Front matter (continued 6)

"When Pascin and his wife and their friends come to Marseilles, I look out for them," he went on. "They are artists and visit the bordels for material, so I protect them in their business as I protect my boys and the girls in their business. One time Pascin brought a Frenchman here with a Russian lady, and the lady started to dance with one of the bordel girls. I stopped it. I said, 'Pascin's friends are my friends and can't afford to lower themselves.' They are my guests and I treat them like guests, not as customers. I don't like degenerates. Of course, if rich people want to indulge a fantasy, I arrange privately for them, for rich people can afford to be fantastic. But I have no use for plain poor people being fantastic unless they are making money by it."

Le Corse and I went walking along the quay. We passed a group of Senegalese. He said: "They're no good," with a deprecating gesture.

"Why?" I asked. "I am just like them."

"No, you're American. Why should you imagine yourself like them because you are of the same complexion? The Spaniards and Portuguese around here are the same complexion as myself, but I am not in their class! The Senegalese are savages and stupid. They don't understand our system with the girls; the same goes for the Arabs."

The bawdy battle between black and white was sharp in Marseilles. The Negroes and Arabs who had settled in large numbers in the city since the armistice had developed a problem for the European apaches. There was a tendency among the Africans to take the girls out of their business and set up housekeeping with them. That, of course, diminished the income of the procurers.

Said Le Corse: "Do you know an artist whose name is Ivan Opfer?"

"Yes," I said.

"He is also Pascin's friend," said Le Corse. "Is he a big painter? I mean, does he sell for big money?" I said that Opfer was successful and had done portraits of celebrated persons in America and Europe, even titled ones.

A shadow fell upon Le Corse's hog face. He shook his head and said, "Ivan Opfer offered me a large portrait of myself, but I refused it. I couldn't take it," he said sadly. "Why?" I asked, surprised and interested. "It is worth money. Opfer is not as big a man as Pascin, but he is good."

"I couldn't take it," said Le Corse, "because he made me look so terribly like an apache and I don't really look like that. I couldn't stand it. Pascin and the other artists painted me nice."

"I wish you had kept it," I said. "I should have liked to see it. It's years since I saw any work of Ivan Opfer's."

"It is at the Hôtel Nautique," said Le Corse. "I'll take you there and ask the proprietor to show it, and you'll see for yourself that it is a painting of a criminal."

We went to the Nautique and the friendly proprietor sent a garçon with us up to an attic to show us the picture. I had known Ivan Opfer when I was an assistant editor of The Liberator. The magazine staff used to be divided in opinion about his work. Some thought it had striking merit; others, that it was tricky. Most of his work that I saw were portraits with a strong caricature element in them. But never had I seen anything by him so gripping as his large portrait of Le Corse. When I saw it I recoiled as if I had been thrust into the presence of an incarnate murderer. It was Le Corse all right—a perfect picture. Opfer had painted it without mercy. Pascin and the other artists had done romantic studies of the man, making him like a picturesque retired sailor of the Marseilles bottoms. But Opfer had penetrated straight into his guts and seized his soul to fix it on that canvas. It was a triumph of achievement, it was so real, so exactly true. And suddenly I felt a little sympathy for Le Corse, a slight kinship of humanity, for I became aware that he was afraid of his real self.

When Le Corse took me into his house and exhibited the pictorial and literary tributes—those bouquets and wreaths that a vanguard of modern artists and writers had laid at his conquering feet, I felt a sickness in the pit of me, a paralysis of all the fibers of fine feeling. For there was no doubt about the genuine talent of those artists: some of the stuff was high genius. And also there was no doubt about the intention of their tribute to Le Corse. They meant a sincere homage to this hero, exalted by the taxes paid for freedom of action by the poor vampires of the waterfront. But I felt better, more hopeful, when I saw Ivan Opfer's portrait of Le Corse, so strangely abandoned there in a little hotel on the Marseilles waterfront.

I said goodbye to Le Corse. "Remember," he said, "if you ever want anything, if you are ever in trouble in Marseilles, just let me know, for you are Pascin's friend." I thanked Le Corse, but I thought that whatever happened to me in Marseilles, I could never bring myself to ask any help of him. "I hope you'll write a successful book," he said, as we parted.

I said I'd like to do a good book. And right then I remembered Senghor, the Senegalese, begging me to write the truth. I settled down to work and began Banjo.

In the beginning of Banjo I was surprised by Bull-frog, who burst into my den one afternoon accompanied by Isadora Duncan. I must go back a little on the trail to pick up and explain Bull-frog. He was a slav adventurer. We had met in Berlin. A student friend who loathed his way of life called him the Bull-frog. Later in Paris we came together again. He was always traveling between Paris and the Midi and sometimes we met for a brief moment in Nice or Monte Carlo or some other tourist spot. We carried on a regular correspondence. He had to write many letters in his clandestine business and as his English was bad, he often asked me to write important ones for him: those that he didn't want anybody else to know about.

Bull-frog was making better progress with his contacts in France than in Germany. Most of his correspondence was kittenish letters from old ladies who were apparently amused by a jumping frog. But one day he surprised me at Monte Carlo. He introduced me into a really smart set: an English lady with a high title and an enormous amount of money, a Christian Scientist from New England who had gone Gurdgieff, a futurist poet from Oxford, a cosmopolitan rentier and three student-like youngsters. And I heard Bull-frog saying very gravely that humanity had produced only six great men and they were all poets and artists. He named them: the Founder of Christianity, Aristotle, Dante, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Tolstoy. Bull-frog was getting by also intellectually.

I went to Bull-frog's hotel to write a letter for him. As he opened a valise to look for a letter I noticed many other letters in the valise that were not addressed to him. I passed my hand over them. A few were addressed to prominent persons. Some were unopened. I exclaimed in surprise. Bull-frog laughed: "I don't steal money or jewelry from them," he said, "for if you steal you'll get caught some day and lose everything. But I get their letters and find out their private business. And if there's anything bad, I'll know how to make them give money without wasting the energy which I must conserve for the building of my Temple." Bull-frog had informed me in Berlin that his big idea was to build an international Temple of Love.

"But if you steal the letters," I said, "it is equally dangerous. Suppose there is money in them!"

"But I don't steal the letters," he said. "When I am going to visit people and I notice mail for them at the desk, I say to the clerk, 'I'll take the mail,' and he hands it over in all confidence, because he is informed that I am an invited guest. So—I slip in my pocket a letter I think important. If it were discovered, I could say I forgot."

A few weeks before Bull-frog arrived in Marseilles, he had sent me a letter from a Nordic person, and his answer to it, which he asked me to render into correct English.

The Nordic letter began: "My dear little big Bullsy—At last I am terribly excited about your plans, because of Isadora Duncan's interest in you. Certainly, if she believes in you, I must also. For I do believe in Isadora Duncan and her dancing, which brings a new beauty and meaning into life. I shall do all in my power to help to finance your plans. I wish I was rich. Nevertheless I have influence. I shall send you the money you need. Then you must come quickly to me, my sweet little lamb."

I corrected the English of the letter and returned it to Bull-frog in Nice. Shortly after he and Isadora Duncan arrived in Marseilles. Bull-frog was impeccably dressed in a style befitting an international businessman. He had a brand-new car and loads of money. I had not seen Isadora Duncan since that night when she danced so tragically and beautifully and for me alone in her studio at Nice. I was not surprised that Isadora Duncan was with Bull-frog. For Isadora Duncan was like a great flowing river through which the traffic of the world could pass. I remember, at a café in Nice, overhearing a chauffeur among his equivocal companions: "Oh, I saw the great dancer, Madame Duncan, on the promenade and I spoke to her and said I knew she was the great dancer. And she invited me to come to the studio and bring my friends to see her dance."

I asked Isadora what she thought of Bull-frog. She smiled and said he was at least amusing, and that if the rich folks would not give her money to build a temple of the dance for beautiful children, they could do worse than give it to Bull-frog. Isadora was interested in the décor of my Marseilles book, so we visited the Vieux Port. And as we three went wandering through the garbage-strewn alleys, the old girls in their shifts and tights in their holes in the walls were so startled by the picture of Isadora Duncan and her long Grecian scarf floating over the muck and misery of Marseilles, that they forgot their business of snatching hats. Shortly after that, Isadora Duncan was strangled by her ancient Grecian scarf in a modern automobile.

PART SIX

THE IDYLLS OF AFRICA

XXVI

When a Negro Goes Native

In the Senegalese Bar in Marseilles I was figuring out the ways and means of a holiday somewhere in Africa. Said a Senegalese: "If I had money to go any place, I'd go straight to Paris, where one can amuse himself." I said I didn't feel attracted to Paris, but to Africa. As I wasn't big and white enough to go on a big game hunt, I might go on a little one-man search party.

A Martinique sailor, whose boat had just arrived from Casablanca, said that Africa was all right and Morocco was the best place. He said he had visited every big port in Africa, and he preferred Morocco. He lived there. He said: "If you're going to Africa, come to Morocco."

"What are the harems like?" I asked.

