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Title: The Souls of Black Folk

Author: W. E. B. Du Bois

Release Date: January, 1996 [eBook #408]
[Most recently updated: August 11, 2021]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK ***




The Souls of Black Folk

by W. E. B. Du Bois

Herein is Written

 The Forethought
I.    Of Our Spiritual Strivings
II.   Of the Dawn of Freedom
III.  Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others
IV.   Of the Meaning of Progress
V.    Of the Wings of Atalanta
VI.   Of the Training of Black Men
VII.  Of the Black Belt
VIII. Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece
IX.   Of the Sons of Master and Man
X.    Of the Faith of the Fathers
XI.   Of the Passing of the First-Born
XII.  Of Alexander Crummell
XIII. Of the Coming of John
XIV.  Of the Sorrow Songs
 The Afterthought

To
Burghardt and Yolande
The Lost and the Found




The Forethought


Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the
strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth
Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader;
for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color
line.

I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my
words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and
passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden there.

I have sought here to sketch, in vague, uncertain outline, the
spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and
strive. First, in two chapters I have tried to show what Emancipation
meant to them, and what was its aftermath. In a third chapter I have
pointed out the slow rise of personal leadership, and criticized
candidly the leader who bears the chief burden of his race to-day.
Then, in two other chapters I have sketched in swift outline the two
worlds within and without the Veil, and thus have come to the central
problem of training men for life. Venturing now into deeper detail, I
have in two chapters studied the struggles of the massed millions of
the black peasantry, and in another have sought to make clear the
present relations of the sons of master and man. Leaving, then, the
white world, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may
view faintly its deeper recesses,—the meaning of its religion, the
passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls. All
this I have ended with a tale twice told but seldom written, and a
chapter of song.

Some of these thoughts of mine have seen the light before in other
guise. For kindly consenting to their republication here, in altered
and extended form, I must thank the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly,
The World’s Work, the Dial, The New World, and the Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science. Before each chapter,
as now printed, stands a bar of the Sorrow Songs,—some echo of haunting
melody from the only American music which welled up from black souls in
the dark past. And, finally, need I add that I who speak here am bone
of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil?

W.E.B. Du B.


Atlanta, Ga., Feb. 1, 1903.




I.
Of Our Spiritual Strivings

O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand,
    All night long crying with a mournful cry,
As I lie and listen, and cannot understand
        The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,
    O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I?
        All night long the water is crying to me.


Unresting water, there shall never be rest
    Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail,
And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west;
        And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,
    All life long crying without avail,
        As the water all night long is crying to me.

ARTHUR SYMONS.

[Illustration]


Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question:
unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the
difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it.
They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or
compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel
to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town;
or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make
your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the
boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question,
How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one
who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in
Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the
revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember
well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in
the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between
Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something
put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous
visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was
merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it
peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in
heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast
veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep
through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in
a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest
when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a
foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all
this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all
their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should
not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just
how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the
sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head,—some way.
With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth
shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale
world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted
itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger
in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us
all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow,
tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in
resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily,
half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and
Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and
gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields
him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through
the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this
double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self
through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a
world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his
twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose
dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this
longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into
a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older
selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too
much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul
in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a
message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man
to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon
by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly
in his face.

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the
kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and
use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and
mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten.
The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia
the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Through history, the powers of
single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die
sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness. Here in
America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man’s turning
hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his
very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power,
like weakness. And yet it is not weakness,—it is the contradiction of
double aims. The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan—on the one
hand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and
drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for
a poverty-stricken horde—could only result in making him a poor
craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty
and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted
toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other world,
toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. The would-be
black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his
people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the
knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh
and blood. The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder
souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and
doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him
was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and
he could not articulate the message of another people. This waste of
double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has
wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand
thousand people,—has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking
false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make
them ashamed of themselves.

Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine
event the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped
Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro
for two centuries. To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery
was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root
of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of
sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied
Israelites. In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his
tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand. At
last it came,—suddenly, fearfully, like a dream. With one wild carnival
of blood and passion came the message in his own plaintive cadences:—

“Shout, O children!
Shout, you’re free!
For God has bought your liberty!”


Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of
national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the
swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast. In
vain do we cry to this our vastest social problem:—

“Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble!”


The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not
yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come
in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests
upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the
unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly
people.

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for
freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a
tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless
host. The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies
of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the
contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with
no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. As the time flew,
however, he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty demanded
for its attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment
gave him. The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign
of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and
perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him. And
why not? Had not votes made war and emancipated millions? Had not votes
enfranchised the freedmen? Was anything impossible to a power that had
done all this? A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote
themselves into the kingdom. So the decade flew away, the revolution of
1876 came, and left the half-free serf weary, wondering, but still
inspired. Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a new vision
began gradually to replace the dream of political power,—a powerful
movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, another
pillar of fire by night after a clouded day. It was the ideal of
“book-learning”; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know
and test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the
longing to know. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the
mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and
law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to
overlook life.

Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly;
only those who have watched and guided the faltering feet, the misty
minds, the dull understandings, of the dark pupils of these schools
know how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn. It was
weary work. The cold statistician wrote down the inches of progress
here and there, noted also where here and there a foot had slipped or
some one had fallen. To the tired climbers, the horizon was ever dark,
the mists were often cold, the Canaan was always dim and far away. If,
however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting-place, little
but flattery and criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for
reflection and self-examination; it changed the child of Emancipation
to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization,
self-respect. In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose
before him, and he saw himself,—darkly as through a veil; and yet he
saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He
began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he
must be himself, and not another. For the first time he sought to
analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of social
degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem. He felt
his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or
savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled
neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of
dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of his
ignorance,—not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of the
humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of
decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet. Nor was his burden
all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy, which two
centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped
upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but
also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white
adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home.

A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world,
but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social
problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and
his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is
darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow
prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defence of culture
against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime,
the “higher” against the “lower” races. To which the Negro cries Amen!
and swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on
just homage to civilization, culture, righteousness, and progress, he
humbly bows and meekly does obeisance. But before that nameless
prejudice that leaps beyond all this he stands helpless, dismayed, and
well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery, the
ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton
license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous
welcoming of the worse, the all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain
for everything black, from Toussaint to the devil,—before this there
rises a sickening despair that would disarm and discourage any nation
save that black host to whom “discouragement” is an unwritten word.

But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the
inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals
which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt
and hate. Whisperings and portents came home upon the four winds: Lo!
we are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our
voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and
serve? And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying:
Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher
culture for half-men? Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or
fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race! Nevertheless, out of the evil
came something of good,—the more careful adjustment of education to
real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes’ social
responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of
progress.

So dawned the time of _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 self-defence,—else what shall
save us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still
seek,—the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the
freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty,—all these we need,
not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing
and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims
before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through
the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the
traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for
other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of
the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two
world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly
lack. We the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-handed:
there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the
Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true
American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the
American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in
all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in
a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be poorer if she
replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hearted but
determined Negro humility? or her coarse and cruel wit with loving
jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music with the soul of the Sorrow
Songs?

Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great
republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the
freedmen’s sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond
the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of an
historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers’ fathers,
and in the name of human opportunity.

And now what I have briefly sketched in large outline let me on coming
pages tell again in many ways, with loving emphasis and deeper detail,
that men may listen to the striving in the souls of black folk.




II.
Of the Dawn of Freedom

Careless seems the great Avenger;
    History’s lessons but record
One death-grapple in the darkness
    ’Twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold,
    Wrong forever on the throne;
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
    And behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow
    Keeping watch above His own.

LOWELL.

[Illustration]


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 over-burdened
Treasury Department and given to the army officials. Already centres of
massed freedmen were forming at Fortress Monroe, Washington, New
Orleans, Vicksburg and Corinth, Columbus, Ky., and Cairo, Ill., as well
as at Port Royal. Army chaplains found here new and fruitful fields;
“superintendents of contrabands” multiplied, and some attempt at
systematic work was made by enlisting the able-bodied men and giving
work to the others.

Then came the Freedmen’s Aid societies, born of the touching appeals
from Pierce and from these other centres of distress. There was the
American Missionary Association, sprung from the Amistad, and now
full-grown for work; the various church organizations, the National
Freedmen’s Relief Association, the American Freedmen’s Union, the
Western Freedmen’s Aid Commission,—in all fifty or more active
organizations, which sent clothes, money, school-books, and teachers
southward. All they did was needed, for the destitution of the freedmen
was often reported as “too appalling for belief,” and the situation was
daily growing worse rather than better.

And daily, too, it seemed more plain that this was no ordinary matter
of temporary relief, but a national crisis; for here loomed a labor
problem of vast dimensions. Masses of Negroes stood idle, or, if they
worked spasmodically, were never sure of pay; and if perchance they
received pay, squandered the new thing thoughtlessly. In these and
other ways were camp-life and the new liberty demoralizing the
freedmen. The broader economic organization thus clearly demanded
sprang up here and there as accident and local conditions determined.
Here it was that Pierce’s Port Royal plan of leased plantations and
guided workmen pointed out the rough way. In Washington the military
governor, at the urgent appeal of the superintendent, opened
confiscated estates to the cultivation of the fugitives, and there in
the shadow of the dome gathered black farm villages. General Dix gave
over estates to the freedmen of Fortress Monroe, and so on, South and
West. The government and benevolent societies furnished the means of
cultivation, and the Negro turned again slowly to work. The systems of
control, thus started, rapidly grew, here and there, into strange
little governments, like that of General Banks in Louisiana, with its
ninety thousand black subjects, its fifty thousand guided laborers, and
its annual budget of one hundred thousand dollars and more. It made out
four thousand pay-rolls a year, registered all freedmen, inquired into
grievances and redressed them, laid and collected taxes, and
established a system of public schools. So, too, Colonel Eaton, the
superintendent of Tennessee and Arkansas, ruled over one hundred
thousand freedmen, leased and cultivated seven thousand acres of cotton
land, and fed ten thousand paupers a year. In South Carolina was
General Saxton, with his deep interest in black folk. He succeeded
Pierce and the Treasury officials, and sold forfeited estates, leased
abandoned plantations, encouraged schools, and received from Sherman,
after that terribly picturesque march to the sea, thousands of the
wretched camp followers.

Three characteristic things one might have seen in Sherman’s raid
through Georgia, which threw the new situation in shadowy relief: the
Conqueror, the Conquered, and the Negro. Some see all significance in
the grim front of the destroyer, and some in the bitter sufferers of
the Lost Cause. But to me neither soldier nor fugitive speaks with so
deep a meaning as that dark human cloud that clung like remorse on the
rear of those swift columns, swelling at times to half their size,
almost engulfing and choking them. In vain were they ordered back, in
vain were bridges hewn from beneath their feet; on they trudged and
writhed and surged, until they rolled into Savannah, a starved and
naked horde of tens of thousands. There too came the characteristic
military remedy: “The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned
rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and
the country bordering the St. John’s River, Florida, are reserved and
set apart for the settlement of Negroes now made free by act of war.”
So read the celebrated “Field-order Number Fifteen.”

All these experiments, orders, and systems were bound to attract and
perplex the government and the nation. Directly after the Emancipation
Proclamation, Representative Eliot had introduced a bill creating a
Bureau of Emancipation; but it was never reported. The following June a
committee of inquiry, appointed by the Secretary of War, reported in
favor of a temporary bureau for the “improvement, protection, and
employment of refugee freedmen,” on much the same lines as were
afterwards followed. Petitions came in to President Lincoln from
distinguished citizens and organizations, strongly urging a
comprehensive and unified plan of dealing with the freedmen, under a
bureau which should be “charged with the study of plans and execution
of measures for easily guiding, and in every way judiciously and
humanely aiding, the passage of our emancipated and yet to be
emancipated blacks from the old condition of forced labor to their new
state of voluntary industry.”

Some half-hearted steps were taken to accomplish this, in part, by
putting the whole matter again in charge of the special Treasury
agents. Laws of 1863 and 1864 directed them to take charge of and lease
abandoned lands for periods not exceeding twelve months, and to
“provide in such leases, or otherwise, for the employment and general
welfare” of the freedmen. Most of the army officers greeted this as a
welcome relief from perplexing “Negro affairs,” and Secretary
Fessenden, July 29, 1864, issued an excellent system of regulations,
which were afterward closely followed by General Howard. Under Treasury
agents, large quantities of land were leased in the Mississippi Valley,
and many Negroes were employed; but in August, 1864, the new
regulations were suspended for reasons of “public policy,” and the army
was again in control.

Meanwhile Congress had turned its attention to the subject; and in
March the House passed a bill by a majority of two establishing a
Bureau for Freedmen in the War Department. Charles Sumner, who had
charge of the bill in the Senate, argued that freedmen and abandoned
lands ought to be under the same department, and reported a substitute
for the House bill attaching the Bureau to the Treasury Department.
This bill passed, but too late for action by the House. The debates
wandered over the whole policy of the administration and the general
question of slavery, without touching very closely the specific merits
of the measure in hand. Then the national election took place; and the
administration, with a vote of renewed confidence from the country,
addressed itself to the matter more seriously. A conference between the
two branches of Congress agreed upon a carefully drawn measure which
contained the chief provisions of Sumner’s bill, but made the proposed
organization a department independent of both the War and the Treasury
officials. The bill was conservative, giving the new department
“general superintendence of all freedmen.” Its purpose was to
“establish regulations” for them, protect them, lease them lands,
adjust their wages, and appear in civil and military courts as their
“next friend.” There were many limitations attached to the powers thus
granted, and the organization was made permanent. Nevertheless, the
Senate defeated the bill, and a new conference committee was appointed.
This committee reported a new bill, February 28, which was whirled
through just as the session closed, and became the act of 1865
establishing in the War Department a “Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and
Abandoned Lands.”

This last compromise was a hasty bit of legislation, vague and
uncertain in outline. A Bureau was created, “to continue during the
present War of Rebellion, and for one year thereafter,” to which was
given “the supervision and management of all abandoned lands and the
control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen,” under “such
rules and regulations as may be presented by the head of the Bureau and
approved by the President.” A Commissioner, appointed by the President
and Senate, was to control the Bureau, with an office force not
exceeding ten clerks. The President might also appoint assistant
commissioners in the seceded States, and to all these offices military
officials might be detailed at regular pay. The Secretary of War could
issue rations, clothing, and fuel to the destitute, and all abandoned
property was placed in the hands of the Bureau for eventual lease and
sale to ex-slaves in forty-acre parcels.

Thus did the United States government definitely assume charge of the
emancipated Negro as the ward of the nation. It was a tremendous
undertaking. Here at a stroke of the pen was erected a government of
millions of men,—and not ordinary men either, but black men emasculated
by a peculiarly complete system of slavery, centuries old; and now,
suddenly, violently, they come into a new birthright, at a time of war
and passion, in the midst of the stricken and embittered population of
their former masters. Any man might well have hesitated to assume
charge of such a work, with vast responsibilities, indefinite powers,
and limited resources. Probably no one but a soldier would have
answered such a call promptly; and, indeed, no one but a soldier could
be called, for Congress had appropriated no money for salaries and
expenses.

Less than a month after the weary Emancipator passed to his rest, his
successor assigned Major-Gen. Oliver O. Howard to duty as Commissioner
of the new Bureau. He was a Maine man, then only thirty-five years of
age. He had marched with Sherman to the sea, had fought well at
Gettysburg, and but the year before had been assigned to the command of
the Department of Tennessee. An honest man, with too much faith in
human nature, little aptitude for business and intricate detail, he had
had large opportunity of becoming acquainted at first hand with much of
the work before him. And of that work it has been truly said that “no
approximately correct history of civilization can ever be written which
does not throw out in bold relief, as one of the great landmarks of
political and social progress, the organization and administration of
the Freedmen’s Bureau.”

On May 12, 1865, Howard was appointed; and he assumed the duties of his
office promptly on the 15th, and began examining the field of work. A
curious mess he looked upon: little despotisms, communistic
experiments, slavery, peonage, business speculations, organized
charity, unorganized almsgiving,—all reeling on under the guise of
helping the freedmen, and all enshrined in the smoke and blood of the
war and the cursing and silence of angry men. On May 19 the new
government—for a government it really was—issued its constitution;
commissioners were to be appointed in each of the seceded states, who
were to take charge of “all subjects relating to refugees and
freedmen,” and all relief and rations were to be given by their consent
alone. The Bureau invited continued cooperation with benevolent
societies, and declared: “It will be the object of all commissioners to
introduce practicable systems of compensated labor,” and to establish
schools. Forthwith nine assistant commissioners were appointed. They
were to hasten to their fields of work; seek gradually to close relief
establishments, and make the destitute self-supporting; act as courts
of law where there were no courts, or where Negroes were not recognized
in them as free; establish the institution of marriage among ex-slaves,
and keep records; see that freedmen were free to choose their
employers, and help in making fair contracts for them; and finally, the
circular said: “Simple good faith, for which we hope on all hands for
those concerned in the passing away of slavery, will especially relieve
the assistant commissioners in the discharge of their duties toward the
freedmen, as well as promote the general welfare.”

No sooner was the work thus started, and the general system and local
organization in some measure begun, than two grave difficulties
appeared which changed largely the theory and outcome of Bureau work.
First, there were the abandoned lands of the South. It had long been
the more or less definitely expressed theory of the North that all the
chief problems of Emancipation might be settled by establishing the
slaves on the forfeited lands of their masters,—a sort of poetic
justice, said some. But this poetry done into solemn prose meant either
wholesale confiscation of private property in the South, or vast
appropriations. Now Congress had not appropriated a cent, and no sooner
did the proclamations of general amnesty appear than the eight hundred
thousand acres of abandoned lands in the hands of the Freedmen’s Bureau
melted quickly away. The second difficulty lay in perfecting the local
organization of the Bureau throughout the wide field of work. Making a
new machine and sending out officials of duly ascertained fitness for a
great work of social reform is no child’s task; but this task was even
harder, for a new central organization had to be fitted on a
heterogeneous and confused but already existing system of relief and
control of ex-slaves; and the agents available for this work must be
sought for in an army still busy with war operations,—men in the very
nature of the case ill fitted for delicate social work,—or among the
questionable camp followers of an invading host. Thus, after a year’s
work, vigorously as it was pushed, the problem looked even more
difficult to grasp and solve than at the beginning. Nevertheless, three
things that year’s work did, well worth the doing: it relieved a vast
amount of physical suffering; it transported seven thousand fugitives
from congested centres back to the farm; and, best of all, it
inaugurated the crusade of the New England schoolma’am.

The annals of this Ninth Crusade are yet to be written,—the tale of a
mission that seemed to our age far more quixotic than the quest of St.
Louis seemed to his. Behind the mists of ruin and rapine waved the
calico dresses of women who dared, and after the hoarse mouthings of
the field guns rang the rhythm of the alphabet. Rich and poor they
were, serious and curious. Bereaved now of a father, now of a brother,
now of more than these, they came seeking a life work in planting New
England schoolhouses among the white and black of the South. They did
their work well. In that first year they taught one hundred thousand
souls, and more.

Evidently, Congress must soon legislate again on the hastily organized
Bureau, which had so quickly grown into wide significance and vast
possibilities. An institution such as that was well-nigh as difficult
to end as to begin. Early in 1866 Congress took up the matter, when
Senator Trumbull, of Illinois, introduced a bill to extend the Bureau
and enlarge its powers. This measure received, at the hands of
Congress, far more thorough discussion and attention than its
predecessor. The war cloud had thinned enough to allow a clearer
conception of the work of Emancipation. The champions of the bill
argued that the strengthening of the Freedmen’s Bureau was still a
military necessity; that it was needed for the proper carrying out of
the Thirteenth Amendment, and was a work of sheer justice to the
ex-slave, at a trifling cost to the government. The opponents of the
measure declared that the war was over, and the necessity for war
measures past; that the Bureau, by reason of its extraordinary powers,
was clearly unconstitutional in time of peace, and was destined to
irritate the South and pauperize the freedmen, at a final cost of
possibly hundreds of millions. These two arguments were unanswered, and
indeed unanswerable: the one that the extraordinary powers of the
Bureau threatened the civil rights of all citizens; and the other that
the government must have power to do what manifestly must be done, and
that present abandonment of the freedmen meant their practical
reenslavement. The bill which finally passed enlarged and made
permanent the Freedmen’s Bureau. It was promptly vetoed by President
Johnson as “unconstitutional,” “unnecessary,” and “extrajudicial,” and
failed of passage over the veto. Meantime, however, the breach between
Congress and the President began to broaden, and a modified form of the
lost bill was finally passed over the President’s second veto, July 16.

The act of 1866 gave the Freedmen’s Bureau its final form,—the form by
which it will be known to posterity and judged of men. It extended the
existence of the Bureau to July, 1868; it authorized additional
assistant commissioners, the retention of army officers mustered out of
regular service, the sale of certain forfeited lands to freedmen on
nominal terms, the sale of Confederate public property for Negro
schools, and a wider field of judicial interpretation and cognizance.
The government of the unreconstructed South was thus put very largely
in the hands of the Freedmen’s Bureau, especially as in many cases the
departmental military commander was now made also assistant
commissioner. It was thus that the Freedmen’s Bureau became a
full-fledged government of men. It made laws, executed them and
interpreted them; it laid and collected taxes, defined and punished
crime, maintained and used military force, and dictated such measures
as it thought necessary and proper for the accomplishment of its varied
ends. Naturally, all these powers were not exercised continuously nor
to their fullest extent; and yet, as General Howard has said, “scarcely
any subject that has to be legislated upon in civil society failed, at
one time or another, to demand the action of this singular Bureau.”

To understand and criticise intelligently so vast a work, one must not
forget an instant the drift of things in the later sixties. Lee had
surrendered, Lincoln was dead, and Johnson and Congress were at
loggerheads; the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, the Fourteenth
pending, and the Fifteenth declared in force in 1870. Guerrilla
raiding, the ever-present flickering after-flame of war, was spending
its forces against the Negroes, and all the Southern land was awakening
as from some wild dream to poverty and social revolution. In a time of
perfect calm, amid willing neighbors and streaming wealth, the social
uplifting of four million slaves to an assured and self-sustaining
place in the body politic and economic would have been a herculean
task; but when to the inherent difficulties of so delicate and nice a
social operation were added the spite and hate of conflict, the hell of
war; when suspicion and cruelty were rife, and gaunt Hunger wept beside
Bereavement,—in such a case, the work of any instrument of social
regeneration was in large part foredoomed to failure. The very name of
the Bureau stood for a thing in the South which for two centuries and
better men had refused even to argue,—that life amid free Negroes was
simply unthinkable, the maddest of experiments.

The agents that the Bureau could command varied all the way from
unselfish philanthropists to narrow-minded busybodies and thieves; and
even though it be true that the average was far better than the worst,
it was the occasional fly that helped spoil the ointment.

Then amid all crouched the freed slave, bewildered between friend and
foe. He had emerged from slavery,—not the worst slavery in the world,
not a slavery that made all life unbearable, rather a slavery that had
here and there something of kindliness, fidelity, and happiness,—but
withal slavery, which, so far as human aspiration and desert were
concerned, classed the black man and the ox together. And the Negro
knew full well that, whatever their deeper convictions may have been,
Southern men had fought with desperate energy to perpetuate this
slavery under which the black masses, with half-articulate thought, had
writhed and shivered. They welcomed freedom with a cry. They shrank
from the master who still strove for their chains; they fled to the
friends that had freed them, even though those friends stood ready to
use them as a club for driving the recalcitrant South back into
loyalty. So the cleft between the white and black South grew. Idle to
say it never should have been; it was as inevitable as its results were
pitiable. Curiously incongruous elements were left arrayed against each
other,—the North, the government, the carpet-bagger, and the slave,
here; and there, all the South that was white, whether gentleman or
vagabond, honest man or rascal, lawless murderer or martyr to duty.

