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Title: The Souls of Black Folk
Author: W. E. B. Du Bois
Release Date: January 1, 1996 [EBook #408]
Language: English
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK ***
The Sou l s o f B lack Fo lk
by W. E. B. Du Bois
Herein is WrittenThe Forethought
I. Of Our Spiritual StrivingsII. Of the Dawn of FreedomIII. Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and OthersIV. Of the Meaning of ProgressV. Of the Wings of AtalantaVI. Of the Training of Black MenVII. Of the Black BeltVIII. Of the Quest of the Golden FleeceIX. Of the Sons of Master and ManX. Of the Faith of the FathersXI. Of the Passing of the First-BornXII. Of Alexander CrummellXIII. Of the Coming of JohnXIV. Of the Sorrow Songs
The Afterthought
ToBurghardt and YolandeThe Lost and the Found
The ForethoughtHerein 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 theproblem 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 foiblefor 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 thousandAmericans live and strive. First, in two chapters I have tried to show what Emancipation meant to them, and whatwas its aftermath. In a third chapter I have pointed out the slow rise of personal leadership, and criticizedcandidly the leader who bears the chief burden of his race to-day. Then, in two other chapters I have sketched inswift outline the two worlds within and without the Veil, and thus have come to the central problem of trainingmen for life. Venturing now into deeper detail, I have in two chapters studied the struggles of the massed millionsof the black peasantry, and in another have sought to make clear the present relations of the sons of master andman. Leaving, then, the white world, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeperrecesses,—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls. Allthis 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 theirrepublication here, in altered and extended form, I must thank the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly, The World’sWork, 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 theonly American music which welled up from black souls in the dark past. And, finally, need I add that I who speakhere 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 ofdelicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approachme in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, Howdoes it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought atMechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, orreduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be aproblem? 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 firstbursts 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 thesea. 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 differentfrom the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I hadthereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and livedabove it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates atexamination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this finecontempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. Butthey should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could neverdecide: 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 intosilent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bittercry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closedround about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons ofnight who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, halfhopelessly, 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 seventhson, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no trueself-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiarsensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, ofmeasuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels histwoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in onedark 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 bleachhis Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. Hesimply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spitupon 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 andisolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in thepast been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale ofEthiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Through history, the powers of single black men flash here andthere 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 strivinghas often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it isnot weakness,—it is the contradiction of double aims. The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan—on the onehand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the other handto plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde—could only result in making him a poor craftsman, for hehad but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor wastempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other world, toward ideals that made himashamed of his lowly tasks. The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge hispeople needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the whiteworld was Greek to his own flesh and blood. The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of hispeople a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beautyrevealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate themessage of another people. This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, haswrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousand people,—has sent them oftenwooing false gods and invoking false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make themashamed of themselves.
Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt anddisappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the AmericanNegro 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 beautythan ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites. In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; inhis tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand. At last it came,—suddenly, fearfully, likea 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 anddevelopment, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast. In vain do we cry to thisour vastest social problem:—
“Take any shape but that, and my firm nervesShall 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 theNegro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by thesimple ignorance of a lowly people.
The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely toelude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host. Theholocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, andthe contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the old cryfor freedom. As the time flew, however, he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty demanded for itsattainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment gave him. The ballot, which before he hadlooked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting theliberty with which war had partially endowed him. And why not? Had not votes made war and emancipatedmillions? Had not votes enfranchised the freedmen? Was anything impossible to a power that had done all this? Amillion black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom. So the decade flew away, therevolution of 1876 came, and left the half-free serf weary, wondering, but still inspired. Slowly but steadily, in thefollowing 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 idealof “book-learning”; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of the cabalisticletters of the white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path toCanaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights highenough to overlook life.
Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly; only those who have watched and guidedthe faltering feet, the misty minds, the dull understandings, of the dark pupils of these schools know howfaithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn. It was weary work. The cold statistician wrote down theinches of progress here and there, noted also where here and there a foot had slipped or some one had fallen. Tothe 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 atleast gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child of Emancipation to the youth withdawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rosebefore him, and he saw himself,—darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of hispower, 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 ofsocial 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, skilledneighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. Hefelt the weight of his ignorance,—not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulatedsloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet. Nor was his burden allpoverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negrowomen had stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditaryweight 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 timeand thought to its own social problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and hisprostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men callthe shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defence of culture against barbarism, learning againstignorance, purity against crime, the “higher” against the “lower” races. To which the Negro cries Amen! andswears 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 thatleaps beyond all this he stands helpless, dismayed, and well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect andmockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton license of fancy, the cynicalignoring of the better and the boisterous welcoming of the worse, the all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain foreverything black, from Toussaint to the devil,—before this there rises a sickening despair that would disarm anddiscourage 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 theNation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need ofhigher culture for half-men? Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of arace! Nevertheless, out of the evil came something of good,—the more careful adjustment of education to reallife, the clearer perception of the Negroes’ social responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning ofprogress.
So dawned the time of Sturm und Drang: storm and stress to-day rocks our little boat on the mad waters of theworld-sea; there is within and without the sound of conflict, the burning of body and rending of soul; inspirationstrives with doubt, and faith with vain questionings. The bright ideals of the past,—physical freedom, politicalpower, the training of brains and the training of hands,—all these in turn have waxed and waned, until even thelast grows dim and overcast. Are they all wrong,—all false? No, not that, but each alone was over-simple andincomplete,—the dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the fond imaginings of the other world which does notknow and does not want to know our power. To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and welded intoone. 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 needin sheer self-defence,—else what shall save us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we stillseek,—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 andaiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of humanbrotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talentsof the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater idealsof the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two world-races may give each to each thosecharacteristics 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 andfolklore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence ina dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be poorer if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blunderingwith light-hearted but determined Negro humility? or her coarse and cruel wit with loving jovial good-humor? orher 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 spiritualstriving of the freedmen’s sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of theirstrength, but who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers’ fathers, andin 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, withloving 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 recordOne 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 unknownStandeth 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 lighterraces of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that causedthe Civil War; and however much they who marched South and North in 1861 may have fixed on the technicalpoints, of union and local autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know, that the question ofNegro slavery was the real cause of the conflict. Curious it was, too, how this deeper question ever forced itself tothe surface despite effort and disclaimer. No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than this oldquestion, newly guised, sprang from the earth,—What shall be done with Negroes? Peremptory militarycommands this way and that, could not answer the query; the Emancipation Proclamation seemed but to broadenand 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 AmericanNegro. In effect, this tale of the dawn of Freedom is an account of that government of men called the Freedmen’sBureau,—one of the most singular and interesting of the attempts made by a great nation to grapple with vastproblems 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 thearmies, East and West, penetrated Virginia and Tennessee than fugitive slaves appeared within their lines. Theycame at night, when the flickering camp-fires shone like vast unsteady stars along the black horizon: old men andthin, with gray and tufted hair; women with frightened eyes, dragging whimpering hungry children; men andgirls, 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, inVirginia, quickly declared slave property contraband of war, and put the fugitives to work; while Fremont, inMissouri, declared the slaves free under martial law. Butler’s action was approved, but Fremont’s was hastilycountermanded, and his successor, Halleck, saw things differently. “Hereafter,” he commanded, “no slaves shouldbe allowed to come into your lines at all; if any come without your knowledge, when owners call for them deliverthem.” Such a policy was difficult to enforce; some of the black refugees declared themselves freemen, othersshowed 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. “Theyconstitute a military resource,” wrote Secretary Cameron, late in 1861; “and being such, that they should not beturned over to the enemy is too plain to discuss.” So gradually the tone of the army chiefs changed; Congressforbade the rendition of fugitives, and Butler’s “contrabands” were welcomed as military laborers. Thiscomplicated rather than solved the problem, for now the scattering fugitives became a steady stream, whichflowed faster as the armies marched.
Then the long-headed man with care-chiselled face who sat in the White House saw the inevitable, andemancipated the slaves of rebels on New Year’s, 1863. A month later Congress called earnestly for the Negrosoldiers whom the act of July, 1862, had half grudgingly allowed to enlist. Thus the barriers were levelled and thedeed was done. The stream of fugitives swelled to a flood, and anxious army officers kept inquiring: “What mustbe 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’sBureau. He was a firm friend of Secretary Chase; and when, in 1861, the care of slaves and abandoned landsdevolved 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 sentthere to found his Port Royal experiment of making free workingmen out of slaves. Before his experiment wasbarely started, however, the problem of the fugitives had assumed such proportions that it was taken from thehands of the over-burdened Treasury Department and given to the army officials. Already centres of massedfreedmen 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 ofcontrabands” multiplied, and some attempt at systematic work was made by enlisting the able-bodied men andgiving work to the others.
Then came the Freedmen’s Aid societies, born of the touching appeals from Pierce and from these other centresof distress. There was the American Missionary Association, sprung from the Amistad, and now full-grown forwork; the various church organizations, the National Freedmen’s Relief Association, the American Freedmen’sUnion, 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 wasoften 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 workedspasmodically, were never sure of pay; and if perchance they received pay, squandered the new thingthoughtlessly. In these and other ways were camp-life and the new liberty demoralizing the freedmen. Thebroader economic organization thus clearly demanded sprang up here and there as accident and local conditionsdetermined. Here it was that Pierce’s Port Royal plan of leased plantations and guided workmen pointed out therough way. In Washington the military governor, at the urgent appeal of the superintendent, opened confiscatedestates 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 governmentand benevolent societies furnished the means of cultivation, and the Negro turned again slowly to work. Thesystems of control, thus started, rapidly grew, here and there, into strange little governments, like that of GeneralBanks in Louisiana, with its ninety thousand black subjects, its fifty thousand guided laborers, and its annualbudget of one hundred thousand dollars and more. It made out four thousand pay-rolls a year, registered allfreedmen, inquired into grievances and redressed them, laid and collected taxes, and established a system ofpublic schools. So, too, Colonel Eaton, the superintendent of Tennessee and Arkansas, ruled over one hundredthousand freedmen, leased and cultivated seven thousand acres of cotton land, and fed ten thousand paupers ayear. In South Carolina was General Saxton, with his deep interest in black folk. He succeeded Pierce and theTreasury officials, and sold forfeited estates, leased abandoned plantations, encouraged schools, and receivedfrom 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 newsituation in shadowy relief: the Conqueror, the Conquered, and the Negro. Some see all significance in the grimfront of the destroyer, and some in the bitter sufferers of the Lost Cause. But to me neither soldier nor fugitivespeaks with so deep a meaning as that dark human cloud that clung like remorse on the rear of those swiftcolumns, 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 intoSavannah, 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 Negroesnow 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 ofEmancipation; but it was never reported. The following June a committee of inquiry, appointed by the Secretaryof War, reported in favor of a temporary bureau for the “improvement, protection, and employment of refugeefreedmen,” on much the same lines as were afterwards followed. Petitions came in to President Lincoln fromdistinguished citizens and organizations, strongly urging a comprehensive and unified plan of dealing with thefreedmen, under a bureau which should be “charged with the study of plans and execution of measures for easilyguiding, and in every way judiciously and humanely aiding, the passage of our emancipated and yet to beemancipated 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 ofthe special Treasury agents. Laws of 1863 and 1864 directed them to take charge of and lease abandoned landsfor periods not exceeding twelve months, and to “provide in such leases, or otherwise, for the employment andgeneral 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 wereafterward closely followed by General Howard. Under Treasury agents, large quantities of land were leased in theMississippi Valley, and many Negroes were employed; but in August, 1864, the new regulations were suspendedfor 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 majorityof two establishing a Bureau for Freedmen in the War Department. Charles Sumner, who had charge of the bill inthe Senate, argued that freedmen and abandoned lands ought to be under the same department, and reported asubstitute for the House bill attaching the Bureau to the Treasury Department. This bill passed, but too late foraction by the House. The debates wandered over the whole policy of the administration and the general questionof slavery, without touching very closely the specific merits of the measure in hand. Then the national electiontook place; and the administration, with a vote of renewed confidence from the country, addressed itself to thematter more seriously. A conference between the two branches of Congress agreed upon a carefully drawnmeasure which contained the chief provisions of Sumner’s bill, but made the proposed organization a departmentindependent 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 weremany 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 theWar 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, “tocontinue during the present War of Rebellion, and for one year thereafter,” to which was given “the supervisionand 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.” ACommissioner, appointed by the President and Senate, was to control the Bureau, with an office force notexceeding ten clerks. The President might also appoint assistant commissioners in the seceded States, and to allthese 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 andsale to ex-slaves in forty-acre parcels.
Thus did the United States government definitely assume charge of the emancipated Negro as the ward of thenation. It was a tremendous undertaking. Here at a stroke of the pen was erected a government of millions ofmen,—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 themidst of the stricken and embittered population of their former masters. Any man might well have hesitated toassume charge of such a work, with vast responsibilities, indefinite powers, and limited resources. Probably noone but a soldier would have answered such a call promptly; and, indeed, no one but a soldier could be called, forCongress 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. Hehad marched with Sherman to the sea, had fought well at Gettysburg, and but the year before had been assignedto the command of the Department of Tennessee. An honest man, with too much faith in human nature, littleaptitude for business and intricate detail, he had had large opportunity of becoming acquainted at first hand withmuch of the work before him. And of that work it has been truly said that “no approximately correct history ofcivilization can ever be written which does not throw out in bold relief, as one of the great landmarks of politicaland 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, andbegan 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 theguise of helping the freedmen, and all enshrined in the smoke and blood of the war and the cursing and silence ofangry 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 subjectsrelating to refugees and freedmen,” and all relief and rations were to be given by their consent alone. The Bureauinvited continued cooperation with benevolent societies, and declared: “It will be the object of all commissionersto introduce practicable systems of compensated labor,” and to establish schools. Forthwith nine assistantcommissioners were appointed. They were to hasten to their fields of work; seek gradually to close reliefestablishments, and make the destitute self-supporting; act as courts of law where there were no courts, or whereNegroes were not recognized in them as free; establish the institution of marriage among ex-slaves, and keeprecords; see that freedmen were free to choose their employers, and help in making fair contracts for them; andfinally, the circular said: “Simple good faith, for which we hope on all hands for those concerned in the passingaway of slavery, will especially relieve the assistant commissioners in the discharge of their duties toward thefreedmen, 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, therewere the abandoned lands of the South. It had long been the more or less definitely expressed theory of the Norththat all the chief problems of Emancipation might be settled by establishing the slaves on the forfeited lands oftheir masters,—a sort of poetic justice, said some. But this poetry done into solemn prose meant either wholesaleconfiscation 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 ofabandoned lands in the hands of the Freedmen’s Bureau melted quickly away. The second difficulty lay inperfecting the local organization of the Bureau throughout the wide field of work. Making a new machine andsending out officials of duly ascertained fitness for a great work of social reform is no child’s task; but this taskwas even harder, for a new central organization had to be fitted on a heterogeneous and confused but alreadyexisting system of relief and control of ex-slaves; and the agents available for this work must be sought for in anarmy still busy with war operations,—men in the very nature of the case ill fitted for delicate social work,—oramong the questionable camp followers of an invading host. Thus, after a year’s work, vigorously as it waspushed, the problem looked even more difficult to grasp and solve than at the beginning. Nevertheless, threethings that year’s work did, well worth the doing: it relieved a vast amount of physical suffering; it transportedseven thousand fugitives from congested centres back to the farm; and, best of all, it inaugurated the crusade ofthe 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 morequixotic than the quest of St. Louis seemed to his. Behind the mists of ruin and rapine waved the calico dresses ofwomen who dared, and after the hoarse mouthings of the field guns rang the rhythm of the alphabet. Rich andpoor they were, serious and curious. Bereaved now of a father, now of a brother, now of more than these, theycame seeking a life work in planting New England schoolhouses among the white and black of the South. Theydid 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 growninto wide significance and vast possibilities. An institution such as that was well-nigh as difficult to end as tobegin. Early in 1866 Congress took up the matter, when Senator Trumbull, of Illinois, introduced a bill to extendthe Bureau and enlarge its powers. This measure received, at the hands of Congress, far more thorough discussionand attention than its predecessor. The war cloud had thinned enough to allow a clearer conception of the work ofEmancipation. The champions of the bill argued that the strengthening of the Freedmen’s Bureau was still amilitary necessity; that it was needed for the proper carrying out of the Thirteenth Amendment, and was a work ofsheer justice to the ex-slave, at a trifling cost to the government. The opponents of the measure declared that thewar 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 thegovernment must have power to do what manifestly must be done, and that present abandonment of the freedmenmeant their practical reenslavement. The bill which finally passed enlarged and made permanent the Freedmen’sBureau. 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 tobroaden, 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 posterityand judged of men. It extended the existence of the Bureau to July, 1868; it authorized additional assistantcommissioners, the retention of army officers mustered out of regular service, the sale of certain forfeited lands tofreedmen on nominal terms, the sale of Confederate public property for Negro schools, and a wider field ofjudicial interpretation and cognizance. The government of the unreconstructed South was thus put very largely inthe hands of the Freedmen’s Bureau, especially as in many cases the departmental military commander was nowmade also assistant commissioner. It was thus that the Freedmen’s Bureau became a full-fledged government ofmen. 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 theaccomplishment of its varied ends. Naturally, all these powers were not exercised continuously nor to their fullestextent; and yet, as General Howard has said, “scarcely any subject that has to be legislated upon in civil societyfailed, 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 thelater sixties. Lee had surrendered, Lincoln was dead, and Johnson and Congress were at loggerheads; theThirteenth 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, andall the Southern land was awakening as from some wild dream to poverty and social revolution. In a time ofperfect calm, amid willing neighbors and streaming wealth, the social uplifting of four million slaves to anassured and self-sustaining place in the body politic and economic would have been a herculean task; but when tothe inherent difficulties of so delicate and nice a social operation were added the spite and hate of conflict, the hellof war; when suspicion and cruelty were rife, and gaunt Hunger wept beside Bereavement,—in such a case, thework of any instrument of social regeneration was in large part foredoomed to failure. The very name of theBureau stood for a thing in the South which for two centuries and better men had refused even to argue,—that lifeamid 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-mindedbusybodies and thieves; and even though it be true that the average was far better than the worst, it was theoccasional 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 andthere something of kindliness, fidelity, and happiness,—but withal slavery, which, so far as human aspiration anddesert were concerned, classed the black man and the ox together. And the Negro knew full well that, whatevertheir deeper convictions may have been, Southern men had fought with desperate energy to perpetuate thisslavery under which the black masses, with half-articulate thought, had writhed and shivered. They welcomedfreedom with a cry. They shrank from the master who still strove for their chains; they fled to the friends that hadfreed them, even though those friends stood ready to use them as a club for driving the recalcitrant South backinto loyalty. So the cleft between the white and black South grew. Idle to say it never should have been; it was asinevitable as its results were pitiable. Curiously incongruous elements were left arrayed against each other,—theNorth, the government, the carpet-bagger, and the slave, here; and there, all the South that was white, whethergentleman 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 humanpassions that swayed and blinded men. Amid it all, two figures ever stand to typify that day to coming ages,—theone, 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 eveningof life, a blighted, ruined form, with hate in his eyes;—and the other, a form hovering dark and mother-like, herawful face black with the mists of centuries, had aforetime quailed at that white master’s command, had bent inlove over the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed in death the sunken eyes of his wife,—aye, too, at hisbehest had laid herself low to his lust, and borne a tawny man-child to the world, only to see her dark boy’s limbsscattered to the winds by midnight marauders riding after “damned Niggers.” These were the saddest sights ofthat woful day; and no man clasped the hands of these two passing figures of the present-past; but, hating, theywent 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 continuedby the act of 1868 until 1869, let us look upon four years of its work as a whole. There were, in 1868, ninehundred Bureau officials scattered from Washington to Texas, ruling, directly and indirectly, many millions ofmen. The deeds of these rulers fall mainly under seven heads: the relief of physical suffering, the overseeing ofthe 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 sixtyhospitals and asylums had been in operation. In fifty months twenty-one million free rations were distributed at acost of over four million dollars. Next came the difficult question of labor. First, thirty thousand black men weretransported from the refuges and relief stations back to the farms, back to the critical trial of a new way ofworking. Plain instructions went out from Washington: the laborers must be free to choose their employers, nofixed rate of wages was prescribed, and there was to be no peonage or forced labor. So far, so good; but wherelocal agents differed toto cælo in capacity and character, where the personnel was continually changing, theoutcome was necessarily varied. The largest element of success lay in the fact that the majority of the freedmenwere willing, even eager, to work. So labor contracts were written,—fifty thousand in a single State,—laborersadvised, wages guaranteed, and employers supplied. In truth, the organization became a vast labor bureau,—notperfect, indeed, notably defective here and there, but on the whole successful beyond the dreams of thoughtfulmen. The two great obstacles which confronted the officials were the tyrant and the idler,—the slaveholder whowas determined to perpetuate slavery under another name; and, the freedman who regarded freedom as perpetualrest,—the Devil and the Deep Sea.
In the work of establishing the Negroes as peasant proprietors, the Bureau was from the first handicapped andat last absolutely checked. Something was done, and larger things were planned; abandoned lands were leased solong as they remained in the hands of the Bureau, and a total revenue of nearly half a million dollars derived fromblack tenants. Some other lands to which the nation had gained title were sold on easy terms, and public landswere opened for settlement to the very few freedmen who had tools and capital. But the vision of “forty acres anda mule”—the righteous and reasonable ambition to become a landholder, which the nation had all butcategorically promised the freedmen—was destined in most cases to bitter disappointment. And those men ofmarvellous hindsight who are today seeking to preach the Negro back to the present peonage of the soil knowwell, or ought to know, that the opportunity of binding the Negro peasant willingly to the soil was lost on that daywhen 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 theGeorgia Negro alone owned three hundred and fifty thousand acres of land, it was by grace of his thrift ratherthan by bounty of the government.
The greatest success of the Freedmen’s Bureau lay in the planting of the free school among Negroes, and theidea of free elementary education among all classes in the South. It not only called the school-mistresses throughthe benevolent agencies and built them schoolhouses, but it helped discover and support such apostles of humanculture as Edmund Ware, Samuel Armstrong, and Erastus Cravath. The opposition to Negro education in theSouth was at first bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South believed an educated Negro tobe a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always hashad, 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 thebayonets 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 foreducational work, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars of which the freedmen themselves gave of theirpoverty.
Such contributions, together with the buying of land and various other enterprises, showed that the ex-slavewas handling some free capital already. The chief initial source of this was labor in the army, and his pay andbounty as a soldier. Payments to Negro soldiers were at first complicated by the ignorance of the recipients, andthe 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, byjoint resolution in 1867, put the whole matter in the hands of the Freedmen’s Bureau. In two years six milliondollars 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, andsome, 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 theBureau. 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 personnelprejudiced the Bureau in favor of the black litigants, and led without doubt to much injustice and annoyance. Onthe other hand, to leave the Negro in the hands of Southern courts was impossible. In a distracted land whereslavery had hardly fallen, to keep the strong from wanton abuse of the weak, and the weak from gloatinginsolently over the half-shorn strength of the strong, was a thankless, hopeless task. The former masters of theland were peremptorily ordered about, seized, and imprisoned, and punished over and again, with scant courtesyfrom army officers. The former slaves were intimidated, beaten, raped, and butchered by angry and revengefulmen. Bureau courts tended to become centres simply for punishing whites, while the regular civil courts tended tobecome solely institutions for perpetuating the slavery of blacks. Almost every law and method ingenuity coulddevise 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 ontop,” and gave the freedmen a power and independence which they could not yet use. It is all well enough for usof another generation to wax wise with advice to those who bore the burden in the heat of the day. It is full easynow to see that the man who lost home, fortune, and family at a stroke, and saw his land ruled by “mules andniggers,” 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 namelesslyassaulted, that the meek shall inherit the earth. Above all, nothing is more convenient than to heap on theFreedmen’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 OliverHoward was born; there was criminal aggression and heedless neglect, but without some system of control therewould 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 wouldhave bettered all things; and even with imperfect agents and questionable methods, the work accomplished wasnot undeserving of commendation.
Such was the dawn of Freedom; such was the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which, summed up in brief, maybe epitomized thus: for some fifteen million dollars, beside the sums spent before 1865, and the dole ofbenevolent societies, this Bureau set going a system of free labor, established a beginning of peasantproprietorship, secured the recognition of black freedmen before courts of law, and founded the free commonschool in the South. On the other hand, it failed to begin the establishment of good-will between ex-masters andfreedmen, to guard its work wholly from paternalistic methods which discouraged self-reliance, and to carry outto any considerable extent its implied promises to furnish the freedmen with land. Its successes were the result ofhard work, supplemented by the aid of philanthropists and the eager striving of black men. Its failures were theresult 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 generallyconspicuous position, was naturally open to repeated and bitter attack. It sustained a searching Congressionalinvestigation at the instance of Fernando Wood in 1870. Its archives and few remaining functions were with bluntdiscourtesy transferred from Howard’s control, in his absence, to the supervision of Secretary of War Belknap in1872, on the Secretary’s recommendation. Finally, in consequence of grave intimations of wrong-doing made bythe Secretary and his subordinates, General Howard was court-martialed in 1874. In both of these trials theCommissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau was officially exonerated from any wilful misdoing, and his workcommended. Nevertheless, many unpleasant things were brought to light,—the methods of transacting thebusiness 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 itall 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 legalconnection with it. With the prestige of the government back of it, and a directing board of unusual respectabilityand national reputation, this banking institution had made a remarkable start in the development of that thriftamong 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 hasnever yet made good. Not even ten additional years of slavery could have done so much to throttle the thrift of thefreedmen as the mismanagement and bankruptcy of the series of savings banks chartered by the Nation for theirespecial aid. Where all the blame should rest, it is hard to say; whether the Bureau and the Bank died chiefly byreason 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 underthe law as the necessity for any such institution at all. Such attacks came primarily from the Border States and theSouth; 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.” Theargument gathered tremendous strength South and North; but its very strength was its weakness. For, argued theplain common-sense of the nation, if it is unconstitutional, unpractical, and futile for the nation to stand guardianover its helpless wards, then there is left but one alternative,—to make those wards their own guardians byarming them with the ballot. Moreover, the path of the practical politician pointed the same way; for, argued thisopportunist, if we cannot peacefully reconstruct the South with white votes, we certainly can with black votes. Sojustice and force joined hands.
