[Illustration]
It was out in the country, far from home, far from my foster home, on a
dark Sunday night. The road wandered from our rambling log-house up the
stony bed of a creek, past wheat and corn, until we could hear dimly
across the fields a rhythmic cadence of song,—soft, thrilling,
powerful, that swelled and died sorrowfully in our ears. I was a
country schoolteacher then, fresh from the East, and had never seen a
Southern Negro revival. To be sure, we in Berkshire were not perhaps as
stiff and formal as they in Suffolk of olden time; yet we were very
quiet and subdued, and I know not what would have happened those clear
Sabbath mornings had some one punctuated the sermon with a wild scream,
or interrupted the long prayer with a loud Amen! And so most striking
to me, as I approached the village and the little plain church perched
aloft, was the air of intense excitement that possessed that mass of
black folk. A sort of suppressed terror hung in the air and seemed to
seize us,—a pythian madness, a demoniac possession, that lent terrible
reality to song and word. The black and massive form of the preacher
swayed and quivered as the words crowded to his lips and flew at us in
singular eloquence. The people moaned and fluttered, and then the
gaunt-cheeked brown woman beside me suddenly leaped straight into the
air and shrieked like a lost soul, while round about came wail and
groan and outcry, and a scene of human passion such as I had never
conceived before.
Those who have not thus witnessed the frenzy of a Negro revival in the
untouched backwoods of the South can but dimly realize the religious
feeling of the slave; as described, such scenes appear grotesque and
funny, but as seen they are awful. Three things characterized this
religion of the slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy. The
Preacher is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on
American soil. A leader, a politician, an orator, a “boss,” an
intriguer, an idealist,—all these he is, and ever, too, the centre of a
group of men, now twenty, now a thousand in number. The combination of
a certain adroitness with deep-seated earnestness, of tact with
consummate ability, gave him his preeminence, and helps him maintain
it. The type, of course, varies according to time and place, from the
West Indies in the sixteenth century to New England in the nineteenth,
and from the Mississippi bottoms to cities like New Orleans or New
York.
The Music of Negro religion is that plaintive rhythmic melody, with its
touching minor cadences, which, despite caricature and defilement,
still remains the most original and beautiful expression of human life
and longing yet born on American soil. Sprung from the African forests,
where its counterpart can still be heard, it was adapted, changed, and
intensified by the tragic soul-life of the slave, until, under the
stress of law and whip, it became the one true expression of a people’s
sorrow, despair, and hope.
Finally the Frenzy of “Shouting,” when the Spirit of the Lord passed
by, and, seizing the devotee, made him mad with supernatural joy, was
the last essential of Negro religion and the one more devoutly believed
in than all the rest. It varied in expression from the silent rapt
countenance or the low murmur and moan to the mad abandon of physical
fervor,—the stamping, shrieking, and shouting, the rushing to and fro
and wild waving of arms, the weeping and laughing, the vision and the
trance. All this is nothing new in the world, but old as religion, as
Delphi and Endor. And so firm a hold did it have on the Negro, that
many generations firmly believed that without this visible
manifestation of the God there could be no true communion with the
Invisible.
These were the characteristics of Negro religious life as developed up
to the time of Emancipation. Since under the peculiar circumstances of
the black man’s environment they were the one expression of his higher
life, they are of deep interest to the student of his development, both
socially and psychologically. Numerous are the attractive lines of
inquiry that here group themselves. What did slavery mean to the
African savage? What was his attitude toward the World and Life? What
seemed to him good and evil,—God and Devil? Whither went his longings
and strivings, and wherefore were his heart-burnings and
disappointments? Answers to such questions can come only from a study
of Negro religion as a development, through its gradual changes from
the heathenism of the Gold Coast to the institutional Negro church of
Chicago.
Moreover, the religious growth of millions of men, even though they be
slaves, cannot be without potent influence upon their contemporaries.
The Methodists and Baptists of America owe much of their condition to
the silent but potent influence of their millions of Negro converts.
Especially is this noticeable in the South, where theology and
religious philosophy are on this account a long way behind the North,
and where the religion of the poor whites is a plain copy of Negro
thought and methods. The mass of “gospel” hymns which has swept through
American churches and well-nigh ruined our sense of song consists
largely of debased imitations of Negro melodies made by ears that
caught the jingle but not the music, the body but not the soul, of the
Jubilee songs. It is thus clear that the study of Negro religion is not
only a vital part of the history of the Negro in America, but no
uninteresting part of American history.
