Page:Nigger Heaven (1926).pdf/188

 was sometimes convinced, the very thing that kept him from doing better work. Wheels within wheels. A vicious circle.

Could he overcome this obstacle? Unwillingly he was obliged to acknowledge to himself that certain writers of his race had overcome it, particularly Charles Waddell Chesnutt, an author strangely unfamiliar to most of the new generation. Byron himself, indeed, had been introduced to his books by a white professor at college. He lifted The Wife of his Youth from its place on his table and opened its pages for the hundredth time. How much he admired the cool deliberation of its style, the sense of form, but more than all the civilized mind of this man who had surveyed the problems of his race from an Olympian height and had turned them into living and artistic drama. Nothing seemed to have escaped his attention, from the lowly life of the worker on the Southern plantation to the snobbery of the near whites of the North. Chesnutt had surveyed the entire field, calmly setting down what he saw, what he thought and felt about it.

Byron especially admired the story called A Matter of Principle which related the painful experience of the Clayton family, members of the Blue Vein Circle in a middle western city. At a dance in Washington, the daughter, Alice, met a number of attractive young men. Shortly after her return to her home she received a note from a coloured Con-