in his home in New Bedford,--white hair
close-cropped; a seamed, hard face, but high in tone, with a gray eye
that could twinkle or glare.

Long years before him Louis XIV drove two Huguenots, Jacques and Louis
Du Bois, into wild Ulster County, New York. One of them in the third or
fourth generation had a descendant, Dr. James Du Bois, a gay, rich
bachelor, who made his money in the Bahamas, where he and the Gilberts
had plantations. There he took a beautiful little mulatto slave as his
mistress, and two sons were born: Alexander in 1803 and John, later.
They were fine, straight, clear-eyed boys, white enough to "pass." He
brought them to America and put Alexander in the celebrated Cheshire
School, in Connecticut. Here he often visited him, but one last time,
fell dead. He left no will, and his relations made short shrift of these
sons. They gathered in the property, apprenticed grandfather to a
shoemaker; then dropped him.

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 fat