self-interest is unquestionably on the side of justice and manly dealing
toward the black man; and one can not help feeling that a cause which
thus enlists the support and advocacy of the “better self” of a nation
must ultimately be invincible: and Mr. Cable, in my judgment, embodies
and represents that Christian conscience and enlightened self-interest
of the hitherto silent South; he vocalizes and inspires its better self.
To him the dishonesty and inhumanity there practiced against the black
race is a blot on the scutcheon of that fair land and doomed to bring in
its wake untold confusion, disaster, and disgrace. From his calm
elevation he sees the impending evil, and with loving solicitude urges
his countrymen to flee the wrath to come. Mr. Tourgee, on the other
hand, speaks with all the eloquence and passion of the aggrieved party
himself. With his whip of fine cords he pitilessly scourges the
inconsistencies, the weaknesses and pettiness of the black man’s
persecutors. The fire is burning within him, he cannot but speak. He has
said himself that he deserves no credit for speaking and writing on this
subject, for it has taken hold of him and possesses him to the exclusion
of almost everything else. Necessity is laid upon him. Not more bound
was Saul of Tarsus to consecrate his fiery eloquence to the cause of the
persecuted Nazarene than is this white man to throw all the weight of
his powerful soul into the plea for justice and Christianity in this
American anomaly and huge inconsistency. Not many colored men would have
attempted Tourgee’s brave defense of Reconstruction and the alleged
corruption of Negro supremacy, more properly termed the period of white
sullenness and desertion of duty. Not many would have dared, fearlessly
as he did, to arraign this country for an enormous pecuniary debt to the
colored man for the two hundred and forty-seven years of unpaid labor of
his ancestors. Not many could so determinedly have held up the glass of
the real Christianity before these believers in a white Christ and these
preachers of the gospel, “Suffer the little _white_ children to come
unto me.” We all see the glaring inconsistency and feel the burning
shame. We appreciate the incongruity and the indignity of having to
stand forever hat in hand as beggars, or be shoved aside as intruders in
a country whose resources have been opened up by the unrequited toil of
our forefathers. We know that our bill is a true one—that the debt is as
real as to any pensioners of our government. But the principles of
patience and forbearance, of meekness and charity, have become so
ingrained in the Negro character that there is hardly enough
self-assertion left to ask as our right that a part of the country’s
surplus wealth be _loaned_ for the education of our children; even
though we know that our present poverty is due to the fact that the toil
of the last quarter century enriched these coffers, but left us the
heirs of crippled, deformed, frost-bitten, horny-handed and empty handed
mothers and fathers. Oh, the shame of it!
A coward during the war gets a few scratches and bruises—often in
_fleeing from the enemy_—and his heirs are handsomely pensioned by his
_grateful_ country! But these poor wretches stood every man to his post
for two hundred and fifty years, digging trenches, building roads,
tunneling mountains, clearing away forests, cultivating the soil in the
cotton fields and rice swamps till fingers dropped off, toes were
frozen, knees twisted, arms stiff and useless—and when their sons and
heirs, with the burdens of helpless parents to support, wish to secure
enough education to enable them to make a start in life, _their_
grateful country sagely deliberates as to the feasibility of sending
them to another undeveloped jungle to show off their talent for
unlimited pioneer work in strange climes! The Indian, during the entire
occupancy of this country by white men, has stood proudly aloof from all
their efforts at development, and presented an unbroken front of
hostility to the introduction and spread of civilization. The Negro,
though brought into the country by force and compelled under the lash to
lend his brawn and sturdy sinews to promote its material growth and
prosperity, nevertheless with perfect amiability of temper and
adaptability of mental structure has quietly and unhesitatingly accepted
its standards and fallen in line with its creeds. He adjusts himself
just as readily and as appreciatively, it would seem, to the higher and
stricter requirements of freedom and citizenship; and although from
beginning to end, nettled and goaded under unprecedented provocation, he
has never once shown any general disposition to arise in his might and
deluge this country with blood or desolate it with burning, as he might
have done. It is no argument to charge weakness as the cause of his
peaceful submission and to sneer at the “inferiority” of a race who
would allow themselves to be made slaves—unrevenged. It _may_ be nobler
to perish red-handed, to kill as many as your battle-axe holds out to
