I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.Īnd yet, being a problem is a strange experience,-peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town or, I fought at Mechanicsville or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require.
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.
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