Front matter (continued 2)

"It was like that during the war that's just ended," I said, "brother against brother and friend against friend. They were all flapped in it and they were all helpless."

I turned my back again and leaned out of the window, thinking how in times of acute crisis the finest individual thoughts and feelings may be reduced to nothing before the blind brute forces of tigerish tribalism which remain at the core of civilized society.

When I looked up Michael was gone.

There was nearly three months' silence between us after that. It was broken at last by the pencilled scrawl and newspaper clipping which I mentioned earlier. Immediately I wrote to Michael, telling him that I had quit the railroad and was going abroad and that I would like to see him before leaving.

He came one evening. Manda made a mess of fried chicken, and we had a reunion with my landlord and Hubert Harrison, who was accompanied by a European person, a radical or bohemian, or perhaps both.

Hubert Harrison entertained us with a little monologue on going abroad. He was sure the trip would do me good, although it would have been wiser for me to accept the original proposal, he said. He asked me to send him articles from abroad for the Negro World (the organ of the Back-to-Africa Movement) which he was editing.

At first Michael was uneasy, listening to our literary conversation. He had never heard me being intellectual. And he was quite awed by the fact that it was pure poetry and not a fine physique that had given me a raise so quickly. He thought that that poem in the New York Tribune had had something to do with it. And with a little more liquor he relaxed and amused us by telling of his sensations when he saw that poem over my name in the newspaper. And then he surprised me by saying that he was thinking about getting a job.

The European woman was charmed by the novel environment and she idealized Michael as an American proletarian. She thought that Michael was significant as a symbol of the unity of the white and black proletariat. But when she asked Michael what division of the working class he belonged to, he appeared embarrassed. After dinner we went for awhile to Connor's Cabaret, which was the most entertaining colored cabaret in Harlem at that time.

Michael came down to the boat the day I sailed. Mr. Gray also was at the pier. I introduced them. Mr. Gray was aware that Michael was poor, and whispered to me, asking if he might give him something. I said, "Sure." He gave Michael ten dollars.

As the boat moved away from the pier, they were standing together. And suddenly I felt alarmed about Mr. Gray and wondered if I should not have warned him about Michael. I thought that if I were not on the scene, Michael might not consider himself bound by our friendship not to prey upon Mr. Gray. But my fear was merely a wild scare. Michael was perfect all the way through and nothing untoward happened.

PART TWO

ENGLISH INNING

V

Adventuring in Search of George Bernard Shaw

When I was a lad I wrote a rhyme about wanting to visit England and my desire to see the famous streets and places and the "factory chimneys pouring smoke." Later, when I began reading the Bernard Shaw plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant, and the sparkling prefaces, I added Shaw to the list of people and things that I wanted to see. Shortly before I left Jamaica for the United States, Shaw arrived in the island on a visit to the Governor, the Fabian Socialist, Sydney (Lord) Olivier, who was his friend. As my friend Mr. Jekyll was well acquainted with the Governor, I urged him to invite the Governor to bring Bernard Shaw up to Jekyll's cottage in the Blue Mountains. But Mr. Jekyll refused. He said he was opposed to the pursuit of celebrities as if they were public property, and that if Bernard Shaw was visiting Jamaica on a quiet tropical holiday, he, Jekyll, wouldn't be the first Englishman to attempt to intrude upon him. And so I had to be content with reading Shaw's one interview in the local paper, in which he said that the Governor was big and capable enough to boss the colony alone. Mr. Jekyll was amused by that and remarked that when Socialists obtained power, they would be more autocratic than capitalists.

Now that I had grown up in America and was starting off to visit England, I realized that I wasn't excited any more about the items I had named in my juvenile poem. Only the item that I had added mentally remained of lasting interest—Bernard Shaw. With the passing years he had grown vastly bigger in my eyes. I had read most of his published works and seen two of his plays in New York. And my admiration had increased. I considered Bernard Shaw the wisest and most penetrating intellectual alive.

And so it was a spontaneous reply, when Frank Harris asked me what person I would like most to meet in London, and I said "Bernard Shaw." I really never thought of anybody else. Perhaps because the purpose of my voyage was a poetical vacation and I hadn't been thinking about meeting people.

In that season of 1919-20 in London, Shaw was triumphant in the theater. There were three of his plays drawing full houses: Arms and the Man, You Never Can Tell and Pygmalion. After seeing Arms and the Man, I forwarded Frank Harris's letter of introduction to Shaw. Soon I received a reply inviting me to his house.

