The night came ... I found myself on the platform with the preacher by my side. They had seated me in the chair of honour.
First the congregation prayed and sang ... such singing, so clear and soaring and melodious. It rocked the very church, burst out through the windows in great surges of melody.
I was introduced as their friend, as the coloured man's friend.
I spoke. I read my poems simply and unaffectedly.
Afterward I shook hands all round.
Matty Smith, the negro girl, as black as soot, and thoroughly African, stood by me as introducer. If I had shut my eyes, her manner of speech might not have been told from that of any cultured white woman's. She was as refined and sensitive a human being as I have ever met.
As I walked back to my attic over the plumber shop, it was with head erect and heaving chest. I deemed myself a champion of the negro race. I was almost putting myself alongside of Lincoln and John Brown.
Their reason for inviting me was that I had had a scathing poem printed, in the New York Independent, on the lynching of a negro in Lincoln's home State of Illinois.
Within two days of my talk at the First Methodist African Church, I met simultaneously in front of the library, two women, each going in opposite directions....