For fifteen years I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the
fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of
half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and
replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder.
The teacher's life is a double one. He stands in a certain fear. He
tends to be stilted, almost dishonest, veiling himself before those
awful eyes. Not the eyes of Almighty God are so straight, so
penetrating, so all-seeing as the wonder-swept eyes of youth. You walk
into a room: to the left is a tall window, bright with colors of crimson
and gold and sunshine. Here are rows of books and there is a table.
Somber blackboards clothe the walls to the right and beside your desk is
the delicate ivory of a nobly cast head. But you see nothing of this:
you see only a silence and eyes,--fringed, soft eyes; hard eyes; eyes
great and small; eyes here so poignant with beauty that the sob
struggles in your throat; eyes there so hard with sorrow that laughter
wells up to meet and beat it back; eyes through which the mockery and
ridicule of hell or some pulse of high heaven may suddenly flash. Ah!
That mighty pause before the class,--that orison and benediction--how
much of my life it has been and made.
I fought earnestly against posing before my class. I tried to be natural
and honest and frank, but it was a bitter hard. What would you say to a
soft, brown face, aureoled in a thousand ripples of gray-black hair,
which knells suddenly: "Do you trust white people?" You do not and you
know that you do not, much as you want to; yet you rise and lie and say
you do; you must say it for her salvation and the world's; you repeat
that she must trust them, that most white folks are honest, and all the
while you are lying and every level, silent eye there knows you are
lying, and miserably you sit and lie on, to the greater glory of God.
I taught history and economics and something called "sociology" at
Atlanta University, where, as our Mr. Webster used to say, we professors
occupied settees and not mere chairs. I was fortunate with this teaching
in having vivid in the minds of my pupils a concrete social problem of
which we all were parts and which we desperately desired to solve. There
was little danger, then, of my teaching or of their thinking becoming
purely theoretical. Work and wage were thrilling realities to us all.
What did we study? I can tell you best by taking a concrete human case,
such as was continually leaping to our eyes and thought and demanding
understanding and interpretation and what I could bring of prophecy.
* * * * *
St. Louis sprawls where mighty rivers meet,--as broad as Philadelphia,
but three stories high instead of two, with wider streets and dirtier
atmosphere, over the dull-brown of wide, calm rivers. The city overflows
into the valleys of Illinois and lies there, writhing under its grimy
cloud. The other city is dusty and hot beyond all dream,--a feverish
Pittsburg in the Mississippi Valley--a great, ruthless, terrible thing!
It is the sort that crushes man and invokes some living superman,--a
giant of things done, a clang of awful accomplishment.
Three men came wandering across this place. They were neither kings nor
wise men, but they came with every significance--perhaps even
greater--than that which the kings bore in the days of old. There was
one who came from the North,--brawny and riotous with energy, a man of
concentrated power, who held all the thunderbolts of modern capital in
his great fists and made flour and meat, iron and steel, cunning
chemicals, wood, paint and paper, transforming to endless tools a
disemboweled earth. He was one who saw nothing, knew nothing, sought
nothing but the making and buying of that which sells; who out from the
magic of his hand rolled over miles of iron road, ton upon ton of food
and metal and wood, of coal and oil and lumber, until the thronging of
knotted ways in East and real St. Louis was like the red, festering
ganglia of some mighty heart.
Then from the East and called by the crash of thunderbolts and
forked-flame came the Unwise Man,--unwise by the theft of endless ages,
but as human as anything God ever made. He was the slave for the miracle
maker. It was he that the thunderbolts struck and electrified into
gasping energy. The rasp of his hard breathing shook the midnights of
all this endless valley and the pulse of his powerful arms set the great
nation to trembling.
And then, at last, out of the South, like a still, small voice, came the
third man,--black, with great eyes and greater memories; hesitantly
eager and yet with the infinite softness and ancient calm which come
from that eternal race whose history is not the history of a day, but
of endless ages. Here, surely, was fit meeting-place for these curiously
intent forces, for these epoch-making and age-twisting forces, for these
human feet on their super-human errands.
Yesterday I rode in East St. Louis. It is the kind of place one quickly
recognizes,--tireless and with no restful green of verdure; hard and
uneven of street; crude, cold, and even hateful of aspect; conventional,
of course, in its business quarter, but quickly beyond one sees the ruts
and the hollows, the stench of ill-tamed sewerage, unguarded railroad
crossings, saloons outnumbering churches and churches catering to
saloons; homes impudently strait and new, prostitutes free and happy,
gamblers in paradise, the town "wide open," shameless and frank; great
factories pouring out stench, filth, and flame--these and all other
things so familiar in the world market places, where industry triumphs
over thought and products overwhelm men. May I tell, too, how yesterday
I rode in this city past flame-swept walls and over gray ashes; in
streets almost wet with blood and beside ruins, where the bones of dead
men new-bleached peered out at me in sullen wonder?
