Part Three — New York Horizon
IX Back in Harlem
Like fixed massed sentinels guarding the approaches to the great metropolis, again the pyramids of New York in their Egyptian majesty dazzled my sight like a miracle of might and took my breath like the banging music of Wagner assaulting one’s spirit and rushing it skyward with the pride and power of an eagle.
The feeling of the dirty steerage passage across the Atlantic was swept away in the immense wonder of clean, vertical heaven-challenging lines, a glory to the grandeur of space.
Oh, I wished that it were possible to know New York in that way only—as a masterpiece wrought for the illumination of the sight, a splendor lifting aloft and shedding its radiance like a searchlight, making one big and great with feeling. Oh, that I should never draw nearer to descend into its precipitous gorges, where visions are broken and shattered and one becomes one of a million, average, ordinary, insignificant.
At last the ship was moored and I came down to the pavement. Ellis Island: doctors peered in my eyes, officials scrutinized my passport, and the gates were thrown open.
The elevated swung me up to Harlem. At first I felt a little fear and trembling, like a stray hound scenting out new territory. But soon I was stirred by familiar voices and the shapes of houses and saloons, and I was inflated with confidence. A wave of thrills flooded the arteries of my being, and I felt as if I had undergone initiation as a member of my tribe. And I was happy. Yes, it was a rare sensation again to be just one black among many. It was good to be lost in the shadows of Harlem again. It was an adventure to loiter down Fifth and Lenox avenues and promenade along Seventh Avenue. Spareribs and corn pone, fried chicken and corn fritters and sweet potatoes were like honey to my palate.
There was a room for me in the old house on One Hundred Thirty-first Street, but there was no trace of Manda. I could locate none of my close railroad friends. But I found Sanina. Sanina was an attractive quadroon from Jamaica who could pass as white. Before prohibition she presided over a buffet flat. Now she animated a cosy speakeasy. Her rendezvous on upper Seventh Avenue, with its pink curtains and spreads, created an artificial rose-garden effect. It was always humming like a beehive with brown butterflies and flames of all ages from the West Indies and from the South.
Sanina infatuated them all. She possessed the cunning and fascination of a serpent, and more charm than beauty. Her clients idolized her with a loyalty and respect that were rare. I was never quite sure what was the secret of her success. For although she was charming, she was ruthless in her affairs. I felt a congeniality and sweet nostalgia in her company, for we had grown up together from kindergarten. Underneath all of her shrewd New York getting-byness there was discernible the green bloom of West Indian naïveté. Yet her poise was a marvel and kept her there floating like an imperishable block of butter on the crest of the dark heaving wave of Harlem. Sanina always stirred me to remember her dominating octoroon grandmother (who was also my godmother) who beat her hard white father in a duel they fought over the disposal of her body. But that is a West Indian tale.... I think that some of Sanina’s success came from her selectiveness. Although there were many lovers mixing up their loving around her, she kept herself exclusively for the lover of her choice.
I passed ten days of purely voluptuous relaxation. My fifty dollars were spent and Sanina was feeding me. I was uncomfortable. I began feeling intellectual again. I wrote to my friend, Max Eastman, that I had returned to New York. My letter arrived at precisely the right moment. The continuation of The Liberator had become a problem. Max Eastman had recently resigned the editorship in order to devote more time to creative writing. Crystal Eastman also was retiring from the management to rest and write a book on feminism. Floyd Dell had just published his successful novel, Moon Calf, and was occupied with the writing of another book.
Max Eastman invited me to Croton over the week-end to discuss the situation. He proposed to resume the editorship again if I could manage the sub-editing that Floyd Dell did formerly. I responded with my hand and my head and my heart. Thus I became associate editor of The Liberator. My experience with the Dreadnought in London was of great service to me now.
The times were auspicious for the magazine. About the time that I was installed it received a windfall of $11,000 from the government, which was I believe a refund on mailing privileges that had been denied the magazine during the war.
