French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre wrote in his autobiography that if his father had lived, he would have crushed him. Allan, soon to rename himself Alain, Locke must have felt something similar about his father’s death in retrospect. He never referred to his father publicly. According to his student and later friend, Robert Fennell, Locke always talked about his mother, usually to every class, but never his father. “Sometimes I wondered if he ever had a father,” Fennell quipped.1 Pliny’s death allowed Locke to become a child god of a matriarchal universe that included his mother, two grandmothers, and most important, him.2 This tiny insulated universe was crucial to nurturing his later ambitions. Locke was growing up in what historian Rayford Logan called the “nadir” in American race relations, when Blacks were pushed back into agricultural labor, slapped with segregation in education and transportation, robbed of the vote, and lynched when they protested against such travesties.3 Bishop Henry Turner of the African Methodist Episcopal Church captured the decade’s lesson to Black men when he stated, “There is no manhood future in the United States for the Negro. … He can never be a man—full, symmetrical, and undwarfed.”4 At home, however, bathed with the undivided love of his mother, Locke grew into adolescence with a sense that nothing could stop him from being a man, that nothing could dwarf him.
Pliny’s death left his mother the head of a poor, barely middle-class family. Her measly salary of $400 a year was just scarcely enough to meet her expenses as the only employed member of the household. Grandmother Locke would follow her son to the grave in 1894, thus easing the burden on Mary, although the $25 spent on a single buggy and simple burial in the family plot was an embarrassment to this proud family. In order to save money, Mary would eventually move the family to a modest home on the all-White but less expensive Stevens Street in Camden. She would also take in boarders periodically, teach night school, and give private piano lessons in her home to make ends meet.
There was also the challenge of rearing a brilliant and precocious young child whose mind was absorbing and processing everything in his world and questioning it relentlessly. Locke told a story about his upbringing that highlights Mary’s achievement in feeding his mental growth, while instilling some sense of the limits he needed to respect if he wanted to succeed in the world. Fennell recalled:
He told the story that, one time when he was a child, he was riding on a streetcar with his mother, a trolley really, in Philadelphia. And in those days the trolleys had an overhead line. And he said that he asked his mother, “What makes the streetcar run?” And his mother replied, “The electricity.” Now this was a new word for him. “Mother, what is electricity?” He told us that this was the 1000th question he had asked his mother that day. And she turned to him and said, Alain, shut up! Just surprised the hell out of us. We certainly did not expect that she would say that. And he used that example to say, “You women today don’t know how to rear children.” Dewey and all that mess was fashionable then.5
To survive, he would have to learn to control himself, to limit his demands on other people, and to study their reactions to his needs if he wanted them met.
Mary Locke’s reaction to her son’s constant questioning may also illuminate her fatigue. She carried a heavy financial burden in a Black Victorian world rapidly falling apart. Her family’s impoverishment was part of a larger systemic decline of the old Black middle class reaching its own nadir at the turn of the century. Most of the great pre–Civil War families started by Black entrepreneurs had lost their money and power by the mid-nineteenth century, and the postwar generations of elite Blacks found themselves excluded from Philadelphia’s business growth sectors.6 Those families who did remain successful were forced to shift from community leadership to professional roles, a realm in which the Lockes had distinguished themselves already. Benjamin Tucker Tanner, a free person of color who had graduated from Allegheny College, was the most powerful African Methodist Episcopal minister in Philadelphia in the 1860s. His son, Henry Ossawa Tanner, became a painter, but after studying at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts and experiencing discrimination in the city’s art community, he became an expatriate in Paris. His younger sister, Mary Louise, was the mother of Sadie T. Alexander, the first Black woman to earn a PhD in America. In cases like the Tanner family, where economic decline was avoided, leadership in the Black community was sacrificed, along with close contact with the Black masses.
