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COMMENTARY - The heart of Providence
By Carl Senna
The weekend after the Friday that Providence police Sgt. Cornel Young Jr. was killed, I was in another community, my attention fo-cused on my 80-year-old host, in his elegant Burke, Va., home with his lovely German-born wife, and their three school-age children. He was E. Harper Johnson, a name known to few Americans today, though a handful might re-call the pleasure of reading one of his hundred or so books for young adults, published in the 1940s and 1950s, with such titles as Kenny or Piankh, the story of the black pharaoh.
A Kenyan citizen today, he came from Birmingham, Ala. As a boy of 8, he was a musical and artistic prodigy, recognized as such among blacks and whites. So two whites, a woman and a male French language instructor, arranged financing for Harper to attend a school in France in the 1920s, because they feared that the talent of this young black boy would never be fulfilled in the segregated South of the 1920s. In Paris, he studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts before World War II. Mr. Johnson was explaining to me how he and his wife, a woman in her 40s, had come to meet, marry and have children, over the initial objections of her German father, who had concerns about the December-May relationship and his race. So he retold the story of his first wife. In the months before the Germans marched into Paris, he and another teenage student, a girl from Normandy, had been required to perform a piano recital together. But he had been terribly shy to play a Chopin piece; after he performed he left the stage and remarked to his instructor that there had been no applause. He was in tears, fearing that he had performed miserably and would not graduate to higher levels of study. When the young girl played her piece, again there was no applause. Their instructor assured them not to worry, but the two of them should play a duo performance next. So they did, and when they had finished they stood up and bowed, but again there was no applause. The packed audience silently sat there for a few moments. Then a tall, elegantly dressed man rushed up the aisle onto the stage, and, standing between Harper and the girl, the man raised their hands up high. The audience then broke into thunderous applause. Harper had to leave Paris when German troops defeated the French, but he left his wife, his concert companion, pregnant. That was the last he saw of her, because she and her child were killed by German troops during the occupation of Paris. He said that the man who had stood on stage with them was none other than Charles de Gaulle, with whom Harper later corresponded. So Harper explained to his putative father-in-law that although he had every reason to dislike Germans, he loved his fiancée; her fa-ther overcame his objections. In 80 years, he said, he had learned that most people are basically good at heart. The television news from Providence had been riveting, a black policeman shot to death by two white officers. The fine and dignified television images of a Providence in genuine mourning for the fallen officer, and races, classes and interests united in grief, from 500 miles away, showed me that most people here are also good at heart.
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