Locke began his trip into Africa by steamer, reaching Alexandria, Egypt, the second week of October. But after only a day or two of rest in Alexandria, he doubled back to the Middle East. Bonding with Africa would have to wait until he took advantage of an invitation to spend a week or so at the Baha’i shrine at Carmel in Haifa, Palestine. Locke was in no hurry to get to Haifa, either, for he took an indirect and leisurely sea route to Palestine that allowed him to visit several areas within Greece. His steamer landed on Piraeus, the Greek city near Athens, then on to the island Lesbos, before reaching Constantinople on October 14. Locke was not simply going to Africa: he was constructing a Grand Tour of the European Mediterranean and the Middle East, and he was taking his time.
Although reluctant to go directly to Africa, he was also intellectually alienated from the West. So, Locke split the difference and journeyed to Constantinople, the capital of a Byzantine tradition that was non-Black and non-Western. Of course, Constantinople had been Westernized and its dominant religion was Islam by the time of Locke’s visit. But in 1923 Constantinople still preserved some of the rich religious, artistic, and literary traditions of the Eastern Christian Empire, especially in its wonderful churches that punctured this Turkish capital’s skyline.
Always a fan of visiting cathedrals, Locke probably spent most of his two days in the city studying the “basilicas” or “royal halls”—the first large Christian churches, built after a.d. 311 when Emperor Constantine decided to legalize Christianity to consolidate his state power. The surviving basilicas housed a lavish Eastern Christian art that was flush with Greek and Roman imagery. The Byzantine Empire had had the capacity to absorb influences from without, but still retain its own unique cultural focus—that was the kind of Black society Locke wished to promote in the Negro Renaissance.
Locke was also fascinated by the intellectual society that had flourished in Constantinople. From the fourth through the fourteenth centuries, Byzantine emperors had placed a high regard on education of civil servants and demanded that officials have knowledge of the classics and be able to write. A courtly elite of intellectuals and scholars emerged to educate this clientele. If one did not obtain a political appointment, a bright young man could “become a scholar, hunt for manuscripts, edit an ancient author, prepare an anthology of useful sayings, sacred or profane, collect proverbs, write a commentary on a scientific text, or publish an encyclopedia.” Locke had left behind that kind of world in Oxford and still longed to re-create it in some institution in America. Going to Constantinople, therefore, signaled what Locke was looking for in going to Africa, a conservative, settled, monumental civilization that had managed to embody the search for power, the love of religion, and the order of a settled society. In going east, he was hoping that he could find in the past a less Western notion of what African American intellectual life could become.
A train and another steamer brought Locke to Haifa, where he was welcomed to the shrine of the Baha’is by their new leader, Shoghi Effendi. The invitation had come to him through the efforts of Louis Gregory, an African American who had recruited Locke for the Baha’is and who became, in the 1920s, one of the most influential American Baha’is. Shoghi Effendi was shy, somewhat halting, and inexperienced without the charisma of his predecessor, Abdúl-Bahas, and that had led some believers to openly question whether Effendi was capable of leading the religion. But by 1923 the American Baha’is were firmly committed to their new leader. Gregory had been elected to the National Assembly and was well positioned to advance his long-term goal of making the American Baha’i movement the most important religious force in the fight against racism in America. Gregory wanted Locke to head a series of interracial amity conventions and succeeded in getting Locke to chair the first, held in Washington, D.C., in 1921 and another held in the spring of 1923. Gregory had probably arranged for Locke’s invitation in the hopes that exposure to Effendi would persuade Locke to commit himself fully to the faith, something he had not yet done, and to becoming a public spokesperson for the faith.
But that does not explain why Locke accepted the invitation. Of course, the opportunity to visit Haifa, Palestine, and the famous Baha’i shrine at Carmel was attractive. But coming to commune with Shoghi Effendi signaled something deeper than sightseeing. Locke was also on a spiritual quest to excavate the remains of his past and try to erect a new, more authentic self. Locke hints at this complex process in his article “Impressions of Haifa,” published in the 1928 issue of the Bahá’í World. “Whether Bahá’í or non-Bahá’í,” he writes, “Haifa makes pilgrims of all who visit her. The place itself makes mystics of us all, for it shuts out the world of materiality,” which Locke wearied of after three months in Europe. “I cannot describe it except to say that its influence lacks the mustiness of asceticism and blends the joy and naturalness of a nature cult with the ethical seriousness and purpose of a spiritual religion.” It was an attempt to put the halves of his personality together, for, as he noted, the shrine at Carmel “is an ideal place for the reconciliation of things that have been artificially and wrongfully put asunder.”1
Locke’s interest in Baha’ism was closely related to his mother. Although she had been raised as an Episcopalian, Mary Locke had embraced Locke’s enthusiasm for Baha’ism. In a letter, right after his mother’s death, he wrote, “It was her wish that I identify myself more closely with” Baha’ism; and thereafter, he did contribute more time and energy to his work with Gregory.2 But Locke also remained somewhat aloof from the Baha’is, and rather than commit wholeheartedly to them, seemed more involved in a pursuit of catharsis through sex. By the summer of 1923, he seemed ready for a change and sought the spiritual calm his mother and the Baha’i faith had instilled in his life. Spiritual pain seemed to bring Locke to Haifa, and he came to find relief. Locke also could see in the Baha’i religion the possibility of bringing together the mystical side of his personality with his social and political commitment to advance race progress. Louis Gregory had advanced the agenda that the logical outgrowth of the Baha’i commitment to advance peace and tolerance was to foreground a program to advance racial harmony in America. Despite those incentives, Locke remained reluctant to commit more of his time to the Baha’i faith in the early 1920s.
