On Being an American.

Three large factors go to the making of a people, (1) the geography and climate of the land, (2) the biological racial factors, (3) the social institutions, and customs, language - in short the sociological cultural factors.

Who, then, is an American? Obviously an American is any member of the human race who lives in this land and is shaped by this cultural milieu. This definition includes the majority of the people now existing here - and it has its faults.

The first fault is that it is inclusive and fairly true; we often prefer what is exclusive and untrue. It ignores certain prejudices and preconceived views. It sweeps through the divisions and the separatisms which have become more or less fixed amongst us. Nevertheless, in spite of these faults and others, it appeals to me. More, I might even say it is me.

I am a member of the human race - though I sometimes feel not as much to be more a blight than a privilege. I was born of parents who, for generations were born and reared here. I have lived in the United States most of my life - and if I do not show the marks of my environment to the extent that some others do, this is only because, in addition to being shaped by my cultural milieu, I have tried to shape myself and to shape it. In any event, for better or worse I am an American.

But strange things have happened to me. Not that queer things do not happen to everyone, but simply that since this is my book, I am mentioning mine.

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In the first place, the history of my family (as much as I know of it) was unusual for America.

My grandfather on my mother's side, P. B. S. Pinchback, was born in Macon, Georgia. I must mention and emphasize that all of this concerning my family was told to me; I do not *know* it to be fact. Do you? Who *knows* about his family, which swiftly branches out to include more than a million ancestors if we follow the tree back through a few hundred years? Most of it is hearsay. Besides, even as regards what is known, the known facts are but a very small portion of the total number of facts. Thus, most that we speak and write is fictional.

Pinchback's father was what is called a white man. He was of Scotch-Welsh-German stock. Pinchback's mother possibly had some dark blood. I have seen a photograph of her but from it I could not say precisely what dark blood. It might have been Negro or Indian or Spanish or Moorish or some other. The photograph shows a woman of olive complexion with straight black hair and high cheek bones, with a general cast of features that would not be particularly noticed on a way or the other unless you were particularly looking for something. In general, the family appears to be similar to many others who existed in the South of those days, with this exception - that one of the boys was to grow up and make a name for himself as a political figure of national prominence.

There were three brothers. While the boys were still comparatively young the family moved to a town on the Mississippi, the name of which I have never known. Pinchback ran away from home and thereafter, I believe, never saw his relatives again.

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He got a job on a river boat and eventually settled in New Orleans to try his fortunes there. What he did, his struggles to support himself, I was not told. Once however, referring to those times he said to me, "I lived on cakes and apples - cakes to fill my stomach, apples to empty it."

The Civil War came. Pinchback became captain of a company of Negroes in the Federal army, and saw active service.

Meanwhile, he had married Nina Hethorn, a white woman of English-French stock. He, by this time, was a sturdy man of prominent forehead, bold dark eyes, a black beard, and forceful personality. She was physically delicate almost to the point of frailty. Their first children came while the war was still on.

Then, the war ended and the black men freed and enfranchised, came Pinchback's opportunity in the political arena. He claimed he had Negro blood, linked himself with the cause of the Negro, and rose to power. How much he was an opportunist, how much he was in sincere sympathy with the freedmen, is a matter which need not concern us here. In my autobiography I will attempt to give as complete a recort of Pinchback as I can. In the present book I am limiting myself to the one theme of his racial strains, his racial position.

It would be interesting if we knew what Pinchback himself believed about his racial heredity. Did he believe he had some Negro blood? Did he not? I do not know. What I do know is this - his belief or disbelief would have had no necessary relation to the facts - and this holds true as regards his Scotch-Welsh-German and other bloods also.

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I would judge that the admixture of dark blood or bloods, whatever they were, occurred in his mother's line two or more generations before her. It is probable, then, that his mother herself did not know. Whatever she believed had reached her by hearsay. Certainly what reached him was hearsay.

I, who write this, am in much the same position as my grandfather was. You who read this are in much the same position as I am. It seems to me that if we all with one accord frankly avowed that our records of the past are but partial and uncertain, that our behaviour of the present is what really counts, we would greatly simplify and advance the cause of genuine human relationships. "I am I." Let us begin with this primal affirmation, let us live it, let us be it throughout the course of our lives, this is the key to the kind of existence that every human being, because he is a human being, essentially desires.

Before I go further I must at this point make clear a distinction which is fundamental in my views of the matters we are concerned with here. With this distinction in mind we can, I believe, disentangle and understand the otherwise confused question of race.

In racial questions such as we have them today, there are two main factors, (1) the strictly racial, that is, the biological factors, and (2) the sociological psychological factors. Strictly speaking race is a biological phenomenon. It has to do with the organic heredity, with the physical composition of people. Put differently, race has to do with the organic actuality. It is, as anthropologists will tell you, a sufficiently

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unknown thing. True, on the basis of certain observed things
about a person, an anthropologist can draw inferences as to what
racial strains are in his make-up. Few anthropologists would
attempt to define all the racial strains, but certainly some of
them could be determined, while others could be guessed at. At
the same time, it is not possible to analyze the racial compo-
sition of a person as we can analyze the chemical composition
of a stomach. In any case, and to repeat, race has to do with
the organic actuality which exists in its complex identity as
a thing distinct from our opinions of it. I may say of a given
person that he is white of black, an oriental or an occidental;
but what I say has no necessary relation to the nature and com-
position of the person himself. On the one hand we have, actual
racial composition; on the other hand we have my opinions about
it together with whatever labels I may happen to use. A stone
is a stone, whatever I may call it. It is however, comparatively
difficult to determine the nature of a stone; so most of us are
content to have a name for it. It is even more difficult to
determine the nature of a man; so most of us are even more content
to have a label for him.

Now these labels, together with ideas, opinions, beliefs,
emotions and their associated behaviour constitute the sociologi-
cal psychological factor of racial matters.

To an thoughtful person it is evident that, a belief is something
quite different from the thing itself; but as most of us are
unthoughtful we easily follow into the assumption that the thing
is as we believe it to be. Thus for example, we may believe,
and therefore assume it to be an fact that all of the main
races are pure races. In point of fact all of the main races

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are mixed races - and so mixed that no one can unravel them
in all or their blended complexity. No one knows for sure,
but guesses have been made as to the strains which make up the
present day peoples of Germany, of France, of England - and the
layman would be surprised at the results of such guesses. They
lead back to Asia - into Africa.

In our own country it is comparatively simple to show the
distinction between the racial and the sociological factors.
Under
There is a large group of people called colored. this blanket
label are to be found people with racial strains from every coun-
try on earth. Some of them are as white as anyone can be.
The term colored obviously does not define their organic actual-
ity. The term colored is a sociological psychological word which
refers not to a racial but to a social group.

There is a larger grouping of people called white. As a
matter of organic fact there are witnin the white group also
racial strains from every race on earth. This racial or blood
admixture is the organic actuality underlying the so-called white
group.

What I have said above is known to almost everyone who has
experienced the people of this country. Yet most of us play
a game and agree not to see what we cannot help but see and know.

No one will ever know how many white people have been recorded
in the books as colored. No one will ever know how many people
with Negro blood have been recorded in the books as white. Nor
need we know. I am simply mentioning this fact as an example
of what I mean when I say that a person's race is one thing,
that what hi is labelled and how he is classified is another -

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nor is there any necessary agreement between the two.

Now to return to my grandfather.

Without any known base for it, Pinchback said he had negro blood. He allowed himself to be called Negro, as this was in line with the role he had cast for himself. And it must be said that, having taken on this role, he played it straight through. To the end of his life he was surrounded by men of all colors and he was the unprejudiced friend of them all.

His role as I have said, was the means of his advancement. It is idle to ask if he might not have found other or better means. This was the means that he was destined to take; and it did not irk him.

In the first place, the condition of America in those days was what we may describe as an open condition. Like all wars the Civil War disarranged established modes and categories and were caused a social opening in which some unusual men were free to come up, in which some unusual things could happen.

Pinchback was in a position of power and influence. He was one of, if not the dominant figure in Louisiana politics. He had become moderately wealthy and was reputed to have quite a fortune for those days. He lived a life of difficulty and danger, during the stormy days of the reconstruction period in Louisiana. In appearance he was a white man, and lived as one all over this country except in so far as his role make him do otherwise. His life was eventful and certainly in all ways as colorful as any political figure of his time. So he had, as I say, no cause to regret any of the factors that had contributed

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to his position.

