May 26th, 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me…

Threescore and ten and my hands brittle around this old quilled spade to dig once again into the hard soil of my mind. I unearth one dull mentation that deserves polishing, a ruby among stones: Even romances can be cultivated amid malevolence.

Outside, the streets of Greenwood swirl in heat and sweat. It is Thursday night, “the negroes Friday night”, when Tulsa’s aristocrats reluctantly relent their consumption of black lives for an evening’s respite. Muffled moans of a trumpet swell in and out of my window. The noise, attributed to a young trumpet player they call Satchmo from New Orleans, plays incessantly. I only know because he toured Tulsa last year and as editor of the leading newspaper in black Tulsa, it is my unfortunate responsibility to know all things. The screeching and wailing trumpet punctuates my thoughts as if the needled phonograph found a home in Satchmo’s foot, rendering the moans, bellows, and staccato punches from his trumpet profane. W. C. Handy’s no better but I prefer his arrangements over the discomfort of Satchmo’s blare and, of course, neither compare to the ivory capers of Scott Joplin but herein I date myself. Handy and Satchmo and herds of musicians like them herald a new age in music (so I am told) an age that reflects the plight of our people – and striking that ironic note, I must constrain my tongue.

I am (questionably) a reliable arbiter on cultural progress. From the recesses of my memory, any bugler’s horn still summons me to scramble for my sanity as in that great gray dark of the war. Perhaps my relic opinions on lesser matters are safer ensconced in my “acorn head”, as a white drover once convinced me, his foot firmly planted on my trachea.

Constraining my tongue is a long acquired habit. I struggle to staunch what flows from my heart to my mouth but by force of will I learned to censor, speaking plainly, at best unaffected. I write, liberally. I have rarely spoken so. Decades of lowering my eyes, my “haughty gaze”, halting my hands, bridling my mouth for protection. I have crafted an art out of speaking plainly but it is not how I write. The controlled channels of the printed page release me but suffuse my anger, refine my ferocity, and prohibit a reckless, verbal deluge that could consume me and my people, whom the white man condemns as savage.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name…

Have suffer’d greatly, both with those that loved me, and alone. Pour. Sip. Pause. Sip. If this is tea, bring me coffee; if this is coffee, bring me tea. We repeated Lincoln’s coffee anecdote frequently in the camps. We drank the sooted dredge and gnawed something inedible referred to as hard tack, purportedly made of compressed horse meat (though we ate it). One wouldn’t think a memory such as that fond but I cannot help staring in this dark cup and relishing the richness of this simple pleasure in contrast. Sipping it now, on the streets of a bustling black community once unfathomable (“black Wall Street” as it is known), the savor is not in the sip.

My home sits in the center of the Greenwood borough on Greenwood Ave, right atop the hustle. The presses one floor below me are not running now but the smell of ink lingers with the aroma of the Bell and Little Restaurant next door. Evening customers line up past their front doors, spilling onto the streets where the cigar hawkers and candy sellers and shoe shiners ply their trade. Throngs of people make their way toward the Dreamland Theatre to witness Chaplin’s comedic bumbling while others just stand or amble in small groups. Thursday night means letting steam from the week’s pressure of working in white homes and businesses slowly evaporate. No one else has work on their minds now but even when I am not working, I am working.

This evening, nearing the eve of which I shall finally retire, my erratic thoughts traipse backwards, tumbling awkward over decades of progress and regress, carried along like the electric current beneath a dry riverbed, which, after so many years, still pulses with the dim surge of possibility. Like that buzzing horn wafting in and out of my window, my thoughts rise and fall on a similar tide but when the waves roll back they yield some memories I am reluctant to collect. Unlike Ulysses, all times I have not enjoyed but all times I have scudded before a gale and always through a storm that dimmed my path, though the journey started with a clear view of the constellation.

