by Claude McKay
At eleven thirty the telephone rang. Seraphine took up the receiver and said, “Friends of Ethiopia.”
“Is Tasan there, Seraphine?” It was Lij Alamaya’s voice.
“No,” she said. “Did he return from Chicago?”
“We came back together yesterday.”
“Then you’ve seen the news about Ethiopia?”
“Yes, we got it before it was published in the newspapers. That’s why we came back.”
“I want to see you very much,” said Seraphine. “Where are you staying?”
“In the same room at the Hotel Santa Cruz. What is it?”
“I can’t tell you over the telephone. I’ll come over right after I get through with my work this afternoon.”
After lunch she went to the Second Avenue apartment and took out of her trunk the envelope with the Emperor’s letter and the photographs and put it in her handbag. She returned to the office to work on the indexing of some lists of names and addresses. But when she placed her bag on the desk, she imagined that it might develop wings and fly out of the room. She imagined that somebody might come in and pounce upon it. She imagined the funniest things and, feeling that the bag was not safe unless she was holding it in her hand, she could not work. Nervous and scared she seized the bag, holding it tightly, as if it were an eel trying to wriggle out of her grasp, and rushed out of the office.
Seraphine thought she would not wait but instead go straight to see Alamaya. But he, not expecting her until the afternoon, had left his hotel. Disappointed and strangely agitated, although she did not desire to see Tasan before talking to Alamaya, her genie pushed her to go back to the bridal apartment. When she arrived she found Alamaya there with Tasan and Gloria Kendall.
Tasan was speaking: “You have nothing to worry about, Alamaya, for the Movement will take care of you. Ethiopia is conquered, but the Comintern is unconquerable. Fascism will collapse with the triumph of the Popular Front and Ethiopia will be restored as a Soviet nation. You must stay here and carry on propaganda through the Popular Front.”
“I will do nothing of the kind,” said Alamaya. “At last I am free. I have no country and no Emperor. No country to suffer from my mistakes and no Emperor to disgrace. For myself I am not afraid. I am through. I am FREE!”
“You are not through and you are not free,” said Tasan. “You’re a member of the Comintern and subject to its discipline.”
“I am through with the bloody Comintern,” said Alamaya. “It was the biggest mistake of my life when I joined the Party in Paris. But there was hardly any other alternative. I was sincere. We were all frightened by the sudden challenge of the Fascists—all of us who believed in the brotherhood of humanity. And I thought I was doing a progressive thing when I joined up. I felt that the future of our country depended on what we younger Ethiopians did. I believed that we should lead the older men who were conservative; that we should tie up with progressive forces. I thought the Comintern was progressive, but I thought wrongly.”
“The Comintern cannot be blamed for the mistakes of the democracies,” said Tasan. “Ethiopia was betrayed and sold by England and France and the League of Nations.”
“And Soviet Russia too,” said Alamaya. “In spite of the sanctions, Russia continued to sell Italy the oil for the airplanes and tanks, and the food for her army to defeat Ethiopia. The Soviet government—”
“The Soviets had a trade treaty with Italy!” cried Tasan. “They had to respect the terms of the treaty.”
“Hell,” said Alamaya. “One of the things that Communism taught me was that no Communist regarded a treaty with a bourgeois as binding. Do you as a Communist consider a treaty with Fascists as more binding? Any treaty can be denounced in a crisis. When the members of the League of Nations took sanctions against Italy they broke treaties. But your league of Communist parties of the Comintern is just a drove of contemptible pigs eating slops out of the Soviet trough. It stinks.”
Tasan showed red at his ears. The training for his career had accustomed him to maintain an exterior of Oriental imperturbability even when his heart was raging, and his poker face, aided by the general pallor of his skin, was a perfect foil. But Alamaya’s outburst, his sudden refractoriness, had caught him off guard. Besides, despite his professions his real attitude towards Africans and Aframericans was still influenced by childish fairy-tale pictures of them as primitives. Alamaya’s sharp penetrating appraisal of the Comintern and Soviet Russia was totally unexpected.
