Feasting and feting and pleasure there was aplenty for me, much kindness and generous praise, but what I remember are not these. I remember first an invitation in New York to view an exhibition of paintings by Negroes. I went from curiosity and what I saw confounded me. The paintings were of unimagined horrors. I saw sad dark faces, I saw dead bodies swinging from trees, I saw charred remains of houses and tragic children. I saw narrow slum streets and slouching poverty-stricken people, I saw patient ignorant faces. And in the crowd there to welcome me I saw the sensitive intelligent faces of educated Negro men and women. Of them I demanded an explanation of the pictures and they explained them to me. What I saw was what they had lived. I heard about prejudice and segregation and denial of opportunity to these citizens of the United States because they were dark. I heard about lynching.
It was a blow from which I could not recover. To me America had always been the heavenly country, the land where all was clean and kind and free. I had seen white men cruel to dark people in other places, but those white men had not been Americans, and so I had somehow from childhood supposed that no Americans were cruel to people whose only difference was that they were dark of skin. And I had known so well the horrors and dangers of race prejudice! Had I not, because I was white, suffered from it even in my childhood? It seemed to me, as I listened now to the Negro men and women who explained to me the pictures, that I remembered all that I had purposely forgotten, how as a child I had heard other children call me a foreign devil because I was fair and they were yellow-skinned, and how they had called my blue eyes “wild beast eyes,” and when I sat in a Chinese theater to watch a play or in the court of a temple to enjoy wandering minstrels and actors on a summer’s day, how always the rascals and rogues in the plays had blue eyes and red hair and big noses and I was vaguely wounded because it meant that the Chinese thought my kind was evil. I remembered how since the revolution I had sometimes been spat upon in the streets by Chinese who did not know me except that I was a foreigner. Above all, I remembered the day when I had all but lost my life because I was a foreigner, though I had spent my life in China and spoke Chinese better than English. And above all I remembered that in the whole world it was still the white people who were the minority, for most of the world’s people are dark.
Yet what broke my heart was not that I had suffered any of these things, but that my own people could commit such offenses against others, and that these others were their fellow citizens. Americans could do this! I stood there before the ghastly paintings that day and gazed at them, and listened to their meaning, and my heart simply filled up. I had to speak or to weep, and I suppose I did both. I cannot remember what I said, but somehow or other I found myself speaking to a group of people, white as well as colored, who had gathered about me, and to them, who were strangers to me, and yet all my own people, I poured out my heart. I tried to tell them that unless we Americans fulfilled our destiny, unless we practiced the great principles of human equality upon which our nation was based, those principles which are our only true superiority, we would one day have to suffer for the sins of white men everywhere in the world, we would have to bear the punishments of Asia upon the white man. And that we might prove our difference from those white men, whom we were not, we must begin here and now to show, by our actions to our own citizens who were not white, that we and they were one, that all were Americans alike, the citizens of a great nation, the members of one body.
Something like this I said, trying to make those Americans understand not only how none in Asia would believe us if at home we degraded people merely because of skin color, but also how we betrayed ourselves and our high calling as a free people if we did not accept all human beings as our equals. When I had finished speaking, I went away at once and remained alone for several days, not wanting to see anyone or to hear a human voice until I had faced and understood the full meaning and portent of this monstrous situation in my own country, a situation which involved us in the whole danger of the white man in Asia, though it was on the other side of the globe. Thereafter I read everything I could on the subject, and I came to know many Negroes, men and women, and I made up my mind that if ever I did return to my own country to live, I would make them my first concern. I know now that this primary disillusionment hastened my decision to return to China, and so to postpone the final question of whether I ought to leave Asia.
There was a final pleasant event. It was a visit to William Lyon Phelps and his wife in New Haven. There I went at Commencement to accept an honorary degree from Yale. It was a warm June day, and when I stepped from the train it was to find myself in a crowd of well-dressed and happy parents, relieved and eager to see their sons graduated at last. Not a porter was to be found to carry my rather heavy bag, and when I approached tentatively a large Negro, he brushed me off saying that he had too much to do. I picked up the bag and was staggering off with it when Dr. Phelps himself, in his cream-white suit, came hurrying to meet me with delightful cries of joy, for he had the gift of making every guest feel welcome. The stately porter, observing this, immediately dropped the innumerable bags he was carrying and hastened across the platform to snatch my own and to glare at me with reproachful eyes.
“Whyn’t you tell me you was comin’ to see Mist’ Billy Phelps, lady?” he demanded. “I always tends to his company first.”
I went off in triumph, Dr. Phelps hauling me along by the arm, and we got in his car, the porter delaying to see us go and to lift his cap. Thence down the street we went, Dr. Phelps talking without let and his car dashing and darting about most alarmingly until he pulled up with a jerk before the handsome red brick house which was his home. Inside his wife Annabel waited for us, as cool, as sweetly sharp as usual, and I was sent up to a big square bedroom where the bed was so high that I had to step up on a stool that night when I went to bed.
One never went to bed early, however, if one could help it, in that charming house. The big living room downstairs was also the library and there I spent a fine evening looking at rare books, and saw for the first time the autographs of my favorite English authors, most of them long dead. Thus I saw the handwriting of Charles Dickens and Robert Browning and Thackeray and Lord Byron and George Eliot, and Dr. Phelps recounted to me the wickedness of book thieves and how he had lost valuable books to various persons whom he had supposed honest. And this, he went on, in spite of his keeping a large tableful of books by the door to which anyone could help himself, only they were all modern books and so not precious, sent to him free, he admitted, by publishers who wanted his praise if possible, knowing how generous he was to praise. For William Phelps, if he was too kind to be a critic, was so because he had all but missed being a writer himself. He had the writer’s temperament and understood very well what it is to make a book and see it destroyed in a moment by someone who is unable himself to write so much as a bit of fiction. Writers are usually poor critics, I do not doubt, certainly of themselves, but the vice versa of that is still more true. Yet William Phelps was shrewder than he seemed, and he could gauge very well the final measure of a book, and when he did not like it he ignored it altogether.