Some time in the early nineties Pinchback moved himself and
family to Washington, D. C. in what was then a growing resident-
ial section of north-west Washington, he bought property and
built a new home. This was a white neighborhood, as his place
of dwelling in New Orleans had been. Of course he brought his
reputation with him, and the people who later bought property
from him knew that they were buying from a man who looked white
but who was called the former *Negro* governor of Louisiana. In
Washington he had a prestige similar to that which he had had
in New Orleans. In the nation's capital he was a well-known
figure in republican party circles.

In this city my mother met and married Nathan Toomer. Toomer
also was from the south, from Georgia. He was tall, well-built
man who would have been considered handsome by any standards.
His father, a plantation owner had left him some money, and
Toomer lived as a gentleman of leisure with a taste for luxury
and elegance. He was of English-Dutch-Spanish stock. I gather
that he lived in the south as a white man. Did he have *Negro* blood?
It is possible. I saw him but once when I was quite a
small boy. He was practically never mentioned in our family.
My grandfather had objected to the marriage, for reasons which
I do not know. My mother obtained a divorce about a year after
the marriage. Then she took me and we went to live in the Pinch-
back home; and in this home, as I say my father was taboo. So
I learned little or nothing about him as I grew up.

Let me now summarise the factors before I go further and
take up my own life.

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(1) The racial factors - By hearsay there were in my heredity the following strains: Scoth, Welsh, German, English, French, Dutch, Spanish, with some dark blood. For the point of this book let us assume the dark blood was *Negro* - or let's be generous and assume that it was both *Negro* and Indian. I personally can readily assume this because I can not feel with certain of my countrymen that all of the others are all right but that *Negro* is not. Blood is blood. My experience has been that none of it is too good, that all of it has potentialities far beyond anything that any race has yet actualised. I am I. My body is my body, with an already given and definite racial composition. As bodies go it is not so bad; I have been able to make fairly constructive use of it; whatever virtues it has are the result of *all* the bloods in it, whatever defects it has are similarly the result of all. So to return -

Suppose in my heredity there were all the racial strains I have mentioned. Of what race am I? To this question there is and can be but one true answer - I am of the human race. This is my organic actuality. This is the actuality that XX would be discovered and realized by any anthropologist who saw with clear eyes and thought with a clear mind. For all I know, I have Hebrew and Asiatic strains too. If so, then the dismembered human race is assembled and one, and again a whole thing in my body, as it probably was in the beginning - and I can take no credit for this re-union because it happened without my conscious decision, but came as a pure gift to me.

(2) The sociological factors - My grandfather, and therefore the family to which I belonged, was linked with the *Negro*, had colored and white friends, lived in a white neighborhood of

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well-to-do people, lived as both white and colored as the occasion called for in its travels around the country. In addition to the foregoing I might add that the family had the prestige which goes with the possession of money and property. They had also the prestige that comes to people who obviously possess a certain quality and aristocracy of character.

I grew up with the children of that neighborhood. In the case of my first friend, our mothers pushed our baby carriages along the sidewalk together, and we became acquainted then. In time I showed characteristics that make for leadership in a group of children. I became the leader, but I was already the friend. Needless to say we were as unconscious of race as we were of class or religion or any of the other generalities which concern and deform adults in their relationships with each other. My childhood, except for the pains and tragedies which fret the lives of all children, was happy. The first four years of my life - and some say these are the most important years of the formative period, were in all ways as fine as I could ask for. Racial matters did not enter into my life. I saw men of all colors come to the house - and thought nothing of it because it was the familiar thing. What thoughts and feelings on this subject the other children had I don't know. They never manifested, and so I may assume that they either had none at all or that they were not troublesome. The children of themselves of course, would never have thought of such things; but they might have picked them up from their parents. This latter seems not to have been the case.

Then came time for me to begin school, a rather strange

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thing happened. All of the other children of my acquaintance went to a school *in* not far away. I was sent down some distance to a school quite out of my district. In Washington they had white and colored schools. All of my friends had gone to a white school, I was sent to a colored one. Why? Perhaps *because* this was in line with my grandfather's role. Perhaps for some other reason. I may have asked at the time for the reason. If it was given to me I do not remember it.

It must have seemed strange to me, and fundamentally inexplicable. But I accepted it. In time I came to like it, except for the fact that it took me away during school hours from my neighborhood playmates. But I joined them for the usual play and games after I came home from school. And I came to make friends with my school-mates, several of whom I asked to visit me.

In this school were children ranging in appearance from coal black to pure white. I had never played with black children before but they were not strange to me owing to the fact that I had seen black men in our house. Like all children they had individual differences, I liked or disliked on a personal basis, and if I had been asked, are these children very different from white children, I think my answer would have been, no. Or I would have asked, how do you mean? Children the world over are natural democrats and natural aristocrats. Most adults, it seems to me have lost the capacity to be naturally either.

In the light of what I now know of American racial divisions and prejudices, it seems probable to me that my going to a colored school made some difference in my relations with the children

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of my block. I have searched my memory as honestly as I can,
and I find there no events to support this view. We continued
being friends, and I continued as the leader until a sickness,
during which I was bedridden and then confined to the house for
a number of months, withdrew me not only from my playmates but
from the world in general.

When I got well again I found that the neighborhood had changed.
New boys had come in, some of them older. My position of leader
had been taken over by others and I never got it back. Of more
importance than this I never again re-established my old friend-
ships with an equal depth but continued to feel somewhat of an
outsider and somewhat alien. This was the beginning of my spirit-
ual career, the beginning of my differentiation into an individ-
ual who thought and dreamed and was destined to travel a good
portion of his life alone.

In my home life the absence and presence of certain things
are especially to be noted. There were no strong prejudices of
any kind - not racial, not class, not political, not religious.
So, I did not acquire these prejudices then, nor have I since.
True, I have run into them, but by some good fortune, together
with my own work upon myself towards individualization, they
have not gotten into me. Within myself I have never felt bias
either against or for a person because he was white or black,
oriental or occidental, of the lower or middle or upper class,
Jew or Gentile. My prejudices - and I have them, are against
individuals whom I dislike on a personal basis, and in particular,
denials of certain traits which I believe to be abnormal and
unbecoming in human beings. What I have just said is more than
a view, more than a mental philosophy. I feel it, I live it,

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it is in my blood and body as well as in my mind. There are men,
I know, whose only strength is the strength of prejudice, strength
of bitterness, strength of denial. I do not say they are wrong;
I simply say they are not my kind, I am not one of them. My
family was, in a sense, of both rachial groups; thus their very
position precluded strong biases for one as against another.
My family belonged to the upper middle class. For a time they
belonged to the governing class. But it seems to me now as I
look back on it that they were quite without class consciousness,
and certainly they had no class arrogance or snobbery. As chil-
dren are, they were at once natural democrats and natural arist-
crats. My grandfather was a staunch republican; therefor his
family was republican too. I did grow up to acquire a prefer-
ence for this party, but this was not accompanied by a prejudice
against the others. The only one of our family who had a religious
trend was my grandmother. She inclined toward catholicism, but
in this case as in many others it was her private affair, and
she kept it to herself without any attempt to make her children
adherants of it or of any other creed. If all of this sounds
unusual, I can only say that it is true, and true without doubt
in so far as my life and my home was concerned.

Because of politics my grandfather was a man of wide and
varied contacts. Because of his nature too. He was hearty,
sure of himself, out-going, liked to spend money, and enjoyed
having many people around him - black men and white men alike.
He had good will towards everyone, except his personal or polit-
ical enemies. I never heard him say a word against anyone be-
cause of the person's color or nationality or class or creed.

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What he said and felt when he was campaigning, or in the company of his men friends, is another matter. I never heard that. I am simply recording here what did and what did not contribute to my conditioning.

My grandmother, it is true, was not fond of black men; but she would always express the dislike with a wry amusement at herself and a twinkle of the eye for me. She did not take her prejudice seriously, nor did I.

My mother and her brothers were as far as I know much like my grandfather as regards the absence of prejudice, though the children were not as large as the father.