Across the river, in the greater city, where bronze St. Louis,--that
just and austere king--looks with angry, fear-swept eyes down from the
rolling heights of Forest Park, which knows him not nor heeds him, there
is something of the same thing, but this city is larger and older and
the forces of evil have had some curbing from those who have seen the
vision and panted for life; but eastward from St. Louis there is a land
of no taxes for great industries; there is a land where you may buy
grafting politicians at far less rate than you would pay for franchises
or privileges in a modern town. There, too, you may escape the buying of
indulgences from the great terminal fist, which squeezes industry out of
St. Louis. In fact, East St. Louis is a paradise for high and frequent
dividends and for the piling up of wealth to be spent in St. Louis and
Chicago and New York and when the world is sane again, across the seas.
So the Unwise Men pouring out of the East,--falling, scrambling, rushing
into America at the rate of a million a year,--ran, walked, and crawled
to this maelstrom of the workers. They garnered higher wage than ever
they had before, but not all of it came in cash. A part, and an
insidious part, was given to them transmuted into whiskey, prostitutes,
and games of chance. They laughed and disported themselves. God! Had not
their mothers wept enough? It was a good town. There was no veil of
hypocrisy here, but a wickedness, frank, ungilded, and open. To be sure,
there were things sometimes to reveal the basic savagery and thin
veneer. Once, for instance, a man was lynched for brawling on the public
square of the county seat; once a mayor who sought to "clean up" was
publicly assassinated; always there was theft and rumors of theft,
until St. Clair County was a hissing in good men's ears; but always,
too, there were good wages and jolly hoodlums and unchecked wassail of
Saturday nights. Gamblers, big and little, rioted in East St. Louis. The
little gamblers used cards and roulette wheels and filched the weekly
wage of the workers. The greater gamblers used meat and iron and undid
the foundations of the world. All the gods of chance flaunted their wild
raiment here, above the brown flood of the Mississippi.
Then the world changed; then civilization, built for culture, rebuilt
itself for wilful murder in Europe, Asia, America, and the Southern
Seas. Hands that made food made powder, and iron for railways was iron
for guns. The wants of common men were forgotten before the groan of
giants. Streams of gold, lost from the world's workers, filtered and
trickled into the hands of gamblers and put new power into the
thunderbolts of East St. Louis.
Wages had been growing before the World War. Slowly but remorselessly
the skilled and intelligent, banding themselves, had threatened the
coffers of the mighty, and slowly the mighty had disgorged. Even the
common workers, the poor and unlettered, had again and again gripped the
sills of the city walls and pulled themselves to their chins; but, alas!
there were so many hands and so many mouths and the feet of the
Disinherited kept coming across the wet paths of the sea to this old El
Dorado.
War brought subtle changes. Wages stood still while prices fattened. It
was not that the white American worker was threatened with starvation,
but it was what was, after all, a more important question,--whether or
not he should lose his front-room and victrola and even the dream of a
Ford car.
There came a whirling and scrambling among the workers,--they fought
each other; they climbed on each others' backs. The skilled and
intelligent, banding themselves even better than before, bargained with
the men of might and held them by bitter threats; the less skilled and
more ignorant seethed at the bottom and tried, as of old, to bring it
about that the ignorant and unlettered should learn to stand together
against both capital and skilled labor.
It was here that there came out of the East a beam of unearthly
light,--a triumph of possible good in evil so strange that the workers
hardly believed it. Slowly they saw the gates of Ellis Island closing,
slowly the footsteps of the yearly million men became fainter and
fainter, until the stream of immigrants overseas was stopped by the
shadow of death at the very time when new murder opened new markets over
all the world to American industry; and the giants with the thunderbolts
stamped and raged and peered out across the world and called for men and
evermore,--men!
The Unwise Men laughed and squeezed reluctant dollars out of the fists
of the mighty and saw in their dream the vision of a day when labor, as
they knew it, should come into its own; saw this day and saw it with
justice and with right, save for one thing, and that was the sound of
the moan of the Disinherited, who still lay without the walls. When they
heard this moan and saw that it came not across the seas, they were at
first amazed and said it was not true; and then they were mad and said
it should not be. Quickly they turned and looked into the red blackness
of the South and in their hearts were fear and hate!
