unexpectedly popped in to see how the _Liberator_ office was running.
Jokingly he said: "Ah, you conspirators," and everybody laughed except
Robert Minor. Minor had recently renounced his anarchism for Communism
and he was as austere-looking as a gaunt Spanish priest.
It was interesting to meet also some of the more conservative Negro
leaders, such as the officials of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People. Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, the author of _The
Souls of Black Folk_ and editor of _The Crisis_, had me to luncheon at
the Civic Club. Of Dr. DuBois I knew nothing until I came to America.
It was a white woman, my English teacher at the Kansas State College,
who mentioned _The Souls of Black Folk_ to me, I think. I found it in
the public library in Topeka. The book shook me like an earthquake. Dr.
DuBois stands on a pedestal illuminated in my mind. And the light that
shines there comes from my first reading of _The Souls of Black Folk_
and also from the _Crisis_ editorial, "Returning Soldiers," which he
published when he returned from Europe in the spring of 1919.
Yet meeting DuBois was something of a personal disappointment. He
seemed possessed of a cold, acid hauteur of spirit, which is not
lessened even when he vouchsafes a smile. Negroes say that Dr. DuBois
is naturally unfriendly and selfish. I did not feel any magnetism in
his personality. But I do in his writings, which is more important.
DuBois is a great passionate polemic, and America should honor and
exalt him even if it disagrees with his views. For his passion is
genuine, and contemporary polemics is so destitute of the pure flame of
passion that the nation should be proud of a man who has made of it a
great art.
Walter White, the present secretary of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People, possessed a charming personality,
ingratiating as a Y.M.C.A. secretary. One felt a strange, even comic,
feeling at the sound of his name and the sight of his extremely white
complexion while hearing him described as a Negro.
The White stories of passing white among the crackers were delightful.
To me the most delectable was one illustrating the finger-nail theory
of telling a near-white from a pure-white. White was traveling on a
train on his way to investigate a lynching in the South. The cracker
said, "There are many yaller niggers who look white, but I can tell
them every time."
"Can you really?" Walter White asked.
"Oh sure, just by looking at their finger nails." And taking White's
hand, he said, "Now if you had nigger blood, it would show here on your
half-moons."
That story excited me by its paradox as much as had the name and
complexion of Walter White. It seemed altogether fantastic that whites
in the South should call him a "nigger" and whites in the North, a
Negro. It violates my feeling of words as pictures conveying color and
meaning. For whenever I am in Walter White's company my eyes compose
him and my emotions respond exactly as they do in the case of any
friendly so-called "white" man. When a white person speaks of Walter
White as a Negro, as if that made him a being physically different
from a white, I get a weird and impish feeling of the unreality of
phenomena. And when a colored person refers to Walter White as colored,
in a tone that implies him to be physically different from and inferior
to the "pure" white person, I feel that life is sublimely funny. For
to me a type like Walter White is Negroid simply because he closely
identifies himself with the Negro group--just as a Teuton becomes a
Moslem if he embraces Islam. White is whiter than many Europeans--even
biologically. I cannot see the difference in the way that most of the
whites and most of the blacks seem to see it. Perhaps what is reality
for them is fantasy for me.
James Weldon Johnson, song writer, poet, journalist, diplomat and
professor, was my favorite among the N.A.A.C.P. officials. I liked
his poise, suavity, diplomacy and gentlemanliness. His career reveals
surprises of achievement and reads like a success story. When a Negro
makes an honorable fight for a decent living and succeeds, I think
all Negroes should feel proud. Perhaps a day will come when, under
a different social set-up, competent Negroes will be summoned like
other Americans to serve their country in diplomatic posts. When that
time comes Negroes may proudly cite as a precedent the record of James
Weldon Johnson, Negro pioneer of the American diplomatic service, who
performed his duties conscientiously and efficiently under unusually
difficult conditions.
Jessie Fauset was assistant editor of _The Crisis_ when I met her.
She very generously assisted at the Harlem evening of one of our
_Liberator_ prayer meetings and was the one fine feature of a bad
show. She was prim, pretty and well-dressed, and talked fluently
and intelligently. All the radicals liked her, although in her
social viewpoint she was away over on the other side of the fence.