The alternative thus offered the nation was not between full and restricted Negro suffrage; else every sensibleman, 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 stoodready to admit a Negro, under any conditions, to the polls; not a single Southern legislature believed free Negrolabor was possible without a system of restrictions that took all its freedom away; there was scarcely a white manin the South who did not honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty. In sucha situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant awronged race, and the only method of compelling the South to accept the results of the war. Thus Negro suffrageended a civil war by beginning a race feud. And some felt gratitude toward the race thus sacrificed in itsswaddling 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,—apermanent Freedmen’s Bureau, with a national system of Negro schools; a carefully supervised employment andlabor office; a system of impartial protection before the regular courts; and such institutions for social bettermentas savings-banks, land and building associations, and social settlements. All this vast expenditure of money andbrains might have formed a great school of prospective citizenship, and solved in a way we have not yet solvedthe 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 Bureauitself. It came to regard its work as merely temporary, and Negro suffrage as a final answer to all presentperplexities. The political ambition of many of its agents and protégés 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 hateits 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, butleaves a legacy of striving for other men. The legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau is the heavy heritage of thisgeneration. 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: despitecompromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free. In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and miles, hemay not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural South the black farmers are peons, boundby law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary. In the mostcultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights andprivileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and peculiar basis. Taxationwithout 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 couldnot.
I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and rolling hills lie like passioned womenwanton with harvest. And there in the King’s Highways sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which thetraveller’s footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air broods fear. Three centuries’ thought has been the raisingand unveiling of that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and the deed. The problemof 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 notWho 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. BookerT. Washington. It began at the time when war memories and ideals were rapidly passing; a day of astonishingcommercial development was dawning; a sense of doubt and hesitation overtook the freedmen’s sons,—then itwas that his leading began. Mr. Washington came, with a simple definite programme, at the psychologicalmoment when the nation was a little ashamed of having bestowed so much sentiment on Negroes, and wasconcentrating its energies on Dollars. His programme of industrial education, conciliation of the South, andsubmission and silence as to civil and political rights, was not wholly original; the Free Negroes from 1830 up towar-time had striven to build industrial schools, and the American Missionary Association had from the firsttaught various trades; and Price and others had sought a way of honorable alliance with the best of theSoutherners. But Mr. Washington first indissolubly linked these things; he put enthusiasm, unlimited energy, andperfect faith into his programme, and changed it from a by-path into a veritable Way of Life. And the tale of themethods 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; itstartled and won the applause of the South, it interested and won the admiration of the North; and after a confusedmurmur 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-nighimpossible. And yet ten years later it was done in the word spoken at Atlanta: “In all things purely social we canbe as separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” This “AtlantaCompromise” is by all odds the most notable thing in Mr. Washington’s career. The South interpreted it in
Compromise” is by all odds the most notable thing in Mr. Washington’s career. The South interpreted it indifferent ways: the radicals received it as a complete surrender of the demand for civil and political equality; theconservatives, 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 largestpersonal following.
Next to this achievement comes Mr. Washington’s work in gaining place and consideration in the North. Othersless 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 thespirit of the age which was dominating the North. And so thoroughly did he learn the speech and thought oftriumphant commercialism, and the ideals of material prosperity, that the picture of a lone black boy poring over aFrench grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home soon seemed to him the acme of absurdities. Onewonders 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 isas though Nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force. So Mr. Washington’s cult has gainedunquestioning followers, his work has wonderfully prospered, his friends are legion, and his enemies areconfounded. To-day he stands as the one recognized spokesman of his ten million fellows, and one of the mostnotable figures in a nation of seventy millions. One hesitates, therefore, to criticise a life which, beginning with solittle, has done so much. And yet the time is come when one may speak in all sincerity and utter courtesy of themistakes and shortcomings of Mr. Washington’s career, as well as of his triumphs, without being thought captiousor 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 Southespecially has he had to walk warily to avoid the harshest judgments,—and naturally so, for he is dealing with theone 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 hedined with President Roosevelt—has the resulting Southern criticism been violent enough to threaten seriouslyhis popularity. In the North the feeling has several times forced itself into words, that Mr. Washington’s counselsof submission overlooked certain elements of true manhood, and that his educational programme wasunnecessarily narrow. Usually, however, such criticism has not found open expression, although, too, the spiritualsons of the Abolitionists have not been prepared to acknowledge that the schools founded before Tuskegee, bymen of broad ideals and self-sacrificing spirit, were wholly failures or worthy of ridicule. While, then, criticismhas not failed to follow Mr. Washington, yet the prevailing public opinion of the land has been but too willing todeliver 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 inoutward expression by the public opinion of the nation. Some of this opposition is, of course, mere envy; thedisappointment of displaced demagogues and the spite of narrow minds. But aside from this, there is amongeducated and thoughtful colored men in all parts of the land a feeling of deep regret, sorrow, and apprehension atthe wide currency and ascendancy which some of Mr. Washington’s theories have gained. These same menadmire his sincerity of purpose, and are willing to forgive much to honest endeavor which is doing somethingworth the doing. They cooperate with Mr. Washington as far as they conscientiously can; and, indeed, it is noordinary tribute to this man’s tact and power that, steering as he must between so many diverse interests andopinions, 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 criticsto unfortunate silence and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so passionately and intemperately asto lose listeners. Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,—criticism ofwriters by readers,—this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society. If the best of theAmerican Negroes receive by outer pressure a leader whom they had not recognized before, manifestly there ishere a certain palpable gain. Yet there is also irreparable loss,—a loss of that peculiarly valuable education whicha group receives when by search and criticism it finds and commissions its own leaders. The way in which this isdone is at once the most elementary and the nicest problem of social growth. History is but the record of suchgroup-leadership; and yet how infinitely changeful is its type and character! And of all types and kinds, what canbe more instructive than the leadership of a group within a group?—that curious double movement where realprogress may be negative and actual advance be relative retrogression. All this is the social student’s inspirationand despair.
Now in the past the American Negro has had instructive experience in the choosing of group leaders, foundingthus a peculiar dynasty which in the light of present conditions is worth while studying. When sticks and stonesand beasts form the sole environment of a people, their attitude is largely one of determined opposition to andconquest of natural forces. But when to earth and brute is added an environment of men and ideas, then theattitude of the imprisoned group may take three main forms,—a feeling of revolt and revenge; an attempt toadjust all thought and action to the will of the greater group; or, finally, a determined effort at self-realization andself-development despite environing opinion. The influence of all of these attitudes at various times can be tracedin 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 leadershipor attempted leadership but the one motive of revolt and revenge,—typified in the terrible Maroons, the Danishblacks, and Cato of Stono, and veiling all the Americas in fear of insurrection. The liberalizing tendencies of thelatter half of the eighteenth century brought, along with kindlier relations between black and white, thoughts ofultimate adjustment and assimilation. Such aspiration was especially voiced in the earnest songs of Phyllis, in themartyrdom of Attucks, the fighting of Salem and Poor, the intellectual accomplishments of Banneker andDerham, and the political demands of the Cuffes.
Stern financial and social stress after the war cooled much of the previous humanitarian ardor. Thedisappointment and impatience of the Negroes at the persistence of slavery and serfdom voiced itself in twomovements. The slaves in the South, aroused undoubtedly by vague rumors of the Haytian revolt, made threefierce attempts at insurrection,—in 1800 under Gabriel in Virginia, in 1822 under Vesey in Carolina, and in 1831again in Virginia under the terrible Nat Turner. In the Free States, on the other hand, a new and curious attempt atself-development was made. In Philadelphia and New York color-prescription led to a withdrawal of Negrocommunicants from white churches and the formation of a peculiar socio-religious institution among the Negroesknown as the African Church,—an organization still living and controlling in its various branches over a millionof men.
Walker’s wild appeal against the trend of the times showed how the world was changing after the coming ofthe cotton-gin. By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed intosubmission. The free Negroes of the North, inspired by the mulatto immigrants from the West Indies, began tochange the basis of their demands; they recognized the slavery of slaves, but insisted that they themselves werefreemen, 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, andothers, strove singly and together as men, they said, not as slaves; as “people of color,” not as “Negroes.” Thetrend of the times, however, refused them recognition save in individual and exceptional cases, considered themas one with all the despised blacks, and they soon found themselves striving to keep even the rights they formerlyhad 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-developmentdawned. To be sure, ultimate freedom and assimilation was the ideal before the leaders, but the assertion of themanhood rights of the Negro by himself was the main reliance, and John Brown’s raid was the extreme of itslogic. After the war and emancipation, the great form of Frederick Douglass, the greatest of American Negroleaders, still led the host. Self-assertion, especially in political lines, was the main programme, and behindDouglass came Elliot, Bruce, and Langston, and the Reconstruction politicians, and, less conspicuous but ofgreater 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, andthe seeking of new lights in the great night. Douglass, in his old age, still bravely stood for the ideals of his earlymanhood,—ultimate assimilation through self-assertion, and on no other terms. For a time Price arose as a newleader, destined, it seemed, not to give up, but to re-state the old ideals in a form less repugnant to the whiteSouth. But he passed away in his prime. Then came the new leader. Nearly all the former ones had becomeleaders by the silent suffrage of their fellows, had sought to lead their own people alone, and were usually, saveDouglass, little known outside their race. But Booker T. Washington arose as essentially the leader not of one racebut of two,—a compromiser between the South, the North, and the Negro. Naturally the Negroes resented, at firstbitterly, signs of compromise which surrendered their civil and political rights, even though this was to beexchanged for larger chances of economic development. The rich and dominating North, however, was not onlyweary of the race problem, but was investing largely in Southern enterprises, and welcomed any method ofpeaceful 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 atsuch 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 anextent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life. Moreover, this is an age when themore advanced races are coming in closer contact with the less developed races, and the race-feeling is thereforeintensified; 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 againstNegroes, and Mr. Washington withdraws many of the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens. Inother periods of intensified prejudice all the Negro’s tendency to self-assertion has been called forth; at this perioda policy of submission is advocated. In the history of nearly all other races and peoples the doctrine preached atsuch crises has been that manly self-respect is worth more than lands and houses, and that a people whovoluntarily 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. Washingtondistinctly 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 insistentlyadvocated for over fifteen years, and has been triumphant for perhaps ten years. As a result of this tender of thepalm-branch, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred:
1. The disfranchisement of the Negro.2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro.3. 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, andprobable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of politicalrights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meagre chance for developing their exceptional men? Ifhistory and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic No. And Mr. Washington thusfaces the triple paradox of his career:
1. 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 withoutthe right of suffrage.
2. He insists on thrift and self-respect, but at the same time counsels a silent submission to civic inferioritysuch as is bound to sap the manhood of any race in the long run.
3. He advocates common-school and industrial training, and depreciates institutions of higher learning; butneither the Negro common-schools, nor Tuskegee itself, could remain open a day were it not for teachers trainedin 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 theyrepresent the attitude of revolt and revenge; they hate the white South blindly and distrust the white racegenerally, and so far as they agree on definite action, think that the Negro’s only hope lies in emigration beyondthe borders of the United States. And yet, by the irony of fate, nothing has more effectually made this programmeseem 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. Theydeprecate the sight of scattered counsels, of internal disagreement; and especially they dislike making their justcriticism 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 theGrimkes, Kelly Miller, J. W. E. Bowen, and other representatives of this group, can much longer be silent. Suchmen feel in conscience bound to ask of this nation three things:
1. The right to vote.2. Civic equality.3. 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 ignorantwhites are debarred, or that any reasonable restrictions in the suffrage should not be applied; they know that thelow social level of the mass of the race is responsible for much discrimination against it, but they also know, andthe 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 allagencies 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 surprisedthat a man of Mr. Washington’s insight cannot see that no such educational system ever has rested or can rest onany other basis than that of the well-equipped college and university, and they insist that there is a demand for afew such institutions throughout the South to train the best of the Negro youth as teachers, professional men, andleaders.
This group of men honor Mr. Washington for his attitude of conciliation toward the white South; they acceptthe “Atlanta Compromise” in its broadest interpretation; they recognize, with him, many signs of promise, manymen of high purpose and fair judgment, in this section; they know that no easy task has been laid upon a regionalready tottering under heavy burdens. But, nevertheless, they insist that the way to truth and right lies instraightforward honesty, not in indiscriminate flattery; in praising those of the South who do well and criticisinguncompromisingly those who do ill; in taking advantage of the opportunities at hand and urging their fellows todo the same, but at the same time in remembering that only a firm adherence to their higher ideals and aspirationswill ever keep those ideals within the realm of possibility. They do not expect that the free right to vote, to enjoycivic rights, and to be educated, will come in a moment; they do not expect to see the bias and prejudices of yearsdisappear at the blast of a trumpet; but they are absolutely certain that the way for a people to gain theirreasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and insisting that they do not want them; that the wayfor 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, thatcolor 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 ofopposing an honored leader, the thinking classes of American Negroes would shirk a heavy responsibility,—aresponsibility to themselves, a responsibility to the struggling masses, a responsibility to the darker races of menwhose future depends so largely on this American experiment, but especially a responsibility to this nation,—thiscommon Fatherland. It is wrong to encourage a man or a people in evil-doing; it is wrong to aid and abet anational crime simply because it is unpopular not to do so. The growing spirit of kindliness and reconciliationbetween the North and South after the frightful difference of a generation ago ought to be a source of deepcongratulation to all, and especially to those whose mistreatment caused the war; but if that reconciliation is to bemarked by the industrial slavery and civic death of those same black men, with permanent legislation into aposition of inferiority, then those black men, if they are really men, are called upon by every consideration ofpatriotism and loyalty to oppose such a course by all civilized methods, even though such opposition involvesdisagreement with Mr. Booker T. Washington. We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds aresown 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 arenot responsible for the past, and they should not be blindly hated or blamed for it. Furthermore, to no class is theindiscriminate endorsement of the recent course of the South toward Negroes more nauseating than to the bestthought of the South. The South is not “solid”; it is a land in the ferment of social change, wherein forces of allkinds are fighting for supremacy; and to praise the ill the South is today perpetrating is just as wrong as tocondemn the good. Discriminating and broad-minded criticism is what the South needs,—needs it for the sake ofher 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 thesame; the ignorant Southerner hates the Negro, the workingmen fear his competition, the money-makers wish touse him as a laborer, some of the educated see a menace in his upward development, while others—usually thesons of the masters—wish to help him to rise. National opinion has enabled this last class to maintain the Negrocommon schools, and to protect the Negro partially in property, life, and limb. Through the pressure of themoney-makers, the Negro is in danger of being reduced to semi-slavery, especially in the country districts; theworkingmen, and those of the educated who fear the Negro, have united to disfranchise him, and some haveurged his deportation; while the passions of the ignorant are easily aroused to lynch and abuse any black man. Topraise this intricate whirl of thought and prejudice is nonsense; to inveigh indiscriminately against “the South” isunjust; 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 thinkingblack men.
It would be unjust to Mr. Washington not to acknowledge that in several instances he has opposed movementsin the South which were unjust to the Negro; he sent memorials to the Louisiana and Alabama constitutionalconventions, he has spoken against lynching, and in other ways has openly or silently set his influence againstsinister schemes and unfortunate happenings. Notwithstanding this, it is equally true to assert that on the wholethe distinct impression left by Mr. Washington’s propaganda is, first, that the South is justified in its presentattitude toward the Negro because of the Negro’s degradation; secondly, that the prime cause of the Negro’sfailure to rise more quickly is his wrong education in the past; and, thirdly, that his future rise depends primarilyon his own efforts. Each of these propositions is a dangerous half-truth. The supplementary truths must never belost 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 blackteachers trained by higher institutions,—it being extremely doubtful if any essentially different development waspossible, and certainly a Tuskegee was unthinkable before 1880; and, third, while it is a great truth to say that theNegro must strive and strive mightily to help himself, it is equally true that unless his striving be not simplyseconded, but rather aroused and encouraged, by the initiative of the richer and wiser environing group, he cannothope for great success.
In his failure to realize and impress this last point, Mr. Washington is especially to be criticised. His doctrinehas tended to make the whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro’s shouldersand stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation, and thehands 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 therace she has cruelly wronged and is still wronging. The North—her co-partner in guilt—cannot salve herconscience 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 ninemillions of men?
The black men of America have a duty to perform, a duty stern and delicate,—a forward movement to opposea part of the work of their greatest leader. So far as Mr. Washington preaches Thrift, Patience, and IndustrialTraining for the masses, we must hold up his hands and strive with him, rejoicing in his honors and glorying inthe strength of this Joshua called of God and of man to lead the headless host. But so far as Mr. Washingtonapologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles theemasculating 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 everycivilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the world accords to men, clingingunwaveringly to those great words which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget: “We hold these truths to beself-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienablerights; 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 beginsto 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 countyschool-commissioners. Young and happy, I too went, and I shall not soon forget that summer, seventeen yearsago.
First, there was a Teachers’ Institute at the county-seat; and there distinguished guests of the superintendenttaught 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 wonderfullyinteresting, but I am sure that the man who has never hunted a country school has something to learn of thepleasures of the chase. I see now the white, hot roads lazily rise and fall and wind before me under the burningJuly sun; I feel the deep weariness of heart and limb as ten, eight, six miles stretch relentlessly ahead; I feel myheart sink heavily as I hear again and again, “Got a teacher? Yes.” So I walked on and on—horses were tooexpensive—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 rollinghills 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 greatwillows; then I had gone to the little cabin in the lot where Josie was resting on her way to town. The gauntfarmer made me welcome, and Josie, hearing my errand, told me anxiously that they wanted a school over thehill; 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 towardthe Carolinas, then plunged into the wood, and came out at Josie’s home. It was a dull frame cottage with fourrooms, perched just below the brow of the hill, amid peach-trees. The father was a quiet, simple soul, calmlyignorant, 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 thecentre 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 anunconscious moral heroism that would willingly give all of life to make life broader, deeper, and fuller for her andhers. I saw much of this family afterwards, and grew to love them for their honest efforts to be decent andcomfortable, and for their knowledge of their own ignorance. There was with them no affectation. The motherwould scold the father for being so “easy”; Josie would roundly berate the boys for carelessness; and all knewthat 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 pleasantyoung white fellow who wanted the white school. The road ran down the bed of a stream; the sun laughed and thewater jingled, and we rode on. “Come in,” said the commissioner,—“come in. Have a seat. Yes, that certificatewill do. Stay to dinner. What do you want a month?” “Oh,” thought I, “this is lucky”; but even then fell the awfulshadow 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 railfence and thorn bushes, near the sweetest of springs. There was an entrance where a door once was, and within, amassive rickety fireplace; great chinks between the logs served as windows. Furniture was scarce. A paleblackboard 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 washaunted by a New England vision of neat little desks and chairs, but, alas! the reality was rough plank bencheswithout backs, and at times without legs. They had the one virtue of making naps dangerous,—possibly fatal, forthe 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 downthe dusty road, and saw the growing row of dark solemn faces and bright eager eyes facing me. First came Josieand her brothers and sisters. The longing to know, to be a student in the great school at Nashville, hovered like astar above this child-woman amid her work and worry, and she studied doggedly. There were the Dowells fromtheir farm over toward Alexandria,—Fanny, with her smooth black face and wondering eyes; Martha, brown anddull; 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 chubbygirl 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 couldspare her, ’Tildy came,—a midnight beauty, with starry eyes and tapering limbs; and her brother, correspondinglyhomely. 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 deepbrown, 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 hadin 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 wouldstart out. I would visit Mun Eddings, who lived in two very dirty rooms, and ask why little Lugene, whoseflaming face seemed ever ablaze with the dark-red hair uncombed, was absent all last week, or why I missed sooften the inimitable rags of Mack and Ed. Then the father, who worked Colonel Wheeler’s farm on shares, wouldtell 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 Lawrencesstopped, I knew that the doubts of the old folks about book-learning had conquered again, and so, toiling up thehill, and getting as far into the cabin as possible, I put Cicero “pro Archia Poeta” into the simplest English withlocal 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 agreat, loud, thin Black, ever working, and trying to buy the seventy-five acres of hill and dale where he lived; butpeople 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. Theylived in a one-and-a-half-room cabin in the hollow of the farm, near the spring. The front room was full of greatfat white beds, scrupulously neat; and there were bad chromos on the walls, and a tired centre-table. In the tinyback kitchen I was often invited to “take out and help” myself to fried chicken and wheat biscuit, “meat” and cornpone, string-beans and berries. At first I used to be a little alarmed at the approach of bedtime in the one lonebedroom, but embarrassment was very deftly avoided. First, all the children nodded and slept, and were stowedaway in one great pile of goose feathers; next, the mother and the father discreetly slipped away to the kitchenwhile I went to bed; then, blowing out the dim light, they retired in the dark. In the morning all were up and awaybefore I thought of awaking. Across the road, where fat Reuben lived, they all went outdoors while the teacherretired, 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 asmall, rough farm, all woods and hills, miles from the big road; but he was full of tales,—he preached now andthen,—and with his children, berries, horses, and wheat he was happy and prosperous. Often, to keep the peace, Imust go where life was less lovely; for instance, ’Tildy’s mother was incorrigibly dirty, Reuben’s larder waslimited seriously, and herds of untamed insects wandered over the Eddingses’ beds. Best of all I loved to go toJosie’s, and sit on the porch, eating peaches, while the mother bustled and talked: how Josie had bought thesewing-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 wistfullonging, and the boys fretted and haunted Alexandria. Alexandria was “town,”—a straggling, lazy village ofhouses, churches, and shops, and an aristocracy of Toms, Dicks, and Captains. Cuddled on the hill to the northwas the village of the colored folks, who lived in three- or four-room unpainted cottages, some neat andhomelike, and some dirty. The dwellings were scattered rather aimlessly, but they centred about the twin templesof 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 thesoft 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 acommon hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and, above all, from the sight of the Veil that hungbetween 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 ofthe coming of the Lord,” saw in every present hindrance or help a dark fatalism bound to bring all things right inHis own good time. The mass of those to whom slavery was a dim recollection of childhood found the world apuzzling thing: it asked little of them, and they answered with little, and yet it ridiculed their offering. Such aparadox they could not understand, and therefore sank into listless indifference, or shiftlessness, or recklessbravado. There were, however, some—such as Josie, Jim, and Ben—to whom War, Hell, and Slavery were butchildhood tales, whose young appetites had been whetted to an edge by school and story and half-awakenedthought. Ill could they be content, born without and beyond the World. And their weak wings beat against theirbarriers,—barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last, in dangerous moments, against everything that opposed evena 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 tothe walls of Fisk University, to the halls of the chapel of melody. As I lingered there in the joy and pain ofmeeting old school-friends, there swept over me a sudden longing to pass again beyond the blue hill, and to seethe 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 beenaway.” I had feared for Jim. With a cultured parentage and a social caste to uphold him, he might have made aventuresome merchant or a West Point cadet. But here he was, angry with life and reckless; and when FannerDurham charged him with stealing wheat, the old man had to ride fast to escape the stones which the furious foolhurled after him. They told Jim to run away; but he would not run, and the constable came that afternoon. Itgrieved Josie, and great awkward John walked nine miles every day to see his little brother through the bars ofLebanon jail. At last the two came back together in the dark night. The mother cooked supper, and Josie emptiedher purse, and the boys stole away. Josie grew thin and silent, yet worked the more. The hill became steep for thequiet 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 yearin 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 andthoughtless, flushed with the passion of youth, bestowed herself on the tempter, and brought home a namelesschild. Josie shivered and worked on, with the vision of schooldays all fled, with a face wan and tired,—workeduntil, 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,—andthe other son lazily digs in the earth to live. A new young widow rents out their cabin to fat Reuben. Reuben is aBaptist preacher now, but I fear as lazy as ever, though his cabin has three rooms; and little Ella has grown into abouncing 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, butsoon bristled into pride over her neat cabin and the tale of her thrifty husband, and the horse and cow, and thefarm they were planning to buy.
