great, literature and art, and that the class labels were incidental.
I cannot be convinced of a proletarian, or a bourgeois, or any special
literature or art. I thought and still think that it is possible to
have a proletarian _period_ of literature, with labor coming into its
heritage as the dominating social factor, exactly as we have had a
Christian period, a Renaissance period, and the various pagan periods.
But I believe that whenever literature and art are good and great they
leap over narrow group barriers and periods to make a universal appeal.
The intelligentsia of our southern states may boycott a Negro's book
or a Negro's painting. Hitler may burn the creative work of Jews,
liberals and radicals, Mussolini may proscribe literature and art that
he considers anti-Fascist, the Pope may index works that he interprets
as anti-Catholic, and the Communists may damn works of literature and
art that appear to them unfavorable to international Communism. I don't
minimize the danger of the obstruction of talent and the destruction of
art. But if the works are authentic they will eventually survive the
noise and racket of the times, I think.
Michael Gold and I on _The Liberator_ endeavored to team along.
But that was impossible. Gold's social revolutionary passion was
electrified with personal feeling that was sometimes as acid as
lime-juice. When he attacked it was with rabbinical zeal, and often his
attacks were spiteful and petty. One day I was informed that he had
entered the Civic Club (a rendezvous of liberals and radicals) in his
shirt sleeves and with an insulting attitude. I remarked that I didn't
see any point in doing that to the pacifist Civic Club; that he might
have gone instead to the Union League Club.
Someone repeated my comment, and one evening when I was dining with
Marguerite Tucker at John's Italian restaurant in Twelfth Street,
Gold came in and challenged me to box. He had been a champion of some
note on the East Side. I shrugged and said the difference between us
was intellectual and not physical, but that I was willing to box, if
he thought that would settle it. So we laughed the matter off and
drank a bottle of dago red together. However, I saw clearly that our
association could not continue. Shortly after that we called a meeting
of _Liberator_ editors and I resigned.
Meanwhile I had been devoting most of my time to dramatic criticism.
Happy Harlem had come down to Broadway in a titillating musical piece
called _Shuffle Along_. The metropolitan critics dismissed it casually
at first. There were faults. Technically the piece was a little too
rhythmically lazy and loose-jointed. But there were some luscious
songs and singing: "Shuffle Along," "Love Will Find a Way," and
"Bandanna Land." And there was Florence Mills. Florence Mills was so
effortless in her perfect mimicry and elfin brown voice that the Negro
impressarios were not even aware that they possessed in her a priceless
gold star. For they had given her a secondary rôle in the revue.
Never had I seen a colored actress whose artistry was as fetching as
Florence Mills's. After the show I went backstage to see her. I said:
"You're the star of the show." No, she said, the stars were Lottie Gee
and someone else whose name I don't remember. I said, "You're the star
for me, and I'm going to say so in my review." She laughed deliciously.
I thought I'd feature _Shuffle Along_ in _The Liberator_. I wanted
especially to do this because the Negro radicals of those days were
always hard on Negro comedy. They were against the trifling, ridiculous
and common side of Negro life presented in artistic form. Radical
Negroes take this attitude because Negroes have traditionally been
represented on the stage as a clowning race. But I felt that if Negroes
can lift clowning to artistry, they can thumb their noses at superior
people who rate them as a clowning race.
I asked William Gropper, the cartoonist, to go along with me to see
_Shuffle Along_ and make some drawings. Gropper made some excellent
things, but they were too savagely realistic for the airy fairy
fascination of Negro comedy. Gropper realized this, and didn't mind
my asking Hugo Gellert to take a stroke at them, because I thought
Gellert's style more suitable to the kind of thing I wanted. I did not
rate Gellert's talent anywhere near Gropper's. But Gellert possessed
a more receptive mind and cunning hand for illustrative work. Gellert
made some clever drawings with a modernistic accent. We printed them
with my article, and that issue of _The Liberator_ was a sensation
among the theatrical set of Harlem.
Florence Mills ran away with the show, mimicking and kicking her
marvelous way right over the heads of all the cast and sheer up to the
dizzying heights until she was transformed into a glorious star.
