III White Friends
The phrase “white friend” used by a Negro among Negroes is so significant in color and emotion, in creating a subtle feeling of social snobbery and superiority, that I have sometimes wondered what is the exact effect of “colored friend” when employed by a white among whites. I mean the sophisticated. I know the reactions and their nuances must be very different within the two groups. An experiment carried out in both groups to determine this would be as rarely illuminating as a scientific discovery to this Negro. But alas, what a pity that it is an impossibility, even as it is for a white reader to share with a black reader the magic inhering in “white friend” with all its implications. It may be partially understood only by comparing it with certain social honors and class distinctions which make for prestige, but it cannot be fully realized.
The peasants of Jamaica were always fond and faithful in friendships. Every boy and every man had a best friend, from whom he expected sympathy and understanding even more than from a near relative. Such a friend shared in confidences which were not revealed even to a brother. Early friendships were encouraged by our parents. And sometimes it was the friendship of youngsters that developed a fraternal feeling among the families of both.
There were few white friends in the social life of the peasants. The white colony agglomerated in the towns and the peasants were 80 per cent of a population of a million. And so the phrase “mah white folks” could not have the significance for a Jamaica peasant that it has for a southern Negro. There were a few settlements of poor whites in the land. They were mainly of German descent. Like the natives, they eked out a living as agriculturists and artisans, sharing in the common community life. The blacks were not sycophantic to them because of their pigmentation, nor did they treat them with contempt as “poor white trash.”
Those were the social conditions in the country. In our only city they were different. In the city there were subtle social distinctions between white and light-colored and between light-colored and black. These distinctions were based upon real class differences which were fixed by the distribution of positions. Generally the whites were the ruling and upper class, the light-colored were the shop-keeping and clerical class, the blacks were the working class.
A peasant would be proud of a white friend who was influential. But from a social-asset point of view, he would place much more value upon the friendship of a light-colored person of the wealthy and educated class or of a black who had risen up out of the peasantry than he would upon that of an undistinguished “poor white.”
My father was the trusted friend of Mr. Hathaway, the missionary who built up the first mission of our region. I remember my first impression of my father: a tall, graying man with an impressive luxuriantly kinky head. He was a prosperous enough peasant and settled on his own land. He was senior deacon of the church and something of a patriarch of the mountain country. My memory retains an unforgettable picture of him, often sitting out upon our barbecue and endeavoring to settle differences between the poorer peasants. For the peasants loved litigation and enjoyed bringing one another into the white man’s court for very trivial offenses. My father always said: Try to settle your differences out of court, for the courts cost more than the cases are worth.
For the best part of my boyhood I was away from home going to school under my school-teacher brother. And when I had grown up a little and returned to the homestead I found my father estranged from the church. For five years he had never set foot on the church premises. After Mr. Hathaway there had been about five other missionaries, but the sixth, a Scotchman, turned out a bad egg, after seeming white and good outside. They said he was tricky and canny in petty things. He had falsified the church accounts and appropriated money that was intended for foreign missions. And he had discharged the native teacher and given the job to his wife.
My father quit the church. It went down to the devil. And the mountain country became a hell for that missionary. Even the children jeered at him along the roads when he went riding by. One by one his fellow missionaries turned from him, refusing to visit the mission, until he was isolated. At last he was compelled to go. When he was leaving, he came to my father’s house and offered to shake hands. My father refused. He said the missionary had not acknowledged his error and he did not think his hands were clean just because they were white. But my mother cried and went out to the gate to the missionary’s wife and they embraced.
I make this digression about white friendship and my father, because, like him, I have also had some white friends in my life, friends from the upper class, the middle class, the lower and the very lowest class. Maybe I have had more white than colored friends. Perhaps I have been impractical in putting the emotional above the social value of friendship, but neither the color of my friends, nor the color of their money, nor the color of their class has ever been of much significance to me. It was more the color of their minds, the warmth and depth of their sensibility and affection, that influenced me.
