Grandfather took his bitter dose like a thoroughbred.  Wild as was his 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 married my brown mother.

So with some circumstance having finally gotten myself born, with a flood of Negro blood, a strain of French, a bit of Dutch, but, thank God! no “Anglo-Saxon,” I come to the days of my childhood.

They were very happy.  Early we moved back to Grandfather Burghardt’s home,—­I barely remember its stone fireplace, big kitchen, and delightful woodshed.  Then this house passed to other branches of the clan and we moved to rented quarters in town,—­to one delectable place “upstairs,” with a wide yard full of shrubbery, and a brook; to another house abutting a railroad, with infinite interests and astonishing playmates; and finally back to the quiet street on which I was born,—­down a long lane and in a homely, cozy cottage, with a living-room, a tiny sitting-room, a pantry, and two attic bedrooms.  Here mother and I lived until she died, in 1884, for father early began his restless wanderings.  I last remember urgent letters for us to come to New Milford, where he had started a barber shop.  Later he became a preacher.  But mother no longer trusted his dreams, and he soon faded out of our lives into silence.