What did they see? They saw something at which they had been taught to
laugh and make sport; they saw that which the heading of every newspaper
column, the lie of every cub reporter, the exaggeration of every press
dispatch, and the distortion of every speech and book had taught them
was a mass of despicable men, inhuman; at best, laughable; at worst, the
meat of mobs and fury.
What did they see? They saw nine and one-half millions of human beings.
They saw the spawn of slavery, ignorant by law and by deviltry, crushed
by insult and debauched by systematic and criminal injustice. They saw a
people whose helpless women have been raped by thousands and whose men
lynched by hundreds in the face of a sneering world. They saw a people
with heads bloody, but unbowed, working faithfully at wages fifty per
cent. lower than the wages of the nation and under conditions which
shame civilization, saving homes, training children, hoping against
hope. They saw the greatest industrial miracle of modern days,--slaves
transforming themselves to freemen and climbing out of perdition by
their own efforts, despite the most contemptible opposition God ever
saw,--they saw all this and what they saw the distraught employers of
America saw, too.
The North called to the South. A scream of rage went up from the cotton
monopolists and industrial barons of the new South. Who was this who
dared to "interfere" with their labor? Who sought to own their black
slaves but they? Who honored and loved "niggers" as they did?
They mobilized all the machinery of modern oppression: taxes, city
ordinances, licenses, state laws, municipal regulations, wholesale
police arrests and, of course, the peculiarly Southern method of the mob
and the lyncher. They appealed frantically to the United States
Government; they groveled on their knees and shed wild tears at the
"suffering" of their poor, misguided black friends, and yet, despite
this, the Northern employers simply had to offer two and three dollars a
day and from one-quarter to one-half a million dark workers arose and
poured themselves into the North. They went to the mines of West
Virginia, because war needs coal; they went to the industries of New
Jersey and Pennsylvania, because war needs ships and iron; they went to
the automobiles of Detroit and the load-carrying of Chicago; and they
went to East St. Louis.
Now there came fear in the hearts of the Unwise Men. It was not that
their wages were lowered,--they went even higher. They received, not
simply, a living wage, but a wage that paid for some of the decencies,
and, in East St. Louis, many of the indecencies of life. What they
feared was not deprivation of the things they were used to and the
shadow of poverty, but rather the definite death of their rising dreams.
But if fear was new-born in the hearts of the Unwise Men, the black man
was born in a house of fear; to him poverty of the ugliest and straitest
type was father, mother, and blood-brother. He was slipping stealthily
northward to escape hunger and insult, the hand of oppression, and the
shadow of death.
Here, then, in the wide valley which Father Marquette saw peaceful and
golden, lazy with fruit and river, half-asleep beneath the nod of
God,--here, then, was staged every element for human tragedy, every
element of the modern economic paradox.
* * * * *
Ah! That hot, wide plain of East St. Louis is a gripping thing. The
rivers are dirty with sweat and toil and lip, like lakes, along the low
and burdened shores; flatboats ramble and thread among them, and above
the steamers bridges swing on great arches of steel, striding with
mighty grace from shore to shore. Everywhere are brick kennels,--tall,
black and red chimneys, tongues of flame. The ground is littered with
cars and iron, tracks and trucks, boxes and crates, metals and coal and
rubber. Nature-defying cranes, grim elevators rise above pile on pile of
black and grimy lumber. And ever below is the water,--wide and silent,
gray-brown and yellow.
This is the stage for the tragedy: the armored might of the modern world
urged by the bloody needs of the world wants, fevered today by a
fabulous vision of gain and needing only hands, hands, hands! Fear of
loss and greed of gain in the hearts of the giants; the clustered
cunning of the modern workman, skilled as artificer and skilled in the
rhythm of the habit of work, tasting the world's good and panting for
more; fear of poverty and hate of "scabs" in the hearts of the workers;
the dumb yearning in the hearts of the oppressed; the echo of laughter
heard at the foot of the Pyramids; the faithful, plodding slouch of the
laborers; fear of the Shadow of Death in the hearts of black men.
We ask, and perhaps there is no answer, how far may the captain of the
world's industry do his deeds, despite the grinding tragedy of its
doing? How far may men fight for the beginning of comfort, out beyond
the horrid shadow of poverty, at the cost of starving other and what the
world calls lesser men? How far may those who reach up out of the slime
that fills the pits of the world's damned compel men with loaves to
divide with men who starve?
