I had traveled over many other ways besides the railroad since those days. Professor Spingarn was appreciative of me as a Negro poet, but he did not appreciate my radicalism, such as it was! Paradoxically, Professor Spingarn supported and advocated Negro racial radicalism and abhorred social radicalism. Professor Spingarn preferred my racial jeremiads to my other poems. Well, I was blunt enough to tell Professor Spingarn that he was a bourgeois. He didn't like it. Nevertheless he found me a publisher.
When I told a Yankee radical about myself and Professor Spingarn, this radical said that it was impossible for any man to be pro-Negro and anti-radical. He said, he believed that Professor Spingarn was pro-Negro not from broad social and humanitarian motives, but because he was a Jew, baffled and bitter. I said, "But Oswald Garrison Villard is also pro-Negro, and he is not a radical nor a Jew." The radical said, "Oh, Villard is an abolitionist by tradition." And I said, "Isn't it possible that Professor Spingarn is also an abolitionist, and by even a greater tradition?"
If only individual motives were as easy to categorize and analyze as they appear to be! Anyway, Professor Spingarn got Harcourt Brace and Company to accept my poems. Max Eastman wrote a splendid preface, and the book was published in the spring of 1922.
Harlem Shadows was a succès d'estime. The reviews were appreciative, some flattering, flattering enough to make a fellow feel conceited about being a poet. But I was too broke and hungry and anxious about the future to cultivate conceit. However, I was not discouraged. The publication of my first American book uplifted me with the greatest joy of my life experience. When my first book was published in Jamaica, I had the happy, giddy feeling of a young goat frolicking over the tropical hills. The English edition of my poems had merely been a stimulant to get out an American book. For to me America was the great, difficult, hard world. I had gone a long, apparently roundabout way, but at least I had achieved my main purpose.
The last Liberator affair in which I actively participated was an international dance. The winter had been cold on our spirits and our feelings warmed currently to celebrate the spring. We trumpeted abroad our international frolic and the response was exhilarating. All shades of radicals responded, pink and black and red; Left liberals, Socialists, Anarchists, Communists, Mayflower Americans and hyphenated Americans, Hindus, Chinese, Negroes. The spirit of The Liberator magnetized that motley throng. There was a large freedom and tolerance about The Liberator which made such a mixing possible. (How regrettable that nothing like the old Liberator exists today! Social thinking is still elastic, even chaotic, in America. Class lines and ideas here are not crystallized to such an extent as to make impossible friendly contact between the different radical groups.)
Our spring frolic brought that international-minded multitude into Forty-second Street. But the metropolitan police resented the invasion. They were aghast at the spectacle of colored persons mixed with white in a free fraternal revel. So they plunged in and broke it up, hushed the saxophones, turned the crowd out of the hall, and threw protesting persons downstairs, lamming them with their billies.
After leaving The Liberator I took a holiday from work. I had not had one for over a year. I was in a small circle of friends and we convived together, consuming synthetic gin. Meanwhile I was thinking about a job. Perhaps I would return to the railroad. James Weldon Johnson advised me to make a tour of the South and read my verses. But I never anticipated with gusto the prospect of appearing as a poet before admiring audiences.
I was often in the company of a dancer who was making a study of African masks for choreographic purposes. One evening while he, my friend, Gladys Wilson, and I were together in my diggings in Fourteenth Street, a woman walked in to whom I had been married seven years before. A little publicity, even for a poor poet, might be an embarrassing thing. The dancer exclaimed in a shocked tone, "Why, I never knew that you were married!" As if that should have made any difference to him. I said that nobody knew, excepting the witnesses, and that there were many more things about me that he and others didn't know.
All my planning was upset. I had married when I thought that a domestic partnership was possible to my existence. But I had wandered far and away until I had grown into a truant by nature and undomesticated in the blood. There were consequences of the moment that I could not face. I desired to be footloose, and felt impelled to start going again.