Still, something touched Locke in Haifa. His article on the visit is written in a completely different voice from that of his European ones. When he writes of Haifa, we hear the voice of a philosophical aesthete, whose senses have been enlivened by the search for peace in a place of spiritual worship among natural beauties.
I shall never forget my first view of it [Mount Carmel] from the terraces of the shrine. Mount Carmel, already casting shadows, was like a dark green curtain behind us and opposite was a gorgeous crescent of hills so glowing with color—gold, sapphire, amethyst as the sunset colors changed—and in between the mottled emerald of the sea, and the gray-toned house roofs of Haifa. Almost immediately opposite and picking up the sun’s reflection like polished metal were the ramparts of “Akka,” transformed for a few moments from its shabby decay into a citadel of light and beauty. Most shrines concentrate the view upon themselves—this one turns itself into a panorama of inspiring loveliness. It is a fine symbol for a Faith that wishes to reconcile the supernatural with the natural, beauty and joy with morality.3
In his own life, Locke had not been able to reconcile his desire for spiritually rewarding work, his commitment to racial struggle, his overwhelming egotism, and his consuming desire for a young male lover with what most people considered “morality.” But in the hard, rocky fortress of Carmel, he was able to nourish the hope that such rapprochement was possible through transcendence and spiritual companionship. He seemed to find the latter in Shoghi Effendi, who himself was in a kind of hiding after having been maligned by American Baha’is as not being a strong enough leader. Even more seriously, traditional enemies of the Baha’is, the Islamic nationalists, had begun burning and killing Baha’is. Locke’s presence seemed to buoy the distant, younger Effendi, and they became friends as he led the Black philosopher around the citadel’s grounds.
The death chambers at Carmel particularly moved Locke. “The shrine chambers of the Bab and ‘Abdúl-Bahá are both impressive,” he wrote in “Impressions of Haifa,” “but in a unique and almost modern way the ante-chambers are simply the means of taking away the melancholy and gruesomeness of death and substituting for them the thought of memory, responsibility and reverence.” He went on to explore the meaning of success for a spiritual leader, and by implication, the meaning of his life, concluding “the death of the greatest teachers is the release of their spirit in the world, and the responsible legacy of their example bequeathed to posterity. Moral ideas find their immortality through the death of their founders.” Very likely Locke reflected upon what moral idea his life would immortalize, what legacy would be his, and what role he was destined to play in world affairs. As yet, all of these were vague. Locke had failed to commit to any definitive cause outside of him. He had no family, no real allegiance to the Washington community, and no public identification with any political movement for social change. Locke seemed to learn here the existential lesson that only by giving oneself wholly to a cause, perhaps as a martyr for a movement, could one gain immortality. Unlike Locke, Shoghi Effendi had done so and had Carmel as “a constant source of inspiration and vision from which to draw.”4
Locke was drawn to Haifa as a place of spiritual inspiration where he could escape the racial narrative and dwell on the tragic nature of all human existence—that we live, struggle, and die regardless of our accomplishments. That tragedy, so evident in the death chambers, was far more universal than the tragedy of Black life in America. At Haifa, he could walk with his friend and hear the higher frequencies of his life—sit awhile and reflect on the eternal question: what would be the meaning of his life? That awakened consciousness must have brought him back to his mother, and he must have longed to bring her to this hallowed place, where they could have commune in that silent way they communicated without speaking. Here, with Shoghi, Locke did not have to be the race man, the deliverer, as perhaps he had to be with Louis Gregory, who wanted him to do the work of making the American Bahai’s racially relevant. Locke was tired already of what lay ahead for him—performing the role of the race man always hustling for the next accomplishment for the Negro to be put, like a notch, on his belt. Here, making a career out of the Black experience seemed a waste of his limited time on earth. So many had allowed race struggle to define them; by coming to Haifa, Locke said that he refused to let his King Tut rationale define what was really a spiritual journey to find himself in a world that treated him with mild, even rude dismissiveness. Too much focus on hustling or reacting to the crudeness of his enemies was ultimately as dehumanizing as anything the people at Oxford had done to him. His life was more than a race struggle—it was a transcendental quest for meaning and inner peace in a hard, unyielding world.
