VI Pugilist vs. Poet
Had I been a black Diogenes exploring the white world with my African lamp, I could have proclaimed: I saw Bernard Shaw! Otherwise I did not get a grand thrill out of London. And I felt entirely out of sympathy with the English environment. There was the climate, of course, which nobody likes. In my young poetic exuberance in the clean green high hills of Jamaica, I had chanted blithely and naïvely of “chimney factories pouring smoke.”
But after working in a factory in New York and getting well acquainted with the heat and smoke of railroad kitchens and engines, I was no longer romantic about factory smoke. And London was enveloped in smoke most of the time. When I was a boy in the tropics I always rejoiced in the periodic fogs which rose up out of the rivers like grand masses of fine fleecy clouds coming out of the belly of the earth and ascending to the sky. But the fog of London was like a heavy suffocating shroud. It not only wrapped you around but entered into your throat like a strangling nightmare. Yet the feeling of London was so harshly unfriendly to me that sometimes I was happy in the embrace of the enfolding fog. London was the only great northern city in which I was obliged to wear an overcoat all the year round.
However, it was more than the climate that made London uncongenial. I lived for months in Brittany and it rained all the time, unceasingly. Yet I loved the environment, because the Bretons were such a sympathetic people. Like the quiet brown fields and the rugged coasts, even like the unending fishermen’s nets everywhere, the unceasing rain was a charming part of the whole harmony of their way of living. But the English as a whole were a strangely unsympathetic people, as coldly chilling as their English fog.
I don’t think I could have survived the ordeal of more than a year’s residence in London if I had not had the freedom of two clubs. The membership of both clubs was overwhelmingly foreign. And perhaps that was why I felt most of the time that I was living on foreign instead of English soil.
One club was for colored soldiers. It was situated in a basement in Drury Lane. There was a host of colored soldiers in London, from the West Indies and Africa, with a few colored Americans, East Indians, and Egyptians among them. A West Indian student from Oxford introduced me to the club. I went often and listened to the soldiers telling tales of their war experiences in France, Egypt, and Arabia. Many were interested in what American Negroes were thinking and writing. And so I brought to the club copies of American Negro magazines and newspapers: The Crisis, The Messenger, The Negro World, the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender. A soldier from Jamaica invited me on a holiday trip to the camp at Winchester.
I wrote a series of articles about the colored soldiers and their club, which Hubert Harrison featured in the Negro World, the organ of the Garvey Back-to-Africa Movement. In due time the Negro World with the first article arrived at the Drury Lane club. The Englishwoman in charge of the club took exception to the article. I think she was the widow of a sergeant major who had served England in India. She had given me an interview, telling about her “colored boys” and their virtues, if white people knew how to manage them. And I had quoted her and said she had a patronizing white maternal attitude toward her colored charges. The Englishwoman did not like that. And so, being persona non grata, I transferred most of my attention to the other club.
The International Club was full of excitement, with its dogmatists and doctrinaires of radical left ideas: Socialists, Communists, anarchists, syndicalists, one-big-unionists and trade unionists, soap-boxers, poetasters, scribblers, editors of little radical sheets which flourish in London. But foreigners formed the majority of the membership. The Jewish element was the largest. The Polish Jews and the Russian Jews were always intellectually at odds. The German Jews were aloof. There were also Czechs, Italians, and Irish nationalists, and rumors of spies.
For the first time I found myself in an atmosphere of doctrinaire and dogmatic ideas in which people devoted themselves entirely to the discussion and analysis of social events from a radical and Marxian point of view. There was an uncompromising earnestness and seriousness about those radicals that reminded me of an orthodox group of persons engaged in the discussion of a theological creed. Only at the International Club I was not alienated by the radicals as I would have been by the theologians. The contact stimulated and broadened my social outlook and plunged me into the reading of Karl Marx.
There was so much emphasis placed upon Marxian intellects and un-Marxian minds, the Marxian and non-Marxian way of approach to social organization, that I felt intellectually inadequate and decided to educate myself. One thing seemed very clear to me: the world was in the beginning of passing through a great social change, and I was excited by the possibilities. These people believed that Marx was the true prophet of the new social order. Suppose they were not wrong! And if not altogether right, suppose they were nearly right? History had taught me that the face of the world had been changed before by an obscure prophet. I had no reason to think that the world I lived in was permanent, solid and unshakable: the World War had just come to a truce.
