And now that I was legging limpingly along with the intellectual gang, Harlem for me did not hold quite the same thrill and glamor as before. Where formerly in saloons and cabarets and along the streets I received impressions like arrows piercing my nerves and distilled poetry from them, now I was often pointed out as an author. I lost the rare feeling of a vagabond feeding upon secret music singing in me.
I was invited to meetings in Harlem. I had to sit on a platform and pretend to enjoy being introduced and praised. I had to respond pleasantly. Hubert Harrison said that I owed it to my race. Standing up like an actor to repeat my poems and kindle them with second-hand emotions. For it was not so easy to light up within me again the spontaneous flames of original creative efforts for expectant audiences. Poets and novelists should let good actors perform for them.
Once I was invited to the Harlem Eclectic Club by its president, William Service Bell. Mr. Bell was a cultivated artistic New England Negro, who personally was very nice. He was precious as a jewel. The Eclectic Club turned out in rich array to hear me: ladies and gentlemen in tenue de rigueur. I had no dress suit to wear, and so, a little nervous, I stood on the platform and humbly said my pieces.
What the Eclectics thought of my poems I never heard. But what they thought of me I did. They were affronted that I did not put on a dress suit to appear before them. They thought I intended to insult their elegance because I was a radical.
The idea that I am an enemy of polite Negro society is fixed in the mind of the Negro élite. But the idea is wrong. I have never had the slightest desire to insult Harlem society or Negro society anywhere, because I happen not to be of it. But ever since I had to tog myself out in a dress suit every evening when I worked as a butler, I have abhorred that damnable uniform. God only knows why it was invented. My esthetic sense must be pretty bad, for I can find no beauty in it, either for white or colored persons. I admire women in bright evening clothes. But men! Blacks in stiff-starched white façades and black uniforms like a flock of crows, imagining they are elegant—oh no!
A Brown Dove Cooing
The Liberator staff had an extra extraordinary moment one afternoon when Max Eastman walked in with Charlie Chaplin. The great little man gave his hand to all of us and touched our hearts. And after looking over the place he perched like a Puck atop of a desk.