Locke was not alone in his spiritual quest. During the 1920s, other Black artists and intellectuals, including Countee Cullen and Jean Toomer, sought a mystical way out of the racial narrative, realizing that that narrative ignored the complexity of their personalities and their sense of the world. While Locke was flirting with Baha’ism in Palestine, Jean Toomer was transitioning out of writing race-inspired literature to adopting the ascetic philosophy of George Gurdjieff, who advocated that a higher spiritual consciousness would ultimately eliminate race consciousness forever.5 But unlike Toomer, Locke could not completely abandon race consciousness to commit himself to mysticism. He was too much of a realist to believe that race prejudice in American life or world imperialism could be eradicated simply on the basis of the Baha’i or Gurdjieff appeal to universal tolerance. Locke’s devotion to the spiritual brotherhood of all humanity was balanced by a desire for power for himself and his kind. Power—something both father and son respected and used frequently to defend themselves—was necessary and with it, almost inevitably, came a level of spiritual disquiet and tension.
Locke’s ambivalence was a struggle with a deeper philosophical conflict. To become a full-fledged Baha’i meant to devote oneself, according to American Baha’i spokesperson Charles Mason Remey, to “the attainment of the Universal Consciousness by all human kind through the spiritual oneness of the peoples of all religions, races, nations and classes.”6 Philosophical idealism still lurked in Locke’s intellectual outlook, and even as an adult, he longed for a kind of prenatal unification with the world that discourses of spiritual oneness promised. But as early as his Oxford years, he had rejected oneness or philosophical idealism in favor of “pluralism” and a philosophy resistant to absorption into any version of oneness.
By 1923, it was no longer simply that others perceived him as different, but that Locke had embraced difference as his personal code. No matter how welcoming the Baha’is could be or how attractive universal brotherhood was, Locke remained convinced that universalism would ultimately crush his identity. Sexuality was as much a part of this existential outlook as race. He didn’t want to be absorbed in some collectivity that denied the undistilled parts of his identity, for example, of being a queer Black man who loved art and had not completely separated from his mother, among other things. He carried a near phobia that something essential about him would be filtered out in any collectivity that did not recognize the irremediable quality of “Lockus.” He now faced the question that he had avoided for nearly the two years following the death of his mother. How could he reconcile the contradiction between his desires to ally himself with a universal spiritual message with his equally powerful desire for a particular, undissolvable cultural identity? He began to locate the answer in Cairo.
Early in November, Locke left Haifa for Cairo, seemingly an odd choice for a Black man in search of his African roots, given that most African Americans came from West Africa. Locke, however, did not agree. He said as much in an article, “Apropos of Africa,” published in the February 1924 issue of Opportunity. It was ridiculous, he asserted, for “Afro-Americans” to limit their prideful identification with Africa to its “West Coast,—erroneously regarded because of the accidents of the slave-trade as our especial patrimony, if we ever had any. But the colored millions of America represent every one of the many racial stocks of Africa, are descended from the peoples of almost every quarter of the continent, and are culturally the heirs of the entire continent.” The American Negro is “the physical composite of eighty-five per cent at least of the African stocks.” From this perspective, “the American Negro is in a real sense the true Pan African.”7 While the argument was self-justifying, it also made prophetic sense and pushed back against the rigid ancestralism that would later take over identity politics.
Locke certainly knew that few if any Egyptians or Ethiopians had come to America through the Atlantic trade system. His argument was at base apologetics, an attempt to counter Eurocentric arguments made by some Egyptologists that Egypt was not part of “Black Africa” and hence not part of the American Negro’s continental homeland. Locke attacked that argument in “Impressions of Luxor,” his second article about his trip to Egypt, published in May 1924 in the Howard Review, where he argued that Egypt’s aesthetic splendor had been “focalized here in an African setting” and “in a polyglot civilization that must have included more African, and possibly even Negro components, than will ordinarily be admitted.”8
In effect, Locke was suggesting that African Americans were “Pan Africans” at heart, representatives of a “polyglot civilization” that had come into being through the Atlantic slave trade, a vast mixing bowl of peoples and cultures that made African Americans as much Arab as African. This was radical anthropology but less than radical political philosophy. It might have made sounder political sense to argue, as he had in Race Contacts, that African Americans and Egyptians were linked together by both living under a system of imperialism orchestrated by Anglo-Americans and the English. But that would not lead us into King Tut’s tomb but into British Egyptian political relations that were tense in the 1920s as calls for nationalism and self-determination, really independence from England, were rife in Egypt. Despite the knowledge he gained of anti-colonialism in the Oxford Cosmopolitan Club, Locke had chosen the cultural road of linking Egyptians and African Americans through a less radical and more gendered line—all of Africa, he reasoned, was our “especial patrimony … if we ever had one.” That last hint of irony—or was it sarcasm—suggests he knew that a direct African heritage for twentieth-century American Negroes was an imagined tradition. But including Egypt in the African American “patrimony” made it easier for his Afro-Anglo Saxon audience to identify with Africa. Here was the other side of the apologetics. Like his Black Brahmins back home, Locke still was not ready to identify with the non-literary, non-scholarly, and non-linear cultures of West Africa. His solution was to identify with the more Europeanized Africa. Ancient African cultures in Egypt and Ethiopia were both part of the Western tradition and precursors of it—alternatives to the modern Western European narrative that all that was civilized was White. Egypt possessed cultural traditions that could stand up to Europe, indeed, prefigure Europe’s historicity, spirituality, and, most important, social and political order. With a longer history of civilized living than the Greeks, Egypt possessed a cultural splendor that made defining African Americans as “Pan Africans” palpable. Anglo-Americans might claim an undocumented lineage to the Greeks; Locke would match their hubris and claim African Americans as the heirs of Egyptian civilization and dare anyone to prove him wrong.
