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Title: The Soul of John Brown
Author: Graham, Stephen
Language: English
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THE SOUL OF JOHN BROWN
[Illustration: LOGO]
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
THE SOUL OF
JOHN BROWN
BY
STEPHEN GRAHAM
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1920
_All Rights Reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1920,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1920.
CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I Thoughts on Slavery 3
II In Virginia 22
III Orators and Actors, Preachers and Singers 70
IV In Tennessee 97
V Marching Through Georgia 119
VI Tramping to the Sea 152
VII After the War: the Vote 182
VIII In Alabama: Color and Color Prejudice 195
IX The Southern Point of View 211
X Exodus 232
XI In North Florida and New Orleans 240
XII The New Negro Mind 263
XIII Negro Leadership 282
XIV The World Aspect 291
XV Up the Mississippi 309
XVI At Vicksburg 328
The Negro slaves were released in 1863. They and their children number
twelve millions out of a total of a hundred millions of all races
blending in America. Where do the children of the slaves stand to-day?
I
THOUGHTS ON SLAVERY
Although Charles Lynch of Virginia used to suspend British farmers by
their thumbs until they cried out _Liberty for ever!_ and lynching
has continued ever since, America is nevertheless at bottom free,
or at least was intended to be so by the idealists and politicians
who brought her forth. America is a living reproof of Europe, and it
has been generally conceived of as a land where men should suffer
no encroachment upon their personal liberty, where they should reap
duly the fruits of their labors, where no man should sap their rugged
independence or infringe upon the sovereign equality of their social
rights, where government should be entirely by consent of the governed,
not handed down from above as from superior beings or masters, but
controlled from below, from the broad base of toiling humanity.
The first discoverers were plunderers and seekers after barbaric
gold and gems, but her real pioneers were God-fearing men who laid
the foundations of modern American civilization by honest work and a
boundless belief in the development of free democracy. The institution
of slavery was therefore the thing which in theory was most abhorrent
to the American mind. It is a curious anomaly that a very short while
after the Declaration of Independence the land from which America
separated became free of slavery, and the British flag pre-eminently
the flag of freedom. But America, freed though she had become from
political interference on the part of Britain, nevertheless inherited
Negro slavery; and the economic prosperity of at least one-half of the
country was founded on the most hideous bondage in world history. Those
who had fled Europe to escape tyrants had themselves, under force of
circumstances, become tyrants.
Not that anyone willed slavery in America or designed to have it.
It was an economic accident. It was in America before most of the
Americans. The first Negro slaves were brought up the James River in
Virginia before the _Mayflower_ arrived, and as Negro orators say
to-day, “If being a long while in this country makes a good American,
we are the best Americans that there are.” Slavery had grown to vast
proportions by the time of the war against Britain. New America in
1783, standing on the threshold of the modern era, inherited a most
terrible burden in her millions of slaves. It was a burden that was
growing into the live flesh of America, and no one dared face at that
time the problem of getting free of it.
The actual American people as a whole were little responsible for
the institution of slavery. The pioneers hated and feared it. The
planters always condemned it in theory, and after the Emancipation of
1863 no one of any sense in the South has ever wished it back. Even
in those States where slavery took deepest root and showed its worst
characteristics, there was throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries a persistent resistance on the part of the colonists against
having black servile labor introduced.
To cite one colony as in a way characteristic of the whole attitude
of the colonists toward slavery, Georgia might be taken. Georgia was
originally an asylum for the bad boys of too respectable British
families and for discharged convicts and hopeless drunkards. Royal
charter guaranteed freedom of religion (except to Papists); an embargo
was placed on West Indian trade, so as to stop the inflow of rum; and
Negro slavery was forbidden. All for the good of reprobates making a
fresh start!
Invalids and merchants settled on the coast and made the society of
Savannah. The bad boys proved to be too poor stuff with which to
found a colony, and a special body of a hundred and thirty frugal
and industrious Scots and a hundred and seventy carefully chosen
Germans were brought in. Real work in Georgia commenced at Ebenezer,
on the Savannah River, and at New Inverness. The merchants strove to
get slavery introduced; the Scots and the Germans strove to keep it
out. At Savannah every night polite society toasted “_The One Thing
Needful_”—Slavery. The common talk of the townsfolk was of the extra
prosperity that would come to Georgia if slaves were brought in, the
extra quantities of cotton, of rice, of timber, and all that middlemen
could re-sell. The ministers of religion actually preached in churches
in favor of an institution sanctioned by the Bible, and it was thought
that a service was done for Christ by bringing the black men out of
Africa, where they were somewhat inaccessible, and throwing them into
the bosom of the Christian family in America. But the Scots and the
Germans remonstrated against the permission of an evil shocking to
human nature and likely to prove in time not a blessing but a scourge.
Over in South Carolina slavery was in full possession, and the wealth
of the Carolinian merchants was a soreness to the lean traders of
Georgia. Cupidity prompted underhand means to achieve the desired end.
Slaves were imported on life lease from owners in South Carolina. One
could not purchase the freehold of a Negro’s liberty and energy, only a
ninety-nine years’ lease of it, as it were, but that sufficed. Freedom
fell, the charter was abrogated, and under the sway of a royal governor
the floodgates of slavery were opened wide. In due time Georgia became
one of the worst slave States of the South. It remains to this day
one of those where in any case the contemporary record of burning and
lynching is most lurid. It would not be unsafe to draw the conclusion
that the introduction of slavery did as much harm to the souls of the
original Germans, Scots, and English and their descendants as to the
Negroes themselves.
The settlers were, however, loath to employ slaves, and for some
years there was little change. It was the rich immigrants from South
Carolina and elsewhere who embarked on large enterprises of planting
with a labor basis of black slaves. The poor white laboring class
was gradually ruined by competition with slave labor. And then it
became generally understood that everyone had to employ slaves, and
it was unbecoming for a white man to toil with his hands. The poor
Whites were if anything more despised than the black slaves, and often
indeed actually despised, paradoxically enough, by the latter. In
some parts there sprang up bands of white gypsies and robbers called
“pinelanders,” who stole from Black and White alike, and lived by their
wits.
In Africa the Negro tribes strove with one another in savagery, and
sold their prisoners to the Negro traders or White agents, who dragged
them to the coast. There they were herded in the holds of noisome
slaving vessels, indiscriminately, nakedly, fortuitously, the violent
ones tied up or chained, the gentler ones unloosed. None knew whither
they were going, and even those victorious tribes who sold them to
the white man knew nothing of the destination of the victims they
thus despatched. Hundreds of thousands, nay, millions of tribesmen
of all kinds and shades of black and brown were thus exported to the
Indies and the Colonies and sold into bondage to the civilized world.
Arrived in America, the slaves were sold to merchants or auctioned as
common cattle and sent up country to work. A healthy male slave of
good dimensions and in his prime would fetch a thousand dollars and
young women eight hundred dollars, and fair-sized girls five hundred.
Olmsted gives a price list which was handed him by a dealer; that
was in 1853.[1] In earlier years the price was considerably less,
and always varied according to the demand. The raw, first-come Negro
slaves were not sold as retinue for the rich, but as colonial utilities
to be worked like cattle on the farms and plantations. Cotton was
the staple, and in thinking of the time the eye must range over a
vast expanse of cotton plantations and see all the main work done by
Negro gangs of men and women in charge of slave drivers. As Olmsted
describes a gang of women in a characteristic passage—“The overseer
rode about them on a horse, carrying in his hand a rawhide whip ... but
as often as he visited one end of the line the hands at the other end
would discontinue their labor until he turned to them again. Clumsy,
awkward, gross, elephantine in all their movements; pouting, grinning,
and leering at us; sly, sensual, and shameless in all their expression
and demeanor; I never before had witnessed, I thought, anything more
revolting....” In 1837 the whole of Georgia, and indeed of the South,
was worked by black slaves—the poor white labor (chiefly Irish) had
diminished almost to disappearance. Slave labor was founded on slave
discipline, and the discipline on punishment. There was no particular
readiness on the part of the savages to do the work given them or
understand what they had to do. Whether they could have been coaxed or
persuaded is problematical. Farmers have not the time or the spirit for
coaxing. The quickest way was by inspiring terror or inflicting pain.
It might have been different if the Negro could have been given any
positive incentive to work, but there was none. He had therefore to be
flogged to it. The smallest gang had its driver with his whip. The type
who to-day has become politely a “speeder up” was then the man with the
whip. He could have had more power by using his whip infrequently and
on the most stubborn slaves, but that was not the common man’s way. He
flogged hard and he flogged often. On a typical Georgian plantation
the field driver had power to inflict twelve lashes there and then
when trouble occurred. The head driver could give thirty-six and the
overseer fifty. Every morning there would be a dozen or so special
floggings by the overseer or his assistant at the office. Women if
anything fared worse than men. On the slightest provocation their
scanty clothes were thrown over their heads and they were subjected to
a beating. Naked boys and girls were tied by their wrists to boughs
of trees so that their toes barely touched the ground, and lashed.
The overseer did it, the owner’s son did it, upon occasion the owner
himself did it.
There were pleasant exceptional homes in Virginia and the Carolinas and
elsewhere where there was no flogging and no cruelty whatsoever, but
instead a great mutual affection. Slavery may have been wrong there
also, or it may have been justifiable. But it was not on account of
the happy slaves that John Brown sallied forth at Harper’s Ferry, but
because of the many unhappy ones. As the whole intensity of the Negro
trouble is centered in the evils of the institution of slavery, it is
necessarily on these that one must insist, though the exceptions be not
lost sight of.
It is often said that the slaves were seldom hurt because, since they
were property, it behooved a master to take care of them and preserve
them. But that is fallacious. Men got pleasure out of beating their
slaves as they get pleasure out of chewing tobacco, drinking spirits,
and using bad language. It grew on them; they liked it more and more.
In many cases no proficiency or industry could save the slaves from a
flogging. And, besides that, there was current in Georgia and all the
more commercial parts a theory that it was most profitable to use up
your slaves every seven years and then re-stock.
Slaves of course were bred, and it is conceivable that it might have
been generally more profitable to have a breeding farm of Negroes and
sell the children than work them off in seven years. But there was
little method in the minds of the planters. They tried to combine the
seven-years system and breeding at the same time. Every girl of sixteen
had children, every woman of thirty had grandchildren. But the women
were worked up to the last moment of pregnancy on the cotton fields
and sent back three weeks after delivery, and even flogged then. The
poor women lay on straw on earthen floors in their torments, moaning
in their agonies. When sent back to the fields too soon they suffered
horrible physical torment. They often appealed to their masters: “Me
make plenty nigger for massa, me useful nigger.” But more than half of
their offspring were allowed to die. The mother would have been worth
her keep as a mother, but, no, she must fill her place in the hoeing
line instead of looking after her children.
There were few genuine Negro families. All were herded or separated and
sold off in batches and re-herded with little or no regard to family
relationships, though these poor, dark-minded slaves did form the most
intimate and precious attachments. The slaves’ fervent hope was that
massa would marry and have children, so that when he died they would
not be sold up, but remain in the family.
Illegitimacy in sexual relationships raged. Almost every planter had
besides his own family a dusky brood of colored women. No likely
girl escaped the overseers. Poor whites and pinelanders broke into
black quarters and ravished where they would. There seemed little
squeamishness, and there was little enough effective resistance on the
part of black girls. The institution of slavery with its cruelties had
brutalized men’s minds. As for the Negro women, one can well understand
how little feminine shame would remain when the bare hips were so
commonly exposed and flogged.
“Oh, but don’t you know—did nobody ever tell or teach any of you that
it is a sin to live with men who are not your husbands?” asked Fanny
Kemble of a slave. The latter seized her vehemently by the wrist and
exclaimed:
“Oh, yes, missie, we know—we know all about dat well enough; but we do
anything to get our poor flesh some rest from the whip; when he make me
follow him into de bush, what use me tell him no? He have strength to
make me.”[2]
Probably the slave drivers and other white men obtained some sensual
gratification from flogging women. Brutality of this kind is often
associated with sexual perversity. The taking of Negro women showed
a will toward the animal and was an act of greater depravity than
ordinary deflections from the straight and moral way. Not that there
was not pride in pale babies and even a readiness on the part of some
Negresses to give themselves to white men. As a plantation song said:
“Twenty-four black girls can’t make one mulatto baby by themselves.”
By flogging and rape and inhuman callousness did the white South
express its reaction to black slavery. There were also burnings,
demoniacal tortures, flogging to death, and every imaginable human
horror. It may well be asked: _How came it about that those who
protested so high-mindedly about the introduction of slavery did not
use the slaves kindly and humanly when they were forced to have them?_
The answer I think lies in the fact that no man is good enough to have
complete control over any other man. No man can be trusted. Give your
best friend or neighbor power over you, and you’ll be surprised at the
use he will make of it. Even wives and children in this respect are not
safe in the hands of their husbands and parents if they are understood
as possessions. “She belongs to me and I’ll kill her,” Gorky makes a
drunken cobbler say. “Ah, no, she does not belong to you; she is a
woman, and a woman belongs to God,” says the Russian friend.
There is indeed little more terrifying in human experience than the
situation which occurs when one human being is entirely in the power of
another, when the prisoner in the dungeon confronts his torturer, when
the unprotected girl falls completely into the power of a man, when
Shylock has Antonio delivered to him, and so forth.
Cruelty can be awakened in almost any man and woman—it can be
developed. A taste for cruelty is like a taste for drink or sexual
desire or drugs. It is a lust. It is indeed one of the worst of the
lusts. One can forgive or excuse a man the other lusts, but cruelty one
cannot—and indeed does not wish to forgive or excuse. Yet how readily
does it develop.
The incredible story is told of a young girl lashed by the overseer,
threatened with burning. She runs away. It is a gala day on the
plantation. The white men hunt her to the swamps with bloodhounds and
she is torn to bits before their eyes. They love the spectacle of
terror even more than the spectacle of pain. The Negro, of nervous,
excitable nature, is marked out by destiny to be a butt for cruelty. It
is so to-day, long after emancipation; the Negro, in whom hysterical
fear can be awakened, is the most likely to be lynched or chased by
the mob or slowly burned for its delight. More terrible than the act
of cruelty is the state of mind of those who can look on at it and
gloat over it. After all, a lynching is often roughly excusable. A man
commits a heinous crime against a woman, scandalizing the community,
and the community takes the law into its own hands. The rightness of
the action can be argued. But what of the state of heart of a mob of
a thousand, watching a Negro burning to death, listening happily to
his yells and crying out to “make him die slow”? It is an appalling
revelation of the devil in man.
And despite the fact that such cruelty agonizes the mind of the
tender-hearted and sympathetic, we must remain tolerant in judgment.
We must not tolerate intolerance; in all other respects we must be
tolerant.
Cruelty is in man. The planters did the natural thing with the slaves
who came into their power. The white South would slip into the same way
of life again to-day if slavery could be introduced. What is more, you
and I, and every man, unless he were of an exceptional nature, would
succumb to the system and disgrace ourselves with similar cruelty. A
demon not altogether banished still lurks in most of us and can easily
be brought back. Lust lives on lust and grows stronger; and cruelty,
like other cravings, is a desire of the flesh, and can easily become
devouring habit. We are greater brutes after we have committed an act
of cruelty or lust than we were before we committed it, and we are made
ready to commit more or worse.
Concomitant with cruelty is callousness. An indifference which is less
than usual human carelessness sets in with regard to creatures on whom
we have satisfied our lusts. Flogging makes a heavy flogged type of
human being who looks as if he had always needed flogging. It ceases
to be piquant to flog him. The old Negress with brutish human lusts
written all over her body is not even horrible or repulsive, _elle
n’existe plus_. The old, worn-out drudge lies down to die in the dirty
straw, the flies gathering about his mouth, and expires without one
Christian solace or one Christian sympathy. Though ministers waxed
eloquent on the Christian advantages to the Blacks of being brought
from pagan Africa to Christian America, there quickly sets in the
belief that after all Negroes are like animals and have no souls to
save.
This callousness showed worst in the selling of slaves, the separating
of black husband and wife, parents and children, family and family,
with the indifference with which a herdsman separates and detaches
sheep from his flock. This, despite the manifest passionate tenderness
and attachment of slave to slave, and even upon occasion slave to
master and home.
The state of the slaves grew most forlorn, forsaken of man, unknown to
God. A prison twilight eclipsed the light of the sun-flooded Southland.
A consciousness of a sad, sad fate was begotten among the slaves. All
the tribes of the Negroes became one in a community of suffering.
And gradually they ceased to be mere savages. They grew to something
higher—through suffering. It was a penal offense for many a long year
even to preach Christ to them. Slaves were beaten when it was found
out that they had been baptized. But before the Blacks were brought
to Christ they must have got a great deal nearer Him than had their
masters. It was illegal to teach a slave to read and write. But the
Negroes in a mysterious way learned the white man’s code and secretly
obtained his Bible and plunged into the Old Testament and the New.
The white man rightly feared that the spread of education among the
slaves would endanger the institution. They spoke of slavery as _the_
institution as if it were the only one in the world. They also feared
the spread of Christian teaching.
As it happened, the Negro soul was very thirsty for religion and drank
very deeply of the wells of God. The Negroes learned to sing together,
thus first of all expressing corporate life. They drew from the story
of Israel’s sufferings a token of their own life, and they formed their
scarcely articulate hymns—which survive to-day as the only folklore
music of America.
Go down, Moses,
Way down in Egyp’ lan’.
Tell ole Pharaoh
Le’ ma people go!
Israel was in Egyp’ lan’,
Oppres’ so hard dey could not stan’.
Le’ ma people go!
or the infinitely pathetic and beautiful
In the valley
On my knees
With my burden
An’ my Saviour
I couldn’t hear nobody pray, O Lord,
Couldn’t hear nobody pray.
O—way down yonder
By myself
I couldn’t hear nobody pray.
Chilly waters
In the Jordan,
Crossing over
Into Canaan,
I couldn’t hear nobody pray, O Lord,
Couldn’t hear nobody pray.
O—way down yonder by myself
I couldn’t hear nobody pray.
Hallelujah!
Troubles over
In the Kingdom
With my Jesus.
I couldn’t hear nobody pray, O Lord,
Couldn’t hear nobody pray.
O—way down yonder
By myself
I couldn’t hear nobody pray.
The poor slave was very much—way down yonder by himself, and he
couldn’t hear nobody pray. Jesus seemed to have been specially born
for him—to love his soul when none other was ready to love it, to
comfort him in all his sufferings, and to promise him that happy heaven
where unabashed the old woolly-head can sit by Mary and “play with the
darling Son,” as another “spiritual” expresses it.
The first Negro preachers and evangelists had the inevitable
persecution, and as inevitably the persecution failed. The North
grew very sympathetic, and Bibles grew as plentiful in the South as
dandelion blossoms. It became the unique lesson book of the Negro.
It alone fed his spiritual consciousness. He obtained at once an
appreciation of its worth to him that made it his greatest treasure,
his only offset against his bondage. He learned it by heart, and there
came to be a greater textual knowledge of the Bible among the Black
masses than among any other people in the world. It is so to-day,
though it is fading. The spiritual life of the Negro became as it were
an answering beacon to the fervor of the Abolitionists of the North,
most of whom were passionate Christians of Puritan type.
The South grew sulky, grew infinitely suspicious and restive, and
irritated and fearful. It began to fear a general slaves’ rising. The
numerical superiority of the Negroes presented itself to the mind as
an ever-growing menace. The idea of emancipation was fraught with the
economic ruin it implied. It is difficult now to resurrect the mind of
society preceding the time of the great Civil War. It is the fashion
to emphasize the technical aspect of the quarrel of North and South,
and to say that the war was fought in order that the Union might be
preserved. But it is truer to say that it was fought because the South
wanted to secede. And the South wished to secede because it saw more
clearly every day that the institution of slavery was in danger. Every
month, every year, saw its special occasions of irritation, premonitory
splashing out of flame, petty explosions and threats. More slaves
escaped every year. The Underground Railway, so called, by which the
Friends succored the poor runaways and brought them out of danger and
distress into the sanctuary of the North grew to be better and better
organized. On the other hand, the punishments of discovered runaways
grew more barbarous and more public, and the rage of the North was
inflamed.
Heroic John Brown made his abortive bid to light up a slaves’
insurrection by his wild exploit of Harper’s Ferry. And then John
Brown, old man as he was, of apostolic aspect and fervor, was tried and
condemned. He did not fear to die. But he wrote to his children that
they should “abhor _with undying hatred_ that sum of all villainies,
slavery,” and while he was being led to the gallows he handed to a
bystander his last words and testament—
I, John Brown, am now quite _certain_ that the crimes of this _guilty
land_ will never be purged away but with blood. I had _as I now think
vainly_ flattered myself that without _very much_ bloodshed it might
be done....
And in his ill-fitting suit and trousers and loose carpet slippers John
Brown was hanged silently and solemnly, and all the troops watching
him, even stern Stonewall Jackson himself, were stricken with a sort of
premonitory terror. Soon came the great war.
And the slaves were made free. That is their story. Where do they stand
to-day?
II
IN VIRGINIA
By the abolition of slavery mankind threw off a great evil. The slave
owner escaped as well as the slave. For, although our human sympathy
goes more readily to the slaves themselves, it is nevertheless true
that it was as bad for the spirit and character of the owners as for
those of their chattels. To-day in America, and especially in the
South, there is a hereditary taint in the mind derived from slavery and
it is to be observed in the descendants of the masters as much as in
the descendants of the slaves. It would be a mistake to think of this
American problem as exclusively a Negro problem. It is as necessary to
study the white people as the black. The children of the owners and the
overseers and the slave drivers are not the same as the children of
families where no slaves were ever owned. Mastery of men and power over
men have been bred in their blood. That in part explains the character
of that section of the United States where slaves were most owned, and
the brutality, cruelty, and sensuality which upon occasion disfigure
the face of society in 1920. The old dead self leers out with strange
visage from the new self, which wishes to be different.
If you see a white man in New Orleans rolling his quid and spitting
out foul brutality against “niggers,” you will often find that his
father was a driver on a plantation. Or if in that abnormal way so
characteristic of the South you hear foul sexual talk about the
Negroes rolling forth from a lowbrow in Vicksburg, it is fairly likely
that he is full of strange black lust himself, and that his father
and grandfather perchance assaulted promiscuously Negro women and
contributed to the writing of racial shame in the vast bastardy of the
South. If you hear a man urging that the Negro is not a human being,
but an animal, you will often find that he himself is nearer to the
animal. His fathers before him held that the Negroes were animals
and not humans. And, believing them animals, they yet sinned with
the animals, and so brought themselves down to animal level. You see
a crowd of white men near Savannah. They are mostly proud of their
English origin. Yet they are going to burn a Negro alive for killing a
sheriff. How is it possible in this century? It is possible because it
is in the blood of the children. They crave to see Uncle Tom’s flesh
crackling in the flames and hear his hysterical howls. Their fathers
did. Their children’s children will do the same unless it is stamped
out by the will of society as a whole.
Of course the inheritance of evil is not the same in all classes of
society. Everyone inherits something from the baleful institution,
but not everyone the same. The mind of the coarse White is crude
and terrible, and the mind of the refined is certainly different.
One should perhaps be more lenient to the poor, and more urgent in
criticism of the rich. For all stand together, and the disease is one
not merely of individuals, but of the whole. The rich and cultured
condone the brutality of the masses because they have a point of view
which is incompatible with theirs.
Those whose ancestors treated the slaves well, claim to be immune from
all criticism. There were in the old days many kind and considerate
masters to whom the Negroes were wonderfully attached. But even these
masters suffered from the institution of slavery, as any rich man
suffers from dependence on retainers and flunkeys and servants whom
he practically owns, as all suffer who are divorced from the reality
of earning their living as equals with their neighbors. And their
children, brought up amidst the submissive servility of the Negroes,
grew to be little monarchs or chiefs, and always to expect other people
to do things for them. Where ordinary white children learn to ask and
say “please,” they learned to order and command and to threaten with
punishment. The firm lip of the educated Southerner has an expression
which is entirely military. In the army, one asks for nothing of
inferiors except courage on the day of battle. All is ordered. And the
power to order and to be obeyed rapidly changes the expression of the
features. It has changed the physiognomy of the aristocracy in the
Southern section of the United States. You can classify all faces into
those who say “please” and those who do not, and the children of the
slave owners are mostly in the second category. Unqualified mastership;
indifference to dirt and misery in the servant class; callous disregard
of others’ pain, or pleasure taken in their pain; slaves said to be
animals and not human beings, and the superadded sin of bestiality,
using a lower caste to satiate coarse lusts which the upper caste could
not satisfy; the buying and selling of creatures who could otherwise
only belong to God—all these terrible sins or sinful conditions are
visited on the third and fourth generation of those who hate, though
as must always be said, God’s mercy is shown to thousands of them that
love Him and keep His eternal commandments.
The children of the slaves also inherit evil from their slavery. The
worst of these are resentment and a desire for revenge. Doubtless,
slavery sensualized the Negro. He was the passive receptacle for
the white man’s lusts. Most of the Negroes arrived in America more
morally pure than they are to-day. As savages, they were nearer to
nature. Mentally and spiritually they are much higher now, but they
have learned more about sin, and sin is written in most of their
bodies. It is sharpest in the mulattoes and “near whites”—those
whose ancestors were longest in slavery have the worst marks of it
in them. The state of the last slaves to be imported into America is
much simpler and happier than the rest. The moral character of the
black Negroes is also simpler than that of the pallid ones. But this
is anticipating my story. I set off to study the ex-slave because the
civilized world is threatened by what may be called a vast slaves’
war. In Russia the grandchildren of the serfs have overthrown those
who were once their masters, and have taken possession of the land and
the state; in Germany Spartacus has arisen to overthrow the military
slavery of Prussianism; and the wage slaves are rising in every land.
There is a vast resentment of lower orders against upper orders, of
the proletarians, who have nothing and are nothing, against those who
through inheritance or achievement have reached the ruling class. The
Negroes are in no way to be compared to the Russians in intellectual
or spiritual capacity: they are racially so much more undeveloped.
Much less divided Russian serf from Russian master than slave from
planter. But it is just because the contrast between the American white
man and American black man is so sharp and the quarrel so elemental
in character that it has seemed worth while to explore the American
situation. And if the struggle is more elemental, it can hardly be said
that there is not more at stake. American industrialism is ravaged by
waves of violent revolutionary ferment. If ill-treatment of the Blacks
should at last force the twelve millions of them to make common cause
with a revolutionary mob, polite America might be overwhelmed and the
larger portion of the world be lost—if not of the world, at least of
that world we call civilization.
What, then, of the Negro? What is he doing, what does he look like,
what does he feel to-day? It is impossible to learn much from current
books, so, following the dictum: “What is remarkable, learn to look at
it with your own eyes,” I went to America to see.
I chose Olmsted as my model. In 1853 Olmsted made a famous journey
through the seaboard States, holding up his mirror to the life of
the South in slavery days. The book which records his impressions
and reflections is one of the most valuable in American literature.
This great student of nature went methodically through Virginia, the
Carolinas and Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana. A pilgrimage not unlike
his has to be repeated to-day to ascertain how the ex-slave is, what
he is doing, how the experiment of his liberation has prospered, and
what is his future in the American Commonwealth. But as America is
so much more developed in 1920, and more problematical in the varied
fields of her national life, it has been necessary to make a broader,
if more rapid, survey of the whole South. I made the following journey
in America: I went slowly south from New York to Trenton, Philadelphia,
Baltimore, and Washington, staying some days at each and seeing America
grow darker as it visibly does when you watch faces from trolley car
windows going from town to town southward. I was on South Street, in
Philadelphia; watched the well-paid artisans and laborers at the docks
of Baltimore, visited there the polite homes of the colored working
class, cleaner, richer, cozier than that of the average British workman
on Tyneside or London Docks. I climbed the Lincoln Heights to talk to
Nanny Burroughs and see her good training college for colored women
there; was at Howard University and talked with black and gentle
Professor Miller and with the pale and intellectual Emmett Scott. I
sailed down the Potomac to Norfolk, Virginia, Uncle Sam’s great naval
base, going to be the greatest of its kind in the world; crossed to
Newport News and talked with black rivetters and chippers and others in
the shipbuilding yards; then, following the way of the first English
colonists and also the first Negro slaves, went up the James River to
Jamestown, and on to Richmond, the fine capital of the Old Dominion. I
traveled to Lynchburg and its tobacco industries, went from thence to
“sober” Knoxville, investigating the race riot there and the attitude
of Tennessee. From Knoxville I went to Chattanooga and Birmingham,
in each of which great steel centers I met the leading Negroes and
investigated conditions. I was at Atlanta, and walked across Georgia
to the sea, following Sherman. A three-hundred-mile walk through the
cotton fields and forests of Georgia was necessary in order to get a
broad section of the mass of the people. The impression left behind
by Sherman’s army which laid waste the country and freed all the
Negroes there gave also something of the historical atmosphere of the
South. From Savannah, which was the point on the sea to which General
Sherman attained, I went to Brunswick and Jacksonville, thence to
Pensacola, and on from Florida to New Orleans and the Gulf plantations.
I journeyed up the Mississippi on a river steamer, stayed at the Negro
city of Mound Bayou, was at Vicksburg and Greenville and Memphis, and
then repaired once more to the contrasting North.
Crossing the Mason-Dixon line was rather a magical and wonderful
event for me. After all, the North, with its mighty cities and
industrialized populations, is merely prose to one who comes from
England. Pennsylvania is a projection of Lancashire and Yorkshire, New
York is a projection of London, and massive Washington has something
of the oppressiveness of English park drives and Wellingtonias. But
southward one divines another and a better country. It has a glamour;
it lures. There the orange grows and there are palms; there is a hotter
sun and brighter flowers. Human beings there, one surmises, have a
more romantic disposition and warmer imagination. Reposing on the vast
feudalism of Negro labor there is a more stately way of living, life is
more spacious. And at the resorts on the coast of Florida and the Gulf
of Mexico a great number of people live for pleasure and happiness, and
not for business and ambition.
I journeyed on a white-painted steamer in the evening down the Potomac
to Old Point Comfort, leaving behind me the noise and glare of
Washington and the hustle of Northern American civilization. It was
the crossing of a frontier—without show of passports or examination
of trunks, the passing to a new country, with a different language and
different ways. The utter silence of the river was a great contrast
to the clangor of the streets of Philadelphia and Baltimore and the
string of towns I had been passing through on my way South. Sunset was
reflected deep in the stream, and mists crept over the surface of the
water. Then the moon silvered down on our course, my cabin window was
full open and the moon looked in. I lay in a capacious sort of cottage
bed and was enchanted by the idea of going to “Dixie,” of which we
had all sung so much; and the soft Southern airs and night and the
throbbing of the river steamer gliding over the placid water gave an
assurance of some new refreshment of spirit. With a quaint irrelevance
the whole British army, and indeed the nation, had been singing
“Dixie” songs throughout the war—“Just try to picture me, way down
in Tennessee” we were always asking of one another. Now, behold, the
war was over, and it might be possible to go there and forget a little
about all that sordid and tumultuous European quarrel.
All night the river whispered its name and lulled the boat to sleep.
Dawn on the broad serenity of the waters at Old Point Comfort was
utterly unlike the North, from which I had come, and the last ten days
of jangling trolley cars hustling along shoppy streets. A morning star
shone in the pale-blue sky, lighting as it were a vestal lamp over
the coast, and we looked upon Virginia. As the sun rose, vapor closed
in the scene. We made the port of Norfolk in a mist which seemed each
moment getting warmer. The chill winds of October were due in the
North, but Virginia was immune. During the week I spent in the city of
Norfolk and on Hampton Roads it did not get less than 85 in the shade,
even at night. The weather, however, was hotter than is usual even in
Eastern Virginia at that time of the year.
I obtained the impression of a great city rather cramped for want of
space, and in this I suppose I was right. By all accounts Norfolk has
trebled its population during the war, and needs to have its center
rebuilt spaciously and worthily. When Olmsted came through in 1853 he
records that Norfolk was a dirty, low, ill-arranged town, having no
lyceum or public library, no gardens, no art galleries, and though
possessing two “Bethels” having no “Seamen’s Home” and no place of
healthy amusement. He rather makes fun of a Lieutenant Maury, who in
those days was having a vision of the Norfolk of the future, and saw
it one of the greatest ports in the world, being midmost point of the
Atlantic coast and having an inner and an outer harbor with perfect
facilities of ingress and egress in all weathers.
To-day Lieutenant Maury’s vision has proved prophetic. In the maps of
the new America which is coming, Norfolk is destined to be printed
in ever larger letters. The war showed the way. The determination of
America to be worthily armed at sea made it certain, and the future
of Norfolk, with Hampton Roads and Newport News, is to be the primary
naval base of the Atlantic coast. The military and naval activities
of Norfolk during the war were very important. Eastern Virginia was
a great training ground, and Norfolk the main port of embarkation of
troops for Europe. Shipbuilding and naval construction also were in
full swing. Great numbers of laborers, especially Negroes, seem to have
been attracted. The number no doubt is exaggerated, but the colored
people there number themselves now at one hundred thousand. They
have been attracted by the high wages and the record of Norfolk for
immunity from mob violence. A lynching is not in anyone’s remembrance.
Trouble might have broken out during the war, but Norfolk possessed an
excellent “City Manager” who was always prepared.
On one occasion some five hundred sailors set out to “clean up colored
town,” but they were met by an adequate force of armed police and
marines and changed their minds. On the other hand, a mob of colored
crews and troops started an attack on the town jail, but a few armed
men quickly dispersed them.
I noticed at once that the Blacks of Norfolk were very much more black
than those of Washington or New York. Their hair was more matted.
Their eyes were more goggly. They were more odorous. When the black
chambermaid had been in my room for two minutes it was filled with a
pungent and sickening odor. The elevator reeked with this odor. It was
the characteristic smell of my first Southern hotel. I noticed it on
the trolley cars. It was wafted among the vegetables and fruit of the
city market. Indeed, the whole town had it. I grew used to it after a
while and was told by those who were liberal of mind that every race
had its smell. For instance, to certain tribes of Indians there was
said to be nothing so disgusting as the smell of a perfectly clean
white man. Even when a man who has a bath every day and a change into
perfectly fresh linen came into his presence, the Indian felt sick.
Negroes were supposed to notice the smell of white men, but were too
subservient or polite to remark upon it. There is, however, a good deal
of doubt about this point in human natural history. The smell that we
have is the smell of the animal in us, and not of the more human or
spiritual part of us. One knows the smell of the bear and the fox,
and that the wolf has a stronger smell than the dog, and the wild cat
than the domestic cat. Bloodhounds are said to follow the trail of the
Negro more readily than that of the white man, and it might reasonably
be argued that the terrible odor of the Blacks is due to their greater
proximity to an animal stage in development. Be that as it may, I
quite see that this odor is something which the Negro will have
difficulty in living down. I learned that he was very sensitive about
it, as about his kinky hair, and that the more educated and refined he
became the more he strove to get rid of these marks. That explained
to me why in all those happy streets of prosperous Baltimore at every
corner there was a “Beauty Parlor,” where specialists plied Mme.
Walker’s “Anti-Kink,” and why the prosperous Negro workingman demanded
a bathroom and hot water in his home. The reason why the Blacks seem
blacker in the South seems to be because they are segregated in “Jim
Crow” sections of the cars, and none of the black comes off on white
people, but is on the contrary intensified by the shadow of black looks.
The colored folk here, moreover, seemed to talk more in the way they
are supposed to talk, and are not mincing the American tongue, as in
the North. Outside my room one maid says: “You’s a fool, sister Ann.”
“Yas, sister Sue, dat’s ‘zackly what I am,” says the other, and laughs
and repeats it as if it were the greatest joke—“Dat’s ‘zackly what I
am.”
I went into the streets to seek the Rev. B——, a leading colored
preacher of Norfolk. I stood in wonderment before a whitewashed
chapel with large china-blue stained-glass windows luridly depicting
our Lord’s baptism and the opening of the heavens over the Jordan.
A grizzled old Negro in a cotton shirt stopped in front of me and
exclaimed insinuatingly, “You’s looking at cullud folks’ church; ain’t
it bewtiful?” I took the opportunity to ask for the Rev. B——. He led
me along and pointed up a flight of wooden steps to a sufficiently
handsome dwelling place.
Rev. B—— on seeing me had a gleam of doubt on his face for perhaps
one second, but only for a second. One instinctively felt that here
in Virginia, where the color line is sharply drawn, no white man
is likely to present himself on terms of equality to a black man
without the desire to patronize or some guile of some kind. It is
rare for any white man to call upon any educated black man, and very
rarely indeed that he comes to him in a straightforward, honest, and
sincere manner. So the Rev. B—— showed doubt for a moment, and then
suddenly, after a few words, his doubt vanished. In my subsequent
journeying and adventures it was always thus—doubt at first glance,
and then, rapidly, the awakening of implicit trust and confidence. I
personally found the Negroes nearly always friendly. Mr. B—— was a
sparely-colored, lean, intellectual young man, a capable white man
in a veil of dark skin. He was all but white. I looked at his webby
hands—what a pity, it seemed, that, being so near, he could not be
_altogether_. And yet I realized that in such men and women, no matter
how fair they be, the psyche is different. There is something intensely
and insolubly Negro in even the nearest of near whites.
Rev. B—— took me all over the city. He was evidently extremely well
known to the colored people, for our conversation was intertwined with
a ceaseless——
“How do, Revrun?”
“How do?”
He showed me his charmingly built church (not that with the china-blue
windows), contrived in graceful horseshoe style, with graduated,
sloping gallery, richly-stained windows, and a vast array of
red-cushioned seats. A black organist was discoursing upon the organ,
and a voluminous, dusky charwoman with large arms was cleaning and
dusting among the pews below.
There sat under Rev. B—— every Sunday a fair share of the quality
colored folk of Norfolk. “I am glad that you have come to me, because I
can show you an up-to-date and proper church,” said the pastor. “There
are nine or ten like this in Norfolk, but when a stranger asks to see
a Negro church he’s usually taken to some out-of-the-way tabernacle
of the Holy Folks or some queer sect where everyone is shouting
Hallelujah, and it all seems very funny. But if you’ll come to me on
Sunday morning you’ll hear a service which for dignity and spiritual
comeliness will compare with any white man’s service in any part of the
world. You mustn’t think of us as still cotton pickers and minstrels
and nothing more. There is a great deal of Negro wealth and refinement
in this city of Norfolk.”
“How do you get on with white ministers?” I asked. “Do you work
together?”
“Oh, white ministers do not recognize black ones on the street,” said
he. “My neighbor, for instance, knows me well enough at the Baptist
Conference, and by his talk I see he knows all about my church. But
here in the city he cannot afford to know me. Yet he has not half so
many worshippers at his church, nor do they pay him half the salary
which my people pay me. He dare not spend on his clothes what I spend;
he has not such a well-appointed home. Yet if we meet on the street—he
doesn’t know me.”
This was evidently a sore point.
We went to Brown’s Bank. Brown has gone to Philadelphia to start a
second Negro bank. The first one has been in existence ten years.
Brown is a financier, and something more than that. For he encourages
the Negro theatres and is greatly helping his people along their way.
We also visited the polite edifice of the Tidewater Bank and Trust
Company, which has been built since the Armistice. “It was contracted
for by Negroes and built by Negroes alone,” said the treasurer
proudly—a blunt, bullet-headed, whimsical fellow, with an intense
desire to push business and to hustle. All the clerks and stenographers
were colored. Each teller sat in his steel cage for which he alone held
the key. All the latest banking machinery was in operation, including
the coin separator and counter and wrapper, and the adding machine. I
worked an imaginary account under colored direction, using the adding
machine, and gave assent to its infallibility. They showed me their
strong room, and I peeped at their cash reserves. The treasurer and
“Revrun” then took me up into a high mountain, namely, the Board Room,
which was in a gallery overlooking the whole of the working part of the
bank.
“My motto,” said the treasurer, “is, ‘Folks who only work for us as
long as they are paid will find they are only paid for what they have
done.’ We work here till we are through, be it eleven or twelve o’clock
at night. The man who isn’t hard is not for us.”
We talked about the Negro.
“He must win freedom,” said the banker. “It is never a bequest, but
a conquest. You can’t have redemption without the shedding of the
Precious Blood, can you, Reverend? I am fighting for the Negro by
succeeding in business. There’s only one thing that can bring him
respect, and that is achievement.”
These were his most impressive words. We walked out of the new bank.
“He has his knock-about car and his limousine and a finely appointed
house and a governess for his children,” said Rev. B——, as we footed
it once more in the sun-bathed street. “But of course you can be a
millionaire to-day and it won’t help you to marry even the poorest
white girl. Or you can be a Negro heiress, but no amount of wealth
will induce a white man to marry a colored girl. For the matter
of that, though, there are Negroes so white you couldn’t tell the
difference, and we’ve got plenty to choose from if our tastes lie that
way. If a Negro wants to marry a white, he can find plenty within his
own race.”
Rev. B—— was himself married to a woman who could pass as white, in
Southern Europe, and his children were little white darlings with curly
hair. We hailed a heavy “F and D” car. I will not mention the actual
name of the build. A young colored dandy was sitting in it. “You see
this car?” said Reverend. “It belongs to Dr. R——. It’s an ‘F and D.’
In many places the agents will not sell this build of car to a Negro,
even for cash down.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, it’s a fine type of car, and rich white men in a city don’t care
to see a colored man going about in one exactly the same. An agent
would lose business if he sold them to Negroes. What’s more, whether
he lost business or not, he wouldn’t do it. Here in Virginia, however,
there is not so much prejudice, but when you go further South you’ll
find it.”
We got into the car. The young dandy proved to be a doctor’s assistant,
a sort of apprentice to the great physician we were about to meet.
He had graduated at Fisk, which he called the Negro Athens. He was
dressed in a well-cut suit of gray, a rich necktie, and a felt hat
which was in excellent taste. His complexion was of the cocoa-brown,
highly-polished type, and his large eyes were quiet and reflective, as
if unawakened to the joy of life. Politely chatting to us, he guided
the beautiful car along some of the most terribly rutty and broken
streets.
“We pay equal taxes,” said he, “but because colored people live in
these streets the city won’t repair the roads. They are all rich people
living in these houses, all Negroes. Several of them own cars....
Now look on the other hand at this street. It’s a white street, all
smoothly repaired. What a beautiful surface; see the difference!” Rev.
B—— urged this point also. It was a striking example of inequality,
and one that makes a strong appeal.
Dr. R—— proved to be a rich practitioner living in a delightful villa
with polished floors and a French neatness and charm in the furniture
and decorations. The sun blinds were all down, and a pleasant creamy
light was diffused upon his books and pictures and silk-upholstered
divan. He was very busy, but said he could always spare a few moments
from his profession if it were a question of helping his race, and he
thought nothing could help the Negroes more than a dispassionate review
of their situation by a white man who could bring it not merely before
America, but before the world. He had more patients than he could deal
with, all Negroes, with the exception of a few Jews. The Jews have no
prejudice, and are ready to be attended by a good doctor, whatever the
color of his skin, which is a point in any case in favor of the Jews.
For a long while the Negroes distrusted their own doctors, and thought
that only a white man could possibly have the skill to treat them. But
a later generation has discovered that their own folk have an excellent
grasp of medicine. My further acquaintance with a considerable number
of colored doctors in the South has led me to the conclusion that
their temperament suits them admirably. They make good doctors. What
is more, they naturally understand the Negro’s body and constitution
and nervous system better than the white man, and the pathology of the
Negro is very different from that of the white man. The white doctor
as yet has not given much separate study to the Negro’s body—though
it is certainly very different from ours in many ways. He is inclined
perhaps to be a little brutal and offhand with Negro patients—and
they certainly are tiresome, with their superstitious fear of ill
health and evil eyes, and what not. This impatience has helped the
colored practitioner. Negroes, like other people, go where they are
best treated, and the medical attendance upon a hundred thousand people
could make many doctors rich.