Thus it is doubly difficult to write of this period calmly, so intense
was the feeling, so mighty the human passions that swayed and blinded
men. Amid it all, two figures ever stand to typify that day to coming
ages,—the one, a gray-haired gentleman, whose fathers had quit
themselves like men, whose sons lay in nameless graves; who bowed to
the evil of slavery because its abolition threatened untold ill to all;
who stood at last, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined form,
with hate in his eyes;—and the other, a form hovering dark and
mother-like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries, had
aforetime quailed at that white master’s command, had bent in love over
the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed in death the sunken
eyes of his wife,—aye, too, at his behest had laid herself low to his
lust, and borne a tawny man-child to the world, only to see her dark
boy’s limbs scattered to the winds by midnight marauders riding after
“damned Niggers.” These were the saddest sights of that woful day; and
no man clasped the hands of these two passing figures of the
present-past; but, hating, they went to their long home, and, hating,
their children’s children live today.

Here, then, was the field of work for the Freedmen’s Bureau; and since,
with some hesitation, it was continued by the act of 1868 until 1869,
let us look upon four years of its work as a whole. There were, in
1868, nine hundred Bureau officials scattered from Washington to Texas,
ruling, directly and indirectly, many millions of men. The deeds of
these rulers fall mainly under seven heads: the relief of physical
suffering, the overseeing of the beginnings of free labor, the buying
and selling of land, the establishment of schools, the paying of
bounties, the administration of justice, and the financiering of all
these activities.

Up to June, 1869, over half a million patients had been treated by
Bureau physicians and surgeons, and sixty hospitals and asylums had
been in operation. In fifty months twenty-one million free rations were
distributed at a cost of over four million dollars. Next came the
difficult question of labor. First, thirty thousand black men were
transported from the refuges and relief stations back to the farms,
back to the critical trial of a new way of working. Plain instructions
went out from Washington: the laborers must be free to choose their
employers, no fixed rate of wages was prescribed, and there was to be
no peonage or forced labor. So far, so good; but where local agents
differed _toto cælo_ 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
_protégés_ led it far afield into questionable activities, until the
South, nursing its own deep prejudices, came easily to ignore all the
good deeds of the Bureau and hate its very name with perfect hatred. So
the Freedmen’s Bureau died, and its child was the Fifteenth Amendment.

The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like
the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a legacy of striving
for other men. The legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau is the heavy
heritage of this generation. To-day, when new and vaster problems are
destined to strain every fibre of the national mind and soul, would it
not be well to count this legacy honestly and carefully? For this much
all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not
free. In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and miles, he may
not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural
South the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to an
economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the
penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the
Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and
privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a
different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the
rule of their political life. And the result of all this is, and in
nature must have been, lawlessness and crime. That is the large legacy
of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the work it did not do because it could not.

I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and
rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton with harvest. And there
in the King’s Highways sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which
the traveller’s footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air broods
fear. Three centuries’ thought has been the raising and unveiling of
that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and
the deed. The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the
color-line.




III.
Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others

From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed, unmanned!
******
Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?

BYRON.

[Illustration]


Easily the most striking thing in the history of the American Negro
since 1876 is the ascendancy of Mr. Booker T. Washington. It began at
the time when war memories and ideals were rapidly passing; a day of
astonishing commercial development was dawning; a sense of doubt and
hesitation overtook the freedmen’s sons,—then it was that his leading
began. Mr. Washington came, with a simple definite programme, at the
psychological moment when the nation was a little ashamed of having
bestowed so much sentiment on Negroes, and was concentrating its
energies on Dollars. His programme of industrial education,
conciliation of the South, and submission and silence as to civil and
political rights, was not wholly original; the Free Negroes from 1830
up to war-time had striven to build industrial schools, and the
American Missionary Association had from the first taught various
trades; and Price and others had sought a way of honorable alliance
with the best of the Southerners. But Mr. Washington first indissolubly
linked these things; he put enthusiasm, unlimited energy, and perfect
faith into his programme, and changed it from a by-path into a
veritable Way of Life. And the tale of the methods by which he did this
is a fascinating study of human life.

It startled the nation to hear a Negro advocating such a programme
after many decades of bitter complaint; it startled and won the
applause of the South, it interested and won the admiration of the
North; and after a confused murmur of protest, it silenced if it did
not convert the Negroes themselves.

To gain the sympathy and cooperation of the various elements comprising
the white South was Mr. Washington’s first task; and this, at the time
Tuskegee was founded, seemed, for a black man, well-nigh impossible.
And yet ten years later it was done in the word spoken at Atlanta: “In
all things purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, and
yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” This
“Atlanta Compromise” is by all odds the most notable thing in Mr.
Washington’s career. The South interpreted it in different ways: the
radicals received it as a complete surrender of the demand for civil
and political equality; the conservatives, as a generously conceived
working basis for mutual understanding. So both approved it, and to-day
its author is certainly the most distinguished Southerner since
Jefferson Davis, and the one with the largest personal following.

Next to this achievement comes Mr. Washington’s work in gaining place
and consideration in the North. Others less shrewd and tactful had
formerly essayed to sit on these two stools and had fallen between
them; but as Mr. Washington knew the heart of the South from birth and
training, so by singular insight he intuitively grasped the spirit of
the age which was dominating the North. And so thoroughly did he learn
the speech and thought of triumphant commercialism, and the ideals of
material prosperity, that the picture of a lone black boy poring over a
French grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home soon seemed
to him the acme of absurdities. One wonders what Socrates and St.
Francis of Assisi would say to this.

And yet this very singleness of vision and thorough oneness with his
age is a mark of the successful man. It is as though Nature must needs
make men narrow in order to give them force. So Mr. Washington’s cult
has gained unquestioning followers, his work has wonderfully prospered,
his friends are legion, and his enemies are confounded. To-day he
stands as the one recognized spokesman of his ten million fellows, and
one of the most notable figures in a nation of seventy millions. One
hesitates, therefore, to criticise a life which, beginning with so
little, has done so much. And yet the time is come when one may speak
in all sincerity and utter courtesy of the mistakes and shortcomings of
Mr. Washington’s career, as well as of his triumphs, without being
thought captious or envious, and without forgetting that it is easier
to do ill than well in the world.

The criticism that has hitherto met Mr. Washington has not always been
of this broad character. In the South especially has he had to walk
warily to avoid the harshest judgments,—and naturally so, for he is
dealing with the one subject of deepest sensitiveness to that section.
Twice—once when at the Chicago celebration of the Spanish-American War
he alluded to the color-prejudice that is “eating away the vitals of
the South,” and once when he dined with President Roosevelt—has the
resulting Southern criticism been violent enough to threaten seriously
his popularity. In the North the feeling has several times forced
itself into words, that Mr. Washington’s counsels of submission
overlooked certain elements of true manhood, and that his educational
programme was unnecessarily narrow. Usually, however, such criticism
has not found open expression, although, too, the spiritual sons of the
Abolitionists have not been prepared to acknowledge that the schools
founded before Tuskegee, by men of broad ideals and self-sacrificing
spirit, were wholly failures or worthy of ridicule. While, then,
criticism has not failed to follow Mr. Washington, yet the prevailing
public opinion of the land has been but too willing to deliver the
solution of a wearisome problem into his hands, and say, “If that is
all you and your race ask, take it.”

Among his own people, however, Mr. Washington has encountered the
strongest and most lasting opposition, amounting at times to
bitterness, and even today continuing strong and insistent even though
largely silenced in outward expression by the public opinion of the
nation. Some of this opposition is, of course, mere envy; the
disappointment of displaced demagogues and the spite of narrow minds.
But aside from this, there is among educated and thoughtful colored men
in all parts of the land a feeling of deep regret, sorrow, and
apprehension at the wide currency and ascendancy which some of Mr.
Washington’s theories have gained. These same men admire his sincerity
of purpose, and are willing to forgive much to honest endeavor which is
doing something worth the doing. They cooperate with Mr. Washington as
far as they conscientiously can; and, indeed, it is no ordinary tribute
to this man’s tact and power that, steering as he must between so many
diverse interests and opinions, he so largely retains the respect of
all.

But the hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous
thing. It leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence
and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so
passionately and intemperately as to lose listeners. Honest and earnest
criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,—criticism
of writers by readers,—this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard
of modern society. If the best of the American Negroes receive by outer
pressure a leader whom they had not recognized before, manifestly there
is here a certain palpable gain. Yet there is also irreparable loss,—a
loss of that peculiarly valuable education which a group receives when
by search and criticism it finds and commissions its own leaders. The
way in which this is done is at once the most elementary and the nicest
problem of social growth. History is but the record of such
group-leadership; and yet how infinitely changeful is its type and
character! And of all types and kinds, what can be more instructive
than the leadership of a group within a group?—that curious double
movement where real progress may be negative and actual advance be
relative retrogression. All this is the social student’s inspiration
and despair.

Now in the past the American Negro has had instructive experience in
the choosing of group leaders, founding thus a peculiar dynasty which
in the light of present conditions is worth while studying. When sticks
and stones and beasts form the sole environment of a people, their
attitude is largely one of determined opposition to and conquest of
natural forces. But when to earth and brute is added an environment of
men and ideas, then the attitude of the imprisoned group may take three
main forms,—a feeling of revolt and revenge; an attempt to adjust all
thought and action to the will of the greater group; or, finally, a
determined effort at self-realization and self-development despite
environing opinion. The influence of all of these attitudes at various
times can be traced in the history of the American Negro, and in the
evolution of his successive leaders.

Before 1750, while the fire of African freedom still burned in the
veins of the slaves, there was in all leadership or attempted
leadership but the one motive of revolt and revenge,—typified in the
terrible Maroons, the Danish blacks, and Cato of Stono, and veiling all
the Americas in fear of insurrection. The liberalizing tendencies of
the latter half of the eighteenth century brought, along with kindlier
relations between black and white, thoughts of ultimate adjustment and
assimilation. Such aspiration was especially voiced in the earnest
songs of Phyllis, in the martyrdom of Attucks, the fighting of Salem
and Poor, the intellectual accomplishments of Banneker and Derham, and
the political demands of the Cuffes.

Stern financial and social stress after the war cooled much of the
previous humanitarian ardor. The disappointment and impatience of the
Negroes at the persistence of slavery and serfdom voiced itself in two
movements. The slaves in the South, aroused undoubtedly by vague rumors
of the Haytian revolt, made three fierce attempts at insurrection,—in
1800 under Gabriel in Virginia, in 1822 under Vesey in Carolina, and in
1831 again in Virginia under the terrible Nat Turner. In the Free
States, on the other hand, a new and curious attempt at
self-development was made. In Philadelphia and New York
color-prescription led to a withdrawal of Negro communicants from white
churches and the formation of a peculiar socio-religious institution
among the Negroes known as the African Church,—an organization still
living and controlling in its various branches over a million of men.

Walker’s wild appeal against the trend of the times showed how the
world was changing after the coming of the cotton-gin. By 1830 slavery
seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly
cowed into submission. The free Negroes of the North, inspired by the
mulatto immigrants from the West Indies, began to change the basis of
their demands; they recognized the slavery of slaves, but insisted that
they themselves were freemen, and sought assimilation and amalgamation
with the nation on the same terms with other men. Thus, Forten and
Purvis of Philadelphia, Shad of Wilmington, Du Bois of New Haven,
Barbadoes of Boston, and others, strove singly and together as men,
they said, not as slaves; as “people of color,” not as “Negroes.” The
trend of the times, however, refused them recognition save in
individual and exceptional cases, considered them as one with all the
despised blacks, and they soon found themselves striving to keep even
the rights they formerly had of voting and working and moving as
freemen. Schemes of migration and colonization arose among them; but
these they refused to entertain, and they eventually turned to the
Abolition movement as a final refuge.

Here, led by Remond, Nell, Wells-Brown, and Douglass, a new period of
self-assertion and self-development dawned. To be sure, ultimate
freedom and assimilation was the ideal before the leaders, but the
assertion of the manhood rights of the Negro by himself was the main
reliance, and John Brown’s raid was the extreme of its logic. After the
war and emancipation, the great form of Frederick Douglass, the
greatest of American Negro leaders, still led the host. Self-assertion,
especially in political lines, was the main programme, and behind
Douglass came Elliot, Bruce, and Langston, and the Reconstruction
politicians, and, less conspicuous but of greater social significance,
Alexander Crummell and Bishop Daniel Payne.

Then came the Revolution of 1876, the suppression of the Negro votes,
the changing and shifting of ideals, and the seeking of new lights in
the great night. Douglass, in his old age, still bravely stood for the
ideals of his early manhood,—ultimate assimilation _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
race-prejudice against Negroes, and Mr. Washington withdraws many of
the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens. In other
periods of intensified prejudice all the Negro’s tendency to
self-assertion has been called forth; at this period a policy of
submission is advocated. In the history of nearly all other races and
peoples the doctrine preached at such crises has been that manly
self-respect is worth more than lands and houses, and that a people who
voluntarily surrender such respect, or cease striving for it, are not
worth civilizing.

In answer to this, it has been claimed that the Negro can survive only
through submission. Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people
give up, at least for the present, three things,—

First, political power,

Second, insistence on civil rights,

Third, higher education of Negro youth,—and concentrate all their
energies on industrial education, and accumulation of wealth, and the
conciliation of the South. This policy has been courageously and
insistently advocated for over fifteen years, and has been triumphant
for perhaps ten years. As a result of this tender of the palm-branch,
what has been the return? In these years there have occurred:

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
common-school training were necessarily slow in planting because they
had to await the black teachers trained by higher institutions,—it
being extremely doubtful if any essentially different development was
possible, and certainly a Tuskegee was unthinkable before 1880; and,
third, while it is a great truth to say that the Negro must strive and
strive mightily to help himself, it is equally true that unless his
striving be not simply seconded, but rather aroused and encouraged, by
the initiative of the richer and wiser environing group, he cannot hope
for great success.

In his failure to realize and impress this last point, Mr. Washington
is especially to be criticised. His doctrine has tended to make the
whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the
Negro’s shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic
spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the
hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting
these great wrongs.

The South ought to be led, by candid and honest criticism, to assert
her better self and do her full duty to the race she has cruelly
wronged and is still wronging. The North—her co-partner in guilt—cannot
salve her conscience by plastering it with gold. We cannot settle this
problem by diplomacy and suaveness, by “policy” alone. If worse come to
worst, can the moral fibre of this country survive the slow throttling
and murder of nine millions of men?

The black men of America have a duty to perform, a duty stern and
delicate,—a forward movement to oppose a part of the work of their
greatest leader. So far as Mr. Washington preaches Thrift, Patience,
and Industrial Training for the masses, we must hold up his hands and
strive with him, rejoicing in his honors and glorying in the strength
of this Joshua called of God and of man to lead the headless host. But
so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does
not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the
emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher
training and ambition of our brighter minds,—so far as he, the South,
or the Nation, does this,—we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them.
By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights
which the world accords to men, clinging unwaveringly to those great
words which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget: “We hold these
truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that
among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”




IV.
Of the Meaning of Progress

Willst Du Deine Macht verkünden,
Wähle sie die frei von Sünden,
Steh’n in Deinem ew’gen Haus!
Deine Geister sende aus!
Die Unsterblichen, die Reinen,
Die nicht fühlen, die nicht weinen!
Nicht die zarte Jungfrau wähle,
Nicht der Hirtin weiche Seele!

SCHILLER.

[Illustration]


Once upon a time I taught school in the hills of Tennessee, where the
broad dark vale of the Mississippi begins to roll and crumple to greet
the Alleghanies. I was a Fisk student then, and all Fisk men thought
that Tennessee—beyond the Veil—was theirs alone, and in vacation time
they sallied forth in lusty bands to meet the county
school-commissioners. Young and happy, I too went, and I shall not soon
forget that summer, seventeen years ago.

First, there was a Teachers’ Institute at the county-seat; and there
distinguished guests of the superintendent taught the teachers
fractions and spelling and other mysteries,—white teachers in the
morning, Negroes at night. A picnic now and then, and a supper, and the
rough world was softened by laughter and song. I remember how— But I
wander.

There came a day when all the teachers left the Institute and began the
hunt for schools. I learn from hearsay (for my mother was mortally
afraid of firearms) that the hunting of ducks and bears and men is
wonderfully interesting, but I am sure that the man who has never
hunted a country school has something to learn of the pleasures of the
chase. I see now the white, hot roads lazily rise and fall and wind
before me under the burning July sun; I feel the deep weariness of
heart and limb as ten, eight, six miles stretch relentlessly ahead; I
feel my heart sink heavily as I hear again and again, “Got a teacher?
Yes.” So I walked on and on—horses were too expensive—until I had
wandered beyond railways, beyond stage lines, to a land of “varmints”
and rattlesnakes, where the coming of a stranger was an event, and men
lived and died in the shadow of one blue hill.

Sprinkled over hill and dale lay cabins and farmhouses, shut out from
the world by the forests and the rolling hills toward the east. There I
found at last a little school. Josie told me of it; she was a thin,
homely girl of twenty, with a dark-brown face and thick, hard hair. I
had crossed the stream at Watertown, and rested under the great
willows; then I had gone to the little cabin in the lot where Josie was
resting on her way to town. The gaunt farmer made me welcome, and
Josie, hearing my errand, told me anxiously that they wanted a school
over the hill; that but once since the war had a teacher been there;
that she herself longed to learn,—and thus she ran on, talking fast and
loud, with much earnestness and energy.

Next morning I crossed the tall round hill, lingered to look at the
blue and yellow mountains stretching toward the Carolinas, then plunged
into the wood, and came out at Josie’s home. It was a dull frame
cottage with four rooms, perched just below the brow of the hill, amid
peach-trees. The father was a quiet, simple soul, calmly ignorant, with
no touch of vulgarity. The mother was different,—strong, bustling, and
energetic, with a quick, restless tongue, and an ambition to live “like
folks.” There was a crowd of children. Two boys had gone away. There
remained two growing girls; a shy midget of eight; John, tall, awkward,
and eighteen; Jim, younger, quicker, and better looking; and two babies
of indefinite age. Then there was Josie herself. She seemed to be the
centre of the family: always busy at service, or at home, or
berry-picking; a little nervous and inclined to scold, like her mother,
yet faithful, too, like her father. She had about her a certain
fineness, the shadow of an unconscious moral heroism that would
willingly give all of life to make life broader, deeper, and fuller for
her and hers. I saw much of this family afterwards, and grew to love
them for their honest efforts to be decent and comfortable, and for
their knowledge of their own ignorance. There was with them no
affectation. The mother would scold the father for being so “easy”;
Josie would roundly berate the boys for carelessness; and all knew that
it was a hard thing to dig a living out of a rocky side-hill.

I secured the school. I remember the day I rode horseback out to the
commissioner’s house with a pleasant young white fellow who wanted the
white school. The road ran down the bed of a stream; the sun laughed
and the water jingled, and we rode on. “Come in,” said the
commissioner,—“come in. Have a seat. Yes, that certificate will do.
Stay to dinner. What do you want a month?” “Oh,” thought I, “this is
lucky”; but even then fell the awful shadow of the Veil, for they ate
first, then I—alone.

The schoolhouse was a log hut, where Colonel Wheeler used to shelter
his corn. It sat in a lot behind a rail fence and thorn bushes, near
the sweetest of springs. There was an entrance where a door once was,
and within, a massive rickety fireplace; great chinks between the logs
served as windows. Furniture was scarce. A pale blackboard crouched in
the corner. My desk was made of three boards, reinforced at critical
points, and my chair, borrowed from the landlady, had to be returned
every night. Seats for the children—these puzzled me much. I was
haunted by a New England vision of neat little desks and chairs, but,
alas! the reality was rough plank benches without backs, and at times
without legs. They had the one virtue of making naps
dangerous,—possibly fatal, for the floor was not to be trusted.

It was a hot morning late in July when the school opened. I trembled
when I heard the patter of little feet down the dusty road, and saw the
growing row of dark solemn faces and bright eager eyes facing me. First
came Josie and her brothers and sisters. The longing to know, to be a
student in the great school at Nashville, hovered like a star above
this child-woman amid her work and worry, and she studied doggedly.
There were the Dowells from their farm over toward Alexandria,—Fanny,
with her smooth black face and wondering eyes; Martha, brown and dull;
the pretty girl-wife of a brother, and the younger brood.

There were the Burkes,—two brown and yellow lads, and a tiny
haughty-eyed girl. Fat Reuben’s little chubby girl came, with golden
face and old-gold hair, faithful and solemn. ’Thenie was on hand
early,—a jolly, ugly, good-hearted girl, who slyly dipped snuff and
looked after her little bow-legged brother. When her mother could spare
her, ’Tildy came,—a midnight beauty, with starry eyes and tapering
limbs; and her brother, correspondingly homely. And then the big
boys,—the hulking Lawrences; the lazy Neills, unfathered sons of mother
and daughter; Hickman, with a stoop in his shoulders; and the rest.

There they sat, nearly thirty of them, on the rough benches, their
faces shading from a pale cream to a deep brown, the little feet bare
and swinging, the eyes full of expectation, with here and there a
twinkle of mischief, and the hands grasping Webster’s blue-black
spelling-book. I loved my school, and the fine faith the children had
in the wisdom of their teacher was truly marvellous. We read and
spelled together, wrote a little, picked flowers, sang, and listened to
stories of the world beyond the hill. At times the school would dwindle
away, and I would start out. I would visit Mun Eddings, who lived in
two very dirty rooms, and ask why little Lugene, whose flaming face
seemed ever ablaze with the dark-red hair uncombed, was absent all last
week, or why I missed so often the inimitable rags of Mack and Ed. Then
the father, who worked Colonel Wheeler’s farm on shares, would tell me
how the crops needed the boys; and the thin, slovenly mother, whose
face was pretty when washed, assured me that Lugene must mind the baby.
“But we’ll start them again next week.” When the Lawrences stopped, I
knew that the doubts of the old folks about book-learning had conquered
again, and so, toiling up the hill, and getting as far into the cabin
as possible, I put Cicero “pro Archia Poeta” into the simplest English
with local applications, and usually convinced them—for a week or so.

On Friday nights I often went home with some of the children,—sometimes
to Doc Burke’s farm. He was a great, loud, thin Black, ever working,
and trying to buy the seventy-five acres of hill and dale where he
lived; but people said that he would surely fail, and the “white folks
would get it all.” His wife was a magnificent Amazon, with saffron face
and shining hair, uncorseted and barefooted, and the children were
strong and beautiful. They lived in a one-and-a-half-room cabin in the
hollow of the farm, near the spring. The front room was full of great
fat white beds, scrupulously neat; and there were bad chromos on the
walls, and a tired centre-table. In the tiny back kitchen I was often
invited to “take out and help” myself to fried chicken and wheat
biscuit, “meat” and corn pone, string-beans and berries. At first I
used to be a little alarmed at the approach of bedtime in the one lone
bedroom, but embarrassment was very deftly avoided. First, all the
children nodded and slept, and were stowed away in one great pile of
goose feathers; next, the mother and the father discreetly slipped away
to the kitchen while I went to bed; then, blowing out the dim light,
they retired in the dark. In the morning all were up and away before I
thought of awaking. Across the road, where fat Reuben lived, they all
went outdoors while the teacher retired, because they did not boast the
luxury of a kitchen.

I liked to stay with the Dowells, for they had four rooms and plenty of
good country fare. Uncle Bird had a small, rough farm, all woods and
hills, miles from the big road; but he was full of tales,—he preached
now and then,—and with his children, berries, horses, and wheat he was
happy and prosperous. Often, to keep the peace, I must go where life
was less lovely; for instance, ’Tildy’s mother was incorrigibly dirty,
Reuben’s larder was limited seriously, and herds of untamed insects
wandered over the Eddingses’ beds. Best of all I loved to go to
Josie’s, and sit on the porch, eating peaches, while the mother bustled
and talked: how Josie had bought the sewing-machine; how Josie worked
at service in winter, but that four dollars a month was “mighty little”
wages; how Josie longed to go away to school, but that it “looked like”
they never could get far enough ahead to let her; how the crops failed
and the well was yet unfinished; and, finally, how “mean” some of the
white folks were.

