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Chapter X Of the Faith of the Fathers
Dim face of Beauty haunting all the world,
Fair face of Beauty all too fair to see, Where the lost stars adown the heavens are
hurled,—
There, there alone for thee
May white peace be.
Beauty, sad face of Beauty, Mystery, Wonder,
What are these dreams to foolish babbling men
Who cry with little noises 'neath the thunder
Of Ages ground to sand,
To a little sand.
Fiona Macleod It was out in the country, far from home,
far from my foster home, on a dark Sunday night.
The road wandered from our rambling log-house up the stony bed of a creek, past wheat and
corn, until we could hear dimly across the fields a rhythmic cadence of song,—soft,
thrilling, powerful, that swelled and died sorrowfully in our ears.
I was a country schoolteacher then, fresh from the East, and had never seen a Southern
*** revival. To be sure, we in Berkshire were not perhaps
as stiff and formal as they in Suffolk of olden time; yet we were very quiet and subdued,
and I know not what would have happened those clear Sabbath mornings had some one punctuated
the sermon with a wild scream, or interrupted the long prayer with a loud Amen!
And so most striking to me, as I approached the village and the little plain church perched
aloft, was the air of intense excitement that possessed that mass of black folk.
A sort of suppressed terror hung in the air and seemed to seize us,—a pythian madness,
a demoniac possession, that lent terrible reality to song and word.
The black and massive form of the preacher swayed and quivered as the words crowded to
his lips and flew at us in singular eloquence. The people moaned and fluttered, and then
the gaunt-cheeked brown woman beside me suddenly leaped straight into the air and shrieked
like a lost soul, while round about came wail and groan and outcry, and a scene of human
passion such as I had never conceived before. Those who have not thus witnessed the frenzy
of a *** revival in the untouched backwoods of the South can but dimly realize the religious
feeling of the slave; as described, such scenes appear grotesque and funny, but as seen they
are awful. Three things characterized this religion of
the slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.
The Preacher is the most unique personality developed by the *** on American soil.
A leader, a politician, an orator, a "boss," an intriguer, an idealist,—all these he
is, and ever, too, the centre of a group of men, now twenty, now a thousand in number.
The combination of a certain adroitness with deep-seated earnestness, of tact with consummate
ability, gave him his preeminence, and helps him maintain it.
The type, of course, varies according to time and place, from the West Indies in the sixteenth
century to New England in the nineteenth, and from the Mississippi bottoms to cities
like New Orleans or New York. The Music of *** religion is that plaintive
rhythmic melody, with its touching minor cadences, which, despite caricature and defilement,
still remains the most original and beautiful expression of human life and longing yet born
on American soil. Sprung from the African forests, where its
counterpart can still be heard, it was adapted, changed, and intensified by the tragic soul-life
of the slave, until, under the stress of law and whip, it became the one true expression
of a people's sorrow, despair, and hope. Finally the Frenzy of "Shouting," when the
Spirit of the Lord passed by, and, seizing the devotee, made him mad with supernatural
joy, was the last essential of *** religion and the one more devoutly believed in than
all the rest. It varied in expression from the silent rapt
countenance or the low murmur and moan to the mad abandon of physical fervor,—the
stamping, shrieking, and shouting, the rushing to and fro and wild waving of arms, the weeping
and laughing, the vision and the trance. All this is nothing new in the world, but
old as religion, as Delphi and Endor. And so firm a hold did it have on the ***,
that many generations firmly believed that without this visible manifestation of the
God there could be no true communion with the Invisible.
These were the characteristics of *** religious life as developed up to the time of Emancipation.
Since under the peculiar circumstances of the black man's environment they were the
one expression of his higher life, they are of deep interest to the student of his development,
both socially and psychologically. Numerous are the attractive lines of inquiry
that here group themselves. What did slavery mean to the African savage?
What was his attitude toward the World and Life?
What seemed to him good and evil,—God and Devil?
Whither went his longings and strivings, and wherefore were his heart-burnings and disappointments?
Answers to such questions can come only from a study of *** religion as a development,
through its gradual changes from the heathenism of the Gold Coast to the institutional ***
church of Chicago. Moreover, the religious growth of millions
of men, even though they be slaves, cannot be without potent influence upon their contemporaries.
The Methodists and Baptists of America owe much of their condition to the silent but
potent influence of their millions of *** converts. Especially is this noticeable in
the South, where theology and religious philosophy are on this account a long way behind the
North, and where the religion of the poor whites is a plain copy of *** thought and
methods. The mass of "gospel" hymns which has swept
through American churches and well-nigh ruined our sense of song consists largely of debased
imitations of *** melodies made by ears that caught the jingle but not the music,
the body but not the soul, of the Jubilee songs.
It is thus clear that the study of *** religion is not only a vital part of the history of
the *** in America, but no uninteresting part of American history.
The *** church of to-day is the social centre of *** life in the United States, and the
most characteristic expression of African character.
Take a typical church in a small Virginia town: it is the "First Baptist"—a roomy
brick edifice seating five hundred or more persons, tastefully finished in Georgia pine,
with a carpet, a small organ, and stained-glass windows.
Underneath is a large assembly room with benches. This building is the central club-house of
a community of a thousand or more Negroes. Various organizations meet here,—the church
proper, the Sunday-school, two or three insurance societies, women's societies, secret societies,
and mass meetings of various kinds. Entertainments, suppers, and lectures are
held beside the five or six regular weekly religious services.
Considerable sums of money are collected and expended here, employment is found for the
idle, strangers are introduced, news is disseminated and charity distributed. At the same time
this social, intellectual, and economic centre is a religious centre of great power.
Depravity, Sin, Redemption, Heaven, Hell, and Damnation are preached twice a Sunday
after the crops are laid by; and few indeed of the community have the hardihood to withstand
conversion. Back of this more formal religion, the Church
often stands as a real conserver of morals, a strengthener of family life, and the final
authority on what is Good and Right. Thus one can see in the *** church to-day,
reproduced in microcosm, all the great world from which the *** is cut off by color-prejudice
and social condition. In the great city churches the same tendency
is noticeable and in many respects emphasized. A great church like the Bethel of Philadelphia
has over eleven hundred members, an edifice seating fifteen hundred persons and valued
at one hundred thousand dollars, an annual budget of five thousand dollars, and a government
consisting of a pastor with several assisting local preachers, an executive and legislative
board, financial boards and tax collectors; general church meetings for making laws; sub-divided
groups led by class leaders, a company of militia, and twenty-four auxiliary societies.
The activity of a church like this is immense and far-reaching, and the bishops who preside
over these organizations throughout the land are among the most powerful *** rulers in
the world. Such churches are really governments of men,
and consequently a little investigation reveals the curious fact that, in the South, at least,
practically every American *** is a church member.
Some, to be sure, are not regularly enrolled, and a few do not habitually attend services;
but, practically, a proscribed people must have a social centre, and that centre for
this people is the *** church. The census of 1890 showed nearly twenty-four
thousand *** churches in the country, with a total enrolled membership of over two and
a half millions, or ten actual church members to every twenty-eight persons, and in some
Southern States one in every two persons. Besides these there is the large number who,
while not enrolled as members, attend and take part in many of the activities of the
church. There is an organized *** church for every
sixty black families in the nation, and in some States for every forty families, owning,
on an average, a thousand dollars' worth of property each, or nearly twenty-six million
dollars in all. Such, then, is the large development of the
*** church since Emancipation. The question now is, What have been the successive
steps of this social history and what are the present tendencies?
First, we must realize that no such institution as the *** church could rear itself without
definite historical foundations. These foundations we can find if we remember
that the social history of the *** did not start in America.
He was brought from a definite social environment,—the polygamous clan life under the headship of
the chief and the potent influence of the priest.
His religion was nature-worship, with profound belief in invisible surrounding influences,
good and bad, and his worship was through incantation and sacrifice.
The first rude change in this life was the slave ship and the West Indian sugar-fields.
The plantation organization replaced the clan and tribe, and the white master replaced the
chief with far greater and more despotic powers. Forced and long-continued toil became the
rule of life, the old ties of blood relationship and kinship disappeared, and instead of the
family appeared a new polygamy and polyandry, which, in some cases, almost reached promiscuity.
It was a terrific social revolution, and yet some traces were retained of the former group
life, and the chief remaining institution was the Priest or Medicine-man.
He early appeared on the plantation and found his function as the healer of the sick, the
interpreter of the Unknown, the comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger
of wrong, and the one who rudely but picturesquely expressed the longing, disappointment, and
resentment of a stolen and oppressed people. Thus, as bard, physician, judge, and priest,
within the narrow limits allowed by the slave system, rose the *** preacher, and under
him the first church was not at first by any means Christian nor definitely organized;
rather it was an adaptation and mingling of heathen rites among the members of each plantation,
and roughly designated as Voodooism. Association with the masters, missionary effort and motives
of expediency gave these rites an early veneer of Christianity, and after the lapse of many
generations the *** church became Christian. Two characteristic things must be noticed
in regard to the church. First, it became almost entirely Baptist and Methodist in faith;
secondly, as a social institution it antedated by many decades the monogamic *** home.
From the very circumstances of its beginning, the church was confined to the plantation,
and consisted primarily of a series of disconnected units; although, later on, some freedom of
movement was allowed, still this geographical limitation was always important and was one
cause of the spread of the decentralized and democratic Baptist faith among the slaves.
At the same time, the visible rite of baptism appealed strongly to their mystic temperament.
To-day the Baptist Church is still largest in membership among Negroes, and has a million
and a half communicants. Next in popularity came the churches organized
in connection with the white neighboring churches, chiefly Baptist and Methodist, with a few
Episcopalian and others. The Methodists still form the second greatest
denomination, with nearly a million members. The faith of these two leading denominations
was more suited to the slave church from the prominence they gave to religious feeling
and fervor. The *** membership in other denominations
has always been small and relatively unimportant, although the Episcopalians and Presbyterians
are gaining among the more intelligent classes to-day, and the Catholic Church is making
headway in certain sections. After Emancipation, and still earlier in the
North, the *** churches largely severed such affiliations as they had had with the
white churches, either by choice or by compulsion. The Baptist churches became independent, but
the Methodists were compelled early to unite for purposes of episcopal government.
This gave rise to the great African Methodist Church, the greatest *** organization in
the world, to the Zion Church and the Colored Methodist, and to the black conferences and
churches in this and other denominations. The second fact noted, namely, that the ***
church antedates the *** home, leads to an explanation of much that is paradoxical
in this communistic institution and in the morals of its members.
But especially it leads us to regard this institution as peculiarly the expression of
the inner ethical life of a people in a sense seldom true elsewhere.
Let us turn, then, from the outer physical development of the church to the more important
inner ethical life of the people who compose it.
The *** has already been pointed out many times as a religious animal,—a being of
that deep emotional nature which turns instinctively toward the supernatural.
