"Oh sure, just by looking at their finger nails." And taking White's hand, he said, "Now if you had nigger blood, it would show here on your half-moons."
That story excited me by its paradox as much as had the name and complexion of Walter White. It seemed altogether fantastic that whites in the South should call him a "nigger" and whites in the North, a Negro. It violates my feeling of words as pictures conveying color and meaning. For whenever I am in Walter White's company my eyes compose him and my emotions respond exactly as they do in the case of any friendly so-called "white" man. When a white person speaks of Walter White as a Negro, as if that made him a being physically different from a white, I get a weird and impish feeling of the unreality of phenomena. And when a colored person refers to Walter White as colored, in a tone that implies him to be physically different from and inferior to the "pure" white person, I feel that life is sublimely funny. For to me a type like Walter White is Negroid simply because he closely identifies himself with the Negro group—just as a Teuton becomes a Moslem if he embraces Islam. White is whiter than many Europeans—even biologically. I cannot see the difference in the way that most of the whites and most of the blacks seem to see it. Perhaps what is reality for them is fantasy for me.
James Weldon Johnson, song writer, poet, journalist, diplomat and professor, was my favorite among the N.A.A.C.P. officials. I liked his poise, suavity, diplomacy and gentlemanliness. His career reveals surprises of achievement and reads like a success story. When a Negro makes an honorable fight for a decent living and succeeds, I think all Negroes should feel proud. Perhaps a day will come when, under a different social set-up, competent Negroes will be summoned like other Americans to serve their country in diplomatic posts. When that time comes Negroes may proudly cite as a precedent the record of James Weldon Johnson, Negro pioneer of the American diplomatic service, who performed his duties conscientiously and efficiently under unusually difficult conditions.
Jessie Fauset was assistant editor of The Crisis when I met her. She very generously assisted at the Harlem evening of one of our Liberator prayer meetings and was the one fine feature of a bad show. She was prim, pretty and well-dressed, and talked fluently and intelligently. All the radicals liked her, although in her social viewpoint she was away over on the other side of the fence. She belonged to that closed decorous circle of Negro society, which consists of persons who live proudly like the better class of conventional whites, except that they do so on much less money. To give a concrete idea of their status one might compare them to the expropriated and defeated Russian intelligentsia in exile.
Miss Fauset has written many novels about the people in her circle. Some white and some black critics consider these people not interesting enough to write about. I think all people are interesting to write about. It depends on the writer's ability to bring them out alive. Could there be a more commendable prescription for the souls of colored Americans than the bitter black imitation of white life? Not a Fannie Hurst syrup-and-pancake hash, but the real meat.
But Miss Fauset is prim and dainty as a primrose, and her novels are quite as fastidious and precious. Primroses are pretty. I remember the primroses where I lived in Morocco, that lovely melancholy land of autumn and summer and mysterious veiled brown women. When the primroses spread themselves across the barren hillsides before the sudden summer blazed over the hot land, I often thought of Jessie Fauset and her novels.
What Mary White Ovington, the godmother of the N.A.A.C.P., thought of me was more piquant to me perhaps than to herself. Her personality radiated a quiet silver shaft of white charm which is lovely when it's real. She was gracious, almost sweet, when she dropped in on The Liberator. But as I listened to her talking in a gentle subjective way I realized that she was emphatic as a seal and possessed of a resolute will.
She told me about her reaction to Booker T. Washington, the officially recognized national leader of the Negroes. Miss Ovington had visited Tuskegee informally. Booker T. Washington had disregarded her, apparently under the impression that she was a poor-white social worker. When he was informed that she originated from a family of high-ups, he became obsequious to her. But she responded coldly. By her austere abolitionist standard she had already taken the measure of the universally popular and idolized Negroid leader.
I repeated the story to my friend Hubert Harrison. He exploded in his large sugary black African way, which sounded like the rustling of dry bamboo leaves agitated by the wind. Hubert Harrison had himself criticized the Negro policy of Booker T. Washington in powerful volcanic English, and subsequently, by some mysterious grapevine chicanery, he had lost his little government job. He joined the Socialist Party. He left it. And finally came to the conclusion that out of the purgatory of their own social confusion, Negroes would sooner or later have to develop their own leaders, independent of white control.
Harrison had a personal resentment against the N.A.A.C.P., and nick-named it the "National Association for the Advancement of Certain People." His sense of humor was ebony hard, and he remarked that it was exciting to think that the N.A.A.C.P. was the progeny of black snobbery and white pride, and had developed into a great organization, with DuBois like a wasp in Booker Washington's hide until the day of his death.