
Why isn't it printed here?"
I was ashamed. My face was scorched with fire. I stammered: "I was
advised to keep it out."
"You are a bloody traitor to your race, sir!" Frank Harris shouted.
"A damned traitor to your own integrity. That's what the English and
civilization have done to your people. Emasculated them. Deprived them
of their guts. Better you were a head-hunting, blood-drinking cannibal
of the jungle than a civilized coward. You were bolder in America. The
English make obscene sycophants of their subject peoples. I am Irish
and I know. But we Irish have guts the English cannot rip out of us.
I'm ashamed of you, sir. It's a good thing you got out of England. It
is no place for a genius to live."
Frank Harris's words cut like a whip into my hide, and I was glad to
get out of his uncomfortable presence. Yet I felt relieved after his
castigation. The excision of the poem had been like a nerve cut out
of me, leaving a wound which would not heal. And it hurt more every
time I saw the damned book of verse. I resolved to plug hard for the
publication of an American edition, which would include the omitted
poem. "A traitor," Frank Harris had said, "a traitor to my race." But I
felt worse for being a traitor to myself. For if a man is not faithful
to his own individuality, he cannot be loyal to anything.
I soon became acquainted and friendly with _The Liberator_
collaborators and sympathizers: Art Young, Boardman Robinson, Stuart
Davis, John Barber, Adolph Dehn, Hugo Gellert, Ivan Opfer, Maurice
Becker, Maurice Sterne, Arturo Giovanitti, Roger Baldwin, Louis
Untermeyer, Mary Heaton Vorse, Lydia Gibson, Cornelia Barnes, Genevieve
Taggard. William Gropper and Michael Gold became contributing editors
at the same time that I joined _The Liberator_ staff.
* * * * *
_The Liberator_ was frequently honored by visitors, many of them women,
some beautiful and some strange. Of course they all wanted to see the
handsome editor-in-chief. But Max Eastman was seldom in the office. He
usually came in when it was nearly time to make up the magazine for
publication. Then he worked quickly with devilish energy, sifting and
scrapping material, titling articles and pictures. And the magazine was
always out on time. Eastman had a lazy manner and there was a general
idea (which apparently pleased him) that he was more of a playboy than
a worker. But he was really a very hard and meticulous worker. I know
of no other writer who works so sternly and carefully, rewriting,
chiseling and polishing his phrases.
There were amusing incidents. One day a wild blonde of unkempt frizzly
hair dashed into the office and declared she had an urgent desire to
see Max Eastman. We said he wasn't there, but she wouldn't believe us.
So she went hunting all over the building, upstairs and downstairs,
opening every door and peeping behind them and even into drawers.
Finally she invaded the washroom, and when she left she locked it up
and carried away the key.
But we had more composed visitors, also. Crystal Eastman brought
Clare Sheridan. They were a striking pair to look at. Two strapping
representatives of the best of the American and English types. They
were interesting to contrast, the one embodying in her personality that
daring freedom of thought and action--all that was fundamentally fine,
noble and genuine in American democracy; the other a symbol of British
aristocracy, a little confused by the surging movement of new social
forces, but sincerely trying to understand.
In 1920 Clare Sheridan had accompanied Kamenev, the Bolshevik
emissary in London, to Russia. She was the first woman of the British
aristocracy to visit that country after the revolution. She had
published a series of articles from her diary in the London _Times_.
I had read them eagerly, for they were like a romance, while I was in
London. Her incisive etchings of the Bolshevik leaders stuck in my
memory. She had summed up Zinoviev, "fussy and impatient, with the
mouth of a petulant woman," and when I went to Russia and met Zinoviev,
each time I heard him prate in his unpleasant falsetto voice, I thought
of Clare Sheridan's deft drawing of him.