In the old slavery days the Negroes were just a broad base where
all were equal. To-day the “race” has lifted up an intelligent and
professional class. The working Negro population of Norfolk could lift
up its intellectual apex of minister, doctor, and banker, and make
them comparatively rich men, and give them all the show of luxury
and culture which would have been the lot of white men in similar
positions. So the broad base of slavery grows to be a pyramid of
freedom.
Dr. R—— was a shrewd, capable, little human mountain. He said, “I
think the time has come for the Negro to amass wealth; it’s the only
thing that counts in America.” He thought the League of Nations might
help the Negro if its representatives ever met at Washington. There
would be Frenchmen and Englishmen and Italians, and, being so near to
the South, it would be a shame to America if lynchings took place while
they were sitting. As it was, the Negro South was a sort of skeleton
cupboard which must not be exposed.
From him I learned first that the Negro had not access to the Carnegie
libraries in the South. I was surprised. Up at Baltimore, in the North,
I was talking to a librarian, and he averred that the Negroes used the
public library much more than white people, and that there were so many
darkies that Whites did not care to go. But I travel such a very short
distance South, and I find no Negro admitted at all.
“Surely that is contrary to the spirit of the Carnegie grants,” said I.
“Yes, for Carnegie was a good friend to the Negro. But so it is,” said
Dr. R——. “And I do not think Negroes should agitate about it. It
would be better for Negroes to build their own libraries. We shall have
to do so. But we don’t want to intrude where we’re not wanted.”
He told me what he considered the most thrilling moment of his life.
He was out with a friend at midnight watching the posting of election
results, when suddenly a “lewd woman” came out of a house door,
screaming and waving her arms. She made right for them, and they were
in terror lest she should fall down at their feet or start reviling
them. Fortunately, they had the presence of mind not to run away from
her, or they might have been lynched by the crowd.
The worthy doctor took us out and drove us all over the city, heartily
apologizing that he could not ask me to have any meal with his wife and
himself. “For, although you may have no prejudice, it would not be safe
for either of us if it were known.” Which was indeed so. Throughout the
whole of the South it is impossible to eat or drink with a colored man
or woman.
My chief way of finding people to whom I had introductions was by
reference to the city directory. Here I found that all colored people
were marked with a star—as much as to say, “Watch out; this party’s
colored.” White women were indicated as “Mrs.” or “Miss,” but colored
women always as plain “Sarah Jones” or “Betty Thompson,” or whatever
the name might be, without any prefix. This I discovered to be one of
many small grievances of the Negro population, akin to that of not
having their roads mended though they pay taxes, and being obliged to
take back seats behind a straw screen in the trolley cars.
It was a novel impression in the Negro church on Sunday morning. I came
rather early, and found an adult Bible class discussing theology in
groups. One man near me exclaimed, “It says ‘He that believeth and is
baptized shall be saved,’ doesn’t it, brother? Well, then, I believe,
so why argufy? I an’t a-goin’ to take no chances. No, sir, I an’t
a-goin’ to do it”—a serene black child of forty years or so.
In the full congregation were all types of Negroes. The men were
undistinguished, but the women were very striking. One lady wore a
gilded skirt and a broad-brimmed, black straw hat. Two Cleopatras
sat in front of me—tall, elegant, graceful, expensively dressed as
in Mayfair, one in chiffon, the other in soft gray satin, tiny gold
chains about their necks, pearl earrings in their ears. They had
smooth, fruit-like cheeks, curving outward to perfect bell mouths.
When they sang they lifted their full, dusky throats like grand birds.
They were evidently of the élite of Norfolk. On the other hand, there
were numbers of baggy and voluminous ladies with enormous bosoms,
almost visibly perspiring. They thronged and they thronged, and all
the red-cushioned seats filled up. There were men of all types, from
the perfect West African Negro to the polished American Arab, yellow
men, brown men, lots with large tortoise-shell spectacles, all with
close-cropped hair which showed the Runic lines of their hard heads.
Fans were provided for every worshipper, and noisy religious and family
talk filled the whole chapel.
We began with some fine singing—not deep and harmonious and complex
as that of the Russians, but hard, resonant, and breezy, followed by
conventional prayers and the reading of the Scriptures. The pastor then
sent someone to ask me if I would come forward and give them Christian
greeting in a few words. I was much astonished, as I did not know one
ever broke into the midst of Divine Service in that way. However, I
came forward and confronted the strange sea of dusky, eager faces and
the thousand waving paper fans, and I said: “Dear brothers and sisters,
I am an Englishman and a white man, but before these I am a Christian.
In Christ, as you know, there is neither white nor black, neither
inferiority nor superiority of race, unless it is that sometimes the
first shall be last and the last first. We know little about the
American Negro in England, but I have come to find out. I have not been
sent by anybody, but was just prompted by the Spirit to come out here
and make your acquaintance, and so bring tidings home to England. I
hope you will take that as an assurance of loving interest in you, and
a promise for the future. I am glad to see you have made such progress
since slavery days and have in Norfolk fine houses and churches and
banks and a theatre and restaurants and businesses, and that you have
such a large measure of happiness and freedom. I believe you have
great gifts to offer on the altar of American civilization, and so far
from remaining a problem you will prove a treasure.” And I told some
touching words of my friend Hugh Chapman, of the chapel of the Savoy,
in London: “Mankind is saved, not by a white man, or by a black, but by
one who combines both—the little brown Man of Nazareth.”
It was a strange sensation, that of facing the Negro congregation. I
could find no _touch_, no point of contact, could indeed take nothing
from _them_. The spiritual atmosphere was an entirely different one
from that of a gathering of Whites. I should have been inclined to say
that there was no spiritual atmosphere whatever. For me it was like
speaking to an empty room and a vast collection of empty seats. But I
know there was something there, though I could not realize it.
After the service there came up to me a purely delightful creature,
full of an almost dangerous ardor for what I had said. She was the
leading spirit at the Liberty Club for colored soldiers and jack tars.
In the afternoon I listened to some wonderful singing at another
church. The little black organist woman sang at the top of her voice
while she bent over the keys, and waved the spirit into her choir by
eager movements with the back of her hand.
“Take me, shake me, don’t let me sleep,” they sang, and it was
infinitely worth while. I felt that in the great ultimate harmony we
could not do without this voice, the voice of the praise of the dark
children.
Next week I went over to Newport News. On a wall in Norfolk I read: “T.
Adkins, Newport News,” and underneath someone had written, “You could
not pay me to live there: Robert Johnson, Norfolk.”
That might possibly explain the relativity of the two places.
Newport News is a ramshackle settlement on the sands across the
water from Norfolk. It has a nondescript, ill-dressed, well-paid,
wild, working-class population, with all manner of cheap shops and
low lodging houses. On every fifth window seems to be scrawled in
whitewash, “HOT DOG 5 cents.” It was explained to me that this is
sausage of a rather poor quality. I had never seen the article so
frankly named elsewhere. For the rest, a good deal of manifest
immorality strolls the streets at night or is voiced on dark verandas.
The police station is a place of considerable mystery and glamour,
and I should say Newport News at this season would have proved an
interesting research for the vice raker. I paid three dollars for
a room whose lock had been burst off, and one of whose windows was
broken, a mosquito-infested hovel, but the only room obtainable.
A very interesting young colored trainer took me over the shipbuilding
yards the next day. He was an enthusiastic boxer, and I asked him the
cause of Negro excellence in this sport. For there are at least three
Negro boxers whom no white boxers have been able to beat, and this
excellence has caused the championship rules to be altered so as to
disqualify colored champions.
He said it was due to quicker eye and greater aggressiveness, above
all to greater aggressiveness. The Negro is a born fighter. It is true
he has greater endurance and a much harder skull, but he has also
remarkable aptitude.
“Has the Negro boxer more science?” I asked.
“No, perhaps not so much. He has fighting blood, that’s what it is. His
ancestors fought for thousands of years.”
I remarked that the red Indians fought also, but they were poor boxers.
He put that down to slight physique.
“I got tired of watching boxing matches in the army,” said I. “The
bulkier and more brutal types always seemed to get the better of those
who were merely skillful. I expect that is why we don’t like watching
a Negro and a white man boxing, it is too much a triumph of body over
mind.”
“There’s no finer sight than to watch two Negroes well matched,” said
the trainer, with a smile.
I thought good boxing showed more the animal side of a man, and I
recalled a reported saying of Jack Johnson—“I’se ready to fight mos’
any man that they is, an’ if ye cahn find any man, why, just send me
down a great big black Russian bear....”
“It jarred the white folk terrible bad that Jack Johnson was the real
champion of the world,” said the trainer. “When the news came through
of Jack Johnson beating Jeffries so far away as Denver, Colorado, the
white folk began pulling the Negroes off the street cars in Norfolk,
Virginia, and beating them, just to vent their rage, they were so sore.”
I thought that rather amusing, but the trainer took a gloomy view.
However, in we went to the shipbuilding yard and looked at many great
vessels in dry dock. Out came a motley crowd of men, blacker than their
nature through the dirt of their work. The ship painters were splashed
from head to foot with the characteristic red paint of ships, and
looked like some new tribe; the blue-shirted rivetters and chippers
were all frayed and ragged from contact with sharp edges and iron.
These Negro workers were very happy and jolly. They seemed nearly all
to be on piecework and earned in most cases ten dollars a day, and in
some exceptional cases and upon occasion twenty or twenty-five dollars.
The rivetters, according to the scale of pay, seemed to be capable
of earning huge wages, and many of them were comparatively well off,
possessing their homes, and giving their children a good education. The
trainer pointed out to me his athletic pets. He was employed by the
company to organize competitions and races and baseball teams and the
like. The strongest Negroes seemed among the gentlest. The heavyweight
champion was a large and beautiful child. He never lost his temper in
the ring, because, as I was told, he never needed to. His ears were not
turned to “cauliflower” and his nose was not flattened out—as yet.
The lunch hour was remarkable for the swarms of men belched forth by
the works. A twenty-cent lunch was ready for all. Wives and mothers
also were allowed to come and bring food to supplement what was served
at the stands. Lunch over, the men formed into groups, and in some
places there were Bible discussions, in others sporting competitions.
Despite high wages, I noticed some Negroes going about picking up
crusts and putting them into paper bags, presumably to feed the
chickens with when they got home. My guide said this was due to the
“Save” propaganda which had been carried on. Y. M. C. A. work was very
much to the fore, an industrial “Y” having been financed by the owners
of the yard. I was told that a little while ago the company found
it difficult to keep the young Negro boys—the heaters and passers,
on whose work the rivetter depends, for one boy heats the rivet and
another passes it, and the rivetter strikes it home. They found so
little in the place to interest them that they drifted away from the
works. It was this that had determined the firm to embark on a program
of physical culture and games. There was also a Y. M. C. A. hut and its
usual appurtenances. A long list of evening classes was being arranged.
A large building had been promised to the “Y” if it made good.
I could not find any man who belonged to a genuine trade-union
affiliated to the American Federation of Labor, though most belonged
to “Colored People’s Brotherhoods.” The Whites with whom they worked,
and with whom they have upon occasion great rivetting competitions,
were presumably non-union also, but that is common; labor in America
is poorly organized, compared with labor in Great Britain. Almost the
whole of Negro labor is at present outside the recognized unions, and
for that reason can almost always be used to break strikes. This
is, of course, unfortunate for the Negro, who is thus branded as a
“blackleg” in addition to being black by nature, which was reproach
enough.
I met a strange character in the evening, one of the colored
organizers, a friend of the white men, and _in_ with the bosses of the
yards. He was possibly a descendant of the type of Negro who in slavery
days acted as agent for the slave merchants, and was to be found on the
West African shore lording it over the batches of poor savages who with
hands tied up were being hustled on to the slave ships. It used to be
a recognizable type. When they themselves were brought over to America
they became overseers or field drivers, and brutal enough they were to
their fellow men of color. To-day they are foremen or speeders up of
Negro gangs, or you find them under the auspices of “Welfare.”
This was a lazy Negro, fat and heavy, with a confused non-thinking
mind, great sooty lips, and bloodshot eyes. He told me he put on a wig
at night and prowled about the town, spying on vice. The great numbers
of black soldiers embarking or disembarking had attracted sharps and
bad women of all kinds. The streets were infested with sin, and he
knew which boarding houses were disreputable and which were properly
kept. He knew where there was drink, and who was organizing the
“bootlegging” business, and what graft the police took. Though sluggish
by nature, this gloomy soul evidently got full of life at night—spying
on the people.
He told me the richest colored man in Newport News was a dentist who
charged as much as six dollars an hour for stopping teeth. The example
of this dentist’s success had caused several fathers to educate their
children for dentistry rather than the Church or the Law. “But we
Negroes don’t want to rise,” said he. “We want to show off. We are
great imitators of swagger. They’ll come wearing a forty-dollar suit
and a clean collar, and brandish a cigar in your face when that is all
they have in the world. We’re a crude people, sir.”
There was on the one hand in Newport News a nucleus of prosperous Negro
families, and on the other hand the many gambling places and dancing
dens where health and ambition and money, and everything else which can
help a man to rise could be squandered. In time to come, when society
takes root, Newport News should become a Negro stronghold. Already
there are so many Negroes no white man dare start a riot.
Not far from Newport News is Hampton Institute, the “Negro Eton,” which
produces the Curzons and the Cecils of the colored race, as someone
amusingly expressed it. It is the crown of Northern effort to educate
the Negro. Endowment and instruction are mostly by Whites. Everyone is
engaged in vital self-support, and the students plough the fields, make
boots, build wagons, print books, and learn all manner of practical
lessons in life. Above all, they are made ready to teach and help
others of their race. It is the show place of the Negro world, and
rightly so, as most of those who lead Negrodom hail as yet from Hampton.
I did not myself visit Hampton, because it has been adequately
described in books, and generally speaking I would rather study the
Negro in his unperfumed haunts, where he is less disguised with
Northern culture. Perhaps one learns more of the needs and requirements
of the Negroes by visiting a poor school where the ordinary routine
of teaching is going on. I visited a high school named after Booker
T. Washington, and talked to the students in the classes. The young
lady who took me to the head master wore a low-cut, white blouse from
which her dainty neck and her head of kinky hair grew like a palm
tree. She had dog’s teeth for eardrops hanging from her ears, and
large, kind, questioning eyes. The head master was a quiet young man
from some Negro university, full of pent-up enthusiasm for his race
and for learning. He had boundless enthusiasm for the Negro people
and their possibilities. Was not the greatest French writer a colored
man, and the greatest Russian poet of Negro blood? We went into the
composition class. They were doing “Argumentation,” which is perhaps a
trifle dull, but we discussed brevity and the principle of suspense.
In the English class each child had read “Silas Marner” and was taking
it in turn to re-tell the story when called upon by the teacher. This
was pretty well done, though Americanisms were frequent, and the two
brothers were said to be “disagreeable” when it was meant that they
disagreed. In French the whole class was standing around the walls of
the room, writing French sentences on the blackboards fitted into the
panelling. French was very popular. Every child wanted to go to France
by and by. In the Latin class we discussed the merits of Cæsar, in the
cookery class whether they ate what they cooked, in the needlework,
invisible mending—when suddenly the fire bell sounded. Each class at
once got up and filed out in orderly manner. In one minute the whole
school of seven hundred black children was cleared. Then they marched
back in twos, shoulder to shoulder, in fine style, to the rub-a-dub-dub
of a kettledrum. It was a surprise alarm, called by a visiting fire
inspector. None, even of the teachers, had known whether the alarm was
real.
The teachers here were all black, and possessed of the greatest
enthusiasm; the children presented some hopeless types, but they were
mostly very eager and intelligent. The methods of teaching seemed to
be advanced, but there were many deficiencies, notably that of the
chemistry class, where all the apparatus was in a tiny cupboard, and
consisted of some bits of tubing, a few old test tubes, and some empty
bottles.
It was a grievance, and I thought a legitimate one, that whereas the
white schools were given good buildings with every latest convenience,
less was thought good enough for the Negro children. Though white
sympathizers with the ex-slave had been very generous in endowing Negro
education, their good work was more than neutralized by the Southern
local authorities, who held the point of view that education spoiled
the “nigger.” If it were not for the enthusiasm of the Negro teachers,
who carry on in any circumstances, it might easily have happened that
the colored people had a whole series of well-endowed universities and
colleges like Fisk and Hampton, but no elementary or secondary school
education worth the name.
Lack of good will toward the Negro thus expresses itself in many
ways; the failure to repair his roads, the failure to give him equal
facilities for education and self-improvement, and his exclusion from
the public libraries. The white man will not say “No” to grants of
money which give him handsome Carnegie library buildings for nothing
or will raise universities, even Negro universities, but he will not
fulfill his part of the unwritten contract—and honor all philanthropy
by indiscriminate good will.
After visiting the school I saw glimpses of Negro women at work in
characteristic places of earning a living. The management was always
very sensitive about strangers being present, so it was possible to
find out little about the conditions. One shop was full of girls
sewing ready-cut trousers on machines run by electricity. The trousers
were cut in Baltimore and sent down here to be sewn cheaply by local
colored labor. A Jew was in charge. A Negro woman was looking after
the “welfare” of the girls. Another was a tobacco factory, where girls
earned eleven dollars a week, working from 7:30 a. m. to 5:30 p. m.,
stripping tobacco leaf in airy and fragrant rooms. At piecework they
earned from six cents a pound.
I visited the publishing office of the _Journal and Guide_, where the
Negroes not only edit a paper but manufacture their own type and do
everything themselves—one of a hundred Negro newspapers published in
the United States. The average number of spelling errors in many of
these sheets seemed to be about three a paragraph, but that in no wise
renders them ridiculous or deters the pen of the ready writers. Negroes
have a passion for journalism which is out of proportion to their
present development and capacity.
As I came out of the publishing office with the editor we saw a hearse.
It was drawn by a motor, and it was a new idea to me, that of being
motored to one’s grave. The editor made a sign and the hearse stopped.
“Just a moment,” said he, and a lugubriously cloaked Ethiopian with
large, shining teeth stepped down.
“This is Undertaker Brown,” said the editor.
“Always at yo’ seyvice, sar,” said the undertaker. “Is yo’ thinking of
taking a ride with me?”
I said I was not meditating on that sad course yet.
“It’s a fine hearse,” said Brown—“and look, they is steel clamps to
keep the coffin steady (he swung open the rear doors) and speshal
receppacles fo’ the flowers.”
I thanked him, and we shook hands effusively.
All the Negroes took charge of me. It was no difficult task to see
their ways of life. It was impossible not to feel happy in the midst
of their childish vivacity and enthusiasm and make-believe. Their
grievances were almost lost sight of in the sunshine of prosperity in
Eastern Virginia. Miss M—— told me how in the Red Cross drives during
the war she “led the cullud folk over the top” and the vividness of
her story of Negro vying with Negro as to who should subscribe most
money, and how she defied the white “crackers” to continue lynching
and persecuting them in the face of such patriotism as they had
shown was not only instructive but extraordinarily amusing, and also
touching; how a large audience of white people was listening to a
combined “platform” of black and white orators, and Negro choirs were
singing “spirituals” while the collection plates rolled round, and Miss
M—— when she arrived at the hall was so dead-beat with rushing round
the town all day that she fell in a faint and she prayed, “Lord, if
I gain strength I’ll take it for a sign that I am to speak.” And she
came to herself and went on to the platform and told the white folk
straight—what she felt—how nine-tenths of her people could not spell
the word _Democracy_ and had indeed only just heard of it, and yet they
sent their children to wounds and death, and they themselves subscribed
their last dimes for patriotic causes. But what did America give in
return? And at the end she overheard one of the worst “crackers” remark
that he could not help admiring her, she was “so durned sincere.”
The last evening I spent in this corner of Virginia was at a resort
of colored soldiers and sailors, and I had a talk with a boy who had
held a commission in the Ninety-second Division, a black unit which
had covered itself with glory in France. He was a lieutenant, and
was at the taking of St. Mihiel. The Negro marines were also very
interesting—eager, serious, and sober fellows. They were proud of
being in Uncle Sam’s navy, but wanted a chance of advancement there,
did not wish to remain twenty years in the same grade, but hoped
desperately for a gold stripe in time, and the chance to become petty
officer. Soldiers and sailors surged in and out of the hall, smoked
cigarettes, drank soda, and chatted. I heard no foul talk, and I took
much pleasure in their appearance. I felt what a fine body of guardians
of their country could be made of them if once prejudice were finally
overcome. In this part of Eastern Virginia, the apex of the South,
the new black world seemed very promising and had gone far in its
fifty-seven years of freedom.
The way from Norfolk to Richmond is up the James River, and I continued
my journey on a boat that had evidently come from New York—redolent
as it was of long-distance passengers. There was a seat, however,
just under the captain’s lookout, and there was nothing before me but
the progressing prow and the silver expanse of the river. A classical
voyage this—for it was up the James River, named after James the
First, that the first pioneers of Raleigh’s virgin land made their way.
It is felt to be romantic, because they were not Roundheads nor Quakers
nor Plymouth Brethren nor other sober-liveried folk, but gentlemen of
sword and ruff, courtier-sailors who upon occasion would be ready to
throw their cloaks in the mud for a Queen to tread upon. The tradition
of courtier survives, and a rich man of Virginia is to-day a Virginian
gentleman, though there is scarcely another State in America where the
landed proprietors claim to be gentry. The James River is significant
for another reason. At little Jamestown, which never came to anything
as a city, the first Negro slaves were landed in America in 1618,
and from the small beginning of one shipload three hundred years ago
nation-wide Negrodom, with all its black millions, has arisen.
Virginia grew prosperous in the cultivation of tobacco, which remains
to-day the staple production of a comparatively poor State. It is
too far north for the cultivation of cotton, and though doubtless
possessing great mineral wealth, industrial research has not gone
so far as in Pennsylvania. It is essentially a conservative State.
Slavery is said to have depressed its economic life so that neighboring
Northern States, whose development began much later, easily overtook
it. A somewhat patriarchal settled state of life took possession of
Virginia, a new feudalism which was out of keeping with hustling
and radical America. It is remarkable, however, how many lawmakers,
administrators, soldiers, and Presidents Virginia has given to the
United States. Starting with gentry, it has bred gentry.
And with regard to the Negro, the State has a good record. Despite the
various inequalities of treatment and Jim-Crowism noticeable by anyone
who is observant, there is little or no brutality or nigger-baiting.
Lynching is rare, and it must be supposed the alleged Negro attacks
upon white women must be rare also. Such relatively good conditions
prevail in Virginia that the whole South takes shelter behind her. And
as the proud Virginian reckons himself _par excellence_ the Southerner,
he is often annoyed when he reads of the worse treatment of the Negroes
further south. Virginia should remember she is not the whole South, and
she does not exert even a moral influence upon Georgia and Mississippi.
In that respect she seems to be as helpless as New England and the
Puritans, to whom politically she has generally been in opposition.
The old Virginian families bound the Negroes to them with undying
devotion. They became part of the family, with all the license of pet
children. They fought for them and assisted them in the Civil War with
the creature-like devotion of clansmen for their chief. The “veterans”
who still survive, Negroes like Robert E. Lee’s cook, who was one
of many picturesque personalities at the Atlanta reunion, are of a
different type from the Negroes of to-day. They identified themselves
with their master and mistress’s estate and person in a way that
is truly touching. Surely of all beings the Negro is capable of the
strongest and most pathetic human attachments.
Freedom, however, and the new ideas blew autumnly over the Virginian
summer. All changed. The family retinues broke up. The affections
were alienated. The new race of Negro individualists arose. The old
“mammies” and “uncles” were a people apart, and are dying out fast
now. The new Negroes are with and for themselves. They make shift to
be happy and to amuse themselves without the white man. And they have
now their schools, their churches which are like religious clubs, their
political societies, theatres, and other segregated interests.
These segregated interests have produced and tend to produce an
ever-increasing Negro culture, and though that culture may be somewhat
despised because of its humble beginnings, there seems no reason why it
should not have a future which will compare with that of white America.
But south of Richmond and south of Virginia there is progressively less
of this Negro culture to be found. There are the oases of Tuskegee
Institute and Atlanta and Fisk Universities, but white opinion is
adverse to Negro education, and the black masses have been unable to
over-crow their neighbors. In Richmond and north of it, however, the
black man has leave to breathe awhile, and there are interesting
developments.
Richmond, which in 1853 reminded Olmsted of Edinburgh in its
picturesqueness, has now quintupled its population, and spread greatly.
It is still a handsome city, and its center of Grecian Capitol and
public gardens is very pleasant. It is the third blackest city in the
United States, between thirty-five and forty per cent of its population
being colored. A certain General Gabriel led an insurrection of Negro
slaves against Richmond in 1801, and the city has always adopted itself
as self-constituted warden of the white man’s safety. The city has,
however, been free enough from disturbance since the Civil War. It
has its well-endowed Negro colleges, and on the other hand its less
satisfactorily placed elementary and secondary schools. As in Norfolk,
Negro business is thriving, though it has deeper roots.
It is less promising west of Richmond. A duller economic life prevails,
and conditions are more normal, less affected by the prosperity of war
industrialism. I traveled by train to Lynchburg. As this was my first
experience of trains south of the Mason-Dixon line, I was interested
to observe the Jim Crow arrangements. The Negroes are kept to separate
waiting rooms, and book their tickets at other booking windows, and
they are put into separate carriages in the trains, and not allowed
promiscuously with white people, as in the North. They have not quite
so good accommodation, though they pay the same fare; sometimes there
is less space, sometimes there is no separate smoking compartment.
Drawing-room cars and “sleepers” are generally unavailable. Colored
people consider it a great grievance, but it is probably the insult
implied in their segregation that affects them most. There is not
an enormous disparity in the comfort. Inability to obtain food on
long-distance trains was often mentioned to me as the chief injustice,
but the personal aspect of the matter was always to the fore: “We don’t
want to mix in with white people, or with those who don’t want us. We
can get on very well by ourselves ...” they were always protesting.
In the North, promiscuously seated black and white passengers all seem
quite happy and at ease. Mixing them works well. There is never any
hitch. In the South, however, segregation seems to be for the Negro’s
good. The less personal contact he has with the white man the safer
he is from sudden outbursts of racial feeling. Of course, the railway
companies ought to give the Negro equal accommodation for equal fare,
but that is another matter.
Lynchburg is a beautifully situated little city beside the Blue Ridge
Mountains. It is a great market for dark tobacco. It manufactures iron
pipes, ploughs, boots and shoes, and a number of other articles, and
boasts of “ideal labor conditions and no strikes.” It is named after
the original planter, Charles Lynch, an Irish boy, who ran from home
and married a Quaker. It lapsed from Quakerism to a very sinful state,
and then is said to have been reformed by the Methodists. Now there is
nothing to trouble the mind unpleasantly at Lynchburg.
The public library seemed to have paused sick in 1905. It is called
the Jones Memorial Library, an impressive white building with an array
of white steps leading up to it. Jones himself, who was a business
man and served a very short while in the war of North and South, is
shown in full martial attire drawing his sword, halfway up the stone
steps—as it were in act of driving readers away. A cold cloister-like
air pervaded the building. Negroes were not permitted in, and white
people did not enter much. The librarian, however, was unusually kind
and obliging, and lent me a book without taking a deposit. This lady
said she would rather sit next to a decent black woman in a train than
to the average White.
“We all had our black mammies—they treated us as if we were their own
babies. Can you blame us if sometimes we love them as our own flesh and
blood? All the trouble we have is due to Northerners coming South. And
if a Negro gets lynched, what a fuss is made of it!”
I met the manager of a tobacco warehouse. He was not willing that I
should see his Negroes at work and talk to them, but he assured me in a
bland way, cigar in hand, that his pickers were a jolly crowd who knew
they were well paid and would never go on strike. He paid thirty to
thirty-five cents the hour for Negro labor.
“The war has played the devil with the niggers,” said he. “It has
spread about the idea of high wages. The North has been especially to
blame, luring the niggers up there with the bait of big money. It has
caused a rise in wages all over the South.”
His employees were unskilled. In his opinion no Negroes were ever
used for skilled work. What I had to tell him of Newport News and its
shipyards was beyond his comprehension. As for Hampton Institute, he
averred that he had never heard that it produced capable artisans. In
his opinion there had been some good Negro carpenters and wheelwrights
in slavery, but none since. Freedom had been very bad for the Negro.
Yes, he utterly approved of lynching. It was always justified, and
mistakes were never made. He had a water-tight mind.
A mile or so away was Virginia College, a red-brick structure in the
woods, where in happy seclusion a few hundred colored men and women
were being enfranchised of civilization and culture. A student took
me to his study-bedroom, hung with portraits of John Brown and Booker
T. Washington. The Bible was still the most important book, and it
occupied the pride of place, though it was interleaved with pages of
the Negro radical monthly, _The Crisis_. The student was an intense
and earnest boy with all the extra seriousness of persecuted race
consciousness. He said, in a low voice, that he would do anything at
any cost for his people. He said the present leaders of the Negro world
would fail, because of narrow outlook, but the next leaders would win
great victories for color. And he would be ready to follow the new
leaders. What a contrast they were!—the boss of the tobacco factory,
cigar in hand, “talking wise” on the nigger, and the quiet Negro
intellectual in his college, whetting daily the sword of learning and
ambition.
III
ORATORS AND ACTORS, PREACHERS AND SINGERS
The aspirations and convictions of the Negroes of to-day were well
voiced in a speech I heard at Harlem. I had been warned that I ought to
hear the “red-hot orator of the Afro-American race,” and so I went to
hear him. The orator was Dean Pickens, of Morgan College, Baltimore.
When he came to the platform the colored audience not only cheered him
by clapping, but stood up and cried aloud three times:
“_Yea, Pickens!_”
The chairman had said he would have to leave about half after five,
but the speaker must not allow himself to be disturbed by that, but
go right on. Pickens, who was one of the very black and very cheerful
types of his race, turned to the chairman and said:
“You won’t disturb _me_, brother! But if you’re going at half after
five, let’s shake hands right now, and then I can go straight ahead.”
And they shook hands with great gusto, and everyone laughed and felt at
ease. Pickens was going to speak; nothing could disturb Pickens; they
relaxed themselves to a joyful, anticipatory calm.
Just before the turn of Pickens to speak a white lady journalist
had rushed on to the platform and rushed off between two pressing
engagements, and had given the audience a “heart-to-heart” talk on
Bolsheviks and agitators, and had told them how thankful they ought to
be that they were in America and not in the Congo still. She gained a
good deal of applause because she was a woman, and a White, and was
glib, but the thinking Negroes did not care for her doctrine, and were
sorry she could not wait to hear it debated.
“Brothers, they’re always telling us what we ought to be,” said the
orator, with an engaging smile. “But there are many different opinions
about what ought to be; it’s what we are that matters. As a colored
pastor said to his flock one day—’Brothers and sisters, it’s not
the _oughtness_ of this problem that we have to consider, but the
_isness_!’ I am going to speak about the _is_ness. Sister S——, who
has just spoken, has had to go to make a hurry call elsewhere, but
I am sorry she could not stay. I think she might perhaps have heard
something worth while this afternoon. Sister S—— warned us against
agitators and radicals. Now, I am not against or for agitators. The
question is: ’What are they agitating about?’ ‘Show me the agitator,’ I
say. President Wilson is a great agitator; he is agitating a League of
Nations. Jesus Christ was a great agitator; He agitated Christianity.
The Pharisees and Sadducees didn’t like His agitating, and they fixed
Him. But He was a good agitator, and we’re not against Him. Then,
again, the Irish are great agitators; the Jews are great agitators;
there are good and bad agitators. (_Applause_.) But, brothers, I’ll
tell you who is the greatest agitator in this country ... the greatest
agitator is injustice. (_Sensation_.) When injustice disappears, I’ll
be against agitators, or I’ll be ready to see them put in a lunatic
asylum. (_Applause_.)
“Sister S—— was very hard on the radicals. There, again, show me the
radical, I say. A man may be radically wrong, yes, but he may also be
radically _right_. (_Laughter_.)
“As for the Bolsheviks, it’s injustice is making Bolshevism. It’s
injustice that changes quiet, inoffensive school teachers and
workingmen into Bolsheviks, just as it is injustice is stirring up
the colored people. Not that we are Bolsheviks. I am not going to say
anything against Bolsheviks, either. Show me the Bolshevik first, I
say, and then I’ll know whether I’m against him. People are alarmed
because the number of Bolsheviks is increasing. But what is making them
increase? If America is such a blessed country, why is she making all
these Bolsheviks? You know a tree by its fruits, and so you may know
a country by what it produces. These Bolsheviks that we read of being
deported in the Soviet Ark weren’t Bolshevik when they came to this
country. It comes to this: that we’ve raised a crop of Bolshevism in
this country and are exporting it to Europe, and now we’re busy sowing
another crop. Stop sowing injustice, and Bolshevism will cease growing.
(_Applause again._)
“But there is less Bolshevism among the colored people than among the
white, because the colored are more humble, more subservient, more used
to inequalities. We are always being told that we are backward, and we
believe it; bad, and we believe it; untrustworthy, and we believe it;
immoral, and we believe it. We are always being told what we ought to
be. But I’ll come back to what we are.
“We may be immoral; we may be a danger to the white women. But has
anyone ever honestly compared the morality of Whites and Blacks? They
will tell you there is not sufficient evidence to make a comparison, or
they will bring you pamphlets and paragraphs out of newspapers, records
of disgusting crimes; and we know very well that in twelve million
Negroes there are bound to be some half-wits and criminals capable
of terrible breaches of morality. But at best it is a paper evidence
against the Negro, while there is flesh-and-blood evidence against the
White. The moral standard of the Whites is written visibly in the
flesh and blood of three million of our race. (_Another sensation._)
Brothers, there’s one standard for the white man, and another for the
colored man. (_Sensation redoubled._) A colored man’s actions are not
judged in the same light as those of a white man.
“Well, I’m not against that. It is giving us a higher ideal. A colored
man has got to be much more careful in this country than a white man.
He’ll be more heavily punished for the same crime. If he gets into a
dispute with a white man he’s bound to lose his case. So he won’t get
into the dispute. (_Laughter._) Where a white man gets five years’
imprisonment, the Negro gets put in the electric chair. Where the
white man gets six days, he gets two years. If a white man seduces
a colored girl, she never gets redress. If the other thing occurs,
the Negro is legally executed, or lynched. What is the result of all
that inequality? Why, it is making us a more moral, less criminal,
less violent people than the Whites. Once at a mixed school they were
teaching the black and white boys to jump. The white boys jumped and
the black boys jumped. But when it was the black boy’s turn the teacher
always lifted the jumping stick a few inches. What was the consequence?
Why, after a while every colored boy in that school could jump at least
a foot higher than any white boy. (Renewed sensation, in which Pickens
attempted several times to resume.)
“That is what is happening to the Negro race in America. We are being
taught to jump a foot higher than the Whites. We will jump it, or we
will break our necks. (_Laughter._)
“Of course a great difference separates the Black from the White
still. And I don’t say that the white man hasn’t given us a chance.
If our positions had been transposed, and we had been masters and the
white folks had been the slaves, I’m not sure that we wouldn’t have
treated them worse than they have treated us. But the white folk make a
mistake when they think we’re not taking the chances they give us. We
are taking them. We are covering the ground that separates Black from
White. The white man is not outstripping us in the race. We are nearer
to him than we were—not farther away. We haven’t caught up, but we’re
touching. We are always doing things we never did before. (_Applause._)
“We shall not have cause to regret the time of persecution and
injustice and the higher standard of morality that has been set us.
Brothers, it’s all worth while. Our boys here have been to France and
bled and suffered for white civilization and white justice. We didn’t
want to go. We didn’t know anything about it. But it’s been good for
us. We’ve made the cause of universal justice our cause. We have taken
a share in world sufferings and world politics. It’s going to help
raise us out of our obscurity. We have discovered the French, and shall
always be grateful to them. We didn’t know France before, but every
colored soldier is glad now that he fought for France. If there is to
be a League of Nations, we know France will stand by us. And we shall
have a share in the councils of Humanity—with our colored brethren in
all parts of the world.” (_Sensation again._)
The orator spoke for two hours, and the above is only a personal
remembrance put down afterwards. His actual speech is therefore much
shortened. But that was the sense and the flavor of it. It was given
in a voice of humor and challenge, resonant, and yet everlastingly
whimsical. Laughter rippled the whole time. I shook hands with him
afterwards; for he was warm and eloquent and moving as few speakers I
have heard. He was utterly exhausted, for he had drawn his words from
his audience, and two thousand people had been pulling at his spirit
for two hours.
It was delightful to listen to a race propagandist so devoid of hatred,
malice, and uncharitableness. Some regard humor as the greatest
concomitant of wisdom, and this representative Negro certainly had
both. He never touched on the tragedy of race hatred and racial
injustice, but he saw the humor of them also. And the colored audience
saw the humor also. With the English there would have been anger, with
the French spontaneous insurrection, with the Jews gnashing of teeth,
but with the Negroes it was humor. There was no collective hate or
spite, but, manifest always, a desire to be happy, even in the worst
circumstances.
It is curious, however, that the Negro has a livelier sense of the
humor of tragedy than the white man. For two months I visited a Negro
theatre every week, and I was much struck by the fact that where
there was most cause to weep or feel melancholy, the colored audience
was most provoked to mirth. Negro companies, such as the Lafayette
Players, play “Broadway successes,” melodramas, classical dramas,
musical comedies, and indeed anything that would be staged in a
white man’s theatre. But the result is nearly always comedy. As upon
occasion white men burn cork and make up as Negroes, so the Negroes
paint themselves white and make up as white men and women. Watching
them is an entrancing study, because there is not only the original
drama and its interest, but superadded the interpretation by Africans
of what they think the white man is and does and says. Some of it is
like the servants’ hall dressed up as master and mistress and their
friends, but has remarkable felicity in acting. A large party, all
in full evening dress, is very striking—only the Negro women are on
the average so huge that when painted white and exposing vast fronts
of bosoms, they are somewhat incredible. A typical evening party on
the stage, with villain and hero, looks very handsome, but not in any
way Anglo-Saxon, if conceivably foreign American. The hero may have a
perfectly villainous expression. One’s mind is taken away from America
to the Mediterranean. Even when painted, it is impossible to look
other than children of the sun. The drama is played with a great deal
of noise. When the moments of passion arrive, everyone lets himself
go, and the stage is swallowed up in a hurly-burly of violent word and
action. There is never any difficulty in hearing what is being said.
But even the minor characters, such as butler and waiter, who should
be practically mute, insist on whistling and singing as they go about,
and serve the guests in a _pas de danse_. In one serious melodrama the
butler never appeared but he hummed resonantly the popular air: “Yakky,
Yekky, Yikky, Yokky Doola.” The villain or villainess is likely to act
the part with great verve, and generally I remarked a true aptitude for
acting, an ability which noise and violence could not hide. A white
drama is literally transformed on the Negro stage. The Negroes catch
hold of any childishness or piece of make-believe and give it a sort of
poetry. Thus, for instance, Miss Elenor Porter’s “Polyanna,” with its
gospel of “_Be glad_,” is a cloying sentimentalism in the hands of the
ordinary white company. But the Negroes make it into a sort of “Alice
in Wonderland,” very amusing, very sweet, and very touching—something
entirely delightful. The consciousness of the white person sitting in
the colored theater is, however, continually disturbed by ripples of
tittering whenever on the stage there is a suggestion of calamity.
When it is melodrama that is being played, the audience laughs all the
time like a collection of intellectuals who have visited a popular
theatre to watch “The Silver King” or “The Girl’s Crossroads.” The very
suggestion of disaster is funny.
This is an indication of difference in soul. There are many who would
see in these white-painted Negroes another instance of a passion for
the imitation of white people. But one could hardly point to anything
that shows more readily the sheer difference of black and white people
than the Negro stage such as it is to-day.
There is not as yet a Negro drama, but it certainly will arise. Ridgely
Torrence’s “Plays for a Negro Theatre” is perhaps the nearest approach
so far to a genuine Negro drama, but the author is white. The great
success of these plays when acted by Negroes only shows the glory that
awaits the awakening of a true Negro dramatist. Every large city in
America has its Negro theatre or music hall or cinema shows. The drama
could become an organ of racial self-expression, and could give voice
to the hopes and aspirations and sorrows of the colored people in a
very moving way. I think such a drama would prove highly original.
Comedy would be conceived in a different spirit. So far from the Negro
imitating the white man, we should all be found imitating him—as we
already imitate him in our dances and music. The new Negro humor would
infect the whole Western world.
It is generally called “the blues.” We say we have a fit of the blues
when we are feeling depressed. It is not at all a laughing matter, but
the Negro finds that state of mind to be always humorous. A hundred
new comic songs tell the humor of sorrows. All the gloomy formulas of
everyday life have been set to music. Telling one’s hard fortune and
howling over it and drawing it out and infinitely bewailing it, and
adding circumstantial minor sorrows as one goes along and infinitely
bewailing them—this is distinctively Negro humor.
I visited one evening a Negro theatre where a musical comedy was going
on—words and music both by Negroes. It opened with the usual singing
and dancing chorus of Negro girls. They were clad in yellow and crimson
and mauve combinations with white tapes on one side from the lace edge
of the knicker to their dusky arms. They danced from the thigh rather
than from the knee, moving waist and bosom in unrestrained undulation,
girls with large, startled seeming eyes and uncontrollable masses of
dark hair. A dance of physical joy and abandon, with no restraint in
the toes or the knees, no veiling of the eyes, no half shutting of
the lips, no holding in of the hair. Accustomed to the very æsthetic
presentment of the Bacchanalia in the Russian Ballet, it might be
difficult to call one of those Negro dancers a Bacchante, and yet
there was one whom I remarked again and again, a Queen of Sheba in her
looks, a face like starry night, and she was clad slightly in mauve,
and went into such ecstasies during the many encores that her hair fell
down about her bare shoulders, and her cheeks and knees, glistening
with perspiration, outshone her eyes. Following this chorus a love
story begins to be developed—a humorous mother-in-law of tremendous
proportions and deep bass voice, her black face blackened further to
the color of boots, reprimands and pets her scapegrace son, who is the
comic loafer. He confers with his “buddy” as to how to win “Baby,” the
belle of Dark City. The “buddy” is the lugubriously stupid and faithful
and above all comic Negro friend who in trying to help you always does
you an ill turn. “Baby” is the beautiful doll of the piece—“Honey
baby, sugar baby!” She is courted also by the villain, who is plausible
and well dressed and polite, but still provocative of mirth. The hero
and the villain do a competitive cake walk for the girl, posturizing,
showing off, approaching and retiring, almost squatting and dancing,
leaping and dancing, swimming through the air, throwing everything
away from them and falling forward, and yet never falling, blowing
out their cheeks and dilating their eyes, and, as it were, hoo-dooing
and out-hoo-dooing one another, pseudo-enragement, monkey-mocking of
one another, feigned stage-fright and pretended escapes. Seeing this
done on a first night, the whole theatre was jammed and packed with
Negro people, and they recalled the couple nine times, and still they
gave encores. One of them, the villain, gave up, but the other, the
hero, went on as if still matched, his mouth open and panting, and
perspiration streaming through the black grease on his face—for he
also had blackened himself further for fun. The wedding service was
danced and sung in a “scena” which would have enravished even a Russian
audience. I had seen nothing so pretty or so amusing, so bewilderingly
full of life and color, since Sanine’s production of the “Fair of
Sorochinsky,” in Moscow.
The most characteristic parts of the comedy, however, were to come.