I cannot remember ever having heard a discussion of the race question in our house. Race, color, were hardly if ever mentioned; in any case, if they were, they made no impression upon me. Nor was I told and made conscious of belonging to any color or race or any other kind of classification. I was left to make my own observations and reach my own conclusions.

What did I think and feel and believe? As near as I can make out, I accepted myself and my family as I saw things, without labels. Suppose, however, that some one had asked me, "Are you white or colored?" I would have asked what was meant. If the explanation had been in terms of the usual racial divisions, and I could have been made to understand them, I would have answered, "White." I knew nothing of what my grandfather was called by some people. All of my family as I saw them were white. We lived in a white neighborhood. The children I had grown up with were white. I myself, though of darker complexion than

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my play-mates was white; against these facts the circumstance
that I went to a colored school would have had little or no
weight. But I was never asked this question; so I had no cause
to define myself to my environment there, thus fixing a self-view.

From the vantage point of the present I now see that had I
continued to live and grow up in that neighborhood of Washington
the question would have arisen. As my young friends grew older
they would have come under the influence of the white-black
division in America. They would have heard what my grandfather
was sometimes called, and they would have attached the typical
American weight to this label, without thinking about it. Foreign
glasses would have been placed over their eyes and they would
have begun looking at me strangely, this feeling that their
old play-mate was after all somehow different from them. Questions
in their minds would have put questions in mine. Labels in their
minds might have forced me to label myself, one way or the other.
As it happened, I left Washington before this not certain but
probable eventuality could come about.

When I was around twelve my mother married again. My step-
father was a white man with work in New York. So I was taken
to live first in Brooklyn and then in New Rochelle. In these
cities naturally, we lived as white people, and I took it as a
matter of course.

Once during these years I was asked by a boy who liked to
feel grown up, what nationality I was. This was the first time
such a question had been put to me. I felt queer because I knew
he wanted some peculiar answer. I did not know what to say until
I remembered that my grandmother spoke French sometimes. Forth-

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with I said I was French. That seemed to satisfy him. He did
not ask again, nor did any other.

After two years in the New York region my mother died. My
grandparents came for me and I was taken with them to live again
in Washington - but a different Washington.

My grandfather had lost ground as a political figure. His
prestige and influence were waning. He had lost money too. The
house of my childhood had been sold. We lived with my uncle in
a mixed neighborhood where colored people predominated. I
seldom saw any of my old play-mates. Again I went to a colored
school. And here for the first time in my life, I lived within
the colored group. It was not difficult to do so. I accepted
this as readily as I had accepted living in Brooklyn and New
Rochelle.

What I have just said may seem to the average person of either
group, a surprising statement. And it is - if you do not know
the facts. So I will give them briefly.

In the first place it should be said in general that the two
groups are not as different as they have been made to seem. Yes,
there is considerable difference between the best of the white
and the worst of the black, just as there is between the best of the
black and the worst of the white - and it is these comparisons
that prejudice is prone to make. But compare the best with the
best and the difference decreases almost to the vanishing point.
I am speaking of people, of human beings. I am comparing them
as human beings. I am thinking, not in terms of range of opport-
unity or social position or achievement in some special field,

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but in terms of character, of fineness of body and of person -
in short, in terms of quality. By any qualitative valuation
the best of the people whom I met in that colored group in Washing-
ton, were not simply on a par with, but had obvious & affinities
with the best people of any group I have met anywhere.

Whatever Negro blood they had was an asset. I do not mean
that it was more of an asset than any of their other bloods, but
I do mean to affirm (in opposition to the contrary superstition)
that it contributed its share to the making of these splendid
people. If I believed with certain of my countrymen that in all
cases of admixture the Negro blood is the dominant blood, and if
I therefore believed that these people were what they were mainly
because of their dark blood, then I'd say let us have more of it
in all the groups of America.

In the Washington of those days - and those days have gone
now - there was a flowering of a natural but transient aristo-
cracy, thrown up by the, for them, creative conditions of the
post-war period. These people, whose racial strains were mixed
and for the most part unknown, happened to find themselves in the
colored group. They had a personal refinement, a certain inward
culture and beauty, a warmth of feeling such as I have seldom
encountered elsewhere or again. A few held or had held political
posts of prominence. Some were in government positions. Others
were in the professions. One was a municipal court judge.
Several were in the real estate business. All were comfortably
fixed financially, and they had a social life that satisfied them.
They were not pushing to get anywhere or be anything other than

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what they were. Without bitterness, but with a sweetness and
a warmth that I will never forget, they were conscious that they
were and had something in themselves. The children of these
families became my friends.

With one or two exceptions, those of my new friends who became
my best friends were, in a racial sense, no different from the
boys and girls I had known in white groups. They behaved as
American youths of that age and class behave. Their quality of
person was considerably higher than the majority of boys and
girls I had played with in the New York region. For this very
reason I felt, if anything, more at home with them. They were
my kind as much as the children of my early years had been.

These new friends of mine were not conscious of being either
colored or white. They had no active prejudices against black
people or white people. Knowing that I had been of, and had
come from, a white world, they were not curious about this world
and certainly they did not feel that it was either superior or
inferior. Segregation, if known to them, meant nothing. They
had never run up against the color line. In fine, they were
as youths of fifteen anywhere.

What I have just written may sound incredible to those whose
heads ring with the rattle of race talk, and who believe that
all people of America from the moment they are born until the
moment of their deaths are consumed with the race phobia. Even
to more balanced minds the statement may sound strange. Young
people in a colored group - and not feeling it? I can only
give my honest word that it was so.

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To explain it somewhat I may point out (1) that this was in
1910; the movement to make the Negro self-conscious and give
him racial solidarity had not yet gotten under way effectively,
(2) that propaganda is always a limited influence and never
reaches but a fraction of people, (3) that only those who make
an issue of race are conscious of this issue, (4) that no people
label themselves and fix their consciousness on this label un-
less the thing has become ingrained in them by hearsay and educa-
tion or unless external circumstances compel them to do so.

These youths whom I am now writing about had simply not been
imprinted. They lived within their world, not on the antagonistic
periphery of it where clashes are most likely to occur. Even
a race riot going on, the deep centers of both groups can be
quite calm.) These youths had their rounds of activity, parties,
and interests - and were self-sufficient. In their world they
were not called colored by each other. They seldom or never came
in contact with members of the white group in any way that would
make them racially self-conscious.

For the next five years, that is, until I finished high school,
I lived within this world exclusively, except during certain
summers when we went away for a vacation. If not happy all of
the time, I was in this similar to young people of that age every-
where; and the causes of my pains were just the ones that disturb
all of the growing people in the American branch of western
civilisation. I was interested and absorbed in my life, in my
friends, in our mutual happenings, in my studies - and I wished
for nothing different and nothing else - except those unformed
realisations that arise in the secret hearts of youth and

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beckon young people on to something which perhaps is not to be
had on this earth, certainly not for the wishing.

During these years I matured considerably and came to feel
myself something of a young man, more independent and self-assured
than the fellows of my acquaintance. I had an active mind and
I used it, not always on my studies, but on self-selected reading
and on the life I saw around me. Of this life I took my own
impressions through my own five senses and came to personal
understandings as regards boys and girls, men and women, sex,
love, marriage, a possible career for myself... I was growing
up into the life of America.

But as yet America had, of course, no large meaning for me.
The nation was limited to my personal experience in it: Washing-
ton, parts of Virginia and Maryland, the New York region, Atlant-
ic City, Saratoga Springs. Americans were limited to those whom
I had met. Like any other youth of my age, I was egocentric and
seemed to feel that the entire world revolved around me as the
central and the most important figure.

Among the Items that came to me were items concerning the
racial situation; but they seemed unrelated to my life. Never-
theless of course, my mind stored them up. I heard of the color
line. I heard of segregation. I heard that colored people were
barred from white hotels, theatres, and restaurants. I heard
of social inequalities. I heard that if a person was known to
have Negro blood, no matter how little, he was called Negro.
I heard of "passing". I heard that the white world was the world
of opportunity, that the colored world was narrow and closed in.

21

I heard of lynchings. I was more than curious about these things: some seemed atrocious, some unjust, some untrue, others absurd and fantastic, but it never occurred to me that they might have some bearing on my personal career, because in me were the facts of my family's life, the facts of my own life up to date.