My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood Progress; and Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly. Thecrazy foundation stones still marked the former site of my poor little cabin, and not far away, on six wearyboulders, 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 peepedthrough the window half reverently, and found things that were more familiar. The blackboard had grown byabout two feet, and the seats were still without backs. The county owns the lot now, I hear, and every year there isa 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 thebroken, 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 andjovial, and people talked. I felt sure that Ben and ’Tildy would come to naught from such a home. But this is anodd 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 atbecause he was homely and crooked. There was Sam Carlon, an impudent old skinflint, who had definite notionsabout “niggers,” and hired Ben a summer and would not pay him. Then the hungry boy gathered his sackstogether, and in broad daylight went into Carlon’s corn; and when the hard-fisted farmer set upon him, the angryboy 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, Docor the seventy-five acres. For it is a hard thing to make a farm out of nothing, even in fifteen years. So I hurriedon, thinking of the Burkes. They used to have a certain magnificent barbarism about them that I liked. They werenever vulgar, never immoral, but rather rough and primitive, with an unconventionality that spent itself in loudguffaws, slaps on the back, and naps in the corner. I hurried by the cottage of the misborn Neill boys. It wasempty, and they were grown into fat, lazy farm-hands. I saw the home of the Hickmans, but Albert, with hisstooping shoulders, had passed from the world. Then I came to the Burkes’ gate and peered through; theenclosure 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 daywould scarcely be happy out of debt, being so used to it. Some day he must stop, for his massive frame isshowing decline. The mother wore shoes, but the lion-like physique of other days was broken. The children hadgrown up. Rob, the image of his father, was loud and rough with laughter. Birdie, my school baby of six, hadgrown 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 towardFarmer Dowell’s. The road and the stream were battling for mastery, and the stream had the better of it. Wesplashed and waded, and the merry boy, perched behind me, chattered and laughed. He showed me where SimonThompson had bought a bit of ground and a home; but his daughter Lana, a plump, brown, slow girl, was notthere. She had married a man and a farm twenty miles away. We wound on down the stream till we came to a gatethat 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 andchildhood there. We sat and talked that night after the chores were done. Uncle Bird was grayer, and his eyes didnot see so well, but he was still jovial. We talked of the acres bought,—one hundred and twenty-five,—of the newguest-chamber added, of Martha’s marrying. Then we talked of death: Fanny and Fred were gone; a shadow hungover 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 overyonder, to escape the blows of her husband. And next morning she died in the home that her little bow-leggedbrother, 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 Progressthere where the dark-faced Josie lies? How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat? How hard athing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all this life and love and strife and failure,—is it thetwilight 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 ofthe past into the promise of the future. I have seen her in the morning, when the first flush of day had half-rousedher; 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 andswelled, 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 ofwar awakened her with its sullen waters, aroused and maddened her, and left her listening to the sea. And the seacried to the hills and the hills answered the sea, till the city rose like a widow and cast away her weeds, and toiledfor her daily bread; toiled steadily, toiled cunningly,—perhaps with some bitterness, with a touch, of réclame,—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 realashes 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 thatwith the Right that triumphed, triumphed something of Wrong, something sordid and mean, something less thanthe broadest and best. All this is bitter hard; and many a man and city and people have found in it excuse forsulking, and brooding, and listless waiting.
Such are not men of the sturdier make; they of Atlanta turned resolutely toward the future; and that future heldaloft 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 withfactories, and stored her shops with cunning handiwork, and stretched long iron ways to greet the busy Mercuryin 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 swarthyAtalanta, tall and wild, would marry only him who out-raced her; and how the wily Hippomenes laid three applesof 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 shelingered over the third, his arms fell round her, and looking on each other, the blazing passion of their loveprofaned the sanctuary of Love, and they were cursed. If Atlanta be not named for Atalanta, she ought to havebeen.
Atalanta is not the first or the last maiden whom greed of gold has led to defile the temple of Love; and notmaids alone, but men in the race of life, sink from the high and generous ideals of youth to the gambler’s code ofthe Bourse; and in all our Nation’s striving is not the Gospel of Work befouled by the Gospel of Pay? So commonis this that one-half think it normal; so unquestioned, that we almost fear to question if the end of racing is notgold, 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 anew 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 cityafter the War,—feudalism, poverty, the rise of the Third Estate, serfdom, the re-birth of Law and Order, and aboveand between all, the Veil of Race. How heavy a journey for weary feet! what wings must Atalanta have to flitover all this hollow and hill, through sour wood and sullen water, and by the red waste of sun-baked clay! Howfleet 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 thriftyMercury of New England, Pluto of the North, and Ceres of the West; and there, too, is the half-forgotten Apolloof the South, under whose aegis the maiden ran,—and as she ran she forgot him, even as there in Boeotia Venuswas forgot. She forgot the old ideal of the Southern gentleman,—that new-world heir of the grace and courtlinessof patrician, knight, and noble; forgot his honor with his foibles, his kindliness with his carelessness, and stoopedto apples of gold,—to men busier and sharper, thriftier and more unscrupulous. Golden apples are beautiful—Iremember 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 mightylevers to lift this old new land; thrift and toil and saving are the highways to new hopes and new possibilities; andyet the warning is needed lest the wily Hippomenes tempt Atalanta to thinking that golden apples are the goal ofracing, 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 thefatal 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 illthe panacea of Wealth has been urged,—wealth to overthrow the remains of the slave feudalism; wealth to raisethe “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 andbeyond 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 mandream that day will never come,—then the part he plays will not be one of sudden learning, but words andthoughts 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 likeproblems of ideals, of leaders and the led, of serfdom, of poverty, of order and subordination, and, through all, theVeil 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 Hippomenespenetrated; already in this smaller world, which now indirectly and anon directly must influence the larger forgood or ill, the habit is forming of interpreting the world in dollars. The old leaders of Negro opinion, in the littlegroups where there is a Negro social consciousness, are being replaced by new; neither the black preacher nor theblack 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, socuriously 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, withhis incorruptible honesty and dignified humility. He is passing away just as surely as the old type of Southerngentleman is passing, and from not dissimilar causes,—the sudden transformation of a fair far-off ideal ofFreedom 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 anotherand a juster world, the vague dream of righteousness, the mystery of knowing; but to-day the danger is that theseideals, 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 towardthe hills and sky as in the days of old, then we may look for noble running; but what if some ruthless or wily oreven thoughtless Hippomenes lay golden apples before her? What if the Negro people be wooed from a strife forrighteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard dollars as the be-all and end-all of life? What if to theMammonism of America be added the rising Mammonism of the re-born South, and the Mammonism of thisSouth 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 Freedomwhich, despite the jeers of latter-day striplings, sprung from our fathers’ blood, must that too degenerate into adusty 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 throwsthree buildings in bold relief against the sky. The beauty of the group lies in its simple unity:—a broad lawn ofgreen rising from the red street and mingled roses and peaches; north and south, two plain and stately halls; andin the midst, half hidden in ivy, a larger building, boldly graceful, sparingly decorated, and with one low spire. Itis a restful group, —one never looks for more; it is all here, all intelligible. There I live, and there I hear from dayto day the low hum of restful life. In winter’s twilight, when the red sun glows, I can see the dark figures passbetween the halls to the music of the night-bell. In the morning, when the sun is golden, the clang of the day-bellbrings 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 ahalf-dozen class-rooms they gather then,—here to follow the love-song of Dido, here to listen to the tale of Troydivine; 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-glorifiedmethods of delving for Truth, and searching out the hidden beauties of life, and learning the good of living. Theriddle of existence is the college curriculum that was laid before the Pharaohs, that was taught in the groves byPlato, that formed the trivium and quadrivium, and is to-day laid before the freedmen’s sons by AtlantaUniversity. And this course of study will not change; its methods will grow more deft and effectual, its contentricher by toil of scholar and sight of seer; but the true college will ever have one goal,—not to earn meat, but toknow 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 realizefor men, both black and white, the broadest possibilities of life, to seek the better and the best, to spread with theirown hands the Gospel of Sacrifice,—all this is the burden of their talk and dream. Here, amid a wide desert ofcaste and proscription, amid the heart-hurting slights and jars and vagaries of a deep race-dislike, lies this greenoasis, where hot anger cools, and the bitterness of disappointment is sweetened by the springs and breezes ofParnassus; 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 hadlifted; they made their mistakes, but those mistakes were not the things at which we lately laughed somewhatuproariously. 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, ratherthan the leaves, are the sources of its life; and from the dawn of history, from Academus to Cambridge, theculture 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 amatter of years and decades; in therefore building quickly and laying their foundation carelessly, and lowering thestandard of knowing, until they had scattered haphazard through the South some dozen poorly equipped highschools and miscalled them universities. They forgot, too, just as their successors are forgetting, the rule ofinequality:—that of the million black youth, some were fitted to know and some to dig; that some had the talentand capacity of university men, and some the talent and capacity of blacksmiths; and that true training meantneither that all should be college men nor all artisans, but that the one should be made a missionary of culture toan untaught people, and the other a free workman among serfs. And to seek to make the blacksmith a scholar isalmost 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 publicschools or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real lifeand the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization. Such an institution theSouth of to-day sorely needs. She has religion, earnest, bigoted:—religion that on both sides the Veil often omitsthe sixth, seventh, and eighth commandments, but substitutes a dozen supplementary ones. She has, as Atlantashows, growing thrift and love of toil; but she lacks that broad knowledge of what the world knows and knew ofhuman living and doing, which she may apply to the thousand problems of real life to-day confronting her. Theneed of the South is knowledge and culture,—not in dainty limited quantity, as before the war, but in broad busyabundance in the world of work; and until she has this, not all the Apples of Hesperides, be they golden andbejewelled, 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 thetemptation of golden fruit. They will not guide her flying feet away from the cotton and gold; for—ah, thoughtfulHippomenes!—do not the apples lie in the very Way of Life? But they will guide her over and beyond them, andleave her kneeling in the Sanctuary of Truth and Freedom and broad Humanity, virgin and undefiled. Sadly didthe Old South err in human education, despising the education of the masses, and niggardly in the support ofcolleges. Her ancient university foundations dwindled and withered under the foul breath of slavery; and evensince 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’sneed and danger, how much heavier the danger and need of the freedmen’s sons! how pressing here the need ofbroad ideals and true culture, the conservation of soul from sordid aims and petty passions! Let us build theSouthern 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 theNation; Atlanta at Atlanta, whose ideal of scholarship has been held above the temptation of numbers. Why nothere, and perhaps elsewhere, plant deeply and for all time centres of learning and living, colleges that yearlywould 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 anddignified 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 mustmen 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 whensaid of Negro boys, for they have less knowledge of working and none to teach them. Teach thinkers to think,—aneeded knowledge in a day of loose and careless logic; and they whose lot is gravest must have the carefulesttraining to think aright. If these things are so, how foolish to ask what is the best education for one or seven orsixty million souls! shall we teach them trades, or train them in liberal arts? Neither and both: teach the workersto work and the thinkers to think; make carpenters of carpenters, and philosophers of philosophers, and fops offools. Nor can we pause here. We are training not isolated men but a living group of men,—nay, a group within agroup. And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man. And tomake men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living,—not sordid money-getting, not applesof gold. The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think fortruth, 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 commonschool on the university, and the industrial school on the common school; and weaving thus a system, not adistortion, 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 murmuringwestward. And at its bidding, the smoke of the drowsy factories sweeps down upon the mighty city and covers itlike a pall, while yonder at the University the stars twinkle above Stone Hall. And they say that yon gray mist isthe 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 himIn 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 towerof Jamestown, have flowed down to our day three streams of thinking: one swollen from the larger world hereand overseas, saying, the multiplying of human wants in culture-lands calls for the world-wide cooperation ofmen 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 thrillof 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 thetemptation 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,—thesincere and passionate belief that somewhere between men and cattle, God created a tertium quid, and called it aNegro,—a clownish, simple creature, at times even lovable within its limitations, but straitly foreordained to walkwithin the Veil. To be sure, behind the thought lurks the afterthought,—some of them with favoring chance mightbecome men, but in sheer self-defence we dare not let them, and we build about them walls so high, and hangbetween 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, theconfused, 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 theafterthought,—suppose, after all, the World is right and we are less than men? Suppose this mad impulse within isall wrong, some mock mirage from the untrue?
So here we stand among thoughts of human unity, even through conquest and slavery; the inferiority of blackmen, even if forced by fraud; a shriek in the night for the freedom of men who themselves are not yet sure of theirright to demand it. This is the tangle of thought and afterthought wherein we are called to solve the problem oftraining men for life.
Behind all its curiousness, so attractive alike to sage and dilettante, lie its dim dangers, throwing across usshadows at once grotesque and awful. Plain it is to us that what the world seeks through desert and wild we havewithin 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 brutalafterthought, we debauch the race thus caught in our talons, selfishly sucking their blood and brains in the futureas 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 thehuman mind exist and must be reckoned with soberly. They cannot be laughed away, nor always successfullystormed 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 religionand common decency. They can be met in but one way,—by the breadth and broadening of human reason, bycatholicity 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 playwith mighty fires; to flout their striving idly is to welcome a harvest of brutish crime and shameless lethargy inour 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 onepanacea of Education leaps to the lips of all:—such human training as will best use the labor of all men withoutenslaving or brutalizing; such training as will give us poise to encourage the prejudices that bulwark society, andto stamp out those that in sheer barbarity deafen us to the wail of prisoned souls within the Veil, and the mountingfury 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? Ahundred and fifty years ago our task would have seemed easier. Then Dr. Johnson blandly assured us thateducation was needful solely for the embellishments of life, and was useless for ordinary vermin. To-day we haveclimbed to heights where we would open at least the outer courts of knowledge to all, display its treasures tomany, and select the few to whom its mystery of Truth is revealed, not wholly by birth or the accidents of thestock 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, andwhere we are dealing with two backward peoples. To make here in human education that ever necessary
where we are dealing with two backward peoples. To make here in human education that ever necessarycombination of the permanent and the contingent—of the ideal and the practical in workable equilibrium—hasbeen 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 CivilWar. From the close of the war until 1876, was the period of uncertain groping and temporary relief. There werearmy schools, mission schools, and schools of the Freedmen’s Bureau in chaotic disarrangement seeking systemand co-operation. Then followed ten years of constructive definite effort toward the building of complete schoolsystems in the South. Normal schools and colleges were founded for the freedmen, and teachers trained there toman the public schools. There was the inevitable tendency of war to underestimate the prejudices of the masterand the ignorance of the slave, and all seemed clear sailing out of the wreckage of the storm. Meantime, startingin this decade yet especially developing from 1885 to 1895, began the industrial revolution of the South. The landsaw glimpses of a new destiny and the stirring of new ideals. The educational system striving to complete itselfsaw new obstacles and a field of work ever broader and deeper. The Negro colleges, hurriedly founded, wereinadequately equipped, illogically distributed, and of varying efficiency and grade; the normal and high schoolswere doing little more than common-school work, and the common schools were training but a third of thechildren who ought to be in them, and training these too often poorly. At the same time the white South, byreason of its sudden conversion from the slavery ideal, by so much the more became set and strengthened in itsracial prejudice, and crystallized it into harsh law and harsher custom; while the marvellous pushing forward ofthe poor white daily threatened to take even bread and butter from the mouths of the heavily handicapped sons ofthe freedmen. In the midst, then, of the larger problem of Negro education sprang up the more practical questionof work, the inevitable economic quandary that faces a people in the transition from slavery to freedom, andespecially 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 beginningwith 1895, was the proffered answer to this combined educational and economic crisis, and an answer of singularwisdom and timeliness. From the very first in nearly all the schools some attention had been given to training inhandiwork, but now was this training first raised to a dignity that brought it in direct touch with the South’smagnificent industrial development, and given an emphasis which reminded black folk that before the Temple ofKnowledge 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 Negroproblem to the broader question of the permanent uplifting and civilization of black men in America, we have aright to inquire, as this enthusiasm for material advancement mounts to its height, if after all the industrial schoolis 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-dayall the more eagerly because of sinister signs in recent educational movements. The tendency is here, born ofslavery and quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism of the day, to regard human beings as among thematerial resources of a land to be trained with an eye single to future dividends. Race-prejudices, which keepbrown and black men in their “places,” we are coming to regard as useful allies with such a theory, no matter howmuch they may dull the ambition and sicken the hearts of struggling human beings. And above all, we daily hearthat an education that encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture andcharacter 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 fourperiods I have mentioned, we find first, boundless, planless enthusiasm and sacrifice; then the preparation ofteachers for a vast public-school system; then the launching and expansion of that school system amid increasingdifficulties; and finally the training of workmen for the new and growing industries. This development has beensharply ridiculed as a logical anomaly and flat reversal of nature. Soothly we have been told that first industrialand manual training should have taught the Negro to work, then simple schools should have taught him to readand write, and finally, after years, high and normal schools could have completed the system, as intelligence andwealth demanded.
That a system logically so complete was historically impossible, it needs but a little thought to prove. Progressin human affairs is more often a pull than a push, a surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of hisduller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage-ground. Thus it was no accident that gave birth to universitiescenturies 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. Theymust first have the common school to teach them to read, write, and cipher; and they must have higher schools toteach 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. Butthey faced, as all men since them have faced, that central paradox of the South,—the social separation of theraces. At that time it was the sudden volcanic rupture of nearly all relations between black and white, in work andgovernment and family life. Since then a new adjustment of relations in economic and political affairs has grownup,—an adjustment subtle and difficult to grasp, yet singularly ingenious, which leaves still that frightful chasmat the color-line across which men pass at their peril. Thus, then and now, there stand in the South two separateworlds; and separate not simply in the higher realms of social intercourse, but also in church and school, onrailway and street-car, in hotels and theatres, in streets and city sections, in books and newspapers, in asylums andjails, in hospitals and graveyards. There is still enough of contact for large economic and group cooperation, butthe separation is so thorough and deep that it absolutely precludes for the present between the races anything likethat sympathetic and effective group-training and leadership of the one by the other, such as the American Negroand all backward peoples must have for effectual progress.
This the missionaries of ’68 soon saw; and if effective industrial and trade schools were impracticable beforethe establishment of a common-school system, just as certainly no adequate common schools could be foundeduntil there were teachers to teach them. Southern whites would not teach them; Northern whites in sufficientnumbers could not be had. If the Negro was to learn, he must teach himself, and the most effective help that couldbe given him was the establishment of schools to train Negro teachers. This conclusion was slowly but surelyreached by every student of the situation until simultaneously, in widely separated regions, without consultationor systematic plan, there arose a series of institutions designed to furnish teachers for the untaught. Above thesneers of critics at the obvious defects of this procedure must ever stand its one crushing rejoinder: in a singlegeneration they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South; they wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of theblack people of the land, and they made Tuskegee possible.
Such higher training-schools tended naturally to deepen broader development: at first they were common andgrammar schools, then some became high schools. And finally, by 1900, some thirty-four had one year or more ofstudies 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 about1896. In all cases the aim was identical,—to maintain the standards of the lower training by giving teachers andleaders the best practicable training; and above all, to furnish the black world with adequate standards of humanculture and lofty ideals of life. It was not enough that the teachers of teachers should be trained in technicalnormal methods; they must also, so far as possible, be broad-minded, cultured men and women, to scattercivilization 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, whichthrew off as their foliage common schools, and later industrial schools, and at the same time strove to shoot theirroots 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 naturalgrowth was not forced, and if the higher training was not either overdone or done with cheap and unsoundmethods. Among white Southerners this feeling is widespread and positive. A prominent Southern journal voicedthis in a recent editorial.
“The experiment that has been made to give the colored students classical training has notbeen satisfactory. Even though many were able to pursue the course, most of them did soin a parrot-like way, learning what was taught, but not seeming to appropriate the truth andimport of their instruction, and graduating without sensible aim or valuable occupation fortheir future. The whole scheme has proved a waste of time, efforts, and the money of thestate.”
While most fair-minded men would recognize this as extreme and overdrawn, still without doubt many areasking, Are there a sufficient number of Negroes ready for college training to warrant the undertaking? Are nottoo many students prematurely forced into this work? Does it not have the effect of dissatisfying the young Negrowith his environment? And do these graduates succeed in real life? Such natural questions cannot be evaded, noron the other hand must a Nation naturally skeptical as to Negro ability assume an unfavorable answer withoutcareful inquiry and patient openness to conviction. We must not forget that most Americans answer all queriesregarding 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 glaringdefects of the present system: too many institutions have attempted to do college work, the work in some caseshas not been thoroughly done, and quantity rather than quality has sometimes been sought. But all this can be saidof higher education throughout the land; it is the almost inevitable incident of educational growth, and leaves thedeeper question of the legitimate demand for the higher training of Negroes untouched. And this latter questioncan be settled in but one way,—by a first-hand study of the facts. If we leave out of view all institutions whichhave not actually graduated students from a course higher than that of a New England high school, even thoughthey be called colleges; if then we take the thirty-four remaining institutions, we may clear up manymisapprehensions by asking searchingly, What kind of institutions are they? what do they teach? and what sort ofmen 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 catchglimpses of a boulder of New England granite, covering a grave, which graduates of Atlanta University haveplaced there,—
“IN GRATEFUL MEMORY OF THEIR FORMER TEACHER AND FRIEND AND OFTHE UNSELFISH LIFE HE LIVED, AND THE NOBLE WORK HE WROUGHT; THATTHEY, THEIR CHILDREN, AND THEIR CHILDREN’S CHILDREN MIGHT BEBLESSED.”
This was the gift of New England to the freed Negro: not alms, but a friend; not cash, but character. It was notand 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 soulsbrought to their favored children in the crusade of the sixties, that finest thing in American history, and one of thefew things untainted by sordid greed and cheap vainglory. The teachers in these institutions came not to keep theNegroes 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 inclose and sympathetic touch with the best traditions of New England. They lived and ate together, studied andworked, 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 initself is enough to put at rest the argument that too large a proportion of Negroes are receiving higher training. Ifthe ratio to population of all Negro students throughout the land, in both college and secondary training, becounted, Commissioner Harris assures us “it must be increased to five times its present average” to equal theaverage of the land.
Fifty years ago the ability of Negro students in any appreciable numbers to master a modern college coursewould have been difficult to prove. To-day it is proved by the fact that four hundred Negroes, many of whomhave been reported as brilliant students, have received the bachelor’s degree from Harvard, Yale, Oberlin, andseventy other leading colleges. Here we have, then, nearly twenty-five hundred Negro graduates, of whom thecrucial query must be made, How far did their training fit them for life? It is of course extremely difficult tocollect satisfactory data on such a point,—difficult to reach the men, to get trustworthy testimony, and to gaugethat testimony by any generally acceptable criterion of success. In 1900, the Conference at Atlanta Universityundertook to study these graduates, and published the results. First they sought to know what these graduateswere doing, and succeeded in getting answers from nearly two-thirds of the living. The direct testimony was inalmost all cases corroborated by the reports of the colleges where they graduated, so that in the main the reportswere worthy of credence. Fifty-three per cent of these graduates were teachers,—presidents of institutions, headsof normal schools, principals of city school-systems, and the like. Seventeen per cent were clergymen; anotherseventeen per cent were in the professions, chiefly as physicians. Over six per cent were merchants, farmers, andartisans, and four per cent were in the government civil-service. Granting even that a considerable proportion ofthe third unheard from are unsuccessful, this is a record of usefulness. Personally I know many hundreds of thesegraduates, 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 whichthey have builded, and looked at life through their eyes. Comparing them as a class with my fellow students inNew England and in Europe, I cannot hesitate in saying that nowhere have I met men and women with a broaderspirit of helpfulness, with deeper devotion to their life-work, or with more consecrated determination to succeedin the face of bitter difficulties than among Negro college-bred men. They have, to be sure, their proportion ofne’er-do-wells, their pedants and lettered fools, but they have a surprisingly small proportion of them; they havenot that culture of manner which we instinctively associate with university men, forgetting that in reality it is theheritage from cultured homes, and that no people a generation removed from slavery can escape a certainunpleasant 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 andfaithfully in a thousand communities in the South. As teachers, they have given the South a commendable systemof city schools and large numbers of private normal-schools and academies. Colored college-bred men haveworked side by side with white college graduates at Hampton; almost from the beginning the backbone ofTuskegee’s teaching force has been formed of graduates from Fisk and Atlanta. And to-day the institute is filledwith college graduates, from the energetic wife of the principal down to the teacher of agriculture, includingnearly half of the executive council and a majority of the heads of departments. In the professions, college menare slowly but surely leavening the Negro church, are healing and preventing the devastations of disease, andbeginning 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 whitepeople need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of thesort?
If it is true that there are an appreciable number of Negro youth in the land capable by character and talent toreceive that higher training, the end of which is culture, and if the two and a half thousand who have hadsomething of this training in the past have in the main proved themselves useful to their race and generation, thequestion 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 theinfluences of culture, as the South grows civilized, is clear. But such transformation calls for singular wisdom andpatience. 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 andsilently separate in many matters of deeper human intimacy,—if this unusual and dangerous development is toprogress amid peace and order, mutual respect and growing intelligence, it will call for social surgery at once thedelicatest and nicest in modern history. It will demand broad-minded, upright men, both white and black, and inits final accomplishment American civilization will triumph. So far as white men are concerned, this fact is to-daybeing recognized in the South, and a happy renaissance of university education seems imminent. But the veryvoices that cry hail to this good work are, strange to relate, largely silent or antagonistic to the higher education ofthe Negro.