The Negro church of to-day is the social centre of Negro life in the
United States, and the most characteristic expression of African
character. Take a typical church in a small Virginia town: it is the
“First Baptist”—a roomy brick edifice seating five hundred or more
persons, tastefully finished in Georgia pine, with a carpet, a small
organ, and stained-glass windows. Underneath is a large assembly room
with benches. This building is the central club-house of a community of
a thousand or more Negroes. Various organizations meet here,—the church
proper, the Sunday-school, two or three insurance societies, women’s
societies, secret societies, and mass meetings of various kinds.
Entertainments, suppers, and lectures are held beside the five or six
regular weekly religious services. Considerable sums of money are
collected and expended here, employment is found for the idle,
strangers are introduced, news is disseminated and charity distributed.
At the same time this social, intellectual, and economic centre is a
religious centre of great power. Depravity, Sin, Redemption, Heaven,
Hell, and Damnation are preached twice a Sunday after the crops are
laid by; and few indeed of the community have the hardihood to
withstand conversion. Back of this more formal religion, the Church
often stands as a real conserver of morals, a strengthener of family
life, and the final authority on what is Good and Right.
Thus one can see in the Negro church to-day, reproduced in microcosm,
all the great world from which the Negro is cut off by color-prejudice
and social condition. In the great city churches the same tendency is
noticeable and in many respects emphasized. A great church like the
Bethel of Philadelphia has over eleven hundred members, an edifice
seating fifteen hundred persons and valued at one hundred thousand
dollars, an annual budget of five thousand dollars, and a government
consisting of a pastor with several assisting local preachers, an
executive and legislative board, financial boards and tax collectors;
general church meetings for making laws; sub-divided groups led by
class leaders, a company of militia, and twenty-four auxiliary
societies. The activity of a church like this is immense and
far-reaching, and the bishops who preside over these organizations
throughout the land are among the most powerful Negro rulers in the
world.
Such churches are really governments of men, and consequently a little
investigation reveals the curious fact that, in the South, at least,
practically every American Negro is a church member. Some, to be sure,
are not regularly enrolled, and a few do not habitually attend
services; but, practically, a proscribed people must have a social
centre, and that centre for this people is the Negro church. The census
of 1890 showed nearly twenty-four thousand Negro churches in the
country, with a total enrolled membership of over two and a half
millions, or ten actual church members to every twenty-eight persons,
and in some Southern States one in every two persons. Besides these
there is the large number who, while not enrolled as members, attend
and take part in many of the activities of the church. There is an
organized Negro church for every sixty black families in the nation,
and in some States for every forty families, owning, on an average, a
thousand dollars’ worth of property each, or nearly twenty-six million
dollars in all.
Such, then, is the large development of the Negro church since
Emancipation. The question now is, What have been the successive steps
of this social history and what are the present tendencies? First, we
must realize that no such institution as the Negro church could rear
itself without definite historical foundations. These foundations we
can find if we remember that the social history of the Negro did not
start in America. He was brought from a definite social
environment,—the polygamous clan life under the headship of the chief
and the potent influence of the priest. His religion was
nature-worship, with profound belief in invisible surrounding
influences, good and bad, and his worship was through incantation and
sacrifice. The first rude change in this life was the slave ship and
the West Indian sugar-fields. The plantation organization replaced the
clan and tribe, and the white master replaced the chief with far
greater and more despotic powers. Forced and long-continued toil became
the rule of life, the old ties of blood relationship and kinship
disappeared, and instead of the family appeared a new polygamy and
polyandry, which, in some cases, almost reached promiscuity. It was a
terrific social revolution, and yet some traces were retained of the
former group life, and the chief remaining institution was the Priest
or Medicine-man. He early appeared on the plantation and found his
function as the healer of the sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the
comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong, and the
one who rudely but picturesquely expressed the longing, disappointment,
and resentment of a stolen and oppressed people. Thus, as bard,
physician, judge, and priest, within the narrow limits allowed by the
slave system, rose the Negro preacher, and under him the first church
was not at first by any means Christian nor definitely organized;
rather it was an adaptation and mingling of heathen rites among the
members of each plantation, and roughly designated as Voodooism.
Association with the masters, missionary effort and motives of
expediency gave these rites an early veneer of Christianity, and after
the lapse of many generations the Negro church became Christian.
