I78-b

OLD HAT

While we were in Georgia, I visited the plantation where Jean Toomer had lived and, had gotten much of his material for Cane. And we talked with some of his distant relatives. One of the old men there had a marvellous patch-work hat on his head with various colored patches of felt, patched over and over where holes had worn through. I traded my new straw hat for it and brought it back with me to New York. Where I put it in a safe deposit vault in a Fifth Avenue bank, where a friend had given me space to store manuscripts there and my grandmother's shawl in which Sheridan Leary had been killed in at Harper's Ferry. I don't know now why I considered that old hat so valuable---except that it was quaint. Nevertheless I put it in my locked suitcase in the safe deposit vault on Fifth Avenue that fall I went to Lincoln.

All winter, I had no reason to go to the safe deposit for anything. But the following spring, I went there to look up some notes in the suitcase. It was a Saturday morning and the safe deposit room was crowded with well dressed people. The attendant handed me my suitcase. As I opened it---to my utter embarassment out came a great cloud of moths, filling the room. Moths had eaten the old hat to a powder! As the bank's various clients fought off the moths in indignant amazement I quickly closed the suitcase, rushed out and took a taxi to the middle of Central Park. There I dumped everything out, and had to go over each leaf of paper piece by piece brushing off moth-eggs---for fear they would turn to eating up my manuscripts and notes next. I was ashamed to carry the suitcase back to the bank.

XLI-218

he was given a grand funeral, attended by a great many saints
and sinners. And his memory lives on.

For finding intense and soul-rocking little churches of
the folk sort in Harlem, Zora Hurston was a great one. She
once discovered a church on 135th Street near Fifth Avenue
that was truly thrilling. Located in a store-front, it held
only about a hundred people. But it's brothers and sisters
radiated such joy under the spell of a nice old minister who
looked and acted as if he were sincere, that people like
Gloria Swanson and Fannie Hurst and J. P. McEvoy used to go
up there with Miss Hurston just to sit and hear the singing
and feel the spirit, while Miss Hurston herself sometimes got
happy and rose to confess her sins. And while these things
were going on, Kid Chocolate was the rising star of the fight
arena, Cab Calloway was conducting his first band and the Berry
Brothers were kids.

③ — the kind that do not go in
for publicity and big
revivals a la Beckton. She

One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, "I want to be a poet---not a Negro poet," meaning, I believe, "I want to write like a white poet,"; meaning subconsciously, "I would like to be a white poet"; meaning behind that, "I would like to be white." And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America---this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and be as little Negro and as much American as possible...

Certainly there is for the American Negro Artist who can escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready for his art. Without going outside his race, and even among the better classes with their "White" culture and conscious American manners, but still Negro enough to be different, there is still sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work. And when he chooses to touch on the relations between Negroes and whites in this country with their innumerable overtones and undertones, surely, and especially for literature and the drama, there is an inexhaustible supply of themes at hand. To these the Negroes artist can give his racial individuality, his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor that so often, as in the Blues, become ironic laughter mixed with tears. But let us look again at the mountain.

The road for the serious black artist, who would produce a racial art is most certainly rocky and the mountain is high. Until recently he received almost no encouragement for his work from either white or colored people. The fine novels of Chestnutt go out of print with neither race noticing their passing. The quaint charm and

humor of Dunbar's dialect verse brought him, in his day,
largely the same kind of encouragement one would give a
sideshow freak (A colored man writing poetry! How odd!
or a clown (How amusing!)

The present vogue in things Negro, although it may do
as much harm as good for the budding colored artist, has
at least done this: it has brought him forcibly to the
attention of his own people among whom for so long, unless
the other race had noticed him beforehand, he was a
prophet with little honor. I understand that Charles
Gilpin acted for years in Negro theatres without any special
acclaim from his own, but when Broadway gave him eight
curtain calls, Negroes, too, began to beat a tin pan
in his honor..................