It was very lengthy, for Negroes do not observe white conventions
regarding time. It would be tedious to describe in words what was
wholly delightful to see. But there were two crises when the audience
roared with joy excessively. First, when the young husband suspects
his wife of flirting with the villain, and second, when he wants to
make it up and every imaginable calamity descends upon his head. He
arrives at his home about midnight, wearing a terribly tight pair of
boots and a suit of old, dusty clothes. There is a party at the house;
everyone is in evening dress. He won’t go in to the dance room. He has
to sit down and take his boots off, and henceforth walks about holding
them in his hands. He sees his wife dancing with the villain, makes a
scene, and then dramatically leaves his wife for ever. Left behind, she
stares a moment in silence, and then throws herself full length on a
low table, kicks up her heels, and vents her unhappiness in a series
of prolonged howls and paroxysms which put the audience into a heaven
of delight. The tight boots and the limp they cause are _blues_; the
wife’s grief is a _blue_; and for the rest of the drama the melancholy
husband is seen tramping about in his socks, carrying his wretched
boots in his hands. His unhappiness is long-drawn-out, but when at last
he decides to forgive and comes back home, he is met by the lugubrious
“buddy” outside his house, who tells him all his wife has suffered in
his absence. The repentant husband looks very miserable.
“And then a little baby boy was born,” says Buddy.
The repentant husband cheers up.
“So like you, such a beauty.”
The husband waxes excited and happy, and asks a flood of questions.
“But the baby died,” says his lugubrious companion.
The poor hero yells with sorrow.
“How Baby wished you were there to see little baby,” says Buddy. “How
she talked of you!”
“The little darling—and she has quite forgiven me?”
“She forgave you, all right. Ah, she was a fine woman. You never
deserved such a woman as she was, so beautiful, so loving, so tender,
so devoted—always saying your name, counting the days you had been
away from her and moping and sighing. Ah, it ate into her heart!”
“Yes, Buddy, I am a worthless, miserable nigger, that’s what I am. I
didn’t deserve to have her.”
“She said: ‘Oh, for one kiss; oh, for one hug—— ‘”
“I’ll go in to her at once.”
“Stop!” says Buddy impressively.
“Wha’s the matter?”
“She died day after baby was born.”
“No?”
“Yassir. Stone dead. Sure’s I live.”
The poor hero breaks down and sobs and wails and howls and blubbers,
distraction in his aspect, his knees knock together, he throws his hat
in the dust—and all the while the audience is convulsed with laughter.
The Negro women in the stalls find their chairs too small for them and
all but fall on to the floor; the smartly dressed Negro youths in the
boxes are guffawing from wide-opened mouths and laughing as much with
their bodies as with their faces.
“Mother and I went to town to buy the coffin,” says Buddy. “Poor old
Mother!”
“Did Mother forgive me?”
“Oh, yes, she forgave you all right. Such a mother as she was. She knew
you were bad and wrong and a disgrace, but she loved you. Ah, how she
loved you!”
“I am glad there’s poor old Mother.”
“Mother and I arranged for the funerals, but we had to sell up the
home. Yes, every stick.”
More and more grief on the part of husband.
“I’ll go in and see her anyway,” says he, moving toward the door.
“Stop!” says Buddy.
“Wha’s the matter?”
“She’s dead ... run over by a trolley car as we were going to the
funeral ...” and so on, the dénouement of course being that when he is
about to go and hang himself he catches a glimpse of Mother, larger, if
possible, than life, and he realizes it is all a hoax, and then Baby
appears with her little baby—and all is joy.
Of course the play _par excellence_ for a Negro theatre is “Othello,”
or rather, for a Negro actor in a mixed cast. Unfortunately, no white
company in the United States will allow a Negro actor to take even a
subordinate role. Even “nigger” parts, humorous Negro parts, have to be
taken by white men. An anomaly to be remedied! The profession of acting
is too noble a one for color prejudice to lurk there. I fear, however,
that it will be long before mixed companies of white and colored
actors perform on the dramatic stage in the United States. “Othello”
apparently is seldom played, though the old tragedy of Shakespeare is
strangely of the time and _apropos_. The tragedy of _Othello_ exhibits
the same race prejudice existent in the sixteenth century as now, and
expresses itself in similar terms. The white woman is not for Moors or
Negroes on any terms. It is almost incredible that _Desdemona_ should
shun
The wealthy curled darlings of our nation, to incur a general mock,
Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom
Of such a thing as thou.
He must have used an enchantment on her. _Othello_ is the devil. He is
a black man. He is a Barbary horse—
You’ll have your nephews neigh to you.
You’ll have coursers for cousins and gennets for Germans.
There is little doubt that by _Othello_ Shakespeare intended a Negro,
or, in any case, someone whom the white denizens of New Orleans
would call a nigger. “Moor” or “Blackamoor” was the common name for
Negro, and the local detail of the play confirms the impression of
a thick-lipped, black-bosomed, rather repulsive physical type. The
psychology of _Othello_ is, moreover, that of the modern Negro. His
florid and sentimental talk, with its romantic yearning and its
exaggerations, is very characteristic.
I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth ‘scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my travels’ history:
Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven,
It was my hint to speak,—such was the process;
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.
And are not his last noble words, with his dramatic and romantic
gesture, and his suicide, the noble African set upon a pedestal!
Fanny Kemble in her diary tells how John Quincy Adams thought “it
served _Desdemona_ right for marrying a ‘nigger,’” and she imagines
the fine effect which some American actor in the rôle of _Iago_ might
obtain by substituting for “I hate the Moor” “I hate the nigger,”
pronounced in proper Charleston or Savannah fashion. “Only think,” says
Fanny Kemble, “what a very new order of interest the whole tragedy
might receive acted from this standpoint and called ‘Amalgamation, or
the Black Bridal.’”
The sympathy of a Southern audience would be almost exclusively with
_Iago_ and _Roderigo_ and the father. But could they tolerate it
without a lynching? No Negro company dare produce it south of the
Mason-Dixon line.
How the Negroes would perform tragedy in the vein of tragedy I do
not know. There is so much tragedy in their history, in their past,
that they have sought only comic relief. I believe the characteristic
Americanism of “Keep Smiling” or, as expressed in the song, “Smile,
Smile, Smile,” comes from the Negro. The colored people as a whole
seem to be serious only in church or at musical gatherings. Even
the eloquent pastor has no easy task to gain the attention of his
congregation. He must walk about and rage and flash, and with crashing
reverberations explode the wrath of God like the voice of the Almighty
in the storm. He must forget ordinary diction in forgetting himself,
and chant in ecstasy and rapture, lifting up his whole soul to the
Lord. If you talk to the Negro, he merely laughs; you must chant to
him to be taken seriously. In this possibly lies the vein for Negro
dramatic tragedy and prophetic poetry. Perhaps, however, the emotional
appeal of such will be too strong for Whites.
It is a great ordeal for a sensitive white person to take part in a
Negro revival or camp meeting. The emotional strain is tremendous.
Though it is difficult to move the Negro, once he is moved he can be
rapidly brought to a frenzy which surely has little enough to do with
the Christian religion. But even when he is not greatly moved it is
somewhat heart-searching for a white person present.
One day I went in at a chapel door. The building was full of Negroes;
every seat seemed taken. Perched high above the platform was a black
woman, all in black, with a large jet cross on her broad bosom. She was
reading from the First Book of Samuel in a great oracular voice which
never rose nor fell, but was like a pronouncement of eternal law. I was
taken right up to the front and given a seat under her throne. I knew
at once that there was likely to be an emotional storm in the audience.
It was throbbing on the heartstrings even as I listened to the reading,
and I wondered how I should combat it. After the Scripture the Lord’s
Prayer was said by a portentous Negro who had the frame of an African
warrior. When he went down on his knees he shook the beams of wood and
the seats. He prayed angrily, and clapped as he prayed, and interjected
remarks.
_Thy will be done!_ Yes, Lord, that’s it, that’s what we want,
certainly.
_Give us this day our daily bread!_ Yes, give us it (clap, clap, clap).
Give us our daily bread, Lord. Feed us! Feed us, Lord!
The congregation also on all hands interjected its remarks and clapped
and praised as the Lord’s Prayer went along.
The woman all in black was a famous mover of souls, and her sermon was
evidently the most looked-for religious excitement of the morning.
She was a plain woman with a powerful will, a great voice, and a rare
knowledge of the Bible. She preached from the text, “Saul hid himself
among the stuff.” First she told the story in a quiet voice and then
began to make the application. It was no use hiding from God, for He
would find you out.
So rousing were her simple words, and such was the atmosphere she was
begetting in the midst of her congregation, that I had to do everything
in my power to avoid breaking down under the influence and sobbing like
a child.
I went over in my mind the drama of “Macbeth,” and reconstructed
“Richard the Third,” and called to memory the speeches I had listened
to at the Bar dinner the night before, and what I had been doing during
the past week and month. But all the while I registered also in my
brain the whole of what the black priestess was saying.
Next to me a feminine voice kept crying out: “_Help her, Lord, help
her!_” and I back-pedalled for all I was worth. Presently the preacher
was lifted out of the ordinary, everyday voice into a barbaric chant,
which rose and fell and acclaimed and declaimed in rhythmical grandeur
and music. I dared not look at the woman at my side. But she now lisped
out, “She’s all right now, Lord; she’s all right now,” and I thought of
the relief of the Welsh when their preachers get into the strain they
call the _hwyl_.
I then very cautiously peered round at the woman. What was my
astonishment to see a girl of eighteen with a face like a huge, dusky
melon. Her jaws were perfectly relaxed, her eyes half shut, and her
upper lip, which was raised, exposed her smiling teeth and a layer of
sweet chewing gum.
Meanwhile the Reverend Norah up above was urging us all to come out
from behind the stuff. We were always hiding behind our business,
behind our families, behind our bodies.
“They are hiding behind their bodies, O Lord!
“Yes, O Lord, they say that they are sick, that they are ill,
“That they cannot do this and they cannot do that because they are
feeble in health.
“O come out from behind the stuff!
“You saw Saul hide behind the baggage, O Lord.
“Our Negro brothers and sisters are hiding there to-day.
“Hiding behind their wealth——
“Hiding behind their charity——
“Hiding behind their houses and their clothes and their cars,
“Yes, and their wives and their husbands,
“And other peoples’ opinions.
“But You see them, O Lord,
“You see them, and You’ll bring them out——”
“I’m hiding there right enough,” broke out from the congregation, and
“Lord, save us!” “Lord, help us!”
The whole mass of black humanity swayed under the power of the emotion
which the woman had kindled. They were about to stand in frenzy and
give the great gospel shout of repentance, when something happened; the
woman’s strength gave way, and she slipped out of the chant back into
her ordinary voice. At once the spell was broken.
The tiniest tots in the congregation then came out carrying little jam
jars which they bore to each individual for his collection, and we sang
a rolling and clamorous hymn, and all went home.
One note further in the sermon, and there would have been a great scene
of conversion at the close of the service, and everyone would have
decided to come out from behind his stuff, as the preacher recommended.
But it’s better for one’s religion not to be converted every Sunday.
Many white people would no doubt be so greatly amused by a sermon of
this kind that they would find difficulty in containing their laughter.
One laugh from a white stranger might have proved calamitous, and would
certainly have evoked hostility. On the other hand, there are Whites
who love psycho-physical religious emotionalism. Such a type is the
poet who wrote—
We mourned all our terrible sins away,
And we all found Jesus at the break of the day.
Blessed Jesus!
I never met a Negro who thought it humorous unless it were a member of
one sect telling of the “goings-on” in another. Each different race or
people seems to have its different characteristic religious expression.
When one has seen the exaltation of Copt and Arab in religion, when one
has heard the great choric voice of Russia at church, and the splendid,
purposeful faith of Teutonic hymns, one knows that a calm singing of
“Praise to the Holiest in the Height!” is not the only mode of praise.
There are fifty thousand ways of praising God, and every single one of
them is right.
So there is no call to chide the Negro for his excess. His ways are
part of the natural and Divine history of Man, and it is infinitely
worth while to consider them with an open and charitable mind. The
hysteria, the frenzy, of some meetings I have observed is not in the
white man. There is no use being appalled by it. It is the third part
which finishes the man downward, as St. John says in the desert.
“And after these emotional excitements they commit so many murders,”
said a Southern woman to me.
“If so, one must be upon one’s guard in the presence of a converted
man,” said I.
* * * * *
The foundation of the Negro’s great religious seriousness is to be
found in the Negro hymn or “spiritual.” These spirituals were before
there were Negro churches, before Christianity was actually allowed to
the slaves. That is why they are more often called plantation melodies.
They were sung in the twilight of the old plantations, and gave voice
to a great human sorrow and a great human need. They show that the
Negro has obtained access to the spiritual deeps, that he has a soul as
we have—a fact so often denied—and that he is capable of penetrating
the sublime. I listened very often to these songs. In several places
they were sung to honor a white visitor. I heard them rendered by
the Hampton Singers and lectured upon by Harry T. Burleigh, to whose
efforts in research the preservation of several are due. There is no
question of the excellence of them. They make a great appeal to all
people who have music in their souls.
It is, however, a musical effect, not an intellectual one. The words
have often little relevance to anything profound, and at best are
childish. There is generally a keynote which murmurs through the whole
of the song, the function of the basso-profundo who provides a river
of harmony like life itself, and the tenors and baritones and the
shriller voices move on this flowing base like ships. On the rivers
the slaves loved to sing as they rowed their masters, using most aptly
the beat of the oars and the swish of the water, while the man who
stood at the helm and steered was usually the deep bass. One of the
most unforgettable melodies is “O, Listen to the Lambs!” The tenors
seem to imitate flocks of innumerable sheep and lambs all crying to one
another, while the basso-profundo is the irrelevance of “I want to go
to Heaven when I die,” continually repeated in subterranean mumbling
and whispers——
O listen to the la-ambs
All a-cry ... in’. All a-cry ... in’.
An’ I wan’ to go to Hebn w’en I die!
“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Go Down, Moses,” “Didn’t Hear Nobody
Pray,” “The Walls of Jericho,” and many others are assuredly famous.
These and many other phenomena give indications of a distinctive Negro
point of view, and of an incipient broad-based popular culture. A
sympathetic study will always give evidence that can be set against
the point of view that the Negro is nothing, or an animal, or a scamp
at best, or a shame to the species. I was sitting in the gardens at
Baltimore in the shade of a giant plane tree one day when out came a
mixed class of Negro boys and girls and a young eager colored master
of about twenty-five. The girls were luxuriant “flappers” of every
hue of polished ebony; the boys were spindle-legged and spry and
bullet-headed. They all examined plants and trees and caterpillars and
flowers under the informing tutelage of the master. They were as noisy
and vivacious as a flock of birds that has suddenly lighted on a plain.
They minded no outsider. But a tall white man passed them, and I saw on
his face a look of unutterable contempt.
“Learning botany” said he to me in a stage whisper. “They’ll know as
much about it to-morrow morning as pigs.”
IV
IN TENNESSEE
The South, they tell me, never alters. It is said to be the least
characteristic and most uninteresting part of the United States. “You
will not care for it,” I was told. “It has not changed in fifty years.”
It is certainly little visited. It does not exemplify the hustle and
efficiency of the North. And then you cannot lecture down there. It
is not a literary domain. The consequence is that in Great Britain
many people confound the “Southern States” with the Republics of South
America. I was asked in letters why I had gone South. It was thought
there must be less interest there. But that is a mistake. The South is
as vital as the West and the East. On the whole it is more picturesque.
It is not so diversified, but the vast areas of cotton on the one hand
and of sugar and corn and rice on the other, and the forests, present
well-marked features and give the South a handsome natural aspect. It
is true that the Southern point of view as regards the Negro does not
change very much, and that all vote one way, but it does not follow
that the Southern point of view as regards the whole future of the
United States has not been modified and will not change. The South has
been very poor and is becoming rich, will perhaps become very rich and
prosperous. It was almost deprived of political power, and now it has,
in an extraordinary way, regained political power. It is well known
that the opinion of a poor and ruined man changes when Fortune makes up
to him for the past. So also with the South.
Then, in considering a people as a whole, one is bound to reckon
character. Thus, in Great Britain, what important factors are the
ruggedness of Yorkshire and Lancashire, the caution of the Scots,
the authority-loving of the southern counties, the enthusiasm and
imaginativeness of the Celts. And in America one has to reckon, not
only with the Puritan fervor of New England, but with the determination
and turbulence and group instinct of the more cavalier spirit of the
South. Though heat makes the Southern women languid and the Southern
men fiery and quick of temper, it does not seem to make them weaker.
On the whole, the Southerner seems to have a stronger will than the
Northerner, and despite the exuberance of North and West, and a flood
of contrary ideas and sentiments, the Southerner remains, as it were,
eternally incapable of being suppressed. As long as America speaks, the
South will always speak. Therefore, the South is very significant in
American life.
After Virginia I went by rail to the neighboring State of Tennessee. I
came into Knoxville one Friday night. The sight of it in the moonlight
was impressive—the broad railway bridge, the clock tower with luminous
face, the main street flocking with a Tennessee crowd, all shops fully
ablaze with light; bunting and wreaths hung from house to house—for
it was the week of the Fair. A Salvation Army meeting bellowed forth
musical offerings and hallelujahs “thro’ the flag-filled air.”
Everywhere electric signs were twinkling. Laughter and talk walked arm
in arm along the broad main way. “It’s a fine city, this Knoxville of
yours,” I ventured to remark to a stranger. “No, not a fine city,” said
he, “a fine people, but not a fine city, a wretched city; it needs
pulling down and rebuilding, but fine people, the finest people in the
world.” This rare self-consciousness and belief in self, this group
feeling, I believe, one would look in vain for in the North.
“Sober Knoxville” is one of the most responsible of Southern cities.
Tennessee as a whole is quiet and steady. Lynching is infrequent. It
was therefore considered very extraordinary that a race riot should
break out in the city. The race riots in Chicago and Washington in 1919
were no doubt worse, but none caused more perplexity than that which
broke out at Knoxville on August 30th of that year.
Deplorable and terrible as were those Negro _pogroms_ of the year
after the war, I think they were due to special conditions. They were
the expression of the frustrated ferocity that would otherwise have
gone into the war. Demobilization excitements had much to do with
them—the parades of Negro regiments, the idleness of white troops
and of the demobilized unemployed. When the complete transition to
peace conditions had been achieved, the danger of these outbreaks was
averted. The year 1920 remains freer from race riots. That is not to
say that they may not break out again, and on a larger scale. In any
time of social upheaval and revolution they become possible. Those that
have occurred show an ugly animus against the Negro still latent in the
common people of the cities.
As explained to me, the outbreak at Knoxville seemed comparatively
simple in origin. Mr. Maures Mayes, a Negro, murdered Mrs. Lindsay,
a white woman. He was arrested and sent to a jail in another city.
A mob formed to enter Knoxville prison and lynch the Negro. But a
committee opened parley with the governor, and was allowed to satisfy
itself that the prisoner was not there. Apparently, however, there
was a considerable amount of whisky stored in the prison. The whisky
attracted the mob also. A general assault was commenced, the place was
stormed, and all prisoners were released. Troops sent to disperse the
mob joined it, and a second purpose then appeared—to take revenge
on the colored population. Someone started a rumor and it spread like
wildfire, that thousands of Negroes were marching on the business
part of the city and that two soldiers had been killed. The colored
folk were taken by surprise—there was a great deal of looting and
destruction and personal robbery, and a number of Negroes were killed,
while many were injured. It was the first race riot that had ever
taken place in Knoxville, and all reputable people were sorry for it.
I was told it all sprang from the crime of one Negro. But one might
just as well say it all sprang from a desire to have the whisky in the
prison—O Knoxville, O sobriety!
Because in general the Negroes are well treated in Knoxville, this
lapse has been discounted, and they are surprisingly free from
bitterness. I called at the Carnegie Library for colored people, a
quiet little building—not much by comparison with the really grand
public library of the city, but still a provision, and as such to be
noted, in comparison with so many other cities where the Negroes not
only have not access to the general public libraries, but have no
separate provision made for them. The Knoxville library for colored
people was, I believe, opened by the mayor some years ago, and the city
felt proud of what it had done. It is unfortunately very inadequate,
but it is in the charge of a capable colored lady who will perhaps
help to “agitate” a bigger and better one. The Negroes are very
grateful in any case for what they have.
I called on several representative Negroes. They were much more
friendly to the whites than those I found in Virginia. “We get on very
well here,” was a common remark. I visited the colored lawyer H——,
established in Knoxville some eight years. He was in deshabille and
was sweeping out his office with a hard brush and shovel. He turned
out to be very lawyer-like in conversation. I asked him a whole series
of questions, to which he answered “Yes” or “No,” without volunteering
any information or enlarging in any way. He called the race riot a
“circumstance.” He said he had won cases even in the Supreme Court, and
was respected by the Bench for his grim determination. After saying
that, he went to the window and spat violently into the street below
and then returned.
I praised his probable skill in handling juries, and he was mollified.
“I am practiced to read men’s faces,” said he. “I pick out the man
who is likely to cause trouble and address myself exclusively to him.
Judges here are absolutely devoid of color prejudice.”
A seeming half-wit had just been sentenced to death at the city of
Danville for accosting a white girl. The trial was of the briefest,
and the Negro’s transit to the electric chair was made the most rapid
possible—so as to avoid a lynching. The lawyer thought that the
sentence was harsh—but as long as lynching was so prevalent, legal
punishment had to be severe.
“Did you ever hear of a white man being convicted for assaulting a
Negro?” I asked.
“No,” said he, constrainedly, “not unless it were an offense against a
child.”
He did not think Negroes showed much enterprise in Knoxville—there
were no banks, no large businesses, no drug stores, though there were
four colored lawyers and sixteen doctors.
After Lawyer H—— I visited Mr. D——, a successful colored dentist,
with well-groomed head and manicured hands. He was clad in a white
hospital coat which was spotless, and by the appurtenances of his
cabinet he seemed to be abreast of scientific progress as far as
dentistry was concerned. He had a good practice, not only among the
Blacks, but with the white country population. He said the old settlers
had no prejudice against a colored dentist, though the younger, newer
men and women were different. While I was talking a colored girl came
in to have Mr. D—— fill a hollow tooth. He said the colored folk had
suffered greatly with their teeth in the past, but were taking more
care of them now. He loved putting gold crowns on teeth, and most smart
Negro young men felt a little gold in the mouth was very _chic_—just
the thing. It is certainly a characteristic of the modern Negro. Mr.
D—— watched the race riot from his office window, and was much
alarmed at the time. But, like Lawyer H——, he felt that there was
good feeling in the city. He thought it an accident. The soldiers had
been inflamed against the Negroes.
In lack of Negro enterprise what a contrast Knoxville was to places
like Norfolk, Virginia! I was soon to realize that the further South I
went the more stagnant would Negro life show itself—until I reached
the point when there would be little scope for investigation. The
traveler going South from Washington is let gradually downward into
a sort of pit of degradation. Chattanooga is lower than Knoxville,
Birmingham lower than Chattanooga, rural Georgia and Alabama lower than
all of these. This I think ought to be realized lest the glamour of
Negro progress in Virginia and the North give a false impression of the
whole.
At Knoxville it was Fair time. The time when I was in the South was
one of fairs and carnivals. As the Russian goes on pilgrimage when
the harvest has been gathered in, so the American goes to the Fair in
the fall. There is in the South a vast network of the moving caravans
of showmen, and a huge show business quite novel to an Englishman. I
arrived in many towns at the time of their Fair, and had the greatest
difficulty in obtaining shelter for the night, so crowded were they.
The people from the country round rolled in to the Fair in their cars
and choked every thoroughfare.
One blemish on the large State Fair is that, except as servants, no
Negroes are to be seen. There is a great gathering of white people,
but no Blacks. It is therefore more polite, more well dressed, more
conventional, and there is less of color and life than would fairly
have obtained had all been welcome. What is a Fair if it be not an
outing for the poor! It is reduced to this in the South, that the
Whites have their Fairs and the Negroes have theirs separately.
I accompanied an Appalachian sportsman. He told me he shot a big, black
bear the day the Armistice was signed. Sure as the first of November
came round he was out with gun and haversack and Negro boys hunting
the bear. He hunted for the love of hunting, though bear’s flesh could
be sold at a dollar a pound and was worth it, every cent. He thought
Tennessee did “mighty well” in the war, and they gave the boys a fine
reception when they came back. They’d had a drop of whisky in them in
the riot, but a few niggers less wasn’t much matter. He pointed out
to me signs of Knoxville prosperity—houses that cost ten to twenty
thousand dollars to build—picturesque and wooden, but very costly
from a European point of view. No cotton was grown in this district,
and next to no tobacco. Many people did not even know what a stalk of
cotton was like.
The Knoxville Fair was a wondrous exposition of Southern hogs (each hog
docketed with personal weight and what it gains per day), bulls and
chickens and pigeons and rabbits and owls and what not, and there was a
hall of automobiles festooned in flags. Caged lions and tigers flanked
the auditorium of the free vaudeville entertainment. Negro boys flogged
bony, grunting camels round the grounds. The pop-corn stands vied with
the ice-cream counters stacked with cones. There was an astonishing
uproar from the various revolving “golden dreams” and of the jibbing
metal horses; and outside all manner of peep shows, men who had sold
their voices talked till they foamed at the lips or went hoarse—of the
freaks and wonders within. Thus the two-headed child, the girl who does
not die though her half-naked body is transfixed with darts; the “whole
dam family” (apes dressed up as human beings); the cigarette fiend, a
thin, yellow strip of humanity who is slowly but surely smoking himself
to death; Bluey, the missing link between monkey and man; the fire
swallower from the South Sea Islands; Zarelda, the girl with a million
eyes (dotted all over her body), who has baffled all scientists; the
garden of Allah and the garden of lovely girls; Leach, the human
picture gallery, with the world’s masterpieces tattooed all over his
body; Dagmar, the living head without a body....
And the owner of the show, and of the bought voice which must not stop
advertising it to the passer by, stands at one side in shirt sleeves,
and rolls his quid and spits, and seems to meditate on dollars and
cents, ever and anon signaling to the man with the voice not to let
the crowd get away without coming in. It was pathetic to come upon
the freaks, later, on the road; see Zarelda, demurely clad in black,
gripping a suitcase, and realize that she had “dates” all over the
South, and showed her million eyes to-day in Knoxville, then in Macon,
then in Savannah, then Jacksonville and Mobile and New Orleans and a
score of other places, sometimes for a day, sometimes for three days or
a week—not in any sense a music-hall artiste, but a sort of gypsy by
life and by profession. How tired the freaks must get, knocking about
from State to State and listening to the loud laugh that speaks the
vacant mind.
One would expect as the accompaniment of this show life a great
number of strolling musicians and a poor folk wandering from town to
town. But there are practically none. Strolling musicians now obtain
polite employment at the many cinema houses where sensational pictures
alternate with low vaudeville. Southern talent meets with a boisterous
reception from the twenty-cent houses of Atlanta and New Orleans.
One hears very broad humor upon occasion, frantic burlesques of the
nervous hysteria and half-witted ignorance of the “nigger”—when the
white man makes up as a Negro he always shows something lower than the
Negro. At one show in New Orleans the whole audience roared with mirth
at a competition in what was called “fizzing,” the spitting of chewed
tobacco in one another’s faces and the bandying of purely Southern
epithets and slang. Music is little developed among the Whites, though
the singing of “Dixie” choruses is hailed as almost national. Musical
instruments are now rare, even among the Negroes, and seem to have
been displaced by the gramophone. There is no “gridling,” no beggars
singing hymns on the city streets. In the country there are few tramps.
The ne’er-do-wells are to be found more in the market places and the
cheap streets. Prohibition has subterraneanized that part of the drink
traffic which it has not killed, and the hitherto unemployed find a
congenial occupation leading the thirsty to the “blind tigers.” It is
rare to come across a man on the road, and Vachel Lindsay, tramping
Georgia and reading his poems to the farmers, must have been unique,
not only as a poet, but as a tramp. I saw nothing resembling the grand
procession of “hoboes” that I met when tramping to Chicago seven years
ago. Perhaps it was because immigration had ceased, and throughout the
whole of America there was a need for labor which absorbed all men. Yet
there could have been few on the road even before the war: the vast
number of Blacks makes it unfitting for a white man to be tramping, and
there is, moreover, less chance for a white man to get work in any case.
Much is said against the “poor Whites” or “poor white trash,” as
the white proletariat is called by the black proletariat. They are
said to be the worst enemies of the Negro, and the Negro is afraid
of Bolshevism or Socialism because he knows the common white people,
“those who have nothing and are nothing,” are the last people likely
to give him justice. As one of the most popular of Negro leaders said
recently: “As long as Socialism is followed by the lower classes of
Whites, we can see there is more danger coming from Socialism to the
Negro than from anything else, because below the Mason and Dixon line
the people who lynch Negroes are the low-down Whites.” Of course those
crowds who joyfully allow themselves to be photographed around the
charred remains of the Negro they have burnt, thus affording the most
terrible means of propaganda to Negro societies, are more of the dull,
uneducated masses than of the refined and rich. They hate the Negro
more because they are thrown more in contact with him, and their women
are more accessible to him. They are in competition with the Negro for
work and wages, and would gladly welcome a complete exodus to the North
or to Liberia, for then their wages would go up. Physically, and man
for man, they are afraid of the Negro, and therefore they attack him
in mobs. Fortunately, there are not in the South great numbers of poor
Whites except in the large cities and at the ports.
By contrast with the people of the North, the people of the South are
noisy, very polite indoors, but brusque and rough without. They will do
a great deal for you as a friend, but not much for you as a stranger.
They have sharp-cut features, thin lips, blank brows. The women do
not take on a fair fullness of flesh, but are inclined to dry up and
fade. There are an enormous number of faded women everywhere—a sign,
perhaps, that the climate does not suit the race. The accent seems to
vary with the State, and Tennessee speaks with far more distinction
than Georgia, where the “nigger brogue” prevails, and it is difficult
to tell White from Black by voice. Nearly all r’s are dropped. Moral
character is said to be weak, but there is nevertheless a very high
standard, at least in matters of sex. The Southern woman is by no means
as conscious of her charms as the Northern woman, and an unusually
susceptible male could spend a quiet time in these parts. Men are not
thinking of love and composing poems, even though it is the South, but
they are if anything keener on business and money. Most people seemed
suspicious of strangers, not communicative, but once they have taken
the stranger to their hearts they easily become warm-heartedly effusive.
As a stranger I encountered a surprising lack of civility at a
“non-union” plough company at Chattanooga. The employees were mostly
Negroes, and I called on the white superintendent to obtain permission
to go over the works. A heavy-jowled fellow kept me waiting half an
hour in an anteroom, and then not only refused point-blank to let me
see conditions in his factory, but was so brusque in his manner that I
was forced to give him my mind roundly on his lack of courtesy, not to
me personally, but to a literary man. As a rich business man he seemed
to consider the profession of letters as dirt under his feet. I must
say I felt shame to be so angry, and I was much amused some weeks later
to read in a Chattanooga newspaper picked up by accident that Billy
Sunday had visited this city and had preached in the said works, and
at the close of his address, the superintendent being present, all the
employees were en bloc converted to Christ.
Chattanooga is a larger city than Knoxville, better built and more
spacious. One has entered the rayon of Southern steel and coal. Its
many factory chimneys and its sooty sky testify to considerable
industrialism. As in its sister city of Birmingham, Alabama, there
are many non-union shops. A great steel strike was in progress in the
United States, but while the workers in the North stood their ground
in a long and bitter struggle, there was scarcely the semblance of
a walkout in places like Chattanooga and Birmingham. Northern labor
trouble seemed to mean Southern capitalistic prosperity.
One reason why Southern labor remains to a great extent unorganized is
the Negro difficulty. Unions are not ready to accept Negro membership.
Therefore the Negro can always be brought in to do the white man’s
work if the latter goes on strike. Whether union or non-union, the
wages seem fairly high. I talked with a Negro moulder who earned on
an average six dollars a day. That is over eighteen hundred dollars
American, and about five hundred pounds British money a year. A
non-union unskilled man would, however, earn little more than two
dollars a day—which, with the cost of food so high, is very little.
I noticed a difference in the attitude of the colored population in
Chattanooga. It was much more depressed than that of Knoxville or the
Virginian cities. Nothing terrible had occurred in Chattanooga, but
there was said to be a bad mob, and what had happened at Knoxville
had frightened them. The newspapers contained intimidating news
paragraphs. On September 26th, at Omaha, Nebraska, the mob had burned
down the courthouse, lynched a Negro, and tried to lynch also the
mayor, E. P. Smith, who was twice hoisted to a lamp-post because he
refused to hand over a prisoner to the mob. “As I stood under that
lamp-post with the mob’s rope necktie circling my neck and listened
to the yells ‘Lynch him,’ I took the same course any true American
would have taken,” said the mayor. In the face of death he refused to
yield his authority to Judge Lynch. That was at Omaha, in the West. On
September 29th two Negroes were lynched by twenty-five masked men at
Montgomery, Alabama, for alleged assault of a white woman. On October
1st the terrifying color riot broke out at Elaine, Arkansas, on a
dispute over cotton prices. On October 6th two Negroes were burned
at the stake and three were shot to death at Washington, Georgia,
for supposed complicity in the murder of a deputy sheriff. Next day,
at Macon, Eugene Hamilton was lynched for attempted murder, and so
on. Since the Civil War one could scarcely find a more bloody and
terrible period. And the poor Whites of Chattanooga kept hinting that
Chattanooga’s turn would soon come. I was told Negroes did not care
to stray far from their homes in the suburbs after dark. They were
tormented and mauled on their way home from church. The Jim Crow
portion of the trolley car was invaded by roughs trying to start
trouble. In some cities in the South the Negroes have all-black motor
omnibuses and jitneys running. These would obviate much of the danger
of the trolley car which has only a straw screen between the races.
But Negro enterprise has not risen to motor omnibuses in depressed
Chattanooga. From a white point of view, the city might be improved by
more light. It is a dark and extensive place. The great companies do
not want to lose their Negroes and might do more to keep them. I found
the Negroes scared, and many were ready to seize the first opportunity
to go northward. Mr. T—— said, “They might kill us all.” Mrs. W——
said: “All who have children want to go away. There’ll be no chance for
our children here. Before the war it was much better, but they seem to
dislike us more now. Perhaps it would have been better if none of our
men had gone to the war.” I endeavored to reassure most of those with
whom I talked, for they had an exaggerated idea of their danger.
At Chattanooga there was no library for the colored people. There
seemed to be little Negro business. I was at once introduced to the
druggist and the undertaker. Undertaking and drug-selling, which
includes ice-cream-soda dispensing, seem the most popular business
enterprises among the Negroes. Wherever three or four polite Negroes
were gathered together and I was talking to them someone would say,
“Permit me to introduce Undertaker So-and-So,” and the latter would
smile blandly and offer his brown hand. At Chattanooga I visited a
swell establishment and looked over a show-room of elegant coffins, and
I was shown into the parlor and the embalming room, where on a stone
slab the bodies were prepared. This undertaker had started originally
with one coffin, and had now become, as I saw, one of the rich men
of the city. Funerals cost between a hundred and a hundred and fifty
dollars, and were usually defrayed by the insurance companies.
I found the large East Side drug store, kept by a young man who had
been in charge of the pneumonia ward of the 92nd Divisional Hospital
in France. He had as many white customers as colored. He did not sell
much patent medicine, as he said the attitude of the United States
Government to patent medicines had become most severe. He was a fully
qualified chemist. Doctors prescribed and he dispensed in the ordinary
way. Yes, many were surprised to find a Negro chemist in a position of
authority in a hospital, but that was due to white people’s ignorance
of the progress made by colored students of medicine.
I greatly enjoyed “Joseph’s Bondage,” a dramatic cantata sung by
a colored choir. Evidently the Negroes had composed the cantata
themselves, for the verbiage was very quaint and simple. In a packed
hall to be the only Whites was for myself and the lady who was with me
a curious position. It caused a whole row of seats to remain empty in
the midst of a crowded house. No Negro male dared sit down next to the
white woman for fear of what I might do. However, when I left my place
to talk to a Negro I knew in another part of the hall the empty line
filled up mechanically.
The production of the cantata was quite amusing. Potiphar’s guards were
the smartest possible, being ex-soldiers from Pershing’s army, upright
Negro boys in khaki. But Potiphar was in blue, and looked like a man in
charge of an elevator, and wore the slackest of pants. Leva, his wife,
pawed Joseph over and yowled: “I love you, I love you.” Pharaoh, with
glistening steel crown and steel slippers, was impressive. Joseph as a
slave was the Negro workingman in his shirt; as Vizier, however, with
the purple on him, he looked very grand, and the jubilee chorus which
he sang when at length Pharaoh stepped down and he sat in Pharaoh’s
seat, was very jolly, swaying to one side of the crowd around him and
singing to them, swaying to the other side and singing to them, and
then to all and God——
I did not leave the city without attending church, and I heard a little
black Boanerges give a brilliant address. He walked up and down his
rostrum with arms folded, and cooed and wheedled, but ever and anon
crouching and exploding, lifting his hand to strike, bawling, even
yelling to humanity and the Almighty. In dumb show he pulled the rope
of a poor fellow being lynched—_and sent straight to hell_. He spoke
of the race riots, and then suddenly becoming breathless, as if he were
a messenger just arrived with bad tidings, he flung both arms wide
apart, dilated his eyeballs, and cried in a terrorizing shriek—“_there
is riot and anarchy in the land_.”
He had chosen a fine combination of texts for his sermon: “Can the
Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? That which is born
of the flesh is flesh and that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit.”
Though a complete stranger, I was singled out and brought to the front
to give the congregation a Christian greeting. I told them I had read
in a Negro paper that “the Negro church had failed. Prayer had been
tried for fifty years and had been proved to be no use.” And I said
what I firmly believe to be true, that only Christianity can save color.
The orator was much pleased and said to his congregation: “See what God
has sent us this Sunday morning,” and he invited me to give the address
in the evening. We had an amusing altercation on the platform. “I do
not know what to call him, or who he is; he may be anybody, a doctor,
a professor, a——” he looked at me inquiringly.
“Oh, plain Mr.,” said I.
He hung on, however, to “Professor” till I interrupted him again.
At the close of my address the deacons came out to assess the
congregation in the matter of collection. They looked it up and
down and decided that twenty-two dollars was the amount that could
be raised. So with their solemn faces they stared patiently at the
congregation while the plates went round. The collection was counted,
and was found to be considerably less. So the deacons addressed
themselves once more to the congregation, averring that some of the
young men were holding back. Then for five minutes individuals were
moved to come up singly and make additional offerings. Progress was
reported, and then more individuals came up till the assessment had
been realized.
Then the most touching thing occurred. The pastor turned to me and
offered to share the collection with me.
“Oh, no!” I whispered hurriedly, feeling, perhaps, rather shocked at
the idea.
“He says ‘Oh, no,’” said the pastor to the congregation.
V
MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA
Traveling from Chattanooga to Atlanta the mind inevitably reverts to
the American Civil War, for in 1863 the victory of the North marched
from Chattanooga and the famous battle of Lookout Mountain to the
taking of Atlanta and the discomfiture of Georgia. The glorious Stars
and Stripes came victoriously out of the Northern horizon, climbed
each hill, dipped and climbed again, with a clamorous, exultant
Northern soldiery behind it. General Sherman began to gather his great
fame, while General Lee, the adventuresome Southern leader, allowed
himself to be cut off in Virginia. The efforts of the South had been
very picturesque, like the play of a gambler with small resources and
enormous hopes, but the shades of ruin gathered about her and began
to negative the charm of her beginnings. Lincoln had proclaimed the
freedom of the slaves. The South pretended that in any case slavery
could not survive the war, and in token of this she enlisted Negro
soldiers, making them free men from the moment of enlistment. In
military extremity policy promises much which afterwards ingrate
security will not ratify. The Southern planter might have obtained some
measure of indemnification for the loss of his slaves had he come to
terms in time. But he hoped somehow he might win the right to manage
his Negroes as he wished without interference. There was the same
violent state of mind on the subject of the Negroes as slaves as there
is now on the subject of the Negroes as free men. All that was missing
was the white-woman talk. Though originally the colonists had been
generally opposed to the introduction of slavery, yet slavery had taken
captive and then poisoned most men’s minds. The South chose to fight to
the end rather than sacrifice the institution prematurely. There was a
pride, as of Lucifer, in the Southerner, too, a belief in himself that
foredoomed him to be hurled into outer darkness and to fall through
space for nine days. Sherman’s army, when it burned Atlanta and marched
through Georgia laying the country waste, was inspired with something
like the wrath of God.
In order to see the ex-slave and ex-master to-day, it is necessary to
dwell not only in cities but in the country, and I chose to walk across
the State of Georgia as the best way to ascertain what life in the
country was like. And I followed in the way Sherman had gone. There, if
anywhere, it seemed to me, the reactions of the war and of slavery must
be apparent to-day.
Sherman was something of a Prussian. He was a capable and scientific
soldier. From an enemy’s standpoint, he was not a humanitarian. War to
him was a trade of terror and blood, and he was logical. “You cannot
qualify war in harsher terms than I will,” said he. “War is cruelty,
and you cannot refine it.” And when he had captured Atlanta he ordered
the whole population to flee.
If they cared to go North, they would find their enemies not unkind. If
they thought there was safety in the South—then let them go further
south to whatever protection the beaten Southern Army could afford.
So North and South they fled, the people of Atlanta, but mostly South,
for they were bitter; and the roads filled with the pitiful array
of thousands of men and women and children with their old-fashioned
coaches, with their barrows, with their servants, with those faithful
Blacks who still heeded not the fact that “the day of liberation had
arrived.” All under safe-conduct to Hood’s army.
What complaints, what laments, as the proud Southern population took
the road. A lamentation that is heard till now! And when the people
had gone, the city of Atlanta was set on fire. Sherman had decided to
march to the sea, and he could not afford to leave an enemy population
in his rear, nor could he allow the chance that secret arsenals
might exist there after he had gone. It was a never to be forgotten
spectacle, “the heaven one expanse of lurid fire, the air filled
with flying, burning cinders.” “We were startled and awed,” says a
soldier who marched with the rest, “seeing vast waves and sheets of
flames thrusting themselves heavenward, rolling and tossing in mighty
billows—a gigantic sea of fire.” Small explosions arranged by the
engineers were punctuated by huge explosions when hidden stores of
ammunition were located, and while these added ruin to ruin in the
city they sounded as lugubrious and awful detonations to the soldiery
on the road. Depots, churches, shops, warehouses, homes flared from
every story and every window. Those who remained in the town were few,
but it was impossible not to be stirred if not appalled. A brigade of
New England soldiers was the last to leave, and marched out by Decatur
Street, led by the band of the 33rd Massachusetts regiment, playing
John Brown’s body lies a-mould’ring in his grave
His soul is marching on—
the lurid glare of the fire gleaming upon their bayonets and equipment,
inflaming their visages and their eyes which were already burning with
the war faith of the North.
That was in the fall of 1864. Years have passed and healed many
wounds. Now it is Atlanta in the fall of 1919 and the crush of the
Fair time. All Georgia is at her capital city. The automobiles are
forced to a walking pace, there are so many of them, and they vent
their displeasure in a multiform chorus of barking, howling, and
hooting. So great is the prosperity of the land that the little farmer
and the workingman have their cars, not mere “Ford runabouts,” but
resplendently enameled, capacious, smooth-running, swift-starting
coaches where wife and family disport themselves more at home than at
home. Atlanta’s new life has grown from the old ruins and hidden them,
as a young forest springs through the charred stumps of a forest fire.
On each side Atlanta’s skyscrapers climb heavenward in severe lines,
and where heaven should be the sky signs twinkle. Every volt that can
be turned into light is being used. The shops and the stores and the
cinemas are dazzling to show what they are worth. The sidewalks are
thronged with Southern youth whose hilarious faces and gregarious
movements show a camaraderie one would hardly observe in the colder
North. Jaunty Negro boys mingle with the crowd and are mirthful among
themselves—as well dressed as the Whites, sharing in the “record
trade” and the boom of the price of cotton. They are not slaves
to-day, but are lifted high with racial pride and the consciousness
of universities and seminaries on Atlanta’s hills, and successes in
medicine, law, and business in the city. They roll along in the joyous
freedom of their bodies, and make the South more Southern than it is.
