The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

We do not know when Mary Locke began to decline. We do not even know what illnesses plagued her in her later years. But it is clear that as the 1920s dawned, Mary Locke was considerably less robust than she had been in the 1910s. We know that because of a remarkable photograph of Mrs. Locke, taken presumably sometime in the early 1920s, of her sitting peacefully in the second-floor apartment on R Street. Mary Locke is seated leaning on a Victorian parlor table with a slender vase next to her, looking into the camera with her soft eyes (see page 4). She is dressed in a beautiful embroidered shirt, her hair nicely uplifted back from her face, and she greets the camera with a controlled, but almost sad smile. She looks the part of the refined, contented, and dignified mother. She also looks considerably thinner and less vigorous than in the photographs of her during the 1913 trip to Bermuda. Now, she appears a bit frail, almost tired. Mary Locke had entered the last season of her life.

Locke responded to his mother's decline in health in a variety of ways. For one, Locke stopped going to Europe in the early 1920s. He surmised that she could no longer stand the strain of a transatlantic crossing and the heavy walking required of European sightseeing. Instead, he found stateside resorts where they could vacation during the summers. He told one correspondent, "Mother and I have been in for repairs at Saratoga, at the summer resorts."1 Although Locke did have a weak heart from his childhood bout with rheumatic fever, and suffered from gout and other common ailments from time to time, he was nonetheless a healthy individual. By exaggerating, if only so slightly, his own medical needs as his mother's health declined, Locke preserved a bond with his mother that her advancing age threatened to sever. Locke had always identified with her-"took after her," in the words of Metz T. P. Lochard, a Chicago Defender editor and close family friend-and that identification extended into her infirmity. In the early 1920s, illness bound them together just as wanderlust and sightseeing had linked them in the years he was abroad.