Egypt was attractive, because Egyptian high aestheticism pioneered the use of art to revitalize an empire. After the death in 1350 b.c. of the pharaoh Akhenaton, who had brutally converted Egyptians to sun-god worship and imposed monotheism on the masses, King Tutankhamen had reversed that religious decision, reinvigorated Egypt, and extended its influence over the Nubians, the Syrians, and the Cretans. In part, this domination was symbolic: King Tut’s minions had produced thousands of beautiful thrones, chariots, walking sticks, jewelry boxes, and other accoutrements of power that celebrated the traditional gods of Thebes. Locke dreamed of returning his people to their ancient traditions by using art to rejuvenate African Americans after a period of decline under what he believed were false prophets. Under King Tut, aestheticization of the male body, especially the young male body of King Tut, reached its apogee. The remarkable treasures of King Tut’s tomb testified to the tremendous love of Egyptians for their boy king. Going to King Tut’s tomb might reveal how art that glorified the Brown male body could turn a divided and contentious people into a powerful nation.
Given that aesthetic history, one would expect Locke to embark for Luxor, King Tut’s tomb, immediately after arriving in Egypt. But instead he dallied for several days in Cairo. Getting down to work was a slow and difficult process for Locke. “I was terribly uncomfortable in Africa at first,” Locke confessed in a letter to Montgomery Gregory shortly after he finally made it to Luxor in early December.9 Locke’s discomfort was not only due to Egypt’s cultural strangeness, but also its lack of the kind of immediately accessible English-speaking bourgeois world he had come to depend on in Europe. Locke thrived on an elaborate set of conventions, protocols, and connections proscribed by Victorian culture. In Egypt, he felt vulnerable, because he lacked access to that kind of social infrastructure. The British imperialists were the ruling class in Egypt in 1923, and Locke hated the British. The indigenous elite spoke Arabic, a language he did not. And they were Islamic, the traditional enemies and persecutors of his beloved Baha’is. It was not clear with whom he could connect.
So, Locke did all the things that thousands of tourists from Europe and America did in Egypt—he visited the bazaars on narrow, crowded streets of Cairo and took time to visit the pyramids outside the town and the majestic Sphinx, using another man’s non-transferable card. Locke may have had a sexual motivation for staying in Cairo. North Africa had a reputation as a place where homosexuals from abroad could find lovers. Egypt was far more tolerant than the United States of same-sex relationships, especially before marriage, although such relationships often remained ambiguous. While in Cairo, Locke appeared to find a young friend in Kamal Hamdy. Locke even wrote and sent pictures of Washington to him after he returned home. “Kamal—here is a comprehensive view [of Washington]. But after all—I love the quaintness and age of Cairo—and of course you.”10 Unfortunately for Locke, his letters and postcards were returned, undelivered.
Whether from an item in his travel guide or a tip from Arthur Schomburg, Locke visited the old Roman fortress of Babylon just outside of Cairo. Nestled in a lovely enclave of courtyards and gardens stood a small museum founded in 1908 by Marcos Simaika Pasha, a leading Copt, to preserve the history of the Christian Church in Egypt. The Copts were Egyptian Christians who had rejected Roman Catholic, Byzantine, and Greek Orthodox Church authority and developed a uniquely African branch of Christianity. Theologically, the Copts were distinguished from both the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox churches by their insistence that Jesus Christ had one and only one divine nature (monophysitism) and not the dual nature of Christ (human and divine) decreed by Byzantine theologians in a.d. 451. The Copts possessed a complicated, overlapping identity. As Christians, they were a religious minority in Islamic Egypt; but as Egyptians with a long history of resistance to Roman and Byzantine hegemony, their struggles for independence echoed Egypt’s own desire for national self-determination during the centuries following the decline of the pharaohs. A unique cultural phenomenon, Coptic art and culture incorporated Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Nubian, and Islamic forms into distinctive syncretic styles in architecture, woodworking, sculpture, literature, and textiles.
