CHAPTER III
Kenneth came into contact with few others than his own people during the first month after his return to Central City. The first two weeks had been spent in getting his offices arranged with the innumerable details of carpentering, plastering, painting, and disposition of the equipment he had ordered in New York during the days he had spent there on his return from France.
During the early months of 1917, when through every available means propaganda was being used to whip into being America’s war spirit, one of the most powerful arguments heard was that of the beneficial effect army life would have on the men who entered the service. Newspapers and magazines were filled with it, orators in church and theatre and hall shouted it, every signboard thrust it into the faces of Americans. Alluring pictures were painted of the growth, physical and mental, that would certainly follow enlistment “to make the world safe for democracy.”
To some of those who fought, such a change probably did come, but the mental outlook of most of them was changed but little. The war was too big a thing, too terrible and too searing a catastrophe, to be adequately comprehended by the farmer boys, the clerks, and the boys fresh from school who chiefly made up the fighting forces. Their lives had been too largely confined to the narrow ways to enable them to realize the immensity of the event into which they had been so suddenly plunged. Their most vivid memories were of “that damned second loot” or of beaucoup vin blanc or, most frequently, of all-too-brief adventures with the mademoiselles. With the end of the war and demobilization had come the short periods of hero-worship and then the sudden forgetfulness of those for whom they had fought. The old narrow life began again with but occasional revolts against the monotony of it all, against the blasting of the high hopes held when the war was being fought. Even these spasmodic revolts eventually petered out in vague mutterings among men like themselves who let their inward dissatisfaction dissipate in thin air.
More deep-rooted was this revolt among Negro ex-service men. Many of them entered the army, not so much because they were fired with the desire to fight for an abstract thing like world democracy, but, because they were of a race oppressed, they entertained very definite beliefs that service in France would mean a more decent regime in America, when the war was over, for themselves and all others who were classed as Negroes. Many of them, consciously or subconsciously, had a spirit which might have been expressed like this: “Yes, we’ll fight for democracy in France, but when that’s over with we’re going to expect and we’re going to get some of that same democracy for ourselves right here in America.” It was because of this spirit and determination that they submitted to the rigid army discipline to which was often added all the contumely that race prejudice could heap upon them.
Kenneth was of that class which thought of these things in a more detached, more abstract, more subconscious manner. During the days when, stationed close to the line, he treated black men brought to the base hospital with arms and legs torn away by exploding shells, with bodies torn and mangled by shrapnel, or with flesh seared by mustard gas, he had inwardly cursed the so-called civilization which not only permitted but made such carnage necessary. But when the nightmare had ended, he rapidly forgot the nausea he had felt, and plunged again into his beloved work. More easily than he would have thought possible, he forgot the months of discomfort and weariness and bloodshed. It came back to him only in fitful memories as of some particularly horrible dream.
To Kenneth, when work grew wearisome or when memories would not down, there came relaxation in literature, an opiate for which he would never cease being grateful to Professor Fuller, his old teacher at Atlanta. It was “Pop”. Fuller who, with his benign and paternal manner, his adoration of the best of the world’s literature, had sown in Kenneth the seed of that same love. He read and reread Jean Christophe, finding in the adventures and particularly in the mental processes of Rolland’s hero many of his own reactions towards life. He had read the plays of Bernard Shaw, garnering here and there a morsel of truth though much of Shaw eluded him. Theodore Dreiser’s gloominess and sex-obsession he liked though it often repelled him; he admired the man for his honesty and disliked his pessimism or what seemed to him a dolorous outlook on life. He loved the colourful romances of Hergesheimer, considering them of little enduring value but nevertheless admiring his descriptions of affluent life, enjoying it vicariously. Willa Cather’s My Antonia he delighted in because of its simplicity and power and beauty.
The works of D. H. Lawrence, Kenneth read with conflicting emotions. Mystical, turgid, tortuous phrases, and meaning not always clear. Yet he revelled in Lawrence’s clear insight into the bends and backwaters and perplexing twistings of the stream of life. Kenneth liked best of all foreign writers Knut Hamsun. He had read many times Hunger, Growth of the Soil, and other novels of the Norwegian writer. He at times was annoyed by their lack of plot, but more often he enjoyed them because they had none, reflecting that life itself is never a smoothly turned and finished work of art, its causes and effects, its tears and joys, its loves and hates neatly dovetailing one into another as writers of fiction would have it.
So too did he satisfy his love for the sea in the novels of Conrad—the love so many have who are born and grow to manhood far from the sea. Kenneth loved it with an abiding and passionate love loved, yet feared it for its relentless power and savagery—a love such as a man would have for an alluring, yet tempestuous mistress of fiery and uncertain temper. In Conrad’s romances he lived by proxy the life he would have liked had not fear of the water and the circumstances of his life prevented it. Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant he read and reread, finding in the struggles of Emma Bovary and Nana and other heroines and heroes of the French realists mental counterparts of some of the coloured men and women of his acquaintance in their struggles against the restrictions of stupid and crass and ignorant surroundings. The very dissimilarities of environment and circumstance between his own acquaintances and the characters in the novels he read, seemed to emphasize the narrowness of his own life in the South. So does a bedridden invalid read with keen delight the adventurous and rococo romances of Zane Grey or Jack London.
But perhaps best of all he admired the writing of Du Bois—the fiery, burning philippics of one of his own race against the proscriptions of race prejudice. He read them with a curious sort of detachment—as being something which touched him in a more or less remote way but not as a factor in forming his own opinions as a Negro in a land where democracy often stopped dead at the colour line.