Soon after taking on my job I called on Frank Harris, I took along an autographed copy of Spring in New Hampshire, the book of verses that I had published in London. The first thing Frank Harris asked was if I had seen Bernard Shaw. I told him all about my visit and Shaw’s cathedral sermon. Harris said that perhaps Shaw was getting religion at last and might die a good Catholic. Harris was not as well-poised as when I first met him. Pearson’s Magazine was not making money, and he was in debt and threatened with suspension of publication. He said he desired to return to Europe where he could find leisure to write, that he was sick and tired of the editor business. He did not congratulate me on my new job. The incident between him and The Liberator was still a rancor in his mind. He wasn’t a man who forgot hurts easily.
But he was pleased that I had put over the publication of a book of poems in London. “It’s a hard, mean city for any kind of genius,” he said, “and that’s an achievement for you.” He looked through the little brown-covered book. Then he ran his finger down the table of contents closely scrutinizing. I noticed his aggressive brow become heavier and scowling. Suddenly he roared: “Where is the poem?”
“Which one?” I asked with a bland countenance, as if I didn’t know which he meant.
“You know which,” he growled. “That fighting poem, ‘If We Must Die.’ Why isn’t it printed here?”
I was ashamed. My face was scorched with fire. I stammered: “I was advised to keep it out.”
“You are a bloody traitor to your race, sir!” Frank Harris shouted. “A damned traitor to your own integrity. That’s what the English and civilization have done to your people. Emasculated them. Deprived them of their guts. Better you were a head-hunting, blood-drinking cannibal of the jungle than a civilized coward. You were bolder in America. The English make obscene sycophants of their subject peoples. I am Irish and I know. But we Irish have guts the English cannot rip out of us. I’m ashamed of you, sir. It’s a good thing you got out of England. It is no place for a genius to live.”
Frank Harris’s words cut like a whip into my hide, and I was glad to get out of his uncomfortable presence. Yet I felt relieved after his castigation. The excision of the poem had been like a nerve cut out of me, leaving a wound which would not heal. And it hurt more every time I saw the damned book of verse. I resolved to plug hard for the publication of an American edition, which would include the omitted poem. “A traitor,” Frank Harris had said, “a traitor to my race.” But I felt worse for being a traitor to myself. For if a man is not faithful to his own individuality, he cannot be loyal to anything.
I soon became acquainted and friendly with The Liberator collaborators and sympathizers: Art Young, Boardman Robinson, Stuart Davis, John Barber, Adolph Dehn, Hugo Gellert, Ivan Opfer, Maurice Becker, Maurice Sterne, Arturo Giovanitti, Roger Baldwin, Louis Untermeyer, Mary Heaton Vorse, Lydia Gibson, Cornelia Barnes, Genevieve Taggard. William Gropper and Michael Gold became contributing editors at the same time that I joined The Liberator staff.
The Liberator was frequently honored by visitors, many of them women, some beautiful and some strange. Of course they all wanted to see the handsome editor-in-chief. But Max Eastman was seldom in the office. He usually came in when it was nearly time to make up the magazine for publication. Then he worked quickly with devilish energy, sifting and scrapping material, titling articles and pictures. And the magazine was always out on time. Eastman had a lazy manner and there was a general idea (which apparently pleased him) that he was more of a playboy than a worker. But he was really a very hard and meticulous worker. I know of no other writer who works so sternly and carefully, rewriting, chiseling and polishing his phrases.
There were amusing incidents. One day a wild blonde of unkempt frizzly hair dashed into the office and declared she had an urgent desire to see Max Eastman. We said he wasn’t there, but she wouldn’t believe us. So she went hunting all over the building, upstairs and downstairs, opening every door and peeping behind them and even into drawers. Finally she invaded the washroom, and when she left she locked it up and carried away the key.
But we had more composed visitors, also. Crystal Eastman brought Clare Sheridan. They were a striking pair to look at. Two strapping representatives of the best of the American and English types. They were interesting to contrast, the one embodying in her personality that daring freedom of thought and action—all that was fundamentally fine, noble and genuine in American democracy; the other a symbol of British aristocracy, a little confused by the surging movement of new social forces, but sincerely trying to understand.