For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy…

Much have I seen and known; cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments. My occupation as editor compels me to reserve my strength of opinion for the printed page. I am always relieved to return to this pen and paper, it gives shape to my capricious emotions allowing my mind to act as an ombudsman over what I feel for what I feel is not always a true depiction of what I think. Would that every man possessed the filter of ink and paper.

My lifelong preoccupation with words harken even to my days when the shackles of Thadeus Adam’s overshadowed those of Jim Crow’s. Ulysses honored; Liberty dishonoured, but both began with hunger in their hearts. To speak of myself in third person seems appropriate for I am one I hardly know myself; my race and my identity, as nomadic and restless as the Hebrews.

Whereas Ulysses conquered kingdoms, Liberty forged minds of men with unadorned phraseology and carefully constructed words. My life’s pursuit has been one of needling loopholes in white opinions. But years of training men to think for themselves, fomenting freedom in wilderness, has rendered my voice somewhat fatigued. I feel more cleanly a dropsy ague in my will. I think Tennyson elsewhere described many of us wanderers as ‘pilgrims of the weary heart’ and I am weary.

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move…

I am a part of all that I have met. I turn, carefully, this withered copy of Tennyson’s Poems in my hands. Opening the front cover, the inscription transports me to the tent of Lieutenant Colonel Branson. Though fatigued by tutelage, I’ve not wearied of the printed word, I have traveled through it. The words remain the world whose margin fades when we move in them. To my dim eyes the printed word remains pregnant, more so now on the blunted edge of liberty and in the waning sunset of my years, than ever. Lieutenant Branson’s words may fade in the flyleaf but they emblazon in my mind:

“The printed word is the black man’s self-emancipator. His release from bondage remains within his own grasp. It is now he who holds whip and chain against himself if ignorance prevails.”

- Lieut. Col. Branson, March 31st, 1866

Back to Branson’s old copy of Lord Alfred, I find myself burrowing in his words finding comfort, understanding. Just as Branson said I would. I seek fire and enthusiasm. Kindling.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought…

To follow knowledge like a sinking star. Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. My body fades as one who has interminably bivouaced here but my mind is as effervescent as a Missouri spring. Before I battled in the field of words, I battled in the field of war and sometimes it seems as though both alike can yield horrific tragedy. Bound in slavery, bonded in battle, as Union soldiers we fought physical foes but here in days of repair and reconstruction, we fight wars of words in legislation, editorials and pamphlets. Ideology an invisible adversary but deadly still.

These black letters filling white paper, these characters and I have woven lonely days as in a somber dance, a tryst between ebony and wool. Black letters on white paper. When compressed too deeply they seep crimson, like today when the black headline in a white paper foments the lynching of young black elevator operator Dick Rowland for assaulting a white girl. Fresh on our minds is the story of a recent Memphis lynching when a black man named Ells Persons was strung up only after they had hacked off his ears, soaked him with kerosene and ignited him alive, his moaning blaze serving as candlelight for the thousands of white onlookers. The black letters can work wickedly in a white world, inducing fear and opening rivulets of raging rivers of hate spilling across all color lines. When the floodwaters subside, the debris clutters our minds, pollutes the landscape of progress. Memory prevails. Black blood from white lashes. Black hate for white injustice. Black suppression in a white republic. Our history of fear inexorably intertwined: white, black.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine…

I cannot convince Andrew, my own dear Telemachus, that words are our greatest weapons. When we stand to look man-to-man, eye-to-eye, he is neither tender, prudent, nor patient I’m afraid and my words, once again, meet malice, a formidable foe. His argument, at times persuasive, is that words are the weak weapons of old fools and that the seed of revolution may begin in words but can only be fulfilled by force. “How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat?” he asks, quoting Du Bois. He is always quoting Du Bois.

My household god, Booker T. Washington and his gentle influencer, Frederick Douglas, he does not adore. I cite both frequently, my own doubts obscured by emphatic pleas, “Despite superficial and temporary signs which might lead one to entertain a contrary opinion, there was never a time when I felt more hopeful for the race than I do at the present” (Washington). I bear a responsibility, a mantle, to lead peaceably even when that old man rises within me, the one slain long ago, the life left smoldering in a smithy of hate.

