But more than that; suddenly I began to hear my grandmother speak for the first time in my life! I don’t mean that she came to the door of my room while I was reading and spoke to me; she was in some other part of the house. What I mean is that while sitting there reading, my mind was swept back over the years to the days when I lived in Mississippi, to the thousands of times when I’d heard my grandmother speak to me and I began to hear the intonation of her voice, the rhythm of her simple, vivid sentences. In fact, that little linking of memory opened wide to me the language of my entire race. “Melanctha” was written in such a manner that I could actually stand outside of the English language and hear it . . .

Am I piling a too-heavy burden of interpretation upon this simple incident? No; in school I was made to study the English of England, not the English of my environment; for every word I used in daily speech, my school urged me to use others on the grounds of correct grammar. That kind of instruction may be all right for a man longing to be a school teacher, or a man aspiring to be a bank teller; but it is death to a man seeking to determine the nature of his experiences, for he is taught to shun the very things—words used by his closest friends!—that may open the door to the vast world of feeling existing about him.

There is a personally poignant note to be added here; after having read “Melanctha,” I began to engage my grandmother in long conversations merely to hear her express herself, in order that I could revel in the way she talked, the way that “Melanctha” had enabled me to understand. Then my grandmother died suddenly and I had to depend entirely upon my memory to reconstruct her innumerable conversations, speeches of endearment, admonishments, longing, horror, anger, fear, threats, exhortations . . .

I shall add another queer experience. In a leading labor journal—sometime after this—I came across a violent attack upon the prose of Stein, an attack that branded her the apogee of all that was degenerate in English and American literature. I was puzzled. Because I had admired how she wrote, I felt condemned too. Who was right? The labor critic or my feelings? How was it possible that I had discovered Negro speech in reading this strange woman’s strange books? Then, because I lived in far off Chicago, because I was dumb and ignorant, because I was foolish enough to think that my reactions were as valid as those of a “critic,” because I belonged to no literary school, I decided upon a simple, direct, naïve course of action to determine who was right and who was wrong. I took Three Lives and gathered together a group of illiterate, class-conscious Negro workers and told them to sit and listen. I read “Melanctha” to them in a dim basement room on Chicago’s South Side and there were such wild howls of delight, such expressions of recognition, that I could barely finish. I was stopped many times by men who proceeded to improvise upon Melanctha’s way of talking and thinking. They swore that they had met such girls, and I cannot mention what they thought was wrong with Melanctha and how they said they would go about curing her. . . . My feelings were satisfied.