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# The Souls of Black Folk
by W. E. B. Du Bois
Herein is Written
| | The Forethought | | —- | —- | | I. | Of Our Spiritual Strivings | | II. | Of the Dawn of Freedom | | III. | Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others | | IV. | Of the Meaning of Progress | | V. | Of the Wings of Atalanta | | VI. | Of the Training of Black Men | | VII. | Of the Black Belt | | VIII. | Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece | | IX. | Of the Sons of Master and Man | | X. | Of the Faith of the Fathers | | XI. | Of the Passing of the First-Born | | XII. | Of Alexander Crummell | | XIII. | Of the Coming of John | | XIV. | Of the Sorrow Songs | | | The Afterthought |
The Forethought
Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange
meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This
meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the
Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.
I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my words with
me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is in
me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden there.
I have sought here to sketch, in vague, uncertain outline, the spiritual world
in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and strive. First, in two
chapters I have tried to show what Emancipation meant to them, and what was its
aftermath. In a third chapter I have pointed out the slow rise of personal
leadership, and criticized candidly the leader who bears the chief burden of
his race to-day. Then, in two other chapters I have sketched in swift outline
the two worlds within and without the Veil, and thus have come to the central
problem of training men for life. Venturing now into deeper detail, I have in
two chapters studied the struggles of the massed millions of the black
peasantry, and in another have sought to make clear the present relations of
the sons of master and man. Leaving, then, the white world, I have stepped
within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper
recesses,—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow,
and the struggle of its greater souls. All this I have ended with a tale twice
told but seldom written, and a chapter of song.
Some of these thoughts of mine have seen the light before in other guise. For
kindly consenting to their republication here, in altered and extended form, I
must thank the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly, The World’s Work, the
Dial, The New World, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science. Before each chapter, as now printed, stands a bar of the Sorrow
Songs,—some echo of haunting melody from the only American music which
welled up from black souls in the dark past. And, finally, need I add that I
who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live
within the Veil?
W.E.B. Du B.
Atlanta, Ga., Feb. 1, 1903.
I.
Of Our Spiritual Strivings
O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand,
All night long crying with a mournful cry,
As I lie and listen, and cannot understand
The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,
O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I?
All night long the water is crying to me.
Unresting water, there shall never be rest
Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail,
And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west;
And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,
All life long crying without avail,
As the water all night long is crying to me.
ARTHUR SYMONS.
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by
some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly
framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a
half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then,
instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know
an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not
these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am
interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To
the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one
who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is
in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon
one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me.
I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark
Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden
schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to
buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The
exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my
card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with
a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in
heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had
thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and
great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at
examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy
heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words
I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But
they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.
Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the
sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head,—some way. With
other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into
tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and
mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did
God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the
prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the
whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who
must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone,
or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian,
the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with
second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true
self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the
other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense
of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring
one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and
pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two
thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body,
whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this
longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a
better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to
be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the
world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white
Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He
simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American,
without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of
Opportunity closed roughly in his face.
This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of
culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers
and his latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in the past been
strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past
flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Through
history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling
stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.
Here in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man’s
turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his
very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like
weakness. And yet it is not weakness,—it is the contradiction of double
aims. The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan—on the one hand to
escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water,
and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken
horde—could only result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but
half a heart in either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of his people, the
Negro minister or doctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the
criticism of the other world, toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly
tasks. The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the
knowledge his people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while
the knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and
blood. The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his
people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of
the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race
which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of
another people. This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two
unreconciled ideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds
of ten thousand thousand people,—has sent them often wooing false gods
and invoking false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to
make them ashamed of themselves.
Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the
end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half
such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries. To him,
so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies,
the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to
a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of
wearied Israelites. In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty;
in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand. At
last it came,—suddenly, fearfully, like a dream. With one wild carnival
of blood and passion came the message in his own plaintive cadences:—
“Shout, O children!
Shout, you’re free!
For God has bought your liberty!”
Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of
national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy
spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast. In vain do we
cry to this our vastest social problem:—
“Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble!”
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet
found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these
years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro
people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal
was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.
The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the
boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing
will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host. The
holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers,
the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and
foes, left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for
freedom. As the time flew, however, he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of
liberty demanded for its attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth
Amendment gave him. The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible
sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting
the liberty with which war had partially endowed him. And why not? Had not
votes made war and emancipated millions? Had not votes enfranchised the
freedmen? Was anything impossible to a power that had done all this? A million
black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom. So the
decade flew away, the revolution of 1876 came, and left the half-free serf
weary, wondering, but still inspired. Slowly but steadily, in the following
years, a new vision began gradually to replace the dream of political
power,—a powerful movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the
unguided, another pillar of fire by night after a clouded day. It was the ideal
of “book-learning”; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to
know and test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the longing
to know. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to
Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but
straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life.
Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly; only those
who have watched and guided the faltering feet, the misty minds, the dull
understandings, of the dark pupils of these schools know how faithfully, how
piteously, this people strove to learn. It was weary work. The cold
statistician wrote down the inches of progress here and there, noted also where
here and there a foot had slipped or some one had fallen. To the tired
climbers, the horizon was ever dark, the mists were often cold, the Canaan was
always dim and far away. If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no
resting-place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey at least gave
leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child of
Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization,
self-respect. In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before
him, and he saw himself,—darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in
himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He began to have a
dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not
another. For the first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his
back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a
half-named Negro problem. He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home,
without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich,
landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a
land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of his
ignorance,—not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of the
humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and
centuries shackled his hands and feet. Nor was his burden all poverty and
ignorance. The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal
defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss of
ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of
corruption from white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the
Negro home.
A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world, but
rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social problems. But
alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and his prostitutes, the
very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is darkened by the shadow of a
vast despair. Men call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the
natural defence of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance,
purity against crime, the “higher” against the “lower”
races. To which the Negro cries Amen! and swears that to so much of this
strange prejudice as is founded on just homage to civilization, culture,
righteousness, and progress, he humbly bows and meekly does obeisance. But
before that nameless prejudice that leaps beyond all this he stands helpless,
dismayed, and well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect and
mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and
wanton license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous
welcoming of the worse, the all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain for
everything black, from Toussaint to the devil,—before this there rises a
sickening despair that would disarm and discourage any nation save that black
host to whom “discouragement” is an unwritten word.
But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable
self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever
accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate.
Whisperings and portents came home upon the four winds: Lo! we are diseased and
dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our voting is vain; what need of
education, since we must always cook and serve? And the Nation echoed and
enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and nothing
more; what need of higher culture for half-men? Away with the black man’s
ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!
Nevertheless, out of the evil came something of good,—the more careful
adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of the
Negroes’ social responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the
meaning of progress.
So dawned the time of storm and stress to-day rocks our
little boat on the mad waters of the world-sea; there is within and without the
sound of conflict, the burning of body and rending of soul; inspiration strives
with doubt, and faith with vain questionings. The bright ideals of the
past,—physical freedom, political power, the training of brains and the
training of hands,—all these in turn have waxed and waned, until even the
last grows dim and overcast. Are they all wrong,—all false? No, not that,
but each alone was over-simple and incomplete,—the dreams of a credulous
race-childhood, or the fond imaginings of the other world which does not know
and does not want to know our power. To be really true, all these ideals must
be melted and welded into one. The training of the schools we need to-day more
than ever,—the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all
the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds and pure hearts. The power
of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence,—else what shall save us from
a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek,—the
freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love
and aspire. Work, culture, liberty,—all these we need, not singly but
together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all
striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal
of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of
fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition
to or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater
ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two
world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack. We
the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-handed: there are to-day no
truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence
than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet
melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian
and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith
and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be
poorer if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hearted but
determined Negro humility? or her coarse and cruel wit with loving jovial
good-humor? or her vulgar music with the soul of the Sorrow Songs?
Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is
the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the freedmen’s sons is
the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their
strength, but who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this
the land of their fathers’ fathers, and in the name of human opportunity.
And now what I have briefly sketched in large outline let me on coming pages
tell again in many ways, with loving emphasis and deeper detail, that men may
listen to the striving in the souls of black folk.
II.
Of the Dawn of Freedom
Careless seems the great Avenger;
History’s lessons but record
One death-grapple in the darkness
’Twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne;
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above His own.
LOWELL.
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the
color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in
Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this
problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who marched South and
North in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points, of union and local
autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know, that the question
of Negro slavery was the real cause of the conflict. Curious it was, too, how
this deeper question ever forced itself to the surface despite effort and
disclaimer. No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old
question, newly guised, sprang from the earth,—What shall be done with
Negroes? Peremptory military commands this way and that, could not answer the
query; the Emancipation Proclamation seemed but to broaden and intensify the
difficulties; and the War Amendments made the Negro problems of to-day.
It is the aim of this essay to study the period of history from 1861 to 1872 so
far as it relates to the American Negro. In effect, this tale of the dawn of
Freedom is an account of that government of men called the Freedmen’s
Bureau,—one of the most singular and interesting of the attempts made by
a great nation to grapple with vast problems of race and social condition.
The war has naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, the President, and the
Nation; and yet no sooner had the armies, East and West, penetrated Virginia
and Tennessee than fugitive slaves appeared within their lines. They came at
night, when the flickering camp-fires shone like vast unsteady stars along the
black horizon: old men and thin, with gray and tufted hair; women with
frightened eyes, dragging whimpering hungry children; men and girls, stalwart
and gaunt,—a horde of starving vagabonds, homeless, helpless, and
pitiable, in their dark distress. Two methods of treating these newcomers
seemed equally logical to opposite sorts of minds. Ben Butler, in Virginia,
quickly declared slave property contraband of war, and put the fugitives to
work; while Fremont, in Missouri, declared the slaves free under martial law.
Butler’s action was approved, but Fremont’s was hastily
countermanded, and his successor, Halleck, saw things differently.
“Hereafter,” he commanded, “no slaves should be allowed to
come into your lines at all; if any come without your knowledge, when owners
call for them deliver them.” Such a policy was difficult to enforce; some
of the black refugees declared themselves freemen, others showed that their
masters had deserted them, and still others were captured with forts and
plantations. Evidently, too, slaves were a source of strength to the
Confederacy, and were being used as laborers and producers. “They
constitute a military resource,” wrote Secretary Cameron, late in 1861;
“and being such, that they should not be turned over to the enemy is too
plain to discuss.” So gradually the tone of the army chiefs changed;
Congress forbade the rendition of fugitives, and Butler’s
“contrabands” were welcomed as military laborers. This complicated
rather than solved the problem, for now the scattering fugitives became a
steady stream, which flowed faster as the armies marched.
Then the long-headed man with care-chiselled face who sat in the White House
saw the inevitable, and emancipated the slaves of rebels on New Year’s,
- A month later Congress called earnestly for the Negro soldiers whom the
act of July, 1862, had half grudgingly allowed to enlist. Thus the barriers
were levelled and the deed was done. The stream of fugitives swelled to a
flood, and anxious army officers kept inquiring: “What must be done with
slaves, arriving almost daily? Are we to find food and shelter for women and
children?”
It was a Pierce of Boston who pointed out the way, and thus became in a sense the founder of the Freedmen’s Bureau. He was a firm friend of Secretary Chase; and when, in 1861, the care of slaves and abandoned lands devolved upon the Treasury officials, Pierce was specially detailed from the ranks to study the conditions. First, he cared for the refugees at Fortress Monroe; and then, after Sherman had captured Hilton Head, Pierce was sent there to found his Port Royal experiment of making free workingmen out of slaves. Before his experiment was barely started, however, the problem of the fugitives had assumed such proportions that it was taken from the hands of the over-burdened Treasury Department and given to the army officials. Already centres of massed freedmen were forming at Fortress Monroe, Washington, New Orleans, Vicksburg and Corinth, Columbus, Ky., and Cairo, Ill., as well as at Port Royal. Army chaplains found here new and fruitful fields; “superintendents of contrabands” multiplied, and some attempt at systematic work was made by enlisting the able-bodied men and giving work to the others.
Then came the Freedmen’s Aid societies, born of the touching appeals from Pierce and from these other centres of distress. There was the American Missionary Association, sprung from the Amistad, and now full-grown for work; the various church organizations, the National Freedmen’s Relief Association, the American Freedmen’s Union, the Western Freedmen’s Aid Commission,—in all fifty or more active organizations, which sent clothes, money, school-books, and teachers southward. All they did was needed, for the destitution of the freedmen was often reported as “too appalling for belief,” and the situation was daily growing worse rather than better.
And daily, too, it seemed more plain that this was no ordinary matter of temporary relief, but a national crisis; for here loomed a labor problem of vast dimensions. Masses of Negroes stood idle, or, if they worked spasmodically, were never sure of pay; and if perchance they received pay, squandered the new thing thoughtlessly. In these and other ways were camp-life and the new liberty demoralizing the freedmen. The broader economic organization thus clearly demanded sprang up here and there as accident and local conditions determined. Here it was that Pierce’s Port Royal plan of leased plantations and guided workmen pointed out the rough way. In Washington the military governor, at the urgent appeal of the superintendent, opened confiscated estates to the cultivation of the fugitives, and there in the shadow of the dome gathered black farm villages. General Dix gave over estates to the freedmen of Fortress Monroe, and so on, South and West. The government and benevolent societies furnished the means of cultivation, and the Negro turned again slowly to work. The systems of control, thus started, rapidly grew, here and there, into strange little governments, like that of General Banks in Louisiana, with its ninety thousand black subjects, its fifty thousand guided laborers, and its annual budget of one hundred thousand dollars and more. It made out four thousand pay-rolls a year, registered all freedmen, inquired into grievances and redressed them, laid and collected taxes, and established a system of public schools. So, too, Colonel Eaton, the superintendent of Tennessee and Arkansas, ruled over one hundred thousand freedmen, leased and cultivated seven thousand acres of cotton land, and fed ten thousand paupers a year. In South Carolina was General Saxton, with his deep interest in black folk. He succeeded Pierce and the Treasury officials, and sold forfeited estates, leased abandoned plantations, encouraged schools, and received from Sherman, after that terribly picturesque march to the sea, thousands of the wretched camp followers.
Three characteristic things one might have seen in Sherman’s raid through Georgia, which threw the new situation in shadowy relief: the Conqueror, the Conquered, and the Negro. Some see all significance in the grim front of the destroyer, and some in the bitter sufferers of the Lost Cause. But to me neither soldier nor fugitive speaks with so deep a meaning as that dark human cloud that clung like remorse on the rear of those swift columns, swelling at times to half their size, almost engulfing and choking them. In vain were they ordered back, in vain were bridges hewn from beneath their feet; on they trudged and writhed and surged, until they rolled into Savannah, a starved and naked horde of tens of thousands. There too came the characteristic military remedy: “The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. John’s River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of Negroes now made free by act of war.” So read the celebrated “Field-order Number Fifteen.”
All these experiments, orders, and systems were bound to attract and perplex the government and the nation. Directly after the Emancipation Proclamation, Representative Eliot had introduced a bill creating a Bureau of Emancipation; but it was never reported. The following June a committee of inquiry, appointed by the Secretary of War, reported in favor of a temporary bureau for the “improvement, protection, and employment of refugee freedmen,” on much the same lines as were afterwards followed. Petitions came in to President Lincoln from distinguished citizens and organizations, strongly urging a comprehensive and unified plan of dealing with the freedmen, under a bureau which should be “charged with the study of plans and execution of measures for easily guiding, and in every way judiciously and humanely aiding, the passage of our emancipated and yet to be emancipated blacks from the old condition of forced labor to their new state of voluntary industry.”
Some half-hearted steps were taken to accomplish this, in part, by putting the whole matter again in charge of the special Treasury agents. Laws of 1863 and 1864 directed them to take charge of and lease abandoned lands for periods not exceeding twelve months, and to “provide in such leases, or otherwise, for the employment and general welfare” of the freedmen. Most of the army officers greeted this as a welcome relief from perplexing “Negro affairs,” and Secretary Fessenden, July 29, 1864, issued an excellent system of regulations, which were afterward closely followed by General Howard. Under Treasury agents, large quantities of land were leased in the Mississippi Valley, and many Negroes were employed; but in August, 1864, the new regulations were suspended for reasons of “public policy,” and the army was again in control.
Meanwhile Congress had turned its attention to the subject; and in March the House passed a bill by a majority of two establishing a Bureau for Freedmen in the War Department. Charles Sumner, who had charge of the bill in the Senate, argued that freedmen and abandoned lands ought to be under the same department, and reported a substitute for the House bill attaching the Bureau to the Treasury Department. This bill passed, but too late for action by the House. The debates wandered over the whole policy of the administration and the general question of slavery, without touching very closely the specific merits of the measure in hand. Then the national election took place; and the administration, with a vote of renewed confidence from the country, addressed itself to the matter more seriously. A conference between the two branches of Congress agreed upon a carefully drawn measure which contained the chief provisions of Sumner’s bill, but made the proposed organization a department independent of both the War and the Treasury officials. The bill was conservative, giving the new department “general superintendence of all freedmen.” Its purpose was to “establish regulations” for them, protect them, lease them lands, adjust their wages, and appear in civil and military courts as their “next friend.” There were many limitations attached to the powers thus granted, and the organization was made permanent. Nevertheless, the Senate defeated the bill, and a new conference committee was appointed. This committee reported a new bill, February 28, which was whirled through just as the session closed, and became the act of 1865 establishing in the War Department a “Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands.”
This last compromise was a hasty bit of legislation, vague and uncertain in outline. A Bureau was created, “to continue during the present War of Rebellion, and for one year thereafter,” to which was given “the supervision and management of all abandoned lands and the control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen,” under “such rules and regulations as may be presented by the head of the Bureau and approved by the President.” A Commissioner, appointed by the President and Senate, was to control the Bureau, with an office force not exceeding ten clerks. The President might also appoint assistant commissioners in the seceded States, and to all these offices military officials might be detailed at regular pay. The Secretary of War could issue rations, clothing, and fuel to the destitute, and all abandoned property was placed in the hands of the Bureau for eventual lease and sale to ex-slaves in forty-acre parcels.
Thus did the United States government definitely assume charge of the emancipated Negro as the ward of the nation. It was a tremendous undertaking. Here at a stroke of the pen was erected a government of millions of men,—and not ordinary men either, but black men emasculated by a peculiarly complete system of slavery, centuries old; and now, suddenly, violently, they come into a new birthright, at a time of war and passion, in the midst of the stricken and embittered population of their former masters. Any man might well have hesitated to assume charge of such a work, with vast responsibilities, indefinite powers, and limited resources. Probably no one but a soldier would have answered such a call promptly; and, indeed, no one but a soldier could be called, for Congress had appropriated no money for salaries and expenses.
Less than a month after the weary Emancipator passed to his rest, his successor assigned Major-Gen. Oliver O. Howard to duty as Commissioner of the new Bureau. He was a Maine man, then only thirty-five years of age. He had marched with Sherman to the sea, had fought well at Gettysburg, and but the year before had been assigned to the command of the Department of Tennessee. An honest man, with too much faith in human nature, little aptitude for business and intricate detail, he had had large opportunity of becoming acquainted at first hand with much of the work before him. And of that work it has been truly said that “no approximately correct history of civilization can ever be written which does not throw out in bold relief, as one of the great landmarks of political and social progress, the organization and administration of the Freedmen’s Bureau.”
On May 12, 1865, Howard was appointed; and he assumed the duties of his office promptly on the 15th, and began examining the field of work. A curious mess he looked upon: little despotisms, communistic experiments, slavery, peonage, business speculations, organized charity, unorganized almsgiving,—all reeling on under the guise of helping the freedmen, and all enshrined in the smoke and blood of the war and the cursing and silence of angry men. On May 19 the new government—for a government it really was—issued its constitution; commissioners were to be appointed in each of the seceded states, who were to take charge of “all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen,” and all relief and rations were to be given by their consent alone. The Bureau invited continued cooperation with benevolent societies, and declared: “It will be the object of all commissioners to introduce practicable systems of compensated labor,” and to establish schools. Forthwith nine assistant commissioners were appointed. They were to hasten to their fields of work; seek gradually to close relief establishments, and make the destitute self-supporting; act as courts of law where there were no courts, or where Negroes were not recognized in them as free; establish the institution of marriage among ex-slaves, and keep records; see that freedmen were free to choose their employers, and help in making fair contracts for them; and finally, the circular said: “Simple good faith, for which we hope on all hands for those concerned in the passing away of slavery, will especially relieve the assistant commissioners in the discharge of their duties toward the freedmen, as well as promote the general welfare.”
No sooner was the work thus started, and the general system and local organization in some measure begun, than two grave difficulties appeared which changed largely the theory and outcome of Bureau work. First, there were the abandoned lands of the South. It had long been the more or less definitely expressed theory of the North that all the chief problems of Emancipation might be settled by establishing the slaves on the forfeited lands of their masters,—a sort of poetic justice, said some. But this poetry done into solemn prose meant either wholesale confiscation of private property in the South, or vast appropriations. Now Congress had not appropriated a cent, and no sooner did the proclamations of general amnesty appear than the eight hundred thousand acres of abandoned lands in the hands of the Freedmen’s Bureau melted quickly away. The second difficulty lay in perfecting the local organization of the Bureau throughout the wide field of work. Making a new machine and sending out officials of duly ascertained fitness for a great work of social reform is no child’s task; but this task was even harder, for a new central organization had to be fitted on a heterogeneous and confused but already existing system of relief and control of ex-slaves; and the agents available for this work must be sought for in an army still busy with war operations,—men in the very nature of the case ill fitted for delicate social work,—or among the questionable camp followers of an invading host. Thus, after a year’s work, vigorously as it was pushed, the problem looked even more difficult to grasp and solve than at the beginning. Nevertheless, three things that year’s work did, well worth the doing: it relieved a vast amount of physical suffering; it transported seven thousand fugitives from congested centres back to the farm; and, best of all, it inaugurated the crusade of the New England schoolma’am.
The annals of this Ninth Crusade are yet to be written,—the tale of a mission that seemed to our age far more quixotic than the quest of St. Louis seemed to his. Behind the mists of ruin and rapine waved the calico dresses of women who dared, and after the hoarse mouthings of the field guns rang the rhythm of the alphabet. Rich and poor they were, serious and curious. Bereaved now of a father, now of a brother, now of more than these, they came seeking a life work in planting New England schoolhouses among the white and black of the South. They did their work well. In that first year they taught one hundred thousand souls, and more.
Evidently, Congress must soon legislate again on the hastily organized Bureau, which had so quickly grown into wide significance and vast possibilities. An institution such as that was well-nigh as difficult to end as to begin. Early in 1866 Congress took up the matter, when Senator Trumbull, of Illinois, introduced a bill to extend the Bureau and enlarge its powers. This measure received, at the hands of Congress, far more thorough discussion and attention than its predecessor. The war cloud had thinned enough to allow a clearer conception of the work of Emancipation. The champions of the bill argued that the strengthening of the Freedmen’s Bureau was still a military necessity; that it was needed for the proper carrying out of the Thirteenth Amendment, and was a work of sheer justice to the ex-slave, at a trifling cost to the government. The opponents of the measure declared that the war was over, and the necessity for war measures past; that the Bureau, by reason of its extraordinary powers, was clearly unconstitutional in time of peace, and was destined to irritate the South and pauperize the freedmen, at a final cost of possibly hundreds of millions. These two arguments were unanswered, and indeed unanswerable: the one that the extraordinary powers of the Bureau threatened the civil rights of all citizens; and the other that the government must have power to do what manifestly must be done, and that present abandonment of the freedmen meant their practical reenslavement. The bill which finally passed enlarged and made permanent the Freedmen’s Bureau. It was promptly vetoed by President Johnson as “unconstitutional,” “unnecessary,” and “extrajudicial,” and failed of passage over the veto. Meantime, however, the breach between Congress and the President began to broaden, and a modified form of the lost bill was finally passed over the President’s second veto, July 16.
The act of 1866 gave the Freedmen’s Bureau its final form,—the form by which it will be known to posterity and judged of men. It extended the existence of the Bureau to July, 1868; it authorized additional assistant commissioners, the retention of army officers mustered out of regular service, the sale of certain forfeited lands to freedmen on nominal terms, the sale of Confederate public property for Negro schools, and a wider field of judicial interpretation and cognizance. The government of the unreconstructed South was thus put very largely in the hands of the Freedmen’s Bureau, especially as in many cases the departmental military commander was now made also assistant commissioner. It was thus that the Freedmen’s Bureau became a full-fledged government of men. It made laws, executed them and interpreted them; it laid and collected taxes, defined and punished crime, maintained and used military force, and dictated such measures as it thought necessary and proper for the accomplishment of its varied ends. Naturally, all these powers were not exercised continuously nor to their fullest extent; and yet, as General Howard has said, “scarcely any subject that has to be legislated upon in civil society failed, at one time or another, to demand the action of this singular Bureau.”
To understand and criticise intelligently so vast a work, one must not forget an instant the drift of things in the later sixties. Lee had surrendered, Lincoln was dead, and Johnson and Congress were at loggerheads; the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, the Fourteenth pending, and the Fifteenth declared in force in 1870. Guerrilla raiding, the ever-present flickering after-flame of war, was spending its forces against the Negroes, and all the Southern land was awakening as from some wild dream to poverty and social revolution. In a time of perfect calm, amid willing neighbors and streaming wealth, the social uplifting of four million slaves to an assured and self-sustaining place in the body politic and economic would have been a herculean task; but when to the inherent difficulties of so delicate and nice a social operation were added the spite and hate of conflict, the hell of war; when suspicion and cruelty were rife, and gaunt Hunger wept beside Bereavement,—in such a case, the work of any instrument of social regeneration was in large part foredoomed to failure. The very name of the Bureau stood for a thing in the South which for two centuries and better men had refused even to argue,—that life amid free Negroes was simply unthinkable, the maddest of experiments.
The agents that the Bureau could command varied all the way from unselfish philanthropists to narrow-minded busybodies and thieves; and even though it be true that the average was far better than the worst, it was the occasional fly that helped spoil the ointment.
Then amid all crouched the freed slave, bewildered between friend and foe. He had emerged from slavery,—not the worst slavery in the world, not a slavery that made all life unbearable, rather a slavery that had here and there something of kindliness, fidelity, and happiness,—but withal slavery, which, so far as human aspiration and desert were concerned, classed the black man and the ox together. And the Negro knew full well that, whatever their deeper convictions may have been, Southern men had fought with desperate energy to perpetuate this slavery under which the black masses, with half-articulate thought, had writhed and shivered. They welcomed freedom with a cry. They shrank from the master who still strove for their chains; they fled to the friends that had freed them, even though those friends stood ready to use them as a club for driving the recalcitrant South back into loyalty. So the cleft between the white and black South grew. Idle to say it never should have been; it was as inevitable as its results were pitiable. Curiously incongruous elements were left arrayed against each other,—the North, the government, the carpet-bagger, and the slave, here; and there, all the South that was white, whether gentleman or vagabond, honest man or rascal, lawless murderer or martyr to duty.
Thus it is doubly difficult to write of this period calmly, so intense was the feeling, so mighty the human passions that swayed and blinded men. Amid it all, two figures ever stand to typify that day to coming ages,—the one, a gray-haired gentleman, whose fathers had quit themselves like men, whose sons lay in nameless graves; who bowed to the evil of slavery because its abolition threatened untold ill to all; who stood at last, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined form, with hate in his eyes;—and the other, a form hovering dark and mother-like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries, had aforetime quailed at that white master’s command, had bent in love over the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed in death the sunken eyes of his wife,—aye, too, at his behest had laid herself low to his lust, and borne a tawny man-child to the world, only to see her dark boy’s limbs scattered to the winds by midnight marauders riding after “damned Niggers.” These were the saddest sights of that woful day; and no man clasped the hands of these two passing figures of the present-past; but, hating, they went to their long home, and, hating, their children’s children live today.
Here, then, was the field of work for the Freedmen’s Bureau; and since, with some hesitation, it was continued by the act of 1868 until 1869, let us look upon four years of its work as a whole. There were, in 1868, nine hundred Bureau officials scattered from Washington to Texas, ruling, directly and indirectly, many millions of men. The deeds of these rulers fall mainly under seven heads: the relief of physical suffering, the overseeing of the beginnings of free labor, the buying and selling of land, the establishment of schools, the paying of bounties, the administration of justice, and the financiering of all these activities.
Up to June, 1869, over half a million patients had been treated by Bureau physicians and surgeons, and sixty hospitals and asylums had been in operation. In fifty months twenty-one million free rations were distributed at a cost of over four million dollars. Next came the difficult question of labor. First, thirty thousand black men were transported from the refuges and relief stations back to the farms, back to the critical trial of a new way of working. Plain instructions went out from Washington: the laborers must be free to choose their employers, no fixed rate of wages was prescribed, and there was to be no peonage or forced labor. So far, so good; but where local agents differed in capacity and character, where the was continually changing, the outcome was necessarily varied. The largest element of success lay in the fact that the majority of the freedmen were willing, even eager, to work. So labor contracts were written,—fifty thousand in a single State,—laborers advised, wages guaranteed, and employers supplied. In truth, the organization became a vast labor bureau,—not perfect, indeed, notably defective here and there, but on the whole successful beyond the dreams of thoughtful men. The two great obstacles which confronted the officials were the tyrant and the idler,—the slaveholder who was determined to perpetuate slavery under another name; and, the freedman who regarded freedom as perpetual rest,—the Devil and the Deep Sea.
In the work of establishing the Negroes as peasant proprietors, the Bureau was from the first handicapped and at last absolutely checked. Something was done, and larger things were planned; abandoned lands were leased so long as they remained in the hands of the Bureau, and a total revenue of nearly half a million dollars derived from black tenants. Some other lands to which the nation had gained title were sold on easy terms, and public lands were opened for settlement to the very few freedmen who had tools and capital. But the vision of “forty acres and a mule”—the righteous and reasonable ambition to become a landholder, which the nation had all but categorically promised the freedmen—was destined in most cases to bitter disappointment. And those men of marvellous hindsight who are today seeking to preach the Negro back to the present peonage of the soil know well, or ought to know, that the opportunity of binding the Negro peasant willingly to the soil was lost on that day when the Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau had to go to South Carolina and tell the weeping freedmen, after their years of toil, that their land was not theirs, that there was a mistake—somewhere. If by 1874 the Georgia Negro alone owned three hundred and fifty thousand acres of land, it was by grace of his thrift rather than by bounty of the government.
The greatest success of the Freedmen’s Bureau lay in the planting of the free school among Negroes, and the idea of free elementary education among all classes in the South. It not only called the school-mistresses through the benevolent agencies and built them schoolhouses, but it helped discover and support such apostles of human culture as Edmund Ware, Samuel Armstrong, and Erastus Cravath. The opposition to Negro education in the South was at first bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know. Perhaps some inkling of this paradox, even in the unquiet days of the Bureau, helped the bayonets allay an opposition to human training which still to-day lies smouldering in the South, but not flaming. Fisk, Atlanta, Howard, and Hampton were founded in these days, and six million dollars were expended for educational work, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars of which the freedmen themselves gave of their poverty.
Such contributions, together with the buying of land and various other enterprises, showed that the ex-slave was handling some free capital already. The chief initial source of this was labor in the army, and his pay and bounty as a soldier. Payments to Negro soldiers were at first complicated by the ignorance of the recipients, and the fact that the quotas of colored regiments from Northern States were largely filled by recruits from the South, unknown to their fellow soldiers. Consequently, payments were accompanied by such frauds that Congress, by joint resolution in 1867, put the whole matter in the hands of the Freedmen’s Bureau. In two years six million dollars was thus distributed to five thousand claimants, and in the end the sum exceeded eight million dollars. Even in this system fraud was frequent; but still the work put needed capital in the hands of practical paupers, and some, at least, was well spent.
The most perplexing and least successful part of the Bureau’s work lay in the exercise of its judicial functions. The regular Bureau court consisted of one representative of the employer, one of the Negro, and one of the Bureau. If the Bureau could have maintained a perfectly judicial attitude, this arrangement would have been ideal, and must in time have gained confidence; but the nature of its other activities and the character of its prejudiced the Bureau in favor of the black litigants, and led without doubt to much injustice and annoyance. On the other hand, to leave the Negro in the hands of Southern courts was impossible. In a distracted land where slavery had hardly fallen, to keep the strong from wanton abuse of the weak, and the weak from gloating insolently over the half-shorn strength of the strong, was a thankless, hopeless task. The former masters of the land were peremptorily ordered about, seized, and imprisoned, and punished over and again, with scant courtesy from army officers. The former slaves were intimidated, beaten, raped, and butchered by angry and revengeful men. Bureau courts tended to become centres simply for punishing whites, while the regular civil courts tended to become solely institutions for perpetuating the slavery of blacks. Almost every law and method ingenuity could devise was employed by the legislatures to reduce the Negroes to serfdom,—to make them the slaves of the State, if not of individual owners; while the Bureau officials too often were found striving to put the “bottom rail on top,” and gave the freedmen a power and independence which they could not yet use. It is all well enough for us of another generation to wax wise with advice to those who bore the burden in the heat of the day. It is full easy now to see that the man who lost home, fortune, and family at a stroke, and saw his land ruled by “mules and niggers,” was really benefited by the passing of slavery. It is not difficult now to say to the young freedman, cheated and cuffed about who has seen his father’s head beaten to a jelly and his own mother namelessly assaulted, that the meek shall inherit the earth. Above all, nothing is more convenient than to heap on the Freedmen’s Bureau all the evils of that evil day, and damn it utterly for every mistake and blunder that was made.
All this is easy, but it is neither sensible nor just. Someone had blundered, but that was long before Oliver Howard was born; there was criminal aggression and heedless neglect, but without some system of control there would have been far more than there was. Had that control been from within, the Negro would have been re-enslaved, to all intents and purposes. Coming as the control did from without, perfect men and methods would have bettered all things; and even with imperfect agents and questionable methods, the work accomplished was not undeserving of commendation.
Such was the dawn of Freedom; such was the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which, summed up in brief, may be epitomized thus: for some fifteen million dollars, beside the sums spent before 1865, and the dole of benevolent societies, this Bureau set going a system of free labor, established a beginning of peasant proprietorship, secured the recognition of black freedmen before courts of law, and founded the free common school in the South. On the other hand, it failed to begin the establishment of good-will between ex-masters and freedmen, to guard its work wholly from paternalistic methods which discouraged self-reliance, and to carry out to any considerable extent its implied promises to furnish the freedmen with land. Its successes were the result of hard work, supplemented by the aid of philanthropists and the eager striving of black men. Its failures were the result of bad local agents, the inherent difficulties of the work, and national neglect.
Such an institution, from its wide powers, great responsibilities, large control of moneys, and generally conspicuous position, was naturally open to repeated and bitter attack. It sustained a searching Congressional investigation at the instance of Fernando Wood in 1870. Its archives and few remaining functions were with blunt discourtesy transferred from Howard’s control, in his absence, to the supervision of Secretary of War Belknap in 1872, on the Secretary’s recommendation. Finally, in consequence of grave intimations of wrong-doing made by the Secretary and his subordinates, General Howard was court-martialed in 1874. In both of these trials the Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau was officially exonerated from any wilful misdoing, and his work commended. Nevertheless, many unpleasant things were brought to light,—the methods of transacting the business of the Bureau were faulty; several cases of defalcation were proved, and other frauds strongly suspected; there were some business transactions which savored of dangerous speculation, if not dishonesty; and around it all lay the smirch of the Freedmen’s Bank.
Morally and practically, the Freedmen’s Bank was part of the Freedmen’s Bureau, although it had no legal connection with it. With the prestige of the government back of it, and a directing board of unusual respectability and national reputation, this banking institution had made a remarkable start in the development of that thrift among black folk which slavery had kept them from knowing. Then in one sad day came the crash,—all the hard-earned dollars of the freedmen disappeared; but that was the least of the loss,—all the faith in saving went too, and much of the faith in men; and that was a loss that a Nation which to-day sneers at Negro shiftlessness has never yet made good. Not even ten additional years of slavery could have done so much to throttle the thrift of the freedmen as the mismanagement and bankruptcy of the series of savings banks chartered by the Nation for their especial aid. Where all the blame should rest, it is hard to say; whether the Bureau and the Bank died chiefly by reason of the blows of its selfish friends or the dark machinations of its foes, perhaps even time will never reveal, for here lies unwritten history.
Of the foes without the Bureau, the bitterest were those who attacked not so much its conduct or policy under the law as the necessity for any such institution at all. Such attacks came primarily from the Border States and the South; and they were summed up by Senator Davis, of Kentucky, when he moved to entitle the act of 1866 a bill “to promote strife and conflict between the white and black races… by a grant of unconstitutional power.” The argument gathered tremendous strength South and North; but its very strength was its weakness. For, argued the plain common-sense of the nation, if it is unconstitutional, unpractical, and futile for the nation to stand guardian over its helpless wards, then there is left but one alternative,—to make those wards their own guardians by arming them with the ballot. Moreover, the path of the practical politician pointed the same way; for, argued this opportunist, if we cannot peacefully reconstruct the South with white votes, we certainly can with black votes. So justice and force joined hands.