How pale and ghostlike the South would seem without its flocks of
colored children, without those many men and women with the sun shadows
in their faces!
“We love our niggers and understand them,” say the Whites, repeating
their formula, and you’d think there was no racial problem whatever
in the South, to see the great “Gate City” given over to merriment
unrestrained and many a Negro colliding with many a White youth and yet
never a fight—nothing on the crowded streets to exemplify the accepted
hostility of one to the other. One has the thought that perhaps Atlanta
did not burn in vain, and that the South as well as the North believes
in the immortality of the soul of John Brown.
The tobacco-chewing, smiling, guffawing crowds of the street, and
Peachtree Street jammed with people and cars! What a hubbub the four
jammed-up processions of automobiles are making—like choruses of
hoarse katydids crying only for repetition’s sake and the lust of
noise! But there is more noise and more joy still a-coming! Skirling
and shrieking, in strange contrast to the Negroes and to the clothed
Whites and to the color of night itself, comes the parade of college
youths all in their pajamas and nightshirts. Long queues of some
hundreds of lads in white shouting at the top of their voices—they
climb in and out of the electric cars, rush into shops and theatres in
a wild game of “Follow my leader.” _Rah, rah, rah_, they cry, _rah,
rah, rah_, and rush into hotels, circle the foyer, and plunge among the
amazed diners in the dining rooms, thread their way around tables and
up the hotel balustrade, invade bedrooms, go out at windows and down
fire escapes, and then once more file along the packed streets amidst
autos and cars, raving all the while with pleasure and excitement. It
is good humor and boisterousness and the jollity of the Fair time.
Up above all the flags and the bunting wave listlessly in the night
air. It seems impossible but that the firing of Atlanta is forgotten,
and the pitiful exodus of its humiliated people—forgotten also the
exultancy of the soldiers of the North singing while the city burned.
Sherman with 60,000 men and 2500 wagons but only 60 guns marched
out, and none knew what his destination was. A retreat from Atlanta
comparable only to Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow was about to
commence. The hostile farming population of Georgia and the Carolinas
should harass the Yankee army as the Russian peasants had done the
French in 1812. That was the Southern belief and the substance of
Southern propaganda at the time. Not so the Northern Army, which had
the consciousness of victory and a radiant belief in its cause and in
its general. “A feeling of exhilaration seemed to pervade all minds,
a feeling of something to come, vague and undefined, still full of
venture and intense interest. Even the common soldiers caught the
inspiration, and many a group called out: ‘Uncle Billy, I guess Grant
is waiting for us at Richmond.’ The general sentiment was that we were
marching for Richmond and that there we should end the war, but how and
when they seemed to care not, nor did they measure the distance, or
count the cost in life, or bother their brains about the great rivers
to be crossed and the food required for man and beast that had to be
gathered by the way.”[3]
Sherman himself had not decided on what point exactly he would march.
But he never intended to march against Lee at Richmond, though the
South and his own soldiers believed it. He always designed to reach the
sea and reopen maritime communication with the North, and kept in mind
Savannah, Port Royal, and even Pensacola in North Florida. So universal
was the belief that he was marching on Richmond by way of Augusta that
in all the country districts of Georgia where the left wing marched
they will tell you still that the enemy was marching on Augusta.
_You shall maintain discipline, patience, and courage_, said Sherman
to his army. _And I will lead you to achievements equal to any of the
past. We are commencing a long and difficult march to a new base, but
all the chances of war have been provided for. The habitual order of
march will be by four roads as nearly parallel as possible. The columns
will start habitually at 7 a. m. and make about 15 miles a day. The
army will forage liberally on the country during the march. Horses,
mules, and wagons belonging to the inhabitants may be appropriated by
the cavalry and artillery freely and without limit, discriminating,
however, between the rich, who are usually hostile, and the poor and
industrious, usually neutral or friendly. All foragers will refrain
from abusive or threatening language, and they will endeavor to
leave each family reasonable means of sustenance. Negroes who are
able-bodied and serviceable may be taken along if supplies permit. All
non-combatants and refugees should go to the rear and be discouraged
from encumbering us. Some ether time we may be able to provide for
the poor Whites and Blacks seeking to escape the bondage under which
they are now suffering. To corps commanders alone is entrusted the
power to destroy mills, houses, cotton gins, etc., but the measure of
the inhabitants’ hostility should be the measure of the ruin which
commanders should enforce._[4]
There was much more said in those very finely written and emphatic
orders, but the sentence that captured the imagination of the common
soldier was certainly “the army will forage liberally on the country”
which at once became a common gag among the men. For it spelt loot and
fun and treasure trove and souvenirs and everything else that stirs a
soldier’s mind. There is a human note throughout the whole of General
Sherman’s orders, but no softness, rather an inexorable sternness. He
had no patience with the cause of the Rebels nor with their ways of
fighting. He and his staff were not averse from the idea of reading
the population of Georgia and South Carolina a terrible lesson. While
the march was military it inevitably became punitive. The cotton was
destroyed, the farms pillaged, the slaves set free, the land laid
waste. It was over a comparatively narrow strip of country, but Sherman
was like the wrath of the Lord descending upon it.
So out marched the four divisions (14th, 15th, 17th, and 20th) joyously
singing as they went the soldiers’ songs of the war—
One and Free
and
He who first the Flag would lower
SHOOT HIM ON THE SPOT.
and all manner of variants of John Brown to the Glory Hallelujah chorus.
The way out from Atlanta is now a road of cheap shops and Jewish
pawnbrokers, Negro beauty parlors, bag shops, gaudy cinema and
vaudeville sheds, fruit stalls and booths of quack doctors and magic
healers, vendors of the Devil’s corn cure, fortune tellers, and what
not. A Negro skyscraper climbs upward. It is decidedly a “colored
neighborhood,” and rough crowds of Negro laborers and poor Whites
frolic through the litter of the street. Painfully the electric cars
sound their alarms and budge and stop, and budge again, threading their
way through the masses, glad to get clear after half a mile of it and
then plunge into the comparative spaciousness of villadom outside the
city.
It is not as it was of yore. Where the bloody July battle of Atlanta
raged a complete peace has now settled down amid the dignified
habitations of the rich. Trees hide the view, and children play upon
the lawns of pleasant houses while the older folk rock to and fro upon
the chairs of shady verandas.
Dignified Decatur dwells on its hill by the wayside, and has reared
its pale monument to the Confederate dead. On this white obelisk the
cause of the South is justified. Within sight of it rises an impressive
courthouse, which by its size and grandeur protests the strength of the
law in a county of Georgia.
There was a gloomy sky with lowering clouds, and a warm, clammy
atmosphere as if the air had been steamed over night and was now
cooling a little. The road leaving behind Decatur and the suburbs of
Atlanta became deep red, almost scarlet in hue, and ran between broad
fields of cotton where every pod was bursting and puffing out in cotton
wool. Men with high spindle-wheeled vehicles came with cotton bales
done up in rough hempen netting. Hooded buggies rolled sedately past
with spectacled Negroes and their wives. Drummers in Ford cars tooted
and raced through the mud. Thus to Ingleside, where a turn in the road
reveals the huge hump of Stone Mountain, shadowy and mystical like
uncleft Eildons. All the soldiers as they bivouacked there or marched
past on that bright November day of ‘64 remarked the mountain, and
their gaze was turned to it in the spirit of curiosity and adventure.
I fell in with a Mr. McCaulay who was a child when Sherman marched
through. He thought the Germans in Belgium hardly equaled Sherman. Not
only did his troops burn Atlanta but almost every house in the country.
He pointed out new houses that had sprung up on the ruins of former
habitations.
... “A fence used to run right along here, and there were crops
growing. No, not cotton; there was not the demand for cotton in those
days, and not nearly so much grown in the State. Over on that side
of the road there was a huge encampment of soldiers, and I remember
stealing out to it to listen to the band.
“The foragers came to the houses and took every bit of food—left us
bone dry of food. They also took our horses and our mules and our cows
and our chickens. Sometimes a family would have a yoke of oxen hidden
in the wood, but that would be all that they had. Everyone had to flee,
and all were destitute. It was a terrible time. But we all stood by one
another and shared one another’s sorrows and helped one another as we
could.
“All colored folk also stood by us. I expect you’ve read, ‘Uncle
Tom’s Cabin,’ and ‘The Leopard’s Spots,’ but the picture is terribly
overdrawn there.”
“I did not know these told the story of the march,” said I.
“They do not. But they give an account of the Negroes that is entirely
misleading. The North has queered the Negro situation by sending all
manner of people down here to stir the Negro up against us. Till we
said, ‘You and your niggers can go to the devil’—and we left them
alone.
“But that was a mistake, and we are realizing it now, and intend to
take charge of the education of the Negro ourselves, and be responsible
for him spiritually as well as physically. There never was a better
relationship between us than there is now.
“And I—I was brought up among them as a child, as an equal, played
with them, wallowed with them in the dirt, slept with them. They’re as
near to me as flesh and blood can be.”
It was curious to receive this outpouring when I had not mentioned the
Negro to him at all and seemed merely curious concerning Sherman’s
march. It is, however, characteristic of the South: the subject of the
treatment of the Negro recurs like _idée fixe_.
At Lithonia, after a meal of large yellow yams and corn and chicken
and biscuits and cane syrup, I called on old Mrs. Johnson, who lived
over the way from Mrs. Jones. Lithonia was much visited by the cavalry.
Decatur was stripped of everything, and Lithonia fared as badly in the
end. Men came into the farmyard and there and then killed the hogs and
threw them on to waiting wagons. These were foragers from the camps
outside Atlanta. But one day someone came with the news—“Sherman
has set fire to the great city and he’ll be here to-morrow.” And
sure enough on the morrow his army began to appear on the road—the
vanguard, and after that there seemed no end to the procession. The
army was all day marching past with its commissariat wagons and its
water wagons, its horses, its mules, and regiment after regiment. The
despoiled farm wives and old folk could not help being thrilled, though
they were enemies. General Slocum, who commanded the left wing of the
army, wrote his name in pencil on granny’s doorpost when he stopped at
her house with one or two of his staff.
The Confederate soldiers were “Johnny Rebs” and the Union soldiers were
“Billy Yanks.” Neither side was known to have committed any crimes
against women or children, and the latter were crazy to watch the Yanks
go by, though often their fathers were away in the hard-pressed Rebel
armies.
As I walked along the red road betwixt the fluffy cotton fields
from village to village and from mansion to mansion, those stately
farmhouses of the South, I was always on the lookout for the oldest
folk along the way. The young ones knew only of the war that was just
past, the middle-aged thought of the old Civil War as somewhat of a
joke, but the only thing the old folks will never laugh over is the
great strife which with its before and after made the very passion of
their lives. So whenever I saw an old man or woman sitting on a veranda
by the wayside I made bold to approach and ask what they knew of the
great march, and how it had affected them, and the Negroes.
They told of the methodical destruction of the railways, and of the
innumerable bonfires whose flames and smokes changed the look of the
sky. Every rail tie or sleeper was riven from its bed of earth and
burned, and the long steel rails were heated over the fires. To make
the fires bigger timber was brought from the woods, and every rail was
first made red-hot and then twisted out of shape—the favorite plan
being for three or four soldiers to take the hot rail from the fire,
place it between two trunks of standing pines, and then push till it
was bent nigh double.
They told of the stillness after the army had gone, and of the sense
of ruin which was upon them with their cotton destroyed, and all their
stores for the winter pillaged, and their live stock driven off. An
old dame told me how the only live animal in her neighborhood was a
broken-down army horse left behind to die by the enemy. The folk were
starving, but a woman resuscitated the horse and went off with him to
try and bring food to the village. She walked by his side for fear he
would drop down dead—and first of all she sought a little corn for the
horse, for “Old Yank” as she called him. Many a weary mile they walked
together, only to find that “Sherman’s bummers” had been there before
her. She slept the night in a Negro hut (a thing no white woman would
dream of doing now) and the Negroes fed her and gave corn to the horse
and sent her on her way. Out of several old buggies and derelict wheels
a “contrapshun” had been rigged out and tied to the old horse, but it
was not until beyond Covington and Conyers that a place was found which
the foragers had missed, and the strange buggy was loaded for home.
I spent a night in Conyers in beautiful country, and was away early
next morning on the Covington road. The road was shadowy and sanguine.
The heavy gossamer mist which closed out the view of the hills clothed
me also with white rime. Warm, listless airs stole through the mist.
On my right, away over to the heaviness of the mist curtain, was a
sea of dark green spotted and flecked with white; on my left was the
wretched single track of the railway to Covington rebuilt on the old
levels where it was destroyed in ‘64. Wooden carts full to the rim
with picked cotton rolled clumsily along the red ruts of the road, and
jolly-looking Negroes sprawled on the top as on broad, old-fashioned
cottage feather beds. And ever and anon there overtook me the
inevitable “speed merchants,” hooting and growling and racketing from
one side to the other of the broken way. I sat down on a stone in an
old wayside cemetery, sun-bleached and yet hoary also with mist. Such
places have a strange fascination, and I knew some of those who lay
beneath the turf had lain unwitting also when the army went by. What
old-fashioned names—Sophronias and Simeons and Claramonds and Nancies!
On most of the graves was the gate of heaven and a crown, and on some
were inscribed virtues, while on one was written “He belonged to the
Baptist Church.” The oldest stones had all fallen and been washed over
with red mud. Among the old were graves of slaves, I was told, but
since the war no Black has been buried with the White.
An old Negro in cotton rags, grizzled white hair on his black,
weather-beaten face, told me where the colored folk lay buried half
a mile away, where he, too, would lay down his old back and rest
from cotton picking at last. “But on de day ob Judgment dere be no
two camps,” said he. “No, sir ... only black and white souls.” He
remembered the joy night and the jubilation after the army passed
through, and how all the colored boys danced and sang to be free, and
then the disillusion and the famine and the misery that followed. The
old fellow was a cotton picker, and had a large cotton bag like a
pillow case slung from his shoulders—an antediluvian piece of Adamite
material with only God and cotton and massa and the Bible for his world.
While sitting on this wayside stone I have the feeling that Sherman’s
army has marched past me. It has gone over the hill and out of view. It
has marched away to Milledgeville and Millen and Ebenezer and Savannah,
and not stopped there. It has gone on and on till it begins marching
into the earth itself. For all that are left of Sherman’s warriors are
stepping inward into the quietness of earth to-day.
The mist lifts a little, and the hot sun streams through. The crickets,
content that it is no longer twilight, have ceased chirping, and
exquisite butterflies, like living flames, are on the wing. It is a
beautiful part of the way, and where there is a sunken, disused road by
the side of the new one I take it for preference. For probably it was
along that the soldiers went. Now young pines are springing from their
footsteps in the sand.
Here no cars have ever sped, and for a long while no foot has trod.
The surface is smooth and unfooted like the seashore when the tide has
ebbed away, and bright flowers greet the wanderer from unfarmed banks
and gullies. So to Almon, where an old gaffer told me how he and some
farm lads with shotguns had determined they would “get” Sherman when he
came riding past with his staff, and how they hid behind a bush, where
the Methodist church is now standing, and let fly. Sherman they missed,
but hit someone else and they fled to the woods. He lost both his hat
and his gun in the chase which followed, but nevertheless got away.
Not that I believed in its entirety the old man’s story. It was his
pet story, told for fifty years, and had become true for him. I came
into Covington, a regular provincial town, whose chief feature is its
large sandy square about which range its shops with their scanty wares.
There I met another old man, a captain who served under Lee, and indeed
surrendered with him. He had been beside Stonewall Jackson when the
latter died. He was now eighty-four years, haunting the Flowers Hotel.
“This world’s a mighty empty place, believe me,” said he. “Eighty-four
years ...!”
He seemed appalled at his own age.
“Threescore and ten is the allotted span.... At seventeen I went gold
digging ... seeking gold ... it was the first rush of the digging mania
in California, but I only got six hundred dollars worth.”
“At seventeen years many their fortunes seek
But at fourscore it is too late a week”
said I sotto voce.
“A mighty empty place,” repeated the old captain, rocking his chair in
the dusk. “Yes, Sherman marched through here. He burned all the cotton
in the barns. I was born here, and lived here mos’ all my life, but I
was with Lee then. That war ought never to have been. No, sir. It was
all a mistake. We thought Abraham Lincoln the devil incarnate, but knew
afterwards he was a good friend to the South. It’s all forgotten now.
We bear the North no grudge except about the niggers——”
He interrupted himself to greet a pretty girl passing by, and he seemed
offended if any woman passed without smiling up at him. But when he
resumed conversation with me he reverted to “The world’s getting to be
a mighty empty place ... eighty-four years ... threescore and ten is
the allotted span, but....”
I turn therefore to the witness of the time, and the genius who
conceived the march and watched his soldiers go. Thus Sherman wrote
of Covington: “We passed through the handsome town of Covington, the
soldiers closing up their ranks, the color bearers unfurling their
flags, and the bands striking up patriotic airs. The white people
came out of their houses to behold the sight, spite of their deep
hatred of the invaders, and the Negroes were simply frantic with joy.
Whenever they heard my name they clustered about my horse, shouted
and prayed in their peculiar style which had a natural eloquence that
would have moved a stone. I have witnessed hundreds, if not thousands
of such scenes, and can see now a poor girl in the very ecstasy of
the Methodist ‘shout,’ hugging the banner of one of the regiments
and jumping to the ‘feet of Jesus’.... I walked up to a plantation
house close by, where were assembled many Negroes, among them an old
gray-haired man of as fine a head as I ever saw. I asked him if he
understood about the war and its progress. He said he did; that he had
been looking for the ‘Angel of the Lord’ ever since he was knee-high,
and though we professed to be fighting for the Union he supposed that
slavery was the cause, and that our success was to be his freedom....”
That was the characteristic Negro point of view—the expectation of
the “Coming of the Lord,” the coming of the angel of deliverance.
Their only lore was the Bible, and their especial guide was the Old
Testament. Despite all talk of their masters, talk which would have
been dismissed as “eyewash” in the war of 1918, they believed that God
had sent to rescue them. They waited the miraculous. Sherman was God’s
messenger.
So the glorious sixty thousand broke into quiet Georgia—_carrying
salvation to the sea_—in an ever memorable way. The foe, stupefied
by defeat, was massing on the one hand at Augusta and on the other at
Macon, bluffed on the left and on the right, while in the center the
unprobed purpose of the general reigned in secret but supreme.
The Twentieth Corps on the extreme left went by Madison, giving color
to a proposed attack on Augusta. The Fifteenth feinted at Macon, the
cavalry galloping right up to that city and inviting a sortie. The
Seventeenth Corps was in close support of the Fifteenth, and the
Fourteenth kept in the center. It was the route of the Fourteenth
that I decided to follow, and it was also the way along which went
Sherman himself. It was generally understood by the Fourteenth Corps
that Milledgeville was its object at the end of a week’s marching. The
order of march for the morrow was issued overnight by army commanders
to corps commanders and then passed on to all ranks. The men slept
in the open, and beside watch fires which burned all night. Outposts
and sentries kept guard, though there were few alarms. The warm
Southern night with never a touch of frost, even in November, passed
over the sleeping army. Reveille was early, commonly at four o’clock,
when the last watch of the night was relieved. The unwanted clarion
shrilled through men’s slumbers, blown by urgent drummer boys. The
bugles of the morning sounded, and then slowly but unmistakably the
whole camp began to rouse from its stertorousness, and one man here,
another there, would start up to stir the smouldering embers of the
fires and make them all begin to blaze; and then began the hubbub
of cleaning and the hubbub of cooking, the neighing of horses, the
clatter of wagon-packing and harnessing. Reveille was made easier by
the prospects of wonderful breakfasts—not mere army rations, the bully
and hard-tack of a later war, but all that a rich countryside could
be made to provide—“potatoes frying nicely in a well-larded pan, the
chicken roasting delicately on the red-hot coals, the grateful fumes
of coffee,” says one chronicler of the time—fried slices of turkey,
roast pig, sweet yams, sorghum syrup, and corn fortified the soldier
for the day’s march. Horses and mules also fared astonishingly well,
and amid braying and neighing and pawing huge quantities of fodder
were provided. Then once more insistent bugles called; knapsacks and
equipment were strapped on, the horses and mules were put in the
traces, the huge droves of cattle were marshaled into the road, and the
army with its officers and sergeants and wagons and guns and pontoons
and impedimenta of every kind (did not Sherman always carry two of
everything?) moved on.
There was something about the aspect of the army on the march that was
like a great moving show. The musical composition of “Marching Thro’
Georgia” has caught it:
Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee!
All hail the flag, the flag which sets you free!
So we brought salvation from Atlanta to the Sea,
When we were marching thro’ Georgia.
The clangor of brass, the braying of mules, the shouts of the soldiers,
the ecstasy of the Negroes, and then the proud starry flag of the Union!
The procession has all long since gone by, and men speak of the
famous deeds “as half-forgotten things.” It is a quiet road over the
hill and down into the vale with never a soldier or a bugle horn.
Cotton, cotton, cotton, and cotton pickers and tiny cabins, and then
maize stalks, corn from which long since the fruit has been cut, now
withered, warped, shrunken, half fallen in every attitude of old age
and despair. It is a diversified country of hill and dale, with
occasionally a huge gray wooden mansion with broad veranda running
round, and massive columns supporting overhanging roof. The columns,
which are veritable pine trunks just trimmed and planed or sawn, give
quite a classical air to the Southern home. Sometimes there will be
seven or eight of these sun-bleached columns on the frontage of a
house, and the first impression is one of stone or marble.
The Southern white man builds large, has great joy in his home, and
would love to live on a grand scale with an army of retainers. The
Negro landowner does not imitate him, and builds a less impressive
type of home, neither so large nor so inviting. Rich colored farmers
are, however, infrequent. The mass of the Negro population is of the
laboring class, and even those who rent land and farm it for themselves
are very poor and sunk in economic bondage. Their houses are mostly
one-roomed wooden arks, mere windowless sheds resting on four stones,
a stone at each corner. Furniture, if any, was of a rudimentary kind.
“See how they live,” said a youth to me. “Just like animals, and that’s
all they are.”
“Why don’t you have any windows?” I asked of a girl sitting on the
floor of her cabin.
“They jus’ doan’ make ‘em with windows,” she replied. “But we’ve got a
window in this side.”
“Yes, but without glass.”
“Ah, no, no glass.”
“Is it cold in winter?”
“Yes, mighty cold.”
Some cabins were poverty-stricken in the extreme. But in others there
were victrolas, and in cases where the merest amenities of life were
lacking you would find a ramshackle Ford car. On the road Negroes with
cars were almost as common as white men, and some Negroes drove very
furiously and sometimes very skillfully. There were no foot passengers
on the road. I went all the way to Milledgeville before I fell in with
a man on foot going a mile to a farm. The current Americanism, _Don’t
walk if you can ride_ seemed to have been changed into, _Don’t stir
forth till you can get a lift_, and white men picked up Negroes and
Negroes white men without prejudice, but with an accepted understanding
of use and wont. I was looked upon with some doubt, and scanned from
hurrying cars with puzzlement. Lonely Jasper County had not seen my
like before. But saying “Good day!” and “How d’ye do?” convinced most
that the strange foot traveler was an honest Christian. Lifts were
readily proffered by men going the same way. Those who whirled past the
other way may have reflected that since I was on foot I must have lost
my car somewhere.
A common question put to me was, “What are you selling?” and people
were a little dumbfounded when I said I was following in Sherman’s
footsteps. That had not occurred to them as a likely occupation on
a hot afternoon. I felt rather like a modern Rip Van Winkle who had
overslept reveille by half a century and was trying in vain to catch
up with the army which had long since turned the dusty corner of the
road. Still, the Southerners were surprisingly friendly. They said they
knew nothing about it themselves, and then took me to the old folk who
remembered. The old folk quavered forth—“It’s a long, long time ago
now.” It interested them always that I had been in the German war and
had marched to the Rhine, and they were full of questions about that.
“Oh, but this war was not a patch on that one,” they said. “I tell them
they don’t know what war is yet—what we suffered then, what ruin there
was, how we had to work and toil and roughen our white hands, and eat
the bread of bitterness like Cain——”
After the Civil War the initial struggle of the settlers and pioneers
in the founding of the colony had to be repeated. Everyone had to
set to and work. The help of the Negroes was at first diminished or
entirely cut off. Even the necessary tools were lacking. Nevertheless
there was now a surprising absence of bitterness. “The war had to be.
Slavery was bad for the South, and it took the war to end it” was an
opinion on all men’s mouths. “When President McKinley said that the
character of Robert E. Lee was the common inheritance of both North and
South he healed the division the war had made,” I heard someone say.
Even of Sherman, though there were bitter memories of him, there were
not a few ready to testify to his humaneness—for instance, this from a
poor store keeper:
“I suppose you’re not old enough to remember the Civil War?”
“’Deed, sir, I do.”
“Do you remember Sherman’s march?”
“Yes, I was only a child, but it made a powerful impression on me. My
father was killed in the war. And we were scared to death when we heard
Sherman was coming. But he never did me any harm. An officer came up,
asked where my father was, learned he was dead. And he made all the
soldiers march past the house, waited till the last one had gone, then
saluted and left us. Captain Kelly was his name, and I shall never
forget his face, it was all slashed about with old scars. He was a
brave man, I’m sure.... No, they didn’t do much harm hereabout, except
to those who had a lot of slaves or to those who had treated their
niggers badly. If they found out that a man had been ill-treating his
niggers they stripped his house and left him with not a thing——”
On the other hand the rich, the owners of large plantations, remained
in many cases still virulent.
“I know Sherman is in hell,” said a Mr. R—— of historic family. “When
my mother lay sick in bed the soldiers came and set fire to our cotton
gin and all our barns. They came upon us like a tribe of Indians and
burst into every room, ransacking the place for jewelry and valuable
property. I was a small boy at the time, but I shall never forget it.
They took the bungs from all our barrels and let the syrup run to
waste in the yard because they themselves wanted no more of it. They
killed our hogs and our cows before our eyes and threw the meat to the
niggers. Yes, sir. A year or so back Sherman’s son said he was going to
make a tour along the way his daddy had gone—to see what a wonderful
thing his daddy had done. Lucky for him he changed his mind. We’d a
strung him to a pole, sure——”
Such sharp feeling was, however, certainly exceptional. Near Eatonton
was a Mr. Lynch of Lynchburg, storekeeper, postmaster, wheelwright, and
blacksmith all in one. He averred that they were “hugging and kissing
the Yankees now, just as they would be hugging and kissing the Germans
in a few years.”
“There’s mean fellows on every side,” said he. “You don’t tell me
that there’s no mean fellows among the English, the French, and the
Italians. I don’t believe all the stories about the Germans. I remember
what they used to say about the Yankees. They get mighty mad with me
when I tell ‘em, but there’s plenty of mean fellows on both sides.”
The village was named after the old man’s grandfather—an Irish
settler. It is just beside the old Eatonton factory which Sherman
burned down. At the next turn in the road there is a roaring as of many
waters. A screen of pine and rank grass undergrowth hides an impressive
sight. A step inward takes you to the romantic stone foundation of the
old factory; you can climb up on one of the pillars and look out. The
interior of the factory is all young trees and moss and tangles of
evergreen, but beyond it rushes a mighty stream over a partially dammed
broad course, red as blood, but wallowing forward in creamy billows and
white foam.
The factory was used to weave coarse cotton cloth, and had evidently
been worked by water power. Quite forgotten now, unvisited, it was yet
a picturesque memorial of the march, and I was surprised to see no
names of visitors scrawled on the walls of its massive old foundations.
I walked into Eatonton by a long and picturesque wooden bridge over the
crimson river, a strange and wonderful structure completely roofed,
and shady as a tunnel. The evening sun blazed on the old wood and on
the red tide and on the greenery beyond, making the scene look like a
colored illustration of a child’s tale.
Eatonton, where Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox were actually born, is now a
hustling “city” with bales of cotton fluff higglety-pigglety down its
streets, and again beautiful bales of extra quality in the windows
of its cotton brokers. There are also modern mills where cotton is
being spun. The business men on the streets talk of “spots” and
“futures”—spot cotton being apparently that which you have on the spot
and can sell now, and futures being crops yet to be picked, which,
presuming on kind Providence, may be sold and re-sold many times before
being grown. What is said of Eatonton may be said of Milledgeville,
twenty miles further on. It is a cotton town. It is a gracious seat as
well, with a scent of history about its old buildings, but it impresses
one as a great cotton center. The streets of Milledgeville were almost
blocked with cotton bales. It would have been easy to fight a battle of
barricades there. The principal church looked as if it were fortified
with cotton bales, and it would have been possible to walk fifty or
a hundred yards stepping on the tops of the bales. Bales were on the
tidy lawns of shady villas or stacked on the verandas, and everywhere
the hard-working gins were roaring and grinding as they tore out the
cottonseed from the white fluff and left cotton that could be spun.
Wisps of cotton lint blew about all over the streets, and cotton was
entangled in dogs’ fur and children’s hair. In the porches of Negro
cabins it was heaped high till the entrance to the doorway itself was
blocked.
Cotton was booming at Savannah and New Orleans, and despite talk of the
weevil destroying the pod, and of bad weather and bad crops, it was
clear that Georgia was very prosperous. Men and women discussed the
price of cotton as they might horse races or State-lottery results or
raffles. Everyone wanted room to store his cotton and hold it till the
maximum price was reached. My impression of Georgia now was that it was
not nearly so rich in live stock and in food as it had been in the time
of Sherman. In his day it grew its own food and was the supply source
of two armies. To-day it imports the greater part of its food. It sells
its cotton and buys food from the more agricultural States of the
South. It might have been thought to be a land overflowing with fruit
and honey and milk, but fruit and honey are cheaper in New York than
there, and there is no margin of milk to give away. Meat is scarce and
dear. There is no plenty on the table unless it be of sweet potatoes.
I imagine that after Sherman’s raid the farmers felt discouraged, and
decided never to be in a position to feed an enemy army again. There
are many always urging the Georgian to grow corn and raise stock, and
so make Georgia economically independent, but the farmer always meets
the suggestion with the statement that cotton gives the largest return
on any given outlay and takes least trouble. That is true, but it is
largely because the Negro cotton picker is such a cheap laboring hand.
A farm laborer would automatically obtain more than a cotton picker.
The hypnotic effect of the slave past is strong and binding upon the
Negroes. Perhaps it is still the curse of Georgia. There are still
planters who drive their laborers with the whip and the gun—though the
shortage of labor during the war caused these to be put up. It is not
in money in the bank that one must reckon true prosperity. However,
in this material way, Georgia has quite recovered from the Civil War.
But she has lost a good many of the compensations of true agriculture;
cotton is so commercial a product that there is no glamour about it,
not even about the old plantations, unless it be that of the patient
melancholy of the cotton pickers.
VI
TRAMPING TO THE SEA
I passed through two ancient capitals of Georgia, first Milledgeville,
and then Louisville. The relationship which Milledgeville bore to
Atlanta reminded me of the relationship of the old Cossack capital of
the Don country to the modern industrial wilderness of South Russia
called Rostof-na-Donu. But business is business, and there is only
business in this land. Even along the way to the old capital it is
always so many miles to Goldstein’s on the mile-posts instead of so
many miles to Milledgeville.
The old legislature sat at Milledgeville, but it fled at the approach
of Sherman. It was a day of great astonishment when General Slocum
paused in his supposed march upon Augusta and General Howard in his
attack on Macon, and one came south from Madison while the other
marched north from McDonough. There was an extraordinary sauve qui
peut. Panic seized the politicians and the rich gentry of the place,
for the rumor of the terrible ways of the foragers was flying ahead of
the Union Army. Everyone strove to carry off or hide his treasures.
They must have had terrible privations and some adventures on the road
trying to race the army, and they would have done better to remain to
face the music, for no private effects were destroyed in this city.
Similar scenes were enacted as at Covington. The darkies made a great
day of jubilee, and hugged and kissed the soldiers who had set them
free. The cotton was burned and made a great flare—seventeen hundred
bales of it even in those days. The depots, magazines, arsenals,
and factories were blown up. Governor Brown had fled with all his
furniture, and Sherman in the governor’s house slept on a roll of army
blankets on the bare floor.
There are many signs of ease and refinement in the spacious streets of
Milledgeville, though it has increased little in size since the war.
It has large schools for the training of cadets and the training of
girls. These are model institutions and are very valuable in Georgia.
The place, however, seemed to lack the cultural significance it ought
to have. But it is true that churches and Sunday schools were full. No
shops of any kind were open on Sundays; the people had forgotten the
taste of alcoholic drink and were ready to crusade against tobacco.
They are not given to lynching, though they allowed some wild men from
Atlanta to break open their jail some years ago and take away a Jew
and hang him. But they are too content. At church on Sunday morning
the pastor complained that while all were willing to give money to
God none were willing to offer themselves. He invited any who were
ready to give themselves unreservedly to God to step forth, and none
did. And it was an eloquent appeal by a capable orator. I met an old
recluse who was at the back of the church. He had tried to give himself
to God but was now living at the asylum where he had found shelter,
being otherwise without means. He had been a Baptist minister at a
church near Stone Mountain, but rheumatism had intervened after twenty
years’ work, and he could no longer stoop to immerse the candidates
for baptism. He was an Englishman who had listened to Carlyle’s and
Ruskin’s lectures, and he talked of Dean Farrar’s sermons and the good
deeds of the Earl of Shaftesbury. He spoke as no one speaks to-day,
good old measured Victorian English. He was a touching type of the
despised and rejected. He loved talking to the Negro children in the
“colored” school till the townsfolk warned him against it. His books
form the nucleus of the town library, but the rats have gnawn all the
bindings of his “Encyclopedia Britannica,” and I formed the opinion
that poor R—— living on sufferance in the lunatic asylum was probably
the best read man in Milledgeville.
It is a delightful walk to Sandersville, over Buffalo Creek and over
many streams crossed by the most fragile of bridges apparently never
properly rebuilt since Wheeler’s cavalry destroyed them in the face of
the oncoming army. Georgia used to have many excellent bridges, but
it never really hindered the Yankee army by destroying them. It seems
rather characteristic of the psychology of the people that they would
not replace what they had had to destroy. Now at the foot of each long
hill down which the automobiles tear is a trap of mere planks and gaps
which chatters and indeed roars when passed over. Many motorists get
into the mud.
Sandersville is a busy town hung in gloomy bunting which no one has had
time to take down since the last county fair. It has a large, dusty,
sandy square with a clock tower in the middle. There are great numbers
of cars and lorries parked around. Cotton bales, old and new, fresh and
decayed, lie on every street. Huge gins are working, and Negroes are
busy shoveling oily-looking cottonseed into barns; cotton fluff is all
over the roadways in little clots; every man is in his shirt; the soda
bars do a great trade even in November. A stranger said to me “Come
and have a drink” and we went in and had a “cherry dope.” There is an
impressive-looking public library, much larger than at Milledgeville,
with high frontal columns of unadorned old bricks mortared and laid
in diamond fashion, a barred door, and an entrance so deep in cotton
fluff, brickdust, and refuse that one might be pardoned for assuming
that learning was not now in repute. On the other hand there is a fine,
well-kept cemetery with large mausoleums for the rich and tiny stones
for the poor.
Sandersville was the scene of one or two combats during the war. But
when it is borne in mind that only a hundred of Sherman’s army died
from all causes on its march to the sea, it will be understood that
the strife was not serious. Sherman has been called a Prussian, and
he certainly possessed military genius and understood soldiering as
a mental science, but he always tried to save his men. He wished to
win victories with the smallest possible loss of men, and he thought
out his unorthodox plans of campaign with that in view. He could have
lost half his army on this adventurous march to the sea. It was a
most daring exploit, and if it had failed the whole responsibility
would have been laid at Sherman’s door. But Sherman had thought the
matter out, and he completely deceived his enemy. Once more after
Milledgeville Slocum is seen to be threatening Augusta in the north
and Howard is striking south. The cavalry is driving the enemy ahead
and plunges northward to Louisville and Waynesboro, well on the way
to Augusta. The enemy evacuates the central regions of Georgia, and
Sherman’s infantry moves through unscathed. Foraging has become
organized and systematic. The wagons amount to many thousands, and it
is curious that the population did not destroy all vehicles and so
prevent the army from carrying away so much. The doubt which General
Sherman expressed at the beginning of the march that supplies might
prove inadequate has entirely vanished, and the army has a crowd of
Negro camp followers almost as big as itself. These eventually became a
great hindrance, but they were evidently encouraged to join themselves
to the soldiers in the Milledgeville and Sandersville district. They
proved invaluable helps in the seeking out of hidden treasure and the
pillaging of farmhouses. They knew the likely spots where valuables
would be buried, and the soldiers knew how to worm out secrets even
from the most faithful black servants on the big estates. One reason
why Georgia burns and hangs more Negroes than any other State is
probably because of the bitterness caused by the unstinted foraging and
the “setting of the niggers against us” as they say.
Be that as it may, the seeds of future hate are always sown in present
wars, and “Sherman’s bummers” in their quest of spoil took little heed
of any future reckoning. The Negroes led the soldiers even to the
deepest recesses of swamps or forests, and showed the hollow tree or
cave or hole where lay deposited the precious family plate and jewelry
and money and even clothing. It was common to take from the planter not
only hams, flour, meal, yams, sorghum molasses, but above all things
turkeys, so rare to-day along the line of Sherman’s march—
How the turkeys gobbled which our commissaries found,
How the sweet potatoes even started from the ground,
When we were marching thro’ Georgia!
But the bummer did not stick at these. He would borrow grandfather’s
dress coat and hat surviving from the old colonial days, and his mate
would array himself in grandmother’s finery, and so attired would drive
their wagon back to camp, hailed by the jests of the whole army; and if
they met an officer on the way they would cry out mirthfully the text
of the army order—_The army will forage liberally on the country._
It is said that no forager would ever sell any of his loot, that
indeed it was a point of honor not to sell. The veterans of the North
must therefore preserve many interesting mementoes of the South.
Both officers and men took many tokens. There used to be an amusing
euphemism current in Sherman’s army: it was—“A Southern lady gave
me that for saving her house from being burned”—and if anyone said,
“That’s a nice gold watch; where did you get it?” the soldier replied,
“Oh, a Southern lady gave it to me,” etc.
The army made camp by three o’clock every day, and it was after three
that most of the unauthorized foraging expeditions took place. They
were gay afternoons spent in singing and gambling, athletics and cock
fighting. The South was found to be possessed of a wonderful race of
fighting cocks. The enthusiasts of the sport rushed from farm yard
to farm yard for astonished chanticleer, and having captured him fed
him well and brought him up to a more martial type of life than that
which in domesticated bliss he had enjoyed with his hens. Every company
had its cock fighting tournament. Each regiment, each brigade, each
division, and indeed each corps, had its champion. The winners of many
bloody frays were soon nicknamed “Bill Sherman” or “Johnny Logan,”
but the losing bird which began to fear to face its adversary would
be hailed as Beauregard or Jeff Davis. The cock fight finals were of
as great interest as the combat of the Reds and White Sox to-day, and
perhaps more real.
Besides game cocks each regiment had a great number of pets. These
were mostly poor, homeless creatures on which the soldier had taken
pity; dogs, singing birds, kids, who followed with the army and had the
army’s tenderness lavished on them.
So they went, marching and camping by old Louisville and the broad
waters of the Ogeechee down to Millen. The old farmers say what an
impressive sight it was to watch them go by on the Millen road with
seemingly more wagons than men, with all the wagons bulging with spoil
and drawn by well-fed horses and mules, with long droves of cattle,
and thousands of frenzied Negroes so frantic with joy that they seemed
to have lost their heads and to be expecting the end of the world.
* * * * *
Davisboro is a dust-swept settlement two sides of a road at the foot of
a hill. Doors stand open, and the general stores in all their disorder
spread their wares. At one end of the little town a large gin is hard
at work steaming and blowing, ravishing cotton seed from cotton fluff,
and many bales are waiting. Louisville, the old capital, is a dozen
miles further on beyond the woods and swamps of a sparsely settled
country. It is now “the slowest town in Georgia.” It is, however, none
the less pleasant for that.
There are many old houses, and in the midst of the way stands the
original wooden “Slave Market” built in 1758, according to a notice
affixed, but now used as a fire station. In the old colonial days
when Louisville was the capital, slaves used to be brought there in
large batches on market days. There was a little platform on which the
all-but-naked victims had to stand and be exhibited and auctioned. As
I sat on a bench and considered the building a young townsman joined
himself to me and gave me a gleeful description of the slaves—“Their
front teeth were filed, they spoke no English; when they saw our big
green grasshoppers they ran after them and caught them and ate them.
The men wore loin cloths and the women cotton chemises halfway to
the knee. Lots of cows, hogs, mules, and niggers were put up and sold
as cattle in a lump. Animals, that’s all they were and all they are
now——” And he laughed in a curious, self-conscious way.
“It is strange to think of the history of them,” said I, “from the
African wastes to the slave ship, from the slave ship to the harbors
of the New World, then to these market places and to the plantations,
taught baby English and hymn-singing, obtaining the Bible as an
only and all-comprehending book, petted and fondled like wonderful
strays from the forest in many families, tortured in others, becoming
eventually a bone of fierce political contention though innocent
themselves, the cause of a great war, and then released in that war and
given the full rights of white American citizens.”
The young townsman’s imagination was not touched by the romance of the
Negro. He was full of the wrong done to the white South by putting it
under the dominance of a free Negro majority.
“You know we lynch them down here,” said he, with a smile. “They want
social equality, but they are not going to get it. The nigger can’t
progress any further.”
“Well, there’s a vast difference between the Negro of 1860 and the
Negro of to-day,” said I. “Hundreds of universities and colleges
have arisen, thousands of schools and Negro organizations for
self-education. The Negro has gone a long way since in yelling crowds
he followed the banners of Sherman. I do not think he is going to stop
short, and I wonder where he is going to and where at last he will
arrive.”
I passed through Eatonton, the birthplace of Joel Chandler Harris,
on my way to the sea. He taught us much about the Negro. In England
Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit have become as cherished as the toys of the
nursery. I think Uncle Remus meant as much to us as “Uncle Tom’s
Cabin.” The genial point of view and the genial books do as much to
help humanity as the strong and bitter ones. Both certainly have their
place. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” stirred people out of a lazy attitude of
mind toward the Negro slaves, but in America it aggravated a bitterness
which no other book has been able to allay. The very intensity of the
white man’s thought about the Negro bodes ill for the future. The White
men of the North deliberately have made the effort to rear a Negro
_intelligentsia_. The idealists of the North said, “You shall go on”;
others said, “No, you shall stay as you were”; the clash of the two
wills lit up racial war, but the Negro has sided with the idealists
who sought to raise him, with the Friends of Pennsylvania and the
humanitarians of New England.
In the panic of Sherman’s approach the planters and their wives told
their slaves that the Yanks would flog them and burn them or put
them in the front of the battle, and drown the women and children
in the Ogeechee or the Chattahoochee. Many believed and fled with
their masters; others hid in the woods, but the rumor of salvation
was on the lips of most. The Southerner has a saying, “The nigger is
the greatest union in the country.” News indeed travels faster among
slaves and servants than among employers and masters. There was not
much hesitation when the army arrived. The Negroes saw and believed.
The incredulous were converted and the scared persuaded out of their
hiding places. All with one accord forgot their fear and then went to
the other extreme; that is, as far in credulity as their dull minds
had lodged in incredulity. The arrival of the victors gave rise to the
most extravagant hopes. The Negro had never reasoned about anything in
an informed way. He knew nothing of the world except the simplicity of
the plantation. He had on the one hand slavery, and on the other the
vague and vast idealism of Christian hymns; the melancholy of bondage
and the emotionalism of Evangelical religion. He did not think of New
York, London, Paris, St. Petersburg, of the workingmen’s movement, of
free thought, of political economy, but only of “de ole plantation,”
and then “de ribber.” From drab slavery he looked straight to Jordan
and the golden gates, and to a no-work, easy-going paradise happy as
the day is long, with God as Massa, and Mary and the Son to play with.