_Shuffle Along_ was conceived, composed and directed by Negroes.
There had been nothing comparable to it since the Williams and Walker
Negro shows. It definitely showed the Negro groping, fumbling and
emerging in artistic group expression. When its best artists were
bought out by white producers and it was superseded by such elaborate
super-productions as _Blackbirds_, which was projected and directed by
a white impresario, there was no artistic gain for the Negro group. But
the Negro _artistes_ made more money, and thoughtless Negroes, like all
good Americans, think that the commercially successful standard is the
only standard by which Negro artistic achievement may be judged.
I have no prejudice against white persons leading and directing Negroes
artistically and otherwise, if they can do it with more than merely
technical competence. Negroes using the technique of the white peoples
to express themselves must necessarily have to go to school to the
whites. But it is no easy achievement for any outsider to get on the
inside of a segregated group of people and express their hidden soul.
Many white people see Negroes from a white point of view and imagine
that they know all about the Negro soul and can express it even better
than the blacks themselves. When I saw the white man's _Blackbirds_ in
Paris and remembered _Shuffle Along_ I was very sad. The _Blackbirds_
flashed like a whip from beginning to end, rushing the actors through
their parts like frightened animals. There was not a suggestion in it
of the inimitably lazy tropical drawl that characterizes Negro life
even in the coldest climate. And that was the secret of the success of
the charming _Shuffle Along_.
In the midst of my career as a dramatic critic I bumped into one of
those acute snags which remain in the memory even as the scar of a bad
wound that has been healed remains in the body. It wasn't because I
was thin-skinned. When I went to work on _The Liberator_ I knew that I
would have to face social problems even greater than before, but I was
determined to face them out. But what happened to me hurt more because
it came from an unexpected source.
I think that instead of rewriting it, I will let the article I wrote at
the time (for _The Liberator_ of May, 1922) tell the story for me:
"Wouldn't your dramatic critic like to see _He Who Gets Slapped?_" So,
very graciously, wrote the Theater Guild's publicity agent to _The
Liberator_. Our sometime dramatic critic, Charles W. Wood, having
deserted us for the season, I elected myself dramatic critic by
acclamation. It would be pleasant to sit in a free front-row parquet
seat along with "The Press," instead of buying a ticket for the second
balcony. And as for the other seat--free seats come in pairs--I decided
to take along William Gropper, _Liberator_ artist of the powerful
punch and vindictive line, and master of the grotesque.
So on the appointed night we presented ourselves at the box office of
the Fulton. It was with keen pleasure that I anticipated seeing this
fantastic play of Leonid Andreyev's, _He, the One Who Gets Slapped_. A
curious and amusing theme!
The stubs were handed to Gropper and we started toward the orchestra.
But the usher, with a look of quizzical amazement on his face, stopped
us. Snatching the stubs from Gropper and muttering something about
seeing the manager, he left us wondering and bewildered. In a moment
he returned, with the manager. "The--the wrong date," the manager
stammered and, taking the stubs marked "orchestra," he hurried off to
the box office, returning with others marked "balcony." Suddenly the
realization came to me. I had come here as a dramatic critic, a lover
of the theater, and a free soul. But--I was abruptly reminded--those
things did not matter. The important fact, with which I was suddenly
slapped in the face, was my color. I am a Negro--_He, the One Who Gets
Slapped_....
Gropper and I were shunted upstairs. I was for refusing to go, but
Gropper, quite properly, urged compromise. So, brooding darkly, madly,
burnt, seared and pierced, and over-burdened with hellish thoughts,
I, with Gropper beside me half-averting his delicate pale face, his
fingers, run through his unkempt mop of black hair, shading his
strangely child-like blue eyes, sat through Leonid Andreyev's play.