Besides knowing Frank Harris and Pearson's Magazine, Shaw was acquainted with the old Masses and also The Liberator, in which my poems had been featured. Anything he had to say on any subject would be interesting to me, as it would be to thousands of his admirers everywhere. For Shaw was a world oracle. And the world then was a vast theater full of dramatic events. The capital of the Empire was full of British and Allied officers and soldiers. And they and the newspapers impressed upon one the fact that the world was passing through a universal upheaval.

Shaw received me one evening alone in his house in Adelphi Terrace. There was an elegance about his reedlike black-clothed figure that I had not anticipated, nor had I expected such a colorfully young face and complexion against the white hair and beard. I told Shaw that Frank Harris had been extremely kind to me and that when he gave me the letter to him, he had said that Shaw was perhaps the only friend he had left in London.

Shaw said that Harris was a remarkable man, but a difficult character, that he chafed under the manners of ordinary society, and even his voice seemed to have been trained as a protest. He then asked me how I came to know Frank Harris. I told him, saying that Harris was the first editor to introduce me to the public. Shaw said that Harris was a good hand at picking possibilities.

I reminded Shaw of his visit to Jamaica. He said he had enjoyed visiting his friend, Lord Olivier. Then he mentioned some of the interesting exotic persons with whom he had come in contact. He told me about a Chinese intellectual who had come all the way from China to visit him, and wanted to talk only about Irish politics. He laughed, thinking it was funny. And I laughed too, yet I could understand a little why an educated Chinaman could have the Irish situation on his subtle Oriental mind. Shaw also mentioned an Indian who had brought him a play, which he said had a fine idea and excellent situations in it, only it couldn't fit into the modern theater.

After Shaw had recalled his Indian and his Chinaman he turned to his Negro visitor and said: "It must be tragic for a sensitive Negro to be a poet. Why didn't you choose pugilism instead of poetry for a profession?" he demanded. "You might have developed into a successful boxer with training. Poets remain poor, unless they have an empire to glorify and popularize like Kipling." I said that poetry had picked me as a medium instead of my picking poetry as a profession.

As Shaw had mentioned the theater, I told him that I had seen his plays and also two of Galsworthy's and one of Arnold Bennett's. Shaw said that Galsworthy was a good playwright, a craftsman; but that Arnold Bennett wasn't, and that he had no sense of the theater. "But," said I, "Arnold Bennett's play, Sacred and Profane Love, was a big success." Shaw admitted that it was, but nevertheless it was not excellent theater, he said, adding that the play was badly constructed. I thought I understood. I remembered the most sentimental scene as the most unreal—the one in which the hero plays the piano to the thrilled woman. The actor could not play the piano, at least not enough for anyone to consider him a pianist, and one felt that the scene did not belong on the stage, although it might have been the pièce de résistance of a novel.

Shaw said that writing a play was much more difficult than writing a novel, and I agreed, although I had not yet tried my hand at either. But the technique of the theater seemed naturally harder to me. Shaw said many writers thought it was easy until they tried to master it. His friend, Lord Olivier, for example, who compiled excellent Socialist treatises, once wrote a play and thought it was excellent. He showed it to Shaw, who read it and said he could not understand what it was all about. Yet Lord Olivier insisted that anybody could understand it!

When Shaw discovered that I was not particularly interested in Irish or world politics, because my social outlook was radical, and that I was not expecting him to say something wise about the colored people in a white-controlled world, he turned to an unexpected subject—cathedrals. He spoke of their architectural grandeur, the poetry in their spires and grand arches, and the prismatic beauty of their great windows. He said there were fine cathedrals outside of London, structures full of poetry and music, which I ought to see—Salisbury, Lincoln, Canterbury, York, Winchester—as interesting in their style as St. Sophia, Rheims and Cologne, although people did not talk so much about them. And he informed me that the best way to get at the essential beauty of a cathedral was to stand in the center and look up.

I was enchanted with this monologue on cathedrals. It was so different from Shaw's hard direct hammering writing. It was soft, poetic. And Shaw's voice is like a poem, it is so finely modulated. Once he mentioned the World War, and let out a whinny which sounded exactly like a young colt in distress or like an accent from his great drama, Heartbreak House. I felt at once that in spite of his elegant composed exterior, the World War must have had a shattering effect on him. Perhaps, prior to 1914 he had thought, as did other Fabian Socialists, that a wholesale war of slaughter and carnage between the civilized nations was impossible; that the world was passing gradually from the cutthroat competitive to a co-operative stage. I myself, under the influence of the international idealistic thought of that period, used to think that way. I remember when I was a school boy in Jamaica that the local militia was disbanded by the Governor, Lord Olivier, Shaw's friend and the most brilliant statistician of the Fabian Socialists. The local paper printed his statement that "such training for citizens is not necessary in an age of established peace, and anyway the people of the West Indies could not be concerned in any imaginary war of the future." Seven years later conscription was declared in Jamaica, the most intensely British of West Indian colonies, before it became effective in England, and West Indian contingents served in France, Egypt, and Arabia.

