Berween 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 Taghanic 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 world I longed for, and all its 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 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 two-ness,--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 does not wish to
Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and
Africa; he does not wish to bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white
Americanism, for he believes--foolishly, perhaps, but fervently--that
Negro blood has yet 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 losing the opportunity of
self-development.
This is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of
culture, to escape both death and isolation, and to husband and use his
best powers. These powers, of body and of mind, have in the past been
so wasted and dispersed as to lose all effectiveness, and to seem like
absence of all power, like weakness. 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 lawyer or
doctor was pushed toward quackery and demagogism, and by the criticism
of the other world toward an elaborate preparation that overfitted him
for 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, a-singing,
and a-laughing 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
eight thousand thousand people, has sent them often wooing false gods
and invoking false means of salvation, and has even at times seemed
destined to make them ashamed of themselves. In the days of bondage
they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt and
disappointment; eighteenth-century Rousseauism never worshiped freedom
with half the unquestioning faith that the American Negro did for two
centuries. To him 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 his songs and exhortations 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!
The Lord has bought your liberty!"
Years have passed away, ten, twenty, thirty. Thirty years of national
life, thirty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy ghost
of Banquo sits in its old place at the national feast. In vain does the
nation cry to its vastest problem,--
"Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves Shall never tremble!"
The freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of
lesser 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 folk.
The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for
freedom, the boom 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 Kuklux 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 decade closed, 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. The decade fled away,--a decade containing, to the
freedman's mind, nothing but suppressed votes, stuffed ballot-boxes, and
election outrages that nullified his vaunted right of suffrage. And yet
that decade from 1875 to 1885 held another 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. Mission
and night schools began in the smoke of battle, ran the gauntlet of
reconstruction, and at last developed into permanent foundations. 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
filth from white whoremongers and 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 defense 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 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.
They still press on, they still nurse the dogged hope,--not a hope
of nauseating patronage, not a hope of reception into charmed social
circles of stock-jobbers, pork-packers, and earl-hunters, but the hope
of a higher synthesis of civilization and humanity, a true progress,
with which the chorus
"Peace, good will to men,"
"May make one music as before,
But vaster."
Thus the second decade of the American Negro's freedom was a period of
conflict, of inspiration and doubt, of faith and vain questionings, of
Sturm and Drang. The ideals of physical freedom, of political power, of
school training, as separate all-sufficient panaceas for social ills,
became in the third decade dim and overcast. They were the vain dreams
of credulous race childhood; not wrong, but incomplete and over-simple.
The training of the schools we need to-day more than ever,--the training
of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and the broader, deeper, higher
culture of gifted minds. The power of the ballot we need in sheer
self-defense, and as a guarantee of good faith. We may misuse it, but
we can scarce do worse in this respect than our whilom masters. Freedom,
too, the long-sought, we still seek,--the freedom of life and limb, the
freedom to work and think. Work, culture, and liberty,--all these we
need, not singly, but together; for to-day these ideals among the Negro
people are gradually coalescing, and finding a higher meaning in the
unifying ideal of race,--the ideal of fostering the traits and talents
of the Negro, not in opposition to, but in conformity with, 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 which
both so sadly lack. Already we come not altogether empty-handed: there
is to-day no true American music but the sweet wild melodies of the
Negro slave; the American fairy tales are Indian and African; we are 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 the light-hearted but determined Negro
humility; or her coarse, cruel wit with loving, jovial good humor; or
her Annie Rooney with Steal Away?
Merely a stern 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 land of their fathers' fathers, and
in the name of human opportunity.