In choosing to visit the Coptic Museum, Locke began his formal study of African culture at its most composite site, even though the Copts had no real connection to Black Americans. But Locke liked the Copts because they were an independent, wealthy, and fiercely proud people who were understudied in the West. “For these people,” he argued later in “Apropos,” “the martyrs and guardians of Christianity in Africa, and their interesting history and institutions, we should cultivate a very special and intimate interest.” The “we” referred to the educated Black American community, which Locke believed needed to hear the central message of Coptic history: racial or cultural minorities could survive and maintain their integrity through group loyalty.11 Starting with the Copts of Egypt meant rejecting an essentialist relationship to Africa for African Americans and embracing one based on a pragmatism—the American Negro, surrounded by adversaries, should behave as the Copts had.
Locke’s visit to the Coptic Museum was his attempt to find in Egypt an example of the kind of group identity and struggle for cultural self-preservation he wished to foster among African Americans. That group identity was concretized in the museum, which only existed because of the collective consciousness of the Coptic people. “In ten years,” Locke wrote, “six of them almost useless to the project because of the war, and with only limited private funds, but with the great intangible capital of group loyalty and cooperation, Murcos Samaika Pasha has assembled in competition with the great endowed museums of Europe and America a collection of Coptic antiquities which almost rivals the best in any line of special collection and in variety outmatches all.”12 Racial and ethnic communities survived because of the willingness of their leaders to create institutions of cultural self-preservation.
Key to Locke’s enthusiasm for the Coptic Museum was that he was met and befriended by its founder and director, Marcos Simaika Pasha, a wealthy, middle-aged man, who gave Locke a tour of the museum. Simaika led Locke through a series of large rooms with marble slabs, carved tiles, stained glass windows, and wood-carved doors and ceilings from old Coptic houses and churches that had been installed in the structure of the museum. Entire pulpits, shrines, and altars were re-created in some rooms, while framed segments of wall paintings and ornate textiles of favorite biblical scenes were hung in others to facilitate meditation.13 Instead of exhibiting the art and artifacts as archaeological curios or modernist art objects, the museum reproduced the religious context in which the artifacts were originally used. The larger intention was to convey to the visitor the spiritual feeling of worship of their churches and suggest their religion was the most important part of their ethnic identity. The museum was a shrine to the people and their history. That suggested to Locke the rationale for an African American–controlled museum in America: it was cultural self-determination, the ability to show through an exhibit what the intelligentsia of the African American minority believed were the most important elements of their culture. Locke did not yet know for certain all those elements, but one of them would be the linkage between African Americans and Africans.
As Pasha led him through the museum, he lectured Locke on how the preservation effort of his museum fit within a larger Egyptian narrative of national pride. Pasha spoke of how the Egyptians were perhaps the first to invent the alphabet, the first to manufacture paper, and the pioneers of drawing, painting, and sculpture. Then he led Locke down the steps to the lower chamber and showed him the museum’s collection of precious Coptic- and Arabic-language manuscripts that lay open in glass library cases. For Pasha, the Coptic manuscripts continued the ancient tradition of Egyptian primacy in writing, learning, and religion, and refuted Europeanist claims that the West had a monopoly on civilization. Here was the literate, ordered African tradition Locke had been looking for. And here, in Pasha, Locke found proof that there were African intellectuals as nationalist-minded and race conscious as he was.14 What Pasha and the Copts represented for Locke was something he had not mentioned in his application to go to Egypt: they were modern, complex, racial but also spiritual humanity in search of meaning.
Not surprisingly, the two men became friends, and Pasha invited Locke to his home to meet other Copts and the Abyssinian envoy to Egypt, His Excellency Belata Heroui. The slender, dark-skinned, regal-looking Heroui, with numerous pre-Christian and Christian crosses on his chest, was in Cairo on his return from Geneva where he had argued the case for the inclusion of Abyssinia, the ancient name for Ethiopia, into the League of Nations. Heroui was one of the most educated men of Abyssinia, an author, a devout Christian, and, like Pasha, a member of the African intellectual elite with whom Locke could identify. After congratulating Heroui on his success at Geneva, Locke discussed with him his dream of an intellectual alliance between African Americans and Abyssinians, the only non-colonized people in Africa. Locke also questioned Heroui about the European and White American discourse that Ethiopians did not consider themselves Negroes and shunned any association with them. Heroui disputed that, promising that Ethiopians would welcome a closer friendship. Locke then proposed an exchange program by which African American students from Howard would be allowed to travel to Ethiopia and Egypt to study their peoples and cultures, while Ethiopian and Egyptian students would be sent to Washington to study at Howard University. Apparently, Heroui was enthusiastic about the plan and encouraged Locke to contact him the following year.
In fact, both Pasha and Heroui were enthusiastic about Locke and his ideas, which buoyed his enthusiasm about Africa. Talking with them confirmed that a transnational racial connection existed between him and at least some African peoples. “Certainly it was most pleasant,” he reported in “Apropos,” “to be assured by their most representative men that they regard us with a brotherly and lively interest and would welcome more cordial and intimate relations. Ethnologists may argue and dispute all they like, but a felt brotherhood and kinship is pragmatically a fact.” Meeting these two “representative men” in Africa suggested a basis exited for an alliance along Pan-African lines.15 These men embodied the political gravitas of African Christianity.