Andreyev's masterpiece, they call it. A masterpiece? A cleverly
melodramatic stringing together of buffoonery, serio-comic philosophy,
sensational love-hungriness and doll-baby impossibilism, staged to
tickle the mawkish emotions of the bourgeois mob! So I thought. I sat
there, apart, alone, black and shrouded in blackness, quivering in
every fiber, my heart denying itself and hiding from every gesture of
human kindliness, hard in its belief that kindliness is to be found
in no nation or race. I sat inwardly groaning through what seemed a
childish caricature of tragedy. Ah! if the accident of birth had made
Andreyev a Negro, if he had been slapped, kicked, buffeted, pounded,
niggered, ridiculed, sneered at, exquisitely tortured, near-lynched
and trampled underfoot by the merry white horde, and if he still
preserved through the terrible agony a sound body and a mind sensitive
and sharp to perceive the qualities of life, he might have written a
real play about being slapped. I had come to see a tragic farce--and I
found myself unwillingly the hero of one. He who got slapped was I. As
always in the world-embracing Anglo-Saxon circus, the intelligence, the
sensibilities of the black clown were slapped without mercy.
* * * * *
Poor, painful black face, intruding into the holy places of the
whites. How like a specter you haunt the pale devils! Always at their
elbow, always darkly peering through the window, giving them no
rest, no peace. How they burn up their energies trying to keep you
out! How apologetic and uneasy they are--yes, even the best of them,
poor devils--when you force an entrance, Blackface, facetiously,
incorrigibly, smiling or disturbingly composed. Shock them out of
their complacency, Blackface; make them uncomfortable; make them
unhappy! Give them no peace, no rest. How can they bear your presence,
Blackface, great, unappeasable ghost of Western civilization!
* * * * *
Damn it all! Goodnight, plays and players. The prison is vast, there
is plenty of space and a little time to sing and dance and laugh and
love. There is a little time to dream of the jungle, revel in rare
scents and riotous colors, croon a plantation melody, and be a real
original Negro in spite of all the crackers. Many a white wretch,
baffled and lost in his civilized jungles, is envious of the toiling,
easy-living Negro.
XIII
"Harlem Shadows"
Meanwhile I was full and overflowing with singing and I sang in all
moods, wild, sweet and bitter. I was steadfastly pursuing one object:
the publication of an American book of verse. I desired to see "If We
Must Die," the sonnet I had omitted in the London volume, inside of a
book.
I gathered together my sheaf of songs and sent them to Professor
Spingarn. He was connected with a new publishing firm. Many years
before I had read with relish his little book, entitled _Creative
Criticism_. I wrote to him then. He introduced me to James Oppenheim
and Waldo Frank of _The Seven Arts_, and they published a couple of my
poems under a nom de plume. That was way back in 1917. Now, five years
later, I asked Professor Spingarn to find me a publisher.
I had traveled over many other ways besides the railroad since those
days. Professor Spingarn was appreciative of me as a Negro poet, but
he did not appreciate my radicalism, such as it was! Paradoxically,
Professor Spingarn supported and advocated Negro racial radicalism and
abhorred social radicalism. Professor Spingarn preferred my racial
jeremiads to my other poems. Well, I was blunt enough to tell Professor
Spingarn that he was a bourgeois. He didn't like it. Nevertheless he
found me a publisher.
When I told a Yankee radical about myself and Professor Spingarn,
this radical said that it was impossible for any man to be pro-Negro
and anti-radical. He said, he believed that Professor Spingarn was
pro-Negro not from broad social and humanitarian motives, but because
he was a Jew, baffled and bitter. I said, "But Oswald Garrison Villard
is also pro-Negro, and he is not a radical nor a Jew." The radical
said, "Oh, Villard is an abolitionist by tradition." And I said, "Isn't
it possible that Professor Spingarn is also an abolitionist, and by
even a greater tradition?"
If only individual motives were as easy to categorize and analyze as
they appear to be! Anyway, Professor Spingarn got Harcourt Brace and
Company to accept my poems. Max Eastman wrote a splendid preface, and
the book was published in the spring of 1922.
_Harlem Shadows_ was a _succès d'estime_. The reviews were
appreciative, some flattering, flattering enough to make a fellow
feel conceited about being a poet. But I was too broke and hungry and
anxious about the future to cultivate conceit. However, I was not
discouraged. The publication of my first American book uplifted me
with the greatest joy of my life experience. When my first book was
published in Jamaica, I had the happy, giddy feeling of a young goat
frolicking over the tropical hills. The English edition of my poems had
merely been a stimulant to get out an American book. For to me America
was the great, difficult, hard world. I had gone a long, apparently
roundabout way, but at least I had achieved my main purpose.