Apropos of white friendship, way back in 1912, when my Songs of Jamaica was published, I received a letter from a man in Singapore praising my effort. This person had been corresponding with Mr. Jekyll about a scheme to establish an international utopian colony for intellectuals and creative talents. Mr. Jekyll, an individualistic aristocrat of the English squirearchy had rejected the idea for himself, saying he had no faith in sentimental and visionary nostrums. But he had carried on a correspondence with several persons who were interested.
Six years later, when my poems appeared in Pearson’s Magazine, I heard from my Singapore correspondent again. He had arrived in San Francisco from Japan. He was intending to come to New York and hoped we would meet. In a few weeks he came and I was shocked out of my skin by the appearance of the apostle of the international cultural life. In my young romantic naïveté in the hill-top of Jamaica I had imagined him to be the personification of a knight-errant of esthetics, lustily fighting against conventionalism for a freer cultural and artistic expression. But the apostle was lank and limp and strangely gray-eyed and there was a grayness in his personality like the sensation of dry sponge. He appeared like an object out of place in space, as if the soul of existence had been taken out of his form and left him a kind of mummy. His voice sounded as if it were trained to suppress all emotion. And he walked like a conventionalized mannikin. I thought that man’s vanity must be vastly greater than his intelligence when such an individual could imagine himself capable of being the inspirer of an international colony of happy humanity.
Mr. Gray’s parentage was international—a mixture of Italian, German and other Nordic strains. He was born in the Orient. When the World War broke, he and his inseparable sister were living in a utopian colony of Europeans of different nationalities. But the colony had to be disbanded because the territory belonged to one of the Allied powers and some of the members were Germans, and there were national quarrels over the cause of the war.
I invited the Grays up to Harlem. They were interested in seeing the big Black Belt, but they did not like Harlem. They did not like New York. Mr. Gray said he was glad to locate me through Pearson’s, and that he enjoyed the magazine as a whole. I said that Frank Harris would be delighted to hear that and he said he would like to meet Frank Harris. I promised him an introduction.
Mr. Gray praised me highly for my new poems. He thought them stronger and riper than the Jamaican dialect rhymes. And also he thought I should have enough leisure to write more. He thought it might be salutary if I could get away from the Black Belt for awhile. And he suggested a plan for me to make a trip abroad.
My surprise over the prompt proposal gave Mr. Gray a kind of self-satisfied amusement. I could tell by his faint sophisticated smile. From my background of hard routine realistic living, idealistic actions did not appear as simple to me as they did to Mr. Gray, who lived by them. His practical life was his lifelong interest in creative talents, the world leadership of intellectual idealists and the establishment of model colonies, out of which he expected a modern Utopia to develop. The World War had confused and disillusioned him a little, but he was still full of hope.
Yet much as I was ready for a holiday from Harlem and though the idea was a vast surprise, I did not accept it right away. I was interested to know the details. Mr. Gray’s plan was that I should be the guest of himself and his sister on a trip to Spain, where I could spend a year, or even two, writing. They had lived in Spain before and thought that living there after the war would be more agreeable than in any other European country, because Spain had kept out of the World War.
Miss Gray’s resemblance to her brother was striking. They looked like twins. She was almost as tall, but she was physically stronger and more prepossessing. Much as I wanted that holiday, I had my doubts that I could be comfortable, much less happy, as their guest. So I said that I would like some time to think the matter over. And they agreed that I should first do a little thinking. But the tone of their voices and of their faces seemed to show that they were certain that I would finally say yes.
I had recently quit my job as waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad, when the Grays arrived in New York. Thus I had plenty of time to spend with them. I was fortunate in not needing to worry about the expense of food. We ate in Harlem and downtown in the Automat restaurants. I visited them in their rooms in their downtown hotel. When I appeared at the desk, the clerk spoke before I did: “Oh, yes, you are the colored visitor from abroad. Mr. Gray is expecting you, just step into the elevator.”
I had lots of time and opportunity to find out whether I would enjoy being a long-time guest of the Grays. And reluctantly I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t. For their ideals I had the highest esteem and I was touched by their generosity. But between them and me there was a great disparity of temperament and outlook, a vast difference in seeing and in feeling the colors of life. I felt convinced that a long intimate association would strain disastrously, and perhaps break, our friendship.