In 1920 Clare Sheridan had accompanied Kamenev, the Bolshevik emissary in London, to Russia. She was the first woman of the British aristocracy to visit that country after the revolution. She had published a series of articles from her diary in the London Times. I had read them eagerly, for they were like a romance, while I was in London. Her incisive etchings of the Bolshevik leaders stuck in my memory. She had summed up Zinoviev, “fussy and impatient, with the mouth of a petulant woman,” and when I went to Russia and met Zinoviev, each time I heard him prate in his unpleasant falsetto voice, I thought of Clare Sheridan’s deft drawing of him.
Clare Sheridan had a handsome, intelligent and arrogant face. She was curious about The Liberator, its staff and contributors and free radical bohemian atmosphere. I asked her why a similar magazine could not exist in London with the same free and easy intercourse between people of different classes and races. She said that social conditions and traditions in London were so different. And I knew from experience that she was telling me the truth. (She did not know that I had recently returned from London.)
She said that she would like to sculpt my head. But she never got around to it. Instead she wrote in her American Diary (after seeing The Emperor Jones with Crystal Eastman, Ernestine Evans, et al.): “I see the Negro in a new light. He used to be rather repulsive to me, but obviously he is human, has been very badly treated.... It must be humiliating to an educated colored man that he may not walk down the street with a white woman, nor dine in a restaurant with her.... I wonder about the psychology of the colored man, like the poet, McKay, who came to see me a few days ago and who is as delightful to talk to as any man one could meet....”
Unexpectedly, Elinor Wylie was ushered into my little office one afternoon. She was accompanied by her sister and I rushed out to find an extra chair. Mrs. Wylie’s eyes were flaming and I was so startled by her enigmatic beauty and Park Avenue elegance that I was dumb with confusion. She tried to make me feel easy, but I was as nervous as a wild cat caught indoors. I knew very little about her, except that she had published a little book of verse. I had read some of her pieces in The New Republic, and I remembered one memorable thing called, “The Lion and the Lamb,” which was infused with a Blakelike imagery and beauty. She promised to send The Liberator a poem, but I don’t think she ever did. Perhaps I did not show enough enthusiasm. I had no idea, at the time, that I was speaking to one of the few great women poets of the English language.
I always felt that the real object of these visits was Max Eastman, who was an ikon for the radical women. And so I acted like a black page, listening a lot and saying very little, but gratefully acknowledging all the gifts of gracious words that were offered to The Liberator.
Lewis Gannett called one day and invited me to lunch with Carl Van Doren, somewhere down around Park Row. Mr. Van Doren was then one of the editors of The Nation. He did most of the talking. He was very practical-minded in the pleasant canny Yankee way. For one who was a college professor he was remarkably well informed about the different phases of American social and industrial life. He said that the Italians and the Negroes were interesting to him as the two most special groups of workers in America. He considered the Italians a hardier and a harder-working group. His idea was thought-provoking and I was struck by the comparison he made between Italians and Negroes. It was fresh and novel, especially as Negroes themselves generally compare their status with that of the Jews. I thought myself that the comparison frequently made between the Jewish group and the Negro group was mainly psychological, while the point that Mr. Van Doren scored was sociological.
One day I had sorted and read until my brain was fagged and I hadn’t found a single startling line. Then I picked up a thin sheaf and discovered some verses which stimulated me like an elixir. They were mostly sonnets, a little modernistic, without capitals, a little voluptuous, yet restrained and strangely precise, with a flavor of Latin eroticism and decadence. They were signed, E.E. Cummings.
I didn’t know anything about the author, but I wrote a note asking him to come in and see Max Eastman. He dropped by one day, a stripling in a fawn-colored suit and resembling a fawn, with his head cocked up to one side and a smile which looked like a curiously-wrought icicle.
Max Eastman was not in. He had not been in the office since I had written to the author, nor had he seen the poems. So I talked to Cummings and dared to argue with him about a couple of the sonnets. I was particularly excited by one called “Maison.” It created something like an exquisite miniature palace of Chinese porcelain. The palace was so real that it rose up out of the page, but the author had also placed in it a little egg so rotten that you could smell it. I argued about that egg, but Cummings said that that was exactly what he wanted to do. I understood and apologized.