Locke encountered an African patriarchy in Cairo that appeared to accept him as a brother. After all, Egypt possessed a very patriarchal society in which men were the lords of their households and communities in ways quite distinct from Locke’s experience growing up in Black Victorian America, in which his mother held considerable power in the household while her husband was alive, and elite African American women influenced dramatically their religious and secular communities. The fraternity of African men he met in Cairo was inspiring. Here were African men who were free, independent, and serious; men who exercised power in their communities without the twin authorities of White men and Black women to affect what they did or said. The closest he had come to this kind of patriarchal acceptance was among people like John Bruce of the Yonkers Historical Society and Alexander Walters at Howard. But they were father figures, who treated him like a surrogate son. In Cairo, he was recognized not as a son, but as a man—a peer—by powerful African men.
Another factor that helped cement Locke’s interest in the Copts and the Abyssinians was that they were among the most tolerant of his homosexuality. The Africa that Locke imagined was a cosmopolitan, intellectual, sophisticated, and sexually liberal Africa that was race conscious, intellectually serious, prosperous, and socially tolerant of diversity. Locke’s vision of what was “Apropos of Africa” also contained what was apropos for him.
Eventually, Locke left Cairo on board one of the tourist steamers of the Anglo-American Nile and Tourist Company headed for Upper Egypt. Traveling down the Nile by tourist steamer was to see Egypt in luxury, though Locke went second-class. Initially, he was not comfortable enough with Egypt to venture off the boat, viewing the pyramids and other monuments from what his guidebook described as “a floating hotel.” That began to change as he worked his way farther south. After spending the night in port at El-Balyana, Locke and a party of sightseers took a donkey excursion to Abydos, where the famous temples of Seti and Rameses, and the Christian monuments at the Coptic Monastery are located. Locke enjoyed both the beauty and the religious sentiment of these monuments to Egyptian power and religion. Next he visited the ruins of the Temple at Dendereh, one of the most impressive of Egyptian monuments, and then on Thursday, reached Luxor, where he took an excursion to its famous Karnak Temple.
Locke continued on the full twenty-one-day Nile trip through Upper Egypt and the Sudan. After reaching Karnak, the natural terminus of his steamboat voyage to Luxor and the tomb of King Tut, Locke continued south to Edfou, where he visited its fine monument that, according to his guidebook, “stands with its two enormous pylons high above the town like some huge Norman castle.” Then, on his twelfth day out of Cairo, he reached Assuan, where his particular interest was to visit the island of Philae and the First Cataract or Rapids of the Nile. Locke then boarded another steamer and continued farther south to the Second Cataract. In his guidebook he checked this passage. “At Kardash (615 miles from Cairo) is a quarry and a small temple, which form one of the most beautiful bits of river scenery on the Nile.”16 Locke’s racial interest in Africa did not curtail his appreciation for the picturesque and the sublime. But the peak moment in the southern excursion must have been the next day when he reached the stunning locale at Kalabsha in the Sudan, where the Nubians, a dark-skinned African people who were dominated but never completely absorbed by the Egyptians, lived. Locke left his steamer and took a train to Khartoum, where he spent a couple of days resting and surveying the vast Sudan, before doubling back.
Locke reached Karnak, just below Luxor, during the first week of December and secured hotel accommodations at the Assouan Cataract Hotel. Locke was finally becoming comfortable in Africa, in part, because it was one of the few places that an African American could be treated like a king for a couple of dollars and a song.
How I can ever come down from these things, I don’t quite know—its a worse tumble than from Oxford. For example, yesterday my share of the retinue was one donkey, one donkey-boy, one guide to tell the donkey & donkey-boy where to go, one sub-donkey-boy to carry my lunch basket, who incidentally flicked the flies away with a fly-whip while under way—all dog-trotting along in the sizzling sun—we covered 18 miles, were under way from 8 AM to 5 30 PM with stops, of course, and the whole affair cost $4 no 3.30, including ferriage across the Nile for the batch. And as to entering this hotel, here is a diagram
—gateman
—Porter
—Boy to dust you[r] shoes
—manager or his deputies to smile & say good evening
—hall porter
—corner man to see you turn in right direction (he always knows where you are going)
—Arab servant or chair bearer who sleeps with one eye open and rises like a Sentry and then your blessed room-door-one insiders well before running the gamut.17
Despite his real desire for a peer relationship with Africans, his private correspondence reveals that what he also wanted was to be treated like a god. The challenge for Locke as he resumed his now almost-compulsive visitation of tombs was to find some deeper synthesis of his conflicting feelings about Africa for African Americans and for himself.