Strange to relate! for this is certain, no secure civilization can be built in the South with the Negro as anignorant, turbulent proletariat. Suppose we seek to remedy this by making them laborers and nothing more: theyare not fools, they have tasted of the Tree of Life, and they will not cease to think, will not cease attempting toread the riddle of the world. By taking away their best equipped teachers and leaders, by slamming the door ofopportunity in the faces of their bolder and brighter minds, will you make them satisfied with their lot? or willyou 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 evenridicule of friends, the demand for higher training steadily increases among Negro youth: there were, in the yearsfrom 1875 to 1880, 22 Negro graduates from Northern colleges; from 1885 to 1890 there were 43, and from 1895to 1900, nearly 100 graduates. From Southern Negro colleges there were, in the same three periods, 143, 413, andover 500 graduates. Here, then, is the plain thirst for training; by refusing to give this Talented Tenth the key toknowledge, can any sane man imagine that they will lightly lay aside their yearning and contentedly becomehewers 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 daywhen 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 catchup with civilization. And as the black third of the land grows in thrift and skill, unless skilfully guided in its largerphilosophy, it must more and more brood over the red past and the creeping, crooked present, until it grasps agospel of revolt and revenge and throws its new-found energies athwart the current of advance. Even to-day themasses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the moral crookedness of yours. Youmay marshal strong indictments against them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic, haveburning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen! If you deplore theirpresence here, they ask, Who brought us? When you cry, Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage, they answerthat legal marriage is infinitely better than systematic concubinage and prostitution. And if in just fury you accusetheir vagabonds of violating women, they also in fury quite as just may reply: The rape which your gentlemenhave done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two millionsof mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable blood. And finally, when you fasten crime upon this race as its peculiartrait, they answer that slavery was the arch-crime, and lynching and lawlessness its twin abortions; that color andrace 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; butI do say that of the nine millions of Negroes in this nation, there is scarcely one out of the cradle to whom thesearguments do not daily present themselves in the guise of terrible truth. I insist that the question of the future ishow best to keep these millions from brooding over the wrongs of the past and the difficulties of the present, sothat all their energies may be bent toward a cheerful striving and cooperation with their white neighbors toward alarger, juster, and fuller future. That one wise method of doing this lies in the closer knitting of the Negro to thegreat industrial possibilities of the South is a great truth. And this the common schools and the manual trainingand trade schools are working to accomplish. But these alone are not enough. The foundations of knowledge inthis race, as in others, must be sunk deep in the college and university if we would build a solid, permanentstructure. Internal problems of social advance must inevitably come, —problems of work and wages, of familiesand homes, of morals and the true valuing of the things of life; and all these and other inevitable problems ofcivilization the Negro must meet and solve largely for himself, by reason of his isolation; and can there be anypossible 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 andshallow thinking than from over-education and over-refinement? Surely we have wit enough to found a Negrocollege so manned and equipped as to steer successfully between the dilettante and the fool. We shall hardlyinduce black men to believe that if their stomachs be full, it matters little about their brains. They already dimlyperceive that the paths of peace winding between honest toil and dignified manhood call for the guidance ofskilled thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship between the black lowly and the black men emancipated bytraining and culture.
The function of the Negro college, then, is clear: it must maintain the standards of popular education, it mustseek the social regeneration of the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact andcooperation. And finally, beyond all this, it must develop men. Above our modern socialism, and out of theworship of the mass, must persist and evolve that higher individualism which the centres of culture protect; theremust come a loftier respect for the sovereign human soul that seeks to know itself and the world about it; thatseeks 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 notwholly bewitched by our Rhinegold, they shall again. Herein the longing of black men must have respect: the richand bitter depth of their experience, the unknown treasures of their inner life, the strange rendings of nature theyhave seen, may give the world new points of view and make their loving, living, and doing precious to all humanhearts. And to themselves in these the days that try their souls, the chance to soar in the dim blue air above thesmoke 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 swingbetween the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul Iwill, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Isthis the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousnessof Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight thePromised 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 andmonotonous right and left. Here and there lay straggling, unlovely villages, and lean men loafed leisurely at thedepots; then again came the stretch of pines and clay. Yet we did not nod, nor weary of the scene; for this ishistoric ground. Right across our track, three hundred and sixty years ago, wandered the cavalcade of Hernandode Soto, looking for gold and the Great Sea; and he and his foot-sore captives disappeared yonder in the grimforests 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 thesouthwest, not far from where Sam Hose was crucified, you may stand on a spot which is to-day the centre of theNegro problem,—the centre of those nine million men who are America’s dark heritage from slavery and theslave-trade.
Not only is Georgia thus the geographical focus of our Negro population, but in many other respects, both nowand yesterday, the Negro problems have seemed to be centered in this State. No other State in the Union cancount a million Negroes among its citizens,—a population as large as the slave population of the whole Union in1800; no other State fought so long and strenuously to gather this host of Africans. Oglethorpe thought slaveryagainst law and gospel; but the circumstances which gave Georgia its first inhabitants were not calculated tofurnish citizens over-nice in their ideas about rum and slaves. Despite the prohibitions of the trustees, theseGeorgians, like some of their descendants, proceeded to take the law into their own hands; and so pliant were thejudges, and so flagrant the smuggling, and so earnest were the prayers of Whitefield, that by the middle of theeighteenth 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 protestagainst slavery from the Scotch Highlanders; and the Moravians of Ebenezer did not like the system. But not tillthe Haytian Terror of Toussaint was the trade in men even checked; while the national statute of 1808 did notsuffice to stop it. How the Africans poured in!—fifty thousand between 1790 and 1810, and then, from Virginiaand from smugglers, two thousand a year for many years more. So the thirty thousand Negroes of Georgia in1790 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 Governmentdrove them beyond the Mississippi. If you wish to ride with me you must come into the “Jim Crow Car.” Therewill be no objection,—already four other white men, and a little white girl with her nurse, are in there. Usuallythe races are mixed in there; but the white coach is all white. Of course this car is not so good as the other, but itis fairly clean and comfortable. The discomfort lies chiefly in the hearts of those four black men yonder—and inmine.
We rumble south in quite a business-like way. The bare red clay and pines of Northern Georgia begin todisappear, and in their place appears a rich rolling land, luxuriant, and here and there well tilled. This is the landof the Creek Indians; and a hard time the Georgians had to seize it. The towns grow more frequent and moreinteresting, and brand-new cotton mills rise on every side. Below Macon the world grows darker; for now weapproach the Black Belt,—that strange land of shadows, at which even slaves paled in the past, and whence comenow only faint and half-intelligible murmurs to the world beyond. The “Jim Crow Car” grows larger and a shadebetter; three rough field-hands and two or three white loafers accompany us, and the newsboy still spreads hiswares at one end. The sun is setting, but we can see the great cotton country as we enter it,—the soil now darkand 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 mileswest of the Atlantic, and one hundred miles north of the Great Gulf lies Dougherty County, with ten thousandNegroes and two thousand whites. The Flint River winds down from Andersonville, and, turning suddenly atAlbany, 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 thebattle of New Orleans; and by the Creek treaty that followed this campaign, all Dougherty County, and muchother rich land, was ceded to Georgia. Still, settlers fought shy of this land, for the Indians were all about, andthey were unpleasant neighbors in those days. The panic of 1837, which Jackson bequeathed to Van Buren, turnedthe planters from the impoverished lands of Virginia, the Carolinas, and east Georgia, toward the West. TheIndians were removed to Indian Territory, and settlers poured into these coveted lands to retrieve their brokenfortunes. For a radius of a hundred miles about Albany, stretched a great fertile land, luxuriant with forests ofpine, oak, ash, hickory, and poplar; hot with the sun and damp with the rich black swamp-land; and here thecorner-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 flankingrows of homes,—whites usually to the north, and blacks to the south. Six days in the week the town looksdecidedly too small for itself, and takes frequent and prolonged naps. But on Saturday suddenly the whole countydisgorges 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 thanthe crowds of the Rhine-pfalz, or Naples, or Cracow. They drink considerable quantities of whiskey, but do notget very drunk; they talk and laugh loudly at times, but seldom quarrel or fight. They walk up and down thestreets, meet and gossip with friends, stare at the shop windows, buy coffee, cheap candy, and clothes, and at duskdrive 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 citylife so little, that we illustrated city life as that of a closely crowded country district. Now the world has well-nighforgotten what the country is, and we must imagine a little city of black people scattered far and wide over threehundred lonesome square miles of land, without train or trolley, in the midst of cotton and corn, and wide patchesof sand and gloomy soil.
It gets pretty hot in Southern Georgia in July,—a sort of dull, determined heat that seems quite independent ofthe sun; so it took us some days to muster courage enough to leave the porch and venture out on the long countryroads, that we might see this unknown world. Finally we started. It was about ten in the morning, bright with afaint breeze, and we jogged leisurely southward in the valley of the Flint. We passed the scattered box-like cabinsof the brickyard hands, and the long tenement-row facetiously called “The Ark,” and were soon in the opencountry, and on the confines of the great plantations of other days. There is the “Joe Fields place”; a rough oldfellow was he, and had killed many a “nigger” in his day. Twelve miles his plantation used to run,—a regularbarony. It is nearly all gone now; only straggling bits belong to the family, and the rest has passed to Jews andNegroes. Even the bits which are left are heavily mortgaged, and, like the rest of the land, tilled by tenants. Hereis one of them now,—a tall brown man, a hard worker and a hard drinker, illiterate, but versed in farmlore, as hisnodding 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 passingcarriages are not every-day occurrences here. Benton is an intelligent yellow man with a good-sized family, andmanages 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 havesettled 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, thePellots, and the Rensons; but the souls of them are passed. The houses lie in half ruin, or have whollydisappeared; the fences have flown, and the families are wandering in the world. Strange vicissitudes have metthese whilom masters. Yonder stretch the wide acres of Bildad Reasor; he died in war-time, but the upstartoverseer hastened to wed the widow. Then he went, and his neighbors too, and now only the black tenantremains; but the shadow-hand of the master’s grand-nephew or cousin or creditor stretches out of the graydistance to collect the rack-rent remorselessly, and so the land is uncared-for and poor. Only black tenants canstand such a system, and they only because they must. Ten miles we have ridden to-day and have seen no whiteface.
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 ishe,—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,—aneat cottage snugly ensconced by the road, and near it a little store. A tall bronzed man rises from the porch as wehail him, and comes out to our carriage. He is six feet in height, with a sober face that smiles gravely. He walkstoo 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 inhis 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 hehas sent away to school. Yes, he says sadly, he is getting on, but cotton is down to four cents; I know how Debtsits staring at him.
Wherever the King may be, the parks and palaces of the Cotton Kingdom have not wholly disappeared. Weplunge even now into great groves of oak and towering pine, with an undergrowth of myrtle and shrubbery. Thiswas the “home-house” of the Thompsons,—slave-barons who drove their coach and four in the merry past. All issilence now, and ashes, and tangled weeds. The owner put his whole fortune into the rising cotton industry of thefifties, and with the falling prices of the eighties he packed up and stole away. Yonder is another grove, withunkempt lawn, great magnolias, and grass-grown paths. The Big House stands in half-ruin, its great front doorstaring blankly at the street, and the back part grotesquely restored for its black tenant. A shabby, well-built Negrohe is, unlucky and irresolute. He digs hard to pay rent to the white girl who owns the remnant of the place. Shemarried 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 ofa thing, perched on stilts of stone, and looking for all the world as though it were just resting here a moment andmight be expected to waddle off down the road at almost any time. And yet it is the centre of a hundred cabinhomes; 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 isheld in the church. The churches vary from log-huts to those like Shepherd’s, and the schools from nothing to thislittle house that sits demurely on the county line. It is a tiny plank-house, perhaps ten by twenty, and has within adouble row of rough unplaned benches, resting mostly on legs, sometimes on boxes. Opposite the door is a squarehome-made desk. In one corner are the ruins of a stove, and in the other a dim blackboard. It is the cheerfulestschoolhouse I have seen in Dougherty, save in town. Back of the schoolhouse is a lodgehouse two stories highand not quite finished. Societies meet there,—societies “to care for the sick and bury the dead”; and thesesocieties grow and flourish.
We had come to the boundaries of Dougherty, and were about to turn west along the county-line, when all thesesights were pointed out to us by a kindly old man, black, white-haired, and seventy. Forty-five years he had livedhere, and now supports himself and his old wife by the help of the steer tethered yonder and the charity of hisblack neighbors. He shows us the farm of the Hills just across the county line in Baker,—a widow and twostrapping sons, who raised ten bales (one need not add “cotton” down here) last year. There are fences and pigsand cows, and the soft-voiced, velvet-skinned young Memnon, who sauntered half-bashfully over to greet thestrangers, is proud of his home. We turn now to the west along the county line. Great dismantled trunks of pinestower 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 itwere. The houses are bare and straight; there are no hammocks or easy-chairs, and few flowers. So when, as hereat Rawdon’s, one sees a vine clinging to a little porch, and home-like windows peeping over the fences, one takesa long breath. I think I never before quite realized the place of the Fence in civilization. This is the Land of theUnfenced, where crouch on either hand scores of ugly one-room cabins, cheerless and dirty. Here lies the Negroproblem in its naked dirt and penury. And here are no fences. But now and then the crisscross rails or straightpalings break into view, and then we know a touch of culture is near. Of course Harrison Gohagen,—a quietyellow man, young, smooth-faced, and diligent,—of course he is lord of some hundred acres, and we expect tosee a vision of well-kept rooms and fat beds and laughing children. For has he not fine fences? And those overyonder, 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 ofbuildings,—wood and brick, mills and houses, and scattered cabins. It seemed quite a village. As it came nearerand nearer, however, the aspect changed: the buildings were rotten, the bricks were falling out, the mills weresilent, and the store was closed. Only in the cabins appeared now and then a bit of lazy life. I could imagine theplace 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 theseventies to woo this coy dark soil. He bought a square mile or more, and for a time the field-hands sang, the ginsgroaned, 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 closedits 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 airwas heavy with a dead sweet perfume. White slender-legged curlews flitted by us, and the garnet blooms of thecotton looked gay against the green and purple stalks. A peasant girl was hoeing in the field, white-turbaned andblack-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 humanlife; shadowed with a tragic past, and big with future promise! This is the Black Belt of Georgia. DoughertyCounty is the west end of the Black Belt, and men once called it the Egypt of the Confederacy. It is full of historicinterest. First there is the Swamp, to the west, where the Chickasawhatchee flows sullenly southward. Theshadow of an old plantation lies at its edge, forlorn and dark. Then comes the pool; pendent gray moss andbrackish waters appear, and forests filled with wildfowl. In one place the wood is on fire, smouldering in dull redanger; but nobody minds. Then the swamp grows beautiful; a raised road, built by chained Negro convicts, dipsdown into it, and forms a way walled and almost covered in living green. Spreading trees spring from a prodigalluxuriance of undergrowth; great dark green shadows fade into the black background, until all is one mass oftangled 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 seventyyears 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 andwomen and children fled and fell before them as they swept into Dougherty. In yonder shadows a dark andhideously painted warrior glided stealthily on,—another and another, until three hundred had crept into thetreacherous swamp. Then the false slime closing about them called the white men from the east. Waist-deep, theyfought beneath the tall trees, until the war-cry was hushed and the Indians glided back into the west. Smallwonder the wood is red.
Then came the black slaves. Day after day the clank of chained feet marching from Virginia and Carolina toGeorgia 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 hadrisen in West Dougherty perhaps the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew. A hundred and fiftybarons commanded the labor of nearly six thousand Negroes, held sway over farms with ninety thousand acrestilled land, valued even in times of cheap soil at three millions of dollars. Twenty thousand bales of ginned cottonwent yearly to England, New and Old; and men that came there bankrupt made money and grew rich. In a singledecade the cotton output increased four-fold and the value of lands was tripled. It was the heyday of the nouveauriche, and a life of careless extravagance among the masters. Four and six bobtailed thoroughbreds rolled theircoaches to town; open hospitality and gay entertainment were the rule. Parks and groves were laid out, rich withflower and vine, and in the midst stood the low wide-halled “big house,” with its porch and columns and greatfireplaces.
And yet with all this there was something sordid, something forced,—a certain feverish unrest andrecklessness; 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 bareruin of some master’s home. “I’ve seen niggers drop dead in the furrow, but they were kicked aside, and theplough 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, andleft 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 standingwhere once was a castle entrance; an old rusty anvil lying amid rotting bellows and wood in the ruins of ablacksmith shop; a wide rambling old mansion, brown and dingy, filled now with the grandchildren of the slaveswho once waited on its tables; while the family of the master has dwindled to two lone women, who live inMacon 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 halfruined, even there where a solitary white woman, a relic of other days, sits alone in state among miles of Negroesand 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 pouredout to the famished and ragged Confederate troops as they battled for a cause lost long before 1861. Sheltered andsecure, it became the place of refuge for families, wealth, and slaves. Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of theland began to tell. The red-clay sub-soil already had begun to peer above the loam. The harder the slaves weredriven the more careless and fatal was their farming. Then came the revolution of war and Emancipation, thebewilderment of Reconstruction,—and now, what is the Egypt of the Confederacy, and what meaning has it forthe 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 quadroonhiding her bare feet; she was married only last week, and yonder in the field is her dark young husband, hoeing tosupport her, at thirty cents a day without board. Across the way is Gatesby, brown and tall, lord of two thousandacres shrewdly won and held. There is a store conducted by his black son, a blacksmith shop, and a ginnery. Fivemiles below here is a town owned and controlled by one white New Englander. He owns almost a Rhode Islandcounty, 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 driveshard bargains in wages. When now we turn and look five miles above, there on the edge of town are five housesof prostitutes,—two of blacks and three of whites; and in one of the houses of the whites a worthless black boywas harbored too openly two years ago; so he was hanged for rape. And here, too, is the high whitewashed fenceof the “stockade,” as the county prison is called; the white folks say it is ever full of black criminals,—the blackfolks say that only colored boys are sent to jail, and they not because they are guilty, but because the State needscriminals 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 andstubby orchards of peach and pear, we see on all sides within the circle of dark forest a Land of Canaan. Here andthere 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, thisDougherty, 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 thebeautiful land; the merchants are in debt to the wholesalers, the planters are in debt to the merchants, the tenantsowe the planters, and laborers bow and bend beneath the burden of it all. Here and there a man has raised his headabove these murky waters. We passed one fenced stock-farm with grass and grazing cattle, that looked veryhome-like after endless corn and cotton. Here and there are black free-holders: there is the gaunt dull-blackJackson, 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 helpedhim 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, thefields, as we proceed, begin to redden and the trees disappear. Rows of old cabins appear filled with renters andlaborers,—cheerless, bare, and dirty, for the most part, although here and there the very age and decay makes thescene picturesque. A young black fellow greets us. He is twenty-two, and just married. Until last year he hadgood luck renting; then cotton fell, and the sheriff seized and sold all he had. So he moved here, where the rent ishigher, 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. Afterthe war it was for many years worked by gangs of Negro convicts,—and black convicts then were even moreplentiful than now; it was a way of making Negroes work, and the question of guilt was a minor one. Hard talesof 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 notuntil one of the fairest regions of the “Oakey Woods” had been ruined and ravished into a red waste, out of whichonly 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. Whyshould he strive? Every year finds him deeper in debt. How strange that Georgia, the world-heralded refuge ofpoor debtors, should bind her own to sloth and misfortune as ruthlessly as ever England did! The poor landgroans with its birth-pains, and brings forth scarcely a hundred pounds of cotton to the acre, where fifty years agoit yielded eight times as much. Of his meagre yield the tenant pays from a quarter to a third in rent, and most ofthe rest in interest on food and supplies bought on credit. Twenty years yonder sunken-cheeked, old black manhas labored under that system, and now, turned day-laborer, is supporting his wife and boarding himself on hiswages 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 werelodged in the great log prison still standing. A dismal place it still remains, with rows of ugly huts filled withsurly ignorant tenants. “What rent do you pay here?” I inquired. “I don’t know,—what is it, Sam?” “All wemake,” answered Sam. It is a depressing place,—bare, unshaded, with no charm of past association, only amemory of forced human toil,—now, then, and before the war. They are not happy, these black men whom wemeet throughout this region. There is little of the joyous abandon and playfulness which we are wont to associatewith the plantation Negro. At best, the natural good-nature is edged with complaint or has changed intosullenness and gloom. And now and then it blazes forth in veiled but hot anger. I remember one big red-eyedblack whom we met by the roadside. Forty-five years he had labored on this farm, beginning with nothing, andstill having nothing. To be sure, he had given four children a common-school training, and perhaps if the newfence-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 inAlbany, whom it was said a policeman had shot and killed for loud talking on the sidewalk. And then he saidslowly: “Let a white man touch me, and he dies; I don’t boast this,—I don’t say it around loud, or before thechildren,—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 andhas nothing but a mortgaged mule. Children? Yes, seven; but they hadn’t been to school this year,—couldn’tafford books and clothes, and couldn’t spare their work. There go part of them to the fields now,—three big boysastride mules, and a strapping girl with bare brown legs. Careless ignorance and laziness here, fierce hate andvindictiveness there;—these are the extremes of the Negro problem which we met that day, and we scarce knewwhich we preferred.
Here and there we meet distinct characters quite out of the ordinary. One came out of a piece of newly clearedground, making a wide detour to avoid the snakes. He was an old, hollow-cheeked man, with a drawn andcharacterful brown face. He had a sort of self-contained quaintness and rough humor impossible to describe; acertain 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 twoyears, but I reckon I’ve got a crop now.” The cotton looked tall and rich, and we praised it. He curtsied low, andthen bowed almost to the ground, with an imperturbable gravity that seemed almost suspicious. Then hecontinued, “My mule died last week,”—a calamity in this land equal to a devastating fire in town,—“but a whiteman loaned me another.” Then he added, eyeing us, “Oh, I gets along with white folks.” We turned theconversation. “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 yetapparently 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 moretouching,—such old empty houses, or the homes of the masters’ sons. Sad and bitter tales lie hidden back of thosewhite 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 overthem, and their children went astray. See yonder sad-colored house, with its cabins and fences and glad crops! Itis 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, andshot 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 lowhouse faced us, with porch and flying pillars, great oaken door, and a broad lawn shining in the evening sun. Butthe window-panes were gone, the pillars were worm-eaten, and the moss-grown roof was falling in. Halfcuriously I peered through the unhinged door, and saw where, on the wall across the hall, was written in once gayletters a faded “Welcome.”
Quite a contrast to the southwestern part of Dougherty County is the northwest. Soberly timbered in oak andpine, it has none of that half-tropical luxuriance of the southwest. Then, too, there are fewer signs of a romanticpast, 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 haveneither the luxuriance of the richer land nor the signs of neglect so often seen, and there were fences andmeadows 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 toallow much for wages, and yet he will not sell off small farms. There is the Negro Sanford; he has workedfourteen years as overseer on the Ladson place, and “paid out enough for fertilizers to have bought a farm,” butthe 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 issmooth-faced and brown, and is fencing up his pigs. He used to run a successful cotton-gin, but the Cotton SeedOil Trust has forced the price of ginning so low that he says it hardly pays him. He points out a stately old houseover the way as the home of “Pa Willis.” We eagerly ride over, for “Pa Willis” was the tall and powerful blackMoses 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. Hiswidow lives here,—a weazened, sharp-featured little woman, who curtsied quaintly as we greeted her. Further onlives 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 elevenblack 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 hundredacres of the Sennet plantation, with its Negro overseer. Then the character of the farms begins to change. Nearlyall the lands belong to Russian Jews; the overseers are white, and the cabins are bare board-houses scattered hereand there. The rents are high, and day-laborers and “contract” hands abound. It is a keen, hard struggle for livinghere, and few have time to talk. Tired with the long ride, we gladly drive into Gillonsville. It is a silent cluster offarmhouses standing on the crossroads, with one of its stores closed and the other kept by a Negro preacher. Theytell 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 scenesone cannot soon forget:—a wide, low, little house, whose motherly roof reached over and sheltered a snug littleporch. There we sat, after the long hot drive, drinking cool water,—the talkative little storekeeper who is my dailycompanion; the silent old black woman patching pantaloons and saying never a word; the ragged picture ofhelpless 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 buyseven 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. Iworked for him thirty-seven days this spring, and he paid me in cardboard checks which were to be cashed at theend of the month. But he never cashed them,—kept putting me off. Then the sheriff came and took my mule andcorn 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 asilvery cloud edged with dark green, its bold white signals waving like the foam of billows from Carolina toTexas across that Black and human Sea? I have sometimes half suspected that here the winged ram Chrysomallusleft that Fleece after which Jason and his Argonauts went vaguely wandering into the shadowy East threethousand 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 BlackSea.
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 theyscarce seem to belong to the slow and sleepy land. Perhaps they sprang from dragons’ teeth. So the CottonKingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre. Even the markets that once defied the parvenu havecrept 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 Kingdomhas moved from the Black to the White Belt,—that the Negro of to-day raises not more than half of the cottoncrop. 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 theConfederacy builded its hopes. So the Negro forms to-day one of the chief figures in a great world-industry; andthis, for its own sake, and in the light of historic interest, makes the field-hands of the cotton country worthstudying.