I had read such a lot about Shaw's athletic appearance and his interest in boxing, and his photographs made him look so strikingly vigorous that I was surprised by his actual physique. Shaw looked healthy, but not like the ordinary healthy rugged man. Under his fine white hair, his complexion was as soft and rosy as a little child's. And there was something about him that reminded me of an evergreen plant grown indoors.

As an animal he suggested an antelope to my mind. And his physique gave an impression of something brittle and frail that one would want to handle with care, like chinaware. I thought that it was perhaps his vegetarian diet that gave him that remarkably deceptive appearance.

Some time after my visit with Shaw I went to hear him lecture at Kingsway Hall, where he unreservedly declared himself a believer in Lenin. I was present with William Gallacher, now Communist member of Parliament. At question time Gallacher said that it was all right for Shaw to come out in theoretical praise of Lenin, but that the workers needed practical action. Shaw replied that action was all right, but that he was getting old and so he would have to leave action to younger men like Gallacher. Yes, indeed, I had a vast admiration for the purely animal cunning and cleverness that lay underneath that great Shavian intellect.

Shaw was helpful in recommending me so that I could obtain a reader's ticket for the British Museum. That may seem easy enough for an ordinary person to acquire, but try, as a stranger in London, to find the responsible householder to sponsor you according to the regulations!

Some months later, when I was getting out my little book of poetry, Spring in New Hampshire, my publisher tried to get Shaw to write a foreword for it. But he refused, saying that my poetry should stand on its own. I did not mind, even though a short foreword by Shaw might have helped the selling of the book. But I could never visualize Shaw as a poet or a subtle appreciator of the nuances of profound poetry. As a poet, I preferred the prefatory note which was contributed by Professor I.R. Richards of Cambridge University.

However, that Bernard Shaw discourse on cathedrals was an exceptional thing. I haven't discovered anything like it in any of his writings. The only writing of his with which I could compare it is the play, Candida. It is pregnant with poetry. As different from his other writings as the innumerable caricatures of Shaw are from his real self. I like to look at a great piling cathedral from the outside. And also I love the vast spaciousness of the inside when it is empty. During the many years I spent on the continent of Europe, I never stopped in a cathedral town without visiting the cathedral. I have spent hours upon hours meditating about modern movements of life in the sublime grandeur of cathedral silence. And as I stood in the nave of those concrete miracles of the medieval movement of belief and faith, transported by the triumphant arches of Gothic glory, often I felt again the musical vibrations of Shaw's cathedral sermon.

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!

VII

A Job in London

Yet London was not wholly Hell, for it was possible for me to compose poetry some of the time. No place can be altogether a God-forsaken Sahara or swamp in which a man is able to discipline and compose his emotions into self-expression. In London I wrote "Flame-heart."

So much I have forgotten in ten years, So much in ten brief years! I have forgot What time the purple apples come to juice, And what month brings the shy forget-me-not. I have forgot the special, startling season Of the pimento's flowering and fruiting; What time of year the ground doves brown the fields And fill the noonday with their curious fluting. I have forgotten much, but still remember The poinsettia's red, blood-red in warm December. I still recall the honey-fever grass, But cannot recollect the high days when We rooted them out of the ping-wing path To stop the mad bees in the rabbit pen. I often try to think in what sweet month The languid painted ladies used to dapple The yellow by-road mazing from the main, Sweet with the golden threads of the rose-apple. I have forgotten—strange—but quite remember The poinsettia's red, blood-red in warm December. What weeks, what months, what time of the mild year We cheated school to have our fling at tops? What days our wine-thrilled bodies pulsed with joy Feasting upon blackberries in the copse? Oh some I know! I have embalmed the days, Even the sacred moments when we played, All innocent of passion, uncorrupt, At noon and evening in the flame-heart's shade. We were so happy, happy, I remember, Beneath the poinsettia's red in warm December.

And then I became acquainted with Sylvia Pankhurst. It happened thus. The Daily Herald, the organ of British organized labor and of the Christian radicals, had created a national sensation by starting a campaign against the French employment of black troops in the subjection of Germany.

The headlines were harrowing:

"Black Scourge in Europe," "Black Peril on the Rhine," "Brutes in French Uniform," "Sexual Horrors Let Loose by France," "Black Menace of 40,000 Troops," "Appeal to the Women of Europe."

