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I do not know that I ever acknowledged receipt of your kindly letter in answer to the one in which I thanked you for a compliment paid. I found in your letter not only great pleasure but much encouragement. I think with you that the colored people ought to erect a monument to John Brown, and I hope to see it done, though hardly for some years. Recent developments seem to indicate that they are learning to act unitedly;
I take the liberty of sending you a copy of the October "Atlantic", which contains one of my stories, which if you read it, I hope you may think the best of the series. I think I have about used up the old Negro who serves as mouthpiece, and I shall drop him in future stories, as well as much of
I presume you saw an article of mine in the "Independent" in June; that paper has accepted from me a Southern Story, dealing with a tragic incident, not of slavery exactly, but showing the fruits of slavery. It is not in dialect, and while it has a moral, I tried to write as an artist and not as a preacher. I had a humorous dialect story in the June "Overland", a rather out-of-the-way publication which it hardly pays to write for.
I read with much interest your stirring weekly letters in the Inter-Ocean. I sincerely hope some of the Southern fire-eaters read them and profit by them. Recent events do not show, however, that the Southern whites have learned much; they certainly have not forgotten how to insult and oppress the Negro, and they still possess their old-time facility with the shot-gun and the cowhide. I see no remedy for the disease but for the colored people to learn to defend themselves.
I have had some thoughts of collecting in book form the stories I have published in the Atlantic, with some others I think as good, which have seen daylight elsewhere. If you have time to answer this letter, perhaps you would be kind enough to advise me from your own experience, whether such a book would he likely to pay for itself, or whether, it would be of sufficient value as an advertisement to justify me in paying for it? I have been writing a good deal this summer among other things a novel which I shall try to inflict on the public sooner or later. kindest regards, I am
P.S.—
You said to me that you thought the fact of color would hurt me in literature—the knowledge of the fact rather. Perhaps it might with the public. It has not with the Independent—on the contrary I think it has helped me with