And so for a couple of years my life was divided between my music and my school books.
Music is a universal art; anybody’s music belongs to everybody; you can’t limit it to race or country.
It is a struggle; for though the black man fights passively, he nevertheless fights; and his passive resistance is more effective at present than active resistance could possibly be. He bears the fury of the storm as does the willow tree.
In an astonishingly short time I reached the point where the language taught itself – where I learned to speak merely by speaking. This point is the place which students taught foreign languages in our schools and colleges find great difficulty in reaching. I think the main trouble is that they learn too much of a language at a time. A French child with a vocabulary of two hundred words can express more spoken ideas than a student of French can with a knowledge of two thousand.
My boy, you are by blood, by appearance, by education, and by tastes a white man. Now, why do you want to throw your life away amidst the poverty and ignorance, in the hopeless struggle, of the black people of the United States?
It is a difficult thing for a white man to learn what a colored man really thinks; because, generally, with the latter an additional and different light must be brought to bear on what he thinks; and his thoughts are often influenced by considerations so delicate and subtle that it would be impossible for him to confess or explain them to one of the opposite race.
It may be because Southerners are very much like Frenchmen in that they must talk; and not only must they talk, but they must express their opinions.
New York had impressed me as a place where there was lots of money and not much difficulty in getting it.
I lived between my music and books, on the whole a rather unwholesome life for a boy to lead. I dwelt in a world of imagination, of dreams and air castles – the kind of atmosphere that sometimes nourishes a genius, more often men unfitted for the practical struggles of life.
Do you know, I don’t object to anyone’s having prejudices so long as those prejudices don’t interfere with my personal liberty.
The Southern whites are not yet living quite in the present age; many of their general ideas hark back to a former century, some of them to the Dark Ages. In the light of other days they are sometimes magnificent. Today they are often cruel and ludicrous.
It is the spirit of the South to defend everything belonging to it. The North is too cosmopolitan and tolerant for such a spirit.
For days I could talk of nothing else with my mother except my ambitions to be a great man, a great colored man, to reflect credit on the race and gain fame for myself.
It is a struggle; for though the white man of the South may be too proud to admit it, he is, nevertheless, using in the contest his best energies; he is devoting to it the greater part of his thought and much of his endeavor.
As I grew older, my love for reading grew stronger. I read with studious interest everything I could find relating to colored men who had gained prominence. My heroes had been King David, then Robert the Bruce; now Frederick Douglass was enshrined in the place of honor.
We hit slavery through a great civil war. Did we destroy it? No, we only changed it into hatred between sections of the country: in the South, into political corruption and chicanery, the degradation of the blacks through peonage, unjust laws, unfair and cruel treatment; and the degradation of the whites by their resorting to these practices, the paralyzation of the public conscience, and the ever over-hanging dread of what the future may bring.
A space was quickly cleared in the crowd, and a rope placed about his neck, when from somewhere came the suggestion, “Burn him!” It ran like an electric current. Have you ever witnessed the transformation of human beings into savage beasts? Nothing can be more terrible.
Can you imagine,” he went on to say, “what would have been the condition of things eventually if there had been no war, and the South had been allowed to follow its course? Instead of one great, prosperous country with nothing before it but the conquests of peace, a score of petty republics, as in Central and South America, wasting their energies in war with each other pr om revolutions.
There were two immediate results of my forced loneliness: I began to find company in books, and greater pleasure in music.
The man who has not loved before he was fourteen has missed a foretaste of Elysium.
The masses of Harlem get a good deal of pleasure out of things far too simple for most other folks.