The instigator of the campaign was the muckraker E.D. Morel, whose pen had been more honorably employed in the exposure of Belgian atrocities in the Congo. Associated with him was a male "expert" who produced certain "facts" about the physiological peculiarities of African sex, which only a prurient-minded white man could find.

Behind the smoke screen of the Daily Herald campaign there were a few significant facts. There was great labor unrest in the industrial region of the Rhineland. The Communists had seized important plants. The junkers were opposing the Communists. The Social-Democratic government was impotent. The French marched in an army. The horror of German air raids and submarine warfare was still fresh in the mind of the British public. And it was not easy to work up and arouse the notorious moral righteousness of the English in favor of the Germans and against the French. Searching for a propaganda issue, the Christian radicals found the colored troops in the Rhineland. Poor black billy goat.

I wrote a letter to George Lansbury, the editor of the Daily Herald, and pointed out that his black-scourge articles would be effective in stirring up more prejudice against Negroes. I thought it was the duty of his paper as a radical organ to enlighten its readers about the real reasons why the English considered colored troops undesirable in Europe, instead of appealing indirectly to illogical emotional prejudices. Lansbury did not print my letter, but sent me a private note saying that he was not personally prejudiced against Negroes. I had no reason to think that Lansbury was personally prejudiced. The previous summer, when colored men were assaulted by organized bands of whites in the English ports and their bedding and furniture hurled into the streets and burned, Lansbury had energetically denounced the action. But I didn't consider the matter a personal issue. It was the public attitude of the Daily Herald that had aroused me. An English friend advised me to send the letter to Sylvia Pankhurst, who was very critical of the policies of the Daily Herald. I did, and Sylvia Pankhurst promptly printed my letter in her weekly, the Workers' Dreadnought.

Maybe I was not civilized enough to understand why the sex of the black race should be put on exhibition to persuade the English people to decide which white gang should control the coal and iron of the Ruhr. However, it is necessary to face the fact that prejudices, however unreasonable they may be, are real—individual, national and racial prejudices. My experience of the English convinced me that prejudice against Negroes had become almost congenital among them. I think the Anglo-Saxon mind becomes morbid when it turns on the sex life of colored people. Perhaps a psychologist might be able to explain why.

Sylvia Pankhurst must have liked the style of my letter, for she wrote asking me to call at her printing office in Fleet Street. I found a plain little Queen-Victoria sized woman with plenty of long unruly bronze-like hair. There was no distinction about her clothes, and on the whole she was very undistinguished. But her eyes were fiery, even a little fanatic, with a glint of shrewdness.

She said she wanted me to do some work for the Workers' Dreadnought. Perhaps I could dig up something along the London docks from the colored as well as the white seamen and write from a point of view which would be fresh and different. Also I was assigned to read the foreign newspapers from America, India, Australia, and other parts of the British Empire, and mark the items which might interest Dreadnought readers. In this work I was assisted by one Comrade Vie. Comrade Vie read the foreign-language papers, mainly French and German.

The opportunity to practice a little practical journalism was not to be missed. A little more schooling, a few more lessons—learning something from everything—keeping the best in my mind for future creative work.

The association with Pankhurst put me in the nest of extreme radicalism in London. The other male-controlled radical groups were quite hostile to the Pankhurst group and its rather hysterical militancy. And the group was perhaps more piquant than important. But Pankhurst herself had a personality as picturesque and passionate as any radical in London. She had left the suffragette legion for the working-class movement, when she discovered that the leading ladies of the legion were not interested in the condition of working women.

And in the labor movement she was always jabbing her hat pin into the hides of the smug and slack labor leaders. Her weekly might have been called the Dread Wasp. And wherever imperialism got drunk and went wild among native peoples, the Pankhurst paper would be on the job. She was one of the first leaders in England to stand up for Soviet Russia. And in 1918 she started the Russian Information Bureau, which remained for a long time the only source of authentic news from Russia.

Comrade Vie was a very young foreigner with a bare bland innocent face. He read and spoke several languages. I did not know his nationality and refrained from asking. For the Pankhurst organization, though small, was revolutionary, and from experience the militant suffragettes knew a lot about conspiracy. However, I suspected that Comrade Vie was a foreign revolutionist. The Pankhurst secretary, a romantic middle-class young woman, had hinted to me that Comrade Vie was more important than he appeared to be.

Comrade Vie wrote also and we often compared articles. I criticized his English and he criticized my point of view, showing me how I could be more effectively radical.

Soon after I became associated with the Workers' Dreadnought, a sawmill strike broke out in London. Most of the sawmills were in the East End, where also the publishing office of the Dreadnought was located. One mill was directly opposite the Dreadnought office. I was assigned to do an article on the strike. A few of the sawmill workers were sympathetic to the Dreadnought organization, and one of the younger of them volunteered to take me round.

