Dear Wallie,

I'm going to edit a little booklet of Lincoln University Poets,-- Eddie Silvera, Bill Hill, Waring Cuney, and myself. We were all four here together at one time. If any of your sons turn out to be poets-- which God forbid-- send 'em here, and they'll be either made or broken.....Do you read the Paris news in the Afro-American? Everybody and his brother's over there-- and Sidney Peterson has married a white lady in New York-- and I never hear of Sadie at Tuskegee-- and God forbid? I promised to write an article about her library. I'd be afraid to go South again, I promised to write articles about so many people-- but what will you-- I was hungry@@What queer things one can find on typewrites####which I never discovered before, did you$$$and@@even.....Well, I've just been to luncheon with the President of this Christian institution. I hope you are much better55555%%%%at least, or is 2½ the legal amount. I shall go to Canada to see?/-.,

Sincerely

Dear Wallie:

Well, I was sitting down here cutting a toe nail when what
should I think about but Vonnie and Minnie (I guess that was the
dog's name, was it not?) and I had never intended to so explore
my past gastronomical accompaniments, but any now after that I
thought I would write to you since it was through you that I
first met them sustained and soothed by an unfaltering world to-
morrow only to be consumed by fire!!! which I now hear wasn't
burnt up at all in anybody's cellar but is in the possession of
Service Bell, who therefore holds the whole younger generation in
his grasps and in 2650 when we're the prey of research experts from
the antique department of Tuskegee his heirs will receive a tremen-
dous sum for the lot, all first and last editions of original copies
containing source material on the whole Negro renaissance except
Stephin Fetchit.....Say, Wallie, aren't you glad we're not connected
up with any organizations? Wouldn't you hate to be head grand secretary
of anything with a middle name like Kinkle? I'd rather be in Fire, that
I thought was in smoke but which is now a la casa de Service Bell after
Lokke said that you said they all got burnt up at 267.....Lord have
mercy upon me at 267. I was once told that I look like Jesus....Will
you-all please move from this house, said 314.....But please don't cut
up my pants....If he's still speechless over the Blacker the Berry,
I mean Benjamin Brawley, what will 267 do to him?...No, unfortunately we
won't move.....We're sublimated—but after two policemen and Bruce,
she was a wilderness wandering from bed room to bed room daily.....
Where I stop now they make up beds only at night, if ever. It's a

much better place and the soul of me was amber dust until I took up
Gertrude Stein and now I'm changing style altogether and you need
not expect to understand my next book unless you too have lost your
mind and are no longer sick but mad because Bunny in his cups once
said you were a greater poet than me and you it seems did e'ne agree
and so I composed GIN MARY to prove that it was not so. You couldn't
be!.....But On Meeting A Genius has a mood of it's own which is, I
think, very good and quite striking.....You are not only a poet, you
are an intellectual. But you really oughtn't to be both at the same
time. In so (something) an atmosphere even pausterized milk will cur-
dle and poor Emma Lou will wander unloved by those who must have hero-
ines, and yet put down in no case study book for the use of college
sociologists, but yet I fear, poor child, more cut up by the mind than
burned up by the emotions except at that gorgeous last moment and a
few other spots where maybe you forgot what she wasn't and made her
what she was which as Gertrude Stein says in conversation generation
we are lost a but Mr. Hemmingway rearranged it for the front of his
classic white folks out-lickering niggers and getting more low-down
than less than the sun also rises at 267 where surely one's mind
could hardly over-rule the emotions unless it changed it's seat so you
ought to produce a grand book because you said they were all great
literary material and Zora said I'm no lady so I got a grand article
on Blues today from Brussels in which me and Clara Smith are hailing
as products of the renaissance and no other native blacks are mentioned
but they are all in Paris passing for Martiniques because they can out-
shimmy all other living Negroes and even Snake Hips bowed down in enyy
before the Beguin which my foreign correspondent tells me is like
flying spray and which I am sure poor Gertrude Stein could never do re-
do o-o-o-o-od do and in the womb of time all things will be revealed
pue ên êrêêêr yipix os umop êpisd st iêdêp use and
This page is upside down so kindely reverse the sheet before you shake twice.

