For the Native Son is an unique product, as distinctively and
characteristically Californian as the gigantic redwood, the flower
festival, the ferocious flea, the moving-picture film, the annual boxing
and tennis champion, the golden poppy or the purple prune. There is only
one other Californian product that can compare with him and that's the
Native Daughter. And as for the Native Daughter - - But if I start up
that squirrel track I'll never get back to the trail. Nevertheless some
day I'm going to pick out a diamond-pointed pen, dip it in wine and on
paper made from orange-tawny POPPY petals, try to do justice to the
Native Daughter. For this inflexible moment, however, my subject is the
Native Son. But if scenery and climate - and weather even - do creep in,
don't blame me. Remember I warned you. Besides sooner or later I shall
be sure to get back to the main theme.

In the January of 1917 I made my annual pilgrimage to California. On the
train was a Native Son who was the hero of the following astonishing
tale. He was one of a large family, of which the only girl had married a
German, a professor in an American university. Shortly before the Great
War, the German brother-in-law went back to the Fatherland to spend his
sabbatical year in study at a German university. Letters came regularly
for a while after the war began; then they stopped. His wife was very
much worried. Our hero decided in his simple western fashion to go to
Germany and find his brother-in-law. He traveled across the country,
cajoled the authorities in Washington into giving him a passport,
crossed the ocean, ran the British blockade and entered the forbidden
land. Straight as an arrow he went to the last address in his
brother-in-law's letters. That gentleman, coming home to his lunch,
tired, worried and almost penniless, found his Californian kinsman
smoking calmly in his room. The Native Son left money enough to pay for
the rest of the year of study and the journey home. Then he started on