This, I think, is about all I can account for of the ideas that went into The Man Who Lived Underground in terms of actual childhood memories; the rest of the concepts and materials were more deliberately arrived at; they came through thought, reading, and talking with others. I think that the best way to begin is to go back and link one of the experiences I’ve already described with some of the “theories” I picked up in northern cities. The first and most powerful occurred when my grandmother was still alive and was living with me in Chicago. At that time, of course, I had all but swept my life clean—at least to my satisfaction—of the religious influences of my grandmother; indeed, I had gone so far as to embrace a concept of life totally opposed to that held by her. Yet one day I went to the library and got a book that miraculously linked my grandmother’s life to my own in a most startling manner; a book that had the strange power of rousing sleeping memories and bridging gulfs between peaks of forgetfulness, making many separate memories one vast web of recollection.

The book was Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives. How did I, a Mississippi-born, grammar-school graduate, Negro boy come in contact with such a highly mannered book of this sort? Well, I heard of it through reading a newspaper account of a very funny woman who was always talking about “a rose is a rose is a rose” and who smoked a rare form of dope in a pipe three feet long while reclining upon a satin couch. I was solemnly assured by the man who had written the account in the newspaper that this woman was “stone crazy”; but, in his condemnation of her, he made one exception: He said that Stein’s story of a Negro girl, “Melanctha,” was really a good story, even though slightly screwy.

Being curious to read anything about Negroes—or maybe because I was unemployed most of the time and idleness is a form of curiosity!—I went to the library and got Three Lives and brought it directly into the home where my grandmother lived. Two more utterly dissimilar things, on the face of it, I imagine, never were brought into closer juxtaposition. (At this time my grandmother would not dare molest my books; I was helping to pay the bills in those days. The northern environment awed and baffled her and my ability to earn a few dollars had given me a new value in her eyes. It may be that she weighed the difference between having rent paid and the moral satisfaction of burning books she hated and decided in favor of rent! The North had undermined her mores to that extent. . . .) I took the book into my room and commenced to read “Melanctha” and, suddenly, the vague, foolish wish I’d made in the sunshine of a summer afternoon in Mississippi, on the steps of my home with the older folks sitting on the porch, was gratified. While turning the pages of “Melanctha” I suddenly began to hear the English language for the first time in my life! And not only that, but I heard English as Negroes spoke it: simple, melodious, tolling, rolling, rough, infectious, subjective, laughing, cutting. . . . Words that I’d used every day but whose power I’d never suspected . . . Words which I’d known all of my life but which I’d never really heard . . . And not only the words, but the winding psychological patterns that lay back of them!