He is a banker, a general trader, an owner of real estate—and a liberal benefactor to his own people. He has established in the negro quarter of the city where he lives a sort of garden and recreation-ground for his race, which is all the more appreciated, as negroes, even when not formally excluded from the public parks, are made very unwelcome in them. In the recreation ground is a plain but well-designed and commodious wooden theatre, where companies of negro actors frequently appear. I am told there is a remarkable development of negro theatrical art in several quarters, but was not fortunate enough to come across any specimens of it.
The keen little walnut-skinned Carnegie-Chrysostom accompanied my guide and me over the garden and theatre. He said very little, but he gleamed appreciation of my guide’s remarks, all tending to impress on me his manifold activities, his astuteness, his success, and his beneficence. Yet one did not feel, as one would have felt had a white millionaire been concerned, that the poorer man was guilty of adulation, the richer of ostentation. There was something impersonal about it all. It was not the men but the race who boasted. The hero of the song of praise was not “I,” nor “he,” but “we.”
And what, now, of the “homes” themselves? [Sidenote: Villa Residences.] Those that I saw were without exception what are called by English house-agents suburban villa residences, which would command, in the neighbourhood of London, rents of from £40 to £70 a year. They were very nice little houses, scrupulously neat and well kept. They had (to my mind) the advantage over English houses of the same class, in the sense of spaciousness which comes with steam-heat and the consequent absence of doors. In some the doorways were filled with bead curtains—hanging strings of glass beads—which seem to be very popular just now in coloured society.
The furniture was always modern and in excellent condition, with a great deal of plush about it. Much of it conveyed the impression (not uncommon in English villa residences) of being intended rather for show than use. The wall-papers ran to large patterns, and were apt to be sombre in tint. Every home, without exception, had its piano, sometimes with open music on it. In the matter of pictures, nicknacks, etc., there was no affectation of “culture.” Æstheticism—that “unanimity of æsthetic appreciations” which so troubled Mr. Wells in Boston—has not yet penetrated the negro home. I did not see a single Wingless Victory. The works of art are simple to the point of primitiveness, and pleasing in so far as they genuinely represent the taste of their owners. One handsomely furnished parlour stands out in my memory, in which a showy overmantel was flanked by two amazing glass transparencies in heavy gilt frames, one representing a moonlit landscape and the other the Houses of Parliament and Clock Tower at Westminster.