Yet I was tantalized by the thought of a vacation in Spain. For West Indians it is the romantic European country, which gave the Caribbean islands their early names and terribly exciting tales of caribs and conquistadors, buccaneers and golden galleons and sugar-cane, rum and African slaves.
I thought I would try taking a little advice. At that time I knew nobody among the Negro intellectuals, excepting Hubert Harrison. Hubert Harrison was a lecturer on the sidewalks of Harlem. He lectured on free-thought, socialism and racialism, and sold books. He spoke precisely and clearly, with fine intelligence and masses of facts. He was very black, compact of figure, and his head resembled an African replica of Socrates.
He came from one of the Virgin Islands. He used to lecture in Wall Street. A group of Jews became interested and brought him to lecture in a hall in One Hundred Twenty-fifth Street. For a time he was the black hope of the Socialists. Then he gave up Socialism for the Garvey pan-African movement.
I explained my dilemma to Harrison and he said I was a fool to hesitate; that I was too conscientious. In civilized life it was not necessary for one to like one’s hosts, he pointed out. Harrison said he would like to talk the plan over with me and Mr. Gray. So I got him and Mr. Gray together at dinner at a little South Carolina cookshop which was good for its special hog food.
Harrison talked to Mr. Gray mostly about the pan-African movement. He had a similar idea, he said, but Garvey, being more spectacular, had run away with it. He told Mr. Gray that he was performing a gracious act by taking me to Europe; that he himself had lived abroad in Denmark and Japan, and the experience had helped him in his later work. He avoided any mention of my real feelings about taking the trip, and I didn’t know how to express what I really felt. Finally Harrison got a personal donation of fifty dollars from Mr. Gray to help in the work of black enlightenment.
I had to fall back upon myself in making a decision. When I did, informing Mr. Gray of all my doubts about the project, he was as surprised as I had been when he first mentioned the subject. Our contacts were all so easy and pleasant, he had not reckoned on the objections. I tried to make him see as I did that a close association would be quite a different thing from polite social contact.
When I told Hubert Harrison what I had done, he exclaimed that I was an impossible poet. But soon after I received a letter from Mr. Gray. He said that both he and his sister appreciated my frankness, especially because of the duplicity they had experienced in their efforts to found a community of free spirits. As an alternative he offered me a brief vacation abroad, regretting that the decrease of his income because of the war did not permit him to make it a long vacation. As the Grays were going to Spain and I did not want to appear as if I were deliberately avoiding traveling with them, I chose going to England.
I had promised Mr. Gray an introduction to Frank Harris, and we were invited to his house one afternoon. Frank Harris in his sitting room was obscured by the bulk of another visitor who resembled an enormous slug. Every gesture he made, every word he uttered, was a gesture of crawling at the feet of Harris, whom he addressed as “Master, Dear Master.” And Frank Harris appeared pleased like a little boy who takes all the credit for a brave deed that others helped him to perform. The scene disconcerted me. I could not understand how a man so forthright in his opinion as Frank Harris could swallow all of that thick cloying syrup of insincerity. But he certainly did, and with relish, rubbing his hands and nodding his head. The phrases poured heavily out of the huge man’s boneless jaws, nauseating the atmosphere: “Dear master, you are the world’s greatest teacher and martyr since Jesus. The pharisees are against you, Master, but your disciples are loyal.” Frank Harris said that he was quite aware of that. If he were in France he would be called universally cher maître, like Anatole France, but a true king had no honor among the Anglo-Saxon peoples.
Frank Harris then spoke of his long and unsuccessful fight against injustice, and he emphasized the Boer War, the Oscar Wilde case, and the World War. And whenever he paused the disciple filled in with “Yes, Master... dear Master.”
The visit ended with Mr. Gray being sold a set of Frank Harris’s books and his taking out a year’s subscription for Pearson’s.
But before I left Frank Harris asked if there were anything he could do for me in London. He could not do much by way of personal introduction he said, because all his friends there had become enemies. I said the only person I was keen about meeting was Bernard Shaw. Well chosen, Frank Harris said, and gave me a letter introducing me to Bernard Shaw.