Endowed with a rich tropical imagination and a keen, delicate appreciation of Nature, the
transplanted African lived in a world animate with gods and devils, elves and witches; full
of strange influences,—of Good to be implored, of Evil to be propitiated.
Slavery, then, was to him the dark triumph of Evil over him.
All the hateful powers of the Under-world were striving against him, and a spirit of
revolt and revenge filled his heart. He called up all the resources of heathenism
to aid,—exorcism and witch-craft, the mysterious Obi worship with its barbarious rites, spells,
and blood-sacrifice even, now and then, of human victims. Weird midnight *** and mystic
conjurations were invoked, the witch-woman and the voodoo-priest became the centre of
*** group life, and that vein of vague superstition which characterizes the unlettered *** even
to-day was deepened and strengthened. In spite, however, of such success as that
of the fierce Maroons, the Danish blacks, and others, the spirit of revolt gradually
died away under the untiring energy and superior strength of the slave masters. By the middle
of the eighteenth century the black slave had sunk, with hushed murmurs, to his place
at the bottom of a new economic system, and was unconsciously ripe for a new philosophy
of life. Nothing suited his condition then better than
the doctrines of passive submission embodied in the newly learned Christianity.
Slave masters early realized this, and cheerfully aided religious propaganda within certain
bounds. The long system of repression and degradation
of the *** tended to emphasize the elements of his character which made him a valuable
chattel: courtesy became humility, moral strength degenerated into submission, and the exquisite
native appreciation of the beautiful became an infinite capacity for dumb suffering.
The ***, losing the joy of this world, eagerly seized upon the offered conceptions of the
next; the avenging Spirit of the Lord enjoining patience in this world, under sorrow and tribulation
until the Great Day when He should lead His dark children home,—this became his comforting
dream. His preacher repeated the prophecy, and his
bards sang,—
"Children, we all shall be free When the Lord shall appear!"
This deep religious fatalism, painted so beautifully in "Uncle Tom," came soon to breed, as all
fatalistic faiths will, the sensualist side by side with the martyr.
Under the lax moral life of the plantation, where marriage was a farce, laziness a virtue,
and property a theft, a religion of resignation and submission degenerated easily, in less
strenuous minds, into a philosophy of indulgence and crime.
Many of the worst characteristics of the *** masses of to-day had their seed in this period
of the slave's ethical growth. Here it was that the Home was ruined under
the very shadow of the Church, white and black; here habits of shiftlessness took root, and
sullen hopelessness replaced hopeful strife. With the beginning of the abolition movement
and the gradual growth of a class of free Negroes came a change.
We often neglect the influence of the freedman before the war, because of the paucity of
his numbers and the small weight he had in the history of the nation.
But we must not forget that his chief influence was internal,—was exerted on the black world;
and that there he was the ethical and social leader. Huddled as he was in a few centres
like Philadelphia, New York, and New Orleans, the masses of the freedmen sank into poverty
and listlessness; but not all of them. The free *** leader early arose and his
chief characteristic was intense earnestness and deep feeling on the slavery question.
Freedom became to him a real thing and not a dream.
His religion became darker and more intense, and into his ethics crept a note of revenge,
into his songs a day of reckoning close at hand.
The "Coming of the Lord" swept this side of Death, and came to be a thing to be hoped
for in this day. Through fugitive slaves and irrepressible
discussion this desire for freedom seized the black millions still in bondage, and became
their one ideal of life. The black bards caught new notes, and sometimes
even dared to sing,—
"O Freedom, O Freedom, O Freedom over me! Before I'll be a slave
I'll be buried in my grave, And go home to my Lord
And be free." For fifty years *** religion thus transformed
itself and identified itself with the dream of Abolition, until that which was a radical
fad in the white North and an anarchistic plot in the white South had become a religion
to the black world. Thus, when Emancipation finally came, it seemed
to the freedman a literal Coming of the Lord. His fervid imagination was stirred as never
before, by the *** of armies, the blood and dust of battle, and the wail and whirl
of social upheaval. He stood dumb and motionless before the whirlwind:
what had he to do with it? Was it not the Lord's doing, and marvellous
in his eyes? Joyed and bewildered with what came, he stood
awaiting new wonders till the inevitable Age of Reaction swept over the nation and brought
the crisis of to-day. It is difficult to explain clearly the present
critical stage of *** religion. First, we must remember that living as the
blacks do in close contact with a great modern nation, and sharing, although imperfectly,
the soul-life of that nation, they must necessarily be affected more or less directly by all the
religious and ethical forces that are to-day moving the United States.
These questions and movements are, however, overshadowed and dwarfed by the (to them)
all-important question of their civil, political, and economic status. They must perpetually
discuss the "*** Problem,"—must live, move, and have their being in it, and interpret
all else in its light or darkness. With this come, too, peculiar problems of
their inner life,—of the status of women, the maintenance of Home, the training of children,
the accumulation of wealth, and the prevention of crime.
All this must mean a time of intense ethical ferment, of religious heart-searching and
intellectual unrest. From the double life every American ***
must live, as a *** and as an American, as swept on by the current of the nineteenth
while yet struggling in the eddies of the fifteenth century,—from this must arise
a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral hesitancy
which is fatal to self-confidence. The worlds within and without the Veil of
Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same
way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and
bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts,
double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double
ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism.
In some such doubtful words and phrases can one perhaps most clearly picture the peculiar
ethical paradox that faces the *** of to-day and is tingeing and changing his religious
life. Feeling that his rights and his dearest ideals
are being trampled upon, that the public conscience is ever more deaf to his righteous appeal,
and that all the reactionary forces of prejudice, greed, and revenge are daily gaining new strength
and fresh allies, the *** faces no enviable dilemma. Conscious of his impotence, and pessimistic,
he often becomes bitter and vindictive; and his religion, instead of a worship, is a complaint
and a curse, a wail rather than a hope, a sneer rather than a faith. On the other hand,
another type of mind, shrewder and keener and more tortuous too, sees in the very strength
of the anti-*** movement its patent weaknesses, and with Jesuitic casuistry is deterred by
no ethical considerations in the endeavor to turn this weakness to the black man's strength.
Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings;
the danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy.
The one type of *** stands almost ready to curse God and die, and the other is too
often found a traitor to right and a coward before force; the one is wedded to ideals
remote, whimsical, perhaps impossible of realization; the other forgets that life is more than meat
and the body more than raiment. But, after all, is not this simply the writhing
of the age translated into black,—the triumph of the Lie which today, with its false culture,
faces the hideousness of the anarchist assassin? To-day the two groups of Negroes, the one
in the North, the other in the South, represent these divergent ethical tendencies, the first
tending toward radicalism, the other toward hypocritical compromise. It is no idle regret
with which the white South mourns the loss of the old-time ***,—the frank, honest,
simple old servant who stood for the earlier religious age of submission and humility.
With all his laziness and lack of many elements of true manhood, he was at least open-hearted,
faithful, and sincere. To-day he is gone, but who is to blame for
his going? Is it not those very persons who mourn for
him? Is it not the tendency, born of Reconstruction and Reaction, to found a society on lawlessness
and deception, to tamper with the moral fibre of a naturally honest and straightforward
people until the whites threaten to become ungovernable tyrants and the blacks criminals
and hypocrites? Deception is the natural defence of the weak against the strong, and the South
used it for many years against its conquerors; to-day it must be prepared to see its black
proletariat turn that same two-edged weapon against itself.
And how natural this is! The death of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner
proved long since to the *** the present hopelessness of physical defence.
Political defence is becoming less and less available, and economic defence is still only
partially effective. But there is a patent defence at hand,—the
defence of deception and flattery, of cajoling and lying.
It is the same defence which peasants of the Middle Age used and which left its stamp on
their character for centuries. To-day the young *** of the South who would
succeed cannot be frank and outspoken, honest and self-assertive, but rather he is daily
tempted to be silent and wary, politic and sly; he must flatter and be pleasant, endure
petty insults with a smile, shut his eyes to wrong; in too many cases he sees positive
personal advantage in deception and lying. His real thoughts, his real aspirations, must
be guarded in whispers; he must not criticise, he must not complain.
Patience, humility, and adroitness must, in these growing black youth, replace impulse,
manliness, and courage. With this sacrifice there is an economic opening,
and perhaps peace and some prosperity. Without this there is riot, migration, or
crime. Nor is this situation peculiar to the Southern
United States, is it not rather the only method by which undeveloped races have gained the
right to share modern culture? The price of culture is a Lie.
On the other hand, in the North the tendency is to emphasize the radicalism of the ***.
Driven from his birthright in the South by a situation at which every fibre of his more
outspoken and assertive nature revolts, he finds himself in a land where he can scarcely
earn a decent living amid the harsh competition and the color discrimination. At the same
time, through schools and periodicals, discussions and lectures, he is intellectually quickened
and awakened. The soul, long pent up and dwarfed, suddenly
expands in new-found freedom. What wonder that every tendency is to excess,—radical
complaint, radical remedies, bitter denunciation or angry silence.
Some sink, some rise. The criminal and the sensualist leave the church for the gambling-hell
and the brothel, and fill the slums of Chicago and Baltimore; the better classes segregate
themselves from the group-life of both white and black, and form an aristocracy, cultured
but pessimistic, whose bitter criticism stings while it points out no way of escape.
They despise the submission and subserviency of the Southern Negroes, but offer no other
means by which a poor and oppressed minority can exist side by side with its masters.
Feeling deeply and keenly the tendencies and opportunities of the age in which they live,
their souls are bitter at the fate which drops the Veil between; and the very fact that this
bitterness is natural and justifiable only serves to intensify it and make it more maddening.
Between the two extreme types of ethical attitude which I have thus sought to make clear wavers
the mass of the millions of Negroes, North and South; and their religious life and activity
partake of this social conflict within their ranks.
Their churches are differentiating,—now into groups of cold, fashionable devotees,
in no way distinguishable from similar white groups save in color of skin; now into large
social and business institutions catering to the desire for information and amusement
of their members, warily avoiding unpleasant questions both within and without the black
world, and preaching in effect if not in word: Dum vivimus, vivamus.
But back of this still broods silently the deep religious feeling of the real *** heart,
the stirring, unguided might of powerful human souls who have lost the guiding star of the
past and seek in the great night a new religious ideal.
Some day the Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of ten million souls shall sweep
irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes
life worth living—Liberty, Justice, and Right—is marked "For White People Only."
End of Chapter X Chapter XI
Of the Passing of the First-Born
O sister, sister, thy first-begotten, The hands that cling and the feet that follow,
The voice of the child's blood crying yet, WHO HATH REMEMBERED ME?
WHO HATH FORGOTTEN? Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow,
But the world shall end when I forget.
Swinburne "Unto you a child is born," sang the bit of
yellow paper that fluttered into my room one brown October morning.
Then the fear of fatherhood mingled wildly with the joy of creation; I wondered how it
looked and how it felt—what were its eyes, and how its hair curled and crumpled itself.
And I thought in awe of her,—she who had slept with Death to tear a man-child from
underneath her heart, while I was unconsciously wandering.
