A Few Portraits in Sepia

I

JAMES BURRUS was born a slave during the tumultuous fifties. His father, who owned a plantation on Stone River between Nashville and Murfreesboro, had bought at one time a slave girl and by her had three sons — James, John, and Preston. His father evidently held her in high esteem, for he never took for himself any other wife. After an early aversion to her white master and rebellion against his advances, the girl grew fond of him. James says that during his boyhood his parents lived together in affectionate companionship.

The father died suddenly just before the Civil War, and it was found that he had bequeathed his entire estate to his slave wife and her sons. But rights of inheritance were not permitted to slaves, and the estate went to a brother. Then came the war and marching armies and disrupted homes. After a long odyssey, during which the mother and sons kept always together, following in the wake of one army and another through Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas, the family returned to make their home in Nashville. The mother at this period married an old slave suitor. But he was inferior to her in personality and ambition, and after a time she separated from him and devoted herself during the rest of her life to her sons.

James and John worked and saved and entered the first class of the little mission school optimistically called Fisk University. While the brothers were struggling to get food and schooling, they heard of the gibe of the great Southern statesman, John C. Calhoun: ‘ Show me a nigger who can do a problem in Euclid or parse a Greek verb and I ’ll admit he’s a human being.’ Piqued by the taunt, the Burrus brothers accepted the challenge in behalf of their race. As they entered Fisk, John said to James: ‘You take the mathematics and I’ll take the Greek.’

The scholarly ambition of these two ex-slaves fitted into the plans and aspirations of Fisk. The founders were scholars, and they offered undiluted Greek, Latin, and higher mathematics to the blacks who came to them. For long years the brothers struggled, studying when they could and working day and night to keep food and shelter for themselves and their mother. Finally these boys with two other students formed the first class to graduate from the college course at Fisk.

John, who had distinguished himself in the classics, remained at his Alma Mater to teach, and James went for graduate study to Dartmouth College in far New England. There he received high honors in mathematics and was, by special vote of the faculty, awarded the degree of Master of Arts — a rare distinction in those days. Thus these brothers, born in slavery, passed Calhoun’s dual test. They were recognized masters of Euclid and of Greek.

After his success at Dartmouth, James, in 1879, rejoined his brother on the Fisk faculty. In a few years both were called to the Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College of Mississippi — one as president, the other as professor. Working together, they built up this institution into one of the first of the modern state colleges for Negroes, maintaining high standards of scholarship and character in both faculty and student body and obtaining larger and larger support from the state treasury for this new kind of public school for Negroes. They took their mother with them to Alcorn, and there she presided over the president’s house. Stories of her charm and of her fierce determination for the advancement of her sons and her race arc current among those who came under her influence.

Although he was happy and successful as a teacher, James Burrus decided that if Negroes were to become really independent they must get money to support themselves and their institutions. So the two brothers resigned their posts at Alcorn, came back to Nashville, joined their younger brother, Preston, who had studied pharmacy, opened a drug store, and also began to buy and sell real estate. Both the drug business and the real estate prospered under the thrifty management of the Burrus family. Three years ago James, the last survivor of the brothers, died and left his entire estate of $122,000 to his Alma Mater, Fisk University.

A dramatic incident marked the close of this dramatic life. In the spring of 1928, as his health was beginning to fail, James announced to Dr. Thomas E. Jones, the new president of Fisk, his intention to leave his fortune to the University. He said that his affairs were all arranged save for one small debt, and that he was then on his way to the outskirts of the city to settle that account so that his estate would be entirely clear. Dr. Jones protested against the long, hard trip by the infirm old man, and offered himself to see to the payment at once. But Burrus insisted upon paying his last debt with his own hand. Painfully he climbed into a passing street car, took his seat in the rear section set apart for Negroes, and asked to be put off at the end of the run so that he coidd then walk the two or three remaining blocks to the house of his creditor. He leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. When the conductor came to rouse him at the end of the line, he found James Burrus dead.

II

Jake works on the larry gang in a Pennsylvania coke yard. He is a Northern Negro; he has never lived South and despises that region. ‘ Full of poor white trash and knee-bending niggers,’ he says. Much of the time Jake is simply a common laborer about the mine. Tamping ties, clearing refuse, repairing oven doors, he puts in his full menial day, checked by Pietro, the young Italian timekeeper.