She belonged to that closed decorous circle of Negro society, which
consists of persons who live proudly like the better class of
conventional whites, except that they do so on much less money. To
give a concrete idea of their status one might compare them to the
expropriated and defeated Russian intelligentsia in exile.
Miss Fauset has written many novels about the people in her circle.
Some white and some black critics consider these people not interesting
enough to write about. I think all people are interesting to write
about. It depends on the writer's ability to bring them out alive.
Could there be a more commendable prescription for the souls of colored
Americans than the bitter black imitation of white life? Not a Fannie
Hurst syrup-and-pancake hash, but the real meat.
But Miss Fauset is prim and dainty as a primrose, and her novels are
quite as fastidious and precious. Primroses are pretty. I remember the
primroses where I lived in Morocco, that lovely melancholy land of
autumn and summer and mysterious veiled brown women. When the primroses
spread themselves across the barren hillsides before the sudden summer
blazed over the hot land, I often thought of Jessie Fauset and her
novels.
What Mary White Ovington, the godmother of the N.A.A.C.P., thought of
me was more piquant to me perhaps than to herself. Her personality
radiated a quiet silver shaft of white charm which is lovely when it's
real. She was gracious, almost sweet, when she dropped in on _The
Liberator_. But as I listened to her talking in a gentle subjective way
I realized that she was emphatic as a seal and possessed of a resolute
will.
She told me about her reaction to Booker T. Washington, the officially
recognized national leader of the Negroes. Miss Ovington had visited
Tuskegee informally. Booker T. Washington had disregarded her,
apparently under the impression that she was a poor-white social
worker. When he was informed that she originated from a family of
high-ups, he became obsequious to her. But she responded coldly. By her
austere abolitionist standard she had already taken the measure of the
universally popular and idolized Negroid leader.
I repeated the story to my friend Hubert Harrison. He exploded in his
large sugary black African way, which sounded like the rustling of
dry bamboo leaves agitated by the wind. Hubert Harrison had himself
criticized the Negro policy of Booker T. Washington in powerful
volcanic English, and subsequently, by some mysterious grapevine
chicanery, he had lost his little government job. He joined the
Socialist Party. He left it. And finally came to the conclusion that
out of the purgatory of their own social confusion, Negroes would
sooner or later have to develop their own leaders, independent of white
control.
Harrison had a personal resentment against the N.A.A.C.P., and
nick-named it the "National Association for the Advancement of Certain
People." His sense of humor was ebony hard, and he remarked that it was
exciting to think that the N.A.A.C.P. was the progeny of black snobbery
and white pride, and had developed into a great organization, with
DuBois like a wasp in Booker Washington's hide until the day of his
death.
And now that I was legging limpingly along with the intellectual gang,
Harlem for me did not hold quite the same thrill and glamor as before.
Where formerly in saloons and cabarets and along the streets I received
impressions like arrows piercing my nerves and distilled poetry from
them, now I was often pointed out as an author. I lost the rare feeling
of a vagabond feeding upon secret music singing in me.
I was invited to meetings in Harlem. I had to sit on a platform and
pretend to enjoy being introduced and praised. I had to respond
pleasantly. Hubert Harrison said that I owed it to my race. Standing
up like an actor to repeat my poems and kindle them with second-hand
emotions. For it was not so easy to light up within me again the
spontaneous flames of original creative efforts for expectant
audiences. Poets and novelists should let good actors perform for them.
Once I was invited to the Harlem Eclectic Club by its president,
William Service Bell. Mr. Bell was a cultivated artistic New England
Negro, who personally was very nice. He was precious as a jewel. The
Eclectic Club turned out in rich array to hear me: ladies and gentlemen
in _tenue de rigueur_. I had no dress suit to wear, and so, a little
nervous, I stood on the platform and humbly said my pieces.
What the Eclectics thought of my poems I never heard. But what they
thought of me I did. They were affronted that I did not put on a dress
suit to appear before them. They thought I intended to insult their
elegance because I was a radical.
