I am a native of our Capital City, born in the Mauve Decade (1903). My schooling has been in the Washington grammar and high schools. It was while a student at Dunbar High School that I felt a restless urge to write something other than dull formal paragraphs in English. I made several attempts at verse but found them so poor that I hastily put such ideas behind me. After leaving high school I entered the government service in Washington, but my radical views could not become reconciled to the conservative bourgeoise ideals around me; so I left the government service and journeyed to New York in the winter of 1926. Here I served an apprenticeship in literary vagabondage with the bizarre and eccentric young vagabond poet of High Harlem, Richard Bruce. It was here that I felt inspired to write “The Black Madonna.” I was one evening at vespers down at St. Mary’s the Virgin, and while lost in contemplation before Our Lady, I thought of a Madonna of swart skin, a Madonna of dark mien. Despite my radicalism I am religious. I admire the socialist form of government, and my favorite poet is Claude McKay. And some day I hope to flee the shores of this exquisite hell. My temperament is Latin. I abhor all things Anglo-Saxon. I’d rather live in the squalor of Mulberry Street, N. Y. (Little Italy) than at Irvington-on-the-Hudson. I love bull fights and dislike baseball games. I like dancing and dislike prayer meetings. I love New York because it is crowded and noisy and an outpost of Europe. Of my home here in Washington I have not much to offer. I like Washington because it has such a large share of Babbitts, both white and black. And I like it because Georgia Douglas Johnson lives there and on Saturday nights has an assembly of likable and civilized people, and because it was from this Saturday night circle that Jean Toomer, Richard Bruce, and Richard Goodwin, the artist, went forth to fame and infamy. THE BLACK MADONNA Not as the white nations know thee O Mother! But swarthy of cheek and full-lipped as the child races are. Yet thou art she, the Immaculate Maid, and none other, Crowned in the stable at Bethlehem, hailed of the star. See where they come, thy people, so humbly appealing, From the ancient lands where the olden faiths had birth. Tired dusky hands uplifted for thy healing. Pity them, Mother, the untaught of earth. COUNTEE CULLEN