There were no between stages to which to aspire. They expected, as did
the Puritan churches about them, the huge combustion of the Last Day,
and they did not set much store by this world. Hence their exalted
state of mind following Sherman’s army. They were ready to shout
_Glory_ when the world was afire, and they displayed all the emotion
which should have been saved for the coming of the Lord.
At first Sherman’s army was quite pleased, and encouraged the emotion
of the freed men. But it got to be too much for the Yankee soldiers,
who felt at last that the Blacks were overdoing it and that in any
case they were a nuisance. The nearer they got to Savannah the more
impatient did they become. At last they began to destroy bridges
between themselves and the Negroes, and put rivers between them. Then,
after leaving Millen for the pine forests of the Savannah shore, they
deliberately destroyed the bridge over Ebenezer Creek. There was a wild
panic, a stampede, and many, it is said, were drowned in the stream.
The splendor of the army went by, the brass bands, the cheering and
the singing of the soldiers and the standard bearers of the North in
the midst of them, the wagons, the many wagons laden with spoil, and
the droves of cattle. But for Georgia and the Negro there set in the
twilight of ruin and disillusion.
Rural Georgia is not very much better off to-day than it was in slavery
days. The large tracts of land which the Blacks thought would be given
them they neither could nor would farm. They lacked experience and
initiative. They could be too easily deceived by their white neighbors,
and were too subservient to their erstwhile masters to make good in the
race of human individuals striving one against another.
“No Negroes own land hereabout,” said some Negro renters to me between
Shady Dale and Eatonton. “They did, but got into debt and lost it.
We rent a thirty-acre farm and pay two bales of cotton rent.” At the
current price of cotton, 38 cents a pound, that amounted to 380 dollars
in American currency, or 95 pounds in British currency, but the tenants
paid in cotton, and as cotton boomed their rents advanced.
It seemed to be everywhere customary to reckon rent in cotton bales,
and it is easy to see what an economic serf the Negro can become under
such terms. This system, known as “truck” in England, was long since
abolished, but its evils were so notorious that truck has remained
a proverbial expression for chicane—hence the phrase “to have no
truck with it.” The Negro is better off as a laborer on a white man’s
plantation than he is when having the responsibility of picking a crop
for master before he picks one for himself.
There are many features of life on the modern plantation, be it of
sugar or cotton, which suggest slavery. Virtual slavery is called
_peonage_ and many examples were given me by Negroes. It is arranged
in some places that the Negro handles as little money as possible.
Instead of money he has credit checks, metal or cardboard disks,
which he can use at the general store to purchase his provisions.
He is kept in debt so that he can never get out, and so lives with
a halter round his neck. Especially during the war, when the rumor
of war wages was tempting the colored labor of the South to migrate
North in huge numbers, efforts were made to keep the Negro without
the means of straying from the locality where the labor of his hands
was the foundation of the life of the community. Other forms of
_peonage_ prevalent in rural parts is the commuting of punishment for
forced labor, the hiring out of penal labor to companies or public
authorities. This resembles the use made of prisoners during the recent
world war, and is virtual slavery.
All inroads made on the liberty of the subject might fittingly
be classed as _peonage_—the denial of the vote to those legally
enfranchised, intimidation by lynch law, etc.
I talked with an old Negro after leaving Louisville and tramping south
toward Midville. He was lolling in rags on his porch—very near white.
His father had been his black mother’s white master. He remembered
Sherman’s passing when he was a boy. A remarkably intelligent and
tragic face, where an unhappy white man looked out on the misery of
abject poverty and quasi-bondage. Cotton had proved bad this year. The
boll weevil had entered the pod early. There were but three or four
bales to the plow. He did not know how he’d foot his bills. The rations
given him in the spring had become exhausted. He had also hoped to buy
clothes. He said the traders came early in the year and supplied him
with all sorts of things on the strength of a large cotton crop, and
he pointed to a toy bicycle lying upside down in the grass. He let his
little boy stride it, and mother thought it fine. Last year God had
blessed them with a very fine crop, and why should He not be as kind
this year? So he signed on for the toy bicycle and for a gramophone as
well. Now he complained that they were cutting off his rations, mother
lay ill a-bed, the weather was getting cold, and they had no clothes.
The boss was coming presently to turn them out of the cabin altogether,
and they did not know where to go. Even while we were talking two
bullet-headed young fellows, clean-shaven, frank, and surly, came up
in an automobile, stopped short, and rated the old man from where they
sat in the car. The cabin and the little cotton plantation belonged to
them now, and the old fellow was reverting from small proprietor to be
laborer on a plantation, and to be laborer was little better than to be
slave.
“We have to let down rope ladders to our people to get them up here,”
said a colored dean of a university to me. “We live in such abysses
down below, and there is no regular way out of the pit.”
I felt as I was marching into Georgia as if I were descending the rope
ladder. What a contrast there was between the bright, radiant-faced
girls at Atlanta studying science and languages, and those whom I was
meeting now. There was a regular sequence or gradation going downward
to filth and serfdom. The first bathed twice a day, and spent hours
working “anti-kink” not only into their hair but into their souls and
minds. They were fresh and fit and happy as morning itself. That was
on the Atlanta heights. I stepped down to the world of business with
its heavier, gloomier types, the hard-faced, skillful, and acquisitive
doctors, the fire-delivering, shadowy-minded clergy, the excited
and eager yet heavy-footed politicians. I took the road and met the
troubled landowners, pathetically happy to exist, though drowning in
mortgage and debt; from them I passed to the farm laborers, with the
jowl of the savage, matted hair, bent backs, deformed with joyless
toil, exuding poisonous perspiration and foul odor, herded like cattle
or worse, nearer to the beast than our domestic animals, feared by
women and weak men, as beasts are feared when they come in the likeness
of human beings.
There were, however, steps lower still in the ladder which leads
downward from the Atlanta hills. Frequently along the road I saw men
in yellow-striped overalls, plodding together, working together,
overlooked by a white man with a gun, and as they walked sounded the
pitiful clank-clank of the chains. It is rather curious, _kandali_ in
Siberia are an atrocity, but in sections of the United States they are
quite natural.
“We do not keep ‘em in jail, but make ‘em work,” says the white man
knowingly. “When there’s much work to do on the roads we soon find
the labor.” At Springfield I remarked the terrible state of disrepair
of the highway and public buildings. The reason was that instead of
setting their criminals to work on them they handed them over to the
State authorities. Other towns knew better. But in the chain gang and
the striped convict so easily obtained at the courts the ex-slave was
seen at his worst, and the rope ladder stopped short before touching
bottom.
There is not much to endear the ordinary wooden cabins in which the
mass of America’s black peasantry is found to live. They are poorer and
barer than the worst you would see in Russia. Ex-serf has fared better
than ex-slave. However, one detail of charm on this Georgian way was
the putting up of tiny stars as a sign of boys serving in the army, a
humble star of hope and glory like some tiny flower blossoming out of
season in the wilds—one white star for a boy in the army, a golden one
for a boy who had died. In their submerged way the Negroes were proud
of having helped in the war. The glory, or the idea, or the parrot cry
of “making the world safe for democracy” had penetrated even into the
most obscure abodes. The poor Negro had discovered Europe at last, and
was especially in love with one nation—the French. The South generally
had not been very eager to see the Negro in the war and has not reacted
sympathetically to the black man’s war glory.
“There’s no managing the neegahs now, they’s got so biggety since the
war,” said a white woman at Shadydale. “Las’ year we white people jus’
had to pick the cotton usselves, men, women, and chillen.” She told me
she did not think it a bit nice of the French girls to walk out with
Negro soldiers, and then told a story of a French bride brought home by
one of the white boys. She tittered. “Yes ... she had twins soon af’
she came, and would you b’lieve it, they were neegahs. Of course he
sent her right back.” The French intimacy with the Negro soldiers has
cooled the Southerner’s regard for the best-loved nation of Europe. It
has also stirred up the racial fear concerning Negroes and white women.
Because the black soldier was a favorite of the white girls in France
it is thought that his eye roves more readily to the pure womanhood of
the South.
Lynching seems often to be due to puritanical fervor, and is compatible
with a type of religiosity. Mob feeling against love is very dangerous.
A pastor kisses a girl of his congregation, a deacon happens to see
it, and his career is ended. An old man on the road volunteered the
fact that he had never “sinned” with a woman, black or white, his whole
life. Certainly there is a high standard of righteousness. Family
life is pure, and love-making is not the chief interest in life as in
some European countries. Men’s minds are more on their business, and
women’s on their homes. I am tempted to think that if the white race
which inhabits the South were French or Russian or Polish or Greek
there would be no lynchings. The great number of mixed relationships
would beget tolerance for inter-racial attraction. I said to a young
Floridan going through in his car—“I can well imagine a certain type
of European women ogling the Negro, making eyes at him and luring him
to his destruction. Have you ever come across such a type?” He answered
“No, and if there were, we’d do away with her, too.”
Of course this rigidly moral point of view falls away when it is a
matter of the white man and the black girl or the mulatto. The morality
of the Negro woman was badly undermined in slavery days, when slave
children were bred without any thought of sin or shame. But though
the moral standard has been low, it is nothing like so low as it was.
Pride of race has been born, and the moral purity of the colored woman
as a whole is now comparatively higher. Certainly even in the country
districts, where the Negro is nearest to his old state of being a
chattel, there is a great decrease in the number of half-bred children.
The solution of the racial problem by ultimate blending of color is not
one which seems likely to succeed here in the course of nature. Black
and White are far more separate and distinct in freedom than they were
in slavery. Even the black mammy is dying out. There are not so many
of that type of colored women. The white mother, moreover, has more
scruple against giving her child away from her own breast. The Southern
woman is as much against promiscuous relationships with Negro women as
her manfolk is against the Negro’s roving eyes. One woman said, “You
can understand the fondness of our young men for some of the Negro
girls when as babies they were suckled by a Negro woman.” There is much
psychological truth in that.
During these weeks on the roads of Georgia three Negroes were burned
in my neighborhood, two near Savannah for supposed complicity in the
murder of a deputy sheriff, and a mob of about a thousand white men
took pleasure in the auto-da-fé. A short while later near Macon a Negro
was accused of making love to a woman of fifty as she was coming home
from church one Sunday evening. Some one certainly attacked her, though
what was his object might be questionable. The accused man fled for
his life. He was captured at midnight by certain well-known citizens
whose names were published in the press. The sheriff argued with a
crowd of about four hundred in the public street for about an hour
and a half, and then, like Pilate, washed his hands of the matter and
let the mob have its way. Paul Brooker, the Negro, lay on the ground
maltreated, but living; gasoline was poured over him, a lighted match
was applied, and he was burned to death. This was not in Catholic Spain
in the days of the Inquisition, but in religious Georgia, solid for
Wilson and the League of Nations. I was told I could not understand why
such things had to be done. No Englishman and no Northerner could ever
penetrate the secret of it. That seemed to put me in the wrong when
conversing with the Southern people. It was a curious fact, however,
that they also for their part took no pains to understand how such
things made the blood boil in the veins of one who lived elsewhere. It
was not the execution nor the crime but the cruelty that seemed to me
unforgivable. I could understand killing the Negro, but I could not and
would not care to understand the state of mind of the four hundred who
enjoyed his torments.
Burnings and hangings and mob violence of other kinds are frequent in
most of the States of the South, but even in such cases where the names
of citizens are given in the press no prosecution or inquiry seems to
follow. Thus the great flag is flouted, and it is possible to imagine
the cynical mirth with which the ecstasy of the Negroes following the
Army of Liberation in 1864 might be compared with the hilarity of the
Southern mob in 1920 watching the ex-slave slowly burning to death on
their accusation and yelling for mercy when there was no merciful ear
to hear.
* * * * *
I suppose nothing begets hate so readily as cruelty. That is why in
all wars there is so much mongering of atrocities: one side tries to
find out all the cruelties and barbarities committed by the other just
to stir up its own adherents. So in the Civil War all the brutalities
of the slave owners were made known, and the Northern soldier’s blood
boiled because of them. Although the quarrel is now healed, there was,
at the time, a deep hate of the Southerners in the war. It was not only
a martial conflict but personal hatred and contempt. What was done to
the Blacks was aggravated by what was done to the white prisoners. The
North discovered a cruelty and callousness in the South which must have
been a puzzle to those who reflected that they were of the same race.
For Georgia is predominantly English by extraction, and still proud,
as I found, of grandfathers and great-grandfathers born in the old
country. Some ascribe the change of temperament to the hot sun and to
the southern latitude; more, to the brutalizing influences of slavery
itself.
When I was at Millen, which once in the glare of a burning railroad
swarmed with Sherman’s troopers, I went out to the old Southern battery
at Lawton and saw the mounds and the fields where the pen of Northern
prisoners was kept. It is waving with grass or corn to-day, and there
is a beautiful crystal spring in the midst of serene, untroubled
nature. Here the prisoners were concentrated in a space of ground three
hundred feet square, enclosed in a stockade and without covering,
exposed to all kinds of weather. When any escaped they were chased
with bloodhounds. Some seven hundred and fifty died while in this
concentration camp. No wonder a soldier of the time wrote: “It fevered
the blood of our brave boys.... God certainly will visit the authors of
all this crime with a terrible judgment.”
Sherman’s soldiers destroyed every hound they could find in Georgia
as they passed through—so strongly did they resent the barbarity
of hunting men with dogs. For the South had learned to hunt runaway
slaves with bloodhounds, and it was a type of hunting which gave a
peculiar satisfaction to the lust of cruelty. What they learned in
the maltreatment of their slaves they could put into practice against
the prisoners they obtained. There again, however, the war has failed
to bear fruit; for the hunting of Negroes with bloodhounds has become
common once more.
The Northern soldiers did not become gentler to the Southern population
as they advanced further into the depths of the country. Rather the
reverse. They would have been even more destructive than before had
they not found the country to be more and more sparsely settled. The
march from Millen to Savannah would have resulted in the harshest
treatment of the people, but happily the way lay through forests and
through the uncultivated wildernesses of Nature herself. The army had
only its prisoners to vent its displeasure upon, and they certainly
did not pet the few hundred Confederate soldiers and “civilian
personages” whom they had collected in bondage. The enemy was found
to have mined the road at one point. An officer of the Union Army had
his leg blown off. Eight-inch shells had been buried in the sand with
friction matches to explode them when trod on. Sherman was very angry,
and called it murder, not war, in a way which reminds one of the
indignation caused when in the late war the Germans started anything
novel. The answer to this mining of the road was to make the rebel
prisoners march ahead of the column in close formation so as to explode
any more which might be laid on the way. They were greatly afraid, and
begged hard to be let off—much to the mirth of the supposed victims.
It was not until nearing one of the forts of Savannah that another mine
exploded—the hurt done to the prisoners remains unrecorded.
* * * * *
The way is eastward to Sylvania and the Savannah River, and then south
to the rice fields and the harbor. The road is deep in sand, and
on each side is uncleared country with high yellow reeds below and
lofty pines above. Persimmons, ripe and yellow, grow by the wayside,
a luscious fruit, good when just rotten and full of softness and sun
heat. Large bird-like butterflies gracefully flitting down the long
corridors between the pines, and myriads of jumping mantises and
grasshoppers suggest that it is not November. The golden foliage of
an occasional beech reminds you that it is. The woods are deep and
gloomy and melancholy. A poorer population lives by pitch-boiling and
lumbering. Every pine tree is bearded with lichen. Moss hangs in long
festoons from the branches. The great dark trunks are here and there
silvered with congealed floods of sap. Trenches two inches deep have
been cut in the wood, and tin gutters and pots have been fixed up to
collect the resin. Every other tree has a brown pot tied to it, and
each pot is half full of the pearly liquid life of the trees. You
emerge from the forest to the pretty clearing of Rincom with a Lutheran
church which has a metal swan above the spire—symbol of the fact that
the first congregation, the one that built the church, had come across
the water from Europe. Six miles from Rincom is the oldest church in
all this part of Georgia, the Ebenezer Chapel, founded by those first
German settlers who sailed up the Savannah River, and in part founded
the colony of Georgia. It also is a church of the swan. The forest is
very dense, and Negroes with shotguns are potting at wild birds from
the highway. Wayside cottages and churches seem almost overcome with
the tillandsia, a subtropical mossy growth that seems to grow downward
rather than upward. There is a slight clearing and a cemetery in the
depth of the forest, and the hundreds of pines and cypresses and oaks
about it are weeping with this hanging moss. The county is that of
Effingham. Springfield, the capital, without electric light, deep
in yellow sand, with a great public square where all the many trees
look like weeping willows because of this gray-green tillandsia hair
trailing and waving ten or twenty feet to a tress, is an obscure town.
Guideposts for Florida begin to appear, and heavy touring cars roll
past on the way to Miami and Palm Beach. There are some charming wooden
churches—the Negro ones being poorer, looking better sacrifices unto
God than those of the Whites. But above the counter in the chief store
is written
In God we trust,
All others pay cash.
The sound of the axe clashes in the woods. There are many fallen trunks
on which it is possible to sit down and rest. Sea mist rolls in from
the Atlantic, and warm airs push through it, feeding the marvelous
tropical mosses. It’s a long way to Savannah—distance seems to be
intensified by the narrowness of the gray corridor of the road through
the vast, high forest. There rises from the obstructed earth black oak
and sterile vine and palmettoes like ladies’ hands with opened fans.
The surface whence the forest grows is swampy, old, lichened, mossy,
springy. It’s hard to find solid earth, so many branches seem to be
overgrown with verdure and moss. In the heat long snakes glide away
from your approach, having seen you before you saw them. And _rat_,
_rat_, _rat_, the red-polled woodpeckers in their tree-top cities call
upon one another and seek their insect luncheons and then flit home and
knock again. The white people speak a “nigger brogue” which is almost
indistinguishable from Negro talk, and they never pronounce an _r_. The
Negro seems very poor and illiterate and afraid. “Hear comes the OLD
RELIABLE FRIND with the LIFT of CHRIST” says a notice on an old wooden
church of colored folk.
I am overtaken by a Negro with a wagon and twelve bales of cotton,
and though he seems trying to race a huge touring car “heading for
Florida” with trunks on top and whole family within, he slows down to
pick me up. His is an enormous lorry, ponderous and ramshackle, shaking
the bones out of your body as it takes you along. The Negro boy held
the steering wheel nonchalantly with one hand and blundered along at
top speed. After ten miles of this we entered one of the vast cotton
warehouses outside Savannah, passed the gateman who would not have
let me in but he thought I was in charge, and we saw where a hundred
thousand bales were being housed and kept. Scores of Negroes were at
work manipulating bales on trolley trains run by petrol engines all
over the asphalted way, and from shed to shed.
“Are you shipping much cotton?” I asked of a white man who was giving
us a receipt for the cotton brought in, while a dozen husky fellows
were unloading the wagon. “Not much,” said he. “Holding for better
prices,” he added, and smiled knowingly.
Then with the empty wagon we rolled off for Savannah, and the boy
driver told me he was going to work his passage soon on a ship from
Savannah to New York. “We don’t get a chance down here.”
And yet how much better off was he with his wagon, and union wages, and
life in a large city than the poor ex-slave, on the land!
While unlading, it had become dark. But an hour more through the
forest brought us to the outlying slums of Savannah, and then to the
“red-light district” where were music and dancing, and open doors and
windows, and the red glow of the lamp luring colored youth to lowest
pleasures; then to the grandeur and spaciousness of modern Savannah,
and the white man’s civilization, up out of Georgia, up out of the pit,
through the veil of the forest and of Nature to the serene heights of
world civilization once more.
VII
AFTER THE WAR: THE VOTE
The march to the sea, like John Brown’s soul marching to eternity, was
a moving symbol of the faith of the war. Men saw in it the march of the
cause of humanity as a whole. Sherman offered Savannah as a Christmas
gift to Abraham Lincoln, and the star of Bethlehem shone anew over a
ravaged land and ravaged hearts. The news when it came was a signal for
great popular rejoicing and a prophetic belief in the end of the war.
Four months afterward there was a general capitulation of the South.
It is true America’s most innocent and Christian man was destroyed by
hate—another Golgotha day in history, when on Good Friday in a theatre
in Washington Lincoln was assassinated—but the fight had been fought
and the victory won. It became possible to ratify the abolition of
slavery by the re-establishment of the Union and the common consent of
all the States.
“In Sixty Three the slaves were free; In Sixty Four the war was o’er,”
says a rhyme, but in truth the Negroes were not free in the South till
the South had been conquered by the United States, and the war was not
o’er till April, 1865. It was on the 24th of May, 1865, that the army
marched past the White House in its final grand review, bearing aloft
its battle-riven flags festooned with flowers. There was glory in the
North; the twilight of confusion in the South; and the Negroes were
free. Peace came once more, though not peace in men’s hearts. War hate
still bred hate, and the lust of cruelty called into being its monster
progeny of revenge.
The fanatic who murdered Lincoln in doing so struck the whole of his
own people. The planters who burned the runaway slaves, the soldiers
who during the war put to death the Negro prisoners who fell into
their hands, the actions generally of the embittered, brought the
calamity of retaliatory spite not only upon themselves but upon the
innocent and the just and the kind. A policy of punishment and not of
reconciliation ruled at Washington, and the white South suffered. The
Negroes and the Negro cause suffered also. The ex-slaves were given
votes and put on an electoral equality with white men. This was a
palpable injustice and indignity. The Negroes in 1863 were not prepared
in mind or in soul or in knowledge for the exercise of the franchise.
Neither were they gifted with the power of will and physical strength
necessary to hold the suffrage when it was given them. There was the
same exaltation nationally when the victory was won as there had been
locally when Sherman marched through, and the same disillusion and the
same destruction of bridges was to take place also. Where the white
man went the black man could not follow. For a brief space of time the
ex-slave dominated the white South. The black vote was exploited by
political charlatans; Negroes did not vote, they were voted, and then
a way was made out of injustice to put the white man and ex-master of
slaves in the right again. For wrong though the South had been, the
war should still have left the educated white man in authority and
not put him under the heel of the illiterate. The poor slaves just
freed, but not educated, not blown upon by the winds of culture, not
sunned in America’s bright moral sun, were in no position to vote upon
America’s destiny or to take a directing hand in her affairs. As is
usual after a war, the victors wanted a revolution in the land where
they had won. The white North revenged itself on the white South. But
a black revolution was a thing that could not be. Racial instinct came
to the help of the Whites, and through general tacit understandings
and organized conspiracies the new black masters were ousted from
their places. Then fear of what might be, and once more, revenge born
of the brief black dominion, went as far the other way in injustice.
Nigger baiting arose, mob violence took the place of the justice of
the courts. The central authority was flouted, first covertly and then
openly. The Negro was hustled back to peonage and servility, and one
might be tempted to think that the cause for which all the blood of
the Civil War had been shed was lost. It would have been lost had not
slavery become a complete anachronism in world society. The yoke could
not be reimposed upon the Negro’s neck. His freedom has persisted, it
has grown.
The maximum of persecution of the Negro in recent years does not equal
the misery of slavery. Even if all the lynchings and burnings and
humiliations and disabilities be put together they do not add up to
one year of servitude. Most Negroes understand that. They know that no
matter what may be the vicissitudes they pass through they are still
progressing to an ever fuller freedom.
In viewing the whole situation one is apt to underestimate the
unhappiness of slavery and to magnify the unhappiness of the present
era of freedom. It is blessed to be free. Even to be the worst possible
peon is far removed from slavery. The great significance of the
Emancipation is that the Negro slaves were set free—free for anything
and everything in the wide world. In the prison house of a national
institution of slavery there was no hope, no sense of the ultimate
possibilities latent in a man. But with freedom every baby became a
potential Alexander.
In 1863 a new life began to germinate, began to have promise. Some
thought that it must show forth at once. But that was fallacious. It
was bound to spend a long time underground before the first modest
shoots of the new should appear. Many have argued that the Negro would
come to nothing in his freedom, and even those who have believed in his
destiny have been impatient. Premature greetings have been given time
and oft to new Negro culture and responsibility. The only criticism
made here is that they were premature. The greatest of these was the
suffrage.
I have said that the denial of the Negro his legitimate vote is a
part of peonage, and I have also said that it was wrong to give the
freed-men votes at once. I should like to explain how Negro suffrage
stands to-day.
In the first place, it was wrong to enfranchise the ex-slaves, not
because they were not entitled to votes, but because they were not
ready to be intrusted with votes. In 1863 in England as well as in
America the world could be saved by the ballot box alone. It was a
rebellion against this belief that caused Carlyle to fulminate against
“Nigger Democracy.” In talking with Dean Brawley of Morehouse College
at Atlanta, I noticed a prejudice against Carlyle which is very
widespread among educated colored people. In the first place I should
like to assure them that the use by Carlyle of the expression “nigger”
has nothing in common with the brutal and contemptuous sense in which
that word is used in America. Thus we say “_working like a nigger_,”
an expression derived from the life of the slaves; “_nigger diploma_,”
a contemptuous English expression for a high degree such as Doctor of
Literature or Doctor of Divinity, thought to have been purchased in
America at a Negro university; the _ten little nigger boys_, the black
boys who come so swiftly to bad ends in the familiar rhyme of our
childhood. “Nigger” is in England a playful word for a Negro, and is
used always in the nursery. It is the children’s word for a black man,
preferably for one who has been thoroughly blacked. Carlyle was one of
the most reverent of men, and not accustomed to speak contemptuously of
God’s creatures. But he was contemptuous of the suffrage. To him and
to Ruskin and to many another it seemed absurd that the voice of the
educated man and the illiterate should have the same value; that the
many who are dull and ignorant should be allowed to outvote the few who
know. The enfranchisement of the freed Negroes furnished Carlyle with
an example of carrying an absurdity to its logical conclusion.
The alternative to government by ballot has, however, proved to
be government by the domination of a military caste, and mankind
generally in our time has shown that it prefers the former. The ballot
box with all its absurdity seems nevertheless our only means of
carrying on in freedom. It would be wrong to grant the suffrage to the
millions of savages under British rule in Africa, because they could
not use it. And it was wrong to enfranchise Negrodom in America with
a stroke of the pen after the Civil War. It has done the Negroes more
harm than good.
To have such a grievance as to be legally enfranchised and yet
physically denied the use of the vote is, of course, great harm. It
affects the social mind. It makes bitterness and brews agitation. To
be conscripted and called upon to fight for the country when this
grievance is in mind has aggravated the harm already done. “We are not
too low to fight the foe, but we’re too low to share in the spoil,” as
the story goes. I heard a Negro comedian indulging in funniosities at a
colored music hall win great applause by a chansonette:
Cullud folk will be ready to fight
When cullud folk has equal right.
I a’nt so foolish as I seem to be.
And it is a reasonable sentiment.
The fact is, Negrodom has to a great extent qualified to vote. Half the
population is sunk in economic bondage and illiteracy, but the other
half has more than average capacity for citizenship. Yet in spite of
the Constitution and the Federal authority these many millions remain
practically without voice in all the Southern States. Physical force is
exerted to keep them from the ballot box.
The Southerner affects to believe that the educated Negro is even less
fitted to have a vote than the illiterate sort. But that is because
he hates to see the Negro rise. He will tell you that in certain
States the Negroes outnumber the Whites by ten to one. But that is a
characteristic misstatement. It is hard to find a city where the black
vote exceeds the white. In the last census the blackest cities were
Birmingham and Memphis, where the Negroes proved to be forty per cent.
of the population, while in
Richmond it was 37%
Atlanta 34%
Nashville 34%
Washington 29%
New Orleans 27%
And there are only two States where the Negro population exceeds that
of the White; namely, Mississippi and South Carolina, where the Negroes
were 57 per cent. and 55 per cent. of the total population.
If, as seems only fair, an illiteracy test were made legal by amendment
of the Constitution, white voters would outnumber black by a large
margin.
As for having anything to fear from the educated Negro vote, there is
of course one matter of anxiety. The Negro would be bound to fight for
social justice, and violence would be done to racial prejudice.
The South is, however, determined that the Negro shall never vote
again. Year by year the colored people as a whole grow in intelligence,
in capacity, and in the number of its intelligentsia, but the South is
not moved. It sees no explosion in the future, and makes no provision
for one—will not, till the explosion comes.
Racial fear, no doubt, plays a large part in this determination, but
there is a further consideration. The Solid South votes Democratic to a
man. The Negro, if he had a chance, would vote as solidly Republican.
I remember being present at a violent quarrel at a Negro meeting in
New Orleans—one Negro, though he had not a vote, had actually called
himself a Democrat. A remedying of the defective suffrage would be an
enormous access of strength to the Republican party. For this reason
Democrats exaggerate their racial fear. And also for that reason every
Republican politician who gains power is bound to make a bid to break
the solid South. Senator Lodge himself was the author of a “Force Bill”
which came near enactment some years ago, and it would have placed
Federal soldiers at every ballot box in the South, to protect black
voters.
The South defies anything which the Federal Government may devise. As
Senator Lamar, of Mississippi, said to his colleagues in the Senate:
“But there is one issue upon which the South is solid, and upon
which she will remain solid—the protection of her civilization from
subjection to an ignorant and servile race. And neither Federal honors
nor Federal bayonets can shake that solidity.”
President Wilson’s administration has been one which was dominated
by Southern Democrats, and as the Southern vote has been behind him
and them, there could hardly be any help given to the Negroes. The
Democratic failure has nevertheless been a real disappointment.
Wilson’s radical idealism; his plunge to the root of trouble wherever
trouble was, led many to believe that he would do something to remedy
the pitiable state of the Negroes. Some legal palliative would come
with a better grace from Democrats than a forceful measure enacted over
their heads by Republicans. Perhaps with the downfall of the Democratic
party and the coming triumph of the Republicans something practical
will be done during the next few years to help the Negro. The main hope
of color must lie in a Republican President and a Republican Senate
being in power together. November, 1920, and its elections will be as
fateful for the Negro as for the world.
Roosevelt gave his party a generous lead when he received Booker T.
Washington at the White House, and I heard young Colonel Roosevelt
one evening, with his father’s nerve and pluck, promise a vast Negro
audience a “square deal” if they would have patience. That square
deal is the Negro’s right, especially in the matter of the vote. It
is strange that the movement for the “rights of man” inaugurated
practically in the French Revolution should have stopped short about
1870, and the contrary ideal of the “privilege of individuals” begun to
progress. As Sutton Griggs very forcefully put it in his address to the
National Baptist Convention at Newark, New Jersey:
“In 1792 a motion was carried in the English House of Commons providing
for the gradual abolition of the slave traffic. In 1794 the French
Convention decreed that the rights of French citizens should be granted
to all slaves in French colonies. In 1834 the British abolished
slavery entirely within their dominions. In 1848 French slaves were
emancipated. In 1863 the Dutch set their slaves free. The South,
unmoved by world thought, clung to its slaves, but they were violently
torn from her grasp in the Civil War. Under the impulse of the doctrine
of the native equality of all men the Fifteenth Amendment to the
Constitution of the United States, forbidding the denial of the right
to vote because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,
was adopted in the year 1869. In the year 1870, bills were passed by
Congress providing fines and imprisonment for anyone who even tried to
prevent the Negro from voting or to keep his vote from being counted.
“But all of the forces that could be marshaled have not, up to the
present time, been able to move our nation or the world one inch
forward in a straight line from this point. The action just mentioned
stands as the last recorded national act designed to incorporate
the Negro race in the governmental structure without reservations.
Further efforts were made by powerful forces, but all have proved to
be abortive. In 1875 a very comprehensive bill intended to make the
Negroes of the South secure in their rights passed the lower house of
Congress but was defeated in the Senate. Some years later, the Lodge
Election Bill, having the same purpose, passed the House but was
defeated in the Senate. The Republican party’s platform, upon which
President Taft was elected, contained an unequivocal declaration in
favor of enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment in letter and in spirit,
but no legislation in that direction was attempted during his term of
office.”
To-day, however, a world war and the greatest affirmation of the rights
of nations if not of man, has been made. There is an opportunity to
resume the interrupted advance.
VIII
IN ALABAMA: COLOR AND COLOR PREJUDICE
I made an expedition into Alabama from Atlanta, and again saw something
of that State when I got down to the Gulf of Mexico. In the matter of
Negro life it is first of all important because of Tuskegee Institute,
which, like the college at Hampton, is sometimes called the Mecca of
the American Negro. It was founded by Booker T. Washington, and is
the visible expression of the self-help idea. There, as at Hampton,
the ex-slave is taught to do something as the end of his schooling.
The establishment is now under the guidance of the beloved Dr. Moton,
a wise and genial African giant of pure Negro extraction: his father
is said to have been a prince who in selling his captives was himself
lured on to a slaver, and suddenly found himself in the position of
his own captive enemies. This was during Civil War time, and he came
to America a slave but to be made free. As a boy barely able to sign
his name young Moton first appeared at Hampton, and the authorities
were at first doubtful about accepting him as a student. But what they
would have missed! Dr. Moton is the very best type of Negro teacher,
the worthy successor of Booker Washington. Tuskegee, besides its
educational work, does much to combat race hatred, and keeps public
opinion in America well informed on the lynchings that take place. The
presence of the institute in the backward State of Alabama is very
important for the future of the South.
At Birmingham, Alabama, I was presented to a very charming young
widow who had been left rather rich, a well-educated lady of leisure,
who lived well and dressed well, and was possessed of a recognizable
American _chic_. I met her in town, and then in response to an
invitation called on her at her house. She was certainly a Negro
beauty, and I have no doubt was highly desired in marriage. There was
a clear five thousand a year besides her charms, and it was impossible
not to feel some of the glamour of that fact—
The belle of the season is wasting
an hour upon you.
_Mmmmmm_ she cooed to everything I said. She was shy as a pedestal
without its statue; her eyes burned, and I could not help feeling
all the atmosphere of “romance.” If she had been a shade lighter in
complexion any white man might have fallen in love with her.
Her children—or was it the children of one of her black
servants?—were playing with a family of real Negro dolls, not “nigger
dolls,” the stove black, red-lipped nigger of the nursery, but colored
dolls, _after Nature_. This was very charming, and I should have
liked to see a baby woolly head at the swelling bosom of my beautiful
acquaintance. She would have made a delightful study for a black
Madonna.
To have their own dolls is one of the new racial triumphs of the
colored people in America. Formerly they had to put up with the
pink and white darlings with yellow hair and pale blue eyes, those
reflections of German babies, which have hitherto held the market of
dolls. It has taken the Negroes half a century of freedom before it
occurred to them that the doll, being the promise of baby-to-be, it was
not entirely good for morals, and for black racial pride, that their
little girls should love white dollies. Perhaps it was mooted first as
a business proposition. It might be a paying enterprise to manufacture
real colored folk’s dolls, brown dolls, mulatto dolls, near white
dolls, black and kinky ones, sad or pretty ones. The year 1920 sees a
lively doll industry in progress. It is believed that in time the white
dolly will become a rarity in the Negro home. Whence children may learn
a lesson: Your pet doll would not perhaps be another girl’s pet doll.
It was also at Southern Brum that, calling on Reverend Williams, I
happened upon this singular conversation:
“Now, isn’t it absurd for us to have white angels?”
“You surely would not like them black?”
“We give Sunday-school cards to our children with white angels on them.
It’s _wrong_.”
“Black angels would be ugly.”
“No more ugly than white.”
I thought the whiteness of the angels was as the whiteness of white
light which contained all color. That, however, was lost on the
reverend, who happened to be a realist.
“Christ himself was not white. He would have had to travel in a Jim
Crow car,” said he. “But put it to yourself: isn’t it absurd for us to
be taught that the good are all white, and that sin itself is black?”
“It does seem to leave you in the shade,” said I.
“Expressions such as ‘black as sin’ ought to be deleted from the
language. One might as well say ‘white as sin.’”
I ransacked my brain rapidly.
“We say ‘pale as envy,’” said I.
“‘Black spite,’” he retorted. “Why should it be black?”
I could not say.
“Then Adam and Eve in the Garden,” he went on, “are always shown as
beautifully white creatures, whereas, considering the climate, they may
well have been as dark-skinned as any Negro couple in Alabama. Babylon
was built by Negroes.”
“Would you have Adam and Eve painted black?”
“Why, yes, I would.”
This struck me as rather diverting, but it was quite serious. Later, in
New York one night at Liberty Hall, before I was driven out as a white
interloper, I heard an orator say to an admiring host of Negroes: “Why,
I ask you, is God always shown as white? It is because He is the white
man’s God. It is the God of our masters. (Yes, brothers, that’s it.)
It’s the God of those who persecute and despise the colored people.
Brothers, we’ve got to knock that white God down and put up a black
God. We’ve got to rewrite the Old Testament and the New from a black
man’s point of view. Our theologians must get busy on a black God.”
This was what we Whites call clap trap, and irreverent as well. But it
seemed to take well with the Harlem brothers. Once more a lesson may be
derived for older children—— If you make God in your own image, it
does not follow that other children will agree that it is like——
It reminded me of the enthusiasm of the soldiers when they got home
from the war and took a good look at their own womenkind; they thought
them so much more good looking than French or German girls. Girls
and dolls, angels and Gods, we like them to correspond to our own
complexion.
Birmingham at night glows to the sky with furnaces. A hundred thousand
black proletarians earn their living on coal and steel, stirring up
soot to heaven. Though I met there the charming Mrs. J——, whom I have
mentioned, and also other educated Negroes, it is not to be supposed
that it is a place of culture, white or black. It is a straggling city
with an ugly, misshapen, ill-balanced interior or center part like
a table spread with small teacups and large jam pots. It will not
stand comparison with Atlanta or New Orleans or Richmond. Strictly
speaking, it is not a city, but an agglomeration of industrialism.
Nevertheless, the factories which surround it are owned by companies of
vast resources, and it is claimed that in the steel industry there are
some of the most extensive industrial plants in the world. Business is
little disturbed by strikes. On the gates of the vast factory estates
is written: _We do not want you unless you are able to look after
yourself. Careless men are always liable to accident._ Some notices
declare “Non-Union Shops,” others “Open Shops,” but it does not seem
to matter much. The unions have little power. Wages are high, though
not as high as in the North, but the cost of living is very much
less, and there is a lower standard of respectability. In some cases
the industrials are housed on the factory grounds, and you see Negro
dwellings which amount to industrial barracks. Every gate has its
porter or civilian sentry, and in order to reach your workingman you
may have to show what your business is with him. On the way to his
door you are met by the notice that trespassers will be prosecuted.
There is no encouragement to loiterers, but you may see the Negro gangs
at work, organized squads of workers hard at it, with Negro foremen or
white foremen. A myriad-fold Negro industrialism straggles near mines
and furnaces, blacker than in Nature. The coaly black Negro collier,
the sooted face of steel worker and tar operative are curious comments
on whether it is good to be Black or to be White. Coke products flame
and smoke at innumerable pipes, while locomotives are panting and
steaming forward and back, and a platoon of chimney stacks belches
forth dense blackness, which, enfolded in the breeze, wanders over the
heavens and one’s eyes.
I strayed in at the doors of some very dirty Negro houses. Here was
little of the _amour propre_ of Baltimore and Philadelphia. Anti-kink
was not being generally applied, and as far as the little ones were
concerned, mother’s little Alabama coon seemed to be getting a little
bit too much for mother. It is not difficult to understand the disgust
of people in the North when in 1917 and 1918 Negro families rolled
up in their thousands from the South—the real obscure, fuzzy-wuzzy,
large-featured, smelly Negro of submerged Alabama. The sight of them
was responsible for much of the feeling which inspired the Northern
riots. “We know our Northern Negroes,” they said in the North, “but
these from the South were like no Negroes we had ever seen.” There was
awakened much prejudice against these uncouth Africans, who seemed so
near to the savage and the beast. It was natural, perhaps. But high
wages and new hopes and ideals quickly improve the black immigrant.
He is being absorbed into the generality of black Negrodom, in its
established worthiness and respectability, above the Mason-Dixon line.
It would be difficult after a few years to pick out a Southern Negro in
a crowd in New York.
The little black children in the suburbs of Birmingham were alternately
very confiding and then suddenly scared and then confiding again as I
tried to talk to them. There was much fear in their bodies. They seemed
if anything to be blacker than their parents, and I volunteered the
opinion that a good deal of their color would come off in a course of
hot baths. But washing facilities were of a rudimentary kind, and the
passion for being fit and fresh could not readily be developed.
The white South could improve its Negroes infinitely if it cared to do
so. On the whole, however, it does not wish its Negroes to rise and
seems most happy when they can readily be identified with the beasts
that perish. But if it thought more highly of the Negro, the Negro
would rise.
I visited Professor K—— in his three-storied house. He had been
one of the Negro Four-Minute Men who had made popular addresses to
his people during the war fervor, inducing them to be “patriotic”
and subscribe their dollars to various funds. He said he was deeply
discouraged. He did not belong to Alabama and would much rather live in
a more civilized part of the world, but he gave his life for the uplift
of the children. He was doing what he could, but the Whites gave no
co-operation. In these factory areas the colored children outnumbered
the Whites five to one. Teaching was, of course, segregated; he had no
objection to that, but very, very little was done by comparison for the
black children. They had most need of blessing—but they shared only in
parsimony and curses. He showed me his school—a ramshackle building
of old, faded wood. “Oh, but our teachers have enthusiasm,” said he.
“They’re doing a work of God, and they love it. Yes, sir.”
I obtained an impression which I think is sound, that there was more
keenness to teach on the part of the colored people of Alabama than on
the part of the Whites. White schools find some difficulty in obtaining
good teachers; colored schools find no such difficulty. If colored
students only go on in the way they have begun, there is quite a good
prospect of their obtaining posts to teach white children in white
schools—not perhaps soon in Alabama, for it is strongly prejudiced,
but elsewhere first, and then in this State. To start off with, they
would be excellent with young children. There is a broad road of
conquest standing open there. As Booker T. Washington very sagaciously
pointed out to his people, there is no stronger argument in their favor
than personal attainment.
However, looking around the houses of the industrialized masses here,
one can only be appalled at the inadequacy of civilization. There is
nothing that is better than in the forlorn mining villages of the
Russian Ural. It makes a sort of Negro little better than a nigger, and
it is surprising that he does not run amuck more often than he does.
If the outlying settlements reminded of the Ural, the center of the
city reminded of nothing better than Omsk. Here on the main street,
at Eighteenth Street, is a very “jazzy” corner, resplendent with five
times too much light at night, vocal with noisy music, and swarming
with Negroes of all castes and colors. By day it is like a web of
gregarious larvæ; by night it is the entrance to wonderland. Here
is massed together the Negro enterprise of the city. Most of the
characters of Octavus Roy Cohen’s clever Negro stories are thought to
be derived from this corner—Mr. Florian Slappey, Lawyer Evans Chew,
and the rest. Do not their ways and doings divert a vast number of
readers to the _Saturday Evening Post_? I may have met some of them. I
cannot say. But I met their like.
The chief establishment is the savings bank building, a squat,
six-story erection in red brick. It is flanked by places of amusement,
but in itself it is an ark of professionalism and learning. It is a
hive of many cells or cabinets, and every cabinet has its special
occupant, a doctor here, a dentist there, a lawyer in the other,
another doctor, a professor, an agent, and so on. You may meet nearly
all who count in Birmingham Negrodom here. By the way, the local way of
pronouncing the name of the city is Bumming Ham; if you say politely,
Birmingham, pronouncing with lips and teeth in the front part of the
mouth, no one will understand what you mean. A Negro pastor whirled me
round to the hub of Bumming Ham in his brand-new car. He had lately
had a very successful revival, of which the motor was an outward and
visible sign. And I called on many of the notables. I met a short,
scrubby Negro of fifty, whose complexion seemed to have been drenched
in yellowness. He explained this by the statement that the blood of
Senator H—— flowed in his veins. The senator had taken a liberty
with his mother, who for her part was thoroughly black. He thanked the
senator, since probably he had given him some brains; his mother’s side
of the family was unusually hard-headed. He had become a professor.
