Page:Nigger Heaven (1926).pdf/187

 of thing around him. Why was it so difficult for him to make a start?

His room was so small that it was almost possible for him to touch every article of furniture without moving from his chair at his writing-table. Often, when he was trying to write, he spread his books of reference open on his bed. He could reach for matches on the adjacent bureau. He turned to this bureau now and from one of the drawers extracted a pile of manuscript, written in pencil.

Was he a writer? he wondered. Was there any excuse for him to go ahead, for him to continue to fill up these sheets of paper with these foolish hieroglyphics? So many stories he had begun and so many he had found it impossible to round out. He glanced swiftly over some of the pages. The stories all started out well enough, he told himself. He possessed a gift—his instructors at Pennsylvania had assured him of that—for delineating character in action, for swift description, occasionally for dialogue, but apparently he had no sense of construction. Somewhere along towards the middle, his stories fell apart. They were spineless. The worst difficulty of all was to find a subject: there was so little to write about.

Try as he might, he could not get away from propaganda. The Negro problem seemed to hover over him and occasionally, like the great, black bird it was, claw at his heart. In his stories this influence invariably made itself felt, and it was, he