"I've got a harem; I'll show you when you come," he laughed. The Martiniquan spoke Arab and Senegalese, French, Spanish and some English words. He had been a sailor since he was fourteen and had sailed all the seas. He was settled in Casablanca, where, he said, he had two wives. He was illiterate, but full of all kinds of practical knowledge. He looked like a friendly gorilla.

However, instead of Morocco, I went to Barcelona with my friend the Senegalese boxer, who had a bout there. Barcelona took my sight and feelings so entirely that it was impossible for me to leave when the boxer was returning to Marseilles. The magnificent spectacle of the sporting spirit of the Spaniards captured my senses and made me an aficionado of Spain. I had never been among any white people who gave such a splendid impression of sporting impartiality, and with such grand gestures. Whether it was boxing between a white and a black or a duel between man and beast in the arena, or a football match between a Spanish and a foreign team, the Spaniards' main interest lay in the technical excellencies of the sport and the best opponent winning. I pursued the Spanish sporting spirit into the popular theaters, where the flamenco is seen and the Andalusian melodies are heard. In no other country have I seen a people's audience so exigent in demanding the best an artist can give, so ruthless in turning thumbs down on a bad artist, and so generous in applauding an excellent performance.

The three days I had intended to spend in Barcelona were increased to over three months in Spain. Then one night, when I was doing the amusement spots of the amazing Barrio Chino in company with a Moslem Negro who claimed to be a Prince of Zanzibar, I met the Martinique sailor again. His boat had brought a cargo from Morocco to Barcelona. He urged me to pay him that visit.

I had lingered long enough in Spain to become aware of the strong African streak in its character. Therefore the second invitation to Morocco was even more interesting. The Prince from Zanzibar wanted to explore more of Europe and Europeans, and so we parted company.

At last I arrived in Casablanca. On the afternoon when the Martiniquan took me to his house in a native quarter, some Guinea sorcerors (or Gueanoua, as they are called in Morocco) were performing a magic rite. The first shock I registered was the realization that they looked and acted exactly like certain peasants of Jamaica who give themselves up to the celebrating of a religious sing-dance orgy which is known as Myalism. The only difference was in their clothing.

The Gueanoua were exorcising a sick woman and they danced and whirled like devils. In the Moorish yard men and boys squatted in a wide circle around them, and women and girls covered up in white haiks sat looking down from the low flat roofs of the dilapidated cabins. The music was made by a single lute and a big bass drum and sounded like muffled thunder in the belly of the earth. I watched them dance a kind of primitive rhumba, beat their heads against posts, and throw off their clothing in their excitement. But I did not see the end, when the devils would be driven forth, because a dancing woman frightened me by throwing herself in a frenzy upon me. They said I was a strange spirit and a hindrance to the magic working. So I had to get out.

The members of the Gueanoua are all pure black. They are the only group of pure Negroes in Morocco. Men and women marry black, and it is the only religious order that has women members. If one is not a pure black he cannot belong to the Gueanoua. They say the strict keeping of this rule makes the Gueanoua magic powerful. The fetish rites are West African and are transmitted from generation to generation. They have a special place in the social life of Morocco. The wealthiest as well as the poorest families have them in to exorcise devils. Often they are protected by powerful sherifian families, and sultans have consulted them.

The harem of the Martiniquan was not such a hot spot, as I saw when I peeped behind the curtain. Just a long spacious room curtained in two, and two women, one old enough to be his mother and one young, brown and buxom. We all had tea together, because, said the Martiniquan, he did not believe in hiding his women from men. However, the male friends that he admitted into his harem were French West Indian soldiers and Senegalese, but not Moors. He was the only person in that quarter who could afford two women. This was because, as a French citizen, he was rated as a European worker and received between forty and fifty francs a day—about six times what the native doing the same work got. Thus the black sailor was really living "white" in Africa.

I enjoyed the Martiniquan Moroccan hospitality for awhile. Then, feeling the overwhelming European atmosphere of Casablanca, I departed for Rabat.

Rabat-Salé was delightfully different. Here the native life was the big tree with solid roots and spreading branches, and the European city was like an imported garden, lovely and carefully tended. At Shellah I visited the tomb of the Black Sultan, who, according to the native legend, was the greatest ruler of Morocco, having united all of North Africa under his rule, conquered Spain, built the great monuments of the Giralda at Seville, the Koutabia at Marrakesh, and the Hassan Tower at Rabat.

I stopped long enough in Rabat to finish Banjo. Some Moroccan students had said to me: "In Fez you will find the heart of Morocco. It is our capital city. You haven't seen Morocco until you see Fez."

Fez was indeed the heart of Morocco and even more to me. In Moscow they had published a cartoon of me sailing upon a magic carpet over the African jungles to see the miracle of the Soviet. In Fez I felt that I was walking all the time on a magic carpet. The maze of souks and bazaars with unfamiliar patterns of wares was like an oriental fantasy. In Fez I got into the inside of Morocco. Hitherto I had been merely a spectator. But the Fassis literally took me in. There I had my first native meal of cous-cous in a native house, and the first invitation was the prelude to many.

I was invited to princely marriage feasts, to eat cous-cous from a common dish with stately old "turbans," to drink thé à la menthe in cool gardens, to the intimate flamenco dancing of fatmas in the garçonnières of fondouks and to the profane paradise of Moulay Abdallah.

Moulay Abdallah is the unique recreation quarter of the young Fassis. It is a separate little walled town with its own shops and police and musicians. Arrayed in richly flowered and loose robes held in place by enormously broad embroidered belts and squatting with the dignity of queens, the young females who take up residence there charmingly dispense mint tea and witty conversation to circles of eager young men. I thought that that antique African city was the unaware keeper of the cup of Eros containing a little of the perfume of the flower of the passion of ancient Greece.

I liked the Moroccan mosaic, which is beautiful and bright everywhere like a symbol of the prismatic native mind. And nowhere is it so lavish and arresting as in Fez. The Spanish mosaics were interesting, but they did not appear as warm and inevitable and illuminating as the Moroccan.

The mosaics of Morocco went to my head like rare wine. Excited and intoxicated and fascinated by the Fassis and their winning and welcome ways, I went completely native. I was initiated into the practice of living native and cheaply. I moved from my expensive hotel and parked my things in a cheaper one. But I hardly lived in it. For my days were fully occupied in sampling the treasures of the city and its environments; in picking up the trails of the peasants bringing their gifts to the town; following the Afro-Oriental bargaining; feeling the color of the accent of the story-tellers in the market places. And in the evening there was always divertissement: a marriage ceremony and feast, an invitation to a fondouk, where a young man would permit the pretty fatmah of his profane love-making to dance; and Moulay Abdallah. And I was never tired of listening to the native musicians playing African variations of the oriental melodies in the Moroccan cafés.

For the first time in my life I felt myself singularly free of color-consciousness. I experienced a feeling that must be akin to the physical well-being of a dumb animal among kindred animals, who lives instinctively and by sensations only, without thinking. But suddenly I found myself right up against European intervention and proscription.

A chaoush (native doorman and messenger) from the British Consulate had accosted me in a souk one day and asked whether I was American. I said I was born in the West Indies and lived in the United States and that I was an American, even though I was a British subject, but I preferred to think of myself as an internationalist. The chaoush said he didn't understand what was an internationalist. I laughed and said that an internationalist was a bad nationalist. He replied gravely: "All the Moors call you an American, and if you are British, you should come and register at the Consulate." I was amused at his gravity, reinforced by that African dignity which is so impressive in Morocco, especially as I had said I was an internationalist just by way of a joke without thinking of its radical implications. But I wasn't aware then of how everybody in Morocco (European and native) was looking for hidden meanings in the simplest phrases. The natives imagine (and rightly enough) that all Europeans are agents of their respective countries with designs upon their own, and the European colonists are suspicious and censorious of visitors who become too sympathetic and friendly with the natives. I saw a local French newspaper which had turned all the batteries of ridicule on a European when he started to wear a fez. I myself had gravitated instinctively to the native element because physically and psychically I felt more affinity with it. I did not go to register at the Consulate. I thought that it was enough that my passport was in perfect order. While scrupulously complying with official regulations regarding passports, identity cards and visas, etc., in all my traveling in strange places, I have always relied on my own personality as the best passport. Not that I was always such a circumspect and model traveler! I got into little difficulties all right. But without claiming special privileges or asking assistance as a foreigner, I submitted to the local authority and always came out on top.

For nearly a week I had not been in my hotel. One morning, after an all-night session of lute-playing and dancing with Andalusian melody makers in a native house, I went to my hotel for a change of clothes. There I found a French police inspector waiting for me. He had been there before. He asked me to show him my passport and other papers. I did. He looked through them and said I must accompany him to the British Consulate. I wondered what I could possibly have done. I had been passing such a jolly time, with no shadow of any trouble. The only thing I could think of was that I had obtained some wine for native friends, because they were not allowed openly to purchase. Then I thought of the chaoush's warning and wondered if my failure to register had anything to do with it. I asked the French inspector if he had any charges against me. He said I would hear everything at the British Consulate.