The idea that I am an enemy of polite Negro society is fixed in the
mind of the Negro élite. But the idea is wrong. I have never had the
slightest desire to insult Harlem society or Negro society anywhere,
because I happen not to be of it. But ever since I had to tog myself
out in a dress suit every evening when I worked as a butler, I have
abhorred that damnable uniform. God only knows why it was invented.
My esthetic sense must be pretty bad, for I can find no beauty in it,
either for white or colored persons. I admire women in bright evening
clothes. But men! Blacks in stiff-starched white façades and black
uniforms like a flock of crows, imagining they are elegant--oh no!
X
A Brown Dove Cooing
_The Liberator_ staff had an extra extraordinary moment one afternoon
when Max Eastman walked in with Charlie Chaplin. The great little man
gave his hand to all of us and touched our hearts. And after looking
over the place he perched like a Puck atop of a desk.
Chaplin informed me that he liked some of my poems which had appeared
in _The Liberator_. I was glad, and gave him a copy of _Spring in
New Hampshire_. In his book, _My Trip Abroad_, he put this one, "The
Tropics in New York":
_Bananas ripe and green and ginger-root,
Cocoa in pods and alligator pears,
And tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit,
Fit for the highest prize at country fairs._
_Set in the window, bringing memories
Of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills.
And dewy dawns and mystical blue skies
In benediction over nun-like hills._
_My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze;
A wave of longing through my body swept,
And, hungry for the old, familiar ways,
I turned aside and bowed my head and wept._
Chaplin came up to Croton one evening of a week-end when I was there
with Max Eastman, Crystal Eastman, Eugen Boissevain, Boardman
Robinson, and the danseuse, Tamiris. He astounded us with some marvels
of comedian tricks. They were swift and sure like the sharp lines
of Goya. Not a suggestion in them of that clowning which he uses so
lavishly on the screen. With an acute gesture of hands and feet he
performed a miracle. With one flick of his hair and a twist to his
face, his features were entirely translated into another person's.
Deftly manipulating a coat, he transformed his dapper little self until
he looked like a weirdly tall undertaker hanging against the wall. The
only thing of Charlie Chaplin on the screen, which suggested anything
like his magnificent spontaneous personal appearance that night is
the incomparable "Shoulder Arms." Pictures like "The Kid" and "The
Gold Rush" are great, but elaborate and lavish. "Shoulder Arms" is a
feat of rapid economical design, as startling as the best of Goya's
grotesqueries.
Another evening when I was at Croton, Chaplin drove up unexpectedly.
He was accompanied by Neysa McMein, an exotic person and a fashionable
artist. She possessed an archaic beauty and poise which were strangely
arresting in those days when women were cultivating a more athletic
style in beauty. Miss McMein was very popular among the smart set of
New York's literati. She was a southerner, and she was shocked cold
when she realized that I was a guest and not a servant in Max Eastman's
house. I must record to her honor that she did not precipitate a
crisis. She merely acted like a perfect _grande dame_ who was not
amused. But our party was frost-bitten. It was a relief when she
departed.
Some time after, Max Eastman seized an opportunity to read some of my
poems to Miss McMein, without disclosing my identity. She expressed
great appreciation and a desire to buy a book of them. Max Eastman
then revealed that I was the author. She was surprised. But she did
not like the verses any less or the idea of my equal association with
whites any more.
However, I did assist at one unforgettable and uninhibited
little-brown-jug-from-down-home party with Charlie Chaplin. It was in
Greenwich Village at the house of Eugen Boissevain. It was a small
gathering with Max and Crystal Eastman, Dudley Field Malone and Doris
Stevens, a leader of the Woman's Movement, William Gropper, myself
and a couple of others. Charlie Chaplin had met Hubert Harrison at my
office and admired his black Socratic head and its precise encyclopedic
knowledge. He had expressed a desire that Harrison should be included
in the party.
I thought it was a happy idea to have another Negro. Hubert Harrison
asked if I was thinking of taking a colored girl. I said I didn't think
I would, for the only girls in Harlem I knew intimately were Sanina's
maids of honor and I was afraid they wouldn't fit in. Harrison agreed
and I suggested that, as he was acquainted with the élite of Harlem, he
might bring down a beautiful brown. Harrison promised to do that.
