Everybody is frankly interested in
everybody else and in what is going on. Of all the cities the country,
San Francisco is by weather and temperament, most adapted to the
pleasant French habit of open-air eating. The clients in the barber
shops, lathered like clowns and trussed up in what is perhaps the least
heroic posture and costume possible for man, are seated at the windows,
where they may enjoy the outside procession during the boresome
processes of the shave and the hair-cut. In the windows of the downtown
shops, with no pretence whatever of the curtains customary in the East,
men clerks disrobe and re-robe life-sized female models of an appalling
nude flesh-likeness. They dress these helpless ladies in all the
fripperies of femininity from the wax out, oblivious to the flippant
comments of gathering crowds. It's all a part of that civic candor
somehow. Nowhere I think are eyes so clear, glances so direct and
expressions so frank as in California. Nowhere is conversation and
discussion more straightforward and courageous.
All that I have written thus far is only by way of preliminary to
showing you what the background of the Native Son has been and to
explaining why Europe does not dazzle him much and the East not at all.
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