I fled to my wife and child, repeating the while to myself half wonderingly, "Wife and
child? Wife and child?"—fled fast and faster than
boat and steam-car, and yet must ever impatiently await them; away from the hard-voiced city,
away from the flickering sea into my own Berkshire Hills that sit all sadly guarding the gates
of Massachusetts. Up the stairs I ran to the wan mother and
whimpering babe, to the sanctuary on whose altar a life at my bidding had offered itself
to win a life, and won. What is this tiny formless thing, this newborn
wail from an unknown world,—all head and voice?
I handle it curiously, and watch perplexed its winking, breathing, and sneezing.
I did not love it then; it seemed a ludicrous thing to love; but her I loved, my girl-mother,
she whom now I saw unfolding like the glory of the morning—the transfigured woman.
Through her I came to love the wee thing, as it grew strong; as its little soul unfolded
itself in twitter and cry and half-formed word, and as its eyes caught the gleam and
flash of life. How beautiful he was, with his olive-tinted
flesh and dark gold ringlets, his eyes of mingled blue and brown, his perfect little
limbs, and the soft voluptuous roll which the blood of Africa had moulded into his features!
I held him in my arms, after we had sped far away from our Southern home,—held him, and
glanced at the hot red soil of Georgia and the breathless city of a hundred hills, and
felt a vague unrest. Why was his hair tinted with gold?
An evil omen was golden hair in my life. Why had not the brown of his eyes crushed
out and killed the blue?—for brown were his father's eyes, and his father's father's.
And thus in the Land of the Color-line I saw, as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the
Veil. Within the Veil was he born, said I; and there
within shall he live,—a *** and a ***'s son.
Holding in that little head—ah, bitterly!—he unbowed pride of a hunted race, clinging with
that tiny dimpled hand—ah, wearily!—to a hope not hopeless but unhopeful, and seeing
with those bright wondering eyes that peer into my soul a land whose freedom is to us
a mockery and whose liberty a lie. I saw the shadow of the Veil as it passed
over my baby, I saw the cold city towering above the blood-red land.
I held my face beside his little cheek, showed him the star-children and the twinkling lights
as they began to flash, and stilled with an even-song the unvoiced terror of my life.
So sturdy and masterful he grew, so filled with bubbling life, so tremulous with the
unspoken wisdom of a life but eighteen months distant from the All-life,—we were not far
from worshipping this revelation of the divine, my wife and I. Her own life builded and moulded
itself upon the child; he tinged her every dream and idealized her every effort.
No hands but hers must touch and garnish those little limbs; no dress or frill must touch
them that had not wearied her fingers; no voice but hers could coax him off to Dreamland,
and she and he together spoke some soft and unknown tongue and in it held communion.
I too mused above his little white bed; saw the strength of my own arm stretched onward
through the ages through the newer strength of his; saw the dream of my black fathers
stagger a step onward in the wild phantasm of the world; heard in his baby voice the
voice of the Prophet that was to rise within the Veil.
And so we dreamed and loved and planned by fall and winter, and the full flush of the
long Southern spring, till the hot winds rolled from the fetid Gulf, till the roses shivered
and the still stern sun quivered its awful light over the hills of Atlanta.
And then one night the little feet pattered wearily to the wee white bed, and the tiny
hands trembled; and a warm flushed face tossed on the pillow, and we knew baby was sick.
Ten days he lay there,—a swift week and three endless days, wasting, wasting away.
Cheerily the mother nursed him the first days, and laughed into the little eyes that smiled
again. Tenderly then she hovered round him, till the smile fled away and Fear crouched
beside the little bed. Then the day ended not, and night was a dreamless
terror, and joy and sleep slipped away. I hear now that Voice at midnight calling
me from dull and dreamless trance,—crying, "The Shadow of Death!
The Shadow of Death!" Out into the starlight I crept, to rouse the
gray physician,—the Shadow of Death, the Shadow of Death.
The hours trembled on; the night listened; the ghastly dawn glided like a tired thing
across the lamplight. Then we two alone looked upon the child as
he turned toward us with great eyes, and stretched his stringlike hands,—the Shadow of Death!
And we spoke no word, and turned away. He died at eventide, when the sun lay like
a brooding sorrow above the western hills, veiling its face; when the winds spoke not,
and the trees, the great green trees he loved, stood motionless.
I saw his breath beat quicker and quicker, pause, and then his little soul leapt like
a star that travels in the night and left a world of darkness in its train.
The day changed not; the same tall trees peeped in at the windows, the same green grass glinted
in the setting sun. Only in the chamber of death writhed the world's
most piteous thing—a childless mother. I shirk not.
I long for work. I pant for a life full of striving.
I am no coward, to shrink before the rugged rush of the storm, nor even quail before the
awful shadow of the Veil. But hearken, O Death!
Is not this my life hard enough,—is not that dull land that stretches its sneering
web about me cold enough,—is not all the world beyond these four little walls pitiless
enough, but that thou must needs enter here,—thou, O Death?
About my head the thundering storm beat like a heartless voice, and the crazy forest pulsed
with the curses of the weak; but what cared I, within my home beside my wife and baby
boy? Wast thou so jealous of one little coign of happiness that thou must needs enter there,—thou,
O Death? A perfect life was his, all joy and love,
with tears to make it brighter,—sweet as a summer's day beside the Housatonic.
The world loved him; the women kissed his curls, the men looked gravely into his wonderful
eyes, and the children hovered and fluttered about him.
I can see him now, changing like the sky from sparkling laughter to darkening frowns, and
then to wondering thoughtfulness as he watched the world.
He knew no color-line, poor dear—and the Veil, though it shadowed him, had not yet
darkened half his sun. He loved the white matron, he loved his black
nurse; and in his little world walked souls alone, uncolored and unclothed.
I—yea, all men—are larger and purer by the infinite breadth of that one little life.
She who in simple clearness of vision sees beyond the stars said when he had flown, "He
will be happy There; he ever loved beautiful things."
And I, far more ignorant, and blind by the web of mine own weaving, sit alone winding
words and muttering, "If still he be, and he be There, and there be a There, let him
be happy, O Fate!" Blithe was the morning of his burial, with
bird and song and sweet-smelling flowers. The trees whispered to the grass, but the
children sat with hushed faces. And yet it seemed a ghostly unreal day,—the
wraith of Life. We seemed to rumble down an unknown street
behind a little white bundle of posies, with the shadow of a song in our ears.
The busy city dinned about us; they did not say much, those pale-faced hurrying men and
women; they did not say much,—they only glanced and said, "***!"
We could not lay him in the ground there in Georgia, for the earth there is strangely
red; so we bore him away to the northward, with his flowers and his little folded hands.
In vain, in vain!—for where, O God! beneath thy broad blue sky shall my dark baby
rest in peace,—where Reverence dwells, and Goodness, and a Freedom that is free?
All that day and all that night there sat an awful gladness in my heart,—nay, blame
me not if I see the world thus darkly through the Veil,—and my soul whispers ever to me
saying, "Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bond, but free."
No bitter meanness now shall sicken his baby heart till it die a living death, no taunt
shall madden his happy boyhood. Fool that I was to think or wish that this
little soul should grow choked and deformed within the Veil!
I might have known that yonder deep unworldly look that ever and anon floated past his eyes
was peering far beyond this narrow Now. In the poise of his little curl-crowned head
did there not sit all that wild pride of being which his father had hardly crushed in his
own heart? For what, forsooth, shall a *** want with
pride amid the studied humiliations of fifty million fellows?
Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals
unattainable, and taught you to cringe and bow.
Better far this nameless void that stops my life than a sea of sorrow for you.
Idle words; he might have borne his burden more bravely than we,—aye, and found it
lighter too, some day; for surely, surely this is not the end.
Surely there shall yet dawn some mighty morning to lift the Veil and set the prisoned free.
Not for me,—I shall die in my bonds,—but for fresh young souls who have not known the
night and waken to the morning; a morning when men ask of the workman, not "Is he white?"
but "Can he work?" When men ask artists, not "Are they black?"
but "Do they know?" Some morning this may be, long, long years
to come. But now there wails, on that dark shore within
the Veil, the same deep voice, THOU SHALT FOREGO!
And all have I foregone at that command, and with small complaint,—all save that fair
young form that lies so coldly wed with death in the nest I had builded.
If one must have gone, why not I? Why may I not rest me from this restlessness
and sleep from this wide waking? Was not the world's alembic, Time, in his
young hands, and is not my time waning? Are there so many workers in the vineyard
that the fair promise of this little body could lightly be tossed away?
The wretched of my race that line the alleys of the nation sit fatherless and unmothered;
but Love sat beside his cradle, and in his ear Wisdom waited to speak.
Perhaps now he knows the All-love, and needs not to be wise.
Sleep, then, child,—sleep till I sleep and waken to a baby voice and the ceaseless patter
of little feet—above the Veil. End of Chapter XI
Chapter XII Of Alexander Crummell
Then from the Dawn it seemed there came, but faint
As from beyond the limit of the world, Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice Around a king returning from his wars.
Tennyson
This is the story of a human heart,—the tale of a black boy who many long years ago
began to struggle with life that he might know the world and know himself.
Three temptations he met on those dark dunes that lay gray and dismal before the wonder-eyes
of the child: the temptation of Hate, that stood out against the red dawn; the temptation
of Despair, that darkened noonday; and the temptation of Doubt, that ever steals along
with twilight. Above all, you must hear of the vales he crossed,—the
Valley of Humiliation and the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
I saw Alexander Crummell first at a Wilberforce commencement season, amid its bustle and crush.
Tall, frail, and black he stood, with simple dignity and an unmistakable air of good breeding.
I talked with him apart, where the storming of the *** young orators could not harm
us. I spoke to him politely, then curiously, then
eagerly, as I began to feel the fineness of his character,—his calm courtesy, the sweetness
of his strength, and his fair blending of the hope and truth of life.
Instinctively I bowed before this man, as one bows before the prophets of the world.
Some seer he seemed, that came not from the crimson Past or the gray To-come, but from
the pulsing Now,—that mocking world which seemed to me at once so light and dark, so
splendid and sordid. Fourscore years had he wandered in this same
world of mine, within the Veil. He was born with the Missouri Compromise and
lay a-dying amid the echoes of Manila and El Caney: stirring times for living, times
dark to look back upon, darker to look forward to. The black-faced lad that paused over his
mud and marbles seventy years ago saw puzzling vistas as he looked down the world.
The slave-ship still groaned across the Atlantic, faint cries burdened the Southern breeze,
and the great black father whispered mad tales of cruelty into those young ears.
From the low doorway the mother silently watched her boy at play, and at nightfall sought him
eagerly lest the shadows bear him away to the land of slaves.
So his young mind worked and winced and shaped curiously a vision of Life; and in the midst
of that vision ever stood one dark figure alone,—ever with the hard, thick countenance
of that bitter father, and a form that fell in vast and shapeless folds.
