THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK

The African American and Black Experience
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903: 2007). The souls of black folk. Oxford University Press. (finish book)
“Heritage Gallery: Charles White” View gallery of the artist: http://www.heritagegallery.com/charles-white.html

Critical Questions: Please reflect on the "Souls of Black Folk". The book was published in 1903 and in it DuBois writes, "the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line." Now, in the 21st Century, does this still ring true? What parts of DuBois message ring true for the contemporary moment? In your opinion, what is the problem of the 21st Century?

Method of Evaluation
Discussion Board Reflections 70% (or 5% per reflection)
Reflection Papers are to be submitted the day the readings are assigned and reflections must be completed by Midnight of that day. I will deduct .5 points/ hour for lateness. Each reflection must be 250-300 words and address major issues raised by the readings and media for the given day. I will often prompt students with a few major questions or issues to address. Students are encouraged to end the reflection by posing a question to the class or me generated by the reading. Please proofread, use this course as an opportunity to become a better writer.

The discussion boards will serve as the major point of encounter for the course. There, we will discuss your ideas as they relate to the readings, and as the forum is open to the class I can address student’s questions and ideas to the full class. Students are expected to comment on fellow students reflections and questions posed.

Discussion Posts Rubric
General: Students should post reflections of 250-300 words in essay form on time. The essay should address all readings and assigned materials, and any questions posed. Students should use textual details to demonstrate their points. Only writing in general terms does not make for a good essay.

5/5: Demonstrates understanding of all assigned materials, using textual details and concepts. Does not overly rely on quotes to fill space. The reflection is proper length, and has few to no grammar and spelling errors. The student demonstrates thoughtful consideration of assigned materials and concepts. When the materials or concepts are unclear or confusing, the student highlights this and asks for clarification, or poses a question to the class.

Deductions:
-1 point: Spelling and grammar errors
-1 point: Sloppy formatting, not in essay form
-1/ neglected assigned material: Students will not be given full credit if they do not address all assigned readings/ materials. It is also important that the focus is on that particular week’s assigned readings, not others. So, if three readings are assigned but the student only writes on one, they cannot receive more than a 3/5.

Additions: +1 For meaningful contributions, questions, commentary on other student’s posts. By ‘meaningful’ I mean the comment furthers the conversation or builds on ideas in some way that has not been already addressed by the original author.

HERE IS THE ARTICLE TO BE USED

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