So I went along to the lion's den. As I entered, the Consul greeted me with a triumphant, "I knew you were here!" As if I had been hiding from anything or anybody in Morocco. The charge against me was that I had left my hotel and was sleeping in native houses. I said I hadn't imagined that it was necessary to ask special permission to stay among people who had voluntarily invited me; that I thought it my right to sleep where I was inclined, since I was not a minor. And, standing there (he did not have even the formal courtesy to offer me a chair), I laughed over the Consul's repulsive pink bald head that was like a white buzzard's. His pink-streaked face turned red, and it was amusing also to watch the mean expression of irritation on the cat face of the little French official. He said: "Let us expel him." I said that I would willingly submit to expulsion on a specific charge, but that, since they said that it was a native affair, they should get a native to make the charge. The petty bureaucrats exchanged embarrassed glances. The Consul said that it was hinted that I was a radical propagandist. I said they could search my effects, and that no one could stand up and accuse me of making any verbal propaganda. The Consul said the colonial people were being actively propagandized by Bolshevik agents since the Russian Revolution. I said that I was not a Bolshevik agent. Finally I was permitted to leave.

The personal unpleasantness opened my eyes a little to the undercurrent of social unrest and the mistakes of mixed authority in Morocco. I'd been so absorbed in the picturesque and exotic side of the native life that I was unaware until authority stepped on my sore toe. I discovered that although the French have established a protectorate over Morocco, many of the natives are also protected by other European powers, mainly Great Britain, Spain and Italy. The British possess unique privileges under a system of capitulations. British subjects, whether they are born British, naturalized or protected, are not liable to local arrest and trial in the French and native courts. If a British subject has committed any offense he must be taken before a British consul.

The privilege of immunity is sometimes abused by morons, and obviously the French local authority is irritated by the idea of a divided authority. Therefore the local atmosphere is infested with petty intrigues.

The specially-protected natives have certain privileges that the subjects of the Sultan, who are protected by the French, cannot enjoy. For example, the specially-protected ones can buy and drink liquor with impunity. But because of a traditional law the subjects of the Sultan cannot. Therefore they drink surreptitiously, and contemptible European bootleggers secretly sell them the vilest stuff imaginable. The young Moroccans generally are afflicted with a pathetic malaise. They're always whining: "I wish I were American or specially protected." And when you ask why, they say: "So that we could have the freedom of men to drink in a bar like the Europeans and the Algerians." The malaise is similar to the prohibition pestilence which plagued the spirit of the youth of America.

That incident spoiled my native holiday. I thought back to Europe, of that most miserable of years I spent in London. I remembered my difficulties, when I was studying at the British Museum, to get lodgings in that quarter. The signs were shouting: "Rooms for rent," but when I inquired I was invariably informed that all rooms were rented. Yet when I passed that way again the signs were still there. I became suspicious. I asked English friends from the International Club to make inquiries. They found that the rooms were for rent. But when they took me along and declared the rooms were for me, we were told that Negroes were not desired as guests. When I left my London hotel I found rooms with an Italian family, and later, a German. And the nearest I got to living quarters close to the British Museum was when I found lodgings with a French family in Great Portland Street.

I felt helpless and wobbly about that black boycott in London. For England is not like America, where one can take refuge from prejudice in a Black Belt. I had to realize that London is a cold white city where English culture is great and formidable like an iceberg. It is a city created for English needs, and admirable, no doubt, for the English people. It was not built to accommodate Negroes. I was very happy when I could get out of it to go back to the Negro pale of America.

And now even in Africa I was confronted by the specter, the white terror always pursuing the black. There was no escape anywhere from the white hound of Civilization.

When I finally left Fez I proceeded to Marrakesh in the far south, the hot city of the plains, vast and wild. The Senegalese in Marseilles often mentioned Marrakesh as the former great caravansérai for the traders traveling between West Africa and North Africa, and so I had to see that monumental city, which was founded by a Senegalese conqueror. Marrakesh moved me. It was like a big West Indian picnic, with flags waving and a multitude of barefoot black children dancing to the flourish of drum, fiddle and fife.

When I was going to Morocco, some Europeans on the boat had remarked facetiously that Morocco was not a Negro country. Themselves divided into jealous cutthroat groups, the Europeans have used their science to make such fine distinctions among people that it is hard to ascertain what white is a true white and when a Negro is really a Negro. I found more than three-quarters of Marrakesh Negroid. There were unimaginably strange contrasts. The city is like an immense cradle of experiment in the marriage of civilized life and primitive life. Here the sun-baked ebony Sudanese and the rude brown Berbers of the Atlas meet and mingle with the refined, learned and skilled city Moors of the north. Marrakesh appeared to be the happiest city of the French Protectorate. The people seemed more contented than in Fez, although they were generally poorer. But poverty in a torrid climate is not anything like poverty in a cold climate. I might say, without poetic license, that in Marrakesh the sun, blazing without being murderous, seemed to consume a lot of the wretchedness and ugliness of poverty.

XXVII

The New Negro in Paris

I finished my native holiday in Marrakesh. In Casablanca I found a huge pile of mail awaiting me. The handsomest thing was a fat envelope from a New York bank containing a gold-lettered pocket book. The pocket book enclosed my first grand from the sale of Home to Harlem.

There were stacks of clippings with criticisms of my novel; praise from the white press, harsh censure from the colored press. And a lot of letters from new admirers and old friends and associates and loves. One letter in particular took my attention. It was from James Weldon Johnson, inviting me to return to America to participate in the Negro renaissance movement. He promised to do his part to facilitate my return if there were any difficulty. And he did.

The Johnson letter set me thinking hard about returning to Harlem. All the reports stressed the great changes that had occurred there since my exile, pictured a Harlem spreading west and south, with splendid new blocks of houses opened up for the colored people. The reports described the bohemian interest in and patronage of Harlem, the many successful colored shows on Broadway, the florescence of Negro literature and art, with many promising aspirants receiving scholarships from foundations and patronage from individuals. Newspapers and magazines brought me exciting impressions of a more glamorous Harlem. Even in Casablanca a Moor of half-German parentage exhibited an article featuring Harlem in an important German newspaper, and he was eager for more information.

But the resentment of the Negro intelligentsia against Home to Harlem was so general, bitter and violent that I was hesitant about returning to the great Black Belt. I had learned very little about the ways of the Harlem élite during the years I lived there. When I left the railroad and the companionship of the common blacks, my intellectual contacts were limited mainly to white radicals and bohemians. I was well aware that if I returned to Harlem I wouldn't be going back to the milieu of railroad men, from whom I had drifted far out of touch. Nor could I go back among radical whites and try to rekindle the flames of an old enthusiasm. I knew that if I did return I would have to find a new orientation among the Negro intelligentsia.

One friend in Harlem had written that Negroes were traveling abroad en masse that spring and summer and that the élite would be camping in Paris. I thought that it might be less unpleasant to meet the advance guard of the Negro intelligentsia in Paris. And so, laying aside my experiment in wearing bags, bournous and tarboosh, I started out.

First to Tangier, where four big European powers were performing their experiment of international government in Africa upon a living corpse. Otherwise Tangier was a rare African-Mediterranean town of Moors and progressive Sephardic Jews and Europeans, mostly Spanish.

Through Spanish Morocco I passed and duly noted its points of interest. The first was Tetuán, which inspired this sonnet:

TETUÁN

Morocco conquering homage paid to Spain And the Alhambra lifted up its towers! Africa's fingers tipped with miracles, And quivering with Arabian designs, Traced words and figures like exotic flowers, Sultanas' chambers of rare tapestries, Filigree marvels from Koranic lines, Mosaics chanting notes like tropic rain. And Spain repaid the tribute ages after: To Tetuán, that fort of struggle and strife, Where chagrined Andalusian Moors retired, She brought a fountain bubbling with new life, Whose jewelled charm won even the native pride, And filled it sparkling with flamenco laughter.

In all Morocco there is no place as delicious as Tetuán. By a kind of magic instinct the Spaniards have created a modern town which stands up like a happy extension of the antique Moroccan. The ancient walls merge into the new without pain. The Spanish Morisco buildings give more lightness to the native Moroccan, and the architectural effect of the whole is a miracle of perfect miscegenation.

I loved the colored native lanterns, illuminating the archways of Larache. I liked Ceuta lying like a symbolic hand-clasp across the Mediterranean. And I adored the quaint tile-roofed houses and cool watered gardens in the mountain fastness of Xauen. From Gibraltar I was barred by the British. But that was no trouble to my skin, for ever since I have been traveling for the sheer enjoyment of traveling I have avoided British territory. That was why I turned down an attractive invitation to visit Egypt, when I was living in France.

Once again in Spain, I inspected the great Moorish landmarks. And more clearly I saw Spain outlined as the antique bridge between Africa and Europe.