But when the coke yard has a furious run, Jake’s days are made up not of hours but of deeds. On these days each oven must be emptied and reloaded — and that is all. These are the days Jake loves. Like a huge imp, his squat black form silhouetted against the tinted smoke from the ovens, he perches on his little coal car, which they call a larry, and waits at the mouth of the mine til! the car is filled. Then, with a turn of the electric switch, he drives the car careening along the narrow rails out over the thick masonry ovens, where, with another turn of the lever, he opens the bed of the car, and the coal pours into the oven to be burned to coke. A few strong thrusts of the crowbar by his gorilla arms, and the larry is emptied.

When the last oven is filled, Jake drives his larry screeching over the little track to the tipple at the mine head, throws aside his crowbar, and hurries his bowlegs out of the yard and down the dirty streets of the village to the shack which to him and four other dusky males is home. He washes off the outer coat of dirt, careful not to disturb the under layers of coal dust ingrained into his body through the years by the black gods of the mine as permanently as the pigment painted on by the gods of biology. He is a rough slab of graphite, not shiny like some blackamoors or smooth like the dark ivory of others. As he sloshes his head in the tepid water, flakes of carbon gleam here and there like insets of precious metal in dark stone.

In the winter in the drab mining villages about Pittsburgh there is nothing but work and sleep. One may break out occasionally and get drunk or beat up a woman, but after a dull spurt or two there is nothing but sleep and work, work and sleep. In the spring and summer, however, there is a little release. Even the god of routine slackens the chains a bit. The sap begins to run. The workers and the villagers begin to grope about, to search out almost human pleasures. On a spring or summer afternoon after his short, harsh day of oven stuffing, Jake takes his quick wash, thrusts his barrel chest into a baseball shirt, his curved legs into the short pants of the uniform, and, with the spikes of his shoes crunching on the floor, swaggers out with careless assurance and lithe dignity.

Jake’s life is at the zenith. Unencumbered by wife or children, full of good hunger and delight in sport and mastery, competent with his larry, and captain of his baseball team, his life, if not rich, at least is strong. He orders his players about with nonchalant authority. He himself plays with easy skill at the post of catcher. Crouching behind the home plate, his legs bowed wide, he knots his gnarled fingers and thumps his big glove lovingly, muttering unmentionable epithets to the nervous batter before him.

It was at the peak of his work at the coke yard and his joy at the diamond that Jake’s career broke. Not that he regarded it as anything out of the ordinary. But it was the beginning of a swift ebb in his life. And primitives, powerful and beautiful at the full tide of young strength, break rapidly when the turning comes.

At a decision by the umpire, Jake threw down his glove and rushed to protest. In the hot controversy, he seized a bat and bashed the umpire’s head. The police dragged him to the hoosegow and later to the penitentiary, where he served a weary year. He came out and returned to the coke yard. But he had to take work of a more lowly order. A new and younger Italian kept the time. The baseball team had passed to the captaincy of another. Jake drifted on to another camp and worked as plasterer on the oven doors and later as common laborer about the mines. His place was with the aged pensioners. His joys were reduced to sitting before a sunny oven door and regaling younger men with libidinous tales, while still younger and more energetic Italian timekeepers regarded him with the scornful eye of the ambitious.

III

Uncle Jeb was sitting on the fence, when I passed by, gazing vacantly at the body of his mule. High overhead a dozen buzzards circled.

Uncle Jeb had lived in that Louisiana parish as a cotton farmer during all of his seventy-seven years. Four years after the Civil War, when he was seventeen, he had married one of the plump black wenches of fifteen or sixteen with whom the boys giggled in back benches as preachers shouted salvation and hell fire from the pulpit.

From that time on, life for Jeb and Sarah had been a succession of babies, crops, planting, and picking. The babies were not much more than an incident with Sarah. She worked in the fields or around the house until a day or so before they came. Ten days later she took her place, a new baby strapped to her shoulders, and held her own with any field gang picking or hoeing cotton. It would be a hard life for the city girl, but every woman that Sarah knew went through the same routine. ‘Sixteen she borned and twelve she reared.’ The children were an asset in a country where the size of a tenant’s farm was determined by the ‘working force’ lie had at his disposal. As soon as the children were five years old they could help make a crop, and by the time they were ten or twelve they could pick or chop cotton as well as any man.

There was no privation while Jeb and Sarah were strong and the children were growing up about them. Shoes were not needed except for the older ones for church, and a hard, hobnailed yellow pair would last a long time if one took them off gratefully as soon as church was over. No clothes at all were needed for the youngest children, and for the others a pair or so of fifty-cent overalls and a cotton shirt would last the year around. A steady succession of youngsters was always ready for the discarded apparel of the older ones. Food was plentiful about the place, and one could always get extras at the plantation store — a side of bacon, a sack of flour, a bag of meal, a gallon of molasses.

