And (he turned to look after her) she did.
Then all three were gone.
He was left only his own smile and their brief memory. Shrugging his suit jacket together, putting his big, country-boy hand against one stone wall, he started up.
And came out onto the concrete ramp rolling toward the first stanchion. Beyond green rails, cars passed left and right of him — along with a trolley. As its troller crossed beneath sustaining guys, its antenna jangling under the overhead wire, sparks spit down. Rocking away toward Brooklyn, a cart lagged behind, its gun-gray horse and its colored driver, in his gray slouch brim, impassive beside the electrical crackling, the blue-green shower of light.
Hart Crane was born on July 21, 1899 in Garrettsville, Ohio. He was the only child of Clarence Arthur and Grace Hart Crane.
Between him and the traffic, a cable thick as an oil drum lifted slant and vertical cords toward the double vault of stone. Sam started forward, walking toward where the cement flooring gave way to wood. And as hundreds on hundreds of thousands of pedestrians had thought so many times before, Sam thought: Lord, this is marvelous!
In July of 1923, Edna St.-Vincent Millay married Dutch coffee importer Eugen Jan Boissevain. The couple lived at 75 % Bedford Street, at nine feet wide the narrowest house in New York City.
At first it seemed the walkway stopped when it hit the bridge’s stanchion. But when he got closer, some white boys, one copper-haired and none more than fourteen, ran round the central stone column, down — those were metal steps up to the higher level, not a ribbed green metal wall — the stairs. Check these off.
Braithwaite died in 1962. Angelina Grimké in 1958. Fenton Johnson in 1958 also…. Effie Lee New-some was doing poorly this past summer, I was told by a lady from Wilberforce, but she was still alive. Her address has been Box 291, Wilberforce, Ohio.
Nanina Alba’s address is 303 Fonville Street, Tuskegee, Alabama. Shall I write her for bionotes, or would you like to?… There is a Charles E. Wheeler, Jr. listed in the Chicago telephone directory, but I can’t get an answer there — yet. Will try again. I am not sure (in fact, I doubt) this is the poet…. Jean Toomer is still in a nursing home in Doylestown, Pa. His wife Marjorie Toomer can be reached at their home, “The Barn”, R. D. 2, Doylestown. She will answer letters promptly. I have visited her twice. She is active for civil rights. Jean’s literary disappointments after Cane were shattering. He tried desperately to repeat that artistic achievement (but not as a Negro) and failed…. I persuaded her and him to give his papers and literary effects to Fisk. A large collection. There is now a chance that Cane may be reprinted along with some of Jean’s unpublished writings…. The sonnet by Allen Tate is perfect for The Poetry of the Negro. His background as a Fugitive and redhot I’LL TAKE MY STANDer adds to its effectiveness. As Countee said about himself, Allen’s “conversion came high-priced,” no doubt…. and there are letters from him in the Toomer Collection. Hart Crane was trying to arrange for the two (Toomer and Tate) to meet. In any case, we can now see that the early anti-Negro expressions of the Fugitives probably reflected guilt feelings, as this “Sonnet at Christmas” makes clear in Tate’s case…. By the way, I also sponsored Frank Lima for his Opportunity. We should let him pass for colored, if he wishes. I thought he was Puerto Rican at the time. Nobody would object to a Mexican identifying as a Negro. Not even a black muslim or a black panther. And I will not object to a couple or so poems by Mason Jordan Mason so long as we make it plain in the biographical note that at least we are not sure. He certainly writes in Negro, as Karl Shapiro says of Tolson. And he’s good.
Once Lewy had made a clock from a ten-gallon kerosene can, a hole punched in the bottom to dribble water (“No, no — !” Mama said. “Don’t bring that in here. Set it out by the pump!“) and a board float in the top, fixed to a cord, that, as the float lowered, turned a spool on another board that rotated an elaborately scrolled hand, from an old clock Lewy’d found, about a cardboard dial. The first dial Lewy had drawn was marked with minutes in five-minute groupings. It kept time for practically three-quarters of an hour. But that evening Lewy came over and closeted himself with Papa in the study, and the next day he’d replaced the dial with one far more elaborate, drawn on a piece of parchment, inked in reds and blacks and greens and suggesting some medieval illuminated compass, now marked with a time scale of three fourteen-minute intervals, each divided in two, then further divided into three, with the major divisions indicated by signs from the zodiac and the smaller ones notated in Hebrew letters, representing a special, ancient, mystic time scale, out of Africa from before the dawn of the West — which Lewy had just made up. Lewy had explained, laughing, to Sam and John: “Now white boys do not do things like this. Your daddy told me that when he was helping me with the letters last night,” and John said, “You should’ve used Arab letters on it! Or Egyptian!” And Lewy, who knew what John was getting at, said, “I like the Jewish letters. They’re easier to remember. And the Bishop doesn’t speak Egyptian — yet.” Helping Lewy fill the clock, or sitting, the three of them, out by the pump, watching the hand’s imperceptible progress across the mystic signs, at such moments Sam could forget the occasional throbs of desire to be the same clear and earth-dark hue as Lewy and his own father. Well, nobody had trouble telling John was colored, for all his rusty hair. Strange though, Sam thought; such an instant as that was what let him look with sympathy at such a group of city white children — who, he was sure, from their ragged socks, worn shoes, and the rope tied around one’s waist in place of a belt, were just the boys who didn’t do things like that.
They broke around him, running — and were gone.
I don’t expect us to find anything from the Allen Ginsberg cabal that meets our criteria. So why don’t we close the door now.
Beside the steps stood a wooden booth with a glassed-in window, before which were the same brass bars he’d become familiar with in front of tellers at the bank and clerks in the subway’s change booths and post offices. Below the wooden shelf with its worn depression for the change to slide into, was another sign —
Tolclass="underline"
Pedestrians 1¢
— faded and flaking. But perhaps the toll was not in effect today — or, indeed, had not been in effect for some time: the booth was closed; no one sat behind the bars to collect.
Sam climbed the stairs and walked around the great stone column — on the near side of which a black-bronze plaque explained that the bridge had first been opened to traffic in 1883—forty-one years ago!
He strolled out on the walkway, looking down over the green rail, at the tracks between him and the trolley wires.
Dead in the afternoon — hasn’t the sky? — , gas lamps at intervals stood along the walkway’s sides. A sailor in early whites came toward him, hurled balled waxed paper from a late lunch over the rail, to follow it with a delicately flipped toothpick from his lips’ corner. He was carrying some kind of Japanese fan. Over its folds, pastel waves were painted in blues and blacks. The sailor hawked across the bar, returned from moving the other authority recently dropped, and gave Sam a grin: Sam imagined sputum sparkling down between girders to the water. The fellow sauntered away around the stone. (The fan. Where was it from? Where would it go?… Cathay.) Benches with wrought iron backs sat along the walkway, wrested as much of that severe sunshine as you need now. Now turning, Sam saw the lower city’s skyline, towers above the water — yes, and there, on the way you go, were his skyscrapers! And there in the other direction was the green woman with the upraised torch — Liberty! Tug and sail and barge traffic moved lazily about the sound.