It was not until my last year in high school that I came face to face with the face question in a personal way. It all occurred in my mind, and was occasioned by the following circumstance.

I intended going to college. But I would go to that college from a colored high school. I foresaw that I might be asked to explain this. I foresaw that for the first time in my life I might be labelled colored because the group I had lived in for four years was so labelled. The name of the school would mean nothing to most of the fellows, but it would mean something unpleasantly definite to those who came from Washington. There would likely be some Washington boys in whatever college I went to. I'd likely meet them, just because I too was from Washington. So what would I say? This foresight was the cause of my trying to explain and answer the question to myself.

My first impulse however was to circumvent the issue. I could spend a year at some prep school. From this school I could go to college, and the name of my high school need never be mentioned. For a time, this course appealed to me as just the thing to do. I reasoned thus: why had my grandparents brought me back to Washington and put me in a colored school? It was not my choice. Hadn't they foreseen that it might make trouble for me? Or were they only thinking of themselves, whose life was almost over, not of my future at all? I resented them for having ~~been~~

22

done this to me. I reasoned that since I had not done it I
was not obligated to be bound to it. I would be right to try
to undo it in any way that I could. Thus my personal predic-
ament was causing me to turn against those I really loved, and
tempting me to pursue a course of evasion.

Soon, however, my resentment passed. Whether I could under-
stand it or not, I was sure that my grandparents had done what
they had to do, they being themselves, destined as they were.
In the deepest part of me I remembered what I had always known -
that they had my good fortune at heart, that in every way in
their power they had been wonderful to me. What was done was
done. I would not try to undo it. Never had I had anything
in my life that I felt I must cover, hide, evade. So I would
not cover this. With this decision firm in me, I faced the
issue squarely and really began for the first time to think about
my family and myself in racial terms.

Behind all of my questions and thoughts was a deepening con-
sciousness that up until now I had been taken by my parents, that
now I must take myself; that heretofore I had followed along
with them, that now I must move myself; that formerly I had
been as they were, that now it was up to me to be myself.

I asked questions. Most that I know of my heredity and my
parentage was told to me at this time. I put things together.
Before I finished I had answered to my satisfaction not only
the question I started with but more important ones. I had
determined, on the basis of the facts as I knew them, my racial
actuality, my social position, my human stand. That stand was

23

essentially the same as my stand at the present time. Those
views were the germs of the ideas that now twenty years later
I am expressing in this book.

I was an American, neither white nor black, rejecting these
divisions, accepting all people as people. Having intimately
known splendid and worthless of both groups, I could say and
know, "Human beings are human beings." I liked or disliked
them, associated with or kept away from them, valued or scorned
them, not on racial or color grounds, but on an individual person-
to-person basis. If others had race prejudice, that was their
affair as long as it did not manifest against me.

In my body were many bloods, some dark blood, all blended
in the fire of six or more generations. I was then, either a
new type of man or the very oldest. In any case I was inescap-
ably myself. My body was inescapably my body. By all standards
it was a pretty good body. For the rest it was up to me to make
the best that I could of it. If I achieved greatness of human
stature, then just to the degree that I did I would justify all
the blood in me. If I proved worthless, then I would betray all.
In my own mind I could not see the dark blood as something quite
different and apart. But if people wanted to say this dark blood
was Negro blood and if they then wanted to call me a Negro, this
was up to them. Fourteen years of my life had lived in the white
group, four years I had lived in the colored group. In my ex-
perience there had been no main difference between the two. But
if people wanted to isolate and fasten on those four years and
to say that therefore I was colored, this too was up to them.

24

As for myself, I would live my life as far as possible on the basis of what was true for me.

Never having found them so in my personal experience, I did not believe that all or even most Americans were crazy, distorted and split on this subject of color and race. I was sure that even if I discovered that some were, I would find a sufficient number who were not. And I was confident also that in the future as in the past I would have good friends and a good life.

I determined what I would do. To my real friends of both groups, I would at the right time, voluntarily define my position. As for people at large, naturally I would go my way and say nothing unless the question was raised. If raised, I would meet it square-ly, going into as much detail as seemed desirable for the occasion. Or again, if it was not the person's business I would either tell him nothing or the first nonsense that came into my head.

All the while these thoughts were working out in my mind, my feelings little by little became outraged that my aristocracy might be invaded and that I might be called to question by louts, white, black, or any other color. But as I settled the thing for myself and my mind grew quiet, my feelings quieted also.

All of the foregoing, as I say, took place in me in advance of my having to use it; so when the time came to go to college I was prepared. I went to college - and I had no use for it, the question was never raised.

I went to the University of Wisconsin. I went there to study scientific agriculture: the agrarian movement moved me twenty years ago. Strange as it seems in the light of what I now know,

25

at that time I had sincere dreams of a large farm in the middle
west. The middle west beckoned me then, and it has ever since.
My various underlying motives for going to Wisconsin are inter-
esting - this was my first real step out into life by myself -
but this is not the place to detail them. Enough to say that I did
go there to undertake a course of study for which, in all ways
except the desire, I was unprepared - and the desire itself
petered out before a year was finished.

This adjustment, for the first week or two, was the most difficult one I had had to make. Part of the difficulty was directly due to my anticipation of what would happen if I was called upon to put my racial position to the test. The rest was due to other matters, personal and scholastic, which we need not go into here. However, before two weeks were out I was in the current of my new life, taking this white world as a matter of course, forgetting being that I had been in a colored group. I began active in freshman affairs, fairly popular, was proposed for the class president, made friends and met places, and studied when I had to.

I passed the courses; but as it became increasingly clear to
me that agriculture was not what I was fated to do, I was thrown
back upon myself and became involved in the sufficiently distress-
ing problem of what I really wanted to do, of what I really could
do best. Whatever my grades, to myself I felt that I was failing,
wasting time and money. This was the first time I had ever felt
myself failing, and it was a profoundly unpleasant state.
Hiterto, I had thought pretty well of myself. I did not feel
that I had any special talent; indeed, strange as it may seem,

26

it had never occurred to me that people did have special talents - though from my reading, if from nothing else, I must have known they had. No, I felt myself to be a thoroughlybred with a pretty active general intelligence, with some strength of character, with some man-ness. But all of this did not help me solve the specific problem of what I was going to do.

Through the interest of a professor of the English department who urged me to write, who urged me to read magazines such as the Nation, the New Republic and the Manchester Guardian, I might, had I been ready to profit by it, have come in contact with the world of American literature, then in 1914. But other things were in store for me - a detour of groping and suffering and chaos during which I almost smashed myself on the nation's hard roads. In 1914 I was interested less in literature than in having a good time, talking, athletics, drinking beer and raising hell in the tradition of American college life.

This same English professor, by the way, thought I might be a Hindoo. He asked me if I were a Hindoo. He was disappointed, because he felt that if I had been I could have drawn upon some interesting material for my themes and stories. No, I was not a Hindoo, nor was I much interested in drawing upon any material for any stories - not then.

Two interesting experiences as regards race, came my way. I went out for football. Someone thought I was an Indian and the word went around. One day a fellow said to me, "Your'e going to make good. You've got them all scared." I was amazed and amused too that the idea of an Indian carried so much weight on a football field. Certainly I did not. Those beefy giants

27

punished my body each day; it was only by will that I kept my-
self there. It was not long before my body cried so loudly
that my will had to bend and call time out for good.

In our house there was a fellow who opened my eyes. In him
I sensed something inimical to me. In me he sensed something
inimical to him. I did not like his weasel face from the first.
It was not long before I disliked him. He was prejudiced against
everyone who was not white, bourgeois and Christian. From
him I learned that there was a prejudice against Jews, a pre-
judice against people who did menial work, a prejudice against
backward peoples who were heathen and benighted. Nor was he
charitable towards Swedes, Poles, Danes, small town people,
and many other not-so-bad people of this earth. As a collection
of prejudices he was quite a sight - and this sight was instruc-
tive to me. Besides, I had the pleasure of hating him a little
more than he hated me.

Wisconsin was a good place; but, in my condition, not the
place for me. I left it and returned home - to find myself
on my hands.

