The Native Son | Page 5

- do creep in, don't blame me. Remember I warned you. Besides sooner
or later I shall be sure to get back to the main theme.

In the January of 1917 I made my annual pilgrimage to California. On
the train was a Native Son who was the hero of the following
astonishing tale. He was one of a large family, of which the only girl
had married a German, a professor in an American university. Shortly
before the Great War, the German brother-in-law went back to the
Fatherland to spend his sabbatical year in study at a German university.
Letters came regularly for a while after the war began; then they
stopped. His 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