After the strong dazzling colors of Morocco, Paris that spring appeared something like the melody of larks chanting over a gray field. It was over three years since I had seen the metropolis. At that time it had a political and financial trouble hanging heavy round its neck. Now it was better, with its head up and a lot of money in every hand. I saw many copies of my book, Banjo, decorating a shop window in the Avenue de l'Opéra and I was disappointed in myself that I could not work up to feeling a thrill such as I imagine an author should feel.

I took a fling at the cabarets in Montparnasse and Montmartre, and I was very happy to meet again a French West Indian girl whom I knew as a bonne in Nice when I was a valet. We ate some good dinners together and saw the excellent French productions of Rose Marie and Show Boat and danced a little at the Bal Negre and at Bricktop's Harlem hang-out in Montmartre.

I found Louise Bryant in Paris. It was our first meeting since she took my manuscript to New York in the summer of 1926. The meeting was a nerve-tearing ordeal. About two years previously she had written of a strange illness and of doctors who gave her only six months to live and of her determination to live a long time longer than that. She had undergone radical treatment. The last time I had seen her she was plump and buxom. Now she was shrunken and thin and fragile like a dried-up reed. Her pretty face had fallen like a mummy's and nothing was left of her startling attractiveness but her eyebrows.

She embarrassed me by continually saying: "Claude, you won't even look at me." Her conversation was pitched in a nervous hysterical key and the burden was "male conceit." I told her that the female was largely responsible for "male conceit." Often when I had seen her before she had been encircled by a following of admirably created young admirers of the collegiate type. Now she was always with an ugly-mugged woman. This woman was like an apparition of a male impersonator, who was never off the stage. She had a trick way of holding her shoulders and her hands like a gangster and simulating a hard-boiled accent. A witty Frenchman pronounced her a Sappho-manqué. The phrase sounded like a desecration of the great glamorous name of Sappho. I wondered why (there being so many attractive women in the world) Louise Bryant should have chosen such a companion. And I thought that it was probably because of the overflow of pity pouring out of her impulsive Irish heart.

I remembered, "Aftermath," the beautiful poem which she sent us for publication in The Liberator after John Reed died. Now it seemed of greater significance:

AFTERMATH

Dear, they are singing your praises, Now you are gone. But only I saw your going, I ... alone ... in the dawn. Dear, they are weeping about you, Now you are dead, And they've placed a granite stone Over your darling head. I cannot cry any more, Too burning deep is my grief.... I dance through my spendthrift days Like a fallen leaf. Faster and faster I whirl Toward the end of my days. Dear, I am drunken with sadness And lost down strange ways. If only the dance could finish Like a flash in the sky.... Oh, soon, If only a storm could come shouting— Hurl me past stars and moon.

And I thought if I could not look frankly with admiration at Louise Bryant's face, I could always turn to the permanently lovely poem which she had created.

I had spruced myself up a bit to meet the colored élite. Observing that the Madrileños were well-tailored, I had a couple of suits made in Madrid, and chose a hat there. In Paris I added shoes and shirts and ties and gloves to my wardrobe.

The cream of Harlem was in Paris. There was the full cast of Blackbirds (with Adelaide Hall starring in the place of Florence Mills), just as fascinating a group off the stage as they were extraordinary on the stage. The Porgy actors had come over from London. There was an army of school teachers and nurses. There were Negro Communists going to and returning from Russia. There were Negro students from London and Scotland and Berlin and the French universities. There were presidents and professors of the best Negro colleges. And there were painters and writers and poets, of whom the most outstanding was Countee Cullen.

I met Professor Alain Locke. He had published The Anthology of the New Negro in 1925 and he was the animator of the movement as well as the originator of the phrase "Negro renaissance." Commenting upon my appearance, Dr. Locke said, "Why, you are wearing the same kind of gloves as I am!" "Yes," I said, "but my hand is heavier than yours." Dr. Locke was extremely nice and invited me to dinner with President Hope of Atlanta University. The dinner was at one of the most expensive restaurants in the grands boulevards. President Hope, who was even more Nordic-looking than Walter White, was very affable and said I did not look like the boxer-type drawings of me which were reproduced with the reviews of Home to Harlem. President Hope hoped that I would visit his university when I returned to America.

There had been an interesting metamorphosis in Dr. Locke. When we met for the first time in Berlin in 1923, he took me for a promenade in the Tiergarten. And walking down the row, with the statues of the Prussian kings supported by the famous philosophers and poets and composers on either side, he remarked to me that he thought those statues the finest ideal and expression of the plastic arts in the world. The remark was amusing, for it was just a short while before that I had walked through the same row with George Grosz, who had described the statues as "the sugar-candy art of Germany." When I showed Dr. Locke George Grosz's book of drawings, Ecce Homo, he recoiled from their brutal realism. (Dr. Locke is a Philadelphia blue-black blood, a Rhodes scholar and graduate of Oxford University, and I have heard him described as the most refined Negro in America).

So it was interesting now to discover that Dr. Locke had become the leading Negro authority on African Negro sculpture. I felt that there was so much more affinity between the art of George Grosz and African sculpture than between the Tiergarten insipid idealization of Nordic kings and artists and the transcending realism of the African artists.

Yet I must admit that although Dr. Locke seemed a perfect symbol of the Aframerican rococo in his personality as much as in his prose style, he was doing his utmost to appreciate the new Negro that he had uncovered. He had brought the best examples of their work together in a pioneer book. But from the indication of his appreciations it was evident that he could not lead a Negro renaissance. His introductory remarks were all so weakly winding round and round and getting nowhere. Probably this results from a kink in Dr. Locke's artistic outlook, perhaps due to its effete European academic quality.

When he published his Anthology of the New Negro, he put in a number of my poems, including one which was originally entitled "The White House." My title was symbolic, not meaning specifically the private homes of white people, but more the vast modern edifice of American Industry from which Negroes were effectively barred as a group. I cannot convey here my amazement and chagrin when Dr. Locke arbitrarily changed the title of my poem to "White Houses" and printed it in his anthology, without consulting me. I protested against the act, calling Dr. Locke's attention to the fact that my poem had been published under the original title of "The White House" in The Liberator. He replied that he had changed the title for political reasons, as it might be implied that the title meant the White House in Washington, and that that could be made an issue against my returning to America.

I wrote him saying that the idea that my poem had reference to the official residence of the President of the United States was ridiculous; and that, whether I was permitted to return to America or not, I did not want the title changed, and would prefer the omission of the poem. For his title "White Houses" was misleading. It changed the whole symbolic intent and meaning of the poem, making it appear as if the burning ambition of the black malcontent was to enter white houses in general. I said that there were many white folks' houses I would not choose to enter, and that, as a fanatical advocate of personal freedom, I hoped that all human beings would always have the right to decide whom they wanted to have enter their houses.

But Dr. Locke high-handedly used his substitute title of "White Houses" in all the editions of his anthology. I couldn't imagine such a man as the leader of a renaissance, when his artistic outlook was so reactionary.

The Negroid élite was not so formidable to meet after all. The financial success of my novel had helped soften hard feelings in some quarters. A lovely lady from Harlem expressed the views of many. Said she: "Why all this nigger-row if a colored writer can exploit his own people and make money and a name? White writers have been exploiting us long enough without any credit to our race. It is silly for the Negro critics to holler to God about Home to Harlem as if the social life of the characters is anything like that of the respectable class of Negroes. The people in Home to Harlem are our low-down Negroes and we respectable Negroes ought to be proud that we are not like them and be grateful to you for giving us a real picture of Negroes whose lives we know little about on the inside." I felt completely vindicated.

My agent in Paris gave a big party for the cast of Blackbirds, to which the lovely lady and other members of the black élite were invited. Adelaide Hall was the animating spirit of the Blackbirds. They gave some exhibition numbers, and we all turned loose and had a grand gay time together, dancing and drinking champagne. The French guests (there were some chic ones) said it was the best party of the season. And in tipsy accents some of the Harlem élite admonished me against writing a Home-to-Harlem book about them.

Thus I won over most of the Negro intelligentsia in Paris, excepting the leading journalist and traveler who remained intransigent. Besides Negro news, the journalist specialized in digging up obscure and Amazing Facts for the edification of the colored people. In these "Facts" Beethoven is proved to be a Negro because he was dark and gloomy; also the Jewish people are proved to have been originally a Negro people!

The journalist was writing and working his way through Paris. Nancy Cunard's Negro Anthology describes him as a guide and quoted him as saying he had observed, in the flesh market of Paris, that white southerners preferred colored trade, while Negro leaders preferred white trade. Returning to New York, he gave lectures "for men only" on the peep-holes in the walls of Paris.

The journalist was a bitter critic of Home to Harlem, declaring it was obscene. I have often wondered if it is possible to establish a really intelligent standard to determine obscenity—a standard by which one could actually measure the obscene act and define the obscene thought. I have done lots of menial work and have no snobbery about common labor. I remember that in Marseilles and other places in Europe I was sometimes approached and offered a considerable remuneration to act as a guide or procurer or do other sordid things. While I was working as a model in Paris a handsome Italian model brought me an offer to work as an occasional attendant in a special bains de vapeur. The Italian said that he made good extra money working there. Now, although I needed more money to live, it was impossible for me to make myself do such things. The French say "On fait ce que on peut." I could not. The very idea of the thing turned me dead cold. My individual morale was all I possessed. I felt that if I sacrificed it to make a little extra money, I would become personally obscene. I would soon be utterly unable to make that easy money. I preferred a menial job.

