The Native Son | Page 7

unfortunately lack - will provide the correct data. Somebody told me once, I seem to recall, that the Santa Clara valley produces sixty per cent of the worlds prunes. But I may be mistaken. What I prefer to remember is one day's trip in that springtide of prune bloom. For hours and hours of motor speed, we glided through a snowy world that showed no speck of black bark or fleck of green leaf; a world in which the sole relief from a silent white blizzard of blossom was the blue of the sky arch, the purple of distant lupines alternating with the gold of blood-centered poppies, pouring like avalanches down hills of emerald green.
Getting out of the scenery zone only to fall into the climate zone. Reader, it's just the same with the climate as the scenery. It's got to be done some time, so why not now?
That's what California produces in the way of scenery and fodder. So now, let's consider the climate, even if I am invading Jesse Williams's territory. For it has magical properties - that climate of California. It makes people grow big and beautiful and strenuous; it makes flowers grow big and beautiful; it makes fleas grow big and - strenuous. It offers, except in the most southern or the most mountainous regions, no such extremes of heat or cold as are found elsewhere in the country. Its marvel is of course the season which corresponds to our winter. The visitor coming, let us say in February, from the ice-bound and frost-locked East through the flat, dreary Middle West, and stalled possibly on the way, remains glued in stupefaction to the car window. In a very few hours he slides from the white, glittering snow-covered heights of the evergreen-packed Sierras through their purple, hazy, snow-filled depths into the sudden warmth of California.
It is like waking suddenly from a nightmare of winter to a poets or a painter's vision of spring.
Who, having seen this picture in January, could resist describing it? Easterners, I appeal to your sense of justice.
At one side, perhaps close to the train, near hills, on which the live oaks spread big, ebon-emerald umbrellas, serpentine endlessly into the distance. On the other side, far hills, bathed in an amethystine mist, invade the horizon. Between stretches the flat green field of the valley, gashed with tawny streaks that are roads and dotted with soft, silvery bunches that are frisking new-born lambs. Little white houses, with a coquettish air of perpetual summer, flaunt long windows and wooden-lace balconies, Early roses flask pink flames here and there. The green-black meshes of the eucalyptus hedges film the distance. The madrone, richly leaved like the laurel, reflects the sunlight from a bole glistening as though freshly carved from wet gold.
Cheer up! We're getting out of scenery and climate into
The race - a blend of many rich bloods - that California has evolved with the help of this scenery and climate is a rare brew. The physical background is Anglo-Saxon of course; and it still breaks through in the prevailing Anglo-Saxon type. To this, the Celt has brought his poetry and mysticism. To it, the Latin has contributed his art instinct; and not art instinct alone but in an infinity of combinations, the dignity of the Spaniard, the spirit of the French, the passion of the Italian.
- into -
All the foregoing is put in, not to make it harder, but because - as a Californiac - I couldn't help it, and to show you what, in the way of a State, the Native Son is accustomed to. You will have to admit that it is some State. The emblem on the California flag is singularly apposite - it's a bear.
- oh boy! - San Francisco!
And if, in addition to being a Californian, this Native Son visiting the East for the first time, is also a San Franciscan, he has come from a city which is, with the exception of peacetime Paris, the gayest and with the exception of none, the happiest city in the world; a city of extraordinary picturesqueness of situation and an equally notable cosmopolitanism of atmosphere; a city which is, above all cities, a paradise for men.
San Francisco, which invents much American slang, must have provided that phrase - "this man's town." For that is what San Francisco is - a mans town.
I dare not appeal to Easterners; but Californiacs, I ask you how could I forbear to say something about "the city"?
San Francisco, or "the city"', as Californians so proudly and lovingly term her, is peculiarly fortunate in her situation and her weather. Riding a series of hills as lightly as a ship the waves, she makes real exercise of any walking within her limits. Moreover the streets are tied so intimately and inextricably