His daughter was a remarkable public speaker, and as Senator H—— was
an orator, he used to tell his Sarah that _there_ was Senator H——
coming out in her. “The Negro has been mixed with the best blood in the
South,” said he; “the blood of the masters, the English aristocrats who
came first to the country.”
I did not think there was much in that.
“Are mulattoes increasing or decreasing in numbers?” I asked.
He thought they were increasing. But he did not deny the fact that
Negro children tend to revert to type. When two mulattoes marry, the
children are generally darker than the parents, and often real Negro
types. The white man’s strain is thrown out rapidly.
“How, then, is it that mulattoes and near Whites are on the increase?”
The professor thought for one reason there was still much illegitimacy,
and for another the Negro race under civilized conditions was getting
a little fairer on the whole. Some of the mulatto women were extremely
beautiful, and consequently more attractive to white men. The white
women of the South hated the mulatto women because they took their
husbands away from them. He thought a good deal of race hatred was
fostered by the white woman, who instinctively hated the other race.
“Did you ever hear of a union between a Negro woman and a white man
that was on other than an animal plane?” I asked him.
Professor M—— knew of several instances where an infatuation for
a Negro woman had inspired a white man to make good in life. It was
generally a tragedy, for they could not marry, and they were subject
to coarse suspicion and raillery and intrigue. It stood in the way of
the white man finding a white bride, and of the Negro woman finding
a Negro husband. Where a white man had become interested in a Negro
woman it was not good for the health of a Negro man to pretend to her
affections. The mob feeling against Negroes was so readily aroused
that it was the easiest thing in Alabama for a white man who had a
grudge against a Negro to “frame up” a crime or a scandal and make him
leave the neighborhood or remain constantly in danger of being roughly
handled.
Alabama has a bad record for lynching. It is about fifth in the list
of bad States. I understood that lynching was on the increase. The old
folk, the people who had been slave owners, the settled inhabitants of
places like Anniston and Montgomery, and of the country, knew all the
family history of their “niggers” from A to Z, and what they might do,
or could do, and they were friendly, compared with the “new sort.”
The poor Whites loved to be in mobs and feel in mobs. Over their meals
and at work and in the trolley cars they loved to talk in the way
of the mob. Individually they don’t understand the Negro—they are
afraid of him, like dogs that will only attack when in numbers. They
mostly came to America after the Civil War and the Emancipation found
the Negroes in possession of land or of work or of houses. They had
their grievances, and instead of visiting them upon God or the Devil
or Society in general, found the Negro a convenient fetish and visited
their discontent on him. It soon became a habit, then it became a sort
of lust and brutal sport.
The older and more solid people have been much annoyed by the growth
of this brutality, and something definite is being done to combat it
in Alabama. Committees have been formed, or were being formed in the
fall of 1919, in every county in the State, half white, half colored,
to inquire into racial strife and see what could be done for life and
freedom.
An old Negro said to me: “We had two clocks on the cabin wall, and one
was very slow and deliberate and always seemed to say:
“’_Take yo’ time. Take yo’ time!_’
“But the other gabbled to us:
“’_Get together, get together, get together!_’ That’s what we got to do
to-day, brothers—get together.”
The Negroes are fond of emphasizing the triviality of color
differences. They reprove the white man playfully. “Why get so excited
about difference in color? We believe in equality of rights for all
men,” I heard a leader say, “for all men of whatever color—white,
black, brown, or yellow, or blue.” And his audience laughed. “Two boys
go into a shop; one buys a red toy, the other a blue toy—but it is not
very important which color—the toy’s the same.”
But of course color prejudice or preference is not such a haphazard
matter, and prejudice against the Negro is prejudice against more than
color. The toy, so to speak, is different. It may be as good, but
it is different. The body, and especially the skull, of a Negro is
different from that of the white man. The nervous system, the brain,
the mind and soul, are different. I heard the theory put forward in
the name of Christian Science that in God’s perfect plan there were no
Negroes. Their dark skins were other men’s evil thought about them. All
men were really white, and the outward appearance of their skin could
be made to correspond to the white idea by concentrated true thought
about them. That is a charitable and beautiful faith to live by. But
what of the new line of Negroes who are proud of being black, who
abhor pallor as nausea? There are many Negroes now who have a religion
of being black. The new generation of children is being brought up
to glorify Negro color. It is told of the princes and warriors from
which it is descended, learns with the geography of the United States
the geography of Africa, and delights in the cognomen—Afro-American.
The color issue will never be settled by all Negroes becoming Whites.
It seems clear also that it cannot be solved by all men becoming
mulattoes. There seems to remain just one obvious solution, and that
is in distinct and parallel development, equality before the law, and
mutual understanding and tolerance.
IX
THE SOUTHERN POINT OF VIEW
Shoemaker: No, my lord, they don’t hurt you there.
Foppington: I tell thee, they pinch me execrably.
Shoemaker: Well, then, my lord, if those shoes pinch you, I’ll be
d—— d.
Foppington: Why, wilt thou undertake to persuade me I cannot feel?
Shoemaker: Your lordship may please to feel what you think fit; but
that shoe does not hurt you.
—(“A Trip to Scarborough.”)
The Southern point of view can be gathered together in a very short
chapter. Its expression has so crystallized that it can be set down in
a series of paragraphs and phrases. Whosoever doth not believe, without
doubt he shall be damned everlastingly. Wherever you meet a Southerner,
be it in the remotest corner of the earth, it is the same as in native
Alabama. I was talking to the Mother Superior of a convent one day in
a genial English countryside. Although I did not know it, she derived
from Mississippi. I mentioned the subject of the Negro, and from her
quiet face, meager with fasting and pale with meditation, there flashed
nevertheless the Southern flame—like lightning across the room.
You have only to mention the Negro sympathetically in a public meeting
and some one of Southern extraction will be found opposing to you a
statement of the Southern creed. Thus, after speaking one morning at
Carnegie Hall, some one came up to me and said very emphatically: If
you had lived among the Negroes you would not speak of them as you
do—the inevitable Southerner.
This is his creed:
1. We understand the niggers and they like us. When they go North
they’re crazy till they get back to us. The North does not understand
the nigger, pets him and spoils him, and at last dislikes him more than
any Southerner.
2. We have occasionally race riots in the South, but they are generally
caused by Yankees who have come South. In any case the worst riots in
recent years have taken place in the North—at Washington, right under
the President’s nose, and at Chicago.
3. Few Northerners or Englishmen understand or can understand the Negro
problem. Those who understand, agree with us. Those who do not agree,
do not understand.
4. The nigger is all right as long as he is kept in his place. You must
make him keep his distance. If once you are familiar with him, you are
lost. He will give himself such airs that it will be impossible to get
on with him.
5. The nigger is an animal. The male of the species we generally call a
“buck nigger.” Like the animals, he is full of lust. Like the animals,
also, he does not feel pain. When he is burned it is not the same as a
white man burning. Like the animals, he has no soul either to lose or
to save, and Christianity and education are alike wasted on him. The
polished Negro is merely disgusting, like an ape in evening dress. You
clothe him and dress him and put him at table, but he’s an animal all
the same and is bound to behave like one. You can’t trust him.
6. Under the influence of alcohol the Negro becomes a wild beast. He
goes out of control. No fear of consequence can stop him. That is why
some of the Southern States have been so ardently prohibitionist.
7. If you had to live with them you’d understand how terrible it is.
8. The nigger is a liar. He will say anything to your face to please
you, or anything he thinks you want him to say. He’ll tell you stories
of lynchings that would make you think we lynched a nigger every week,
instead of it’s being the rarest occurrence.
9. When we lynch ‘em it’s for a very good reason—to protect our white
women. Ask any of your English or Northern friends, who pity the Negro,
whether they’d be willing to let their daughters marry a Negro. It’s a
horrible thought. But that is what the Negro is always after—the white
woman. His fancy runs to her, and if it were not for the terror of
being lynched we should never be able to leave our wives and daughters
in security. The R in the middle of the Negro’s name stands for his
favorite proclivity. We burn ‘em alive, yes, and do it slow, because
killing’s too good for them, and we get just so mad that everyone wants
to be there, and have his part in putting them to death. In the North
they do not lynch the Negro, but if one commits a crime they blame the
whole Negro race. In the South we find the guilty man and punish him.
10. When the white man goes to the Negro girl, it’s different. He ought
to be ashamed of himself, but there, it’s human nature, and you can’t
be too stern with him.
11. The white man is master, and must remain master. But you do not
realize how precarious his position is, outnumbered as he is, ten to
one, in many districts. If the niggers joined hands against us we might
be all killed in a night.
12. They have votes. By the greatest injustice ever committed in
this country, the Constitution of the United States was amended to
give these people votes and give them power over us. It is true we
prevent them using their votes, and override the Constitution at
every election. But political agitation goes on all the time. Every
Negro would vote Republican if he had a chance, just because we vote
Democrat. The Republican party knows that, and is always conspiring to
restore to the Negro his lost power of voting. It will never succeed,
but you can see the anxiety it causes us.
13. As for education, it’s bad for the nigger almost every way, and
every new educated nigger makes it more difficult to keep ‘em down. But
kept down they must be.
14. Justice? Well, you ask any nigger which he’d prefer, a Southern
court of justice and a Southern judge, or a Northern one. He would
always prefer the Southern one, because in the South we understand
him. And we’re very fond of them and they of us. We get on very well
together.
* * * * *
Southern belief rarely strays out of this codified expression of
thought. Get into converse with a Southerner on the subject of the
Negroes, and you will almost always be able to refer his talk to 1 or 6
or 10 or some other paragraph of the foregoing. It is sufficiently pat
and parrot-like to be amusing at last. The Negro himself is amused and
pained by it. It amounts to this: The Southerner has made the Negro a
pair of boots and he says they fit very well. The Negro says they don’t
fit. But the Southerner says he’ll risk his salvation on it—he made
the boots, and he knows his trade. The Negro, however, has to wear them.
Perhaps if it were merely opinion, the idleness of the spoken word,
the Southern point of view would merit less attention. Talk might be
discounted, as mere talk is discounted by responsible minds. But it has
unfortunately a remarkable counterpart in action. It is the concomitant
of mob murder and torture. It is expressed not only in narrow and
bitter phrase, but in actual flesh twisting; not only in the flames of
fanaticism, but in real flames.
Lynching is a popular sport in the South. It is perhaps popular in idea
all over the world. Even in Great Britain, where the policeman is on a
sort of moral pedestal, and is paid immense respect, how often among
the masses does one hear the sentiment that such and such a person
should be put against a wall and shot. Even in a nation that has such
a phrase as “the majesty of the law” the idea of taking the law into
one’s own hands is generally popular. In Russia, _samosudi_, as they
are called, are frequent, and there is a short and terrible way with
pickpockets when the crowd finds them out. France’s passion for _la
lanterne_ does not need to be enlarged upon.
It is said that in countries where the laws are badly administered
and the police held in little respect, lynchings are the more
frequent. This is so. And while lynching can have a moral sanction
at first, it may, if unchecked, grow to be a popular sport, a means
of “national” holiday, like the shows of Rome, the _auto-da-fé’s_ of
Spain, bullfights, and boxing competitions. When sufficient cause for
a lynching is lacking, cause may have to be invented, just to let
the folk have some “fun.” In the United States to-day there are not
sufficient crimes committed by the Negroes to satisfy the hunger of
the crowd for lynchings. So inevitably many innocent black men are
sacrificed just for sport’s sake.
Last year seventy-seven Negroes were lynched in America; fourteen of
them were burned alive. Burning appears to be on the increase, and
is an obvious indication of growing mob lust. This form of brutality
has long ago ceased in the Europe from which perhaps it was derived.
Spaniards burned the Indians. Indians burned the settlers. Settlers
burned their runaway slaves. And still to-day in comparatively large
numbers the white Southern mob burns its Negro victims. It has its
historical background. The thought of burning supposed delinquents
alive is common in Southern minds. “Make ‘em die slow” is even a
watchword.
The Southern half of the United States is fond of saying that the North
is now quite as bad in its treatment of the Negro. Happily, that is
untrue. Seventy-two out of the seventy-seven lynchings occurred south
of the Mason-Dixon line, and the rest occurred in the Western States.
The North was immune. Unfortunately, this good record was marred by
some bad race riots in Northern cities.
Of all the States, Georgia had the worst record for lynching. During
last year she lynched twenty-two persons, almost twice as many as the
next worst, Mississippi. Two of these were for alleged attacks on white
women. The rest were for a variety of crimes and misdemeanors. Thus, in
April, a soldier was beaten to death at Blakely for wearing his uniform
too long. In May, at Warrenton, Benny Richards was burned to death for
murder. In the first week in August a soldier was shot for refusing to
yield the road, and another was hanged for discussing the Chicago race
riots. At Pope City another soldier was lynched for shooting. In the
belief that the Negroes were planning a rising, Eli Cooper was taken at
Ocmulgee and publicly burned at the stake. On September 10th, in the
Georgian city of Athens, another Negro, Obe Cox, was burned for murder.
In Americus, in October, Ernest Glenwood was drowned as a propagandist.
On October 5th, Moses Martin was shot for incautious remarks. Next
day, at Lincolnton, one Negro was shot for misleading the mob, and two
others were burned alive for committing murder. Next day another was
shot at Macon for attempted murder. Two were hanged at Buena Vista for
intimacy with a white woman, and before the end of the month three more
met their end from the mob for shooting and manslaughter.
As far as Georgia is concerned, this record disposes of the theory
that lynching only takes place when white women have been attacked.
As a matter of fact, the commonest motive for lynching of Negroes
throughout the United States has been shown to be mob condemnation, of
violence—not of lust. By far the greatest number of lynchings are for
supposed murder. The mob lynches the Negro as a man shoots his dog when
the latter has turned on him. Formerly, attacks on women provided the
greater number of cases. If the Negro were fool enough ever to make
eyes at a white woman, he risked his life. Many innocent admirations
and misunderstandings have resulted in lynchings. As for rape, the
Negro who commits it is bound to come to a violent end. Very few escape
lynching, and the South claims that whatever immunity it enjoys from
Negro sexual crimes is due to the deterrent of lynch law. It claims
that if the criminals were merely dealt with according to the law,
sexual crimes would speedily multiply.
White people with the white-race instinct are generally ready to
condone lynching when it is proved that it thus acts as a deterrent.
Perhaps they are right, and they ought not to put it to themselves
from the black man’s point of view. But there is the other point of
view, and there is the collective opinion of the colored people on the
subject, and that opinion is being organized and will make itself felt.
It is worth attention and sympathy.
Granted that the black man is the under man as far as the Whites
are concerned, is he not entitled to some protection for his _own_
women? One of these Georgia lynchings which occurred last year was a
characteristic affair. It occurred at the town of Milan. Two young
white fellows tried to break into a house and seize two colored girls
living there with their mother. They ran screaming to a neighbor’s
home. The Whites tore down a door, ripped up flooring, fired a gun, and
made a great disturbance. One old Negro woman was so frightened she
jumped into a well, and a worthy Negro grandfather of seventy-two years
came out with a shotgun and fired in defence of the women. One of the
white men fired on him. The Negro fired back and killed him. The other
white man fled. Now, for that deed, instead of being honored as a brave
man, the Negro was seized by the white mob and hanged on a high post,
and his old body was shot to pieces. This man was a good and quiet
citizen who went to chapel every Sunday, and had performed his duty at
peace with God and man for a lifetime. The man who led the lynchers was
a “Christian” preacher. Sworn evidence on the matter was taken, but the
officers of the law in the county refused to act.
This lynching was by no means exceptional in its character. To cite
an exceptional affair, one might well take the happenings in Brooks
and Lowndes Counties, Georgia, in May, 1918. Here a white bully with a
pronounced spite against Negroes had been in court and paid the fine of
thirty dollars for gambling which had been pronounced against a certain
colored man called Sidney Johnson, and the latter had been sent to his
estate to work off the debt. This is an example of the abuse of the
law for keeping Negroes still in a state of slavery—a characteristic
example of peonage.
Johnson did the work to pay off the fine, but the farmer held him to
do a great deal more. Eventually the Negro feigned sickness as an
excuse for not doing any more. The farmer then came to his house and
flogged him. It must be supposed this roused the devil in Johnson; he
threatened the farmer, and he paid a return visit to the white man’s
house, fired on him through the window, killing the man himself and
dangerously wounding his wife. At once the usual lynching committee was
formed, and for a whole week they hunted for Johnson, who had gone into
hiding. During that time they lynched eleven Negroes, of whom one was a
woman.
The white farmer had given cause for much hatred. He had constantly
ill-treated his colored laborers. On one occasion he had flogged a
Negro woman. Her husband had stood up for her, and he had him arrested
and sentenced to a term of penal servitude in chains. The white mob
concluded that he must have shot the farmer for revenge, and they
accordingly lynched him. He was shot to death. His wife would not be
quieted, but kept insisting that her poor husband had been innocent.
The mob therefore seized her. It tied her upside down by her ankles to
a tree, poured petrol on her clothing, and burned her to death. White
American women will perhaps take note that this colored sister of
theirs was in her eighth month with child. The mob around her was not
angry or insensate, but hysterical with brutal pleasure. The clothes
burned off her body. Her child, prematurely born, was kicked to and fro
by the mob and then—— Well, that is perhaps sufficient. There are
many details of this crime which cannot be set down in print. But all
these facts were authenticated and submitted to the governor of the
State. The point that struck me was the pleasure which was taken by the
mob in the sufferings which it was causing. It was drunk with cruelty.
Here was little idea of a deterrent. Here was no question of racial
prudence. From the point of view of the natural history of mankind, it
put those white denizens of Georgia on a lower level than cannibals.
It was America’s glorious May, when she was pouring troops into Europe
and winning the war; hundreds of thousands of Negroes were clad in the
uniform of the army and were fighting for “freedom and justice” in
Europe. The moral eloquence of the President was in all men’s minds.
America had the chance to take the moral leadership of the world.
But away back in Georgia the mob pursued its horrible way. At length
it found the original Johnson who had committed the murder, and he
defended himself to the last in a house with gun and revolver, and died
fighting. His dead body was dragged at the back of a motor car through
the district, and then burned.
The facts were brought to the attention of the governor, and he made
a statement denouncing mob violence. But no one was ever brought to
justice, though the names of the ringleaders were ascertained. No
committee of inquiry was sent from Washington. In fact, the people of
Georgia were allowed thus to smirch the glorious flag of the republic
and to lower the opinion of America in every capital of the world;
for the facts of this story have been printed in circular form and
distributed widely. It is undoubtedly a remarkable example of lynching.
It seems rather strange that lynching crowds allow themselves to be
photographed. Men and women and children in hundreds are to be seen
in horrible pictures. One sees the summer mob all in straw hats, the
men without coats or waistcoats, the women in white blouses, all
eager, some mirthful, some facetious. You can upon occasion buy these
photographs as picture postcards. The people are neither ashamed nor
afraid.
Northern Negroes go down to investigate lynchings, buy these
photographs, bring them back to safe New York, and then print them off
in circulars with details of the whole affair. Southern newspapers,
though reticent, cannot forego giving descriptions of lynchings,
everyone is so much interested in them. Newspaper reports are also
reprinted. There is no need to resort to hearsay in telling of the
mob murders of the South. They are heavily documented and absolutely
authenticated. The United States Government cannot, for instance,
prosecute such a Negro association as the N. A. A. C. P. for the
pamphlets it issues on lynchings, because it does no more than publish
facts which have been publicly authenticated. If prosecuted, worse
details would see light. Therefore, these pamphlets go forth.
The first thing they do is tell the colored people as a whole what has
been happening. The Negroes of Alabama and Tennessee hear what has been
happening in Georgia; the Negroes of Florida and Louisiana hear what
has taken place in Arkansas and Texas. Above all, the educated Northern
Negroes know of it. Advanced papers such as the _Crisis_, the Chicago
_Defender_, and the _Negro Messenger_ are giving the Negro people as
a whole a new consciousness. First of all in Christianity in the days
of slavery and in their melancholy plantation music they obtained a
collective race consciousness. And now, through persecution on the one
hand and newspapers on the other they are strengthening and fulfilling
that consciousness. Destiny is being shaped in this race, and white men
are the instruments who are shaping it. May it not emerge eventually as
a sword, the sword of the wrath of the Lord.
I met many Whites who boasted of having taken part in a lynching, and I
have met those who possessed gruesome mementoes in the shape of charred
bones and gray, dry, Negro skin. I said they were fools. Actually to
have the signs upon them! Truly they were in the state of mind in which
most men seem to be when fate is going to overtake them. They were
proud of their “quick way with niggers,” they justified it, they felt
the wisdom of lynching could never be disproved. The matter to them
was not worth arguing. They assumed that anyone who wished to argue
the point must have sympathy with the “niggers,” and that was enough
for them. It never occurred to them that one who doubted the wisdom of
lynching might be actuated by sympathy or at least apprehensive for
them.
I felt sorry for the white women of the South; there will some day be
a terrible reckoning against them. Their honor and safety are being
made the pretext for terrible brutality and cruelty. Revenge, when
it gains its opportunity, will therefore wreak itself upon the white
woman most. Because in the name of the white woman they justify burning
Negroes at the stake to-day, white women may be burned by black mobs by
and by. There is no doubt that almost any insurrection of Negroes could
ultimately be put down by force, and that it would be very bad for the
Negroes and for their cause, but before it could be put down what might
happen? And should it synchronize with revolutionary disturbances among
the Whites themselves, or with a foreign war?
I do not believe that there are real conspiracies of Negroes. But
there is growing disaffection. The colored people are a friendly,
easy-going, fond-to-foolish folk by nature. But their affection and
devotion have been roughly refused. It has almost disappeared. Now we
have the phenomenon of Negro mothers telling their little children
of the terrible things done by the white folk, and every Negro child
is learning that the white man is his enemy. Every lynching, every
_auto-da-fé_ is secreting hate and the need for revenge in the Negro
masses. Because the Negroes are weak and helpless and unorganized
to-day, illiterate often, stupid and unbalanced often, clownish and
funny and unreliable, white folk think that it will always be so.
But they are wrong. While the industrialized masses of the Whites are
certainly degenerating, the masses of the Negroes are certainly rising.
Trouble is bound to arise and retribution terrible. What the lowbrows
of the South are teaching the Negro he will be found to have learned,
and as Shylock said about revenge—it will go hard but he betters the
instruction.
It may be thought that this is written with too much emphasis, and that
this statement on the lynchings is too unmerciful to the white South.
But I believe it is absolutely necessary. There are those who would be
ready to do again the injustice which was done to the Whites in the
South after the Civil War. When discussing these matters in the North
I have been horror-struck by the opinions I have heard expressed. This
is written in no partisan spirit, and I believe those who would rejoice
in the destruction or punishment of the Southern white population are
utterly wrong in heart. Punishment and revenge will only perpetuate the
strife. But an _éclaircissement_, a flood of daylight on these matters,
a thorough shaking of these stupid people down below the line—a
warning in such terrible terms as I have made, might save Black and
White for the religion of love and a joy in God’s creatures.
It may come from a stranger, a complete outsider, with more force than
from an American. I have, however, found a Southerner who condemned
Georgia, the Roman Catholic Bishop, Benjamin J. Keiley, who gave out a
very serious warning in Savannah on the 2nd of November of last year.
He said:
“It is hardly necessary to state that I am a Southerner.... I warmly
love the South; and her story, her traditions, and her ideals are
very dear to me.... But I fully recognize the absolute justice of one
charge which is made against her, and I look with grave apprehension
to the future, for no people that disregards justice can ever have the
blessing of God, and we are guilty of great injustice to the Negro. The
Negro was brought here against his will; he is here and he will remain
here, and he is not treated with justice by us; nay, I will say that he
is often not treated with ordinary humanity.
“Look at the statistics in our own State. Georgia stands first in the
list of States in the matter of lynching. Has there ever been a man
punished in this State for lynching a Negro?
“Lynching is murder, nothing else.
“Besides, is it not the fact that fair and impartial justice is not
meted out to white and colored men alike? The courts of this State
either set the example, or follow the example set them, and they make
a great distinction between the white and the black criminal brought
before them. The latter as a rule gets the full limit of the law. Do
you ever hear of a street difficulty in which a Negro and a white man
were involved which was brought before a judge, in which, no matter
what were the real facts of the case, the Negro did not get the worst
of it?
“Georgians boast of being a Christian people, and this year they are
putting their hands into their pockets to raise millions to bring the
light of Christianity, as understood by them, to some less favored
peoples in Europe.
“I would like to know if it is entirely compatible with Christian
morality to treat the Negro as he is treated here? My belief is that
the Negro and the white man were redeemed by the blood of Christ shed
on the cross of Calvary, and that the Christian religion absolutely
condemns injustice to anyone and forbids the taking of life.
“To me the murder of a Negro is as much murder as the killing of a
white man, and in each case Christian civilization demands that the
punishment of the crime should rest in the hands of the lawfully
constituted authorities.
“I have lived to see in Georgia an appeal made to the highest authority
in the State for protection of the lives of colored men, women, and
children, answered by the statement that the Negro should not commit
crimes! The people of Georgia vest in certain officials the execution
of justice. Yet no lyncher has ever been punished here, and I regret
to state that public sentiment seems to justify the conduct of the
officials.
“Only a short time ago I was reading the strange news of the race
riots in the Northern and Western cities. Thank God, we have had none
of these riots in the South. Do you know the reason? The only reason is
the forbearance of the Negro. He has been treated with gross injustice;
he has not retaliated. In all these cases gross disregard for law
and order are either the cause or the direct consequence of those
disturbances.
“Are there not numbers of honest, law-abiding citizens of Georgia who
know that I am telling God’s truth, and who will protest against this
injustice to the Negro? Is there not a just and fearless man on the
bench in this State who will have the courage to announce that there
shall be no difference in his court between the white man and the
colored man?
“Injustice and disregard of law and the lawful conduct of affairs are
the sure forerunners of anarchy and the loss of our liberty, and we are
drifting in that direction.
“The Negro will not stand asking for justice from Georgia laws or
Georgia courts. He has been patient, and I hope he will remain so, but
he well knows where the remedy lies, and he will very soon be found
knocking at the door of the Federal Congress, asking protection. And
Congress will hear him.
“If appeals to right, justice, to Christian morality, do not avail to
put a stop to this injustice to the Negro and protect him against the
murderous lynchers, then Georgia will see Federal bayonets giving him
protection.”
Such a voice is very rare. The warning is the more worth heeding.
X
EXODUS
The Negro’s refrain, “Let My People Go,” continues to have a strong
emotional appeal. Though devoted to the Southland in an intense,
sentimental way, for the Negro has an infinitely pathetic love of home,
he has come sorrowfully to the conclusion—_he must go away from here_.
It is strange, because homesickness is almost a mania with the Negro.
He relates himself to the white master’s house where he works, to the
rude cabin where his family live, to his church, to the “home niggers,”
in an extravagant pathological way which has nothing to do with
gratitude. Perhaps it is because as a people the slaves were uprooted
out of a home in Africa, and they have a haunting melancholy in the
hidden depths of their souls. I believe their childish idealization
of heaven in their hymns is fundamentally a sort of homesickness. The
Negro is not a natural nomad or vagrant like the Russian, the Jew, the
Tartar. He must have been as geographically fixed in his native haunts
in Africa. Judge, then, how great a disturbance must take place before
the Negro en masse would be ready to emigrate. Yet so it is to-day.
With consternation in their aspect, whole families, whole communities,
are waiting—to go North. And hundreds of thousands of them are on the
move. Of course it is not a complete change of scene. The North has its
Negro masses too. One rather loses sight of them among the Whites, but
they are there. And they do not cease to invite their unhappy brothers
and sisters down South to throw up everything and come North.
While it is commonly said that the Negro cannot stand the colder
climate of the North, there is, however, not much evidence to that
effect. As their orators are proud to declaim—the only civilized man
to accompany Peary to the actual North Pole was his trusted servant,
Matt Henson, a Negro. To some delicate Negroes, no doubt, a severe
climate would be fatal, but that is true for Whites as well as Negroes.
On the whole, the Northern air seems to be good for the Negro if he
can stand it. The Negroes of New York and Chicago and Boston, and the
Canadian Negroes, are firmer in flesh and in will than those who live
in the South. And they are certainly more energetic. They yield more
hope for the race as a whole than do the others. Perhaps one ought to
discount this fact in the light of the extra prosperity and happiness
of the Northern Negroes. There is nothing that will undermine the
constitution more than terror and nervous depression. Security is the
real Negro ozone.
There has been during the last three years a steady migration of
Negroes northward. This has been primarily due to the stoppage of
foreign immigration and the consequent labor shortage in the districts
which depended on the immigrant. The reasons why the Negro was ready to
leave his Southern habitat have been summarized in the U. S. Department
of Labor Report:[5]
“General dissatisfaction with conditions, ravages of boll weevil,
floods, change of crop system, low wages, poor houses on plantations,
poor school facilities, unsatisfactory crop settlements, rough
treatment, cruelty of the law officers, unfairness in courts, lynching,
desire for travel, labor agents, the Negro press, letters from friends
in the North, and, finally, advice of white friends in the South where
crops had failed.”
It is impossible to calculate the numbers with any likelihood of
accuracy. Even the census of 1920 will hardly indicate what has taken
place—for no one can say what allowance ought to be made for natural
increase in the last ten years. But the insurance companies reckon that
between May, 1916, and September, 1917, between thirty-five and forty
thousand Negroes left Georgia. Perhaps the net loss to the South has
been a quarter of a million, the majority young, single men and women.
Some certainly put the figure higher. The movement has slowed down,
owing to the after-the-war stagnancy in trade, the very bad housing
conditions in the North, the race riot in Chicago, and other retarding
influences. With a revival of trade it may go on more rapidly.
Certainly whenever a countryside in the South is visited by some
special act of violence there is a tendency for the colored population
to flee. Unfortunately, the lot of migrants of the type of Negroes is
always a hard one. It is difficult to settle down in a new community.
Irregular habits bring disease. Provincial dullness makes it difficult
to find a job or to evade sharpers. Unfortunately, also, Negroes are
not by nature altruistic, not clannish like the Jews. They do not help
one another in distress as much as poor Whites do. So many who flee
northward inevitably come to grief.
It is urged in the South that the North is not entirely appreciative of
the influx of so many Negroes. But, on the other hand, it is alleged
that the large Northern companies sent their agents into every State
in the South seeking labor. It was certainly useful to the companies.
And although the loose and nondescript unemployed immigrants were
guilty of a number of crimes, it is generally held that those who
found employment proved very steady and reliable. The Negro proved a
safe man in the munition factory, and it was found he could do a white
man’s job in a mine and in the steel works. The employers of labor were
well pleased. But there was a section of the community that was not
pleased, and that was the working class—the poor Whites once more, who
saw in Negro migration an influx of non-union labor, depressing wages,
and lowering the standard of living. The workingmen speedily quarreled
with the Negro—seeing in him the oft encountered strike breaker.
Those who have gone through the Negro district of Chicago, with its
filthy, ramshackle frame buildings occupied by Negro families, a family
to a room, know how appalling is the aspect of the Negro there. In
the old days the white population took it as a matter of course, as
they did so many other things in this evil industrial conglomeration
so aptly called the _Jungle_. But too much competition and too many
unfamiliar, gloomy Negro faces on the streets caused the nervous shock
which accounted for the Chicago riots, begun strangely enough not by
a Negro attack, but by a white youth knocking a Negro boy off a raft
on the lake and drowning him. The three days’ free fight which ensued
was one of the most disillusioning episodes in the history of Northern
friendship for the Negro.
Nevertheless, Negro leaders still cry “Come North!”
* * * * *
There have always been those who thought that the Negro problem could
be solved by encouraging migration. The exodus to the North was hailed
as a partial liquidation of the Southern trouble. Doubtless an even
distribution of Negroes over the whole of the country would put them
in the desired minority as regards Whites. Outnumbered by ten to one,
they would never seem to threaten to grasp electoral control or be in
a position to use physical force with a chance of success. But these
are highly theoretical suppositions. Even at the present great rate
of exodus it would take hundreds of years to even them out, and there
is no reason to think that the emigrants would distribute themselves
easily. They would probably crowd more and more into the large cities
like Chicago and Pittsburgh, and be as much involved in evil conditions
there as they were in the South.
Another popular misconception is that it is possible to find a home
for the Negro in Africa, and get rid of him that way. Men say airily,
“Pack them all off to Liberia,” as they used to say, “Send the Jews
back to Palestine.” It is not a practical proposal. Abraham Lincoln
held this view, and he opened negotiations with foreign governments in
order to find suitable territory for Negro colonization, but he gave
up the idea when General Butler, who investigated the matter for him,
convinced him that the Negro birth rate was greater than any possible
rate of transport.
What was true in 1865 ought to be more obvious to-day. It is a physical
impossibility to transport those twelve millions and their progeny to
Africa. If a large instalment were taken, would they not perish from
starvation and disease? The eyes of the world would be on the United
States doing such a thing, and they would be involved in a terrible
scandal.
But, indeed, the first to cry out “Give us back our niggers” would be
the South; for her whole prosperity has a foundation of Negro labor.
Take away the black population, and the white farmers, and traders,
and financiers would be so impoverished that they also would want to
emigrate to Africa.
In a material way would not the whole continent of America suffer
greatly? You cannot withdraw twelve million from the laboring class
and go on as before. It is a ridiculous solution. The only reason for
giving it place in serious criticism is that so many people nurse the
delusion that the problem can be solved by deportation. It stands
in the way when people would otherwise face the facts honestly—our
forefathers introduced the Negro into our midst, he is here to stay,
and we have to find out what is best for him and best for the White,
taking the facts as they are.
One good purpose has, however, been served by the encouragement of
Negro emigration back to Africa. It has kept the Negro in touch
with his original home. It has broadened the Negro’s outlook and
started a Negro Zionism—a sentiment for Africa. The Negro loves
large conceptions—the universal tempts his mind as it tempts that of
the Slav. In short, Liberianism has possessed the Negro of a world
movement.
XI
IN NORTH FLORIDA AND NEW ORLEANS
Lynching is more associated with the cotton-growing districts than
with others. It is not a fact that the further south you go the more
violent the temper of the people. Southeastern Georgia, where the main
business is lumbering and rice growing, has a better record than the
cotton-growing interior. The cotton planters are aware of this, and
it is not uncommon to curse the cotton and wish they could turn to
something else. Cotton is not a popular industry. In the old days it
bound slavery upon planter and Negro—for cotton necessitates cheap
labor—and now it keeps the Negro down and perpetuates an ungenerous
type of life.
I worked down the Atlantic coast to Brunswick and Jacksonville,
preparing in mind for some sort of joyful surprise when I should enter
Florida. Brunswick is one of the oldest ports in Georgia. As far as
records go, it has never been disgraced by a lynching. Its background
of industry is chiefly timber, and the eye looks in vain for a cotton
bale or a cotton blossom. It is a peaceful little city, all sand and
low palm and scrub, with innumerable grasshoppers and butterflies even
in December. An open-streeted port with placid, happy Negroes and no
race movement of any kind.
At Jacksonville one experiences a complete change of air. It is the
climate of Florida, and the difference between cotton and fruit. The
difference also between much sombre business and some gilded pleasure.
When the rich from the North step out of their cars in Florida and take
their ease at Palm Beach, they naturally would not care to be mixed up
in the South’s pet sport. Lynchings are bad business in Florida, for
if the things occurred there that take place in the neighboring State
of Georgia it would certainly frighten away many polite and wealthy
visitors. As regards the white woman also, the Floridians do not so
assiduously libel the Negro as do the Georgians. Ladies need not be
afraid to visit the watering places; the colored man is said to have
his passions well under control. Most of the trouble that does occur is
in more obscure places, and more in northern than in southern Florida.
Jacksonville is a large port with a population bordering on a hundred
thousand. Naturally, there are masses of poor as well as numbers
of rich. There is employment for a great quantity of Negro labor,
and on the streets one may observe the characteristics of a large
maritime city. What strikes an Englishman visiting these Atlantic
ports—Baltimore, Norfolk, Savannah, Jacksonville, when compared
with Hull, Cardiff, Liverpool, London Docks, etc.—is the absence
of that somewhat agitating phenomenon of black dock laborers walking
out with poor white girls. You may see them any evening in England.
As a natural and instinctive thing, most Whites resent it, and street
fights in England are the not uncommon result. In America, walking out
with Negroes either innocently or otherwise is impossible. Riots and
lynchings do not arise from that reason, but from alleged individual
assaults upon white women. It should be remarked that womanhood
in America is _practically_ idealized. The public as a whole is
disinclined to tolerate a woman smoking or drinking, or bathing in
inadequate attire, or even “spooning.” It would not occur to a poor
white factory girl as even possible to walk out with a Negro. Her moral
self-esteem is higher than that of her English sister. The girls who
are seen walking out with Negroes in London belong more often to a
class which is economically or morally submerged.
The Jacksonville Negroes were in a state of considerable anxiety and
ferment when I was there. Not because of white-woman trouble, but in
anticipation of a riot breaking out on one plea or another. A bad
lynching had occurred in the preceding September. A drunken White
quarreled with a Negro taxi driver, threatened him and exasperated him,
whereupon a conflict ensued in which the White was killed. The white
mob then rounded up every Negro chauffeur in the city and terrified a
great number of homes, because the lyncher does not care whether he
lynches the right Negro or not, as long as one of them suffers. And in
this case two paid the penalty. Undoubtedly the horror and terror of
being taken by the mob is the worst of an execution of this kind.
The Negroes were very suspicious of white men, and I did not make
much progress inquiring into their ways of life. I found, however, a
considerably inflated prosperity of churches, due to the philanthropy
of Northern visitors, and a well-to-do black proletariat working in
the shipbuilding yard and the docks. Nearly all the work done by them
was, however, unskilled, and they were only taken as substitutes on
skilled work. Substitutes earned as much as seven dollars a day. There
is a “Colored” Bank and, as at Birmingham, a so-called “skyscraper” of
six stories accommodating all and sundry of trades and professions.
Once more, successful drug stores and burial parlors, and a Mme. Nettie
Price with beauty establishment. I called at the War Camp Community
Club for colored soldiers and sailors—not so enterprising as the one I
visited at Norfolk—but the right sort of institution, well used in a
proper and discreet way.
I crossed the neck of land to Pensacola, passing through Tallahassee,
a district where fine leaves of tobacco for cigar wrapping are grown
under trellis. Orange groves hung in plenteous fruit just ripe to pick,
changing from green to gold. Pensacola is a port with a great history
of its own involving Spanish, British, French, American history. Its
background is of orange groves and pecan orchards. The pecan nut, a
refinement from the walnut, is so prized in the rest of the United
States that one can make a good living and save money on a planting
of a hundred or so trees. The main street of Pensacola, leading down
to the long pier, is very picturesque, with its mariners’ grocers and
marine stores. A passenger vessel plies weekly to Mobile, the great
fruit port of southern Alabama, and it is possible to get a passage
on cargo boats going to New Orleans. Before the war there was much
maritime traffic, but few of the vessels which sailed away to do
transport and other war duties have returned.
Pensacola claims to be the oldest white city in the United States,
disputing the matter with St. Augustine, Jacksonville, and is taking
the question very seriously in view of any celebration. It is not an
important place, but is building toward its own supposed greatness,
has a fine new railway station and huge, white stone post office and
mammoth hotel. These buildings are puzzling in a town where life seems
so placid.
Here was a bad lynching for rape a year ago, and a Negro was burned
to death. Representations were made to the governor of Florida on the
matter. The governor, Sidney I. Catts, replied that he made every
effort to keep down lynching in the State, but he could not bring the
lynchers to trial, as the citizenship of the State would not stand for
it. Apparently he condoned the burning of the Negro, because it was a
clear case of sexual wantonness and violence on the part of one of the
Negro race. It is somewhat surprising that the chief officer of the law
should thus fail to uphold the law. Who is to uphold it if he do not? A
contrast this, to the heroic behavior of Mayor Smith of Omaha!
* * * * *
Nature did not intend the Gulf of Mexico as a frame for lynching,
nor that those happy, blue skies should look down on human candles.
If ever there was a serene and happy place in the world it is here,
and there is scope for all races to live and to let live. Health is
on the shoulder of the winds that blow; fish and fruit and grain and
sugar are abundant. Are not the harbors bobbing with grapefruit; upon
occasion does not every boy suck the natural sugar from the cane? The
luscious canteloupe fills with the sun; peaches and nectarines swell
to double sizes of lusciousness and sweetness. Visitors, moreover,
bring a plenitude of dollars and scatter them as they go. Jacksonville,
Tallahassee, Pensacola, Mobile, New Orleans—they are more blest by
Nature than other cities of the South.
Personally, I preferred New Orleans. It is the finest and most
interesting city in which to live. It is by far the largest city of the
South, Atlanta coming second, and Birmingham, Alabama, third. It is the
great port of the vast Mississippi River, and is the head of what was
a mighty river traffic. It faces south, and is more related to France
and Spain and the Indies than to Britain and Scandinavia and the North
Atlantic. Like New York, it has also a strange mixture of races, but
they are southern races.
Of course it has been notorious as a city of pleasure and fast living.
Everyone says to the tourist, “When you get to New Orleans, you’ll
see ‘life,’” by which is meant the life-wasting of the immoral. Its
reputation in that respect resembled that of Cairo, and the curious,
even if they did not wish to taste, could pay to be shown round and
thus satisfy their eyes by looking upon evil. The money which flows
southward from the pockets of the rich throughout the winter has no
doubt helped to keep the red light burning. Now all has changed,
however. The various vice crusades and the enactment of prohibition
have combined to bring New Orleans to the moral level of other cities
of America. There is a violent opposition to the Puritan movement in
many sections of the population, and the law is flouted very often,
but New Orleans nevertheless has ceased to present any particular
interest to the low pleasure seeker or those of morbid imagination.
The city will be the better for it. It is a wonderful place. The
inhabitants, after all, were not mainly engaged in the business of
pleasure, but in honest trade, and they increase ever. New Orleans is
the metropolis of the South, and has a vast and growing commerce which
is rendered picturesque by the glamour of that abundance of Nature in
the midst of which she is founded.
One pictures New Orleans as a city of men in white, with white
hats as well as white clothes, men smoking heavy, black cigars, or
sauntering idly in the company of exotic-looking ladies; a city of
wide open streets and white houses, of many open-air cafés and garden
theatres and luxuriant parks, a place certainly of fashion and gayety
and elegant living. But what I found on my first impression was an
unpainted city, a mass of houses mostly wooden, but mouldering,
pallid, and peeling, of every hue of decay. Some walls seemed ready
to fall out, some ready to fall in. Man of the period 1920, European,
industrialized, diminutive, clad in sober garb, pursued the common way
of life. The cheap lunch shop, hall-mark of American civilization,
identified the city as American. There were the usual lofty, ramshackle
caravanserai with Negro bell boys and the clatter of ice water, the
usual public gardens strewn with the newspapers of the day. But though
it was winter, the weather was hot. The atmosphere was dense and warm,
and the closeness was not dissipated even by the wind when it came.
A gale blew in from the Gulf. It scattered warm rain in the city, it
rushed through multitudes of palm trees in the suburbs outside.
The American part of the city is vast and residential and conventional.
The business section expresses business; the home section is uptown
and removed from the life of the center. If there were only this “new”
part, nothing would distinguish New Orleans from other cities. But it
has its _vieux carrée_ in which its history is written, the old, or
French, part of the town. The American side is continually rebuilding
itself, but the French remains as it was. It has not torn itself down
and got rebuilt in modern style. Its great public place is Jackson
Square, flanked by the market, and that is beautifully prim and French,
but it is foiled by ugly railings and municipal sheds. Nevertheless,
it holds one more than does the architectural grandeur of Lafayette
Square, in the American half, with its stupendously grand Post Office
and Town Hall; and the subdued simplicity of Dauphine Street and
Chartres and Bienville and many others is better than any quantity of
the new and takes one back in mind to Old Paris and Old London. With
all its Creole restaurants and cheap markets and French churches, it
reminded me forcibly of Soho, in London, but of course it is larger and
grander.
