Free The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes Page A

life.”
    “Must be, if you say so,” said Miss Lucas.
    “Well, let’s go,” commanded the great Lesche. “Let’s rehearse this first lecture now. Come on, boys.”
    The jazz band began to cry
Mood Indigo
in the best manner of the immortal Duke Ellington. Lesche began to speak in his great soft voice. Bushy-haired Tulane Lucas began to glide across the floor.
    “Goddamn!” said Sol, “It’s worth the money!”
    “Hey! Hey!” said Miss Lucas.
    “Sh-ss-ss-s!” said Lesche. “Be dignified … 
rooted
in the deepest source of life …
er-r-r?”
    “… O, early soul in motion
 …” prompted the Yale man.
    “O, early soul …
” intoned Lesche.
    The amazing collection of people gathered together in the Colony of Joy astounded even Lesche, whose very blasé-ness was what really made him appear so fresh. His thirty-seven clients in residence came almost all from families high in the Social Register, and equally high in the financial world. When Mrs. Carlos Gleed’s check of entrance came in, Sol said, “Boy, we’re made … for of society there could be no higher—blue blood straight out of Back Bay.
    The opening of the Colony created a furor among all the smart neurasthenics from Park Avenue right on up to New England. Dozens applied too late, and failed to get in. Others drove up daily for the lectures.
    Of those who came, some had belonged formerly to the self-denial cults; others to Gurdijief; others had been analyzed in Paris, Berlin, Vienna; had consulted Adler, Hirschfeld, Freud. Some had studied
under
famous Yogi. Others had been at Nyack. Now they had come to the Colony of Joy.
    Up and down Park Avenue miraculous gossip flew.
    Why, Mrs. Charles Duveen Althouse of Newport and Paris—feeling bad for years—is said to looklike a cherub since she’s gone into the Colony.… My dear, the famous Oriental fan-painter, Vankulmer Jones—he’s
another
man these days. The rhythms, he says, the rhythms have worked wonders! And just the very presence of Lesche … Nothing America has ever known—rumor flew about the penthouses of the East River—nothing is equal to it.… The Baroness Langstrund gasped in a letter to a talkative friend, “My God, it’s marvellous!”
    Far better than Indian thought, Miss Joan Reeves, the heiress of Meadow Brook, was said to have said by her best friends. “The movement is amazing.”
    Almost all of them had belonged to cults before—cults that had never satisfied. Some had even been injured by them. To a cult that based the soul-search on self-denial—deny what you like best, have it around you all the time, but never touch it,
never—
then you will be strong—Mrs. Duveen Althouse had belonged. She denied chocolates for a whole year; kept fresh candy sitting in each corner of her boudoir—resisted with all her soul—and at the end of a year was a wreck.
    Mr. Jones, the fan-painter, had belonged to a group on Cape Cod that believed in change through change: that is, whatever you want to be, you can. And all the members, after they had paid their fees, were told by the Mystic Master to changetheir names to whatever they most wished to be, or whoever, past or present, they admired. Some, without much depth, chose Napoleon or Cleopatra. But others, Daphne or Zeus or Merry del Val. Mr. Jones chose Horse. He’d always wanted to be an animal, to possess their strength and calm, their vigor, their ways. But after a whole summer at the Cape he was even less of a horse than before. And greatly mosquito bitten.
    Mrs. Ken Prather, II, a member of Lesche’s group, had once spent months entire kneeling holding her big toes behind her, deep in contemplation. A most handsome Indian came once a week to her home on East 64th, for an enormous consideration, and gave her lessons in silence, and in positions of thought. But finally she just couldn’t stand it any more.
    Others of the Colony of Joy had been Scientists in their youth. Others had wandered, disappointed, the