Mary had contact with the Black masses because she was forced to teach in segregated schools. Under Philadelphia’s curious segregation rules, all students were not segregated, but Black teachers were, ironically justified as needed to ensure positions for Black teachers. Segregation increased in Philadelphia over the next decade, becoming the rule there by the 1910s. Mary had a job at the segregated Mount Vernon School in Camden, New Jersey, but she could never leave it for a job in one of the few remaining integrated schools. Having obtained her job in 1886 when she returned to work after the birth of her second son, she saw the number of pupils increase over the years as barely literate southern migrants flooded into Camden desperate for education. Mary was fulfilling the mission of her husband and father-in-law to aid “self-improvement” among ex-slaves, yet at the same time was alienated from the culture of those coming into her community. Mary was stuck in an all-Black world of education while her son advanced in White areas of educational excellence.
Not all of the old Black middle class suffered decline. Some, like Philadelphia’s Minton family, thrived in the new environment, but engendered bitterness from Mary. She had known the Mintons since the early days of the Institute of Colored Youth, when Martha Minton had taught Ishmael Locke. After the Civil War, the Mintons had continued to prosper in part because Theophilus and Martha’s sons had pursued lucrative medical careers. But after seeing one of the sons at a ball, Mary could not hold back her resentment. She wrote Alain, “They say Minton has transferred his youthful affections from Rose to Helen Stevens. I suppose the money is the bait and the stylish team they have is another consideration for his lordship[.] She will not relish the color of his skin, I think, however. The caterers certainly make the money.”7 Caterers was a cultural as well as an economic sign—a position of service, largely to White people, with all the deference and condescension that went with “Brown service” to elite Whites, but also a sign of finding economic opportunity in servicing Black occasions of spectacular celebration and display. To make such an accommodation to economic reality gritted against the upper-class aspirations of Mary Locke.
Mary even resented those in the Locke family who were economically secure, describing them as unsophisticated. Successful relatives, such as Harry and Lizzie Locke, were also caterers, who frequently invited Mary and her son over to dinner on the weekends, often after church on Sunday. Mary and her son seldom went, however. Harry and Lizzie Locke had cats and allowed them to walk all over the kitchen and dining room tables, something that Mary and especially Roy abhorred. Harry and Lizzie were “unrefined” and “dirty,” but they were kindhearted and often loaned her money. Varick, the father of Locke’s younger cousin Ross Hawkins, a distant relative on Mary’s side of the family, was also a source of tension. Varick roomed with Mary and was relatively well off. He loaned her money but complained bitterly and loudly when she was unable to pay it back. He was also sometimes drunk on weekends. Another roomer, Mr. Bush, was more redeeming. He was a loyal friend of the family and a refined schoolteacher. Though he lacked social position in Philadelphia, he was open to discussions of art and culture. His amiability, willingness to work at odd jobs, and display of fatherly interest in her son made Bush almost a surrogate husband for Mary.
Mary Locke escaped from Philadelphia’s Black Victorian decline through participation in the White world of Philadelphia’s genteel culture. She took watercolor lessons at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and took Alain, who gained his early love of pictures from such visits. She also took singing lessons, and while music was a love in itself, her remarks about the singing class reveal what else she valued about such situations. “I went over Wednesday night to the singing class and liked it very much. The class is all white, but one colored man, very nice looking.”8 Although poverty forced her to move to Camden, she was able, almost as compensation, to live on the all-White block of Stevens Street. And when she went to church on Sundays, she preferred to attend Philadelphia Christ Church, the hub of Anglo-American Episcopalians in Philadelphia, rather than Black Episcopalian St. Thomas. Worship in White institutions was more “cultured” than even the refined audience at St. Thomas. Mary also became a follower of Dr. Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture Society, attending lectures at the Philadelphia meeting house and enrolling Locke in classes there. She described later in life what a typical visit to the Ethical Culture Society meant to her. “I got myself ready and went to the Ethical Culture Society at the Century Club to hear Prof. Josiah Royce on ‘Race Questions and Prejudices.’ I went early and it was well I did for it was crowded—but such an audience! CULTURE written in every line of the faces—such an audience as you would enjoy.”9