After a couple of days resting in his regal hotel and sightseeing among the local monuments, Locke took a donkey team across the river to Luxor and confronted the main reason for his six-month sabbatical: the excavation of King Tut’s tomb. The second year’s excavation by Howard Carter and his team had commenced in October, when Locke was en route to Haifa, and there was little to see. In the winter of 1922, after the tomb had first been uncovered, curious visitors often caught glimpses of the priceless artifacts that Carter and others carted away for labeling, photographing, and cataloging. By contrast, the second year’s work of breaking into the burial chamber of the king had gone very slowly and had yielded few immediate treasures. Once Carter and company demolished the partition wall separating the antechamber and the burial chamber and cracked open the huge gilded shrine inside, they learned that more shrines stood between them and the remains of King Tut. The task of disassembling each of the four shrines was slow, tedious, and undramatic. Not until February 1924 could they lift the lid of the yellow-gold sarcophagus that held King Tut’s remains, when Locke had been long gone. When he arrived in December 1923, Carter and his team were finishing work on the second shrine and beginning work on the third. Carter’s rising anger at the numerous official visitors to the tomb demanded by Egyptian authorities and the rising tensions within his own research team had led him to decide not to admit almost any new visitors into the tomb. This was a monumental setback for Locke, who had hoped all along to represent the race by getting a glimpse of Tut in the tomb.
Such exclusion, especially by an Englishman, galvanized Locke into action. Unwilling to accede to Carter’s blanket restriction, Locke visited the tomb on several occasions in December to try to gain access. “Tut is the most exclusive creature on earth,” he confided to Gregory. “There is just a chance before leaving of stepping over the threshold at the journalist’s second fortnightly view; but only a chance—and that through Egyptian channels. Carter is a bear.” Evidently, Locke had taken his case to the Egyptian authorities who, like the Coptic and Ethiopian intellectuals in Cairo, responded favorably to the rationale of an African American nationalist interested in Egypt and the excavation. Indeed, from Locke’s letter, he had successfully pitched the story of his visit—that he was in Egypt to represent African American scholarly interest in the excavation—to American and French archaeologists on the scene. “There have been surprising reactions—for example Mr. Winlock in charge of Metropolitan Museum staff was cordial enough over the idea of colored men investigating E[gypt] to throw in a luncheon and carte blanche to their excavations.”18
Writing about this portion of his visit in “Impressions of Luxor,” Locke echoed Winlock’s interpretation that excavation of the tomb would never have succeeded without the “spirit of cooperation among the various agencies,” especially from the “staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, led by Arthur Winlock.” By crediting the Metropolitan, Locke took away some of the self-inflated credit of Carter. Although Locke’s report was his revenge on Carter for keeping him out of the tomb, Locke’s observation was also one of the many little truths of the King Tut tomb that seldom reached the public. Carter had seized upon the discovery as his property, not that of the Egyptians or the scientific community at large. Another hidden truth was that it had been Carter’s Egyptian helper who had actually discovered the hidden step that had led them to King Tut’s tomb. But that fact had been lost in the swell of press for Carter. Locke had arrived in Luxor when many people, not only the Metropolitan staff but also the Egyptian authorities, were tiring of Carter’s self-inflation and his sole control over the excavation of the tomb. As Locke wrote in “Impressions”: “The conflict with the Carnevon expedition has reached the flash point and the preference of the Egyptian officials is for the research to be carried out by its own archaeologists and if that is not possible by the French who are seen as less imperialistic than the British.”19 Here again was an echo of his view in “Black Watch on the Rhine” that the French were “less imperialistic.”
As a practical matter, though, the Egyptians lacked the corps of scientifically trained archaeologists needed to carry out such work, and that opened the door for Locke’s plan to educate such a corps of African American scholars at Howard University to do such research in Africa. In the charged nationalist atmosphere of the tomb’s excavation, his plan found welcoming ears. Locke believed that if he could gain support for his plan in Egypt for Howard University participation, he could return to Washington and drum up support for a Howard University research mission in Egypt. Locke recognized that even Howard did not possess the kind of archaeologically trained experts needed, but here again he was lucky. Excluded from active participation in the British and American excavation work, Locke contacted the Institut francais d’archaeologiel orientale’s mission in Luxor about the possibility of Howard University students being trained by the French Institut and then assisting with the Institute’s own excavations in Luxor.
Although Locke was not able to meet George Foucart, the director of the Institute and a renowned archaeologist, before leaving he wrote Foucart a letter outlining the plan and received an enthusiastic response in January. “I attach extreme importance,” Foucart wrote, “to the realization of our common enterprise. We can envision (a) scientific cooperation, (b) official administrative cooperation, (c) material realization (financial, etc.). It is important that these arrangements are done soon with proper suggestions. I am solicitous of all of your suggestions, I want your responses and all of your input in our decisions. [I envision] a premier program (between your university and my department).”20
It is hard to imagine a more successful accomplishment of his Luxor trip: here was a major French scholar willing to work cooperatively with him and Howard to train Black American students to do scientific research in Africa. Unlike the relationship he had broached in Cairo, his arrangement with the French Institute would not only legitimate a research mission to Egypt but also provide the scientific training Locke knew was so wanting on his home turf. Despite his misgivings, there were professional opportunities merging for him and like-minded African Americans in Africa. And if he could pull off establishing a relationship between Howard and the French Research Institute, he might be able to bring to his university a scholarly reputation in the anthropological study of Africa that would even rival the British.