Two characteristic things must be noticed in regard to the church.
First, it became almost entirely Baptist and Methodist in faith;
secondly, as a social institution it antedated by many decades the
monogamic Negro home. From the very circumstances of its beginning, the
church was confined to the plantation, and consisted primarily of a
series of disconnected units; although, later on, some freedom of
movement was allowed, still this geographical limitation was always
important and was one cause of the spread of the decentralized and
democratic Baptist faith among the slaves. At the same time, the
visible rite of baptism appealed strongly to their mystic temperament.
To-day the Baptist Church is still largest in membership among Negroes,
and has a million and a half communicants. Next in popularity came the
churches organized in connection with the white neighboring churches,
chiefly Baptist and Methodist, with a few Episcopalian and others. The
Methodists still form the second greatest denomination, with nearly a
million members. The faith of these two leading denominations was more
suited to the slave church from the prominence they gave to religious
feeling and fervor. The Negro membership in other denominations has
always been small and relatively unimportant, although the
Episcopalians and Presbyterians are gaining among the more intelligent
classes to-day, and the Catholic Church is making headway in certain
sections. After Emancipation, and still earlier in the North, the Negro
churches largely severed such affiliations as they had had with the
white churches, either by choice or by compulsion. The Baptist churches
became independent, but the Methodists were compelled early to unite
for purposes of episcopal government. This gave rise to the great
African Methodist Church, the greatest Negro organization in the world,
to the Zion Church and the Colored Methodist, and to the black
conferences and churches in this and other denominations.
The second fact noted, namely, that the Negro church antedates the
Negro home, leads to an explanation of much that is paradoxical in this
communistic institution and in the morals of its members. But
especially it leads us to regard this institution as peculiarly the
expression of the inner ethical life of a people in a sense seldom true
elsewhere. Let us turn, then, from the outer physical development of
the church to the more important inner ethical life of the people who
compose it. The Negro has already been pointed out many times as a
religious animal,—a being of that deep emotional nature which turns
instinctively toward the supernatural. Endowed with a rich tropical
imagination and a keen, delicate appreciation of Nature, the
transplanted African lived in a world animate with gods and devils,
elves and witches; full of strange influences,—of Good to be implored,
of Evil to be propitiated. Slavery, then, was to him the dark triumph
of Evil over him. All the hateful powers of the Under-world were
striving against him, and a spirit of revolt and revenge filled his
heart. He called up all the resources of heathenism to aid,—exorcism
and witch-craft, the mysterious Obi worship with its barbarious rites,
spells, and blood-sacrifice even, now and then, of human victims. Weird
midnight orgies and mystic conjurations were invoked, the witch-woman
and the voodoo-priest became the centre of Negro group life, and that
vein of vague superstition which characterizes the unlettered Negro
even to-day was deepened and strengthened.
In spite, however, of such success as that of the fierce Maroons, the
Danish blacks, and others, the spirit of revolt gradually died away
under the untiring energy and superior strength of the slave masters.
By the middle of the eighteenth century the black slave had sunk, with
hushed murmurs, to his place at the bottom of a new economic system,
and was unconsciously ripe for a new philosophy of life. Nothing suited
his condition then better than the doctrines of passive submission
embodied in the newly learned Christianity. Slave masters early
realized this, and cheerfully aided religious propaganda within certain
bounds. The long system of repression and degradation of the Negro
tended to emphasize the elements of his character which made him a
valuable chattel: courtesy became humility, moral strength degenerated
into submission, and the exquisite native appreciation of the beautiful
became an infinite capacity for dumb suffering. The Negro, losing the
joy of this world, eagerly seized upon the offered conceptions of the
next; the avenging Spirit of the Lord enjoining patience in this world,
under sorrow and tribulation until the Great Day when He should lead
His dark children home,—this became his comforting dream. His preacher
repeated the prophecy, and his bards sang,—
“Children, we all shall be free
When the Lord shall appear!”
This deep religious fatalism, painted so beautifully in “Uncle Tom,”
came soon to breed, as all fatalistic faiths will, the sensualist side
by side with the martyr. Under the lax moral life of the plantation,
where marriage was a farce, laziness a virtue, and property a theft, a
religion of resignation and submission degenerated easily, in less
strenuous minds, into a philosophy of indulgence and crime. Many of the
worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in
this period of the slave’s ethical growth. Here it was that the Home
was ruined under the very shadow of the Church, white and black; here
habits of shiftlessness took root, and sullen hopelessness replaced
hopeful strife.