We seldom study the condition of the Negro to-day honestly and carefully. It is so much easier to assume thatwe know it all. Or perhaps, having already reached conclusions in our own minds, we are loth to have themdisturbed by facts. And yet how little we really know of these millions,—of their daily lives and longings, of theirhomely joys and sorrows, of their real shortcomings and the meaning of their crimes! All this we can only learnby intimate contact with the masses, and not by wholesale arguments covering millions separate in time andspace, and differing widely in training and culture. To-day, then, my reader, let us turn our faces to the Black Beltof 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 thepart of the mass of the population to make income cover expense. This is the direct heritage of the South from thewasteful economies of the slave régime; but it was emphasized and brought to a crisis by the Emancipation of theslaves. In 1860, Dougherty County had six thousand slaves, worth at least two and a half millions of dollars; itsfarms were estimated at three millions,—making five and a half millions of property, the value of which dependedlargely on the slave system, and on the speculative demand for land once marvellously rich but already partiallydevitalized by careless and exhaustive culture. The war then meant a financial crash; in place of the five and a halfmillions of 1860, there remained in 1870 only farms valued at less than two millions. With this came increasedcompetition 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 itthat involved the owners of the cotton-belt in debt. And if things went ill with the master, how fared it with theman?
The plantations of Dougherty County in slavery days were not as imposing and aristocratic as those ofVirginia. The Big House was smaller and usually one-storied, and sat very near the slave cabins. Sometimes thesecabins stretched off on either side like wings; sometimes only on one side, forming a double row, or edging theroad that turned into the plantation from the main thoroughfare. The form and disposition of the laborers’ cabinsthroughout the Black Belt is to-day the same as in slavery days. Some live in the self-same cabins, others incabins rebuilt on the sites of the old. All are sprinkled in little groups over the face of the land, centering aboutsome dilapidated Big House where the head-tenant or agent lives. The general character and arrangement of thesedwellings remains on the whole unaltered. There were in the county, outside the corporate town of Albany, aboutfifteen 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 morecarefully 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 andsombre amid the green of the cotton-fields. It is nearly always old and bare, built of rough boards, and neitherplastered nor ceiled. Light and ventilation are supplied by the single door and by the square hole in the wall withits wooden shutter. There is no glass, porch, or ornamentation without. Within is a fireplace, black and smoky, andusually unsteady with age. A bed or two, a table, a wooden chest, and a few chairs compose the furniture; while astray show-bill or a newspaper makes up the decorations for the walls. Now and then one may find such a cabinkept scrupulously neat, with merry steaming fireplaces and hospitable door; but the majority are dirty anddilapidated, 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 almostexclusively. This is primarily because we have so little accurate knowledge of country life. Here in DoughertyCounty one may find families of eight and ten occupying one or two rooms, and for every ten rooms of houseaccommodation for the Negroes there are twenty-five persons. The worst tenement abominations of New York donot have above twenty-two persons for every ten rooms. Of course, one small, close room in a city, without ayard, is in many respects worse than the larger single country room. In other respects it is better; it has glasswindows, a decent chimney, and a trustworthy floor. The single great advantage of the Negro peasant is that hemay 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 suchhomes to Negroes; white laborers would be offered better accommodations, and might, for that and similarreasons, 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 isa good business investment to raise the standard of living among labor by slow and judicious methods; that aNegro laborer who demands three rooms and fifty cents a day would give more efficient work and leave a largerprofit than a discouraged toiler herding his family in one room and working for thirty cents. Lastly, among suchconditions of life there are few incentives to make the laborer become a better farmer. If he is ambitious, hemoves to town or tries other labor; as a tenant-farmer his outlook is almost hopeless, and following it as amakeshift, 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 singletenants,—widows and bachelors, and remnants of broken groups. The system of labor and the size of the housesboth 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 marriedcouples, but comparatively few families with half-grown and grown sons and daughters. The average size ofNegro families has undoubtedly decreased since the war, primarily from economic stress. In Russia over a thirdof 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 youngmen marry between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five; the young women between twenty and thirty. Suchpostponement 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 ofprostitution, and less frequently that of illegitimacy than one would imagine. Rather, it takes the form ofseparation and desertion after a family group has been formed. The number of separated persons is thirty-five tothe 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 theseparation is not permanent. Nevertheless, here lies the seat of greatest moral danger. There is little or noprostitution among these Negroes, and over three-fourths of the families, as found by house-to-houseinvestigation, deserve to be classed as decent people with considerable regard for female chastity. To be sure, theideas of the mass would not suit New England, and there are many loose habits and notions. Yet the rate of
ideas of the mass would not suit New England, and there are many loose habits and notions. Yet the rate ofillegitimacy is undoubtedly lower than in Austria or Italy, and the women as a class are modest. The plague-spotin sexual relations is easy marriage and easy separation. This is no sudden development, nor the fruit ofEmancipation. It is the plain heritage from slavery. In those days Sam, with his master’s consent, “took up” withMary. No ceremony was necessary, and in the busy life of the great plantations of the Black Belt it was usuallydispensed with. If now the master needed Sam’s work in another plantation or in another part of the sameplantation, or if he took a notion to sell the slave, Sam’s married life with Mary was usually unceremoniouslybroken, and then it was clearly to the master’s interest to have both of them take new mates. This widespreadcustom of two centuries has not been eradicated in thirty years. To-day Sam’s grandson “takes up” with a womanwithout license or ceremony; they live together decently and honestly, and are, to all intents and purposes, manand wife. Sometimes these unions are never broken until death; but in too many cases family quarrels, a rovingspirit, a rival suitor, or perhaps more frequently the hopeless battle to support a family, lead to separation, and abroken household is the result. The Negro church has done much to stop this practice, and now most marriageceremonies are performed by the pastors. Nevertheless, the evil is still deep seated, and only a general raising ofthe 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 arethoroughly lewd and vicious. The rest, over eighty per cent, are poor and ignorant, fairly honest and wellmeaning, plodding, and to a degree shiftless, with some but not great sexual looseness. Such class lines are by nomeans fixed; they vary, one might almost say, with the price of cotton. The degree of ignorance cannot easily beexpressed. We may say, for instance, that nearly two-thirds of them cannot read or write. This but partiallyexpresses the fact. They are ignorant of the world about them, of modern economic organization, of the functionof government, of individual worth and possibilities,—of nearly all those things which slavery in self-defence hadto keep them from learning. Much that the white boy imbibes from his earliest social atmosphere forms thepuzzling problems of the black boy’s mature years. America is not another word for Opportunity to all her sons.
It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of amass 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 onbreaking the monotony of toil with a glimpse at the great town-world on Saturday; they have their loafers andtheir rascals; but the great mass of them work continuously and faithfully for a return, and under circumstancesthat would call forth equal voluntary effort from few if any other modern laboring class. Over eighty-eight percent of them—men, women, and children—are farmers. Indeed, this is almost the only industry. Most of thechildren get their schooling after the “crops are laid by,” and very few there are that stay in school after the springwork has begun. Child-labor is to be found here in some of its worst phases, as fostering ignorance and stuntingphysical development. With the grown men of the county there is little variety in work: thirteen hundred arefarmers, and two hundred are laborers, teamsters, etc., including twenty-four artisans, ten merchants, twenty-onepreachers, and four teachers. This narrowness of life reaches its maximum among the women: thirteen hundredand 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 andadults are not in the world earning incomes, but are making homes, learning of the world, or resting after the heatof the strife. But here ninety-six per cent are toiling; no one with leisure to turn the bare and cheerless cabin into ahome, no old folks to sit beside the fire and hand down traditions of the past; little of careless happy childhoodand dreaming youth. The dull monotony of daily toil is broken only by the gayety of the thoughtless and theSaturday trip to town. The toil, like all farm toil, is monotonous, and here there are little machinery and few toolsto relieve its burdensome drudgery. But with all this, it is work in the pure open air, and this is something in a daywhen fresh air is scarce.
The land on the whole is still fertile, despite long abuse. For nine or ten months in succession the crops willcome if asked: garden vegetables in April, grain in May, melons in June and July, hay in August, sweet potatoesin September, and cotton from then to Christmas. And yet on two-thirds of the land there is but one crop, and thatleaves 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; manythousands of acres it used to run, here and there, and beyond the great wood. Thirteen hundred human beings hereobeyed 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 eighthundred pounds of cotton. Can’t make anything at that. Why didn’t he buy land! Humph! Takes money to buyland. And he turns away. Free! The most piteous thing amid all the black ruin of war-time, amid the brokenfortunes of the masters, the blighted hopes of mothers and maidens, and the fall of an empire,—the most piteousthing amid all this was the black freedman who threw down his hoe because the world called him free. What didsuch a mockery of freedom mean? Not a cent of money, not an inch of land, not a mouthful of victuals,—not evenownership of the rags on his back. Free! On Saturday, once or twice a month, the old master, before the war, usedto dole out bacon and meal to his Negroes. And after the first flush of freedom wore off, and his true helplessnessdawned 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 fordaily toil in gangs; and the slave gradually became a metayer, or tenant on shares, in name, but a laborer withindeterminate wages in fact.
Still the price of cotton fell, and gradually the landlords deserted their plantations, and the reign of themerchant 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 aweekly village, has now moved to town; and thither the Negro tenant follows him. The merchant keepseverything,—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 acresof land; he fingers his hat nervously until the merchant finishes his morning chat with Colonel Saunders, and callsout, “Well, Sam, what do you want?” Sam wants him to “furnish” him,—i.e., to advance him food and clothingfor the year, and perhaps seed and tools, until his crop is raised and sold. If Sam seems a favorable subject, he andthe merchant go to a lawyer, and Sam executes a chattel mortgage on his mule and wagon in return for seed and aweek’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 fiveusually 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; ifthe mule wants shoeing, an order on the blacksmith, etc. If Sam is a hard worker and crops promise well, he isoften 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 oneseason, 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 thesection. So skilfully and so closely has he drawn the bonds of the law about the tenant, that the black man hasoften simply to choose between pauperism and crime; he “waives” all homestead exemptions in his contract; hecannot touch his own mortgaged crop, which the laws put almost in the full control of the land-owner and of themerchant. When the crop is growing the merchant watches it like a hawk; as soon as it is ready for market hetakes possession of it, sells it, pays the landowner his rent, subtracts his bill for supplies, and if, as sometimeshappens, 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 thetenant. The currency of the Black Belt is cotton. It is a crop always salable for ready money, not usually subject togreat yearly fluctuations in price, and one which the Negroes know how to raise. The landlord therefore demandshis rent in cotton, and the merchant will accept mortgages on no other crop. There is no use asking the blacktenant, then, to diversify his crops,—he cannot under this system. Moreover, the system is bound to bankrupt thetenant. I remember once meeting a little one-mule wagon on the River road. A young black fellow sat in it drivinglistlessly, 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 toit,—“what have you got there?”
“Meat and meal,” answered the man, stopping. The meat lay uncovered in the bottom of the wagon,—a greatthin 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, itsSpanish war interludes and Philippine matinees, just as though God really were dead. Once in debt, it is no easymatter for a whole race to emerge.
In the year of low-priced cotton, 1898, out of three hundred tenant families one hundred and seventy-fiveended their year’s work in debt to the extent of fourteen thousand dollars; fifty cleared nothing, and the remainingseventy-five made a total profit of sixteen hundred dollars. The net indebtedness of the black tenant families ofthe whole county must have been at least sixty thousand dollars. In a more prosperous year the situation is farbetter; but on the average the majority of tenants end the year even, or in debt, which means that they work forboard 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 thecarelessness of the nation in letting the slave start with nothing, is the widespread opinion among the merchantsand 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; andeven to-day the mass of the Negro laborers need stricter guardianship than most Northern laborers. Behind thishonest and widespread opinion dishonesty and cheating of the ignorant laborers have a good chance to takerefuge. And to all this must be added the obvious fact that a slave ancestry and a system of unrequited toil has notimproved the efficiency or temper of the mass of black laborers. Nor is this peculiar to Sambo; it has in historybeen just as true of John and Hans, of Jacques and Pat, of all ground-down peasantries. Such is the situation of themass of the Negroes in the Black Belt to-day; and they are thinking about it. Crime, and a cheap and dangeroussocialism, are the inevitable results of this pondering. I see now that ragged black man sitting on a log, aimlesslywhittling a stick. He muttered to me with the murmur of many ages, when he said: “White man sit down wholeyear; Nigger work day and night and make crop; Nigger hardly gits bread and meat; white man sittin’ down gitsall. It’s wrong.” And what do the better classes of Negroes do to improve their situation? One of two things: if anyway possible, they buy land; if not, they migrate to town. Just as centuries ago it was no easy thing for the serf toescape into the freedom of town-life, even so to-day there are hindrances laid in the way of county laborers. Inconsiderable parts of all the Gulf States, and especially in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, the Negroes onthe plantations in the back-country districts are still held at forced labor practically without wages. Especially isthis true in districts where the farmers are composed of the more ignorant class of poor whites, and the Negroesare beyond the reach of schools and intercourse with their advancing fellows. If such a peon should run away, thesheriff, elected by white suffrage, can usually be depended on to catch the fugitive, return him, and ask noquestions. If he escape to another county, a charge of petty thieving, easily true, can be depended upon to securehis return. Even if some unduly officious person insist upon a trial, neighborly comity will probably make hisconviction sure, and then the labor due the county can easily be bought by the master. Such a system isimpossible in the more civilized parts of the South, or near the large towns and cities; but in those vast stretchesof land beyond the telegraph and the newspaper the spirit of the Thirteenth Amendment is sadly broken. Thisrepresents the lowest economic depths of the black American peasant; and in a study of the rise and condition ofthe 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 hinderedby the migration-agent laws. The “Associated Press” recently informed the world of the arrest of a young whiteman in Southern Georgia who represented the “Atlantic Naval Supplies Company,” and who “was caught in theact of enticing hands from the turpentine farm of Mr. John Greer.” The crime for which this young man wasarrested is taxed five hundred dollars for each county in which the employment agent proposes to gather laborersfor work outside the State. Thus the Negroes’ ignorance of the labor-market outside his own vicinity is increasedrather 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 thecharacter of all Negroes unknown to the mass of the community must be vouched for by some white man. This isreally a revival of the old Roman idea of the patron under whose protection the new-made freedman was put. Inmany instances this system has been of great good to the Negro, and very often under the protection and guidanceof the former master’s family, or other white friends, the freedman progressed in wealth and morality. But thesame system has in other cases resulted in the refusal of whole communities to recognize the right of a Negro tochange his habitation and to be master of his own fortunes. A black stranger in Baker County, Georgia, forinstance, is liable to be stopped anywhere on the public highway and made to state his business to the satisfactionof any white interrogator. If he fails to give a suitable answer, or seems too independent or “sassy,” he may bearrested or summarily driven away.
Thus it is that in the country districts of the South, by written or unwritten law, peonage, hindrances to themigration of labor, and a system of white patronage exists over large areas. Besides this, the chance for lawlessoppression and illegal exactions is vastly greater in the country than in the city, and nearly all the more seriousrace disturbances of the last decade have arisen from disputes in the county between master and man,—as, forinstance, the Sam Hose affair. As a result of such a situation, there arose, first, the Black Belt; and, second, theMigration to Town. The Black Belt was not, as many assumed, a movement toward fields of labor under moregenial climatic conditions; it was primarily a huddling for self-protection,—a massing of the black population formutual defence in order to secure the peace and tranquillity necessary to economic advance. This movement tookplace between Emancipation and 1880, and only partially accomplished the desired results. The rush to townsince 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 orfive to one. There is undoubtedly a security to the blacks in their very numbers,—a personal freedom fromarbitrary treatment, which makes hundreds of laborers cling to Dougherty in spite of low wages and economicdistress. But a change is coming, and slowly but surely even here the agricultural laborers are drifting to town andleaving the broad acres behind. Why is this? Why do not the Negroes become land-owners, and build up theblack 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 fewleisure hours of a holiday trip to unravelling the snarl of centuries,—to such men very often the whole troublewith the black field-hand may be summed up by Aunt Ophelia’s word, “Shiftless!” They have noted repeatedlyscenes like one I saw last summer. We were riding along the highroad to town at the close of a long hot day. Acouple of young black fellows passed us in a muleteam, with several bushels of loose corn in the ear. One wasdriving, 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 thewagon. They never saw it,—not they. A rod farther on we noted another ear on the ground; and between thatcreeping 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 whenthey do work, and they work willingly. They have no sordid, selfish, money-getting ways, but rather a fine disdainfor mere cash. They’ll loaf before your face and work behind your back with good-natured honesty. They’ll steala watermelon, and hand you back your lost purse intact. Their great defect as laborers lies in their lack ofincentive beyond the mere pleasure of physical exertion. They are careless because they have not found that itpays to be careful; they are improvident because the improvident ones of their acquaintance get on about as wellas the provident. Above all, they cannot see why they should take unusual pains to make the white man’s landbetter, or to fatten his mule, or save his corn. On the other hand, the white land-owner argues that any attempt toimprove these laborers by increased responsibility, or higher wages, or better homes, or land of their own, wouldbe sure to result in failure. He shows his Northern visitor the scarred and wretched land; the ruined mansions, theworn-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 itdifficult for them to understand each other. The Negro dimly personifies in the white man all his ills andmisfortunes; if he is poor, it is because the white man seizes the fruit of his toil; if he is ignorant, it is because thewhite man gives him neither time nor facilities to learn; and, indeed, if any misfortune happens to him, it isbecause of some hidden machinations of “white folks.” On the other hand, the masters and the masters’ sons havenever been able to see why the Negro, instead of settling down to be day-laborers for bread and clothes, areinfected with a silly desire to rise in the world, and why they are sulky, dissatisfied, and careless, where theirfathers were happy and dumb and faithful. “Why, you niggers have an easier time than I do,” said a puzzledAlbany 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 thousandsof Dougherty have struggled from him up toward their ideal, and what that ideal is. All social struggle isevidenced by the rise, first of economic, then of social classes, among a homogeneous population. To-day thefollowing 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 centof 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 ormoney 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 ofhis share, however, comes pay and interest for food and clothing advanced him during the year. Thus we have alaborer without capital and without wages, and an employer whose capital is largely his employees’ wages. It isan unsatisfactory arrangement, both for hirer and hired, and is usually in vogue on poor land with hard-pressedowners.
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 thefreedmen on account of its larger freedom and its possibility for making a surplus. But with the carrying out ofthe crop-lien system, the deterioration of the land, and the slavery of debt, the position of the metayers has sunkto a dead level of practically unrewarded toil. Formerly all tenants had some capital, and often considerable; butabsentee landlordism, rising rack-rent, and failing cotton have stripped them well-nigh of all, and probably notover half of them to-day own their mules. The change from cropper to tenant was accomplished by fixing therent. If, now, the rent fixed was reasonable, this was an incentive to the tenant to strive. On the other hand, if therent was too high, or if the land deteriorated, the result was to discourage and check the efforts of the blackpeasantry. There is no doubt that the latter case is true; that in Dougherty County every economic advantage ofthe price of cotton in market and of the strivings of the tenant has been taken advantage of by the landlords andmerchants, 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 thenext 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 toextract 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 canonly be evil,—abuse and neglect of the soil, deterioration in the character of the laborers, and a widespread senseof injustice. “Wherever the country is poor,” cried Arthur Young, “it is in the hands of metayers,” and “theircondition is more wretched than that of day-laborers.” He was talking of Italy a century ago; but he might havebeen talking of Dougherty County to-day. And especially is that true to-day which he declares was true in Francebefore 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 ofDougherty 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 ahouse with perhaps a garden-spot; then supplies of food and clothing are advanced, and certain fixed wages aregiven at the end of the year, varying from thirty to sixty dollars, out of which the supplies must be paid for, withinterest. About eighteen per cent of the population belong to this class of semi-metayers, while twenty-two percent are laborers paid by the month or year, and are either “furnished” by their own savings or perhaps moreusually by some merchant who takes his chances of payment. Such laborers receive from thirty-five to fifty centsa day during the working season. They are usually young unmarried persons, some being women; and when theymarry 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 responsibilitywhich comes through having money transactions. While some of the renters differ little in condition from themetayers, yet on the whole they are more intelligent and responsible persons, and are the ones who eventuallybecome 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, orwith 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,—andthere may have been a few,—their land was probably held in the name of some white patron,—a method notuncommon during slavery. In 1875 ownership of land had begun with seven hundred and fifty acres; ten yearslater 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 andforty thousand dollars in 1900.
Two circumstances complicate this development and make it in some respects difficult to be sure of the realtendencies; they are the panic of 1893, and the low price of cotton in 1898. Besides this, the system of assessingproperty in the country districts of Georgia is somewhat antiquated and of uncertain statistical value; there are noassessors, and each man makes a sworn return to a tax-receiver. Thus public opinion plays a large part, and thereturns vary strangely from year to year. Certainly these figures show the small amount of accumulated capitalamong the Negroes, and the consequent large dependence of their property on temporary prosperity. They havelittle to tide over a few years of economic depression, and are at the mercy of the cotton-market far more than thewhites. And thus the land-owners, despite their marvellous efforts, are really a transient class, continually beingdepleted by those who fall back into the class of renters or metayers, and augmented by newcomers from themasses. Of one hundred land-owners in 1898, half had bought their land since 1893, a fourth between 1890 and1893, a fifth between 1884 and 1890, and the rest between 1870 and 1884. In all, one hundred and eighty-fiveNegroes 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, theNegroes would have owned nearer thirty thousand acres than the fifteen thousand they now hold. And yet thesefifteen thousand acres are a creditable showing,—a proof of no little weight of the worth and ability of the Negropeople. If they had been given an economic start at Emancipation, if they had been in an enlightened and richcommunity which really desired their best good, then we might perhaps call such a result small or eveninsignificant. But for a few thousand poor ignorant field-hands, in the face of poverty, a falling market, and socialstress, to save and capitalize two hundred thousand dollars in a generation has meant a tremendous effort. Therise of a nation, the pressing forward of a social class, means a bitter struggle, a hard and soul-sickening battlewith 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 havesucceeded in emerging into peasant proprietorship; and these are not all firmly fixed, but grow and shrink innumber with the wavering of the cotton-market. Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, andhalf of them sit in hopeless serfdom. For these there is one other avenue of escape toward which they have turnedin increasing numbers, namely, migration to town. A glance at the distribution of land among the black ownerscuriously reveals this fact. In 1898 the holdings were as follows: Under forty acres, forty-nine families; forty totwo 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 thesewere under forty acres. The great increase of holdings, then, has come in the buying of small homesteads neartown, where their owners really share in the town life; this is a part of the rush to town. And for every land-ownerwho has thus hurried away from the narrow and hard conditions of country life, how many field-hands, how manytenants, how many ruined renters, have joined that long procession? Is it not strange compensation? The sin of thecountry districts is visited on the town, and the social sores of city life to-day may, here in Dougherty County, andperhaps 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 martTo 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 thenew century. Indeed, the characteristic of our age is the contact of European civilization with the world’sundeveloped peoples. Whatever we may say of the results of such contact in the past, it certainly forms a chapterin human action not pleasant to look back upon. War, murder, slavery, extermination, and debauchery,—this hasagain and again been the result of carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the sea and theheathen without the law. Nor does it altogether satisfy the conscience of the modern world to be toldcomplacently that all this has been right and proper, the fated triumph of strength over weakness, of righteousnessover evil, of superiors over inferiors. It would certainly be soothing if one could readily believe all this; and yetthere are too many ugly facts for everything to be thus easily explained away. We feel and know that there aremany delicate differences in race psychology, numberless changes that our crude social measurements are not yetable to follow minutely, which explain much of history and social development. At the same time, too, we knowthat these considerations have never adequately explained or excused the triumph of brute force and cunning overweakness and innocence.
It is, then, the strife of all honorable men of the twentieth century to see that in the future competition of racesthe survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true; that we may be able topreserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium ongreed and impudence and cruelty. To bring this hope to fruition, we are compelled daily to turn more and more toa conscientious study of the phenomena of race-contact,—to a study frank and fair, and not falsified and coloredby 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 averageman who is not a scientist knows all about, but nevertheless a line of study which by reason of the enormous racecomplications 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 beanswered, 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 ofaction and communication: there is, first, the physical proximity of home and dwelling-places, the way in whichneighborhoods group themselves, and the contiguity of neighborhoods. Secondly, and in our age chiefest, thereare the economic relations,—the methods by which individuals cooperate for earning a living, for the mutualsatisfaction of wants, for the production of wealth. Next, there are the political relations, the cooperation in socialcontrol, in group government, in laying and paying the burden of taxation. In the fourth place there are the lesstangible but highly important forms of intellectual contact and commerce, the interchange of ideas throughconversation and conference, through periodicals and libraries; and, above all, the gradual formation for eachcommunity of that curious tertium quid which we call public opinion. Closely allied with this come the variousforms of social contact in everyday life, in travel, in theatres, in house gatherings, in marrying and giving inmarriage. 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 eachother. It is my present task, therefore, to indicate, from my point of view, how the black race in the South meetand 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 physicalcolor-line on the map, on the one side of which whites dwell and on the other Negroes. The winding and intricacyof the geographical color-line varies, of course, in different communities. I know some towns where a straightline drawn through the middle of the main street separates nine-tenths of the whites from nine-tenths of theblacks. In other towns the older settlement of whites has been encircled by a broad band of blacks; in still othercases little settlements or nuclei of blacks have sprung up amid surrounding whites. Usually in cities each streethas its distinctive color, and only now and then do the colors meet in close proximity. Even in the countrysomething of this segregation is manifest in the smaller areas, and of course in the larger phenomena of the BlackBelt.
