“Dearest Matthew, my man,” wrote Kautilya in September, “forgive my silence. I am in Virginia with your mother. I could not stay in Washington. I wanted to sit a space apart and in quiet to think and hearken and decide. The wind is in the trees, the strong winds of purpose, the soft winds of infinite desire; the wide black earth around me is breathing deep with fancies. There is rain and mud and a certain emptiness. But somehow I love this land, perhaps because mother loves it so. I seem to see salvation here, a gate to the world. Here is a tiny kingdom of tree and wood and hut. Oh, yes, and the brook, the symphony of the brook. And then there are the broad old fields as far as we can look toward the impounding woods.
“Beloved, I am beginning to feel that this place of yours may be no mere temporary refuge. That it may again be Home for you. I see this as yet but dimly, but life here seems symbolic. Here is the earth yearning for seed. Here men make food and clothes. We are at the bottom and beginning of things. The very first chapter of that great story of industry, wage and wealth, government, life.
“On such deep founding-stones you may perhaps build. I can see work transformed. This cabin with little change in its aspect can be made a place of worship, of beauty and books. I have even planned a home for you: this old and black and vine-clad cabin undisturbed but with an L built behind and above. The twin cabin must run far back and rise a half story for a broad and peaceful chamber—for life with music and color floating in it. Perhaps a little lake to woo the brook; and then, in years, of course, a tower and a secret garden! Yes, I should like to see a tower, where Muezzins call to God and His world.
“And this world is really much nearer to our world than I had thought. This brook dances on to a river fifty miles away—next door only for a little Ford truck. And the river winds in stately curve down Jamestown-of-the-Slaves. We went down the other day, walking part of the way through woods and dells, toward the great highway of the Atlantic. Think, Matthew, take your geography and trace it: from Hampton Roads to Guiana is a world of colored folk, and a world, men tell me, physically beautiful beyond conception; socially enslaved, industrially ruined, spiritually dead; but ready for the breath of Life and Resurrection. South is Latin America, east is Africa, and east of east lies my own Asia. Oh, Matthew, think this thing through. Your mother prophesies. We sense a new age.
“This is the age of commerce and industry—of making, shaping, carrying, buying and selling. We have made manufacturers, railroad men, and merchants rich because we ranked them highest, and we have helped them in cities for convenience, and they are white and in white cities. Just suppose we change our ranking. Suppose in our hearts we rate the colored farmers and all discoverers, poets, and dreamers high and even higher and give them space outside of white cities? We would widen the world. It is simply a matter of wanting to. We have bribed white factories with tariffs and monopoly. We are going to bribe black agriculture and poetry. And, Matthew, Work is not God—Love is God and Work is His Prophet.”
Hurriedly Matthew wrote back: “No, no, Kautilya of the World, no, no! Think not of home in that breeder of slaves and hate, Virginia. I shudder to find you there even for a season. There is horror there which your dear eyes are not yet focused to see and which the old blindness of my mother forgets. There is evil all about you. Oh, sister, you do not know—you do not dream. Down yonder lurk mob and rape and rope and faggot. Ignorance is King and Hate is High Prime Minister. Men are tyrants or slaves. Women are dolls or sluts. Industry is lying, and government stealing.
“The land is literally accursed with the blood and pain of three hundred years of slavery. Ask mother. Ask her to tell you how many years she has fought and clawed for the honor of her own body. There is a little weal on her breast, a jagged scar upon her knee, a broken finger on one hand. Ask her whence these came. Ask her who imprisoned and killed my father and why and where her other children are buried. Come away, come away, my crumpled bird, as soon as may be, lest they despoil you. You may hide there until our wounds are healed, but then come away to the midst of life. Only in the center of the world can our work be done. We must stand, you and I, even if apart, where beats down the fiercest blaze of Western civilization, and pushing back this hell, raise a black world upon it.
“I ought not to write tonight, for I am in the depths; the sudden change of Chicago’s Fall has dropped upon me. I caught cold and was ill a day, and then I arose and did not go to work. Instead, I went down to the art gallery. There was a new exhibit of borrowed paintings from all ends of the world. After mud and filth and grayness, my soul was starving for color and curve and form. I went. And then went back again, day after day. I literally forgot my work for a week and bathed myself in a new world of beauty.