Clare Sheridan had a handsome, intelligent and arrogant face. She was
curious about _The Liberator_, its staff and contributors and free
radical bohemian atmosphere. I asked her why a similar magazine could
not exist in London with the same free and easy intercourse between
people of different classes and races. She said that social conditions
and traditions in London were so different. And I knew from experience
that she was telling me the truth. (She did not know that I had
recently returned from London.)
She said that she would like to sculpt my head. But she never got
around to it. Instead she wrote in her _American Diary_ (after seeing
_The Emperor Jones_ with Crystal Eastman, Ernestine Evans, _et al._):
"I see the Negro in a new light. He used to be rather repulsive to me,
but obviously he is human, has been very badly treated.... It must be
humiliating to an educated colored man that he may not walk down the
street with a white woman, nor dine in a restaurant with her.... I
wonder about the psychology of the colored man, like the poet, McKay,
who came to see me a few days ago and who is as delightful to talk to
as any man one could meet...."
Unexpectedly, Elinor Wylie was ushered into my little office one
afternoon. She was accompanied by her sister and I rushed out to find
an extra chair. Mrs. Wylie's eyes were flaming and I was so startled
by her enigmatic beauty and Park Avenue elegance that I was dumb with
confusion. She tried to make me feel easy, but I was as nervous as a
wild cat caught indoors. I knew very little about her, except that she
had published a little book of verse. I had read some of her pieces in
_The New Republic_, and I remembered one memorable thing called, "The
Lion and the Lamb," which was infused with a Blakelike imagery and
beauty. She promised to send _The Liberator_ a poem, but I don't think
she ever did. Perhaps I did not show enough enthusiasm. I had no idea,
at the time, that I was speaking to one of the few great women poets of
the English language.
I always felt that the real object of these visits was Max Eastman, who
was an ikon for the radical women. And so I acted like a black page,
listening a lot and saying very little, but gratefully acknowledging
all the gifts of gracious words that were offered to _The Liberator_.
Lewis Gannett called one day and invited me to lunch with Carl Van
Doren, somewhere down around Park Row. Mr. Van Doren was then one
of the editors of _The Nation_. He did most of the talking. He was
very practical-minded in the pleasant canny Yankee way. For one who
was a college professor he was remarkably well informed about the
different phases of American social and industrial life. He said that
the Italians and the Negroes were interesting to him as the two most
special groups of workers in America. He considered the Italians a
hardier and a harder-working group. His idea was thought-provoking and
I was struck by the comparison he made between Italians and Negroes.
It was fresh and novel, especially as Negroes themselves generally
compare their status with that of the Jews. I thought myself that the
comparison frequently made between the Jewish group and the Negro group
was mainly psychological, while the point that Mr. Van Doren scored was
sociological.
One day I had sorted and read until my brain was fagged and I hadn't
found a single startling line. Then I picked up a thin sheaf and
discovered some verses which stimulated me like an elixir. They were
mostly sonnets, a little modernistic, without capitals, a little
voluptuous, yet restrained and strangely precise, with a flavor of
Latin eroticism and decadence. They were signed, E.E. Cummings.
I didn't know anything about the author, but I wrote a note asking him
to come in and see Max Eastman. He dropped by one day, a stripling in
a fawn-colored suit and resembling a fawn, with his head cocked up to
one side and a smile which looked like a curiously-wrought icicle.
Max Eastman was not in. He had not been in the office since I had
written to the author, nor had he seen the poems. So I talked to
Cummings and dared to argue with him about a couple of the sonnets. I
was particularly excited by one called "_Maison_." It created something
like an exquisite miniature palace of Chinese porcelain. The palace was
so real that it rose up out of the page, but the author had also placed
in it a little egg so rotten that you could smell it. I argued about
that egg, but Cummings said that that was exactly what he wanted to do.
I understood and apologized.
I wanted to make a spread of the verses in _The Liberator_, but Robert
Minor was substituting as editor-in-chief that month and he had a
violent reaction against the verses. I remember Minor's saying to me
that if I liked such poems I was more of a decadent than a social
revolutionist. I protested that the verses were poetry, and that in
any work of art my natural reaction was more for its intrinsic beauty
than for its social significance. I said that my social sentiments were
strong, definite and radical, but that I kept them separate from my
esthetic emotions, for the two were different and should not be mixed
up.