The Negro artist works against an undertow of sharp
criticism and misunderstanding from his own group and
unintentional bribes from the whites. "Oh, be respectable,
write about nice people, show how good we are," say the
Negroes. "Be stereotyped, don't go too far, don't shatter
our illusions about you, don't amuse us too seriously.
We will pay you," say the whites. Both would have
told Jean Toomer not to write "Cane". The colored people
did not praise it. The white people did not buy it. Most
of the colored people who did read "Cane" hate it. They
are afraid of it. Although the critics gave it good
reviews the public remained indifferent. Yet (excepting
the work of DuBois) "Cane" contains the finest prose
written by a Negro in America. And like the singing of
Robeson, it is truly racial..................

Whereas the better-class Negro should tell the artist
what to do, the people at least let him alone when he does
appear. And they are not ashamed of him---if they know he
exists at all. And they accept what beauty is their own
without question. But in spite of the Nordicized Negro
intelligentsia and the desires of some white editors we
have an honest American Negro literature already with us.
Now I await the rise of the Negro theatre. Our folk music,

having achieved world-wide fame, offers itself to the
genius of the great individual American Negro composer
who is to come. And within the next decade I expect to
see the work of a growing school of colored artists who paint
and model the beauty of dark faces and create with new tech-
nique the expressions of their own soul-world. And the
Negro dancers who will dance like flame and the singers
who will continue to carry songs to all who listen---they
will be with us in even greater numbers tomorrow.

Most of my own poems are racial in theme and treatment,
derived from the life I know. In many of them I try to grasp
and hold some of the meanings and rhythms of jazz. I am
sincere as I know how to be in these poems and yet after
every reading of my poetry I answer questions like these
from my own people: "Do you think Negroes should always
write about Negroes? I wish you wouldn't read some of your
poems to white folks. How do you find anything interesting
in a place like a cabaret? Why do you write about black
people? You aren't black. What makes you do so many jazz
poems?

But jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of
Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the
Negro soul---the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a
white world, a world of subway's trains, and work, work, work;
the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a
smile..................

But, to my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro
artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to
change through the force of his art that old whispering
"I want to be white," hidden in the aspirations of his
people, to "Why should I want to be white?" I am a
Negro---and beautiful!"

So I am ashamed for the black poet who says, "I want
to be a poet, not a Negro poet," as though his own racial
world were not as interesting as any other world. I am
ashamed, too, for the colored artist who runs from the pain-
ting of Negro faces to the painting of sunsets after the man-
ner of the academicians because he fears the strange

un-whiteness of his own features. And artist must be free
to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never
be afraid to do what he might choose. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing
voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate the closed
ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen
and prehaps understand. Let Paul Robeson singing Water
Boy, and Rudolph Fisher writing about the streets of
Harlem, and Jean Toomer holding the hearts of Georgia in
his hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange fantasies
cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white,
respectable, ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer
of their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who create
now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves
without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we
ar glad. If they are not, it dosen't matter. We know
we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and
the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we
are glad. If they are not, their displeasure dosen't
matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong
as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free,
within ourselves.

123-b

table she was singing for--unless a duke, or a steel magnate,
or a world celebrity sat there.

Rich but lowly patrons could tip Florence ever so heavily,
and she would not even codescand to accept a glass of champagne
with them. But the amazing thing was that they would come back
her
and tip her even better for her songs the next time. In the
snob world of *de luxe boite de nuit* society it was considered
a mark of distinction for Florence to sit for a moment at your
table.

Most of the time when Florence was not singing she would
remain
at her own table by the orchestra stand saying,
"Tell them, 'No, thank you!'" to the waiters who came with
offers of champagne from guests who admired her looks or
her singing. These frequent, "No, thank you's" greatly in-
furiated the management who were too shor sighted to see that
that was, no doubt, a part of Florence's spell over her following—
because she was by no means a great singer of popular
songs. She was no Raquel Meiler or Yvette Guilbert. But she
was very pretty and brown, and could wear the gowns of the great
Paris couturieres as few other women could. At that time she
went home every morning and got plenty of sleep, and would
come to work every night looking as fresh and lovely as a black-
eyed susan from some unheard-of Alabama *champs de
luxe* where sophisticated darkies grow.