I wanted to make a spread of the verses in The Liberator, but Robert Minor was substituting as editor-in-chief that month and he had a violent reaction against the verses. I remember Minor’s saying to me that if I liked such poems I was more of a decadent than a social revolutionist. I protested that the verses were poetry, and that in any work of art my natural reaction was more for its intrinsic beauty than for its social significance. I said that my social sentiments were strong, definite and radical, but that I kept them separate from my esthetic emotions, for the two were different and should not be mixed up.
Robert Minor said he could not visualize me as a real Negro. He thought of a Negro as of a rugged tree in the forest. Perhaps Minor had had Negro playmates like that in Texas and he could not imagine any other type. Minor himself always gave me the impression of a powerful creature of the jungle. His personality seemed to exude a kind of blind elemental brute force. He appeared to me like a reincarnation of Richard Cœur de Lion—a warrior who had found the revolutionary road to heaven and who would annihilate even the glorious ineffectual angels if he found them drifted and stranded on his warpath.
I kept the Cummings verses for the following month when the editorship was resumed by Max Eastman. Eastman recognized their distinctive quality, but not in my enthusiastic way. So we didn’t make a special spread of them as we often did with unusual verse. We printed a couple or more—but not very prominently.
The delirious verses of the Baroness Von Freytag Loringhoven titillated me even as did her crazy personality. She was a constant visitor to see me, always gaudily accoutred in rainbow raiment, festooned with barbaric beads and spangles and bangles, and toting along her inevitable poodle in gilded harness. She had such a precious way of petting the poodle with a slap and ejaculating, “Hund-bitch!”
She was a model, and in marvelous German-English she said: “Mein features not same, schön, but mein back, gut. The artists love to paint it.” The Baroness’s back was indeed a natural work of art.
One day she entertained me by reading, in her masculine throaty voice, a poem she called “Dornröschen”:
Stab for me
lip set intensity.
press to my bower—
my nook, my core
I wait for thee
numb breathlessly
messir
since yore....
I liked the thing so much, I appropriated it for The Liberator. Down in Greenwich Village they made a joke of the Baroness, even the radicals. Some did not believe that she was an authentic baroness, listed in Gotha. As if that really mattered, when she acted the part so magnificently. Yet she was really titled, although she was a working woman. The ultra-moderns of the Village used to mock at the baroness’s painted finger nails. Today all American women are wearing painted finger nails.
How shockingly sad it was to meet Frau Freytag a few years later in the Kurfurstendamm in Berlin, a shabby wretched female selling newspapers, stripped of all the rococo richness of her clothes, her speech, her personality. She went from Berlin to Paris and death. Poor brave Baroness von Freytag Loringhoven.
Our bookkeeper was an Englishman named Mylius. He was an equivocal type, soft and sinister, with a deceptive deferential manner. Dickens would have found him admirable for the creation of Uriah Heep. Mylius had won international notoriety as the man who was prosecuted for libeling His Majesty, King George of England. He had circulated a story that George V had contracted a morganatic marriage. Mylius liked to come into my office to talk. He was a money-fool. He presented me with a copy of a worthless book he had written called, The Socialization of Money. He seemed to think that money was entirely the invention of governments and bankers, an evil thing having no relationship to other commodities. I got it out of Mylius that his father, who was I believe a Greek Jew, was a banker and had left him a fortune when he died. And he had gambled away every penny of that fortune at Monte Carlo.
One day Mylius pushed into my office with a fake frightened expression. He said there was a criminal-looking man outside who wanted to see me. I went downstairs and found Michael. I brought him up to my office. Michael had read in a newspaper that I was working on The Liberator and he had looked up the address and called to see me. In two years Michael had changed almost beyond recognition. The college-lad veneer had vanished. A nasty scar had spoiled his right eyebrow and his face was prematurely old, with lines like welts. After I went abroad he had landed a job as a street-car conductor. He had worked a few months and becoming disgusted, he drifted back to petty banditry. He was copped and jailed in a local prison, where he made criminal friends more expert than himself. Now he was in with a gang.
