to this subject for the last ten years—a poem by Maurice Thompson in the
New York Independent for January 21, 1892, entitled _A Voodoo Prophecy_.
From beginning to end it is full of ghoulish imagery and fine poetic
madness. Here are a few stanzas of it:
“I am the prophet of the dusky race,
The poet of wild Africa. Behold,
The midnight vision brooding in my face!
Come near me,
And hear me,
While from my lips the words of Fate are told.
A black and terrible memory masters me,
The shadow and the substance of deep wrong;
You know the past, hear now what is to be:
From the midnight land,
Over sea and sand,
From the green jungle, hear my Voodoo-song;
A tropic heat is in my bubbling veins,
Quintessence of all savagery is mine,
The lust of ages ripens in my reins,
And burns
And yearns,
Like venom-sap within a noxious vine.
Was I a heathen? Ay, I was—am still
A fetich worshipper; but I was free
To loiter or to wander at my will,
To leap and dance,
To hurl my lance,
And breathe the air of savage liberty.
You drew me to a higher life, you say;
Ah, drove me, with the lash of slavery!
Am I unmindful? Every cursed day
Of pain
And chain
Roars like a torrent in my memory.
You make my manhood whole with ‘equal rights!’
Poor empty words! Dream you I honor them?—
I who have stood on Freedom’s wildest hights?
My Africa,
I see the day
When none dare touch thy garment’s lowest hem.
You cannot make me love you with your whine
Of fine repentance. Veil your pallid face
In presence of the shame that mantles mine;
Stand
At command
Of the black prophet of the Negro race!
I hate you, and I live to nurse my hate,
Remembering when you plied the slaver’s trade
In my dear land ... How patiently I wait
The day,
Not far away,
When all your pride shall shrivel up and fade.
Yea, all your whiteness darken under me!
Darken and be jaundiced, and your blood
Take in dread humors from my savagery,
Until
Your will
Lapse into mine and seal my masterhood.
You, seed of Abel, proud of your descent,
And arrogant, because your cheeks are fair,
Within my loins an inky curse is pent,
To flood
Your blood
And stain your skin and crisp your golden hair.
As you have done by me, so will I do
By all the generations of your race;
Your snowy limbs, your blood’s patrician blue
Shall be
Tainted by me,
And I will set my seal upon your face!
Yea, I will dash my blackness down your veins,
And through your nerves my sensuousness I’ll fling;
Your lips, your eyes, shall bear the musty stains
Of Congo kisses,
While shrieks and hisses
Shall blend into the savage songs I sing!
Your temples will I break, your fountains fill,
Your cities raze, your fields to deserts turn;
My heathen fires shall shine on every hill,
And wild beasts roam,
Where stands your home;—
Even the wind your hated dust shall spurn.
I will absorb your very life in me,
And mold you to the shape of my desire;
Back through the cycles of all cruelty
I will swing you,
And wring you,
And roast you in my passions’ hottest fire.
You, North and South, you, East and West,
Shall drink the cup your fathers gave to me;
My back still burns, I bare my bleeding breast,
I set my face,
My limbs I brace,
To make the long, strong fight for mastery.
My serpent fetich lolls its withered lip
And bares its shining fangs at thought of this:
I scarce can hold the monster in my grip.
So strong is he,
So eagerly
He leaps to meet my precious prophecies.
Hark for the coming of my countless host,
Watch for my banner over land and sea.
The ancient power of vengeance is not lost!
Lo! on the sky
The fire-clouds fly,
And strangely moans the windy, weltering sea.”
Now this would be poetry if it were only truthful. Simple and sensuous
it surely is, but it lacks the third requisite—truth. The Negro is
utterly incapable of such vindictiveness. Such concentrated venom might
be distilled in the cold Saxon, writhing and chafing under oppression
and repression such as the Negro in America has suffered and is
suffering. But the black man is in real life only too glad to accept the
olive branch of reconciliation. He merely asks to be let alone. To be
allowed to pursue his destiny as a free man and an American citizen, to
rear and educate his children in peace, to engage in art, science,
trades or industries according to his ability,—and _to go to the wall if
he fail_. He is willing, if I understand him, to let bygones be bygones.