There were some sixty sawmills in London, one of the most important of which was either owned or partly controlled by George Lansbury, Labor Member of Parliament and managing editor of the Daily Herald. Some of the strikers informed me that the Lansbury mill had in its employ some workers who were not members of the sawmill union and who were not striking. Technically, such workers were scabs. The strikers thought it would make an excellent story for the militant Dreadnought. So did I.

The name of Lansbury was symbolic of all that was simon-pure, pious and self-righteous in the British Labor movement. As the boss of the Daily Herald, he stood at the center like an old bearded angel of picturesque honesty, with his right arm around the neck of the big trade-union leaders and Parliamentarians and his left waving to the Independent Labor partyites and all the radical Left. Like a little cat up against a big dog, the Workers' Dreadnought was always spitting at the Daily Herald.

I thought the story would give the Dreadnought some more fire to spit. Here was my chance for getting even with the Daily Herald for its black-scourge-in-Europe campaign. Comrade Vie helped me put some ginger into my article. When I showed the article to Miss Smyth, the upper-middle-class person who was Pankhurst's aid, she gasped and said: "But this is a scoop." Her gentle-lady poker face was lit as she read.

Finally the article reached Sylvia Pankhurst. She summoned me and said: "Your article is excellent but I'm so sorry we cannot print it." "Why?" I asked. "Because," said she, "we owe Lansbury twenty pounds. Besides, I have borrowed paper from the Daily Herald to print the Dreadnought. I can't print that."

It is possible that Miss Pankhurst acted more from a feeling of personal loyalty. Although Lansbury was centrist and she was extreme leftist, they were personal friends, ever since they had been associated in the suffrage cause. And after all, one might concede that there are items which the capitalist press does not consider fit to print for capitalist reasons, and items which the radical press does not consider fit to print for radical reasons.

That summer Sylvia Pankhurst made the underground trip to Russia to attend the Second Congress of the Third International.

Early in September, 1920, I was sent down to Portsmouth to report the Trades Union Congress for the Dreadnought. There were gathered at the Congress some of the leaders who later became members of the British Labor Government: J.H. Thomas, J.R. Clynes, Arthur Henderson, A.A. Purcell, Herbert Morrison, Frank Hodges, and Margaret Bonfield. The most picturesque personage of them all was Frank Hodges, the secretary of the Miners' Federation, who in his style and manner appeared like a representative of the nobility. I mentioned this to A.J. Cook, who was a minor official of the Federation, and he informed me that Hodges was always hunting foxes with the lords.

At the press table I met Scott Nearing, who, after listening to clever speeches by the labor leaders, whispered to me that England would soon be the theater of the next revolution. The speeches were warm; Labor was feeling its strength in those times. Even J.H. Thomas was red, at least in the face, about Winston Churchill, who had declared that "Labor was not fit to govern."

As a Dreadnought reporter, I had been instructed to pay little attention to the official leaders, but to seek out any significant rank-and-filers and play them up in my story. I was taken up by delegates from the Rhondda Valley in South Wales, which was the extreme leftist element of the Miners' Federation. One of them, A.J. Cook, was exceptionally friendly and gave me interesting information about the British Labor movement. He was very proud that it was the most powerful in the world and included every class of worker. He said he believed the labor movement was the only hope for Negroes because they were in the lowest economic group. He pointed out that J.R. Clynes' General Union of Workers consisted of the lowest class of people (domestic servants and porters and hotel workers) and yet it was extremely important in the councils of the Trades Union Congress.

At that time I could not imagine Cook becoming a very influential official. He was extremely loquacious, but his ideas were an odd mix-up of liberal sentiment and socialist thought, and sentimental to an extreme. He was also a parson, and divided his time between preaching and the pit. However, the radical miners told me they were going to push Cook forward to take the place of Hodges, whom they could no longer stomach. And sure enough, in a few brief years Cook became the radical secretary of the Miners' Federation.

But the labor official at the Congress who carried me away with him was Robert Smillie, the president of the Miners' Federation. Crystal Eastman had given me a note to him and he had said a few wise words to me about the necessity of colored labor being organized, especially in the vast European colonies, for the betterment of its own living standard and to protect that of white organized labor. Smillie was like a powerful ash which had forced itself up, coaxing nourishment out of infertile soil, and towering over saplings and shrubs. His face and voice were so terribly full of conviction that in comparison the colleagues around him appeared theatrical. When he stood forth to speak the audience was shot through with excitement, and subdued. He compelled you to think along his line whether or not you agreed with him. I remember his passionate speech for real democracy in the Congress, advocating proportional representation and pointing out that on vital issues the united Miners' Federation was often outvoted by a nondescript conglomeration like J.R. Clynes' General Union of Workers for example. You felt that Smillie had convinced the Congress, but when the vote was taken it went against him.