The alternative thus offered the nation was not between full and restricted Negro suffrage; else every sensible man, black and white, would easily have chosen the latter. It was rather a choice between suffrage and slavery, after endless blood and gold had flowed to sweep human bondage away. Not a single Southern legislature stood ready to admit a Negro, under any conditions, to the polls; not a single Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible without a system of restrictions that took all its freedom away; there was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty. In such a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race, and the only method of compelling the South to accept the results of the war. Thus Negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race feud. And some felt gratitude toward the race thus sacrificed in its swaddling clothes on the altar of national integrity; and some felt and feel only indifference and contempt.
Had political exigencies been less pressing, the opposition to government guardianship of Negroes less bitter, and the attachment to the slave system less strong, the social seer can well imagine a far better policy,—a permanent Freedmen’s Bureau, with a national system of Negro schools; a carefully supervised employment and labor office; a system of impartial protection before the regular courts; and such institutions for social betterment as savings-banks, land and building associations, and social settlements. All this vast expenditure of money and brains might have formed a great school of prospective citizenship, and solved in a way we have not yet solved the most perplexing and persistent of the Negro problems.
That such an institution was unthinkable in 1870 was due in part to certain acts of the Freedmen’s Bureau itself. It came to regard its work as merely temporary, and Negro suffrage as a final answer to all present perplexities. The political ambition of many of its agents and led it far afield into questionable activities, until the South, nursing its own deep prejudices, came easily to ignore all the good deeds of the Bureau and hate its very name with perfect hatred. So the Freedmen’s Bureau died, and its child was the Fifteenth Amendment.
The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a legacy of striving for other men. The legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau is the heavy heritage of this generation. To-day, when new and vaster problems are destined to strain every fibre of the national mind and soul, would it not be well to count this legacy honestly and carefully? For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free. In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and miles, he may not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural South the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule of their political life. And the result of all this is, and in nature must have been, lawlessness and crime. That is the large legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the work it did not do because it could not.
I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton with harvest. And there in the King’s Highways sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which the traveller’s footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air broods fear. Three centuries’ thought has been the raising and unveiling of that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and the deed. The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.
III.
Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others
From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed, unmanned!
**
Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
BYRON.
Easily the most striking thing in the history of the American Negro since 1876
is the ascendancy of Mr. Booker T. Washington. It began at the time when war
memories and ideals were rapidly passing; a day of astonishing commercial
development was dawning; a sense of doubt and hesitation overtook the
freedmen’s sons,—then it was that his leading began. Mr. Washington
came, with a simple definite programme, at the psychological moment when the
nation was a little ashamed of having bestowed so much sentiment on Negroes,
and was concentrating its energies on Dollars. His programme of industrial
education, conciliation of the South, and submission and silence as to civil
and political rights, was not wholly original; the Free Negroes from 1830 up to
war-time had striven to build industrial schools, and the American Missionary
Association had from the first taught various trades; and Price and others had
sought a way of honorable alliance with the best of the Southerners. But Mr.
Washington first indissolubly linked these things; he put enthusiasm, unlimited
energy, and perfect faith into his programme, and changed it from a by-path
into a veritable Way of Life. And the tale of the methods by which he did this
is a fascinating study of human life.
It startled the nation to hear a Negro advocating such a programme after many
decades of bitter complaint; it startled and won the applause of the South, it
interested and won the admiration of the North; and after a confused murmur of
protest, it silenced if it did not convert the Negroes themselves.
To gain the sympathy and cooperation of the various elements comprising the
white South was Mr. Washington’s first task; and this, at the time
Tuskegee was founded, seemed, for a black man, well-nigh impossible. And yet
ten years later it was done in the word spoken at Atlanta: “In all things
purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the
hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” This “Atlanta
Compromise” is by all odds the most notable thing in Mr.
Washington’s career. The South interpreted it in different ways: the
radicals received it as a complete surrender of the demand for civil and
political equality; the conservatives, as a generously conceived working basis
for mutual understanding. So both approved it, and to-day its author is
certainly the most distinguished Southerner since Jefferson Davis, and the one
with the largest personal following.
Next to this achievement comes Mr. Washington’s work in gaining place and
consideration in the North. Others less shrewd and tactful had formerly essayed
to sit on these two stools and had fallen between them; but as Mr. Washington
knew the heart of the South from birth and training, so by singular insight he
intuitively grasped the spirit of the age which was dominating the North. And
so thoroughly did he learn the speech and thought of triumphant commercialism,
and the ideals of material prosperity, that the picture of a lone black boy
poring over a French grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home soon
seemed to him the acme of absurdities. One wonders what Socrates and St.
Francis of Assisi would say to this.
And yet this very singleness of vision and thorough oneness with his age is a
mark of the successful man. It is as though Nature must needs make men narrow
in order to give them force. So Mr. Washington’s cult has gained
unquestioning followers, his work has wonderfully prospered, his friends are
legion, and his enemies are confounded. To-day he stands as the one recognized
spokesman of his ten million fellows, and one of the most notable figures in a
nation of seventy millions. One hesitates, therefore, to criticise a life
which, beginning with so little, has done so much. And yet the time is come
when one may speak in all sincerity and utter courtesy of the mistakes and
shortcomings of Mr. Washington’s career, as well as of his triumphs,
without being thought captious or envious, and without forgetting that it is
easier to do ill than well in the world.
The criticism that has hitherto met Mr. Washington has not always been of this
broad character. In the South especially has he had to walk warily to avoid the
harshest judgments,—and naturally so, for he is dealing with the one
subject of deepest sensitiveness to that section. Twice—once when at the
Chicago celebration of the Spanish-American War he alluded to the
color-prejudice that is “eating away the vitals of the South,” and
once when he dined with President Roosevelt—has the resulting Southern
criticism been violent enough to threaten seriously his popularity. In the
North the feeling has several times forced itself into words, that Mr.
Washington’s counsels of submission overlooked certain elements of true
manhood, and that his educational programme was unnecessarily narrow. Usually,
however, such criticism has not found open expression, although, too, the
spiritual sons of the Abolitionists have not been prepared to acknowledge that
the schools founded before Tuskegee, by men of broad ideals and
self-sacrificing spirit, were wholly failures or worthy of ridicule. While,
then, criticism has not failed to follow Mr. Washington, yet the prevailing
public opinion of the land has been but too willing to deliver the solution of
a wearisome problem into his hands, and say, “If that is all you and your
race ask, take it.”
Among his own people, however, Mr. Washington has encountered the strongest and
most lasting opposition, amounting at times to bitterness, and even today
continuing strong and insistent even though largely silenced in outward
expression by the public opinion of the nation. Some of this opposition is, of
course, mere envy; the disappointment of displaced demagogues and the spite of
narrow minds. But aside from this, there is among educated and thoughtful
colored men in all parts of the land a feeling of deep regret, sorrow, and
apprehension at the wide currency and ascendancy which some of Mr.
Washington’s theories have gained. These same men admire his sincerity of
purpose, and are willing to forgive much to honest endeavor which is doing
something worth the doing. They cooperate with Mr. Washington as far as they
conscientiously can; and, indeed, it is no ordinary tribute to this man’s
tact and power that, steering as he must between so many diverse interests and
opinions, he so largely retains the respect of all.
But the hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing. It
leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence and paralysis of
effort, and others to burst into speech so passionately and intemperately as to
lose listeners. Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are
most nearly touched,—criticism of writers by readers,—this is the
soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society. If the best of the
American Negroes receive by outer pressure a leader whom they had not
recognized before, manifestly there is here a certain palpable gain. Yet there
is also irreparable loss,—a loss of that peculiarly valuable education
which a group receives when by search and criticism it finds and commissions
its own leaders. The way in which this is done is at once the most elementary
and the nicest problem of social growth. History is but the record of such
group-leadership; and yet how infinitely changeful is its type and character!
And of all types and kinds, what can be more instructive than the leadership of
a group within a group?—that curious double movement where real progress
may be negative and actual advance be relative retrogression. All this is the
social student’s inspiration and despair.
Now in the past the American Negro has had instructive experience in the
choosing of group leaders, founding thus a peculiar dynasty which in the light
of present conditions is worth while studying. When sticks and stones and
beasts form the sole environment of a people, their attitude is largely one of
determined opposition to and conquest of natural forces. But when to earth and
brute is added an environment of men and ideas, then the attitude of the
imprisoned group may take three main forms,—a feeling of revolt and
revenge; an attempt to adjust all thought and action to the will of the greater
group; or, finally, a determined effort at self-realization and
self-development despite environing opinion. The influence of all of these
attitudes at various times can be traced in the history of the American Negro,
and in the evolution of his successive leaders.
Before 1750, while the fire of African freedom still burned in the veins of the
slaves, there was in all leadership or attempted leadership but the one motive
of revolt and revenge,—typified in the terrible Maroons, the Danish
blacks, and Cato of Stono, and veiling all the Americas in fear of
insurrection. The liberalizing tendencies of the latter half of the eighteenth
century brought, along with kindlier relations between black and white,
thoughts of ultimate adjustment and assimilation. Such aspiration was
especially voiced in the earnest songs of Phyllis, in the martyrdom of Attucks,
the fighting of Salem and Poor, the intellectual accomplishments of Banneker
and Derham, and the political demands of the Cuffes.
Stern financial and social stress after the war cooled much of the previous
humanitarian ardor. The disappointment and impatience of the Negroes at the
persistence of slavery and serfdom voiced itself in two movements. The slaves
in the South, aroused undoubtedly by vague rumors of the Haytian revolt, made
three fierce attempts at insurrection,—in 1800 under Gabriel in Virginia,
in 1822 under Vesey in Carolina, and in 1831 again in Virginia under the
terrible Nat Turner. In the Free States, on the other hand, a new and curious
attempt at self-development was made. In Philadelphia and New York
color-prescription led to a withdrawal of Negro communicants from white
churches and the formation of a peculiar socio-religious institution among the
Negroes known as the African Church,—an organization still living and
controlling in its various branches over a million of men.
Walker’s wild appeal against the trend of the times showed how the world
was changing after the coming of the cotton-gin. By 1830 slavery seemed
hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into
submission. The free Negroes of the North, inspired by the mulatto immigrants
from the West Indies, began to change the basis of their demands; they
recognized the slavery of slaves, but insisted that they themselves were
freemen, and sought assimilation and amalgamation with the nation on the same
terms with other men. Thus, Forten and Purvis of Philadelphia, Shad of
Wilmington, Du Bois of New Haven, Barbadoes of Boston, and others, strove
singly and together as men, they said, not as slaves; as “people of
color,” not as “Negroes.” The trend of the times, however,
refused them recognition save in individual and exceptional cases, considered
them as one with all the despised blacks, and they soon found themselves
striving to keep even the rights they formerly had of voting and working and
moving as freemen. Schemes of migration and colonization arose among them; but
these they refused to entertain, and they eventually turned to the Abolition
movement as a final refuge.
Here, led by Remond, Nell, Wells-Brown, and Douglass, a new period of
self-assertion and self-development dawned. To be sure, ultimate freedom and
assimilation was the ideal before the leaders, but the assertion of the manhood
rights of the Negro by himself was the main reliance, and John Brown’s
raid was the extreme of its logic. After the war and emancipation, the great
form of Frederick Douglass, the greatest of American Negro leaders, still led
the host. Self-assertion, especially in political lines, was the main
programme, and behind Douglass came Elliot, Bruce, and Langston, and the
Reconstruction politicians, and, less conspicuous but of greater social
significance, Alexander Crummell and Bishop Daniel Payne.
Then came the Revolution of 1876, the suppression of the Negro votes, the
changing and shifting of ideals, and the seeking of new lights in the great
night. Douglass, in his old age, still bravely stood for the ideals of his
early manhood,—ultimate assimilation self-assertion, and
on no other terms. For a time Price arose as a new leader, destined, it seemed,
not to give up, but to re-state the old ideals in a form less repugnant to the
white South. But he passed away in his prime. Then came the new leader. Nearly
all the former ones had become leaders by the silent suffrage of their fellows,
had sought to lead their own people alone, and were usually, save Douglass,
little known outside their race. But Booker T. Washington arose as essentially
the leader not of one race but of two,—a compromiser between the South,
the North, and the Negro. Naturally the Negroes resented, at first bitterly,
signs of compromise which surrendered their civil and political rights, even
though this was to be exchanged for larger chances of economic development. The
rich and dominating North, however, was not only weary of the race problem, but
was investing largely in Southern enterprises, and welcomed any method of
peaceful cooperation. Thus, by national opinion, the Negroes began to recognize
Mr. Washington’s leadership; and the voice of criticism was hushed.
Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and
submission; but adjustment at such a peculiar time as to make his programme
unique. This is an age of unusual economic development, and Mr.
Washington’s programme naturally takes an economic cast, becoming a
gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently almost completely to
overshadow the higher aims of life. Moreover, this is an age when the more
advanced races are coming in closer contact with the less developed races, and
the race-feeling is therefore intensified; and Mr. Washington’s programme
practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races. Again, in our
own land, the reaction from the sentiment of war time has given impetus to
race-prejudice against Negroes, and Mr. Washington withdraws many of the high
demands of Negroes as men and American citizens. In other periods of
intensified prejudice all the Negro’s tendency to self-assertion has been
called forth; at this period a policy of submission is advocated. In the
history of nearly all other races and peoples the doctrine preached at such
crises has been that manly self-respect is worth more than lands and houses,
and that a people who voluntarily surrender such respect, or cease striving for
it, are not worth civilizing.
In answer to this, it has been claimed that the Negro can survive only through
submission. Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up, at least
for the present, three things,—
First, political power,
Second, insistence on civil rights,
Third, higher education of Negro youth,—and concentrate all their
energies on industrial education, and accumulation of wealth, and the
conciliation of the South. This policy has been courageously and insistently
advocated for over fifteen years, and has been triumphant for perhaps ten
years. As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the return?
In these years there have occurred:
- The disfranchisement of the Negro.
- The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro.
- The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of
the Negro.
These movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr. Washington’s teachings; but his propaganda has, without a shadow of doubt, helped their speedier accomplishment. The question then comes: Is it possible, and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meagre chance for developing their exceptional men? If history and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic . And Mr. Washington thus faces the triple paradox of his career: - He is striving nobly to make Negro artisans business men and
property-owners; but it is utterly impossible, under modern competitive
methods, for workingmen and property-owners to defend their rights and exist
without the right of suffrage.
- He insists on thrift and self-respect, but at the same time counsels a
silent submission to civic inferiority such as is bound to sap the manhood of
any race in the long run.
- He advocates common-school and industrial training, and depreciates
institutions of higher learning; but neither the Negro common-schools, nor
Tuskegee itself, could remain open a day were it not for teachers trained in
Negro colleges, or trained by their graduates.
This triple paradox in Mr. Washington’s position is the object of criticism by two classes of colored Americans. One class is spiritually descended from Toussaint the Savior, through Gabriel, Vesey, and Turner, and they represent the attitude of revolt and revenge; they hate the white South blindly and distrust the white race generally, and so far as they agree on definite action, think that the Negro’s only hope lies in emigration beyond the borders of the United States. And yet, by the irony of fate, nothing has more effectually made this programme seem hopeless than the recent course of the United States toward weaker and darker peoples in the West Indies, Hawaii, and the Philippines,—for where in the world may we go and be safe from lying and brute force?
The other class of Negroes who cannot agree with Mr. Washington has hitherto said little aloud. They deprecate the sight of scattered counsels, of internal disagreement; and especially they dislike making their just criticism of a useful and earnest man an excuse for a general discharge of venom from small-minded opponents. Nevertheless, the questions involved are so fundamental and serious that it is difficult to see how men like the Grimkes, Kelly Miller, J. W. E. Bowen, and other representatives of this group, can much longer be silent. Such men feel in conscience bound to ask of this nation three things: - The right to vote.
- Civic equality.
- The education of youth according to ability. They acknowledge Mr.
Washington’s invaluable service in counselling patience and courtesy in
such demands; they do not ask that ignorant black men vote when ignorant whites
are debarred, or that any reasonable restrictions in the suffrage should not be
applied; they know that the low social level of the mass of the race is
responsible for much discrimination against it, but they also know, and the
nation knows, that relentless color-prejudice is more often a cause than a
result of the Negro’s degradation; they seek the abatement of this relic
of barbarism, and not its systematic encouragement and pampering by all
agencies of social power from the Associated Press to the Church of Christ.
They advocate, with Mr. Washington, a broad system of Negro common schools
supplemented by thorough industrial training; but they are surprised that a man
of Mr. Washington’s insight cannot see that no such educational system
ever has rested or can rest on any other basis than that of the well-equipped
college and university, and they insist that there is a demand for a few such
institutions throughout the South to train the best of the Negro youth as
teachers, professional men, and leaders.
This group of men honor Mr. Washington for his attitude of conciliation toward the white South; they accept the “Atlanta Compromise” in its broadest interpretation; they recognize, with him, many signs of promise, many men of high purpose and fair judgment, in this section; they know that no easy task has been laid upon a region already tottering under heavy burdens. But, nevertheless, they insist that the way to truth and right lies in straightforward honesty, not in indiscriminate flattery; in praising those of the South who do well and criticising uncompromisingly those who do ill; in taking advantage of the opportunities at hand and urging their fellows to do the same, but at the same time in remembering that only a firm adherence to their higher ideals and aspirations will ever keep those ideals within the realm of possibility. They do not expect that the free right to vote, to enjoy civic rights, and to be educated, will come in a moment; they do not expect to see the bias and prejudices of years disappear at the blast of a trumpet; but they are absolutely certain that the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and insisting that they do not want them; that the way for a people to gain respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves; that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.
In failing thus to state plainly and unequivocally the legitimate demands of their people, even at the cost of opposing an honored leader, the thinking classes of American Negroes would shirk a heavy responsibility,—a responsibility to themselves, a responsibility to the struggling masses, a responsibility to the darker races of men whose future depends so largely on this American experiment, but especially a responsibility to this nation,—this common Fatherland. It is wrong to encourage a man or a people in evil-doing; it is wrong to aid and abet a national crime simply because it is unpopular not to do so. The growing spirit of kindliness and reconciliation between the North and South after the frightful difference of a generation ago ought to be a source of deep congratulation to all, and especially to those whose mistreatment caused the war; but if that reconciliation is to be marked by the industrial slavery and civic death of those same black men, with permanent legislation into a position of inferiority, then those black men, if they are really men, are called upon by every consideration of patriotism and loyalty to oppose such a course by all civilized methods, even though such opposition involves disagreement with Mr. Booker T. Washington. We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.
First, it is the duty of black men to judge the South discriminatingly. The present generation of Southerners are not responsible for the past, and they should not be blindly hated or blamed for it. Furthermore, to no class is the indiscriminate endorsement of the recent course of the South toward Negroes more nauseating than to the best thought of the South. The South is not “solid”; it is a land in the ferment of social change, wherein forces of all kinds are fighting for supremacy; and to praise the ill the South is today perpetrating is just as wrong as to condemn the good. Discriminating and broad-minded criticism is what the South needs,—needs it for the sake of her own white sons and daughters, and for the insurance of robust, healthy mental and moral development.
Today even the attitude of the Southern whites toward the blacks is not, as so many assume, in all cases the same; the ignorant Southerner hates the Negro, the workingmen fear his competition, the money-makers wish to use him as a laborer, some of the educated see a menace in his upward development, while others—usually the sons of the masters—wish to help him to rise. National opinion has enabled this last class to maintain the Negro common schools, and to protect the Negro partially in property, life, and limb. Through the pressure of the money-makers, the Negro is in danger of being reduced to semi-slavery, especially in the country districts; the workingmen, and those of the educated who fear the Negro, have united to disfranchise him, and some have urged his deportation; while the passions of the ignorant are easily aroused to lynch and abuse any black man. To praise this intricate whirl of thought and prejudice is nonsense; to inveigh indiscriminately against “the South” is unjust; but to use the same breath in praising Governor Aycock, exposing Senator Morgan, arguing with Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, and denouncing Senator Ben Tillman, is not only sane, but the imperative duty of thinking black men.
It would be unjust to Mr. Washington not to acknowledge that in several instances he has opposed movements in the South which were unjust to the Negro; he sent memorials to the Louisiana and Alabama constitutional conventions, he has spoken against lynching, and in other ways has openly or silently set his influence against sinister schemes and unfortunate happenings. Notwithstanding this, it is equally true to assert that on the whole the distinct impression left by Mr. Washington’s propaganda is, first, that the South is justified in its present attitude toward the Negro because of the Negro’s degradation; secondly, that the prime cause of the Negro’s failure to rise more quickly is his wrong education in the past; and, thirdly, that his future rise depends primarily on his own efforts. Each of these propositions is a dangerous half-truth. The supplementary truths must never be lost sight of: first, slavery and race-prejudice are potent if not sufficient causes of the Negro’s position; second, industrial and common-school training were necessarily slow in planting because they had to await the black teachers trained by higher institutions,—it being extremely doubtful if any essentially different development was possible, and certainly a Tuskegee was unthinkable before 1880; and, third, while it is a great truth to say that the Negro must strive and strive mightily to help himself, it is equally true that unless his striving be not simply seconded, but rather aroused and encouraged, by the initiative of the richer and wiser environing group, he cannot hope for great success.
In his failure to realize and impress this last point, Mr. Washington is especially to be criticised. His doctrine has tended to make the whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro’s shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs.
The South ought to be led, by candid and honest criticism, to assert her better self and do her full duty to the race she has cruelly wronged and is still wronging. The North—her co-partner in guilt—cannot salve her conscience by plastering it with gold. We cannot settle this problem by diplomacy and suaveness, by “policy” alone. If worse come to worst, can the moral fibre of this country survive the slow throttling and murder of nine millions of men?
The black men of America have a duty to perform, a duty stern and delicate,—a forward movement to oppose a part of the work of their greatest leader. So far as Mr. Washington preaches Thrift, Patience, and Industrial Training for the masses, we must hold up his hands and strive with him, rejoicing in his honors and glorying in the strength of this Joshua called of God and of man to lead the headless host. But so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds,—so far as he, the South, or the Nation, does this,—we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them. By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the world accords to men, clinging unwaveringly to those great words which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
IV.
Of the Meaning of Progress
Willst Du Deine Macht verkünden,
Wähle sie die frei von Sünden,
Steh’n in Deinem ew’gen Haus!
Deine Geister sende aus!
Die Unsterblichen, die Reinen,
Die nicht fühlen, die nicht weinen!
Nicht die zarte Jungfrau wähle,
Nicht der Hirtin weiche Seele!
SCHILLER.
Once upon a time I taught school in the hills of Tennessee, where the broad
dark vale of the Mississippi begins to roll and crumple to greet the
Alleghanies. I was a Fisk student then, and all Fisk men thought that
Tennessee—beyond the Veil—was theirs alone, and in vacation time
they sallied forth in lusty bands to meet the county school-commissioners.
Young and happy, I too went, and I shall not soon forget that summer, seventeen
years ago.
First, there was a Teachers’ Institute at the county-seat; and there
distinguished guests of the superintendent taught the teachers fractions and
spelling and other mysteries,—white teachers in the morning, Negroes at
night. A picnic now and then, and a supper, and the rough world was softened by
laughter and song. I remember how— But I wander.
There came a day when all the teachers left the Institute and began the hunt
for schools. I learn from hearsay (for my mother was mortally afraid of
firearms) that the hunting of ducks and bears and men is wonderfully
interesting, but I am sure that the man who has never hunted a country school
has something to learn of the pleasures of the chase. I see now the white, hot
roads lazily rise and fall and wind before me under the burning July sun; I
feel the deep weariness of heart and limb as ten, eight, six miles stretch
relentlessly ahead; I feel my heart sink heavily as I hear again and again,
“Got a teacher? Yes.” So I walked on and on—horses were too
expensive—until I had wandered beyond railways, beyond stage lines, to a
land of “varmints” and rattlesnakes, where the coming of a stranger
was an event, and men lived and died in the shadow of one blue hill.
Sprinkled over hill and dale lay cabins and farmhouses, shut out from the world
by the forests and the rolling hills toward the east. There I found at last a
little school. Josie told me of it; she was a thin, homely girl of twenty, with
a dark-brown face and thick, hard hair. I had crossed the stream at Watertown,
and rested under the great willows; then I had gone to the little cabin in the
lot where Josie was resting on her way to town. The gaunt farmer made me
welcome, and Josie, hearing my errand, told me anxiously that they wanted a
school over the hill; that but once since the war had a teacher been there;
that she herself longed to learn,—and thus she ran on, talking fast and
loud, with much earnestness and energy.
Next morning I crossed the tall round hill, lingered to look at the blue and
yellow mountains stretching toward the Carolinas, then plunged into the wood,
and came out at Josie’s home. It was a dull frame cottage with four
rooms, perched just below the brow of the hill, amid peach-trees. The father
was a quiet, simple soul, calmly ignorant, with no touch of vulgarity. The
mother was different,—strong, bustling, and energetic, with a quick,
restless tongue, and an ambition to live “like folks.” There was a
crowd of children. Two boys had gone away. There remained two growing girls; a
shy midget of eight; John, tall, awkward, and eighteen; Jim, younger, quicker,
and better looking; and two babies of indefinite age. Then there was Josie
herself. She seemed to be the centre of the family: always busy at service, or
at home, or berry-picking; a little nervous and inclined to scold, like her
mother, yet faithful, too, like her father. She had about her a certain
fineness, the shadow of an unconscious moral heroism that would willingly give
all of life to make life broader, deeper, and fuller for her and hers. I saw
much of this family afterwards, and grew to love them for their honest efforts
to be decent and comfortable, and for their knowledge of their own ignorance.
There was with them no affectation. The mother would scold the father for being
so “easy”; Josie would roundly berate the boys for carelessness;
and all knew that it was a hard thing to dig a living out of a rocky side-hill.
I secured the school. I remember the day I rode horseback out to the
commissioner’s house with a pleasant young white fellow who wanted the
white school. The road ran down the bed of a stream; the sun laughed and the
water jingled, and we rode on. “Come in,” said the
commissioner,—“come in. Have a seat. Yes, that certificate will do.
Stay to dinner. What do you want a month?” “Oh,” thought I,
“this is lucky”; but even then fell the awful shadow of the Veil,
for they ate first, then I—alone.
The schoolhouse was a log hut, where Colonel Wheeler used to shelter his corn.
It sat in a lot behind a rail fence and thorn bushes, near the sweetest of
springs. There was an entrance where a door once was, and within, a massive
rickety fireplace; great chinks between the logs served as windows. Furniture
was scarce. A pale blackboard crouched in the corner. My desk was made of three
boards, reinforced at critical points, and my chair, borrowed from the
landlady, had to be returned every night. Seats for the children—these
puzzled me much. I was haunted by a New England vision of neat little desks and
chairs, but, alas! the reality was rough plank benches without backs, and at
times without legs. They had the one virtue of making naps
dangerous,—possibly fatal, for the floor was not to be trusted.
It was a hot morning late in July when the school opened. I trembled when I
heard the patter of little feet down the dusty road, and saw the growing row of
dark solemn faces and bright eager eyes facing me. First came Josie and her
brothers and sisters. The longing to know, to be a student in the great school
at Nashville, hovered like a star above this child-woman amid her work and
worry, and she studied doggedly. There were the Dowells from their farm over
toward Alexandria,—Fanny, with her smooth black face and wondering eyes;
Martha, brown and dull; the pretty girl-wife of a brother, and the younger
brood.
There were the Burkes,—two brown and yellow lads, and a tiny haughty-eyed
girl. Fat Reuben’s little chubby girl came, with golden face and old-gold
hair, faithful and solemn. ’Thenie was on hand early,—a jolly,
ugly, good-hearted girl, who slyly dipped snuff and looked after her little
bow-legged brother. When her mother could spare her, ’Tildy came,—a
midnight beauty, with starry eyes and tapering limbs; and her brother,
correspondingly homely. And then the big boys,—the hulking Lawrences; the
lazy Neills, unfathered sons of mother and daughter; Hickman, with a stoop in
his shoulders; and the rest.
There they sat, nearly thirty of them, on the rough benches, their faces
shading from a pale cream to a deep brown, the little feet bare and swinging,
the eyes full of expectation, with here and there a twinkle of mischief, and
the hands grasping Webster’s blue-black spelling-book. I loved my school,
and the fine faith the children had in the wisdom of their teacher was truly
marvellous. We read and spelled together, wrote a little, picked flowers, sang,
and listened to stories of the world beyond the hill. At times the school would
dwindle away, and I would start out. I would visit Mun Eddings, who lived in
two very dirty rooms, and ask why little Lugene, whose flaming face seemed ever
ablaze with the dark-red hair uncombed, was absent all last week, or why I
missed so often the inimitable rags of Mack and Ed. Then the father, who worked
Colonel Wheeler’s farm on shares, would tell me how the crops needed the
boys; and the thin, slovenly mother, whose face was pretty when washed, assured
me that Lugene must mind the baby. “But we’ll start them again next
week.” When the Lawrences stopped, I knew that the doubts of the old
folks about book-learning had conquered again, and so, toiling up the hill, and
getting as far into the cabin as possible, I put Cicero “pro Archia
Poeta” into the simplest English with local applications, and usually
convinced them—for a week or so.
On Friday nights I often went home with some of the children,—sometimes
to Doc Burke’s farm. He was a great, loud, thin Black, ever working, and
trying to buy the seventy-five acres of hill and dale where he lived; but
people said that he would surely fail, and the “white folks would get it
all.” His wife was a magnificent Amazon, with saffron face and shining
hair, uncorseted and barefooted, and the children were strong and beautiful.
They lived in a one-and-a-half-room cabin in the hollow of the farm, near the
spring. The front room was full of great fat white beds, scrupulously neat; and
there were bad chromos on the walls, and a tired centre-table. In the tiny back
kitchen I was often invited to “take out and help” myself to fried
chicken and wheat biscuit, “meat” and corn pone, string-beans and
berries. At first I used to be a little alarmed at the approach of bedtime in
the one lone bedroom, but embarrassment was very deftly avoided. First, all the
children nodded and slept, and were stowed away in one great pile of goose
feathers; next, the mother and the father discreetly slipped away to the
kitchen while I went to bed; then, blowing out the dim light, they retired in
the dark. In the morning all were up and away before I thought of awaking.
Across the road, where fat Reuben lived, they all went outdoors while the
teacher retired, because they did not boast the luxury of a kitchen.
I liked to stay with the Dowells, for they had four rooms and plenty of good
country fare. Uncle Bird had a small, rough farm, all woods and hills, miles
from the big road; but he was full of tales,—he preached now and
then,—and with his children, berries, horses, and wheat he was happy and
prosperous. Often, to keep the peace, I must go where life was less lovely; for
instance, ’Tildy’s mother was incorrigibly dirty, Reuben’s
larder was limited seriously, and herds of untamed insects wandered over the
Eddingses’ beds. Best of all I loved to go to Josie’s, and sit on
the porch, eating peaches, while the mother bustled and talked: how Josie had
bought the sewing-machine; how Josie worked at service in winter, but that four
dollars a month was “mighty little” wages; how Josie longed to go
away to school, but that it “looked like” they never could get far
enough ahead to let her; how the crops failed and the well was yet unfinished;
and, finally, how “mean” some of the white folks were.
For two summers I lived in this little world; it was dull and humdrum. The
girls looked at the hill in wistful longing, and the boys fretted and haunted
Alexandria. Alexandria was “town,”—a straggling, lazy village
of houses, churches, and shops, and an aristocracy of Toms, Dicks, and
Captains. Cuddled on the hill to the north was the village of the colored
folks, who lived in three- or four-room unpainted cottages, some neat and
homelike, and some dirty. The dwellings were scattered rather aimlessly, but
they centred about the twin temples of the hamlet, the Methodist, and the
Hard-Shell Baptist churches. These, in turn, leaned gingerly on a sad-colored
schoolhouse. Hither my little world wended its crooked way on Sunday to meet
other worlds, and gossip, and wonder, and make the weekly sacrifice with
frenzied priest at the altar of the “old-time religion.” Then the
soft melody and mighty cadences of Negro song fluttered and thundered.
I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made it; and yet
there was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness, sprung from common
joy and grief, at burial, birth, or wedding; from a common hardship in poverty,
poor land, and low wages; and, above all, from the sight of the Veil that hung
between us and Opportunity. All this caused us to think some thoughts together;
but these, when ripe for speech, were spoken in various languages. Those whose
eyes twenty-five and more years before had seen “the glory of the coming
of the Lord,” saw in every present hindrance or help a dark fatalism
bound to bring all things right in His own good time. The mass of those to whom
slavery was a dim recollection of childhood found the world a puzzling thing:
it asked little of them, and they answered with little, and yet it ridiculed
their offering. Such a paradox they could not understand, and therefore sank
into listless indifference, or shiftlessness, or reckless bravado. There were,
however, some—such as Josie, Jim, and Ben—to whom War, Hell, and
Slavery were but childhood tales, whose young appetites had been whetted to an
edge by school and story and half-awakened thought. Ill could they be content,
born without and beyond the World. And their weak wings beat against their
barriers,—barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last, in dangerous
moments, against everything that opposed even a whim.
The ten years that follow youth, the years when first the realization comes
that life is leading somewhere,—these were the years that passed after I
left my little school. When they were past, I came by chance once more to the
walls of Fisk University, to the halls of the chapel of melody. As I lingered
there in the joy and pain of meeting old school-friends, there swept over me a
sudden longing to pass again beyond the blue hill, and to see the homes and the
school of other days, and to learn how life had gone with my school-children;
and I went.
Josie was dead, and the gray-haired mother said simply, “We’ve had
a heap of trouble since you’ve been away.” I had feared for Jim.
With a cultured parentage and a social caste to uphold him, he might have made
a venturesome merchant or a West Point cadet. But here he was, angry with life
and reckless; and when Fanner Durham charged him with stealing wheat, the old
man had to ride fast to escape the stones which the furious fool hurled after
him. They told Jim to run away; but he would not run, and the constable came
that afternoon. It grieved Josie, and great awkward John walked nine miles
every day to see his little brother through the bars of Lebanon jail. At last
the two came back together in the dark night. The mother cooked supper, and
Josie emptied her purse, and the boys stole away. Josie grew thin and silent,
yet worked the more. The hill became steep for the quiet old father, and with
the boys away there was little to do in the valley. Josie helped them to sell
the old farm, and they moved nearer town. Brother Dennis, the carpenter, built
a new house with six rooms; Josie toiled a year in Nashville, and brought back
ninety dollars to furnish the house and change it to a home.
When the spring came, and the birds twittered, and the stream ran proud and
full, little sister Lizzie, bold and thoughtless, flushed with the passion of
youth, bestowed herself on the tempter, and brought home a nameless child.
Josie shivered and worked on, with the vision of schooldays all fled, with a
face wan and tired,—worked until, on a summer’s day, some one
married another; then Josie crept to her mother like a hurt child, and
slept—and sleeps.
I paused to scent the breeze as I entered the valley. The Lawrences have
gone,—father and son forever,—and the other son lazily digs in the
earth to live. A new young widow rents out their cabin to fat Reuben. Reuben is
a Baptist preacher now, but I fear as lazy as ever, though his cabin has three
rooms; and little Ella has grown into a bouncing woman, and is ploughing corn
on the hot hillside. There are babies a-plenty, and one half-witted girl.
Across the valley is a house I did not know before, and there I found, rocking
one baby and expecting another, one of my schoolgirls, a daughter of Uncle Bird
Dowell. She looked somewhat worried with her new duties, but soon bristled into
pride over her neat cabin and the tale of her thrifty husband, and the horse
and cow, and the farm they were planning to buy.
My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood Progress; and Progress, I
understand, is necessarily ugly. The crazy foundation stones still marked the
former site of my poor little cabin, and not far away, on six weary boulders,
perched a jaunty board house, perhaps twenty by thirty feet, with three windows
and a door that locked. Some of the window-glass was broken, and part of an old
iron stove lay mournfully under the house. I peeped through the window half
reverently, and found things that were more familiar. The blackboard had grown
by about two feet, and the seats were still without backs. The county owns the
lot now, I hear, and every year there is a session of school. As I sat by the
spring and looked on the Old and the New I felt glad, very glad, and yet—
After two long drinks I started on. There was the great double log-house on the
corner. I remembered the broken, blighted family that used to live there. The
strong, hard face of the mother, with its wilderness of hair, rose before me.
She had driven her husband away, and while I taught school a strange man lived
there, big and jovial, and people talked. I felt sure that Ben and ’Tildy
would come to naught from such a home. But this is an odd world; for Ben is a
busy farmer in Smith County, “doing well, too,” they say, and he
had cared for little ’Tildy until last spring, when a lover married her.
A hard life the lad had led, toiling for meat, and laughed at because he was
homely and crooked. There was Sam Carlon, an impudent old skinflint, who had
definite notions about “niggers,” and hired Ben a summer and would
not pay him. Then the hungry boy gathered his sacks together, and in broad
daylight went into Carlon’s corn; and when the hard-fisted farmer set
upon him, the angry boy flew at him like a beast. Doc Burke saved a murder and
a lynching that day.
The story reminded me again of the Burkes, and an impatience seized me to know
who won in the battle, Doc or the seventy-five acres. For it is a hard thing to
make a farm out of nothing, even in fifteen years. So I hurried on, thinking of
the Burkes. They used to have a certain magnificent barbarism about them that I
liked. They were never vulgar, never immoral, but rather rough and primitive,
with an unconventionality that spent itself in loud guffaws, slaps on the back,
and naps in the corner. I hurried by the cottage of the misborn Neill boys. It
was empty, and they were grown into fat, lazy farm-hands. I saw the home of the
Hickmans, but Albert, with his stooping shoulders, had passed from the world.
