Increasingly, during my thirty-six years' residence in this [107] country, I have been shocked, amazed and frightened by the attitude of many Americans to their fellow-Americans, the Negro minority. The problem will have to be solved and room made for the Negro in the national life. They cannot be kept down, nor should they be. It is up to them to prove themselves all that they claim to be and it is up to all of us to see that they do, and that the abominable utterances and the poisonous hatred of such a man as Senator Bilbo are stifled, and there are a number such as he. Again I restate my belief that the problem cannot be solved today (I make no prophecy about the future) by intermarriage. It must be solved by fearless justice, the recognition of the fact that all men are brothers and that if the Negro is a problem it is our fault. If he is uneducated and not properly trained in the technique of citizenship it is again our fault. It is time that prominent white men and congressmen in both Houses and parties left off yelling for democracy and free elections in the Balkans and elsewhere and applied the same principles to their own southern States. Forgive this tirade, but I feel strongly on the matter, as you see.

This colored woman, Mrs. Snyder, mothered me for months and looked after me until my eldest girl was born, sending for her own doctor, who was not colored but not a particularly good doctor, so I did not get the skilled care I should have had. That was not her fault as she did her best to see me through. I have been curiously unlucky when my three children were born, and only once had a hospital nurse with me. Anyway, when my first child was born I had inexpert care. Walter Evans went into hysterics all the time, demanding most of the attention of the doctor, but Mrs. Snyder was like a tower of strength and I shall never forget her. Later the doctor sent in a practical nurse but she was so incompetent that I suffered severely at her [108] hands and went through three months of great discomfort and agony.

My Waterloo was the weekly washing. I used to go down to the basement, which was fitted with the usual stationary tubs, and do the washing. I had brought all my own baby clothes with me, of very great beauty, yards long, beautiful flannels, real lace insertion, almost priceless - a dozen of everything and what I did to those clothes was a sorrow and a pain. When I was through washing them, they looked most peculiar. One morning, I heard a knock on my door and on opening it I found a woman who lived in the flat below me. She looked at me with distress and said, "See here, Mrs. Evans, it's Monday morning and I can't stand it any longer. I'm an English servant and you are an English lady and I've got sense enough to know it. There are things I know and things you don't, and you're coming down with me every Monday morning until I say you needn't and I'll teach you how to launder clothes." She said it as if she had learnt it off by heart and she was as good as her word. Today there is nothing about laundry work that I don't know and I owe it all to Mrs. Schubert. Here is another instance of somebody for whom I had [109] done nothing but who was just straight human and kind and I got another peek into the house of humanity. She and I became real friends and she used to champion me when Walter Evans was in a rage. Time and again I have taken refuge in her small apartment. I wonder whether she and Mrs. Snyder are alive. I fancy not; they would be too old.