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The Souls of Black Folk

by W. E. B. Du Bois

Herein is Written

The Forethought

I. Of Our Spiritual Strivings

II. Of the Dawn of Freedom

III. Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others

IV. Of the Meaning of Progress

V. Of the Wings of Atalanta

VI. Of the Training of Black Men

VII. Of the Black Belt

VIII. Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece

IX. Of the Sons of Master and Man

X. Of the Faith of the Fathers

XI. Of the Passing of the First-Born

XII. Of Alexander Crummell

XIII. Of the Coming of John

XIV. Of the Sorrow Songs

The Afterthought

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