We chatted reminiscently. I related my radical adventures in London. I exhibited what I had accomplished by way of literature on the side. And I presented him with a signed copy of the book. Michael looked with admiration at the frontispiece (a photograph of myself) and at me.
“Jeez,” he said, “you did do it, all right. You’re a bird.”
“What species?” I asked.
Michael laughed. “What are you wanting me to say? You are an eagle?”
“Oh no,” I said, “that’s a white folk’s bird. Blackbird will do.”
“There you’re starting again,” Michael said. “You know I haven’t been in Harlem since you left.”
I said that I was living in the same place and invited him to come up. I told him that my landlord, Mr. Morris, had asked after him.
Michael shook his head. “It ain’t like before. I’m in with a rotten gang. We’se all suspicious of one another. If I came around to see you, they’d soon get wise to it and want to mess around there, thinking there was something to make.”
I said I wouldn’t care, since there was nothing. And knowing them might be another exciting diversion, I thought.
Michael’s face became ugly. “No, you’re better off without knowing that gang. They couldn’t understand you like me. They’re just no good. They’re worse than me. And lookit that guy what send you out to me. He was looking at me as if I wasn’t human. I know that my mug ain’t no angel’s since that wop bastard gashed me, but all the same I ain’t no gorilla.”
“Couldn’t you find another job and start working again?” I asked.
He shook his head. “It’s too late now. I can’t get away or escape. I’m not like you. Perhaps if I had had some talent, like you.”
I knew that he was doomed. I had a pocket edition of Francis Thompson’s “Hound of Heaven” on my desk. It was one of my favorite things. Michael looked at it. I said that Thompson was an Irish poet.
“I read a lot, whenever I get a chance,” he said, “newspapers and magazines.”
I read a little from “The Hound”:
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after....
In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
I shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
I stand amid the dust o’ the moulded years—
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap....
I told Michael something of the writer’s way of living. And I gave him the book.
“Can you spare it?” he asked. I said I was always “sparing” books, dropping them everywhere, because they were too heavy to tote.
“I guess when the gang sees me with these here,” said Michael, “they’ll be thinking that I’m turning queer.”
As I opened the door to let him out, I saw Mylius acting as if he were just passing by on the way upstairs to his office. He had been listening at the keyhole. Michael went on out. Mylius said, “I was scared he was going to assassinate you in there.”
“He isn’t a criminal,” I said. “He’s just an old college friend down on his luck.” Mylius was interested and wanted to talk some more, but I was seized by such a loathsome feeling for the big white reptile, I turned my back and shut my door.
I never saw Michael again. Just before I left for Europe the following year I received a pathetic scrawl informing me that he had been caught in a hold-up and sentenced to prison for nine years....
THE HARLEM INTELLIGENTSIA
I had departed from America just after achieving some notoriety as a poet, and before I had become acquainted with the Negro intellectuals. When I got the job of assistant editor on The Liberator, Hubert Harrison, the Harlem street-corner lecturer and agitator, came down to Fourteenth Street to offer his congratulations.
I introduced him to Robert Minor, who was interested in the activities of the advanced Negro radicals. Harrison suggested a little meeting that would include the rest of the black Reds. It was arranged to take place at the Liberator office, and besides Harrison there were Grace Campbell, one of the pioneer Negro members of the Socialist Party; Richard Moore and W.A. Domingo, who edited The Emancipator, a radical Harlem weekly; Cyril Briggs, the founder of the African Blood Brotherhood and editor of the monthly magazine, The Crusader; Mr. Fanning, who owned the only Negro cigar store in Harlem; and one Otto Huiswood, who hailed from Curaçao, the birthplace of Daniel Deleon. Perhaps there were others whom I don’t remember. The real object of the meeting, I think, was to discuss the possibility of making the Garvey Back-to-Africa Movement (officially called the Universal Negro Improvement Association) more class-conscious.
I remember that just as we ended our discussion, Max Eastman unexpectedly popped in to see how the Liberator office was running. Jokingly he said: “Ah, you conspirators,” and everybody laughed except Robert Minor. Minor had recently renounced his anarchism for Communism and he was as austere-looking as a gaunt Spanish priest.
