A Black Rose

A retelling based on Portals to Freedom by Howard Colby Ives (George Ronald, 1937). The narrative is retold in our own words; the lines in quotation marks are verbatim from the book. Read the full text for Ives's own telling.

In the spring of 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá went down to the Bowery.

It was the poorest quarter of New York — a district of flophouses and saloons and men the city had given up on. He went to the Bowery Mission, spoke to the destitute who gathered there, and as He left, He pressed a coin into the hand of each man who passed. Among the crowd that night were boys: ragged, sharp-eyed street boys with no homes worth the name.

Mrs. Kinney, in whose home the Master was often a guest, could not stop thinking about them. So she gathered a group — twenty or thirty of them — and brought them to her house one afternoon to meet 'Abdu'l-Bahá in person. They came scrubbed as well as such boys could be, and 'Abdu'l-Bahá met each one at the door as though a prince had arrived, greeting them with a warmth that must have bewildered children who were used to being shooed away.

Among them was a boy of about thirteen who was Black — the only Black child in the room. Whatever such a boy had learned to expect from a room full of white faces in 1912, he had learned to expect it well, and he kept to the edge of things.

'Abdu'l-Bahá saw him.

A large box of expensive chocolates had been brought out for the boys. The Master took it up and began to serve them Himself. And as He came to the dark-skinned boy, He paused. Looking at him — and then, deliberately, looking around at all the other boys so that not one of them could miss it — He said that here, among all these flowers, was a black rose.

The room went still. Something shifted in it that no sermon could have accomplished. The boy who had been at the margin was suddenly, in the eyes of every child there, the most distinguished guest in the house.

But 'Abdu'l-Bahá was not finished. Later He took up a long chocolate nougat — dark on the outside, sweet within — and came again to the boy. Without a word He laid the dark sweet against the boy's cheek, His eyes moving once more around the room, and put His arm about the child's shoulders. The lesson needed no translation: the dark and the beautiful, the dark and the sweet, were one and the same, and any eye that could not see it was the poorer for its blindness.

Howard Colby Ives, who set the scene down years later, understood that he had witnessed something more than a kindness. He had watched the Master take the cruelest prejudice of his country and dissolve it, in a single gesture, in front of the very children most likely to inherit it. The standard 'Abdu'l-Bahá held before them was nothing less than the one He named elsewhere that day:

You must be perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect.

The boys went home that evening to the streets they had come from. But one of them — and perhaps more than one — carried away a thing the Bowery had never offered him: the memory of an afternoon when a Figure of God from the other side of the world had looked straight at him and called him a rose.

This account is retold for the Bahai Story Library; it is a paraphrase, not the original text. The quoted words are verbatim from Portals to Freedom (Howard Colby Ives, George Ronald, 1937). See the source for Ives's complete telling.

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