hack and then fall with an exultant yell and savage grin of fiendish
delight on the huge pile of bloody corpses,—expiring with the solace and
unction of having ten thousand wounds all in front. I don’t know. I
sometimes think it depends on where you plant your standard and who
wears the white plume which your eye inadvertently seeks. If Napoleon is
the ideal of mankind, I suppose ’tis only noble to be strong; and true
greatness may consist in an adamantine determination never to serve. The
greatest race with which I am even partially acquainted, proudly boasts
that it has never met another race save as either enemy or victim. They
seem to set great store by this fact and I judge it must be immensely
noble according to their ideals. But somehow it seems to me that those
nations and races who choose the Nazarene for their plumed knight would
find some little jarring and variance between such notions and His
ideals. There could not be at all times perfect unanimity between Leader
and host. A good many of his sayings, it seems to me, would have to be
explained away; not a few of his injunctions quietly ignored, and I am
not sure but the great hulk of his principles and precepts must after
all lie like leaden lumps, an undigested and unassimilable mass on an
uneasy overburdened stomach. I find it rather hard to understand these
things, and somehow I feel at times as if I have taken hold of the wrong
ideal. But then, I suppose, it must be because I have not enough of the
spirit that comes with the blood of those grand old _sea kings_ (I
believe you call them) who shot out in their trusty barks speeding over
unknown seas and, like a death-dealing genius, with the piercing eye and
bloodthirsty heart of hawk or vulture killed and harried, burned and
caroused. This is doubtless all very glorious and noble, and the seed of
it must be an excellent thing to have in one’s blood. But I haven’t it.
I frankly admit my limitations. I am hardly capable of appreciating to
the full such grand intrepidity,—due of course to the fact that the
stock from which I am sprung did not attain that royal kink in its blood
ages ago. My tribe has to own kinship with a very tame and unsanguinary
individual who, a long time ago when blue blood was a distilling in the
stirring fiery world outside, had no more heroic and daring a thing to
do than help a pale sorrow-marked man as he was toiling up a certain
hill at Jerusalem bearing his own cross whereon he was soon to be
ignominiously nailed. This Cyrenian fellow was used to bearing burdens
and he didn’t mind giving a lift over a hard place now and then, with no
idea of doing anything grand or memorable, or that even so much as his
name would be known thereby. And then, too, by a rather strange
coincidence this unwarlike and insignificant kinsman of ours had his
home in a country (the fatherland of all the family) which had afforded
kindly shelter to that same mysterious Stranger, when, a babe and
persecuted by bloody power and heartless jealousy, He had to flee the
land of his birth. And somehow this same country has in its day done so
much fostering and sheltering of that kind—has watched and hovered over
the cradles of religions and given refuge and comfort to the persecuted,
the world weary, the storm tossed benefactors of mankind so often that
she has come to represent nothing stronger or more imposing than the
“eternal womanly” among the nations, and to accept as her mission and
ideal, _loving service_ to mankind.
With such antecedents then the black race in America should not be
upbraided for having no taste for blood and carnage. It is the fault of
their constitution that they prefer the judicial awards of peace and
have an eternal patience to abide the bloodless triumph of right. It is
no argument, therefore, when I point to the record of their physical
supremacy—when the homes and helpless ones of this country were
absolutely at the black man’s mercy and not a town laid waste, not a
building burned, and _not a woman insulted_—it is no argument, I say,
for you to retort: “_He was a coward; he didn’t dare!_” The facts simply
do not show this to have been the case.
Now the tardy conscience of the nation wakes up one bright morning and
is overwhelmed with blushes and stammering confusion because convicted
of dishonorable and unkind treatment of _the Indian_; and there is a
wonderful scurrying around among the keepers of the keys to get out more
blankets and send out a few primers for the “_wards_.” While the black
man, a faithful son and indefeasible heir,—who can truthfully say, “Lo,
these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy
commandment, and yet thou never gavest me a kid that I might make merry
with my friends,”—is snubbed and chilled and made unwelcome at every
merry-making of the family. And when appropriations for education are
talked of, the section for which he has wrought and suffered most,
actually defeats the needed and desired assistance for fear they may not
be able to prevent his getting a fair and equitable share in the
distribution.
Oh, the shame of it!