“Who are you to criticize the Comintern?” said Tasan. “What do you know or understand about treaties and diplomatic action among civilized peoples? Ethiopia is only a land of howling black savages, over-sexed cannibals with many wives gorging themselves with raw meat. Africa is the black plague of Europe. It can’t rule itself or exploit its resources. European nations are lured there to quarrel with each other and fight like wolves and die in its jungles. You ought to be glad and grateful if the Comintern takes a human interest in Ethiopia.”
Said Alamaya: “If I must make a choice, I would prefer the European wolves as real wolves to the Comintern wolves hidden in fleece. We African savages are used to fighting wild animals in the open; but we’re not accustomed to fighting them in disguise. I have learned my lesson the hard way and you and the Comintern can go to hell where you belong.”
“Understand this,” said Tasan, “you can’t fight the Comintern. It will crush you like a worm.”
“I don’t care,” said Alamaya. “I have made a mess of my mission. I failed Ethiopia and I failed the Aframericans who wanted to help Ethiopia—”
“What help could Aframericans give to Ethiopia?” said Tasan. “They’re all venal beggars and sycophants, always stretching out their black hands and praying to the white gods. Aframericans with their airs and antics imitating white people are a big joke, and so is Ethiopia.”
“I guess it’s because you imagine we’re a joke that you had to put the Princess Benebe over on us,” said Seraphine.
“Who told you about that?” said Gloria Kendall, jumping out of her chair.
Ignoring Gloria, Seraphine continued: “Aframericans are a joke indeed, just a toy for your amusement.”
Tasan wondered how much Seraphine knew and what was the source of her information. He said: “Mrs. Nordling, you’re a new couple and shouldn’t be involved in this thing. Lij Alamaya was welcomed in Harlem as a prince and the people wanted a princess. They have the kingdom of heaven with angels and a god in Harlem—why not princes and princesses? The Communist Party was hot stuff in Harlem, when it made a pact with god.”
“The colored people are not a joke,” said Seraphine. “And if Alamaya cannot expose you, I will.”
“Who would believe you and what newspaper will publish it? Do you think the newspapers want to show themselves up? I’ve got the influence to block every move you make. Besides, Alamaya was a party to it. When you expose Princess Benebe you also expose Lij Alamaya and make all Harlem ridiculous.”
“I am fed up with everything and don’t care what you all do,” said Gloria. “I agreed to masquerade as a princess, because I was told it was for the good of the movement. I did it as a part of my duty. I believed that Lij Alamaya and the Hands to Ethiopia were wrong to oppose the Friends and the Popular Front. I believed that they were leading Aframericans down the wrong road. They told me it was my job as Princess Benebe to hold Lij Alamaya to the party line. But I soon discovered that Lij Alamaya was a real person, a patriot who loved his people. And I was nothing but a tool . . .”
“Then you abandoned the party line so you could land the Ethiopian sucker with your own hook and line,” said Tasan with a simian leer.
“You be damned, you slimy skunk. Why shouldn’t I abandon your party line when you use it to hang Ethiopia and hamstring Aframericans—”
“It is the Ku Klux Klan stringing up your people and not the Comintern,” sho
uted Tasan. “The whole goddam colored race should be grateful to Soviet Russia and the Comintern. Look what we did for them in the Scottsboro case.1 We summoned the United States before the bar of the world to be judged and condemned for degrading and outlawing its colored minority. Yet their treacherous ungrateful Uncle Tom boot-licking leaders try to poison the minds of the people and turn them against the Communists. I wish I had the power to turn loose a band of Cossacks among them to teach them a lesson.”
“The Cossacks are far away,” said Alamaya, “but the Ku Klux Klan is right here. I wouldn’t be surprised if you made a deal with them to ginger up their persecution of Aframericans, just as you supplied the Fascists with materials to conquer Ethiopia. Blackmail and gangsterism are Communist tactics just as they are the Fascists’.”
Tasan grimaced. “You will find that out in Ethiopia.”
“Here, Alamaya,” said Seraphine, “the Emperor’s letter I discovered right here in Maxim’s apartment.”