Uncle Jeb and Sarah never bothered about the race problem. Niggers were niggers, and white folks white folks. All those relationships between the races that seem unjust and abnormal to the outsider were a part of the system under which they had always lived. They accepted slights and hurts from the white man and the bites of the mosquitoes along with the sun and the rain. They realized vaguely that they were being cheated, but they did not get excited or think of leaving the plantation. They did not know where to go, and when their children in later years discovered that there were places where one could live by other means than making crops, Jeb and Sarah were too old to start a new life.

The old people did not worry over any of the conditions of their earthly lot. Their concern was for the future world of bliss or damnation. Uncle Jeb had been a deacon in the Baptist Church for forty years. Sarah had shouted her glorified faith down the aisles of that church on innumerable occasions. One by one the children had come through from the mourners’ bench to the amen corner, had been baptized in the little creek that passed for the River Jordan, and been led shivering with cold, but with a strange ecstasy, to the mercy seat. Religion to Uncle Jeb and Sarah and their children was no cold philosophy or moral code; it was pageantry, song, a riotous release of spirit. It had little to do with their behavior. The preachers exhorted against dancing and card playing, and men and women were expelled from the church for these offenses; but as often as not they would be welcomed back on the next Sunday after penitential tears and frenzied confessions had softened the hearts of the members. All the moral teachings of their primitive religion were accepted with the resigned humor of a faith discounted from the beginning.

So Uncle Jeb lived his years. His children he taught to be polite to white and black. He went to church and worked hard, from February, when he ploughed over the land, through March and April, when he planted cotton, and through May and June, when he and the children chopped weeds from beneath the rows and loosened the ground around the growing plants. Then came a lull during July and August. This was the time for camp meetings and associations, when for weeks under the shade of some pleasant grove the entire community would gather for days of gorging and preaching and shouting and singing. They were praising God and enjoying themselves mightily.

With September and October came time for picking cotton. Uncle Jeb and his large family soon picked their crop and were then free to help out other farmers. Even in the poorest years one could get fifty cents a hundred for picking cotton, and the methodical arms of Jeb in his prime could account for four or five hundred pounds a day. In the years of low prices Jeb and his family had enough to eat and wear. When cotton went sky-high, Jeb prospered; Sarah bought a tawdry silk dress; the older boys invested in a secondor third-hand Ford or Buick from a shrewd city dealer. The boys would race the car over the country roads for a month or so until its patched tires or defective vitals gave way. Then, with all the money for the crop gone, the car would stand in the yard of the cabin, a mechanical ghost, slowly rusting away. In a few years there might be three or four of these melancholy wrecks sitting before every cabin in the community.

The World War came, and Jeb found his children slipping away one by one. Shreveport was only fifty miles away. Jeb had been there only once; his children would drive there nonchalantly, in the flush of their pride of ownership in a rickety car, in two hours or less. One would get a job on the railroad and settle in Shreveport, and later wander on to St. Louis or Kansas City, and from there to Chicago — the ultimate destination of migrating Negroes from the lower Mississippi Valley. One by one they drifted off, to movies and high wages, to bright lights and the freedom of the North, to nds of people pressing around some garish corner in the city.

After the war, the plantation went under the hammer. It was taken over by hard-faced men who told Uncle Jeb that he was too old to earn his keep, since there were plenty of young men with large families to chop and pick the cotton. So Uncle Jeb moved on to another plantation where the soil was less fertile, and the difficulty of making a crop with only the aid of Sarah made his fingers even more knotted, his ‘j’ints’ even more rheumatic.

He managed to keep alive, though, and to hold on to one mule and a plough. Jeb had bought that mule during the flush years of the war, and in the days when it became increasingly difficult for him to rent a farm that mule had meant salvation. Younger men without stock could get a farm on ‘halvers.’ But no one wanted to take a chance on old Uncle Jeb. It was only because of his mule that he was able to get anything to do at all. And now that mule lay dead at the end of a cotton furrow, and Uncle Jeb sat astride a fence staring with vacant eyes while the buzzards circled aloft.

