I: Twenty-One
I’ve Known Rivers
That November the First World War ended. In Cleveland, everybody poured into the streets to celebrate the Armistice. Negroes, too, although Negroes were increasingly beginning to wonder where, for them, was that democracy they had fought to preserve. In Cleveland, a liberal city, the color line began to be drawn tighter and tighter. Theaters and restaurants in the downtown area began to refuse to accommodate colored people. Landlords doubled and tripled the rents at the approach of a dark tenant. And when the white soldiers came back from the war, Negroes were often discharged from their jobs and white men hired in their places.
The end of the war! But many of the students at Central kept talking, not about the end of the war, but about Russia, where Lenin had taken power in the name of the workers, who made everything, and who would now own everything they made. “No more pogroms,” the Jews said, “no more race hatred, no more landlords.” John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World shook Central High School, too.
The daily papers pictured the Bolsheviki as the greatest devils on earth, but I didn’t see how they could be that bad if they had done away with race hatred and landlords—two evils that I knew well at first hand.
My father raised my allowance that year, so I was able to help my mother with the expenses of our household. It was a pleasant year for me, for I was a senior. I was elected Class Poet and Editor of our Year Book. As an officer in the drill corps, I wore a khaki uniform and leather puttees, and gave orders. I went calling on a little brownskin girl, who was as old as I was—seventeen—but only in junior high school, because she had just come up from the poor schools of the South. I met her at a dance at the Longwood Gym. Sometimes she wore a red dress that was very becoming to her, so I wrote a poem about her that declared:
When Susanna Jones wears red
Her face is like an ancient cameo
Turned brown by the ages.Come with a blast of trumpets,
Jesus!When Susanna Jones wears red
A queen from some time-dead Egyptian night
Walks once again.Blow trumpets, Jesus!
And the beauty of Susanna Jones in red
Burns in my heart a love-fire sharp like pain.Sweet silver trumpets,
Jesus!
I always tried to keep verses and poems apart, although I saw no harm in writing verses if you felt like it, and poetry if you could.
June came. And graduation. Like most graduations, it made you feel both sorry and glad: sorry to be leaving and glad to be going. Some students were planning to enter college, but not many, because there was no money for college in most of Central’s families.
My father had written me to come to Mexico again to discuss with him my future plans. He hinted that he would send me to college if I intended to go, and he thought I had better go.
I didn’t want to return to Mexico, but I had a feeling I’d never get any further education if I didn’t, since my mother wanted me to go to work and be, as she put it, “of