Then I came to the Burkes’ gate and peered through; the enclosure looked
rough and untrimmed, and yet there were the same fences around the old farm
save to the left, where lay twenty-five other acres. And lo! the cabin in the
hollow had climbed the hill and swollen to a half-finished six-room cottage.
The Burkes held a hundred acres, but they were still in debt. Indeed, the gaunt
father who toiled night and day would scarcely be happy out of debt, being so
used to it. Some day he must stop, for his massive frame is showing decline.
The mother wore shoes, but the lion-like physique of other days was broken. The
children had grown up. Rob, the image of his father, was loud and rough with
laughter. Birdie, my school baby of six, had grown to a picture of maiden
beauty, tall and tawny. “Edgar is gone,” said the mother, with head
half bowed,—“gone to work in Nashville; he and his father
couldn’t agree.”
Little Doc, the boy born since the time of my school, took me horseback down
the creek next morning toward Farmer Dowell’s. The road and the stream
were battling for mastery, and the stream had the better of it. We splashed and
waded, and the merry boy, perched behind me, chattered and laughed. He showed
me where Simon Thompson had bought a bit of ground and a home; but his daughter
Lana, a plump, brown, slow girl, was not there. She had married a man and a
farm twenty miles away. We wound on down the stream till we came to a gate that
I did not recognize, but the boy insisted that it was “Uncle
Bird’s.” The farm was fat with the growing crop. In that little
valley was a strange stillness as I rode up; for death and marriage had stolen
youth and left age and childhood there. We sat and talked that night after the
chores were done. Uncle Bird was grayer, and his eyes did not see so well, but
he was still jovial. We talked of the acres bought,—one hundred and
twenty-five,—of the new guest-chamber added, of Martha’s marrying.
Then we talked of death: Fanny and Fred were gone; a shadow hung over the other
daughter, and when it lifted she was to go to Nashville to school. At last we
spoke of the neighbors, and as night fell, Uncle Bird told me how, on a night
like that, ’Thenie came wandering back to her home over yonder, to escape
the blows of her husband. And next morning she died in the home that her little
bow-legged brother, working and saving, had bought for their widowed mother.
My journey was done, and behind me lay hill and dale, and Life and Death. How
shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies? How many
heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat? How hard a thing is life
to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all this life and love and strife
and failure,—is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some
faint-dawning day?
Thus sadly musing, I rode to Nashville in the Jim Crow car.
V.
Of the Wings of Atalanta
O black boy of Atlanta!
But half was spoken;
The slave’s chains and the master’s
Alike are broken;
The one curse of the races
Held both in tether;
They are rising—all are rising—
The black and white together.
WHITTIER.
South of the North, yet north of the South, lies the City of a Hundred Hills,
peering out from the shadows of the past into the promise of the future. I have
seen her in the morning, when the first flush of day had half-roused her; she
lay gray and still on the crimson soil of Georgia; then the blue smoke began to
curl from her chimneys, the tinkle of bell and scream of whistle broke the
silence, the rattle and roar of busy life slowly gathered and swelled, until
the seething whirl of the city seemed a strange thing in a sleepy land.
Once, they say, even Atlanta slept dull and drowsy at the foot-hills of the
Alleghanies, until the iron baptism of war awakened her with its sullen waters,
aroused and maddened her, and left her listening to the sea. And the sea cried
to the hills and the hills answered the sea, till the city rose like a widow
and cast away her weeds, and toiled for her daily bread; toiled steadily,
toiled cunningly,—perhaps with some bitterness, with a touch, of
,—and yet with real earnestness, and real sweat.
It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream; to see the
wide vision of empire fade into real ashes and dirt; to feel the pang of the
conquered, and yet know that with all the Bad that fell on one black day,
something was vanquished that deserved to live, something killed that in
justice had not dared to die; to know that with the Right that triumphed,
triumphed something of Wrong, something sordid and mean, something less than
the broadest and best. All this is bitter hard; and many a man and city and
people have found in it excuse for sulking, and brooding, and listless waiting.
Such are not men of the sturdier make; they of Atlanta turned resolutely toward
the future; and that future held aloft vistas of purple and
gold:—Atlanta, Queen of the cotton kingdom; Atlanta, Gateway to the Land
of the Sun; Atlanta, the new Lachesis, spinner of web and woof for the world.
So the city crowned her hundred hills with factories, and stored her shops with
cunning handiwork, and stretched long iron ways to greet the busy Mercury in
his coming. And the Nation talked of her striving.
Perhaps Atlanta was not christened for the winged maiden of dull Boeotia; you
know the tale,—how swarthy Atalanta, tall and wild, would marry only him
who out-raced her; and how the wily Hippomenes laid three apples of gold in the
way. She fled like a shadow, paused, startled over the first apple, but even as
he stretched his hand, fled again; hovered over the second, then, slipping from
his hot grasp, flew over river, vale, and hill; but as she lingered over the
third, his arms fell round her, and looking on each other, the blazing passion
of their love profaned the sanctuary of Love, and they were cursed. If Atlanta
be not named for Atalanta, she ought to have been.
Atalanta is not the first or the last maiden whom greed of gold has led to
defile the temple of Love; and not maids alone, but men in the race of life,
sink from the high and generous ideals of youth to the gambler’s code of
the Bourse; and in all our Nation’s striving is not the Gospel of Work
befouled by the Gospel of Pay? So common is this that one-half think it normal;
so unquestioned, that we almost fear to question if the end of racing is not
gold, if the aim of man is not rightly to be rich. And if this is the fault of
America, how dire a danger lies before a new land and a new city, lest Atlanta,
stooping for mere gold, shall find that gold accursed!
It was no maiden’s idle whim that started this hard racing; a fearful
wilderness lay about the feet of that city after the War,—feudalism,
poverty, the rise of the Third Estate, serfdom, the re-birth of Law and Order,
and above and between all, the Veil of Race. How heavy a journey for weary
feet! what wings must Atalanta have to flit over all this hollow and hill,
through sour wood and sullen water, and by the red waste of sun-baked clay! How
fleet must Atalanta be if she will not be tempted by gold to profane the
Sanctuary!
The Sanctuary of our fathers has, to be sure, few Gods,—some sneer,
“all too few.” There is the thrifty Mercury of New England, Pluto
of the North, and Ceres of the West; and there, too, is the half-forgotten
Apollo of the South, under whose aegis the maiden ran,—and as she ran she
forgot him, even as there in Boeotia Venus was forgot. She forgot the old ideal
of the Southern gentleman,—that new-world heir of the grace and
courtliness of patrician, knight, and noble; forgot his honor with his foibles,
his kindliness with his carelessness, and stooped to apples of gold,—to
men busier and sharper, thriftier and more unscrupulous. Golden apples are
beautiful—I remember the lawless days of boyhood, when orchards in
crimson and gold tempted me over fence and field—and, too, the merchant
who has dethroned the planter is no despicable parvenu. Work and wealth are the
mighty levers to lift this old new land; thrift and toil and saving are the
highways to new hopes and new possibilities; and yet the warning is needed lest
the wily Hippomenes tempt Atalanta to thinking that golden apples are the goal
of racing, and not mere incidents by the way.
Atlanta must not lead the South to dream of material prosperity as the
touchstone of all success; already the fatal might of this idea is beginning to
spread; it is replacing the finer type of Southerner with vulgar money-getters;
it is burying the sweeter beauties of Southern life beneath pretence and
ostentation. For every social ill the panacea of Wealth has been
urged,—wealth to overthrow the remains of the slave feudalism; wealth to
raise the “cracker” Third Estate; wealth to employ the black serfs,
and the prospect of wealth to keep them working; wealth as the end and aim of
politics, and as the legal tender for law and order; and, finally, instead of
Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, wealth as the ideal of the Public School.
Not only is this true in the world which Atlanta typifies, but it is
threatening to be true of a world beneath and beyond that world,—the
Black World beyond the Veil. Today it makes little difference to Atlanta, to
the South, what the Negro thinks or dreams or wills. In the soul-life of the
land he is to-day, and naturally will long remain, unthought of, half
forgotten; and yet when he does come to think and will and do for
himself,—and let no man dream that day will never come,—then the
part he plays will not be one of sudden learning, but words and thoughts he has
been taught to lisp in his race-childhood. To-day the ferment of his striving
toward self-realization is to the strife of the white world like a wheel within
a wheel: beyond the Veil are smaller but like problems of ideals, of leaders
and the led, of serfdom, of poverty, of order and subordination, and, through
all, the Veil of Race. Few know of these problems, few who know notice them;
and yet there they are, awaiting student, artist, and seer,—a field for
somebody sometime to discover. Hither has the temptation of Hippomenes
penetrated; already in this smaller world, which now indirectly and anon
directly must influence the larger for good or ill, the habit is forming of
interpreting the world in dollars. The old leaders of Negro opinion, in the
little groups where there is a Negro social consciousness, are being replaced
by new; neither the black preacher nor the black teacher leads as he did two
decades ago. Into their places are pushing the farmers and gardeners, the
well-paid porters and artisans, the business-men,—all those with property
and money. And with all this change, so curiously parallel to that of the
Other-world, goes too the same inevitable change in ideals. The South laments
to-day the slow, steady disappearance of a certain type of Negro,—the
faithful, courteous slave of other days, with his incorruptible honesty and
dignified humility. He is passing away just as surely as the old type of
Southern gentleman is passing, and from not dissimilar causes,—the sudden
transformation of a fair far-off ideal of Freedom into the hard reality of
bread-winning and the consequent deification of Bread.
In the Black World, the Preacher and Teacher embodied once the ideals of this
people—the strife for another and a juster world, the vague dream of
righteousness, the mystery of knowing; but to-day the danger is that these
ideals, with their simple beauty and weird inspiration, will suddenly sink to a
question of cash and a lust for gold. Here stands this black young Atalanta,
girding herself for the race that must be run; and if her eyes be still toward
the hills and sky as in the days of old, then we may look for noble running;
but what if some ruthless or wily or even thoughtless Hippomenes lay golden
apples before her? What if the Negro people be wooed from a strife for
righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard dollars as the be-all and
end-all of life? What if to the Mammonism of America be added the rising
Mammonism of the re-born South, and the Mammonism of this South be reinforced
by the budding Mammonism of its half-wakened black millions? Whither, then, is
the new-world quest of Goodness and Beauty and Truth gone glimmering? Must
this, and that fair flower of Freedom which, despite the jeers of latter-day
striplings, sprung from our fathers’ blood, must that too degenerate into
a dusty quest of gold,—into lawless lust with Hippomenes?
The hundred hills of Atlanta are not all crowned with factories. On one, toward
the west, the setting sun throws three buildings in bold relief against the
sky. The beauty of the group lies in its simple unity:—a broad lawn of
green rising from the red street and mingled roses and peaches; north and
south, two plain and stately halls; and in the midst, half hidden in ivy, a
larger building, boldly graceful, sparingly decorated, and with one low spire.
It is a restful group, —one never looks for more; it is all here, all
intelligible. There I live, and there I hear from day to day the low hum of
restful life. In winter’s twilight, when the red sun glows, I can see the
dark figures pass between the halls to the music of the night-bell. In the
morning, when the sun is golden, the clang of the day-bell brings the hurry and
laughter of three hundred young hearts from hall and street, and from the busy
city below,—children all dark and heavy-haired,—to join their clear
young voices in the music of the morning sacrifice. In a half-dozen class-rooms
they gather then,—here to follow the love-song of Dido, here to listen to
the tale of Troy divine; there to wander among the stars, there to wander among
men and nations,—and elsewhere other well-worn ways of knowing this queer
world. Nothing new, no time-saving devices,—simply old time-glorified
methods of delving for Truth, and searching out the hidden beauties of life,
and learning the good of living. The riddle of existence is the college
curriculum that was laid before the Pharaohs, that was taught in the groves by
Plato, that formed the and , and is to-day laid
before the freedmen’s sons by Atlanta University. And this course of
study will not change; its methods will grow more deft and effectual, its
content richer by toil of scholar and sight of seer; but the true college will
ever have one goal,—not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that
life which meat nourishes.
The vision of life that rises before these dark eyes has in it nothing mean or
selfish. Not at Oxford or at Leipsic, not at Yale or Columbia, is there an air
of higher resolve or more unfettered striving; the determination to realize for
men, both black and white, the broadest possibilities of life, to seek the
better and the best, to spread with their own hands the Gospel of
Sacrifice,—all this is the burden of their talk and dream. Here, amid a
wide desert of caste and proscription, amid the heart-hurting slights and jars
and vagaries of a deep race-dislike, lies this green oasis, where hot anger
cools, and the bitterness of disappointment is sweetened by the springs and
breezes of Parnassus; and here men may lie and listen, and learn of a future
fuller than the past, and hear the voice of Time:
“Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren.”
They made their mistakes, those who planted Fisk and Howard and Atlanta before
the smoke of battle had lifted; they made their mistakes, but those mistakes
were not the things at which we lately laughed somewhat uproariously. They were
right when they sought to found a new educational system upon the University:
where, forsooth, shall we ground knowledge save on the broadest and deepest
knowledge? The roots of the tree, rather than the leaves, are the sources of
its life; and from the dawn of history, from Academus to Cambridge, the culture
of the University has been the broad foundation-stone on which is built the
kindergarten’s A B C.
But these builders did make a mistake in minimizing the gravity of the problem
before them; in thinking it a matter of years and decades; in therefore
building quickly and laying their foundation carelessly, and lowering the
standard of knowing, until they had scattered haphazard through the South some
dozen poorly equipped high schools and miscalled them universities. They
forgot, too, just as their successors are forgetting, the rule of
inequality:—that of the million black youth, some were fitted to know and
some to dig; that some had the talent and capacity of university men, and some
the talent and capacity of blacksmiths; and that true training meant neither
that all should be college men nor all artisans, but that the one should be
made a missionary of culture to an untaught people, and the other a free
workman among serfs. And to seek to make the blacksmith a scholar is almost as
silly as the more modern scheme of making the scholar a blacksmith; almost, but
not quite.
The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to
furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite society; it
is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and
the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of
civilization. Such an institution the South of to-day sorely needs. She has
religion, earnest, bigoted:—religion that on both sides the Veil often
omits the sixth, seventh, and eighth commandments, but substitutes a dozen
supplementary ones. She has, as Atlanta shows, growing thrift and love of toil;
but she lacks that broad knowledge of what the world knows and knew of human
living and doing, which she may apply to the thousand problems of real life
to-day confronting her. The need of the South is knowledge and
culture,—not in dainty limited quantity, as before the war, but in broad
busy abundance in the world of work; and until she has this, not all the Apples
of Hesperides, be they golden and bejewelled, can save her from the curse of
the Boeotian lovers.
The Wings of Atalanta are the coming universities of the South. They alone can
bear the maiden past the temptation of golden fruit. They will not guide her
flying feet away from the cotton and gold; for—ah, thoughtful
Hippomenes!—do not the apples lie in the very Way of Life? But they will
guide her over and beyond them, and leave her kneeling in the Sanctuary of
Truth and Freedom and broad Humanity, virgin and undefiled. Sadly did the Old
South err in human education, despising the education of the masses, and
niggardly in the support of colleges. Her ancient university foundations
dwindled and withered under the foul breath of slavery; and even since the war
they have fought a failing fight for life in the tainted air of social unrest
and commercial selfishness, stunted by the death of criticism, and starving for
lack of broadly cultured men. And if this is the white South’s need and
danger, how much heavier the danger and need of the freedmen’s sons! how
pressing here the need of broad ideals and true culture, the conservation of
soul from sordid aims and petty passions! Let us build the Southern
university—William and Mary, Trinity, Georgia, Texas, Tulane, Vanderbilt,
and the others—fit to live; let us build, too, the Negro
universities:—Fisk, whose foundation was ever broad; Howard, at the heart
of the Nation; Atlanta at Atlanta, whose ideal of scholarship has been held
above the temptation of numbers. Why not here, and perhaps elsewhere, plant
deeply and for all time centres of learning and living, colleges that yearly
would send into the life of the South a few white men and a few black men of
broad culture, catholic tolerance, and trained ability, joining their hands to
other hands, and giving to this squabble of the Races a decent and dignified
peace?
Patience, Humility, Manners, and Taste, common schools and kindergartens,
industrial and technical schools, literature and tolerance,—all these
spring from knowledge and culture, the children of the university. So must men
and nations build, not otherwise, not upside down.
Teach workers to work,—a wise saying; wise when applied to German boys
and American girls; wiser when said of Negro boys, for they have less knowledge
of working and none to teach them. Teach thinkers to think,—a needed
knowledge in a day of loose and careless logic; and they whose lot is gravest
must have the carefulest training to think aright. If these things are so, how
foolish to ask what is the best education for one or seven or sixty million
souls! shall we teach them trades, or train them in liberal arts? Neither and
both: teach the workers to work and the thinkers to think; make carpenters of
carpenters, and philosophers of philosophers, and fops of fools. Nor can we
pause here. We are training not isolated men but a living group of
men,—nay, a group within a group. And the final product of our training
must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man. And to make men, we
must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living,—not sordid
money-getting, not apples of gold. The worker must work for the glory of his
handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.
And all this is gained only by human strife and longing; by ceaseless training
and education; by founding Right on righteousness and Truth on the unhampered
search for Truth; by founding the common school on the university, and the
industrial school on the common school; and weaving thus a system, not a
distortion, and bringing a birth, not an abortion.
When night falls on the City of a Hundred Hills, a wind gathers itself from the
seas and comes murmuring westward. And at its bidding, the smoke of the drowsy
factories sweeps down upon the mighty city and covers it like a pall, while
yonder at the University the stars twinkle above Stone Hall. And they say that
yon gray mist is the tunic of Atalanta pausing over her golden apples. Fly, my
maiden, fly, for yonder comes Hippomenes!
VI.
Of the Training of Black Men
Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside,
And naked on the Air of Heaven ride,
Were’t not a Shame—were’t not a Shame for him
In this clay carcase crippled to abide?
OMAR KHAYYÁM (FITZGERALD).
From the shimmering swirl of waters where many, many thoughts ago the
slave-ship first saw the square tower of Jamestown, have flowed down to our day
three streams of thinking: one swollen from the larger world here and overseas,
saying, the multiplying of human wants in culture-lands calls for the
world-wide cooperation of men in satisfying them. Hence arises a new human
unity, pulling the ends of earth nearer, and all men, black, yellow, and white.
The larger humanity strives to feel in this contact of living Nations and
sleeping hordes a thrill of new life in the world, crying, “If the
contact of Life and Sleep be Death, shame on such Life.” To be sure,
behind this thought lurks the afterthought of force and dominion,—the
making of brown men to delve when the temptation of beads and red calico cloys.
The second thought streaming from the death-ship and the curving river is the
thought of the older South,—the sincere and passionate belief that
somewhere between men and cattle, God created a , and called
it a Negro,—a clownish, simple creature, at times even lovable within its
limitations, but straitly foreordained to walk within the Veil. To be sure,
behind the thought lurks the afterthought,—some of them with favoring
chance might become men, but in sheer self-defence we dare not let them, and we
build about them walls so high, and hang between them and the light a veil so
thick, that they shall not even think of breaking through.
And last of all there trickles down that third and darker thought,—the
thought of the things themselves, the confused, half-conscious mutter of men
who are black and whitened, crying “Liberty, Freedom,
Opportunity—vouchsafe to us, O boastful World, the chance of living
men!” To be sure, behind the thought lurks the
afterthought,—suppose, after all, the World is right and we are less than
men? Suppose this mad impulse within is all wrong, some mock mirage from the
untrue?
So here we stand among thoughts of human unity, even through conquest and
slavery; the inferiority of black men, even if forced by fraud; a shriek in the
night for the freedom of men who themselves are not yet sure of their right to
demand it. This is the tangle of thought and afterthought wherein we are called
to solve the problem of training men for life.
Behind all its curiousness, so attractive alike to sage and ,
lie its dim dangers, throwing across us shadows at once grotesque and awful.
Plain it is to us that what the world seeks through desert and wild we have
within our threshold,—a stalwart laboring force, suited to the
semi-tropics; if, deaf to the voice of the Zeitgeist, we refuse to use and
develop these men, we risk poverty and loss. If, on the other hand, seized by
the brutal afterthought, we debauch the race thus caught in our talons,
selfishly sucking their blood and brains in the future as in the past, what
shall save us from national decadence? Only that saner selfishness, which
Education teaches, can find the rights of all in the whirl of work.
Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet it remains a heavy
fact. Such curious kinks of the human mind exist and must be reckoned with
soberly. They cannot be laughed away, nor always successfully stormed at, nor
easily abolished by act of legislature. And yet they must not be encouraged by
being let alone. They must be recognized as facts, but unpleasant facts; things
that stand in the way of civilization and religion and common decency. They can
be met in but one way,—by the breadth and broadening of human reason, by
catholicity of taste and culture. And so, too, the native ambition and
aspiration of men, even though they be black, backward, and ungraceful, must
not lightly be dealt with. To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to
play with mighty fires; to flout their striving idly is to welcome a harvest of
brutish crime and shameless lethargy in our very laps. The guiding of thought
and the deft coordination of deed is at once the path of honor and humanity.
And so, in this great question of reconciling three vast and partially
contradictory streams of thought, the one panacea of Education leaps to the
lips of all:—such human training as will best use the labor of all men
without enslaving or brutalizing; such training as will give us poise to
encourage the prejudices that bulwark society, and to stamp out those that in
sheer barbarity deafen us to the wail of prisoned souls within the Veil, and
the mounting fury of shackled men.
But when we have vaguely said that Education will set this tangle straight,
what have we uttered but a truism? Training for life teaches living; but what
training for the profitable living together of black men and white? A hundred
and fifty years ago our task would have seemed easier. Then Dr. Johnson blandly
assured us that education was needful solely for the embellishments of life,
and was useless for ordinary vermin. To-day we have climbed to heights where we
would open at least the outer courts of knowledge to all, display its treasures
to many, and select the few to whom its mystery of Truth is revealed, not
wholly by birth or the accidents of the stock market, but at least in part
according to deftness and aim, talent and character. This programme, however,
we are sorely puzzled in carrying out through that part of the land where the
blight of slavery fell hardest, and where we are dealing with two backward
peoples. To make here in human education that ever necessary combination of the
permanent and the contingent—of the ideal and the practical in workable
equilibrium—has been there, as it ever must be in every age and place, a
matter of infinite experiment and frequent mistakes.
In rough approximation we may point out four varying decades of work in
Southern education since the Civil War. From the close of the war until 1876,
was the period of uncertain groping and temporary relief. There were army
schools, mission schools, and schools of the Freedmen’s Bureau in chaotic
disarrangement seeking system and co-operation. Then followed ten years of
constructive definite effort toward the building of complete school systems in
the South. Normal schools and colleges were founded for the freedmen, and
teachers trained there to man the public schools. There was the inevitable
tendency of war to underestimate the prejudices of the master and the ignorance
of the slave, and all seemed clear sailing out of the wreckage of the storm.
Meantime, starting in this decade yet especially developing from 1885 to 1895,
began the industrial revolution of the South. The land saw glimpses of a new
destiny and the stirring of new ideals. The educational system striving to
complete itself saw new obstacles and a field of work ever broader and deeper.
The Negro colleges, hurriedly founded, were inadequately equipped, illogically
distributed, and of varying efficiency and grade; the normal and high schools
were doing little more than common-school work, and the common schools were
training but a third of the children who ought to be in them, and training
these too often poorly. At the same time the white South, by reason of its
sudden conversion from the slavery ideal, by so much the more became set and
strengthened in its racial prejudice, and crystallized it into harsh law and
harsher custom; while the marvellous pushing forward of the poor white daily
threatened to take even bread and butter from the mouths of the heavily
handicapped sons of the freedmen. In the midst, then, of the larger problem of
Negro education sprang up the more practical question of work, the inevitable
economic quandary that faces a people in the transition from slavery to
freedom, and especially those who make that change amid hate and prejudice,
lawlessness and ruthless competition.
The industrial school springing to notice in this decade, but coming to full
recognition in the decade beginning with 1895, was the proffered answer to this
combined educational and economic crisis, and an answer of singular wisdom and
timeliness. From the very first in nearly all the schools some attention had
been given to training in handiwork, but now was this training first raised to
a dignity that brought it in direct touch with the South’s magnificent
industrial development, and given an emphasis which reminded black folk that
before the Temple of Knowledge swing the Gates of Toil.
Yet after all they are but gates, and when turning our eyes from the temporary
and the contingent in the Negro problem to the broader question of the
permanent uplifting and civilization of black men in America, we have a right
to inquire, as this enthusiasm for material advancement mounts to its height,
if after all the industrial school is the final and sufficient answer in the
training of the Negro race; and to ask gently, but in all sincerity, the
ever-recurring query of the ages, Is not life more than meat, and the body more
than raiment? And men ask this to-day all the more eagerly because of sinister
signs in recent educational movements. The tendency is here, born of slavery
and quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism of the day, to regard
human beings as among the material resources of a land to be trained with an
eye single to future dividends. Race-prejudices, which keep brown and black men
in their “places,” we are coming to regard as useful allies with
such a theory, no matter how much they may dull the ambition and sicken the
hearts of struggling human beings. And above all, we daily hear that an
education that encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and
seeks as an end culture and character rather than bread-winning, is the
privilege of white men and the danger and delusion of black.
Especially has criticism been directed against the former educational efforts
to aid the Negro. In the four periods I have mentioned, we find first,
boundless, planless enthusiasm and sacrifice; then the preparation of teachers
for a vast public-school system; then the launching and expansion of that
school system amid increasing difficulties; and finally the training of workmen
for the new and growing industries. This development has been sharply ridiculed
as a logical anomaly and flat reversal of nature. Soothly we have been told
that first industrial and manual training should have taught the Negro to work,
then simple schools should have taught him to read and write, and finally,
after years, high and normal schools could have completed the system, as
intelligence and wealth demanded.
That a system logically so complete was historically impossible, it needs but a
little thought to prove. Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a
push, a surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller
brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage-ground. Thus it was no accident
that gave birth to universities centuries before the common schools, that made
fair Harvard the first flower of our wilderness. So in the South: the mass of
the freedmen at the end of the war lacked the intelligence so necessary to
modern workingmen. They must first have the common school to teach them to
read, write, and cipher; and they must have higher schools to teach teachers
for the common schools. The white teachers who flocked South went to establish
such a common-school system. Few held the idea of founding colleges; most of
them at first would have laughed at the idea. But they faced, as all men since
them have faced, that central paradox of the South,—the social separation
of the races. At that time it was the sudden volcanic rupture of nearly all
relations between black and white, in work and government and family life.
Since then a new adjustment of relations in economic and political affairs has
grown up,—an adjustment subtle and difficult to grasp, yet singularly
ingenious, which leaves still that frightful chasm at the color-line across
which men pass at their peril. Thus, then and now, there stand in the South two
separate worlds; and separate not simply in the higher realms of social
intercourse, but also in church and school, on railway and street-car, in
hotels and theatres, in streets and city sections, in books and newspapers, in
asylums and jails, in hospitals and graveyards. There is still enough of
contact for large economic and group cooperation, but the separation is so
thorough and deep that it absolutely precludes for the present between the
races anything like that sympathetic and effective group-training and
leadership of the one by the other, such as the American Negro and all backward
peoples must have for effectual progress.
This the missionaries of ’68 soon saw; and if effective industrial and
trade schools were impracticable before the establishment of a common-school
system, just as certainly no adequate common schools could be founded until
there were teachers to teach them. Southern whites would not teach them;
Northern whites in sufficient numbers could not be had. If the Negro was to
learn, he must teach himself, and the most effective help that could be given
him was the establishment of schools to train Negro teachers. This conclusion
was slowly but surely reached by every student of the situation until
simultaneously, in widely separated regions, without consultation or systematic
plan, there arose a series of institutions designed to furnish teachers for the
untaught. Above the sneers of critics at the obvious defects of this procedure
must ever stand its one crushing rejoinder: in a single generation they put
thirty thousand black teachers in the South; they wiped out the illiteracy of
the majority of the black people of the land, and they made Tuskegee possible.
Such higher training-schools tended naturally to deepen broader development: at
first they were common and grammar schools, then some became high schools. And
finally, by 1900, some thirty-four had one year or more of studies of college
grade. This development was reached with different degrees of speed in
different institutions: Hampton is still a high school, while Fisk University
started her college in 1871, and Spelman Seminary about 1896. In all cases the
aim was identical,—to maintain the standards of the lower training by
giving teachers and leaders the best practicable training; and above all, to
furnish the black world with adequate standards of human culture and lofty
ideals of life. It was not enough that the teachers of teachers should be
trained in technical normal methods; they must also, so far as possible, be
broad-minded, cultured men and women, to scatter civilization among a people
whose ignorance was not simply of letters, but of life itself.
It can thus be seen that the work of education in the South began with higher
institutions of training, which threw off as their foliage common schools, and
later industrial schools, and at the same time strove to shoot their roots ever
deeper toward college and university training. That this was an inevitable and
necessary development, sooner or later, goes without saying; but there has
been, and still is, a question in many minds if the natural growth was not
forced, and if the higher training was not either overdone or done with cheap
and unsound methods. Among white Southerners this feeling is widespread and
positive. A prominent Southern journal voiced this in a recent editorial.
“The experiment that has been made to give the colored students classical
training has not been satisfactory. Even though many were able to pursue the
course, most of them did so in a parrot-like way, learning what was taught, but
not seeming to appropriate the truth and import of their instruction, and
graduating without sensible aim or valuable occupation for their future. The
whole scheme has proved a waste of time, efforts, and the money of the
state.”
While most fair-minded men would recognize this as extreme and overdrawn, still
without doubt many are asking, Are there a sufficient number of Negroes ready
for college training to warrant the undertaking? Are not too many students
prematurely forced into this work? Does it not have the effect of dissatisfying
the young Negro with his environment? And do these graduates succeed in real
life? Such natural questions cannot be evaded, nor on the other hand must a
Nation naturally skeptical as to Negro ability assume an unfavorable answer
without careful inquiry and patient openness to conviction. We must not forget
that most Americans answer all queries regarding the Negro a priori, and that
the least that human courtesy can do is to listen to evidence.
The advocates of the higher education of the Negro would be the last to deny
the incompleteness and glaring defects of the present system: too many
institutions have attempted to do college work, the work in some cases has not
been thoroughly done, and quantity rather than quality has sometimes been
sought. But all this can be said of higher education throughout the land; it is
the almost inevitable incident of educational growth, and leaves the deeper
question of the legitimate demand for the higher training of Negroes untouched.
And this latter question can be settled in but one way,—by a first-hand
study of the facts. If we leave out of view all institutions which have not
actually graduated students from a course higher than that of a New England
high school, even though they be called colleges; if then we take the
thirty-four remaining institutions, we may clear up many misapprehensions by
asking searchingly, What kind of institutions are they? what do they teach? and
what sort of men do they graduate?
And first we may say that this type of college, including Atlanta, Fisk, and
Howard, Wilberforce and Claflin, Shaw, and the rest, is peculiar, almost
unique. Through the shining trees that whisper before me as I write, I catch
glimpses of a boulder of New England granite, covering a grave, which graduates
of Atlanta University have placed there,—
“IN GRATEFUL MEMORY OF THEIR FORMER TEACHER AND FRIEND AND OF THE
UNSELFISH LIFE HE LIVED, AND THE NOBLE WORK HE WROUGHT; THAT THEY, THEIR
CHILDREN, AND THEIR CHILDREN’S CHILDREN MIGHT BE BLESSED.”
This was the gift of New England to the freed Negro: not alms, but a friend;
not cash, but character. It was not and is not money these seething millions
want, but love and sympathy, the pulse of hearts beating with red
blood;—a gift which to-day only their own kindred and race can bring to
the masses, but which once saintly souls brought to their favored children in
the crusade of the sixties, that finest thing in American history, and one of
the few things untainted by sordid greed and cheap vainglory. The teachers in
these institutions came not to keep the Negroes in their place, but to raise
them out of the defilement of the places where slavery had wallowed them. The
colleges they founded were social settlements; homes where the best of the sons
of the freedmen came in close and sympathetic touch with the best traditions of
New England. They lived and ate together, studied and worked, hoped and
harkened in the dawning light. In actual formal content their curriculum was
doubtless old-fashioned, but in educational power it was supreme, for it was
the contact of living souls.
From such schools about two thousand Negroes have gone forth with the
bachelor’s degree. The number in itself is enough to put at rest the
argument that too large a proportion of Negroes are receiving higher training.
If the ratio to population of all Negro students throughout the land, in both
college and secondary training, be counted, Commissioner Harris assures us
“it must be increased to five times its present average” to equal
the average of the land.
Fifty years ago the ability of Negro students in any appreciable numbers to
master a modern college course would have been difficult to prove. To-day it is
proved by the fact that four hundred Negroes, many of whom have been reported
as brilliant students, have received the bachelor’s degree from Harvard,
Yale, Oberlin, and seventy other leading colleges. Here we have, then, nearly
twenty-five hundred Negro graduates, of whom the crucial query must be made,
How far did their training fit them for life? It is of course extremely
difficult to collect satisfactory data on such a point,—difficult to
reach the men, to get trustworthy testimony, and to gauge that testimony by any
generally acceptable criterion of success. In 1900, the Conference at Atlanta
University undertook to study these graduates, and published the results. First
they sought to know what these graduates were doing, and succeeded in getting
answers from nearly two-thirds of the living. The direct testimony was in
almost all cases corroborated by the reports of the colleges where they
graduated, so that in the main the reports were worthy of credence. Fifty-three
per cent of these graduates were teachers,—presidents of institutions,
heads of normal schools, principals of city school-systems, and the like.
Seventeen per cent were clergymen; another seventeen per cent were in the
professions, chiefly as physicians. Over six per cent were merchants, farmers,
and artisans, and four per cent were in the government civil-service. Granting
even that a considerable proportion of the third unheard from are unsuccessful,
this is a record of usefulness. Personally I know many hundreds of these
graduates, and have corresponded with more than a thousand; through others I
have followed carefully the life-work of scores; I have taught some of them and
some of the pupils whom they have taught, lived in homes which they have
builded, and looked at life through their eyes. Comparing them as a class with
my fellow students in New England and in Europe, I cannot hesitate in saying
that nowhere have I met men and women with a broader spirit of helpfulness,
with deeper devotion to their life-work, or with more consecrated determination
to succeed in the face of bitter difficulties than among Negro college-bred
men. They have, to be sure, their proportion of ne’er-do-wells, their
pedants and lettered fools, but they have a surprisingly small proportion of
them; they have not that culture of manner which we instinctively associate
with university men, forgetting that in reality it is the heritage from
cultured homes, and that no people a generation removed from slavery can escape
a certain unpleasant rawness and gaucherie, despite the best of training.
With all their larger vision and deeper sensibility, these men have usually
been conservative, careful leaders. They have seldom been agitators, have
withstood the temptation to head the mob, and have worked steadily and
faithfully in a thousand communities in the South. As teachers, they have given
the South a commendable system of city schools and large numbers of private
normal-schools and academies. Colored college-bred men have worked side by side
with white college graduates at Hampton; almost from the beginning the backbone
of Tuskegee’s teaching force has been formed of graduates from Fisk and
Atlanta. And to-day the institute is filled with college graduates, from the
energetic wife of the principal down to the teacher of agriculture, including
nearly half of the executive council and a majority of the heads of
departments. In the professions, college men are slowly but surely leavening
the Negro church, are healing and preventing the devastations of disease, and
beginning to furnish legal protection for the liberty and property of the
toiling masses. All this is needful work. Who would do it if Negroes did not?
How could Negroes do it if they were not trained carefully for it? If white
people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do
black people need nothing of the sort?
If it is true that there are an appreciable number of Negro youth in the land
capable by character and talent to receive that higher training, the end of
which is culture, and if the two and a half thousand who have had something of
this training in the past have in the main proved themselves useful to their
race and generation, the question then comes, What place in the future
development of the South ought the Negro college and college-bred man to
occupy? That the present social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must
eventually yield to the influences of culture, as the South grows civilized, is
clear. But such transformation calls for singular wisdom and patience. If,
while the healing of this vast sore is progressing, the races are to live for
many years side by side, united in economic effort, obeying a common
government, sensitive to mutual thought and feeling, yet subtly and silently
separate in many matters of deeper human intimacy,—if this unusual and
dangerous development is to progress amid peace and order, mutual respect and
growing intelligence, it will call for social surgery at once the delicatest
and nicest in modern history. It will demand broad-minded, upright men, both
white and black, and in its final accomplishment American civilization will
triumph. So far as white men are concerned, this fact is to-day being
recognized in the South, and a happy renaissance of university education seems
imminent. But the very voices that cry hail to this good work are, strange to
relate, largely silent or antagonistic to the higher education of the Negro.
Strange to relate! for this is certain, no secure civilization can be built in
the South with the Negro as an ignorant, turbulent proletariat. Suppose we seek
to remedy this by making them laborers and nothing more: they are not fools,
they have tasted of the Tree of Life, and they will not cease to think, will
not cease attempting to read the riddle of the world. By taking away their best
equipped teachers and leaders, by slamming the door of opportunity in the faces
of their bolder and brighter minds, will you make them satisfied with their
lot? or will you not rather transfer their leading from the hands of men taught
to think to the hands of untrained demagogues? We ought not to forget that
despite the pressure of poverty, and despite the active discouragement and even
ridicule of friends, the demand for higher training steadily increases among
Negro youth: there were, in the years from 1875 to 1880, 22 Negro graduates
from Northern colleges; from 1885 to 1890 there were 43, and from 1895 to 1900,
nearly 100 graduates. From Southern Negro colleges there were, in the same
three periods, 143, 413, and over 500 graduates. Here, then, is the plain
thirst for training; by refusing to give this Talented Tenth the key to
knowledge, can any sane man imagine that they will lightly lay aside their
yearning and contentedly become hewers of wood and drawers of water?
