[Illustration]
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question:
unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the
difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it.
They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or
compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel
to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town;
or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make
your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the
boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question,
How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one
who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in
Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the
revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember
well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in
the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between
Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something
put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous
visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was
merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it
peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in
heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast
veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep
through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in
a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest
when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a
foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all
this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all
their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should
not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just
how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the
sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head,—some way.
With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth
shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale
world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted
itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger
in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us
all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow,
tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in
resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily,
half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and
Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and
gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields
him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through
the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this
double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self
through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a
world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his
twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose
dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this
longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into
a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older
selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too
much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul
in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a
message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man
to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon
by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly
in his face.
This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the
kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and
use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and
mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten.
The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia
the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Through history, the powers of
single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die
sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness. Here in
America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man’s turning
hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his
very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power,
like weakness. And yet it is not weakness,—it is the contradiction of
double aims. The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan—on the one
hand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and
drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for
a poverty-stricken horde—could only result in making him a poor
craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty
and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted
toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other world,
toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. The would-be
black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his
people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the
knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh
and blood. The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder
souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and
doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him
was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and
he could not articulate the message of another people. This waste of
double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has
wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand
thousand people,—has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking
false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make
them ashamed of themselves.
Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine
event the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped
Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro
for two centuries. To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery
was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root
of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of
sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied
Israelites. In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his
tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand. At
last it came,—suddenly, fearfully, like a dream. With one wild carnival
of blood and passion came the message in his own plaintive cadences:—
“Shout, O children!
Shout, you’re free!
For God has bought your liberty!”
Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of
national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the
swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast. In
vain do we cry to this our vastest social problem:—
“Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble!”
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not
yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come
in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests
upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the
unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly
people.
The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for
freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a
tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless
host. The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies
of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the
contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with
no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. As the time flew,
however, he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty demanded
for its attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment
gave him. The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign
of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and
perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him. And
why not? Had not votes made war and emancipated millions? Had not votes
enfranchised the freedmen? Was anything impossible to a power that had
done all this? A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote
themselves into the kingdom. So the decade flew away, the revolution of
1876 came, and left the half-free serf weary, wondering, but still
inspired. Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a new vision
began gradually to replace the dream of political power,—a powerful
movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, another
pillar of fire by night after a clouded day. It was the ideal of
“book-learning”; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know
and test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the
longing to know. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the
mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and
law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to
overlook life.
Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly;
only those who have watched and guided the faltering feet, the misty
minds, the dull understandings, of the dark pupils of these schools
know how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn. It was
weary work. The cold statistician wrote down the inches of progress
here and there, noted also where here and there a foot had slipped or
some one had fallen. To the tired climbers, the horizon was ever dark,
the mists were often cold, the Canaan was always dim and far away. If,
however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting-place, little
but flattery and criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for
reflection and self-examination; it changed the child of Emancipation
to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization,
self-respect. In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose
before him, and he saw himself,—darkly as through a veil; and yet he
saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He
began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he
must be himself, and not another. For the first time he sought to
analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of social
degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem. He felt
his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or
savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled
neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of
dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of his
ignorance,—not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of the
humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of
decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet. Nor was his burden
all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy, which two
centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped
upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but
also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white
adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home.
A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world,
but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social
problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and
his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is
darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow
prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defence of culture
against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime,
the “higher” against the “lower” races. To which the Negro cries Amen!
and swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on
just homage to civilization, culture, righteousness, and progress, he
humbly bows and meekly does obeisance. But before that nameless
prejudice that leaps beyond all this he stands helpless, dismayed, and
well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery, the
ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton
license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous
welcoming of the worse, the all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain
for everything black, from Toussaint to the devil,—before this there
rises a sickening despair that would disarm and discourage any nation
save that black host to whom “discouragement” is an unwritten word.
But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the
inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals
which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt
and hate. Whisperings and portents came home upon the four winds: Lo!
we are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our
voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and
serve? And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying:
Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher
culture for half-men? Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or
fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race! Nevertheless, out of the evil
came something of good,—the more careful adjustment of education to
real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes’ social
responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of
progress.
So dawned the time of _Sturm und Drang:_ storm and stress to-day rocks
our little boat on the mad waters of the world-sea; there is within and
without the sound of conflict, the burning of body and rending of soul;
inspiration strives with doubt, and faith with vain questionings. The
bright ideals of the past,—physical freedom, political power, the
training of brains and the training of hands,—all these in turn have
waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast. Are they
all wrong,—all false? No, not that, but each alone was over-simple and
incomplete,—the dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the fond
imaginings of the other world which does not know and does not want to
know our power. To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and
welded into one. The training of the schools we need to-day more than
ever,—the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all
the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds and pure hearts.
The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence,—else what shall
save us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still
seek,—the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the
freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty,—all these we need,
not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing
and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims
before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through
the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the
traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for
other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of
the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two
world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly
lack. We the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-handed:
there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the
Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true
American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the
American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in
all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in
a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be poorer if she
replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hearted but
determined Negro humility? or her coarse and cruel wit with loving
jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music with the soul of the Sorrow
Songs?
Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great
republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the
freedmen’s sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond
the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of an
historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers’ fathers,
and in the name of human opportunity.
And now what I have briefly sketched in large outline let me on coming
pages tell again in many ways, with loving emphasis and deeper detail,
that men may listen to the striving in the souls of black folk.
II.
Of the Dawn of Freedom
Careless seems the great Avenger;
History’s lessons but record
One death-grapple in the darkness
’Twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne;
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above His own.