The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

The summer had done its trick. Locke began his second year at Oxford in good spirits. Mrs. Dine, the landlady of the boarding and lodging house at 40 Beaumont Street, stepped into the vacuum created by the departure of his mother and nursed him back to health with plenty of rest, hot lemonade, and gin. She was the first of many surrogate mothers he would rely on throughout his life. A week after Mary's departure on September 9, Locke was his old energetic self again, eager to start the new term. "I seem to be waking up from last year's hibernation," he announced to his mother, "shaking off the Oxford slough, and getting ready to work."1

For one thing, he had new rooms. After a month at Dine's, in futile pursuit of overly expensive accommodations on fashionable Banbury Road, Locke finally compromised on less-expensive furnished rooms down the street from Dine's at 14 Beaumont Street. He described it as "the large house at the corner diagonal from Dine's. They are finer rooms than her's," he boasted to his mother, "very old antique furniture and a large oil painting by D'Eychaert, a fine specimen of the genre Dutch. … The people, Mrs. Foster, of the house have been very well to do, fine Wedgewood china and that sort of thing."2 Mary Locke did not remember the house, yet approved: "the street is such a pleasant one and so conveniently located. I know your penchant for antiques, so suppose the furniture will just suit you."3 She was right about the street: the house stood next door to the Ashmolean Museum; across the street stood the regal Randolph Hotel, where the Rhodes Trust held its annual spring luncheon. Locke relished lavish accommodations, because "good locations have a lot to do with an entrée into social life, and then I think it more or less a duty for me to live representatively while here-few Rhodes men had such rooms."4