For two summers I lived in this little world; it was dull and humdrum.
The girls looked at the hill in wistful longing, and the boys fretted
and haunted Alexandria. Alexandria was “town,”—a straggling, lazy
village of houses, churches, and shops, and an aristocracy of Toms,
Dicks, and Captains. Cuddled on the hill to the north was the village
of the colored folks, who lived in three- or four-room unpainted
cottages, some neat and homelike, and some dirty. The dwellings were
scattered rather aimlessly, but they centred about the twin temples of
the hamlet, the Methodist, and the Hard-Shell Baptist churches. These,
in turn, leaned gingerly on a sad-colored schoolhouse. Hither my little
world wended its crooked way on Sunday to meet other worlds, and
gossip, and wonder, and make the weekly sacrifice with frenzied priest
at the altar of the “old-time religion.” Then the soft melody and
mighty cadences of Negro song fluttered and thundered.

I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made it;
and yet there was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness,
sprung from common joy and grief, at burial, birth, or wedding; from a
common hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and, above all,
from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and Opportunity. All
this caused us to think some thoughts together; but these, when ripe
for speech, were spoken in various languages. Those whose eyes
twenty-five and more years before had seen “the glory of the coming of
the Lord,” saw in every present hindrance or help a dark fatalism bound
to bring all things right in His own good time. The mass of those to
whom slavery was a dim recollection of childhood found the world a
puzzling thing: it asked little of them, and they answered with little,
and yet it ridiculed their offering. Such a paradox they could not
understand, and therefore sank into listless indifference, or
shiftlessness, or reckless bravado. There were, however, some—such as
Josie, Jim, and Ben—to whom War, Hell, and Slavery were but childhood
tales, whose young appetites had been whetted to an edge by school and
story and half-awakened thought. Ill could they be content, born
without and beyond the World. And their weak wings beat against their
barriers,—barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last, in dangerous
moments, against everything that opposed even a whim.

The ten years that follow youth, the years when first the realization
comes that life is leading somewhere,—these were the years that passed
after I left my little school. When they were past, I came by chance
once more to the walls of Fisk University, to the halls of the chapel
of melody. As I lingered there in the joy and pain of meeting old
school-friends, there swept over me a sudden longing to pass again
beyond the blue hill, and to see the homes and the school of other
days, and to learn how life had gone with my school-children; and I
went.

Josie was dead, and the gray-haired mother said simply, “We’ve had a
heap of trouble since you’ve been away.” I had feared for Jim. With a
cultured parentage and a social caste to uphold him, he might have made
a venturesome merchant or a West Point cadet. But here he was, angry
with life and reckless; and when Fanner Durham charged him with
stealing wheat, the old man had to ride fast to escape the stones which
the furious fool hurled after him. They told Jim to run away; but he
would not run, and the constable came that afternoon. It grieved Josie,
and great awkward John walked nine miles every day to see his little
brother through the bars of Lebanon jail. At last the two came back
together in the dark night. The mother cooked supper, and Josie emptied
her purse, and the boys stole away. Josie grew thin and silent, yet
worked the more. The hill became steep for the quiet old father, and
with the boys away there was little to do in the valley. Josie helped
them to sell the old farm, and they moved nearer town. Brother Dennis,
the carpenter, built a new house with six rooms; Josie toiled a year in
Nashville, and brought back ninety dollars to furnish the house and
change it to a home.

When the spring came, and the birds twittered, and the stream ran proud
and full, little sister Lizzie, bold and thoughtless, flushed with the
passion of youth, bestowed herself on the tempter, and brought home a
nameless child. Josie shivered and worked on, with the vision of
schooldays all fled, with a face wan and tired,—worked until, on a
summer’s day, some one married another; then Josie crept to her mother
like a hurt child, and slept—and sleeps.

I paused to scent the breeze as I entered the valley. The Lawrences
have gone,—father and son forever,—and the other son lazily digs in the
earth to live. A new young widow rents out their cabin to fat Reuben.
Reuben is a Baptist preacher now, but I fear as lazy as ever, though
his cabin has three rooms; and little Ella has grown into a bouncing
woman, and is ploughing corn on the hot hillside. There are babies
a-plenty, and one half-witted girl. Across the valley is a house I did
not know before, and there I found, rocking one baby and expecting
another, one of my schoolgirls, a daughter of Uncle Bird Dowell. She
looked somewhat worried with her new duties, but soon bristled into
pride over her neat cabin and the tale of her thrifty husband, and the
horse and cow, and the farm they were planning to buy.

My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood Progress; and Progress,
I understand, is necessarily ugly. The crazy foundation stones still
marked the former site of my poor little cabin, and not far away, on
six weary boulders, perched a jaunty board house, perhaps twenty by
thirty feet, with three windows and a door that locked. Some of the
window-glass was broken, and part of an old iron stove lay mournfully
under the house. I peeped through the window half reverently, and found
things that were more familiar. The blackboard had grown by about two
feet, and the seats were still without backs. The county owns the lot
now, I hear, and every year there is a session of school. As I sat by
the spring and looked on the Old and the New I felt glad, very glad,
and yet—

After two long drinks I started on. There was the great double
log-house on the corner. I remembered the broken, blighted family that
used to live there. The strong, hard face of the mother, with its
wilderness of hair, rose before me. She had driven her husband away,
and while I taught school a strange man lived there, big and jovial,
and people talked. I felt sure that Ben and ’Tildy would come to naught
from such a home. But this is an odd world; for Ben is a busy farmer in
Smith County, “doing well, too,” they say, and he had cared for little
’Tildy until last spring, when a lover married her. A hard life the lad
had led, toiling for meat, and laughed at because he was homely and
crooked. There was Sam Carlon, an impudent old skinflint, who had
definite notions about “niggers,” and hired Ben a summer and would not
pay him. Then the hungry boy gathered his sacks together, and in broad
daylight went into Carlon’s corn; and when the hard-fisted farmer set
upon him, the angry boy flew at him like a beast. Doc Burke saved a
murder and a lynching that day.

The story reminded me again of the Burkes, and an impatience seized me
to know who won in the battle, Doc or the seventy-five acres. For it is
a hard thing to make a farm out of nothing, even in fifteen years. So I
hurried on, thinking of the Burkes. They used to have a certain
magnificent barbarism about them that I liked. They were never vulgar,
never immoral, but rather rough and primitive, with an
unconventionality that spent itself in loud guffaws, slaps on the back,
and naps in the corner. I hurried by the cottage of the misborn Neill
boys. It was empty, and they were grown into fat, lazy farm-hands. I
saw the home of the Hickmans, but Albert, with his stooping shoulders,
had passed from the world. Then I came to the Burkes’ gate and peered
through; the enclosure looked rough and untrimmed, and yet there were
the same fences around the old farm save to the left, where lay
twenty-five other acres. And lo! the cabin in the hollow had climbed
the hill and swollen to a half-finished six-room cottage.

The Burkes held a hundred acres, but they were still in debt. Indeed,
the gaunt father who toiled night and day would scarcely be happy out
of debt, being so used to it. Some day he must stop, for his massive
frame is showing decline. The mother wore shoes, but the lion-like
physique of other days was broken. The children had grown up. Rob, the
image of his father, was loud and rough with laughter. Birdie, my
school baby of six, had grown to a picture of maiden beauty, tall and
tawny. “Edgar is gone,” said the mother, with head half bowed,—“gone to
work in Nashville; he and his father couldn’t agree.”

Little Doc, the boy born since the time of my school, took me horseback
down the creek next morning toward Farmer Dowell’s. The road and the
stream were battling for mastery, and the stream had the better of it.
We splashed and waded, and the merry boy, perched behind me, chattered
and laughed. He showed me where Simon Thompson had bought a bit of
ground and a home; but his daughter Lana, a plump, brown, slow girl,
was not there. She had married a man and a farm twenty miles away. We
wound on down the stream till we came to a gate that I did not
recognize, but the boy insisted that it was “Uncle Bird’s.” The farm
was fat with the growing crop. In that little valley was a strange
stillness as I rode up; for death and marriage had stolen youth and
left age and childhood there. We sat and talked that night after the
chores were done. Uncle Bird was grayer, and his eyes did not see so
well, but he was still jovial. We talked of the acres bought,—one
hundred and twenty-five,—of the new guest-chamber added, of Martha’s
marrying. Then we talked of death: Fanny and Fred were gone; a shadow
hung over the other daughter, and when it lifted she was to go to
Nashville to school. At last we spoke of the neighbors, and as night
fell, Uncle Bird told me how, on a night like that, ’Thenie came
wandering back to her home over yonder, to escape the blows of her
husband. And next morning she died in the home that her little
bow-legged brother, working and saving, had bought for their widowed
mother.

My journey was done, and behind me lay hill and dale, and Life and
Death. How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie
lies? How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat? How
hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all
this life and love and strife and failure,—is it the twilight of
nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?

Thus sadly musing, I rode to Nashville in the Jim Crow car.




V.
Of the Wings of Atalanta

O black boy of Atlanta!
    But half was spoken;
The slave’s chains and the master’s
    Alike are broken;
The one curse of the races
    Held both in tether;
They are rising—all are rising—
    The black and white together.

WHITTIER.

[Illustration]


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 _réclame_,—and yet with real earnestness,
and real sweat.

It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream; to
see the wide vision of empire fade into real ashes and dirt; to feel
the pang of the conquered, and yet know that with all the Bad that fell
on one black day, something was vanquished that deserved to live,
something killed that in justice had not dared to die; to know that
with the Right that triumphed, triumphed something of Wrong, something
sordid and mean, something less than the broadest and best. All this is
bitter hard; and many a man and city and people have found in it excuse
for sulking, and brooding, and listless waiting.

Such are not men of the sturdier make; they of Atlanta turned
resolutely toward the future; and that future held aloft vistas of
purple and gold:—Atlanta, Queen of the cotton kingdom; Atlanta, Gateway
to the Land of the Sun; Atlanta, the new Lachesis, spinner of web and
woof for the world. So the city crowned her hundred hills with
factories, and stored her shops with cunning handiwork, and stretched
long iron ways to greet the busy Mercury in his coming. And the Nation
talked of her striving.

Perhaps Atlanta was not christened for the winged maiden of dull
Boeotia; you know the tale,—how swarthy Atalanta, tall and wild, would
marry only him who out-raced her; and how the wily Hippomenes laid
three apples of gold in the way. She fled like a shadow, paused,
startled over the first apple, but even as he stretched his hand, fled
again; hovered over the second, then, slipping from his hot grasp, flew
over river, vale, and hill; but as she lingered over the third, his
arms fell round her, and looking on each other, the blazing passion of
their love profaned the sanctuary of Love, and they were cursed. If
Atlanta be not named for Atalanta, she ought to have been.

Atalanta is not the first or the last maiden whom greed of gold has led
to defile the temple of Love; and not maids alone, but men in the race
of life, sink from the high and generous ideals of youth to the
gambler’s code of the Bourse; and in all our Nation’s striving is not
the Gospel of Work befouled by the Gospel of Pay? So common is this
that one-half think it normal; so unquestioned, that we almost fear to
question if the end of racing is not gold, if the aim of man is not
rightly to be rich. And if this is the fault of America, how dire a
danger lies before a new land and a new city, lest Atlanta, stooping
for mere gold, shall find that gold accursed!

It was no maiden’s idle whim that started this hard racing; a fearful
wilderness lay about the feet of that city after the War,—feudalism,
poverty, the rise of the Third Estate, serfdom, the re-birth of Law and
Order, and above and between all, the Veil of Race. How heavy a journey
for weary feet! what wings must Atalanta have to flit over all this
hollow and hill, through sour wood and sullen water, and by the red
waste of sun-baked clay! How fleet must Atalanta be if she will not be
tempted by gold to profane the Sanctuary!

The Sanctuary of our fathers has, to be sure, few Gods,—some sneer,
“all too few.” There is the thrifty Mercury of New England, Pluto of
the North, and Ceres of the West; and there, too, is the half-forgotten
Apollo of the South, under whose aegis the maiden ran,—and as she ran
she forgot him, even as there in Boeotia Venus was forgot. She forgot
the old ideal of the Southern gentleman,—that new-world heir of the
grace and courtliness of patrician, knight, and noble; forgot his honor
with his foibles, his kindliness with his carelessness, and stooped to
apples of gold,—to men busier and sharper, thriftier and more
unscrupulous. Golden apples are beautiful—I remember the lawless days
of boyhood, when orchards in crimson and gold tempted me over fence and
field—and, too, the merchant who has dethroned the planter is no
despicable parvenu. Work and wealth are the mighty levers to lift this
old new land; thrift and toil and saving are the highways to new hopes
and new possibilities; and yet the warning is needed lest the wily
Hippomenes tempt Atalanta to thinking that golden apples are the goal
of racing, and not mere incidents by the way.

Atlanta must not lead the South to dream of material prosperity as the
touchstone of all success; already the fatal might of this idea is
beginning to spread; it is replacing the finer type of Southerner with
vulgar money-getters; it is burying the sweeter beauties of Southern
life beneath pretence and ostentation. For every social ill the panacea
of Wealth has been urged,—wealth to overthrow the remains of the slave
feudalism; wealth to raise the “cracker” Third Estate; wealth to employ
the black serfs, and the prospect of wealth to keep them working;
wealth as the end and aim of politics, and as the legal tender for law
and order; and, finally, instead of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, wealth
as the ideal of the Public School.

Not only is this true in the world which Atlanta typifies, but it is
threatening to be true of a world beneath and beyond that world,—the
Black World beyond the Veil. Today it makes little difference to
Atlanta, to the South, what the Negro thinks or dreams or wills. In the
soul-life of the land he is to-day, and naturally will long remain,
unthought of, half forgotten; and yet when he does come to think and
will and do for himself,—and let no man dream that day will never
come,—then the part he plays will not be one of sudden learning, but
words and thoughts he has been taught to lisp in his race-childhood.
To-day the ferment of his striving toward self-realization is to the
strife of the white world like a wheel within a wheel: beyond the Veil
are smaller but like problems of ideals, of leaders and the led, of
serfdom, of poverty, of order and subordination, and, through all, the
Veil of Race. Few know of these problems, few who know notice them; and
yet there they are, awaiting student, artist, and seer,—a field for
somebody sometime to discover. Hither has the temptation of Hippomenes
penetrated; already in this smaller world, which now indirectly and
anon directly must influence the larger for good or ill, the habit is
forming of interpreting the world in dollars. The old leaders of Negro
opinion, in the little groups where there is a Negro social
consciousness, are being replaced by new; neither the black preacher
nor the black teacher leads as he did two decades ago. Into their
places are pushing the farmers and gardeners, the well-paid porters and
artisans, the business-men,—all those with property and money. And with
all this change, so curiously parallel to that of the Other-world, goes
too the same inevitable change in ideals. The South laments to-day the
slow, steady disappearance of a certain type of Negro,—the faithful,
courteous slave of other days, with his incorruptible honesty and
dignified humility. He is passing away just as surely as the old type
of Southern gentleman is passing, and from not dissimilar causes,—the
sudden transformation of a fair far-off ideal of Freedom into the hard
reality of bread-winning and the consequent deification of Bread.

In the Black World, the Preacher and Teacher embodied once the ideals
of this people—the strife for another and a juster world, the vague
dream of righteousness, the mystery of knowing; but to-day the danger
is that these ideals, with their simple beauty and weird inspiration,
will suddenly sink to a question of cash and a lust for gold. Here
stands this black young Atalanta, girding herself for the race that
must be run; and if her eyes be still toward the hills and sky as in
the days of old, then we may look for noble running; but what if some
ruthless or wily or even thoughtless Hippomenes lay golden apples
before her? What if the Negro people be wooed from a strife for
righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard dollars as the be-all
and end-all of life? What if to the Mammonism of America be added the
rising Mammonism of the re-born South, and the Mammonism of this South
be reinforced by the budding Mammonism of its half-wakened black
millions? Whither, then, is the new-world quest of Goodness and Beauty
and Truth gone glimmering? Must this, and that fair flower of Freedom
which, despite the jeers of latter-day striplings, sprung from our
fathers’ blood, must that too degenerate into a dusty quest of
gold,—into lawless lust with Hippomenes?

The hundred hills of Atlanta are not all crowned with factories. On
one, toward the west, the setting sun throws three buildings in bold
relief against the sky. The beauty of the group lies in its simple
unity:—a broad lawn of green rising from the red street and mingled
roses and peaches; north and south, two plain and stately halls; and in
the midst, half hidden in ivy, a larger building, boldly graceful,
sparingly decorated, and with one low spire. It is a restful group,
—one never looks for more; it is all here, all intelligible. There I
live, and there I hear from day to day the low hum of restful life. In
winter’s twilight, when the red sun glows, I can see the dark figures
pass between the halls to the music of the night-bell. In the morning,
when the sun is golden, the clang of the day-bell brings the hurry and
laughter of three hundred young hearts from hall and street, and from
the busy city below,—children all dark and heavy-haired,—to join their
clear young voices in the music of the morning sacrifice. In a
half-dozen class-rooms they gather then,—here to follow the love-song
of Dido, here to listen to the tale of Troy divine; there to wander
among the stars, there to wander among men and nations,—and elsewhere
other well-worn ways of knowing this queer world. Nothing new, no
time-saving devices,—simply old time-glorified methods of delving for
Truth, and searching out the hidden beauties of life, and learning the
good of living. The riddle of existence is the college curriculum that
was laid before the Pharaohs, that was taught in the groves by Plato,
that formed the _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!




VI.
Of the Training of Black Men

Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside,
And naked on the Air of Heaven ride,
    Were’t not a Shame—were’t not a Shame for him
In this clay carcase crippled to abide?

OMAR KHAYYÁM (FITZGERALD).

[Illustration]


From the shimmering swirl of waters where many, many thoughts ago the
slave-ship first saw the square tower of Jamestown, have flowed down to
our day three streams of thinking: one swollen from the larger world
here and overseas, saying, the multiplying of human wants in
culture-lands calls for the world-wide cooperation of men in satisfying
them. Hence arises a new human unity, pulling the ends of earth nearer,
and all men, black, yellow, and white. The larger humanity strives to
feel in this contact of living Nations and sleeping hordes a thrill of
new life in the world, crying, “If the contact of Life and Sleep be
Death, shame on such Life.” To be sure, behind this thought lurks the
afterthought of force and dominion,—the making of brown men to delve
when the temptation of beads and red calico cloys.

The second thought streaming from the death-ship and the curving river
is the thought of the older South,—the sincere and passionate belief
that somewhere between men and cattle, God created a _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. To-day we have climbed to heights where we would open at least
the outer courts of knowledge to all, display its treasures to many,
and select the few to whom its mystery of Truth is revealed, not wholly
by birth or the accidents of the stock market, but at least in part
according to deftness and aim, talent and character. This programme,
however, we are sorely puzzled in carrying out through that part of the
land where the blight of slavery fell hardest, and where we are dealing
with two backward peoples. To make here in human education that ever
necessary combination of the permanent and the contingent—of the ideal
and the practical in workable equilibrium—has been there, as it ever
must be in every age and place, a matter of infinite experiment and
frequent mistakes.

In rough approximation we may point out four varying decades of work in
Southern education since the Civil War. From the close of the war until
1876, was the period of uncertain groping and temporary relief. There
were army schools, mission schools, and schools of the Freedmen’s
Bureau in chaotic disarrangement seeking system and co-operation. Then
followed ten years of constructive definite effort toward the building
of complete school systems in the South. Normal schools and colleges
were founded for the freedmen, and teachers trained there to man the
public schools. There was the inevitable tendency of war to
underestimate the prejudices of the master and the ignorance of the
slave, and all seemed clear sailing out of the wreckage of the storm.
Meantime, starting in this decade yet especially developing from 1885
to 1895, began the industrial revolution of the South. The land saw
glimpses of a new destiny and the stirring of new ideals. The
educational system striving to complete itself saw new obstacles and a
field of work ever broader and deeper. The Negro colleges, hurriedly
founded, were inadequately equipped, illogically distributed, and of
varying efficiency and grade; the normal and high schools were doing
little more than common-school work, and the common schools were
training but a third of the children who ought to be in them, and
training these too often poorly. At the same time the white South, by
reason of its sudden conversion from the slavery ideal, by so much the
more became set and strengthened in its racial prejudice, and
crystallized it into harsh law and harsher custom; while the marvellous
pushing forward of the poor white daily threatened to take even bread
and butter from the mouths of the heavily handicapped sons of the
freedmen. In the midst, then, of the larger problem of Negro education
sprang up the more practical question of work, the inevitable economic
quandary that faces a people in the transition from slavery to freedom,
and especially those who make that change amid hate and prejudice,
lawlessness and ruthless competition.

The industrial school springing to notice in this decade, but coming to
full recognition in the decade beginning with 1895, was the proffered
answer to this combined educational and economic crisis, and an answer
of singular wisdom and timeliness. From the very first in nearly all
the schools some attention had been given to training in handiwork, but
now was this training first raised to a dignity that brought it in
direct touch with the South’s magnificent industrial development, and
given an emphasis which reminded black folk that before the Temple of
Knowledge swing the Gates of Toil.

Yet after all they are but gates, and when turning our eyes from the
temporary and the contingent in the Negro problem to the broader
question of the permanent uplifting and civilization of black men in
America, we have a right to inquire, as this enthusiasm for material
advancement mounts to its height, if after all the industrial school is
the final and sufficient answer in the training of the Negro race; and
to ask gently, but in all sincerity, the ever-recurring query of the
ages, Is not life more than meat, and the body more than raiment? And
men ask this to-day all the more eagerly because of sinister signs in
recent educational movements. The tendency is here, born of slavery and
quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism of the day, to
regard human beings as among the material resources of a land to be
trained with an eye single to future dividends. Race-prejudices, which
keep brown and black men in their “places,” we are coming to regard as
useful allies with such a theory, no matter how much they may dull the
ambition and sicken the hearts of struggling human beings. And above
all, we daily hear that an education that encourages aspiration, that
sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character
rather than bread-winning, is the privilege of white men and the danger
and delusion of black.

Especially has criticism been directed against the former educational
efforts to aid the Negro. In the four periods I have mentioned, we find
first, boundless, planless enthusiasm and sacrifice; then the
preparation of teachers for a vast public-school system; then the
launching and expansion of that school system amid increasing
difficulties; and finally the training of workmen for the new and
growing industries. This development has been sharply ridiculed as a
logical anomaly and flat reversal of nature. Soothly we have been told
that first industrial and manual training should have taught the Negro
to work, then simple schools should have taught him to read and write,
and finally, after years, high and normal schools could have completed
the system, as intelligence and wealth demanded.

That a system logically so complete was historically impossible, it
needs but a little thought to prove. Progress in human affairs is more
often a pull than a push, a surging forward of the exceptional man, and
the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his
vantage-ground. Thus it was no accident that gave birth to universities
centuries before the common schools, that made fair Harvard the first
flower of our wilderness. So in the South: the mass of the freedmen at
the end of the war lacked the intelligence so necessary to modern
workingmen. They must first have the common school to teach them to
read, write, and cipher; and they must have higher schools to teach
teachers for the common schools. The white teachers who flocked South
went to establish such a common-school system. Few held the idea of
founding colleges; most of them at first would have laughed at the
idea. But they faced, as all men since them have faced, that central
paradox of the South,—the social separation of the races. At that time
it was the sudden volcanic rupture of nearly all relations between
black and white, in work and government and family life. Since then a
new adjustment of relations in economic and political affairs has grown
up,—an adjustment subtle and difficult to grasp, yet singularly
ingenious, which leaves still that frightful chasm at the color-line
across which men pass at their peril. Thus, then and now, there stand
in the South two separate worlds; and separate not simply in the higher
realms of social intercourse, but also in church and school, on railway
and street-car, in hotels and theatres, in streets and city sections,
in books and newspapers, in asylums and jails, in hospitals and
graveyards. There is still enough of contact for large economic and
group cooperation, but the separation is so thorough and deep that it
absolutely precludes for the present between the races anything like
that sympathetic and effective group-training and leadership of the one
by the other, such as the American Negro and all backward peoples must
have for effectual progress.