In Pactolus Prime Mr. Tourgee has succeeded incomparably, we think, in
photographing and vocalizing the feelings of the colored American in
regard to the Christian profession and the pagan practice of the
dominant forces in the American government. And as an impassioned
denunciation of the heartless and godless spirit of caste founded on
color, as a scathing rebuke to weak-eyed Christians who cannot read the
golden rule across the color line, as an unanswerable arraignment of
unparalleled ingratitude and limping justice in the policy of this
country towards the weaker of its two children, that served it so long
and so faithfully, the book is destined to live and to furnish an
invaluable contribution to this already plethoric department of American
literature.
Mr. Cable and Mr. Tourgee represent possibly the most eminent as well as
the most prolific among the writers on this subject belonging to the
didactic or polemic class. A host of others there are—lesser lights, or
of more intermittent coruscations—who have contributed on either side
the debate single treatises, numerous magazine articles or newspaper
editorials, advocating some one theory some another on the so-called
_race problem_. In this group belongs the author of “An Appeal to
Pharaoh,” advocating the deportation absurdity; also the writings of H.
W. Grady; “In Plain Black and White,” “The Brother in Black,” “The South
Investigated,” “A Defense of the Negro Race,” “The Prosperity of the
South Dependent on the Elevation of the Negro,” “The Old South and the
New,” “Black and White,” etc., etc., among which are included articles
from the pen of colored men themselves, such as Mr. Douglass, Dr.
Crummell, Dr. Arnett, Dr. Blyden, Dr. Scarborough, Dr. Price, Mr.
Fortune, and others. These are champions of the forces on either side.
They stand ever at the forefront dealing desperate blows right and left,
now fist and skull, now broad-sword and battle-axe, now with the flash
and boom of artillery; while the little fellows run out ever and anon
from the ranks and deliver a telling blow between the eyes of an
antagonist. All are wrought up to a high tension, some are blinded with
passion, others appalled with dread,—all sincerely feel the reality of
their own vision and earnestly hope to compel their world to see with
their eyes. Such works, full of the fever and heat of debate belong to
the turmoil and turbulence of the time. A hundred years from now they
may be interesting history, throwing light on a feature of these days
which, let us hope, will then be hardly intelligible to an American
citizen not over fifty years old.
Among our artists for art’s sweet sake, Mr. Howells has recently tried
his hand also at painting the Negro, attempting merely a side light in
half tones, on his life and manners; and I think the unanimous verdict
of the subject is that, in this single department at least, Mr. Howells
does not know what he is talking about. And yet I do not think we should
quarrel with _An Imperative Duty_ because it lacks the earnestness and
bias of a special pleader. Mr. Howells merely meant to press the button
and give one picture from American life involving racial complications.
The kodak does no more; it cannot preach sermons or solve problems.
Besides, the portrayal of Negro characteristics was by no means the main
object of the story, which was rather meant, I judge, to be a thumb nail
sketch containing a psychological study of a morbidly sensitive
conscience hectoring over a weak and vacillating will and fevered into
increased despotism by reading into its own life and consciousness the
analyses and terrible retributions of fiction,—a product of the
Puritan’s uncompromising sense of “_right though the heavens fall_,”
irritated and kept sore by being unequally yoked with indecision and
cowardice. Of such strokes Mr. Howells is undoubtedly master. It is true
there is little point and no force of character about the beautiful and
irresponsible young heroine; but as that is an attainment of so many of
Mr. Howells’ models, it is perhaps not to be considered as illustrating
any racial characteristics. I cannot help sharing, however, the
indignation of those who resent the picture in the colored
church,—“evidently,” Mr. Howells assures us, “representing _the best
colored society_”; where the horrified young prig, Rhoda Aldgate, meets
nothing but the frog-like countenances and cat-fish mouths, the musky
exhalations and the “bress de Lawd, Honey,” of an uncultivated people.
It is just here that Mr. Howells fails—and fails because he gives only a
half truth, and that a partisan half truth. One feels that he had no
business to attempt a subject of which he knew so little, or for which
he cared so little. There is one thing I would like to say to my white
fellow countrymen, and especially to those who dabble in ink and affect
to discuss the Negro; and yet I hesitate because I feel it is a fact
which persons of the finer sensibilities and more delicate perceptions
must know instinctively: namely, that it is an insult to humanity and a
sin against God to publish any such sweeping generalizations of a race
on such meager and superficial information. We meet it at every
turn—this obtrusive and offensive vulgarity, this gratuitous sizing up
of the Negro and conclusively writing down his equation, sometimes even
among his ardent friends and bravest defenders. Were I not afraid of
falling myself into the same error that I am condemning, I would say it
seems an _Anglo-Saxon characteristic_ to have such overweening
confidence in his own power of induction that there is no equation which
he would acknowledge to be indeterminate, however many unknown
quantities it may possess.