Andrew sees straight through the rhetoric to my dubiety, as children often do, and scoffs. His scorn for weakness is permissible given our loss of Benjamin, his son (my grandson) in the recent war. Benjamin’s remains lie somewhere beneath the heels of French citizens. He once sent us pamphlets that Germany’s propaganda patrol dropped on our black soldiers. The pamphlets decried our supposed freedom, providing a blistering assault on the resolve of our young men by questioning the American rights of negro soldiers fighting alongside whites. “They can die together but not vote together.” (Our nation percolates in nothing if not contradictions).

One would think Germany had enough prejudices not to contend with ours and no one abrogates the horror that happened there but the psychological missile hit its mark. On Monday, Memorial Day, our young men will march the streets of Tulsa not with the white soldiers they fought valiantly alongside, but bringing up the rear of the parade, behind the jugglers and clowns, suffering the derision of cowards who scoff that a black man dare don a uniform of “liberty”. Germans seemed to have no trouble sighting in on all our soldiers regardless of skin color. Andrew scolds me with Du Bois “we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.”

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die…

Death closes all: but something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done. Andrew thinks me soft and I am less so, simply weathered. Mine has been a campaign of successive, tiny battles in a long fought war for equality. Save the War Between the States, a war won in inches.

It is for Benjamin and the many young Dick Rowlands that I now write this reflection. Since my powers of rhetoric wax feebly, I must tread this path with my pen, a path I’m reluctant to climb. Throughout my sojourning, the thought of returning in my mind to live it again fills me with trepidation and ... shame. Having traveled once, I am unsure I have the fortitude to journey back again even if only in my head. Some memories should remain unstirred.

But I cannot convince Andrew and those of his opinion that I have lifted the sword vainly, so I’m left to evince, once again, by the only armament I know. Compelled by a desire to avert more death and destruction toward my people, I walk a rail, sliding, on one side the expedient path of force with interminable results and the other, the methodical equanimity of resistance by rationale. My old, quilled spade, a prize won in the army camps, dips in my inkwell, imbued in irony yet again, scribbling words that Andrew deems strained eunuchs. All I know is that I must bleed again, this time from the point of my pen, by words, here on these pages.

This tattered copy of Tennyson’s poetry must, once again, bear me along. I return to Tennyson, Marvell, Milton, Melville, Thomas Gray, George Herbert, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats and more, for by their words I am sustained. Branson’s dear copies well loved, well worn. Andrew thinks my affinity for white men’s words makes me malleable, “makes me white”. I counter that his opinion is recalcitrant, galvanized by hate. I unsuccessfully deploy Du Bois myself sometimes, stating that black or white, we should seek an education that above all, encourages aspiration and not merely “meat and raiment”.  It is also painfully obvious to all that the negroes’ written words remain a paucity because of our indifference to the priority of education and publication. Until our words become alive on pages of their own and in abundant supply, I will return to learn from whomever necessary. Besides, on the printed page, I sometimes see black and white in harmony (but I won’t tell that to Andrew).

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Arduous as it is to essay this task, I lean into it and recall that at first, words were not a battle nor a burden but a love affair with letters, for even romances can be cultivated amid malevolence. Before I learned through words to bridle hate, I learned through words to dream, to think, and above all, to envy. On the old master’s plantation, in the soldiers’ camps, on the cattle drives, in the classrooms, on the prairie, and in editorial pages. Through war, famine, plenitude, and poverty, words burnished in me a small flame. From the first time my fingers formed the letter A on the open palm of my mother’s hand in the dank corner of the plantation stable, to the constant instruction to my people of the printed word, the squiggly movements of my forefinger inscribed a destiny. Those first lines, atop the pulse of my guiding spirit, led me where I sit today, writing my last testament.

Slave, soldier, freedman, drover, teacher, cattleman, and my true metier, writer. Liberty is my name as Liberty is my story, and these are my words.