No. The dangerously clear logic of the Negro’s position will more and
more loudly assert itself in that day when increasing wealth and more intricate
social organization preclude the South from being, as it so largely is, simply
an armed camp for intimidating black folk. Such waste of energy cannot be
spared if the South is to catch up with civilization. And as the black third of
the land grows in thrift and skill, unless skilfully guided in its larger
philosophy, it must more and more brood over the red past and the creeping,
crooked present, until it grasps a gospel of revolt and revenge and throws its
new-found energies athwart the current of advance. Even to-day the masses of
the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the moral
crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments against them, but
their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic, have burning
truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen! If
you deplore their presence here, they ask, Who brought us? When you cry,
Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage, they answer that legal marriage is
infinitely better than systematic concubinage and prostitution. And if in just
fury you accuse their vagabonds of violating women, they also in fury quite as
just may reply: The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black
women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two millions
of mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable blood. And finally, when you fasten
crime upon this race as its peculiar trait, they answer that slavery was the
arch-crime, and lynching and lawlessness its twin abortions; that color and
race are not crimes, and yet it is they which in this land receive most
unceasing condemnation, North, East, South, and West.
I will not say such arguments are wholly justified,—I will not insist
that there is no other side to the shield; but I do say that of the nine
millions of Negroes in this nation, there is scarcely one out of the cradle to
whom these arguments do not daily present themselves in the guise of terrible
truth. I insist that the question of the future is how best to keep these
millions from brooding over the wrongs of the past and the difficulties of the
present, so that all their energies may be bent toward a cheerful striving and
cooperation with their white neighbors toward a larger, juster, and fuller
future. That one wise method of doing this lies in the closer knitting of the
Negro to the great industrial possibilities of the South is a great truth. And
this the common schools and the manual training and trade schools are working
to accomplish. But these alone are not enough. The foundations of knowledge in
this race, as in others, must be sunk deep in the college and university if we
would build a solid, permanent structure. Internal problems of social advance
must inevitably come, —problems of work and wages, of families and homes,
of morals and the true valuing of the things of life; and all these and other
inevitable problems of civilization the Negro must meet and solve largely for
himself, by reason of his isolation; and can there be any possible solution
other than by study and thought and an appeal to the rich experience of the
past? Is there not, with such a group and in such a crisis, infinitely more
danger to be apprehended from half-trained minds and shallow thinking than from
over-education and over-refinement? Surely we have wit enough to found a Negro
college so manned and equipped as to steer successfully between the
and the fool. We shall hardly induce black men to believe
that if their stomachs be full, it matters little about their brains. They
already dimly perceive that the paths of peace winding between honest toil and
dignified manhood call for the guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving,
reverent comradeship between the black lowly and the black men emancipated by
training and culture.
The function of the Negro college, then, is clear: it must maintain the
standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of the
Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact and
cooperation. And finally, beyond all this, it must develop men. Above our
modern socialism, and out of the worship of the mass, must persist and evolve
that higher individualism which the centres of culture protect; there must come
a loftier respect for the sovereign human soul that seeks to know itself and
the world about it; that seeks a freedom for expansion and self-development;
that will love and hate and labor in its own way, untrammeled alike by old and
new. Such souls aforetime have inspired and guided worlds, and if we be not
wholly bewitched by our Rhinegold, they shall again. Herein the longing of
black men must have respect: the rich and bitter depth of their experience, the
unknown treasures of their inner life, the strange rendings of nature they have
seen, may give the world new points of view and make their loving, living, and
doing precious to all human hearts. And to themselves in these the days that
try their souls, the chance to soar in the dim blue air above the smoke is to
their finer spirits boon and guerdon for what they lose on earth by being
black.
I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in
arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in
gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the
strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and
Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor
condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you
grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the
dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high
Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?
VII.
Of the Black Belt
I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
As the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.
Look not upon me, because I am black,
Because the sun hath looked upon me:
My mother’s children were angry with me;
They made me the keeper of the vineyards;
But mine own vineyard have I not kept.
THE SONG OF SOLOMON.
Out of the North the train thundered, and we woke to see the crimson soil of
Georgia stretching away bare and monotonous right and left. Here and there lay
straggling, unlovely villages, and lean men loafed leisurely at the depots;
then again came the stretch of pines and clay. Yet we did not nod, nor weary of
the scene; for this is historic ground. Right across our track, three hundred
and sixty years ago, wandered the cavalcade of Hernando de Soto, looking for
gold and the Great Sea; and he and his foot-sore captives disappeared yonder in
the grim forests to the west. Here sits Atlanta, the city of a hundred hills,
with something Western, something Southern, and something quite its own, in its
busy life. Just this side Atlanta is the land of the Cherokees and to the
southwest, not far from where Sam Hose was crucified, you may stand on a spot
which is to-day the centre of the Negro problem,—the centre of those nine
million men who are America’s dark heritage from slavery and the
slave-trade.
Not only is Georgia thus the geographical focus of our Negro population, but in
many other respects, both now and yesterday, the Negro problems have seemed to
be centered in this State. No other State in the Union can count a million
Negroes among its citizens,—a population as large as the slave population
of the whole Union in 1800; no other State fought so long and strenuously to
gather this host of Africans. Oglethorpe thought slavery against law and
gospel; but the circumstances which gave Georgia its first inhabitants were not
calculated to furnish citizens over-nice in their ideas about rum and slaves.
Despite the prohibitions of the trustees, these Georgians, like some of their
descendants, proceeded to take the law into their own hands; and so pliant were
the judges, and so flagrant the smuggling, and so earnest were the prayers of
Whitefield, that by the middle of the eighteenth century all restrictions were
swept away, and the slave-trade went merrily on for fifty years and more.
Down in Darien, where the Delegal riots took place some summers ago, there used
to come a strong protest against slavery from the Scotch Highlanders; and the
Moravians of Ebenezer did not like the system. But not till the Haytian Terror
of Toussaint was the trade in men even checked; while the national statute of
1808 did not suffice to stop it. How the Africans poured in!—fifty
thousand between 1790 and 1810, and then, from Virginia and from smugglers, two
thousand a year for many years more. So the thirty thousand Negroes of Georgia
in 1790 doubled in a decade,—were over a hundred thousand in 1810, had
reached two hundred thousand in 1820, and half a million at the time of the
war. Thus like a snake the black population writhed upward.
But we must hasten on our journey. This that we pass as we near Atlanta is the
ancient land of the Cherokees,—that brave Indian nation which strove so
long for its fatherland, until Fate and the United States Government drove them
beyond the Mississippi. If you wish to ride with me you must come into the
“Jim Crow Car.” There will be no objection,—already four
other white men, and a little white girl with her nurse, are in there. Usually
the races are mixed in there; but the white coach is all white. Of course this
car is not so good as the other, but it is fairly clean and comfortable. The
discomfort lies chiefly in the hearts of those four black men yonder—and
in mine.
We rumble south in quite a business-like way. The bare red clay and pines of
Northern Georgia begin to disappear, and in their place appears a rich rolling
land, luxuriant, and here and there well tilled. This is the land of the Creek
Indians; and a hard time the Georgians had to seize it. The towns grow more
frequent and more interesting, and brand-new cotton mills rise on every side.
Below Macon the world grows darker; for now we approach the Black
Belt,—that strange land of shadows, at which even slaves paled in the
past, and whence come now only faint and half-intelligible murmurs to the world
beyond. The “Jim Crow Car” grows larger and a shade better; three
rough field-hands and two or three white loafers accompany us, and the newsboy
still spreads his wares at one end. The sun is setting, but we can see the
great cotton country as we enter it,—the soil now dark and fertile, now
thin and gray, with fruit-trees and dilapidated buildings,—all the way to
Albany.
At Albany, in the heart of the Black Belt, we stop. Two hundred miles south of
Atlanta, two hundred miles west of the Atlantic, and one hundred miles north of
the Great Gulf lies Dougherty County, with ten thousand Negroes and two
thousand whites. The Flint River winds down from Andersonville, and, turning
suddenly at Albany, the county-seat, hurries on to join the Chattahoochee and
the sea. Andrew Jackson knew the Flint well, and marched across it once to
avenge the Indian Massacre at Fort Mims. That was in 1814, not long before the
battle of New Orleans; and by the Creek treaty that followed this campaign, all
Dougherty County, and much other rich land, was ceded to Georgia. Still,
settlers fought shy of this land, for the Indians were all about, and they were
unpleasant neighbors in those days. The panic of 1837, which Jackson bequeathed
to Van Buren, turned the planters from the impoverished lands of Virginia, the
Carolinas, and east Georgia, toward the West. The Indians were removed to
Indian Territory, and settlers poured into these coveted lands to retrieve
their broken fortunes. For a radius of a hundred miles about Albany, stretched
a great fertile land, luxuriant with forests of pine, oak, ash, hickory, and
poplar; hot with the sun and damp with the rich black swamp-land; and here the
corner-stone of the Cotton Kingdom was laid.
Albany is to-day a wide-streeted, placid, Southern town, with a broad sweep of
stores and saloons, and flanking rows of homes,—whites usually to the
north, and blacks to the south. Six days in the week the town looks decidedly
too small for itself, and takes frequent and prolonged naps. But on Saturday
suddenly the whole county disgorges itself upon the place, and a perfect flood
of black peasantry pours through the streets, fills the stores, blocks the
sidewalks, chokes the thoroughfares, and takes full possession of the town.
They are black, sturdy, uncouth country folk, good-natured and simple,
talkative to a degree, and yet far more silent and brooding than the crowds of
the Rhine-pfalz, or Naples, or Cracow. They drink considerable quantities of
whiskey, but do not get very drunk; they talk and laugh loudly at times, but
seldom quarrel or fight. They walk up and down the streets, meet and gossip
with friends, stare at the shop windows, buy coffee, cheap candy, and clothes,
and at dusk drive home—happy? well no, not exactly happy, but much
happier than as though they had not come.
Thus Albany is a real capital,—a typical Southern county town, the centre
of the life of ten thousand souls; their point of contact with the outer world,
their centre of news and gossip, their market for buying and selling, borrowing
and lending, their fountain of justice and law. Once upon a time we knew
country life so well and city life so little, that we illustrated city life as
that of a closely crowded country district. Now the world has well-nigh
forgotten what the country is, and we must imagine a little city of black
people scattered far and wide over three hundred lonesome square miles of land,
without train or trolley, in the midst of cotton and corn, and wide patches of
sand and gloomy soil.
It gets pretty hot in Southern Georgia in July,—a sort of dull,
determined heat that seems quite independent of the sun; so it took us some
days to muster courage enough to leave the porch and venture out on the long
country roads, that we might see this unknown world. Finally we started. It was
about ten in the morning, bright with a faint breeze, and we jogged leisurely
southward in the valley of the Flint. We passed the scattered box-like cabins
of the brickyard hands, and the long tenement-row facetiously called “The
Ark,” and were soon in the open country, and on the confines of the great
plantations of other days. There is the “Joe Fields place”; a rough
old fellow was he, and had killed many a “nigger” in his day.
Twelve miles his plantation used to run,—a regular barony. It is nearly
all gone now; only straggling bits belong to the family, and the rest has
passed to Jews and Negroes. Even the bits which are left are heavily mortgaged,
and, like the rest of the land, tilled by tenants. Here is one of them
now,—a tall brown man, a hard worker and a hard drinker, illiterate, but
versed in farmlore, as his nodding crops declare. This distressingly new board
house is his, and he has just moved out of yonder moss-grown cabin with its one
square room.
From the curtains in Benton’s house, down the road, a dark comely face is
staring at the strangers; for passing carriages are not every-day occurrences
here. Benton is an intelligent yellow man with a good-sized family, and manages
a plantation blasted by the war and now the broken staff of the widow. He might
be well-to-do, they say; but he carouses too much in Albany. And the
half-desolate spirit of neglect born of the very soil seems to have settled on
these acres. In times past there were cotton-gins and machinery here; but they
have rotted away.
The whole land seems forlorn and forsaken. Here are the remnants of the vast
plantations of the Sheldons, the Pellots, and the Rensons; but the souls of
them are passed. The houses lie in half ruin, or have wholly disappeared; the
fences have flown, and the families are wandering in the world. Strange
vicissitudes have met these whilom masters. Yonder stretch the wide acres of
Bildad Reasor; he died in war-time, but the upstart overseer hastened to wed
the widow. Then he went, and his neighbors too, and now only the black tenant
remains; but the shadow-hand of the master’s grand-nephew or cousin or
creditor stretches out of the gray distance to collect the rack-rent
remorselessly, and so the land is uncared-for and poor. Only black tenants can
stand such a system, and they only because they must. Ten miles we have ridden
to-day and have seen no white face.
A resistless feeling of depression falls slowly upon us, despite the gaudy
sunshine and the green cottonfields. This, then, is the Cotton
Kingdom,—the shadow of a marvellous dream. And where is the King? Perhaps
this is he,—the sweating ploughman, tilling his eighty acres with two
lean mules, and fighting a hard battle with debt. So we sit musing, until, as
we turn a corner on the sandy road, there comes a fairer scene suddenly in
view,—a neat cottage snugly ensconced by the road, and near it a little
store. A tall bronzed man rises from the porch as we hail him, and comes out to
our carriage. He is six feet in height, with a sober face that smiles gravely.
He walks too straight to be a tenant,—yes, he owns two hundred and forty
acres. “The land is run down since the boom-days of eighteen hundred and
fifty,” he explains, and cotton is low. Three black tenants live on his
place, and in his little store he keeps a small stock of tobacco, snuff, soap,
and soda, for the neighborhood. Here is his gin-house with new machinery just
installed. Three hundred bales of cotton went through it last year. Two
children he has sent away to school. Yes, he says sadly, he is getting on, but
cotton is down to four cents; I know how Debt sits staring at him.
Wherever the King may be, the parks and palaces of the Cotton Kingdom have not
wholly disappeared. We plunge even now into great groves of oak and towering
pine, with an undergrowth of myrtle and shrubbery. This was the
“home-house” of the Thompsons,—slave-barons who drove their
coach and four in the merry past. All is silence now, and ashes, and tangled
weeds. The owner put his whole fortune into the rising cotton industry of the
fifties, and with the falling prices of the eighties he packed up and stole
away. Yonder is another grove, with unkempt lawn, great magnolias, and
grass-grown paths. The Big House stands in half-ruin, its great front door
staring blankly at the street, and the back part grotesquely restored for its
black tenant. A shabby, well-built Negro he is, unlucky and irresolute. He digs
hard to pay rent to the white girl who owns the remnant of the place. She
married a policeman, and lives in Savannah.
Now and again we come to churches. Here is one now,—Shepherd’s,
they call it,—a great whitewashed barn of a thing, perched on stilts of
stone, and looking for all the world as though it were just resting here a
moment and might be expected to waddle off down the road at almost any time.
And yet it is the centre of a hundred cabin homes; and sometimes, of a Sunday,
five hundred persons from far and near gather here and talk and eat and sing.
There is a schoolhouse near,—a very airy, empty shed; but even this is an
improvement, for usually the school is held in the church. The churches vary
from log-huts to those like Shepherd’s, and the schools from nothing to
this little house that sits demurely on the county line. It is a tiny
plank-house, perhaps ten by twenty, and has within a double row of rough
unplaned benches, resting mostly on legs, sometimes on boxes. Opposite the door
is a square home-made desk. In one corner are the ruins of a stove, and in the
other a dim blackboard. It is the cheerfulest schoolhouse I have seen in
Dougherty, save in town. Back of the schoolhouse is a lodgehouse two stories
high and not quite finished. Societies meet there,—societies “to
care for the sick and bury the dead”; and these societies grow and
flourish.
We had come to the boundaries of Dougherty, and were about to turn west along
the county-line, when all these sights were pointed out to us by a kindly old
man, black, white-haired, and seventy. Forty-five years he had lived here, and
now supports himself and his old wife by the help of the steer tethered yonder
and the charity of his black neighbors. He shows us the farm of the Hills just
across the county line in Baker,—a widow and two strapping sons, who
raised ten bales (one need not add “cotton” down here) last year.
There are fences and pigs and cows, and the soft-voiced, velvet-skinned young
Memnon, who sauntered half-bashfully over to greet the strangers, is proud of
his home. We turn now to the west along the county line. Great dismantled
trunks of pines tower above the green cottonfields, cracking their naked
gnarled fingers toward the border of living forest beyond. There is little
beauty in this region, only a sort of crude abandon that suggests
power,—a naked grandeur, as it were. The houses are bare and straight;
there are no hammocks or easy-chairs, and few flowers. So when, as here at
Rawdon’s, one sees a vine clinging to a little porch, and home-like
windows peeping over the fences, one takes a long breath. I think I never
before quite realized the place of the Fence in civilization. This is the Land
of the Unfenced, where crouch on either hand scores of ugly one-room cabins,
cheerless and dirty. Here lies the Negro problem in its naked dirt and penury.
And here are no fences. But now and then the crisscross rails or straight
palings break into view, and then we know a touch of culture is near. Of course
Harrison Gohagen,—a quiet yellow man, young, smooth-faced, and
diligent,—of course he is lord of some hundred acres, and we expect to
see a vision of well-kept rooms and fat beds and laughing children. For has he
not fine fences? And those over yonder, why should they build fences on the
rack-rented land? It will only increase their rent.
On we wind, through sand and pines and glimpses of old plantations, till there
creeps into sight a cluster of buildings,—wood and brick, mills and
houses, and scattered cabins. It seemed quite a village. As it came nearer and
nearer, however, the aspect changed: the buildings were rotten, the bricks were
falling out, the mills were silent, and the store was closed. Only in the
cabins appeared now and then a bit of lazy life. I could imagine the place
under some weird spell, and was half-minded to search out the princess. An old
ragged black man, honest, simple, and improvident, told us the tale. The Wizard
of the North—the Capitalist—had rushed down in the seventies to woo
this coy dark soil. He bought a square mile or more, and for a time the
field-hands sang, the gins groaned, and the mills buzzed. Then came a change.
The agent’s son embezzled the funds and ran off with them. Then the agent
himself disappeared. Finally the new agent stole even the books, and the
company in wrath closed its business and its houses, refused to sell, and let
houses and furniture and machinery rust and rot. So the Waters-Loring
plantation was stilled by the spell of dishonesty, and stands like some gaunt
rebuke to a scarred land.
Somehow that plantation ended our day’s journey; for I could not shake
off the influence of that silent scene. Back toward town we glided, past the
straight and thread-like pines, past a dark tree-dotted pond where the air was
heavy with a dead sweet perfume. White slender-legged curlews flitted by us,
and the garnet blooms of the cotton looked gay against the green and purple
stalks. A peasant girl was hoeing in the field, white-turbaned and
black-limbed. All this we saw, but the spell still lay upon us.
How curious a land is this,—how full of untold story, of tragedy and
laughter, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic past, and
big with future promise! This is the Black Belt of Georgia. Dougherty County is
the west end of the Black Belt, and men once called it the Egypt of the
Confederacy. It is full of historic interest. First there is the Swamp, to the
west, where the Chickasawhatchee flows sullenly southward. The shadow of an old
plantation lies at its edge, forlorn and dark. Then comes the pool; pendent
gray moss and brackish waters appear, and forests filled with wildfowl. In one
place the wood is on fire, smouldering in dull red anger; but nobody minds.
Then the swamp grows beautiful; a raised road, built by chained Negro convicts,
dips down into it, and forms a way walled and almost covered in living green.
Spreading trees spring from a prodigal luxuriance of undergrowth; great dark
green shadows fade into the black background, until all is one mass of tangled
semi-tropical foliage, marvellous in its weird savage splendor. Once we crossed
a black silent stream, where the sad trees and writhing creepers, all glinting
fiery yellow and green, seemed like some vast cathedral,—some green Milan
builded of wildwood. And as I crossed, I seemed to see again that fierce
tragedy of seventy years ago. Osceola, the Indian-Negro chieftain, had risen in
the swamps of Florida, vowing vengeance. His war-cry reached the red Creeks of
Dougherty, and their war-cry rang from the Chattahoochee to the sea. Men and
women and children fled and fell before them as they swept into Dougherty. In
yonder shadows a dark and hideously painted warrior glided stealthily
on,—another and another, until three hundred had crept into the
treacherous swamp. Then the false slime closing about them called the white men
from the east. Waist-deep, they fought beneath the tall trees, until the
war-cry was hushed and the Indians glided back into the west. Small wonder the
wood is red.
Then came the black slaves. Day after day the clank of chained feet marching
from Virginia and Carolina to Georgia was heard in these rich swamp lands. Day
after day the songs of the callous, the wail of the motherless, and the
muttered curses of the wretched echoed from the Flint to the Chickasawhatchee,
until by 1860 there had risen in West Dougherty perhaps the richest slave
kingdom the modern world ever knew. A hundred and fifty barons commanded the
labor of nearly six thousand Negroes, held sway over farms with ninety thousand
acres tilled land, valued even in times of cheap soil at three millions of
dollars. Twenty thousand bales of ginned cotton went yearly to England, New and
Old; and men that came there bankrupt made money and grew rich. In a single
decade the cotton output increased four-fold and the value of lands was
tripled. It was the heyday of the , and a life of careless
extravagance among the masters. Four and six bobtailed thoroughbreds rolled
their coaches to town; open hospitality and gay entertainment were the rule.
Parks and groves were laid out, rich with flower and vine, and in the midst
stood the low wide-halled “big house,” with its porch and columns
and great fireplaces.
And yet with all this there was something sordid, something forced,—a
certain feverish unrest and recklessness; for was not all this show and tinsel
built upon a groan? “This land was a little Hell,” said a ragged,
brown, and grave-faced man to me. We were seated near a roadside blacksmith
shop, and behind was the bare ruin of some master’s home.
“I’ve seen niggers drop dead in the furrow, but they were kicked
aside, and the plough never stopped. Down in the guard-house, there’s
where the blood ran.”
With such foundations a kingdom must in time sway and fall. The masters moved
to Macon and Augusta, and left only the irresponsible overseers on the land.
And the result is such ruin as this, the Lloyd
“home-place”:—great waving oaks, a spread of lawn, myrtles
and chestnuts, all ragged and wild; a solitary gate-post standing where once
was a castle entrance; an old rusty anvil lying amid rotting bellows and wood
in the ruins of a blacksmith shop; a wide rambling old mansion, brown and
dingy, filled now with the grandchildren of the slaves who once waited on its
tables; while the family of the master has dwindled to two lone women, who live
in Macon and feed hungrily off the remnants of an earldom. So we ride on, past
phantom gates and falling homes,—past the once flourishing farms of the
Smiths, the Gandys, and the Lagores,—and find all dilapidated and half
ruined, even there where a solitary white woman, a relic of other days, sits
alone in state among miles of Negroes and rides to town in her ancient coach
each day.
This was indeed the Egypt of the Confederacy,—the rich granary whence
potatoes and corn and cotton poured out to the famished and ragged Confederate
troops as they battled for a cause lost long before 1861. Sheltered and secure,
it became the place of refuge for families, wealth, and slaves. Yet even then
the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell. The red-clay sub-soil already
had begun to peer above the loam. The harder the slaves were driven the more
careless and fatal was their farming. Then came the revolution of war and
Emancipation, the bewilderment of Reconstruction,—and now, what is the
Egypt of the Confederacy, and what meaning has it for the nation’s weal
or woe?
It is a land of rapid contrasts and of curiously mingled hope and pain. Here
sits a pretty blue-eyed quadroon hiding her bare feet; she was married only
last week, and yonder in the field is her dark young husband, hoeing to support
her, at thirty cents a day without board. Across the way is Gatesby, brown and
tall, lord of two thousand acres shrewdly won and held. There is a store
conducted by his black son, a blacksmith shop, and a ginnery. Five miles below
here is a town owned and controlled by one white New Englander. He owns almost
a Rhode Island county, with thousands of acres and hundreds of black laborers.
Their cabins look better than most, and the farm, with machinery and
fertilizers, is much more business-like than any in the county, although the
manager drives hard bargains in wages. When now we turn and look five miles
above, there on the edge of town are five houses of prostitutes,—two of
blacks and three of whites; and in one of the houses of the whites a worthless
black boy was harbored too openly two years ago; so he was hanged for rape. And
here, too, is the high whitewashed fence of the “stockade,” as the
county prison is called; the white folks say it is ever full of black
criminals,—the black folks say that only colored boys are sent to jail,
and they not because they are guilty, but because the State needs criminals to
eke out its income by their forced labor.
The Jew is the heir of the slave baron in Dougherty; and as we ride westward,
by wide stretching cornfields and stubby orchards of peach and pear, we see on
all sides within the circle of dark forest a Land of Canaan. Here and there are
tales of projects for money-getting, born in the swift days of
Reconstruction,—“improvement” companies, wine companies,
mills and factories; most failed, and the Jew fell heir. It is a beautiful
land, this Dougherty, west of the Flint. The forests are wonderful, the solemn
pines have disappeared, and this is the “Oakey Woods,” with its
wealth of hickories, beeches, oaks and palmettos. But a pall of debt hangs over
the beautiful land; the merchants are in debt to the wholesalers, the planters
are in debt to the merchants, the tenants owe the planters, and laborers bow
and bend beneath the burden of it all. Here and there a man has raised his head
above these murky waters. We passed one fenced stock-farm with grass and
grazing cattle, that looked very home-like after endless corn and cotton. Here
and there are black free-holders: there is the gaunt dull-black Jackson, with
his hundred acres. “I says, ‘Look up! If you don’t look up
you can’t get up,’” remarks Jackson, philosophically. And
he’s gotten up. Dark Carter’s neat barns would do credit to New
England. His master helped him to get a start, but when the black man died last
fall the master’s sons immediately laid claim to the estate. “And
them white folks will get it, too,” said my yellow gossip.
I turn from these well-tended acres with a comfortable feeling that the Negro
is rising. Even then, however, the fields, as we proceed, begin to redden and
the trees disappear. Rows of old cabins appear filled with renters and
laborers,—cheerless, bare, and dirty, for the most part, although here
and there the very age and decay makes the scene picturesque. A young black
fellow greets us. He is twenty-two, and just married. Until last year he had
good luck renting; then cotton fell, and the sheriff seized and sold all he
had. So he moved here, where the rent is higher, the land poorer, and the owner
inflexible; he rents a forty-dollar mule for twenty dollars a year. Poor
lad!—a slave at twenty-two. This plantation, owned now by a foreigner,
was a part of the famous Bolton estate. After the war it was for many years
worked by gangs of Negro convicts,—and black convicts then were even more
plentiful than now; it was a way of making Negroes work, and the question of
guilt was a minor one. Hard tales of cruelty and mistreatment of the chained
freemen are told, but the county authorities were deaf until the free-labor
market was nearly ruined by wholesale migration. Then they took the convicts
from the plantations, but not until one of the fairest regions of the
“Oakey Woods” had been ruined and ravished into a red waste, out of
which only a Yankee or an immigrant could squeeze more blood from debt-cursed
tenants.
No wonder that Luke Black, slow, dull, and discouraged, shuffles to our
carriage and talks hopelessly. Why should he strive? Every year finds him
deeper in debt. How strange that Georgia, the world-heralded refuge of poor
debtors, should bind her own to sloth and misfortune as ruthlessly as ever
England did! The poor land groans with its birth-pains, and brings forth
scarcely a hundred pounds of cotton to the acre, where fifty years ago it
yielded eight times as much. Of his meagre yield the tenant pays from a quarter
to a third in rent, and most of the rest in interest on food and supplies
bought on credit. Twenty years yonder sunken-cheeked, old black man has labored
under that system, and now, turned day-laborer, is supporting his wife and
boarding himself on his wages of a dollar and a half a week, received only part
of the year.
The Bolton convict farm formerly included the neighboring plantation. Here it
was that the convicts were lodged in the great log prison still standing. A
dismal place it still remains, with rows of ugly huts filled with surly
ignorant tenants. “What rent do you pay here?” I inquired. “I
don’t know,—what is it, Sam?” “All we make,”
answered Sam. It is a depressing place,—bare, unshaded, with no charm of
past association, only a memory of forced human toil,—now, then, and
before the war. They are not happy, these black men whom we meet throughout
this region. There is little of the joyous abandon and playfulness which we are
wont to associate with the plantation Negro. At best, the natural good-nature
is edged with complaint or has changed into sullenness and gloom. And now and
then it blazes forth in veiled but hot anger. I remember one big red-eyed black
whom we met by the roadside. Forty-five years he had labored on this farm,
beginning with nothing, and still having nothing. To be sure, he had given four
children a common-school training, and perhaps if the new fence-law had not
allowed unfenced crops in West Dougherty he might have raised a little stock
and kept ahead. As it is, he is hopelessly in debt, disappointed, and
embittered. He stopped us to inquire after the black boy in Albany, whom it was
said a policeman had shot and killed for loud talking on the sidewalk. And then
he said slowly: “Let a white man touch me, and he dies; I don’t
boast this,—I don’t say it around loud, or before the
children,—but I mean it. I’ve seen them whip my father and my old
mother in them cotton-rows till the blood ran; by—” and we passed
on.
Now Sears, whom we met next lolling under the chubby oak-trees, was of quite
different fibre. Happy?—Well, yes; he laughed and flipped pebbles, and
thought the world was as it was. He had worked here twelve years and has
nothing but a mortgaged mule. Children? Yes, seven; but they hadn’t been
to school this year,—couldn’t afford books and clothes, and
couldn’t spare their work. There go part of them to the fields
now,—three big boys astride mules, and a strapping girl with bare brown
legs. Careless ignorance and laziness here, fierce hate and vindictiveness
there;—these are the extremes of the Negro problem which we met that day,
and we scarce knew which we preferred.
Here and there we meet distinct characters quite out of the ordinary. One came
out of a piece of newly cleared ground, making a wide detour to avoid the
snakes. He was an old, hollow-cheeked man, with a drawn and characterful brown
face. He had a sort of self-contained quaintness and rough humor impossible to
describe; a certain cynical earnestness that puzzled one. “The niggers
were jealous of me over on the other place,” he said, “and so me
and the old woman begged this piece of woods, and I cleared it up myself. Made
nothing for two years, but I reckon I’ve got a crop now.” The
cotton looked tall and rich, and we praised it. He curtsied low, and then bowed
almost to the ground, with an imperturbable gravity that seemed almost
suspicious. Then he continued, “My mule died last week,”—a
calamity in this land equal to a devastating fire in town,—“but a
white man loaned me another.” Then he added, eyeing us, “Oh, I gets
along with white folks.” We turned the conversation. “Bears?
deer?” he answered, “well, I should say there were,” and he
let fly a string of brave oaths, as he told hunting-tales of the swamp. We left
him standing still in the middle of the road looking after us, and yet
apparently not noticing us.
The Whistle place, which includes his bit of land, was bought soon after the
war by an English syndicate, the “Dixie Cotton and Corn Company.” A
marvellous deal of style their factor put on, with his servants and
coach-and-six; so much so that the concern soon landed in inextricable
bankruptcy. Nobody lives in the old house now, but a man comes each winter out
of the North and collects his high rents. I know not which are the more
touching,—such old empty houses, or the homes of the masters’ sons.
Sad and bitter tales lie hidden back of those white doors,—tales of
poverty, of struggle, of disappointment. A revolution such as that of ’63
is a terrible thing; they that rose rich in the morning often slept in
paupers’ beds. Beggars and vulgar speculators rose to rule over them, and
their children went astray. See yonder sad-colored house, with its cabins and
fences and glad crops! It is not glad within; last month the prodigal son of
the struggling father wrote home from the city for money. Money! Where was it
to come from? And so the son rose in the night and killed his baby, and killed
his wife, and shot himself dead. And the world passed on.
I remember wheeling around a bend in the road beside a graceful bit of forest
and a singing brook. A long low house faced us, with porch and flying pillars,
great oaken door, and a broad lawn shining in the evening sun. But the
window-panes were gone, the pillars were worm-eaten, and the moss-grown roof
was falling in. Half curiously I peered through the unhinged door, and saw
where, on the wall across the hall, was written in once gay letters a faded
“Welcome.”
Quite a contrast to the southwestern part of Dougherty County is the northwest.
Soberly timbered in oak and pine, it has none of that half-tropical luxuriance
of the southwest. Then, too, there are fewer signs of a romantic past, and more
of systematic modern land-grabbing and money-getting. White people are more in
evidence here, and farmer and hired labor replace to some extent the absentee
landlord and rack-rented tenant. The crops have neither the luxuriance of the
richer land nor the signs of neglect so often seen, and there were fences and
meadows here and there. Most of this land was poor, and beneath the notice of
the slave-baron, before the war. Since then his poor relations and foreign
immigrants have seized it. The returns of the farmer are too small to allow
much for wages, and yet he will not sell off small farms. There is the Negro
Sanford; he has worked fourteen years as overseer on the Ladson place, and
“paid out enough for fertilizers to have bought a farm,” but the
owner will not sell off a few acres.
Two children—a boy and a girl—are hoeing sturdily in the fields on
the farm where Corliss works. He is smooth-faced and brown, and is fencing up
his pigs. He used to run a successful cotton-gin, but the Cotton Seed Oil Trust
has forced the price of ginning so low that he says it hardly pays him. He
points out a stately old house over the way as the home of “Pa
Willis.” We eagerly ride over, for “Pa Willis” was the tall
and powerful black Moses who led the Negroes for a generation, and led them
well. He was a Baptist preacher, and when he died, two thousand black people
followed him to the grave; and now they preach his funeral sermon each year.
His widow lives here,—a weazened, sharp-featured little woman, who
curtsied quaintly as we greeted her. Further on lives Jack Delson, the most
prosperous Negro farmer in the county. It is a joy to meet him,—a great
broad-shouldered, handsome black man, intelligent and jovial. Six hundred and
fifty acres he owns, and has eleven black tenants. A neat and tidy home nestled
in a flower-garden, and a little store stands beside it.
We pass the Munson place, where a plucky white widow is renting and struggling;
and the eleven hundred acres of the Sennet plantation, with its Negro overseer.
Then the character of the farms begins to change. Nearly all the lands belong
to Russian Jews; the overseers are white, and the cabins are bare board-houses
scattered here and there. The rents are high, and day-laborers and
“contract” hands abound. It is a keen, hard struggle for living
here, and few have time to talk. Tired with the long ride, we gladly drive into
Gillonsville. It is a silent cluster of farmhouses standing on the crossroads,
with one of its stores closed and the other kept by a Negro preacher. They tell
great tales of busy times at Gillonsville before all the railroads came to
Albany; now it is chiefly a memory. Riding down the street, we stop at the
preacher’s and seat ourselves before the door. It was one of those scenes
one cannot soon forget:—a wide, low, little house, whose motherly roof
reached over and sheltered a snug little porch. There we sat, after the long
hot drive, drinking cool water,—the talkative little storekeeper who is
my daily companion; the silent old black woman patching pantaloons and saying
never a word; the ragged picture of helpless misfortune who called in just to
see the preacher; and finally the neat matronly preacher’s wife, plump,
yellow, and intelligent. “Own land?” said the wife; “well,
only this house.” Then she added quietly. “We did buy seven hundred
acres across up yonder, and paid for it; but they cheated us out of it. Sells
was the owner.” “Sells!” echoed the ragged misfortune, who
was leaning against the balustrade and listening, “he’s a regular
cheat. I worked for him thirty-seven days this spring, and he paid me in
cardboard checks which were to be cashed at the end of the month. But he never
cashed them,—kept putting me off. Then the sheriff came and took my mule
and corn and furniture—” “Furniture? But furniture is exempt
from seizure by law.” “Well, he took it just the same,” said
the hard-faced man.
VIII.
Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece
But the Brute said in his breast, “Till the mills I grind have ceased,
The riches shall be dust of dust, dry ashes be the feast!
“On the strong and cunning few
Cynic favors I will strew;
I will stuff their maw with overplus until their spirit dies;
From the patient and the low
I will take the joys they know;
They shall hunger after vanities and still an-hungered go.
Madness shall be on the people, ghastly jealousies arise;
Brother’s blood shall cry on brother up the dead and empty skies.”
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY.
Have you ever seen a cotton-field white with harvest,—its golden fleece
hovering above the black earth like a silvery cloud edged with dark green, its
bold white signals waving like the foam of billows from Carolina to Texas
across that Black and human Sea? I have sometimes half suspected that here the
winged ram Chrysomallus left that Fleece after which Jason and his Argonauts
went vaguely wandering into the shadowy East three thousand years ago; and
certainly one might frame a pretty and not far-fetched analogy of witchery and
dragons’ teeth, and blood and armed men, between the ancient and the
modern quest of the Golden Fleece in the Black Sea.
And now the golden fleece is found; not only found, but, in its birthplace,
woven. For the hum of the cotton-mills is the newest and most significant thing
in the New South to-day. All through the Carolinas and Georgia, away down to
Mexico, rise these gaunt red buildings, bare and homely, and yet so busy and
noisy withal that they scarce seem to belong to the slow and sleepy land.