It was interesting to meet also some of the more conservative Negro leaders, such as the officials of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, the author of The Souls of Black Folk and editor of The Crisis, had me to luncheon at the Civic Club. Of Dr. DuBois I knew nothing until I came to America. It was a white woman, my English teacher at the Kansas State College, who mentioned The Souls of Black Folk to me, I think. I found it in the public library in Topeka. The book shook me like an earthquake. Dr. DuBois stands on a pedestal illuminated in my mind. And the light that shines there comes from my first reading of The Souls of Black Folk and also from the Crisis editorial, “Returning Soldiers,” which he published when he returned from Europe in the spring of 1919.
Yet meeting DuBois was something of a personal disappointment. He seemed possessed of a cold, acid hauteur of spirit, which is not lessened even when he vouchsafes a smile. Negroes say that Dr. DuBois is naturally unfriendly and selfish. I did not feel any magnetism in his personality. But I do in his writings, which is more important. DuBois is a great passionate polemic, and America should honor and exalt him even if it disagrees with his views. For his passion is genuine, and contemporary polemics is so destitute of the pure flame of passion that the nation should be proud of a man who has made of it a great art.
Walter White, the present secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, possessed a charming personality, ingratiating as a Y.M.C.A. secretary. One felt a strange, even comic, feeling at the sound of his name and the sight of his extremely white complexion while hearing him described as a Negro.
The White stories of passing white among the crackers were delightful. To me the most delectable was one illustrating the finger-nail theory of telling a near-white from a pure-white. White was traveling on a train on his way to investigate a lynching in the South. The cracker said, “There are many yaller niggers who look white, but I can tell them every time.”
“Can you really?” Walter White asked.
“Oh sure, just by looking at their finger nails.” And taking White’s hand, he said, “Now if you had nigger blood, it would show here on your half-moons.”
That story excited me by its paradox as much as had the name and complexion of Walter White. It seemed altogether fantastic that whites in the South should call him a “nigger” and whites in the North, a Negro. It violates my feeling of words as pictures conveying color and meaning. For whenever I am in Walter White’s company my eyes compose him and my emotions respond exactly as they do in the case of any friendly so-called “white” man. When a white person speaks of Walter White as a Negro, as if that made him a being physically different from a white, I get a weird and impish feeling of the unreality of phenomena. And when a colored person refers to Walter White as colored, in a tone that implies him to be physically different from and inferior to the “pure” white person, I feel that life is sublimely funny. For to me a type like Walter White is Negroid simply because he closely identifies himself with the Negro group—just as a Teuton becomes a Moslem if he embraces Islam. White is whiter than many Europeans—even biologically. I cannot see the difference in the way that most of the whites and most of the blacks seem to see it. Perhaps what is reality for them is fantasy for me.
James Weldon Johnson, song writer, poet, journalist, diplomat and professor, was my favorite among the N.A.A.C.P. officials. I liked his poise, suavity, diplomacy and gentlemanliness. His career reveals surprises of achievement and reads like a success story. When a Negro makes an honorable fight for a decent living and succeeds, I think all Negroes should feel proud. Perhaps a day will come when, under a different social set-up, competent Negroes will be summoned like other Americans to serve their country in diplomatic posts. When that time comes Negroes may proudly cite as a precedent the record of James Weldon Johnson, Negro pioneer of the American diplomatic service, who performed his duties conscientiously and efficiently under unusually difficult conditions.
Jessie Fauset was assistant editor of The Crisis when I met her. She very generously assisted at the Harlem evening of one of our Liberator prayer meetings and was the one fine feature of a bad show. She was prim, pretty and well-dressed, and talked fluently and intelligently. All the radicals liked her, although in her social viewpoint she was away over on the other side of the fence. She belonged to that closed decorous circle of Negro society, which consists of persons who live proudly like the better class of conventional whites, except that they do so on much less money. To give a concrete idea of their status one might compare them to the expropriated and defeated Russian intelligentsia in exile.