With the beginning of the abolition movement and the gradual growth of
a class of free Negroes came a change. We often neglect the influence
of the freedman before the war, because of the paucity of his numbers
and the small weight he had in the history of the nation. But we must
not forget that his chief influence was internal,—was exerted on the
black world; and that there he was the ethical and social leader.
Huddled as he was in a few centres like Philadelphia, New York, and New
Orleans, the masses of the freedmen sank into poverty and listlessness;
but not all of them. The free Negro leader early arose and his chief
characteristic was intense earnestness and deep feeling on the slavery
question. Freedom became to him a real thing and not a dream. His
religion became darker and more intense, and into his ethics crept a
note of revenge, into his songs a day of reckoning close at hand. The
“Coming of the Lord” swept this side of Death, and came to be a thing
to be hoped for in this day. Through fugitive slaves and irrepressible
discussion this desire for freedom seized the black millions still in
bondage, and became their one ideal of life. The black bards caught new
notes, and sometimes even dared to sing,—
“O Freedom, O Freedom, O Freedom over me!
Before I’ll be a slave
I’ll be buried in my grave,
And go home to my Lord
And be free.”
For fifty years Negro religion thus transformed itself and identified
itself with the dream of Abolition, until that which was a radical fad
in the white North and an anarchistic plot in the white South had
become a religion to the black world. Thus, when Emancipation finally
came, it seemed to the freedman a literal Coming of the Lord. His
fervid imagination was stirred as never before, by the tramp of armies,
the blood and dust of battle, and the wail and whirl of social
upheaval. He stood dumb and motionless before the whirlwind: what had
he to do with it? Was it not the Lord’s doing, and marvellous in his
eyes? Joyed and bewildered with what came, he stood awaiting new
wonders till the inevitable Age of Reaction swept over the nation and
brought the crisis of to-day.
It is difficult to explain clearly the present critical stage of Negro
religion. First, we must remember that living as the blacks do in close
contact with a great modern nation, and sharing, although imperfectly,
the soul-life of that nation, they must necessarily be affected more or
less directly by all the religious and ethical forces that are to-day
moving the United States. These questions and movements are, however,
overshadowed and dwarfed by the (to them) all-important question of
their civil, political, and economic status. They must perpetually
discuss the “Negro Problem,”—must live, move, and have their being in
it, and interpret all else in its light or darkness. With this come,
too, peculiar problems of their inner life,—of the status of women, the
maintenance of Home, the training of children, the accumulation of
wealth, and the prevention of crime. All this must mean a time of
intense ethical ferment, of religious heart-searching and intellectual
unrest. From the double life every American Negro must live, as a Negro
and as an American, as swept on by the current of the nineteenth while
yet struggling in the eddies of the fifteenth century,—from this must
arise a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid sense of
personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence.
The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and
changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and
this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of
doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts,
double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double
words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or revolt, to
hypocrisy or radicalism.
In some such doubtful words and phrases can one perhaps most clearly
picture the peculiar ethical paradox that faces the Negro of to-day and
is tingeing and changing his religious life. Feeling that his rights
and his dearest ideals are being trampled upon, that the public
conscience is ever more deaf to his righteous appeal, and that all the
reactionary forces of prejudice, greed, and revenge are daily gaining
new strength and fresh allies, the Negro faces no enviable dilemma.
Conscious of his impotence, and pessimistic, he often becomes bitter
and vindictive; and his religion, instead of a worship, is a complaint
and a curse, a wail rather than a hope, a sneer rather than a faith. On
the other hand, another type of mind, shrewder and keener and more
tortuous too, sees in the very strength of the anti-Negro movement its
patent weaknesses, and with Jesuitic casuistry is deterred by no
ethical considerations in the endeavor to turn this weakness to the
black man’s strength. Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable
streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in
anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy. The one type of Negro stands
almost ready to curse God and die, and the other is too often found a
traitor to right and a coward before force; the one is wedded to ideals
remote, whimsical, perhaps impossible of realization; the other forgets
that life is more than meat and the body more than raiment. But, after
all, is not this simply the writhing of the age translated into
black,—the triumph of the Lie which today, with its false culture,
faces the hideousness of the anarchist assassin?