He does not even demand satisfaction for the centuries of his ancestors’
unpaid labor. He asks neither pension, nor dole nor back salaries; but
is willing to start from the bottom, all helpless and unprovided for as
he is, with absolutely nothing as his stock in trade, with no capital,
in a country developed, enriched, and made to blossom through his
father’s “sweat and toil,”—with none of the accumulations of ancestors’
labors, with no education or moral training for the duties and
responsibilities of freedom; nay, with every power, mental, moral, and
physical, emasculated by a debasing slavery—he is willing, even glad to
take his place in the lists alongside his oppressors, who have had every
advantage, to be tried with them by their own standards, and to ask no
quarter from them or high Heaven to palliate or excuse the ignominy of a
defeat.
The Voodoo Prophecy has no interest then as a picture of the black, but
merely as a revelation of the white man. Maurice Thompson in penning
this portrait of the Negro, has, unconsciously it may be, laid bare his
own soul—its secret dread and horrible fear. And this, it seems to me,
is the key to the Southern situation, the explanation of the apparent
heartlessness and cruelty of some, and the stolid indifference to
atrocity on the part of others, before which so many of us have stood
paralyzed in dumb dismay. The Southerner is not a cold-blooded villain.
Those of us who have studied the genus in its native habitat can testify
that his impulses are generous and kindly, and that while the South
presents a solid phalanx of iron resistance to the Negro’s advancement,
still as individuals to individuals they are warm-hearted and often even
tender. And just here is the difference between the Southerner and his
more philosophical, less sentimental Northern brother. The latter in an
abstract metaphysical way rather wants you to have all the rights that
belong to you. He thinks it better for the country, better for him that
justice, universal justice be done. But he doesn’t care to have the
blacks, in the concrete, too near him. He doesn’t know them and doesn’t
want to know them. He really can’t understand how the Southerner could
have let those little cubs get so close to him as they did in the old
days—nursing from the same bottle and feeding at the same breast.
To the Southerner, on the other hand, race antipathy and color-phobia
_as such_ does not exist. Personally, there is hardly a man of them but
knows, and has known from childhood, some black fellow whom he loves as
dearly as if he were white, whom he regards as indispensable to his own
pleasures, and for whom he would break every commandment in the
decalogue to save him from any general disaster. But our Bourbon seems
utterly incapable of generalizing his few ideas. He would die for A or
B, but suddenly becomes utterly impervious to every principle of logic
when you ask for the simple golden rule to be applied to the class of
which A or B is one. Another fact strikes me as curious. A Southern
white man’s regard for his black friend varies in inverse ratio to the
real distance between them in education and refinement. Puck expresses
it—“I can get on a great deal better with a nigger than I can with a
Negro.” And Mr. Douglass puts it: “Let a colored man be out at elbows
and toes and half way into the gutter and there is no prejudice against
him; but let him respect himself and be a man and Southern whites can’t
abide to ride in the same car with him.”
Why this anomaly? Is it pride? Ordinarily, congeniality increases with
similarity in taste and manners. Is it antipathy to color? It does not
exist. The explanation is the white man’s dread dimly shadowed out in
this Voodoo Prophecy of Maurice Thompson, and fed and inspired by such
books as Minden Armais and a few wild theorizers who have nothing better
to do with their time than spend it advocating the fusion of races as a
plausible and expedient policy. Now I believe there are two ideas which
master the Southern white man and incense him against the black race. On
this point he is a monomaniac. In the face of this feeling he would not
admit he was convinced of the axioms of Geometry. The one is personal
and present, the fear of Negro political domination. The other is for
his posterity—the future horror of being lost as a race in this virile
and vigorous black race. Relieve him of this nightmare and he becomes
“as gentle as the sucking dove.” With that dread delusion maddening him
he would drive his sword to the hilt in the tender breast of his darling
child, did he fancy that through her the curse would come.