Here is an extract from Dr. Mayo, a thoroughly earnest man and sincerely
friendly, as I believe, to the colored people.
“Among these women are as many grades of native, intellectual, moral
and executive force as among the white people. The plantations of
the Gulf, the Atlantic coast and the Mississippi bottoms swarm with
negro women who seem hardly lifted above the brutes. I know a group
of young colored women, many of them accomplished teachers, who bear
themselves as gently and with as varied womanly charms as any score
of ladies in the land. The one abyss of perdition _to this class_ is
the slough of unchastity in which, _as a race_ they still flounder,
half conscious that it is a slough—the double inheritance of savage
Africa and slavery.”
Now there may be one side of a truth here, yet who but a self-confident
Anglo-Saxon would dare make such a broad unblushing statement about a
people _as a race_? Some developments brought to light recently through
the scientific Christianity and investigating curiosity of Dr. Parkhurst
may lead one to suspect the need of missionary teaching to “elevate” the
white race; and yet I have too much respect for the autonomy of races,
too much reverence for the collective view of God’s handiwork to speak
of any such condition, however general, as characterizing _the race_.
The colored people do not object to the adequate and truthful portrayal
of types of their race in whatever degree of the scale of civilization,
or of social and moral development, is consonant with actual facts or
possibilities. As Mr. Howells himself says, “A man can be anything along
the vast range from angel to devil, and without living either the good
thing or the bad thing in which his fancy dramatizes him, he can
perceive it”—and I would add, can appreciate and even enjoy its
delineation by the artist. The average Englishman takes no exception to
the humorous caricatures of Dickens or to the satires and cynicisms of
Thackeray. The Quilps and the Bernsteins are but strongly developed
negatives of our universal human nature on the dark side. We recognize
them as genre sketches,—and with the Agneses and Esthers and Aunt
Lamberts as foils and correctives, we can appreciate them accordingly:
while we do not believe ourselves to be the original of the portrait,
there is enough sympathy and fellow feeling for the character to prevent
our human relationship from being outraged and insulted. But were
Dickens to introduce an average scion of his countrymen to a whole
congregation of _Quilps_, at the same time sagely informing him that
these represented _the best there was_ of English life and morals, I
strongly suspect the charming author would be lifted out on the toe of
said average Englishman’s boot, in case there shouldn’t happen to be a
good horsewhip handy.
Our grievance then is not that we are not painted as angels of light or
as goody-goody Sunday-school developments; but we do claim that a man
whose acquaintanceship is so slight that he cannot even discern
diversities of individuality, has no right or authority to hawk “the
only true and authentic” pictures of a race of human beings. Mr.
Howells’ point of view is precisely that of a white man who sees colored
people at long range or only in certain capacities. His conclusions
about the colored man are identical with the impressions that will be
received and carried abroad by foreigners from all parts of the globe,
who shall attend our Columbian Exposition for instance, and who, through
the impartiality and generosity of our white countrymen, will see
colored persons only as bootblacks and hotel waiters, grinning from ear
to ear and bowing and courtesying for the extra tips. In the same way
Mr. Howells has met colored persons in hotels or on the commons
promenading and sparking, or else acting as menials and lazzaroni. He
has not seen, and therefore cannot be convinced that there exists a
quiet, self-respecting, dignified class of easy life and manners (save
only where it crosses the roughness of their white fellow countrymen’s
barbarity) of cultivated tastes and habits, and with no more in common
with the class of his acquaintance than the accident of
complexion,—beyond a sympathy with their wrongs, or a resentment at
being socially and morally classified with them, according as the
principle of altruism or of self love is dominant in the individual.