Thus the temptation of Hate grew and shadowed the growing child,—gliding stealthily into
his laughter, fading into his play, and seizing his dreams by day and night with rough, rude
turbulence. So the black boy asked of sky and sun and
flower the never-answered Why? and loved, as he grew, neither the world nor the world's
rough ways. Strange temptation for a child, you may think;
and yet in this wide land to-day a thousand thousand dark children brood before this same
temptation, and feel its cold and shuddering arms.
For them, perhaps, some one will some day lift the Veil,—will come tenderly and cheerily
into those sad little lives and brush the brooding hate away, just as Beriah Green strode
in upon the life of Alexander Crummell. And before the bluff, kind-hearted man the
shadow seemed less dark. Beriah Green had a school in Oneida County,
New York, with a score of mischievous boys. "I'm going to bring a black boy here to educate,"
said Beriah Green, as only a crank and an abolitionist would have dared to say. "Oho!"
laughed the boys. "Ye-es," said his wife; and Alexander came.
Once before, the black boy had sought a school, had travelled, cold and hungry, four hundred
miles up into free New Hampshire, to Canaan. But the godly farmers hitched ninety yoke
of oxen to the abolition schoolhouse and dragged it into the middle of the swamp.
The black boy trudged away. The nineteenth was the first century of human
sympathy,—the age when half wonderingly we began to descry in others that transfigured
spark of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhoppers and peasants, and tramps and thieves,
and millionaires and—sometimes—Negroes, became throbbing souls whose warm pulsing
life touched us so nearly that we half gasped with surprise, crying, "Thou too!
Hast Thou seen Sorrow and the dull waters of Hopelessness?
Hast Thou known Life?" And then all helplessly we peered into those
Other-worlds, and wailed, "O World of Worlds, how shall man make you one?"
So in that little Oneida school there came to those schoolboys a revelation of thought
and longing beneath one black skin, of which they had not dreamed before.
And to the lonely boy came a new dawn of sympathy and inspiration.
The shadowy, formless thing—the temptation of Hate, that hovered between him and the
world—grew fainter and less sinister. It did not wholly fade away, but diffused
itself and lingered thick at the edges. Through it the child now first saw the blue
and gold of life,—the sun-swept road that ran 'twixt heaven and earth until in one far-off
wan wavering line they met and kissed. A vision of life came to the growing boy,—mystic,
wonderful. He raised his head, stretched himself, breathed
deep of the fresh new air. Yonder, behind the forests, he heard strange sounds; then
glinting through the trees he saw, far, far away, the bronzed hosts of a nation calling,—calling
faintly, calling loudly. He heard the hateful clank of their chains;
he felt them cringe and grovel, and there rose within him a protest and a prophecy.
And he girded himself to walk down the world. A voice and vision called him to be a priest,—a
seer to lead the uncalled out of the house of bondage.
He saw the headless host turn toward him like the whirling of mad waters,—he stretched
forth his hands eagerly, and then, even as he stretched them, suddenly there swept across
the vision the temptation of Despair. They were not wicked men,—the problem of
life is not the problem of the wicked,—they were calm, good men, Bishops of the Apostolic
Church of God, and strove toward righteousness. They said slowly, "It is all very natural—it
is even commendable; but the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church cannot admit
a ***." And when that thin, half-grotesque figure
still haunted their doors, they put their hands kindly, half sorrowfully, on his shoulders,
and said, "Now,—of course, we—we know how YOU feel about it; but you see it is impossible,—that
is—well—it is premature. Sometime, we trust—sincerely trust—all
such distinctions will fade away; but now the world is as it is."
This was the temptation of Despair; and the young man fought it doggedly.
Like some grave shadow he flitted by those halls, pleading, arguing, half angrily demanding
admittance, until there came the final NO: until men hustled the disturber away, marked
him as foolish, unreasonable, and injudicious, a vain rebel against God's law.
And then from that Vision Splendid all the glory faded slowly away, and left an earth
gray and stern rolling on beneath a dark despair. Even the kind hands that stretched themselves
toward him from out the depths of that dull morning seemed but parts of the purple shadows.
He saw them coldly, and asked, "Why should I strive by special grace when the way of
the world is closed to me?" All gently yet, the hands urged him on,—the
hands of young John Jay, that daring father's daring son; the hands of the good folk of
Boston, that free city. And yet, with a way to the priesthood of the
Church open at last before him, the cloud lingered there; and even when in old St. Paul's
the venerable Bishop raised his white arms above the *** deacon—even then the burden
had not lifted from that heart, for there had passed a glory from the earth.
And yet the fire through which Alexander Crummell went did not burn in vain.
Slowly and more soberly he took up again his plan of life.
More critically he studied the situation. Deep down below the slavery and servitude
of the *** people he saw their fatal weaknesses, which long years of mistreatment had emphasized.
The dearth of strong moral character, of unbending righteousness, he felt, was their great shortcoming,
and here he would begin. He would gather the best of his people into
some little Episcopal chapel and there lead, teach, and inspire them, till the leaven spread,
till the children grew, till the world hearkened, till—till—and then across his dream gleamed
some faint after-glow of that first fair vision of youth—only an after-glow, for there had
passed a glory from the earth. One day—it was in 1842, and the springtide
was struggling merrily with the May winds of New England—he stood at last in his own
chapel in Providence, a priest of the Church. The days sped by, and the dark young clergyman
labored; he wrote his sermons carefully; he intoned his prayers with a soft, earnest voice;
he haunted the streets and accosted the wayfarers; he visited the sick, and knelt beside the
dying. He worked and toiled, week by week, day by
day, month by month. And yet month by month the congregation dwindled,
week by week the hollow walls echoed more sharply, day by day the calls came fewer and
fewer, and day by day the third temptation sat clearer and still more clearly within
the Veil; a temptation, as it were, bland and smiling, with just a shade of mockery
in its smooth tones. First it came casually, in the cadence of
a voice: "Oh, colored folks? Yes."
Or perhaps more definitely: "What do you EXPECT?" In voice and gesture lay the doubt—the temptation
of Doubt. How he hated it, and stormed at it furiously!
"Of course they are capable," he cried; "of course they can learn and strive and achieve—"
and "Of course," added the temptation softly, "they do nothing of the sort."
Of all the three temptations, this one struck the deepest.
Hate? He had outgrown so childish a thing.
Despair? He had steeled his right arm against it, and
fought it with the vigor of determination. But to doubt the worth of his life-work,—to
doubt the destiny and capability of the race his soul loved because it was his; to find
listless squalor instead of eager endeavor; to hear his own lips whispering, "They do
not care; they cannot know; they are dumb driven cattle,—why cast your pearls before
swine?"—this, this seemed more than man could bear; and he closed the door, and sank
upon the steps of the chancel, and cast his robe upon the floor and writhed.
The evening sunbeams had set the dust to dancing in the gloomy chapel when he arose.
He folded his vestments, put away the hymn-books, and closed the great Bible.
He stepped out into the twilight, looked back upon the narrow little pulpit with a weary
smile, and locked the door. Then he walked briskly to the Bishop, and told the Bishop
what the Bishop already knew. "I have failed," he said simply.
And gaining courage by the confession, he added: "What I need is a larger constituency.
There are comparatively few Negroes here, and perhaps they are not of the best.
I must go where the field is wider, and try again."
So the Bishop sent him to Philadelphia, with a letter to Bishop Onderdonk.
Bishop Onderdonk lived at the head of six white steps,—corpulent, red-faced, and the
author of several thrilling tracts on Apostolic Succession.
It was after dinner, and the Bishop had settled himself for a pleasant season of contemplation,
when the bell must needs ring, and there must burst in upon the Bishop a letter and a thin,
ungainly ***. Bishop Onderdonk read the letter hastily and
frowned. Fortunately, his mind was already clear on this point; and he cleared his brow
and looked at Crummell. Then he said, slowly and impressively: "I
will receive you into this diocese on one condition: no *** priest can sit in my church
convention, and no *** church must ask for representation there."
I sometimes fancy I can see that tableau: the frail black figure, nervously twitching
his hat before the massive abdomen of Bishop Onderdonk; his threadbare coat thrown against
the dark woodwork of the bookcases, where Fox's "Lives of the Martyrs" nestled happily
beside "The Whole Duty of Man." I seem to see the wide eyes of the *** wander
past the Bishop's broadcloth to where the swinging glass doors of the cabinet glow in
the sunlight. A little blue fly is trying to cross the yawning
keyhole. He marches briskly up to it, peers into the
chasm in a surprised sort of way, and rubs his feelers reflectively; then he essays its
depths, and, finding it bottomless, draws back again.
The dark-faced priest finds himself wondering if the fly too has faced its Valley of Humiliation,
and if it will plunge into it,—when lo! it spreads its tiny wings and buzzes merrily
across, leaving the watcher wingless and alone. Then the full weight of his burden fell upon
him. The rich walls wheeled away, and before him
lay the cold rough moor winding on through life, cut in twain by one thick granite ridge,—here,
the Valley of Humiliation; yonder, the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
And I know not which be darker,—no, not I. But this I know: in yonder Vale of the
Humble stand to-day a million swarthy men, who willingly would
". . . bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,"— all this and more would they bear did they
but know that this were sacrifice and not a meaner thing.
So surged the thought within that lone black breast.
The Bishop cleared his throat suggestively; then, recollecting that there was really nothing
to say, considerately said nothing, only sat tapping his foot impatiently.
But Alexander Crummell said, slowly and heavily: "I will never enter your diocese on such terms."
And saying this, he turned and passed into the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
You might have noted only the physical dying, the shattered frame and hacking cough; but
in that soul lay deeper death than that. He found a chapel in New York,—the church
of his father; he labored for it in poverty and starvation, scorned by his fellow priests.
Half in despair, he wandered across the sea, a beggar with outstretched hands.
Englishmen clasped them,—Wilberforce and Stanley, Thirwell and Ingles, and even Froude
and Macaulay; Sir Benjamin Brodie bade him rest awhile at Queen's College in Cambridge,
and there he lingered, struggling for health of body and mind, until he took his degree
in '53. Restless still, and unsatisfied, he turned
toward Africa, and for long years, amid the spawn of the slave-smugglers, sought a new
heaven and a new earth. So the man groped for light; all this was
not Life,—it was the world-wandering of a soul in search of itself, the striving of
one who vainly sought his place in the world, ever haunted by the shadow of a death that
is more than death,—the passing of a soul that has missed its duty.
Twenty years he wandered,—twenty years and more; and yet the hard rasping question kept
gnawing within him, "What, in God's name, am I on earth for?"
In the narrow New York parish his soul seemed cramped and smothered.
In the fine old air of the English University he heard the millions wailing over the sea.
In the wild fever-cursed swamps of West Africa he stood helpless and alone.
You will not wonder at his weird pilgrimage,—you who in the swift whirl of living, amid its
cold paradox and marvellous vision, have fronted life and asked its riddle face to face.