In the early part of the evening Florence would often laugh
and talk with the waiters and the musicians, or with Bruce and
me—but an hour later be was as remote as you please to a party of
well-to-do tourists from Wisconsin spending a thousand francs
at the front table. It was the first time I had ever seen a
and
colored person deliberately openly snubbing white people, so
it always amused me no end to watch Florence move regally away
from a table of money-spending Americans who wanted nothing
in the world so much as to have her sit down with them.
name

Her full name was Florence Embry Jones and her husband's name
was Palmer Jones. Palmer was a fine piano player, and

123-c

they sometimes sang together. But Palmer at that time was working
at the Ambassadeurs, and didn't arrive at the Grand Duc until
about three o'clock in the morning, so until he came, Florence sang
with the orchestra---perhaps a couple of songs an hour
between dances---the popular American tunes of the day. Then when
Palmer arrived, she would do a group of special numbers with him
at the piano---if they felt like it.

Palmer knew himself knew a great many old blues and folk
songs like FRANKIE AND JOHNNIE and HENRICO. He would occasionally
sing one or two of those songs for the guests, inserting off-
color lyrics like if the crowd was that kind of crowd.

Then when all the other clubs were closed, the best of the
musicians and entertainers from various other smart places would
drop into the Grand Duc, and there'd be a jam session until seven
or eight in the morning---only in 1924 in Paris they had no
such a name for it. They'd just get together and the
would cream
music of the Negro musicians then in France
like Cricket Smith on the trumpet, Louis Jones on the violin,
Palmer Jones at the piano,

## OUTLINE:

59. NOT WITHOUT LAUGHTER

The novel. The oxymoron bible classes. Prof. Wright.
Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Winkler. Laudee. Howard-Lincoln
games. Junior Prom. Biffers. FOUR LINCOLN POETS:
Edward Silvera, William Allyn Hill, Waring Cuney, and
myself. Marion Anderson. Abbie Mitchell. Revivals.
The SURVEY. End with ALMA MATER.

60. PATRON AND FRIEND

61. NOT PRIMITIVE

62. DIAGNOSIS

63. LITERARY QUARREL

## IV. POETRY INTO BREAD

64. HAVANA XXXI

Mention trip to Canada as reason for wanting to go to
the dark lands for a vacation rather than the white.
Trouble with ticket on first trip. NAACP investigation.
Mrs. Bethune, Pablo de la Torriente Brau, Gustavo Urrutia,
Jose Antonio Fernandez de Castro, the Mattins, reading
at French Club (Circle Francaise) Nicolas Guillen, Ramos
Blanco, Kid Chocolate's club, Mariano, arrest at beach,
poetry translated, the mulatto girls' ball, Lolita, friend
of Covarrubias, Club Atenas, the Alexanders (Raymond Pace)

65. CAPE HAITI

The Congo dances. The fishermen. Coloma and Clizeanne.
The marines and the bars. The beach and the green snakes.
Absinthe. The intellectuals. The sea. History. The
Citadel.

66. PEOPLE WITHOUT SHOES

67. DELEGATION

The trip home. Jacques Romain. "You get in that car
and drive on back here. Quarantine in Cuba. Havana
again. The spy. Zell ill.

68. MARY McCLEOD BETHUNE

HER SPEECH AT COLUMBIA. Her school. Her trip North
with us. Reading at (?) on the way. New York again.
Zell and Grand Central Art School, and Mr. (?)

70. LECTURE TOUR

Aram and Oakwood. POPO AND FIFINA. Trip east to see
Robeson. Hunter Stagg's party at Richmond. Edward
Donahoe's at Richmond. Paul Green & Larry Flynn.
Allen Tate. Poet Laureate of Mississippi. A.C.L.
Adams. Raddie's accident. Julia Peterkin. Hampton.
Student strikes. Spirituals sung. Tuskegee. Florida.