I wrote my article on the Trades Union Congress around Smillie because his personality and address were more significant in my opinion than any rank-and-filer's. It was featured on the front page of the Dreadnought. But when Pankhurst returned from Russia, she sharply reproved me for it, saying that it wasn't the policy of the Dreadnought to praise the official labor leaders, but to criticize them. Naturally, I resented the criticism, especially as Pankhurst had suppressed my article on Lansbury.

Just before leaving for the Trade Union Congress I was introduced to a young English sailor named Springhall. He was a splendid chap. He had been put into the British navy as a boy and had developed into a fine man, not merely physically, but intellectually. Springhall was a constant reader of the Dreadnought and other social propaganda literature and he said that other men on his ship were eager for more stuff about the international workers' movement. At that time there was a widespread discontent and desire for better wages among the rank and file of the navy. Springhall came to the Dreadnought publishing office in the Old Ford Road and we gave him many copies of the Dreadnought. The Dreadnought was legally on sale on the newsstands, so he had the legal right to take as many as he desired. Before he left he promised to send me some navy news for the paper.

When I returned to London I found a letter from the young sailor, Springhall, with some interesting items for the paper and the information that he was sending an article. The article arrived in a few days and it was a splendid piece of precious information. But its contents were so important and of such a nature that I put it away and waited for Pankhurst to return and pass it.

Pankhurst returned late in September. I turned over Springhall's document to her. She was enthusiastic, edited the document, and decided to give it the front page. We used a nom de plume and a fictitious name for a battleship. Only Pankhurst and myself knew who the author was. The intelligence of the stuff was so extraordinary that she did not want to risk having the youth's identity discovered by the authorities. And she thought he could serve the social cause more excellently by remaining at his post.

A couple of days after the issue appeared, the Dreadnought office was raided by the police. I was just going out, leaving the little room on the top floor where I always worked, when I met Pankhurst's private secretary coming upstairs. She whispered that Scotland Yard was downstairs. Immediately I thought of Springhall's article and I returned to my room, where I had the original under a blotter. Quickly I folded it and stuck it in my sock. Going down, I met a detective coming up. They had turned Pankhurst's office upside down and descended to the press-room, without finding what they were looking for.

"And what are you?" the detective asked.

"Nothing, Sir," I said, with a big black grin. Chuckling, he let me pass. (I learned afterward that he was the ace of Scotland Yard.) I walked out of that building and into another, and entering a water closet I tore up the original article, dropped it in, and pulled the chain. When I got home to the Bow Road that evening I found another detective waiting for me. He was very polite and I was more so. With alacrity I showed him all my papers, but he found nothing but lyrics.

Pankhurst was arrested and charged with attempting to incite dissatisfaction among His Majesty's Forces. She was released on bail and given time to straighten out her affairs before she came up for trial. She received many messages of sympathy and among them was a brief telegram from Bernard Shaw asking: "Why did you let them get you?"

Pankhurst's arrest was the beginning of a drive against the Reds. For weeks the big press had carried on a campaign against Red propaganda and alien agitators and Bolshevik gold in Britain. Liberal intellectuals like Bertrand Russell and Mrs. Snowden had visited Russia, and labor men like Robert Williams and George Lansbury. There was an organized labor and liberal demand to end the Russian blockade. And when the press broadcast the fact that $325,000 of Bolshevik capital had been offered to the Daily Herald, it must have struck Scotland Yard like a bomb.

Within a week of Pankhurst's arrest, Comrade Vie was seized just as he was leaving England to go abroad. He was arrested as he was departing from the house of a member of Parliament who was a Communist sympathizer. The police announced that he was a Bolshevik courier. They discovered on his person letters from Pankhurst to Lenin, Zinoviev and other members of the Bolshevik Politbureau; also notes in cipher, documents of information about the armed forces, the important industrial centers, and Ireland, a manual for officers of the future British Red army and statements about the distribution of money. Comrade Vie was even more important than I had suspected.

One evening when I got back home from Fleet Street I was surprised to find Springhall, the sailor, there. He had come up to London to see Pankhurst. He said his ship was leaving England and he would like to talk to her. He was on one of the crack battleships. I begged him for God's sake to leave at once, that he could not see Pankhurst, who had been enjoined from political activity by the court and was undoubtedly under police surveillance. Also, as editor of the Dreadnought, she had taken the full responsibility for his article, and her difficult situation in the movement would be made worse if the police should get him too.