Robert Minor said he could not visualize me as a real Negro. He thought
of a Negro as of a rugged tree in the forest. Perhaps Minor had had
Negro playmates like that in Texas and he could not imagine any other
type. Minor himself always gave me the impression of a powerful
creature of the jungle. His personality seemed to exude a kind of
blind elemental brute force. He appeared to me like a reincarnation of
Richard Cœur de Lion--a warrior who had found the revolutionary road to
heaven and who would annihilate even the glorious ineffectual angels
if he found them drifted and stranded on his warpath.
I kept the Cummings verses for the following month when the editorship
was resumed by Max Eastman. Eastman recognized their distinctive
quality, but not in my enthusiastic way. So we didn't make a special
spread of them as we often did with unusual verse. We printed a couple
or more--but not very prominently.
The delirious verses of the Baroness Von Freytag Loringhoven titillated
me even as did her crazy personality. She was a constant visitor
to see me, always gaudily accoutred in rainbow raiment, festooned
with barbaric beads and spangles and bangles, and toting along her
inevitable poodle in gilded harness. She had such a precious way of
petting the poodle with a slap and ejaculating, "Hund-bitch!"
She was a model, and in marvelous German-English she said: "_Mein_
features not same, schön, but _mein_ back, _gut_. The artists love to
paint it." The Baroness's back was indeed a natural work of art.
One day she entertained me by reading, in her masculine throaty voice,
a poem she called "_Dornröschen_":
_Stab for me
lip set intensity.
press to my bower--
my nook, my core
I wait for thee
numb breathlessly
messir
since yore...._
I liked the thing so much, I appropriated it for _The Liberator_.
Down in Greenwich Village they made a joke of the Baroness, even the
radicals. Some did not believe that she was an authentic baroness,
listed in Gotha. As if that really mattered, when she acted the part so
magnificently. Yet she was really titled, although she was a working
woman. The ultra-moderns of the Village used to mock at the baroness's
painted finger nails. Today all American women are wearing painted
finger nails.
How shockingly sad it was to meet Frau Freytag a few years later in the
Kurfurstendamm in Berlin, a shabby wretched female selling newspapers,
stripped of all the rococo richness of her clothes, her speech, her
personality. She went from Berlin to Paris and death. Poor brave
Baroness von Freytag Loringhoven.
* * * * *
Our bookkeeper was an Englishman named Mylius. He was an equivocal
type, soft and sinister, with a deceptive deferential manner. Dickens
would have found him admirable for the creation of Uriah Heep. Mylius
had won international notoriety as the man who was prosecuted for
libeling His Majesty, King George of England. He had circulated a story
that George V had contracted a morganatic marriage. Mylius liked to
come into my office to talk. He was a money-fool. He presented me with
a copy of a worthless book he had written called, _The Socialization
of Money_. He seemed to think that money was entirely the invention of
governments and bankers, an evil thing having no relationship to other
commodities. I got it out of Mylius that his father, who was I believe
a Greek Jew, was a banker and had left him a fortune when he died. And
he had gambled away every penny of that fortune at Monte Carlo.
One day Mylius pushed into my office with a fake frightened
expression. He said there was a criminal-looking man outside who
wanted to see me. I went downstairs and found Michael. I brought him
up to my office. Michael had read in a newspaper that I was working
on _The Liberator_ and he had looked up the address and called to see
me. In two years Michael had changed almost beyond recognition. The
college-lad veneer had vanished. A nasty scar had spoiled his right
eyebrow and his face was prematurely old, with lines like welts. After
I went abroad he had landed a job as a street-car conductor. He had
worked a few months and becoming disgusted, he drifted back to petty
banditry. He was copped and jailed in a local prison, where he made
criminal friends more expert than himself. Now he was in with a gang.