as I certainly I am consorting with noxne other these days and you
don't know wnat mophitic means and neither do I but I am going to
look up umbulus before I get my master's degree and Nella Larsen is
right for more and more we are passing and now even you say that
you won't live in Harlem upon your return. That's right, desert
the race that made you what you are today and I only wrote one re-
view, I lied if I put an s on it, and that one was written in Han,
published in June, and paid for in August and I swore before that
and reswear now that I never intend to write another book review as
long as I live because the game is not worth the candle amd so with
BLACK AMERICA on page something of the Literary, no, I mean BOOK
LEAGUE MONTHLY for June, O literary historian, you will see, if the
Bookman every sends you your article, my last published book review
to see the light of day and if the B oo k man doesn't send you your
article and you want to borrow my copy I will send that to you if you
let me know at once before I fold my tents and steal away into the
darkness of the eastern shore where the moon rises out of the Chesa-
peak Bay dripping with little nigger B. boys as celebrated in a poem
over which many have wept but few have what would you what could you
what would could would you when if you can't get sick you must at
least go crazy because this is page 37 and the letter begins at 2
times the 3 placed after Aunt Hager's children which just came on
this post and I most anxious to enliven my week-end with it's pur-
usal so you may rest assured it will go off to N. Y. on Monday but
I shall rearrange it all in the style of Stein so that the colored
papers will find it too erudite for their attention and will leave
it entirely to the more highly subsidized literary monthlies which
never pretended to use anything that won the war for without red c.
nurses how would Jake have lived to meet Banjo or TWO COLORED WOMEN
IN FRANCE got there for it really is a great saving at so low a price
for 39¢/.      No, I will not signit.

Dear Wallie,

It's a gorgeous book that nobody but a brand new nigger would dare
write and I am sure it will complicate things immeasurably for all
the associations, leagues, and federations, as well as for the seal-
of-high-and-holy-approval Harmon Awards and even reverberate in the
midst of the Nations and Worlds Any Other Day But This..... And what
with two more plays and another novel, you yourself are a great and
nobel example to the Negro race, going in boldly for a literary ca-
reer and not deigning to hit a tap of any other kind of work—
with or without the doctor's orders! May the Gods preserve you in
your thorny way and give you extra appendages like Mercury so that
you may tread with winged heels and so avoid the rocks and stones.
For deep are the pits thereof for he who falls in mud..... And you are
only 21 or is it 23 and Youth and Blackness ought to make you the
marvel of the age, especially since Aunt Hagar has now knocked down
all the old ones, and you still have fifty years yet in which to be
a young and new Negro yourself..... I really do like the book very much
and shall use it for prescribed reading for every English class I
ever teach, as well as for Christmas presents for the next decade.
When is it due to appear?.... I didn't find a great many things to
correct (that I could detect) and I'm sending you my notes on it, bit
by bit. I enjoyed reading it greatly. A bee stung me in the left
eye today as I was watching honey being removed from the eaves of the
house where I board, so forgive me if I seem a little caustic in the
latter passages, since my sight is limited..... If you'll be so kind,
maybe I'll send you something to razz for me some day soon..... As it
is now, I'm about to fold my tents and steal away into the fastnesses

of Maryland and points both south and north, so unless you answer
immediately, write me hereafter through Knopf as my address will be
in my hat band for the next month or so, or year or so, I don't know.
I've got plenty of amusing things I want to do, but between what one
has to do and what one wants to do there is often a terrible tangle,
is there not? However, quien sabe? I usually manage to come out
having done in some fashion just what I wanted to do, although some-
times mired in it long after I've ceased the wanting. Nevertheless,
I know quite well one must pay prices, and have long been able to
calculate in advance.....I've done nothing all week but play a mar-
velous old record by Ethel Waters called AFTER ALL THESE YEARS and
have given away half my clothes (my few clothes) to the village boys
because I'm too lazy to start packing them. Besides who wants the
same old clothes forever! I used to feel like that about books, too,
and once threw my entire library into the sea book by book after I
left Columbia. (However, this is not a suit by suit performance;
rather only a shirt by shirt.) I am unecided as to whether I should
throw away my valuable correspondance during my collegiate years or
not— leaving the autographs and slanders to posterity, or tug them
by the suit case load to the eastern shores or where ever else I go.
Would you, for example, care to see your noble letters in the HARLEM
LITERARY MUSEUM fifty years after my death, all open to the public,
at least twenty years before your own demise? Or in the hands of
some rich autograph collector?....But I do not think I can carry
them this hot weather, and I don't think I can burn them either
because it would take too long to sort them out and see which ones
are not from people that I might later want to blackmail....so
I think I shall continue to play AFTER ALL THESE YEARS....It seems
that I had something of importance to tell you in this letter but I

can't for the life of me think what it was....Anyhow, will you kindly
come on back to Harlem so that you can be lynched personally by W. E.
B. D. when Aunt Hager finishes her assalt on all the high males still
virgin in their innocence of what cometh upon them. Indeed the second
renaissance beginneth with this tearing of the veil.

I'll be seeing you—