IV

Two dusky gamins were amusing a crowd on Canal Street on a night of Mardi Gras in New Orleans. That afternoon a Negro had shot and killed ‘Tiny’ Lawrence, Tulane football star, in a street quarrel. The papers were carrying streamer headlines. The stage was set for a race riot. In any city but mellow, tolerant New Orleans, vicarious sacrifices would probably already have been dangling from trees and telegraph poles. Even here some single incident might start the angry mob on a mad nigger hunt. The Negroes, sensing danger, had simply vanished from the streets. Not one of the hundred thousand Negroes of the city was to be seen anywhere during the whole night, save these two boys who were flaunting themselves on the busiest streets. Their display, oddly enough, while it teetered on the very edge of riot, in effect soothed and diverted racial feeling.

One boy, leaning over a strange contraption made of tin cans, wires, and leather straps attached to a soap box, holding a small harmonica between his teeth, thumping with both hands on the cans and bits of tin attached to the box and pounding with his feet on pedals and odd bits of metal, produced a weird, perversely harmonious cacophony. His companion, feet beating a persuasive tattoo on the pavement, arms revolving furiously, white eyes rolling, teeth flashing in gleaming contrast to the shiny blackness of his face, flapping rags of clothing showing glimpses of smooth black skin, danced — an eccentric, oddly graceful dervish.

The dancer stopped, sweat dropping from his face, lips parted wide in a grateful grin as the ring of spectators broke into applause. The other boy deserted his musical cabinet to circle the crowd with outstretched hat, bowing with impudently exaggerated gratitude as small silver coins dropped into it.

At just that moment a policeman broke through the circle and made a lunge for the boys. In a flash, leaving music box and audience behind, the boys ducked beneath the crowd like practised swimmers and came up safely a block away. The policeman stood before the crowd panting from his sudden exertion. With a kick he crushed the box into splinters and bent the tin accessories beyond use. From the crowd came a clamor of disapproval. A sailor scowled at the officer and grumbled, ‘Aw, let the little niggers alone.’ A young white boy yelped, ‘You big cheese, why don’t you pick on someone your size!’ and dodged giggling from the policeman’s arm. As the crowd dispersed, the officer took a final kick at the box and walked away mopping his brow. Around the corner the two gamins, emerging from the sea of the Mardi Gras crowd, busily counted their money, chortling gleefully.

This music making on the streets is forbidden, and the gamins wage a constant duel with their wits against the powers that be. They can make a new box in an hour or so, and the spontaneous appeal of the jazz tom-tom and clever dancing is sure to gather a few coins before the arrival of the patrolman. Often the police themselves are sympathetic and walk the other way when they hear the music start.

The gamins’ life is as elemental as their music. Their needs are few. For food they can buy or steal one of the long French loaves that last through the day. Down on the wharf or on the railroad sidings, where fruits and foodstuffs are being unloaded, they can always find some defective produce that is theirs for the taking. If the watchman is suspicious and surly, they can steal behind his back. If he is friendly, they feast in peace. Fewclothes are needed in the warm New Orleans climate. They make their home where they find it. The back room of a speakeasy or a corner of the street is their bed. They have a brother who is kind when sober, but most of the time he is stupefied by cheap gin and Marihuana cigarettes. Their father has another family out by the airport at Algiers across the river, and they seldom see him.

Both boys have finished what formal schooling they are to receive. The younger, now ten years old, dropped out in the middle of the third grade. The older, twelve, spent a few dismal weeks in the fourth. The teachers were glad to be rid of them, for they were always making trouble in the school yard, singing, dancing, or fighting. The boys feel no compulsion to return to school. And as for the truant officer — he might as well try to handle a couple of young eels.

When the boys have made a good night with their dance and music box, they wander on to a place on Billere Street where one may buy a bottle of gin for thirty or forty cents. If they have money to spare, they may invest in a manly plug of chewing tobacco. They steal intermittently, more as an exercise in ingenuity than from greed. On Rampart Street they stand for hours before a store where sample records drone out the newest blues. Whenever a song-and-dance show comes to one of the Negro theatres, they are among the attentive audience. Here they learn new dance patterns and weave these into their own steps with clever versatility.

No prophecy can possibly state their future. Perhaps it is a smoky cabaret where their artful artlessness will please sophisticates. Maybe it is within the walls and walk-around of the parish jail or the miasmal prison camp at Angola. Possibly it is on a glittering stage where they will strut like peacocks in fantastic costume at the opposite pole from their present rags. Whatever their future, those gamins that night in New Orleans, with their assured and impudent agility, amused the crowd and diverted the minds of common men from hates and prejudice.

