have come to find out. I have not been sent by anybody, but was just prompted by the Spirit to come out here and make your acquaintance, and so bring tidings home to England. I hope you will take that as an assurance of loving interest in you, and a promise for the future. I am glad to see you have made such progress since slavery days and have in Norfolk fine houses and churches and banks and a theatre and restaurants and businesses, and that you have such a large measure of happiness and freedom. I believe you have great gifts to offer on the altar of American civilization, and so far from remaining a problem you will prove a treasure.” And I told some touching words of my friend Hugh Chapman, of the chapel of the Savoy, in London: “Mankind is saved, not by a white man, or by a black, but by one who combines both—the little brown Man of Nazareth.” [47] It was a strange sensation, that of facing the Negro congregation. I could find no touch, no point of contact, could indeed take nothing from them. The spiritual atmosphere was an entirely different one from that of a gathering of Whites. I should have been inclined to say that there was no spiritual atmosphere whatever. For me it was like speaking to an empty room and a vast collection of empty seats. But I know there was something there, though I could not realize it. [48] [48] After the service there came up to me a purely delightful creature, full of an almost dangerous ardor for what I had said. She was the leading spirit at the Liberty Club for colored soldiers and jack tars. In the afternoon I listened to some wonderful singing at another church. The little black organist woman sang at the top of her voice while she bent over the keys, and waved the spirit into her choir by eager movements with the back of her hand. “Take me, shake me, don’t let me sleep,” they sang, and it was infinitely worth while. I felt that in the great ultimate harmony we could not do without this voice, the voice of the praise of the dark children. Next week I went over to Newport News. On a wall in Norfolk I read: “T. Adkins, Newport News,” and underneath someone had written, “You could not pay me to live there: Robert Johnson, Norfolk.” That might possibly explain the relativity of the two places. Newport News is a ramshackle settlement on the sands across the water from Norfolk. It has a nondescript, ill-dressed, well-paid, wild,
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