“BUT YOU CALLED ME BROTHER!”

ALTHOUGH I thought that I had read everything that Tolstoy had ever written, I happened to miss the story that my friend Wesley Boyd, a Methodist minister, told me. This story is especially applicable to social conditions in a postwar period. Tolstoy, who always had deep sympathy for the poor and gave away much that he owned, once passed a beggar on a village street in Russia during a war famine. The man was emaciated, starved almost to death, and, as usual, begging alms.

Tolstoy searched in his pockets for something to give to the beggar, for his generous heart went out in a sincere pity for the man, but he found no coin, because of the simple fact that all day long he had been giving away money. However, he kissed him on each sunken cheek, took him into his arms, and said: “Do not be angry with me, my brother, I have nothing to give you.”

The thin face of that beggar lighted with a great glow4, became illuminated as if a great inner light had transformed it, and he whispered in reply, as the tears ran down his cheeks: “But you called me brother—that is a great gift!” I was deeply moved by the story, for I had just read Richard Wright’s Black Boy, one of the most discussed books of the year. It had been banned in many cities, and yet to me it is a great and useful social document.

I had little opportunity to read it until it had been out for several months, but I finally got to its pages with a certain dread and eagerness, for some had said that it was a gruesome, cruel, and hard story. Others had said that it was a beautiful, tender, kindly, eager, hopeful story of what a Negro boy goes through in the South, at least an intelligent one. I actually found it to be the story of a Negro boy who 103 went about this world with a great wistful eagerness to find someone, black or white, brown or yellow, who would walk up to him and call him “brother.”

It was his hope, his faith, his dream, his goal. And at long last he found such a man. Now Richard Wright is going on to glory in his creative self-expression. Indeed, what most of us want is somebody, in the spirit of Tolstoy, to call us “brother.”

This poor, distracted world wants and needs a “brother.” Human beings are human beings, and the hungers of one are the hungers of all. Nationality and color do not change the basic needs and the hungers of humanity. The whole world hungers for brother¬ hood, and brotherhood is the only thing which will cure the deep distress of the world.