This the missionaries of ’68 soon saw; and if effective industrial and
trade schools were impracticable before the establishment of a
common-school system, just as certainly no adequate common schools
could be founded until there were teachers to teach them. Southern
whites would not teach them; Northern whites in sufficient numbers
could not be had. If the Negro was to learn, he must teach himself, and
the most effective help that could be given him was the establishment
of schools to train Negro teachers. This conclusion was slowly but
surely reached by every student of the situation until simultaneously,
in widely separated regions, without consultation or systematic plan,
there arose a series of institutions designed to furnish teachers for
the untaught. Above the sneers of critics at the obvious defects of
this procedure must ever stand its one crushing rejoinder: in a single
generation they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South; they
wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of the black people of the
land, and they made Tuskegee possible.

Such higher training-schools tended naturally to deepen broader
development: at first they were common and grammar schools, then some
became high schools. And finally, by 1900, some thirty-four had one
year or more of studies of college grade. This development was reached
with different degrees of speed in different institutions: Hampton is
still a high school, while Fisk University started her college in 1871,
and Spelman Seminary about 1896. In all cases the aim was identical,—to
maintain the standards of the lower training by giving teachers and
leaders the best practicable training; and above all, to furnish the
black world with adequate standards of human culture and lofty ideals
of life. It was not enough that the teachers of teachers should be
trained in technical normal methods; they must also, so far as
possible, be broad-minded, cultured men and women, to scatter
civilization among a people whose ignorance was not simply of letters,
but of life itself.

It can thus be seen that the work of education in the South began with
higher institutions of training, which threw off as their foliage
common schools, and later industrial schools, and at the same time
strove to shoot their roots ever deeper toward college and university
training. That this was an inevitable and necessary development, sooner
or later, goes without saying; but there has been, and still is, a
question in many minds if the natural growth was not forced, and if the
higher training was not either overdone or done with cheap and unsound
methods. Among white Southerners this feeling is widespread and
positive. A prominent Southern journal voiced this in a recent
editorial.

“The experiment that has been made to give the colored students
classical training has not been satisfactory. Even though many were
able to pursue the course, most of them did so in a parrot-like way,
learning what was taught, but not seeming to appropriate the truth and
import of their instruction, and graduating without sensible aim or
valuable occupation for their future. The whole scheme has proved a
waste of time, efforts, and the money of the state.”


While most fair-minded men would recognize this as extreme and
overdrawn, still without doubt many are asking, Are there a sufficient
number of Negroes ready for college training to warrant the
undertaking? Are not too many students prematurely forced into this
work? Does it not have the effect of dissatisfying the young Negro with
his environment? And do these graduates succeed in real life? Such
natural questions cannot be evaded, nor on the other hand must a Nation
naturally skeptical as to Negro ability assume an unfavorable answer
without careful inquiry and patient openness to conviction. We must not
forget that most Americans answer all queries regarding the Negro a
priori, and that the least that human courtesy can do is to listen to
evidence.

The advocates of the higher education of the Negro would be the last to
deny the incompleteness and glaring defects of the present system: too
many institutions have attempted to do college work, the work in some
cases has not been thoroughly done, and quantity rather than quality
has sometimes been sought. But all this can be said of higher education
throughout the land; it is the almost inevitable incident of
educational growth, and leaves the deeper question of the legitimate
demand for the higher training of Negroes untouched. And this latter
question can be settled in but one way,—by a first-hand study of the
facts. If we leave out of view all institutions which have not actually
graduated students from a course higher than that of a New England high
school, even though they be called colleges; if then we take the
thirty-four remaining institutions, we may clear up many
misapprehensions by asking searchingly, What kind of institutions are
they? what do they teach? and what sort of men do they graduate?

And first we may say that this type of college, including Atlanta,
Fisk, and Howard, Wilberforce and Claflin, Shaw, and the rest, is
peculiar, almost unique. Through the shining trees that whisper before
me as I write, I catch glimpses of a boulder of New England granite,
covering a grave, which graduates of Atlanta University have placed
there,—

“IN GRATEFUL MEMORY OF THEIR FORMER TEACHER AND FRIEND AND OF THE
UNSELFISH LIFE HE LIVED, AND THE NOBLE WORK HE WROUGHT; THAT THEY,
THEIR CHILDREN, AND THEIR CHILDREN’S CHILDREN MIGHT BE BLESSED.”


This was the gift of New England to the freed Negro: not alms, but a
friend; not cash, but character. It was not and is not money these
seething millions want, but love and sympathy, the pulse of hearts
beating with red blood;—a gift which to-day only their own kindred and
race can bring to the masses, but which once saintly souls brought to
their favored children in the crusade of the sixties, that finest thing
in American history, and one of the few things untainted by sordid
greed and cheap vainglory. The teachers in these institutions came not
to keep the Negroes in their place, but to raise them out of the
defilement of the places where slavery had wallowed them. The colleges
they founded were social settlements; homes where the best of the sons
of the freedmen came in close and sympathetic touch with the best
traditions of New England. They lived and ate together, studied and
worked, hoped and harkened in the dawning light. In actual formal
content their curriculum was doubtless old-fashioned, but in
educational power it was supreme, for it was the contact of living
souls.

From such schools about two thousand Negroes have gone forth with the
bachelor’s degree. The number in itself is enough to put at rest the
argument that too large a proportion of Negroes are receiving higher
training. If the ratio to population of all Negro students throughout
the land, in both college and secondary training, be counted,
Commissioner Harris assures us “it must be increased to five times its
present average” to equal the average of the land.

Fifty years ago the ability of Negro students in any appreciable
numbers to master a modern college course would have been difficult to
prove. To-day it is proved by the fact that four hundred Negroes, many
of whom have been reported as brilliant students, have received the
bachelor’s degree from Harvard, Yale, Oberlin, and seventy other
leading colleges. Here we have, then, nearly twenty-five hundred Negro
graduates, of whom the crucial query must be made, How far did their
training fit them for life? It is of course extremely difficult to
collect satisfactory data on such a point,—difficult to reach the men,
to get trustworthy testimony, and to gauge that testimony by any
generally acceptable criterion of success. In 1900, the Conference at
Atlanta University undertook to study these graduates, and published
the results. First they sought to know what these graduates were doing,
and succeeded in getting answers from nearly two-thirds of the living.
The direct testimony was in almost all cases corroborated by the
reports of the colleges where they graduated, so that in the main the
reports were worthy of credence. Fifty-three per cent of these
graduates were teachers,—presidents of institutions, heads of normal
schools, principals of city school-systems, and the like. Seventeen per
cent were clergymen; another seventeen per cent were in the
professions, chiefly as physicians. Over six per cent were merchants,
farmers, and artisans, and four per cent were in the government
civil-service. Granting even that a considerable proportion of the
third unheard from are unsuccessful, this is a record of usefulness.
Personally I know many hundreds of these graduates, and have
corresponded with more than a thousand; through others I have followed
carefully the life-work of scores; I have taught some of them and some
of the pupils whom they have taught, lived in homes which they have
builded, and looked at life through their eyes. Comparing them as a
class with my fellow students in New England and in Europe, I cannot
hesitate in saying that nowhere have I met men and women with a broader
spirit of helpfulness, with deeper devotion to their life-work, or with
more consecrated determination to succeed in the face of bitter
difficulties than among Negro college-bred men. They have, to be sure,
their proportion of ne’er-do-wells, their pedants and lettered fools,
but they have a surprisingly small proportion of them; they have not
that culture of manner which we instinctively associate with university
men, forgetting that in reality it is the heritage from cultured homes,
and that no people a generation removed from slavery can escape a
certain unpleasant rawness and gaucherie, despite the best of training.

With all their larger vision and deeper sensibility, these men have
usually been conservative, careful leaders. They have seldom been
agitators, have withstood the temptation to head the mob, and have
worked steadily and faithfully in a thousand communities in the South.
As teachers, they have given the South a commendable system of city
schools and large numbers of private normal-schools and academies.
Colored college-bred men have worked side by side with white college
graduates at Hampton; almost from the beginning the backbone of
Tuskegee’s teaching force has been formed of graduates from Fisk and
Atlanta. And to-day the institute is filled with college graduates,
from the energetic wife of the principal down to the teacher of
agriculture, including nearly half of the executive council and a
majority of the heads of departments. In the professions, college men
are slowly but surely leavening the Negro church, are healing and
preventing the devastations of disease, and beginning to furnish legal
protection for the liberty and property of the toiling masses. All this
is needful work. Who would do it if Negroes did not? How could Negroes
do it if they were not trained carefully for it? If white people need
colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black
people need nothing of the sort?

If it is true that there are an appreciable number of Negro youth in
the land capable by character and talent to receive that higher
training, the end of which is culture, and if the two and a half
thousand who have had something of this training in the past have in
the main proved themselves useful to their race and generation, the
question then comes, What place in the future development of the South
ought the Negro college and college-bred man to occupy? That the
present social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must eventually
yield to the influences of culture, as the South grows civilized, is
clear. But such transformation calls for singular wisdom and patience.
If, while the healing of this vast sore is progressing, the races are
to live for many years side by side, united in economic effort, obeying
a common government, sensitive to mutual thought and feeling, yet
subtly and silently separate in many matters of deeper human
intimacy,—if this unusual and dangerous development is to progress amid
peace and order, mutual respect and growing intelligence, it will call
for social surgery at once the delicatest and nicest in modern history.
It will demand broad-minded, upright men, both white and black, and in
its final accomplishment American civilization will triumph. So far as
white men are concerned, this fact is to-day being recognized in the
South, and a happy renaissance of university education seems imminent.
But the very voices that cry hail to this good work are, strange to
relate, largely silent or antagonistic to the higher education of the
Negro.

Strange to relate! for this is certain, no secure civilization can be
built in the South with the Negro as an ignorant, turbulent
proletariat. Suppose we seek to remedy this by making them laborers and
nothing more: they are not fools, they have tasted of the Tree of Life,
and they will not cease to think, will not cease attempting to read the
riddle of the world. By taking away their best equipped teachers and
leaders, by slamming the door of opportunity in the faces of their
bolder and brighter minds, will you make them satisfied with their lot?
or will you not rather transfer their leading from the hands of men
taught to think to the hands of untrained demagogues? We ought not to
forget that despite the pressure of poverty, and despite the active
discouragement and even ridicule of friends, the demand for higher
training steadily increases among Negro youth: there were, in the years
from 1875 to 1880, 22 Negro graduates from Northern colleges; from 1885
to 1890 there were 43, and from 1895 to 1900, nearly 100 graduates.
From Southern Negro colleges there were, in the same three periods,
143, 413, and over 500 graduates. Here, then, is the plain thirst for
training; by refusing to give this Talented Tenth the key to knowledge,
can any sane man imagine that they will lightly lay aside their
yearning and contentedly become hewers of wood and drawers of water?

No. The dangerously clear logic of the Negro’s position will more and
more loudly assert itself in that day when increasing wealth and more
intricate social organization preclude the South from being, as it so
largely is, simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk. Such
waste of energy cannot be spared if the South is to catch up with
civilization. And as the black third of the land grows in thrift and
skill, unless skilfully guided in its larger philosophy, it must more
and more brood over the red past and the creeping, crooked present,
until it grasps a gospel of revolt and revenge and throws its new-found
energies athwart the current of advance. Even to-day the masses of the
Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the
moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments against
them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic,
have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O
Southern Gentlemen! If you deplore their presence here, they ask, Who
brought us? When you cry, Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage,
they answer that legal marriage is infinitely better than systematic
concubinage and prostitution. And if in just fury you accuse their
vagabonds of violating women, they also in fury quite as just may
reply: The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black
women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two
millions of mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable blood. And finally,
when you fasten crime upon this race as its peculiar trait, they answer
that slavery was the arch-crime, and lynching and lawlessness its twin
abortions; that color and race are not crimes, and yet it is they which
in this land receive most unceasing condemnation, North, East, South,
and West.

I will not say such arguments are wholly justified,—I will not insist
that there is no other side to the shield; but I do say that of the
nine millions of Negroes in this nation, there is scarcely one out of
the cradle to whom these arguments do not daily present themselves in
the guise of terrible truth. I insist that the question of the future
is how best to keep these millions from brooding over the wrongs of the
past and the difficulties of the present, so that all their energies
may be bent toward a cheerful striving and cooperation with their white
neighbors toward a larger, juster, and fuller future. That one wise
method of doing this lies in the closer knitting of the Negro to the
great industrial possibilities of the South is a great truth. And this
the common schools and the manual training and trade schools are
working to accomplish. But these alone are not enough. The foundations
of knowledge in this race, as in others, must be sunk deep in the
college and university if we would build a solid, permanent structure.
Internal problems of social advance must inevitably come, —problems of
work and wages, of families and homes, of morals and the true valuing
of the things of life; and all these and other inevitable problems of
civilization the Negro must meet and solve largely for himself, by
reason of his isolation; and can there be any possible solution other
than by study and thought and an appeal to the rich experience of the
past? Is there not, with such a group and in such a crisis, infinitely
more danger to be apprehended from half-trained minds and shallow
thinking than from over-education and over-refinement? Surely we have
wit enough to found a Negro college so manned and equipped as to steer
successfully between the _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?




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.

[Illustration]


Out of the North the train thundered, and we woke to see the crimson
soil of Georgia stretching away bare and monotonous right and left.
Here and there lay straggling, unlovely villages, and lean men loafed
leisurely at the depots; then again came the stretch of pines and clay.
Yet we did not nod, nor weary of the scene; for this is historic
ground. Right across our track, three hundred and sixty years ago,
wandered the cavalcade of Hernando de Soto, looking for gold and the
Great Sea; and he and his foot-sore captives disappeared yonder in the
grim forests to the west. Here sits Atlanta, the city of a hundred
hills, with something Western, something Southern, and something quite
its own, in its busy life. Just this side Atlanta is the land of the
Cherokees and to the southwest, not far from where Sam Hose was
crucified, you may stand on a spot which is to-day the centre of the
Negro problem,—the centre of those nine million men who are America’s
dark heritage from slavery and the slave-trade.

Not only is Georgia thus the geographical focus of our Negro
population, but in many other respects, both now and yesterday, the
Negro problems have seemed to be centered in this State. No other State
in the Union can count a million Negroes among its citizens,—a
population as large as the slave population of the whole Union in 1800;
no other State fought so long and strenuously to gather this host of
Africans. Oglethorpe thought slavery against law and gospel; but the
circumstances which gave Georgia its first inhabitants were not
calculated to furnish citizens over-nice in their ideas about rum and
slaves. Despite the prohibitions of the trustees, these Georgians, like
some of their descendants, proceeded to take the law into their own
hands; and so pliant were the judges, and so flagrant the smuggling,
and so earnest were the prayers of Whitefield, that by the middle of
the eighteenth century all restrictions were swept away, and the
slave-trade went merrily on for fifty years and more.

Down in Darien, where the Delegal riots took place some summers ago,
there used to come a strong protest against slavery from the Scotch
Highlanders; and the Moravians of Ebenezer did not like the system. But
not till the Haytian Terror of Toussaint was the trade in men even
checked; while the national statute of 1808 did not suffice to stop it.
How the Africans poured in!—fifty thousand between 1790 and 1810, and
then, from Virginia and from smugglers, two thousand a year for many
years more. So the thirty thousand Negroes of Georgia in 1790 doubled
in a decade,—were over a hundred thousand in 1810, had reached two
hundred thousand in 1820, and half a million at the time of the war.
Thus like a snake the black population writhed upward.

But we must hasten on our journey. This that we pass as we near Atlanta
is the ancient land of the Cherokees,—that brave Indian nation which
strove so long for its fatherland, until Fate and the United States
Government drove them beyond the Mississippi. If you wish to ride with
me you must come into the “Jim Crow Car.” There will be no
objection,—already four other white men, and a little white girl with
her nurse, are in there. Usually the races are mixed in there; but the
white coach is all white. Of course this car is not so good as the
other, but it is fairly clean and comfortable. The discomfort lies
chiefly in the hearts of those four black men yonder—and in mine.

We rumble south in quite a business-like way. The bare red clay and
pines of Northern Georgia begin to disappear, and in their place
appears a rich rolling land, luxuriant, and here and there well tilled.
This is the land of the Creek Indians; and a hard time the Georgians
had to seize it. The towns grow more frequent and more interesting, and
brand-new cotton mills rise on every side. Below Macon the world grows
darker; for now we approach the Black Belt,—that strange land of
shadows, at which even slaves paled in the past, and whence come now
only faint and half-intelligible murmurs to the world beyond. The “Jim
Crow Car” grows larger and a shade better; three rough field-hands and
two or three white loafers accompany us, and the newsboy still spreads
his wares at one end. The sun is setting, but we can see the great
cotton country as we enter it,—the soil now dark and fertile, now thin
and gray, with fruit-trees and dilapidated buildings,—all the way to
Albany.

At Albany, in the heart of the Black Belt, we stop. Two hundred miles
south of Atlanta, two hundred miles west of the Atlantic, and one
hundred miles north of the Great Gulf lies Dougherty County, with ten
thousand Negroes and two thousand whites. The Flint River winds down
from Andersonville, and, turning suddenly at Albany, the county-seat,
hurries on to join the Chattahoochee and the sea. Andrew Jackson knew
the Flint well, and marched across it once to avenge the Indian
Massacre at Fort Mims. That was in 1814, not long before the battle of
New Orleans; and by the Creek treaty that followed this campaign, all
Dougherty County, and much other rich land, was ceded to Georgia.
Still, settlers fought shy of this land, for the Indians were all
about, and they were unpleasant neighbors in those days. The panic of
1837, which Jackson bequeathed to Van Buren, turned the planters from
the impoverished lands of Virginia, the Carolinas, and east Georgia,
toward the West. The Indians were removed to Indian Territory, and
settlers poured into these coveted lands to retrieve their broken
fortunes. For a radius of a hundred miles about Albany, stretched a
great fertile land, luxuriant with forests of pine, oak, ash, hickory,
and poplar; hot with the sun and damp with the rich black swamp-land;
and here the corner-stone of the Cotton Kingdom was laid.

Albany is to-day a wide-streeted, placid, Southern town, with a broad
sweep of stores and saloons, and flanking rows of homes,—whites usually
to the north, and blacks to the south. Six days in the week the town
looks decidedly too small for itself, and takes frequent and prolonged
naps. But on Saturday suddenly the whole county disgorges itself upon
the place, and a perfect flood of black peasantry pours through the
streets, fills the stores, blocks the sidewalks, chokes the
thoroughfares, and takes full possession of the town. They are black,
sturdy, uncouth country folk, good-natured and simple, talkative to a
degree, and yet far more silent and brooding than the crowds of the
Rhine-pfalz, or Naples, or Cracow. They drink considerable quantities
of whiskey, but do not get very drunk; they talk and laugh loudly at
times, but seldom quarrel or fight. They walk up and down the streets,
meet and gossip with friends, stare at the shop windows, buy coffee,
cheap candy, and clothes, and at dusk drive home—happy? well no, not
exactly happy, but much happier than as though they had not come.

Thus Albany is a real capital,—a typical Southern county town, the
centre of the life of ten thousand souls; their point of contact with
the outer world, their centre of news and gossip, their market for
buying and selling, borrowing and lending, their fountain of justice
and law. Once upon a time we knew country life so well and city life so
little, that we illustrated city life as that of a closely crowded
country district. Now the world has well-nigh forgotten what the
country is, and we must imagine a little city of black people scattered
far and wide over three hundred lonesome square miles of land, without
train or trolley, in the midst of cotton and corn, and wide patches of
sand and gloomy soil.

It gets pretty hot in Southern Georgia in July,—a sort of dull,
determined heat that seems quite independent of the sun; so it took us
some days to muster courage enough to leave the porch and venture out
on the long country roads, that we might see this unknown world.
Finally we started. It was about ten in the morning, bright with a
faint breeze, and we jogged leisurely southward in the valley of the
Flint. We passed the scattered box-like cabins of the brickyard hands,
and the long tenement-row facetiously called “The Ark,” and were soon
in the open country, and on the confines of the great plantations of
other days. There is the “Joe Fields place”; a rough old fellow was he,
and had killed many a “nigger” in his day. Twelve miles his plantation
used to run,—a regular barony. It is nearly all gone now; only
straggling bits belong to the family, and the rest has passed to Jews
and Negroes. Even the bits which are left are heavily mortgaged, and,
like the rest of the land, tilled by tenants. Here is one of them
now,—a tall brown man, a hard worker and a hard drinker, illiterate,
but versed in farmlore, as his nodding crops declare. This
distressingly new board house is his, and he has just moved out of
yonder moss-grown cabin with its one square room.

From the curtains in Benton’s house, down the road, a dark comely face
is staring at the strangers; for passing carriages are not every-day
occurrences here. Benton is an intelligent yellow man with a good-sized
family, and manages a plantation blasted by the war and now the broken
staff of the widow. He might be well-to-do, they say; but he carouses
too much in Albany. And the half-desolate spirit of neglect born of the
very soil seems to have settled on these acres. In times past there
were cotton-gins and machinery here; but they have rotted away.

The whole land seems forlorn and forsaken. Here are the remnants of the
vast plantations of the Sheldons, the Pellots, and the Rensons; but the
souls of them are passed. The houses lie in half ruin, or have wholly
disappeared; the fences have flown, and the families are wandering in
the world. Strange vicissitudes have met these whilom masters. Yonder
stretch the wide acres of Bildad Reasor; he died in war-time, but the
upstart overseer hastened to wed the widow. Then he went, and his
neighbors too, and now only the black tenant remains; but the
shadow-hand of the master’s grand-nephew or cousin or creditor
stretches out of the gray distance to collect the rack-rent
remorselessly, and so the land is uncared-for and poor. Only black
tenants can stand such a system, and they only because they must. Ten
miles we have ridden to-day and have seen no white face.

A resistless feeling of depression falls slowly upon us, despite the
gaudy sunshine and the green cottonfields. This, then, is the Cotton
Kingdom,—the shadow of a marvellous dream. And where is the King?
Perhaps this is he,—the sweating ploughman, tilling his eighty acres
with two lean mules, and fighting a hard battle with debt. So we sit
musing, until, as we turn a corner on the sandy road, there comes a
fairer scene suddenly in view,—a neat cottage snugly ensconced by the
road, and near it a little store. A tall bronzed man rises from the
porch as we hail him, and comes out to our carriage. He is six feet in
height, with a sober face that smiles gravely. He walks too straight to
be a tenant,—yes, he owns two hundred and forty acres. “The land is run
down since the boom-days of eighteen hundred and fifty,” he explains,
and cotton is low. Three black tenants live on his place, and in his
little store he keeps a small stock of tobacco, snuff, soap, and soda,
for the neighborhood. Here is his gin-house with new machinery just
installed. Three hundred bales of cotton went through it last year. Two
children he has sent away to school. Yes, he says sadly, he is getting
on, but cotton is down to four cents; I know how Debt sits staring at
him.

Wherever the King may be, the parks and palaces of the Cotton Kingdom
have not wholly disappeared. We plunge even now into great groves of
oak and towering pine, with an undergrowth of myrtle and shrubbery.
This was the “home-house” of the Thompsons,—slave-barons who drove
their coach and four in the merry past. All is silence now, and ashes,
and tangled weeds. The owner put his whole fortune into the rising
cotton industry of the fifties, and with the falling prices of the
eighties he packed up and stole away. Yonder is another grove, with
unkempt lawn, great magnolias, and grass-grown paths. The Big House
stands in half-ruin, its great front door staring blankly at the
street, and the back part grotesquely restored for its black tenant. A
shabby, well-built Negro he is, unlucky and irresolute. He digs hard to
pay rent to the white girl who owns the remnant of the place. She
married a policeman, and lives in Savannah.

Now and again we come to churches. Here is one now,—Shepherd’s, they
call it,—a great whitewashed barn of a thing, perched on stilts of
stone, and looking for all the world as though it were just resting
here a moment and might be expected to waddle off down the road at
almost any time. And yet it is the centre of a hundred cabin homes; and
sometimes, of a Sunday, five hundred persons from far and near gather
here and talk and eat and sing. There is a schoolhouse near,—a very
airy, empty shed; but even this is an improvement, for usually the
school is held in the church. The churches vary from log-huts to those
like Shepherd’s, and the schools from nothing to this little house that
sits demurely on the county line. It is a tiny plank-house, perhaps ten
by twenty, and has within a double row of rough unplaned benches,
resting mostly on legs, sometimes on boxes. Opposite the door is a
square home-made desk. In one corner are the ruins of a stove, and in
the other a dim blackboard. It is the cheerfulest schoolhouse I have
seen in Dougherty, save in town. Back of the schoolhouse is a
lodgehouse two stories high and not quite finished. Societies meet
there,—societies “to care for the sick and bury the dead”; and these
societies grow and flourish.