V

Thousands of Negroes, North and South, are working in hotels as waiters, elevator men, and bell boys. Langston Hughes, who himself served such an apprenticeship, portrays this life in his poem, ‘Brass Spittoons.’

VI

Such are some of the brown Americans. The Southern field hand and his family represent nearly half the race still holding on to the farm, living in the rural South, economically at the nadir, but not entirely devoid of pleasures and of those qualities that have for ages been praised in the ’sturdy peasant.’ The larryman has a good deal in common with the hundreds of thousands of mine workers, factory hands, stockyard employees, — laborers in the ‘heavy industries,’ — who make up so large a part of the Negroes of the Northern industrial centres. The New Orleans gamins, and the spittoon polisher of Langston Hughes’s poem, stand for the army of colored ‘boys,’ aged ten to fifty, who live from hand to mouth in the cities and towns or are on call for every menial service. The Burrus brothers are, of course, heroes of an earlier age. They are of the very small band who successfully bridged the tremendous chasm, reaching all the way from slavery to economic independence and intellectual attainment.

The gallery may well close with a portrait of a modern. There is no use pretending that this final portrait is at all typical of the race. In fact the man is superior in every way to the average member of any race in this nation which is a complex of so many races. But he is what any Negro may become if he has a stimulating home environment and a little more than half a chance in the world. He will be wholly unknown to the average white reader, yet he is what tens of thousands of the ‘New Negroes’ are approaching, if not quite equaling.

VII

Horace Mann Bond is a typical brown American in at least one respect, his blood mixture. His grandfathers on both sides were white men. Both his grandmothers had Indian blood, and one of them was half white. His ancestry therefore is ten-sixteenths white, chiefly Scotch, Irish, and English; three-sixteenths Indian, known to be partly Cherokee; and three-sixteenths African, with no knowledge whatever of which of the great kingdoms of that continent are involved.

His grandmother, Jane Arthur, who lived in one of the very few slave-owning families of the Kentucky mountains, was given as a wedding present to the bride of a plantation owner and followed her mistress to her new home in the blue grass. As lady’s maid, she lived in the ‘big house,’ as was the custom, and she had children by her master, as was also the custom. All the children of the menage grew up together, eating and playing and quarreling, regardless of color or condition of servitude. They all called the father ‘Pa,’ and the mistress ‘Ma,’ and the lady’s maid ‘Mammy.’

As soon as she could, after emancipation was finally understood and acted upon in this Kentucky plantation, Jane Arthur bundled up her two sons and started back to her people in the mountains of Knox County. There she found her parents and two of her sisters. Another two, Charity and Patience, had been sold to unknown parts and were never heard of again. The mother, whom Jane found in her old home, was an interest ing character. She had come years earlier from the tidewater section of Virginia, the daughter of a slave girl by a Cherokee Indian. She had straight black hair which came to her waist, high cheek bones, and a strong lithe body. During her life in Virginia she had absorbed a vocabulary of old English which she held on to until her death — ‘hapenny,’‘tuppence,’ ‘mought.’ She also knew a lot of witchcraft, — how to keep spirits from knotting the horses’ manes, and to catch ‘ hants ’ in sieves, — which her family supposed came directly from Africa, but which turned out to be simply the Scotch and English superstitions current in early Virginia.

Jane Arthur had returned to the mountains, but she did not intend her sons to stay there. She had the current faith in the transforming power of learning, and she kept hammering at each of her sons to ‘get an education and make a man of himself.’ A subscription ‘blab’ school was organized among the few colored families of the mountain county and taught by Aunt America.’ Here James Rond, Horace s father, learned the blue-backed speller if nothing else. Before he was ten he could spell ‘ incompatibility and incomprehensibility.’ In a manuscript autobiography, he describes how, knowing only words from the speller, one day while thumbing the family Riblc he suddenly discovered he could read.

Driven by his ambitious mother, James finally trudged over the mountains to Berea, where white and colored were accepted on equal terms, into an institution that covered the gamut of learning from a, b, c, to A. B. He entered the second grade of the grammar school, got a job as college bell ringer, and for ten solid years rung his way through to graduation. On a scholarship he went to Oberlin College in Ohio, a kind of foster parent of Berea. There he was graduated in theology and met the girl who became his wife, attracted to her first, perhaps, because her given name was that of his heroic mother. Jane Echols had the conglomerate ancestry common to so many Negroes. Her mother — part Indian and part white, in addition to her Negro blood — had been a free woman, but she had lived as a servant in Virginia and the son of the family had fallen in love with her. The boy wanted to elope with her to the North, but his mother put a stop to that. And after having one child by her, Jane, he was sent off to college. James Rond and Jane Echols were married, and the fifth of their six children was Horace Mann Rond.