We chatted reminiscently. I related my radical adventures in London.
I exhibited what I had accomplished by way of literature on the side.
And I presented him with a signed copy of the book. Michael looked with
admiration at the frontispiece (a photograph of myself) and at me.
"Jeez," he said, "you did do it, all right. You're a bird."
"What species?" I asked.
Michael laughed. "What are you wanting me to say? You are an eagle?"
"Oh no," I said, "that's a white folk's bird. Blackbird will do."
"There you're starting again," Michael said. "You know I haven't been
in Harlem since you left."
I said that I was living in the same place and invited him to come up.
I told him that my landlord, Mr. Morris, had asked after him.
Michael shook his head. "It ain't like before. I'm in with a rotten
gang. We'se all suspicious of one another. If I came around to see
you, they'd soon get wise to it and want to mess around there, thinking
there was something to make."
I said I wouldn't care, since there was nothing. And knowing them might
be another exciting diversion, I thought.
Michael's face became ugly. "No, you're better off without knowing
that gang. They couldn't understand you like me. They're just no good.
They're worse than me. And lookit that guy what send you out to me. He
was looking at me as if I wasn't human. I know that my mug ain't no
angel's since that wop bastard gashed me, but all the same I ain't no
gorilla."
"Couldn't you find another job and start working again?" I asked.
He shook his head. "It's too late now. I can't get away or escape. I'm
not like you. Perhaps if I had had some talent, like you."
I knew that he was doomed. I had a pocket edition of Francis Thompson's
"Hound of Heaven" on my desk. It was one of my favorite things. Michael
looked at it. I said that Thompson was an Irish poet.
"I read a lot, whenever I get a chance," he said, "newspapers and
magazines."
I read a little from "The Hound":
_I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after...._
_In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
I shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
I stand amid the dust o' the moulded years--
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap._...
I told Michael something of the writer's way of living. And I gave him
the book.
"Can you spare it?" he asked. I said I was always "sparing" books,
dropping them everywhere, because they were too heavy to tote.
"I guess when the gang sees me with these here," said Michael, "they'll
be thinking that I'm turning queer."
As I opened the door to let him out, I saw Mylius acting as if he
were just passing by on the way upstairs to his office. He had been
listening at the keyhole. Michael went on out. Mylius said, "I was
scared he was going to assassinate you in there."
"He isn't a criminal," I said. "He's just an old college friend down
on his luck." Mylius was interested and wanted to talk some more, but
I was seized by such a loathsome feeling for the big white reptile, I
turned my back and shut my door.
I never saw Michael again. Just before I left for Europe the following
year I received a pathetic scrawl informing me that he had been caught
in a hold-up and sentenced to prison for nine years....
THE HARLEM INTELLIGENTSIA
I had departed from America just after achieving some notoriety as a
poet, and before I had become acquainted with the Negro intellectuals.
When I got the job of assistant editor on _The Liberator_, Hubert
Harrison, the Harlem street-corner lecturer and agitator, came down to
Fourteenth Street to offer his congratulations.
I introduced him to Robert Minor, who was interested in the activities
of the advanced Negro radicals. Harrison suggested a little meeting
that would include the rest of the black Reds. It was arranged to
take place at the _Liberator_ office, and besides Harrison there were
Grace Campbell, one of the pioneer Negro members of the Socialist
Party; Richard Moore and W.A. Domingo, who edited _The Emancipator_, a
radical Harlem weekly; Cyril Briggs, the founder of the African Blood
Brotherhood and editor of the monthly magazine, _The Crusader_; Mr.
Fanning, who owned the only Negro cigar store in Harlem; and one Otto
Huiswood, who hailed from Curaçao, the birthplace of Daniel Deleon.
Perhaps there were others whom I don't remember. The real object of
the meeting, I think, was to discuss the possibility of making the
Garvey Back-to-Africa Movement (officially called the Universal Negro
Improvement Association) more class-conscious.