Outwardly it seemed - and I knew it would seem to everyone -
that in leaving the university I had been wrong. Inwardly I had
a sense of right, a feeling that I had moved inevitably in terms
of my fate that was unfolding in ways that neither I nor anyone
could foresee, and I was sure that the results of my decision
would work out for the best. From one point of view, this was
the blind confidence of youth, of a youth who had been fairly
well taken care of and protected. From another point of view,
it was the inner certainty arising from a nacent sense of a

28

mission in life which would not suffer but rather would be further-
ed because I had left behind me something that did not belong
to my life any more.

It was a blow to my grandfather. He could see only the surface
aspect of it. All along he had expected great things of me,
in terms of what he considered great. He had wanted me to go to
Harvard, then into the law school. After much argument and
persuasion, I had swung him in favor of the middle western venture.
Now - I had turned back on my won choice. What was going to
become of me? What was going to happen to this grandson of his
hf whom he had been proud? Had I been less sure of myself, had
I known more of the assaults of life, I would have asked the same
question of myself with even more anxiety.

In me was a fire of some kind; it was beginning to burn. In
me was a power for individuality; it was beginning to be called
forth and excercised. In me were the makings of a man, the com-
ponents of a whole human being; they were being energised. But
the price I had to pay for my own birth was that for the next
nine years I suffered and searched along the tortured mazes of
what seemed a lost path - to find myself.

I could stay no place long. Restless and driven, I went to
New York, to Amherst, back again to Washington. I went to Chic-\ ago - and back home. Then again to New York, and back. And
then to Chicago, to Milwaukee. Then to New York. Necessarily
I same to know something of the reality of the white American
scene.

Several times I tried college again. I got jobs as an athletic
director, as a salesman of Ford cars, as a grocery dlerk, as a
district manager. I liked each job and found something in it

29

in addition to my livelihood; but my experiences in the business
world quite stripped me of the illusion that any American youth
can rise from the bottom to the top - the regular cabin-to-White
House myth.

Readings of Darwin and Haeckel, the evolutionists, the materialists, and the atheists, stripped me of all religious belief; and, though my mind was greatly stimulated, my emotions were such that for a time I felt as if the bottom of the world had dropped from under, leaving me dangling like a man being hung.

Socialism stripped me of my republican aristocratic notions; and I felt myself ከዚእንና ተክለም to be a comrade of the mass of men of no destiny whose life is caught and thwarted in the injustices and stupidities of an acquisitive society.

Life ripped at my props and stays until they toppled. All things tore at my ego until I seemed to have none left, until I felt myself as pulp, sunken, prostrate, doomed to a failure from which, by no conceivable struggle or effort, could I escape.

If I had broken away from my traditions in the first place,
now traditions and everything else was breaking away from me.
If I started the thing, now life was finishing it. I was a son
of chaos - and thus in truth was an offspring of the modern
human race.

This was the line of my descent into - what? - purgatory, the broken whirling, chartless hell of this earth. I found myself rooted in the fundamental **human** problem once and for all. Perhaps I learned to suffer.

In the midst of these spiritual vicissitudes, the racial ከዚእንና

30

problem seemed sheer nonsense, having nothing at all to do with
the main issue. Absorbed as I was in the problem of the very core
of my life, struggling to find meaning in life itself, struggling
to save myself, my conception of myself as an American was
patently valueless. Being an American would not save me. Being
white would not help me, being black would not. The few times
I thought of such matters they appeared stupidly superficial, of
no more consequence than a snowball in hell.

Once I had an experience distasteful and challenging. It was
a triangle - myself, a girl, and another man. This man began
wroking on the girl, trying to convince her that I was an colored.
He was a suave fellow, much older than myself, well placed
in the business world. Disdaining a cudgel as a clumsy weapon,
he used a rapier insidiously. Here, in this matter of race,
he thought he had found my Achilles heel. In the most culti-
vated way he tried to pierce this heel with at least a gill of
pasteurised black blood. Well, he was clever.

This girl was the first one to whom I told the racial facts
of my life. The result was staisfactory. In the end, our rel-
ationship was found to hinge, as most relationships do, not on
the racial but on the individual person-to-person equation. On
an individual basis it was worked out.

At this point I may mention that in the course of my goings
and comings across America I was, at various times by various
people, taken to be an Englishman, a Spaniard, a Frenchman, an
Italian, a Cuban, a South American, a Russian, and a Japonese.
People must have their dramas, however ridiculous, they may be.
We should not begrudge them these. Believing this, I even some-
times created dramas for them by elaborating their own fictions.

31

On the other hand - if the opinions of these people could be credited, then in sum they would amount to a public avowal of what I sometimes feel myself to be, namely, a universal man.

Sometime in 1917 my descent into purgatory ended and I began coming back. All of a sudden I took breath again, found myself, and found myself in an intensely interesting world. Something had opened up. My mind functioned as never before. I read avidly - the philosophers, the novelists, the scientists, the socialists, the sociologists. I even gave lectures.

There then, there came to me an experience which was like a miracle. One day I was one thing. The next, I was a different person. Some fundamental turnover occurred, a transformation. I left the old person behind and became the new - and this was my birth.

Such energy I had. Such lucidity, such keenness of sensation, such depth and swiftness of feeling, such sense of personal power, such sense of being well-founded. I am I.

I wanted to tackle all things, consume them in my understanding, achieve, overcome, do something great in the world of men who were doing great things - but what and how? As yet I had no definite focus or direction. It was my destiny to go through two XXX or three more years of trials and errors before I came out of the woods.

I went to college again, this time to New York University and to City College. In history, sociology, and psychology, I was, from the word of my professors, a brilliant student. I was so keen on study and had such deep delight with it that

32

I even pictured myself becoming a scholar.

Bernard Shaw came into my hands. He was a deep and lasting influence, his candor, his incision, wit, and scope. After his touch all things seemed sharp and clear. Via Shaw I came to Ibsen and to the literature of modern England. But, curiously enough, not yet had I come in contact with the literature of modern America, and not yet did I think that I myself might write.

The war fever got into me. I left City College. By the army I was rejected because of injuries suffered in athletics. I tried the Red Cross and the Y. M. C. A. Mentally I was against war, but the excitement of the thing gave me no rest.

Again I moved about. I did farm work. I made a trip to the middle west. I worked in a social settlement on New York's east side. I rode blind baggage with a friend to the home of his parents in western New York. I worked in a shipyard, and thereafter could no longer idealize the protelariat.

I made many friends, I fell in love - and fell out.

I lived in, and came to know many people in, the region of New York below 14th Street. The Rand School, lectures on poetry by Alfred Kreymborg, lectures on Romains Rolland, the Dial, Lewis Mumford. I got hold of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass". I was coming nearer and nearer to my future world.

But it was not, to my consciousness a straight approach. Even now I made detours, the most important of which was an excursion into music. Even now I lost myself to find myself again. My last finding was clinched by reading Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister". This book gave back to me my ideals of an aristocracy of character and of culture.

33

In 1919 I made my important decision. Every circumstance in my external environment, every condition and desire in myself, now made it imperative and inescapable that I do so.

Business or the professions were far behind me - in any case remote. This person, myself, who had gone through all and more than I have described, at last had something to say, something to communicate and to contribute which could find an instrument only in art. But which art?

All along I had loved music, and doubtless had some talent as a composer. The expression of feeling in musical sounds came natural to me. On the other hand, I loved words too. The expression of ideas in speech was easy for me. Ever since discovering Shaw my taste for the written word had increased. I had no doubt but what, with practice, I could learn to use words in writing, skillfully and with beauty. The factors in favor of music decreased; the factors in favor of writing increased. I decided it would be writing.

With this decision firm in me I began casting about for the means of having at least two years of uninterrupted apprenticeship to my chosen craft and art. I was then in New York. If I wanted to stay in New York I would have to work for my living, and I was pretty sure that I could not work and write at the same time. Already I had lost much time. Already my material was far in excess of my ability to use it.

My grandparents were in Washington, living in an apartment where there was a room for me. But now, however, my grandfather was more or less hopeless about his grandson. I knew he would be opposed to the plan I had formed. Nevertheless I proposed

34

to him that I come home, take care of them, have an allowance
of five dollars a week - and write. They were alone. They were
getting feeble. They needed me. He accepted. The prodigal
went home.