Perhaps they sprang from dragons’ teeth. So the Cotton Kingdom still
lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre. Even the markets that once
defied the parvenu have crept one by one across the seas, and then slowly and
reluctantly, but surely, have started toward the Black Belt.
To be sure, there are those who wag their heads knowingly and tell us that the
capital of the Cotton Kingdom has moved from the Black to the White
Belt,—that the Negro of to-day raises not more than half of the cotton
crop. Such men forget that the cotton crop has doubled, and more than doubled,
since the era of slavery, and that, even granting their contention, the Negro
is still supreme in a Cotton Kingdom larger than that on which the Confederacy
builded its hopes. So the Negro forms to-day one of the chief figures in a
great world-industry; and this, for its own sake, and in the light of historic
interest, makes the field-hands of the cotton country worth studying.
We seldom study the condition of the Negro to-day honestly and carefully. It is
so much easier to assume that we know it all. Or perhaps, having already
reached conclusions in our own minds, we are loth to have them disturbed by
facts. And yet how little we really know of these millions,—of their
daily lives and longings, of their homely joys and sorrows, of their real
shortcomings and the meaning of their crimes! All this we can only learn by
intimate contact with the masses, and not by wholesale arguments covering
millions separate in time and space, and differing widely in training and
culture. To-day, then, my reader, let us turn our faces to the Black Belt of
Georgia and seek simply to know the condition of the black farm-laborers of one
county there.
Here in 1890 lived ten thousand Negroes and two thousand whites. The country is
rich, yet the people are poor. The keynote of the Black Belt is debt; not
commercial credit, but debt in the sense of continued inability on the part of
the mass of the population to make income cover expense. This is the direct
heritage of the South from the wasteful economies of the slave
but it was emphasized and brought to a crisis by the Emancipation of the
slaves. In 1860, Dougherty County had six thousand slaves, worth at least two
and a half millions of dollars; its farms were estimated at three
millions,—making five and a half millions of property, the value of which
depended largely on the slave system, and on the speculative demand for land
once marvellously rich but already partially devitalized by careless and
exhaustive culture. The war then meant a financial crash; in place of the five
and a half millions of 1860, there remained in 1870 only farms valued at less
than two millions. With this came increased competition in cotton culture from
the rich lands of Texas; a steady fall in the normal price of cotton followed,
from about fourteen cents a pound in 1860 until it reached four cents in 1898.
Such a financial revolution was it that involved the owners of the cotton-belt
in debt. And if things went ill with the master, how fared it with the man?
The plantations of Dougherty County in slavery days were not as imposing and
aristocratic as those of Virginia. The Big House was smaller and usually
one-storied, and sat very near the slave cabins. Sometimes these cabins
stretched off on either side like wings; sometimes only on one side, forming a
double row, or edging the road that turned into the plantation from the main
thoroughfare. The form and disposition of the laborers’ cabins throughout
the Black Belt is to-day the same as in slavery days. Some live in the
self-same cabins, others in cabins rebuilt on the sites of the old. All are
sprinkled in little groups over the face of the land, centering about some
dilapidated Big House where the head-tenant or agent lives. The general
character and arrangement of these dwellings remains on the whole unaltered.
There were in the county, outside the corporate town of Albany, about fifteen
hundred Negro families in 1898. Out of all these, only a single family occupied
a house with seven rooms; only fourteen have five rooms or more. The mass live
in one- and two-room homes.
The size and arrangements of a people’s homes are no unfair index of
their condition. If, then, we inquire more carefully into these Negro homes, we
find much that is unsatisfactory. All over the face of the land is the one-room
cabin,—now standing in the shadow of the Big House, now staring at the
dusty road, now rising dark and sombre amid the green of the cotton-fields. It
is nearly always old and bare, built of rough boards, and neither plastered nor
ceiled. Light and ventilation are supplied by the single door and by the square
hole in the wall with its wooden shutter. There is no glass, porch, or
ornamentation without. Within is a fireplace, black and smoky, and usually
unsteady with age. A bed or two, a table, a wooden chest, and a few chairs
compose the furniture; while a stray show-bill or a newspaper makes up the
decorations for the walls. Now and then one may find such a cabin kept
scrupulously neat, with merry steaming fireplaces and hospitable door; but the
majority are dirty and dilapidated, smelling of eating and sleeping, poorly
ventilated, and anything but homes.
Above all, the cabins are crowded. We have come to associate crowding with
homes in cities almost exclusively. This is primarily because we have so little
accurate knowledge of country life. Here in Dougherty County one may find
families of eight and ten occupying one or two rooms, and for every ten rooms
of house accommodation for the Negroes there are twenty-five persons. The worst
tenement abominations of New York do not have above twenty-two persons for
every ten rooms. Of course, one small, close room in a city, without a yard, is
in many respects worse than the larger single country room. In other respects
it is better; it has glass windows, a decent chimney, and a trustworthy floor.
The single great advantage of the Negro peasant is that he may spend most of
his life outside his hovel, in the open fields.
There are four chief causes of these wretched homes: First, long custom born of
slavery has assigned such homes to Negroes; white laborers would be offered
better accommodations, and might, for that and similar reasons, give better
work. Secondly, the Negroes, used to such accommodations, do not as a rule
demand better; they do not know what better houses mean. Thirdly, the landlords
as a class have not yet come to realize that it is a good business investment
to raise the standard of living among labor by slow and judicious methods; that
a Negro laborer who demands three rooms and fifty cents a day would give more
efficient work and leave a larger profit than a discouraged toiler herding his
family in one room and working for thirty cents. Lastly, among such conditions
of life there are few incentives to make the laborer become a better farmer. If
he is ambitious, he moves to town or tries other labor; as a tenant-farmer his
outlook is almost hopeless, and following it as a makeshift, he takes the house
that is given him without protest.
In such homes, then, these Negro peasants live. The families are both small and
large; there are many single tenants,—widows and bachelors, and remnants
of broken groups. The system of labor and the size of the houses both tend to
the breaking up of family groups: the grown children go away as contract hands
or migrate to town, the sister goes into service; and so one finds many
families with hosts of babies, and many newly married couples, but
comparatively few families with half-grown and grown sons and daughters. The
average size of Negro families has undoubtedly decreased since the war,
primarily from economic stress. In Russia over a third of the bridegrooms and
over half the brides are under twenty; the same was true of the antebellum
Negroes. Today, however, very few of the boys and less than a fifth of the
Negro girls under twenty are married. The young men marry between the ages of
twenty-five and thirty-five; the young women between twenty and thirty. Such
postponement is due to the difficulty of earning sufficient to rear and support
a family; and it undoubtedly leads, in the country districts, to sexual
immorality. The form of this immorality, however, is very seldom that of
prostitution, and less frequently that of illegitimacy than one would imagine.
Rather, it takes the form of separation and desertion after a family group has
been formed. The number of separated persons is thirty-five to the
thousand,—a very large number. It would of course be unfair to compare
this number with divorce statistics, for many of these separated women are in
reality widowed, were the truth known, and in other cases the separation is not
permanent. Nevertheless, here lies the seat of greatest moral danger. There is
little or no prostitution among these Negroes, and over three-fourths of the
families, as found by house-to-house investigation, deserve to be classed as
decent people with considerable regard for female chastity. To be sure, the
ideas of the mass would not suit New England, and there are many loose habits
and notions. Yet the rate of illegitimacy is undoubtedly lower than in Austria
or Italy, and the women as a class are modest. The plague-spot in sexual
relations is easy marriage and easy separation. This is no sudden development,
nor the fruit of Emancipation. It is the plain heritage from slavery. In those
days Sam, with his master’s consent, “took up” with Mary. No
ceremony was necessary, and in the busy life of the great plantations of the
Black Belt it was usually dispensed with. If now the master needed Sam’s
work in another plantation or in another part of the same plantation, or if he
took a notion to sell the slave, Sam’s married life with Mary was usually
unceremoniously broken, and then it was clearly to the master’s interest
to have both of them take new mates. This widespread custom of two centuries
has not been eradicated in thirty years. To-day Sam’s grandson
“takes up” with a woman without license or ceremony; they live
together decently and honestly, and are, to all intents and purposes, man and
wife. Sometimes these unions are never broken until death; but in too many
cases family quarrels, a roving spirit, a rival suitor, or perhaps more
frequently the hopeless battle to support a family, lead to separation, and a
broken household is the result. The Negro church has done much to stop this
practice, and now most marriage ceremonies are performed by the pastors.
Nevertheless, the evil is still deep seated, and only a general raising of the
standard of living will finally cure it.
Looking now at the county black population as a whole, it is fair to
characterize it as poor and ignorant. Perhaps ten per cent compose the
well-to-do and the best of the laborers, while at least nine per cent are
thoroughly lewd and vicious. The rest, over eighty per cent, are poor and
ignorant, fairly honest and well meaning, plodding, and to a degree shiftless,
with some but not great sexual looseness. Such class lines are by no means
fixed; they vary, one might almost say, with the price of cotton. The degree of
ignorance cannot easily be expressed. We may say, for instance, that nearly
two-thirds of them cannot read or write. This but partially expresses the fact.
They are ignorant of the world about them, of modern economic organization, of
the function of government, of individual worth and possibilities,—of
nearly all those things which slavery in self-defence had to keep them from
learning. Much that the white boy imbibes from his earliest social atmosphere
forms the puzzling problems of the black boy’s mature years. America is
not another word for Opportunity to her sons.
It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp and
comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. We often forget that
each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul. Ignorant it may be, and
poverty stricken, black and curious in limb and ways and thought; and yet it
loves and hates, it toils and tires, it laughs and weeps its bitter tears, and
looks in vague and awful longing at the grim horizon of its life,—all
this, even as you and I. These black thousands are not in reality lazy; they
are improvident and careless; they insist on breaking the monotony of toil with
a glimpse at the great town-world on Saturday; they have their loafers and
their rascals; but the great mass of them work continuously and faithfully for
a return, and under circumstances that would call forth equal voluntary effort
from few if any other modern laboring class. Over eighty-eight per cent of
them—men, women, and children—are farmers. Indeed, this is almost
the only industry. Most of the children get their schooling after the
“crops are laid by,” and very few there are that stay in school
after the spring work has begun. Child-labor is to be found here in some of its
worst phases, as fostering ignorance and stunting physical development. With
the grown men of the county there is little variety in work: thirteen hundred
are farmers, and two hundred are laborers, teamsters, etc., including
twenty-four artisans, ten merchants, twenty-one preachers, and four teachers.
This narrowness of life reaches its maximum among the women: thirteen hundred
and fifty of these are farm laborers, one hundred are servants and washerwomen,
leaving sixty-five housewives, eight teachers, and six seamstresses.
Among this people there is no leisure class. We often forget that in the United
States over half the youth and adults are not in the world earning incomes, but
are making homes, learning of the world, or resting after the heat of the
strife. But here ninety-six per cent are toiling; no one with leisure to turn
the bare and cheerless cabin into a home, no old folks to sit beside the fire
and hand down traditions of the past; little of careless happy childhood and
dreaming youth. The dull monotony of daily toil is broken only by the gayety of
the thoughtless and the Saturday trip to town. The toil, like all farm toil, is
monotonous, and here there are little machinery and few tools to relieve its
burdensome drudgery. But with all this, it is work in the pure open air, and
this is something in a day when fresh air is scarce.
The land on the whole is still fertile, despite long abuse. For nine or ten
months in succession the crops will come if asked: garden vegetables in April,
grain in May, melons in June and July, hay in August, sweet potatoes in
September, and cotton from then to Christmas. And yet on two-thirds of the land
there is but one crop, and that leaves the toilers in debt. Why is this?
Away down the Baysan road, where the broad flat fields are flanked by great oak
forests, is a plantation; many thousands of acres it used to run, here and
there, and beyond the great wood. Thirteen hundred human beings here obeyed the
call of one,—were his in body, and largely in soul. One of them lives
there yet,—a short, stocky man, his dull-brown face seamed and drawn, and
his tightly curled hair gray-white. The crops? Just tolerable, he said; just
tolerable. Getting on? No—he wasn’t getting on at all. Smith of
Albany “furnishes” him, and his rent is eight hundred pounds of
cotton. Can’t make anything at that. Why didn’t he buy land!
Takes money to buy land. And he turns away. Free! The most
piteous thing amid all the black ruin of war-time, amid the broken fortunes of
the masters, the blighted hopes of mothers and maidens, and the fall of an
empire,—the most piteous thing amid all this was the black freedman who
threw down his hoe because the world called him free. What did such a mockery
of freedom mean? Not a cent of money, not an inch of land, not a mouthful of
victuals,—not even ownership of the rags on his back. Free! On Saturday,
once or twice a month, the old master, before the war, used to dole out bacon
and meal to his Negroes. And after the first flush of freedom wore off, and his
true helplessness dawned on the freedman, he came back and picked up his hoe,
and old master still doled out his bacon and meal. The legal form of service
was theoretically far different; in practice, task-work or
“cropping” was substituted for daily toil in gangs; and the slave
gradually became a metayer, or tenant on shares, in name, but a laborer with
indeterminate wages in fact.
Still the price of cotton fell, and gradually the landlords deserted their
plantations, and the reign of the merchant began. The merchant of the Black
Belt is a curious institution,—part banker, part landlord, part banker,
and part despot. His store, which used most frequently to stand at the
cross-roads and become the centre of a weekly village, has now moved to town;
and thither the Negro tenant follows him. The merchant keeps
everything,—clothes and shoes, coffee and sugar, pork and meal, canned
and dried goods, wagons and ploughs, seed and fertilizer,—and what he has
not in stock he can give you an order for at the store across the way. Here,
then, comes the tenant, Sam Scott, after he has contracted with some absent
landlord’s agent for hiring forty acres of land; he fingers his hat
nervously until the merchant finishes his morning chat with Colonel Saunders,
and calls out, “Well, Sam, what do you want?” Sam wants him to
“furnish” him,—, to advance him food and clothing
for the year, and perhaps seed and tools, until his crop is raised and sold. If
Sam seems a favorable subject, he and the merchant go to a lawyer, and Sam
executes a chattel mortgage on his mule and wagon in return for seed and a
week’s rations. As soon as the green cotton-leaves appear above the
ground, another mortgage is given on the “crop.” Every Saturday, or
at longer intervals, Sam calls upon the merchant for his “rations”;
a family of five usually gets about thirty pounds of fat side-pork and a couple
of bushels of cornmeal a month. Besides this, clothing and shoes must be
furnished; if Sam or his family is sick, there are orders on the druggist and
doctor; if the mule wants shoeing, an order on the blacksmith, etc. If Sam is a
hard worker and crops promise well, he is often encouraged to buy
more,—sugar, extra clothes, perhaps a buggy. But he is seldom encouraged
to save. When cotton rose to ten cents last fall, the shrewd merchants of
Dougherty County sold a thousand buggies in one season, mostly to black men.
The security offered for such transactions—a crop and chattel
mortgage—may at first seem slight. And, indeed, the merchants tell many a
true tale of shiftlessness and cheating; of cotton picked at night, mules
disappearing, and tenants absconding. But on the whole the merchant of the
Black Belt is the most prosperous man in the section. So skilfully and so
closely has he drawn the bonds of the law about the tenant, that the black man
has often simply to choose between pauperism and crime; he “waives”
all homestead exemptions in his contract; he cannot touch his own mortgaged
crop, which the laws put almost in the full control of the land-owner and of
the merchant. When the crop is growing the merchant watches it like a hawk; as
soon as it is ready for market he takes possession of it, sells it, pays the
landowner his rent, subtracts his bill for supplies, and if, as sometimes
happens, there is anything left, he hands it over to the black serf for his
Christmas celebration.
The direct result of this system is an all-cotton scheme of agriculture and the
continued bankruptcy of the tenant. The currency of the Black Belt is cotton.
It is a crop always salable for ready money, not usually subject to great
yearly fluctuations in price, and one which the Negroes know how to raise. The
landlord therefore demands his rent in cotton, and the merchant will accept
mortgages on no other crop. There is no use asking the black tenant, then, to
diversify his crops,—he cannot under this system. Moreover, the system is
bound to bankrupt the tenant. I remember once meeting a little one-mule wagon
on the River road. A young black fellow sat in it driving listlessly, his
elbows on his knees. His dark-faced wife sat beside him, stolid, silent.
“Hello!” cried my driver,—he has a most imprudent way of
addressing these people, though they seem used to it,—“what have
you got there?”
“Meat and meal,” answered the man, stopping. The meat lay uncovered
in the bottom of the wagon,—a great thin side of fat pork covered with
salt; the meal was in a white bushel bag.
“What did you pay for that meat?”
“Ten cents a pound.” It could have been bought for six or seven
cents cash.
“And the meal?”
“Two dollars.” One dollar and ten cents is the cash price in town.
Here was a man paying five dollars for goods which he could have bought for
three dollars cash, and raised for one dollar or one dollar and a half.
Yet it is not wholly his fault. The Negro farmer started behind,—started
in debt. This was not his choosing, but the crime of this happy-go-lucky nation
which goes blundering along with its Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war
interludes and Philippine matinees, just as though God really were dead. Once
in debt, it is no easy matter for a whole race to emerge.
In the year of low-priced cotton, 1898, out of three hundred tenant families
one hundred and seventy-five ended their year’s work in debt to the
extent of fourteen thousand dollars; fifty cleared nothing, and the remaining
seventy-five made a total profit of sixteen hundred dollars. The net
indebtedness of the black tenant families of the whole county must have been at
least sixty thousand dollars. In a more prosperous year the situation is far
better; but on the average the majority of tenants end the year even, or in
debt, which means that they work for board and clothes. Such an economic
organization is radically wrong. Whose is the blame?
The underlying causes of this situation are complicated but discernible. And
one of the chief, outside the carelessness of the nation in letting the slave
start with nothing, is the widespread opinion among the merchants and employers
of the Black Belt that only by the slavery of debt can the Negro be kept at
work. Without doubt, some pressure was necessary at the beginning of the
free-labor system to keep the listless and lazy at work; and even to-day the
mass of the Negro laborers need stricter guardianship than most Northern
laborers. Behind this honest and widespread opinion dishonesty and cheating of
the ignorant laborers have a good chance to take refuge. And to all this must
be added the obvious fact that a slave ancestry and a system of unrequited toil
has not improved the efficiency or temper of the mass of black laborers. Nor is
this peculiar to Sambo; it has in history been just as true of John and Hans,
of Jacques and Pat, of all ground-down peasantries. Such is the situation of
the mass of the Negroes in the Black Belt to-day; and they are thinking about
it. Crime, and a cheap and dangerous socialism, are the inevitable results of
this pondering. I see now that ragged black man sitting on a log, aimlessly
whittling a stick. He muttered to me with the murmur of many ages, when he
said: “White man sit down whole year; Nigger work day and night and make
crop; Nigger hardly gits bread and meat; white man sittin’ down gits all.
” And what do the better classes of Negroes do to
improve their situation? One of two things: if any way possible, they buy land;
if not, they migrate to town. Just as centuries ago it was no easy thing for
the serf to escape into the freedom of town-life, even so to-day there are
hindrances laid in the way of county laborers. In considerable parts of all the
Gulf States, and especially in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, the
Negroes on the plantations in the back-country districts are still held at
forced labor practically without wages. Especially is this true in districts
where the farmers are composed of the more ignorant class of poor whites, and
the Negroes are beyond the reach of schools and intercourse with their
advancing fellows. If such a peon should run away, the sheriff, elected by
white suffrage, can usually be depended on to catch the fugitive, return him,
and ask no questions. If he escape to another county, a charge of petty
thieving, easily true, can be depended upon to secure his return. Even if some
unduly officious person insist upon a trial, neighborly comity will probably
make his conviction sure, and then the labor due the county can easily be
bought by the master. Such a system is impossible in the more civilized parts
of the South, or near the large towns and cities; but in those vast stretches
of land beyond the telegraph and the newspaper the spirit of the Thirteenth
Amendment is sadly broken. This represents the lowest economic depths of the
black American peasant; and in a study of the rise and condition of the Negro
freeholder we must trace his economic progress from the modern serfdom.
Even in the better-ordered country districts of the South the free movement of
agricultural laborers is hindered by the migration-agent laws. The
“Associated Press” recently informed the world of the arrest of a
young white man in Southern Georgia who represented the “Atlantic Naval
Supplies Company,” and who “was caught in the act of enticing hands
from the turpentine farm of Mr. John Greer.” The crime for which this
young man was arrested is taxed five hundred dollars for each county in which
the employment agent proposes to gather laborers for work outside the State.
Thus the Negroes’ ignorance of the labor-market outside his own vicinity
is increased rather than diminished by the laws of nearly every Southern State.
Similar to such measures is the unwritten law of the back districts and small
towns of the South, that the character of all Negroes unknown to the mass of
the community must be vouched for by some white man. This is really a revival
of the old Roman idea of the patron under whose protection the new-made
freedman was put. In many instances this system has been of great good to the
Negro, and very often under the protection and guidance of the former
master’s family, or other white friends, the freedman progressed in
wealth and morality. But the same system has in other cases resulted in the
refusal of whole communities to recognize the right of a Negro to change his
habitation and to be master of his own fortunes. A black stranger in Baker
County, Georgia, for instance, is liable to be stopped anywhere on the public
highway and made to state his business to the satisfaction of any white
interrogator. If he fails to give a suitable answer, or seems too independent
or “sassy,” he may be arrested or summarily driven away.
Thus it is that in the country districts of the South, by written or unwritten
law, peonage, hindrances to the migration of labor, and a system of white
patronage exists over large areas. Besides this, the chance for lawless
oppression and illegal exactions is vastly greater in the country than in the
city, and nearly all the more serious race disturbances of the last decade have
arisen from disputes in the county between master and man,—as, for
instance, the Sam Hose affair. As a result of such a situation, there arose,
first, the Black Belt; and, second, the Migration to Town. The Black Belt was
not, as many assumed, a movement toward fields of labor under more genial
climatic conditions; it was primarily a huddling for self-protection,—a
massing of the black population for mutual defence in order to secure the peace
and tranquillity necessary to economic advance. This movement took place
between Emancipation and 1880, and only partially accomplished the desired
results. The rush to town since 1880 is the counter-movement of men
disappointed in the economic opportunities of the Black Belt.
In Dougherty County, Georgia, one can see easily the results of this experiment
in huddling for protection. Only ten per cent of the adult population was born
in the county, and yet the blacks outnumber the whites four or five to one.
There is undoubtedly a security to the blacks in their very numbers,—a
personal freedom from arbitrary treatment, which makes hundreds of laborers
cling to Dougherty in spite of low wages and economic distress. But a change is
coming, and slowly but surely even here the agricultural laborers are drifting
to town and leaving the broad acres behind. Why is this? Why do not the Negroes
become land-owners, and build up the black landed peasantry, which has for a
generation and more been the dream of philanthropist and statesman?
To the car-window sociologist, to the man who seeks to understand and know the
South by devoting the few leisure hours of a holiday trip to unravelling the
snarl of centuries,—to such men very often the whole trouble with the
black field-hand may be summed up by Aunt Ophelia’s word,
“Shiftless!” They have noted repeatedly scenes like one I saw last
summer. We were riding along the highroad to town at the close of a long hot
day. A couple of young black fellows passed us in a muleteam, with several
bushels of loose corn in the ear. One was driving, listlessly bent forward, his
elbows on his knees,—a happy-go-lucky, careless picture of
irresponsibility. The other was fast asleep in the bottom of the wagon. As we
passed we noticed an ear of corn fall from the wagon. They never saw
it,—not they. A rod farther on we noted another ear on the ground; and
between that creeping mule and town we counted twenty-six ears of corn.
Shiftless? Yes, the personification of shiftlessness. And yet follow those
boys: they are not lazy; to-morrow morning they’ll be up with the sun;
they work hard when they do work, and they work willingly. They have no sordid,
selfish, money-getting ways, but rather a fine disdain for mere cash.
They’ll loaf before your face and work behind your back with good-natured
honesty. They’ll steal a watermelon, and hand you back your lost purse
intact. Their great defect as laborers lies in their lack of incentive beyond
the mere pleasure of physical exertion. They are careless because they have not
found that it pays to be careful; they are improvident because the improvident
ones of their acquaintance get on about as well as the provident. Above all,
they cannot see why they should take unusual pains to make the white
man’s land better, or to fatten his mule, or save his corn. On the other
hand, the white land-owner argues that any attempt to improve these laborers by
increased responsibility, or higher wages, or better homes, or land of their
own, would be sure to result in failure. He shows his Northern visitor the
scarred and wretched land; the ruined mansions, the worn-out soil and mortgaged
acres, and says, This is Negro freedom!
Now it happens that both master and man have just enough argument on their
respective sides to make it difficult for them to understand each other. The
Negro dimly personifies in the white man all his ills and misfortunes; if he is
poor, it is because the white man seizes the fruit of his toil; if he is
ignorant, it is because the white man gives him neither time nor facilities to
learn; and, indeed, if any misfortune happens to him, it is because of some
hidden machinations of “white folks.” On the other hand, the
masters and the masters’ sons have never been able to see why the Negro,
instead of settling down to be day-laborers for bread and clothes, are infected
with a silly desire to rise in the world, and why they are sulky, dissatisfied,
and careless, where their fathers were happy and dumb and faithful. “Why,
you niggers have an easier time than I do,” said a puzzled Albany
merchant to his black customer. “Yes,” he replied, “and so
does yo’ hogs.”
Taking, then, the dissatisfied and shiftless field-hand as a starting-point,
let us inquire how the black thousands of Dougherty have struggled from him up
toward their ideal, and what that ideal is. All social struggle is evidenced by
the rise, first of economic, then of social classes, among a homogeneous
population. To-day the following economic classes are plainly differentiated
among these Negroes.
A “submerged tenth” of croppers, with a few paupers; forty per cent
who are metayers and thirty-nine per cent of semi-metayers and wage-laborers.
There are left five per cent of money-renters and six per cent of
freeholders,—the “Upper Ten” of the land. The croppers are
entirely without capital, even in the limited sense of food or money to keep
them from seed-time to harvest. All they furnish is their labor; the land-owner
furnishes land, stock, tools, seed, and house; and at the end of the year the
laborer gets from a third to a half of the crop. Out of his share, however,
comes pay and interest for food and clothing advanced him during the year. Thus
we have a laborer without capital and without wages, and an employer whose
capital is largely his employees’ wages. It is an unsatisfactory
arrangement, both for hirer and hired, and is usually in vogue on poor land
with hard-pressed owners.
Above the croppers come the great mass of the black population who work the
land on their own responsibility, paying rent in cotton and supported by the
crop-mortgage system. After the war this system was attractive to the freedmen
on account of its larger freedom and its possibility for making a surplus. But
with the carrying out of the crop-lien system, the deterioration of the land,
and the slavery of debt, the position of the metayers has sunk to a dead level
of practically unrewarded toil. Formerly all tenants had some capital, and
often considerable; but absentee landlordism, rising rack-rent, and failing
cotton have stripped them well-nigh of all, and probably not over half of them
to-day own their mules. The change from cropper to tenant was accomplished by
fixing the rent. If, now, the rent fixed was reasonable, this was an incentive
to the tenant to strive. On the other hand, if the rent was too high, or if the
land deteriorated, the result was to discourage and check the efforts of the
black peasantry. There is no doubt that the latter case is true; that in
Dougherty County every economic advantage of the price of cotton in market and
of the strivings of the tenant has been taken advantage of by the landlords and
merchants, and swallowed up in rent and interest. If cotton rose in price, the
rent rose even higher; if cotton fell, the rent remained or followed
reluctantly. If the tenant worked hard and raised a large crop, his rent was
raised the next year; if that year the crop failed, his corn was confiscated
and his mule sold for debt. There were, of course, exceptions to
this,—cases of personal kindness and forbearance; but in the vast
majority of cases the rule was to extract the uttermost farthing from the mass
of the black farm laborers.
The average metayer pays from twenty to thirty per cent of his crop in rent.
The result of such rack-rent can only be evil,—abuse and neglect of the
soil, deterioration in the character of the laborers, and a widespread sense of
injustice. “Wherever the country is poor,” cried Arthur Young,
“it is in the hands of metayers,” and “their condition is
more wretched than that of day-laborers.” He was talking of Italy a
century ago; but he might have been talking of Dougherty County to-day. And
especially is that true to-day which he declares was true in France before the
Revolution: “The metayers are considered as little better than menial
servants, removable at pleasure, and obliged to conform in all things to the
will of the landlords.” On this low plane half the black population of
Dougherty County—perhaps more than half the black millions of this
land—are to-day struggling.
A degree above these we may place those laborers who receive money wages for
their work. Some receive a house with perhaps a garden-spot; then supplies of
food and clothing are advanced, and certain fixed wages are given at the end of
the year, varying from thirty to sixty dollars, out of which the supplies must
be paid for, with interest. About eighteen per cent of the population belong to
this class of semi-metayers, while twenty-two per cent are laborers paid by the
month or year, and are either “furnished” by their own savings or
perhaps more usually by some merchant who takes his chances of payment. Such
laborers receive from thirty-five to fifty cents a day during the working
season. They are usually young unmarried persons, some being women; and when
they marry they sink to the class of metayers, or, more seldom, become renters.
The renters for fixed money rentals are the first of the emerging classes, and
form five per cent of the families. The sole advantage of this small class is
their freedom to choose their crops, and the increased responsibility which
comes through having money transactions. While some of the renters differ
little in condition from the metayers, yet on the whole they are more
intelligent and responsible persons, and are the ones who eventually become
land-owners. Their better character and greater shrewdness enable them to gain,
perhaps to demand, better terms in rents; rented farms, varying from forty to a
hundred acres, bear an average rental of about fifty-four dollars a year. The
men who conduct such farms do not long remain renters; either they sink to
metayers, or with a successful series of harvests rise to be land-owners.
In 1870 the tax-books of Dougherty report no Negroes as landholders. If there
were any such at that time,—and there may have been a few,—their
land was probably held in the name of some white patron,—a method not
uncommon during slavery. In 1875 ownership of land had begun with seven hundred
and fifty acres; ten years later this had increased to over sixty-five hundred
acres, to nine thousand acres in 1890 and ten thousand in 1900. The total
assessed property has in this same period risen from eighty thousand dollars in
1875 to two hundred and forty thousand dollars in 1900.
Two circumstances complicate this development and make it in some respects
difficult to be sure of the real tendencies; they are the panic of 1893, and
the low price of cotton in 1898. Besides this, the system of assessing property
in the country districts of Georgia is somewhat antiquated and of uncertain
statistical value; there are no assessors, and each man makes a sworn return to
a tax-receiver. Thus public opinion plays a large part, and the returns vary
strangely from year to year. Certainly these figures show the small amount of
accumulated capital among the Negroes, and the consequent large dependence of
their property on temporary prosperity. They have little to tide over a few
years of economic depression, and are at the mercy of the cotton-market far
more than the whites. And thus the land-owners, despite their marvellous
efforts, are really a transient class, continually being depleted by those who
fall back into the class of renters or metayers, and augmented by newcomers
from the masses. Of one hundred land-owners in 1898, half had bought their land
since 1893, a fourth between 1890 and 1893, a fifth between 1884 and 1890, and
the rest between 1870 and 1884. In all, one hundred and eighty-five Negroes
have owned land in this county since 1875.
If all the black land-owners who had ever held land here had kept it or left it
in the hands of black men, the Negroes would have owned nearer thirty thousand
acres than the fifteen thousand they now hold. And yet these fifteen thousand
acres are a creditable showing,—a proof of no little weight of the worth
and ability of the Negro people. If they had been given an economic start at
Emancipation, if they had been in an enlightened and rich community which
really desired their best good, then we might perhaps call such a result small
or even insignificant. But for a few thousand poor ignorant field-hands, in the
face of poverty, a falling market, and social stress, to save and capitalize
two hundred thousand dollars in a generation has meant a tremendous effort. The
rise of a nation, the pressing forward of a social class, means a bitter
struggle, a hard and soul-sickening battle with the world such as few of the
more favored classes know or appreciate.
Out of the hard economic conditions of this portion of the Black Belt, only six
per cent of the population have succeeded in emerging into peasant
proprietorship; and these are not all firmly fixed, but grow and shrink in
number with the wavering of the cotton-market. Fully ninety-four per cent have
struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom. For
these there is one other avenue of escape toward which they have turned in
increasing numbers, namely, migration to town. A glance at the distribution of
land among the black owners curiously reveals this fact. In 1898 the holdings
were as follows: Under forty acres, forty-nine families; forty to two hundred
and fifty acres, seventeen families; two hundred and fifty to one thousand
acres, thirteen families; one thousand or more acres, two families. Now in 1890
there were forty-four holdings, but only nine of these were under forty acres.
The great increase of holdings, then, has come in the buying of small
homesteads near town, where their owners really share in the town life; this is
a part of the rush to town. And for every land-owner who has thus hurried away
from the narrow and hard conditions of country life, how many field-hands, how
many tenants, how many ruined renters, have joined that long procession? Is it
not strange compensation? The sin of the country districts is visited on the
town, and the social sores of city life to-day may, here in Dougherty County,
and perhaps in many places near and far, look for their final healing without
the city walls.
IX.
Of the Sons of Master and Man
Life treads on life, and heart on heart;
We press too close in church and mart
To keep a dream or grave apart.
MRS. BROWNING.
The world-old phenomenon of the contact of diverse races of men is to have new
exemplification during the new century. Indeed, the characteristic of our age
is the contact of European civilization with the world’s undeveloped
peoples. Whatever we may say of the results of such contact in the past, it
certainly forms a chapter in human action not pleasant to look back upon. War,
murder, slavery, extermination, and debauchery,—this has again and again
been the result of carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of
the sea and the heathen without the law. Nor does it altogether satisfy the
conscience of the modern world to be told complacently that all this has been
right and proper, the fated triumph of strength over weakness, of righteousness
over evil, of superiors over inferiors. It would certainly be soothing if one
could readily believe all this; and yet there are too many ugly facts for
everything to be thus easily explained away. We feel and know that there are
many delicate differences in race psychology, numberless changes that our crude
social measurements are not yet able to follow minutely, which explain much of
history and social development. At the same time, too, we know that these
considerations have never adequately explained or excused the triumph of brute
force and cunning over weakness and innocence.
It is, then, the strife of all honorable men of the twentieth century to see
that in the future competition of races the survival of the fittest shall mean
the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true; that we may be able to
preserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong,
and not continue to put a premium on greed and impudence and cruelty. To bring
this hope to fruition, we are compelled daily to turn more and more to a
conscientious study of the phenomena of race-contact,—to a study frank
and fair, and not falsified and colored by our wishes or our fears. And we have
in the South as fine a field for such a study as the world affords,—a
field, to be sure, which the average American scientist deems somewhat beneath
his dignity, and which the average man who is not a scientist knows all about,
but nevertheless a line of study which by reason of the enormous race
complications with which God seems about to punish this nation must
increasingly claim our sober attention, study, and thought, we must ask, what
are the actual relations of whites and blacks in the South? and we must be
answered, not by apology or fault-finding, but by a plain, unvarnished tale.
In the civilized life of to-day the contact of men and their relations to each
other fall in a few main lines of action and communication: there is, first,
the physical proximity of home and dwelling-places, the way in which
neighborhoods group themselves, and the contiguity of neighborhoods. Secondly,
and in our age chiefest, there are the economic relations,—the methods by
which individuals cooperate for earning a living, for the mutual satisfaction
of wants, for the production of wealth. Next, there are the political
relations, the cooperation in social control, in group government, in laying
and paying the burden of taxation. In the fourth place there are the less
tangible but highly important forms of intellectual contact and commerce, the
interchange of ideas through conversation and conference, through periodicals
and libraries; and, above all, the gradual formation for each community of that
curious which we call public opinion. Closely allied with
this come the various forms of social contact in everyday life, in travel, in
theatres, in house gatherings, in marrying and giving in marriage. Finally,
there are the varying forms of religious enterprise, of moral teaching and
benevolent endeavor. These are the principal ways in which men living in the
same communities are brought into contact with each other. It is my present
task, therefore, to indicate, from my point of view, how the black race in the
South meet and mingle with the whites in these matters of everyday life.
First, as to physical dwelling. It is usually possible to draw in nearly every
Southern community a physical color-line on the map, on the one side of which
whites dwell and on the other Negroes. The winding and intricacy of the
geographical color-line varies, of course, in different communities. I know
some towns where a straight line drawn through the middle of the main street
separates nine-tenths of the whites from nine-tenths of the blacks. In other
towns the older settlement of whites has been encircled by a broad band of
blacks; in still other cases little settlements or nuclei of blacks have sprung
up amid surrounding whites. Usually in cities each street has its distinctive
color, and only now and then do the colors meet in close proximity. Even in the
country something of this segregation is manifest in the smaller areas, and of
course in the larger phenomena of the Black Belt.
All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering
by social grades common to all communities. A Negro slum may be in dangerous
proximity to a white residence quarter, while it is quite common to find a
white slum planted in the heart of a respectable Negro district. One thing,
however, seldom occurs: the best of the whites and the best of the Negroes
almost never live in anything like close proximity. It thus happens that in
nearly every Southern town and city, both whites and blacks see commonly the
worst of each other. This is a vast change from the situation in the past,
when, through the close contact of master and house-servant in the patriarchal
big house, one found the best of both races in close contact and sympathy,
while at the same time the squalor and dull round of toil among the field-hands
was removed from the sight and hearing of the family. One can easily see how a
person who saw slavery thus from his father’s parlors, and sees freedom
on the streets of a great city, fails to grasp or comprehend the whole of the
new picture. On the other hand, the settled belief of the mass of the Negroes
that the Southern white people do not have the black man’s best interests
at heart has been intensified in later years by this continual daily contact of
the better class of blacks with the worst representatives of the white race.