Culture with a capital C was more than just an elitist escape for the Black middle class. It was a vision of what constituted an ideal society. What Mary saw on the faces of those Whites at the Ethical Culture Society was a commitment to the notion that economic, social, political, and aesthetic interests of their city had shared responsibility to foster the life of the mind as well as trade, industry, and social position. Despite the decline in power of Philadelphia’s upper class by the early twentieth century, its shared vision of a responsible society still held sway in such institutions as the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Academy of Music, the Franklin Institute, and the Free Library that were open to all regardless of race. Such cosmopolitanism extended to Mary’s early upbringing of her son. She took him regularly to concerts at the Academy of Music, to lectures at the Ethical Culture Society, and to the library to read the Greek myths. Although the Black Victorians maintained such independent institutions as the Demosthenian Institute and the Negro Historical Society, they partook of all that Philadelphia had to offer. For Mary, “Culture” was a vision of enlightened living she had imbibed while growing up in Philadelphia.10
Nevertheless, lack of money—and a husband to supply it—exerted downward pressure on the family’s social position. As Mary wrote her son after repaying a long-standing loan to a disagreeable lender, “Our financial straits have thrown us into contact with strange people.”11 Families like the Lockes who had once lived comfortably and had prided themselves on their hereditary gentility found themselves losing ground too often to Blacks they regarded as uncouth, uncivilized, and often uneducated, who had the money but lacked the breeding and good manners that their upbringing had promised them would ensure their social position. Locke grew up resenting his family’s poverty. Abandonment and poverty did not deter him from having an overweening confidence in his ability to be a success and to have an exceedingly optimistic personality. Beneath that exterior lay a deep-seated anxiety about money. Throughout his life he would bristle at any reference to his early poverty and seek to create the myth of his family’s wealth and prominence.
Such insecurity is perhaps illustrated by Locke’s public recollection that his family owned their Camden home and his mother was a school principal, when in fact his mother rented the house and she was not a principal, as he once claimed. Like his mother, Locke harbored bitterness toward the wealthier if somewhat less sophisticated members of the Black bourgeoisie and was even more sharply critical of less fortunate Blacks. Following Mary’s lead, he would strive constantly to associate himself with Whites, believing such connections were the key to elevating the family’s status. As a student in Philadelphia schools, he was compulsively determined to be successful, as if such success would vindicate his family reputation. Perhaps he was right. As Sadie T. Alexander recalled, “The Lockes were not wealthy. No one believed them to be so. The chief reputation of the family came from his achievements.”12 The only area left to his family for redemption was education, and Alain Locke would be their redeemer.
Even before his father’s death, Alain’s dependency on his mother caused him problems when he attempted to make the transition to school. Fortunately, an observant, caring kindergarten teacher at the David Foy school helped him separate himself from his mother, mentally break out of his intense home life, and settle down to school work.
Locke recalled to his friend Douglas Stafford that this teacher was a student of Froebelian psychology, who had:
faced him with Froebel’s toy-symbols, forms which, their designer had intended, neither conveyed a denotation nor played with some set of mind. If the master of Keilhau was correct, his tools for children were sufficiently indeterminate to throw the child back onto pre-lingually developed resources. The hope is that the child may enjoy some awareness of what he is like and wants before we undertake explicitly to tell him what answers are best. Alain credited these experiences with what was his most striking personal trait, an unusual freedom from inner conflict. He was able, he felt, to distinguish between those things belonging to his temperament and earliest subconscious learning on the one hand, and on the other[,] those objective necessities in society demanding respect.13
Froebel, the inventor of the kindergarten, believed that children needed a year of transition between home life and formal school learning. Such a conference with the kindergarten teacher seems to have been a success. Although school was not home, Locke’s earliest school experiences confirmed that in this new environment, he could maintain his individuality. He was extremely fortunate to be in such an elite Philadelphia school environment, since to a remarkable degree, his early schoolteachers indulged rather than suppressed his sense of specialness. For the rest of his stay at David Foy School, Locke was a superb student, even if his idiosyncrasy of demanding only fine-point pens with which to write somewhat unnerved his elementary schoolteachers.
By the time Locke transferred to Charles S. Close School, in the First Ward of Philadelphia, he was an excellent student. In his first year (eighth grade) at Charles Close, he received straight As in all subjects and in conduct. In the tenth grade, Locke was written up in the local newspaper as doing excellent work, especially in math. He was also the smallest student, the newspaper noted. That same year he won admittance to Central High School, the second-oldest high school in America and the jewel of the public school system in Philadelphia. He was already a star at age thirteen.