All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to allcommunities. A Negro slum may be in dangerous proximity to a white residence quarter, while it is quitecommon to find a white slum planted in the heart of a respectable Negro district. One thing, however, seldomoccurs: the best of the whites and the best of the Negroes almost never live in anything like close proximity. Itthus happens that in nearly every Southern town and city, both whites and blacks see commonly the worst of eachother. 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 thesame time the squalor and dull round of toil among the field-hands was removed from the sight and hearing of thefamily. One can easily see how a person who saw slavery thus from his father’s parlors, and sees freedom on thestreets of a great city, fails to grasp or comprehend the whole of the new picture. On the other hand, the settledbelief of the mass of the Negroes that the Southern white people do not have the black man’s best interests atheart has been intensified in later years by this continual daily contact of the better class of blacks with the worstrepresentatives 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 ofNegroes and whites for work and wealth that are too readily overlooked or not thoroughly understood. Theaverage American can easily conceive of a rich land awaiting development and filled with black laborers. To himthe Southern problem is simply that of making efficient workingmen out of this material, by giving them therequisite 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, allthe advantages and defects of such training; they are willing and good-natured, but not self-reliant, provident, orcareful. If now the economic development of the South is to be pushed to the verge of exploitation, as seemsprobable, then we have a mass of workingmen thrown into relentless competition with the workingmen of theworld, but handicapped by a training the very opposite to that of the modern self-reliant democratic laborer. Whatthe black laborer needs is careful personal guidance, group leadership of men with hearts in their bosoms, to trainthem to foresight, carefulness, and honesty. Nor does it require any fine-spun theories of racial differences toprove the necessity of such group training after the brains of the race have been knocked out by two hundred andfifty years of assiduous education in submission, carelessness, and stealing. After Emancipation, it was the plainduty of some one to assume this group leadership and training of the Negro laborer. I will not stop here to inquirewhose duty it was—whether that of the white ex-master who had profited by unpaid toil, or the Northernphilanthropist whose persistence brought on the crisis, or the National Government whose edict freed thebondmen; I will not stop to ask whose duty it was, but I insist it was the duty of some one to see that theseworkingmen were not left alone and unguided, without capital, without land, without skill, without economicorganization, without even the bald protection of law, order, and decency,—left in a great land, not to settle downto slow and careful internal development, but destined to be thrown almost immediately into relentless and sharpcompetition with the best of modern workingmen under an economic system where every participant is fightingfor 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 isnot the same system as that of the old industrial North, of England, or of France, with their trade-unions, theirrestrictive laws, their written and unwritten commercial customs, and their long experience. It is, rather, a copy ofthat England of the early nineteenth century, before the factory acts,—the England that wrung pity from thinkersand 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 whohave come to take charge of the industrial exploitation of the New South,—the sons of poor whites fired with anew thirst for wealth and power, thrifty and avaricious Yankees, and unscrupulous immigrants. Into the hands ofthese 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 coldquestion of dollars and dividends. Under such a system all labor is bound to suffer. Even the white laborers arenot yet intelligent, thrifty, and well trained enough to maintain themselves against the powerful inroads oforganized capital. The results among them, even, are long hours of toil, low wages, child labor, and lack ofprotection against usury and cheating. But among the black laborers all this is aggravated, first, by a raceprejudice which varies from a doubt and distrust among the best element of whites to a frenzied hatred among theworst; and, secondly, it is aggravated, as I have said before, by the wretched economic heritage of the freedmenfrom slavery. With this training it is difficult for the freedman to learn to grasp the opportunities already opened tohim, 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 customthe victim of the worst and most unscrupulous men in each community. The crop-lien system which isdepopulating the fields of the South is not simply the result of shiftlessness on the part of Negroes, but is also theresult of cunningly devised laws as to mortgages, liens, and misdemeanors, which can be made by consciencelessmen to entrap and snare the unwary until escape is impossible, further toil a farce, and protest a crime. I haveseen, in the Black Belt of Georgia, an ignorant, honest Negro buy and pay for a farm in installments threeseparate times, and then in the face of law and decency the enterprising American who sold it to him pocketed themoney and deed and left the black man landless, to labor on his own land at thirty cents a day. I have seen a blackfarmer fall in debt to a white storekeeper, and that storekeeper go to his farm and strip it of every singlemarketable article,—mules, ploughs, stored crops, tools, furniture, bedding, clocks, looking-glass,—and all thiswithout a sheriff or officer, in the face of the law for homestead exemptions, and without rendering to a singleresponsible person any account or reckoning. And such proceedings can happen, and will happen, in anycommunity where a class of ignorant toilers are placed by custom and race-prejudice beyond the pale ofsympathy and race-brotherhood. So long as the best elements of a community do not feel in duty bound to protectand train and care for the weaker members of their group, they leave them to be preyed upon by these swindlersand rascals.
This unfortunate economic situation does not mean the hindrance of all advance in the black South, or theabsence of a class of black landlords and mechanics who, in spite of disadvantages, are accumulating propertyand making good citizens. But it does mean that this class is not nearly so large as a fairer economic system mighteasily make it, that those who survive in the competition are handicapped so as to accomplish much less than theydeserve to, and that, above all, the personnel of the successful class is left to chance and accident, and not to anyintelligent 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 inresults, 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 closesympathetic 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 mendoubted as to whether the Negro could develop such leaders; but to-day no one seriously disputes the capabilityof individual Negroes to assimilate the culture and common sense of modern civilization, and to pass it on, tosome extent at least, to their fellows. If this is true, then here is the path out of the economic situation, and here isthe imperative demand for trained Negro leaders of character and intelligence,—men of skill, men of light andleading, college-bred men, black captains of industry, and missionaries of culture; men who thoroughlycomprehend and know modern civilization, and can take hold of Negro communities and raise and train them byforce of precept and example, deep sympathy, and the inspiration of common blood and ideals. But if such menare to be effective they must have some power,—they must be backed by the best public opinion of thesecommunities, and able to wield for their objects and aims such weapons as the experience of the world has taughtare 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 aconsideration 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 prevalentconceptions of government. In the fifties we were near enough the echoes of the French Revolution to believepretty thoroughly in universal suffrage. We argued, as we thought then rather logically, that no social class was sogood, so true, and so disinterested as to be trusted wholly with the political destiny of its neighbors; that in everystate the best arbiters of their own welfare are the persons directly affected; consequently that it is only by armingevery hand with a ballot,—with the right to have a voice in the policy of the state,—that the greatest good to thegreatest number could be attained. To be sure, there were objections to these arguments, but we thought we hadanswered 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 timeand bitter experience would teach the most hardheaded. It was at this time that the question of Negro suffrage inthe South was raised. Here was a defenceless people suddenly made free. How were they to be protected fromthose who did not believe in their freedom and were determined to thwart it? Not by force, said the North; not bygovernment guardianship, said the South; then by the ballot, the sole and legitimate defence of a free people, saidthe Common Sense of the Nation. No one thought, at the time, that the ex-slaves could use the ballot intelligentlyor very effectively; but they did think that the possession of so great power by a great class in the nation wouldcompel 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 trickerythat ever follows in the wake of war overtook us. So flagrant became the political scandals that reputable menbegan to leave politics alone, and politics consequently became disreputable. Men began to pride themselves onhaving nothing to do with their own government, and to agree tacitly with those who regarded public office as aprivate 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 theNorth who neglected their own civic duties grew hilarious over the exaggerated importance with which the Negroregarded the franchise. Thus it easily happened that more and more the better class of Negroes followed theadvice from abroad and the pressure from home, and took no further interest in politics, leaving to the carelessand the venal of their race the exercise of their rights as voters. The black vote that still remained was not trainedand educated, but further debauched by open and unblushing bribery, or force and fraud; until the Negro voterwas 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 onthis continent depends on the purification of the ballot, the civic training of voters, and the raising of voting to theplane of a solemn duty which a patriotic citizen neglects to his peril and to the peril of his children’s children,—inthis day, when we are striving for a renaissance of civic virtue, what are we going to say to the black voter of theSouth? Are we going to tell him still that politics is a disreputable and useless form of human activity? Are wegoing to induce the best class of Negroes to take less and less interest in government, and to give up their right totake such an interest, without a protest? I am not saying a word against all legitimate efforts to purge the ballot ofignorance, pauperism, and crime. But few have pretended that the present movement for disfranchisement in theSouth is for such a purpose; it has been plainly and frankly declared in nearly every case that the object of thedisfranchising 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 intellectualdevelopment of the Negro? Can we establish a mass of black laborers and artisans and landholders in the Southwho, 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 andability of the laboring classes to compel respect for their welfare,—can this system be carried out in the Southwhen half its laboring force is voiceless in the public councils and powerless in its own defence? To-day the blackman of the South has almost nothing to say as to how much he shall be taxed, or how those taxes shall beexpended; as to who shall execute the laws, and how they shall do it; as to who shall make the laws, and how theyshall be made. It is pitiable that frantic efforts must be made at critical times to get law-makers in some Stateseven to listen to the respectful presentation of the black man’s side of a current controversy. Daily the Negro iscoming more and more to look upon law and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliationand oppression. The laws are made by men who have little interest in him; they are executed by men who haveabsolutely 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 oneguilty one escape.
I should be the last one to deny the patent weaknesses and shortcomings of the Negro people; I should be thelast to withhold sympathy from the white South in its efforts to solve its intricate social problems. I freelyacknowledged that it is possible, and sometimes best, that a partially undeveloped people should be ruled by thebest of their stronger and better neighbors for their own good, until such time as they can start and fight theworld’s battles alone. I have already pointed out how sorely in need of such economic and spiritual guidance theemancipated Negro was, and I am quite willing to admit that if the representatives of the best white Southernpublic opinion were the ruling and guiding powers in the South to-day the conditions indicated would be fairlywell fulfilled. But the point I have insisted upon and now emphasize again, is that the best opinion of the Southto-day is not the ruling opinion. That to leave the Negro helpless and without a ballot to-day is to leave him not tothe guidance of the best, but rather to the exploitation and debauchment of the worst; that this is no truer of theSouth than of the North,—of the North than of Europe: in any land, in any country under modern freecompetition, to lay any class of weak and despised people, be they white, black, or blue, at the political mercy oftheir stronger, richer, and more resourceful fellows, is a temptation which human nature seldom has withstoodand 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 hasappeared in the slums of great cities a distinct criminal class among the blacks. In explaining this unfortunatedevelopment, we must note two things: (1) that the inevitable result of Emancipation was to increase crime andcriminals, and (2) that the police system of the South was primarily designed to control slaves. As to the firstpoint, we must not forget that under a strict slave system there can scarcely be such a thing as crime. But whenthese variously constituted human particles are suddenly thrown broadcast on the sea of life, some swim, somesink, and some hang suspended, to be forced up or down by the chance currents of a busy hurrying world. Sogreat an economic and social revolution as swept the South in ’63 meant a weeding out among the Negroes of theincompetents and vicious, the beginning of a differentiation of social grades. Now a rising group of people are notlifted bodily from the ground like an inert solid mass, but rather stretch upward like a living plant with its rootsstill 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 ungovernedviciousness. 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 adequatejails or reformatories; its police system was arranged to deal with blacks alone, and tacitly assumed that everywhite man was ipso facto a member of that police. Thus grew up a double system of justice, which erred on thewhite side by undue leniency and the practical immunity of red-handed criminals, and erred on the black side byundue severity, injustice, and lack of discrimination. For, as I have said, the police system of the South wasoriginally designed to keep track of all Negroes, not simply of criminals; and when the Negroes were freed andthe whole South was convinced of the impossibility of free Negro labor, the first and almost universal device wasto 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 ofinjustice 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 havehighway robbery, burglary, murder, and rape, there was a curious effect on both sides the color-line: the Negroesrefused to believe the evidence of white witnesses or the fairness of white juries, so that the greatest deterrent tocrime, the public opinion of one’s own social caste, was lost, and the criminal was looked upon as crucified ratherthan hanged. On the other hand, the whites, used to being careless as to the guilt or innocence of accusedNegroes, were swept in moments of passion beyond law, reason, and decency. Such a situation is bound toincrease crime, and has increased it. To natural viciousness and vagrancy are being daily added motives of revoltand revenge which stir up all the latent savagery of both races and make peaceful attention to economicdevelopment often impossible.
But the chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but thepreventing of the young from being trained to crime. And here again the peculiar conditions of the South haveprevented 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 ofmen and women and children makes the chain-gangs perfect schools of crime and debauchery. The struggle forreformatories, which has gone on in Virginia, Georgia, and other States, is the one encouraging sign of theawakening 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 decentself-respecting citizens. We have been so hotly engaged recently in discussing trade-schools and the highereducation that the pitiable plight of the public-school system in the South has almost dropped from view. Of everyfive dollars spent for public education in the State of Georgia, the white schools get four dollars and the Negroone dollar; and even then the white public-school system, save in the cities, is bad and cries for reform. If this istrue of the whites, what of the blacks? I am becoming more and more convinced, as I look upon the system ofcommon-school training in the South, that the national government must soon step in and aid popular educationin some way. To-day it has been only by the most strenuous efforts on the part of the thinking men of the Souththat the Negro’s share of the school fund has not been cut down to a pittance in some half-dozen States; and thatmovement not only is not dead, but in many communities is gaining strength. What in the name of reason doesthis nation expect of a people, poorly trained and hard pressed in severe economic competition, without politicalrights, 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 buoyedby 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 inthe South, as I have conceived them, including, for the reasons set forth, crime and education. But after all thathas been said on these more tangible matters of human contact, there still remains a part essential to a properdescription 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 toany clear conception of the group life taken as a whole. What is thus true of all communities is peculiarly true ofthe South, where, outside of written history and outside of printed law, there has been going on for a generation asdeep a storm and stress of human souls, as intense a ferment of feeling, as intricate a writhing of spirit, as ever apeople experienced. Within and without the sombre veil of color vast social forces have been at work,—effortsfor human betterment, movements toward disintegration and despair, tragedies and comedies in social andeconomic life, and a swaying and lifting and sinking of human hearts which have made this land a land ofmingled 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 destinyis so fatefully bound up with that of the nation. And yet the casual observer visiting the South sees at first little ofthis. He notes the growing frequency of dark faces as he rides along,—but otherwise the days slip lazily on, thesun shines, and this little world seems as happy and contented as other worlds he has visited. Indeed, on thequestion of questions—the Negro problem—he hears so little that there almost seems to be a conspiracy ofsilence; the morning papers seldom mention it, and then usually in a far-fetched academic way, and indeed almostevery one seems to forget and ignore the darker half of the land, until the astonished visitor is inclined to ask ifafter all there IS any problem here. But if he lingers long enough there comes the awakening: perhaps in a suddenwhirl of passion which leaves him gasping at its bitter intensity; more likely in a gradually dawning sense ofthings he had not at first noticed. Slowly but surely his eyes begin to catch the shadows of the color-line: here hemeets crowds of Negroes and whites; then he is suddenly aware that he cannot discover a single dark face; oragain at the close of a day’s wandering he may find himself in some strange assembly, where all faces are tingedbrown 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 approachand mingle their waters in seeming carelessness,—then they divide and flow wide apart. It is done quietly; nomistakes are made, or if one occurs, the swift arm of the law and of public opinion swings down for a moment, aswhen the other day a black man and a white woman were arrested for talking together on Whitehall Street inAtlanta.
Now if one notices carefully one will see that between these two worlds, despite much physical contact anddaily intermingling, there is almost no community of intellectual life or point of transference where the thoughtsand 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 whitefamilies, there were bonds of intimacy, affection, and sometimes blood relationship, between the races. Theylived in the same home, shared in the family life, often attended the same church, and talked and conversed witheach other. But the increasing civilization of the Negro since then has naturally meant the development of higherclasses: there are increasing numbers of ministers, teachers, physicians, merchants, mechanics, and independentfarmers, who by nature and training are the aristocracy and leaders of the blacks. Between them, however, and thebest element of the whites, there is little or no intellectual commerce. They go to separate churches, they live inseparate sections, they are strictly separated in all public gatherings, they travel separately, and they are beginningto read different papers and books. To most libraries, lectures, concerts, and museums, Negroes are either notadmitted 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 socialbetterment, and the like,—it is usually true that the very representatives of the two races, who for mutual benefitand the welfare of the land ought to be in complete understanding and sympathy, are so far strangers that one sidethinks 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 historicalreasons so strong as in the South, such a situation is extremely difficult to correct. The white man, as well as theNegro, 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 hasforced 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 hascome to replace that finer sympathy and love between some masters and house servants which the radical andmore uncompromising drawing of the color-line in recent years has caused almost completely to disappear. In aworld where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look frankly into his eyes and feelhis heart beating with red blood; in a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more thanlegislative halls and magazine articles and speeches,—one can imagine the consequences of the almost utterabsence 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 tothe worst, in generous acknowledgment of a common humanity and a common destiny. On the other hand, inmatters of simple almsgiving, where there can be no question of social contact, and in the succor of the aged andsick, the South, as if stirred by a feeling of its unfortunate limitations, is generous to a fault. The black beggar isnever turned away without a good deal more than a crust, and a call for help for the unfortunate meets quickresponse. I remember, one cold winter, in Atlanta, when I refrained from contributing to a public relief fund lestNegroes should be discriminated against, I afterward inquired of a friend: “Were any black people receiving aid?”“Why,” said he, “they were all black.”
And yet this does not touch the kernel of the problem. Human advancement is not a mere question ofalmsgiving, but rather of sympathy and cooperation among classes who would scorn charity. And here is a landwhere, in the higher walks of life, in all the higher striving for the good and noble and true, the color-line comesto 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. Ihave not glossed over matters for policy’s sake, for I fear we have already gone too far in that sort of thing. Onthe other hand, I have sincerely sought to let no unfair exaggerations creep in. I do not doubt that in someSouthern communities conditions are better than those I have indicated; while I am no less certain that in othercommunities 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 inwhich the Negro problems place them. Such an essentially honest-hearted and generous people cannot cite thecaste-levelling precepts of Christianity, or believe in equality of opportunity for all men, without coming to feelmore and more with each generation that the present drawing of the color-line is a flat contradiction to theirbeliefs and professions. But just as often as they come to this point, the present social condition of the Negrostands as a menace and a portent before even the most open-minded: if there were nothing to charge against theNegro 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 anythingbut the least possible fellowship with such persons and survive? and shall we let a mawkish sentiment sweepaway the culture of our fathers or the hope of our children? The argument so put is of great strength, but it is not awhit 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 smallnumber have, in spite of tremendous disadvantages, risen to the level of American civilization. And when, byproscription and prejudice, these same Negroes are classed with and treated like the lowest of their people, simplybecause they are Negroes, such a policy not only discourages thrift and intelligence among black men, but puts adirect premium on the very things you complain of,—inefficiency and crime. Draw lines of crime, ofincompetency, of vice, as tightly and uncompromisingly as you will, for these things must be proscribed; but acolor-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 theseopposing views to see and appreciate and sympathize with each other’s position,—for the Negro to realize moredeeply than he does at present the need of uplifting the masses of his people, for the white people to realize morevividly than they have yet done the deadening and disastrous effect of a color-prejudice that classes PhillisWheatley 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, norfor the white South to reply that their social condition is the main cause of prejudice. They both act as reciprocalcause and effect, and a change in neither alone will bring the desired effect. Both must change, or neither canimprove to any great extent. The Negro cannot stand the present reactionary tendencies and unreasoning drawingof the color-line indefinitely without discouragement and retrogression. And the condition of the Negro is ever theexcuse for further discrimination. Only by a union of intelligence and sympathy across the color-line in thiscritical 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 menWho 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 wanderedfrom our rambling log-house up the stony bed of a creek, past wheat and corn, until we could hear dimly acrossthe fields a rhythmic cadence of song,—soft, thrilling, powerful, that swelled and died sorrowfully in our ears. Iwas 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 andsubdued, and I know not what would have happened those clear Sabbath mornings had some one punctuated thesermon with a wild scream, or interrupted the long prayer with a loud Amen! And so most striking to me, as Iapproached the village and the little plain church perched aloft, was the air of intense excitement that possessedthat mass of black folk. A sort of suppressed terror hung in the air and seemed to seize us,—a pythian madness, ademoniac possession, that lent terrible reality to song and word. The black and massive form of the preacherswayed and quivered as the words crowded to his lips and flew at us in singular eloquence. The people moanedand fluttered, and then the gaunt-cheeked brown woman beside me suddenly leaped straight into the air andshrieked like a lost soul, while round about came wail and groan and outcry, and a scene of human passion suchas I had never conceived before.
Those who have not thus witnessed the frenzy of a Negro revival in the untouched backwoods of the South canbut dimly realize the religious feeling of the slave; as described, such scenes appear grotesque and funny, but asseen they are awful. Three things characterized this religion of the slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and theFrenzy. The Preacher is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil. A leader, apolitician, an orator, a “boss,” an intriguer, an idealist,—all these he is, and ever, too, the centre of a group ofmen, now twenty, now a thousand in number. The combination of a certain adroitness with deep-seatedearnestness, of tact with consummate ability, gave him his preeminence, and helps him maintain it. The type, ofcourse, varies according to time and place, from the West Indies in the sixteenth century to New England in thenineteenth, 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 andlonging yet born on American soil. Sprung from the African forests, where its counterpart can still be heard, itwas adapted, changed, and intensified by the tragic soul-life of the slave, until, under the stress of law and whip, itbecame 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 himmad with supernatural joy, was the last essential of Negro religion and the one more devoutly believed in than allthe rest. It varied in expression from the silent rapt countenance or the low murmur and moan to the mad abandonof physical fervor,—the stamping, shrieking, and shouting, the rushing to and fro and wild waving of arms, theweeping and laughing, the vision and the trance. All this is nothing new in the world, but old as religion, asDelphi and Endor. And so firm a hold did it have on the Negro, that many generations firmly believed thatwithout 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 underthe peculiar circumstances of the black man’s environment they were the one expression of his higher life, theyare of deep interest to the student of his development, both socially and psychologically. Numerous are theattractive lines of inquiry that here group themselves. What did slavery mean to the African savage? What washis attitude toward the World and Life? What seemed to him good and evil,—God and Devil? Whither went hislongings and strivings, and wherefore were his heart-burnings and disappointments? Answers to such questionscan come only from a study of Negro religion as a development, through its gradual changes from the heathenism
can come only from a study of Negro religion as a development, through its gradual changes from the heathenismof 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 potentinfluence upon their contemporaries. The Methodists and Baptists of America owe much of their condition to thesilent but potent influence of their millions of Negro converts. Especially is this noticeable in the South, wheretheology and religious philosophy are on this account a long way behind the North, and where the religion of thepoor whites is a plain copy of Negro thought and methods. The mass of “gospel” hymns which has swept throughAmerican churches and well-nigh ruined our sense of song consists largely of debased imitations of Negromelodies made by ears that caught the jingle but not the music, the body but not the soul, of the Jubilee songs. Itis thus clear that the study of Negro religion is not only a vital part of the history of the Negro in America, but nouninteresting part of American history.
The Negro church of to-day is the social centre of Negro life in the United States, and the most characteristicexpression of African character. Take a typical church in a small Virginia town: it is the “First Baptist”—a roomybrick edifice seating five hundred or more persons, tastefully finished in Georgia pine, with a carpet, a smallorgan, and stained-glass windows. Underneath is a large assembly room with benches. This building is the centralclub-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 ofvarious kinds. Entertainments, suppers, and lectures are held beside the five or six regular weekly religiousservices. 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, andDamnation are preached twice a Sunday after the crops are laid by; and few indeed of the community have thehardihood to withstand conversion. Back of this more formal religion, the Church often stands as a real conserverof 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 theNegro is cut off by color-prejudice and social condition. In the great city churches the same tendency isnoticeable and in many respects emphasized. A great church like the Bethel of Philadelphia has over elevenhundred members, an edifice seating fifteen hundred persons and valued at one hundred thousand dollars, anannual budget of five thousand dollars, and a government consisting of a pastor with several assisting localpreachers, an executive and legislative board, financial boards and tax collectors; general church meetings formaking 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 theseorganizations 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 factthat, in the South, at least, practically every American Negro is a church member. Some, to be sure, are notregularly enrolled, and a few do not habitually attend services; but, practically, a proscribed people must have asocial centre, and that centre for this people is the Negro church. The census of 1890 showed nearly twenty-fourthousand Negro churches in the country, with a total enrolled membership of over two and a half millions, or tenactual 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 theactivities of the church. There is an organized Negro church for every sixty black families in the nation, and insome States for every forty families, owning, on an average, a thousand dollars’ worth of property each, or nearlytwenty-six million dollars in all.