Coming now to the economic relations of the races, we are on ground made
familiar by study, much discussion, and no little philanthropic effort. And yet
with all this there are many essential elements in the cooperation of Negroes
and whites for work and wealth that are too readily overlooked or not
thoroughly understood. The average American can easily conceive of a rich land
awaiting development and filled with black laborers. To him the Southern
problem is simply that of making efficient workingmen out of this material, by
giving them the requisite technical skill and the help of invested capital. The
problem, however, is by no means as simple as this, from the obvious fact that
these workingmen have been trained for centuries as slaves. They exhibit,
therefore, all the advantages and defects of such training; they are willing
and good-natured, but not self-reliant, provident, or careful. If now the
economic development of the South is to be pushed to the verge of exploitation,
as seems probable, then we have a mass of workingmen thrown into relentless
competition with the workingmen of the world, but handicapped by a training the
very opposite to that of the modern self-reliant democratic laborer. What the
black laborer needs is careful personal guidance, group leadership of men with
hearts in their bosoms, to train them to foresight, carefulness, and honesty.
Nor does it require any fine-spun theories of racial differences to prove the
necessity of such group training after the brains of the race have been knocked
out by two hundred and fifty years of assiduous education in submission,
carelessness, and stealing. After Emancipation, it was the plain duty of some
one to assume this group leadership and training of the Negro laborer. I will
not stop here to inquire whose duty it was—whether that of the white
ex-master who had profited by unpaid toil, or the Northern philanthropist whose
persistence brought on the crisis, or the National Government whose edict freed
the bondmen; I will not stop to ask whose duty it was, but I insist it was the
duty of some one to see that these workingmen were not left alone and unguided,
without capital, without land, without skill, without economic organization,
without even the bald protection of law, order, and decency,—left in a
great land, not to settle down to slow and careful internal development, but
destined to be thrown almost immediately into relentless and sharp competition
with the best of modern workingmen under an economic system where every
participant is fighting for himself, and too often utterly regardless of the
rights or welfare of his neighbor.
For we must never forget that the economic system of the South to-day which has
succeeded the old regime is not the same system as that of the old industrial
North, of England, or of France, with their trade-unions, their restrictive
laws, their written and unwritten commercial customs, and their long
experience. It is, rather, a copy of that England of the early nineteenth
century, before the factory acts,—the England that wrung pity from
thinkers and fired the wrath of Carlyle. The rod of empire that passed from the
hands of Southern gentlemen in 1865, partly by force, partly by their own
petulance, has never returned to them. Rather it has passed to those men who
have come to take charge of the industrial exploitation of the New
South,—the sons of poor whites fired with a new thirst for wealth and
power, thrifty and avaricious Yankees, and unscrupulous immigrants. Into the
hands of these men the Southern laborers, white and black, have fallen; and
this to their sorrow. For the laborers as such, there is in these new captains
of industry neither love nor hate, neither sympathy nor romance; it is a cold
question of dollars and dividends. Under such a system all labor is bound to
suffer. Even the white laborers are not yet intelligent, thrifty, and well
trained enough to maintain themselves against the powerful inroads of organized
capital. The results among them, even, are long hours of toil, low wages, child
labor, and lack of protection against usury and cheating. But among the black
laborers all this is aggravated, first, by a race prejudice which varies from a
doubt and distrust among the best element of whites to a frenzied hatred among
the worst; and, secondly, it is aggravated, as I have said before, by the
wretched economic heritage of the freedmen from slavery. With this training it
is difficult for the freedman to learn to grasp the opportunities already
opened to him, and the new opportunities are seldom given him, but go by favor
to the whites.
Left by the best elements of the South with little protection or oversight, he
has been made in law and custom the victim of the worst and most unscrupulous
men in each community. The crop-lien system which is depopulating the fields of
the South is not simply the result of shiftlessness on the part of Negroes, but
is also the result of cunningly devised laws as to mortgages, liens, and
misdemeanors, which can be made by conscienceless men to entrap and snare the
unwary until escape is impossible, further toil a farce, and protest a crime. I
have seen, in the Black Belt of Georgia, an ignorant, honest Negro buy and pay
for a farm in installments three separate times, and then in the face of law
and decency the enterprising American who sold it to him pocketed the money and
deed and left the black man landless, to labor on his own land at thirty cents
a day. I have seen a black farmer fall in debt to a white storekeeper, and that
storekeeper go to his farm and strip it of every single marketable
article,—mules, ploughs, stored crops, tools, furniture, bedding, clocks,
looking-glass,—and all this without a sheriff or officer, in the face of
the law for homestead exemptions, and without rendering to a single responsible
person any account or reckoning. And such proceedings can happen, and will
happen, in any community where a class of ignorant toilers are placed by custom
and race-prejudice beyond the pale of sympathy and race-brotherhood. So long as
the best elements of a community do not feel in duty bound to protect and train
and care for the weaker members of their group, they leave them to be preyed
upon by these swindlers and rascals.
This unfortunate economic situation does not mean the hindrance of all advance
in the black South, or the absence of a class of black landlords and mechanics
who, in spite of disadvantages, are accumulating property and making good
citizens. But it does mean that this class is not nearly so large as a fairer
economic system might easily make it, that those who survive in the competition
are handicapped so as to accomplish much less than they deserve to, and that,
above all, the of the successful class is left to chance and
accident, and not to any intelligent culling or reasonable methods of
selection. As a remedy for this, there is but one possible procedure. We must
accept some of the race prejudice in the South as a fact,—deplorable in
its intensity, unfortunate in results, and dangerous for the future, but
nevertheless a hard fact which only time can efface. We cannot hope, then, in
this generation, or for several generations, that the mass of the whites can be
brought to assume that close sympathetic and self-sacrificing leadership of the
blacks which their present situation so eloquently demands. Such leadership,
such social teaching and example, must come from the blacks themselves. For
some time men doubted as to whether the Negro could develop such leaders; but
to-day no one seriously disputes the capability of individual Negroes to
assimilate the culture and common sense of modern civilization, and to pass it
on, to some extent at least, to their fellows. If this is true, then here is
the path out of the economic situation, and here is the imperative demand for
trained Negro leaders of character and intelligence,—men of skill, men of
light and leading, college-bred men, black captains of industry, and
missionaries of culture; men who thoroughly comprehend and know modern
civilization, and can take hold of Negro communities and raise and train them
by force of precept and example, deep sympathy, and the inspiration of common
blood and ideals. But if such men are to be effective they must have some
power,—they must be backed by the best public opinion of these
communities, and able to wield for their objects and aims such weapons as the
experience of the world has taught are indispensable to human progress.
Of such weapons the greatest, perhaps, in the modern world is the power of the
ballot; and this brings me to a consideration of the third form of contact
between whites and blacks in the South,—political activity.
In the attitude of the American mind toward Negro suffrage can be traced with
unusual accuracy the prevalent conceptions of government. In the fifties we
were near enough the echoes of the French Revolution to believe pretty
thoroughly in universal suffrage. We argued, as we thought then rather
logically, that no social class was so good, so true, and so disinterested as
to be trusted wholly with the political destiny of its neighbors; that in every
state the best arbiters of their own welfare are the persons directly affected;
consequently that it is only by arming every hand with a ballot,—with the
right to have a voice in the policy of the state,—that the greatest good
to the greatest number could be attained. To be sure, there were objections to
these arguments, but we thought we had answered them tersely and convincingly;
if some one complained of the ignorance of voters, we answered, “Educate
them.” If another complained of their venality, we replied,
“Disfranchise them or put them in jail.” And, finally, to the men
who feared demagogues and the natural perversity of some human beings we
insisted that time and bitter experience would teach the most hardheaded. It
was at this time that the question of Negro suffrage in the South was raised.
Here was a defenceless people suddenly made free. How were they to be protected
from those who did not believe in their freedom and were determined to thwart
it? Not by force, said the North; not by government guardianship, said the
South; then by the ballot, the sole and legitimate defence of a free people,
said the Common Sense of the Nation. No one thought, at the time, that the
ex-slaves could use the ballot intelligently or very effectively; but they did
think that the possession of so great power by a great class in the nation
would compel their fellows to educate this class to its intelligent use.
Meantime, new thoughts came to the nation: the inevitable period of moral
retrogression and political trickery that ever follows in the wake of war
overtook us. So flagrant became the political scandals that reputable men began
to leave politics alone, and politics consequently became disreputable. Men
began to pride themselves on having nothing to do with their own government,
and to agree tacitly with those who regarded public office as a private
perquisite. In this state of mind it became easy to wink at the suppression of
the Negro vote in the South, and to advise self-respecting Negroes to leave
politics entirely alone. The decent and reputable citizens of the North who
neglected their own civic duties grew hilarious over the exaggerated importance
with which the Negro regarded the franchise. Thus it easily happened that more
and more the better class of Negroes followed the advice from abroad and the
pressure from home, and took no further interest in politics, leaving to the
careless and the venal of their race the exercise of their rights as voters.
The black vote that still remained was not trained and educated, but further
debauched by open and unblushing bribery, or force and fraud; until the Negro
voter was thoroughly inoculated with the idea that politics was a method of
private gain by disreputable means.
And finally, now, to-day, when we are awakening to the fact that the perpetuity
of republican institutions on this continent depends on the purification of the
ballot, the civic training of voters, and the raising of voting to the plane of
a solemn duty which a patriotic citizen neglects to his peril and to the peril
of his children’s children,—in this day, when we are striving for a
renaissance of civic virtue, what are we going to say to the black voter of the
South? Are we going to tell him still that politics is a disreputable and
useless form of human activity? Are we going to induce the best class of
Negroes to take less and less interest in government, and to give up their
right to take such an interest, without a protest? I am not saying a word
against all legitimate efforts to purge the ballot of ignorance, pauperism, and
crime. But few have pretended that the present movement for disfranchisement in
the South is for such a purpose; it has been plainly and frankly declared in
nearly every case that the object of the disfranchising laws is the elimination
of the black man from politics.
Now, is this a minor matter which has no influence on the main question of the
industrial and intellectual development of the Negro? Can we establish a mass
of black laborers and artisans and landholders in the South who, by law and
public opinion, have absolutely no voice in shaping the laws under which they
live and work? Can the modern organization of industry, assuming as it does
free democratic government and the power and ability of the laboring classes to
compel respect for their welfare,—can this system be carried out in the
South when half its laboring force is voiceless in the public councils and
powerless in its own defence? To-day the black man of the South has almost
nothing to say as to how much he shall be taxed, or how those taxes shall be
expended; as to who shall execute the laws, and how they shall do it; as to who
shall make the laws, and how they shall be made. It is pitiable that frantic
efforts must be made at critical times to get law-makers in some States even to
listen to the respectful presentation of the black man’s side of a
current controversy. Daily the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law
and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and
oppression. The laws are made by men who have little interest in him; they are
executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black people
with courtesy or consideration; and, finally, the accused law-breaker is tried,
not by his peers, but too often by men who would rather punish ten innocent
Negroes than let one guilty one escape.
I should be the last one to deny the patent weaknesses and shortcomings of the
Negro people; I should be the last to withhold sympathy from the white South in
its efforts to solve its intricate social problems. I freely acknowledged that
it is possible, and sometimes best, that a partially undeveloped people should
be ruled by the best of their stronger and better neighbors for their own good,
until such time as they can start and fight the world’s battles alone. I
have already pointed out how sorely in need of such economic and spiritual
guidance the emancipated Negro was, and I am quite willing to admit that if the
representatives of the best white Southern public opinion were the ruling and
guiding powers in the South to-day the conditions indicated would be fairly
well fulfilled. But the point I have insisted upon and now emphasize again, is
that the best opinion of the South to-day is not the ruling opinion. That to
leave the Negro helpless and without a ballot to-day is to leave him not to the
guidance of the best, but rather to the exploitation and debauchment of the
worst; that this is no truer of the South than of the North,—of the North
than of Europe: in any land, in any country under modern free competition, to
lay any class of weak and despised people, be they white, black, or blue, at
the political mercy of their stronger, richer, and more resourceful fellows, is
a temptation which human nature seldom has withstood and seldom will withstand.
Moreover, the political status of the Negro in the South is closely connected
with the question of Negro crime. There can be no doubt that crime among
Negroes has sensibly increased in the last thirty years, and that there has
appeared in the slums of great cities a distinct criminal class among the
blacks. In explaining this unfortunate development, we must note two things:
(1) that the inevitable result of Emancipation was to increase crime and
criminals, and (2) that the police system of the South was primarily designed
to control slaves. As to the first point, we must not forget that under a
strict slave system there can scarcely be such a thing as crime. But when these
variously constituted human particles are suddenly thrown broadcast on the sea
of life, some swim, some sink, and some hang suspended, to be forced up or down
by the chance currents of a busy hurrying world. So great an economic and
social revolution as swept the South in ’63 meant a weeding out among the
Negroes of the incompetents and vicious, the beginning of a differentiation of
social grades. Now a rising group of people are not lifted bodily from the
ground like an inert solid mass, but rather stretch upward like a living plant
with its roots still clinging in the mould. The appearance, therefore, of the
Negro criminal was a phenomenon to be awaited; and while it causes anxiety, it
should not occasion surprise.
Here again the hope for the future depended peculiarly on careful and delicate
dealing with these criminals. Their offences at first were those of laziness,
carelessness, and impulse, rather than of malignity or ungoverned viciousness.
Such misdemeanors needed discriminating treatment, firm but reformatory, with
no hint of injustice, and full proof of guilt. For such dealing with criminals,
white or black, the South had no machinery, no adequate jails or reformatories;
its police system was arranged to deal with blacks alone, and tacitly assumed
that every white man was a member of that police. Thus grew
up a double system of justice, which erred on the white side by undue leniency
and the practical immunity of red-handed criminals, and erred on the black side
by undue severity, injustice, and lack of discrimination. For, as I have said,
the police system of the South was originally designed to keep track of all
Negroes, not simply of criminals; and when the Negroes were freed and the whole
South was convinced of the impossibility of free Negro labor, the first and
almost universal device was to use the courts as a means of reenslaving the
blacks. It was not then a question of crime, but rather one of color, that
settled a man’s conviction on almost any charge. Thus Negroes came to
look upon courts as instruments of injustice and oppression, and upon those
convicted in them as martyrs and victims.
When, now, the real Negro criminal appeared, and instead of petty stealing and
vagrancy we began to have highway robbery, burglary, murder, and rape, there
was a curious effect on both sides the color-line: the Negroes refused to
believe the evidence of white witnesses or the fairness of white juries, so
that the greatest deterrent to crime, the public opinion of one’s own
social caste, was lost, and the criminal was looked upon as crucified rather
than hanged. On the other hand, the whites, used to being careless as to the
guilt or innocence of accused Negroes, were swept in moments of passion beyond
law, reason, and decency. Such a situation is bound to increase crime, and has
increased it. To natural viciousness and vagrancy are being daily added motives
of revolt and revenge which stir up all the latent savagery of both races and
make peaceful attention to economic development often impossible.
But the chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment
of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.
And here again the peculiar conditions of the South have prevented proper
precautions. I have seen twelve-year-old boys working in chains on the public
streets of Atlanta, directly in front of the schools, in company with old and
hardened criminals; and this indiscriminate mingling of men and women and
children makes the chain-gangs perfect schools of crime and debauchery. The
struggle for reformatories, which has gone on in Virginia, Georgia, and other
States, is the one encouraging sign of the awakening of some communities to the
suicidal results of this policy.
It is the public schools, however, which can be made, outside the homes, the
greatest means of training decent self-respecting citizens. We have been so
hotly engaged recently in discussing trade-schools and the higher education
that the pitiable plight of the public-school system in the South has almost
dropped from view. Of every five dollars spent for public education in the
State of Georgia, the white schools get four dollars and the Negro one dollar;
and even then the white public-school system, save in the cities, is bad and
cries for reform. If this is true of the whites, what of the blacks? I am
becoming more and more convinced, as I look upon the system of common-school
training in the South, that the national government must soon step in and aid
popular education in some way. To-day it has been only by the most strenuous
efforts on the part of the thinking men of the South that the Negro’s
share of the school fund has not been cut down to a pittance in some half-dozen
States; and that movement not only is not dead, but in many communities is
gaining strength. What in the name of reason does this nation expect of a
people, poorly trained and hard pressed in severe economic competition, without
political rights, and with ludicrously inadequate common-school facilities?
What can it expect but crime and listlessness, offset here and there by the
dogged struggles of the fortunate and more determined who are themselves buoyed
by the hope that in due time the country will come to its senses?
I have thus far sought to make clear the physical, economic, and political
relations of the Negroes and whites in the South, as I have conceived them,
including, for the reasons set forth, crime and education. But after all that
has been said on these more tangible matters of human contact, there still
remains a part essential to a proper description of the South which it is
difficult to describe or fix in terms easily understood by strangers. It is, in
fine, the atmosphere of the land, the thought and feeling, the thousand and one
little actions which go to make up life. In any community or nation it is these
little things which are most elusive to the grasp and yet most essential to any
clear conception of the group life taken as a whole. What is thus true of all
communities is peculiarly true of the South, where, outside of written history
and outside of printed law, there has been going on for a generation as deep a
storm and stress of human souls, as intense a ferment of feeling, as intricate
a writhing of spirit, as ever a people experienced. Within and without the
sombre veil of color vast social forces have been at work,—efforts for
human betterment, movements toward disintegration and despair, tragedies and
comedies in social and economic life, and a swaying and lifting and sinking of
human hearts which have made this land a land of mingled sorrow and joy, of
change and excitement and unrest.
The centre of this spiritual turmoil has ever been the millions of black
freedmen and their sons, whose destiny is so fatefully bound up with that of
the nation. And yet the casual observer visiting the South sees at first little
of this. He notes the growing frequency of dark faces as he rides
along,—but otherwise the days slip lazily on, the sun shines, and this
little world seems as happy and contented as other worlds he has visited.
Indeed, on the question of questions—the Negro problem—he hears so
little that there almost seems to be a conspiracy of silence; the morning
papers seldom mention it, and then usually in a far-fetched academic way, and
indeed almost every one seems to forget and ignore the darker half of the land,
until the astonished visitor is inclined to ask if after all there IS any
problem here. But if he lingers long enough there comes the awakening: perhaps
in a sudden whirl of passion which leaves him gasping at its bitter intensity;
more likely in a gradually dawning sense of things he had not at first noticed.
Slowly but surely his eyes begin to catch the shadows of the color-line: here
he meets crowds of Negroes and whites; then he is suddenly aware that he cannot
discover a single dark face; or again at the close of a day’s wandering
he may find himself in some strange assembly, where all faces are tinged brown
or black, and where he has the vague, uncomfortable feeling of the stranger. He
realizes at last that silently, resistlessly, the world about flows by him in
two great streams: they ripple on in the same sunshine, they approach and
mingle their waters in seeming carelessness,—then they divide and flow
wide apart. It is done quietly; no mistakes are made, or if one occurs, the
swift arm of the law and of public opinion swings down for a moment, as when
the other day a black man and a white woman were arrested for talking together
on Whitehall Street in Atlanta.
Now if one notices carefully one will see that between these two worlds,
despite much physical contact and daily intermingling, there is almost no
community of intellectual life or point of transference where the thoughts and
feelings of one race can come into direct contact and sympathy with the
thoughts and feelings of the other. Before and directly after the war, when all
the best of the Negroes were domestic servants in the best of the white
families, there were bonds of intimacy, affection, and sometimes blood
relationship, between the races. They lived in the same home, shared in the
family life, often attended the same church, and talked and conversed with each
other. But the increasing civilization of the Negro since then has naturally
meant the development of higher classes: there are increasing numbers of
ministers, teachers, physicians, merchants, mechanics, and independent farmers,
who by nature and training are the aristocracy and leaders of the blacks.
Between them, however, and the best element of the whites, there is little or
no intellectual commerce. They go to separate churches, they live in separate
sections, they are strictly separated in all public gatherings, they travel
separately, and they are beginning to read different papers and books. To most
libraries, lectures, concerts, and museums, Negroes are either not admitted at
all, or on terms peculiarly galling to the pride of the very classes who might
otherwise be attracted. The daily paper chronicles the doings of the black
world from afar with no great regard for accuracy; and so on, throughout the
category of means for intellectual communication,—schools, conferences,
efforts for social betterment, and the like,—it is usually true that the
very representatives of the two races, who for mutual benefit and the welfare
of the land ought to be in complete understanding and sympathy, are so far
strangers that one side thinks all whites are narrow and prejudiced, and the
other thinks educated Negroes dangerous and insolent. Moreover, in a land where
the tyranny of public opinion and the intolerance of criticism is for obvious
historical reasons so strong as in the South, such a situation is extremely
difficult to correct. The white man, as well as the Negro, is bound and barred
by the color-line, and many a scheme of friendliness and philanthropy, of
broad-minded sympathy and generous fellowship between the two has dropped
still-born because some busybody has forced the color-question to the front and
brought the tremendous force of unwritten law against the innovators.
It is hardly necessary for me to add very much in regard to the social contact
between the races. Nothing has come to replace that finer sympathy and love
between some masters and house servants which the radical and more
uncompromising drawing of the color-line in recent years has caused almost
completely to disappear. In a world where it means so much to take a man by the
hand and sit beside him, to look frankly into his eyes and feel his heart
beating with red blood; in a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea
together means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and
speeches,—one can imagine the consequences of the almost utter absence of
such social amenities between estranged races, whose separation extends even to
parks and streetcars.
Here there can be none of that social going down to the people,—the
opening of heart and hand of the best to the worst, in generous acknowledgment
of a common humanity and a common destiny. On the other hand, in matters of
simple almsgiving, where there can be no question of social contact, and in the
succor of the aged and sick, the South, as if stirred by a feeling of its
unfortunate limitations, is generous to a fault. The black beggar is never
turned away without a good deal more than a crust, and a call for help for the
unfortunate meets quick response. I remember, one cold winter, in Atlanta, when
I refrained from contributing to a public relief fund lest Negroes should be
discriminated against, I afterward inquired of a friend: “Were any black
people receiving aid?” “Why,” said he, “they were
black.”
And yet this does not touch the kernel of the problem. Human advancement is not
a mere question of almsgiving, but rather of sympathy and cooperation among
classes who would scorn charity. And here is a land where, in the higher walks
of life, in all the higher striving for the good and noble and true, the
color-line comes to separate natural friends and coworkers; while at the bottom
of the social group, in the saloon, the gambling-hell, and the brothel, that
same line wavers and disappears.
I have sought to paint an average picture of real relations between the sons of
master and man in the South. I have not glossed over matters for policy’s
sake, for I fear we have already gone too far in that sort of thing. On the
other hand, I have sincerely sought to let no unfair exaggerations creep in. I
do not doubt that in some Southern communities conditions are better than those
I have indicated; while I am no less certain that in other communities they are
far worse.
Nor does the paradox and danger of this situation fail to interest and perplex
the best conscience of the South. Deeply religious and intensely democratic as
are the mass of the whites, they feel acutely the false position in which the
Negro problems place them. Such an essentially honest-hearted and generous
people cannot cite the caste-levelling precepts of Christianity, or believe in
equality of opportunity for all men, without coming to feel more and more with
each generation that the present drawing of the color-line is a flat
contradiction to their beliefs and professions. But just as often as they come
to this point, the present social condition of the Negro stands as a menace and
a portent before even the most open-minded: if there were nothing to charge
against the Negro but his blackness or other physical peculiarities, they
argue, the problem would be comparatively simple; but what can we say to his
ignorance, shiftlessness, poverty, and crime? can a self-respecting group hold
anything but the least possible fellowship with such persons and survive? and
shall we let a mawkish sentiment sweep away the culture of our fathers or the
hope of our children? The argument so put is of great strength, but it is not a
whit stronger than the argument of thinking Negroes: granted, they reply, that
the condition of our masses is bad; there is certainly on the one hand adequate
historical cause for this, and unmistakable evidence that no small number have,
in spite of tremendous disadvantages, risen to the level of American
civilization. And when, by proscription and prejudice, these same Negroes are
classed with and treated like the lowest of their people, simply because they
are Negroes, such a policy not only discourages thrift and intelligence among
black men, but puts a direct premium on the very things you complain
of,—inefficiency and crime. Draw lines of crime, of incompetency, of
vice, as tightly and uncompromisingly as you will, for these things must be
proscribed; but a color-line not only does not accomplish this purpose, but
thwarts it.
In the face of two such arguments, the future of the South depends on the
ability of the representatives of these opposing views to see and appreciate
and sympathize with each other’s position,—for the Negro to realize
more deeply than he does at present the need of uplifting the masses of his
people, for the white people to realize more vividly than they have yet done
the deadening and disastrous effect of a color-prejudice that classes Phillis
Wheatley and Sam Hose in the same despised class.
It is not enough for the Negroes to declare that color-prejudice is the sole
cause of their social condition, nor for the white South to reply that their
social condition is the main cause of prejudice. They both act as reciprocal
cause and effect, and a change in neither alone will bring the desired effect.
Both must change, or neither can improve to any great extent. The Negro cannot
stand the present reactionary tendencies and unreasoning drawing of the
color-line indefinitely without discouragement and retrogression. And the
condition of the Negro is ever the excuse for further discrimination. Only by a
union of intelligence and sympathy across the color-line in this critical
period of the Republic shall justice and right triumph,
“That mind and soul according well,
May make one music as before,
But vaster.”
X.
Of the Faith of the Fathers
Dim face of Beauty haunting all the world,
Fair face of Beauty all too fair to see,
Where the lost stars adown the heavens are hurled,—
There, there alone for thee
May white peace be.
Beauty, sad face of Beauty, Mystery, Wonder,
What are these dreams to foolish babbling men
Who cry with little noises ’neath the thunder
Of Ages ground to sand,
To a little sand.
FIONA MACLEOD.
It was out in the country, far from home, far from my foster home, on a dark
Sunday night. The road wandered from our rambling log-house up the stony bed of
a creek, past wheat and corn, until we could hear dimly across the fields a
rhythmic cadence of song,—soft, thrilling, powerful, that swelled and
died sorrowfully in our ears. I was a country schoolteacher then, fresh from
the East, and had never seen a Southern Negro revival. To be sure, we in
Berkshire were not perhaps as stiff and formal as they in Suffolk of olden
time; yet we were very quiet and subdued, and I know not what would have
happened those clear Sabbath mornings had some one punctuated the sermon with a
wild scream, or interrupted the long prayer with a loud Amen! And so most
striking to me, as I approached the village and the little plain church perched
aloft, was the air of intense excitement that possessed that mass of black
folk. A sort of suppressed terror hung in the air and seemed to seize
us,—a pythian madness, a demoniac possession, that lent terrible reality
to song and word. The black and massive form of the preacher swayed and
quivered as the words crowded to his lips and flew at us in singular eloquence.
The people moaned and fluttered, and then the gaunt-cheeked brown woman beside
me suddenly leaped straight into the air and shrieked like a lost soul, while
round about came wail and groan and outcry, and a scene of human passion such
as I had never conceived before.
Those who have not thus witnessed the frenzy of a Negro revival in the
untouched backwoods of the South can but dimly realize the religious feeling of
the slave; as described, such scenes appear grotesque and funny, but as seen
they are awful. Three things characterized this religion of the
slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy. The Preacher is the most
unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil. A leader, a
politician, an orator, a “boss,” an intriguer, an
idealist,—all these he is, and ever, too, the centre of a group of men,
now twenty, now a thousand in number. The combination of a certain adroitness
with deep-seated earnestness, of tact with consummate ability, gave him his
preeminence, and helps him maintain it. The type, of course, varies according
to time and place, from the West Indies in the sixteenth century to New England
in the nineteenth, and from the Mississippi bottoms to cities like New Orleans
or New York.
The Music of Negro religion is that plaintive rhythmic melody, with its
touching minor cadences, which, despite caricature and defilement, still
remains the most original and beautiful expression of human life and longing
yet born on American soil. Sprung from the African forests, where its
counterpart can still be heard, it was adapted, changed, and intensified by the
tragic soul-life of the slave, until, under the stress of law and whip, it
became the one true expression of a people’s sorrow, despair, and hope.
Finally the Frenzy of “Shouting,” when the Spirit of the Lord
passed by, and, seizing the devotee, made him mad with supernatural joy, was
the last essential of Negro religion and the one more devoutly believed in than
all the rest. It varied in expression from the silent rapt countenance or the
low murmur and moan to the mad abandon of physical fervor,—the stamping,
shrieking, and shouting, the rushing to and fro and wild waving of arms, the
weeping and laughing, the vision and the trance. All this is nothing new in the
world, but old as religion, as Delphi and Endor. And so firm a hold did it have
on the Negro, that many generations firmly believed that without this visible
manifestation of the God there could be no true communion with the Invisible.
These were the characteristics of Negro religious life as developed up to the
time of Emancipation. Since under the peculiar circumstances of the black
man’s environment they were the one expression of his higher life, they
are of deep interest to the student of his development, both socially and
psychologically. Numerous are the attractive lines of inquiry that here group
themselves. What did slavery mean to the African savage? What was his attitude
toward the World and Life? What seemed to him good and evil,—God and
Devil? Whither went his longings and strivings, and wherefore were his
heart-burnings and disappointments? Answers to such questions can come only
from a study of Negro religion as a development, through its gradual changes
from the heathenism of the Gold Coast to the institutional Negro church of
Chicago.
Moreover, the religious growth of millions of men, even though they be slaves,
cannot be without potent influence upon their contemporaries. The Methodists
and Baptists of America owe much of their condition to the silent but potent
influence of their millions of Negro converts. Especially is this noticeable in
the South, where theology and religious philosophy are on this account a long
way behind the North, and where the religion of the poor whites is a plain copy
of Negro thought and methods. The mass of “gospel” hymns which has
swept through American churches and well-nigh ruined our sense of song consists
largely of debased imitations of Negro melodies made by ears that caught the
jingle but not the music, the body but not the soul, of the Jubilee songs. It
is thus clear that the study of Negro religion is not only a vital part of the
history of the Negro in America, but no uninteresting part of American history.
The Negro church of to-day is the social centre of Negro life in the United
States, and the most characteristic expression of African character. Take a
typical church in a small Virginia town: it is the “First
Baptist”—a roomy brick edifice seating five hundred or more
persons, tastefully finished in Georgia pine, with a carpet, a small organ, and
stained-glass windows. Underneath is a large assembly room with benches. This
building is the central club-house of a community of a thousand or more
Negroes. Various organizations meet here,—the church proper, the
Sunday-school, two or three insurance societies, women’s societies,
secret societies, and mass meetings of various kinds. Entertainments, suppers,
and lectures are held beside the five or six regular weekly religious services.
Considerable sums of money are collected and expended here, employment is found
for the idle, strangers are introduced, news is disseminated and charity
distributed. At the same time this social, intellectual, and economic centre is
a religious centre of great power. Depravity, Sin, Redemption, Heaven, Hell,
and Damnation are preached twice a Sunday after the crops are laid by; and few
indeed of the community have the hardihood to withstand conversion. Back of
this more formal religion, the Church often stands as a real conserver of
morals, a strengthener of family life, and the final authority on what is Good
and Right.
Thus one can see in the Negro church to-day, reproduced in microcosm, all the
great world from which the Negro is cut off by color-prejudice and social
condition. In the great city churches the same tendency is noticeable and in
many respects emphasized. A great church like the Bethel of Philadelphia has
over eleven hundred members, an edifice seating fifteen hundred persons and
valued at one hundred thousand dollars, an annual budget of five thousand
dollars, and a government consisting of a pastor with several assisting local
preachers, an executive and legislative board, financial boards and tax
collectors; general church meetings for making laws; sub-divided groups led by
class leaders, a company of militia, and twenty-four auxiliary societies. The
activity of a church like this is immense and far-reaching, and the bishops who
preside over these organizations throughout the land are among the most
powerful Negro rulers in the world.
Such churches are really governments of men, and consequently a little
investigation reveals the curious fact that, in the South, at least,
practically every American Negro is a church member. Some, to be sure, are not
regularly enrolled, and a few do not habitually attend services; but,
practically, a proscribed people must have a social centre, and that centre for
this people is the Negro church. The census of 1890 showed nearly twenty-four
thousand Negro churches in the country, with a total enrolled membership of
over two and a half millions, or ten actual church members to every
twenty-eight persons, and in some Southern States one in every two persons.
Besides these there is the large number who, while not enrolled as members,
attend and take part in many of the activities of the church. There is an
organized Negro church for every sixty black families in the nation, and in
some States for every forty families, owning, on an average, a thousand
dollars’ worth of property each, or nearly twenty-six million dollars in
all.
Such, then, is the large development of the Negro church since Emancipation.
The question now is, What have been the successive steps of this social history
and what are the present tendencies? First, we must realize that no such
institution as the Negro church could rear itself without definite historical
foundations. These foundations we can find if we remember that the social
history of the Negro did not start in America. He was brought from a definite
social environment,—the polygamous clan life under the headship of the
chief and the potent influence of the priest. His religion was nature-worship,
with profound belief in invisible surrounding influences, good and bad, and his
worship was through incantation and sacrifice. The first rude change in this
life was the slave ship and the West Indian sugar-fields. The plantation
organization replaced the clan and tribe, and the white master replaced the
chief with far greater and more despotic powers. Forced and long-continued toil
became the rule of life, the old ties of blood relationship and kinship
disappeared, and instead of the family appeared a new polygamy and polyandry,
which, in some cases, almost reached promiscuity. It was a terrific social
revolution, and yet some traces were retained of the former group life, and the
chief remaining institution was the Priest or Medicine-man. He early appeared
on the plantation and found his function as the healer of the sick, the
interpreter of the Unknown, the comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural
avenger of wrong, and the one who rudely but picturesquely expressed the
longing, disappointment, and resentment of a stolen and oppressed people. Thus,
as bard, physician, judge, and priest, within the narrow limits allowed by the
slave system, rose the Negro preacher, and under him the first church was not
at first by any means Christian nor definitely organized; rather it was an
adaptation and mingling of heathen rites among the members of each plantation,
and roughly designated as Voodooism. Association with the masters, missionary
effort and motives of expediency gave these rites an early veneer of
Christianity, and after the lapse of many generations the Negro church became
Christian.
Two characteristic things must be noticed in regard to the church. First, it
became almost entirely Baptist and Methodist in faith; secondly, as a social
institution it antedated by many decades the monogamic Negro home. From the
very circumstances of its beginning, the church was confined to the plantation,
and consisted primarily of a series of disconnected units; although, later on,
some freedom of movement was allowed, still this geographical limitation was
always important and was one cause of the spread of the decentralized and
democratic Baptist faith among the slaves. At the same time, the visible rite
of baptism appealed strongly to their mystic temperament. To-day the Baptist
Church is still largest in membership among Negroes, and has a million and a
half communicants. Next in popularity came the churches organized in connection
with the white neighboring churches, chiefly Baptist and Methodist, with a few
Episcopalian and others. The Methodists still form the second greatest
denomination, with nearly a million members. The faith of these two leading
denominations was more suited to the slave church from the prominence they gave
to religious feeling and fervor. The Negro membership in other denominations
has always been small and relatively unimportant, although the Episcopalians
and Presbyterians are gaining among the more intelligent classes to-day, and
the Catholic Church is making headway in certain sections. After Emancipation,
and still earlier in the North, the Negro churches largely severed such
affiliations as they had had with the white churches, either by choice or by
compulsion. The Baptist churches became independent, but the Methodists were
compelled early to unite for purposes of episcopal government. This gave rise
to the great African Methodist Church, the greatest Negro organization in the
world, to the Zion Church and the Colored Methodist, and to the black
conferences and churches in this and other denominations.
The second fact noted, namely, that the Negro church antedates the Negro home,
leads to an explanation of much that is paradoxical in this communistic
institution and in the morals of its members. But especially it leads us to
regard this institution as peculiarly the expression of the inner ethical life
of a people in a sense seldom true elsewhere. Let us turn, then, from the outer
physical development of the church to the more important inner ethical life of
the people who compose it. The Negro has already been pointed out many times as
a religious animal,—a being of that deep emotional nature which turns
instinctively toward the supernatural. Endowed with a rich tropical imagination
and a keen, delicate appreciation of Nature, the transplanted African lived in
a world animate with gods and devils, elves and witches; full of strange
influences,—of Good to be implored, of Evil to be propitiated. Slavery,
then, was to him the dark triumph of Evil over him. All the hateful powers of
the Under-world were striving against him, and a spirit of revolt and revenge
filled his heart. He called up all the resources of heathenism to
aid,—exorcism and witch-craft, the mysterious Obi worship with its
barbarious rites, spells, and blood-sacrifice even, now and then, of human
victims. Weird midnight orgies and mystic conjurations were invoked, the
witch-woman and the voodoo-priest became the centre of Negro group life, and
that vein of vague superstition which characterizes the unlettered Negro even
to-day was deepened and strengthened.
