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....”