Yet I don't think I would call another man obscene who could do what I was asked to do without having any personal feeling of revulsion against it. And if an artistic person had or was familiar with such sordid experiences of life and could transmute them into literary or any other art form, I could not imagine that his performance or his thought was obscene.

The Negro journalist argued violently against me. He insisted that I had exploited Negroes to please the white reading public. He said that the white public would not read good Negro books because of race prejudice; that he himself had written a "good" book which had not sold. I said that Negro writers, instead of indulging in whining and self-pity, should aim at reaching the reading public in general or creating a special Negro public; that Negroes had plenty of money to spend on books if books were sold to them.

I said I knew the chances for a black writer and a white writer were not equal, even if both were of the same caliber. The white writer had certain avenues, social and financial, which opened to carry him along to success, avenues which were closed to the black. Nevertheless I believed that the Negro writer also had a chance, even though a limited one, with the great American reading public. I thought that if a Negro writer were sincere in creating a plausible Negro tale—if a Negro character were made credible and human in his special environment with a little of the virtues and the vices that are common to the human species—he would obtain some recognition and appreciation. For Negro writers are not alone in competing with heavy handicaps. They have allies among some of the white writers and artists, who are fighting formalism and classicism, crusading for new forms and ideas against the dead weight of the old.

But the journalist was loudly positive that it was easy for a Negro writer to make a sensational success as a writer by "betraying" his race to the white public. So many of the Negro élite love to mouth that phrase about "betraying the race"! As if the Negro group had special secrets which should not be divulged to the other groups. I said I did not think the Negro could be betrayed by any real work of art. If the Negro were betrayed in any place it was perhaps in that Negro press, by which the journalist was syndicated, with its voracious black appetite for yellow journalism.

Thereupon the journalist declared that he would prove that it was easy for a Negro to write the "nigger stuff" the whites wanted of him and make a success of it. He revealed that he was planning a novel for white consumption; that, indeed, he had already written some of it. He was aiming at going over to the white market. He was going to stop writing for Negroes, who gave him so little support, although he had devoted his life to the betterment of the Negro.

I was eager to see him prove his thesis. For he was expressing the point of view of the majority of the colored élite, who maintain that Negroes in the arts can win success by clowning only, because that is all the whites expect and will accept of them. So although I disliked his type of mind, I promised to help him, I was so keen about the result of his experiment. I introduced him to my agent in Paris, and my agent introduced him to a publisher in New York.

Our Negro journalist is very yellow and looks like a métèque in France, without attracting undue attention. Yet besides his "Amazing Facts" about Negroes he has written in important magazines, stressing the practical nonexistence of color prejudice in Europe and blaming Negroes for such as exists! Also he wrote in a white magazine about Africa and the color problem under a nom de plume which gave no indication of the writer's origin.

He might have thought that as he had "passed white" a little in complexion and in journalism, it would be just as easy "passing white" as a creative writer. Well, the Negro journalist deliberately wrote his novel as a "white" novelist—or as he imagined a white man would write. But the sensational white novel by a Negro has not yet found its publisher.

The last time I heard about him, he was again a Negro in Ethiopia, interviewing Haile Selassie and reporting the white rape of Ethiopia from an African point of view for the American Negro press.

Nigger Heaven, the Harlem novel of Carl Van Vechten, also was much discussed. I met some of Mr. Van Vechten's Negro friends, who were not seeing him any more because of his book. I felt flattered that they did not mind seeing me! Yet most of them agreed that Nigger Heaven was broadly based upon the fact of contemporary high life in Harlem. Some of them said that Harlemites should thank their stars that Nigger Heaven had soft-pedaled some of the actually wilder Harlem scenes. While the conventional Negro moralists gave the book a hostile reception because of its hectic bohemianism, the leaders of the Negro intelligentsia showed a marked liking for it. In comparing it with Home to Harlem, James Weldon Johnson said that I had shown a contempt for the Negro bourgeoisie. But I could not be contemptuous of a Negro bourgeoisie which simply does not exist as a class or a group in America. Because I made the protagonist of my novel a lusty black worker, it does not follow that I am unsympathetic to a refined or wealthy Negro.

My attitude toward Nigger Heaven was quite different from that of its Negro friends and foes. I was more interested in the implications of the book. It puzzled me a little that the author, who is generally regarded as a discoverer and sponsor of promising young Negro writers, gave Lascar, the ruthless Negro prostitute, the victory over Byron, the young Negro writer, whom he left, when the novel ends, in the hands of the police, destined perhaps for the death house in Sing Sing.

Carl Van Vechten also was in Paris in the summer of 1929. I had been warned by a white non-admirer of Mr. Van Vechten that I would not like him because he patronized Negroes in a subtle way, to which the Harlem élite were blind because they were just learning sophistication! I thought it would be a new experience to meet a white who was subtly patronizing to a black; the majority of them were so naïvely crude about it. But I found Mr. Van Vechten not a bit patronizing, and quite all right. It was neither his fault nor mine if my reaction was negative.

One of Mr. Van Vechten's Harlem sheiks introduced us after midnight at the Café de la Paix. Mr. Van Vechten was a heavy drinker at that time, but I was not drinking liquor. I had recently suffered from a cerebral trouble and a specialist had warned me against drinking, even wine. And when a French doctor forbids wine, one ought to heed. When we met at that late hour at the celebrated rendezvous of the world's cosmopolites, Mr. Van Vechten was full and funny. He said, "What will you take?" I took a soft drink and I could feel that Mr. Van Vechten was shocked.

I am afraid that as a soft drinker I bored him. The white author and the black author of books about Harlem could not find much of anything to make conversation. The market trucks were rolling by loaded with vegetables for Les Halles, and suddenly Mr. Van Vechten, pointing to a truck-load of huge carrots, exclaimed, "How I would like to have all of them!" Perhaps carrots were more interesting than conversation. But I did not feel in any way carroty. I don't know whether my looks betrayed any disapproval. Really I hadn't the slightest objection to Mr. Van Vechten's enthusiasm for the truck driver's raw carrots, though I prefer carrots en casserole avec poulet cocotte. But he excused himself to go to the men's room and never came back. So, after waiting a considerable time, I paid the bill with some Home to Harlem money and walked in the company of the early dawn (which is delicious in Paris) back to the Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Mr. Van Vechten's sheik friend was very upset. He was a precious, hesitating sheik and very nervous about that introduction, wondering if it would take. I said that all was okay. But upon returning to New York he sent me a message from Mr. Van Vechten. The message said that Mr. Van Vechten was sorry for not returning, but he was so high that, after leaving us, he discovered himself running along the avenue after a truck load of carrots.

Among the Negro intelligentsia in Paris there was an interesting group of story-tellers, poets and painters. Some had received grants from foundations to continue work abroad; some were being helped by private individuals; and all were more or less identified with the Negro renaissance. It was illuminating to exchange ideas with them. I was an older man and not regarded as a member of the renaissance, but more as a forerunner. Indeed, some of them had aired their resentment of my intrusion from abroad into the renaissance set-up. They had thought that I had committed literary suicide because I went to Russia.

For my part I was deeply stirred by the idea of a real Negro renaissance. The Arabian cultural renaissance and the great European renaissance had provided some of my most fascinating reading. The Russian literary renaissance and also the Irish had absorbed my interest. My idea of a renaissance was one of talented persons of an ethnic or national group working individually or collectively in a common purpose and creating things that would be typical of their group.

I was surprised when I discovered that many of the talented Negroes regarded their renaissance more as an uplift organization and a vehicle to accelerate the pace and progress of smart Negro society. It was interesting to note how sharply at variance their artistic outlook was from that of the modernistic white groups that took a significant interest in Negro literature and art. The Negroes were under the delusion that when a lady from Park Avenue or from Fifth Avenue, or a titled European, became interested in Negro art and invited Negro artists to her home, that was a token of Negroes breaking into upper-class white society. I don't think that it ever occurred to them that perhaps such white individuals were searching for a social and artistic significance in Negro art which they could not find in their own society, and that the radical nature and subject of their interest operated against the possibility of their introducing Negroes further than their own particular homes in coveted white society.

Also, among the Negro artists there was much of that Uncle Tom attitude which works like Satan against the idea of a coherent and purposeful Negro group. Each one wanted to be the first Negro, the one Negro, and the only Negro for the whites instead of for their group. Because an unusual number of them were receiving grants to do creative work, they actually and naïvely believed that Negro artists as a group would always be treated differently from white artists and be protected by powerful white patrons.

Some of them even expressed the opinion that Negro art would solve the centuries-old social problem of the Negro. That idea was vaguely hinted by Dr. Locke in his introduction to The New Negro. Dr. Locke's essay is a remarkable chocolate soufflé of art and politics, with not an ingredient of information inside.

