Call it folly, if you will. Call it blind sentiment, if you like. But also call it passion, call it devotion, call it energy, warmth, and strength, high aspiration and an honorable pride. Call it youth, and all the glory and the wealth of youth.
And admit, my city friends, your life has been the better for it. They enriched your life in ways you may not know, in ways you never pause to estimate. They brought you—the half million or more of them who came and stayed—a warmth you lacked, a passion that God knows you needed, a belief and a devotion that was wanting in your life, an integrity of purpose that was rare in your own swarming hordes. They brought to all the multiplex and feverish life of all your ancient swarming peoples some of the warmth, the depth, the richness of the secret and unfathomed South. They brought some of its depth and mystery to those sky-shining vertices of splintered light, to all those dizzy barricades of sky-aspiring brick, to those cold, salmon-colored panes, and to all the weary grey of all those stony-hearted pavements. They brought a warmth of earth, an exultant joy of youth, a burst of living laughter, a full-bodied warmth and living energy of humor, shot through with sunlight and with Africa, and a fiery strength of living faith and hope that all the acrid jests, the bitter wisdoms, the cynical appraisals, and the old, unrighteous, and scornmaking pride of all the ancient of the earth and Israel could not destroy or weaken.
Say what you will, you needed them. They enriched your life in ways you do not know. They brought to it the whole enormous treasure of their dreams and of their hopes, the aspiration of high purposes. They were transformed, perhaps, submerged or deadened, in some ways defeated later, maybe, but they were not lost. Something of all of them, of each of them, went out into your air, diffused among the myriad tangle of your billion-footed life, wore down into the granite dullness of your pavements, sank through into the very weather of your brick, the cold anatomy of your steel and stone, into the very hue and weather of your lives, my friends, in secret and unknown ways into all you said and thought and did, into all that you had shaped and wrought.
There’s not a ferry slip around Manhattan that is not grained a little with their passion. There’s not a salmon flank of morning at the river’s edge that does not catch you at the throat and heart a little more because the fierce excitement of their youth and of their wild imagination went into it. There’s not a canyon gulch blued with the slant of morning light that lacks a little of their jubilation. They’re in every little tug that slides and fetters at the wharves of morning, they’re there in the huge slant of evening light, in the last old tingeings of unearthly red upon the red brick of the harbor heights. They’re there in winglike soar and swoop of every bridge and humming rail in every singing cable. They’re there in tunnel’s depths. They’re there in every cobble, every brick. They’re there upon the acrid and exciting tang of smoke. They’re upon the very air you breathe.
Try to forget them or deny them, if you will, but they brought your harsh flanks warmth around them, brothers. They are there.
AND SO THOSE younglings from the South did not go home except for visits. Somehow they loved the poison they had drunk: the snake that stung them was now buried in their blood.
Of all of them, Alsop played the surest role: they clustered round him like chicks about a mother hen and he was most comforting. He loved the South—and yet was not so cabined and confined as they. For while the others kept inviolate the little walls of their own province, their special language, and the safe circle of their own community, venturing forth into that great and outer strangeness day by day like Elizabethan mariners on a quest for gold, or looking for the passage to Cathay—it was, in fact, still Indian country so far as some of them could see, and at night they slept within the picket circle of their wheels—Alsop cast a wider circle. He was broadening. He was talking to new people day by day—people on park benches, on bus tops, in lunchrooms, drug stores, soda fountains; people in Manhattan and the Bronx, in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island.