Springhall returned to his ship. But he was bold with youthful zeal and extremely incautious. I remember his actively participating in his uniform in the grand demonstration in Trafalgar Square for the hunger-striking and dying mayor of Cork. And he marched with the crowds upon the prison and fought with the police and got severely beaten up. He wanted to quit the navy, believing that he could be a better agitator outside. But his friends on the outside thought that he could be of more importance at his post. Anyway he must have acted indiscreetly and created suspicion against himself, for when his ship arrived at its next port, he was summarily dismissed. However, his revolutionary ardor did not handicap him in being clever enough to maneuver his dismissal and steer clear of a court-martial. A few years after he visited Russia, and later I was informed that he subsequently became an active leader of the British Communist Youth Movement.

Comrade Vie was convicted under the simple charge of alien non-registration. He was sentenced to six months' imprisonment and to pay the costs of his trial and deportation. Upon his release, Pankhurst's secretary followed him to Russia, where they were married. Apparently it was his preoccupation with his love affair that enabled the detectives to trap Comrade Vie. Three years later I saw them again in Moscow, but he did not seem to be importantly employed.

VIII

Regarding Reactionary Criticism

My little brown book of verse, Spring in New Hampshire, appeared in the midst of the radical troubles in the fall of 1920. I had not neglected the feeling of poetry, even while I was listening to Marxian expositions at the International Club and had become involved in radical activities. A little action was a nice stimulant for another lyric.

C.K. Ogden, the author of Basic English and The Foundation of Esthetics, besides steering me round the picture galleries and being otherwise kind, had published a set of my verses in his Cambridge Magazine. Later he got me a publisher.

But I was so anxious about leaving London for America that I hardly felt the excitement I should about the first book I had done since I left Jamaica. The Pankhurst group had been disrupted by the police raids. Many of the members were acquainted with Comrade Vie, but unaware of his real identity. His unexpected arrest and the disclosures of the police that he was a Bolshevik agent had started lots of rubberneck gossip. Some asserted that Comrade Vie had been deliberately betrayed. And members accused other members of being spies and traitors. A dissident group, headed by Edgar Whitehead, the secretary of the organization, desired to bring Pankhurst herself to a private trial and I also had to give an accounting of my activities.

One evening, when I visited the International Club the secretary showed me an anonymous letter he had received, accusing me also of being a spy. I declare that I felt sick and was seized with a crazy craving to get quickly out of that atmosphere and far away from London. But I had used up all of my return fare. All I had received from the Dreadnought was payment for my board. The organization was always in need of money.

My little book had brought me no money. I hadn't been banking on it. I had stopped writing for the Negro World because it had not paid for contributions. An English friend, and I.W.W. who had lived in America (I think he had been deported thence), undertook to find a group of friends to put up the fare to get me back there.

While I was hotly preparing my departure, Sylvia Pankhurst was sentenced to six months' imprisonment. Pankhurst was a good agitator and fighter, but she wasn't a leader. She possessed the magnetism to attract people to her organization, but she did not have the power to hold them. I remember a few of them: William Gallacher, Saklatvala (the Indian M.P.), A.J. Cook, who became the secretary of the Miners' Federation, and that very brilliant and talented writing couple, Eden and Cedar Paul. And I was informed that before my time there had been others even more brilliant among the Left literary and artistic set. I remember saying to Springhall that it was a pity the organization was too small for him. It was a one-woman show, not broad-based enough to play a decisive rôle in the labor movement.

At last, when I was safely fixed in my third-class bunk, I had time to read and ponder over the English reviews of my book. If it is difficult to ascertain the real attitude of the common people of any country regarding certain ideas and things, it should be easy enough to find out that of the élite by writing a book. The reviews will reveal more or less the mind of the better classes.

In most of the reviews of my poems there was a flippant note, either open or veiled, at the idea of a Negro writing poetry. After reading them I could understand better why Bernard Shaw had asked me why I did not go in for pugilism instead of poetry. I think I got as much amusement out of reading them from my own angle as the reviewers had in writing from theirs.

But more than all there was one that deserves special mention. It was the review published in the Spectator, the property, I think, of the Strachey family, and the organ of the Tory intellectuals. There can be little doubt that the London Spectator represents the opinion of that English group, which, because of its wealth and power, its facilities for and standards of high education, and its domination of most of the universe, either directly or indirectly, is the most superior in the world.