They were nearly all Harlem-conscious, in a curious synthetic way, it seemed to me—not because they were aware of Harlem's intrinsic values as a unique and popular Negro quarter, but apparently because white folks had discovered black magic there. I understood more clearly why there had been so much genteel-Negro hostility to my Home to Harlem and to Langston Hughes's primitive Negro poems.

I wondered after all whether it would be better for me to return to the new milieu of Harlem. Much as all my sympathy was with the Negro group and the idea of a Negro renaissance, I doubted if going back to Harlem would be an advantage. I had done my best Harlem stuff when I was abroad, seeing it from a long perspective. I thought it might be better to leave Harlem to the artists who were on the spot, to give them their chance to produce something better than Home to Harlem. I thought that I might as well go back to Africa.

XXVIII

Hail and Farewell to Morocco

I suppose every man who achieves something worthwhile naturally attracts some woman. I was interested in Carmina, who had a white lover. Carmina was a pretty colored lady who had recently deserted the best circles of Harlem for Paris. I liked Carmina. She had lived her life a lot, even as I, and neither of us could reproach the other about the past. But when Louise Bryant saw us together she scolded me. "That girl is not your type," she said. "Why don't you go on living as you always did? Why do you have to go around with a female on your arm, simply because you have written a successful novel?" I said that perhaps it was nothing more than "male conceit." Louise Bryant laughed and said, "Take care you don't spoil yourself by doing the thing that every man thinks he ought to do because of male conceit."

Louise Bryant and Carmina did not like each other. The three of us were spending a convivial evening together and, feeling gallant, I tried to find something to praise in Louise's appearance. She had been to a hairdresser's that afternoon and her neatly shingled hair was gleaming black. I said, "Louise, your hair is very nice tonight." Louise smiled her appreciation. But Carmina said, in a loud whisper, "Can't you see it's dyed?" A blighting frost descended on the party.

It was a sweet relief to give up for awhile discussing problems of race and art for an atmosphere of pure sensuality and amorous intrigue. Carmina also had been fed up with too much race in the upper circles of Harlem, which was why she had fled to Paris. One night I was drunk and maudlin in Montparnasse and Louise Bryant shrieked at me in high intoxicated accents, shaking her forefinger at me, "Go away and write another book. Go home to Harlem or back to Africa, but leave Paris. Get a grip on yourself." She looked like the picture of an old emaciated witch, and her forefinger was like a broomstick. Perhaps it was her better unconscious self warning me, for she also could not get a grip on herself and get away from Paris.

I heeded the warning. I started off for Africa. But I lingered a long time in Spain. The weeks turned into months. From Madrid I went to Andalusia and visited Cordova and Granada again, then went back to Barcelona. A French radical friend wrote chidingly about my preference for Spain, so medieval and religion-ridden. I wrote him that I expected radical changes in medieval Spain sooner than in nationalistic France. That was no prophecy. The thing was in the air; students mentioned it to you on the café terraces; waiters spoke of it in the pensions and restaurants; chauffeurs spoke of their comrades murdered in Morocco by King Alfonso; bank clerks said a change was coming soon, and even guides had something to say. That was in the winter of 1929-30. I was in Spain early in 1930 when the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera collapsed. In the spring of 1931 I was in Spanish Morocco when King Alfonso abdicated, and in Tetuán I witnessed a wonderful demonstration of amity and fraternity between the native Moorish and civilian Spanish populations. There in Africa I hankered after Spain again and indited these three sonnets for Barcelona:

BARCELONA

1

In Barcelona town they dance the nights Along the streets. The folk, erecting stands Upon the people's pavements, come together From pueblo, barrio, in families, Lured by the lilting playing of the bands, Rejoicing in the balmy summer weather, In spreading rings they weave fine fantasies Like rare mosaics of many-colored lights. Kindled, it glows, the magical Sardana, And sweeps the city in a glorious blaze. The garrison, the sailors from the ships, The workers join and block the city's ways, Ripe laughter ringing from intriguing lips, Crescending like a wonderful hosanna.

2

Oh admirable city from every range! Whether I stand upon your natural towers,— With your blue carpet spreading to their feet, Its patterns undulate between the bars,— Watching until the tender twilight hours, Its motion cradling soft a silver fleet; Or far descend from underneath the stars, Down—to your bottoms sinister and strange: The nights eccentric of the Barrio Chino, The creatures of the shadows of the walls, Gray like the savage caricatures of Goya, The chulos of the abysmal dancing halls, And, in the garish lights of La Criolla, The feminine flamenco of El Niño.

3

Oh Barcelona, queen of Europe's cities, From dulcet thoughts of you my guts are twisted With bitter pain of longing for your sights, And for your hills, your picturesque glory singing, My feet are mutinous, mine eyes are misted. Upon my happy thoughts your harbor lights Are shimmering like bells melodious ringing With sweet cadenzas of flamenco ditties. I see your movement flashing like a knife, Reeling my senses, drunk upon the hues Of motion, the eternal rainbow wheel, Your passion smouldering like a lighted fuse, But more than all sensations oh, I feel Your color flaming in the dance of life.

I was ready to begin another book, and a Moorish friend had put his house in Fez at my disposal. But as soon as I landed in Fez, toward the end of 1930, the French police pounced upon me. I had arrived there a few days before the official visit of President Domergue of France. The police declared I should leave Fez immediately. They said British authorities had furnished proof that I was a political agent; that I had carried on propaganda among the British military forces and also visited Soviet Russia. I went to the British Consulate for further information. There I was told that they possessed no information about me, but that I must obey the local authority. They wanted to send me back to Europe. I refused to go. I said I would leave Fez if I were forced to, but I was determined to remain awhile in Africa. So I went to Casablanca and from there to Tangier.

Months later a merchant from Fez came to Tangier and hinted why I had been obliged to leave. He said that Moroccan custom permitted anyone who had a serious grievance to complain to the sultan in person when he made an official visit to a city. And as Morocco was a protectorate of France, any person who desired could present his complaint to the sultan of France during his official visit. But the police had a system of banishing real malcontents for a short period during the sultan's visit. The police had feared that I might seize an opportunity to complain to the French sultan, President Domergue, about the unjust treatment I received during my first visit to Fez! And so they had ordered me to leave.

In Tangier I rented a Dar Hassani (native house) and went to work on Gingertown, a book of short stories. Mail for me had accumulated in Paris. When it arrived there was a little pile of letters from Carmina. She chided me for deserting her and said that she, too, wanted to go to Africa; that she was sick of Europe and growing worse. She had met all the leading bohemians, writers and artists, more than I ever met. She was a frequent visitor to the Rue Fleurus and was hooked up with one of Gertrude Stein's young men. But she was disgusted with him; he was just a poor white mouse, she said. She was sick of it all and wanted to come to me.

Come to me! I was exceeding flattered, forgetting all about "male conceit." The idea of Carmina leaving her white man for me was tantalizing. She had introduced him to me in Paris, and he had said, "J'ai le béguin pour toi." I said, "Merci, mais je n'ai pas." His bloodless white skin was nauseating. He had no color.

Carmina had been traveling around a lot herself and confided to me that she was keeping a diary of her randonnée. She thought I might help her to publish it.

And so Carmina came to Morocco. It was just at the commencement of l'Aïd El Kebir (the Big Feast), when the Moroccans cut the throats of thousands of lambs and the air is filled with their plaintive bleating and the crooked streets are running with their blood. We went to live in my little native house at that time of the Great Sacrifice. In the beginning it was nice, being together and working together. People liked Carmina. She was pretty. The Spanish liked the name Carmina because it had a little of Carmen in it. And the Moors liked Mina because it was a native name derived from the lovely sweet flower, Jasmine, which in Morocco is Yasmina, a name often given to Negresses and Mulattresses. And I liked her being so much admired.

I showed Carmina how to make Moroccan tea with mint and other flavorful shrubs. And a native woman friend cooked us big bowls of cous-cous in olive oil with the tenderest pieces of lamb and chicken. The Aframerican honeymoon in Africa was quite happy, until Carmina announced that she desired to marry me. But I couldn't because I wasn't divorced and I expected some day to return to America.

And now there was no peace between us. Carmina insisted she had to marry, to satisfy her mother, who was a Christian church-loving woman. In anger I said indiscreetly: "Why didn't you marry your white man in Paris." She said she would show me she could marry him. And one day she announced that her former white lover was coming to Morocco to marry her. I said I thought that that wasn't a bad idea, since she had to be married. I meant it. But my attitude turned Carmina raging. She said the right kind of man would be jealous. She was right, I suppose. But even from the angle of pure passion only I couldn't imagine myself being jealous of Carmina's white lover. And frankly I was interested in seeing her marry her white man from a social point of view. Because the story of Negroes in civilization is one of white men loving black women and giving them mulatto children, while they preferred to marry their own white women. Carmina said she was a modern woman and that if I were truly a radical and bohemian, I would not have such reactionary ideas about marriage. I asked her why she was not modern enough to live with a black man as she had lived with a white man. Also I said I was thinking in black-and-white, and that as marriage has a social value and her white man was of the better class, I'd like to see her marry him. Mixed marriages were mostly one-sided, colored men marrying white women; I'd also like to see white men marrying colored women, I told her. White men must have some social reason for not marrying the Negro women in whose flesh they find delight.

