Here Is a Black Rose: Howard Colby Ives Witnesses an Inversion

Howard Colby Ives — a Unitarian minister who became one of the most devoted American Bahá’ís — left, in Portals to Freedom, a collection of small remembered scenes from the months in 1912 when he met ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. The book’s rhythm is quiet: a conversation in a hotel lobby, a glance across a table, a sentence that recomposed an entire day.

In one of those scenes Ives describes the way the Master worked in a New York street crowd. People pressed close; ‘Abdu’l-Bahá greeted them by turn. A young Black boy stood at the edge of the gathering, hesitant — uncertain whether this dignified Eastern visitor would notice him at all in a country whose laws and customs were doing everything possible to keep him from being noticed.

The Master saw him. Ives describes what happened next. The Master raised His hand with a gesture of princely welcome and, in a voice loud enough that the entire crowd could hear, declared the boy a black rose.

The phrase did not sound like a phrase. It sounded like a naming. The Master was not consoling the boy with a kindly metaphor; He was conferring on him, in front of every white witness present, the public dignity that the country had been withholding from him every other day of his life. Ives never forgot it.

Ives also describes, in the same chapter, what it was like to sit close to the Master and to be exposed, sustained, to the quality of presence the Master carried:

There flowed from Him to me during that marvelous contact a constant stream of power.

The phrase is plain and unembarrassed. Ives, a man trained in Protestant restraint, did not in his ordinary speech use words like power about other human beings. He used the word here because nothing else would do.

The black rose and the stream of power belong, in Ives’s account, to the same revelation. The dignity that the Master conferred on a boy in a crowd was the same dignity that Ives himself had received the first time he sat in the Master’s presence. Both were aspects of the single fact that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá saw human beings, and named them, as God had made them.

Paraphrased from Portals to Freedom (Howard Colby Ives, George Ronald, 1937); see original for full text.

Ives, H. C.. (1937). *Portals to Freedom*. George Ronald. https://bahai-library.com/ives_portals_freedom