Such, then, is the large development of the Negro church since Emancipation. The question now is, What havebeen the successive steps of this social history and what are the present tendencies? First, we must realize that nosuch institution as the Negro church could rear itself without definite historical foundations. These foundationswe can find if we remember that the social history of the Negro did not start in America. He was brought from adefinite social environment,—the polygamous clan life under the headship of the chief and the potent influence ofthe priest. His religion was nature-worship, with profound belief in invisible surrounding influences, good andbad, and his worship was through incantation and sacrifice. The first rude change in this life was the slave shipand the West Indian sugar-fields. The plantation organization replaced the clan and tribe, and the white masterreplaced the chief with far greater and more despotic powers. Forced and long-continued toil became the rule oflife, the old ties of blood relationship and kinship disappeared, and instead of the family appeared a newpolygamy 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 orMedicine-man. He early appeared on the plantation and found his function as the healer of the sick, the interpreterof the Unknown, the comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong, and the one who rudely butpicturesquely expressed the longing, disappointment, and resentment of a stolen and oppressed people. Thus, asbard, 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 anadaptation and mingling of heathen rites among the members of each plantation, and roughly designated asVoodooism. Association with the masters, missionary effort and motives of expediency gave these rites an earlyveneer 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 andMethodist 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 primarilyof a series of disconnected units; although, later on, some freedom of movement was allowed, still thisgeographical limitation was always important and was one cause of the spread of the decentralized anddemocratic Baptist faith among the slaves. At the same time, the visible rite of baptism appealed strongly to theirmystic temperament. To-day the Baptist Church is still largest in membership among Negroes, and has a millionand a half communicants. Next in popularity came the churches organized in connection with the whiteneighboring churches, chiefly Baptist and Methodist, with a few Episcopalian and others. The Methodists stillform the second greatest denomination, with nearly a million members. The faith of these two leadingdenominations 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 theEpiscopalians and Presbyterians are gaining among the more intelligent classes to-day, and the Catholic Church ismaking headway in certain sections. After Emancipation, and still earlier in the North, the Negro churches largelysevered such affiliations as they had had with the white churches, either by choice or by compulsion. The Baptistchurches became independent, but the Methodists were compelled early to unite for purposes of episcopalgovernment. 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 otherdenominations.
The second fact noted, namely, that the Negro church antedates the Negro home, leads to an explanation ofmuch that is paradoxical in this communistic institution and in the morals of its members. But especially it leadsus to regard this institution as peculiarly the expression of the inner ethical life of a people in a sense seldom trueelsewhere. Let us turn, then, from the outer physical development of the church to the more important innerethical life of the people who compose it. The Negro has already been pointed out many times as a religiousanimal,—a being of that deep emotional nature which turns instinctively toward the supernatural. Endowed witha rich tropical imagination and a keen, delicate appreciation of Nature, the transplanted African lived in a worldanimate with gods and devils, elves and witches; full of strange influences,—of Good to be implored, of Evil tobe 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 resourcesof heathenism to aid,—exorcism and witch-craft, the mysterious Obi worship with its barbarious rites, spells, andblood-sacrifice even, now and then, of human victims. Weird midnight orgies and mystic conjurations wereinvoked, the witch-woman and the voodoo-priest became the centre of Negro group life, and that vein of vaguesuperstition 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 ofrevolt gradually died away under the untiring energy and superior strength of the slave masters. By the middle ofthe eighteenth century the black slave had sunk, with hushed murmurs, to his place at the bottom of a neweconomic system, and was unconsciously ripe for a new philosophy of life. Nothing suited his condition thenbetter than the doctrines of passive submission embodied in the newly learned Christianity. Slave masters earlyrealized this, and cheerfully aided religious propaganda within certain bounds. The long system of repression anddegradation 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 ofthe beautiful became an infinite capacity for dumb suffering. The Negro, losing the joy of this world, eagerlyseized 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 hiscomforting dream. His preacher repeated the prophecy, and his bards sang,—
“Children, we all shall be freeWhen the Lord shall appear!”
This deep religious fatalism, painted so beautifully in “Uncle Tom,” came soon to breed, as all fatalistic faithswill, the sensualist side by side with the martyr. Under the lax moral life of the plantation, where marriage was afarce, laziness a virtue, and property a theft, a religion of resignation and submission degenerated easily, in lessstrenuous minds, into a philosophy of indulgence and crime. Many of the worst characteristics of the Negromasses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth. Here it was that the Home was ruinedunder the very shadow of the Church, white and black; here habits of shiftlessness took root, and sullenhopelessness replaced hopeful strife.
With the beginning of the abolition movement and the gradual growth of a class of free Negroes came achange. We often neglect the influence of the freedman before the war, because of the paucity of his numbers andthe 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 fewcentres like Philadelphia, New York, and New Orleans, the masses of the freedmen sank into poverty andlistlessness; but not all of them. The free Negro leader early arose and his chief characteristic was intenseearnestness and deep feeling on the slavery question. Freedom became to him a real thing and not a dream. Hisreligion became darker and more intense, and into his ethics crept a note of revenge, into his songs a day ofreckoning close at hand. The “Coming of the Lord” swept this side of Death, and came to be a thing to be hopedfor in this day. Through fugitive slaves and irrepressible discussion this desire for freedom seized the blackmillions still in bondage, and became their one ideal of life. The black bards caught new notes, and sometimeseven dared to sing,—
“O Freedom, O Freedom, O Freedom over me!Before I’ll be a slaveI’ll be buried in my grave,And go home to my LordAnd be free.”
For fifty years Negro religion thus transformed itself and identified itself with the dream of Abolition, until thatwhich was a radical fad in the white North and an anarchistic plot in the white South had become a religion to theblack world. Thus, when Emancipation finally came, it seemed to the freedman a literal Coming of the Lord. Hisfervid imagination was stirred as never before, by the tramp of armies, the blood and dust of battle, and the wailand 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 awaitingnew 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 livingas the blacks do in close contact with a great modern nation, and sharing, although imperfectly, the soul-life ofthat nation, they must necessarily be affected more or less directly by all the religious and ethical forces that areto-day moving the United States. These questions and movements are, however, overshadowed and dwarfed bythe (to them) all-important question of their civil, political, and economic status. They must perpetually discussthe “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, thetraining of children, the accumulation of wealth, and the prevention of crime. All this must mean a time of intenseethical ferment, of religious heart-searching and intellectual unrest. From the double life every American Negromust live, as a Negro and as an American, as swept on by the current of the nineteenth while yet struggling in theeddies of the fifteenth century,—from this must arise a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid sense ofpersonality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence. The worlds within and without the Veil ofColor are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce apeculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with doublethoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and temptthe 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 thatfaces the Negro of to-day and is tingeing and changing his religious life. Feeling that his rights and his dearestideals are being trampled upon, that the public conscience is ever more deaf to his righteous appeal, and that allthe reactionary forces of prejudice, greed, and revenge are daily gaining new strength and fresh allies, the Negrofaces 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 afaith. On the other hand, another type of mind, shrewder and keener and more tortuous too, sees in the verystrength of the anti-Negro movement its patent weaknesses, and with Jesuitic casuistry is deterred by no ethicalconsiderations in the endeavor to turn this weakness to the black man’s strength. Thus we have two great andhardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the otherin hypocrisy. The one type of Negro stands almost ready to curse God and die, and the other is too often found atraitor to right and a coward before force; the one is wedded to ideals remote, whimsical, perhaps impossible ofrealization; the other forgets that life is more than meat and the body more than raiment. But, after all, is not thissimply 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 divergentethical tendencies, the first tending toward radicalism, the other toward hypocritical compromise. It is no idleregret with which the white South mourns the loss of the old-time Negro,—the frank, honest, simple old servantwho stood for the earlier religious age of submission and humility. With all his laziness and lack of manyelements of true manhood, he was at least open-hearted, faithful, and sincere. To-day he is gone, but who is toblame for his going? Is it not those very persons who mourn for him? Is it not the tendency, born ofReconstruction and Reaction, to found a society on lawlessness and deception, to tamper with the moral fibre of anaturally honest and straightforward people until the whites threaten to become ungovernable tyrants and theblacks criminals and hypocrites? Deception is the natural defence of the weak against the strong, and the Southused it for many years against its conquerors; to-day it must be prepared to see its black proletariat turn that sametwo-edged weapon against itself. And how natural this is! The death of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner provedlong since to the Negro the present hopelessness of physical defence. Political defence is becoming less and lessavailable, and economic defence is still only partially effective. But there is a patent defence at hand,—thedefence of deception and flattery, of cajoling and lying. It is the same defence which peasants of the Middle Ageused and which left its stamp on their character for centuries. To-day the young Negro of the South who wouldsucceed cannot be frank and outspoken, honest and self-assertive, but rather he is daily tempted to be silent andwary, politic and sly; he must flatter and be pleasant, endure petty insults with a smile, shut his eyes to wrong; intoo 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 economicopening, and perhaps peace and some prosperity. Without this there is riot, migration, or crime. Nor is thissituation peculiar to the Southern United States, is it not rather the only method by which undeveloped races havegained 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 hisbirthright in the South by a situation at which every fibre of his more outspoken and assertive nature revolts, hefinds himself in a land where he can scarcely earn a decent living amid the harsh competition and the colordiscrimination. At the same time, through schools and periodicals, discussions and lectures, he is intellectuallyquickened and awakened. The soul, long pent up and dwarfed, suddenly expands in new-found freedom. Whatwonder that every tendency is to excess,—radical complaint, radical remedies, bitter denunciation or angrysilence. Some sink, some rise. The criminal and the sensualist leave the church for the gambling-hell and thebrothel, and fill the slums of Chicago and Baltimore; the better classes segregate themselves from the group-lifeof both white and black, and form an aristocracy, cultured but pessimistic, whose bitter criticism stings while itpoints out no way of escape. They despise the submission and subserviency of the Southern Negroes, but offer noother means by which a poor and oppressed minority can exist side by side with its masters. Feeling deeply andkeenly the tendencies and opportunities of the age in which they live, their souls are bitter at the fate which dropsthe Veil between; and the very fact that this bitterness is natural and justifiable only serves to intensify it andmake it more maddening.
Between the two extreme types of ethical attitude which I have thus sought to make clear wavers the mass ofthe millions of Negroes, North and South; and their religious life and activity partake of this social conflict withintheir ranks. Their churches are differentiating,—now into groups of cold, fashionable devotees, in no waydistinguishable from similar white groups save in color of skin; now into large social and business institutionscatering to the desire for information and amusement of their members, warily avoiding unpleasant questionsboth within and without the black world, and preaching in effect if not in word: Dum vivimus, vivamus.
But back of this still broods silently the deep religious feeling of the real Negro heart, the stirring, unguidedmight of powerful human souls who have lost the guiding star of the past and seek in the great night a newreligious ideal. Some day the Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of ten million souls shall sweepirresistibly 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,Who hath remembered me? who hath forgotten?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 Octobermorning. Then the fear of fatherhood mingled wildly with the joy of creation; I wondered how it looked and howit felt—what were its eyes, and how its hair curled and crumpled itself. And I thought in awe of her,—she whohad slept with Death to tear a man-child from underneath her heart, while I was unconsciously wandering. I fledto my wife and child, repeating the while to myself half wonderingly, “Wife and child? Wife and child?”—fledfast 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 biddinghad offered itself to win a life, and won. What is this tiny formless thing, this newborn wail from an unknownworld,—all head and voice? I handle it curiously, and watch perplexed its winking, breathing, and sneezing. I didnot love it then; it seemed a ludicrous thing to love; but her I loved, my girl-mother, she whom now I sawunfolding like the glory of the morning—the transfigured woman. Through her I came to love the wee thing, as itgrew strong; as its little soul unfolded itself in twitter and cry and half-formed word, and as its eyes caught thegleam and flash of life. How beautiful he was, with his olive-tinted flesh and dark gold ringlets, his eyes ofmingled blue and brown, his perfect little limbs, and the soft voluptuous roll which the blood of Africa hadmoulded into his features! I held him in my arms, after we had sped far away from our Southern home,—heldhim, 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 eyescrushed out and killed the blue?—for brown were his father’s eyes, and his father’s father’s. And thus in the Landof 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 thatlittle 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 aland whose freedom is to us a mockery and whose liberty a lie. I saw the shadow of the Veil as it passed over mybaby, I saw the cold city towering above the blood-red land. I held my face beside his little cheek, showed himthe star-children and the twinkling lights as they began to flash, and stilled with an even-song the unvoiced terrorof my life.
So sturdy and masterful he grew, so filled with bubbling life, so tremulous with the unspoken wisdom of a lifebut 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 idealizedher every effort. No hands but hers must touch and garnish those little limbs; no dress or frill must touch themthat had not wearied her fingers; no voice but hers could coax him off to Dreamland, and she and he togetherspoke some soft and unknown tongue and in it held communion. I too mused above his little white bed; saw thestrength of my own arm stretched onward through the ages through the newer strength of his; saw the dream ofmy black fathers stagger a step onward in the wild phantasm of the world; heard in his baby voice the voice of theProphet 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, tillthe hot winds rolled from the fetid Gulf, till the roses shivered and the still stern sun quivered its awful light overthe hills of Atlanta. And then one night the little feet pattered wearily to the wee white bed, and the tiny handstrembled; and a warm flushed face tossed on the pillow, and we knew baby was sick. Ten days he lay there,—aswift week and three endless days, wasting, wasting away. Cheerily the mother nursed him the first days, andlaughed into the little eyes that smiled again. Tenderly then she hovered round him, till the smile fled away andFear 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 thatVoice at midnight calling me from dull and dreamless trance,—crying, “The Shadow of Death! The Shadow ofDeath!” 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 wetwo alone looked upon the child as he turned toward us with great eyes, and stretched his stringlike hands,—theShadow 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 thewinds spoke not, and the trees, the great green trees he loved, stood motionless. I saw his breath beat quicker andquicker, pause, and then his little soul leapt like a star that travels in the night and left a world of darkness in itstrain. The day changed not; the same tall trees peeped in at the windows, the same green grass glinted in thesetting 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 ofthe storm, nor even quail before the awful shadow of the Veil. But hearken, O Death! Is not this my life hardenough,—is not that dull land that stretches its sneering web about me cold enough,—is not all the world beyondthese four little walls pitiless enough, but that thou must needs enter here,—thou, O Death? About my head thethundering storm beat like a heartless voice, and the crazy forest pulsed with the curses of the weak; but whatcared I, within my home beside my wife and baby boy? Wast thou so jealous of one little coign of happiness thatthou 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 theHousatonic. 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 sparklinglaughter 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 whitematron, he loved his black nurse; and in his little world walked souls alone, uncolored and unclothed. I—yea, allmen—are larger and purer by the infinite breadth of that one little life. She who in simple clearness of vision seesbeyond the stars said when he had flown, “He will be happy There; he ever loved beautiful things.” And I, farmore 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 thegrass, but the children sat with hushed faces. And yet it seemed a ghostly unreal day,—the wraith of Life. Weseemed to rumble down an unknown street behind a little white bundle of posies, with the shadow of a song inour ears. The busy city dinned about us; they did not say much, those pale-faced hurrying men and women; theydid 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 awayto the northward, with his flowers and his little folded hands. In vain, in vain!—for where, O God! beneath thybroad blue sky shall my dark baby rest in peace,—where Reverence dwells, and Goodness, and a Freedom that isfree?
All that day and all that night there sat an awful gladness in my heart,—nay, blame me not if I see the worldthus darkly through the Veil,—and my soul whispers ever to me saying, “Not dead, not dead, but escaped; notbond, but free.” No bitter meanness now shall sicken his baby heart till it die a living death, no taunt shall maddenhis happy boyhood. Fool that I was to think or wish that this little soul should grow choked and deformed withinthe Veil! I might have known that yonder deep unworldly look that ever and anon floated past his eyes waspeering far beyond this narrow Now. In the poise of his little curl-crowned head did there not sit all that wildpride of being which his father had hardly crushed in his own heart? For what, forsooth, shall a Negro want withpride amid the studied humiliations of fifty million fellows? Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbedyour ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you to cringe and bow. Better far thisnameless 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 theprisoned free. Not for me,—I shall die in my bonds,—but for fresh young souls who have not known the nightand 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 tocome. But now there wails, on that dark shore within the Veil, the same deep voice, Thou shalt forego! And allhave I foregone at that command, and with small complaint,—all save that fair young form that lies so coldly wedwith 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 widewaking? Was not the world’s alembic, Time, in his young hands, and is not my time waning? Are there so manyworkers in the vineyard that the fair promise of this little body could lightly be tossed away? The wretched of myrace that line the alleys of the nation sit fatherless and unmothered; but Love sat beside his cradle, and in his earWisdom waited to speak. Perhaps now he knows the All-love, and needs not to be wise. Sleep, then, child,—sleeptill 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 faintAs from beyond the limit of the world,Like the last echo born of a great cry,Sounds, as if some fair city were one voiceAround 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 withlife that he might know the world and know himself. Three temptations he met on those dark dunes that lay grayand dismal before the wonder-eyes of the child: the temptation of Hate, that stood out against the red dawn; thetemptation 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 ofDeath.
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, wherethe storming of the lusty young orators could not harm us. I spoke to him politely, then curiously, then eagerly, asI began to feel the fineness of his character,—his calm courtesy, the sweetness of his strength, and his fairblending of the hope and truth of life. Instinctively I bowed before this man, as one bows before the prophets ofthe world. Some seer he seemed, that came not from the crimson Past or the gray To-come, but from the pulsingNow,—that mocking world which seemed to me at once so light and dark, so splendid and sordid. Fourscoreyears 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: stirringtimes for living, times dark to look back upon, darker to look forward to. The black-faced lad that paused over hismud and marbles seventy years ago saw puzzling vistas as he looked down the world. The slave-ship still groanedacross the Atlantic, faint cries burdened the Southern breeze, and the great black father whispered mad tales ofcruelty into those young ears. From the low doorway the mother silently watched her boy at play, and at nightfallsought 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 visionever stood one dark figure alone,—ever with the hard, thick countenance of that bitter father, and a form that fellin vast and shapeless folds. Thus the temptation of Hate grew and shadowed the growing child,—glidingstealthily into his laughter, fading into his play, and seizing his dreams by day and night with rough, rudeturbulence. 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 darkchildren brood before this same temptation, and feel its cold and shuddering arms. For them, perhaps, some onewill some day lift the Veil,—will come tenderly and cheerily into those sad little lives and brush the brooding hateaway, just as Beriah Green strode in upon the life of Alexander Crummell. And before the bluff, kind-heartedman the shadow seemed less dark. Beriah Green had a school in Oneida County, New York, with a score ofmischievous boys. “I’m going to bring a black boy here to educate,” said Beriah Green, as only a crank and anabolitionist would have dared to say. “Oho!” laughed the boys. “Ye-es,” said his wife; and Alexander came. Oncebefore, the black boy had sought a school, had travelled, cold and hungry, four hundred miles up into free NewHampshire, to Canaan. But the godly farmers hitched ninety yoke of oxen to the abolition schoolhouse anddragged 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 descryin others that transfigured spark of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhoppers and peasants, and trampsand thieves, and millionaires and—sometimes—Negroes, became throbbing souls whose warm pulsing lifetouched us so nearly that we half gasped with surprise, crying, “Thou too! Hast Thou seen Sorrow and the dullwaters of Hopelessness? Hast Thou known Life?” And then all helplessly we peered into those Other-worlds, andwailed, “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 oneblack skin, of which they had not dreamed before. And to the lonely boy came a new dawn of sympathy andinspiration. 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 earthuntil 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 nationcalling,—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 sawthe headless host turn toward him like the whirling of mad waters,—he stretched forth his hands eagerly, andthen, 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, goodmen, Bishops of the Apostolic Church of God, and strove toward righteousness. They said slowly, “It is all verynatural—it is even commendable; but the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church cannot admit aNegro.” And when that thin, half-grotesque figure still haunted their doors, they put their hands kindly, halfsorrowfully, on his shoulders, and said, “Now,—of course, we—we know how you feel about it; but you see it isimpossible,—that is—well—it is premature. Sometime, we trust—sincerely trust—all such distinctions will fadeaway; 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 flittedby those halls, pleading, arguing, half angrily demanding admittance, until there came the final No; until menhustled 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 onbeneath a dark despair. Even the kind hands that stretched themselves toward him from out the depths of that dullmorning seemed but parts of the purple shadows. He saw them coldly, and asked, “Why should I strive by specialgrace when the way of the world is closed to me?” All gently yet, the hands urged him on,—the hands of youngJohn Jay, that daring father’s daring son; the hands of the good folk of Boston, that free city. And yet, with a wayto the priesthood of the Church open at last before him, the cloud lingered there; and even when in old St. Paul’sthe venerable Bishop raised his white arms above the Negro deacon—even then the burden had not lifted fromthat 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 hetook up again his plan of life. More critically he studied the situation. Deep down below the slavery and servitudeof the Negro people he saw their fatal weaknesses, which long years of mistreatment had emphasized. The dearthof strong moral character, of unbending righteousness, he felt, was their great shortcoming, and here he wouldbegin. He would gather the best of his people into some little Episcopal chapel and there lead, teach, and inspirethem, till the leaven spread, till the children grew, till the world hearkened, till—till—and then across his dreamgleamed some faint after-glow of that first fair vision of youth—only an after-glow, for there had passed a gloryfrom the earth.
One day—it was in 1842, and the springtide was struggling merrily with the May winds of New England—hestood at last in his own chapel in Providence, a priest of the Church. The days sped by, and the dark youngclergyman labored; he wrote his sermons carefully; he intoned his prayers with a soft, earnest voice; he hauntedthe streets and accosted the wayfarers; he visited the sick, and knelt beside the dying. He worked and toiled, weekby week, day by day, month by month. And yet month by month the congregation dwindled, week by week thehollow walls echoed more sharply, day by day the calls came fewer and fewer, and day by day the thirdtemptation sat clearer and still more clearly within the Veil; a temptation, as it were, bland and smiling, with just ashade 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 expect?” 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 andstrive and achieve—” and “Of course,” added the temptation softly, “they do nothing of the sort.” Of all the threetemptations, this one struck the deepest. Hate? He had outgrown so childish a thing. Despair? He had steeled hisright arm against it, and fought it with the vigor of determination. But to doubt the worth of his life-work,—todoubt the destiny and capability of the race his soul loved because it was his; to find listless squalor instead ofeager endeavor; to hear his own lips whispering, “They do not care; they cannot know; they are dumb drivencattle,—why cast your pearls before swine?”—this, this seemed more than man could bear; and he closed thedoor, 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 hisvestments, put away the hymn-books, and closed the great Bible. He stepped out into the twilight, looked backupon the narrow little pulpit with a weary smile, and locked the door. Then he walked briskly to the Bishop, andtold the Bishop what the Bishop already knew. “I have failed,” he said simply. And gaining courage by theconfession, he added: “What I need is a larger constituency. There are comparatively few Negroes here, andperhaps they are not of the best. I must go where the field is wider, and try again.” So the Bishop sent him toPhiladelphia, with a letter to Bishop Onderdonk.
Bishop Onderdonk lived at the head of six white steps,—corpulent, red-faced, and the author of severalthrilling tracts on Apostolic Succession. It was after dinner, and the Bishop had settled himself for a pleasantseason of contemplation, when the bell must needs ring, and there must burst in upon the Bishop a letter and athin, ungainly Negro. Bishop Onderdonk read the letter hastily and frowned. Fortunately, his mind was alreadyclear on this point; and he cleared his brow and looked at Crummell. Then he said, slowly and impressively: “Iwill receive you into this diocese on one condition: no Negro priest can sit in my church convention, and noNegro church must ask for representation there.”
I sometimes fancy I can see that tableau: the frail black figure, nervously twitching his hat before the massiveabdomen of Bishop Onderdonk; his threadbare coat thrown against the dark woodwork of the bookcases, whereFox’s “Lives of the Martyrs” nestled happily beside “The Whole Duty of Man.” I seem to see the wide eyes of theNegro 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 asurprised sort of way, and rubs his feelers reflectively; then he essays its depths, and, finding it bottomless, drawsback again. The dark-faced priest finds himself wondering if the fly too has faced its Valley of Humiliation, and ifit will plunge into it,—when lo! it spreads its tiny wings and buzzes merrily across, leaving the watcher winglessand alone.
Then the full weight of his burden fell upon him. The rich walls wheeled away, and before him lay the coldrough 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: inyonder 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 spurnsThat 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 thethought within that lone black breast. The Bishop cleared his throat suggestively; then, recollecting that there wasreally nothing to say, considerately said nothing, only sat tapping his foot impatiently. But Alexander Crummellsaid, slowly and heavily: “I will never enter your diocese on such terms.” And saying this, he turned and passedinto the Valley of the Shadow of Death. You might have noted only the physical dying, the shattered frame andhacking cough; but in that soul lay deeper death than that. He found a chapel in New York,—the church of hisfather; he labored for it in poverty and starvation, scorned by his fellow priests. Half in despair, he wanderedacross the sea, a beggar with outstretched hands. Englishmen clasped them,—Wilberforce and Stanley, Thirwelland Ingles, and even Froude and Macaulay; Sir Benjamin Brodie bade him rest awhile at Queen’s College inCambridge, and there he lingered, struggling for health of body and mind, until he took his degree in ’53. Restlessstill, and unsatisfied, he turned toward Africa, and for long years, amid the spawn of the slave-smugglers, soughta 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, thestriving of one who vainly sought his place in the world, ever haunted by the shadow of a death that is more thandeath,—the passing of a soul that has missed its duty. Twenty years he wandered,—twenty years and more; andyet the hard rasping question kept gnawing within him, “What, in God’s name, am I on earth for?” In the narrowNew York parish his soul seemed cramped and smothered. In the fine old air of the English University he heardthe 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 andmarvellous 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 isa shade more difficult for him; if your heart sickens in the blood and dust of battle, remember that to him the dustis thicker and the battle fiercer. No wonder the wanderers fall! No wonder we point to thief and murderer, andhaunting prostitute, and the never-ending throng of unhearsed dead! The Valley of the Shadow of Death gives fewof 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 anddiscrimination, with that rare courtesy which is the armor of pure souls. He fought among his own, the low, thegrasping, and the wicked, with that unbending righteousness which is the sword of the just. He never faltered, heseldom complained; he simply worked, inspiring the young, rebuking the old, helping the weak, guiding thestrong.