“You fiend!” cried Alamaya. “You—” He bounded forward and clipped Tasan with a stinging punch to his brow. Tasan thudded on the floor like a sack of sand thrown from a truck.
“I’m getting out of this hyena’s lair,” said Alamaya.
“And I’m going with you,” said Gloria.
“I’m coming too,” said Seraphine.
But as they reached the sidewalk they met Dandy Nordling, bare-headed and beaming like a Sunkist orange with good humor. He gathered Seraphine in his arms and said: “Darling, I have found the coziest thing you can imagine. Right in the heart of the Village in Eighth Street. Come on, I’ll show it to you right away. We’ll soon invite you all to a little house-warming,” he said to Alamaya and Gloria. And holding Seraphine’s hand, he led her off.
20
ART AND RACE
In one of the assembly rooms of the Parthenon Hall the Interlink was sponsoring a meeting in appreciation of the work of the Aframerican artist Dixon Davis Lee. Mr. Lee was a graphic artist with a powerful punch. For many years he had wrestled with charcoal and brush. But only recently he was hailed as a genius and welcomed into the ranks of the serious artists.
Mr. Lee had earned his first money as an artist drawing likenesses of customers in Aframerican cafés. He was a mere youth when he started making drawings of the habitués of a cabaret in Atlanta, Georgia. He had no training, but he possessed talent. And he pushed it with a mighty will, for he was ambitious. He studied drawings in the newspapers and appealing types in all the popular magazines he could get his hands on. In those early efforts, his drawings of Aframericans appeared as if the models were white.
When he came to New York he got his chance to study at night at a commercial art school and to see a better quality and variety of drawings in newspapers and finer pictures in magazines. He never attended any of the pure art schools or made contacts with students of pure art.
In Harlem he made a little more money and wider contacts, making drawings of convives in café and cabaret. He attracted the attention of visitors from downtown. There was potential power in his work and his seriousness in his subject set him apart from the ordinary café artist. Besides, he himself, broad-shouldered, chocolate-hued, was an interesting type.
Dixon Davis Lee got his first New York start when he made a drawing of the editor of Broadway Balcony in a Harlem nightspot. Editor Pat Conman invited the artist to bring some of his stuff down to his office. Lee was lifted off his feet and riding the air like a singing lark. He thought he had already reached the heights. But when he went to the Balcony’s office Pat Conman brought him back down to earth. Conman looked through Lee’s portfolio and told him that he had a powerful punch in his line, but that he was like a man possessing a superb tool who didn’t know how to use it, because he was not trained in his craft. Conman pointed out to Lee the fact that his best work was his Aframerican types but that the features of all of them were like anemic whites. He exhorted Lee to make his people real.
“Make your Aframericans brutal and bloody and big with life—‘bawdacious’ as they say in Harlem,” he said. “Do caricatures of the better-known Broadway sepians, so that the public can guess who they are without their names being mentioned. And I’ll give you a break in my weekly.”
Pat Conman gave Dixon Davis Lee a stack of the Broadway Balcony and told him to study the type of illustrations. The Broadway Balcony was a little gadfly weekly which specialized in brief items full of malice and innuendos about stage people and the more or less prominent personalities of Broadway and café society. It was started during the earlier part of the regime of President Hoover1 and quickly attained considerable local popularity. Its illustrations were not of a high standard, but they were funny and peptic.
Lee heeded Pat Conman’s suggestions and applied them to his work and soon he was turning out some startling Aframerican types. Working for the Broadway Balcony brought Lee into contact with other artists and sophisticated persons, which extended his artistic horizon. His Aframerican contributions featured the Southern black in the cotton field and in the chain gang and in his cabin; as porter, handyman, roustabout and entertainer. Lee overcame the unconscious habit of making his Aframerican features appear like “stereotype whites,” but he could not make them look human. Upon the powerful energetic bodies he invariably placed gorilla-like heads, with incredibly vacant, vicious and depraved faces. They produced a strange sensation of the grotesque photographic trick of a person’s posing his head and becoming a part of another strange body. Sometimes in his drawings Lee created a white figure as a foil to his black, in which he reverted to his originally unsophisticated manner: the white faces were always rose-pink sweet, like the girl on the magazine cover.