Miss Fauset has written many novels about the people in her circle. Some white and some black critics consider these people not interesting enough to write about. I think all people are interesting to write about. It depends on the writer’s ability to bring them out alive. Could there be a more commendable prescription for the souls of colored Americans than the bitter black imitation of white life? Not a Fannie Hurst syrup-and-pancake hash, but the real meat.
But Miss Fauset is prim and dainty as a primrose, and her novels are quite as fastidious and precious. Primroses are pretty. I remember the primroses where I lived in Morocco, that lovely melancholy land of autumn and summer and mysterious veiled brown women. When the primroses spread themselves across the barren hillsides before the sudden summer blazed over the hot land, I often thought of Jessie Fauset and her novels.
What Mary White Ovington, the godmother of the N.A.A.C.P., thought of me was more piquant to me perhaps than to herself. Her personality radiated a quiet silver shaft of white charm which is lovely when it’s real. She was gracious, almost sweet, when she dropped in on The Liberator. But as I listened to her talking in a gentle subjective way I realized that she was emphatic as a seal and possessed of a resolute will.
She told me about her reaction to Booker T. Washington, the officially recognized national leader of the Negroes. Miss Ovington had visited Tuskegee informally. Booker T. Washington had disregarded her, apparently under the impression that she was a poor-white social worker. When he was informed that she originated from a family of high-ups, he became obsequious to her. But she responded coldly. By her austere abolitionist standard she had already taken the measure of the universally popular and idolized Negroid leader.
I repeated the story to my friend Hubert Harrison. He exploded in his large sugary black African way, which sounded like the rustling of dry bamboo leaves agitated by the wind. Hubert Harrison had himself criticized the Negro policy of Booker T. Washington in powerful volcanic English, and subsequently, by some mysterious grapevine chicanery, he had lost his little government job. He joined the Socialist Party. He left it. And finally came to the conclusion that out of the purgatory of their own social confusion, Negroes would sooner or later have to develop their own leaders, independent of white control.
Harrison had a personal resentment against the N.A.A.C.P., and nick-named it the “National Association for the Advancement of Certain People.” His sense of humor was ebony hard, and he remarked that it was exciting to think that the N.A.A.C.P. was the progeny of black snobbery and white pride, and had developed into a great organization, with DuBois like a wasp in Booker Washington’s hide until the day of his death.
And now that I was legging limpingly along with the intellectual gang, Harlem for me did not hold quite the same thrill and glamor as before. Where formerly in saloons and cabarets and along the streets I received impressions like arrows piercing my nerves and distilled poetry from them, now I was often pointed out as an author. I lost the rare feeling of a vagabond feeding upon secret music singing in me.
I was invited to meetings in Harlem. I had to sit on a platform and pretend to enjoy being introduced and praised. I had to respond pleasantly. Hubert Harrison said that I owed it to my race. Standing up like an actor to repeat my poems and kindle them with second-hand emotions. For it was not so easy to light up within me again the spontaneous flames of original creative efforts for expectant audiences. Poets and novelists should let good actors perform for them.
Once I was invited to the Harlem Eclectic Club by its president, William Service Bell. Mr. Bell was a cultivated artistic New England Negro, who personally was very nice. He was precious as a jewel. The Eclectic Club turned out in rich array to hear me: ladies and gentlemen in tenue de rigueur. I had no dress suit to wear, and so, a little nervous, I stood on the platform and humbly said my pieces.
What the Eclectics thought of my poems I never heard. But what they thought of me I did. They were affronted that I did not put on a dress suit to appear before them. They thought I intended to insult their elegance because I was a radical.
The idea that I am an enemy of polite Negro society is fixed in the mind of the Negro élite. But the idea is wrong. I have never had the slightest desire to insult Harlem society or Negro society anywhere, because I happen not to be of it. But ever since I had to tog myself out in a dress suit every evening when I worked as a butler, I have abhorred that damnable uniform. God only knows why it was invented. My esthetic sense must be pretty bad, for I can find no beauty in it, either for white or colored persons. I admire women in bright evening clothes. But men! Blacks in stiff-starched white façades and black uniforms like a flock of crows, imagining they are elegant—oh no!