So I started reading Marx. But it wasn’t entertaining reading. Much of it was like studying subjects you dislike, which are necessary to pass an examination. However, I got the essential stuff. And a Marx emerged from his pages different from my former idea of him as a torch-burning prophet of social revolution. I saw the picture of a man imprisoned by walls upon walls of books and passionately studying the history and philosophy and science of the world, so that he might outline a new social system for the world. I thought that Marx belonged even more to the institutions of learning than to the street corners from which I had so often heard his gospel preached. And I marveled that any modern system of social education could ignore the man who stood like a great fixed monument in the way of the world.
If there was no romance for me in London, there was plenty of radical knowledge. All the outstanding extreme radicals came to the International Club to lecture and I heard most of them—Walton Newbold, the first Communist Member of Parliament; Saklatvala, the Indian Parsee and first unofficial Communist Member of Parliament; A.J. Cook of the Miners’ Federation, who later became its secretary; Guy Aldred, an anarchist editor; Jack Tanner, a shop steward committee leader; Arthur McManus and William Gallacher, the agitators from the Clyde; George Lansbury, the editor of the Daily Herald; and Sylvia Pankhurst, who had deserted the suffragette for the workers’ movement.
I was the only African visiting the International Club, but I soon introduced others: a mulatto sailor from Limehouse, a West Indian student from Oxford, a young black minister of the Anglican church, who was ambitious to have a colored congregation in London, a young West Indian doctor from Dulwich, three soldiers from the Drury Lane club, and a couple of boxers. The minister and the doctor did not make a second visit, but the others did.
The club had also its social diversions and there was always dancing. The manager, desiring to offer something different, asked the boxers to put on an exhibition match. The boxers were willing and a large crowd filled the auditorium of the club to see them.
One was a coffee brown, the other bronze; both were strapping broad-chested fellows. Their bodies gleamed as if they were painted in oil. The darker one was like a stout bamboo, smooth and hairless. They put on an entertaining act, showing marvelous foot and muscle work, dancing and feinting all over the stage.
Some weeks later the black boxer gave me a ticket for his official fight, which was taking place in Holborn. His opponent was white and English. I was glad of the opportunity to see my friend in a real fight. And it was a good fight. Both men were in good form, possessing powerful punches. And they fully satisfied the crowd with the brutal pleasure it craved. In the ninth round, I think, the black man won with a knockout.
Some fellows from the Drury Lane club had come to encourage their comrade. After the match we grouped around him with congratulations. We proposed to go to a little colored restaurant off Shaftesbury Avenue to celebrate the event. At that moment, a white man pushed his way through to the boxer and putting out his hand said: Shake, Darkey, you did a clean job; it was a fine fight. The boxer shook hands and thanked his admirer quietly. He was a modest type of fellow. Then he turned to a little woman almost hidden in the group—a shy, typically nondescript and dowdy Englishwoman, with her hat set inelegantly back on her head—and introduced her to his white admirer: “This is my wife.” The woman held out her hand, but the white man, ignoring it, exclaimed: “You damned nigger!” The boxer hauled back and hit him in the mouth and he dropped to the pavement.
We hurried away to the restaurant. We sat around, the poor woman among us, endeavoring to woo the spirit of celebration. But we were all wet. The boxer said: “I guess they don’t want no colored in this damned white man’s country.” He dropped his head down on the table and sobbed like a child. And I thought that that was his knockout.
I thought, too, of Bernard Shaw’s asking why I did not choose pugilism instead of poetry for a profession. He no doubt imagined that it would be easier for a black man to win success at boxing than at writing in a white world. But looking at life through an African telescope I could not see such a great difference in the choice. For, according to British sporting rules, no Negro boxer can compete for a championship in the land of cricket, and only Negroes who are British subjects are given a chance to fight. These regulations have nothing to do with the science of boxing or the Negro’s fitness to participate. They are made merely to discourage boxers who are black and of African descent.
Perhaps the black poet has more potential scope than the pugilist. The literary censors of London have not yet decreed that no book by a Negro should be published in Britain—not yet!