Pat Conman persuaded Lee to coin a name from his initials and sign his drawings “Dèdé Lee” instead of “Dixon Davis Lee.” He said that that was more artistic and suitable to the spirit of his Broadway Balcony. Lee’s work soon established itself as the most distinctively artistic contribution in the Balcony. His drawings were remarked and appreciated in the more exclusive art circles. He was fortunate in obtaining an assignment to draw for a newspaper.
After a three-year spell of successful notoriety, the Balcony began losing circulation. Life had changed a lot along Broadway and many balconies were empty. The Balcony faded rapidly and suddenly died in 1933. Editor Pat Conman turned with disgust from the scandals of Broadway, which were scarcely shocking in that bleak wolfish year, and became seriously interested in the social developments of the nation. In 1935 he became an assistant in the editorial department of the Sunday supplement of the Labor Herald. He was soon active in the organizing of artists and writers. Also he was a zealous worker in the ranks of the Popular Front.
Pat Conman had not lost contact with Dèdé Lee. He still found time for relaxation in the amusements of Harlem. But his reactions were not the same. He wrote pieces about dark fingers weaving the anguish of a race into the swing notes of the piano and the social protest inherent in the Aframerican pattern of tap dancing. And to the Sunday supplement of the Labor Herald he contributed an illustrated two-page appreciation of the work of Dèdé Lee and its profound social significance.
Up until that time Dèdé Lee had never been troubled by ideas of the social implications of his art. If he had it might have handicapped the cunning of his hand and spoiled his success. Like every normal Aframerican, he resented the discrimination to which he was subjected as one of the untouchables of the nation. But his art had materially provided him with the means of escaping from some of the harsher realities of discrimination. He was married to a pretty Aframerican girl who liked fashionable clothes and parties and they associated with the smartest pleasure-seeking set in Harlem. No one of that set ever thought there was any social meaning in the drawings of Aframerican types which Dèdé Lee contributed to the white newspaper. He made a good living out of his work, which enabled him to live up to their standard, and that was enough.
Dèdé Lee’s art had enlightened him more from the angle of social experience than of social significance. Many of those who delighted in it had no notion that he was an Aframerican. On one occasion he was invited by the exclusive Ante-Bellum Club of New York to visit the club. The distinctive mark of this club was that its members were descendants of Southerners who were slave owners and gentlemen, but none of whom were slave traders. Dèdé Lee accepted the invitation, which specifically stated that the afternoon would also celebrate a revival of the custom of the drinking of mint julep. But when he arrived at the club and announced that he was Dèdé Lee, the custodian was so confused that in his agitation he stepped on the artist’s toes. He asked him to wait in an anteroom, forgetting the usual courtesy of relieving a visitor of his topcoat and hat. He took Lee’s card and hurried into the club room. He returned with a responsible member. This personage made an attempt of an apology to Lee, explaining there was a mistake about the date, the secretary was not there, but he would communicate with him. Lee did not receive any explanatory communication. He did not expect any. He knew the cause of the mistake. The members of the Ante-Bellum Club had imagined that artist Dèdé Lee, who so perfectly rendered the popular Southern point of view in his art, was white.
Dèdé Lee was not unappreciative of the effort of his original benefactor, Pat Conman, in ranking him in the company of artists whose work possessed significant social substance. It meant much to him to be rated among the real artists instead of remaining just a popular caricaturist. And also it meant perhaps even more to Mrs. Lee to get acquainted with the advance guard of socially serious artists. There were some big names, some aristocratic names among them. Magnus Chetwind was one of those names that were big in the popular as much as the exclusive sense. He was a popular lecturer in esthetics and had successfully sold the public his ideas of making the people art-conscious. He had established the People’s Art Gallery, which was a signal success. He was in constant demand as an art populariser on the radio. He was a rare combination: an art dealer and art critic whose opinion on art was generally accepted as authoritative.