To-day the two groups of Negroes, the one in the North, the other in
the South, represent these divergent ethical tendencies, the first
tending toward radicalism, the other toward hypocritical compromise. It
is no idle regret with which the white South mourns the loss of the
old-time Negro,—the frank, honest, simple old servant who stood for the
earlier religious age of submission and humility. With all his laziness
and lack of many elements of true manhood, he was at least
open-hearted, faithful, and sincere. To-day he is gone, but who is to
blame for his going? Is it not those very persons who mourn for him? Is
it not the tendency, born of Reconstruction and Reaction, to found a
society on lawlessness and deception, to tamper with the moral fibre of
a naturally honest and straightforward people until the whites threaten
to become ungovernable tyrants and the blacks criminals and hypocrites?
Deception is the natural defence of the weak against the strong, and
the South used it for many years against its conquerors; to-day it must
be prepared to see its black proletariat turn that same two-edged
weapon against itself. And how natural this is! The death of Denmark
Vesey and Nat Turner proved long since to the Negro the present
hopelessness of physical defence. Political defence is becoming less
and less available, and economic defence is still only partially
effective. But there is a patent defence at hand,—the defence of
deception and flattery, of cajoling and lying. It is the same defence
which peasants of the Middle Age used and which left its stamp on their
character for centuries. To-day the young Negro of the South who would
succeed cannot be frank and outspoken, honest and self-assertive, but
rather he is daily tempted to be silent and wary, politic and sly; he
must flatter and be pleasant, endure petty insults with a smile, shut
his eyes to wrong; in too many cases he sees positive personal
advantage in deception and lying. His real thoughts, his real
aspirations, must be guarded in whispers; he must not criticise, he
must not complain. Patience, humility, and adroitness must, in these
growing black youth, replace impulse, manliness, and courage. With this
sacrifice there is an economic opening, and perhaps peace and some
prosperity. Without this there is riot, migration, or crime. Nor is
this situation peculiar to the Southern United States, is it not rather
the only method by which undeveloped races have gained the right to
share modern culture? The price of culture is a Lie.
On the other hand, in the North the tendency is to emphasize the
radicalism of the Negro. Driven from his birthright in the South by a
situation at which every fibre of his more outspoken and assertive
nature revolts, he finds himself in a land where he can scarcely earn a
decent living amid the harsh competition and the color discrimination.
At the same time, through schools and periodicals, discussions and
lectures, he is intellectually quickened and awakened. The soul, long
pent up and dwarfed, suddenly expands in new-found freedom. What wonder
that every tendency is to excess,—radical complaint, radical remedies,
bitter denunciation or angry silence. Some sink, some rise. The
criminal and the sensualist leave the church for the gambling-hell and
the brothel, and fill the slums of Chicago and Baltimore; the better
classes segregate themselves from the group-life of both white and
black, and form an aristocracy, cultured but pessimistic, whose bitter
criticism stings while it points out no way of escape. They despise the
submission and subserviency of the Southern Negroes, but offer no other
means by which a poor and oppressed minority can exist side by side
with its masters. Feeling deeply and keenly the tendencies and
opportunities of the age in which they live, their souls are bitter at
the fate which drops the Veil between; and the very fact that this
bitterness is natural and justifiable only serves to intensify it and
make it more maddening.
Between the two extreme types of ethical attitude which I have thus
sought to make clear wavers the mass of the millions of Negroes, North
and South; and their religious life and activity partake of this social
conflict within their ranks. Their churches are differentiating,—now
into groups of cold, fashionable devotees, in no way distinguishable
from similar white groups save in color of skin; now into large social
and business institutions catering to the desire for information and
amusement of their members, warily avoiding unpleasant questions both
within and without the black world, and preaching in effect if not in
word: _Dum vivimus, vivamus_.
But back of this still broods silently the deep religious feeling of
the real Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might of powerful human
souls who have lost the guiding star of the past and seek in the great
night a new religious ideal. Some day the Awakening will come, when the
pent-up vigor of ten million souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the
Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes
life worth living—Liberty, Justice, and Right—is marked “For White
People Only.”
XI.
Of the Passing of the First-Born
O sister, sister, thy first-begotten,
The hands that cling and the feet that follow,
The voice of the child’s blood crying yet,
_Who hath remembered me? who hath forgotten?_
Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow,
But the world shall end when I forget.