The party was warming up with Jamaica rum cocktails and snatches of
radical gossip when Harrison arrived. Clinging coyly to his arm was
an old brown girl who was neither big nor little, short nor fat,
or anything. Nothing about her was exciting, voice, or clothes, or
style--simply nothing. I was amazed, and wondered why of all Harlem
Harrison had chosen her. If she were his wife or his mistress I could
understand, but the lady herself quickly announced that she was nothing
to Harrison at all. And so she was introduced round the room. Harrison
never explained why he brought that kind of woman. Erotically he was
very indiscriminate and I suppose that descending from the soap-box,
he remembered the party and invited the first pick-up he met to
accompany him.
At this intimate little party there was no white shadow and no black
apprehension, no complexes arising out of conscious superiority
or circumstantial inferiority. We were all in a spirit of happy
relaxation, like children playing merrily together and, absorbed in the
games, forgetful of themselves. Harrison was a little stiff at first
with his starched bosom--his was the only dress suit in the group--but
his simple Sudanese soul soon came up laughing in spite of it.
Suddenly I was excited. I saw Charlie Chaplin hopping from one end of
the room to the other, and I thought he was about to improvise some
treat again, as he had up at Croton. But no, it wasn't that. He was
trying to escape. Harrison's brown dove was fluttering in pursuit of
Chaplin and filling the room with a crescendo of coo-coo-cooing, just
as if she were down home in the bushes. She had at last discovered
that the Mr. Chaplin to whom she had been introduced was indeed the
authentic Charlie Chaplin, lord of the cinema. And importunately she
was demanding his autograph, "so I kin tell it in Harlem about my
adventure."
But Chaplin was determined not to turn our informal little soirée into
an autograph evening. And oh, it was delicious to see the king of the
comics skipping hither and thither and declaring he had no pen. The
brownie flew into the anteroom and returned triumphant with her vanity
case containing card and pencil and announced that she always kept
herself provided with the right things for her customers.
I diverted her attention from her quarry by pouring her a tumbler of
Jamaica rum, and we started a game. Soon the little brown jug was full
and running over and chasing everybody. She said that she was aware
that I was the contact man between Harlem and the Village. And I felt
so flattered to be taken as a sweetman that I tried to imitate the
famous Harlem strut. To Crystal Eastman, who was acting as hostess and
who was as usual distinctively dressed, the brown jug confided that she
would like to exchange visitors between Harlem and Greenwich Village.
And soon she was passing out her cards. But I noticed that the address
was crossed out. She explained that she was rooming temporarily, but
said she would let us have her new address as soon as she was fixed up.
Her last place had recently been raided by the police!
Well, that was one evening, a surprise party that nobody had dreamed
about, something really different and delightful. Parties are so often
tediously the same thing: swilling and scrappy unsatisfactory smart
talk. I had a good time, which stirred me to thoughts of Philadelphia
when I was railroading. I felt sure that none of the whites there had
ever before had the pleasure of a brown madam at a bohemian party.
When I told the story of the party to some of the élite of Harlem, I
was simply dumbfounded by their violent reaction. They insisted that
the Negro race had been betrayed, because a little brown jug from
Harlem had provided a little innocent diversion in Greenwich Village.
I didn't know what to say. So I hummed an old delicious ditty of my
pre-blasé period: "Little brown jug, don't I love you...."
XI
A Look at H.G. Wells
When H.G. Wells came over here to the Naval Conference as a star
reporter for the liberal New York _World_ and the neo-Tory London
_Daily Mail_, his restless curiosity urged him to find time from his
preoccupation with high international politics to bestow a little
attention on _The Liberator_. Max Eastman had him to dinner at his home
in Greenwich Village, and later there was an informal reception for the
_Liberator_ staff and collaborators.
I had stumbled upon Wells at about the same time that I began reading
Bernard Shaw. While I admired Shaw for the hammering logic of his
prefaces and his sparkling wit, I liked in H.G. Wells those qualities I
like in Dickens--the sentimental serving of his characters with a vast
sauce of provincial humor.
During my residence in London I had followed Wells's popular _Outline
of History_ as it appeared in instalments, and upon returning to
America I read in the published volume the instalments that I had
missed.