In spite, however, of such success as that of the fierce Maroons, the Danish
blacks, and others, the spirit of revolt gradually died away under the untiring
energy and superior strength of the slave masters. By the middle of the
eighteenth century the black slave had sunk, with hushed murmurs, to his place
at the bottom of a new economic system, and was unconsciously ripe for a new
philosophy of life. Nothing suited his condition then better than the doctrines
of passive submission embodied in the newly learned Christianity. Slave masters
early realized this, and cheerfully aided religious propaganda within certain
bounds. The long system of repression and degradation of the Negro tended to
emphasize the elements of his character which made him a valuable chattel:
courtesy became humility, moral strength degenerated into submission, and the
exquisite native appreciation of the beautiful became an infinite capacity for
dumb suffering. The Negro, losing the joy of this world, eagerly seized upon
the offered conceptions of the next; the avenging Spirit of the Lord enjoining
patience in this world, under sorrow and tribulation until the Great Day when
He should lead His dark children home,—this became his comforting dream.
His preacher repeated the prophecy, and his bards sang,—
“Children, we all shall be free
When the Lord shall appear!”
This deep religious fatalism, painted so beautifully in “Uncle
Tom,” came soon to breed, as all fatalistic faiths will, the sensualist
side by side with the martyr. Under the lax moral life of the plantation, where
marriage was a farce, laziness a virtue, and property a theft, a religion of
resignation and submission degenerated easily, in less strenuous minds, into a
philosophy of indulgence and crime. Many of the worst characteristics of the
Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s
ethical growth. Here it was that the Home was ruined under the very shadow of
the Church, white and black; here habits of shiftlessness took root, and sullen
hopelessness replaced hopeful strife.
With the beginning of the abolition movement and the gradual growth of a class
of free Negroes came a change. We often neglect the influence of the freedman
before the war, because of the paucity of his numbers and the small weight he
had in the history of the nation. But we must not forget that his chief
influence was internal,—was exerted on the black world; and that there he
was the ethical and social leader. Huddled as he was in a few centres like
Philadelphia, New York, and New Orleans, the masses of the freedmen sank into
poverty and listlessness; but not all of them. The free Negro leader early
arose and his chief characteristic was intense earnestness and deep feeling on
the slavery question. Freedom became to him a real thing and not a dream. His
religion became darker and more intense, and into his ethics crept a note of
revenge, into his songs a day of reckoning close at hand. The “Coming of
the Lord” swept this side of Death, and came to be a thing to be hoped
for in this day. Through fugitive slaves and irrepressible discussion this
desire for freedom seized the black millions still in bondage, and became their
one ideal of life. The black bards caught new notes, and sometimes even dared
to sing,—
“O Freedom, O Freedom, O Freedom over me!
Before I’ll be a slave
I’ll be buried in my grave,
And go home to my Lord
And be free.”
For fifty years Negro religion thus transformed itself and identified itself
with the dream of Abolition, until that which was a radical fad in the white
North and an anarchistic plot in the white South had become a religion to the
black world. Thus, when Emancipation finally came, it seemed to the freedman a
literal Coming of the Lord. His fervid imagination was stirred as never before,
by the tramp of armies, the blood and dust of battle, and the wail and whirl of
social upheaval. He stood dumb and motionless before the whirlwind: what had he
to do with it? Was it not the Lord’s doing, and marvellous in his eyes?
Joyed and bewildered with what came, he stood awaiting new wonders till the
inevitable Age of Reaction swept over the nation and brought the crisis of
to-day.
It is difficult to explain clearly the present critical stage of Negro
religion. First, we must remember that living as the blacks do in close contact
with a great modern nation, and sharing, although imperfectly, the soul-life of
that nation, they must necessarily be affected more or less directly by all the
religious and ethical forces that are to-day moving the United States. These
questions and movements are, however, overshadowed and dwarfed by the (to them)
all-important question of their civil, political, and economic status. They
must perpetually discuss the “Negro Problem,”—must live,
move, and have their being in it, and interpret all else in its light or
darkness. With this come, too, peculiar problems of their inner life,—of
the status of women, the maintenance of Home, the training of children, the
accumulation of wealth, and the prevention of crime. All this must mean a time
of intense ethical ferment, of religious heart-searching and intellectual
unrest. From the double life every American Negro must live, as a Negro and as
an American, as swept on by the current of the nineteenth while yet struggling
in the eddies of the fifteenth century,—from this must arise a painful
self-consciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral hesitancy
which is fatal to self-confidence. The worlds within and without the Veil of
Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the
same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar
sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts,
double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and
double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or revolt, to hypocrisy or
radicalism.
In some such doubtful words and phrases can one perhaps most clearly picture
the peculiar ethical paradox that faces the Negro of to-day and is tingeing and
changing his religious life. Feeling that his rights and his dearest ideals are
being trampled upon, that the public conscience is ever more deaf to his
righteous appeal, and that all the reactionary forces of prejudice, greed, and
revenge are daily gaining new strength and fresh allies, the Negro faces no
enviable dilemma. Conscious of his impotence, and pessimistic, he often becomes
bitter and vindictive; and his religion, instead of a worship, is a complaint
and a curse, a wail rather than a hope, a sneer rather than a faith. On the
other hand, another type of mind, shrewder and keener and more tortuous too,
sees in the very strength of the anti-Negro movement its patent weaknesses, and
with Jesuitic casuistry is deterred by no ethical considerations in the
endeavor to turn this weakness to the black man’s strength. Thus we have
two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the
danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy. The one type
of Negro stands almost ready to curse God and die, and the other is too often
found a traitor to right and a coward before force; the one is wedded to ideals
remote, whimsical, perhaps impossible of realization; the other forgets that
life is more than meat and the body more than raiment. But, after all, is not
this simply the writhing of the age translated into black,—the triumph of
the Lie which today, with its false culture, faces the hideousness of the
anarchist assassin?
To-day the two groups of Negroes, the one in the North, the other in the South,
represent these divergent ethical tendencies, the first tending toward
radicalism, the other toward hypocritical compromise. It is no idle regret with
which the white South mourns the loss of the old-time Negro,—the frank,
honest, simple old servant who stood for the earlier religious age of
submission and humility. With all his laziness and lack of many elements of
true manhood, he was at least open-hearted, faithful, and sincere. To-day he is
gone, but who is to blame for his going? Is it not those very persons who mourn
for him? Is it not the tendency, born of Reconstruction and Reaction, to found
a society on lawlessness and deception, to tamper with the moral fibre of a
naturally honest and straightforward people until the whites threaten to become
ungovernable tyrants and the blacks criminals and hypocrites? Deception is the
natural defence of the weak against the strong, and the South used it for many
years against its conquerors; to-day it must be prepared to see its black
proletariat turn that same two-edged weapon against itself. And how natural
this is! The death of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner proved long since to the
Negro the present hopelessness of physical defence. Political defence is
becoming less and less available, and economic defence is still only partially
effective. But there is a patent defence at hand,—the defence of
deception and flattery, of cajoling and lying. It is the same defence which
peasants of the Middle Age used and which left its stamp on their character for
centuries. To-day the young Negro of the South who would succeed cannot be
frank and outspoken, honest and self-assertive, but rather he is daily tempted
to be silent and wary, politic and sly; he must flatter and be pleasant, endure
petty insults with a smile, shut his eyes to wrong; in too many cases he sees
positive personal advantage in deception and lying. His real thoughts, his real
aspirations, must be guarded in whispers; he must not criticise, he must not
complain. Patience, humility, and adroitness must, in these growing black
youth, replace impulse, manliness, and courage. With this sacrifice there is an
economic opening, and perhaps peace and some prosperity. Without this there is
riot, migration, or crime. Nor is this situation peculiar to the Southern
United States, is it not rather the only method by which undeveloped races have
gained the right to share modern culture? The price of culture is a Lie.
On the other hand, in the North the tendency is to emphasize the radicalism of
the Negro. Driven from his birthright in the South by a situation at which
every fibre of his more outspoken and assertive nature revolts, he finds
himself in a land where he can scarcely earn a decent living amid the harsh
competition and the color discrimination. At the same time, through schools and
periodicals, discussions and lectures, he is intellectually quickened and
awakened. The soul, long pent up and dwarfed, suddenly expands in new-found
freedom. What wonder that every tendency is to excess,—radical complaint,
radical remedies, bitter denunciation or angry silence. Some sink, some rise.
The criminal and the sensualist leave the church for the gambling-hell and the
brothel, and fill the slums of Chicago and Baltimore; the better classes
segregate themselves from the group-life of both white and black, and form an
aristocracy, cultured but pessimistic, whose bitter criticism stings while it
points out no way of escape. They despise the submission and subserviency of
the Southern Negroes, but offer no other means by which a poor and oppressed
minority can exist side by side with its masters. Feeling deeply and keenly the
tendencies and opportunities of the age in which they live, their souls are
bitter at the fate which drops the Veil between; and the very fact that this
bitterness is natural and justifiable only serves to intensify it and make it
more maddening.
Between the two extreme types of ethical attitude which I have thus sought to
make clear wavers the mass of the millions of Negroes, North and South; and
their religious life and activity partake of this social conflict within their
ranks. Their churches are differentiating,—now into groups of cold,
fashionable devotees, in no way distinguishable from similar white groups save
in color of skin; now into large social and business institutions catering to
the desire for information and amusement of their members, warily avoiding
unpleasant questions both within and without the black world, and preaching in
effect if not in word: .
But back of this still broods silently the deep religious feeling of the real
Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might of powerful human souls who have lost
the guiding star of the past and seek in the great night a new religious ideal.
Some day the Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of ten million souls
shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of
Death, where all that makes life worth living—Liberty, Justice, and
Right—is marked “For White People Only.”
XI.
Of the Passing of the First-Born
O sister, sister, thy first-begotten,
The hands that cling and the feet that follow,
The voice of the child’s blood crying yet,
Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow,
But the world shall end when I forget.
SWINBURNE.
“Unto you a child is born,” sang the bit of yellow paper that
fluttered into my room one brown October morning. Then the fear of fatherhood
mingled wildly with the joy of creation; I wondered how it looked and how it
felt—what were its eyes, and how its hair curled and crumpled itself. And
I thought in awe of her,—she who had slept with Death to tear a man-child
from underneath her heart, while I was unconsciously wandering. I fled to my
wife and child, repeating the while to myself half wonderingly, “Wife and
child? Wife and child?”—fled fast and faster than boat and
steam-car, and yet must ever impatiently await them; away from the hard-voiced
city, away from the flickering sea into my own Berkshire Hills that sit all
sadly guarding the gates of Massachusetts.
Up the stairs I ran to the wan mother and whimpering babe, to the sanctuary on
whose altar a life at my bidding had offered itself to win a life, and won.
What is this tiny formless thing, this newborn wail from an unknown
world,—all head and voice? I handle it curiously, and watch perplexed its
winking, breathing, and sneezing. I did not love it then; it seemed a ludicrous
thing to love; but her I loved, my girl-mother, she whom now I saw unfolding
like the glory of the morning—the transfigured woman. Through her I came
to love the wee thing, as it grew strong; as its little soul unfolded itself in
twitter and cry and half-formed word, and as its eyes caught the gleam and
flash of life. How beautiful he was, with his olive-tinted flesh and dark gold
ringlets, his eyes of mingled blue and brown, his perfect little limbs, and the
soft voluptuous roll which the blood of Africa had moulded into his features! I
held him in my arms, after we had sped far away from our Southern
home,—held him, and glanced at the hot red soil of Georgia and the
breathless city of a hundred hills, and felt a vague unrest. Why was his hair
tinted with gold? An evil omen was golden hair in my life. Why had not the
brown of his eyes crushed out and killed the blue?—for brown were his
father’s eyes, and his father’s father’s. And thus in the
Land of the Color-line I saw, as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the
Veil.
Within the Veil was he born, said I; and there within shall he live,—a
Negro and a Negro’s son. Holding in that little head—ah,
bitterly!—he unbowed pride of a hunted race, clinging with that tiny
dimpled hand—ah, wearily!—to a hope not hopeless but unhopeful, and
seeing with those bright wondering eyes that peer into my soul a land whose
freedom is to us a mockery and whose liberty a lie. I saw the shadow of the
Veil as it passed over my baby, I saw the cold city towering above the
blood-red land. I held my face beside his little cheek, showed him the
star-children and the twinkling lights as they began to flash, and stilled with
an even-song the unvoiced terror of my life.
So sturdy and masterful he grew, so filled with bubbling life, so tremulous
with the unspoken wisdom of a life but eighteen months distant from the
All-life,—we were not far from worshipping this revelation of the divine,
my wife and I. Her own life builded and moulded itself upon the child; he
tinged her every dream and idealized her every effort. No hands but hers must
touch and garnish those little limbs; no dress or frill must touch them that
had not wearied her fingers; no voice but hers could coax him off to Dreamland,
and she and he together spoke some soft and unknown tongue and in it held
communion. I too mused above his little white bed; saw the strength of my own
arm stretched onward through the ages through the newer strength of his; saw
the dream of my black fathers stagger a step onward in the wild phantasm of the
world; heard in his baby voice the voice of the Prophet that was to rise within
the Veil.
And so we dreamed and loved and planned by fall and winter, and the full flush
of the long Southern spring, till the hot winds rolled from the fetid Gulf,
till the roses shivered and the still stern sun quivered its awful light over
the hills of Atlanta. And then one night the little feet pattered wearily to
the wee white bed, and the tiny hands trembled; and a warm flushed face tossed
on the pillow, and we knew baby was sick. Ten days he lay there,—a swift
week and three endless days, wasting, wasting away. Cheerily the mother nursed
him the first days, and laughed into the little eyes that smiled again.
Tenderly then she hovered round him, till the smile fled away and Fear crouched
beside the little bed.
Then the day ended not, and night was a dreamless terror, and joy and sleep
slipped away. I hear now that Voice at midnight calling me from dull and
dreamless trance,—crying, “The Shadow of Death! The Shadow of
Death!” Out into the starlight I crept, to rouse the gray
physician,—the Shadow of Death, the Shadow of Death. The hours trembled
on; the night listened; the ghastly dawn glided like a tired thing across the
lamplight. Then we two alone looked upon the child as he turned toward us with
great eyes, and stretched his stringlike hands,—the Shadow of Death! And
we spoke no word, and turned away.
He died at eventide, when the sun lay like a brooding sorrow above the western
hills, veiling its face; when the winds spoke not, and the trees, the great
green trees he loved, stood motionless. I saw his breath beat quicker and
quicker, pause, and then his little soul leapt like a star that travels in the
night and left a world of darkness in its train. The day changed not; the same
tall trees peeped in at the windows, the same green grass glinted in the
setting sun. Only in the chamber of death writhed the world’s most
piteous thing—a childless mother.
I shirk not. I long for work. I pant for a life full of striving. I am no
coward, to shrink before the rugged rush of the storm, nor even quail before
the awful shadow of the Veil. But hearken, O Death! Is not this my life hard
enough,—is not that dull land that stretches its sneering web about me
cold enough,—is not all the world beyond these four little walls pitiless
enough, but that thou must needs enter here,—thou, O Death? About my head
the thundering storm beat like a heartless voice, and the crazy forest pulsed
with the curses of the weak; but what cared I, within my home beside my wife
and baby boy? Wast thou so jealous of one little coign of happiness that thou
must needs enter there,—thou, O Death?
A perfect life was his, all joy and love, with tears to make it
brighter,—sweet as a summer’s day beside the Housatonic. The world
loved him; the women kissed his curls, the men looked gravely into his
wonderful eyes, and the children hovered and fluttered about him. I can see him
now, changing like the sky from sparkling laughter to darkening frowns, and
then to wondering thoughtfulness as he watched the world. He knew no
color-line, poor dear—and the Veil, though it shadowed him, had not yet
darkened half his sun. He loved the white matron, he loved his black nurse; and
in his little world walked souls alone, uncolored and unclothed. I—yea,
all men—are larger and purer by the infinite breadth of that one little
life. She who in simple clearness of vision sees beyond the stars said when he
had flown, “He will be happy There; he ever loved beautiful
things.” And I, far more ignorant, and blind by the web of mine own
weaving, sit alone winding words and muttering, “If still he be, and he
be There, and there be a There, let him be happy, O Fate!”
Blithe was the morning of his burial, with bird and song and sweet-smelling
flowers. The trees whispered to the grass, but the children sat with hushed
faces. And yet it seemed a ghostly unreal day,—the wraith of Life. We
seemed to rumble down an unknown street behind a little white bundle of posies,
with the shadow of a song in our ears. The busy city dinned about us; they did
not say much, those pale-faced hurrying men and women; they did not say
much,—they only glanced and said, “Niggers!”
We could not lay him in the ground there in Georgia, for the earth there is
strangely red; so we bore him away to the northward, with his flowers and his
little folded hands. In vain, in vain!—for where, O God! beneath thy
broad blue sky shall my dark baby rest in peace,—where Reverence dwells,
and Goodness, and a Freedom that is free?
All that day and all that night there sat an awful gladness in my
heart,—nay, blame me not if I see the world thus darkly through the
Veil,—and my soul whispers ever to me saying, “Not dead, not dead,
but escaped; not bond, but free.” No bitter meanness now shall sicken his
baby heart till it die a living death, no taunt shall madden his happy boyhood.
Fool that I was to think or wish that this little soul should grow choked and
deformed within the Veil! I might have known that yonder deep unworldly look
that ever and anon floated past his eyes was peering far beyond this narrow
Now. In the poise of his little curl-crowned head did there not sit all that
wild pride of being which his father had hardly crushed in his own heart? For
what, forsooth, shall a Negro want with pride amid the studied humiliations of
fifty million fellows? Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your
ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you to cringe
and bow. Better far this nameless void that stops my life than a sea of sorrow
for you.
Idle words; he might have borne his burden more bravely than we,—aye, and
found it lighter too, some day; for surely, surely this is not the end. Surely
there shall yet dawn some mighty morning to lift the Veil and set the prisoned
free. Not for me,—I shall die in my bonds,—but for fresh young
souls who have not known the night and waken to the morning; a morning when men
ask of the workman, not “Is he white?” but “Can he
work?” When men ask artists, not “Are they black?” but
“Do they know?” Some morning this may be, long, long years to come.
But now there wails, on that dark shore within the Veil, the same deep voice,
And all have I foregone at that command, and with small
complaint,—all save that fair young form that lies so coldly wed with
death in the nest I had builded.
If one must have gone, why not I? Why may I not rest me from this restlessness
and sleep from this wide waking? Was not the world’s alembic, Time, in
his young hands, and is not my time waning? Are there so many workers in the
vineyard that the fair promise of this little body could lightly be tossed
away? The wretched of my race that line the alleys of the nation sit fatherless
and unmothered; but Love sat beside his cradle, and in his ear Wisdom waited to
speak. Perhaps now he knows the All-love, and needs not to be wise. Sleep,
then, child,—sleep till I sleep and waken to a baby voice and the
ceaseless patter of little feet—above the Veil.
XII.
Of Alexander Crummell
Then from the Dawn it seemed there came, but faint
As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
Around a king returning from his wars.
TENNYSON.
This is the story of a human heart,—the tale of a black boy who many long
years ago began to struggle with life that he might know the world and know
himself. Three temptations he met on those dark dunes that lay gray and dismal
before the wonder-eyes of the child: the temptation of Hate, that stood out
against the red dawn; the temptation of Despair, that darkened noonday; and the
temptation of Doubt, that ever steals along with twilight. Above all, you must
hear of the vales he crossed,—the Valley of Humiliation and the Valley of
the Shadow of Death.
I saw Alexander Crummell first at a Wilberforce commencement season, amid its
bustle and crush. Tall, frail, and black he stood, with simple dignity and an
unmistakable air of good breeding. I talked with him apart, where the storming
of the lusty young orators could not harm us. I spoke to him politely, then
curiously, then eagerly, as I began to feel the fineness of his
character,—his calm courtesy, the sweetness of his strength, and his fair
blending of the hope and truth of life. Instinctively I bowed before this man,
as one bows before the prophets of the world. Some seer he seemed, that came
not from the crimson Past or the gray To-come, but from the pulsing
Now,—that mocking world which seemed to me at once so light and dark, so
splendid and sordid. Fourscore years had he wandered in this same world of
mine, within the Veil.
He was born with the Missouri Compromise and lay a-dying amid the echoes of
Manila and El Caney: stirring times for living, times dark to look back upon,
darker to look forward to. The black-faced lad that paused over his mud and
marbles seventy years ago saw puzzling vistas as he looked down the world. The
slave-ship still groaned across the Atlantic, faint cries burdened the Southern
breeze, and the great black father whispered mad tales of cruelty into those
young ears. From the low doorway the mother silently watched her boy at play,
and at nightfall sought him eagerly lest the shadows bear him away to the land
of slaves.
So his young mind worked and winced and shaped curiously a vision of Life; and
in the midst of that vision ever stood one dark figure alone,—ever with
the hard, thick countenance of that bitter father, and a form that fell in vast
and shapeless folds. Thus the temptation of Hate grew and shadowed the growing
child,—gliding stealthily into his laughter, fading into his play, and
seizing his dreams by day and night with rough, rude turbulence. So the black
boy asked of sky and sun and flower the never-answered Why? and loved, as he
grew, neither the world nor the world’s rough ways.
Strange temptation for a child, you may think; and yet in this wide land to-day
a thousand thousand dark children brood before this same temptation, and feel
its cold and shuddering arms. For them, perhaps, some one will some day lift
the Veil,—will come tenderly and cheerily into those sad little lives and
brush the brooding hate away, just as Beriah Green strode in upon the life of
Alexander Crummell. And before the bluff, kind-hearted man the shadow seemed
less dark. Beriah Green had a school in Oneida County, New York, with a score
of mischievous boys. “I’m going to bring a black boy here to
educate,” said Beriah Green, as only a crank and an abolitionist would
have dared to say. “Oho!” laughed the boys. “Ye-es,”
said his wife; and Alexander came. Once before, the black boy had sought a
school, had travelled, cold and hungry, four hundred miles up into free New
Hampshire, to Canaan. But the godly farmers hitched ninety yoke of oxen to the
abolition schoolhouse and dragged it into the middle of the swamp. The black
boy trudged away.
The nineteenth was the first century of human sympathy,—the age when half
wonderingly we began to descry in others that transfigured spark of divinity
which we call Myself; when clodhoppers and peasants, and tramps and thieves,
and millionaires and—sometimes—Negroes, became throbbing souls
whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we half gasped with surprise,
crying, “Thou too! Hast Thou seen Sorrow and the dull waters of
Hopelessness? Hast Thou known Life?” And then all helplessly we peered
into those Other-worlds, and wailed, “O World of Worlds, how shall man
make you one?”
So in that little Oneida school there came to those schoolboys a revelation of
thought and longing beneath one black skin, of which they had not dreamed
before. And to the lonely boy came a new dawn of sympathy and inspiration. The
shadowy, formless thing—the temptation of Hate, that hovered between him
and the world—grew fainter and less sinister. It did not wholly fade
away, but diffused itself and lingered thick at the edges. Through it the child
now first saw the blue and gold of life,—the sun-swept road that ran
’twixt heaven and earth until in one far-off wan wavering line they met
and kissed. A vision of life came to the growing boy,—mystic, wonderful.
He raised his head, stretched himself, breathed deep of the fresh new air.
Yonder, behind the forests, he heard strange sounds; then glinting through the
trees he saw, far, far away, the bronzed hosts of a nation
calling,—calling faintly, calling loudly. He heard the hateful clank of
their chains; he felt them cringe and grovel, and there rose within him a
protest and a prophecy. And he girded himself to walk down the world.
A voice and vision called him to be a priest,—a seer to lead the uncalled
out of the house of bondage. He saw the headless host turn toward him like the
whirling of mad waters,—he stretched forth his hands eagerly, and then,
even as he stretched them, suddenly there swept across the vision the
temptation of Despair.
They were not wicked men,—the problem of life is not the problem of the
wicked,—they were calm, good men, Bishops of the Apostolic Church of God,
and strove toward righteousness. They said slowly, “It is all very
natural—it is even commendable; but the General Theological Seminary of
the Episcopal Church cannot admit a Negro.” And when that thin,
half-grotesque figure still haunted their doors, they put their hands kindly,
half sorrowfully, on his shoulders, and said, “Now,—of course,
we—we know how feel about it; but you see it is
impossible,—that is—well—it is premature. Sometime, we
trust—sincerely trust—all such distinctions will fade away; but now
the world is as it is.”
This was the temptation of Despair; and the young man fought it doggedly. Like
some grave shadow he flitted by those halls, pleading, arguing, half angrily
demanding admittance, until there came the final until men hustled
the disturber away, marked him as foolish, unreasonable, and injudicious, a
vain rebel against God’s law. And then from that Vision Splendid all the
glory faded slowly away, and left an earth gray and stern rolling on beneath a
dark despair. Even the kind hands that stretched themselves toward him from out
the depths of that dull morning seemed but parts of the purple shadows. He saw
them coldly, and asked, “Why should I strive by special grace when the
way of the world is closed to me?” All gently yet, the hands urged him
on,—the hands of young John Jay, that daring father’s daring son;
the hands of the good folk of Boston, that free city. And yet, with a way to
the priesthood of the Church open at last before him, the cloud lingered there;
and even when in old St. Paul’s the venerable Bishop raised his white
arms above the Negro deacon—even then the burden had not lifted from that
heart, for there had passed a glory from the earth.
And yet the fire through which Alexander Crummell went did not burn in vain.
Slowly and more soberly he took up again his plan of life. More critically he
studied the situation. Deep down below the slavery and servitude of the Negro
people he saw their fatal weaknesses, which long years of mistreatment had
emphasized. The dearth of strong moral character, of unbending righteousness,
he felt, was their great shortcoming, and here he would begin. He would gather
the best of his people into some little Episcopal chapel and there lead, teach,
and inspire them, till the leaven spread, till the children grew, till the
world hearkened, till—till—and then across his dream gleamed some
faint after-glow of that first fair vision of youth—only an after-glow,
for there had passed a glory from the earth.
One day—it was in 1842, and the springtide was struggling merrily with
the May winds of New England—he stood at last in his own chapel in
Providence, a priest of the Church. The days sped by, and the dark young
clergyman labored; he wrote his sermons carefully; he intoned his prayers with
a soft, earnest voice; he haunted the streets and accosted the wayfarers; he
visited the sick, and knelt beside the dying. He worked and toiled, week by
week, day by day, month by month. And yet month by month the congregation
dwindled, week by week the hollow walls echoed more sharply, day by day the
calls came fewer and fewer, and day by day the third temptation sat clearer and
still more clearly within the Veil; a temptation, as it were, bland and
smiling, with just a shade of mockery in its smooth tones. First it came
casually, in the cadence of a voice: “Oh, colored folks? Yes.” Or
perhaps more definitely: “What do you ” In voice and
gesture lay the doubt—the temptation of Doubt. How he hated it, and
stormed at it furiously! “Of course they are capable,” he cried;
“of course they can learn and strive and achieve—” and
“Of course,” added the temptation softly, “they do nothing of
the sort.” Of all the three temptations, this one struck the deepest.
Hate? He had outgrown so childish a thing. Despair? He had steeled his right
arm against it, and fought it with the vigor of determination. But to doubt the
worth of his life-work,—to doubt the destiny and capability of the race
his soul loved because it was his; to find listless squalor instead of eager
endeavor; to hear his own lips whispering, “They do not care; they cannot
know; they are dumb driven cattle,—why cast your pearls before
swine?”—this, this seemed more than man could bear; and he closed
the door, and sank upon the steps of the chancel, and cast his robe upon the
floor and writhed.
The evening sunbeams had set the dust to dancing in the gloomy chapel when he
arose. He folded his vestments, put away the hymn-books, and closed the great
Bible. He stepped out into the twilight, looked back upon the narrow little
pulpit with a weary smile, and locked the door. Then he walked briskly to the
Bishop, and told the Bishop what the Bishop already knew. “I have
failed,” he said simply. And gaining courage by the confession, he added:
“What I need is a larger constituency. There are comparatively few
Negroes here, and perhaps they are not of the best. I must go where the field
is wider, and try again.” So the Bishop sent him to Philadelphia, with a
letter to Bishop Onderdonk.
Bishop Onderdonk lived at the head of six white steps,—corpulent,
red-faced, and the author of several thrilling tracts on Apostolic Succession.
It was after dinner, and the Bishop had settled himself for a pleasant season
of contemplation, when the bell must needs ring, and there must burst in upon
the Bishop a letter and a thin, ungainly Negro. Bishop Onderdonk read the
letter hastily and frowned. Fortunately, his mind was already clear on this
point; and he cleared his brow and looked at Crummell. Then he said, slowly and
impressively: “I will receive you into this diocese on one condition: no
Negro priest can sit in my church convention, and no Negro church must ask for
representation there.”
I sometimes fancy I can see that tableau: the frail black figure, nervously
twitching his hat before the massive abdomen of Bishop Onderdonk; his
threadbare coat thrown against the dark woodwork of the bookcases, where
Fox’s “Lives of the Martyrs” nestled happily beside
“The Whole Duty of Man.” I seem to see the wide eyes of the Negro
wander past the Bishop’s broadcloth to where the swinging glass doors of
the cabinet glow in the sunlight. A little blue fly is trying to cross the
yawning keyhole. He marches briskly up to it, peers into the chasm in a
surprised sort of way, and rubs his feelers reflectively; then he essays its
depths, and, finding it bottomless, draws back again. The dark-faced priest
finds himself wondering if the fly too has faced its Valley of Humiliation, and
if it will plunge into it,—when lo! it spreads its tiny wings and buzzes
merrily across, leaving the watcher wingless and alone.
Then the full weight of his burden fell upon him. The rich walls wheeled away,
and before him lay the cold rough moor winding on through life, cut in twain by
one thick granite ridge,—here, the Valley of Humiliation; yonder, the
Valley of the Shadow of Death. And I know not which be darker,—no, not I.
But this I know: in yonder Vale of the Humble stand to-day a million swarthy
men, who willingly would
“. . . bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,”—
all this and more would they bear did they but know that this were sacrifice
and not a meaner thing. So surged the thought within that lone black breast.
The Bishop cleared his throat suggestively; then, recollecting that there was
really nothing to say, considerately said nothing, only sat tapping his foot
impatiently. But Alexander Crummell said, slowly and heavily: “I will
never enter your diocese on such terms.” And saying this, he turned and
passed into the Valley of the Shadow of Death. You might have noted only the
physical dying, the shattered frame and hacking cough; but in that soul lay
deeper death than that. He found a chapel in New York,—the church of his
father; he labored for it in poverty and starvation, scorned by his fellow
priests. Half in despair, he wandered across the sea, a beggar with
outstretched hands. Englishmen clasped them,—Wilberforce and Stanley,
Thirwell and Ingles, and even Froude and Macaulay; Sir Benjamin Brodie bade him
rest awhile at Queen’s College in Cambridge, and there he lingered,
struggling for health of body and mind, until he took his degree in ’53.
Restless still, and unsatisfied, he turned toward Africa, and for long years,
amid the spawn of the slave-smugglers, sought a new heaven and a new earth.
So the man groped for light; all this was not Life,—it was the
world-wandering of a soul in search of itself, the striving of one who vainly
sought his place in the world, ever haunted by the shadow of a death that is
more than death,—the passing of a soul that has missed its duty. Twenty
years he wandered,—twenty years and more; and yet the hard rasping
question kept gnawing within him, “What, in God’s name, am I on
earth for?” In the narrow New York parish his soul seemed cramped and
smothered. In the fine old air of the English University he heard the millions
wailing over the sea. In the wild fever-cursed swamps of West Africa he stood
helpless and alone.
You will not wonder at his weird pilgrimage,—you who in the swift whirl
of living, amid its cold paradox and marvellous vision, have fronted life and
asked its riddle face to face. And if you find that riddle hard to read,
remember that yonder black boy finds it just a little harder; if it is
difficult for you to find and face your duty, it is a shade more difficult for
him; if your heart sickens in the blood and dust of battle, remember that to
him the dust is thicker and the battle fiercer. No wonder the wanderers fall!
No wonder we point to thief and murderer, and haunting prostitute, and the
never-ending throng of unhearsed dead! The Valley of the Shadow of Death gives
few of its pilgrims back to the world.
But Alexander Crummell it gave back. Out of the temptation of Hate, and burned
by the fire of Despair, triumphant over Doubt, and steeled by Sacrifice against
Humiliation, he turned at last home across the waters, humble and strong,
gentle and determined. He bent to all the gibes and prejudices, to all hatred
and discrimination, with that rare courtesy which is the armor of pure souls.
He fought among his own, the low, the grasping, and the wicked, with that
unbending righteousness which is the sword of the just. He never faltered, he
seldom complained; he simply worked, inspiring the young, rebuking the old,
helping the weak, guiding the strong.
So he grew, and brought within his wide influence all that was best of those
who walk within the Veil. They who live without knew not nor dreamed of that
full power within, that mighty inspiration which the dull gauze of caste
decreed that most men should not know. And now that he is gone, I sweep the
Veil away and cry, Lo! the soul to whose dear memory I bring this little
tribute. I can see his face still, dark and heavy-lined beneath his snowy hair;
lighting and shading, now with inspiration for the future, now in innocent pain
at some human wickedness, now with sorrow at some hard memory from the past.
The more I met Alexander Crummell, the more I felt how much that world was
losing which knew so little of him. In another age he might have sat among the
elders of the land in purple-bordered toga; in another country mothers might
have sung him to the cradles.
He did his work,—he did it nobly and well; and yet I sorrow that here he
worked alone, with so little human sympathy. His name to-day, in this broad
land, means little, and comes to fifty million ears laden with no incense of
memory or emulation. And herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are
poor,—all men know something of poverty; not that men are
wicked,—who is good? not that men are ignorant,—what is Truth? Nay,
but that men know so little of men.
He sat one morning gazing toward the sea. He smiled and said, “The gate
is rusty on the hinges.” That night at star-rise a wind came moaning out
of the west to blow the gate ajar, and then the soul I loved fled like a flame
across the Seas, and in its seat sat Death.
I wonder where he is to-day? I wonder if in that dim world beyond, as he came
gliding in, there rose on some wan throne a King,—a dark and pierced Jew,
who knows the writhings of the earthly damned, saying, as he laid those
heart-wrung talents down, “Well done!” while round about the
morning stars sat singing.
XIII.
Of the Coming of John
What bring they ’neath the midnight,
Beside the River-sea?
They bring the human heart wherein
No nightly calm can be;
That droppeth never with the wind,
Nor drieth with the dew;
O calm it, God; thy calm is broad
To cover spirits too.
The river floweth on.
MRS. BROWNING.
Carlisle Street runs westward from the centre of Johnstown, across a great
black bridge, down a hill and up again, by little shops and meat-markets, past
single-storied homes, until suddenly it stops against a wide green lawn. It is
a broad, restful place, with two large buildings outlined against the west.
When at evening the winds come swelling from the east, and the great pall of
the city’s smoke hangs wearily above the valley, then the red west glows
like a dreamland down Carlisle Street, and, at the tolling of the supper-bell,
throws the passing forms of students in dark silhouette against the sky. Tall
and black, they move slowly by, and seem in the sinister light to flit before
the city like dim warning ghosts. Perhaps they are; for this is Wells
Institute, and these black students have few dealings with the white city
below.
And if you will notice, night after night, there is one dark form that ever
hurries last and late toward the twinkling lights of Swain Hall,—for
Jones is never on time. A long, straggling fellow he is, brown and hard-haired,
who seems to be growing straight out of his clothes, and walks with a
half-apologetic roll. He used perpetually to set the quiet dining-room into
waves of merriment, as he stole to his place after the bell had tapped for
prayers; he seemed so perfectly awkward. And yet one glance at his face made
one forgive him much,—that broad, good-natured smile in which lay no bit
of art or artifice, but seemed just bubbling good-nature and genuine
satisfaction with the world.
He came to us from Altamaha, away down there beneath the gnarled oaks of
Southeastern Georgia, where the sea croons to the sands and the sands listen
till they sink half drowned beneath the waters, rising only here and there in
long, low islands. The white folk of Altamaha voted John a good boy,—fine
plough-hand, good in the rice-fields, handy everywhere, and always good-natured
and respectful. But they shook their heads when his mother wanted to send him
off to school. “It’ll spoil him,—ruin him,” they said;
and they talked as though they knew. But full half the black folk followed him
proudly to the station, and carried his queer little trunk and many bundles.
And there they shook and shook hands, and the girls kissed him shyly and the
boys clapped him on the back. So the train came, and he pinched his little
sister lovingly, and put his great arms about his mother’s neck, and then
was away with a puff and a roar into the great yellow world that flamed and
flared about the doubtful pilgrim. Up the coast they hurried, past the squares
and palmettos of Savannah, through the cotton-fields and through the weary
night, to Millville, and came with the morning to the noise and bustle of
Johnstown.
And they that stood behind, that morning in Altamaha, and watched the train as
it noisily bore playmate and brother and son away to the world, had thereafter
one ever-recurring word,—“When John comes.” Then what parties
were to be, and what speakings in the churches; what new furniture in the front
room,—perhaps even a new front room; and there would be a new
schoolhouse, with John as teacher; and then perhaps a big wedding; all this and
more—when John comes. But the white people shook their heads.
At first he was coming at Christmas-time,—but the vacation proved too
short; and then, the next summer,—but times were hard and schooling
costly, and so, instead, he worked in Johnstown. And so it drifted to the next
summer, and the next,—till playmates scattered, and mother grew gray, and
sister went up to the Judge’s kitchen to work. And still the legend
lingered,—“When John comes.”
