I shall now relate another experience from my childhood to show how such things can be instilled into a child and yet when that child manifests it in his conduct it will be rejected by the parent who did not think that the child would dare carry out their teachings in a literal manner. I was living in Jackson, Mississippi, when the Leopold and Loeb trial was a subject of national discussion. I remember one summer afternoon when the entire family had gathered upon the front porch—the older people sat on the porch and the children sat on the steps—and were listening intently to my uncle who was reading a newspaper account of the trial, and of how Leopold and Loeb were so brilliant that, though but nineteen years, they had learned to speak German, French, and Spanish. Suddenly I, a Negro boy who had not in all my life ever heard any language spoken but English, had a strange desire to hear other languages, and especially English!

“Uncle, how does German sound?” I asked.

“Why, I imagine it sounds to a German just like English sounds to you,” he explained.

“I wish I could forget English for a few minutes, just so I could listen to it and hear how it sounds,” I piped up brightly.

The array of elderly Negroes—my blood relatives on the porch there—were struck dumb that summer afternoon. They stared at me. Then my uncle leaned forward.

“That boy is coming to no good end,” he said, shaking his head. “Imagine someone saying that he wants to forget his language so he can hear how it sounds!”

Yet it seemed that they could not realize that it was their teaching me their religion, their encouraging me to live beyond the world, to be in the world but not of the world, that had implanted the germ of such ideas in me. This is another experience that gradually found its way, in a modified form, into The Man Who Lived Underground. Years later anything of this emotional complexion that ever rose in my experience reminded me of those early experiences. It may be that those events that create fear or enchantment in a young mind are the ones whose impressions last longest; it may be that the neural paths of response made in the young form the streets, tracks, and roadways over which the vehicles of later experiences run. . . . It may be that a man goes through life seeking, blindly and unconsciously, for the repetition of those dim webs of conditioning which he learned at an age when he could make no choice. . . . This, of course, is speculation.

Especially did Mark Twain’s What Is Man? intrigue me by the manner in which Twain stood outside of human life and gazed at it; in reading that book my mind and feelings were swept back to the teachings and attitudes of my grandmother. I’ve often wondered just what kind of childhood conditioning must Mark Twain have undergone to have made his mind run so often into such channels. Though a white American, a mocker of religion, he, too, perhaps, must have caught some inkling of the tendency so widespread in the vast Mississippi Valley that made men and women stand aside and gaze with wistful, baffled eyes upon the riddle of their existence. In my reading of Twain my childhood experiences would return and make what I was reading seem strangely familiar. . . . (The recurring motif of the strangely familiar that runs through The Man Who Lived Underground was based entirely upon my memories of those years of reading and living. I’ve often wondered if there is a relationship between religion and crime, that is, what is the effect of the story of Christ’s death and agony upon the cross upon children of five and six years of age. I’ve heard parents express horror at their children listening to crime stories on the radio; yet on Sunday mornings they never hesitate to send them off to Sunday school to hear the most horrific story of all. . . .)