We had come to the boundaries of Dougherty, and were about to turn west
along the county-line, when all these sights were pointed out to us by
a kindly old man, black, white-haired, and seventy. Forty-five years he
had lived here, and now supports himself and his old wife by the help
of the steer tethered yonder and the charity of his black neighbors. He
shows us the farm of the Hills just across the county line in Baker,—a
widow and two strapping sons, who raised ten bales (one need not add
“cotton” down here) last year. There are fences and pigs and cows, and
the soft-voiced, velvet-skinned young Memnon, who sauntered
half-bashfully over to greet the strangers, is proud of his home. We
turn now to the west along the county line. Great dismantled trunks of
pines tower above the green cottonfields, cracking their naked gnarled
fingers toward the border of living forest beyond. There is little
beauty in this region, only a sort of crude abandon that suggests
power,—a naked grandeur, as it were. The houses are bare and straight;
there are no hammocks or easy-chairs, and few flowers. So when, as here
at Rawdon’s, one sees a vine clinging to a little porch, and home-like
windows peeping over the fences, one takes a long breath. I think I
never before quite realized the place of the Fence in civilization.
This is the Land of the Unfenced, where crouch on either hand scores of
ugly one-room cabins, cheerless and dirty. Here lies the Negro problem
in its naked dirt and penury. And here are no fences. But now and then
the crisscross rails or straight palings break into view, and then we
know a touch of culture is near. Of course Harrison Gohagen,—a quiet
yellow man, young, smooth-faced, and diligent,—of course he is lord of
some hundred acres, and we expect to see a vision of well-kept rooms
and fat beds and laughing children. For has he not fine fences? And
those over yonder, why should they build fences on the rack-rented
land? It will only increase their rent.

On we wind, through sand and pines and glimpses of old plantations,
till there creeps into sight a cluster of buildings,—wood and brick,
mills and houses, and scattered cabins. It seemed quite a village. As
it came nearer and nearer, however, the aspect changed: the buildings
were rotten, the bricks were falling out, the mills were silent, and
the store was closed. Only in the cabins appeared now and then a bit of
lazy life. I could imagine the place under some weird spell, and was
half-minded to search out the princess. An old ragged black man,
honest, simple, and improvident, told us the tale. The Wizard of the
North—the Capitalist—had rushed down in the seventies to woo this coy
dark soil. He bought a square mile or more, and for a time the
field-hands sang, the gins groaned, and the mills buzzed. Then came a
change. The agent’s son embezzled the funds and ran off with them. Then
the agent himself disappeared. Finally the new agent stole even the
books, and the company in wrath closed its business and its houses,
refused to sell, and let houses and furniture and machinery rust and
rot. So the Waters-Loring plantation was stilled by the spell of
dishonesty, and stands like some gaunt rebuke to a scarred land.

Somehow that plantation ended our day’s journey; for I could not shake
off the influence of that silent scene. Back toward town we glided,
past the straight and thread-like pines, past a dark tree-dotted pond
where the air was heavy with a dead sweet perfume. White slender-legged
curlews flitted by us, and the garnet blooms of the cotton looked gay
against the green and purple stalks. A peasant girl was hoeing in the
field, white-turbaned and black-limbed. All this we saw, but the spell
still lay upon us.

How curious a land is this,—how full of untold story, of tragedy and
laughter, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic
past, and big with future promise! This is the Black Belt of Georgia.
Dougherty County is the west end of the Black Belt, and men once called
it the Egypt of the Confederacy. It is full of historic interest. First
there is the Swamp, to the west, where the Chickasawhatchee flows
sullenly southward. The shadow of an old plantation lies at its edge,
forlorn and dark. Then comes the pool; pendent gray moss and brackish
waters appear, and forests filled with wildfowl. In one place the wood
is on fire, smouldering in dull red anger; but nobody minds. Then the
swamp grows beautiful; a raised road, built by chained Negro convicts,
dips down into it, and forms a way walled and almost covered in living
green. Spreading trees spring from a prodigal luxuriance of
undergrowth; great dark green shadows fade into the black background,
until all is one mass of tangled semi-tropical foliage, marvellous in
its weird savage splendor. Once we crossed a black silent stream, where
the sad trees and writhing creepers, all glinting fiery yellow and
green, seemed like some vast cathedral,—some green Milan builded of
wildwood. And as I crossed, I seemed to see again that fierce tragedy
of seventy years ago. Osceola, the Indian-Negro chieftain, had risen in
the swamps of Florida, vowing vengeance. His war-cry reached the red
Creeks of Dougherty, and their war-cry rang from the Chattahoochee to
the sea. Men and women and children fled and fell before them as they
swept into Dougherty. In yonder shadows a dark and hideously painted
warrior glided stealthily on,—another and another, until three hundred
had crept into the treacherous swamp. Then the false slime closing
about them called the white men from the east. Waist-deep, they fought
beneath the tall trees, until the war-cry was hushed and the Indians
glided back into the west. Small wonder the wood is red.

Then came the black slaves. Day after day the clank of chained feet
marching from Virginia and Carolina to Georgia was heard in these rich
swamp lands. Day after day the songs of the callous, the wail of the
motherless, and the muttered curses of the wretched echoed from the
Flint to the Chickasawhatchee, until by 1860 there had risen in West
Dougherty perhaps the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew.
A hundred and fifty barons commanded the labor of nearly six thousand
Negroes, held sway over farms with ninety thousand acres tilled land,
valued even in times of cheap soil at three millions of dollars. Twenty
thousand bales of ginned cotton went yearly to England, New and Old;
and men that came there bankrupt made money and grew rich. In a single
decade the cotton output increased four-fold and the value of lands was
tripled. It was the heyday of the _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.

The Jew is the heir of the slave baron in Dougherty; and as we ride
westward, by wide stretching cornfields and stubby orchards of peach
and pear, we see on all sides within the circle of dark forest a Land
of Canaan. Here and there are tales of projects for money-getting, born
in the swift days of Reconstruction,—“improvement” companies, wine
companies, mills and factories; most failed, and the Jew fell heir. It
is a beautiful land, this Dougherty, west of the Flint. The forests are
wonderful, the solemn pines have disappeared, and this is the “Oakey
Woods,” with its wealth of hickories, beeches, oaks and palmettos. But
a pall of debt hangs over the beautiful land; the merchants are in debt
to the wholesalers, the planters are in debt to the merchants, the
tenants owe the planters, and laborers bow and bend beneath the burden
of it all. Here and there a man has raised his head above these murky
waters. We passed one fenced stock-farm with grass and grazing cattle,
that looked very home-like after endless corn and cotton. Here and
there are black free-holders: there is the gaunt dull-black Jackson,
with his hundred acres. “I says, ‘Look up! If you don’t look up you
can’t get up,’” remarks Jackson, philosophically. And he’s gotten up.
Dark Carter’s neat barns would do credit to New England. His master
helped him to get a start, but when the black man died last fall the
master’s sons immediately laid claim to the estate. “And them white
folks will get it, too,” said my yellow gossip.

I turn from these well-tended acres with a comfortable feeling that the
Negro is rising. Even then, however, the fields, as we proceed, begin
to redden and the trees disappear. Rows of old cabins appear filled
with renters and laborers,—cheerless, bare, and dirty, for the most
part, although here and there the very age and decay makes the scene
picturesque. A young black fellow greets us. He is twenty-two, and just
married. Until last year he had good luck renting; then cotton fell,
and the sheriff seized and sold all he had. So he moved here, where the
rent is higher, the land poorer, and the owner inflexible; he rents a
forty-dollar mule for twenty dollars a year. Poor lad!—a slave at
twenty-two. This plantation, owned now by a foreigner, was a part of
the famous Bolton estate. After the war it was for many years worked by
gangs of Negro convicts,—and black convicts then were even more
plentiful than now; it was a way of making Negroes work, and the
question of guilt was a minor one. Hard tales of cruelty and
mistreatment of the chained freemen are told, but the county
authorities were deaf until the free-labor market was nearly ruined by
wholesale migration. Then they took the convicts from the plantations,
but not until one of the fairest regions of the “Oakey Woods” had been
ruined and ravished into a red waste, out of which only a Yankee or an
immigrant could squeeze more blood from debt-cursed tenants.

No wonder that Luke Black, slow, dull, and discouraged, shuffles to our
carriage and talks hopelessly. Why should he strive? Every year finds
him deeper in debt. How strange that Georgia, the world-heralded refuge
of poor debtors, should bind her own to sloth and misfortune as
ruthlessly as ever England did! The poor land groans with its
birth-pains, and brings forth scarcely a hundred pounds of cotton to
the acre, where fifty years ago it yielded eight times as much. Of his
meagre yield the tenant pays from a quarter to a third in rent, and
most of the rest in interest on food and supplies bought on credit.
Twenty years yonder sunken-cheeked, old black man has labored under
that system, and now, turned day-laborer, is supporting his wife and
boarding himself on his wages of a dollar and a half a week, received
only part of the year.

The Bolton convict farm formerly included the neighboring plantation.
Here it was that the convicts were lodged in the great log prison still
standing. A dismal place it still remains, with rows of ugly huts
filled with surly ignorant tenants. “What rent do you pay here?” I
inquired. “I don’t know,—what is it, Sam?” “All we make,” answered Sam.
It is a depressing place,—bare, unshaded, with no charm of past
association, only a memory of forced human toil,—now, then, and before
the war. They are not happy, these black men whom we meet throughout
this region. There is little of the joyous abandon and playfulness
which we are wont to associate with the plantation Negro. At best, the
natural good-nature is edged with complaint or has changed into
sullenness and gloom. And now and then it blazes forth in veiled but
hot anger. I remember one big red-eyed black whom we met by the
roadside. Forty-five years he had labored on this farm, beginning with
nothing, and still having nothing. To be sure, he had given four
children a common-school training, and perhaps if the new fence-law had
not allowed unfenced crops in West Dougherty he might have raised a
little stock and kept ahead. As it is, he is hopelessly in debt,
disappointed, and embittered. He stopped us to inquire after the black
boy in Albany, whom it was said a policeman had shot and killed for
loud talking on the sidewalk. And then he said slowly: “Let a white man
touch me, and he dies; I don’t boast this,—I don’t say it around loud,
or before the children,—but I mean it. I’ve seen them whip my father
and my old mother in them cotton-rows till the blood ran; by—” and we
passed on.

Now Sears, whom we met next lolling under the chubby oak-trees, was of
quite different fibre. Happy?—Well, yes; he laughed and flipped
pebbles, and thought the world was as it was. He had worked here twelve
years and has nothing but a mortgaged mule. Children? Yes, seven; but
they hadn’t been to school this year,—couldn’t afford books and
clothes, and couldn’t spare their work. There go part of them to the
fields now,—three big boys astride mules, and a strapping girl with
bare brown legs. Careless ignorance and laziness here, fierce hate and
vindictiveness there;—these are the extremes of the Negro problem which
we met that day, and we scarce knew which we preferred.

Here and there we meet distinct characters quite out of the ordinary.
One came out of a piece of newly cleared ground, making a wide detour
to avoid the snakes. He was an old, hollow-cheeked man, with a drawn
and characterful brown face. He had a sort of self-contained quaintness
and rough humor impossible to describe; a certain cynical earnestness
that puzzled one. “The niggers were jealous of me over on the other
place,” he said, “and so me and the old woman begged this piece of
woods, and I cleared it up myself. Made nothing for two years, but I
reckon I’ve got a crop now.” The cotton looked tall and rich, and we
praised it. He curtsied low, and then bowed almost to the ground, with
an imperturbable gravity that seemed almost suspicious. Then he
continued, “My mule died last week,”—a calamity in this land equal to a
devastating fire in town,—“but a white man loaned me another.” Then he
added, eyeing us, “Oh, I gets along with white folks.” We turned the
conversation. “Bears? deer?” he answered, “well, I should say there
were,” and he let fly a string of brave oaths, as he told hunting-tales
of the swamp. We left him standing still in the middle of the road
looking after us, and yet apparently not noticing us.

The Whistle place, which includes his bit of land, was bought soon
after the war by an English syndicate, the “Dixie Cotton and Corn
Company.” A marvellous deal of style their factor put on, with his
servants and coach-and-six; so much so that the concern soon landed in
inextricable bankruptcy. Nobody lives in the old house now, but a man
comes each winter out of the North and collects his high rents. I know
not which are the more touching,—such old empty houses, or the homes of
the masters’ sons. Sad and bitter tales lie hidden back of those white
doors,—tales of poverty, of struggle, of disappointment. A revolution
such as that of ’63 is a terrible thing; they that rose rich in the
morning often slept in paupers’ beds. Beggars and vulgar speculators
rose to rule over them, and their children went astray. See yonder
sad-colored house, with its cabins and fences and glad crops! It is not
glad within; last month the prodigal son of the struggling father wrote
home from the city for money. Money! Where was it to come from? And so
the son rose in the night and killed his baby, and killed his wife, and
shot himself dead. And the world passed on.

I remember wheeling around a bend in the road beside a graceful bit of
forest and a singing brook. A long low house faced us, with porch and
flying pillars, great oaken door, and a broad lawn shining in the
evening sun. But the window-panes were gone, the pillars were
worm-eaten, and the moss-grown roof was falling in. Half curiously I
peered through the unhinged door, and saw where, on the wall across the
hall, was written in once gay letters a faded “Welcome.”

Quite a contrast to the southwestern part of Dougherty County is the
northwest. Soberly timbered in oak and pine, it has none of that
half-tropical luxuriance of the southwest. Then, too, there are fewer
signs of a romantic past, and more of systematic modern land-grabbing
and money-getting. White people are more in evidence here, and farmer
and hired labor replace to some extent the absentee landlord and
rack-rented tenant. The crops have neither the luxuriance of the richer
land nor the signs of neglect so often seen, and there were fences and
meadows here and there. Most of this land was poor, and beneath the
notice of the slave-baron, before the war. Since then his poor
relations and foreign immigrants have seized it. The returns of the
farmer are too small to allow much for wages, and yet he will not sell
off small farms. There is the Negro Sanford; he has worked fourteen
years as overseer on the Ladson place, and “paid out enough for
fertilizers to have bought a farm,” but the owner will not sell off a
few acres.

Two children—a boy and a girl—are hoeing sturdily in the fields on the
farm where Corliss works. He is smooth-faced and brown, and is fencing
up his pigs. He used to run a successful cotton-gin, but the Cotton
Seed Oil Trust has forced the price of ginning so low that he says it
hardly pays him. He points out a stately old house over the way as the
home of “Pa Willis.” We eagerly ride over, for “Pa Willis” was the tall
and powerful black Moses who led the Negroes for a generation, and led
them well. He was a Baptist preacher, and when he died, two thousand
black people followed him to the grave; and now they preach his funeral
sermon each year. His widow lives here,—a weazened, sharp-featured
little woman, who curtsied quaintly as we greeted her. Further on lives
Jack Delson, the most prosperous Negro farmer in the county. It is a
joy to meet him,—a great broad-shouldered, handsome black man,
intelligent and jovial. Six hundred and fifty acres he owns, and has
eleven black tenants. A neat and tidy home nestled in a flower-garden,
and a little store stands beside it.

We pass the Munson place, where a plucky white widow is renting and
struggling; and the eleven hundred acres of the Sennet plantation, with
its Negro overseer. Then the character of the farms begins to change.
Nearly all the lands belong to Russian Jews; the overseers are white,
and the cabins are bare board-houses scattered here and there. The
rents are high, and day-laborers and “contract” hands abound. It is a
keen, hard struggle for living here, and few have time to talk. Tired
with the long ride, we gladly drive into Gillonsville. It is a silent
cluster of farmhouses standing on the crossroads, with one of its
stores closed and the other kept by a Negro preacher. They tell great
tales of busy times at Gillonsville before all the railroads came to
Albany; now it is chiefly a memory. Riding down the street, we stop at
the preacher’s and seat ourselves before the door. It was one of those
scenes one cannot soon forget:—a wide, low, little house, whose
motherly roof reached over and sheltered a snug little porch. There we
sat, after the long hot drive, drinking cool water,—the talkative
little storekeeper who is my daily companion; the silent old black
woman patching pantaloons and saying never a word; the ragged picture
of helpless misfortune who called in just to see the preacher; and
finally the neat matronly preacher’s wife, plump, yellow, and
intelligent. “Own land?” said the wife; “well, only this house.” Then
she added quietly. “We did buy seven hundred acres across up yonder,
and paid for it; but they cheated us out of it. Sells was the owner.”
“Sells!” echoed the ragged misfortune, who was leaning against the
balustrade and listening, “he’s a regular cheat. I worked for him
thirty-seven days this spring, and he paid me in cardboard checks which
were to be cashed at the end of the month. But he never cashed
them,—kept putting me off. Then the sheriff came and took my mule and
corn and furniture—” “Furniture? But furniture is exempt from seizure
by law.” “Well, he took it just the same,” said the hard-faced man.




VIII.
Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece

But the Brute said in his breast, “Till the mills I grind have ceased,
The riches shall be dust of dust, dry ashes be the feast!


    “On the strong and cunning few
    Cynic favors I will strew;
I will stuff their maw with overplus until their spirit dies;
    From the patient and the low
    I will take the joys they know;
    They shall hunger after vanities and still an-hungered go.
Madness shall be on the people, ghastly jealousies arise;
Brother’s blood shall cry on brother up the dead and empty skies.”

WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY.

[Illustration]


Have you ever seen a cotton-field white with harvest,—its golden fleece
hovering above the black earth like a silvery cloud edged with dark
green, its bold white signals waving like the foam of billows from
Carolina to Texas across that Black and human Sea? I have sometimes
half suspected that here the winged ram Chrysomallus left that Fleece
after which Jason and his Argonauts went vaguely wandering into the
shadowy East three thousand years ago; and certainly one might frame a
pretty and not far-fetched analogy of witchery and dragons’ teeth, and
blood and armed men, between the ancient and the modern quest of the
Golden Fleece in the Black Sea.

And now the golden fleece is found; not only found, but, in its
birthplace, woven. For the hum of the cotton-mills is the newest and
most significant thing in the New South to-day. All through the
Carolinas and Georgia, away down to Mexico, rise these gaunt red
buildings, bare and homely, and yet so busy and noisy withal that they
scarce seem to belong to the slow and sleepy land. Perhaps they sprang
from dragons’ teeth. So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still
bows beneath her sceptre. Even the markets that once defied the parvenu
have crept one by one across the seas, and then slowly and reluctantly,
but surely, have started toward the Black Belt.

To be sure, there are those who wag their heads knowingly and tell us
that the capital of the Cotton Kingdom has moved from the Black to the
White Belt,—that the Negro of to-day raises not more than half of the
cotton crop. Such men forget that the cotton crop has doubled, and more
than doubled, since the era of slavery, and that, even granting their
contention, the Negro is still supreme in a Cotton Kingdom larger than
that on which the Confederacy builded its hopes. So the Negro forms
to-day one of the chief figures in a great world-industry; and this,
for its own sake, and in the light of historic interest, makes the
field-hands of the cotton country worth studying.

We seldom study the condition of the Negro to-day honestly and
carefully. It is so much easier to assume that we know it all. Or
perhaps, having already reached conclusions in our own minds, we are
loth to have them disturbed by facts. And yet how little we really know
of these millions,—of their daily lives and longings, of their homely
joys and sorrows, of their real shortcomings and the meaning of their
crimes! All this we can only learn by intimate contact with the masses,
and not by wholesale arguments covering millions separate in time and
space, and differing widely in training and culture. To-day, then, my
reader, let us turn our faces to the Black Belt of Georgia and seek
simply to know the condition of the black farm-laborers of one county
there.

Here in 1890 lived ten thousand Negroes and two thousand whites. The
country is rich, yet the people are poor. The keynote of the Black Belt
is debt; not commercial credit, but debt in the sense of continued
inability on the part of the mass of the population to make income
cover expense. This is the direct heritage of the South from the
wasteful economies of the slave _régime;_ but it was emphasized and
brought to a crisis by the Emancipation of the slaves. In 1860,
Dougherty County had six thousand slaves, worth at least two and a half
millions of dollars; its farms were estimated at three millions,—making
five and a half millions of property, the value of which depended
largely on the slave system, and on the speculative demand for land
once marvellously rich but already partially devitalized by careless
and exhaustive culture. The war then meant a financial crash; in place
of the five and a half millions of 1860, there remained in 1870 only
farms valued at less than two millions. With this came increased
competition in cotton culture from the rich lands of Texas; a steady
fall in the normal price of cotton followed, from about fourteen cents
a pound in 1860 until it reached four cents in 1898. Such a financial
revolution was it that involved the owners of the cotton-belt in debt.
And if things went ill with the master, how fared it with the man?

The plantations of Dougherty County in slavery days were not as
imposing and aristocratic as those of Virginia. The Big House was
smaller and usually one-storied, and sat very near the slave cabins.
Sometimes these cabins stretched off on either side like wings;
sometimes only on one side, forming a double row, or edging the road
that turned into the plantation from the main thoroughfare. The form
and disposition of the laborers’ cabins throughout the Black Belt is
to-day the same as in slavery days. Some live in the self-same cabins,
others in cabins rebuilt on the sites of the old. All are sprinkled in
little groups over the face of the land, centering about some
dilapidated Big House where the head-tenant or agent lives. The general
character and arrangement of these dwellings remains on the whole
unaltered. There were in the county, outside the corporate town of
Albany, about fifteen hundred Negro families in 1898. Out of all these,
only a single family occupied a house with seven rooms; only fourteen
have five rooms or more. The mass live in one- and two-room homes.

The size and arrangements of a people’s homes are no unfair index of
their condition. If, then, we inquire more carefully into these Negro
homes, we find much that is unsatisfactory. All over the face of the
land is the one-room cabin,—now standing in the shadow of the Big
House, now staring at the dusty road, now rising dark and sombre amid
the green of the cotton-fields. It is nearly always old and bare, built
of rough boards, and neither plastered nor ceiled. Light and
ventilation are supplied by the single door and by the square hole in
the wall with its wooden shutter. There is no glass, porch, or
ornamentation without. Within is a fireplace, black and smoky, and
usually unsteady with age. A bed or two, a table, a wooden chest, and a
few chairs compose the furniture; while a stray show-bill or a
newspaper makes up the decorations for the walls. Now and then one may
find such a cabin kept scrupulously neat, with merry steaming
fireplaces and hospitable door; but the majority are dirty and
dilapidated, smelling of eating and sleeping, poorly ventilated, and
anything but homes.

Above all, the cabins are crowded. We have come to associate crowding
with homes in cities almost exclusively. This is primarily because we
have so little accurate knowledge of country life. Here in Dougherty
County one may find families of eight and ten occupying one or two
rooms, and for every ten rooms of house accommodation for the Negroes
there are twenty-five persons. The worst tenement abominations of New
York do not have above twenty-two persons for every ten rooms. Of
course, one small, close room in a city, without a yard, is in many
respects worse than the larger single country room. In other respects
it is better; it has glass windows, a decent chimney, and a trustworthy
floor. The single great advantage of the Negro peasant is that he may
spend most of his life outside his hovel, in the open fields.

There are four chief causes of these wretched homes: First, long custom
born of slavery has assigned such homes to Negroes; white laborers
would be offered better accommodations, and might, for that and similar
reasons, give better work. Secondly, the Negroes, used to such
accommodations, do not as a rule demand better; they do not know what
better houses mean. Thirdly, the landlords as a class have not yet come
to realize that it is a good business investment to raise the standard
of living among labor by slow and judicious methods; that a Negro
laborer who demands three rooms and fifty cents a day would give more
efficient work and leave a larger profit than a discouraged toiler
herding his family in one room and working for thirty cents. Lastly,
among such conditions of life there are few incentives to make the
laborer become a better farmer. If he is ambitious, he moves to town or
tries other labor; as a tenant-farmer his outlook is almost hopeless,
and following it as a makeshift, he takes the house that is given him
without protest.