Education also provided Locke with an unconscious adolescent quest to construct a sexual identity. Rather than adolescent rebellion, he slowly opened up a new realm of emotional intimacy and sexual consciousness to people other than his mother. Schooling brought him into contact with boys, mostly White boys, first at Charles Close, and then at Central High, who accepted him, even as they thought him odd. As Locke later recalled to Douglas Stafford, “ ‘I think those white boys must have looked at me in much the same way as ducks upon a chicken.’ Race was not the only thing. How could they figure out a fellow forbidden by health from doing those things they took for granted as the only possible meaningful stuff of which to make a boy’s life?”14
Locke’s health figures in the construction of his identity as a young boy as much as his diminutive height—two factors that set him apart from the others as much as his race, he recalls. He was tiny—no more than 4´11˝ when fully grown, so perhaps in the height range of three and a half feet tall in junior and senior high schools. And he was weak, still suffering the after-effects of rheumatic fever, heart valves that did not work properly, so participation in sports, such as baseball and track, nascent football or rugby, was completely out. Of course, Locke did not want to participate in such sports, he said, but the sense that he envied the kind of homosocial frivolity and bodily comradeship made possible by participation in such sports lurks in his recollections. Already, because of physical predicament and mental outlook, he was an outsider; and yet, Locke turned that position into that of the perennial observer. In doing so, he created, one suspects, an intriguing, even captivating identity for himself among these young White boys. He was the boy with the wry sense of humor, the sardonic wit, the ability to make observation of others into a discourse that would allow him to stay in the mix even as he stood outside of real participation.
Locke’s recollection of an incident with the “White boys” at a swimming hole shows how he was able to participate even as a virtual invalid.
I have waded from time to time at resorts but I never swam and never wished to. But I used to go swimming with those boys. I might dangle a foot, but the most important thing was watching the clothes. A prankster, you see, could tie them into knots or make off with them. It was a filthy hole, but I sat on the bank. Besides, they had to provide for me, make me necessary. They couldn’t understand me, but they liked me and had to have me involved.15
Douglass Stafford, his close friend, relates the rest of the story:
The surface of the bank was slick with mud. He was squatted upon its crest, discovering the changing curves and shapes of moving bodies. The appearing and disappearing flesh robbed him of control. Pink, tan, and youthfully fuzzed sinews sped into and out of the murky mess. He was fairly hypnotized. His staunchest and most admired defender stood poised to dive from a coarse old plane, his dripping body gleaming in the sunlight. Alain gasped and fell in. The diver never plunged. The whole naked troop came to his rescue, begging, even before they could be sure he was alive, that he say nothing to his mother of the accident, lest he not be allowed to come with them again. “I’m sorry,” he gasped, “but I’ll have to tell my mother. She’ll let me come back.” They wrung out his clothes, dried them with theirs, and watched him head homeward for a long talk with his mother, they fearful all the while that “the chicken” would come no more.16
Locke’s retelling of this incident to his friend Stafford decades later creates another narrative of how frail health awakened his sexual needs. The emotions catalyzed by such witnessing of the beauty of young male bodies brought forth an emotion he could not control. At the waterhole, Locke discovered emotions that were his alone. The Victorian rigid separation of public and private spheres would allow him and others to indulge and pursue emotional relationships without public rebuke. Indeed, single-sex schooling unconsciously encouraged boys such as Locke to develop powerful emotional attachments with their classmates.
From the standpoint of Locke’s relationship with his mother, the challenge was to find a compromise that allowed him to have a sexual life within the context of his overwhelming—and emasculating—emotional involvement with her. The humorous splashdown carried a terrifying symbolism for this child who was dreadfully fearful of the water: the awakening of adolescent sexual emotion carried the possibility of losing the love of his life—his mother. Going home to tell her about it was key: he could not gain the one by losing the other.
