Other Editors
It was a great moment when my first poems were published in Pearson's, although they were not actually the first to be published in America. In December of 1917, Seven Arts, which was edited by James Oppenheim and Waldo Frank, published two of my sonnets over the nom de plume of Eli Edwards. The nom de plume was adapted from my mother's name. I used it because at the time when the poems were submitted, I was a waiter in a women's club. The members were students of the arts. Some were literary aspirants and were always reading and discussing the new and little magazines. As I was a good enough waiter I did not care to be discovered as a poet there.
When my poems appeared in Pearson's I received many letters of encouragement and suggestion. And one of them started an interesting correspondence which resulted in my traveling to Europe the following year.
I was particularly excited about appearing in Pearson's, because there was no doubt that Frank Harris was a truly great critic. And many were my dismal disappointments in rejection slips and letters of half-hearted praise, until he fortified me with his frank, hearty and noble voice of encouragement. "The White Fiends," which Pearson's published, had been rejected previously by The Crisis, a Negro magazine.
Some months before, I had sent some poems to William Stanley Braithwaite, who was highly placed as a critic on the Boston Evening Transcript. Mr. Braithwaite was distinguished for his literary dialogues in the Literary Supplement of the Transcript, in which the characters were intellectual Bostonians with Greek names and conversed in lofty accents that were all Greek to me.
In Mr. Braithwaite's writings there was not the slightest indication of what sort of American he might be. And I was surprised one day to read in the Negro magazine, The Crisis, that he was a colored man. Mr. Braithwaite was kind enough to write me, a very interesting letter. He said that my poems were good, but that, barring two, any reader could tell that the author was a Negro. And because of the almost insurmountable prejudice against all things Negro, he said, he would advise me to write and send to the magazines only such poems as did not betray my racial identity.
There was sincerity in Mr. Braithwaite's letter, a sincerity that was grim and terrible to me. He was a poet himself, but I was unacquainted with his poetry. I went in search of him in his poetry at the Forty-second Street Library. I found a thin volume containing some purely passionless lyrics, only one line of which I have ever remembered (I quote from memory):