If it is worth recording, I may say here that I took a violent
prejudice against Mr. Wells's _History_. I felt something flippant
in the style and I did not like Mr. Wells's attitude toward colored
people in general and Africa and Negroes in particular. In the League
of Free Nations book he put out in 1918 he said: "Africa is the great
source upon which our modern comforts and conveniences depend.... The
most obvious danger of Africa is the militarization of the black....
The Negro makes a good soldier, he is hardy, he stands the sea and he
stands the cold...."
I suppose the average white reader will exclaim: "And what's wrong with
that? It is wise and sane and humanitarian." But he should remember
that I am Negro and think that the greatest danger of Africa is not
the militarization of the black, but the ruthless exploitation of the
African by the European. There is also something to be said in favor of
native comforts and conveniences. Before the arrival of the European
with gunpowder the African was accustomed to protecting his rights
with arrow and spear. Now, against modern civilization, he must needs
learn the use of modern methods and weapons. The liberal apologists
of the European grip on Africa may be very unctious and sentimental
about native rights. But the conditions indicate that if the natives
must survive, they must themselves learn and practice the art of
self-protection.
Mr. Wells always seems to be shouting about his unusually scientific
mind. Yet I must confess that I was shocked by the plan of his large
tome outlining world history. Because it appears there as if Africa
and Africans have not been of enormous importance in world history.
Mr. Wells mentions Africa in his language-formation section and leaves
Africa there as if nothing more developed. One learns more of Africa
from earlier historians than Mr. Wells, who did not know so much
about science. Herodotus gives us some remarkable information that
he acquired by traveling four hundred years before Jesus Christ. And
Ptolemy, the Egyptian geographer, has rendered a remarkable description
of Central Africa in the second century after Christ, although I
learned as a school boy that it was discovered by David Livingstone.
And as late as the fifteenth century, in the high tide of the European
renaissance, Leo the African adventured below the Sahara to give the
world historical facts about the Negro nations.
Mr. Wells gives a large outline of the nations of Europe and a
not-so-large one of the nations of Asia. He makes no mention of the
great Negro nations of Western Africa and the Western Sudan before and
after the Moslem invasion; of the Negroid nations of Songhoy and Ghana,
Fezzan and Timbuctu, Yoruba and Benin, Ashanti and Dahomey, which were
arrested in their growth and finally annihilated by the slave traffic
and European imperialism, nor of the Senegalese who played a dominant
part in the history of Morocco and the conquest of Spain.
Yes indeed, Africa and its blacks are of foundational importance in
the history of the world, ancient and modern, and in the creating of
European civilization. However, Mr. Wells's ignoring of the African
civilizations in his _Outline of History_ may be deliberate. In his
marvelous _World of William Clissold_, he speculates whether the Negro
could participate in "common citizenship in a world republic." Says he:
"The Negro is the hardest case ... yet ... in the eighteenth century he
was the backbone of the British navy...." It is entirely too funny to
think--seven years after the appallingly beastly modern white savagery
of 1914-18--of Mr. Wells naïvely wondering whether the Negro is capable
of becoming a civilized citizen of a world republic. He cites the
precedent of Negroes in his British navy. He might have gone farther
back and mentioned the Negro contingent in the army of Xerxes the Great
(when Britons were savages) and about which Herodotus so glowingly
writes.
But even if Mr. Wells likes to take a popular crack at history, he
is none the less a first-rate novelist in the tradition of Charles
Dickens and I don't think he imagines himself a historian any more than
I do, so one must be tolerant if his _Outline_ has the earmarks of a
glorified _Research Magnificent_.
Also, I did not like Mr. Wells's inspired articles on the Naval
Conference. Paradoxically, I found myself sympathizing with the _Daily
Mail_, which rebuked him for his offensive against Japan. Mr. Wells
injected much violent prejudice into what should have been unbiased
reporting. While Mr. Wells was outlining history, he might have
reserved a little of his English sentimentality for Japan, from the
knowledge that Japan might not have been a "yellow peril" today if the
white powers hadn't broken open her door and forced their civilization
upon her.