Now argument is almost supersensible with a monomaniac. What is most
needed is a sedative for the excited nerves, and then a mental tonic to
stimulate the power of clear perception and truthful cerebration. The
Southern patient needs to be brought to see, by the careful and cautious
injection of cold facts and by the presentation of well selected object
lessons that so far as concerns his first named horror of black
supremacy politically, the usual safeguards of democracy are in the
hands of intelligence and wealth in the South as elsewhere. The weapons
of fair argument and persuasion, the precautionary bulwark of education
and justice, the unimpeachable supremacy and insuperable advantage of
intelligence and discipline over mere numbers—are all in his reach. It
is to his interest to help make the black peasant an intelligent and
self-respecting citizen. No section can thrive under the incubus of an
illiterate, impoverished, cheerless and hopeless peasantry. Let the
South once address herself in good faith to the improvement of the
condition of her laboring classes, let her give but a tithe of the care
and attention which are bestowed in the North on its mercurial and
inflammable importations, let her show but the disposition in her
relative poverty merely to utter the benediction, _Be ye warmed and fed
and educated_, even while she herself has not the wherewithal to emulate
the Pullman villages and the Carnegie munificence, let her but give him
a fair wage and an honest reckoning and a kindly God-speed,—and she will
find herself in possession of the most tractable laborer, the most
faithful and reliable henchman, the most invaluable co-operator and
friendly vassal of which this or any country can boast.
So far as regards the really less sane idea that amicable relations
subsisting between the races may promote their ultimate blending and
loss of identity, it hardly seems necessary to refute it. Blending of
races in the aggregate is simply an unthinkable thought, and the union
of individuals can never fall out by accident or haphazard. There must
be the deliberate wish and intention on each side; and the average black
man in this country is as anxious to preserve his identity and transmit
his type as is the average white man. In any case, hybridity is in no
sense dependent on sectional or national amity. Oppression and outrage
are not the means to chain the affections. Cupid, who knows no bolt or
bars, is more wont to be stimulated with romantic sympathy towards a
forbidden object unjustly persecuted. The sensible course is to remove
those silly and unjust barriers which protect nothing and merely call
attention to the possibilities of law-breaking, and depend instead on
religion and common sense to guide, control and direct in the paths of
purity and right reason.
The froth and foam, the sticks and debris at the water-top may have an
uncertain movement, but as deep calleth unto deep the mighty ocean swell
is always true to the tides; and whatever the fluctuations along the
ragged edge between the races, the home instinct is sufficiently strong
with each to hold the great mass true to its attractions. If Maurice
Thompson’s nightmare vision is sincere on his part, then, it has no
objective reality; ’tis merely a hideous phantasm bred of his own
fevered and jaundiced senses; if he does not believe in it himself, it
was most unkind and uncalled for to publish abroad such inflaming and
irritating fabrications.
After this cursory glance at a few contributions which have peculiarly
emphasized one phase of our literature during the last decade or two, I
am brought to the conclusion that an authentic portrait, at once
æsthetic and true to life, presenting the black man as a free American
citizen, not the humble slave of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_—but the _man_,
divinely struggling and aspiring yet tragically warped and distorted by
the adverse winds of circumstance, has not yet been painted. It is my
opinion that the canvas awaits the brush of the colored man himself. It
is a pathetic—a fearful arraignment of America’s conditions of life,
that instead of that enrichment from the years and days, the summers and
springs under which, as Browning says,
“The flowers turn double and the leaves turn flowers,”—
the black man’s native and original flowers have in this country been
all hardened and sharpened into thorns and spurs. In literature we have
no artists for art’s sake. Albery A. Whitman in “_Twasinta’s Seminoles_”
and “_Not a Man and Yet a Man_” is almost the only poet who has
attempted a more sustained note than the lyrics of Mrs. Harper, and even
that note is almost a wail.