The last _Liberator_ affair in which I actively participated was an
international dance. The winter had been cold on our spirits and
our feelings warmed currently to celebrate the spring. We trumpeted
abroad our international frolic and the response was exhilarating. All
shades of radicals responded, pink and black and red; Left liberals,
Socialists, Anarchists, Communists, Mayflower Americans and hyphenated
Americans, Hindus, Chinese, Negroes. The spirit of _The Liberator_
magnetized that motley throng. There was a large freedom and tolerance
about _The Liberator_ which made such a mixing possible. (How
regrettable that nothing like the old _Liberator_ exists today! Social
thinking is still elastic, even chaotic, in America. Class lines and
ideas here are not crystallized to such an extent as to make impossible
friendly contact between the different radical groups.)
Our spring frolic brought that international-minded multitude into
Forty-second Street. But the metropolitan police resented the invasion.
They were aghast at the spectacle of colored persons mixed with white
in a free fraternal revel. So they plunged in and broke it up, hushed
the saxophones, turned the crowd out of the hall, and threw protesting
persons downstairs, lamming them with their billies.
* * * * *
After leaving _The Liberator_ I took a holiday from work. I had not had
one for over a year. I was in a small circle of friends and we convived
together, consuming synthetic gin. Meanwhile I was thinking about a
job. Perhaps I would return to the railroad. James Weldon Johnson
advised me to make a tour of the South and read my verses. But I never
anticipated with gusto the prospect of appearing as a poet before
admiring audiences.
I was often in the company of a dancer who was making a study of
African masks for choreographic purposes. One evening while he,
my friend, Gladys Wilson, and I were together in my diggings in
Fourteenth Street, a woman walked in to whom I had been married seven
years before. A little publicity, even for a poor poet, might be an
embarrassing thing. The dancer exclaimed in a shocked tone, "Why, I
never knew that you were _married!_" As if that should have made any
difference to _him_. I said that nobody knew, excepting the witnesses,
and that there were many more things about me that he and others didn't
know.
All my planning was upset. I had married when I thought that a domestic
partnership was possible to my existence. But I had wandered far and
away until I had grown into a truant by nature and undomesticated in
the blood. There were consequences of the moment that I could not face.
I desired to be footloose, and felt impelled to start going again.
Where? Russia signaled. A vast upheaval and a grand experiment. What
could I understand there? What could I learn for my life, for my work?
Go and see, was the command. Escape from the pit of sex and poverty,
from domestic death, from the cul-de-sac of self-pity, from the hot
syncopated fascination of Harlem, from the suffocating ghetto of color
consciousness. Go, better than stand still, keep going.
PART FOUR
THE MAGIC PILGRIMAGE
XIV
The Dominant Urge
I went to Russia. Some thought I was invited by the Soviet government;
others, that I was sent by the Communist Party. But it was not so easy
to have the honor of an invitation or the privilege of being sent.
For I was not one of the radicals abroad, important to the Soviet
government; and I was not a member of the Communist Party. All I had
was the dominant urge to go, and that discovered the way. Millions of
ordinary human beings and thousands of writers were stirred by the
Russian thunder rolling round the world. And as a social-minded being
and a poet, I too was moved.
But money was necessary so that I could go to Russia. I had none.
I mentioned my object to James Weldon Johnson, then secretary of
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He
suggested I might raise some money by selling special copies of my
book of poems with signed photographs. And very kindly he placed at
my disposal a select list of persons connected with the N.A.A.C.P. In
that way a small number of copies of _Harlem Shadows_ was sold. The
price asked was five dollars. I remember that about six persons sent
checks for ten dollars. One check was signed by Mrs. Henry Villard.