Young Horace was born in 1904. He grew up in a family which moved about as the father held pastorates in Kentucky, Alabama, and Georgia. During these early years his formal schooling was sketchy. His mother helped out the family income by teaching, and as the older children were all in school, Horace, when he was only three years old, was bundled off with them. There some of the older girls amused themselves by teaching the baby to read. His mother also coached him evenings and Sundays, and an aunt who had graduated from Meharry Medical College taught him by rote whole sections from medical textbooks. Thus, before the time most children would be starting to school, young Bond was by way of becoming a prodigy. He read omnivorously from his father’s well-selected library and any other books he could get his hands on. Once a teacher promised to give him as many of the works of Dumas as he would read, and within a month he had the whole set of twenty volumes.

When his father became pastor at Talladega College, the boy had had but few months of schooling, yet he impressed his teachers so much by the general knowledge his wide reading had given him that at nine years of age he was entered in the ninth grade. The boy became interested in writing. Other students got him to compose their themes for them. Some girls in the normal class persuaded him that he was in love with a little girl of the village and got him to write her long, passionate, and flowery love letters, which those spiteful hussies took and, instead of delivering, read in their classes to the great amusement of all and to the shame and embarrassment (probably not unmixed with a little delighted pride) of the author. At any rate, he was start ed on a career of writing which has carried his work into many of the national magazines.

Later moves of the family sent the boy to Atlanta University and to Lincoln Institute in Kentucky, where at the age of fourteen he was the proud possessor of a diploma stating that he had completed sixteen high-school units and was ready for college. He chose Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. For two years he limped along, easily handling the literary subjects, but completely at a loss in mathematics and science. Then fortunately one of his fellow students taunted him with his low standing. He swore that he would beat that man at everything. He began to study hard and was at the top of his class during his last two years.

He was then given a scholarship at Pennsylvania State College, where he was stimulated by the all-white competition and consoled by finding that many of the students there were as stupid as any he had known among his own race. Then, with intermittent graduate terms at the University of Chicago, from which he received his Master’s degree in 1926, he has taught for periods at Lincoln University, the State College for Negroes in Langston, Oklahoma, and Fisk University. Meanwhile he has carried on important research and has published findings from his factual studies as well as sketches from his creative imagination.

Young Bond was raised in a puritan home. Both his parents had studied at Oberlin College, which was a solidly pious institution. His father, while liberal, was after all a preacher. And Negroes who are conservative at all are apt to be even more conservative than white people. The boy grew up with ‘don’ts’ sprinkled all over the place: ‘Don’t smoke, don’t swear, don’t drink, don’t play cards, don’t be familiar with girls.’ Into only one of the prohibited fields did Bond venture to any considerable degree. While in college he had some lucky breaks at cards. Suddenly he found himself with a reputation as a great card shark. The rumor went around the campus that he was a hardened gambler, who wore short trousers and pretended to be young simply to deceive the unwary. He confesses to one other excess. While in Chicago he met some fervid religionists. They persuaded him to meet with them and then to address them. He found he could move audiences easily. By sonorous sentences, eloquent gestures, passionately earnest manner, he could bring shouts or tears, could even produce exaggerated ecstasies. This was fascinating business. He did it a number of times and his fame as an exhorter spread. Suddenly realizing what he was doing and the hold this emotional drug might get on him, he stopped. He says he is n’t concerned about most of his youthful acts, but that he is ashamed of his ventures into speaking with tongues. The use of language is his power and his danger.

Bond identifies himself with the South. He is a dark Southerner, it is true, but nevertheless a Southerner. Maybe he has the ability and the patience to see it through, to be among the first of the stepchildren to be accepted heartily as a part of the intellectual and literary wealth of this historic section of the United States. When the South realizes and acts upon the great potential wealth of the brown Americans who make up a third of its population, it may not only greatly increase its productive labor and its purchasing power, but add appreciably to the intellectual and artistic renaissance which is already under way. Bond, with his cosmopolitan blood, his excellent home environment, his modesty and humor, his loyalty to the South, and his unquestioned ability as a student and writer, is one of a small but growing band of whom this section may well be proud.