The answers to these questions are hard, but yet one answer looms above
all,--justice lies with the lowest; the plight of the lowest man,--the
plight of the black man--deserves the first answer, and the plight of
the giants of industry, the last.
Little cared East St. Louis for all this bandying of human problems, so
long as its grocers and saloon-keepers flourished and its industries
steamed and screamed and smoked and its bankers grew rich. Stupidity,
license, and graft sat enthroned in the City Hall. The new black folk
were exploited as cheerfully as white Polacks and Italians; the rent of
shacks mounted merrily, the street car lines counted gleeful gains, and
the crimes of white men and black men flourished in the dark. The high
and skilled and smart climbed on the bent backs of the ignorant; harder
the mass of laborers strove to unionize their fellows and to bargain
with employers.
Nor were the new blacks fools. They had no love for nothings in labor;
they had no wish to make their fellows' wage envelopes smaller, but they
were determined to make their own larger. They, too, were willing to
join in the new union movement. But the unions did not want them. Just
as employers monopolized meat and steel, so they sought to monopolize
labor and beat a giant's bargain. In the higher trades they succeeded.
The best electrician in the city was refused admittance to the union and
driven from the town because he was black. No black builder, printer, or
machinist could join a union or work in East St. Louis, no matter what
his skill or character. But out of the stink of the stockyards and the
dust of the aluminum works and the sweat of the lumber yards the willing
blacks could not be kept.
They were invited to join unions of the laborers here and they joined.
White workers and black workers struck at the aluminum works in the fall
and won higher wages and better hours; then again in the spring they
struck to make bargaining compulsory for the employer, but this time
they fronted new things. The conflagration of war had spread to America;
government and court stepped in and ordered no hesitation, no strikes;
the work must go on.
Deeper was the call for workers. Black men poured in and red anger
flamed in the hearts of the white workers. The anger was against the
wielders of the thunderbolts, but here it was impotent because employers
stood with the hand of the government before their faces; it was against
entrenched union labor, which had risen on the backs of the unskilled
and unintelligent and on the backs of those whom for any reason of race
or prejudice or chicane they could beat beyond the bars of competition;
and finally the anger of the mass of white workers was turned toward
these new black interlopers, who seemed to come to spoil their last
dream of a great monopoly of common labor.
These angers flamed and the union leaders, fearing their fury and
knowing their own guilt, not only in the larger and subtler matter of
bidding their way to power across the weakness of their less fortunate
fellows, but also conscious of their part in making East St. Louis a
miserable town of liquor and lust, leaped quickly to ward the gathering
thunder from their own heads. The thing they wanted was even at their
hands: here were black men, guilty not only of bidding for jobs which
white men could have held at war prices, even if they could not fill,
but also guilty of being black! It was at this blackness that the unions
pointed the accusing finger. It was here that they committed the
unpardonable crime. It was here that they entered the Shadow of Hell,
where suddenly from a fight for wage and protection against industrial
oppression East St. Louis became the center of the oldest and nastiest
form of human oppression,--race hatred.
The whole situation lent itself to this terrible transformation.
Everything in the history of the United States, from slavery to Sunday
supplements, from disfranchisement to residence segregation, from
"Jim-Crow" cars to a "Jim-Crow" army draft--all this history of
discrimination and insult festered to make men think and willing to
think that the venting of their unbridled anger against 12,000,000
humble, upstriving workers was a way of settling the industrial tangle
of the ages. It was the logic of the broken plate, which, seared of old
across its pattern, cracks never again, save along the old destruction.
So hell flamed in East St. Louis! The white men drove even black union
men out of their unions and when the black men, beaten by night and
assaulted, flew to arms and shot back at the marauders, five thousand
rioters arose and surged like a crested stormwave, from noonday until
midnight; they killed and beat and murdered; they dashed out the brains
of children and stripped off the clothes of women; they drove victims
into the flames and hanged the helpless to the lighting poles. Fathers
were killed before the faces of mothers; children were burned; heads
were cut off with axes; pregnant women crawled and spawned in dark, wet
fields; thieves went through houses and firebrands followed; bodies were
thrown from bridges; and rocks and bricks flew through the air.
The Negroes fought. They grappled with the mob like beasts at bay. They
drove them back from the thickest cluster of their homes and piled the
white dead on the street, but the cunning mob caught the black men
between the factories and their homes, where they knew they were armed
only with their dinner pails. Firemen, policemen, and militiamen stood
with hanging hands or even joined eagerly with the mob.