Eugen Boissevain sent me one hundred dollars. Crystal Eastman gave
me a letter as one of the editors of _The Liberator_, asking any
radical who could to facilitate my getting to Russia. Just before
I sailed James Weldon Johnson gave me a little farewell party at
his residence in Harlem. A few of Harlem's élite came: Dr. DuBois,
Walter White, Jessie Fauset, Rosamond Johnson, and from among downtown
liberal intellectuals, Heywood Broun and F.P.A. of the New York
_World_, John Farrar, who was then editor of _The Bookman_, and Ruth
Hale. It was a pleasant evening and the first of the bohemian-élite
interracial parties in Harlem which became so popular during the highly
propagandized Negro renaissance period.
I signed on as a stoker on a slow freighter going to Liverpool. Just as
that time, Crystal Eastman also had booked passage on another boat to
go with her children to London to join her husband. We had arranged to
have a last meal together on the eve of my sailing. But I waited until
near midnight and she didn't appear. So I went out alone in Harlem,
visiting the speakeasies and cabarets and drinking a farewell to the
illegal bars.
In one joint I met Hubert Harrison and we had together a casual drink.
But I did not inform him or any of my few familiars that I was sailing
for Europe the next day. Sentimental adieux embarrass me. I took a
look in at Sanina's for a brief moment. Late that night, when I got
home with just enough liquor to fill me with a mellow mood for my next
adventure, I found a tiny scrap of paper thrust into my keyhole:
Claude dear:
I just dashed in to give you a hug and say goodbye--Bon Voyage, dear
child!
Crystal
I tucked the little note in a corner of my pocket book and have carried
it with me all these years, through many countries, transferring it,
when one pocket book was worn out, to another.
Six years later, when I was in Spain, I received a copy of _The Nation_
containing the announcement of beautiful Crystal Eastman's death. It
was sudden and shocking to me. I took her farewell note out of my
pocket book and read it and cried. Crystal Eastman was a great-hearted
woman whose life was big with primitive and exceptional gestures. She
never wrote that Book of Woman which was imprinted on her mind. She
was poor, and fettered with a family. She had a grand idea for a group
of us to go off to write in some quiet corner of the world, where
living was cheap and easy. But it couldn't be realized. And so life was
cheated of one contribution about women that no other woman could write.
* * * * *
At Liverpool I left the freighter and went straight to London. There
was a reunion with a few intimates of the International Socialist Club.
Many of the members had left for Russia the year before to live there
permanently. Also a number of British Communists were preparing to
travel to Russia for the Fourth Congress of the Communist International.
Arthur McManus, one of the Left labor men from the Clyde, was one
of them. I asked if he could assist me to go to Russia. He was not
enthusiastic, especially since I was once connected with the Pankhurst
group, which was now out of favor at Moscow. McManus said that I
should have been recommended by the American Communist Party. The
more difficult it seemed, the more determined I was to make my way to
Russia. One evening in a barroom, I heard a group of English comrades
facetiously discussing Edgar Whitehead, the former secretary to the
Pankhurst Group, saying that he was always landing something good in
the movement. I heard them mention that Whitehead was in Berlin. He was
liaison agent and interpreter for the English-speaking radicals who
were traveling to Russia. Whitehead had studied German in Berlin when
he was a schoolmaster. He had been a leader of conscientious objectors
during the last war. He was also my friend, and I thought I'd take a
chance on his helping.
The next day I took the channel boat to Ostend. Arriving in Berlin,
I made inquiries and found Whitehead. He promised to get me through
to Russia. That I was not indorsed by any Communist party did not
matter to him. He was not a fanatic or dogmatist. In the days of our
association together in London we often waxed satirical about Communist
orthodoxy and we had often discussed the idea of a neo-radical magazine
in which nothing in the universe would be held sacred.
Whitehead started working for me. The intervening time I spent
visiting the theaters. Expressionism was setting the pace. I saw the
revolving stage for the first time and admired it. Also I visited
many of the cabarets, which had sprung up like mushrooms under the
Socialist-Republican régime, some of which seemed to express the
ultimate in erotomania. The youngsters of both sexes, the hectic
pleasure-chasers of the Berlin of that epoch (before Poincaré grabbed
the Ruhr), were methodically exploiting the nudist colony indoors,
which was perhaps more exciting than the outdoor experiments.