And if you find that riddle hard to read, remember that yonder black boy finds it just
a little harder; if it is difficult for you to find and face your duty, it is a shade
more difficult for him; if your heart sickens in the blood and dust of battle, remember
that to him the dust is thicker and the battle fiercer.
No wonder the wanderers fall! No wonder we point to thief and murderer,
and haunting ***, and the never-ending throng of unhearsed dead!
The Valley of the Shadow of Death gives few of its pilgrims back to the world.
But Alexander Crummell it gave back. Out of the temptation of Hate, and burned
by the fire of Despair, triumphant over Doubt, and steeled by Sacrifice against Humiliation,
he turned at last home across the waters, humble and strong, gentle and determined.
He bent to all the gibes and prejudices, to all hatred and discrimination, with that rare
courtesy which is the armor of pure souls. He fought among his own, the low, the grasping,
and the wicked, with that unbending righteousness which is the sword of the just.
He never faltered, he seldom complained; he simply worked, inspiring the young, rebuking
the old, helping the weak, guiding the strong. So he grew, and brought within his wide influence
all that was best of those who walk within the Veil.
They who live without knew not nor dreamed of that full power within, that mighty inspiration
which the dull gauze of caste decreed that most men should not know.
And now that he is gone, I sweep the Veil away and cry, Lo! the soul to whose dear memory
I bring this little tribute. I can see his face still, dark and heavy-lined
beneath his snowy hair; lighting and shading, now with inspiration for the future, now in
innocent pain at some human wickedness, now with sorrow at some hard memory from the past.
The more I met Alexander Crummell, the more I felt how much that world was losing which
knew so little of him. In another age he might have sat among the
elders of the land in purple-bordered toga; in another country mothers might have sung
him to the cradles. He did his work,—he did it nobly and well;
and yet I sorrow that here he worked alone, with so little human sympathy.
His name to-day, in this broad land, means little, and comes to fifty million ears laden
with no incense of memory or emulation. And herein lies the tragedy of the age: not
that men are poor,—all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked,—who
is good? not that men are ignorant,—what is Truth?
Nay, but that men know so little of men. He sat one morning gazing toward the sea.
He smiled and said, "The gate is rusty on the hinges."
That night at starrise a wind came moaning out of the west to blow the gate ajar, and
then the soul I loved fled like a flame across the Seas, and in its seat sat Death.
I wonder where he is to-day? I wonder if in that dim world beyond, as he
came gliding in, there rose on some wan throne a King,—a dark and pierced Jew, who knows
the writhings of the earthly damned, saying, as he laid those heart-wrung talents down,
"Well done!" while round about the morning stars sat singing.
End of Chapter XII Chapter XIII
Of the Coming of John
What bring they 'neath the midnight,
Beside the River-sea? They bring the human heart wherein
No nightly calm can be; That droppeth never with the wind,
Nor drieth with the dew; O calm it, God; thy calm is broad
To cover spirits too.
The river floweth on.
Mrs. Browning
Carlisle Street runs westward from the centre of Johnstown, across a great black bridge,
down a hill and up again, by little shops and meat-markets, past single-storied homes,
until suddenly it stops against a wide green lawn.
It is a broad, restful place, with two large buildings outlined against the west.
When at evening the winds come swelling from the east, and the great pall of the city's
smoke hangs wearily above the valley, then the red west glows like a dreamland down Carlisle
Street, and, at the tolling of the supper-bell, throws the passing forms of students in dark
silhouette against the sky. Tall and black, they move slowly by, and seem
in the sinister light to flit before the city like dim warning ghosts.
Perhaps they are; for this is Wells Institute, and these black students have few dealings
with the white city below. And if you will notice, night after night,
there is one dark form that ever hurries last and late toward the twinkling lights of Swain
Hall,—for Jones is never on time. A long, straggling fellow he is, brown and
hard-haired, who seems to be growing straight out of his clothes, and walks with a half-apologetic
roll. He used perpetually to set the quiet dining-room
into waves of merriment, as he stole to his place after the bell had tapped for prayers;
he seemed so perfectly awkward. And yet one glance at his face made one forgive
him much,—that broad, good-natured smile in which lay no bit of art or artifice, but
seemed just bubbling good-nature and genuine satisfaction with the world.
He came to us from Altamaha, away down there beneath the gnarled oaks of Southeastern Georgia,
where the sea croons to the sands and the sands listen till they sink half drowned beneath
the waters, rising only here and there in long, low islands.
The white folk of Altamaha voted John a good boy,—fine plough-hand, good in the rice-fields,
handy everywhere, and always good-natured and respectful.
But they shook their heads when his mother wanted to send him off to school. "It'll spoil
him,—ruin him," they said; and they talked as though they knew.
But full half the black folk followed him proudly to the station, and carried his ***
little trunk and many bundles. And there they shook and shook hands, and
the girls kissed him shyly and the boys clapped him on the back.
So the train came, and he pinched his little sister lovingly, and put his great arms about
his mother's neck, and then was away with a puff and a roar into the great yellow world
that flamed and flared about the doubtful pilgrim.
Up the coast they hurried, past the squares and palmettos of Savannah, through the cotton-fields
and through the weary night, to Millville, and came with the morning to the noise and
bustle of Johnstown. And they that stood behind, that morning in
Altamaha, and watched the train as it noisily bore playmate and brother and son away to
the world, had thereafter one ever-recurring word,—"When John comes." Then what parties
were to be, and what speakings in the churches; what new furniture in the front room,—perhaps
even a new front room; and there would be a new schoolhouse, with John as teacher; and
then perhaps a big wedding; all this and more—when John comes.
But the white people shook their heads. At first he was coming at Christmas-time,—but
the vacation proved too short; and then, the next summer,—but times were hard and schooling
costly, and so, instead, he worked in Johnstown. And so it drifted to the next summer, and
the next,—till playmates scattered, and mother grew gray, and sister went up to the
Judge's kitchen to work. And still the legend lingered,—"When John
comes." Up at the Judge's they rather liked this refrain;
for they too had a John—a fair-haired, smooth-faced boy, who had played many a long summer's day
to its close with his darker namesake. "Yes, sir!
John is at Princeton, sir," said the broad-shouldered gray-haired Judge every morning as he marched
down to the post-office. "Showing the Yankees what a Southern gentleman
can do," he added; and strode home again with his letters and papers.
Up at the great pillared house they lingered long over the Princeton letter,—the Judge
and his frail wife, his sister and growing daughters.
"It'll make a man of him," said the Judge, "college is the place."
And then he asked the shy little waitress, "Well, Jennie, how's your John?" and added
reflectively, "Too bad, too bad your mother sent him off—it will spoil him."
And the waitress wondered. Thus in the far-away Southern village the
world lay waiting, half consciously, the coming of two young men, and dreamed in an inarticulate
way of new things that would be done and new thoughts that all would think.
And yet it was singular that few thought of two Johns,—for the black folk thought of
one John, and he was black; and the white folk thought of another John, and he was white.
And neither world thought the other world's thought, save with a vague unrest.
Up in Johnstown, at the Institute, we were long puzzled at the case of John Jones.
For a long time the clay seemed unfit for any sort of moulding.
He was loud and boisterous, always laughing and singing, and never able to work consecutively
at anything. He did not know how to study; he had no idea
of thoroughness; and with his tardiness, carelessness, and appalling good-humor, we were sore perplexed.
One night we sat in faculty-meeting, worried and serious; for Jones was in trouble again.
This last escapade was too much, and so we solemnly voted "that Jones, on account of
repeated disorder and inattention to work, be suspended for the rest of the term."
It seemed to us that the first time life ever struck Jones as a really serious thing was
when the Dean told him he must leave school. He stared at the gray-haired man blankly,
with great eyes. "Why,—why," he faltered, "but—I haven't
graduated!" Then the Dean slowly and clearly explained,
reminding him of the tardiness and the carelessness, of the poor lessons and neglected work, of
the noise and disorder, until the fellow hung his head in confusion.
Then he said quickly, "But you won't tell mammy and sister,—you won't write mammy,
now will you? For if you won't I'll go out into the city
and work, and come back next term and show you something."
So the Dean promised faithfully, and John shouldered his little trunk, giving neither
word nor look to the giggling boys, and walked down Carlisle Street to the great city, with
sober eyes and a set and serious face. Perhaps we imagined it, but someway it seemed
to us that the serious look that crept over his boyish face that afternoon never left
it again. When he came back to us he went to work with
all his rugged strength. It was a hard struggle, for things did not
come easily to him,—few crowding memories of early life and teaching came to help him
on his new way; but all the world toward which he strove was of his own building, and he
builded slow and hard. As the light dawned lingeringly on his new
creations, he sat rapt and silent before the vision, or wandered alone over the green campus
peering through and beyond the world of men into a world of thought.
And the thoughts at times puzzled him sorely; he could not see just why the circle was not
square, and carried it out fifty-six decimal places one midnight,—would have gone further,
indeed, had not the matron rapped for lights out.
He caught terrible colds lying on his back in the meadows of nights, trying to think
out the solar system; he had grave doubts as to the ethics of the Fall of Rome, and
strongly suspected the Germans of being thieves and rascals, despite his textbooks; he pondered
long over every new Greek word, and wondered why this meant that and why it couldn't mean
something else, and how it must have felt to think all things in Greek.
So he thought and puzzled along for himself,—pausing perplexed where others skipped merrily, and
walking steadily through the difficulties where the rest stopped and surrendered.
Thus he grew in body and soul, and with him his clothes seemed to grow and arrange themselves;
coat sleeves got longer, cuffs appeared, and collars got less soiled.
Now and then his boots shone, and a new dignity crept into his walk.
And we who saw daily a new thoughtfulness growing in his eyes began to expect something
of this plodding boy. Thus he passed out of the preparatory school into college, and we
who watched him felt four more years of change, which almost transformed the tall, grave man
who bowed to us commencement morning. He had left his *** thought-world and come
back to a world of motion and of men. He looked now for the first time sharply about him,
and wondered he had seen so little before. He grew slowly to feel almost for the first
time the Veil that lay between him and the white world; he first noticed now the oppression
that had not seemed oppression before, differences that erstwhile seemed natural, restraints
and slights that in his boyhood days had gone unnoticed or been greeted with a laugh. He
felt angry now when men did not call him "Mister," he clenched his hands at the "Jim Crow" cars,
and chafed at the color-line that hemmed in him and his.
A tinge of sarcasm crept into his speech, and a vague bitterness into his life; and
he sat long hours wondering and planning a way around these crooked things.
Daily he found himself shrinking from the choked and narrow life of his native town.
And yet he always planned to go back to Altamaha,—always planned to work there.
Still, more and more as the day approached he hesitated with a nameless dread; and even
the day after graduation he seized with eagerness the offer of the Dean to send him North with
the quartette during the summer vacation, to sing for the Institute.
A breath of air before the plunge, he said to himself in half apology.
