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 of _The
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 again and 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 land
Of colors singing symphonies of life!
Myself is like a stone upon my spirit,
Reluctant, passing from your sunny shore.
Oh native colors,
Pure colors aglow
With 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 willingly
A captive I
Remained to be._
_Oh friends, my friends! When Ramadan returns
And daily fast and feasting through the night,
With chants and music honey-dripping sweets,
And fatmahs shading their flamenco feet,
My thoughts will wing
The waves of air
To 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 me
A 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 mandolin
And drop the scented blossoms in your cups!
Oh make one tune,
One melody
Of 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 house
And bugle call
And muffled drum
Proclaimed the day!_
_When liquid-eyed Habeeb draws from the lute
A murmur golden like a thousand bees,
Embowelled in a sheltering tropic tree,
With honey brimming in the honeycomb,
The tuneful air
Will waft the sound
Across to me._
_Notes soared with the dear odor of your soil
And like its water cooling to my tongue,
Haunting me always like a splendid dream,
Of vistas opening to an infinite way
Of perfect love
That angels make
In Paradise._
_Habeeb, Habeeba, I may never return
Another sacred fast to keep with you,
But when your Prince of months inaugurates
Our year, my thoughts will turn to Ramadan,
Forgetting never
Its tokens
Unforgettable._
--_Mektoub._
XXIX
On Belonging to a Minority Group
It was 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 entitled _Black 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 was discovered 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 pamphlet _Black Man and White Ladyship_ the 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 pamphlet _Black Man and White Ladyship_, which was
not published for sale but probably for spite. In telling the story of
her friendship, Miss Cunard among 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 the dilemma 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 read _Home 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 in _Home 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 of _Nigger Heaven_. I
remember some of those stanzas:
_I couldn't forget
The banjo's whang
And the piano's bang
As we strutted the do-do-do's
In Harlem!_
_That pansy seal
A-tossing me
All loose and free, O, lily me!
In muscled arms
Of Ebony!_
_I couldn't forget
That black boy's eyes
That black boy's shake
That black boy's size
I couldn't forget
O, 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 of _Home 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 which _Home to Harlem_ is 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 York _Herald
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, including
_Home 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, when I 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 of _Don'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 Stein concludes that Negroes are suffering from
nothingness. In the ineffable Stein manner she decided to take Paul
Robeson as _the_ representative 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 opera _Four Saints in Three Acts_ to 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 Russia was 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 the _Nation_ on 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's
population; 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.