Once a tongue of the Mississippi divided the old from the new, a long
and narrow strip of somewhat torpid water. Now it has been filled up,
though where the water was it is in some places green with grass. Six
lines of electric cars and four streams of other traffic go up and
down Canal Street, as it is now called. It is a great highway, finer
in some respects than the Nevsky Prospect in Petrograd, certainly
broader. On one side of it and down to the water edge it is definitely
and undoubtedly old; on the other it is definitely and undoubtedly new.
On one side is reality and matter of fact, on the other glamour and
color; on one you make or lose money, on the other you have or miss
adventures; one is prose, the other poetry; and it is well understood
in New Orleans. You work in one, you live a conventional home life in
one, but in the other you seek pleasure and adventures away from home.
Not that you cannot dine on the new side, where there are costly and
luxurious hotels, but an interesting and characteristic story might be
written of a man who stayed too long over his wine in the new part,
and then, late at night, strayed across this broad, dark Lethe which
divides old from new, to lose himself on the farther side—an adventure
and a dream.
The foreign streets are of red brick and painted wood, with
vine-wreathed verandas and balconies. The houses are crowded within.
Red painted wood, with vine-wreathed verandas and show a bed occupying
half a tiny room, and perhaps a Creole lady in the bed. There is not
much squeamishness in the Creoles. French is spoken everywhere, and
often English is not understood. Most of the people are Catholic, and
are related spiritually to “Mother Church.” Old St. Louis Cathedral,
with its spiky tower, is full of people of a Sunday morning, and the
service is so perfunctory that it is clear it is no mission church,
but one long established and sure. There are monastical institutions,
even for the Negroes. While Irish Catholics do not like Negroes, the
French and Spanish do. Specially interesting is the Convent of the
Sacred Heart, with its black Mother Superior and its happy, placid
Negro Catholicism. The best of the Negroes call themselves Negro
Creoles. The Creoles are the cross-breed of French and Spaniard and
their descendants. Strictly speaking, no Negroes are Creoles, but the
descendants of the slaves of the Creoles and in general the French
and Spanish-speaking Negroes call themselves Negro Creoles, and are
generally indulged in the appellation. Creoles indeed have not much
prejudice against color, being much mixed themselves, and in any case
of French extraction, and the French have never had much sense of
racial distinction. To speak French is a sign of belonging to society
in New Orleans. The opening of the opera season at the French Opera
House (lately burned down) is the event of the winter, and everyone
of importance _must_ be present. The next sign of good taste is to
know cuisine, and to be able to differentiate the _delicaces_ and the
subtleties of the famous Creole chefs.
I visited the mayor, Catholic, but of German name. He could not easily
have kept his mayoralty with such a name in England. But here he was
very popular. He was a human pyramid in long, voluminous morning
coat, smoking a cigar as he worked, but walking with a ponderous and
poised walk, and exhibiting a front of truly mayoral proportions. He
said, concerning the Negroes, “We have no trouble with them here;
we get on very well together. They are outside politics; that makes
it much easier. If they had the power to vote, of course it would
be different.” New Orleans is one of those places where a Negro’s
grandfather must have voted if he is to vote, and he must prove that
his grandfather voted. I demurred to the mayor. “The Negroes seem very
suspicious of the Whites, and hostile,” said I. He thought not. It was
evidently his set policy to have that point of view. Politically he
could not afford to be strongly interested in the Negro ferment. For
although the disenfranchised Negro population thought him friendly to
them, the Whites also thought him “sound on the nigger question.” No
white man who expressed sympathy for the Negro could possibly succeed
in Louisiana politics. There was proceeding while I was there a violent
election campaign for the governorship of the State, and it was
curious that, though the Negro could take little personal part in the
choosing of the governor, he nevertheless took almost first place in
the political discussions. Soundness on the Negro question seemed to be
the chief test of candidacy. A man who might betray lynchers to justice
or anything of that kind was evidently feared by the white population.
Nevertheless, as I have said, the Creoles were on friendly terms with
the Negroes. It is the Anglo-Saxon and Irish-American section of the
population, the undifferentiated Southern Whites, who determine the way
of politics here, as elsewhere in the South. It is likely that if the
Creoles were left to themselves with the Negro population, they would
grant them full rights, not only in the courts and in suffrage, but
socially. The Negroes know this, and are therefore on very good terms
with the French-speaking population.
Nevertheless, it must be said that but for a handful of leaders the
Negro population is more dull, more impassive, and ignorant than
elsewhere. A black proletariat of a hundred thousand ought to be able
to raise on its broad base a fine column of intelligence and business.
There ought to be large and flourishing groups of doctors and lawyers
and shopkeepers, but here, as at Birmingham, there is the usual
Insurance Society’s building, which is all-in-all. And Negro insurance
is little more than the organization of burying clubs, with the
Negro undertakers as prime beneficiaries. The biggest Negro business
throughout the South is connected with burying Negroes. It is sad, but
it is characteristic of this era of their development. New Orleans
has its “Pythian Building,” its temple of the Knights of Pythias, of
which the debonair Mr. Green is Grand Master, not only for the State of
Louisiana, but for the world. This is the civic center of the Negro’s
life in New Orleans, and, like the Penny Bank Building of Birmingham,
and its sister building at Jacksonville, houses many activities. The
Pythian Temple of New Orleans is said to be the finest Negro building
in the United States. It is a fine edifice, and in America business
is judged much more by the building it inhabits than in Europe. An
integral part of the temple is a very useful theatre, not a cinema
hall, but a genuine stage for the “legitimate” drama. Here, no doubt,
the Knights of Pythias appear in full regalia and parade to do the
pseudo ritual of the society. But the theatre is used for all manner of
purposes.
I was present one Sunday afternoon at a local meeting of the National
Association. The Southern White is opposed to the Association, and
would do much to thwart it if he knew much about it. But the Southern
Whites do not mix with Negro intellectuals, and are content to live in
that paradise indicated by the mayor—_We get on all right with them
down here_.
When, however, a bad lynching takes place the local white population
soon hears of the National Association. It sends its representatives
down from New York to investigate the facts. In such cases facts
are the last things the white community wish brought to light, and
then the National Association is discovered and roundly abused. Its
representatives are sometimes white, which makes them more dangerous
from a Southern point of view. Attempts are made to “railroad”
them—run them out of town.
The case of Mr. Shillady, in Texas, must be mentioned here. He is
the white secretary of this militant association, and has done very
valuable work for his country by investigating and authenticating the
details of mob murders. Texas has a bad record for lynching, rioting,
and lawlessness. The Texan people, however, would not have him, and he
was actually thrashed publicly by a judge and a constable. It was done
in front of the Driscoll Hotel, Austin, where Shillady was staying.
Having been assaulted in this way, he was put on a Northern train and
told to leave it at his peril. The judge remains still judge, the
constable remains still a constable—if he be not now a sergeant or
inspector. When we sing “Down Texas Way” that is what it means.
The local meeting this Sunday afternoon was of a quarrelsome character.
A well-known and devoted Negro leader had been accused in a New Orleans
Negro paper of “selling out the colored folk” at St. Louis. There had
been great enthusiasm in the forming of what is called the “American
Legion,” a national club of all who had served or worn an American
uniform in the Great War. Negro membership of the Legion was apparently
being barred in the South, and some wrong-headed Negro journalist
had accused an old Creole Negro of attending the St. Louis inaugural
gathering of the Legion and agreeing that Negro soldiers and sailors
should be excluded.
A violent personal quarrel banged from man to man. As I was asked to
speak, I told them I thought they could ill afford to quarrel among
themselves. Nevertheless, I had noticed a marked disposition to quarrel
among the educated Negroes. Loyalty to one another was not one of their
characteristics. No people could do much who did not prize unity more
than discord. While so many were against them all, how absurd to spend
an afternoon quarreling with one another!
This was warmly applauded, though no doubt one might as well sit in
Canute’s chair and “bid the main flood bate its usual height,” as
bid them cease to quarrel. They brought the fighting instinct out of
Africa, and still longed to wield the battle-axe.
Besides the Pythian Temple Block, New Orleans has also a sort of South
Street, a cheap line of shops with “swell toggery” for Negroes. Negro
suit-pressing establishments, barbers, and the like, pawnshops, and
what not. This is South Rampart, and on it is the People’s Drug Store,
a hive of Negro life. Up above the store Mrs. Camille Cohen-Bell
operates an insurance company, and her father, W. L. Cohen, runs for
what it is worth in opinion (it cannot count much in votes), the Negro
Republican party.
During a fortnight in New Orleans I visited frequently this pleasant
company of Negro Creoles, the well-educated Mrs. Bell, who loved
to speak French, and her ebullient father. The place was haunted
by undertakers. It appeared that when a Negro was insured in the
company he was allotted to an undertaker in case of death. Undertakers
therefore became very anxious when clients moved out of their parish.
If any one fell sick away from home, and there was the likelihood of
his dying and being buried by a stranger, the fret of the local buriers
was comical.
I met here a very advanced Negro lady who gave out very positive views
on morality. The presence of a white man was perhaps a challenge
to her mind. Some white woman called Jean Gordon had been making a
missionary address to the Negroes on moral purity and proper behavior
at a large Baptist church. I did not hear Jean Gordon, but her black
protagonist was so forceful I asked her to write a statement of what
she thought. This was her answer to Jean Gordon:
“ ... Jean Gordon states that every young colored girl knows no white
man may marry her under the law, and if she brings into the world an
illegitimate child she is not fit to be a mother. All very true. Now,
I daresay that every young colored girl is aware of this fact, but,
judging from the way the white men run after these colored girls,
either they (the white men) are in ignorance of the law, or it is their
object flagrantly to disobey it. There is one thing I wish all white
men and women to bear in mind, when they refer to illicit relations
of white men and black women, and vice versa—it is this: the laws of
this Southland are made by white men, and no sooner have they made
these laws than they get busy finding ways to break them and evading
punishment for so doing. It is a well-known fact that no Negro woman
seeks the attentions of a white man—rather is the shoe on the other
foot, and Negro women have a very hard time making Whites keep in
their places. However, the attraction is not confined to the men of
the white race, for good-looking colored men have as hard a time as
the good-looking colored women. So, it seems to me that if Jean Gordon
should address an audience of white men and women, and plead with them
to teach their boys, husbands, brothers, and fathers the necessity of
respecting the laws, and the women of all races, then colored young
women would have no trouble keeping their virtue and their morals. All
honor is due to the Negro women, for no one knows better than Jean
Gordon herself the terrible pressure brought against them by white men
who seek to force their attentions on them. The wonder of it is that
so many of them are able to hold out against such odds, but God is in
His heaven and does not sleep. So, I say, let the white women get busy
and teach morality and respect to their own, and we shall see how that
will work out. As for illegitimate children, the bearing of these is
not confined to women of the Negro race by any means. The white infant
asylums will give ample proof of this. We know full well that a white
man may not marry a colored girl in the South, but we wonder just why
it is he does not marry the white girl whom he seduces? I am able to
give a partial reason—THE FORCE OF HABIT! The white man has grown so
accustomed to seducing Negro women and getting by with it, that the
virtue of his own women has come to mean nothing to him.
“We now come to Jean Gordon’s statement relative to ‘wild stories
are being circulated that the Negro won the great world war....’ No
intelligent Negro can claim that the Negro won the world war, but
every intelligent man, woman, and child, in this country and on the
other side, is aware that the Negro did his share in winning it over
there, and did his full share over here. The Negro has participated
in every war in which this country has engaged, and at no time did he
retreat nor show the yellow streak. No one can cite an instance where
a Negro protested against going to the front. Against propaganda that
was overwhelming, the Negro remained loyal. The first Negroes to set
foot on French soil were from Louisiana—longshoremen; they were not
soldiers, true, but they did what they were sent to do, and did it
well. Very few white regiments from Louisiana saw the firing line,
yet they are all soldiers. No doubt, had they been sent to the front,
they would have fought, but so would every black citizen of the United
States. However, if it is true that ‘comparatively few of them fought
when the total of the millions of white men who died in that struggle
is considered,’ the reason for that is that the South did its level
best to keep the Negro out of the war as a soldier. And it must be
known that every white man who fought and died was not an American!
Every black man who fought did his part creditably, as has ever been
the case. Whole Negro regiments were decorated by the French, and bear
in mind that among those who were the first to be decorated by the
French were American Negroes! As for the fighting qualities of the
Negro, all I need do is to refer any ‘doubting Thomas’ to Xon Hill.
Nothing more need be said. And I repeat for all concerned that while
the Negro did not win the world war, _he did his share in helping to
win it_ over there, and he and his women who remained over here helped
to win it by laboring and giving funds.... The Negro dug trenches, he
fought, he died on the battlefield, he gave of his money and his labor
over here, and his women gave of their money and labor. _Did_ the Negro
help win the great world war? _I’ll say he did!!!_ Will anyone say he
did not? If anyone has done more, let him come forward.
“Before concluding, I wish to ask Jean Gordon just why it is she and
the women of the South are so bitterly opposed to giving suffrage to
Negro women? Do they fear us? Yea, they need to fear us, for we have
made up our minds that we are going to help our men of the South get
their rights, and Jean Gordon, being a woman, is fully aware that when
a woman wills a thing, it is as good as done. The Negro men are going
to come out on top, and their women are going to see to it. The Negro
men are going to learn to protect their women from the snares of white
men, and their women are going to help them do this, too.... No longer
does a Negro woman consider it an honor to have a white man for a
‘friend’—a lover; gradually have we made her understand that it is an
insult, and she now tells her father, brother, or husband, as the case
may be, and it is up to this man to defend the virtue of his female
relative, in the _same way_ the white man defends his. No more do we
hear nice-looking colored boys bragging that such and such a white
woman is quite crazy for him, for we have shown him that her affection
for him is likely to lead him into trouble, so, having quite a variety
of colors to choose from in the women of his own race (thanks to the
white man for that), the Negro boy runs along with the kind of girl who
pleases him, and keeps out of trouble. Very often, though, the White
does not let him stay out of trouble—there are so many ways devised by
these nice white people to hurt the Negro who is peaceably bent. The
Negro has been patient, true, but we all know there is an end to all
patience. I hope the time has come when the Whites of this section will
take up more time in improving themselves and less time in seeing the
error of our ways. We both of us have much to do, but we Negroes are
aware of it, and are anxious to improve ourselves, but we are unable
to take pattern after those who are more in need of lessons than we.
The Negro is bound to come out on top—even though he is in a hopeless
minority. Right will ever and always crush Might; for reference, see
William Hohenzollern!”
* * * * *
By this sulphurous little smoke one may know of subterranean fire.
When the earthquake comes the Jean Gordons will fall down and the new
Negro woman will stand forth. White society in places like New Orleans
may one day be overthrown unless it can live for ideals and reform its
institutions. Much depends on the law which is corrupted and much on
the churches now in decay. Literature in New Orleans is nigh dead, so I
will not mention that.
XII
THE NEW MIND OF THE NEGRO
Resentment is the main characteristic of the Negro forward movement.
In endeavoring to understand the Negro mind a maximum is gained by
answering the question: _What does it mean to have been a slave?_
Analysis of racial consciousness at once brings to light in the case of
the Negro a slave mentality. He has been pre-dispositioned by slavery.
To have been a slave, or to be the child of a slave, means to have an
old unpaid grudge in the blood; to have, in fact, _resentment_ either
smouldering or abeyant or militant. If it does not develop in the
slave it will develop in the child of the slave or the child of the
child. It may not take a violent form. Certain circumstances, such as
prosperity, have power to neutralize it. On the other hand, certain
other circumstances have power to bring it more rapidly to a head. The
virus feeds on grievances, will even feed on imaginary grievances, but
most certainly will grow apace on real grievances. In all seriousness,
there is nothing like burning people alive for bringing out active
spite and hate. Because of burning and lynching, the whole of American
Negrodom swells larger in resentment, day by day, and moon by moon.
The character of ex-slave, and the child of one who was a slave, is
aptly shown by the way the Negro treats animals, in the way also in
which he treats those Negroes who happen to come under him.
It is appalling to hear a Negro say to a horse struggling with a
heavy load: “I’ll take a stick and beat you to death,” and to realize
that the voice of the tyrannous master is being repeated as by a
human phonograph. If the American Negroes are more cruel to animals,
though quick to understand their ways, it is because they conceive of
themselves as masters and the animals as their slaves.
For while a man is a slave he is learning in one way to be a master.
A slave’s children are more ready to be tyrannous than the children
of one who never has been a slave. When a slave is being flogged he
is learning racially how to flog when he gets a chance. His children
will have a flogging spirit in them. When he is being tortured he is
learning how to torture.
The Anglo-Saxon looks upon animals as friends and equals. He loves his
horse and his dog, he honors the fox and the bear. Not so the Negro,
the Russian peasant, the Jew. They have an attitude toward the animals
which is quite other. And toward human beings in their power or employ
they often have a point of view which is hateful. The peasant workman
in the power of the _Kulak_ peasant, the Jewish seamstress in the power
of the Jew who owns the “sweatshop,” the Negro workman under the Negro
boss or foreman! To be in the power of a master is bad, but to be in
the power of a slave is so much worse!
In a land where the slave class is gaining power there is therefore a
great deal of resentment in the air. America has it; Russia has it.
To-day all the world has it. In the Great War the youth of almost every
country underwent the yoke of military slavery, and what resentment
there is against the masters! In Germany, where that slavery was worst,
it raised Spartacus from death. And who was this Spartacus who has
suddenly become a type and given a name to a movement? Himself a slave,
he led an insurrection of slaves against Rome. The masters defeated him
and killed him, and the heads of hundreds of his followers were impaled
on spikes upon all roads which led to Rome—a warning and a witness
to all other slaves of that and other times. Bitter and malignant
blood-stained faces stared at the passers-by upon the Roman highway.
They stare still in history, and they stare to-day, not from pikes, but
from an infinite number of children of slaves. Spartacus lives.
What is called the Spartacus movement in Germany is called Bolshevism
in Russia. Bolshevism is eminently a slave movement. The children of
the serfs have grasped everything. Its first expression has been class
war and revenge on the master class. There is so much of slave in the
Russian that his racial name is Slav. Now comes out all the resentment
and ill feeling of centuries. Unlike the followers of Spartacus, the
Russian serf has triumphed, and instead of having his head impaled he
has been able to impale the heads of his masters. From his example
all slaves and children of slaves throughout the world have taken
courage. Russian serfs and military slaves and wage slaves and Negroes
are finding an accord, and here we have the foundation for a grand
proletarian revolutionary movement throughout the world.
It may be objected that the American Negroes are not Bolshevik. They
are not in name, but they are potentially of the same spirit. They
hate the white proletariat because the latter uses them ill, but
curiously enough they have a common cause. The leaders of the Negro
forward movement are almost exclusively Bolshevik in spirit. We cannot
wonder at it. Persecution has developed a great resentment and class
hate. When the time comes, Dr. Du Bois and Johnson and Walter White
and Pickens and the rest will know whose side they are on in the great
world struggle.
There are those who will say that if ever the lynching mob become the
victims of the enraged Negroes no one will shed tears but the lynchers
themselves. They say the lyncher knows that he is wrong and has been
told so often enough. Thus, in a pedagogic way, think the wiseheads who
do not stray out of doors when a Negro is being killed. Thus think also
the governors of the States, the sheriffs, the judges, the police, and
the law. But they are fond and foolish. It is not the lynching crowd on
whom vengeance will ultimately be taken. The Negro mob, when it rises,
may easily join with the lynchers and make common cause against those
who should have administered the law, and against those who have stood
idly by. In those days we may see the ugly crowd making its way to
the Pilate governors, who so often wash their hands, and beating them
to death and burning their wives. That is the real movement. There is
nothing very reasonable in it, but the risen mob is not guided by logic.
Resentment is the principal feeling of the Negro soldiers returned from
France. It is an example of how modern life, undirected, uncontrolled,
and unadvised, is manufacturing ever and ever more of the dangerous
stuff of revolution.
A policy as to the use of Negro citizens in the Great War was not come
to in the United States. Once more the seemingly unworkable theories
of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were applied
equally to the Negro as to the white man, as if the Negro were only a
white man with a dark skin. Negroes were conscripted equally with white
men, drilled and equipped, and sent to France, without any regard to
the two vital questions:
1. Is it fitting, and can America condone the use of colored troops to
fight white enemies?
2. When many white citizens have such a violent animus against the
Negro, is it practicable to use the latter in the army?
The first of these questions was evaded by America as it had been from
the first by France. There are many who think that the use of “native”
troops against the Germans was more indefensible than the German use
of poison gas. For, by using colored troops against Whites in a white
man’s quarrel, the moral leadership of the Whites is obviously thrown
away, and there are bound to be serious after-effects in the weakening
of morale.
The second question was merely an important practical detail that had
been overlooked. Theoretically, all American citizens are equal. The
laws apply without distinction of race or color. In practice, equality
is denied. What more natural than to continue in the theoretical
assumption of equality, and hope that divergency in practice might be
overlooked. What more absurd, however, than to take a man who is being
illegally disfranchised by the community and make him fight for that
community?
The Northern white soldier did not, however, feel ill disposed toward
the black soldier, and I have met those who saw deeds of heroism done
by Negroes, and many who saw them wounded and suffering in the common
cause, and felt drawn toward them, to help them and their brothers.
But whatever may have been the common feeling about Negro soldiers in
the United States, it was definitely hostile to them in the camps in
France. There emerged two characteristic points of view: (1) That it
was good to kill off as many Negroes as possible, as that helped to
solve the Negro problem. (2) That the Negro was not worthy to fight for
his country.
Not much for patriotism to feed on there! There seems never to have
been any resolve to make first-class Negro regiments, and those units
who served in France were by no means adequately trained. By all
competent accounts they were very slack, and it goes without saying
that an almost superhuman effort of discipline was necessary to obtain
complete steadiness in this terrible war. It was common to endeavor
to terrorize the Negroes by alarming and exaggerated accounts of
the horrors of battle. Negroes were talked to by Whites in a very
unsoldierly way. Baiting them and scaring them was thought to be better
sport than dealing with them sternly and seriously. There is no doubt
also that some white soldiers rejoiced to see the Negro put back into
the slavery position and forced to obey on pain of death. There are
those who cannot forgive the Negro having got free from slavery, and
for them the spectacle of the Negro in the rank and file afforded much
pleasure. Threating Negroes with a court-martial and death sentence
became a characteristic jest.
The white man, however, soon found that the Negro fell into the humor
of the war more readily than into the tragedy of it. It agreed with his
own sense of humor. It was soon impossible to scare the raw recruits
with yarns. The idea of running away from a machine gun became natural
and hilarious. The dangers from night-bombing raiders over the lines
were facetiously exaggerated. Hiding best became a humorous point of
honor, and one Negro would vaunt against another how far he fled.
Private soldiers chaffed their officers on the subject of death. Asked
what “going over the top” meant, the raw recruit would answer: “I know;
it means Good mornin’, Jesus.” In short, in nearly every Negro unit
there set in a humoresque attitude to the war.
Officer: The Germans are going to start an offensive.
Negro Soldier: That so, cap? Then we’se spread the news over France.
As the popular joke has it.
The Negro officer then began to receive the white man’s attention.
Having trained many colored officers, Negroes often of education and
means and refinement, and having given them commission and uniform,
the Staff came to the conclusion that they had made a mistake. The
white Southern officer stirred up trouble, the white ranker would not
salute. There was the usual sordid squabble in officers’ messes. And
then the upshot—a great number of Negro officers subjected to the
humiliation of losing their commissions and being placed in the ranks.
This discouragement necessarily set the Negro officer thinking. It
cultivated his resentment. It sowed in his heart the seed of national
disaffection.
The next serious trouble was that of the French women and the Negro.
The indifference of white women whether the man they walked with
was black or brown or white was taken as an intolerable affront by
Southerners. They felt called upon to interfere and save the French
woman from herself. The rape legend was imported, and every effort
was made to infect the French male with race prejudice. Happily, the
propaganda failed. For one thing, Puritanism does not easily take root
in a French heart, and for another, the French have no instinctive
horror of Negroes. Possibly the rape legend even made the Negro a
little ornamental from the point of view of _amour_. “Black American
troops in France have given rise to as many complaints of attempted
rape as all the rest of the army ‘Les troupes noires Americaines
en France ont donné lieu, a elle seules, a autant de plaintes pour
tentatives de viol, que tout le reste de l’Armée,’” as an army order
puts it.
Negro honor, however, demands that the charge be rebutted, and the
matter has been thoroughly investigated. There does not seem to be much
in it. As every one knows who served in the ranks, women of easy virtue
were extremely plentiful and complaisant. The need might easily have
been to protect the Negro from the women rather than the women from the
Negro.
The fact is simply that the Negro walking with a white woman is to the
Southern American White as a red rag to a bull. And as by nature this
White is unrestrained and unreasonable, he seeks by all means, fair or
foul, to part them.
Finally, the culmination of the story of the American Negro in the war
is that the White denied him any valor or prowess or military virtue of
any kind, said the Negro was a coward and a runaway and utterly useless
in the fighting line. Fighting units were taken off their allotted duty
and changed to labor units. Regiments were ordered home; whole brigades
were given as a present to the grateful French. They may have been
rather inefficient. But, if so, that was due to bad training. Negroes
have fought magnificently in America’s wars of the past. They are a
great fighting race, and they are capable of discipline.
I listened when at New Orleans to a lecture given by Sergeant Needham
Roberts of the 369th U. S. Infantry, a handsome young Negro warrior,
twice wounded, the first American to be decorated by the French
Government. He was entirely patriotic, and made the apathetic Negro
audience stand to sing the “Star-Spangled Banner.” He told how he ran
away from home to enlist, trained with a mass of black strangers, went
across the ocean—quite a terrifying experience for some of these young
soldiers, who but for the war had never crossed the sea. He gave his
first impressions of France and of the line, the exaggerated fright of
shell explosions and night attacks and bombs from the air. They were
just getting used to the first aspect of war when one day the news flew
round—“We are all ordered home again.” Official orders to that effect
quickly followed. They had all packed up and were marching to entrain
for Cherbourg when, according to the sergeant, Foch intervened.
“Why are you sending them back?” said he.
“They are not wanted.”
Foch seemed astonished.
“If you cannot use them, I can,” said the French marshal.
And then, hurray!—we were attached to the French.
It was no playground, the French front, but, as ever, a sterner piece
of reality than American or British. The Negroes were hotly engaged
and had many casualties. Roberts won his Croix de Guerre for a feat
which he performed with his chum, Pete Johnson. They had been left at
an advanced listening post and apparently overlooked—not relieved
for three days and three nights. The division had been relieved. On
the third night the Germans made a raid which the two Negro soldiers
repelled by themselves, first throwing out their bombs, then firing,
and finishing with a remarkable bit of butchery with the bayonet. The
Germans whom they did not put out of action they put to flight. How
many Germans lay dead it would be difficult to say. The number probably
grew like those of Falstaff’s men in buckram, but I did hear twenty
mentioned.
There was no doubt about the fact that Sergeant Roberts was a jolly
soldier—a “bonny faechter”—and he made himself on good terms with
his audience very quickly. He came from New York, and had swung along
Fifth Avenue with the heroes of New York’s Fighting Fifteenth. He was
full of the faith of the North, horribly depressed by the atmosphere of
the South, above all by the passivity and apathy of the Negroes of New
Orleans. He had better keep north of the Mason-Dixon line, for he is
evidently a born fighter.
If the war itself was a persistent educator of the Negro, his
subsequent treatment after the Armistice enforced very terribly what he
learned. It would be hardly worth while to enlarge on this in detail.
The fact which I wished to isolate is the growing resentment of the
colored people, the fact that some twelve millions are becoming highly
charged with resentment.
As illustration of this resentment one could quote much from the spoken
and the written word of the Negroes. But a poem, or part of a poem,
may suffice. It is Archibald Grimké’s “Thirteen Black Soldiers.” The
24th United States Infantry, a Negro regiment, was sent to Houston,
Texas, and was received with lack of sympathy and some hostility by the
population. A series of petty troubles culminated in a riot and mutiny.
Sixty-four Negroes were court-martialled, and thirteen were sentenced
to death, and hanged. It seems to show a lack of foresight to station
a Negro regiment among such a hostile people as the Texans. They are
more the enemies of the Negroes than were the Germans, and there was
certainty of trouble. Grimké’s poem expresses the boiling resentment to
which I have referred.
She hanged them, her thirteen black soldiers,
She hanged them for mutiny and murder,
She hanged them after she had put on them her uniform,
After she had put on them her uniform, the uniform of her soldiers,
She told them they were to be brave, to fight and, if needs be, to die
for her.
This was many years before she hanged them, her thirteen black
soldiers.
She told them to go there and they went,
To come here and they came, her brave black soldiers.
For her they went without food and water,
For her they suffered cold and heat,
For her they marched by day,
For her they watched by night,
For her in strange lands they stood fearless,
For her in strange lands they watched shelterless,
For her in strange lands they fought,
For her in strange lands they bled,
For her they faced fevers and fierce men,
For her they were always and everywhere ready to die.
And now she has hanged them, her thirteen black soldiers.
For murder and mutiny she hanged them in anger and hate,
Hanged them in secret and dark and disgrace,
In secret and dark she disowned them,
In secret and dark buried them and left them in nameless disgrace.
Why did she hang them, her thirteen black soldiers?
What had they done to merit such fate?
She sent them to Houston, to Houston, in Texas,
She sent them in her uniform to this Southern city,
She sent them, her soldiers, her thirteen brave soldiers,
They went at her bidding to Houston,
They went where they were ordered.
They could not choose another place,
For they were soldiers and went where they were ordered.
They marched into Houston not knowing what awaited them.
Insult awaited them and violence.
Insult and violence hissed at them from house windows and struck at
them in the streets,
American colorphobia hissed and struck at them as they passed by on
the streets.
In the street cars they met discrimination and insult,
“They are not soldiers, they and their uniforms,
They are but common niggers,
They must be treated like common niggers,
They and their uniform.”
So hissed colorphobia, indigenous to Texas.
And then it squirted its venom on them,
Squirted its venom on them and on their uniform.
And what did she do, she who put that uniform on them,
And bade them to do and die if needs be for her?
Did she raise an arm to protect them?
Did she raise her voice to frighten away the reptilian thing?
Did she lift a finger or say a word of rebuke at it?
Did she do anything in defence of her black soldiers?
She did nothing. She sat complacent, indifferent in her seat of power.
She had eyes, but she refused to see what Houston was doing to her
black soldiers,
She had ears, but she stuffed them with cotton,
That she might not hear the murmured rage of her black soldiers,
They suffered alone, they were defenceless against insult and violence,
For she would not see them nor hear them nor protect them.
Then in desperation they smote the reptilian thing,
They smote it as they had smitten before her enemies,
For was it not her enemy, the reptilian thing, as well as their own?
They in an hour of madness smote it in battle furiously,
And it shrank back from their blows hysterical,
Terror and fear of death seized it, and it cried unto her to help.
And she, who would not hear her black soldiers in their dire need,
She, who put her uniform on them, heard their enemy.
She flew at its call and hanged her brave black soldiers.
She hanged them for doing for themselves what she ought to have done
for them,
She hanged them for resenting insult to her uniform,
She hanged them for defending from violence her brave black soldiers.
They marched with the dignity of brave men to the gallows,
With the souls of warriors they marched without a whimper to their doom.
And so they were hanged, her thirteen black soldiers,
And so they lie buried in nameless disgrace.
Is the watchword of Dr. Du Bois to be wondered?—
We return.
We return from fighting.
We return fighting.
I met at Memphis, Tennessee, one of the few Southern white men who are
sympathetic to the Negro and understand the gravity of the situation.
This was Mr. Bolton Smith, a rich business man, a member of the Rotary
Club _quand meme_. As one who among other activities advances money on
the security of real estate in the Mississippi Delta, he necessarily
has been brought a great deal into contact with the Negro. Society in
Memphis looked at him somewhat askance because he did not share the
current conventional view, but he was not blackballed, only indulgently
laughed at as one who had a weak spot in his mental armor. In places
remote from Memphis, however, his views receive weighty consideration.
If he had his way he would give the Negro his right and his due, and
stop lynching. He does not believe the Negro wishes “social equality,”
the right to mix indiscriminately with white people, in schools, in
trains, in marriage. He thinks the Negro prefers to be separate as
long as there is no implied dishonor. He made a special study of the
Frederick Douglass School at Cincinnati, an all black school which is
admirably conducted, and found that by themselves the Negroes progress
more than when mixed with Whites. As Cincinnati is a city on the
northern fringe, with northern institutions, the Negroes had the choice
to go to mixed schools with white children if they desired, but they
preferred to be by themselves, and indeed did better by themselves. As
regards Jim Crow cars, Smith said he would give equal comfort and equal
facilities in colored cars and in colored waiting rooms. He does not
think the Negro desires to be in a Pullman car where there are white
women. It works without scandal in the North, but there is too much
risk of the woman going into hysterics in the South, and the Negro
getting lynched at a wayside station. He believes in abandoning “the
policy of pin pricks,” and, above all, in suppressing lynching and race
riot.
He was, however, strongly opposed to Du Bois and the National
Association. He considered that Du Bois was leading the Negroes
wrongly, leading them in fact to a worse calamity than any which had
yet overtaken them. “If the Negro resorts to force,” said Mr. Smith to
me, “he will be destroyed. In peace and in law the white man fails to
understand how to handle the Negro, but if it comes to force, the issue
becomes quite simple for the white man, and the Negro stands little
more chance than a savage. Christianity alone can save the Negro, and
the leaders of the National Association are leading the people away
from Christianity.” He wished all Negroes could see how fatal it is for
them to abandon Christianity.
“If it were not for the lynchings, the National Association and its
newspaper would shrink to very small proportions. Every time a Negro is
lynched it adds a thousand to the circulation of the _Crisis_, and a
burning adds ten thousand,” said he.
“Hell would soon lose its heat should sin expire,” said I. I was
inclined to agree that the only way was through Christianity. But there
is such a thing as the wrath of God, and it is not incompatible with
Divine Fatherhood and all-merciful Providence. John Brown has been
greatly condemned, but he was not outside Christianity—surely he was a
child of God. He used to think that without much shedding of blood the
crimes of this guilty land could be purged away, but now....
I do not think the white South will be able to avert the wrath of God
by machine guns, nor will it quell the Negro by force once the Negro
moves from the depths of his being. Better than believe in meeting the
great wrath is to be advised betimes and mend one’s ways. Was not the
Civil War a sufficient bloodletting? Could not the lesson be learned?
It is certainly in vain to work directly against Du Bois when his
power as a leader of revolt could be removed utterly by stopping the
lynching. The U. S. Postmaster General refused postal facilities to
one number of his newspaper because it was going too far in stirring up
sedition, but it was ineffectual, and was, on the contrary, a useful
advertisement for the paper. And then, is it not known there are far
more advanced groups of Negroes than that of the association of which
Dr. Du Bois is president? There are those who laugh Du Bois to scorn as
a Moderate. There are those who have sworn that for every Negro done
to death by the mob two white men shall somehow perish. An eye for an
eye and a tooth for a tooth is the gospel—or rather, two eyes for one.
Something is being started which will not cease with a recital of the
Beatitudes. If America does not cast out the devil of class hate from
the midst of her she will again be ravished by the Angel of Death as
in the Civil War. The established peaceful routine of a country like
America is very deceptive. All seems so permanent, so unshakable.
The new refinement, the new politeness and well-lined culture, and
vast commercial organization and press suggest that no calamity could
overtake them. The force that makes for disruption and anarchy is
generated silently and secretly. It accumulates, accumulates, and one
day it must discharge itself. Its name is resentment, and its first
expression is revenge.
XIII
NEGRO LEADERSHIP
Dr. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, as the leader of the militant movement, is
the greatest force among the Negroes to-day. Light of skin, short of
stature, square-headed, he would pass easily in Southern Europe or in
Russia as a white man. He looks rather like a highly polished Jewish
professor. Considered carefully, however, it will be realized that
behind an impassive mask-like face is an emotional and fiery nature.
There is a white heat of resentment in him, and a decision _not to
forgive_. Possibly his devotion to the cause and the race drags him
down a little. For he is possessed of an unusual literary genius. The
fire that ran in the veins of Dumas and of Pushkin is in him also, and
as a master of the written word he stands entirely without rival in
the American Negro world. In that respect he is altogether a greater
man than Booker T. Washington. The latter was a practical genius, and
what is gall and wormwood in the bosom of Du Bois was the milk of
human kindness in his more sooty, natural breast. “I’m going to shout
‘Glory!’ when this world is afire, and I don’t feel noways tired,”
he used always to be saying. “Booker T.,” as he is affectionately
called, was the wonderful colored baby of the first days of freedom.
His, “Up from Slavery,” which he wrote, and the vocational institute of
Tuskegee, Alabama, are the chief monuments which he left behind him.
But his portrait is almost as common in Negro cabins as pictures of
the Tsar used to be in Russian _izbas_. “Our Booker T.,” the Negroes
say lovingly and possessingly, looking upon the first of their number
who rose from the dark depths of servitude, first fruits of them that
slept. Freedom and Hope raised Booker T. Washington, but now he is dead
a new time needs a new leader. Fain would the Whites have “Booker T.”
back. The amenable Negro leader is much more to their taste than the
militant one.
Many years ago Du Bois wrote “Souls of Black Folk,” which is a
fascinating personal study. It has a true literary quality which raises
it from the ruck of ephemeral publications to an enduring place. It is,
however, immature. There is an emphasis of personal culture, and a note
of self-pity, which a more developed writer would have been at pains to
transmute. But the gift is unmistakable. You perceive it again and in
better measure in “Darkwater,” published this year.
It has taken the war and the recent increased persecution of the Negro
people to bring out the real power of Du Bois. As a labor leader said
to me, “He is first of all a statesman and a politician. He is leading
the Negroes. I wonder where he will lead them to?”
Certainly no other Negro in the United States is regarded by so many
others as his leader. No doubt most of the quiet, cautious, and
traditionally religious Negroes fight shy of him. But they, for their
part, have no leader. Dr. Moton, the lineal descendant of Booker
Washington at Tuskegee Institute, is only a leader in the sense that
Dr. Arnold of Rugby might be considered a leader. He is there in his
place. He is a great light, and is taken for granted.
In August, 1919, Dr. Moton wrote to the President, warning him of the
growing tension:
“I want especially to call your attention to the intense feeling on the
part of the colored people throughout the country toward white people,
and the apparent revolutionary attitude of many Negroes, which shows
itself in a desire to have justice at any cost. The riots in Washington
and Chicago and near riots in many other cities have not surprised
me in the least. I predicted in an address several months ago, at
the fiftieth anniversary of the Hampton Institute, on the second of
May—ex-President Taft and Mr. George Foster Peabody were present at
the time—that this would happen if the matter was not taken hold of
vigorously by the thoughtful elements of both races.
“I think the time is at hand, and I think of nothing that would have a
more salutary effect on the whole situation now than if you should in
your own wise way, as you did a year ago, make a statement regarding
mob law; laying especial stress on lynching and every form of injustice
and unfairness. You would lose nothing by specifically referring to the
lynching record in the past six months; many of them have been attended
with unusual horrors, and it would be easy to do it now because of the
two most recent riots in the North, notably, Washington and Chicago.
The South was never more ready to listen than at present to that kind
of advice, and it would have a tremendously stabilizing effect, as I
have said, on the members of my race.
“You very probably saw the account of the lynching in Georgia of an old
colored man seventy years of age, who shot one of two intoxicated white
men in his attempt to protect two colored girls who had been commanded
to come out of their home in the night by these two men. The colored
man killed the white man after he had been shot by one of the white men
because he had simply protested.
“I am enclosing the lynching record for the past six months and an
editorial from the Atlanta _Constitution_, which strongly denounces mob
violence.
“With all kind wishes, and assuring you of no desire to add to your
burdens, but simply to call attention to what seems to me vital not
only for the interest of the twelve millions of black people, but
equally as important for the welfare of the millions of Whites whom
they touch, I am,
“Very sincerely and gratefully,
“R. R. MOTON.”
In reply to this letter, President Wilson wrote Dr. Moton as follows:
“My dear Dr. Moton:
“Thank you sincerely for your letter of August eighth. It conveys
information and suggestions, the importance of which I fully realize
and for which I am sincerely obliged. I will take the suggestions you
make under very serious consideration, because I realize how critical
the situation has become and how important it is to steady affairs in
every possible way.
“Again thanking you for your public-spirited co-operation,
“Cordially and sincerely yours,
“WOODROW WILSON.”
With this conventional reply the matter closes, and things in America
became steadily worse in the months which followed. The twilight peace
of Tuskegee has been in contrast with the loud, clamorous denunciations
from Dr. Du Bois. For Du Bois gives forth new words of leadership each
month. He has a voice like a trumpet and must be heard. Therefore, he
is the leader.
Associated with him are many brilliant men of whom the most powerful
is the poet and orator, James Welldon Johnson, a darker man than Du
Bois, slender and taller. He is energetic, and may constantly be heard
from platforms in New York and elsewhere. I heard him speak. I was not
moved by him as by Dean Pickens, but he is more intense and has the
reputation of extraordinary brilliance at times.
If the persecution were lifted from off the Negro race there would
doubtless be room for quiet educational leadership, and flamboyancy
would fail. White sympathizers such as Mr. Bolton Smith of Memphis
emphasize the value of the quieter, more unobtrusive work done in
places like Piney Woods School, the Frederick Douglass School, by
Laurence Jones and Principal Russell. But of course peaceful growth
is impossible until the mass of the people are guaranteed against the
present terrifying mob violence and general social injustice.
On the other hand, it does not follow that Du Bois is a new Moses
leading his people to a Promised Land. He may be leading them to
terrific bloodshed and slaughter. He may be leading them to a complete
racial fiasco, not because he wants to do so or can do otherwise, but
because perhaps that fiasco is written on the American Negro’s card of
destiny.
The Negroes are arming themselves. They are more ready to retaliate—to
quote a letter from Memphis: “There is an increased determination
on the part of great numbers of Negroes to defend their rights by
force.... The Negro is emotional, and the masses of them are quite
ready to think they are oppressed in matters in which they are
not oppressed at all, and therefore to use force on unjustifiable
occasions. This shows itself in the increased use of firearms by
petty thieves against the police. A Negro was arrested here recently
on the charge of selling stolen chickens. His home was known. It was
inconceivable that the ordinary white petty thief would shoot officers
of the law in order to prevent an arrest which probably would have
resulted in a comparatively small punishment, but this man murdered an
officer and is to be hung. The same thing has occurred here several
times. Under these circumstances it is difficult to induce the police
to hold the proper attitude toward the Negro. They never know when he
is going to shoot, and so it is natural that they should shoot a Negro
much quicker than they would a white man. This begets in its turn a
feeling of resentment which makes the relations between the Negro and
the police more difficult. I cannot emphasize too strongly the fact
that when a minority tries to protect itself—although it may use
only the weapons which the majority in the past has been accustomed
to use in defending itself against tyranny, the minority is apt to
find itself condemned in the eyes of the public. Take the attitude
which the mass of Americans are occupying with reference to the Reds
and their deportation.... A small number of the Reds have appealed to
force—the whole crowd are more or less outlawed by American public
opinion. What I am apprehensive of if the Negroes continue to follow Du
Bois is just such an embitterment of relations between the two races.
I do not believe that the race relation in Chicago is the better for
the race riot. On the other hand, in Europe, every revolution usually
resulted sooner or later in greater freedom even where the revolution
was suppressed. My experience with Negro uprisings has been precisely
the reverse. Such progress as the Negro has made has been by education
and the awakening of the conscience of the white man.