I need not detail what I went through during the next two
years. I took on the responsibility of our home, did most of
the house-work, nursed my grandparents in illness, withdrew from
almost everyone and everything except my household duties and
my reading and my writing. Though isolate physically from the
modern American literary world I lived in that world, in Waldo
Frank, Sherwood Anderson, Van Wyck Brooks, Robert Frost, Carl
Sandburg, intensely. At the end of these two years I had written
the proverbial trunkful of manuscripts - and I was exhausted.

Poems, essays, articles, reviews, notes, fragments of an
exposition - some of them clearly written, none of them with any
real merit, none vitally alive, with anything in them. A few
I sent out to magazines. They came back, as I had expected.
On the whole my idea was to keep my writings to myself until I
myself was sure I had done something authentic.

Now I must go back away.

Before I left New York I was invited to a literary party given
by Lola Ridge. It seemed a casual happening; it turned out to
be quite important for me. At this party were almost all the
writers who figured prominently in the New York literary camp.
Notable among the men, to me, was Waldo Frank. He seemed to be
a light in that room of smoke and many faces and literary talk.

A few days later Frank and myself accidently met in Central
Park, and I had a long talk during which I told him of my plan
and my hopes to write. He

35

and my hopes to write. He was very fine, offered to help me
in any way he could, and gave me an address at which he could
always be reached.

The following years, during my solitary struggle with words,
there was always a warm glow in me because in New York was Waldo
Frank. When the right time came, when I had written something
that I myself believed in, but not before, I would avail myself
of his offer and get in touch with him.

One of the pieces composed during my apprenticeship, was a
poem that I called, "The First American." As a poem it was not
much. As a record of myself it was of more significance. Here
in this piece I put down, partially at least, not only my own
racial actuality but what I conceived to be the racial actuality
of the people of the United States. The theme in brief, was that
here in America we have a new race - the Americans.

I had lived among white people. I had lived among colored
people. I had lived among Jews. I had met and known people of
the various nationalistic groups. I had come in contact with
my fellow countrymen from the bottom to the top of the American
scene.

I had seen the divisions, the separatisms and antagonisms.
I had observed that, if the issue came up, very few of these
United States citizens were aware of being *Americans*. On the
contrary, they were aware of, and put value upon, their hearsay
descents, their groupistic affiliations.

True, they were conscious of being *anything but* Americans.

36

Yet, underlying what they were aware of, underlying all of the
divisions, I had observed what seemed to me to be authentic,
namely, that a new type of man was arising in this country -
not European, not African, not Asiatic - but American. And in
this American I saw the divisions mended, the differences recon-
ciled - saw that (1) we would in truth be a united people exist-
ing in the *United* States, saw that (2) we would in truth be once
again members of a united human race.

Now all of this, needless to say, did not get into the poem.
Years were to pass before that could happen, before the germ of
"The First American" could grow and ripen and be embodied in
"The Blue Meridian." But into "The First American" I did put
something of my actuality, something of my vision of America -
though it needed explaining.

Soon after I had written it I read it to a friend of that time,
a colored fellow of more than ordinary mental grasp. I considered
him a sort of prodigy. I read the poem, and he looked blank.
I explained it, and he looked puzzled. So I plunged in and gave
him my position and my experiences at some length. At the end
he said three words, "You're white."

"What are you"? I asked.

"Colored."

I threw up my hands. "After all I've said you still don't
get the point. I am not talking about whites or blacks, I am
talking about Americans. I am an American. You are an American.
Everyone is an American. Don't you see what I mean?"

He shook his head then. He shook it ever afterwards. My
reality was but words to him, words quite unrelated to what

37

was real for him.

Never before had I realized the extent to which a conscious-
ness of being colored had become fixed in members of that group.
But there it was, fixed unshakeably in a man of unusual intelli-
gence. Never before had I known what a thorough job it had been
done in the matter of racial condition. But there it was, having
gone down from his head and emotions to become lodged in the
behaviour patterns of his body. And a similar kind of fixing
and condition had doubtless occurred also in members of the white
group at large. Ah America, what bifocals you have put upon
your eyes!

Who was I to attempt to unfix all this? As I was neither a
propagandist nor a reformer I concluded that it was not my business
and I had best let it alone. Which is just what I did. The
whole thing had started as an individual position; so then, in
the future, I'd restrict myself and to those who, because of
their relations with me were individually concerned.

The summer of 1921 found me desperate, imprisoned in a pocket
of life in which I felt my life might be lost. Circumstance
was a straight jacket that bound me without respite. My grand-
father was slowly dying. My grandmother was bed-ridden. From
their former position of wealth they had descended so that we
had just enough money coming in to pay for food and rent.

My strength had been sapped. The atmosphere of the house
each day drained me. I drained myself by my unremitting work.
My nerves, overworked and exhausted were strained to the snapping
point. Night after night I'd toss on the bed or try to hold my-
self still by gazing through the windows at the far black vault
of heaven and the white stars.

38

Having battered me, life was avenging itself because I was not whole.

I could eat but little. My stomach was distressed. I had
relief from pain only when I sat still with pillows propping
my back. And there was no way of resting, no way of getting out.
Or so it seemed, and it went on for weeks and months. But my
fate was making.

One day, out of nowhere, a man was put in touch with me. He was principal of a Negro school in Georgia on his way north for funds. He wanted someone to act as principal during his absence. He asked me.

I lept at the opportunity. Anything to get away for awhile.
In addition, I'd never seen the south and I had always wanted to.

My grandfather went to a hospital. Shortly I was on the spot - and this was the experience which gave rise to "Cain" - or, at least, a valuable part or it.

Here was red earth, here pine trees, and smoke or haze in
the valley. Here were cane and cotton fields, here cabins.
Here was the south, before cities. Here were Negros, people
of the earth, and their singing. Never before had I heard
spirituals and work songs. Here I heard them in their native
setting, and they were like a part of me. At times I identified
with the whole scene so intensely that I lost my own identity.

I was in Georgia not much over two months. Before I left
I began writing about it. On the train to Washington I wrote.
I wrote when I got home.

My grandfather died.

39

I resumed writing.

Some of the pieces were impure and formless. But some, I knew,
were really written. These authentic ones I began sending out.
The Double Dealer of New Orleans was the first to accept. Then
the Liberator and, later, Broom. In these literary magazines
I made my mark. Beyond them was Waldo Frank and the possibility
of a book

Now I felt warranted in sending something to Waldo Frank.
I sent a batch of the best - and waited his response as if my
whole life were at stake.

His words to me fed me as nothing else had done and confirmed
my belief.

He too talked about a book. Now I wanted a book published
as I wanted nothing else. I wanted it because it would be a
substantial testament of my achievement, and also because I felt
that it would lead me from the cramped conditions of Washington
which I had outgrown, into the world of writers and literature.
I saw it as my passport to this world.

But I had not enough for a book. I had at most a hundred
typed pages. These were about Georgia. It seemed that I had
said all I had to say about it. So what, then? I'd fill out.
The middle section of "Cain" was thus manufactured.

I sent the manuscript to Frank. He took it to Horace Liveright.
Liveright accepted it, but wanted a foreword written by Frank.

Frank himself had a book to write, based on Negro life. It was
arranged that he come to Washington and then both of us would

40

go south.

Frank came. He stayed at the apartment with us. I took
this opportunity to convey to him my position in America. I
read to him "The First American." I explained my actuality
and my ideas to the point where I felt sure he understood them.
I did this because I wanted that we understand each other on
this point too, and also because he was going to write the fore-
word to my book and I wanted this introduction of myself to the
literary world to be accurate and right.

We went south. We came back. Frank returned to New York.
In several of his letters he referred to what he called my "vision",
and seemed to feel that it "protected" me. Perhaps it did. I
was mainly concerned with whether or not he understood that it was
not a vision but an actuality.
Once or twice I suspected that he, like my colored friend, felt
it was words, fine words to be sure, but unrelated to reality.
But I argued myself out of the suspicion by reminding myself
that Waldo Frank was the author of "Our America."