In such homes, then, these Negro peasants live. The families are both
small and large; there are many single tenants,—widows and bachelors,
and remnants of broken groups. The system of labor and the size of the
houses both tend to the breaking up of family groups: the grown
children go away as contract hands or migrate to town, the sister goes
into service; and so one finds many families with hosts of babies, and
many newly married couples, but comparatively few families with
half-grown and grown sons and daughters. The average size of Negro
families has undoubtedly decreased since the war, primarily from
economic stress. In Russia over a third of the bridegrooms and over
half the brides are under twenty; the same was true of the antebellum
Negroes. Today, however, very few of the boys and less than a fifth of
the Negro girls under twenty are married. The young men marry between
the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five; the young women between twenty
and thirty. Such postponement is due to the difficulty of earning
sufficient to rear and support a family; and it undoubtedly leads, in
the country districts, to sexual immorality. The form of this
immorality, however, is very seldom that of prostitution, and less
frequently that of illegitimacy than one would imagine. Rather, it
takes the form of separation and desertion after a family group has
been formed. The number of separated persons is thirty-five to the
thousand,—a very large number. It would of course be unfair to compare
this number with divorce statistics, for many of these separated women
are in reality widowed, were the truth known, and in other cases the
separation is not permanent. Nevertheless, here lies the seat of
greatest moral danger. There is little or no prostitution among these
Negroes, and over three-fourths of the families, as found by
house-to-house investigation, deserve to be classed as decent people
with considerable regard for female chastity. To be sure, the ideas of
the mass would not suit New England, and there are many loose habits
and notions. Yet the rate of illegitimacy is undoubtedly lower than in
Austria or Italy, and the women as a class are modest. The plague-spot
in sexual relations is easy marriage and easy separation. This is no
sudden development, nor the fruit of Emancipation. It is the plain
heritage from slavery. In those days Sam, with his master’s consent,
“took up” with Mary. No ceremony was necessary, and in the busy life of
the great plantations of the Black Belt it was usually dispensed with.
If now the master needed Sam’s work in another plantation or in another
part of the same plantation, or if he took a notion to sell the slave,
Sam’s married life with Mary was usually unceremoniously broken, and
then it was clearly to the master’s interest to have both of them take
new mates. This widespread custom of two centuries has not been
eradicated in thirty years. To-day Sam’s grandson “takes up” with a
woman without license or ceremony; they live together decently and
honestly, and are, to all intents and purposes, man and wife. Sometimes
these unions are never broken until death; but in too many cases family
quarrels, a roving spirit, a rival suitor, or perhaps more frequently
the hopeless battle to support a family, lead to separation, and a
broken household is the result. The Negro church has done much to stop
this practice, and now most marriage ceremonies are performed by the
pastors. Nevertheless, the evil is still deep seated, and only a
general raising of the standard of living will finally cure it.

Looking now at the county black population as a whole, it is fair to
characterize it as poor and ignorant. Perhaps ten per cent compose the
well-to-do and the best of the laborers, while at least nine per cent
are thoroughly lewd and vicious. The rest, over eighty per cent, are
poor and ignorant, fairly honest and well meaning, plodding, and to a
degree shiftless, with some but not great sexual looseness. Such class
lines are by no means fixed; they vary, one might almost say, with the
price of cotton. The degree of ignorance cannot easily be expressed. We
may say, for instance, that nearly two-thirds of them cannot read or
write. This but partially expresses the fact. They are ignorant of the
world about them, of modern economic organization, of the function of
government, of individual worth and possibilities,—of nearly all those
things which slavery in self-defence had to keep them from learning.
Much that the white boy imbibes from his earliest social atmosphere
forms the puzzling problems of the black boy’s mature years. America is
not another word for Opportunity to _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 county
between master and man,—as, for instance, the Sam Hose affair. As a
result of such a situation, there arose, first, the Black Belt; and,
second, the Migration to Town. The Black Belt was not, as many assumed,
a movement toward fields of labor under more genial climatic
conditions; it was primarily a huddling for self-protection,—a massing
of the black population for mutual defence in order to secure the peace
and tranquillity necessary to economic advance. This movement took
place between Emancipation and 1880, and only partially accomplished
the desired results. The rush to town since 1880 is the
counter-movement of men disappointed in the economic opportunities of
the Black Belt.

In Dougherty County, Georgia, one can see easily the results of this
experiment in huddling for protection. Only ten per cent of the adult
population was born in the county, and yet the blacks outnumber the
whites four or five to one. There is undoubtedly a security to the
blacks in their very numbers,—a personal freedom from arbitrary
treatment, which makes hundreds of laborers cling to Dougherty in spite
of low wages and economic distress. But a change is coming, and slowly
but surely even here the agricultural laborers are drifting to town and
leaving the broad acres behind. Why is this? Why do not the Negroes
become land-owners, and build up the black landed peasantry, which has
for a generation and more been the dream of philanthropist and
statesman?

To the car-window sociologist, to the man who seeks to understand and
know the South by devoting the few leisure hours of a holiday trip to
unravelling the snarl of centuries,—to such men very often the whole
trouble with the black field-hand may be summed up by Aunt Ophelia’s
word, “Shiftless!” They have noted repeatedly scenes like one I saw
last summer. We were riding along the highroad to town at the close of
a long hot day. A couple of young black fellows passed us in a
muleteam, with several bushels of loose corn in the ear. One was
driving, listlessly bent forward, his elbows on his knees,—a
happy-go-lucky, careless picture of irresponsibility. The other was
fast asleep in the bottom of the wagon. As we passed we noticed an ear
of corn fall from the wagon. They never saw it,—not they. A rod farther
on we noted another ear on the ground; and between that creeping mule
and town we counted twenty-six ears of corn. Shiftless? Yes, the
personification of shiftlessness. And yet follow those boys: they are
not lazy; to-morrow morning they’ll be up with the sun; they work hard
when they do work, and they work willingly. They have no sordid,
selfish, money-getting ways, but rather a fine disdain for mere cash.
They’ll loaf before your face and work behind your back with
good-natured honesty. They’ll steal a watermelon, and hand you back
your lost purse intact. Their great defect as laborers lies in their
lack of incentive beyond the mere pleasure of physical exertion. They
are careless because they have not found that it pays to be careful;
they are improvident because the improvident ones of their acquaintance
get on about as well as the provident. Above all, they cannot see why
they should take unusual pains to make the white man’s land better, or
to fatten his mule, or save his corn. On the other hand, the white
land-owner argues that any attempt to improve these laborers by
increased responsibility, or higher wages, or better homes, or land of
their own, would be sure to result in failure. He shows his Northern
visitor the scarred and wretched land; the ruined mansions, the
worn-out soil and mortgaged acres, and says, This is Negro freedom!

Now it happens that both master and man have just enough argument on
their respective sides to make it difficult for them to understand each
other. The Negro dimly personifies in the white man all his ills and
misfortunes; if he is poor, it is because the white man seizes the
fruit of his toil; if he is ignorant, it is because the white man gives
him neither time nor facilities to learn; and, indeed, if any
misfortune happens to him, it is because of some hidden machinations of
“white folks.” On the other hand, the masters and the masters’ sons
have never been able to see why the Negro, instead of settling down to
be day-laborers for bread and clothes, are infected with a silly desire
to rise in the world, and why they are sulky, dissatisfied, and
careless, where their fathers were happy and dumb and faithful. “Why,
you niggers have an easier time than I do,” said a puzzled Albany
merchant to his black customer. “Yes,” he replied, “and so does yo’
hogs.”

Taking, then, the dissatisfied and shiftless field-hand as a
starting-point, let us inquire how the black thousands of Dougherty
have struggled from him up toward their ideal, and what that ideal is.
All social struggle is evidenced by the rise, first of economic, then
of social classes, among a homogeneous population. To-day the following
economic classes are plainly differentiated among these Negroes.

A “submerged tenth” of croppers, with a few paupers; forty per cent who
are metayers and thirty-nine per cent of semi-metayers and
wage-laborers. There are left five per cent of money-renters and six
per cent of freeholders,—the “Upper Ten” of the land. The croppers are
entirely without capital, even in the limited sense of food or money to
keep them from seed-time to harvest. All they furnish is their labor;
the land-owner furnishes land, stock, tools, seed, and house; and at
the end of the year the laborer gets from a third to a half of the
crop. Out of his share, however, comes pay and interest for food and
clothing advanced him during the year. Thus we have a laborer without
capital and without wages, and an employer whose capital is largely his
employees’ wages. It is an unsatisfactory arrangement, both for hirer
and hired, and is usually in vogue on poor land with hard-pressed
owners.

Above the croppers come the great mass of the black population who work
the land on their own responsibility, paying rent in cotton and
supported by the crop-mortgage system. After the war this system was
attractive to the freedmen on account of its larger freedom and its
possibility for making a surplus. But with the carrying out of the
crop-lien system, the deterioration of the land, and the slavery of
debt, the position of the metayers has sunk to a dead level of
practically unrewarded toil. Formerly all tenants had some capital, and
often considerable; but absentee landlordism, rising rack-rent, and
failing cotton have stripped them well-nigh of all, and probably not
over half of them to-day own their mules. The change from cropper to
tenant was accomplished by fixing the rent. If, now, the rent fixed was
reasonable, this was an incentive to the tenant to strive. On the other
hand, if the rent was too high, or if the land deteriorated, the result
was to discourage and check the efforts of the black peasantry. There
is no doubt that the latter case is true; that in Dougherty County
every economic advantage of the price of cotton in market and of the
strivings of the tenant has been taken advantage of by the landlords
and merchants, and swallowed up in rent and interest. If cotton rose in
price, the rent rose even higher; if cotton fell, the rent remained or
followed reluctantly. If the tenant worked hard and raised a large
crop, his rent was raised the next year; if that year the crop failed,
his corn was confiscated and his mule sold for debt. There were, of
course, exceptions to this,—cases of personal kindness and forbearance;
but in the vast majority of cases the rule was to extract the uttermost
farthing from the mass of the black farm laborers.

The average metayer pays from twenty to thirty per cent of his crop in
rent. The result of such rack-rent can only be evil,—abuse and neglect
of the soil, deterioration in the character of the laborers, and a
widespread sense of injustice. “Wherever the country is poor,” cried
Arthur Young, “it is in the hands of metayers,” and “their condition is
more wretched than that of day-laborers.” He was talking of Italy a
century ago; but he might have been talking of Dougherty County to-day.
And especially is that true to-day which he declares was true in France
before the Revolution: “The metayers are considered as little better
than menial servants, removable at pleasure, and obliged to conform in
all things to the will of the landlords.” On this low plane half the
black population of Dougherty County—perhaps more than half the black
millions of this land—are to-day struggling.

A degree above these we may place those laborers who receive money
wages for their work. Some receive a house with perhaps a garden-spot;
then supplies of food and clothing are advanced, and certain fixed
wages are given at the end of the year, varying from thirty to sixty
dollars, out of which the supplies must be paid for, with interest.
About eighteen per cent of the population belong to this class of
semi-metayers, while twenty-two per cent are laborers paid by the month
or year, and are either “furnished” by their own savings or perhaps
more usually by some merchant who takes his chances of payment. Such
laborers receive from thirty-five to fifty cents a day during the
working season. They are usually young unmarried persons, some being
women; and when they marry they sink to the class of metayers, or, more
seldom, become renters.

The renters for fixed money rentals are the first of the emerging
classes, and form five per cent of the families. The sole advantage of
this small class is their freedom to choose their crops, and the
increased responsibility which comes through having money transactions.
While some of the renters differ little in condition from the metayers,
yet on the whole they are more intelligent and responsible persons, and
are the ones who eventually become land-owners. Their better character
and greater shrewdness enable them to gain, perhaps to demand, better
terms in rents; rented farms, varying from forty to a hundred acres,
bear an average rental of about fifty-four dollars a year. The men who
conduct such farms do not long remain renters; either they sink to
metayers, or with a successful series of harvests rise to be
land-owners.

In 1870 the tax-books of Dougherty report no Negroes as landholders. If
there were any such at that time,—and there may have been a few,—their
land was probably held in the name of some white patron,—a method not
uncommon during slavery. In 1875 ownership of land had begun with seven
hundred and fifty acres; ten years later this had increased to over
sixty-five hundred acres, to nine thousand acres in 1890 and ten
thousand in 1900. The total assessed property has in this same period
risen from eighty thousand dollars in 1875 to two hundred and forty
thousand dollars in 1900.

Two circumstances complicate this development and make it in some
respects difficult to be sure of the real tendencies; they are the
panic of 1893, and the low price of cotton in 1898. Besides this, the
system of assessing property in the country districts of Georgia is
somewhat antiquated and of uncertain statistical value; there are no
assessors, and each man makes a sworn return to a tax-receiver. Thus
public opinion plays a large part, and the returns vary strangely from
year to year. Certainly these figures show the small amount of
accumulated capital among the Negroes, and the consequent large
dependence of their property on temporary prosperity. They have little
to tide over a few years of economic depression, and are at the mercy
of the cotton-market far more than the whites. And thus the
land-owners, despite their marvellous efforts, are really a transient
class, continually being depleted by those who fall back into the class
of renters or metayers, and augmented by newcomers from the masses. Of
one hundred land-owners in 1898, half had bought their land since 1893,
a fourth between 1890 and 1893, a fifth between 1884 and 1890, and the
rest between 1870 and 1884. In all, one hundred and eighty-five Negroes
have owned land in this county since 1875.

If all the black land-owners who had ever held land here had kept it or
left it in the hands of black men, the Negroes would have owned nearer
thirty thousand acres than the fifteen thousand they now hold. And yet
these fifteen thousand acres are a creditable showing,—a proof of no
little weight of the worth and ability of the Negro people. If they had
been given an economic start at Emancipation, if they had been in an
enlightened and rich community which really desired their best good,
then we might perhaps call such a result small or even insignificant.
But for a few thousand poor ignorant field-hands, in the face of
poverty, a falling market, and social stress, to save and capitalize
two hundred thousand dollars in a generation has meant a tremendous
effort. The rise of a nation, the pressing forward of a social class,
means a bitter struggle, a hard and soul-sickening battle with the
world such as few of the more favored classes know or appreciate.

Out of the hard economic conditions of this portion of the Black Belt,
only six per cent of the population have succeeded in emerging into
peasant proprietorship; and these are not all firmly fixed, but grow
and shrink in number with the wavering of the cotton-market. Fully
ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of
them sit in hopeless serfdom. For these there is one other avenue of
escape toward which they have turned in increasing numbers, namely,
migration to town. A glance at the distribution of land among the black
owners curiously reveals this fact. In 1898 the holdings were as
follows: Under forty acres, forty-nine families; forty to two hundred
and fifty acres, seventeen families; two hundred and fifty to one
thousand acres, thirteen families; one thousand or more acres, two
families. Now in 1890 there were forty-four holdings, but only nine of
these were under forty acres. The great increase of holdings, then, has
come in the buying of small homesteads near town, where their owners
really share in the town life; this is a part of the rush to town. And
for every land-owner who has thus hurried away from the narrow and hard
conditions of country life, how many field-hands, how many tenants, how
many ruined renters, have joined that long procession? Is it not
strange compensation? The sin of the country districts is visited on
the town, and the social sores of city life to-day may, here in
Dougherty County, and perhaps in many places near and far, look for
their final healing without the city walls.




IX.
Of the Sons of Master and Man

Life treads on life, and heart on heart;
We press too close in church and mart
To keep a dream or grave apart.

MRS. BROWNING.

[Illustration]


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 nine-tenths of the blacks. In other towns the older
settlement of whites has been encircled by a broad band of blacks; in
still other cases little settlements or nuclei of blacks have sprung up
amid surrounding whites. Usually in cities each street has its
distinctive color, and only now and then do the colors meet in close
proximity. Even in the country something of this segregation is
manifest in the smaller areas, and of course in the larger phenomena of
the Black Belt.

All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural
clustering by social grades common to all communities. A Negro slum may
be in dangerous proximity to a white residence quarter, while it is
quite common to find a white slum planted in the heart of a respectable
Negro district. One thing, however, seldom occurs: the best of the
whites and the best of the Negroes almost never live in anything like
close proximity. It thus happens that in nearly every Southern town and
city, both whites and blacks see commonly the worst of each other. This
is a vast change from the situation in the past, when, through the
close contact of master and house-servant in the patriarchal big house,
one found the best of both races in close contact and sympathy, while
at the same time the squalor and dull round of toil among the
field-hands was removed from the sight and hearing of the family. One
can easily see how a person who saw slavery thus from his father’s
parlors, and sees freedom on the streets of a great city, fails to
grasp or comprehend the whole of the new picture. On the other hand,
the settled belief of the mass of the Negroes that the Southern white
people do not have the black man’s best interests at heart has been
intensified in later years by this continual daily contact of the
better class of blacks with the worst representatives of the white
race.

Coming now to the economic relations of the races, we are on ground
made familiar by study, much discussion, and no little philanthropic
effort. And yet with all this there are many essential elements in the
cooperation of Negroes and whites for work and wealth that are too
readily overlooked or not thoroughly understood. The average American
can easily conceive of a rich land awaiting development and filled with
black laborers. To him the Southern problem is simply that of making
efficient workingmen out of this material, by giving them the requisite
technical skill and the help of invested capital. The problem, however,
is by no means as simple as this, from the obvious fact that these
workingmen have been trained for centuries as slaves. They exhibit,
therefore, all the advantages and defects of such training; they are
willing and good-natured, but not self-reliant, provident, or careful.
If now the economic development of the South is to be pushed to the
verge of exploitation, as seems probable, then we have a mass of
workingmen thrown into relentless competition with the workingmen of
the world, but handicapped by a training the very opposite to that of
the modern self-reliant democratic laborer. What the black laborer
needs is careful personal guidance, group leadership of men with hearts
in their bosoms, to train them to foresight, carefulness, and honesty.
Nor does it require any fine-spun theories of racial differences to
prove the necessity of such group training after the brains of the race
have been knocked out by two hundred and fifty years of assiduous
education in submission, carelessness, and stealing. After
Emancipation, it was the plain duty of some one to assume this group
leadership and training of the Negro laborer. I will not stop here to
inquire whose duty it was—whether that of the white ex-master who had
profited by unpaid toil, or the Northern philanthropist whose
persistence brought on the crisis, or the National Government whose
edict freed the bondmen; I will not stop to ask whose duty it was, but
I insist it was the duty of some one to see that these workingmen were
not left alone and unguided, without capital, without land, without
skill, without economic organization, without even the bald protection
of law, order, and decency,—left in a great land, not to settle down to
slow and careful internal development, but destined to be thrown almost
immediately into relentless and sharp competition with the best of
modern workingmen under an economic system where every participant is
fighting for himself, and too often utterly regardless of the rights or
welfare of his neighbor.

For we must never forget that the economic system of the South to-day
which has succeeded the old regime is not the same system as that of
the old industrial North, of England, or of France, with their
trade-unions, their restrictive laws, their written and unwritten
commercial customs, and their long experience. It is, rather, a copy of
that England of the early nineteenth century, before the factory
acts,—the England that wrung pity from thinkers and fired the wrath of
Carlyle. The rod of empire that passed from the hands of Southern
gentlemen in 1865, partly by force, partly by their own petulance, has
never returned to them. Rather it has passed to those men who have come
to take charge of the industrial exploitation of the New South,—the
sons of poor whites fired with a new thirst for wealth and power,
thrifty and avaricious Yankees, and unscrupulous immigrants. Into the
hands of these men the Southern laborers, white and black, have fallen;
and this to their sorrow. For the laborers as such, there is in these
new captains of industry neither love nor hate, neither sympathy nor
romance; it is a cold question of dollars and dividends. Under such a
system all labor is bound to suffer. Even the white laborers are not
yet intelligent, thrifty, and well trained enough to maintain
themselves against the powerful inroads of organized capital. The
results among them, even, are long hours of toil, low wages, child
labor, and lack of protection against usury and cheating. But among the
black laborers all this is aggravated, first, by a race prejudice which
varies from a doubt and distrust among the best element of whites to a
frenzied hatred among the worst; and, secondly, it is aggravated, as I
have said before, by the wretched economic heritage of the freedmen
from slavery. With this training it is difficult for the freedman to
learn to grasp the opportunities already opened to him, and the new
opportunities are seldom given him, but go by favor to the whites.

Left by the best elements of the South with little protection or
oversight, he has been made in law and custom the victim of the worst
and most unscrupulous men in each community. The crop-lien system which
is depopulating the fields of the South is not simply the result of
shiftlessness on the part of Negroes, but is also the result of
cunningly devised laws as to mortgages, liens, and misdemeanors, which
can be made by conscienceless men to entrap and snare the unwary until
escape is impossible, further toil a farce, and protest a crime. I have
seen, in the Black Belt of Georgia, an ignorant, honest Negro buy and
pay for a farm in installments three separate times, and then in the
face of law and decency the enterprising American who sold it to him
pocketed the money and deed and left the black man landless, to labor
on his own land at thirty cents a day. I have seen a black farmer fall
in debt to a white storekeeper, and that storekeeper go to his farm and
strip it of every single marketable article,—mules, ploughs, stored
crops, tools, furniture, bedding, clocks, looking-glass,—and all this
without a sheriff or officer, in the face of the law for homestead
exemptions, and without rendering to a single responsible person any
account or reckoning. And such proceedings can happen, and will happen,
in any community where a class of ignorant toilers are placed by custom
and race-prejudice beyond the pale of sympathy and race-brotherhood. So
long as the best elements of a community do not feel in duty bound to
protect and train and care for the weaker members of their group, they
leave them to be preyed upon by these swindlers and rascals.

This unfortunate economic situation does not mean the hindrance of all
advance in the black South, or the absence of a class of black
landlords and mechanics who, in spite of disadvantages, are
accumulating property and making good citizens. But it does mean that
this class is not nearly so large as a fairer economic system might
easily make it, that those who survive in the competition are
handicapped so as to accomplish much less than they deserve to, and
that, above all, the _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 common-school facilities? What can it expect but
crime and listlessness, offset here and there by the dogged struggles
of the fortunate and more determined who are themselves buoyed by the
hope that in due time the country will come to its senses?

I have thus far sought to make clear the physical, economic, and
political relations of the Negroes and whites in the South, as I have
conceived them, including, for the reasons set forth, crime and
education. But after all that has been said on these more tangible
matters of human contact, there still remains a part essential to a
proper description of the South which it is difficult to describe or
fix in terms easily understood by strangers. It is, in fine, the
atmosphere of the land, the thought and feeling, the thousand and one
little actions which go to make up life. In any community or nation it
is these little things which are most elusive to the grasp and yet most
essential to any clear conception of the group life taken as a whole.
What is thus true of all communities is peculiarly true of the South,
where, outside of written history and outside of printed law, there has
been going on for a generation as deep a storm and stress of human
souls, as intense a ferment of feeling, as intricate a writhing of
spirit, as ever a people experienced. Within and without the sombre
veil of color vast social forces have been at work,—efforts for human
betterment, movements toward disintegration and despair, tragedies and
comedies in social and economic life, and a swaying and lifting and
sinking of human hearts which have made this land a land of mingled
sorrow and joy, of change and excitement and unrest.

The centre of this spiritual turmoil has ever been the millions of
black freedmen and their sons, whose destiny is so fatefully bound up
with that of the nation. And yet the casual observer visiting the South
sees at first little of this. He notes the growing frequency of dark
faces as he rides along,—but otherwise the days slip lazily on, the sun
shines, and this little world seems as happy and contented as other
worlds he has visited. Indeed, on the question of questions—the Negro
problem—he hears so little that there almost seems to be a conspiracy
of silence; the morning papers seldom mention it, and then usually in a
far-fetched academic way, and indeed almost every one seems to forget
and ignore the darker half of the land, until the astonished visitor is
inclined to ask if after all there IS any problem here. But if he
lingers long enough there comes the awakening: perhaps in a sudden
whirl of passion which leaves him gasping at its bitter intensity; more
likely in a gradually dawning sense of things he had not at first
noticed. Slowly but surely his eyes begin to catch the shadows of the
color-line: here he meets crowds of Negroes and whites; then he is
suddenly aware that he cannot discover a single dark face; or again at
the close of a day’s wandering he may find himself in some strange
assembly, where all faces are tinged brown or black, and where he has
the vague, uncomfortable feeling of the stranger. He realizes at last
that silently, resistlessly, the world about flows by him in two great
streams: they ripple on in the same sunshine, they approach and mingle
their waters in seeming carelessness,—then they divide and flow wide
apart. It is done quietly; no mistakes are made, or if one occurs, the
swift arm of the law and of public opinion swings down for a moment, as
when the other day a black man and a white woman were arrested for
talking together on Whitehall Street in Atlanta.