Because little direct evidence has survived, the precise details of Locke’s first sexual experience will probably never be available. But Locke did narrate to his friend Stafford some of his feelings about this adolescent encounter. Stafford recalled that Locke was not at all ambivalent about this first explicitly sexual experience, which took place in a neighboring cellar where a darkroom had been set up. “He could revisit the interlude more than half a century later throughout his life, without shame, embarrassment, or apology. There was, at least on his part, no clumsy adolescent fumbling of the kind that can distort later erotic attitudes. It was, he said, just as he had expected and wanted it to be. This discovery of his most secret self came when he awakened with another in an unlighted room to some part of the universe that he could sense in no other way. He had sinned against no one. Consenting equally, they had joined in a new way the total rhythm, however varied or enriched with seeming dissonance to its cadence. There was no need for slyly written notes or the awful waste of childishly concealed passion. He went straight home and told his mother. They talked sensibly about the event and what it could mean. The only surprise to him later in this was the naturalness with which he found himself this close to another besides his mother.”17
The notion that Locke’s mother would not have had any misgivings about her son having had a sexual experience with another man begs credibility. Perhaps revealing this incident, which might not be regarded as homosexuality today, but as youthful experimentation, might not upset his mother because from her standpoint it meant he was not interested in girls and hence not interested in ever leaving her for another. Still, it seems incredible that she would not have felt that her son’s sexuality was being determined by someone else’s—a man, who, in consummating a set of feelings was, in the terms of the day, steering him astray. Later letters from Mary to her son while he was away at school do not contain references that support the notion she had a clear and unwavering sense of his sexual identity. Like most mothers, she probably suspected something; but that they talked about it while he was in high school as a natural occurrence seems a recollection that is a reconstruction.
As Locke remarked to Stafford, so overwhelming was his intimacy with his mother and his distance from all others that he was “surprised” to find himself able to be close to anyone “besides his mother.” The story of Locke’s sexual intimacy with a man as an adolescent, therefore, makes plain that no matter what level of confidence he shared with his mother about what happened, any such intimacy had to accommodate to the primacy of his relationship with his mother.
As an adolescent, Locke was balancing three worlds—the world he shared with his mother, the barely visible world of his sexuality, and the very visible world of integrated education at Central High School. Founded in 1836 at Broad and Green Streets, Central High was extremely proud of its excellent faculty, most of whom were drawn from college positions, and of its curriculum, which “compared favorably with the courses of instruction in most American colleges.”18 In 1894, Dr. Robert Ellis Thompson left his chair at the University of Pennsylvania to become the principal of the school, and Central received the right to confer the bachelor of arts degree on its graduates. Thompson revolutionized the curriculum of the school, organizing the teachers and the subjects into departments along college lines. By the time Locke arrived in 1898, Central was one of the finest academic institutions in the nation.
Originally established to attract the sons of the Philadelphia elite to the public school system, Central also enabled poorer boys to rise socially through their studies.19 Admittance was contingent not only on intelligence but also on mastering elite manners and gentlemanly behavior. Central stood for the values of Victorian manhood, for Character, Discipline, and Self-Restraint as the essential qualities of a Victorian gentleman. Students might choose whether they wanted to specialize in the classical, the Latin scientific, or the modern language course of study, but they all had to listen to Dr. Francis Brandt lecture on the fruits of Discipline, or Dr. Robert Thompson explain the transition to manhood as progress up the stem of a Y to a fork in the road where one branch led to a life of good, and the other to a life of evil.
Electing the classical course with a heavy load of Greek, Latin, and English composition, Locke graduated from Central with an overall average of 94.6, just barely runner-up to the class valedictorian. In addition to the numerous courses in the humanities, including electives in American literature and French, Locke took numerous electives in the sciences, including anatomy and physiology, astronomy, chemistry, and physics. His record suggests he would have succeeded admirably at his family’s first career recommendation that he go to medical school. His best marks were registered in Latin composition, anatomy, architecture, chemistry, history, French, English philology, and ethics.
Locke succeeded at Central not only because he was a brilliant student but also because his family and community had trained him in the manners, behavior, and attitude of Victorianism. His intelligence and refinement made him a hit with White students at Central. When Locke in 1902 applied for two more years of graduate work at the School of Pedagogy, he was gladly accepted. When Locke later in 1903 applied for admission to Harvard, Dr. Thompson wrote an enthusiastic letter of recommendation that revealed how Central’s students and teachers regarded him.