Said the Spectator critic: "Spring in New Hampshire is extrinsically as well as intrinsically interesting. It is written by a man who is a pure-blooded Negro.... Perhaps the ordinary reader's first impulse in realizing that the book is by an American Negro is to inquire into its good taste. Not until we are satisfied that his work does not overstep the barriers which a not quite explicable but deep instinct in us is ever alive to maintain can we judge it with genuine fairness. Mr. Claude McKay never offends our sensibilities. His love poetry is clear of the hint which would put our racial instinct against him, whether we would or not."

So there it bobbed up again. As it was among the élite of the class-conscious working class, so it was among the aristocracy of the upper class: the bugaboo of sex—the African's sex, whether he is a poet or pugilist.

Why should a Negro's love poetry be offensive to the white man, who prides himself on being modern and civilized? Now it seems to me that if the white man is really more civilized than the colored (be the color black, brown or yellow), then the white man should take Negro poetry and pugilism in his stride, just as he takes Negro labor in Africa and fattens on it.

If the critic of the organ of British aristocracy had used his facilities for education and knowledge and tolerance (which the average black student has not) to familiarize himself with the history and derivations of poetry he might have concluded that the love poetry of a Negro might be in better taste than the gory poetry of a civilized British barbarian like Rudyard Kipling.

It seems to me that every European white lover of lyric and amatory poetry should be informed that one of the greatest, if not the greatest, poets of love, was a Negro named Antar. And that European or white man's love poetry today probably owes much of its inspiration to Antar, who was the son of a Negro woman and an Arabian chieftain.

One of the big surprises of my living in North Africa was the discovery that even the illiterate Moor is acquainted with the history and the poetry of Antar. Often in the Arab cafés (which I haunted like a loco, because of the native music), when I was especially enthralled by the phrasing of a song, I was informed that it was an Antari (a song from Antar). When I was introduced as a poet there was not a suspicion of surprise among the natives. Instead I was surprised by their flattering remarks: "A poet! Mezziane! Mezziane! Our greatest poet, Antar, was a Negro."

W.A. Clouston, who writes with authority on Arabian poetry, says: "It is far from impossible that the famous romance of Antar produced the model for the earliest of the romances of chivalry." Certainly it was the Arabian poets who, upon the Arab conquest of Spain, introduced lyric feeling into the rude and barbaric accents of the Europeans. The troubadours of southern Europe stem directly from the Arabian poets. The Arab poets and musicians were the original troubadours. And happily they exist today exactly as they did thirteen centuries ago, wherever Moslem culture holds sway.

Says Sismondi, the famous scholar: "It is from them that we have derived that intoxication of love, that tenderness and delicacy of sentiment and that reverential awe of woman, by turns slaves and divinities, which have operated so powerfully on our chivalrous feelings."

But it should not be necessary for me in this place to attempt to enlighten the English gentlemen. I am not a scholar and this book is not scholarly. The English gentleman has the means and the material to educate himself that no Negro has. If he does not make the proper use of them it must be because he is spoiled by his modern civilization. The story of Antar was translated from the Arabian into English way back in 1820, and by an Englishman named Terrick Hamilton.

Antar is as great in Arabian literature as Homer in Greek. Said the founder of Islam: "I have never heard an Arab described whom I should like to have seen so much as Antar." In the universal white system of education the white school boy learns about Homer and Virgil and their works, even if he does not read Greek and Latin. He learns nothing of Antar, although it is possible that European poetry derives more from Antar than from Homer. Yet the white child is so rich in its heritage that it may not be such a great loss to him if he grows up in ignorance of the story and poetry of Antar. The Negro child, born into an inferior position in the overwhelming white world, is in a different category. He should know something of the Antar who was born a slave, who fought for his liberation, who loved so profoundly passionately and chastely that his love inspired and uplifted him to be one of the poets of the Arabian pleiades.

Behold the sport of passion in my noble person! But I have thanked my forebearance, applauded my resolution. And the slave has been elevated above his master; For I have concealed my passion and kept my secret, I will not leave a word for the railers, and I will not ease the hearts of my enemies by the violation of my honor. I have borne the evils of fortune, till I have discovered its secret meaning ... I have met every peril in my bosom, And the world can cast no reproach on me for my complexion: My blackness has not diminished my glory.

My mother is Zebeeda, I disavow not her name and I am Antar, But I am not vainglorious ... Her dark complexion sparkles like a sabre in the shades of night And her shape is like the well-formed spear....

To me these verses of Antar written more than twelve centuries ago are more modern and full of meaning for a Negro than is Homer. Perhaps if black and mulatto children knew more of the story and the poetry of Antar, we might have better Negro poets. But in our Negro schools and colleges we learn a lot of Homer and nothing of Antar.

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!

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.