Now if one notices carefully one will see that between these two
worlds, despite much physical contact and daily intermingling, there is
almost no community of intellectual life or point of transference where
the thoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and
sympathy with the thoughts and feelings of the other. Before and
directly after the war, when all the best of the Negroes were domestic
servants in the best of the white families, there were bonds of
intimacy, affection, and sometimes blood relationship, between the
races. They lived in the same home, shared in the family life, often
attended the same church, and talked and conversed with each other. But
the increasing civilization of the Negro since then has naturally meant
the development of higher classes: there are increasing numbers of
ministers, teachers, physicians, merchants, mechanics, and independent
farmers, who by nature and training are the aristocracy and leaders of
the blacks. Between them, however, and the best element of the whites,
there is little or no intellectual commerce. They go to separate
churches, they live in separate sections, they are strictly separated
in all public gatherings, they travel separately, and they are
beginning to read different papers and books. To most libraries,
lectures, concerts, and museums, Negroes are either not admitted at
all, or on terms peculiarly galling to the pride of the very classes
who might otherwise be attracted. The daily paper chronicles the doings
of the black world from afar with no great regard for accuracy; and so
on, throughout the category of means for intellectual
communication,—schools, conferences, efforts for social betterment, and
the like,—it is usually true that the very representatives of the two
races, who for mutual benefit and the welfare of the land ought to be
in complete understanding and sympathy, are so far strangers that one
side thinks all whites are narrow and prejudiced, and the other thinks
educated Negroes dangerous and insolent. Moreover, in a land where the
tyranny of public opinion and the intolerance of criticism is for
obvious historical reasons so strong as in the South, such a situation
is extremely difficult to correct. The white man, as well as the Negro,
is bound and barred by the color-line, and many a scheme of
friendliness and philanthropy, of broad-minded sympathy and generous
fellowship between the two has dropped still-born because some busybody
has forced the color-question to the front and brought the tremendous
force of unwritten law against the innovators.

It is hardly necessary for me to add very much in regard to the social
contact between the races. Nothing has come to replace that finer
sympathy and love between some masters and house servants which the
radical and more uncompromising drawing of the color-line in recent
years has caused almost completely to disappear. In a world where it
means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look
frankly into his eyes and feel his heart beating with red blood; in a
world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more than
legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches,—one can imagine
the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social amenities
between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks and
streetcars.

Here there can be none of that social going down to the people,—the
opening of heart and hand of the best to the worst, in generous
acknowledgment of a common humanity and a common destiny. On the other
hand, in matters of simple almsgiving, where there can be no question
of social contact, and in the succor of the aged and sick, the South,
as if stirred by a feeling of its unfortunate limitations, is generous
to a fault. The black beggar is never turned away without a good deal
more than a crust, and a call for help for the unfortunate meets quick
response. I remember, one cold winter, in Atlanta, when I refrained
from contributing to a public relief fund lest Negroes should be
discriminated against, I afterward inquired of a friend: “Were any
black people receiving aid?” “Why,” said he, “they were _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.”




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.

[Illustration]


It was out in the country, far from home, far from my foster home, on a
dark Sunday night. The road wandered from our rambling log-house up the
stony bed of a creek, past wheat and corn, until we could hear dimly
across the fields a rhythmic cadence of song,—soft, thrilling,
powerful, that swelled and died sorrowfully in our ears. I was a
country schoolteacher then, fresh from the East, and had never seen a
Southern Negro revival. To be sure, we in Berkshire were not perhaps as
stiff and formal as they in Suffolk of olden time; yet we were very
quiet and subdued, and I know not what would have happened those clear
Sabbath mornings had some one punctuated the sermon with a wild scream,
or interrupted the long prayer with a loud Amen! And so most striking
to me, as I approached the village and the little plain church perched
aloft, was the air of intense excitement that possessed that mass of
black folk. A sort of suppressed terror hung in the air and seemed to
seize us,—a pythian madness, a demoniac possession, that lent terrible
reality to song and word. The black and massive form of the preacher
swayed and quivered as the words crowded to his lips and flew at us in
singular eloquence. The people moaned and fluttered, and then the
gaunt-cheeked brown woman beside me suddenly leaped straight into the
air and shrieked like a lost soul, while round about came wail and
groan and outcry, and a scene of human passion such as I had never
conceived before.

Those who have not thus witnessed the frenzy of a Negro revival in the
untouched backwoods of the South can but dimly realize the religious
feeling of the slave; as described, such scenes appear grotesque and
funny, but as seen they are awful. Three things characterized this
religion of the slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy. The
Preacher is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on
American soil. A leader, a politician, an orator, a “boss,” an
intriguer, an idealist,—all these he is, and ever, too, the centre of a
group of men, now twenty, now a thousand in number. The combination of
a certain adroitness with deep-seated earnestness, of tact with
consummate ability, gave him his preeminence, and helps him maintain
it. The type, of course, varies according to time and place, from the
West Indies in the sixteenth century to New England in the nineteenth,
and from the Mississippi bottoms to cities like New Orleans or New
York.

The Music of Negro religion is that plaintive rhythmic melody, with its
touching minor cadences, which, despite caricature and defilement,
still remains the most original and beautiful expression of human life
and longing yet born on American soil. Sprung from the African forests,
where its counterpart can still be heard, it was adapted, changed, and
intensified by the tragic soul-life of the slave, until, under the
stress of law and whip, it became the one true expression of a people’s
sorrow, despair, and hope.

Finally the Frenzy of “Shouting,” when the Spirit of the Lord passed
by, and, seizing the devotee, made him mad with supernatural joy, was
the last essential of Negro religion and the one more devoutly believed
in than all the rest. It varied in expression from the silent rapt
countenance or the low murmur and moan to the mad abandon of physical
fervor,—the stamping, shrieking, and shouting, the rushing to and fro
and wild waving of arms, the weeping and laughing, the vision and the
trance. All this is nothing new in the world, but old as religion, as
Delphi and Endor. And so firm a hold did it have on the Negro, that
many generations firmly believed that without this visible
manifestation of the God there could be no true communion with the
Invisible.

These were the characteristics of Negro religious life as developed up
to the time of Emancipation. Since under the peculiar circumstances of
the black man’s environment they were the one expression of his higher
life, they are of deep interest to the student of his development, both
socially and psychologically. Numerous are the attractive lines of
inquiry that here group themselves. What did slavery mean to the
African savage? What was his attitude toward the World and Life? What
seemed to him good and evil,—God and Devil? Whither went his longings
and strivings, and wherefore were his heart-burnings and
disappointments? Answers to such questions can come only from a study
of Negro religion as a development, through its gradual changes from
the heathenism of the Gold Coast to the institutional Negro church of
Chicago.

Moreover, the religious growth of millions of men, even though they be
slaves, cannot be without potent influence upon their contemporaries.
The Methodists and Baptists of America owe much of their condition to
the silent but potent influence of their millions of Negro converts.
Especially is this noticeable in the South, where theology and
religious philosophy are on this account a long way behind the North,
and where the religion of the poor whites is a plain copy of Negro
thought and methods. The mass of “gospel” hymns which has swept through
American churches and well-nigh ruined our sense of song consists
largely of debased imitations of Negro melodies made by ears that
caught the jingle but not the music, the body but not the soul, of the
Jubilee songs. It is thus clear that the study of Negro religion is not
only a vital part of the history of the Negro in America, but no
uninteresting part of American history.

The Negro church of to-day is the social centre of Negro life in the
United States, and the most characteristic expression of African
character. Take a typical church in a small Virginia town: it is the
“First Baptist”—a roomy brick edifice seating five hundred or more
persons, tastefully finished in Georgia pine, with a carpet, a small
organ, and stained-glass windows. Underneath is a large assembly room
with benches. This building is the central club-house of a community of
a thousand or more Negroes. Various organizations meet here,—the church
proper, the Sunday-school, two or three insurance societies, women’s
societies, secret societies, and mass meetings of various kinds.
Entertainments, suppers, and lectures are held beside the five or six
regular weekly religious services. Considerable sums of money are
collected and expended here, employment is found for the idle,
strangers are introduced, news is disseminated and charity distributed.
At the same time this social, intellectual, and economic centre is a
religious centre of great power. Depravity, Sin, Redemption, Heaven,
Hell, and Damnation are preached twice a Sunday after the crops are
laid by; and few indeed of the community have the hardihood to
withstand conversion. Back of this more formal religion, the Church
often stands as a real conserver of morals, a strengthener of family
life, and the final authority on what is Good and Right.

Thus one can see in the Negro church to-day, reproduced in microcosm,
all the great world from which the Negro is cut off by color-prejudice
and social condition. In the great city churches the same tendency is
noticeable and in many respects emphasized. A great church like the
Bethel of Philadelphia has over eleven hundred members, an edifice
seating fifteen hundred persons and valued at one hundred thousand
dollars, an annual budget of five thousand dollars, and a government
consisting of a pastor with several assisting local preachers, an
executive and legislative board, financial boards and tax collectors;
general church meetings for making laws; sub-divided groups led by
class leaders, a company of militia, and twenty-four auxiliary
societies. The activity of a church like this is immense and
far-reaching, and the bishops who preside over these organizations
throughout the land are among the most powerful Negro rulers in the
world.

Such churches are really governments of men, and consequently a little
investigation reveals the curious fact that, in the South, at least,
practically every American Negro is a church member. Some, to be sure,
are not regularly enrolled, and a few do not habitually attend
services; but, practically, a proscribed people must have a social
centre, and that centre for this people is the Negro church. The census
of 1890 showed nearly twenty-four thousand Negro churches in the
country, with a total enrolled membership of over two and a half
millions, or ten actual church members to every twenty-eight persons,
and in some Southern States one in every two persons. Besides these
there is the large number who, while not enrolled as members, attend
and take part in many of the activities of the church. There is an
organized Negro church for every sixty black families in the nation,
and in some States for every forty families, owning, on an average, a
thousand dollars’ worth of property each, or nearly twenty-six million
dollars in all.

Such, then, is the large development of the Negro church since
Emancipation. The question now is, What have been the successive steps
of this social history and what are the present tendencies? First, we
must realize that no such institution as the Negro church could rear
itself without definite historical foundations. These foundations we
can find if we remember that the social history of the Negro did not
start in America. He was brought from a definite social
environment,—the polygamous clan life under the headship of the chief
and the potent influence of the priest. His religion was
nature-worship, with profound belief in invisible surrounding
influences, good and bad, and his worship was through incantation and
sacrifice. The first rude change in this life was the slave ship and
the West Indian sugar-fields. The plantation organization replaced the
clan and tribe, and the white master replaced the chief with far
greater and more despotic powers. Forced and long-continued toil became
the rule of life, the old ties of blood relationship and kinship
disappeared, and instead of the family appeared a new polygamy and
polyandry, which, in some cases, almost reached promiscuity. It was a
terrific social revolution, and yet some traces were retained of the
former group life, and the chief remaining institution was the Priest
or Medicine-man. He early appeared on the plantation and found his
function as the healer of the sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the
comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong, and the
one who rudely but picturesquely expressed the longing, disappointment,
and resentment of a stolen and oppressed people. Thus, as bard,
physician, judge, and priest, within the narrow limits allowed by the
slave system, rose the Negro preacher, and under him the first church
was not at first by any means Christian nor definitely organized;
rather it was an adaptation and mingling of heathen rites among the
members of each plantation, and roughly designated as Voodooism.
Association with the masters, missionary effort and motives of
expediency gave these rites an early veneer of Christianity, and after
the lapse of many generations the Negro church became Christian.

Two characteristic things must be noticed in regard to the church.
First, it became almost entirely Baptist and Methodist in faith;
secondly, as a social institution it antedated by many decades the
monogamic Negro home. From the very circumstances of its beginning, the
church was confined to the plantation, and consisted primarily of a
series of disconnected units; although, later on, some freedom of
movement was allowed, still this geographical limitation was always
important and was one cause of the spread of the decentralized and
democratic Baptist faith among the slaves. At the same time, the
visible rite of baptism appealed strongly to their mystic temperament.
To-day the Baptist Church is still largest in membership among Negroes,
and has a million and a half communicants. Next in popularity came the
churches organized in connection with the white neighboring churches,
chiefly Baptist and Methodist, with a few Episcopalian and others. The
Methodists still form the second greatest denomination, with nearly a
million members. The faith of these two leading denominations was more
suited to the slave church from the prominence they gave to religious
feeling and fervor. The Negro membership in other denominations has
always been small and relatively unimportant, although the
Episcopalians and Presbyterians are gaining among the more intelligent
classes to-day, and the Catholic Church is making headway in certain
sections. After Emancipation, and still earlier in the North, the Negro
churches largely severed such affiliations as they had had with the
white churches, either by choice or by compulsion. The Baptist churches
became independent, but the Methodists were compelled early to unite
for purposes of episcopal government. This gave rise to the great
African Methodist Church, the greatest Negro organization in the world,
to the Zion Church and the Colored Methodist, and to the black
conferences and churches in this and other denominations.

The second fact noted, namely, that the Negro church antedates the
Negro home, leads to an explanation of much that is paradoxical in this
communistic institution and in the morals of its members. But
especially it leads us to regard this institution as peculiarly the
expression of the inner ethical life of a people in a sense seldom true
elsewhere. Let us turn, then, from the outer physical development of
the church to the more important inner ethical life of the people who
compose it. The Negro has already been pointed out many times as a
religious animal,—a being of that deep emotional nature which turns
instinctively toward the supernatural. Endowed with a rich tropical
imagination and a keen, delicate appreciation of Nature, the
transplanted African lived in a world animate with gods and devils,
elves and witches; full of strange influences,—of Good to be implored,
of Evil to be propitiated. Slavery, then, was to him the dark triumph
of Evil over him. All the hateful powers of the Under-world were
striving against him, and a spirit of revolt and revenge filled his
heart. He called up all the resources of heathenism to aid,—exorcism
and witch-craft, the mysterious Obi worship with its barbarious rites,
spells, and blood-sacrifice even, now and then, of human victims. Weird
midnight orgies and mystic conjurations were invoked, the witch-woman
and the voodoo-priest became the centre of Negro group life, and that
vein of vague superstition which characterizes the unlettered Negro
even to-day was deepened and strengthened.

In spite, however, of such success as that of the fierce Maroons, the
Danish blacks, and others, the spirit of revolt gradually died away
under the untiring energy and superior strength of the slave masters.
By the middle of the eighteenth century the black slave had sunk, with
hushed murmurs, to his place at the bottom of a new economic system,
and was unconsciously ripe for a new philosophy of life. Nothing suited
his condition then better than the doctrines of passive submission
embodied in the newly learned Christianity. Slave masters early
realized this, and cheerfully aided religious propaganda within certain
bounds. The long system of repression and degradation of the Negro
tended to emphasize the elements of his character which made him a
valuable chattel: courtesy became humility, moral strength degenerated
into submission, and the exquisite native appreciation of the beautiful
became an infinite capacity for dumb suffering. The Negro, losing the
joy of this world, eagerly seized upon the offered conceptions of the
next; the avenging Spirit of the Lord enjoining patience in this world,
under sorrow and tribulation until the Great Day when He should lead
His dark children home,—this became his comforting dream. His preacher
repeated the prophecy, and his bards sang,—

“Children, we all shall be free
When the Lord shall appear!”


This deep religious fatalism, painted so beautifully in “Uncle Tom,”
came soon to breed, as all fatalistic faiths will, the sensualist side
by side with the martyr. Under the lax moral life of the plantation,
where marriage was a farce, laziness a virtue, and property a theft, a
religion of resignation and submission degenerated easily, in less
strenuous minds, into a philosophy of indulgence and crime. Many of the
worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in
this period of the slave’s ethical growth. Here it was that the Home
was ruined under the very shadow of the Church, white and black; here
habits of shiftlessness took root, and sullen hopelessness replaced
hopeful strife.

With the beginning of the abolition movement and the gradual growth of
a class of free Negroes came a change. We often neglect the influence
of the freedman before the war, because of the paucity of his numbers
and the small weight he had in the history of the nation. But we must
not forget that his chief influence was internal,—was exerted on the
black world; and that there he was the ethical and social leader.
Huddled as he was in a few centres like Philadelphia, New York, and New
Orleans, the masses of the freedmen sank into poverty and listlessness;
but not all of them. The free Negro leader early arose and his chief
characteristic was intense earnestness and deep feeling on the slavery
question. Freedom became to him a real thing and not a dream. His
religion became darker and more intense, and into his ethics crept a
note of revenge, into his songs a day of reckoning close at hand. The
“Coming of the Lord” swept this side of Death, and came to be a thing
to be hoped for in this day. Through fugitive slaves and irrepressible
discussion this desire for freedom seized the black millions still in
bondage, and became their one ideal of life. The black bards caught new
notes, and sometimes even dared to sing,—

“O Freedom, O Freedom, O Freedom over me!
Before I’ll be a slave
I’ll be buried in my grave,
And go home to my Lord
And be free.”


For fifty years Negro religion thus transformed itself and identified
itself with the dream of Abolition, until that which was a radical fad
in the white North and an anarchistic plot in the white South had
become a religion to the black world. Thus, when Emancipation finally
came, it seemed to the freedman a literal Coming of the Lord. His
fervid imagination was stirred as never before, by the tramp of armies,
the blood and dust of battle, and the wail and whirl of social
upheaval. He stood dumb and motionless before the whirlwind: what had
he to do with it? Was it not the Lord’s doing, and marvellous in his
eyes? Joyed and bewildered with what came, he stood awaiting new
wonders till the inevitable Age of Reaction swept over the nation and
brought the crisis of to-day.

It is difficult to explain clearly the present critical stage of Negro
religion. First, we must remember that living as the blacks do in close
contact with a great modern nation, and sharing, although imperfectly,
the soul-life of that nation, they must necessarily be affected more or
less directly by all the religious and ethical forces that are to-day
moving the United States. These questions and movements are, however,
overshadowed and dwarfed by the (to them) all-important question of
their civil, political, and economic status. They must perpetually
discuss the “Negro Problem,”—must live, move, and have their being in
it, and interpret all else in its light or darkness. With this come,
too, peculiar problems of their inner life,—of the status of women, the
maintenance of Home, the training of children, the accumulation of
wealth, and the prevention of crime. All this must mean a time of
intense ethical ferment, of religious heart-searching and intellectual
unrest. From the double life every American Negro must live, as a Negro
and as an American, as swept on by the current of the nineteenth while
yet struggling in the eddies of the fifteenth century,—from this must
arise a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid sense of
personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence.
The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and
changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and
this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of
doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts,
double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double
words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or revolt, to
hypocrisy or radicalism.

In some such doubtful words and phrases can one perhaps most clearly
picture the peculiar ethical paradox that faces the Negro of to-day and
is tingeing and changing his religious life. Feeling that his rights
and his dearest ideals are being trampled upon, that the public
conscience is ever more deaf to his righteous appeal, and that all the
reactionary forces of prejudice, greed, and revenge are daily gaining
new strength and fresh allies, the Negro faces no enviable dilemma.
Conscious of his impotence, and pessimistic, he often becomes bitter
and vindictive; and his religion, instead of a worship, is a complaint
and a curse, a wail rather than a hope, a sneer rather than a faith. On
the other hand, another type of mind, shrewder and keener and more
tortuous too, sees in the very strength of the anti-Negro movement its
patent weaknesses, and with Jesuitic casuistry is deterred by no
ethical considerations in the endeavor to turn this weakness to the
black man’s strength. Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable
streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in
anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy. The one type of Negro stands
almost ready to curse God and die, and the other is too often found a
traitor to right and a coward before force; the one is wedded to ideals
remote, whimsical, perhaps impossible of realization; the other forgets
that life is more than meat and the body more than raiment. But, after
all, is not this simply the writhing of the age translated into
black,—the triumph of the Lie which today, with its false culture,
faces the hideousness of the anarchist assassin?

To-day the two groups of Negroes, the one in the North, the other in
the South, represent these divergent ethical tendencies, the first
tending toward radicalism, the other toward hypocritical compromise. It
is no idle regret with which the white South mourns the loss of the
old-time Negro,—the frank, honest, simple old servant who stood for the
earlier religious age of submission and humility. With all his laziness
and lack of many elements of true manhood, he was at least
open-hearted, faithful, and sincere. To-day he is gone, but who is to
blame for his going? Is it not those very persons who mourn for him? Is
it not the tendency, born of Reconstruction and Reaction, to found a
society on lawlessness and deception, to tamper with the moral fibre of
a naturally honest and straightforward people until the whites threaten
to become ungovernable tyrants and the blacks criminals and hypocrites?
Deception is the natural defence of the weak against the strong, and
the South used it for many years against its conquerors; to-day it must
be prepared to see its black proletariat turn that same two-edged
weapon against itself. And how natural this is! The death of Denmark
Vesey and Nat Turner proved long since to the Negro the present
hopelessness of physical defence. Political defence is becoming less
and less available, and economic defence is still only partially
effective. But there is a patent defence at hand,—the defence of
deception and flattery, of cajoling and lying. It is the same defence
which peasants of the Middle Age used and which left its stamp on their
character for centuries. To-day the young Negro of the South who would
succeed cannot be frank and outspoken, honest and self-assertive, but
rather he is daily tempted to be silent and wary, politic and sly; he
must flatter and be pleasant, endure petty insults with a smile, shut
his eyes to wrong; in too many cases he sees positive personal
advantage in deception and lying. His real thoughts, his real
aspirations, must be guarded in whispers; he must not criticise, he
must not complain. Patience, humility, and adroitness must, in these
growing black youth, replace impulse, manliness, and courage. With this
sacrifice there is an economic opening, and perhaps peace and some
prosperity. Without this there is riot, migration, or crime. Nor is
this situation peculiar to the Southern United States, is it not rather
the only method by which undeveloped races have gained the right to
share modern culture? The price of culture is a Lie.

On the other hand, in the North the tendency is to emphasize the
radicalism of the Negro. Driven from his birthright in the South by a
situation at which every fibre of his more outspoken and assertive
nature revolts, he finds himself in a land where he can scarcely earn a
decent living amid the harsh competition and the color discrimination.
At the same time, through schools and periodicals, discussions and
lectures, he is intellectually quickened and awakened. The soul, long
pent up and dwarfed, suddenly expands in new-found freedom. What wonder
that every tendency is to excess,—radical complaint, radical remedies,
bitter denunciation or angry silence. Some sink, some rise. The
criminal and the sensualist leave the church for the gambling-hell and
the brothel, and fill the slums of Chicago and Baltimore; the better
classes segregate themselves from the group-life of both white and
black, and form an aristocracy, cultured but pessimistic, whose bitter
criticism stings while it points out no way of escape. They despise the
submission and subserviency of the Southern Negroes, but offer no other
means by which a poor and oppressed minority can exist side by side
with its masters. Feeling deeply and keenly the tendencies and
opportunities of the age in which they live, their souls are bitter at
the fate which drops the Veil between; and the very fact that this
bitterness is natural and justifiable only serves to intensify it and
make it more maddening.

Between the two extreme types of ethical attitude which I have thus
sought to make clear wavers the mass of the millions of Negroes, North
and South; and their religious life and activity partake of this social
conflict within their ranks. Their churches are differentiating,—now
into groups of cold, fashionable devotees, in no way distinguishable
from similar white groups save in color of skin; now into large social
and business institutions catering to the desire for information and
amusement of their members, warily avoiding unpleasant questions both
within and without the black world, and preaching in effect if not in
word: _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.”




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.

[Illustration]


“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.




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.