So he grew, and brought within his wide influence all that was best of those who walk within the Veil. Theywho live without knew not nor dreamed of that full power within, that mighty inspiration which the dull gauze ofcaste decreed that most men should not know. And now that he is gone, I sweep the Veil away and cry, Lo! thesoul to whose dear memory I bring this little tribute. I can see his face still, dark and heavy-lined beneath hissnowy hair; lighting and shading, now with inspiration for the future, now in innocent pain at some humanwickedness, now with sorrow at some hard memory from the past. The more I met Alexander Crummell, themore I felt how much that world was losing which knew so little of him. In another age he might have sat amongthe 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 humansympathy. His name to-day, in this broad land, means little, and comes to fifty million ears laden with no incenseof memory or emulation. And herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor,—all men know somethingof poverty; not that men are wicked,—who is good? not that men are ignorant,—what is Truth? Nay, but that menknow 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 atstar-rise a wind came moaning out of the west to blow the gate ajar, and then the soul I loved fled like a flameacross 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 somewan throne a King,—a dark and pierced Jew, who knows the writhings of the earthly damned, saying, as he laidthose 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 upagain, by little shops and meat-markets, past single-storied homes, until suddenly it stops against a wide greenlawn. It is a broad, restful place, with two large buildings outlined against the west. When at evening the windscome swelling from the east, and the great pall of the city’s smoke hangs wearily above the valley, then the redwest glows like a dreamland down Carlisle Street, and, at the tolling of the supper-bell, throws the passing formsof students in dark silhouette against the sky. Tall and black, they move slowly by, and seem in the sinister light toflit before the city like dim warning ghosts. Perhaps they are; for this is Wells Institute, and these black studentshave 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 thetwinkling 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 usedperpetually to set the quiet dining-room into waves of merriment, as he stole to his place after the bell had tappedfor prayers; he seemed so perfectly awkward. And yet one glance at his face made one forgive him much,—thatbroad, good-natured smile in which lay no bit of art or artifice, but seemed just bubbling good-nature and genuinesatisfaction with the world.
He came to us from Altamaha, away down there beneath the gnarled oaks of Southeastern Georgia, where thesea croons to the sands and the sands listen till they sink half drowned beneath the waters, rising only here andthere in long, low islands. The white folk of Altamaha voted John a good boy,—fine plough-hand, good in therice-fields, handy everywhere, and always good-natured and respectful. But they shook their heads when hismother wanted to send him off to school. “It’ll spoil him,—ruin him,” they said; and they talked as though theyknew. But full half the black folk followed him proudly to the station, and carried his queer little trunk and manybundles. And there they shook and shook hands, and the girls kissed him shyly and the boys clapped him on theback. 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 doubtfulpilgrim. Up the coast they hurried, past the squares and palmettos of Savannah, through the cotton-fields andthrough 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 andbrother and son away to the world, had thereafter one ever-recurring word,—“When John comes.” Then whatparties were to be, and what speakings in the churches; what new furniture in the front room,—perhaps even anew front room; and there would be a new schoolhouse, with John as teacher; and then perhaps a big wedding; allthis 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,—buttimes were hard and schooling costly, and so, instead, he worked in Johnstown. And so it drifted to the nextsummer, and the next,—till playmates scattered, and mother grew gray, and sister went up to the Judge’s kitchento 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, whohad 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 theYankees what a Southern gentleman can do,” he added; and strode home again with his letters and papers. Up atthe great pillared house they lingered long over the Princeton letter,—the Judge and his frail wife, his sister andgrowing daughters. “It’ll make a man of him,” said the Judge, “college is the place.” And then he asked the shylittle waitress, “Well, Jennie, how’s your John?” and added reflectively, “Too bad, too bad your mother sent himoff—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. Andyet it was singular that few thought of two Johns,—for the black folk thought of one John, and he was black; andthe 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 clayseemed unfit for any sort of moulding. He was loud and boisterous, always laughing and singing, and never ableto work consecutively at anything. He did not know how to study; he had no idea of thoroughness; and with histardiness, 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 hemust leave school. He stared at the gray-haired man blankly, with great eyes. “Why,—why,” he faltered, “but—Ihaven’t graduated!” Then the Dean slowly and clearly explained, reminding him of the tardiness and thecarelessness, of the poor lessons and neglected work, of the noise and disorder, until the fellow hung his head inconfusion. Then he said quickly, “But you won’t tell mammy and sister,—you won’t write mammy, now willyou? For if you won’t I’ll go out into the city and work, and come back next term and show you something.” Sothe Dean promised faithfully, and John shouldered his little trunk, giving neither word nor look to the gigglingboys, 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 thatafternoon never left it again. When he came back to us he went to work with all his rugged strength. It was a hardstruggle, for things did not come easily to him,—few crowding memories of early life and teaching came to helphim on his new way; but all the world toward which he strove was of his own building, and he builded slow andhard. As the light dawned lingeringly on his new creations, he sat rapt and silent before the vision, or wanderedalone over the green campus peering through and beyond the world of men into a world of thought. And thethoughts 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. Hecaught terrible colds lying on his back in the meadows of nights, trying to think out the solar system; he had gravedoubts 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 whyit couldn’t mean something else, and how it must have felt to think all things in Greek. So he thought and puzzledalong for himself,—pausing perplexed where others skipped merrily, and walking steadily through the difficultieswhere the rest stopped and surrendered.
Thus he grew in body and soul, and with him his clothes seemed to grow and arrange themselves; coat sleevesgot longer, cuffs appeared, and collars got less soiled. Now and then his boots shone, and a new dignity crept intohis walk. And we who saw daily a new thoughtfulness growing in his eyes began to expect something of thisplodding boy. Thus he passed out of the preparatory school into college, and we who watched him felt four moreyears of change, which almost transformed the tall, grave man who bowed to us commencement morning. He hadleft his queer thought-world and come back to a world of motion and of men. He looked now for the first timesharply about him, and wondered he had seen so little before. He grew slowly to feel almost for the first time theVeil that lay between him and the white world; he first noticed now the oppression that had not seemedoppression before, differences that erstwhile seemed natural, restraints and slights that in his boyhood days hadgone unnoticed or been greeted with a laugh. He felt angry now when men did not call him “Mister,” he clenchedhis hands at the “Jim Crow” cars, and chafed at the color-line that hemmed in him and his. A tinge of sarcasmcrept into his speech, and a vague bitterness into his life; and he sat long hours wondering and planning a wayaround these crooked things. Daily he found himself shrinking from the choked and narrow life of his nativetown. And yet he always planned to go back to Altamaha,—always planned to work there. Still, more and moreas the day approached he hesitated with a nameless dread; and even the day after graduation he seized witheagerness the offer of the Dean to send him North with the quartette during the summer vacation, to sing for theInstitute. 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. Theyreminded 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 theirhats; he peered into the hurrying carriages. Then, leaning back with a sigh, he said, “This is the World.” Thenotion suddenly seized him to see where the world was going; since many of the richer and brighter seemedhurrying all one way. So when a tall, light-haired young man and a little talkative lady came by, he rose halfhesitatingly and followed them. Up the street they went, past stores and gay shops, across a broad square, untilwith 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 hadhoarded. There seemed really no time for hesitation, so he drew it bravely out, passed it to the busy clerk, andreceived simply a ticket but no change. When at last he realized that he had paid five dollars to enter he knew notwhat, he stood stockstill amazed. “Be careful,” said a low voice behind him; “you must not lynch the coloredgentleman 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 will not understand us at the South,” he said halfimpatiently, as if continuing an argument. “With all your professions, one never sees in the North so cordial andintimate relations between white and black as are everyday occurrences with us. Why, I remember my closestplayfellow in boyhood was a little Negro named after me, and surely no two,—well!” The man stopped short andflushed to the roots of his hair, for there directly beside his reserved orchestra chairs sat the Negro he hadstumbled over in the hallway. He hesitated and grew pale with anger, called the usher and gave him his card, witha 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 aworld 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 waillingered and swept through every muscle of his frame, and put it all a-tune. He closed his eyes and grasped theelbows of the chair, touching unwittingly the lady’s arm. And the lady drew away. A deep longing swelled in allhis 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 calledhim 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 openbefore men?
Then the movement changed, and fuller, mightier harmony swelled away. He looked thoughtfully across thehall, and wondered why the beautiful gray-haired woman looked so listless, and what the little man could bewhispering about. He would not like to be listless and idle, he thought, for he felt with the music the movement ofpower within him. If he but had some master-work, some life-service, hard,—aye, bitter hard, but without thecringing and sickening servility, without the cruel hurt that hardened his heart and soul. When at last a soft sorrowcrept across the violins, there came to him the vision of a far-off home, the great eyes of his sister, and the darkdrawn face of his mother. And his heart sank below the waters, even as the sea-sand sinks by the shores ofAltamaha, only to be lifted aloft again with that last ethereal wail of the swan that quivered and faded away intothe sky.
It left John sitting so silent and rapt that he did not for some time notice the usher tapping him lightly on theshoulder and saying politely, “Will you step this way, please, sir?” A little surprised, he arose quickly at the lasttap, and, turning to leave his seat, looked full into the face of the fair-haired young man. For the first time theyoung man recognized his dark boyhood playmate, and John knew that it was the Judge’s son. The White Johnstarted, lifted his hand, and then froze into his chair; the black John smiled lightly, then grimly, and followed theusher down the aisle. The manager was sorry, very, very sorry,—but he explained that some mistake had beenmade in selling the gentleman a seat already disposed of; he would refund the money, of course,—and indeed feltthe matter keenly, and so forth, and—before he had finished John was gone, walking hurriedly across the squareand 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 thefire. 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 mymanifest 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, whichis 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 scrubbedand scoured,—above all, one; the gardens and yards had an unwonted trimness, and Jennie bought a newgingham. With some finesse and negotiation, all the dark Methodists and Presbyterians were induced to join in amonster welcome at the Baptist Church; and as the day drew near, warm discussions arose on every corner as tothe 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; butsister Jennie stood on the platform, nervously fingering her dress, tall and lithe, with soft brown skin and lovingeyes peering from out a tangled wilderness of hair. John rose gloomily as the train stopped, for he was thinking ofthe “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 andnarrowness of it all seized him; he looked in vain for his mother, kissed coldly the tall, strange girl who calledhim brother, spoke a short, dry word here and there; then, lingering neither for handshaking nor gossip, startedsilently up the street, raising his hat merely to the last eager old aunty, to her open-mouthed astonishment. Thepeople 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 stuckup,” complained a Baptist sister. But the white postmaster from the edge of the crowd expressed the opinion ofhis folks plainly. “That damn Nigger,” said he, as he shouldered the mail and arranged his tobacco, “has goneNorth 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 themilk in the ice-cream. When the speaking came at night, the house was crowded to overflowing. The threepreachers had especially prepared themselves, but somehow John’s manner seemed to throw a blanket overeverything,—he seemed so cold and preoccupied, and had so strange an air of restraint that the Methodist brothercould not warm up to his theme and elicited not a single “Amen”; the Presbyterian prayer was but feeblyresponded to, and even the Baptist preacher, though he wakened faint enthusiasm, got so mixed up in his favoritesentence that he had to close it by stopping fully fifteen minutes sooner than he meant. The people moveduneasily in their seats as John rose to reply. He spoke slowly and methodically. The age, he said, demanded newideas; we were far different from those men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,—with broader ideas ofhuman brotherhood and destiny. Then he spoke of the rise of charity and popular education, and particularly ofthe spread of wealth and work. The question was, then, he added reflectively, looking at the low discolored
the spread of wealth and work. The question was, then, he added reflectively, looking at the low discoloredceiling, what part the Negroes of this land would take in the striving of the new century. He sketched in vagueoutline the new Industrial School that might rise among these pines, he spoke in detail of the charitable andphilanthropic work that might be organized, of money that might be saved for banks and business. Finally heurged 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 goodand true. What difference does it make whether a man be baptized in river or washbowl, or not at all? Let’s leaveall that littleness, and look higher.” Then, thinking of nothing else, he slowly sat down. A painful hush seized thatcrowded mass. Little had they understood of what he said, for he spoke an unknown tongue, save the last wordabout baptism; that they knew, and they sat very still while the clock ticked. Then at last a low suppressed snarlcame from the Amen corner, and an old bent man arose, walked over the seats, and climbed straight up into thepulpit. He was wrinkled and black, with scant gray and tufted hair; his voice and hands shook as with palsy; buton his face lay the intense rapt look of the religious fanatic. He seized the Bible with his rough, huge hands; twicehe 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 wildshrieking 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 denunciationfor trampling on the true Religion, and he realized with amazement that all unknowingly he had put rough, rudehands on something this little world held sacred. He arose silently, and passed out into the night. Down towardthe sea he went, in the fitful starlight, half conscious of the girl who followed timidly after him. When at last hestood upon the bluff, he turned to his little sister and looked upon her sorrowfully, remembering with sudden painhow little thought he had given her. He put his arm about her and let her passion of tears spend itself on hisshoulder.
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 tothe 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, andbefore he left the depot he had hurt them. He sought to teach them at the church, and had outraged their deepestfeelings. He had schooled himself to be respectful to the Judge, and then blundered into his front door. And all thetime he had meant right,—and yet, and yet, somehow he found it so hard and strange to fit his old surroundingsagain, to find his place in the world about him. He could not remember that he used to have any difficulty in thepast, when life was glad and gay. The world seemed smooth and easy then. Perhaps,—but his sister came to thekitchen 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 plungedsquarely into the business. “You’ve come for the school, I suppose. Well John, I want to speak to you plainly. Youknow I’m a friend to your people. I’ve helped you and your family, and would have done more if you hadn’t gotthe notion of going off. Now I like the colored people, and sympathize with all their reasonable aspirations; butyou and I both know, John, that in this country the Negro must remain subordinate, and can never expect to be theequal of white men. In their place, your people can be honest and respectful; and God knows, I’ll do what I can tohelp them. But when they want to reverse nature, and rule white men, and marry white women, and sit in myparlor, then, by God! we’ll hold them under if we have to lynch every Nigger in the land. Now, John, the questionis, are you, with your education and Northern notions, going to accept the situation and teach the darkies to befaithful servants and laborers as your fathers were,—I knew your father, John, he belonged to my brother, and hewas a good Nigger. Well—well, are you going to be like him, or are you going to try to put fool ideas of risingand 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 thekeen 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, andheadstrong. The mother wept, the sisters sang. The whole white town was glad. A proud man was the Judge, andit was a goodly sight to see the two swinging down Main Street together. And yet all did not go smoothly betweenthem, for the younger man could not and did not veil his contempt for the little town, and plainly had his heart seton New York. Now the one cherished ambition of the Judge was to see his son mayor of Altamaha, representativeto 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 townwith nothing but mud and Negroes?” “I did,” the Judge would answer laconically; and on this particular day itseemed from the gathering scowl that he was about to add something more emphatic, but neighbors had alreadybegun 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 anddirty, and books, pencils, and slates largely missing. Nevertheless, he struggled hopefully on, and seemed to see atlast some glimmering of dawn. The attendance was larger and the children were a shade cleaner this week. Eventhe booby class in reading showed a little comforting progress. So John settled himself with renewed patience thisafternoon.
“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 lockthe 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 womenhad 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 alittle spoiled and self-indulgent, and as headstrong as his proud father. He seemed a young man pleasant to lookupon, as he sat on the great black stump at the edge of the pines idly swinging his legs and smoking. “Why, thereisn’t even a girl worth getting up a respectable flirtation with,” he growled. Just then his eye caught a tall, willowyfigure hurrying toward him on the narrow path. He looked with interest at first, and then burst into a laugh as hesaid, “Well, I declare, if it isn’t Jennie, the little brown kitchen-maid! Why, I never noticed before what a trimlittle body she is. Hello, Jennie! Why, you haven’t kissed me since I came home,” he said gaily. The young girlstared at him in surprise and confusion,—faltered something inarticulate, and attempted to pass. But a wilfulmood had seized the young idler, and he caught at her arm. Frightened, she slipped by; and half mischievously heturned 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 wearilyhomeward from the schoolhouse; then, thinking to shield his mother from the blow, started to meet his sister asshe came from work and break the news of his dismissal to her. “I’ll go away,” he said slowly; “I’ll go away andfind work, and send for them. I cannot live here longer.” And then the fierce, buried anger surged up into histhroat. 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 mightypines in black and gold. There came from the wind no warning, not a whisper from the cloudless sky. There wasonly a black man hurrying on with an ache in his heart, seeing neither sun nor sea, but starting as from a dream atthe 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, andthe body lay white and still beneath the pines, all bathed in sunshine and in blood. John looked at it dreamily, thenwalked 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 thegray past he had played with that dead boy, romping together under the solemn trees. The night deepened; hethought 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 greatlong dining-room with its hundreds of merry eyes. Then as the sheen of the starlight stole over him, he thought ofthe 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 andfluttered 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 shadowswhere lay the noise of horses galloping, galloping on. With an effort he roused himself, bent forward, and lookedsteadily 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 horsesthundering 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 thecoiling twisted rope. Then, as the storm burst round him, he rose slowly to his feet and turned his closed eyestoward 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. Andso before each thought that I have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird oldsongs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men. Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred mestrangely. They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and ofmine. Then in after years when I came to Nashville I saw the great temple builded of these songs towering overthe pale city. To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red with theblood and dust of toil. Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of thevoices 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; thehuman spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fatefulchance the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole Americanmusic, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, ithas been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; butnotwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negropeople.
Away back in the thirties the melody of these slave songs stirred the nation, but the songs were soon halfforgotten. Some, like “Near the lake where drooped the willow,” passed into current airs and their source wasforgotten; others were caricatured on the “minstrel” stage and their memory died away. Then in war-time camethe singular Port Royal experiment after the capture of Hilton Head, and perhaps for the first time the North metthe Southern slave face to face and heart to heart with no third witness. The Sea Islands of the Carolinas, wherethey met, were filled with a black folk of primitive type, touched and moulded less by the world about them thanany others outside the Black Belt. Their appearance was uncouth, their language funny, but their hearts werehuman and their singing stirred men with a mighty power. Thomas Wentworth Higginson hastened to tell of thesesongs, and Miss McKim and others urged upon the world their rare beauty. But the world listened only halfcredulously until the Fisk Jubilee Singers sang the slave songs so deeply into the world’s heart that it can neverwholly forget them again.
There was once a blacksmith’s son born at Cadiz, New York, who in the changes of time taught school in Ohioand helped defend Cincinnati from Kirby Smith. Then he fought at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and finallyserved 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 theJubilee songs passed into the soul of George L. White, he knew his life-work was to let those Negroes sing to theworld as they had sung to him. So in 1871 the pilgrimage of the Fisk Jubilee Singers began. North to Cincinnatithey rode,—four half-clothed black boys and five girl-women,—led by a man with a cause and a purpose. Theystopped at Wilberforce, the oldest of Negro schools, where a black bishop blessed them. Then they went, fightingcold and starvation, shut out of hotels, and cheerfully sneered at, ever northward; and ever the magic of their songkept thrilling hearts, until a burst of applause in the Congregational Council at Oberlin revealed them to theworld. They came to New York and Henry Ward Beecher dared to welcome them, even though the metropolitandailies sneered at his “Nigger Minstrels.” So their songs conquered till they sang across the land and across thesea, before Queen and Kaiser, in Scotland and Ireland, Holland and Switzerland. Seven years they sang, andbrought 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, sometimesill, by straggling quartettes. Caricature has sought again to spoil the quaint beauty of the music, and has filled theair with many debased melodies which vulgar ears scarce know from the real. But the true Negro folk-song stilllives 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 slaveto the world. They tell us in these eager days that life was joyous to the black slave, careless and happy. I caneasily believe this of some, of many. But not all the past South, though it rose from the dead, can gainsay theheart-touching witness of these songs. They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children ofdisappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderingsand hidden ways.
The songs are indeed the siftings of centuries; the music is far more ancient than the words, and in it we cantrace here and there signs of development. My grandfather’s grandmother was seized by an evil Dutch trader twocenturies ago; and coming to the valleys of the Hudson and Housatonic, black, little, and lithe, she shivered andshrank in the harsh north winds, looked longingly at the hills, and often crooned a heathen melody to the childbetween her knees, thus:
The child sang it to his children and they to their children’s children, and so two hundred years it has travelleddown to us and we sing it to our children, knowing as little as our fathers what its words may mean, but knowingwell the meaning of its music.
This was primitive African music; it may be seen in larger form in the strange chant which heralds “TheComing 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 suddenpoverty, the United States refused to fulfill its promises of land to the freedmen, a brigadier-general went down tothe Sea Islands to carry the news. An old woman on the outskirts of the throng began singing this song; all themass 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 barsbegin the life story of “Alexander Crummell.” Then there is the song of many waters, “Roll, Jordan, roll,” amighty chorus with minor cadences. There were many songs of the fugitive like that which opens “The Wings ofAtalanta,” and the more familiar “Been a-listening.” The seventh is the song of the End and the Beginning—“MyLord, 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 thischapter—“Wrestlin’ Jacob, the day is a-breaking,”—a paean of hopeful strife. The last master song is the song ofsongs—“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 threestrains in the third, eighth, and ninth chapters; and others I am sure could easily make a selection on morescientific principles. There are, too, songs that seem to be a step removed from the more primitive types: there isthe 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” isthe first, and songs like “March on” (chapter six) and “Steal away” are the second. The first is African music, thesecond Afro-American, while the third is a blending of Negro music with the music heard in the foster land. Theresult is still distinctively Negro and the method of blending original, but the elements are both Negro andCaucasian. One might go further and find a fourth step in this development, where the songs of white Americahave 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,—amass 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 displacedthe older sentiment. Once in a while we catch a strange word of an unknown tongue, as the “Mighty Myo,” whichfigures 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 ofwords, partly because the frolics were seldom heard by the stranger, and the music less often caught. Of nearly allthe songs, however, the music is distinctly sorrowful. The ten master songs I have mentioned tell in word andmusic of trouble and exile, of strife and hiding; they grope toward some unseen power and sigh for rest in theEnd.
The words that are left to us are not without interest, and, cleared of evident dross, they conceal much of realpoetry and meaning beneath conventional theology and unmeaning rhapsody. Like all primitive folk, the slavestood 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 andimpressed 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 onelittle phrase:
Over the inner thoughts of the slaves and their relations one with another the shadow of fear ever hung, so thatwe get but glimpses here and there, and also with them, eloquent omissions and silences. Mother and child aresung, but seldom father; fugitive and weary wanderer call for pity and affection, but there is little of wooing andwedding; the rocks and the mountains are well known, but home is unknown. Strange blending of love andhelplessness 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 voicesings 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 thewaters, perhaps—who knows?—back to his ancient forests again. Later days transfigured his fatalism, and amidthe 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 themouth of the slave. Especially is this true of Bible phrases. “Weep, O captive daughter of Zion,” is quaintlyturned into “Zion, weep-a-low,” and the wheels of Ezekiel are turned every way in the mystic dreaming of theslave, 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 orlonger tales, although there are some few examples of sustained efforts, chiefly paraphrases of the Bible. Threeshort series of verses have always attracted me,—the one that heads this chapter, of one line of which ThomasWentworth Higginson has fittingly said, “Never, it seems to me, since man first lived and suffered was his infinitelonging for peace uttered more plaintively.” The second and third are descriptions of the Last Judgment,—the onea 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. Theminor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes afaith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, themeaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins. Issuch 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 ofto-day are of proven inefficiency and not worth the saving. Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoplesirreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men. A thousand years ago such an assumption, easilypossible, would have made it difficult for the Teuton to prove his right to life. Two thousand years ago suchdogmatism, readily welcome, would have scouted the idea of blond races ever leading civilization. So wofullyunorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of “swift” and “slow” in humandoing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science. Whyshould Æschylus have sung two thousand years before Shakespeare was born? Why has civilization flourished inEurope, and flickered, flamed, and died in Africa? So long as the world stands meekly dumb before suchquestions, shall this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by denying freedom of opportunityto 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 threegifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song—soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonized andunmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay thefoundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; thethird, a gift of the Spirit. Around us the history of the land has centred for thrice a hundred years; out of thenation’s heart we have called all that was best to throttle and subdue all that was worst; fire and blood, prayer andsacrifice, have billowed over this people, and they have found peace only in the altars of the God of Right. Norhas our gift of the Spirit been merely passive. Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof ofthis nation,—we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation aftergeneration have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest thenation 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 beenAmerica 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 ofthings there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veiland the prisoned shall go free. Free, free as the sunshine trickling down the morning into these high windows ofmine, free as yonder fresh young voices welling up to me from the caverns of brick and mortar below—swellingwith song, instinct with life, tremulous treble and darkening bass. My children, my little children, are singing tothe sunshine, and thus they sing:
And the traveller girds himself, and sets his face toward the Morning, and goes his way.
The AfterthoughtHear 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 exaltethnations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare. Thus in Thy good time may infinitereason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed
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