One day in the mail his preface to my book came. I read it
and had as many mixed feelings as I have ever had. On the one
hand, it was a tribute and a send-off as only Waldo Frank could
have written it, and my gratitude for his having gotten the book
accepted rose to the surface and increased my gratitude for the
present piece of work in so far as it affirmed me as a literary
artist of great promise. On the other hand, in so far as the
racial thing went, it was evasive, or, in any case, indefinite.
According to the reader he would have thought I was white or
black, or again he may have thought nothing of it. But

41

he certainly would not know what I was.

Well, I asked myself, why should the reader know? Why should any such thing be incorporated in a foreword to this book? Why should Waldo Frank or any other be my spokesman in this matter? All of this was true enough, and I was more or less reconciled to letting the preface stand as it was, inasmuch as it was so splended that I could not take issue with it on this after all minor point, inasmuch as my need to have the book published was so great, but my suspicions as to Waldo Frank's lack of understanding of, or failure to accept, my actuality became active again.

As I found out later from several sources, my doubts were warranted. I have been told that Frank, after seeing myself and my family, after hearing my statement, not of words or visions but of facts, returned to New York and told people of the negro writer who was emerging into the world of American literature. Thus an erroneous picture of me had been put in the minds of certain people in New York before my book came out. Thus was started a misunderstanding in the very world, namely the literary black art world, in which I really expected to be really understood. But I knew none of this at the time.

In the early summer of 1923 I went to New York. My book was coming out in the fall. There I met Gorham Munson, Hart Crane, Kenneth Burke, Matthew Josephson, and others, and became active in the literary affairs of this, which was then known as, the younger generation. We had our life and work, and it was very exciting life and work, giving me a taste for and an experience

42

of the literary life such as I had never known before and have
never experienced since. There was an excitement in the air.
Writing was a living thing. We had programs and aims, and we
were all caught up in a ferment. These were the last days of
Secession and Broom. But the Dial and the Little Review were
still going, and what was not yet an actuality we had as a
growing potentiality in our minds.

Sometimes I wondered what if anything Frank had said to these
other fellows about my race. But it didn't matter much, one
way or the other. What they thought of my race was of no more
consequence than what I thought of theirs. The life was the
thing - and we were having that life.

The first jolt I got was when I received a letter from Horace
Liveright asking in effect, that I feature myself as a *negro*
for some publicity he was getting out in connection with "Cain".
Now I had seen, talked, lunched with Liveright. Once he had
said to me that he had run into prejudice in college, and he
asked if I had. I said no. That was that. Otherwise, the ques-
tion of race had not come up even in a vague way. Looking back
on it I can blame myself for not having opened the subject with
him. However this may be, I received the request I have just
mentioned.

I answered to the effect that as I was not a *negro* I could
not feature myself as one. His reply to this did nothing else
than pull my cork. He said he didn't see why I should deny my
race. This made me mad and I was all for going to his office
and telling him what was what in no uncertain terms, even at the

43

risk of losing him as my publisher. Friends dissuaded me, and
I let the matter drop, but not without having explained to them
the facts of my racial actuality.

"Cain" came out. The reviews were splendid. It didn't sell
well, but it made its literary mark, that was all I asked.

Meanwhile, since I was a human being as well as a writer,
since I was living in this modern world of multiple experience
as well as in the world of words and books, some extra-literary
things had happened to me. Of these happenings, the only line
that I will follow briefly is that which led me into the Gurdjieff
work.

It will be remembered that on leaving the University of Wis-
consin and returning home I started on my way to chaos. Through
the years that followed I got bumped and broken, mentally and
emotionally. Only my body held out. Spiritually I was plunged
into the fundamental problems of this era; and the plunge, though
unvaluable, involved as a means to the expansion of my consciousness, and
my conscious individualization, sort of dislocated my parts.

This dislocation, together with the accompanying need to
integrate myself, persisted in my inner life even while exter-
iorly I achieved some measure of order, balance, and direction.
(I was a bit of chaos dressed in formal attire.) Or, to be
accurate, I should say that the dislocation persisted off and on,
sometimes being resolved in the intensity of a period of function-
ing but then coming into evidence again when such a period passed.

During the winter of 1923, owing to a complex of causes, my
writing stopped; and my disharmony became distressingly prominent.

44

So it became clear that my literary occupations had not worked deep to make of me an integrated man. Had it done so for others?

Now I looked questioningly, not at the book, but at the writer of it. This was an heretical focus. Only their liking for me kept my colleagues from pronouncing excommunication. What I saw or believed I saw, was at once disquieting and challenging. I saw that these people, writers and artists, men and women, were much like myself with respect to the chaos of their personal lives - but that, unlike myself, they were unwilling or in any case uneager to search for a whole way of living that would make them whole. True, some of them talked about it. Some of them talked about "the end of a direction," and "a new slope of consciousness." Few of them felt the urgent need to do anything about it. They suffered, therefore; and their art too. Great art, I was convinced, could issue only from great human beings. Small men could not produce really big books. Twisted thwarted confused men could only express their confusion.

The resistance of my fellows further aroused me. I talked to them and thus talked to myself. I studied them and thus learned about myself. I urged them, and thus urged myself.

Old sayings came to my mind as if they were my sayings.
"Physician, heal thyself." "Know thyself." "The first duty
of an artist in a sick world is to become well." And the like.

I became the champion of something nonliterary, non-artistic
and - I must confess, at that time unknown to myself. I must
also confess that I became a sort of socratic pest. I realize
it now, looking back. They were still writing, even if I was

45

not. They were still going on in their way, bumpily and circular though it was, even if I had come to the dead end of a direction and realized that the course of my life had led through mazes into a blind alley. I should let them alone.

True, a pest to most of my colleagues - but a discoverer to myself. I was working something out.

In the course of this work I came to certain realizations that prepared for the revolution of my life.

The modern world was uprooted, the modern world was breaking down, **but we couldn't go back.** There was nothing to go back to. Besides in our hasty leaps into the future we had burned our bridges. The soil, the earth was still there, even under city pavements and congested sky scrapers.

But such peasantry as America had had - and I sang one of its swan songs in Cain - was swiftly disappearing, swiftly being industrialized and urbanized by machines, motor cars, phonographs, movies ... "Back to nature," even if desirable, was no longer possible, because industry had taken nature ~~unto itself.~~ into itself. Even if he wanted to, a city person could not become a soil person by changing his locale and living on a farm or in the woods.

So then, whether we wished to or not, we **had to go on**. We had to go on and accept the task of creating a **human world** that was at least as conducive to man's well-being and growth as the world of nature was conducive to the growth of plant and animal life. The creation of a human world, this was our task. Those who sought to cure themselves by a return to more primitive conditions were either romantics or escapists. We had to project

46

real values and then realize them in full-bodied life. And this
included everyone in America, and everyone in western civilization
who had arisen - or who had been pushed above the grass line.
So I saught for the means of going on. I would work to be able
to contribute my share to the building of a functioning civili-
sation in these modern times. I too, because I must be, would
be,a builder of the world. This was my general outlook, my general
stand.

The problems of life were not respectors of colors, or of racial
groups. Though to this degree, nevertheless the basic problems
of modern life had caught up white and colored alike, northerners
and southerners, Americans and Europeans. These problems were
the modern boat. Everyone was in this boat. Each one had to
pull his oar, else we sink. The task of solving them was at
every man's door, in his house, in his body and soul.

Specific problems like race problems, nationality problems,
and others which were outgrowths of the general condition, could
move towards a fruitful resolution only on the condition that
the general basic issues were thus moved. Any attempt to solve
a specific issue on the assumption that it was isolate and could
be cured by itself, was foredoomed to failure. On this ground
I rejected wuch attempts, without of course denying that they
some times had good and necessary immediate effects in the matter
of improv[ing] practical day to day living conditions.

The basic issues were, in my view, (1) economic, and (2)
psychological and spiritual.

Our economic system had run away with itself and was doing

47

damage not only to the proletarians and the petty bourgeois,
but to the capitalists as well. All classes and all groups
were involved in the mutilation.

Our psyches were split and chaotic. Our spirits were shrunken.
Our souls were empty. To compensate for this emptiness, to
to avenge our tortured slow deaths, we had grown fangs and sacks
of poison - and we used these fangs - race fangs, sex fangs,
class fangs, national and religious fangs, all manner of personal
fangs, - with typical man-insanity against each other.