“To put the matter in a few words, the problem that I would like
immensely to emphasize to you, is the wholly abnormal position of
the minority seeking its rights. We are apt to think that the Negro
can achieve these rights in the way that our ancestors achieved
theirs against the aristocracy, but unless I am utterly wrong, that
view is doomed to failure and if followed will result in embittering
the relations between the races so that segregation or deportation
or extermination must result. Personally I do not believe that we
will fail, but if we succeed it will be in spite of Du Bois and of
the attitude of armed resistance. Never was a better illustration
of the wisdom under certain conditions of the Tolstoi attitude of
non-resistance.”
That of course is nicely deduced, but events are not ruled by wisdom
and logic. It might very well have been said to the Israelites during
the long period of the Plagues. It is such a period in the history of
the Negroes.
XIV
THE WORLD ASPECT
The American Negroes are the aristocrats of the Negro world. It may be
a paradox to assume that a proletariat can become an aristocracy, but
an aristocracy is the best a race can produce in culture and manners.
No doubt African Negrodom is made up of a great number of races, but
all seem to have one common interest and to yield more homage to the
name of Africa itself than to any constituent part, kingdom, or state
or pasture. The American Negro is beginning to lead Africa as he is
leading the Indies. The reason is that the children of the American
slaves have made the greatest cultural progress of all Negroes.
Though persecution has been less in some parts of Africa and on the
West Indian islands, opportunity has also been less. In 1863 America
committed herself to the task of raising her millions of black slaves
to the cultural level of white citizenship. But no one has ever essayed
to raise the savage masses of Africa much higher than the baptismal
font. It is always pointed out to the American Negro that his good
fortune is prodigious. The Negro retorts that if he has good fortune
his fathers paid for it in the sufferings of slavery, and he still pays
in the price of lynching. Yet, of course, the Negroes in Africa have
suffered greatly, and their fathers suffered greatly. No Negro can deny
that he owes America much. And Africa owes, or will owe, more still.
In America the door at least stands open for Negro progress. In Africa,
and especially in South Africa, it is not quite certain that the door
is not closed. If the door remains ajar it is not because the white
man wills it, but because the American Negro has got his foot in. A
low Commercial-Imperial idea reigns. The native is, “the labor on the
spot.” An unfailing supply of cheap native labor is considered the
great desideratum. Attempts on the Negro’s part to raise himself by
education or by technical skill are looked upon with suspicion, and one
must remember that as far as the British Empire or French or Belgian
mandatorial regions are concerned there are no institutions in Africa
comparable to Tuskegee and Hampton. If the labor unions in the United
States are foolishly antagonistic to the progress of Negro skilled
labor, they are twice more so in South Africa. If there is peonage in
America there is an abundance of pseudo slavery in Africa, and while
the American trolley car has its Jim Crow section the South African one
often has not even that, and the Negro must walk unless accompanied by
white employer. An open hostility has arisen between Black and White
which much resembles that of the Southern States of America. If it
were not for the leadership of the American Negroes it would not be
promising for Negrodom as a whole.
Of course there is a vital difference between the British Empire and
the United States; the people of the empire are subjects, and of
the republic they are citizens. While Britain technically rules her
four hundred million colored subjects _from above downward_ America
theoretically holds that all her people are free and equal. The
American ideal is higher, the British more practical.
There is another difference, and it is that our Blacks, except in
the Indies, are mostly indigenous, and have not been transplanted
from their native wilds. They have not been slaves and have not the
slave psychology. In Africa the white man is in contact with masses
of natives in a primitive condition; in the United States the Negro
has been definitely cut off from his kith and kin. The American Negro
was set free in a land rampant with democratic ideals and possessed
of a sublime belief in human progress. But Africa has been and is
increasingly a commercial domain whose only function from the modern
white man’s point of view is the making of material fortune. The white
man in Africa is much more exclusively a dollar hunter than the
American. And though Britain has been much praised for letting South
Africa govern herself it does not seem as if the Union was mating much
progress in ideals and culture. The King of England was a better friend
to the native than the local government is proving itself to be.
A blatant anti-nigger tendency is growing throughout the British
Empire, and it is very vulgar, very undignified, and at the same time
disgraceful. It applies to India and Egypt as much as to Africa. It
is due perhaps to a general deterioration in education and training.
One may remark that those who complain of the ways of their servants
are generally unfitted to have servants, and it is characteristic
of _parvenus_ to ill treat those beneath them, and I would say if a
white man cannot get on well with a Negro it is a sign that he is not
a gentleman. But the genuine type of English gentleman is passing.
To think that the race of Livingstone and Stanley and Harry Johnston
should be pitifully complaining about the Negroes, as if God had not
made them aright!
The British people used to be able to manage native races well—in
the age of the Victorian, when the Englishman could treat his native
servant as if he were a gentleman also, never doubting that in God’s
sight an equal dignity invested both master and man. Read the memoirs
and letters of colonial people of time past, and then compare with
the current noisy prejudice in India and Africa. The falling away is
appalling. And the “natives” know the change which has been coming
about—the new type of officer and employer, the man with the whisky
brain, the mind stocked with music-hall funniosity and pseudo cynicism,
the grumbler, the man who expects everything to have been arranged
for his comfort and success beforehand. Astonishing to hear young
officers calling even Hindoos and Syrians and Arabs niggers! The native
instinctively knows the man of restraint and good manners and human
dignity and properly trained unselfishness. The lowest coolie can tell
the difference between a gentleman and a cad; and the educated colored
man, while he respects in the deepest way the nation of Shakespeare and
Burke and Wellington and Gordon, is puzzled to find a common spirit in
the English-speaking people of to-day.
“I was reared in an atmosphere of admiration—almost of veneration—for
England,” says Dr. Du Bois. “I had always looked on England as the best
administrator of colored peoples, and laid her success to her system of
justice,” but he wavers in that faith now, having heard the new story
of Hindoos and Arabs and the Negroes of South Africa and Negroes of
West Africa.
In converse with Professor Hoffmann in New Orleans, a British subject
formerly in the service of the British Government in Northern Nigeria,
an extremely capable and enlightened Negro, now head master of a
colored school, I found confirmation of this. His impression of the
change of spirit in the empire was similar to that expressed by Du
Bois, and I found admiration of British rule giving way to doubt in
many Negro minds. Indeed it has been possible for American Anglophobes
to do a good deal of propaganda among the Negroes by representing
how badly the natives now fare under British rule. There is some
exaggeration in this respect, but it makes an important impression on
the mind of the American Negro. He has begun to feel a care and an
anxiety for the condition of his brethren overseas. The educated Negro
of the United States now feels a responsibility toward the African
Negro, and also toward all dark-skinned people whatsoever.
The assumption by the Negro of a common ground with the natives of
India is somewhat surprising and amusing. There is no ethnological
common ground. But the color bar of the British Empire applies almost
as stringently to the Indians as to the Negroes. “We’ll smash them all
to hell,” says a bellicose Negro stranger to a young Hindoo student
at Washington, much to the astonishment of the latter. The advanced
Negroes of America place the liberation of the peoples of India and
Egypt in the very foreground of their world policy. They say also that
the natives of South Africa must be delivered from the Union of South
Africa.
One thing is certain, and that is that the British Empire will not hold
together for long unless the Whites can manage the Blacks, and uphold
the standard of justice which was formerly lived by. Votes are not
necessary, but ordinary human rights of free existence and opportunity
are necessary. The empire is at the crossroads. It is a question
whether it can be held together by good will, or whether Britain
will be forced to inaugurate a rule of force and obedience. The old
conception of good will is being tested in South Africa and Egypt and
India as it is in Ireland. Possibly as a result of the war, political
circumstances may force it back to the ideal of force and a paramount
central authority. The belief of native races in the King, and their
hatred of the King’s intermediaries, is characteristic of the time. The
American Negro is keeping a sharp lookout on the lot of colored people
within the British Empire. As he leads in intelligence, in ideals, and
in material wealth, he intends to missionarize the native world in the
name of civilization. The missionaries are called agitators; their
press seditious; their ideals dangerous; but words do not alter the
fact that the flag of Pan-African unity has been raised, and the common
needs of all dark-skinned races have been mooted.
The Republic of Liberia has often been dismissed as a failure, by
the white man. But it is destined to be America’s advanced post in
Africa for Black civilizing Black. I was fortunate in meeting in
America Bishop Lloyd, just returned from Liberia, and he gave a very
interesting account of the positive side of development there. First
of all the American Negro is the élite, the aristocracy of Liberia. He
is taking upon himself the immense task of educating the Negro masses
of the interior. In this and in commerce and in the establishment of
law and order, Liberia is very successful. America and American ideals
are a gospel to the Liberian Negroes. Never a word is said of the
injustices and sufferings which attend Negro life in the States, but
on the contrary America is regarded as a Negro Paradise. When America
declared war on Germany it was the joy of Liberia to declare war also,
and her war effort was remarkable.
It is somewhat curious that while British difficulties with native
races obtain large advertisement in the United States and elsewhere,
the lynchings and burnings and race riots of America are in general
successfully hushed up within the States where they occur. But of
course the American Negro is very proud of the America which he
feels he helped in no small way to make. America has given the Negro
an ideal, and she is to him religion. All that is new in the Negro
movement, moreover, takes its rise from America.
We have seen inaugurated in New York recently the so-called “Black Star
Line,” a line of steamships owned by Negroes, and manned by Negroes.
Its object is to trade with Negro communities, and advance the common
interests of the dark-skinned people throughout the world. Whether
it is destined to succeed depends on the soundness of its financial
backing. But it is an interesting adventure. Its first ship out of New
York carried out the last cargo of whisky before “Prohibition” set
in. A storm forced the vessel back to port after the port had become
legally “dry,” and some thought the cargo would be seized. It was
said there were many leaks to the ship, but after many parleys and
reconnaissances with white officials the _Yarmouth_, afterwards named
_Frederick Douglass_, got away.
It is generally advertised under the caption “OVER THE TOP—FOR WHAT?”
and was started by a Negro orator called the Hon. Marcus Garvey. He
founded a society known as The Universal Negro Improvement Association
which boasts now a membership of over two millions in America, Africa,
and the Indies. This is a militant organization. But its membership
is evidently useful as a ready-to-hand investing public who can be
persuaded to put its money into a whole series of Negro business
enterprises, such as “The Negro Factories Corporation,” “West Indies
Trading Association of Canada,” and, of course, the Black Star Line.
The association has its organ, “The Negro World,” and it meets, as
far as New York is concerned, at a place called popularly “The Subway
Church,” between Seventh and Lenox Avenues. Whites are not wanted,
and indeed not admitted, but the crowds are so huge it is possible to
slip in. Musical features alternate with impassioned oratory. Whether,
like a bubble blown from the soap of commerce and the water and air of
humanitarianism, this will burst and let the members down, or whether
it is sound and genuine, it is at least instructive and interesting in
its developments. The lecturers and speakers choose the largest terms
of thought, and visualize always some four hundred millions of colored
brethren throughout the world. A universal convention is even to be
called.
How the _Yarmouth_ fared with the rest of her “wet cargo” during its
six months’ trip has not been made public, but the Negroes hailed the
progress of the vessel as a “diplomatic triumph,” and when it returned
to New York an accession of 25,000 new members was announced. Five
thousand in Cuba, two thousand five hundred in Jamaica, eight thousand
in Panama, seven thousand in Bocas del Toro and Port Limon; the staff
of the ship and its “ambassadors” were feted on their return. All made
speeches, and all were greeted with the greatest enthusiasm. Thus,
at the “Star Casino” one of the ambassadors described the arrival at
Jamaica:
“At last we came in sight of the emerald isle of the Caribbean
Sea—that beautiful island that is ever green—that wonderful island
Jamaica; and dear indeed is the island of Jamaica to me. With pleasure
I saw the people as they crowded along the docks to catch the first
view of our steamer, the first ship of the Black Star Line. I could
hear the hurrahs and the huzzahs as she majestically wended her way up
to Port Royal. We had taken on board our Negro pilot, who piloted us
into the harbor of Kingston, one of the finest harbors of the world. As
she sped along, the people of Kingston were running down the streets in
order that they might catch a sight of the _Yarmouth_. We steamed to
the dock and they came on board. They did not wait for invitation to
the captain’s cabin, but came up to the wheelhouse, they came into the
chart room, they invaded every portion of the ship.... On the second
night after our arrival a grand reception was arranged.”
The ship made a triumphal entry wherever she arrived. At one port
where the ropes were thrown out from the ship, the Negroes seized them,
pulled her alongside the dock of a fruit company, and then with their
hands pulled the vessel itself the entire length of the quay. No one
had ever seen the like, but the Blacks wanted to feel it with their
hands—their own ship.
This was strictly a new-world voyage, and a comparatively easy one,
with plenty of passengers and of freight. The cry is for more ships and
bigger enterprise, and if the company makes good Africa will no doubt
see Africa come riding toward itself on the waves. It is possible,
however, that the Whites of Africa may prove more hostile than those of
the easy-going States of South America and the Indies. The news of the
Negro line is no doubt very rousing for all intelligent colored people.
What in reality is Black Internationalism is hardly realized as yet,
especially by Great Britain. Anything said against the Negroes is
heard by a vast number of educated and intelligent colored people.
Thus you find the words of the Germanophile E. D. Morel used to stir
the masses against Britain. Says Morel, according to the Negroes: “The
results of installing black barbarians among European communities are
inevitable.... The African is the most developed sexually of any....
Sexually, they are unrestrained and unrestrainable. That is perfectly
well known.... For the working classes the importation of Negro
mercenaries by the hundred thousand from the heart of Africa to fight
the battles and execute the lusts of capitalist governments in the
heart of Europe is a terrific portent. The workers alike of Britain,
France, and Italy will be ill advised if they allow it to pass in
silence.” And when the _Daily Herald_ says that “Wherever there are
black troops who have been long distant from their own womenfolk there
follows a ghastly outbreak of prostitution, rape, and syphilis” it is
necessarily treated as a slur by Negroes. A Negro writer who protested
in a well-written and cogent letter to that newspaper fails to get
his letter printed, but he prints it all right in the Negro press
of America, and asks, “Why this obscene maniacal outburst about the
sex-vitality of black men in a proletarian paper?”
If there is a race riot as at Cardiff or Liverpool, or if a scheme is
mooted to dispossess the squatters of Rhodesia of more of their land,
or a General Dyer machine-guns a crowd of civilians in the name of
keeping order in India—it is absurd to think of the matter locally and
provincially. It is discussed throughout the world. It is impossible to
act now as if the subject races had no collective consciousness.
* * * * *
So much for the point of view of the world outside America. There
is another point of view which is perhaps closer to those subjects
specially treated in this volume. What the world does to the native and
says of him are known in America. America has power to help the native
races of dark color throughout the world, and many Americans, white
as well as dark, are willing to do so. But there is one very serious
difficulty, and that is the moral sanction.
While those things occur; such as burning Negroes at the stake and
denying them the equable justice of a true Court of Law, America has
no right to speak; her truly grand idealism is rendered almost wholly
impotent. It was the same in the promulgation of the League of Nations
and the idea of helping small nations; it is the same with regard to
American interference, in the name of human rights and ideals, in the
Irish question. It can always be objected: Why do you not look after
your own subjects first, and save your Negroes? An American said to me
in Philadelphia: “I am not overfond of the Bolsheviks, but of one thing
I am glad—_The red hand of the Tsar will never rule again_.”
No?
And another said: “Thank God the pogroms are over.”
Are they?
And a third said: “I am sorry America refused to take a mandate for
Armenia.”
But why not take a mandate for Georgia and Mississippi?
In 1919, when the question of American delegations to Ireland was being
discussed, a member in the British House of Commons asked if a British
delegation could not be sent to America to investigate conditions among
the Negroes.
Mr. Bonar Law thought that a very humorous suggestion. The very humor
of it was sufficient answer to America. No need for Britain to send
investigators.
As long as America with her ideals was enough unto herself the Negro
question was strictly her affair. But when she takes the moral
leadership of the civilized world it becomes to a certain extent every
one’s affair.
The point is that America as a whole cannot afford to tolerate
what is done locally in particular States. It is not a matter of
non-interference from Washington in the local affairs of Georgia and
Mississippi and the rest. The baleful happenings in these States rob
Americans in other States of their good name, and spoil America’s
reputation in the world. The fact that the terms of the Constitution
are not carried out, decreases throughout the value of the American
citizenship. And the growing scandal causes America’s opinions on world
politics to be seriously discounted.
Thus though America was antipathetic to the old Tsarist régime, and
still talks of the “bloody Tsar,” it is a fact growing daily more
obvious that compared with the present régime of the great republic
the rule of the Tsar over his subject races was in some ways better.
On the other hand, the American press has lately been flooded with the
atrocities of the Bolsheviks. The fact is, we, all of us, believe evil
readily of a country which is far away, but are not ready to face evils
near at home when they affect ourselves.
* * * * *
Thus the matter affects the world and America. There is a third
interest, and that is exclusively of the Negro himself. He needs a
guaranteed charter, an authenticated minimum. If the vote cannot be
given him, at least let him have justice; if he cannot be admitted
to labor unions let his labor be adequately protected; if an offense
against a white woman is regarded as specially heinous and dangerous
let the legal punishment be increased; afford his women protection
also. If the Whites have changed their minds about slavery let them
state how much they sanction—what are its limits. Let the American
Republic and the British Empire state their policy with regard to their
colored population. Make it clear and manifest.
The Negro’s chief danger lies in a consensus of evil opinion
concerning him. The South rejoices when a race riot disgraces some
Northern city and says: “They’re beginning to find out the Negro isn’t
an angel up there.” When a General Dyer uses the machine-gun argument,
or a mob of dockers fall foul of Negro immigrants at Cardiff or
Liverpool, America smiles and says, “You also?” When there are reports
of constant trouble in South Africa someone else says, “So you cannot
get on with them either?” and when one is burned to death in Georgia,
South Africa says, “So you burn them to death, eh?”
Out of a cycle of happenings is derived the thought: _No one can afford
to feel virtuous about the Negro_.
That fact no doubt helps the Negro press in the chanting of its
sorrows, but it does not help the Negro himself. In fact, it shuts out
a good deal of hope which might have been derived from white sympathy,
and it threatens the colored peoples as a whole with worse things to
be. These are the days of democracies and white proletariats, and both
show themselves less friendly toward Negroes and “natives” than the
old monarchies. Their hostility is based on an old fashioned ignorant
contempt; competition in the labor market, and a sort of fear. Probably
it can be overcome in time, but if so it will not be through white
enlightenment, but through a world organization and understanding
on the part of the colored races. For while throughout the world the
Whites degenerate somewhat, these others rise. The gulf between the two
is being diminished, and there may come a time not very far away when
the white hegemony will be lost.
XV
UP THE MISSISSIPPI
From New Orleans I traveled up the Mississippi; calling at such
characteristic points as Reserve, Vicksburg, Greenville, Mound Bayou,
Memphis, accomplishing the journey partly by rail and partly by boat.
Reserve is a vast sugar plantation owned by five brothers. It is only
thirty miles from the great city and the Whites are mostly Creoles.
The Mother of Rivers, clad in brown silk, flows toward the green humps
of hundreds of levees and embankments. The shores are low and level,
and there grows almost to the water edge a vast, close, ten-feet-high
jungle of sugar cane. You walk along the top of the levee till you
see a lane running across the plantation like a trench dug through
it. In the lane itself there is no view except the erect, green wall
of canes on either hand and the blue sky above. Beneath your feet are
cart ruts and withered stalks of sugar gone purple at the joints and
straw-colored in the flanks. Take a stalk and break it across, and it
breaks in shreds like a bamboo, revealing the inner fatness of sweet
pith which you can suck if you will, for it is sugar. It has a dilute
sweetness which rapidly cloys an unaccustomed palate, though the
people of the countryside suck it continuously, and many consider the
natural sugar the source of all health. The taste is reproduced very
well in the _pralines_ on which New Orleans prides itself.
A long and novel sort of lane this through the sugar! A Negro worker
coming along the road sees a white man, but does not want to meet him,
and he takes three steps into the dark-green depths, clawing his way
inside as through many barely shut doors, and he is lost. You would
seek him in vain if he wished to hide.
The lane debouches into a sun-bathed, half-cleared area which is
covered with stricken canes looking like warriors tumbled in death
after a great battle; for it is winter and the time of the taking
of the harvest. Negro gangs with rough bills like meat choppers are
slicing the side leaves from the cane and then cutting, slicing and
cutting, all over the plantation, with joyous noise, and there are
great numbers of dark girls in straw hats working methodically and
rhythmically from the shoulder and the bosom, striking, clipping,
felling, as it were automatically, unwaveringly. They break in and cut
in, strewing ever more extensively the carpet of canes in their rear,
but the wall they attack is ten times as dense as the thickest field of
corn and twice as high. The master or overseer, on horseback, stands
about and calls sharply to the workers in French _patois_. He may be
white Creole, but is often as dark as his gang. Where sugar is not
rising, beyond the plantations if you walk as far, Nature seems sunk
in swamp and swarming with snakes. The low jungle over the Mississippi
marshes has many alligators and a multitude of other reptiles.
In a clearing of the sugar harvest it is possible to sit on a hummock
of grass and see something of a plantation as a whole. It is a
cloudless day with the faintest haze over the blueness of the sky. The
sun heat is tempered by a delightful air which keeps on moving all the
time like an invisible river of health and vigor. There is a whispering
in the myriads of the canes, and you hear the slashing and the clumping
of the cutting which is going on all the while. On one hand are the
rudimentary huts of the Negroes, like dressing rooms, on the other the
lofty refinery of white-painted corrugated iron, with many chimneys
and cranes. The refinery, using electric power taken from the river,
works off all the local cane and also imports large quantities of raw
sugar brought from Cuba. Pile driving is going on in the Mississippi,
and there will soon be a landing stage to which the Cuban steamers
themselves can approach. The Louisiana cane is red and the Cuban is
yellow-green, and the latter is much the sweeter. On the plantation,
where a fair stretch of ground has been cleared, the motor plough is
at work with huge spiked wheels, turning the black soil over the sugar
seed for next year. The cane has an eye at each joint, the eye is the
seed, and from it sprouts next year’s plant, growing at right angles
to the old cane in the earth. “In February,” says the young Creole
ploughman, “the young plants have to be dug up and replanted. Work goes
on steadily all the year round.”
I resumed my way up the Mississippi on an old, broken-down steamer with
a remarkably high, wooden, dripping, splashing paddle wheel. To go by
boat used to be a favorite way of traveling, but the new railways on
each side of the great river have killed the water traffic by taking
away all large freight. It does not seem a profitable enterprise to
ply the Mississippi for passengers alone. There are therefore only a
few river steamers left, and these have to call at all the tiniest and
obscurest waterside places and lumber camps, and can seldom make more
than forty or fifty miles a day. Few people will travel a week or ten
days or a fortnight or anything you like to Memphis when a locomotive
will do it in twenty-four hours. The passengers therefore sit in stuffy
trains listening to the _vers libre_ of the man who offers in a low
voice: _chewing gum_, _cigarettes_, _iced coco-cola_; and the country
whirls past them unprofitably. The cotton bales which used to go down
stream in thousands upon river steamers are now closely packed in
railway trucks; and the molasses goes no longer in barrels, but in
huge, iron cisterns on wheels. There is therefore little traffic on
the mighty river—she is happier and freer, more as she was of yore,
with few steamers, few barges, few rafts—instead, only an occasional
rowing boat and a ferry. The water is brown and vast and placid, and
runs in many courses beyond wooded islands, beyond vast, swampy forks
and tongues of the mainland. It is a sort of café-au-lait color, and
the shadows mantle softly upon it deliciously. Willows grow in the
water on its shores and islands, and in shadow or sunlight the water
laps gently the many tree trunks or lies still under the green shade of
the branches. It is a great, intricate, unexplored labyrinth of waters,
and now you see it unadorned and lovely, with no advertisements on
its banks and no shoddy reminder of our civilization on any hand—the
Mississippi as she was when we first saw her. I traveled on a boat
called _Senator Cordill_ and we made barely thirty miles a day, so many
were the stopping places, so many the accidents. It cost a little over
a dollar a day, including board, and was the nearest approach to a
gift. The ship had a motley gang of colored laborers fetching freight
on their backs in intermittent procession, beating out dust from the
long, wooden gangway up which they tramped with their burdens. The
wooden paddle wheel, which was ten feet high, had got into disrepair,
and at a riverside town where we stopped some colored carpenters
were at work fitting new wooden parts into her while close-cropped
Negroes with coal-dusted skulls shoveled coal aboard from a lighter.
We had three wooden decks rolling with small freight for tiny places
in Louisiana, Mississippi State, and Arkansas. In the cabins were
huge family bedsteads, and no locks on the doors. When the wheel was
repaired and the time came for departure the Negro crew deserted en
masse, and the captain, with the unlighted cigar which he had rolled
and bitten in his capacious mouth all day, stood on the bank and
accosted all and sundry, begging them to come aboard and work on the
ship. Meanwhile in a quayside hut Negro girls were “shimmying” as they
brought in food for their colored boys, and our erstwhile crew was
heard singing and shouting. Only next morning did we get enough hands,
and at the misty dawn, when the river was so still that it looked like
an unbroken sheet of ice, we raised anchor and plunged outward again.
In the main current whole trees were seen to be floating, and our wheel
might easily strike one of them and get broken again. We sat down to
breakfast, the eight passengers: one was a judge, another a district
attorney, a third was an agent for timber, and the rest were women.
The china at table was of different shapes and sizes, and there were
only three teaspoons—so the rest of the passengers were served with
tablespoons for their coffee.
Judge T—— insisted on having a teaspoon from the colored girl who
waited on us, but was obliged to content himself with the tablespoon
laid.
“Teaspoons is sca’ce,” said she.
We stop at various “landing places,” points and creeks and bends, the
boat generally coming close to shore. A long plank is thrown out,
and then commences the cakewalk of the Negro “rousters” carrying out
all manner of goods—in one place it is materials for the building
of a church—and bringing back cotton bales or whatever else may be
waiting for us. It is a sight at which one could gaze spellbound for
hours; for the Negroes keep in step and seem listening to an inaudible
music. They lurch with their shoulders, kick out with their flexible
knees, and whether taking long strides or marking time they keep in
unison with the whole, their heads bent, their eyes half closed and
bleared with some inner preoccupation. They are in all manner of ragged
garments: one has a lilac-covered hat, another an old dressing gown,
others are in sloppy blue overalls, some wear shabby Cuban hats, and
they go screeching and singing and dodging knocks on the head, but
always keeping step with the dance. The captain, with yesterday’s unlit
cigar stuck in the side of his month, gives directions about each
bit of freight, using wonderful expressions of abuse and otherwise
“encouraging” the “niggers.” Looking at the “rousters” you can easily
understand that dancing of a certain kind is innate with the Negro and
springs from him. He has an inborn sense of the beating of time which
we call rhythm. It is so exaggerated that it tilts out ridiculously
with his stomach and controls inanely his bobbing head and nose
and dropping eyes. He looks a savage, but he is spellbound. He is
completely illiterate and largely unintelligent, but he has solved
the problem of carrying huge cotton bales to the ship, providing a
rhythmical physical stream for them to flow upon. It is not half the
effort that it would be to white people without rhythm.
One of the reasons why the Negroes box so well is because they do it in
the same rhythmical way they shift these cotton bales.
Presently they commence to sing while they haul up the anchor, and a
rowing boat passing us with Negro oarsmen is also choric with bright,
hard, rhythmic music. These people understand music and time in
their bodies, not in their minds. Their blood and their nerves have
consciousness of tempo.
The many stops in Mississippi State afford opportunities of going
ashore, picking up wild pecan nuts, talking to Negroes at their cabin
doors. One never sees a white man. This along the Mississippi is the
real black belt. According to the census, the Negro is in a clear
majority. This causes the Whites to be always apprehensive. The idea
prevails that the Black can only be kept in his place by terror.
As regards this point of view, the Whites prize above everything
solidarity of opinion. They hold that they cannot afford to discuss
the matter, and they will tolerate no cleavage. In politics all are of
course Democrats, and if the American Democratic party is on the whole
much less liable to “splits” than the Republican party, it is largely
due to the discipline of the black belt.
“They outnumber us ten to one,” says the agent for timber, exaggerating
characteristically. “It’s come to such a point hereabout that they’re
pulling the white women out of their houses. It’s done every day.”
I could not believe that.
“But if a Black attacks a white woman hereabouts he is certain to be
lynched, and knows it,” said I.
“Yes, it’s the only way.”
“But there is not a lynching every day?”
“No.”
“So there are not really so many attacks on the women.”
But the day-moth of his thought refused to be caught in a logical net.
“Did you ever see a man tarred and feathered?” I asked of the district
attorney.
“No, but I’ve seen one lynched, and helped to lynch him,” said he.
“But lynching isn’t very good for legal business,” I hazarded.
He at once felt ruffled.
“It doesn’t make any difference to the Negro,” said he. “He hasn’t got
a soul. They don’t go to heaven or hell.”
“How do you make that out?”
“They’re just animals,” said he. “They were never in the Garden of
Eden, for Adam and Eve were white. Consequently, as they had no part in
original sin, they have no share in our salvation either. Christ did
not come to save those who never fell from grace.”
“I never heard that before,” said I, and was so greatly amused I could
not help showing it.
The attorney sought me out afterwards with Biblical proof. The sons
of Cain, it appears, took themselves wives from the daughters of
men; these other men were not descended from Adam and were probably
Negroes—the attorney was perfectly serious. The judge, however,
to whom we referred the matter, was of a cynical turn of mind, and
chuckled heartily. “I am a subscriber to foreign missions,” said he.
“If they have not Adam for their father, why do we send missionaries to
Africa?”
One of the chief places which I wished to visit was the Negro city of
Mound Bayou, in the Mississippi Delta. In the blackest part of the
State of Mississippi this is a city which is entirely Negro, possesses
a Negro mayor, Negro policemen, and indeed is entirely without
accommodation for white men. I stayed there a night in a Negro hotel
where the old wall paper was in hundreds of peeling strips hanging on
the walls, and everything in the bedroom was broken. It is a musical
sort of city, all a-jangle with the banjo and the brassy clamor of
the gramophone. Places of amusement are many—the Lyceum, the Casino,
the Bon-Ton café (with jazzy music), the Luck Coles restaurant, etc.;
one sees many advertisements of minstrel shows. But it is a working
city, and at present, with the high cotton prices, it is tasting
real prosperity. It is situated in the rich land of the Delta, very
malarial and snake-haunted, and therefore not very suitable for white
men, but the district produces the highest quality of cotton in the
United States. It is in a way a one-man city, and owes most to Charles
Banks, who is one of those agreeable and talented African giants, who,
like Dr. Moton and others, seem to have an unexpected capacity for
greatness. His energy and calm foresight and his money guarantee the
gins and the cottonseed-oil factory and the Negro bank and probably the
local newspaper and one or other of the churches.
In Mound Bayou is no segregation and no racial trouble, and the
Negroes show how happily they can live when unmolested. It is a type
of settlement well worth encouraging. The chief interest of the city
just now is the building of a “consolidated school.” All the small
schools are to be pulled down, and the money has been subscribed for
the building of a handsome new school on modern lines. It will be put
up facing the Carnegie Library Building. I was sorry to see the latter
devoid of books, and used as a Sunday school, but the building was
given before the city was ready for the responsible work of organizing
and controlling a public library. I talked in the infants’ school to a
strange array of children with heads like marbles, and found a common
chord in interest and love for animals. We imitated together all the
animals we knew, and agreed that no one who did not love animals ever
came to anything in this world. But if they loved their animals, they
must love teacher too. I talked in the beautiful Wesleyan church on the
difference between _E pluribus unum_ and _E pluribus duo_, but that was
to grown-ups—and they were so dull, compared with the children. The
point was, however, that though the United States might fail to obtain
unity of race, her peoples, white and black and yellow, Teutonic and
Slav and the rest, could still be one in ideal.
“We are trying here to understand the beauty of being black,” said one
of the audience edifyingly. “Solomon’s bride herself was black,” said
he.
Mound Bayou is the pride of Mississippi, as far as the black part of it
is concerned. The crowds that appear when a train comes in remind one
of similar pictures in Africa. America seems to have disappeared and
Africa to have been substituted. An entirely black South, or even one
State entirely black, is, however, unthinkable. The white man has shed
too much blood for his ideals there. He can never easily abandon any
part of it. He must rise to the standard of his sacrifices. To my eyes,
Mound Bayou was a little pathetic—like the sort of small establishment
of a woman who has been separated from a rich husband through
estrangement or desertion. It is not quite in the nature of things, and
is more like a courageous protest than the beginning of something new.
It stands, however, as a symbol of incompatibility of temperament.
There are many who say that when left to himself the Negro slips back
from civilization into a primitive state of laziness or savagery, and
they instance life in Haiti and the supposed failure of Liberia. It
is said that he does not keep up the white man’s standard, he is not
so strenuous, he is not a good organizer, nor dependable. That is not
entirely true, but there is some truth in it. Mound Bayou is situated
in a highly malarial region, unfitted for white habitation, but being
surrounded with the best cotton-growing land in America it ought to
be exceedingly prosperous. The best that can be said is that the
local planters are in a better plight than their neighbors who are
intermingled with Whites. Complete financial failure has threatened
the little city in the past, and if it were not for the founder, Mr.
Montgomery, and its financier, Mr. Banks, most of the proprietorship
must have passed over into white hands. To all appearances, the Negro
needs decent white co-operation in business, and mixed commercial
relationships are better than segregated ones. The difficulty is to
find conscientious business Whites who realize that the prosperity of
the Negro is worth while. The fixed idea of the white business man is
to fool the Negro and exploit him to the last penny.
Mound Bayou has its own Negro cotton buyers, who give a fair price
for the cotton. But it is with the greatest difficulty that a Negro
planter can obtain from a white buyer the true market price, and it is
rare that a landlord who receives cotton bales as rent will take into
consideration the enhanced price of cotton, even though the enhancement
is supposed to be primarily due to the smallness of the harvest.
Where the white man is in control it is true the Negro produces more
because he has to in order to live, but he is nevertheless the victim
of a systematized swindling, and he knows it. It is causing a growing
discontent among the black peasantry, and I was continually told about
it.
One of the worst riots of 1919 took place on the other side of the
river—in the State of Arkansas, at Elaine. It is also in this
so-called Delta region. The origin of the riot was rooted in the
economic problem. The white buyers and landlords had been consistently
defrauding the Negro countryside by overlooking the enhanced value of
cotton. Cotton had risen in price from a pre-war average of ten cents a
pound to twenty-eight cents in 1917 and actually to forty cents in the
current year. Formerly it was generally represented to the Negro that
he was always deep in debt for his “rations” or his rent. The white
policy was to keep the Negro in debt. It was never the custom to render
him accounts or to argue with him when he claimed more than was handed
him.
“You had a fine crop—you’re just about straight,” was a common
greeting in the fall of 1919.
But with the prolific Delta crop of cotton and a quadruple price,
the discontent of the Negro can be imagined. It was intense, and was
growing.
There are two versions of the outcome of it. One is that a firm of
white lawyers approached some of the Negro planters with an idea
of taking the matter to court and seeing what could be obtained in
redress. The other is that the Negroes “got together,” organized a body
called “The Farmers’ Progressive Union,” which then approached the
firm of lawyers on its own account. I incline to think that the former
is the more probable. The white firm thought there was money to be made
from fighting Negro claims. Some of the Negroes were actually agreed
to take the matter to a Federal Grand Jury, and charge the Whites with
frustration of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
The Negroes were undoubtedly daring, and held public meetings and used
sufficient bravado to alarm the local white population. The rumor flew
from farm to farm that the Negroes were plotting an insurrection.
Someone discovered a heap of rifles stacked where they had been left
and forgotten when the Armistice had interrupted drilling. This gave
the necessary color to the idea. Besides the rusty rifles, the Negroes
were seen to be not without firearms of one kind or another. The Negro
loves weapons, as an Oriental loves jewelry. Shotguns and revolvers in
plenty are to be found in the cabins of the colored country folk. The
Whites put up a _provocateur_ as before a pogrom in Russia. He started
firing on Negroes at random in the Elaine streets. Then two white
officials attempted to break into a Negro meeting, resorted to arms,
and were met by firing in return. One of the Whites was killed, the
other wounded. This started the three days of destruction in Phillips
County. The whole Negro population was rounded up by white troops
and farmers with rifles. Machine guns were even brought into play
against an imaginary black army. A great number of Negroes were put in
a stockade under military arrest, many were killed, many wounded. And
three hundred were placed in jail and charged with riot and murder.
No Whites were arrested. The governor, a Mr. Brough, was largely
responsible for this method of investigating the alleged conspiracy
of the Negroes to make an insurrection. The whole occurrence was
astonishingly ugly, and it was followed by ten-minute trials before
exclusively white juries, and swift sentences to electrocution for
some Negro prisoners, and to long terms of penal servitude for others.
The riot and the trials so exasperated Negroes throughout the United
States that there is no doubt a Federal Commission of impartial men
might well have been appointed to investigate the whole affair, both
as regards its inception and as regards its military culmination and
its aftermath of trial and punishment. As it is, though Governor Brough
says to the Negroes, “You _did_ plan an insurrection,” and though the
Whites of Elaine may feel happier and more secure, it is an obvious
truism that the white population of other States cannot be feeling
more secure because of it, and that the Negroes in other districts
feel less secure—they feel the need to arm. It has caused a great
increase in public insecurity. Perhaps because of this the riot has
been more discussed than other riots. Somewhat shocked and fretful, the
governor, who is probably a brisk business man, and in no way like one
of those more neurotic governors of Russian provinces which occur in
Aùdreyev’s tales, called a meeting. Some four hundred Whites and tamed
Negroes were brought together to see what could be done to improve race
relationship. This was a month after these events.
The _Commercial Appeal_ of Memphis reports the governor’s remarks:
“This meeting has been called for the purpose of a heart-to-heart
discussion of the relations between the white people and the Negroes
of the State. These relations have become strained, especially by the
recent rebellion in Phillips County. I say ‘rebellion’ advisedly and
without qualifications, for it was an insurrection, and a damnable one.
“And I want to say in the beginning that Arkansas is going to handle
her own problems. I do not intend to go to New York City or to Topeka,
Kansas. When I want advice from Negroes I shall ask it from Arkansas
Negroes, and when I want similar advice from white people, I shall get
it from the white people of Arkansas.
“I also wish to say that I do not intend to be intimidated by any
publications or any letters I may receive. I have already received
several letters which said that if I permitted the execution of
these twelve Negroes from Phillips County to go through, I would be
assassinated. One of the letters contained a crude drawing of a coffin,
represented to be my own in case the Negroes were electrocuted. I
received one letter to-day which stated that the entire city of Helena
would be burned if these Negroes went to their death. But I repeat that
I will not be intimidated by any outside influence in this question.
Our own questions must be settled within the boundaries of our State,
and I believe that there are not enough representative Negroes in the
State to do this.”
So said the governor, but it is rather a question whether in these days
of Leagues of Nations and Alliances and “sympathies” one State like
Arkansas, washed partly by a great river, can live entirely within its
own boundaries and without outside consideration.
The mighty Mississippi rolls onward, bearing the spars and the sands
of half the States of America to the sea. And after the massacre at
Elaine, for some days, dead bodies of Negroes were washed up on other
shores. Doleful messengers, these, on the river of Time.
XVI
AT VICKSBURG
I suppose not many make the pilgrimage of America; land in New England
with the Puritans or sail up the James River with the Cavaliers, linger
reflectively at Mt. Vernon, consider Boston Harbor and the tax on tea,
pause at Bunker Hill, and so on—or visit Sumter, where the Stars and
Stripes were hauled down by the South, and then make the tour of the
war which followed. It would be worth while—to think a little at
Gettysburg and think again in Georgia, walking perchance to the sea
after General Sherman. No such pilgrimage would be complete without
riding the great mother river of America, and it occurred to me that
a fitting place in which to end a pilgrimage, as far as the South is
concerned, might be Vicksburg, with its vast National Cemetery of the
dead of the Civil War. It is one of the most remarkable war shrines
in any land. But, more than that, it is a solemn reminder of all the
brothers’ blood that can be shed out of pride and vainglory of heart,
and an obstinate refusal on the part of one section of a nation to
follow the guiding star of the whole.
Vicksburg is a beautiful city, built on a steep cliff, continually in
sight of the broad, brown, passive streams of the Delta and the strips
of forest which break up the waters. Above it all are the beautiful
lawns and terraces of the National Cemetery rising from the Mississippi
shore, and the dead lie in view, as it were, of the broad loveliness of
the river. Sixteen thousand Americans hallow the soil. They are mostly
of Grant’s army, but over and above there is another burying ground
with many of his enemies. No vulgar notice warns you not to pick the
flowers. Pick them if you will. But poems and prayers are scattered
everywhere, and still as you go you pause and read, and pause and read
again—
On Fame’s eternal camping ground
Their silent tents are spread,
And glory guards with solemn round
The bivouac of the dead.
Tiny cubes of white marble give the soldiers’ numbers and names and
regiments. It reminds one now somehow of the great cemeteries of France.
The mighty troop, the flashing blade,
The bugle’s stirring blast,
The charge, the dreadful cannonade,
The din, the shout, are past,
says the next notice board. And yet, are they past? Are they not always
going on—as long as the cause for which the soldiers fought remains?
They fought for unity. They fought also for freedom. They had to do
what fanatical old John Brown set out to do at Harper’s Ferry, try to
release the land from that which was abominable in the sight of the
Lord. They strove to do it by righteous force. They were martyrs on
the altar of their country. And there is no doubt their country loved
them for their devotion. No land honors more its heroic dead than does
America. It is no mean thing to have died for America. The smoke still
rises to heaven where her men were slain, and it will rise until their
cause is completely vindicated.
Down below in the city, at the corner of Clay and Farmer Streets, last
year they burned a Negro to death, suspending him from a tree over
a slow fire. According to the evening paper, “The flesh on the body
began to crinkle and blister. The face of the Negro became horribly
distorted with pain. He assumed an attitude of prayer, raising his
palms together.”
When the victim was dead the leader of the mob cried out: “Have you had
enough fun, boys?” And they cut him down.
That Negro is with John Brown and the repentant thief and many another
such, in Paradise. But those who did the deed are damned. The Negroes
have been fleeing from Vicksburg ever since this terrible day. But the
dead of the old war remain in these great cemeteries. Something has
been effected: the children of the slaves are become free, but the
children of those who used to be masters still take a Negro now and
then and burn him to death.
I sat on a pyramid of lawn and looked down to the river. There was a
din of sawmills. The Memphis train went howling past, and then with a
petty rush on the road below an electric trolley car from Vicksburg.
The world went on in seeming peace. A throng of Negro workmen holding
on to one another came singing along the way. They were not slaves,
anyway. They had life, the beginnings of new life. Though fraught
with grave dangers, impeded by prejudice and hate and a thousand
difficulties—nevertheless it was new life that they had. And those
who died to give it them lie in these quiet graves while the river of
life goes past. They did not mean that the gift of freedom should be
tarnished. Most of them would be ready to die again to complete the
gift they gave. And John Brown himself if he should reappear would
not be sweetened by what he saw happening in the world. His soul goes
marching on, but it is still the soul of vengeance and wrath.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Best men, 18-25 $1,200-$1,300
Fair men 950- 1,050
Boys 375- 950
Young women 800- 1,000
Girls, 5 ft. 750- 850
” 4 ft. 9 ins. 700- 750
” 4 ft. 350- 450
—“A Journey Through the Seaboard
Slave States,” by F. L. Olmsted.
[2] “Two Years on a Georgian Plantation,” by Frances Kemble.
[3] “Sherman’s Memoirs.”
[4] Field Orders 119 and 120, abbreviated.
[5] “Negro Migration in 1916-17,” Government Printing Office,
Washington, 1919.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:
—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.
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