Always I was inflamed by the vision of New York as an eye-dazzling picture. Fascinated, I explored all points in my leisure moments, by day and by night. I rode all the ferries. I took long trips, from the Battery to the Bowery, from Broadway through Harlem to the Bronx. I liked to walk under the elevated tracks with the trains clashing and clanging overhead. There was excitement when the sudden roaring of the train abruptly blotted out conversation. Even the clothes suspended in the canyon tenements appeared endowed with a strange life of their own. In the stampeding hours of morning, noon, and evening, when the crowds assumed epic proportions, I was so exalted by their monster movement that I forgot that they were white.
I particularly remember some nocturnal wanderings with Adolf Dehn, the artist, spanning blocks upon blocks along the East River, and the vast space-filling feeling of the gigantic gas tanks. One loves in New York its baroque difference from the classic cities, the blind chaotic surging of bigness of expression. I remember how, when I worked in the West Eighties and spent my rest time loitering along Riverside Drive, the black giants of the New York Central, belching flame and smoke and dust along the façades of the fine palaces, created a picture like a caravan of modern pirates coming home in a rolling cloud of glory. The grim pioneer urge of the great pragmatic metropolis was a ferment in my feeling.
Often I was possessed with the desire to see New York as when I first saw it from the boat—one solid massive mammoth mass of spiring steel and stone. And I remember one week-end when Eugen Boissevain offered a ride over to Jersey, whence one could see New York in that way. Max Eastman was with us. We drove up to a summit commanding a grand view of the city. We stood there a long time drinking in the glory of the pyramids. Afterward we drove aimlessly around the country. Finally we became hungry. We stopped at several hotels and restaurants, but none would serve the three of us together. At last one place offered to serve us in the kitchen. So, being hungry, all three of us went into the kitchen. The cooks were frying and roasting at the stove. Kitchen help were peeling potatoes, washing dishes, cleaning up garbage. We sat down at the servants' table, where a waiter served us.
It was one of the most miserable meals I ever ate. I felt not only my own humiliation, but more keenly the humiliation that my presence had forced upon my friends. The discomfort of the hot bustling kitchen, the uncongenial surroundings—their splendid gesture, but God! it was too much. I did not want friends to make such sacrifices for me. If I had to suffer in hell, I did not want to make others suffer there too. The physical and sensual pleasures of life are precious, rare, elusive. I have never desired to restrict the enjoyment of others. I am a pagan; I am not a Christian. I am not white steel and stone.
On many occasions when I was invited out by white friends I refused. Sometimes they resented my attitude. For I did not always choose to give the reason. I did not always like to intrude the fact of my being a black problem among whites. For, being born and reared in the atmosphere of white privilege, my friends were for the most part unconscious of black barriers. In their happy ignorance they would lead one into the traps of insult. I think the persons who invented discrimination in public places to ostracize people of a different race or nation or color or religion are the direct descendants of medieval torturers. It is the most powerful instrument in the world that may be employed to prevent rapproachement and understanding between different groups of people. It is a cancer in the universal human body and poison to the individual soul. It saps the sentiment upon which friendliness and love are built. Ultimately it can destroy even the most devoted friendship. Only super-souls among the whites can maintain intimate association with colored people against the insults and insinuations of the general white public and even the colored public. Yet no white person, however sympathetic, can feel fully the corroding bitterness of color discrimination. Only the black victim can.
It was at this time that I wrote a series of sonnets expressing my bitterness, hate and love. Some of them were quoted out of their context to prove that I hate America. Mr. Lothrop Stoddard was the chief offender in his The Rising Tide of Color.
Here are the sonnets:
BAPTISM
Into the furnace let me go alone;
Stay you without in terror of the heat.
I will go naked in—for thus 'tis sweet—
Into the weird depths of the hottest zone.
I will not quiver in the frailest bone,
You will not note a flicker of defeat;
My heart shall tremble not its fate to meet,
My mouth give utterance to any moan.
The yawning oven spits forth fiery spears;
Red aspish tongues shout wordlessly my name.
Desire destroys, consumes my mortal fears,
Transforming me into a shape of flame.
I will come out, back to your world of tears,
A stronger soul within a finer frame.
THE WHITE CITY