This is his sixth year under our care. … With every year he has risen higher in the esteem and confidence of those who have been teaching him. … I presume you know that he is a colored youth and also that the nearer one is to the South, the sharper the race prejudices which divide his people from the whites. I have known but few boys … who have not even needed to overcome this unhappy prejudice, and to attain complete popularity with their classmates. Of these Mr. Locke is a notable instance. His white classmates accepted him on perfectly equal terms, deferred to his opinion as much as to that of any of their number, and the only thing they found peculiar in him was his excessive attention to his personal cleanliness. They used to say that if Mr. Locke had to defile his hands with chalk at the blackboard, he had no peace until he got them washed. I have had the opportunity of meeting him twice a week in that class, and I have been impressed with his fineness of discrimination, his evidence of fresh thought, his admirable personal bearing, and indeed almost everything that goes to make a good teacher.20
Thompson’s fatherly letter (and Harvard’s underlining) shows Locke’s success in gaining “complete popularity with ‘his’ classmates.” But it also reveals the level of stress Locke’s achievement cost him. Brought up in the rigid discipline of his Black Victorian family, he had internalized the “white normative gaze” of elite Philadelphians to such an extent that he could easily conform to their expectations. But his “excessive attention to his personal cleanliness” suggests the neurotic struggle brewing just beneath the surface of that success. Thompson’s language is telling. “If Mr. Locke had to defile his hands with chalk at the blackboard, he had no peace until he got them washed.” References to “dirt” or “soiling” are psychologically associated with feces; but here, interestingly, it is “chalk” Locke is trying to wash off his black body. Normally, one would assume a young hyper-assimilating African American would be trying to wash the black off; while that is still operative here, there is also the possibility of another interpretation—that he is trying to wipe the “white,” that is, “chalk” off his body. Locke paid an enormous cost almost daily in Central High and the School of Pedagogy to fit in and gain the confidence of those whom he secretly found to be soiling his soul.
Why would Locke have such ambivalence around the people he seemed so eager to impress? It is because of the contradiction of his education. Although Locke was “everything that goes to make a good teacher,” according to Thompson, Locke had no chance of being hired at a mixed school in Philadelphia, especially not at Central or the School of Pedagogy, where most of his classmates and friends eventually taught. The teacher preparation of the School of Pedagogy was a fraud for him, and the ideology of the Black Victorians that manifestation of gentlemanly culture would override racism a cruel myth. Without an extraordinary effort and a bit of luck, Locke knew he was destined, if not careful, to end up like his mother—slaving away trying to educate the very people that his education had educated him away from knowing anything about. After six years of working very hard to fit in, to show he was as White and talented as any of his “fellows,” there was nothing he could do to eradicate that he was Black. And all the while he carried out his performance, he secretly resented them because given his intelligence and accomplishment, not to welcome him into their community was to defile him.
Nonetheless, the School of Pedagogy was crucial to Locke’s future. For it was there that Locke completed his transformation from a Black Victorian into a Black Aesthete—and then began to leave even that subject formation behind. The “six years in our care” allowed him to recognize and re-create himself in the language of late nineteenth-century men of culture who had lost faith in the moral vision of Victorian society and dispense with the notion that his young classmates owed anyone anything. Locke became an expert in performing the transition from the responsible to the irresponsible lover of art by fashioning a unique “aesthetic” personality that was part serious, part humorous, always precocious, and able to participate in the intellectual games as a player whose witty asides and spectacular assertions gave him a unique persona. There Locke had crafted a lifelong asset—the ability to make an enduring impression on White people who in turn would do everything they could to help him. In 1925 School of Pedagogy literature professor Hughes Mearns, with whom Locke sustained a mentoring relationship into the 1930s, wrote Locke about his first impression of him.