It was the old world horror come to life again: all that Jews suffered
in Spain and Poland; all that peasants suffered in France, and Indians
in Calcutta; all that aroused human deviltry had accomplished in ages
past they did in East St. Louis, while the rags of six thousand
half-naked black men and women fluttered across the bridges of the calm
Mississippi.
The white South laughed,--it was infinitely funny--the "niggers" who had
gone North to escape slavery and lynching had met the fury of the mob
which they had fled. Delegations rushed North from Mississippi and
Texas, with suspicious timeliness and with great-hearted offers to take
these workers back to a lesser hell. The man from Greensville,
Mississippi, who wanted a thousand got six, because, after all, the end
was not so simple.
No, the end was not simple. On the contrary, the problem raised by East
St. Louis was curiously complex. The ordinary American, tired of the
persistence of "the Negro problem," sees only another anti-Negro mob and
wonders, not when we shall settle this problem, but when we shall be
well rid of it. The student of social things sees another mile-post in
the triumphant march of union labor; he is sorry that blood and rapine
should mark its march,--but, what will you? War is life!
Despite these smug reasonings the bare facts were these: East St. Louis,
a great industrial center, lost 5,000 laborers,--good, honest,
hard-working laborers. It was not the criminals, either black or white,
who were driven from East St. Louis. They are still there. They will
stay there. But half the honest black laborers were gone. The crippled
ranks of industrial organization in the mid-Mississippi Valley cannot be
recruited from Ellis Island, because in Europe men are dead and maimed,
and restoration, when restoration comes, will raise a European demand
for labor such as this age has never seen. The vision of industrial
supremacy has come to the giants who lead American industry and finance.
But it can never be realized unless the laborers are here to do the
work,--the skilled laborers, the common laborers, the willing laborers,
the well-paid laborers. The present forces, organized however cunningly,
are not large enough to do what America wants; but there is another
group of laborers, 12,000,000 strong, the natural heirs, by every logic
of justice, to the fruits of America's industrial advance. They will be
used simply because they must be used,--but their using means East St.
Louis!
Eastward from St. Louis lie great centers, like Chicago, Indianapolis,
Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburg, Philadelphia, and New York; in every one
of these and in lesser centers there is not only the industrial unrest
of war and revolutionized work, but there is the call for workers, the
coming of black folk, and the deliberate effort to divert the thoughts
of men, and particularly of workingmen, into channels of race hatred
against blacks. In every one of these centers what happened in East St.
Louis has been attempted, with more or less success. Yet the American
Negroes stand today as the greatest strategic group in the world. Their
services are indispensable, their temper and character are fine, and
their souls have seen a vision more beautiful than any other mass of
workers. They may win back culture to the world if their strength can be
used with the forces of the world that make for justice and not against
the hidden hates that fight for barbarism. For fight they must and fight
they will!
Rising on wings we cross again the rivers of St. Louis, winding and
threading between the towers of industry that threaten and drown the
towers of God. Far, far beyond, we sight the green of fields and hills;
but ever below lies the river, blue,--brownish-gray, touched with the
hint of hidden gold. Drifting through half-flooded lowlands, with
shanties and crops and stunted trees, past struggling corn and
straggling village, we rush toward the Battle of the Marne and the West,
from this dread Battle of the East. Westward, dear God, the fire of Thy
Mad World crimsons our Heaven. Our answering Hell rolls eastward from
St. Louis.
* * * * *
Here, in microcosm, is the sort of economic snarl that arose continually
for me and my pupils to solve. We could bring to its unraveling little
of the scholarly aloofness and academic calm of most white universities.
To us this thing was Life and Hope and Death!
How should we think such a problem through, not simply as Negroes, but
as men and women of a new century, helping to build a new world? And
first of all, here is no simple question of race antagonism. There are
no races, in the sense of great, separate, pure breeds of men, differing
in attainment, development, and capacity. There are great groups,--now
with common history, now with common interests, now with common
ancestry; more and more common experience and present interest drive
back the common blood and the world today consists, not of races, but of
the imperial commercial group of master capitalists, international and
predominantly white; the national middle classes of the several nations,
white, yellow, and brown, with strong blood bonds, common languages, and
common history; the international laboring class of all colors; the
backward, oppressed groups of nature-folk, predominantly yellow, brown,
and black.
Two questions arise from the work and relations of these groups: how to
furnish goods and services for the wants of men and how equitably and
sufficiently to satisfy these wants. There can be no doubt that we have
passed in our day from a world that could hardly satisfy the physical
wants of the mass of men, by the greatest effort, to a world whose
technique supplies enough for all, if all can claim their right. Our
great ethical question today is, therefore, how may we justly distribute
the world's goods to satisfy the necessary wants of the mass of men.