I respectfully submit that there is hardly a colored church in any
considerable city in this country, which could be said in any sense to
represent _the best colored society_, in which Rhoda Aldgate could not
have seen, when she opened her eyes, persons as quietly and as
becomingly dressed, as cultivated in tone and as refined in manner, as
herself; persons, too, as sensitive to rough contact and as horribly
alive as she could be (though they had known it from childhood) to the
galling distinctions in this country which insist on _levelling down_
all individuals more or less related to the Africans. So far from the
cringing deference which Mr. Howells paints as exhibited to “the young
white lady,” in nine cases out of ten the congregation would have
supposed intuitively that she was a quadroon, so far from the unusual
was her appearance and complexion. In not a few such colored churches
would she have found young women of aspiration and intellectual activity
with whom she could affiliate without nausea and from whom she could
learn a good many lessons—and, sadly I say it, even more outside the
churches whom bitterness at racial inconsistency of white Christians had
soured into a silent disbelief of all religion. In either class she
would have found no trouble in reaching a heart which could enter into
all the agony of her own trial and bitter grief. Nor am I so sure, if
she had followed her first gushing impulse to go South and “elevate” the
race with whom she had discovered her relationship, that she would have
found even them so ready to receive her condescending patronage.
There are numerous other inadvertent misrepresentations in the book—such
as supposing that colored people voluntarily and deliberately prefer to
keep to themselves in all public places and that from choice “they have
their own neighborhoods, their own churches, their own amusements, their
own resorts,”—the intimation that there is a “_black_ voice,” a black
character, easy, irresponsible and fond of what is soft and pleasant, a
black ideal of art and a black barbaric taste in color, a black
affinity—so that in some occult and dreadful way one, only one-sixteenth
related and totally foreign by education and environment, can still feel
that one-sixteenth race calling her more loudly than the
fifteen-sixteenths. I wish to do Mr. Howells the justice to admit,
however, that one feels his blunders to be wholly unintentional and due
to the fact that he has studied his subject merely from the outside.
With all his matchless powers as a novelist, not even he can yet “think
himself imaginatively” into the colored man’s place.
To my mind the quaintest and truest little bit of portraiture from
low-life that I have read in a long time is the little story that
appeared last winter in the Harpers, of the “_Widder Johnsing and how
she caught the preacher_.” It is told with naive impersonality and
appreciative humor, and is quite equal, I think, both in subject and
treatment to the best of Mrs. Stowe’s New England dialect stories. It is
idyllic in its charming simplicity and naturalness, and delightfully
fresh in its sparkling wit and delicious humor. We do not resent such
pictures as this of our lowly folk—such a homely and honest
“Pomegranate, which, if cut deep down the middle,
Shows a heart within blood tinctured of a _veined humanity_,”
is always sweet to the taste and dear to the heart, however plain and
humble the setting.
A longer and more elaborate work, Harold, published anonymously, comes
properly in our group second, the didactic novel. It gives the picture
of a black Englishman cultured and refined, brought in painful contact
with American,—or rather _un-American_, color prejudice. The point of
the book seems to be to show that education for the black man is a
curse, since it increases his sensitiveness to the indignities he must
suffer in consequence of white barbarity. The author makes Harold, after
a futile struggle against American inequalities, disappear into the
jungles of Africa, “there to wed a dusky savage,” at the last cursing
the day he had ever suspected a broader light or known a higher
aspiration; a conclusion which, to my mind, is a most illogical one. If
the cultivated black man cannot endure the white man’s barbarity—the
cure, it seems to me, would be to cultivate the white man. Civilize
both, then each will know what is due from man to man, and that reduces
at once to a minimum the friction of their contact.
In the same rank as Harold belongs that improbability of
improbabilities, Doctor Huguet, by the arch-sensationalist, Ignatius
Donelly. As its purpose is evidently good, I shall not undertake to
review the book. Suffice it to say the plot hinges on the exchange of
soul between the body of a black chicken thief and that of a cultivated
white gentleman, and sets forth the indignities and wrongs to which the
cultured soul, with all its past of refinement and learning, has to
submit in consequence of its change of cuticle. The book is an able
protest against that snobbishness which elevates complexion into a
touchstone of aristocracy and makes the pigment cells of a man’s skin
his badge of nobility regardless of the foulness or purity of the soul
within; the only adverse criticism from the colored man’s point of view
being the selection of a chicken thief as his typical black man; but on
the principle of antitheses this may have been artistically necessary.