Roses Supposes

From James Weldon Johnson’s autobiography (published in 1933):

JWJ was hired during the year he was kept from school because of a town quarantine to work for Dr. Summers, the best surgeon in Florida.

“The forces at work on each individual are so manifold, so potent, so arbitrary, and often so veiled as to make fatalism a plausible philosophy.

‘Nevertheless, I know that in the moment in which Dr. Summers took his Roman Missal out of my hand and said, ‘That will do,’ I had made contact with one of those mysterious forces that play close around us or flash to us across the void from another orbit. Dr. Summers was an extraordinary man. Of course, he was educated; but I had by now known a number of educated people. What was unprecedented for me was that in him I came into close touch with a man of great culture. he was, moreover, a cosmopolite. He had traveled a good part of the world over, through Europe, to North Africa, to Greece and Turkey. He spoke French and German, the later, because of his student days in Germany, as fluently as he did English. he had wide knowledge of literature, and was himself a poet. His local literary reputation was very high because of the poems he sometimes contributed to the Times-Union. He was an accomplished and brilliant talker. When alone, however, he was generally melancholy. He would sit for a long period inhaling from a small can of ether, seemingly lost in dreams. After I had learned something about ether, this habit caused me such anxiety that I spoke to him regarding it. He merely smiled sadly. I dared to speak to him about so personal a mtter because from the beginning the relation between us was on a high level. It was not that of employer to employee. Less still was it that of white employer to Negro employee. Between the two of us, as individuals, ‘race’ never showed its head. He neither condescended nor patronized; in fact, he treated me as an intellectual equal. We talked about things that only people in the same sphere may talk about. More than once, in conversation with others, he remarked that I had more sense than any of the Jacksonville doctors he knew anything about. This need not, however, be taken as extremely high praise; for his opinion with respect to the intellectuality of Jacksonville doctors in general was pretty low. In matters of money he was careless […]”

“My duties were light and gave me a good deal of time to do things that appealed to me. I explored the books the doctor kept at his office. The number was not large but the range was wide; wider than that covered by the ten thousand books at the University library, many of those being, undoubtedly, donations from the libraries of defunct clergyman. I corner of the doctor’s shelves was devoted to erotica; there I found the Decameron of Boccaccio and the Droll Stories of Balzac. It would be interesting, at least to me, if I could now determine what effect on me these forbidden books had. I can somewhat recall the glow that pervaded my body and my mind as I read some of these stories. Others of the stories struck me as very funny. I was stirred and entertained; was I damaged? The whole case for censorship is in that question. I cannot see that these books had the slightest deleterious effect. And I do not believe that any normal person is in any manner damaged by such reading. I grant that on persons of abnormal instincts or weaknesses there may not be this lack of bad effects, but those persons are anyhow bound to get at certain facts about life, and probably from sources far more contaminating than the wit and delicacy of Boccaccio and Balzac and the other masters of erotic literature. Did these books do me any good? That is a question the advocates of a censorship might follow up with, but it raises a point not involved; a book may be 100 per cent ‘pure’ and do nobody any good.”

[…]

Dr. Summers took JWJ to Washington as a companion, which gave JWJ the chance to explore DC from top to bottom. He sat in the balcony of the House and Senate watching debates for several days, never realizing in 30 years he would be haunting those same halls trying to get the Dyer Anti-Lynching bill passed.

On the boat ride to DC: “He matched the captain with stories of travels to far, strange places. he gave a thrilling recital of his experiences during the bombardment of Alexandria, seven years before. At other times he walked the small deck space alone, pausing frequently to look out broodingly on the sea, as though waiting for it to give him the answer to some question burning in his brain. Or he sat for long periods, a book in one hand, in the other his vade mecum, a tin of ether.”

“When I returned to Atlanta University in the fall I was filled with regret at parting from Dr. Summers. The regret was mutual. He had formed a strong affection for me which he did not hide. I had made him my model of all that a man and a gentleman should be. The question rose in my mind whether I was not gaining more through contact with him than I would gain in going on in school. My father’s estimate of this influence was not so high as mine. From my boastings at home he had formed the opinion that the doctor was a very smart man, but visionary and impractical; in a word, without hard, common sense. My father was partially right. I myself could see that many of the things that Dr. Summers did and said were not governed by hard, common sense. But what my father did not appreciate, nor I, fully, was that that was the very point. I think he was glad that the time had come for me to return to Atlanta. The doctor did not intimate that I should do other than continue my schooling, but he urged upon me to choose medicine as a profession, and had a while before set me to the preliminary reading of a textbook on anatomy. Already, I had assisted him in several operations by administering the anaesthetic. When I left him I had thrown over the idea of becoming a lawyer for that of becoming a physician and surgeon, with the emphasis on the surgeon. I left him also with an older ambition clarified, strengthened, and brought into some shape—the ambition to write. We exchanged letters, and I sent him regularly whatever new things I wrote. He moved to a western city, and we continued the correspondence for several years. Then one day I was shocked to learn that Dr. Summers had committed suicide. I was deeply grieved, for I had lost an understanding friend, one who was, in many was, a kindred spirit.