It was a bright September afternoon, and the streets of New York were brilliant with moving
men. They reminded John of the sea, as he sat in
the square and watched them, so changelessly changing, so bright and dark, so grave and
gay. He scanned their rich and faultless clothes,
the way they carried their hands, the shape of their hats; he peered into the hurrying
carriages. Then, leaning back with a sigh, he said, "This
is the World." The notion suddenly seized him to see where
the world was going; since many of the richer and brighter seemed hurrying all one way.
So when a tall, light-haired young man and a little talkative lady came by, he rose half
hesitatingly and followed them. Up the street they went, past stores and gay shops, across
a broad square, until with a hundred others they entered the high portal of a great building.
He was pushed toward the ticket-office with the others, and felt in his pocket for the
new five-dollar bill he had hoarded. There seemed really no time for hesitation,
so he drew it bravely out, passed it to the busy clerk, and received simply a ticket but
no change. When at last he realized that he had paid
five dollars to enter he knew not what, he stood stockstill amazed.
"Be careful," said a low voice behind him; "you must not lynch the colored gentleman
simply because he's in your way," and a girl looked up roguishly into the eyes of her fair-haired
escort. A shade of annoyance passed over the escort's
face. "You WILL not understand us at the South,"
he said half impatiently, as if continuing an argument.
"With all your professions, one never sees in the North so cordial and intimate relations
between white and black as are everyday occurrences with us.
Why, I remember my closest playfellow in boyhood was a little *** named after me, and surely
no two,—WELL!" The man stopped short and flushed to the roots of his hair, for there
directly beside his reserved orchestra chairs sat the *** he had stumbled over in the
hallway. He hesitated and grew pale with anger, called
the usher and gave him his card, with a few peremptory words, and slowly sat down.
The lady deftly changed the subject. All this John did not see, for he sat in a
half-daze minding the scene about him; the delicate beauty of the hall, the faint perfume,
the moving myriad of men, the rich clothing and low hum of talking seemed all a part of
a world so different from his, so strangely more beautiful than anything he had known,
that he sat in dreamland, and started when, after a hush, rose high and clear the music
of Lohengrin's swan. The infinite beauty of the wail lingered and
swept through every muscle of his frame, and put it all a-tune.
He closed his eyes and grasped the elbows of the chair, touching unwittingly the lady's
arm. And the lady drew away.
A deep longing swelled in all his heart to rise with that clear music out of the dirt
and dust of that low life that held him prisoned and befouled.
If he could only live up in the free air where birds sang and setting suns had no touch of
blood! Who had called him to be the slave and butt
of all? And if he had called, what right had he to
call when a world like this lay open before men?
Then the movement changed, and fuller, mightier harmony swelled away. He looked thoughtfully
across the hall, and wondered why the beautiful gray-haired woman looked so listless, and
what the little man could be whispering about. He would not like to be listless and idle,
he thought, for he felt with the music the movement of power within him. If he but had
some master-work, some life-service, hard,—aye, bitter hard, but without the cringing and
sickening servility, without the cruel hurt that hardened his heart and soul.
When at last a soft sorrow crept across the violins, there came to him the vision of a
far-off home, the great eyes of his sister, and the dark drawn face of his mother.
And his heart sank below the waters, even as the sea-sand sinks by the shores of Altamaha,
only to be lifted aloft again with that last ethereal wail of the swan that quivered and
faded away into the sky. It left John sitting so silent and rapt that
he did not for some time notice the usher tapping him lightly on the shoulder and saying
politely, "Will you step this way, please, sir?"
A little surprised, he arose quickly at the last tap, and, turning to leave his seat,
looked full into the face of the fair-haired young man.
For the first time the young man recognized his dark boyhood playmate, and John knew that
it was the Judge's son. The White John started, lifted his hand, and
then froze into his chair; the black John smiled lightly, then grimly, and followed
the usher down the aisle. The manager was sorry, very, very sorry,—but
he explained that some mistake had been made in selling the gentleman a seat already disposed
of; he would refund the money, of course,—and indeed felt the matter keenly, and so forth,
and—before he had finished John was gone, walking hurriedly across the square and down
the broad streets, and as he passed the park he buttoned his coat and said, "John Jones,
you're a natural-born fool." Then he went to his lodgings and wrote a letter, and tore
it up; he wrote another, and threw it in the fire.
Then he seized a scrap of paper and wrote: "Dear Mother and Sister—I am coming—John."
"Perhaps," said John, as he settled himself on the train, "perhaps I am to blame myself
in struggling against my manifest destiny simply because it looks hard and unpleasant.
Here is my duty to Altamaha plain before me; perhaps they'll let me help settle the ***
problems there,—perhaps they won't. 'I will go in to the King, which is not according
to the law; and if I perish, I perish.'" And then he mused and dreamed, and planned a life-work;
and the train flew south. Down in Altamaha, after seven long years,
all the world knew John was coming. The homes were scrubbed and scoured,—above
all, one; the gardens and yards had an unwonted trimness, and Jennie bought a new gingham.
With some finesse and negotiation, all the dark Methodists and Presbyterians were induced
to join in a monster welcome at the Baptist Church; and as the day drew near, warm discussions
arose on every corner as to the exact extent and nature of John's accomplishments.
It was noontide on a gray and cloudy day when he came.
The black town flocked to the depot, with a little of the white at the edges,—a happy
throng, with "Good-mawnings" and "Howdys" and laughing and joking and jostling.
Mother sat yonder in the window watching; but sister Jennie stood on the platform, nervously
fingering her dress, tall and lithe, with soft brown skin and loving eyes peering from
out a tangled wilderness of hair. John rose gloomily as the train stopped, for
he was thinking of the "Jim Crow" car; he stepped to the platform, and paused: a little
dingy station, a black crowd gaudy and dirty, a half-mile of dilapidated shanties along
a straggling ditch of mud. An overwhelming sense of the sordidness and
narrowness of it all seized him; he looked in vain for his mother, kissed coldly the
tall, strange girl who called him brother, spoke a short, dry word here and there; then,
lingering neither for handshaking nor gossip, started silently up the street, raising his
hat merely to the last eager old aunty, to her open-mouthed astonishment.
The people were distinctly bewildered. This silent, cold man,—was this John?
Where was his smile and hearty hand-grasp? "'Peared kind o' down in the mouf," said the
Methodist preacher thoughtfully. "Seemed monstus stuck up," complained a Baptist
sister. But the white postmaster from the edge of
the crowd expressed the opinion of his folks plainly.
"That damn ***," said he, as he shouldered the mail and arranged his tobacco, "has gone
North and got plum full o' fool notions; but they won't work in Altamaha."
And the crowd melted away. The meeting of welcome at the Baptist Church
was a failure. Rain spoiled the barbecue, and thunder turned
the milk in the ice-cream. When the speaking came at night, the house was crowded to overflowing.
The three preachers had especially prepared themselves, but somehow John's manner seemed
to throw a blanket over everything,—he seemed so cold and preoccupied, and had so strange
an air of restraint that the Methodist brother could not warm up to his theme and elicited
not a single "Amen"; the Presbyterian prayer was but feebly responded to, and even the
Baptist preacher, though he wakened faint enthusiasm, got so mixed up in his favorite
sentence that he had to close it by stopping fully fifteen minutes sooner than he meant.
The people moved uneasily in their seats as John rose to reply.
He spoke slowly and methodically. The age, he said, demanded new ideas; we were
far different from those men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,—with broader ideas
of human brotherhood and destiny. Then he spoke of the rise of charity and popular
education, and particularly of the spread of wealth and work.
The question was, then, he added reflectively, looking at the low discolored ceiling, what
part the Negroes of this land would take in the striving of the new century.
He sketched in vague outline the new Industrial School that might rise among these pines,
he spoke in detail of the charitable and philanthropic work that might be organized, of money that
might be saved for banks and business. Finally he urged unity, and deprecated especially
religious and denominational bickering. "To-day," he said, with a smile, "the world
cares little whether a man be Baptist or Methodist, or indeed a churchman at all, so long as he
is good and true. What difference does it make whether a man
be baptized in river or washbowl, or not at all?
Let's leave all that littleness, and look higher."
Then, thinking of nothing else, he slowly sat down.
A painful hush seized that crowded mass. Little had they understood of what he said,
for he spoke an unknown tongue, save the last word about baptism; that they knew, and they
sat very still while the clock ticked. Then at last a low suppressed snarl came from
the Amen corner, and an old bent man arose, walked over the seats, and climbed straight
up into the pulpit. He was wrinkled and black, with scant gray
and tufted hair; his voice and hands shook as with palsy; but on his face lay the intense
rapt look of the religious fanatic. He seized the Bible with his rough, huge hands;
twice he raised it inarticulate, and then fairly burst into words, with rude and awful
eloquence. He quivered, swayed, and bent; then rose aloft
in perfect majesty, till the people moaned and wept, wailed and shouted, and a wild shrieking
arose from the corners where all the pent-up feeling of the hour gathered itself and rushed
into the air. John never knew clearly what the old man said;
he only felt himself held up to scorn and scathing denunciation for trampling on the
true Religion, and he realized with amazement that all unknowingly he had put rough, rude
hands on something this little world held sacred.
He arose silently, and passed out into the night.
Down toward the sea he went, in the fitful starlight, half conscious of the girl who
followed timidly after him. When at last he stood upon the bluff, he turned to his little
sister and looked upon her sorrowfully, remembering with sudden pain how little thought he had
given her. He put his arm about her and let her passion
of tears spend itself on his shoulder. Long they stood together, peering over the
gray unresting water. "John," she said, "does it make every one—unhappy
when they study and learn lots of things?" He paused and smiled.
"I am afraid it does," he said. "And, John, are you glad you studied?"
"Yes," came the answer, slowly but positively. She watched the flickering lights upon the
sea, and said thoughtfully, "I wish I was unhappy,—and—and," putting both arms about
his neck, "I think I am, a little, John." It was several days later that John walked
up to the Judge's house to ask for the privilege of teaching the *** school.
The Judge himself met him at the front door, stared a little hard at him, and said brusquely,
"Go 'round to the kitchen door, John, and wait."
Sitting on the kitchen steps, John stared at the corn, thoroughly perplexed.
What on earth had come over him? Every step he made offended some one.
He had come to save his people, and before he left the depot he had hurt them.
He sought to teach them at the church, and had outraged their deepest feelings.
He had schooled himself to be respectful to the Judge, and then blundered into his front
door. And all the time he had meant right,—and
yet, and yet, somehow he found it so hard and strange to fit his old surroundings again,
to find his place in the world about him. He could not remember that he used to have
any difficulty in the past, when life was glad and gay.
The world seemed smooth and easy then. Perhaps,—but his sister came to the kitchen
door just then and said the Judge awaited him.
The Judge sat in the dining-room amid his morning's mail, and he did not ask John to
sit down. He plunged squarely into the business. "You've
come for the school, I suppose. Well John, I want to speak to you plainly.
You know I'm a friend to your people. I've helped you and your family, and would
have done more if you hadn't got the notion of going off.
