“Over the souls of men spread the condor wings of colossal monsters and all manner of evil things prey upon the heart and soul and body of Paul Robeson. Yet it may be in some far day the shadows shall fade and the Prince of Darkness be chained forever in his hell. And till then Robeson can but stand up stoutly to the monsters in his own heart and without, and with the aid of God he may yet triumph.”

♥

"I live quietly, I simmer lightly to avoid setting off the smoke alarms, I like on Facebook, I play 'casual games' and am mildly depressed."

"Peril hides in the house of Madison Grant!"

Alain Locke's voice quivered with earnestness and his lean, black-nailed fingers clawed at Wallace Thurman's mightily-muscled arm as he croaked his warning. He was a wiry, sunburnt man with a straggling black beard, and his ragged garments proclaimed him a philosopher. He looked smaller and meaner than ever in contrast to the brilliant bohemian with his black brows, broad chest, and powerful limbs. They stood on a corner by the Savoy Ballroom, and on either side of them flowed past the many-tongued, many-colored stream of the Harlem streets, which are exotic, hybrid, flamboyant, and clamorous.

Thurman pulled his eyes back from following a broad-shouldered, red-lipped Créole whose short skirt bared her thick brown thigh at each insolent step, and frowned down at his importunate companion.

"What do you mean by peril?" he demanded.

The wiry patron glanced furtively over his shoulder before replying, and lowered his voice.

"Who can say? But black men and fellow travelers have slept in the house of Madison Grant and never been seen or heard of again. What became of them? He swore they rose and went their way -- and it is true that no citizen of the city has ever disappeared from his house. But no one saw the travelers again, and men say that goods and equipment recognized as theirs have been seen in the pawnshops. If Grant did not sell them, after doing away with their owners, how came they there?"

"I have no goods," growled the giant bohemian, touching the worn stag grip of the pistol that hung at his hip. "I have even sold my breezer."

Minstrels sang her beauty throughout the western world, and the pride of a queen's dynasty was hers. But on that night Josephine Baker's pride was dropped from her like a cloak. In her chamber whose ceiling was a lapis lazuli dome, whose marble floor was littered with rare furs, and whose walls were lavish with golden friezework, ten girls, daughters of tycoons, their slender limbs weighted with gem-crusted armlets and anklets, slumbered on velvet couches about her royal bed with its golden dais and silken canopy. But the Bronze Venus lolled not on that silken bed.

She lay naked on her supple belly upon the bare marble like the most abased suppliant, her black hair cropped above her tawny neck, her slender fingers intertwined. She lay and writhed in pure horror that froze the blood in her lithe limbs and dilated her beautiful eyes, that pricked the roots of her dark hair and made goose-flesh rise along her supple spine.

Above her, in the darkest corner of the marble chamber, lurked a vast shapeless shadow. It was no living thing of form or flesh and blood. It was a clot of darkness, a blur in the sight, a monstrous night-born incubus that might have been deemed a figment of a sleep-drugged brain, but for the points of blazing yellow fire that glimmered like two eyes from the blackness.

The spider raced across the chamber floor, the gray rope waving out behind it. W.E.B. DuBois leaped high, clearing a couch -- with a quick wheel the fiend ran up the wall, and the strand, leaping off the floor like a live thing, whipped about the Pan-Africanist's ankle. He caught himself on his hands as he fell, jerking frantically at the web which held him like a pliant vise, or the coil of a python. The hairy devil was racing down the wall to complete its capture. Stung to frenzy, DuBois caught up a jewel chest and hurled it with all his strength. It was a move the monster was not expecting. Full in the midst of the branching black legs the massive missile struck, smashing against the wall with a muffled sickening crunch. Blood and greenish slime spattered, and the shattered mass fell with the burst gem-chest to the floor. The crushed black body lay among the flaming riot of jewels that spilled over it; the hairy legs moved aimlessly, the dying eyes glittered redly among the twinkling gems.