I have never ceased talking about you since the day I was bowled over by a bit of your sixteen-year-old genius and asked you, with a grin of course, whether you were a rogue or a genius. You said speculatively but hesitatingly, that you did not think you had it in you to make a rogue and that, of course, therefore, nodding at the paper, it must be—if I say that it must be—that you are—well, what one says one is! It was great fun.21
Locke had become a rogue, a practical jokester, a trickster, at the School of Pedagogy but most important adopted the persona of the aesthete, who, his classmate and friend Albert Rowland complained, made jokes whenever they attended church or chapel together.22 By the 1890s, the young adolescents at Central and the School of Pedagogy could no longer take seriously the dictums of the old Victorian patriarchs at the school. As these young aesthetes secretly rebelled against the patriarchal fathers of American education, Mearns served as a sympathetic uncle who encouraged their creativity, imagination, and rebellion. And the key to that rebellion was the rejection of the moral element in art and the taking seriously the religious grounding of aesthetics in a traditional moral universe. Instead of partaking of art as a means to something else, something higher, Locke and friends venerated art as an end of its own, and made the pursuit of art experiences the main concern of their lives. Locke mimicked his classmates’ adoration of art of all kinds, developed a taste for noticing and commenting on the picturesque, and arranged his room at home with art, such that his rooms, like those of his classmates from elite White families, became art objects themselves. Art and nature began to substitute for religion as the source of their most important spiritual experiences. Classmate Phil Boyer wrote to Locke: “I have just returned from an hour’s walk through God’s own country. Is not the silent worship of His creation an excellent substitute for Sunday school?”23
At the School of Pedagogy, Locke mastered the language of ambiguity and indirection, of irony and wit, of pun and “signifying” that characterized this aesthetic temperament. He wrote Boyer,
The arrival of your letter is ancient history and I do not recall the date but I do remember that it was a very welcome one and that the news concerning the increase in your protégés was as startling as it was amusing. When I think of the fact that you have the S of P on your hands there is something pitiable in your plight but remember that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.24
Boyer ably parried Locke’s thrusts, writing back some months later:
I have at last taken an evening at home and was just about to re-read my Dickens Christmas Carol when I thought of you and the length of time it has been up to me to fill a “pot of message” as you call it. Conscience stricken, I threw aside the book and like a good little youngster, am now at work. I am writing, too, because I am beginning to be filled with that “good will toward men” Christmas Spirit that extends even so far as Harvard. May you have the happiest Christmas of your life even if you are “corrupt and contented” and I am not sure but that the very fact of your being in that state will make you happier, that is, if you are undeniably there.25
One can see why Mearns called Locke “great fun!”
Locke was fun because he had become an expert in performing what could be called the closet. Aestheticism was at base the performance of unfulfilled same-sex love. While most of his classmates were young men infatuated with one another, the way they expressed it was in the rebellion against moralism in art. Long walks talking about art, debating the merits of one picture over another, putting down a less sophisticated classmate’s taste in some banal watercolors, for example, were all part of the performance of intimacy through art appreciation—especially art appreciation and taste detached from any moral agenda. But here was also another key: most of his classmates were not having sex with other young men. Rather, they were indulged in an adolescent pastime that would, in fact, pass, or if consummated, would be done in such a way that a kiss or more was not enough to concretize into an identity as a homosexual. The problem for Locke is that he was already past that by the time he graduated from School of Pedagogy: he was not just interested in the art to have a homosocial relationship, but instead saw the pursuit of art as part of an overall romantic relationship with men who were valued because they shared that interest as well. Ultimately, Locke would have to leave School of Pedagogy not only for racial, but also sexual reasons: he could never abide by the compromise Philadelphia teaching would exact of him—to be in the closet for the rest of his life. Unlike Phil Boyer, who was a heterosexual rogue who married and settled into provincial teaching in the suburbs, Locke was a homosexual aesthete. Philadelphia never accepted Walt Whitman’s homosexuality and was not about to accept the Whitman side of Locke.