The fact is, a sense of freedom in mind as well as in body is necessary
to the appreciative and inspiring pursuit of the beautiful. A bird
cannot warble out his fullest and most joyous notes while the wires of
his cage are pricking and cramping him at every heart beat. His tones
become only the shrill and poignant protest of rage and despair. And so
the black man’s vexations and chafing environment, even since his
physical emancipation has given him speech, has goaded him into the
eloquence and fire of oratory rather than the genial warmth and cheery
glow of either poetry or romance. And pity ’tis, ’tis true. A race that
has produced for America the only folk-lore and folk songs of native
growth, a race which has grown the most original and unique assemblage
of fable and myth to be found on the continent, a race which has
suggested and inspired almost the only distinctive American note which
could chain the attention and charm the ear of the outside world—has as
yet found no mouthpiece of its own to unify and perpetuate its wondrous
whisperings—no painter-poet to distil in the alembic of his own
imagination the gorgeous dyes, the luxuriant juices of this rich and
tropical vegetation. It was the glory of Chaucer that he justified the
English language to itself—that he took the homely and hitherto despised
Saxon elements and ideas, and lovingly wove them into an artistic
product which even Norman conceit and uppishness might be glad to
acknowledge and imitate. The only man who is doing the same for Negro
folk-lore is one not to the manner born. Joel Chandler Harris has made
himself rich and famous by simply standing around among the black
railroad hands and cotton pickers of the South and compiling the simple
and dramatic dialogues which fall from their lips. What I hope to see
before I die is a black man honestly and appreciatively portraying both
the Negro as he is, and the white man, occasionally, as seen from the
Negro’s standpoint.
There is an old proverb “The devil is always painted _black_—by white
painters.” And what is needed, perhaps, to reverse the picture of the
lordly man slaying the lion, is for the lion to turn painter.
Then too we need the calm clear judgment of ourselves and of others born
of a disenchantment similar to that of a little girl I know in the
South, who was once being laboriously held up over the shoulders of a
surging throng to catch her first glimpse of a real live president. “Why
Nunny,” she cried half reproachfully, as she strained her little neck to
see—“_It’s nuffin but a man!_”
When we have been sized up and written down by others, we need not feel
that the last word is said and the oracles sealed. “It’s nuffin but a
man.” And there are many gifts the giftie may gie us, far better than
seeing ourselves as others see us—and one is that of Bion’s maxim “_Know
Thyself_.” Keep true to your own ideals. Be not ashamed of what is
homely and your own. Speak out and speak honestly. Be true to yourself
and to the message God and Nature meant you to deliver. The young David
cannot fight in Saul’s unwieldy armor. Let him simply therefore gird his
loins, take up his own parable and tell this would-be great American
nation “_A chile’s amang ye takin’ notes_;” and when men act the part of
cowards or wild beasts, this great silent but open-eyed constituency has
a standard by which they are being tried. Know thyself, and know those
around at their true weight of solid intrinsic manhood without being
dazzled by the fact that littleness of soul is often gilded with wealth,
power and intellect. There can be no nobility but that of soul, and no
catalogue of adventitious circumstances can wipe out the stain or
palliate the meanness of inflicting one ruthless, cruel wrong. ’Tis not
only safer, but nobler, grander, diviner,
“To be that which we destroy
Than, by destruction, dwell in doubtful joy.”
With this platform to stand on we can with clear eye weigh what is
written and estimate what is done and ourselves paint what is true with
the calm spirit of those who know their cause is right and who believe
there is a God who judgeth the nations.
WHAT ARE WE WORTH?
I once heard Henry Ward Beecher make this remark: “Were Africa and the
Africans to sink to-morrow, how much poorer would the world be? A little
less gold and ivory, a little less coffee, a considerable ripple,
perhaps, where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans would come together—that
is all; not a poem, not an invention, not a piece of art would be missed
from the world.”
This is not a flattering statement; but then we do not want flattery if
seeing ourselves as others see us is to help us in fulfilling the higher
order, “know thyself.” The world is often called cold and hard. I don’t
know much about that; but of one thing I am sure, it is intensely
practical. Waves of sentiment or prejudice may blur its old eyes for a
little while but you are sure to have your bill presented first or last
with the inexorable “How much owest thou?” What have you produced, what
consumed? What is your real value in the world’s economy? What do you
give to the world over and above what you have cost? What would be
missed had you never lived? What are you worth? What of actual value
would go down with you if you were sunk into the ocean or buried by an
earthquake to-morrow? Show up your cash account and your balance sheet.