My reasoning infuriated Carmina, and our relationship became intolerable. She left me. Perhaps Carmina's white mouse had his special white fascination. I have known women who used to be afraid of mice and who in later years made pets of rats. Carmina's Nordic came, but he didn't marry. After being surfeited with loving, he left her still a spinster. I suppose it is easier for some women (like some men) to have than to hold.

I have read white writers and heard white men who romantically said that Negro women will not be faithful to white men. And there are Negro writers who write vicarious tales of colored girls ditching rich white men for black sheiks. I wonder what actual experience such colored writers have. All bunk. And my experience is not limited to just one. I know that in the West Indies the black and brown women become the faithful mistresses of Europeans.

So Carmina left me for a white skin. I don't think because it was so hot and I so cold. But the white skin is a symbol of money and power. In North Africa the native social system holds out against the European assault simply because the native women are confined in their harems. To modern thinking minds this is objectionable. Yet it is the native fanaticism in sex and religion which makes North Africa a little more wholesome than the rest of that fatal continent.

Some folk's remedy for lost love is immediately to love again. But if it is a big love, that remedy is like swilling beer to get rid of a champagne hangover. For if one has a passionate love in his system, I don't think indulging in lesser and indiscriminate loving helps to rid one of it. At least not for me. My way is to face it and live it down in hard work, sweat it out of my system. And so to get rid of the feeling and the odor of lost love, I gave up the little house and went for a few months up in the mountain fastness of Xauen in Spanish Morocco. There I finished my book, Gingertown.

When I came back I leased a little house in the country by the sea, about three miles out of Tangier. I found a little brown native girl to take care of the house. She brought her mother along, so that she could look her own people in the face without flinching. There also was a boy on a bicycle to run errands. And we all cultivated the garden and lived comfortably on twenty-five dollars each month.

One day when I was not at home, Carmina rode out there and pushed herself into the house. Both mother and daughter were very nonplussed by the American brown girl, who looked exactly like their own people, yet did not dress like them nor talk their language. Nevertheless, undaunted, they barred the way to my workroom. Carmina fired a volley of Americanisms and departed. Some days later it was reported to me in the Petit Socco of Tangier that she said she had told the woman she ought to be horsewhipped. Also, she had read a great book called Mother India about those awfully uncivilized Asiatics, and she wished somebody would write a Mother Morocco about the barbarous Africans.

Twice a week I tramped into town and spent the night in the native cafés listening to the alluring singing of Andalusian songs to the accompaniment of lute and mandolin. It was interesting to note that Spanish and French words and musical phrases were slipping into the native melodies. Some day a wonderful new music is destined to come out of North Africa.

The life was a little lazy. I did not plunge deep enough down into the native ways to touch the depths of that tribal opposition to other opposing groups which gave strength and meaning to their common existence.

So I lived on the edge of the native life, among them, but not one of them. I could have become a member by marrying into a family, as my two Senegalese friends had done. But religion was an obstacle. I did not want to take a backward step in that direction. I had interesting conversations with my friend Sidi Abdallah, a poet, who was educated in Egypt and was conceded by the natives to be the most highly educated and broad-minded Moroccan of the town. He assured me that Islam was all-embracing and could accommodate free-thinkers. It was he who started me off on the great story of Antar, informing me of the high-lights that were not hinted of in the Encyclopedia Britannica. He told me too that the father of free-thought was the Moslem, Averrhoës, who lived in Spain in the twelfth century; that he was the real founder of pantheism and of modern European free thought. And he told me his story, how he was imprisoned and flogged by the Caliph of Cordova, because he had said that the Caliph had no divine authority.

Sidi Abdallah was very eloquent. He resented the Christian representation of Islam as the religion of the sword. It was the religion of social equality, for all humanity, he said. It was the liberal and liberating religion, when the orthodox Christians were persecuting dissident Christians and pagans. Arabia was a land of refuge for the dissident Christians and Jews and pagans fleeing Christian persecution. "Our great Prophet dreamed of a religion of reconciliation in a world where all men would be like brothers, worshipping the same God," he said. "Take the Guinea fetishists, for example; they are primitive magicians and steeped in superstition, yet we accept and tolerate them as Moslems because they acknowledge Mohammed as the prophet."

All that Sidi Abdallah said was fine and vastly illuminating. I had a better conception of Islam after knowing him. The philosophy was all right, but the fact was that Islam, as it was practiced in North Africa when I observed it, was intolerant and fanatic. The Moors frankly admitted that perhaps Morocco was the most fanatically Islamic country in the West.

It was better, I thought, to live as I did without getting too deeply involved, and thinking too much, because I experienced more of purely physical happiness than at any time in my life.

When Carmina and I separated she circulated the report that I disliked white people. The natives were puzzled about that, because large numbers of them are as white as some Spanish and French. In the Riff and other mountain regions there are blue-eyed and blonde-haired types resembling Nordics, except that they are rather bronzed. But they are all remarkably free of any color obsessions or ideas of discrimination. They are Africans. The others are roumi or Europeans. So they thought that Carmina meant that I did not like the roumi or Europeans. And that did not displease them. They opened their doors wider for me. And I did not mind the report, for I was not particularly interested in European society in North Africa.

But I did have "white" friends (if the Moors do not object to the use of that phrase) from the white colony. They were all Americans, some of whom are interestingly friendly to colored people abroad. They delighted in flaunting their intimacy with colored persons in the face of the smug European colony. Also there were visitors from Europe.

My first and oldest French friend, Pierre Vogein, came to see me in 1932. He and his wife had come over the previous summer, but I was away in Xauen. Also Max Eastman and his wife, Eliena Krylenko, visited me the same year. And there came some of the Gertrude Stein young men. Carmina's young man had been a kind of protégé of Gertrude Stein. Carmina said she had been welcome at Gertrude Stein's at first. But when she and the young man became seriously enamored of each other, Gertrude Stein grew cold to them. Carmina said she could not understand Gertrude Stein being a novelist, for she seemed almost incapable of understanding life. She said Miss Stein saw black as black and white as white, without any shades, and so it was impossible to understand one like herself, for she was neither black nor white. She said Miss Stein did not seem to realize that chameleon was a fundamental feature of life; that serpents shed their skins and even the leopard might change its spots for a woman. But Miss Stein was reactionary: she did not believe in change.

Carmina was considered one of the most intellectual women in Harlem. Carmina said that Gertrude Stein reproached her young man, telling him that if he were seriously interested in Negroes he should have gone to Africa to hunt for an authentic one. Carmina said she did not know what more authentic than herself Miss Stein desired. For besides having some of the best white blood mingled with black in her veins, which were blue, she came from the best Negroid middle-class stock, and Gertrude Stein was also only middle-class.

An interesting couple of visitors from Paris was Monsieur Henri Cartier-Bresson, and his friend, an American colored woman. He was a Norman, and a painter and photographer. He had studied at Oxford and had a suggestion of upper-class English something about him. He had a falsetto voice which was not unpleasant, but it wasn't so pleasant to listen to it reiterating that its possessor could fancy only Negro women because he preferred the primitive. That falsetto voice just did not sound authentic and convincing to me.

And if a white man is fond of black women, why should he be declaring his liking to me! The penchant of white men for black women is nothing new. It has given the world an arresting new type of humanity, generally known as mulatto. M. Bresson had hunted all over West Africa in search of the pure primitive. And he had returned to Paris to find an American brown woman nearly twice his age and as sophisticated as Carmina, but not so pretty.

M. Bresson brought his lady over to lunch at my house. I was living alone then like an ascetic, which I found necessary to the completion of a new book. But I asked Mr. Charles Ford over to meet my guests. He came in his bathing suit, walking his way down the peninsular strip which lay between the river and the bay, and swimming over to my house. He took one look at the pair and left. The lady said, "He smells like a down-home." I said, "Yes, but he's not a cracker." Later Ford explained that his precious artistic sense of the harmony of form and rhythm had suffered too great a shock.

Our conversation turned upon M. Bresson's unwillingness to carry on with his father the business of an industrialist. M. Bresson's colored lady thought that he would be more interesting as a business man than as a modern photographer. She said he was not so artistic as he was plain lazy; that he was so lazy he wouldn't even pick up his pajamas from the floor.

I said that there at the head of Africa in Morocco, hard by the ancient civilized Mediterranean, the natives did not worry about pajamas. Going to bed was an effortless thing. And I asked M. Bresson whether among the pure primitives (if there were any left) in the middle or the bottom of Africa, one had to worry about pajamas. Or if one might be satisfied with a broad banana leaf. M. Bresson was not so sure. He had returned all the way to Paris to find his pure primitive and bring her to Morocco to show me. Well, in less than a couple of years I heard of M. Bresson in Mexico with a Mexican girl. Perhaps when his protracted period of adolescence has passed he will finally finish like a cool Norman and practical Frenchman by marrying a woman of his country and his class.