There was, however, another side to Locke’s experience of Egypt, which is buried in “Impressions.” Along with his official, diplomatic, and scientific mission to Egypt, there was also psychological digging going on. “Impressions” began not with a trumpeting of his new scientific alliance with the French Institut, but instead with a long mediation on the Egyptian cult of the dead. “The cult of the dead, her most dominant and persistent concern, made the tomb the depository center of her civilization, and except for that fact probably nothing would have remained to solve in any concrete way the historical problem of Egyptian life and culture.” Locke was fascinated by the concept of immortality and also sought a way to immortalize himself. In Egypt, he saw that building monuments and donating one’s vital spiritual possessions to honor one’s civilization was one way of achieving immortality. “From Napata, in the extreme south, to Gizeh, near Cairo, a distance of eleven hundred miles, scattered at intervals that are closing up with each new discovery are the graveyards of the dynasties of this characteristically death-worshipping civilization.”21 Black culture in America was also fascinated with death. Slaves retained African burial practices and ceremonies, especially as they were encouraged to seek fulfillment in an afterlife. The Black middle class held spectacular funerals and wakes of the Black American middle class, and Black Victorian culture was suffused with ornate celebrations of the dead. The trip to Upper Egypt seemed to open up feelings of mourning in Locke, the Black Victorian, surrounding the death of his mother and his own attempts to preserve the self that animated her body even after she had gone on. Egypt, therefore, touched that side of him that he was exploring privately, the feelings of loss of the kind of nurture that his mother had given him. In Egypt, he found a motherland that touched his feelings for his lost mother.
Unfortunately, while Locke’s visit to Egyptian tombs rubbed open his search for meaning in a world without his mother, it did not provide any answers to that search. This is odd because King Tut was, as an adult child, the embodiment of what Locke, a child-sized adult, should have dreamed of becoming for his people. But Locke seemed to be put off by the aesthetics of ancient Egyptian civilization. Perhaps it was too much death, too much the Black Victorian splendor amplified. It failed to answer his question of how to create a renaissance of art out of his encounter with Egypt. Locke found its art—and historical moment—largely decadent. “Tut-ankh-a-men’s tomb … has already revealed an extraordinary and apparent sudden flowering in the artistry of this period. [Its] objects already displayed in part at the Cairo Museum are not merely fine in one aspect of art, they are indeed the most richly composite art in the world, and only a certain wizardry of craftsmanship keeps them from being in bad taste as too ornate.” Without such “wizardry of craftsmanship,” the art would be in “bad taste” and “too ornate”—not a ringing endorsement. It was not as an aesthete, but as a philosopher of culture that Locke could embrace what he found in Egypt.22 A spiritual emptiness seemed to be at the center of a culture that covered itself with incredible opulence and flash. It was all too gaudy to him, almost as if he were reviewing a Black working-class funeral back home.
But there may have been another reason Locke recoiled. Seeing the way ancient Egyptians honored and loved their boy king, probably barely shorter than Locke himself, it could not have been lost on him that there was nothing he could do that would ever elicit that kind of adoration for him. This whole trip had been about death and the underlying question, what would be his legacy? What would he be remembered for? Given how he was treated as someone barely tolerated—McKay’s caricature was probably just a smidgeon of the snickering about Locke just out of earshot—Locke was not going to be wrapped up in the twentieth-century sarcophagus and be preserved for centuries as an icon of African American deliverance. Instead, he was wrapped in invisibility, the little man ignored. He could not but come away from this model of splendid hero worship feeling a bit jealous and dejected, for nothing yet suggested that saving the race like Tut had saved his civilization would result in anything but disappointment for Locke. Looking that far in the past showed how far African people had fallen to get to America. It showed as well how quixotic his own quest for a renaissance of Black people in America really was.
Back in Cairo, Locke seemed to regain his balance. Once again the purview of the Coptics and their aggressive self-reliance seized his consciousness and he felt renewed and able to act. He arranged to receive on consignment a cache of Coptic antiquities to be shipped to the United States for him to try and sell. Under the aura of Simaika Pasha, Locke became the engaged curator and potential African scholar. With the African Christians he could play the rescuing, liberating authority figure that their patriarchy had inspired him to want to be. With the Coptic art, he could represent it back in America as something he—not Carter—had discovered. Locke had also seen what a self-conscious, inspired minority in the Copts could do if they steadfastly held on to their traditions in the face of attacks from Islamic Egyptians and British imperialists. In Cairo, he found a racial mission that met his psychological needs for mastery and control and was wrapped in a rationale of selfless service to other Brown people.
Nevertheless, Locke was ambivalent as he left Egypt. The dominant odor of his trip to Egypt remained that of embalming fluid and only uncertain answers of deliverance for a modern people—or for him.