The unhappy person unless great, is poisonous. The happy
person even if small is sweet. It is not reasonable to expect
that a man who is being destroyed will heop others to live.

So what?

(1) A constructive change of the economic system. I, however,
had no special talent in this field. By experience temperament
and interest it was not my field, except insofar as I together
with everyone else, was involved in it; hence my contribution
at best would be minor. Hence I would leave this field to others,
and concern myself with the issues which, more and more I had
come to realize I could handle best, namely, the psychological
spiritual issues.

Because of my personal experiences, my ups and downs, my
I-am-I states, and my I-am-nothing states, I was fairly well
convinced that in man there was a curious duality - an "I";
a something that was not I. an inner being; an outer personality.
I was further convinced that the inner being was the real thing,
that the outer personality was the false thing, that the "I"

48

was the source of life, that the personality was the sack of
poison. The question was - how to bring man together into an
integrated complete whole. My answer was - by increasing the
"I" while at the same time eliminating the personality. But
I had no method, no means of doing this.

Also because of my personal experiencesm my disorganisation
of parts, I was convinced that the parts of man - his mind,
emotions, and body - were radically out of harmony with each other.
But how to bring them into harmony? Neither did I have a means
of doing this.

I discussed these matters with almost everyone I came in con-
tact with. To me they were the really vital matters, and my
heart and mind were concentrated on them.

Nobody could help me. Many people did not even get the point.
Each one himself a specialist and therefore lopsided, was content
to pursue his speciality, achieve, if he could, some distinction
in it, and let the rest, namely, his _whole_ life go hang.

It was just at this time that first A. R. Orage and then
Gurdjieff himself came to America. A pamphlet of the Gurdjieff
institute came into my hands. In it I found expressed, more
completely and with more authority than with anything possible
from me, just the conditions of man which I myself had realized.
Moreover, a method, a means of _doing something about it_ was
promised. It was no wonder that I went heart and soul into the
Gurdjieff work.

Here was a work that gave man direction and helped him move
on the way out of the chaos of modern civilisation. Here was
a work that indicated what must be done in order to achieve a

49

balanced development. Here was work whose scope was greater
and more complete than anything I had dreamed of. Here, in
fine, was truth.

That summer I went to the institute at Fontainebleau, prepared
to stay there or in some similar place for the fest of my life -
or in any case until I had fulfilled my human needs as far as
possible under those extraordinary conditions. After a time,
because of a motor accident to himself, Gurdjieff closed the
institute. I remained there a month or so longer and then return-
ed to America and became a member of the groups then being con-
ducted by Orage. These groups and the life that grew out of
them became my life. I was worlds removed from the literary
set. I knew little or nothing of what was happening in it.
That I had once written a book called "Cain" seemed remote.
What had happened to it I neither knew nor cared. Much less
I knew of what was happening in the Negro world.

Gradually however I began making other contacts, I began
awakening with interest to the wide activities of that time.
Then I discovered, among other things, that a ferment was in the
negro world also, a literary ferment, and that it was producing
a new literature. I was sufficiently moved to write an article.
After this I viewed the movement as a splendid thing but as some-
thing that had no special meaning for me.

Time passed.

The next I knew I received a visit from Alain Locke. Locke
said he was getting together a book of Negro material and wanted
something I had written, preferably a new story or a story from
"Cain". I replied that I had written no new stories of that kind

50

and did not want "Cain" dismembered. He pressed. I thought
of the article. I offered it to him. It turned out that
he did not want it. My expressed attitude was - this article
or nothing. I concluded that the matter was finished. Before
Locke left he talked to me about Winold Reis, the artist. He
said Reis was doing interesting things and had expressed a desire
to do a portrait of me. He urged me to sit for Reis, never
mentioning that he himself would use the portrait in his book.

Out of curiosity or vanity or something I did sit for Reis;
and, so far as I knew, that was that.

But when Locke's book, "The New Negro" came out, there was
the Reis portrait, and there was a story from "Cain", and there
in an introduction, were words about me which have caused as much
or more misunderstanding than Waldo Frank's!

However there was and is, among others, this great difference
between Frank and Locke. Frank helped me at a time when I most
needed hdlp. I will never forget it. Locke tricked and misused
me.

For a short time after the appearance of Locke's book I was
furious - because I felt blocked. I could not take my things
out of it. I could not, without risk of putting myself in a
false light, publicly explain the trick that had been played
oh me. My dear enemies, those who liked to misrepresent me would
have echoed Horace Liveright and said at once, "Toomer wants
to deny his race." To have said the thing right I would have had
to write something not much less than my auto-biography. Well,
I shrugged and let it drop - but not without a pretty sharp sense
of the irony of the situation. My writing, namely, the very

51

thing that should have made me understood, was being so presented
and interpreted that I was now much more misunderstood in this
respect than at any other time of my life.

Yet even this misunderstanding did not strike me as being
serious when my emotions cooled. I was living in New York.
So far as I knew, I would never live anywhere else permanently.
I had my life and work. So far as I could foresee I would have
no other life or work. I had my friends and our sufficiently
absorbing activities. The racial thing, insofar as it existed,
had its proportioned place in the scale of values - and this
was all I asked. It made no difference what I was called. The
label "Negro" was of no more consequence than any other.

At times however I did have a feeling that I was letting the
thing slide; and I had a feeling that the slide was gathering
momentum. When such feelings came to me I thought about the
situation with some concern. I felt I ought to do something.
I felt I should write a book stating who and what I actually was.
It was now clear to me that if I didn't, surely no one else would -
and why should they?

I can not tell why I did not write that book then. Perhaps
it was because I sincerely felt that it didn't matter. Perhaps
it was because I did not want to put such emphasis on this one
thing, which, in my actual life from day to day, was not emphatic.
Perhaps I foresaw that by book might cause even more misunderstand-
ing, though of a different kind. I was, as you can see, in a
difficult position; and perhaps the simple truth is that I was
not equal to the handling of it. It would be a difficult book

52

to write. It still is.

It was one thing for me to have worked out my personal position
long ago in the last year of high school. It was one thing for
me to have maintained this position with a moderate degree of
integrity and sincerity. It was one thing for me to have told
this position to certain of my intimate friends and to have
had them, or at least some of them, accept it. But it was quite
another for me to project this personal thing into the American
world in which, as I had come to realize more and more, there
was this fixed view that in this country a person must be either
black or white. Besides, I had no wish at this time to under-
take to re-educate America on this subject. My thoughts were
in terms, not of the mass, but of individuals. And in the life
of an individual the racial factor was obviously subordinate
to the factors which involved him in his efforts towards self-
development. If someone wants to say that I evaded the issue
then, he may be right. It depends upon whether he is looking
at me or at himself. It was clear to me. What I say is - I
let it slip as regards the general American reading public.

I let it slip to the extent that when Countee Cullen asked
permission to print one of my poems in his anthology I gave him
this permission. If it would help the Negro groups to have
me thus listed - all right.

At this point I realize that, in my attempt to condense the
story of my life I have failed to mention any number of important
factors and considerations which the reader needs to know in order
to understand what I am putting down. Again it is a case where
a part can not be understood without a grasp of the whole. But

53

how am I to convey this whole in this book which is by design a selection? Perhaps I have ventured upon an impossible task. I have misgivings that it is so. But before I abandon this book I will make a test of my power to give enough while not giving all.

In the mind of a critical reader certain questions have undoubtedly already come up. For example - why did I care so much about being misrepresented and misunderstood along racial lines? Why should I care what color I was called any more than I would care as to what people said about the height or weight of my body? There is something here that needs explaining. If, as I say, I had worked the racial thing out for myself; and if, as I say, black blood was on a par with any other blood, then why could what Waldo Frank said or what Alain Locke did upset me much? Precisely how much did I care? What were the complex of factors which contributed to my being upset even to the degree that I was? Then there are other questions concerning other aspect of my life which I have mentioned but not gone into.
Well, I'll see what can be done without giving this book the x complex texture of a full and detailed autobiography. To begin with, we must go back a way. From a reading of this sketch thus far a person would not guess the importance that love and woman and a family played in my life. Nor would they guess the importance to me of being a man - I mean, simply being really a man, with all that pertains to man, including certain what we may call patriarchal desires.