“I saw in Claude Monet what sunrise and sunset on the old cathedral at Rouen might say to a human soul, in pale gold, white, and purple, and in purple, yellow, and gold. I felt the mists of London hiding Big Ben. Rich somber peace and silence fell on me and on the picnic party beneath spreading branches. I walked with that lady about the red flowers of her garden. I reveled in blue seas, faint color-swept fields, riot of sweet flowers, poppies and grain, brooks and villages.
“I saw Pisano’s Paris; the colors of Matisse raged in my soul, deluging all form, unbeautiful with rhythm. I delighted in the luscious dark folk of Paul Gaugin, in sun and shade, fruit and sea, palm and totem, and in the color that melts and flows and cries. Then there were the mad brown-gray-green lines of Picasso which swerved and melted into strange faces, forms, and figures, haunting things like their African prototypes; there was a dark little girl by Derain floating in a field of blue with a yellow castle, square and old.
“As from a far flight into the unknown I came back to the lovely coloring of Brangwyn and Cottet. I discovered the lucent blue water of Cézanne, his plunging landscapes and the hard truth of his faces. I saw how lovely Mrs. Samari looked to Renoir and vineyards to Van Gogh.
“At the end of the week I emerged half-ashamed, uncertain in judgment, and yet with added width to my world. I dimly remembered how you all talked of painting there in Berlin; then I knew nothing, nothing. Or rather now I know nothing, and then I did not know how ignorant I was. And, withal, mentally breathless, I returned with a certain peace and slept to dreams of clouds of light. I rose the next morning lightheaded, rested and strong, and went down blithely to that hole in the ground, to the grim, gigantic task. I was a more complete man—a unit of a real democracy.
“Even as I reached for my shovel the boss yelled at me. ‘Away a week. You’re fired!’ Well, somehow I got back again after a few days. After all, I reckon, I am a good worker. But there was still trouble, and the boss had taken a dislike to me. It was like a groom incurring the displeasure of some high lackey in the court of Louis XIV. As I have said, we subway laborers were not yet organized, and emissaries from the trade unions were working among us. I never knew what unions meant before. I think I was a bit prejudiced against them. They were organizations, to my mind, which took food from the mouths of black men.
“Now suddenly I saw the thing from the other side. Unless we banded ourselves together and as one body against this Leviathan which ‘hires and fires,’ we were helpless, crushed piecemeal, having no voice as to ourselves and our work. And so I went in for the union. We struck: our hours of work were too long; the overtime was too poorly paid; we were being maimed by accidents and cheated of our insurance; we had no decent luncheon time or place. Well, we struck and we were roundly beaten. There were five hungry men eager to take every place we left vacant; mostly black men—they were hungriest. There were the police and politics against us.
“Again I was ‘fired,’ and this time for good. It was strange in this great, busy, and rich city, actually to be among the unemployed, and so much work to be done! I never believed in the unemployed before. To me the unemployed were the lazy, the shiftless, the debauched. But I am not lazy. I am eager for work; I am strong and willing and for a week I actually did not know how I was going to earn my bread.
“Several times and in several places I applied for work, and then at last I found a new reason staring in my face. It was Sammy. He strutted over to me as I came out of one employment office, and stood with his legs apart, scowling at me. He had neither smile nor handshake. ‘Say, bo,’ he blustered, ‘why didn’t you come around and fix up them divorce papers? See here, I’m tired of your damned stallin’! Think you’re going to crawl back to Sara one of these days because your fancy woman has jilted you? Well, by God, you ain’t. You’re going ahead with this divorce, or I’ll damn well drive you out of Chicago.’
“I made no answer. I think I smiled at him a little because he did appear to me pathetically funny; and then I went and got a job. I knew one place where workers were scarce, but I had always shrunk from going there. But that morning I went out to the stockyards and got a job. The world stinks about me. I am lifting rotten food. I am helping to murder things that live. The continual bleating of death beats on my ears and heart. I am drugged with weariness and ugliness. I seem to know as never before what pain and poverty mean. In the world there is only you—only you and that halo about your head which is the worldwide Cause.
“But Sammy’s command set me thinking. I dimly see what must be done to restore the balance and cooperation of the white and black worlds: Brain and Brawn must unite in one body. But where shall the work begin? I begin to believe right here in Chicago, crossroads of the world—midway between Atlantic and Pacific, North and South Poles. This is the place. How shall I begin?”