The Native Son | Page 5

wife was very much worried. Our hero decided in his simple western fashion to go to Germany and find his brother-in-law. He traveled across the country, cajoled the authorities in Washington into giving him a passport, crossed the ocean, ran the British blockade and entered the forbidden land. Straight as an arrow he went to the last address in his brother-in-law's letters. That gentleman, coming home to his lunch, tired, worried and almost penniless, found his Californian kinsman smoking calmly in his room. The Native Son left money enough to pay for the rest of the year of study and the journey home. Then he started on the long trip back.
In the English port at which his ship touched, he was mistaken for a disloyal newspaper man for whom the British Secret Service had long been seeking. He was arrested, searched and submitted to a very disquieting third degree. When they asked him in violent explosive tones what he went into Germany for, he replied in his mild, unexcited Western voice - to give his brother-in-law some money. All Europe is accustomed to crazy Americans of course, but this strained credulity to the breaking point; for nobody who has not tried to travel in the war countries can realize the sheer unbelievability of such guilelessness. The British laughed loud and long. His papers were taken away and sent to London but in a few days everything was returned. A mistake had been made, the authorities admitted, and proper apologies were tendered. But they released him with looks and gestures in which an abashed bewilderment struggled with a growing irritation.
That is a typical Native Son story.
If you are an Easterner and meet the Native Son first in New York (and the only criticism to be brought against him is that he sometimes chooses - think of that - chooses to live outside his native State!) you wonder at the clear-eyed composure, the calm-visioned unexcitability with which he views the metropolis. There is a story of a San Francisco newspaper man who landed for the first time in New York early in the morning. Before night he had explored the city, written a scathing philippic on it and sold it to a leading newspaper. New York had not daunted him. It had only annoyed him. He was quite impervious to its hydra-headed appeal. But you don't get the answer to that imperviousness until you visit the California which has produced the Native Son. Then you understand.
Yes, Reader, your worst fears are justified; I'm going to talk about scenery. But don't say that I didn't warn you! However, as it's got to be done sometime, why not now? I'll be perfectly fair, though; so -
For the Native Son has come from a State whose back yard is two hundred thousand square miles (more or less) of American continent and whose front yard is five hundred thousand square miles (less or more) or Pacific Ocean, whose back fence is ten thousand miles (or thereabouts) of bristling snow-capped mountains and whose front hedge is ten thousand miles (or approximately) of golden foam-topped combers; a State that looks up one clear and unimpeded waterway to the evasive North Pole, and down another clear and unimpeded waterway to the elusive South Pole and across a third clear and unimpeded water way straight to the magical, mystical, mysterious Orient. This sense of amplitude gives the Native Son an air of superiority . . . Yes, you're quite right, it has a touch of superciliousness - very difficult to understand and much more difficult to endure when you haven't seen California; but completely understandable and endurable when you have.
- Californiacs read every word, Easterners skip this paragraph -
Man helped nature to place Italy, Spain, Japan among the wonder regions of the world; but nature placed California there without assistance from anybody. I do not refer alone to the scenery of California which is duplicated in no other spot of the sidereal system; nor to the climate which matches it; nor to its super-mundane fertility, nor to its super-solar fecundity. The railroad folder with its voluble vocabulary has already beaten me to it. I do not refer solely to that rich yellow-and-violet, springtime bourgeoning which turns California into one huge Botticelli background of flower colors and sheens. I do not refer to that heavy purple-and-gold, autumn fruitage, which changes it to a theme for Titian and Veronese. I am thinking particularly of those surprising phenomena left over from pre-historic eras; the "big" trees - the sequoia gigantea, which really belong to the early fairy-tales of H. G. Wells, and to those other trees, not so big but still giants - the sequoia sempivirens or redwoods, which make of California forests black-and-silver compositions of filmy fluttering light and solid bedded shade.