In the final reckoning do you belong on the debit or the credit side of
the account? according to a fair and square, an impartial and practical
reckoning. It is by this standard that society estimates individuals;
and by this standard finally and inevitably the world will measure and
judge nations and races.
It may not be unprofitable then for us to address ourselves to the task
of casting up our account and carefully overhauling our books. It may be
well to remember at the outset that the operation is purely a
mathematical one and allows no room for sentiment. The good housewife’s
pet chicken which she took when first hatched, fed from her own hand and
fondled on her bosom as lovingly as if it were a babe, is worth no more
(for all the affection and care lavished on it) when sold in the
shambles: and that never-to-be-forgotten black hen that stole into the
parlor, flew upon the mantel looking for a nest among those handsome
curios, smashed the sèvers vases and picked the buds from the lovely tea
rose—so exasperatingly that the good woman could never again endure the
sight of her—this ill-fated bird is worth no less. There are sections of
this country in which the very name of the Negro, even in homeopathic
doses, stirs up such a storm of feeling that men fairly grow wild and
are unfit to discuss the simplest principles of life and conduct where
the colored man is concerned; and you would think it necessary for the
Ethiopian actually to change his skin before there can be any harmonious
living or lucid thinking: there are a few nooks and crannies, on the
other hand, in another quarter of the same country, in which that name
embodies an idealized theory and a benevolent sentiment; and the black
man (the blacker the better) is the petted nursling, the haloed idea,
the foregone conclusion. In these Arcadias, it is as good capital as
pushing selfishness and aspiring mediocrity need ask, to be advertised
as one of the oppressed race and probably born a slave.
But after all sentiment, whether adverse or favorable, is ephemeral.
Ever shifting and unreliable, it can never be counted in estimating
values. The sentiments of youth are outgrown in age, and we like to-day
what we despised or were indifferent to yesterday. Nine-tenths of the
mis-called color prejudice or race prejudice in this country is mere
sentiment governed by the association of ideas. It is not color
prejudice at all. The color of a man’s face _per se_ has no more to do
with his worthiness and companionableness than the color of his eyes or
the shades of his hair. You admire the one or think the other more
beautiful to rest the gaze upon. But every one with brains knows and
must admit that he must look deeper than this for the man. Mrs.
Livermore once said in my hearing: “It is not that the Negro is black;
Spaniards, Portuguese, East Indians, enter our parlors, sup at our
tables, and, if they have a sufficiently long bank account, they may
marry our daughters: but the Negro is weak—and we don’t like weakness.”
Now this dislike it is useless to inveigh against and folly to raile at.
We share it ourselves and often carry it to a more unjustifiable extent.
For as a rule the narrower the mind and the more circumscribed the
experience, the greater will be the exaggeration of accidents over
substance, and of circumstance over soul. It does no good to argue with
the poor sea-sick wretch who, even on land after the voyage, is
nauseated by the sight of clear spring water. In vain you show the
unreason of the feeling. This, you explain, is a different time, a
different place, a different stage of progress in the circulation of
waters. That was salt, this is fresh, and so on. You might as well be
presenting syllogisms to Ætna. “Yes, my dear Fellow,” he cries, “You
talk admirably; but you don’t know how I feel. You don’t know how sick I
was on that nasty ship!” And so your rhetoric cannot annihilate the
association of ideas. He feels; _you know_. But he will outgrow his
feeling,—and you are content to wait.
Just as impervious to reason is the man who is dominated by the
sentiment of race prejudice. You can only consign him to the fatherly
hand of Time; and pray that your own mental sight be not thus obscured
and your judgment warped in your endeavors to be just and true.
Sentiment and cant, then, both being ruled out, let us try to study our
subject as the world finally reckons it—not certain crevices and
crannies of the earth, but the cool, practical, business-like world.
What are we worth? not in Georgia nor in Massachusetts; not to our
brothers and sisters and cousins and aunts, every one of whom would
unhesitatingly declare us worth a great gold-lump; nor to the
exasperated neighbor over the way who would be just as ready, perhaps,
to write us down a most unmitigated nuisance. But what do we represent
to the world? What is our market value. Are we a positive and additive
quantity or a negative factor in the world’s elements. What have we cost
and what do we come to?