“Son,” my father said, the night before I went East to college, “remember you’re a Negro. You’ll have to do twice as much twice better than your classmates. Before you act, think how what you do may reflect on other Negroes. Those white people will be judging the race by you. Don’t let the race down, son.” I have no memory of protesting this terrible burden laid on my mind and heart. Indeed, I am sure I did not. What my father said checked with what I had been taught to _feel_. My father went on. “Out East you may feel it less because there’re fewer Negroes, or for the same reason, you may feel it more. Some say one thing, some the other. But no matter where you go in this country, you’ll never get away from being made to know that you are a Negro.” “Yes, sir,” I said. “We’re aliens in an alien land.” (And yet he had fought the Garveyites’ dream of going “back to Africa”; had applauded the deportation of Emma Goldman; on every day of national memorial had hung out the flag, and when the breezes of May, the suns of July and the snows of February rent and seared it, had bought another!) “But there’s some purpose in it,” he went on wearily. “‘God works in mysterious ways....’ There’s certainly some purpose. So do your best. Remember you’re a Negro.” “I’ll remember,” I said, knowing that I would, because I had been well and exactly taught and because such lessons thrust deep. But feeling even then, I like to think, the iron unfairness of it; perhaps even drawing a sorry comfort from it, like many a Negro boy before and since. For after all, it is a ready-made excuse. More, it is license for us all to live in that blind, egoistic immaturity which, even under the most wholesome learning, we are reluctant to forego anyway. “Twice as much twice better....” “A Negro’s just as good as anybody else,” my father said, “but he’s always got to prove it.” Thus burdened, I went off to college. 7