Now I like the colored people, and sympathize with all their reasonable aspirations; but
you and I both know, John, that in this country the *** must remain subordinate, and can
never expect to be the equal of white men. In their place, your people can be honest
and respectful; and God knows, I'll do what I can to help them.
But when they want to reverse nature, and rule white men, and marry white women, and
sit in my parlor, then, by God! we'll hold them under if we have to lynch every ***
in the land. Now, John, the question is, are you, with
your education and Northern notions, going to accept the situation and teach the darkies
to be faithful servants and laborers as your fathers were,—I knew your father, John,
he belonged to my brother, and he was a good ***.
Well—well, are you going to be like him, or are you going to try to put fool ideas
of rising and equality into these folks' heads, and make them discontented and unhappy?"
"I am going to accept the situation, Judge Henderson," answered John, with a brevity
that did not escape the keen old man. He hesitated a moment, and then said shortly,
"Very well,—we'll try you awhile. Good-morning." It was a full month after the opening of the
*** school that the other John came home, tall, gay, and headstrong.
The mother wept, the sisters sang. The whole white town was glad.
A proud man was the Judge, and it was a goodly sight to see the two swinging down Main Street
together. And yet all did not go smoothly between them,
for the younger man could not and did not veil his contempt for the little town, and
plainly had his heart set on New York. Now the one cherished ambition of the Judge
was to see his son mayor of Altamaha, representative to the legislature, and—who could say?—governor
of Georgia. So the argument often waxed hot between them.
"Good heavens, father," the younger man would say after dinner, as he lighted a cigar and
stood by the fireplace, "you surely don't expect a young fellow like me to settle down
permanently in this—this God-forgotten town with nothing but mud and Negroes?"
"I did," the Judge would answer laconically; and on this particular day it seemed from
the gathering scowl that he was about to add something more emphatic, but neighbors had
already begun to drop in to admire his son, and the conversation drifted.
"Heah that John is livenin' things up at the darky school," volunteered the postmaster,
after a pause. "What now?" asked the Judge, sharply.
"Oh, nothin' in particulah,—just his almighty air and uppish ways. B'lieve I did heah somethin'
about his givin' talks on the French Revolution, equality, and such like.
He's what I call a dangerous ***." "Have you heard him say anything out of the
way?" "Why, no,—but Sally, our girl, told my wife
a lot of rot. Then, too, I don't need to heah: a ***
what won't say 'sir' to a white man, or—" "Who is this John?" interrupted the son.
"Why, it's little black John, Peggy's son,—your old playfellow."
The young man's face flushed angrily, and then he laughed.
"Oh," said he, "it's the darky that tried to force himself into a seat beside the lady
I was escorting—" But Judge Henderson waited to hear no more.
He had been nettled all day, and now at this he rose with a half-smothered oath, took his
hat and cane, and walked straight to the schoolhouse. For John, it had been a long, hard pull to
get things started in the rickety old shanty that sheltered his school.
The Negroes were rent into factions for and against him, the parents were careless, the
children irregular and dirty, and books, pencils, and slates largely missing.
Nevertheless, he struggled hopefully on, and seemed to see at last some glimmering of dawn.
The attendance was larger and the children were a shade cleaner this week.
Even the *** class in reading showed a little comforting progress.
So John settled himself with renewed patience this afternoon.
"Now, Mandy," he said cheerfully, "that's better; but you mustn't chop your words up
so: 'If—the-man—goes.' Why, your little brother even wouldn't tell a story that way,
now would he?" "Naw, suh, he cain't talk."
"All right; now let's try again: 'If the man—' "John!"
The whole school started in surprise, and the teacher half arose, as the red, angry
face of the Judge appeared in the open doorway. "John, this school is closed.
You children can go home and get to work. The white people of Altamaha are not spending
their money on black folks to have their heads crammed with impudence and lies.
Clear out! I'll lock the door myself."
Up at the great pillared house the tall young son wandered aimlessly about after his father's
abrupt departure. In the house there was little to interest
him; the books were old and stale, the local newspaper flat, and the women had retired
with headaches and sewing. He tried a nap, but it was too warm.
So he sauntered out into the fields, complaining disconsolately, "Good Lord! how long will
this imprisonment last!" He was not a bad fellow,—just a little spoiled
and self-indulgent, and as headstrong as his proud father.
He seemed a young man pleasant to look upon, as he sat on the great black stump at the
edge of the pines idly swinging his legs and smoking.
"Why, there isn't even a girl worth getting up a respectable flirtation with," he growled.
Just then his eye caught a tall, willowy figure hurrying toward him on the narrow path.
He looked with interest at first, and then burst into a laugh as he said, "Well, I declare,
if it isn't Jennie, the little brown kitchen-maid! Why, I never noticed before what a trim little
body she is. Hello, Jennie!
Why, you haven't kissed me since I came home," he said gaily.
The young girl stared at him in surprise and confusion,—faltered something inarticulate,
and attempted to pass. But a wilful mood had seized the young idler,
and he caught at her arm. Frightened, she slipped by; and half mischievously
he turned and ran after her through the tall pines.
Yonder, toward the sea, at the end of the path, came John slowly, with his head down.
He had turned wearily homeward from the schoolhouse; then, thinking to shield his mother from the
blow, started to meet his sister as she came from work and break the news of his dismissal
to her. "I'll go away," he said slowly; "I'll go away
and find work, and send for them. I cannot live here longer."
And then the fierce, buried anger surged up into his throat.
He waved his arms and hurried wildly up the path.
The great brown sea lay silent. The air scarce breathed.
The dying day bathed the twisted oaks and mighty pines in black and gold.
There came from the wind no warning, not a whisper from the cloudless sky. There was
only a black man hurrying on with an ache in his heart, seeing neither sun nor sea,
but starting as from a dream at the frightened cry that woke the pines, to see his dark sister
struggling in the arms of a tall and fair-haired man.
He said not a word, but, seizing a fallen limb, struck him with all the pent-up hatred
of his great black arm, and the body lay white and still beneath the pines, all bathed in
sunshine and in blood. John looked at it dreamily, then walked back
to the house briskly, and said in a soft voice, "Mammy, I'm going away—I'm going to be free."
She gazed at him dimly and faltered, "No'th, honey, is yo' gwine No'th agin?"
He looked out where the North Star glistened pale above the waters, and said, "Yes, mammy,
I'm going—North." Then, without another word, he went out into
the narrow lane, up by the straight pines, to the same winding path, and seated himself
on the great black stump, looking at the blood where the body had lain. Yonder in the gray
past he had played with that dead boy, romping together under the solemn trees.
The night deepened; he thought of the boys at Johnstown.
He wondered how Brown had turned out, and Carey? And Jones,—Jones?
Why, he was Jones, and he wondered what they would all say when they knew, when they knew,
in that great long dining-room with its hundreds of merry eyes.
Then as the sheen of the starlight stole over him, he thought of the gilded ceiling of that
vast concert hall, heard stealing toward him the faint sweet music of the swan. Hark! was
it music, or the hurry and shouting of men? Yes, surely! Clear and high the faint sweet
melody rose and fluttered like a living thing, so that the very earth trembled as with the
*** of horses and murmur of angry men. He leaned back and smiled toward the sea,
whence rose the strange melody, away from the dark shadows where lay the noise of horses
galloping, galloping on. With an effort he roused himself, bent forward,
and looked steadily down the pathway, softly humming the "Song of the Bride,"—
"Freudig gefuhrt, ziehet dahin." Amid the trees in the dim morning twilight
he watched their shadows dancing and heard their horses thundering toward him, until
at last they came sweeping like a storm, and he saw in front that haggard white-haired
man, whose eyes flashed red with fury. Oh, how he pitied him,—pitied him,—and
wondered if he had the coiling twisted rope. Then, as the storm burst round him, he rose
slowly to his feet and turned his closed eyes toward the Sea.
And the world whistled in his ears. End of Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV Of the Sorrow Songs
I walk through the churchyard
To lay this body down; I know moon-rise, I know star-rise;
I walk in the moonlight, I walk in the starlight; I'll lie in the grave and stretch out my arms,
I'll go to judgment in the evening of the day,
And my soul and thy soul shall meet that day,
When I lay this body down.
*** Song They that walked in darkness sang songs in
the olden days—Sorrow Songs—for they were weary at heart.
And so before each thought that I have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting
echo of these weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men. Ever
since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely.
They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as
of me and of mine. Then in after years when I came to Nashville
I saw the great temple builded of these songs towering over the pale city.
To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red
with the blood and dust of toil. Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts
of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices
of the past. Little of beauty has America given the world
save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her ***; the human spirit in this new
world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty.
And so by fateful chance the *** folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day
not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human
experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half
despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding,
it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift
of the *** people. Away back in the thirties the melody of these
slave songs stirred the nation, but the songs were soon half forgotten.
Some, like "Near the lake where drooped the willow," passed into current airs and their
source was forgotten; others were caricatured on the "minstrel" stage and their memory died
away. Then in war-time came the singular Port Royal
experiment after the capture of Hilton Head, and perhaps for the first time the North met
the Southern slave face to face and heart to heart with no third witness.
The Sea Islands of the Carolinas, where they met, were filled with a black folk of primitive
type, touched and moulded less by the world about them than any others outside the Black
Belt. Their appearance was uncouth, their language
funny, but their hearts were human and their singing stirred men with a mighty power. Thomas
Wentworth Higginson hastened to tell of these songs, and Miss McKim and others urged upon
the world their rare beauty. But the world listened only half credulously
until the Fisk Jubilee Singers sang the slave songs so deeply into the world's heart that
it can never wholly forget them again. There was once a blacksmith's son born at
Cadiz, New York, who in the changes of time taught school in Ohio and helped defend Cincinnati
from Kirby Smith. Then he fought at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg
and finally served in the Freedmen's Bureau at Nashville.
Here he formed a Sunday-school class of black children in 1866, and sang with them and taught
them to sing. And then they taught him to sing, and when
once the glory of the Jubilee songs passed into the soul of George L. White, he knew
his life-work was to let those Negroes sing to the world as they had sung to him.
So in 1871 the pilgrimage of the Fisk Jubilee Singers began.
North to Cincinnati they rode,—four half-clothed black boys and five girl-women,—led by a
man with a cause and a purpose. They stopped at Wilberforce, the oldest of *** schools,
where a black bishop blessed them. Then they went, fighting cold and starvation,
shut out of hotels, and cheerfully sneered at, ever northward; and ever the magic of
their song kept thrilling hearts, until a burst of applause in the Congregational Council
at Oberlin revealed them to the world. They came to New York and Henry Ward Beecher
dared to welcome them, even though the metropolitan dailies sneered at his "*** Minstrels."
So their songs conquered till they sang across the land and across the sea, before Queen
and Kaiser, in Scotland and Ireland, Holland and Switzerland.
Seven years they sang, and brought back a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to found
Fisk University. Since their day they have been imitated—sometimes
well, by the singers of Hampton and Atlanta, sometimes ill, by straggling quartettes. Caricature
has sought again to spoil the quaint beauty of the music, and has filled the air with
many debased melodies which vulgar ears scarce know from the real.
