inner revolt against this treatment, he uttered no word against the
thieves and made no plea. He tried his fortunes here and in Haiti,
where, during his short, restless sojourn, my own father was born.
Eventually, grandfather became chief steward on the passenger boat
between New York and New Haven; later he was a small merchant in
Springfield; and finally he retired and ended his days at New Bedford.
Always he held his head high, took no insults, made few friends. He was
not a "Negro"; he was a man! Yet the current was too strong even for
him. Then even more than now a colored man had colored friends or none
at all, lived in a colored world or lived alone. A few fine, strong,
black men gained the heart of this silent, bitter man in New York and
New Haven. If he had scant sympathy with their social clannishness, he
was with them in fighting discrimination. So, when the white
Episcopalians of Trinity Parish, New Haven, showed plainly that they no
longer wanted black Folks as fellow Christians, he led the revolt which
resulted in St. Luke's Parish, and was for years its senior warden. He
lies dead in the Grove Street Cemetery, beside Jehudi Ashmun.

Beneath his sternness was a very human man. Slyly he wrote
poetry,--stilted, pleading things from a soul astray. He loved women in
his masterful way, marrying three beautiful wives in succession and
clinging to each with a certain desperate, even if unsympathetic,
affection. As a father he was, naturally, a failure,--hard, domineering,
unyielding. His four children reacted characteristically: one was until
past middle life a thin spinster, the mental image of her father; one
died; one passed over into the white world and her children's children
are now white, with no knowledge of their Negro blood; the fourth, my
father, bent before grandfather, but did not break--better if he had. He
yielded and flared back, asked forgiveness and forgot why, became the
harshly-held favorite, who ran away and rioted and roamed and loved and