[Illustration]


This is the story of a human heart,—the tale of a black boy who many
long years ago began to struggle with life that he might know the world
and know himself. Three temptations he met on those dark dunes that lay
gray and dismal before the wonder-eyes of the child: the temptation of
Hate, that stood out against the red dawn; the temptation of Despair,
that darkened noonday; and the temptation of Doubt, that ever steals
along with twilight. Above all, you must hear of the vales he
crossed,—the Valley of Humiliation and the Valley of the Shadow of
Death.

I saw Alexander Crummell first at a Wilberforce commencement season,
amid its bustle and crush. Tall, frail, and black he stood, with simple
dignity and an unmistakable air of good breeding. I talked with him
apart, where the storming of the lusty young orators could not harm us.
I spoke to him politely, then curiously, then eagerly, as I began to
feel the fineness of his character,—his calm courtesy, the sweetness of
his strength, and his fair blending of the hope and truth of life.
Instinctively I bowed before this man, as one bows before the prophets
of the world. Some seer he seemed, that came not from the crimson Past
or the gray To-come, but from the pulsing Now,—that mocking world which
seemed to me at once so light and dark, so splendid and sordid.
Fourscore years had he wandered in this same world of mine, within the
Veil.

He was born with the Missouri Compromise and lay a-dying amid the
echoes of Manila and El Caney: stirring times for living, times dark to
look back upon, darker to look forward to. The black-faced lad that
paused over his mud and marbles seventy years ago saw puzzling vistas
as he looked down the world. The slave-ship still groaned across the
Atlantic, faint cries burdened the Southern breeze, and the great black
father whispered mad tales of cruelty into those young ears. From the
low doorway the mother silently watched her boy at play, and at
nightfall sought him eagerly lest the shadows bear him away to the land
of slaves.

So his young mind worked and winced and shaped curiously a vision of
Life; and in the midst of that vision ever stood one dark figure
alone,—ever with the hard, thick countenance of that bitter father, and
a form that fell in vast and shapeless folds. Thus the temptation of
Hate grew and shadowed the growing child,—gliding stealthily into his
laughter, fading into his play, and seizing his dreams by day and night
with rough, rude turbulence. So the black boy asked of sky and sun and
flower the never-answered Why? and loved, as he grew, neither the world
nor the world’s rough ways.

Strange temptation for a child, you may think; and yet in this wide
land to-day a thousand thousand dark children brood before this same
temptation, and feel its cold and shuddering arms. For them, perhaps,
some one will some day lift the Veil,—will come tenderly and cheerily
into those sad little lives and brush the brooding hate away, just as
Beriah Green strode in upon the life of Alexander Crummell. And before
the bluff, kind-hearted man the shadow seemed less dark. Beriah Green
had a school in Oneida County, New York, with a score of mischievous
boys. “I’m going to bring a black boy here to educate,” said Beriah
Green, as only a crank and an abolitionist would have dared to say.
“Oho!” laughed the boys. “Ye-es,” said his wife; and Alexander came.
Once before, the black boy had sought a school, had travelled, cold and
hungry, four hundred miles up into free New Hampshire, to Canaan. But
the godly farmers hitched ninety yoke of oxen to the abolition
schoolhouse and dragged it into the middle of the swamp. The black boy
trudged away.

The nineteenth was the first century of human sympathy,—the age when
half wonderingly we began to descry in others that transfigured spark
of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhoppers and peasants, and
tramps and thieves, and millionaires and—sometimes—Negroes, became
throbbing souls whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we
half gasped with surprise, crying, “Thou too! Hast Thou seen Sorrow and
the dull waters of Hopelessness? Hast Thou known Life?” And then all
helplessly we peered into those Other-worlds, and wailed, “O World of
Worlds, how shall man make you one?”

So in that little Oneida school there came to those schoolboys a
revelation of thought and longing beneath one black skin, of which they
had not dreamed before. And to the lonely boy came a new dawn of
sympathy and inspiration. The shadowy, formless thing—the temptation of
Hate, that hovered between him and the world—grew fainter and less
sinister. It did not wholly fade away, but diffused itself and lingered
thick at the edges. Through it the child now first saw the blue and
gold of life,—the sun-swept road that ran ’twixt heaven and earth until
in one far-off wan wavering line they met and kissed. A vision of life
came to the growing boy,—mystic, wonderful. He raised his head,
stretched himself, breathed deep of the fresh new air. Yonder, behind
the forests, he heard strange sounds; then glinting through the trees
he saw, far, far away, the bronzed hosts of a nation calling,—calling
faintly, calling loudly. He heard the hateful clank of their chains; he
felt them cringe and grovel, and there rose within him a protest and a
prophecy. And he girded himself to walk down the world.

A voice and vision called him to be a priest,—a seer to lead the
uncalled out of the house of bondage. He saw the headless host turn
toward him like the whirling of mad waters,—he stretched forth his
hands eagerly, and then, even as he stretched them, suddenly there
swept across the vision the temptation of Despair.

They were not wicked men,—the problem of life is not the problem of the
wicked,—they were calm, good men, Bishops of the Apostolic Church of
God, and strove toward righteousness. They said slowly, “It is all very
natural—it is even commendable; but the General Theological Seminary of
the Episcopal Church cannot admit a Negro.” And when that thin,
half-grotesque figure still haunted their doors, they put their hands
kindly, half sorrowfully, on his shoulders, and said, “Now,—of course,
we—we know how _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
heavy-lined beneath his snowy hair; lighting and shading, now with
inspiration for the future, now in innocent pain at some human
wickedness, now with sorrow at some hard memory from the past. The more
I met Alexander Crummell, the more I felt how much that world was
losing which knew so little of him. In another age he might have sat
among the elders of the land in purple-bordered toga; in another
country mothers might have sung him to the cradles.

He did his work,—he did it nobly and well; and yet I sorrow that here
he worked alone, with so little human sympathy. His name to-day, in
this broad land, means little, and comes to fifty million ears laden
with no incense of memory or emulation. And herein lies the tragedy of
the age: not that men are poor,—all men know something of poverty; not
that men are wicked,—who is good? not that men are ignorant,—what is
Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.

He sat one morning gazing toward the sea. He smiled and said, “The gate
is rusty on the hinges.” That night at star-rise a wind came moaning
out of the west to blow the gate ajar, and then the soul I loved fled
like a flame across the Seas, and in its seat sat Death.

I wonder where he is to-day? I wonder if in that dim world beyond, as
he came gliding in, there rose on some wan throne a King,—a dark and
pierced Jew, who knows the writhings of the earthly damned, saying, as
he laid those heart-wrung talents down, “Well done!” while round about
the morning stars sat singing.




XIII.
Of the Coming of John

What bring they ’neath the midnight,
    Beside the River-sea?
They bring the human heart wherein
    No nightly calm can be;
That droppeth never with the wind,
    Nor drieth with the dew;
O calm it, God; thy calm is broad
    To cover spirits too.
        The river floweth on.

MRS. BROWNING.

[Illustration]


Carlisle Street runs westward from the centre of Johnstown, across a
great black bridge, down a hill and up again, by little shops and
meat-markets, past single-storied homes, until suddenly it stops
against a wide green lawn. It is a broad, restful place, with two large
buildings outlined against the west. When at evening the winds come
swelling from the east, and the great pall of the city’s smoke hangs
wearily above the valley, then the red west glows like a dreamland down
Carlisle Street, and, at the tolling of the supper-bell, throws the
passing forms of students in dark silhouette against the sky. Tall and
black, they move slowly by, and seem in the sinister light to flit
before the city like dim warning ghosts. Perhaps they are; for this is
Wells Institute, and these black students have few dealings with the
white city below.

And if you will notice, night after night, there is one dark form that
ever hurries last and late toward the twinkling lights of Swain
Hall,—for Jones is never on time. A long, straggling fellow he is,
brown and hard-haired, who seems to be growing straight out of his
clothes, and walks with a half-apologetic roll. He used perpetually to
set the quiet dining-room into waves of merriment, as he stole to his
place after the bell had tapped for prayers; he seemed so perfectly
awkward. And yet one glance at his face made one forgive him much,—that
broad, good-natured smile in which lay no bit of art or artifice, but
seemed just bubbling good-nature and genuine satisfaction with the
world.

He came to us from Altamaha, away down there beneath the gnarled oaks
of Southeastern Georgia, where the sea croons to the sands and the
sands listen till they sink half drowned beneath the waters, rising
only here and there in long, low islands. The white folk of Altamaha
voted John a good boy,—fine plough-hand, good in the rice-fields, handy
everywhere, and always good-natured and respectful. But they shook
their heads when his mother wanted to send him off to school. “It’ll
spoil him,—ruin him,” they said; and they talked as though they knew.
But full half the black folk followed him proudly to the station, and
carried his queer little trunk and many bundles. And there they shook
and shook hands, and the girls kissed him shyly and the boys clapped
him on the back. So the train came, and he pinched his little sister
lovingly, and put his great arms about his mother’s neck, and then was
away with a puff and a roar into the great yellow world that flamed and
flared about the doubtful pilgrim. Up the coast they hurried, past the
squares and palmettos of Savannah, through the cotton-fields and
through the weary night, to Millville, and came with the morning to the
noise and bustle of Johnstown.

And they that stood behind, that morning in Altamaha, and watched the
train as it noisily bore playmate and brother and son away to the
world, had thereafter one ever-recurring word,—“When John comes.” Then
what parties were to be, and what speakings in the churches; what new
furniture in the front room,—perhaps even a new front room; and there
would be a new schoolhouse, with John as teacher; and then perhaps a
big wedding; all this and more—when John comes. But the white people
shook their heads.

At first he was coming at Christmas-time,—but the vacation proved too
short; and then, the next summer,—but times were hard and schooling
costly, and so, instead, he worked in Johnstown. And so it drifted to
the next summer, and the next,—till playmates scattered, and mother
grew gray, and sister went up to the Judge’s kitchen to work. And still
the legend lingered,—“When John comes.”

Up at the Judge’s they rather liked this refrain; for they too had a
John—a fair-haired, smooth-faced boy, who had played many a long
summer’s day to its close with his darker namesake. “Yes, sir! John is
at Princeton, sir,” said the broad-shouldered gray-haired Judge every
morning as he marched down to the post-office. “Showing the Yankees
what a Southern gentleman can do,” he added; and strode home again with
his letters and papers. Up at the great pillared house they lingered
long over the Princeton letter,—the Judge and his frail wife, his
sister and growing daughters. “It’ll make a man of him,” said the
Judge, “college is the place.” And then he asked the shy little
waitress, “Well, Jennie, how’s your John?” and added reflectively, “Too
bad, too bad your mother sent him off—it will spoil him.” And the
waitress wondered.

Thus in the far-away Southern village the world lay waiting, half
consciously, the coming of two young men, and dreamed in an
inarticulate way of new things that would be done and new thoughts that
all would think. And yet it was singular that few thought of two
Johns,—for the black folk thought of one John, and he was black; and
the white folk thought of another John, and he was white. And neither
world thought the other world’s thought, save with a vague unrest.

Up in Johnstown, at the Institute, we were long puzzled at the case of
John Jones. For a long time the clay seemed unfit for any sort of
moulding. He was loud and boisterous, always laughing and singing, and
never able to work consecutively at anything. He did not know how to
study; he had no idea of thoroughness; and with his tardiness,
carelessness, and appalling good-humor, we were sore perplexed. One
night we sat in faculty-meeting, worried and serious; for Jones was in
trouble again. This last escapade was too much, and so we solemnly
voted “that Jones, on account of repeated disorder and inattention to
work, be suspended for the rest of the term.”

It seemed to us that the first time life ever struck Jones as a really
serious thing was when the Dean told him he must leave school. He
stared at the gray-haired man blankly, with great eyes. “Why,—why,” he
faltered, “but—I haven’t graduated!” Then the Dean slowly and clearly
explained, reminding him of the tardiness and the carelessness, of the
poor lessons and neglected work, of the noise and disorder, until the
fellow hung his head in confusion. Then he said quickly, “But you won’t
tell mammy and sister,—you won’t write mammy, now will you? For if you
won’t I’ll go out into the city and work, and come back next term and
show you something.” So the Dean promised faithfully, and John
shouldered his little trunk, giving neither word nor look to the
giggling boys, and walked down Carlisle Street to the great city, with
sober eyes and a set and serious face.

Perhaps we imagined it, but someway it seemed to us that the serious
look that crept over his boyish face that afternoon never left it
again. When he came back to us he went to work with all his rugged
strength. It was a hard struggle, for things did not come easily to
him,—few crowding memories of early life and teaching came to help him
on his new way; but all the world toward which he strove was of his own
building, and he builded slow and hard. As the light dawned lingeringly
on his new creations, he sat rapt and silent before the vision, or
wandered alone over the green campus peering through and beyond the
world of men into a world of thought. And the thoughts at times puzzled
him sorely; he could not see just why the circle was not square, and
carried it out fifty-six decimal places one midnight,—would have gone
further, indeed, had not the matron rapped for lights out. He caught
terrible colds lying on his back in the meadows of nights, trying to
think out the solar system; he had grave doubts as to the ethics of the
Fall of Rome, and strongly suspected the Germans of being thieves and
rascals, despite his textbooks; he pondered long over every new Greek
word, and wondered why this meant that and why it couldn’t mean
something else, and how it must have felt to think all things in Greek.
So he thought and puzzled along for himself,—pausing perplexed where
others skipped merrily, and walking steadily through the difficulties
where the rest stopped and surrendered.

Thus he grew in body and soul, and with him his clothes seemed to grow
and arrange themselves; coat sleeves got longer, cuffs appeared, and
collars got less soiled. Now and then his boots shone, and a new
dignity crept into his walk. And we who saw daily a new thoughtfulness
growing in his eyes began to expect something of this plodding boy.
Thus he passed out of the preparatory school into college, and we who
watched him felt four more years of change, which almost transformed
the tall, grave man who bowed to us commencement morning. He had left
his queer thought-world and come back to a world of motion and of men.
He looked now for the first time sharply about him, and wondered he had
seen so little before. He grew slowly to feel almost for the first time
the Veil that lay between him and the white world; he first noticed now
the oppression that had not seemed oppression before, differences that
erstwhile seemed natural, restraints and slights that in his boyhood
days had gone unnoticed or been greeted with a laugh. He felt angry now
when men did not call him “Mister,” he clenched his hands at the “Jim
Crow” cars, and chafed at the color-line that hemmed in him and his. A
tinge of sarcasm crept into his speech, and a vague bitterness into his
life; and he sat long hours wondering and planning a way around these
crooked things. Daily he found himself shrinking from the choked and
narrow life of his native town. And yet he always planned to go back to
Altamaha,—always planned to work there. Still, more and more as the day
approached he hesitated with a nameless dread; and even the day after
graduation he seized with eagerness the offer of the Dean to send him
North with the quartette during the summer vacation, to sing for the
Institute. A breath of air before the plunge, he said to himself in
half apology.

It was a bright September afternoon, and the streets of New York were
brilliant with moving men. They reminded John of the sea, as he sat in
the square and watched them, so changelessly changing, so bright and
dark, so grave and gay. He scanned their rich and faultless clothes,
the way they carried their hands, the shape of their hats; he peered
into the hurrying carriages. Then, leaning back with a sigh, he said,
“This is the World.” The notion suddenly seized him to see where the
world was going; since many of the richer and brighter seemed hurrying
all one way. So when a tall, light-haired young man and a little
talkative lady came by, he rose half hesitatingly and followed them. Up
the street they went, past stores and gay shops, across a broad square,
until with a hundred others they entered the high portal of a great
building.

He was pushed toward the ticket-office with the others, and felt in his
pocket for the new five-dollar bill he had hoarded. There seemed really
no time for hesitation, so he drew it bravely out, passed it to the
busy clerk, and received simply a ticket but no change. When at last he
realized that he had paid five dollars to enter he knew not what, he
stood stockstill amazed. “Be careful,” said a low voice behind him;
“you must not lynch the colored gentleman simply because he’s in your
way,” and a girl looked up roguishly into the eyes of her fair-haired
escort. A shade of annoyance passed over the escort’s face. “You _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 geführt, ziehet dahin.”


Amid the trees in the dim morning twilight he watched their shadows
dancing and heard their horses thundering toward him, until at last
they came sweeping like a storm, and he saw in front that haggard
white-haired man, whose eyes flashed red with fury. Oh, how he pitied
him,—pitied him,—and wondered if he had the coiling twisted rope. Then,
as the storm burst round him, he rose slowly to his feet and turned his
closed eyes toward the Sea.

And the world whistled in his ears.




XIV.
Of the Sorrow Songs

I walk through the churchyard
    To lay this body down;
I know moon-rise, I know star-rise;
I walk in the moonlight, I walk in the starlight;
I’ll lie in the grave and stretch out my arms,
I’ll go to judgment in the evening of the day,
And my soul and thy soul shall meet that day,
    When I lay this body down.

NEGRO SONG.

[Illustration]


They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days—Sorrow
Songs—for they were weary at heart. And so before each thought that I
have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these
weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men. Ever
since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely. They came
out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them
as of me and of mine. Then in after years when I came to Nashville I
saw the great temple builded of these songs towering over the pale
city. To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and
its bricks were red with the blood and dust of toil. Out of them rose
for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of
the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past.

Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God
himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has
expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so
by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the
slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the
most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas.
It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above
all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but
notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of
the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.

Away back in the thirties the melody of these slave songs stirred the
nation, but the songs were soon half forgotten. Some, like “Near the
lake where drooped the willow,” passed into current airs and their
source was forgotten; others were caricatured on the “minstrel” stage
and their memory died away. Then in war-time came the singular Port
Royal experiment after the capture of Hilton Head, and perhaps for the
first time the North met the Southern slave face to face and heart to
heart with no third witness. The Sea Islands of the Carolinas, where
they met, were filled with a black folk of primitive type, touched and
moulded less by the world about them than any others outside the Black
Belt. Their appearance was uncouth, their language funny, but their
hearts were human and their singing stirred men with a mighty power.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson hastened to tell of these songs, and Miss
McKim and others urged upon the world their rare beauty. But the world
listened only half credulously until the Fisk Jubilee Singers sang the
slave songs so deeply into the world’s heart that it can never wholly
forget them again.

There was once a blacksmith’s son born at Cadiz, New York, who in the
changes of time taught school in Ohio and helped defend Cincinnati from
Kirby Smith. Then he fought at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and
finally served in the Freedmen’s Bureau at Nashville. Here he formed a
Sunday-school class of black children in 1866, and sang with them and
taught them to sing. And then they taught him to sing, and when once
the glory of the Jubilee songs passed into the soul of George L. White,
he knew his life-work was to let those Negroes sing to the world as
they had sung to him. So in 1871 the pilgrimage of the Fisk Jubilee
Singers began. North to Cincinnati they rode,—four half-clothed black
boys and five girl-women,—led by a man with a cause and a purpose. They
stopped at Wilberforce, the oldest of Negro schools, where a black
bishop blessed them. Then they went, fighting cold and starvation, shut
out of hotels, and cheerfully sneered at, ever northward; and ever the
magic of their song kept thrilling hearts, until a burst of applause in
the Congregational Council at Oberlin revealed them to the world. They
came to New York and Henry Ward Beecher dared to welcome them, even
though the metropolitan dailies sneered at his “Nigger Minstrels.” So
their songs conquered till they sang across the land and across the
sea, before Queen and Kaiser, in Scotland and Ireland, Holland and
Switzerland. Seven years they sang, and brought back a hundred and
fifty thousand dollars to found Fisk University.

Since their day they have been imitated—sometimes well, by the singers
of Hampton and Atlanta, sometimes ill, by straggling quartettes.
Caricature has sought again to spoil the quaint beauty of the music,
and has filled the air with many debased melodies which vulgar ears
scarce know from the real. But the true Negro folk-song still lives in
the hearts of those who have heard them truly sung and in the hearts of
the Negro people.

What are these songs, and what do they mean? I know little of music and
can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and
knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the
slave to the world. They tell us in these eager days that life was
joyous to the black slave, careless and happy. I can easily believe
this of some, of many. But not all the past South, though it rose from
the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching witness of these songs. They
are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment;
they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer
world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.

The songs are indeed the siftings of centuries; the music is far more
ancient than the words, and in it we can trace here and there signs of
development. My grandfather’s grandmother was seized by an evil Dutch
trader two centuries ago; and coming to the valleys of the Hudson and
Housatonic, black, little, and lithe, she shivered and shrank in the
harsh north winds, looked longingly at the hills, and often crooned a
heathen melody to the child between her knees, thus:

[Illustration]

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:

[Illustration]

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:

[Illustration]

A black woman said of the song, “It can’t be sung without a full heart
and a troubled sperrit.” The same voice sings here that sings in the
German folk-song:

“Jetz Geh i’ an’s brunele, trink’ aber net.”


Of death the Negro showed little fear, but talked of it familiarly and
even fondly as simply a crossing of the waters, perhaps—who knows?—back
to his ancient forests again. Later days transfigured his fatalism, and
amid the dust and dirt the toiler sang:

“Dust, dust and ashes, fly over my grave,
But the Lord shall bear my spirit home.”


The things evidently borrowed from the surrounding world undergo
characteristic change when they enter the mouth of the slave.
Especially is this true of Bible phrases. “Weep, O captive daughter of
Zion,” is quaintly turned into “Zion, weep-a-low,” and the wheels of
Ezekiel are turned every way in the mystic dreaming of the slave, till
he says:

“There’s a little wheel a-turnin’ in-a-my heart.”


As in olden time, the words of these hymns were improvised by some
leading minstrel of the religious band. The circumstances of the
gathering, however, the rhythm of the songs, and the limitations of
allowable thought, confined the poetry for the most part to single or
double lines, and they seldom were expanded to quatrains or longer
tales, although there are some few examples of sustained efforts,
chiefly paraphrases of the Bible. Three short series of verses have
always attracted me,—the one that heads this chapter, of one line of
which Thomas Wentworth Higginson has fittingly said, “Never, it seems
to me, since man first lived and suffered was his infinite longing for
peace uttered more plaintively.” The second and third are descriptions
of the Last Judgment,—the one a late improvisation, with some traces of
outside influence:

“Oh, the stars in the elements are falling,
And the moon drips away into blood,
And the ransomed of the Lord are returning unto God,
Blessed be the name of the Lord.”


And the other earlier and homelier picture from the low coast lands:

“Michael, haul the boat ashore,
Then you’ll hear the horn they blow,
Then you’ll hear the trumpet sound,
Trumpet sound the world around,
Trumpet sound for rich and poor,
Trumpet sound the Jubilee,
Trumpet sound for you and me.”


Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a
faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair
change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in
life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless
justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is
always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their
souls and not by their skins. Is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow
Songs sing true?

The silently growing assumption of this age is that the probation of
races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven
inefficiency and not worth the saving. Such an assumption is the
arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds
of men. A thousand years ago such an assumption, easily possible, would
have made it difficult for the Teuton to prove his right to life. Two
thousand years ago such dogmatism, readily welcome, would have scouted
the idea of blond races ever leading civilization. So wofully
unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the
meaning of “swift” and “slow” in human doing, and the limits of human
perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of
science. Why should Æschylus have sung two thousand years before
Shakespeare was born? Why has civilization flourished in Europe, and
flickered, flamed, and died in Africa? So long as the world stands
meekly dumb before such questions, shall this nation proclaim its
ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by denying freedom of opportunity
to those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty?

Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were
here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours:
a gift of story and song—soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and
unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the
wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast
economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could
have done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit. Around us the history of
the land has centred for thrice a hundred years; out of the nation’s
heart we have called all that was best to throttle and subdue all that
was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice, have billowed over
this people, and they have found peace only in the altars of the God of
Right. Nor has our gift of the Spirit been merely passive. Actively we
have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation,—we
fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with
theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong,
careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the
nation be smitten with a curse. Our song, our toil, our cheer, and
warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood. Are not
these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and striving? Would
America have been America without her Negro people?

Even so is the hope that sang in the songs of my fathers well sung. If
somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good,
pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend
the Veil and the prisoned shall go free. Free, free as the sunshine
trickling down the morning into these high windows of mine, free as
yonder fresh young voices welling up to me from the caverns of brick
and mortar below—swelling with song, instinct with life, tremulous
treble and darkening bass. My children, my little children, are singing
to the sunshine, and thus they sing:

[Illustration]

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




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