But the true *** folk-song still lives in the hearts of those who have heard them truly
sung and in the hearts of the *** people. What are these songs, and what do they mean?
I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something
of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the slave
to the world. They tell us in these eager days that life
was joyous to the black slave, careless and happy.
I can easily believe this of some, of many. But not all the past South, though it rose
from the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching witness of these songs.
They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell
of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings
and hidden ways. The songs are indeed the siftings of centuries;
the music is far more ancient than the words, and in it we can trace here and there signs
of development. My grandfather's grandmother was seized by
an evil Dutch trader two centuries ago; and coming to the valleys of the Hudson and Housatonic,
black, little, and lithe, she shivered and shrank in the harsh north winds, looked longingly
at the hills, and often crooned a heathen melody to the child between her knees, thus:
Do ba-na co-ba, ge-ne me, ge-ne me! Do ba-na co-ba, ge-ne me, ge-ne me!
Ben d' nu-li, nu-li, nu-li, ben d' le. The child sang it to his children and they
to their children's children, and so two hundred years it has travelled down to us and we sing
it to our children, knowing as little as our fathers what its words may mean, but knowing
well the meaning of its music. This was primitive African music; it may be
seen in larger form in the strange chant which heralds "The Coming of John":
"You may bury me in the East,
You may bury me in the West,
But I'll hear the trumpet sound in that morning," —the voice of exile.
Ten master songs, more or less, one may pluck from the forest of melody-songs of undoubted
*** origin and wide popular currency, and songs peculiarly characteristic of the slave.
One of these I have just mentioned. Another whose strains begin this book is "Nobody
knows the trouble I've seen." When, struck with a sudden poverty, the United
States refused to fulfill its promises of land to the freedmen, a brigadier-general
went down to the Sea Islands to carry the news.
An old woman on the outskirts of the throng began singing this song; all the mass joined
with her, swaying. And the soldier wept.
The third song is the cradle-song of death which all men know,-"Swing low, sweet chariot,"—whose
bars begin the life story of "Alexander Crummell." Then there is the song of many waters, "Roll,
Jordan, roll," a mighty chorus with minor cadences.
There were many songs of the fugitive like that which opens "The Wings of Atalanta,"
and the more familiar "Been a-listening." The seventh is the song of the End and the
Beginning—"My Lord, what a mourning! when the stars begin to fall"; a strain of this
is placed before "The Dawn of Freedom." The song of groping—"My way's cloudy"—begins
"The Meaning of Progress"; the ninth is the song of this chapter—"Wrestlin' Jacob, the
day is a-breaking,"—a paean of hopeful strife. The last master song is the song of songs—"Steal
away,"—sprung from "The Faith of the Fathers." There are many others of the *** folk-songs
as striking and characteristic as these, as, for instance, the three strains in the third,
eighth, and ninth chapters; and others I am sure could easily make a selection on more
scientific principles. There are, too, songs that seem to be a step
removed from the more primitive types: there is the maze-like medley, "Bright sparkles,"
one phrase of which heads "The Black Belt"; the Easter carol, "Dust, dust and ashes";
the dirge, "My mother's took her flight and gone home"; and that burst of melody hovering
over "The Passing of the First-Born"—"I hope my mother will be there in that beautiful
world on high." These represent a third step in the development
of the slave song, of which "You may bury me in the East" is the first, and songs like
"March on" (chapter six) and "Steal away" are the second.
The first is African music, the second Afro-American, while the third is a blending of *** music
with the music heard in the foster land. The result is still distinctively *** and
the method of blending original, but the elements are both *** and Caucasian.
One might go further and find a fourth step in this development, where the songs of white
America have been distinctively influenced by the slave songs or have incorporated whole
phrases of *** melody, as "Swanee River" and "Old Black Joe." Side by side, too, with
the growth has gone the debasements and imitations—the *** "minstrel" songs, many of the "gospel"
hymns, and some of the contemporary "***" songs,—a mass of music in which the novice
may easily lose himself and never find the real *** melodies.
In these songs, I have said, the slave spoke to the world.
Such a message is naturally veiled and half articulate.
Words and music have lost each other and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theology
have displaced the older sentiment. Once in a while we catch a strange word of
an unknown tongue, as the "Mighty Myo," which figures as a river of death; more often slight
words or mere doggerel are joined to music of singular sweetness.
Purely secular songs are few in number, partly because many of them were turned into hymns
by a change of words, partly because the frolics were seldom heard by the stranger, and the
music less often caught. Of nearly all the songs, however, the music
is distinctly sorrowful. The ten master songs I have mentioned tell
in word and music of trouble and exile, of strife and hiding; they grope toward some
unseen power and sigh for rest in the End. The words that are left to us are not without
interest, and, cleared of evident dross, they conceal much of real poetry and meaning beneath
conventional theology and unmeaning rhapsody. Like all primitive folk, the slave stood near
to Nature's heart. Life was a "rough and rolling sea" like the
brown Atlantic of the Sea Islands; the "Wilderness" was the home of God, and the "lonesome valley"
led to the way of life. "Winter'll soon be over," was the picture of life and death to
a tropical imagination. The sudden wild thunderstorms of the South
awed and impressed the Negroes,—at times the rumbling seemed to them "mournful," at
times imperious:
"My Lord calls me, He calls me by the thunder,
The trumpet sounds it in my soul." The monotonous toil and exposure is painted
in many words. One sees the ploughmen in the hot, moist furrow,
singing:
"Dere's no rain to wet you,
Dere's no sun to burn you,
Oh, push along, believer,
I want to go home." The bowed and bent old man cries, with thrice-repeated
wail:
"O Lord, keep me from sinking down," and he rebukes the devil of doubt who can
whisper:
"Jesus is dead and God's gone away." Yet the soul-hunger is there, the restlessness
of the savage, the wail of the wanderer, and the plaint is put in one little phrase:
My soul wants something that's new, that's new
Over the inner thoughts of the slaves and their relations one with another the shadow
of fear ever hung, so that we get but glimpses here and there, and also with them, eloquent
omissions and silences. Mother and child are sung, but seldom father;
fugitive and weary wanderer call for pity and affection, but there is little of wooing
and wedding; the rocks and the mountains are well known, but home is unknown.
Strange blending of love and helplessness sings through the refrain:
"Yonder's my ole mudder,
Been waggin' at de hill so long; 'Bout time she cross over,
Git home bime-by." Elsewhere comes the cry of the "motherless"
and the "Farewell, farewell, my only child." Love-songs are scarce and fall into two categories—the
frivolous and light, and the sad. Of deep successful love there is ominous silence,
and in one of the oldest of these songs there is a depth of history and meaning:
Poor Ro-sy, poor gal; Poor Ro-sy, poor gal; Ro-sy break my poor heart,
Heav'n shall-a-be my home. A black woman said of the song, "It can't
be sung without a full heart and a troubled sperrit."
The same voice sings here that sings in the German folk-song:
"Jetz Geh i' an's brunele, trink' aber net." Of death the *** showed little fear, but
talked of it familiarly and even fondly as simply a crossing of the waters, perhaps—who
knows?—back to his ancient forests again. Later days transfigured his fatalism, and
amid the dust and dirt the toiler sang:
"Dust, dust and ashes, fly over my grave,
But the Lord shall bear my spirit home." The things evidently borrowed from the surrounding
world undergo characteristic change when they enter the mouth of the slave. Especially is
this true of Bible phrases. "Weep, O captive daughter of Zion," is quaintly
turned into "Zion, weep-a-low," and the wheels of Ezekiel are turned every way in the mystic
dreaming of the slave, till he says: "There's a little wheel a-turnin' in-a-my
heart." As in olden time, the words of these hymns
were improvised by some leading minstrel of the religious band.
The circumstances of the gathering, however, the rhythm of the songs, and the limitations
of allowable thought, confined the poetry for the most part to single or double lines,
and they seldom were expanded to quatrains or longer tales, although there are some few
examples of sustained efforts, chiefly paraphrases of the Bible.
Three short series of verses have always attracted me,—the one that heads this chapter, of
one line of which Thomas Wentworth Higginson has fittingly said, "Never, it seems to me,
since man first lived and suffered was his infinite longing for peace uttered more plaintively."
The second and third are descriptions of the Last Judgment,—the one a late improvisation,
with some traces of outside influence:
"Oh, the stars in the elements are falling,
And the moon drips away into blood,
And the ransomed of the Lord are returning unto God,
Blessed be the name of the Lord." And the other earlier and homelier picture
from the low coast lands:
"Michael, haul the boat ashore,
Then you'll hear the horn they blow,
Then you'll hear the trumpet sound,
Trumpet sound the world around,
Trumpet sound for rich and poor,
Trumpet sound the Jubilee,
Trumpet sound for you and me." Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs
there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things.
The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence.
Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless
justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always
clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their
skins. Is such a hope justified?
Do the Sorrow Songs sing true? The silently growing assumption of this age
is that the probation of races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven
inefficiency and not worth the saving. Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples
irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men.
A thousand years ago such an assumption, easily possible, would have made it difficult for
the Teuton to prove his right to life. Two thousand years ago such dogmatism, readily
welcome, would have scouted the idea of blond races ever leading civilization.
So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning
of "swift" and "slow" in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled,
unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science. Why should AEschylus have sung two thousand
years before Shakespeare was born? Why has civilization flourished in Europe,
and flickered, flamed, and died in Africa? So long as the world stands meekly dumb before
such questions, shall this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by
denying freedom of opportunity to those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the
Mighty? Your country?
How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here.
Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song—soft,
stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat
back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic
empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third,
a gift of the Spirit. Around us the history of the land has centred
for thrice a hundred years; out of the nation's heart we have called all that was best to
throttle and subdue all that was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice, have billowed
over this people, and they have found peace only in the altars of the God of Right.
Nor has our gift of the Spirit been merely passive.
Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation,—we fought
their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after
generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy,
and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse.
Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood.
Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and striving?
Would America have been America without her *** people?
Even so is the hope that sang in the songs of my fathers well sung.
If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful,
then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free.
Free, free as the sunshine trickling down the morning into these high windows of mine,
free as yonder fresh young voices welling up to me from the caverns of brick and mortar
below—swelling with song, instinct with life, tremulous treble and darkening bass.
My children, my little children, are singing to the sunshine, and thus they sing:
Let us cheer the wea-ry trav-el-ler, Cheer the wea-ry trav-el-ler, Let us
cheer the wea-ry trav-el-ler A-long the heav-en-ly way.
And the traveller girds himself, and sets his face toward the Morning, and goes his
way.
The Afterthought Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that
this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness.
Let there spring, Gentle One, from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed
to reap the harvest wonderful. Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with
truth, and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day
when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare. Thus in Thy good time may infinite reason
turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed
The End
This ends the reading of The Souls of Black Folk
by W. E. B. Du Bois