Up at the Judge’s they rather liked this refrain; for they too had a
John—a fair-haired, smooth-faced boy, who had played many a long
summer’s day to its close with his darker namesake. “Yes, sir! John
is at Princeton, sir,” said the broad-shouldered gray-haired Judge every
morning as he marched down to the post-office. “Showing the Yankees what
a Southern gentleman can do,” he added; and strode home again with his
letters and papers. Up at the great pillared house they lingered long over the
Princeton letter,—the Judge and his frail wife, his sister and growing
daughters. “It’ll make a man of him,” said the Judge,
“college is the place.” And then he asked the shy little waitress,
“Well, Jennie, how’s your John?” and added reflectively,
“Too bad, too bad your mother sent him off—it will spoil
him.” And the waitress wondered.
Thus in the far-away Southern village the world lay waiting, half consciously,
the coming of two young men, and dreamed in an inarticulate way of new things
that would be done and new thoughts that all would think. And yet it was
singular that few thought of two Johns,—for the black folk thought of one
John, and he was black; and the white folk thought of another John, and he was
white. And neither world thought the other world’s thought, save with a
vague unrest.
Up in Johnstown, at the Institute, we were long puzzled at the case of John
Jones. For a long time the clay seemed unfit for any sort of moulding. He was
loud and boisterous, always laughing and singing, and never able to work
consecutively at anything. He did not know how to study; he had no idea of
thoroughness; and with his tardiness, carelessness, and appalling good-humor,
we were sore perplexed. One night we sat in faculty-meeting, worried and
serious; for Jones was in trouble again. This last escapade was too much, and
so we solemnly voted “that Jones, on account of repeated disorder and
inattention to work, be suspended for the rest of the term.”
It seemed to us that the first time life ever struck Jones as a really serious
thing was when the Dean told him he must leave school. He stared at the
gray-haired man blankly, with great eyes. “Why,—why,” he
faltered, “but—I haven’t graduated!” Then the Dean
slowly and clearly explained, reminding him of the tardiness and the
carelessness, of the poor lessons and neglected work, of the noise and
disorder, until the fellow hung his head in confusion. Then he said quickly,
“But you won’t tell mammy and sister,—you won’t write
mammy, now will you? For if you won’t I’ll go out into the city and
work, and come back next term and show you something.” So the Dean
promised faithfully, and John shouldered his little trunk, giving neither word
nor look to the giggling boys, and walked down Carlisle Street to the great
city, with sober eyes and a set and serious face.
Perhaps we imagined it, but someway it seemed to us that the serious look that
crept over his boyish face that afternoon never left it again. When he came
back to us he went to work with all his rugged strength. It was a hard
struggle, for things did not come easily to him,—few crowding memories of
early life and teaching came to help him on his new way; but all the world
toward which he strove was of his own building, and he builded slow and hard.
As the light dawned lingeringly on his new creations, he sat rapt and silent
before the vision, or wandered alone over the green campus peering through and
beyond the world of men into a world of thought. And the thoughts at times
puzzled him sorely; he could not see just why the circle was not square, and
carried it out fifty-six decimal places one midnight,—would have gone
further, indeed, had not the matron rapped for lights out. He caught terrible
colds lying on his back in the meadows of nights, trying to think out the solar
system; he had grave doubts as to the ethics of the Fall of Rome, and strongly
suspected the Germans of being thieves and rascals, despite his textbooks; he
pondered long over every new Greek word, and wondered why this meant that and
why it couldn’t mean something else, and how it must have felt to think
all things in Greek. So he thought and puzzled along for himself,—pausing
perplexed where others skipped merrily, and walking steadily through the
difficulties where the rest stopped and surrendered.
Thus he grew in body and soul, and with him his clothes seemed to grow and
arrange themselves; coat sleeves got longer, cuffs appeared, and collars got
less soiled. Now and then his boots shone, and a new dignity crept into his
walk. And we who saw daily a new thoughtfulness growing in his eyes began to
expect something of this plodding boy. Thus he passed out of the preparatory
school into college, and we who watched him felt four more years of change,
which almost transformed the tall, grave man who bowed to us commencement
morning. He had left his queer thought-world and come back to a world of motion
and of men. He looked now for the first time sharply about him, and wondered he
had seen so little before. He grew slowly to feel almost for the first time the
Veil that lay between him and the white world; he first noticed now the
oppression that had not seemed oppression before, differences that erstwhile
seemed natural, restraints and slights that in his boyhood days had gone
unnoticed or been greeted with a laugh. He felt angry now when men did not call
him “Mister,” he clenched his hands at the “Jim Crow”
cars, and chafed at the color-line that hemmed in him and his. A tinge of
sarcasm crept into his speech, and a vague bitterness into his life; and he sat
long hours wondering and planning a way around these crooked things. Daily he
found himself shrinking from the choked and narrow life of his native town. And
yet he always planned to go back to Altamaha,—always planned to work
there. Still, more and more as the day approached he hesitated with a nameless
dread; and even the day after graduation he seized with eagerness the offer of
the Dean to send him North with the quartette during the summer vacation, to
sing for the Institute. A breath of air before the plunge, he said to himself
in half apology.
It was a bright September afternoon, and the streets of New York were brilliant
with moving men. They reminded John of the sea, as he sat in the square and
watched them, so changelessly changing, so bright and dark, so grave and gay.
He scanned their rich and faultless clothes, the way they carried their hands,
the shape of their hats; he peered into the hurrying carriages. Then, leaning
back with a sigh, he said, “This is the World.” The notion suddenly
seized him to see where the world was going; since many of the richer and
brighter seemed hurrying all one way. So when a tall, light-haired young man
and a little talkative lady came by, he rose half hesitatingly and followed
them. Up the street they went, past stores and gay shops, across a broad
square, until with a hundred others they entered the high portal of a great
building.
He was pushed toward the ticket-office with the others, and felt in his pocket
for the new five-dollar bill he had hoarded. There seemed really no time for
hesitation, so he drew it bravely out, passed it to the busy clerk, and
received simply a ticket but no change. When at last he realized that he had
paid five dollars to enter he knew not what, he stood stockstill amazed.
“Be careful,” said a low voice behind him; “you must not
lynch the colored gentleman simply because he’s in your way,” and a
girl looked up roguishly into the eyes of her fair-haired escort. A shade of
annoyance passed over the escort’s face. “You not
understand us at the South,” he said half impatiently, as if continuing
an argument. “With all your professions, one never sees in the North so
cordial and intimate relations between white and black as are everyday
occurrences with us. Why, I remember my closest playfellow in boyhood was a
little Negro named after me, and surely no two,—!” The
man stopped short and flushed to the roots of his hair, for there directly
beside his reserved orchestra chairs sat the Negro he had stumbled over in the
hallway. He hesitated and grew pale with anger, called the usher and gave him
his card, with a few peremptory words, and slowly sat down. The lady deftly
changed the subject.
All this John did not see, for he sat in a half-daze minding the scene about
him; the delicate beauty of the hall, the faint perfume, the moving myriad of
men, the rich clothing and low hum of talking seemed all a part of a world so
different from his, so strangely more beautiful than anything he had known,
that he sat in dreamland, and started when, after a hush, rose high and clear
the music of Lohengrin’s swan. The infinite beauty of the wail lingered
and swept through every muscle of his frame, and put it all a-tune. He closed
his eyes and grasped the elbows of the chair, touching unwittingly the
lady’s arm. And the lady drew away. A deep longing swelled in all his
heart to rise with that clear music out of the dirt and dust of that low life
that held him prisoned and befouled. If he could only live up in the free air
where birds sang and setting suns had no touch of blood! Who had called him to
be the slave and butt of all? And if he had called, what right had he to call
when a world like this lay open before men?
Then the movement changed, and fuller, mightier harmony swelled away. He looked
thoughtfully across the hall, and wondered why the beautiful gray-haired woman
looked so listless, and what the little man could be whispering about. He would
not like to be listless and idle, he thought, for he felt with the music the
movement of power within him. If he but had some master-work, some
life-service, hard,—aye, bitter hard, but without the cringing and
sickening servility, without the cruel hurt that hardened his heart and soul.
When at last a soft sorrow crept across the violins, there came to him the
vision of a far-off home, the great eyes of his sister, and the dark drawn face
of his mother. And his heart sank below the waters, even as the sea-sand sinks
by the shores of Altamaha, only to be lifted aloft again with that last
ethereal wail of the swan that quivered and faded away into the sky.
It left John sitting so silent and rapt that he did not for some time notice
the usher tapping him lightly on the shoulder and saying politely, “Will
you step this way, please, sir?” A little surprised, he arose quickly at
the last tap, and, turning to leave his seat, looked full into the face of the
fair-haired young man. For the first time the young man recognized his dark
boyhood playmate, and John knew that it was the Judge’s son. The White
John started, lifted his hand, and then froze into his chair; the black John
smiled lightly, then grimly, and followed the usher down the aisle. The manager
was sorry, very, very sorry,—but he explained that some mistake had been
made in selling the gentleman a seat already disposed of; he would refund the
money, of course,—and indeed felt the matter keenly, and so forth,
and—before he had finished John was gone, walking hurriedly across the
square and down the broad streets, and as he passed the park he buttoned his
coat and said, “John Jones, you’re a natural-born fool.” Then
he went to his lodgings and wrote a letter, and tore it up; he wrote another,
and threw it in the fire. Then he seized a scrap of paper and wrote:
“Dear Mother and Sister—I am coming—John.”
“Perhaps,” said John, as he settled himself on the train,
“perhaps I am to blame myself in struggling against my manifest destiny
simply because it looks hard and unpleasant. Here is my duty to Altamaha plain
before me; perhaps they’ll let me help settle the Negro problems
there,—perhaps they won’t. ‘I will go in to the King, which
is not according to the law; and if I perish, I perish.’” And then
he mused and dreamed, and planned a life-work; and the train flew south.
Down in Altamaha, after seven long years, all the world knew John was coming.
The homes were scrubbed and scoured,—above all, one; the gardens and
yards had an unwonted trimness, and Jennie bought a new gingham. With some
finesse and negotiation, all the dark Methodists and Presbyterians were induced
to join in a monster welcome at the Baptist Church; and as the day drew near,
warm discussions arose on every corner as to the exact extent and nature of
John’s accomplishments. It was noontide on a gray and cloudy day when he
came. The black town flocked to the depot, with a little of the white at the
edges,—a happy throng, with “Good-mawnings” and
“Howdys” and laughing and joking and jostling. Mother sat yonder in
the window watching; but sister Jennie stood on the platform, nervously
fingering her dress, tall and lithe, with soft brown skin and loving eyes
peering from out a tangled wilderness of hair. John rose gloomily as the train
stopped, for he was thinking of the “Jim Crow” car; he stepped to
the platform, and paused: a little dingy station, a black crowd gaudy and
dirty, a half-mile of dilapidated shanties along a straggling ditch of mud. An
overwhelming sense of the sordidness and narrowness of it all seized him; he
looked in vain for his mother, kissed coldly the tall, strange girl who called
him brother, spoke a short, dry word here and there; then, lingering neither
for handshaking nor gossip, started silently up the street, raising his hat
merely to the last eager old aunty, to her open-mouthed astonishment. The
people were distinctly bewildered. This silent, cold man,—was this John?
Where was his smile and hearty hand-grasp? “’Peared kind o’
down in the mouf,” said the Methodist preacher thoughtfully.
“Seemed monstus stuck up,” complained a Baptist sister. But the
white postmaster from the edge of the crowd expressed the opinion of his folks
plainly. “That damn Nigger,” said he, as he shouldered the mail and
arranged his tobacco, “has gone North and got plum full o’ fool
notions; but they won’t work in Altamaha.” And the crowd melted
away.
The meeting of welcome at the Baptist Church was a failure. Rain spoiled the
barbecue, and thunder turned the milk in the ice-cream. When the speaking came
at night, the house was crowded to overflowing. The three preachers had
especially prepared themselves, but somehow John’s manner seemed to throw
a blanket over everything,—he seemed so cold and preoccupied, and had so
strange an air of restraint that the Methodist brother could not warm up to his
theme and elicited not a single “Amen”; the Presbyterian prayer was
but feebly responded to, and even the Baptist preacher, though he wakened faint
enthusiasm, got so mixed up in his favorite sentence that he had to close it by
stopping fully fifteen minutes sooner than he meant. The people moved uneasily
in their seats as John rose to reply. He spoke slowly and methodically. The
age, he said, demanded new ideas; we were far different from those men of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,—with broader ideas of human
brotherhood and destiny. Then he spoke of the rise of charity and popular
education, and particularly of the spread of wealth and work. The question was,
then, he added reflectively, looking at the low discolored ceiling, what part
the Negroes of this land would take in the striving of the new century. He
sketched in vague outline the new Industrial School that might rise among these
pines, he spoke in detail of the charitable and philanthropic work that might
be organized, of money that might be saved for banks and business. Finally he
urged unity, and deprecated especially religious and denominational bickering.
“To-day,” he said, with a smile, “the world cares little
whether a man be Baptist or Methodist, or indeed a churchman at all, so long as
he is good and true. What difference does it make whether a man be baptized in
river or washbowl, or not at all? Let’s leave all that littleness, and
look higher.” Then, thinking of nothing else, he slowly sat down. A
painful hush seized that crowded mass. Little had they understood of what he
said, for he spoke an unknown tongue, save the last word about baptism; that
they knew, and they sat very still while the clock ticked. Then at last a low
suppressed snarl came from the Amen corner, and an old bent man arose, walked
over the seats, and climbed straight up into the pulpit. He was wrinkled and
black, with scant gray and tufted hair; his voice and hands shook as with
palsy; but on his face lay the intense rapt look of the religious fanatic. He
seized the Bible with his rough, huge hands; twice he raised it inarticulate,
and then fairly burst into words, with rude and awful eloquence. He quivered,
swayed, and bent; then rose aloft in perfect majesty, till the people moaned
and wept, wailed and shouted, and a wild shrieking arose from the corners where
all the pent-up feeling of the hour gathered itself and rushed into the air.
John never knew clearly what the old man said; he only felt himself held up to
scorn and scathing denunciation for trampling on the true Religion, and he
realized with amazement that all unknowingly he had put rough, rude hands on
something this little world held sacred. He arose silently, and passed out into
the night. Down toward the sea he went, in the fitful starlight, half conscious
of the girl who followed timidly after him. When at last he stood upon the
bluff, he turned to his little sister and looked upon her sorrowfully,
remembering with sudden pain how little thought he had given her. He put his
arm about her and let her passion of tears spend itself on his shoulder.
Long they stood together, peering over the gray unresting water.
“John,” she said, “does it make every one—unhappy when
they study and learn lots of things?”
He paused and smiled. “I am afraid it does,” he said.
“And, John, are you glad you studied?”
“Yes,” came the answer, slowly but positively.
She watched the flickering lights upon the sea, and said thoughtfully, “I
wish I was unhappy,—and—and,” putting both arms about his
neck, “I think I am, a little, John.”
It was several days later that John walked up to the Judge’s house to ask
for the privilege of teaching the Negro school. The Judge himself met him at
the front door, stared a little hard at him, and said brusquely, “Go
’round to the kitchen door, John, and wait.” Sitting on the kitchen
steps, John stared at the corn, thoroughly perplexed. What on earth had come
over him? Every step he made offended some one. He had come to save his people,
and before he left the depot he had hurt them. He sought to teach them at the
church, and had outraged their deepest feelings. He had schooled himself to be
respectful to the Judge, and then blundered into his front door. And all the
time he had meant right,—and yet, and yet, somehow he found it so hard
and strange to fit his old surroundings again, to find his place in the world
about him. He could not remember that he used to have any difficulty in the
past, when life was glad and gay. The world seemed smooth and easy then.
Perhaps,—but his sister came to the kitchen door just then and said the
Judge awaited him.
The Judge sat in the dining-room amid his morning’s mail, and he did not
ask John to sit down. He plunged squarely into the business.
“You’ve come for the school, I suppose. Well John, I want to speak
to you plainly. You know I’m a friend to your people. I’ve helped
you and your family, and would have done more if you hadn’t got the
notion of going off. Now I like the colored people, and sympathize with all
their reasonable aspirations; but you and I both know, John, that in this
country the Negro must remain subordinate, and can never expect to be the equal
of white men. In their place, your people can be honest and respectful; and God
knows, I’ll do what I can to help them. But when they want to reverse
nature, and rule white men, and marry white women, and sit in my parlor, then,
by God! we’ll hold them under if we have to lynch every Nigger in the
land. Now, John, the question is, are you, with your education and Northern
notions, going to accept the situation and teach the darkies to be faithful
servants and laborers as your fathers were,—I knew your father, John, he
belonged to my brother, and he was a good Nigger. Well—well, are you
going to be like him, or are you going to try to put fool ideas of rising and
equality into these folks’ heads, and make them discontented and
unhappy?”
“I am going to accept the situation, Judge Henderson,” answered
John, with a brevity that did not escape the keen old man. He hesitated a
moment, and then said shortly, “Very well,—we’ll try you
awhile. Good-morning.”
It was a full month after the opening of the Negro school that the other John
came home, tall, gay, and headstrong. The mother wept, the sisters sang. The
whole white town was glad. A proud man was the Judge, and it was a goodly sight
to see the two swinging down Main Street together. And yet all did not go
smoothly between them, for the younger man could not and did not veil his
contempt for the little town, and plainly had his heart set on New York. Now
the one cherished ambition of the Judge was to see his son mayor of Altamaha,
representative to the legislature, and—who could say?—governor of
Georgia. So the argument often waxed hot between them. “Good heavens,
father,” the younger man would say after dinner, as he lighted a cigar
and stood by the fireplace, “you surely don’t expect a young fellow
like me to settle down permanently in this—this God-forgotten town with
nothing but mud and Negroes?” “ did,” the Judge would
answer laconically; and on this particular day it seemed from the gathering
scowl that he was about to add something more emphatic, but neighbors had
already begun to drop in to admire his son, and the conversation drifted.
“Heah that John is livenin’ things up at the darky school,”
volunteered the postmaster, after a pause.
“What now?” asked the Judge, sharply.
“Oh, nothin’ in particulah,—just his almighty air and uppish
ways. B’lieve I did heah somethin’ about his givin’ talks on
the French Revolution, equality, and such like. He’s what I call a
dangerous Nigger.”
“Have you heard him say anything out of the way?”
“Why, no,—but Sally, our girl, told my wife a lot of rot. Then,
too, I don’t need to heah: a Nigger what won’t say
‘sir’ to a white man, or—”
“Who is this John?” interrupted the son.
“Why, it’s little black John, Peggy’s son,—your old
playfellow.”
The young man’s face flushed angrily, and then he laughed.
“Oh,” said he, “it’s the darky that tried to force
himself into a seat beside the lady I was escorting—”
But Judge Henderson waited to hear no more. He had been nettled all day, and
now at this he rose with a half-smothered oath, took his hat and cane, and
walked straight to the schoolhouse.
For John, it had been a long, hard pull to get things started in the rickety
old shanty that sheltered his school. The Negroes were rent into factions for
and against him, the parents were careless, the children irregular and dirty,
and books, pencils, and slates largely missing. Nevertheless, he struggled
hopefully on, and seemed to see at last some glimmering of dawn. The attendance
was larger and the children were a shade cleaner this week. Even the booby
class in reading showed a little comforting progress. So John settled himself
with renewed patience this afternoon.
“Now, Mandy,” he said cheerfully, “that’s better; but
you mustn’t chop your words up so:
‘If—the-man—goes.’ Why, your little brother even
wouldn’t tell a story that way, now would he?”
“Naw, suh, he cain’t talk.”
“All right; now let’s try again: ‘If the man—’
“John!”
The whole school started in surprise, and the teacher half arose, as the red,
angry face of the Judge appeared in the open doorway.
“John, this school is closed. You children can go home and get to work.
The white people of Altamaha are not spending their money on black folks to
have their heads crammed with impudence and lies. Clear out! I’ll lock
the door myself.”
Up at the great pillared house the tall young son wandered aimlessly about
after his father’s abrupt departure. In the house there was little to
interest him; the books were old and stale, the local newspaper flat, and the
women had retired with headaches and sewing. He tried a nap, but it was too
warm. So he sauntered out into the fields, complaining disconsolately,
“Good Lord! how long will this imprisonment last!” He was not a bad
fellow,—just a little spoiled and self-indulgent, and as headstrong as
his proud father. He seemed a young man pleasant to look upon, as he sat on the
great black stump at the edge of the pines idly swinging his legs and smoking.
“Why, there isn’t even a girl worth getting up a respectable
flirtation with,” he growled. Just then his eye caught a tall, willowy
figure hurrying toward him on the narrow path. He looked with interest at
first, and then burst into a laugh as he said, “Well, I declare, if it
isn’t Jennie, the little brown kitchen-maid! Why, I never noticed before
what a trim little body she is. Hello, Jennie! Why, you haven’t kissed me
since I came home,” he said gaily. The young girl stared at him in
surprise and confusion,—faltered something inarticulate, and attempted to
pass. But a wilful mood had seized the young idler, and he caught at her arm.
Frightened, she slipped by; and half mischievously he turned and ran after her
through the tall pines.
Yonder, toward the sea, at the end of the path, came John slowly, with his head
down. He had turned wearily homeward from the schoolhouse; then, thinking to
shield his mother from the blow, started to meet his sister as she came from
work and break the news of his dismissal to her. “I’ll go
away,” he said slowly; “I’ll go away and find work, and send
for them. I cannot live here longer.” And then the fierce, buried anger
surged up into his throat. He waved his arms and hurried wildly up the path.
The great brown sea lay silent. The air scarce breathed. The dying day bathed
the twisted oaks and mighty pines in black and gold. There came from the wind
no warning, not a whisper from the cloudless sky. There was only a black man
hurrying on with an ache in his heart, seeing neither sun nor sea, but starting
as from a dream at the frightened cry that woke the pines, to see his dark
sister struggling in the arms of a tall and fair-haired man.
He said not a word, but, seizing a fallen limb, struck him with all the pent-up
hatred of his great black arm, and the body lay white and still beneath the
pines, all bathed in sunshine and in blood. John looked at it dreamily, then
walked back to the house briskly, and said in a soft voice, “Mammy,
I’m going away—I’m going to be free.”
She gazed at him dimly and faltered, “No’th, honey, is yo’
gwine No’th agin?”
He looked out where the North Star glistened pale above the waters, and said,
“Yes, mammy, I’m going—North.”
Then, without another word, he went out into the narrow lane, up by the
straight pines, to the same winding path, and seated himself on the great black
stump, looking at the blood where the body had lain. Yonder in the gray past he
had played with that dead boy, romping together under the solemn trees. The
night deepened; he thought of the boys at Johnstown. He wondered how Brown had
turned out, and Carey? And Jones,—Jones? Why, he was Jones, and he
wondered what they would all say when they knew, when they knew, in that great
long dining-room with its hundreds of merry eyes. Then as the sheen of the
starlight stole over him, he thought of the gilded ceiling of that vast concert
hall, heard stealing toward him the faint sweet music of the swan. Hark! was it
music, or the hurry and shouting of men? Yes, surely! Clear and high the faint
sweet melody rose and fluttered like a living thing, so that the very earth
trembled as with the tramp of horses and murmur of angry men.
He leaned back and smiled toward the sea, whence rose the strange melody, away
from the dark shadows where lay the noise of horses galloping, galloping on.
With an effort he roused himself, bent forward, and looked steadily down the
pathway, softly humming the “Song of the Bride,”—
“Freudig geführt, ziehet dahin.”
Amid the trees in the dim morning twilight he watched their shadows dancing and
heard their horses thundering toward him, until at last they came sweeping like
a storm, and he saw in front that haggard white-haired man, whose eyes flashed
red with fury. Oh, how he pitied him,—pitied him,—and wondered if
he had the coiling twisted rope. Then, as the storm burst round him, he rose
slowly to his feet and turned his closed eyes toward the Sea.
And the world whistled in his ears.
XIV.
Of the Sorrow Songs
I walk through the churchyard
To lay this body down;
I know moon-rise, I know star-rise;
I walk in the moonlight, I walk in the starlight;
I’ll lie in the grave and stretch out my arms,
I’ll go to judgment in the evening of the day,
And my soul and thy soul shall meet that day,
When I lay this body down.
NEGRO SONG.
They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days—Sorrow
Songs—for they were weary at heart. And so before each thought that I
have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird
old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men. Ever since I was a
child these songs have stirred me strangely. They came out of the South unknown
to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine. Then in
after years when I came to Nashville I saw the great temple builded of these
songs towering over the pale city. To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the
songs themselves, and its bricks were red with the blood and dust of toil. Out
of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full
of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past.
Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself
stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself
in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the
Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not
simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of
human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been,
and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and
misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual
heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.
Away back in the thirties the melody of these slave songs stirred the nation,
but the songs were soon half forgotten. Some, like “Near the lake where
drooped the willow,” passed into current airs and their source was
forgotten; others were caricatured on the “minstrel” stage and
their memory died away. Then in war-time came the singular Port Royal
experiment after the capture of Hilton Head, and perhaps for the first time the
North met the Southern slave face to face and heart to heart with no third
witness. The Sea Islands of the Carolinas, where they met, were filled with a
black folk of primitive type, touched and moulded less by the world about them
than any others outside the Black Belt. Their appearance was uncouth, their
language funny, but their hearts were human and their singing stirred men with
a mighty power. Thomas Wentworth Higginson hastened to tell of these songs, and
Miss McKim and others urged upon the world their rare beauty. But the world
listened only half credulously until the Fisk Jubilee Singers sang the slave
songs so deeply into the world’s heart that it can never wholly forget
them again.
There was once a blacksmith’s son born at Cadiz, New York, who in the
changes of time taught school in Ohio and helped defend Cincinnati from Kirby
Smith. Then he fought at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and finally served in
the Freedmen’s Bureau at Nashville. Here he formed a Sunday-school class
of black children in 1866, and sang with them and taught them to sing. And then
they taught him to sing, and when once the glory of the Jubilee songs passed
into the soul of George L. White, he knew his life-work was to let those
Negroes sing to the world as they had sung to him. So in 1871 the pilgrimage of
the Fisk Jubilee Singers began. North to Cincinnati they rode,—four
half-clothed black boys and five girl-women,—led by a man with a cause
and a purpose. They stopped at Wilberforce, the oldest of Negro schools, where
a black bishop blessed them. Then they went, fighting cold and starvation, shut
out of hotels, and cheerfully sneered at, ever northward; and ever the magic of
their song kept thrilling hearts, until a burst of applause in the
Congregational Council at Oberlin revealed them to the world. They came to New
York and Henry Ward Beecher dared to welcome them, even though the metropolitan
dailies sneered at his “Nigger Minstrels.” So their songs conquered
till they sang across the land and across the sea, before Queen and Kaiser, in
Scotland and Ireland, Holland and Switzerland. Seven years they sang, and
brought back a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to found Fisk University.
Since their day they have been imitated—sometimes well, by the singers of
Hampton and Atlanta, sometimes ill, by straggling quartettes. Caricature has
sought again to spoil the quaint beauty of the music, and has filled the air
with many debased melodies which vulgar ears scarce know from the real. But the
true Negro folk-song still lives in the hearts of those who have heard them
truly sung and in the hearts of the Negro people.
What are these songs, and what do they mean? I know little of music and can say
nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and knowing them, I
know that these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world.
They tell us in these eager days that life was joyous to the black slave,
careless and happy. I can easily believe this of some, of many. But not all the
past South, though it rose from the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching
witness of these songs. They are the music of an unhappy people, of the
children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced
longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.
The songs are indeed the siftings of centuries; the music is far more ancient
than the words, and in it we can trace here and there signs of development. My
grandfather’s grandmother was seized by an evil Dutch trader two
centuries ago; and coming to the valleys of the Hudson and Housatonic, black,
little, and lithe, she shivered and shrank in the harsh north winds, looked
longingly at the hills, and often crooned a heathen melody to the child between
her knees, thus:
The child sang it to his children and they to their children’s children,
and so two hundred years it has travelled down to us and we sing it to our
children, knowing as little as our fathers what its words may mean, but knowing
well the meaning of its music.
This was primitive African music; it may be seen in larger form in the strange
chant which heralds “The Coming of John”:
“You may bury me in the East,
You may bury me in the West,
But I’ll hear the trumpet sound in that morning,”
—the voice of exile.
Ten master songs, more or less, one may pluck from the forest of melody-songs
of undoubted Negro origin and wide popular currency, and songs peculiarly
characteristic of the slave. One of these I have just mentioned. Another whose
strains begin this book is “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve
seen.” When, struck with a sudden poverty, the United States refused to
fulfill its promises of land to the freedmen, a brigadier-general went down to
the Sea Islands to carry the news. An old woman on the outskirts of the throng
began singing this song; all the mass joined with her, swaying. And the soldier
wept.
The third song is the cradle-song of death which all men
know,—“Swing low, sweet chariot,”—whose bars begin the
life story of “Alexander Crummell.” Then there is the song of many
waters, “Roll, Jordan, roll,” a mighty chorus with minor cadences.
There were many songs of the fugitive like that which opens “The Wings of
Atalanta,” and the more familiar “Been a-listening.” The
seventh is the song of the End and the Beginning—“My Lord, what a
mourning! when the stars begin to fall”; a strain of this is placed
before “The Dawn of Freedom.” The song of groping—“My
way’s cloudy”—begins “The Meaning of Progress”;
the ninth is the song of this chapter—“Wrestlin’ Jacob, the
day is a-breaking,”—a paean of hopeful strife. The last master song
is the song of songs—“Steal away,”—sprung from
“The Faith of the Fathers.”
There are many others of the Negro folk-songs as striking and characteristic as
these, as, for instance, the three strains in the third, eighth, and ninth
chapters; and others I am sure could easily make a selection on more scientific
principles. There are, too, songs that seem to be a step removed from the more
primitive types: there is the maze-like medley, “Bright sparkles,”
one phrase of which heads “The Black Belt”; the Easter carol,
“Dust, dust and ashes”; the dirge, “My mother’s took
her flight and gone home”; and that burst of melody hovering over
“The Passing of the First-Born”—“I hope my mother will
be there in that beautiful world on high.”
These represent a third step in the development of the slave song, of which
“You may bury me in the East” is the first, and songs like
“March on” (chapter six) and “Steal away” are the
second. The first is African music, the second Afro-American, while the third
is a blending of Negro music with the music heard in the foster land. The
result is still distinctively Negro and the method of blending original, but
the elements are both Negro and Caucasian. One might go further and find a
fourth step in this development, where the songs of white America have been
distinctively influenced by the slave songs or have incorporated whole phrases
of Negro melody, as “Swanee River” and “Old Black Joe.”
Side by side, too, with the growth has gone the debasements and
imitations—the Negro “minstrel” songs, many of the
“gospel” hymns, and some of the contemporary “coon”
songs,—a mass of music in which the novice may easily lose himself and
never find the real Negro melodies.
In these songs, I have said, the slave spoke to the world. Such a message is
naturally veiled and half articulate. Words and music have lost each other and
new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theology have displaced the older
sentiment. Once in a while we catch a strange word of an unknown tongue, as the
“Mighty Myo,” which figures as a river of death; more often slight
words or mere doggerel are joined to music of singular sweetness. Purely
secular songs are few in number, partly because many of them were turned into
hymns by a change of words, partly because the frolics were seldom heard by the
stranger, and the music less often caught. Of nearly all the songs, however,
the music is distinctly sorrowful. The ten master songs I have mentioned tell
in word and music of trouble and exile, of strife and hiding; they grope toward
some unseen power and sigh for rest in the End.
The words that are left to us are not without interest, and, cleared of evident
dross, they conceal much of real poetry and meaning beneath conventional
theology and unmeaning rhapsody. Like all primitive folk, the slave stood near
to Nature’s heart. Life was a “rough and rolling sea” like
the brown Atlantic of the Sea Islands; the “Wilderness” was the
home of God, and the “lonesome valley” led to the way of life.
“Winter’ll soon be over,” was the picture of life and death
to a tropical imagination. The sudden wild thunderstorms of the South awed and
impressed the Negroes,—at times the rumbling seemed to them
“mournful,” at times imperious:
“My Lord calls me,
He calls me by the thunder,
The trumpet sounds it in my soul.”
The monotonous toil and exposure is painted in many words. One sees the
ploughmen in the hot, moist furrow, singing:
“Dere’s no rain to wet you,
Dere’s no sun to burn you,
Oh, push along, believer,
I want to go home.”
The bowed and bent old man cries, with thrice-repeated wail:
“O Lord, keep me from sinking down,”
and he rebukes the devil of doubt who can whisper:
“Jesus is dead and God’s gone away.”
Yet the soul-hunger is there, the restlessness of the savage, the wail of the
wanderer, and the plaint is put in one little phrase:
Over the inner thoughts of the slaves and their relations one with another the
shadow of fear ever hung, so that we get but glimpses here and there, and also
with them, eloquent omissions and silences. Mother and child are sung, but
seldom father; fugitive and weary wanderer call for pity and affection, but
there is little of wooing and wedding; the rocks and the mountains are well
known, but home is unknown. Strange blending of love and helplessness sings
through the refrain:
“Yonder’s my ole mudder,
Been waggin’ at de hill so long;
’Bout time she cross over,
Git home bime-by.”
Elsewhere comes the cry of the “motherless” and the
“Farewell, farewell, my only child.”
Love-songs are scarce and fall into two categories—the frivolous and
light, and the sad. Of deep successful love there is ominous silence, and in
one of the oldest of these songs there is a depth of history and meaning:
A black woman said of the song, “It can’t be sung without a full
heart and a troubled sperrit.” The same voice sings here that sings in
the German folk-song:
“Jetz Geh i’ an’s brunele, trink’ aber net.”
Of death the Negro showed little fear, but talked of it familiarly and even
fondly as simply a crossing of the waters, perhaps—who knows?—back
to his ancient forests again. Later days transfigured his fatalism, and amid
the dust and dirt the toiler sang:
“Dust, dust and ashes, fly over my grave,
But the Lord shall bear my spirit home.”
The things evidently borrowed from the surrounding world undergo characteristic
change when they enter the mouth of the slave. Especially is this true of Bible
phrases. “Weep, O captive daughter of Zion,” is quaintly turned
into “Zion, weep-a-low,” and the wheels of Ezekiel are turned every
way in the mystic dreaming of the slave, till he says:
“There’s a little wheel a-turnin’ in-a-my heart.”
As in olden time, the words of these hymns were improvised by some leading
minstrel of the religious band. The circumstances of the gathering, however,
the rhythm of the songs, and the limitations of allowable thought, confined the
poetry for the most part to single or double lines, and they seldom were
expanded to quatrains or longer tales, although there are some few examples of
sustained efforts, chiefly paraphrases of the Bible. Three short series of
verses have always attracted me,—the one that heads this chapter, of one
line of which Thomas Wentworth Higginson has fittingly said, “Never, it
seems to me, since man first lived and suffered was his infinite longing for
peace uttered more plaintively.” The second and third are descriptions of
the Last Judgment,—the one a late improvisation, with some traces of
outside influence:
“Oh, the stars in the elements are falling,
And the moon drips away into blood,
And the ransomed of the Lord are returning unto God,
Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
And the other earlier and homelier picture from the low coast lands:
“Michael, haul the boat ashore,
Then you’ll hear the horn they blow,
Then you’ll hear the trumpet sound,
Trumpet sound the world around,
Trumpet sound for rich and poor,
Trumpet sound the Jubilee,
Trumpet sound for you and me.”
Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith
in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often
to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a
faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world
beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime,
somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins. Is such a
hope justified? Do the Sorrow Songs sing true?
The silently growing assumption of this age is that the probation of races is
past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven inefficiency and not
worth the saving. Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent
toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men. A thousand years ago such an
assumption, easily possible, would have made it difficult for the Teuton to
prove his right to life. Two thousand years ago such dogmatism, readily
welcome, would have scouted the idea of blond races ever leading civilization.
So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress,
the meaning of “swift” and “slow” in human doing, and
the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the
shores of science. Why should Æschylus have sung two thousand years before
Shakespeare was born? Why has civilization flourished in Europe, and flickered,
flamed, and died in Africa? So long as the world stands meekly dumb before such
questions, shall this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices
by denying freedom of opportunity to those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the
Seats of the Mighty?
Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here
we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story
and song—soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land;
the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and
lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than
your weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit. Around us
the history of the land has centred for thrice a hundred years; out of the
nation’s heart we have called all that was best to throttle and subdue
all that was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice, have billowed over
this people, and they have found peace only in the altars of the God of Right.
Nor has our gift of the Spirit been merely passive. Actively we have woven
ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation,—we fought their
battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation
after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not
Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse. Our song,
our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in
blood-brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and
striving? Would America have been America without her Negro people?
Even so is the hope that sang in the songs of my fathers well sung. If
somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful
yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veil and the
prisoned shall go free. Free, free as the sunshine trickling down the morning
into these high windows of mine, free as yonder fresh young voices welling up
to me from the caverns of brick and mortar below—swelling with song,
instinct with life, tremulous treble and darkening bass. My children, my little
children, are singing to the sunshine, and thus they sing:
And the traveller girds himself, and sets his face toward the Morning, and goes his way.
The Afterthought
Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born
into the world wilderness. Let there spring, Gentle One, from out its leaves
vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the harvest wonderful. Let the
ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sigh for the
righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood
is mockery and a snare. Thus in Thy good time may infinite reason turn the
tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed
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