Knowing that he could not stay at the School of Pedagogy despite being the peer of its aesthetes, Locke pressed all of his supporters for help in finding another mooring, as when he wrote to ask Mearns for help on his Harvard application:
As I remember it, you were still at school when the decision was reached that I had better prepare myself for the full entrance examinations to Harvard. Quite as you predicted I have come across several instructions and regulations which I hope have other interpretations than those which I, in my ignorance of Harvard regime, can give them. Your kind offer to help in event of such little difficulties has not been forgotten but I have purposely waited until I had quite a collection of them that I might not too often and without cause impose upon your patience or encroach upon your time. Indeed even now I should feel less culpable and more the less grateful if you could let me know when an hour’s talk would give you the least inconvenience.26
Locke’s language descends to the ingratiating, but yet Mearns approved. Recalling Martin Green’s observation that the English dandy-aesthete Harold Acton “moved in curves” with his arm on his hip, Locke’s language moves in curves, approaching and withdrawing.27 It is also a reminder of how observers described Booker T. Washington’s way of behaving in front of White folks—indirect, not challenging, but getting what he wanted. Locke could be even bolder because he was dealing with sympathetic Whites of Philadelphia’s educational elite. Indeed, Locke had little if any experience with racist Whites, a weakness uncovered later in his career when he rudely discovered that not all Whites would be charmed by his gentlemanly behavior. But at School of Pedagogy, Locke can manipulate the teachers and students because he has already moved beyond them and sees their sexual timidity and racial hypocrisy as part of the same cloth. And yet having moved beyond them, he nevertheless is still caught in their problematic—he too will perform the closet in professional situations by labeling always his interests in art rather than in other men’s bodies. Calling Philadelphians “paralyzingly discreet,” Locke was also describing how he himself was still caught in strategies of survival.
Becoming an aesthete, therefore, would never be enough for Locke. While he loved art for its own sake, something about the rejection of School of Pedagogy taught him that he could never be the completely irresponsible gadfly of art that his performance among his classmates and in front of his professors suggested he would become. At some point, he would feel the tug of that nexus of responsibilities his mother felt and saw on the face of those elite arranged at the Ethical Culture Society one afternoon, but directed to some new, more Black, purpose. At some time, he would drop the pose and use the style, taste, and aesthetic posturing to advance a new interpretation of American culture with his predicament and that more broadly of the Black subject, as its center. Associations with his young White aesthetic classmates would then be another social experience that provided the advanced tools to refashion American culture to make room for him.
Locke began to translate his performance of sophistication and deportment into a new rhetorical strategy in an essay written just before he left the School of Pedagogy.
The appearance of a few faint rays upon the horizon of dramatic art has revived the interest in this most important problem of the American drama and has, at last, aroused even the controllers of our dramatic syndicates. Art lovers have long deplored the shortcomings of the American stage and have tried to awaken public interest by speaking of the “universality of Shakespeare” and the “glowing imagery of Ibsen.” Here and there some party of enthusiasts would present one of their beloved works; but the theatre-going public would overlook their modest announcement to be absorbed in the huge chest bedaubed with primary colors, which blazed a path for Mrs. Leslie Carter in Zaza, or something equally ridiculous. … The real problem that was producing such outrages was the theatrical syndicates, which had control of all the great theatrical centers. No amount of literary criticism could break its power, a commercial rival alone could check its power. Such it has found in the recently established Academy of Dramatic Art.28
The optimistic, almost hopeful ending to this Daily Theme in Mearns’s class voices a new generation of American aestheticism. Unlike Henry James, Henry Adams, and George Santayana, Locke’s generation of aesthetes was not hopelessly pessimistic about American culture. Young men like Locke and Van Wyck Brooks believed a return to emphasis on form would perhaps break the grip of Victorianism and moralizing high culture on the one hand, and the stranglehold of banal popular entertainment on the other. The postwar rebellion against Victorian American culture began in the 1890s in the adolescence of boys like Locke who attended elite institutions of higher education, who found art to be a way out of the stultifying moralism of a patriarchal culture, and who would later use the love of form, of line, and of color to challenge traditional Victorian morality notions of the role of art in American culture.
In 1904, Harvard College admitted Locke as a freshman, refusing to give him the advanced placement he requested for the years at the School of Pedagogy. It did not matter. Locke was glad to escape Philadelphia and its peculiar professional predicament. Afterward, Philip Boyer wrote to tell Locke that all the other members of his class had found positions in Philadelphia’s school system. Locke wrote back that he felt quite “corrupt and contented” at Harvard.29 Of course he did. As a Victorian, he would barely reveal the hurt and anger his ostracism from their Philadelphia that racism caused. To his mother he would reveal upon arriving in Cambridge, “If I can get situated up here, Philadelphia will never see me again.”30 More privately, to Boyer, he would express in the 1930s a barely audible sense of hurt at having been forced out of the Philadelphia nest. “Life here [at Howard University in Washington] hectic as usual. I rather envy you your somewhat more tranquil base of operations.”31