I am a little tired of hearing precious bohemian white men protesting their admiration and love for Negro women and the rest. Yet many of them are shocked at the idea of intimacy between a black man and a white woman, because of their confused ideas of erotic attraction. Perhaps I am hypercritical in detecting a false accent in their enthusiasm. But it strikes me as being neither idealistic or realistic. I know it is a different thing from the sympathy and friendship that the humane and tolerant members of one group or nation or race of people feel for the members of another. And I know it is different from that blind urge of sexual desire which compelled white men to black women during the age of black slavery in the Occident (and perhaps in Africa today), and created an interesting new type of humanity. The performance of such men was not actuated by false and puerile theories of sex. I have a certain respect for them. But these nice modern faddists—they give me a feeling of white lice crawling on black bodies.

The most interesting visitor of them all was the American writer and protégé of Gertrude Stein, Charles Henri Ford, who published a queer book of adolescence in Paris under the rather puritan title of The Young and Evil. Young Mr. Ford suddenly dropped in upon me one day when a group of tribesmen were killing a steer in my garden. They cooked the liver in the yard and roasted some of the meat on skewers and invited him to join us in the feast. He was like a rare lily squatting in among the bearded and bournoused natives, and he enjoyed it. When he left in the evening I gave him a chunk of meat from what had been given to me.

He had been in Italy with a Cuban girl. When they came to Madrid she found a young Spanish lover and the three of them came on to Tangier. He came to see me soon again and I invited some of the younger Moors and a few fatmahs to meet him. They all rather liked him. They said he looked wonderfully like the cinema portraits of Marlene Dietrich.

He came again and again, evidently liking my little isolated house on the river. He was likable enough, and we gave a few native parties for him. The young men brought their lutes and mandolins and sang Andalusian melodies, and the girls danced. One evening Mr. Ford came over early and excitedly told me that the young men were bringing a very beautiful fatmah—prettier than any he had seen at my place. I said I couldn't think of any pretty girl of that class whom Mr. Ford knew and I had not seen before. He said he felt certain I hadn't seen her. So we waited expectantly until the carriages arrived with the party. When the girl unveiled she turned out to be the first little one who had worked for me when I arrived in Tangier. We were both very surprised. She had lost the quaint native freshness of our earlier acquaintanceship and already she had developed like a fine and hardened cashew-nut. She was not aware that the joy-makers were bringing her to my new place. But she was not in the slightest embarrassed. She established herself as temporary hostess as well as guest and was just as charming in the rôle as she had been efficient as a little housekeeper.... Our fiesta lasted two days. The Moroccans are a magical barbaric people, if one isn't too civilized to appreciate the subtlety and beauty of their barbaresques. When at last I decided to return to America, in homage to them I indited: "A Farewell to Morocco."

Oh wistful and heartrending earth, oh land Of colors singing symphonies of life! Myself is like a stone upon my spirit, Reluctant, passing from your sunny shore. Oh native colors, Pure colors aglow With magic light. Mysterious atmosphere whose elements, Like hands inspired by a magnetic force, Touched so caressingly my inmost chords, How strangely I was brought beneath your spell! But willingly A captive I Remained to be. Oh friends, my friends! When Ramadan returns And daily fast and feasting through the night, With chants and music honey-dripping sweets, And fatmahs shading their flamenco feet, My thoughts will wing The waves of air To be with you. Oh when the cannon sounds to breaks the fast, The children chorus madly their relief, And you together group to feast at last, You'll feel my hungry spirit there in your midst, Released from me A prisoner, To fly to you. And when you go beneath the orange trees, To mark and serenade the crescent growth, With droning lute and shivering mandolin And drop the scented blossoms in your cups! Oh make one tune, One melody Of love for me. Keeping your happy vigil through the night, With tales and music whiling by the hours, You may recall my joy to be with you, Until the watchers passed from house to house And bugle call And muffled drum Proclaimed the day! When liquid-eyed Habeeb draws from the lute A murmur golden like a thousand bees, Embowelled in a sheltering tropic tree, With honey brimming in the honeycomb, The tuneful air Will waft the sound Across to me. Notes soared with the dear odor of your soil And like its water cooling to my tongue, Haunting me always like a splendid dream, Of vistas opening to an infinite way Of perfect love That angels make In Paradise. Habeeb, Habeeba, I may never return Another sacred fast to keep with you, But when your Prince of months inaugurates Our year, my thoughts will turn to Ramadan, Forgetting never Its tokens Unforgettable.

—Mektoub.

XXIX

On Belonging to a Minority Group

It was in Africa that I was introduced to Nancy Cunard—an introduction by mail. Years before, when I saw her at a studio in Paris, she had been mentioned as a personage, but I had not been introduced. In Africa I received a pamphlet from Miss Cunard entitled Black Man and White Ladyship. The interesting pamphlet gave details about the Cunard daughter establishing a friendship with a Negro musician, of which the Cunard mother had disapproved.

Miss Cunard wrote that she was making a Negro anthology to dedicate to her Negro friend, and asked me to be a contributor. I promised that I would as soon as I found it possible to take time from the novel I was writing. That started an interesting correspondence between us.

Although I considered the contents of the Nancy Cunard pamphlet of absorbing interest and worthy of publication, I did not admire the style and tone of presentation.

After some months, Miss Cunard informed me that she was traveling to New York, and from there to the West Indies, including Jamaica. She asked me if I could introduce her to anybody in Jamaica who could put her in touch with the natives. I addressed her to my eldest brother, who is well-placed somewhere between the working masses and the controlling classes of Jamaica and has an excellent knowledge of both. From Jamaica Miss Cunard wrote again that she had landed in paradise after the purgatory of New York, where she was put in the spotlight by the newspapers, when it was discovered that she was residing in Harlem among the Negroes. My brother invited her to his home in the heart of the banana, chocolate, and ginger region of Jamaica, and she stayed there two weeks with her Negro secretary. Both she and her secretary wrote extolling my brother's hospitality and the warmth and kindliness of the peasants. Miss Cunard said she particularly liked my brother's face, and she sent me a snapshot of him.

Meanwhile I had come to the point of a breakdown while working on my novel in Morocco; and besides I was in pecuniary difficulties. Nevertheless I wrote an article for Miss Cunard's anthology and forwarded it to her on her return to France. Miss Cunard extravagantly praised the article and said it was one of the best and also that I was one of the best, whatever that "best" meant. She said she would use it with a full-page photograph of myself which was done by a friend of ours, the photographer, Berenice Abbot.

However, she did not accompany her praise by a check, and I requested payment. I was in need of money. Miss Cunard replied that she was not paying contributors and that my article was too long after all. She was doing the book for the benefit of the Negro race and she had thought that every Negro would be glad to contribute something for nothing. She had suffered and sacrificed a fortune for Negroes, she said.

I comprehended Miss Cunard's way of reasoning. Yet in spite of the penalty she had to pay for her interest in the Negro, I did not consider it my bounden duty to write for her without remuneration. Miss Cunard would have been shocked at the idea of asking the printers and binders to print and bind her charitable book without remuneration. But in spite of her ultra-modern attitude toward life, apparently she still clung to the antiquated and aristocratic and very British idea that artists should perform for noble and rich people for prestige instead of remuneration.

I might say that I too have suffered a lot for my knowledge of, and contact with, the white race. Yet if I were composing an anthology of the white hell, it never would have occurred to me that all sympathetic white writers and artists owed me a free contribution. I suppose it takes a modern white aristocrat to indulge in that kind of archaic traditional thinking.

As Miss Cunard would not pay for my article, I requested its return. She said she was going to take extracts from it. I forbade her to touch it. That made her mad, comme une vache enragée. My brother also was supposed to do an article on the Jamaica banana industry for Miss Cunard. He decided not to. And suddenly Miss Cunard did not like his face any more. She wrote that he was big and fat.

In her pamphlet Black Man and White Ladyship the reader gets the impression that the Cunard daughter enjoys taking a Negro stick to beat the Cunard mother. Miss Cunard seemed to have been ultra-modern in ideas and contacts without alarming Lady Cunard, who was a little modern herself. Then Miss Cunard became aware of the Negro by way of jazz in Venice. And soon also she was made aware that her mother would not accept her friendship with a Negro. Other white women have come up against that problem. It is not merely a problem of people of different races; people of different religions and of different classes know the unreasonableness and the bitterness of it. The mother Cunard drastically reduced the income of the daughter Cunard. The daughter replied with the pamphlet Black Man and White Ladyship, which was not published for sale but probably for spite. In telling the story of her friendship, Miss Cunard among other things ridicules her mother's American accent. Yet the American Negroes she professes to like speak the same language as her mother, with slight variations.

Writing in her strange, heavy and ineffectual giant of a Negro anthology, Miss Cunard has this to say of me: "His people [the characters of my novels] and himself have also that wrong kind of race-consciousness; they ring themselves in."