What hinders the answer to this question? Dislikes, jealousies,
hatreds,--undoubtedly like the race hatred in East St. Louis; the
jealousy of English and German; the dislike of the Jew and the Gentile.
But these are, after all, surface disturbances, sprung from ancient
habit more than from present reason. They persist and are encouraged
because of deeper, mightier currents. If the white workingmen of East
St. Louis felt sure that Negro workers would not and could not take the
bread and cake from their mouths, their race hatred would never have
been translated into murder. If the black workingmen of the South could
earn a decent living under decent circumstances at home, they would not
be compelled to underbid their white fellows.
Thus the shadow of hunger, in a world which never needs to be hungry,
drives us to war and murder and hate. But why does hunger shadow so vast
a mass of men? Manifestly because in the great organizing of men for
work a few of the participants come out with more wealth than they can
possibly use, while a vast number emerge with less than can decently
support life. In earlier economic stages we defended this as the reward
of Thrift and Sacrifice, and as the punishment of Ignorance and Crime.
To this the answer is sharp: Sacrifice calls for no such reward and
Ignorance deserves no such punishment. The chief meaning of our present
thinking is that the disproportion between wealth and poverty today
cannot be adequately accounted for by the thrift and ignorance of the
rich and the poor.
Yesterday we righted one great mistake when we realized that the
ownership of the laborer did not tend to increase production. The world
at large had learned this long since, but black slavery arose again in
America as an inexplicable anachronism, a wilful crime. The freeing of
the black slaves freed America. Today we are challenging another
ownership,-the ownership of materials which go to make the goods we
need. Private ownership of land, tools, and raw materials may at one
stage of economic development be a method of stimulating production and
one which does not greatly interfere with equitable distribution. When,
however, the intricacy and length of technical production increased, the
ownership of these things becomes a monopoly, which easily makes the
rich richer and the poor poorer. Today, therefore, we are challenging
this ownership; we are demanding general consent as to what materials
shall be privately owned and as to how materials shall be used. We are
rapidly approaching the day when we shall repudiate all private property
in raw materials and tools and demand that distribution hinge, not on
the power of those who monopolize the materials, but on the needs of the
mass of men.
Can we do this and still make sufficient goods, justly gauge the needs
of men, and rightly decide who are to be considered "men"? How do we
arrange to accomplish these things today? Somebody decides whose wants
should be satisfied. Somebody organizes industry so as to satisfy these
wants. What is to hinder the same ability and foresight from being used
in the future as in the past? The amount and kind of human ability
necessary need not be decreased,--it may even be vastly increased, with
proper encouragement and rewards. Are we today evoking the necessary
ability? On the contrary, it is not the Inventor, the Manager, and the
Thinker who today are reaping the great rewards of industry, but rather
the Gambler and the Highwayman. Rightly-organized industry might easily
save the Gambler's Profit and the Monopolist's Interest and by paying a
more discriminating reward in wealth and honor bring to the service of
the state more ability and sacrifice than we can today command. If we do
away with interest and profit, consider the savings that could be made;
but above all, think how great the revolution would be when we ask the
mysterious Somebody to decide in the light of public opinion whose wants
should be satisfied. This is the great and real revolution that is
coming in future industry.
But this is not the need of the revolution nor indeed, perhaps, its real
beginning. What we must decide sometime is who are to be considered
"men." Today, at the beginning of this industrial change, we are
admitting that economic classes must give way. The laborers' hire must
increase, the employers' profit must be curbed. But how far shall this
change go? Must it apply to all human beings and to all work throughout
the world?
Certainly not. We seek to apply it slowly and with some reluctance to
white men and more slowly and with greater reserve to white women, but
black folk and brown and for the most part yellow folk we have widely
determined shall not be among those whose needs must justly be heard and
whose wants must be ministered to in the great organization of world
industry.
In the teaching of my classes I was not willing to stop with showing
that this was unfair,--indeed I did not have to do this. They knew
through bitter experience its rank injustice, because they were black.
What I had to show was that no real reorganization of industry could be
permanently made with the majority of mankind left out. These
disinherited darker peoples must either share in the future industrial
democracy or overturn the world.
Of course, the foundation of such a system must be a high, ethical
ideal. We must really envisage the wants of humanity. We must want the
wants of all men. We must get rid of the fascination for exclusiveness.
Here, in a world full of folk, men are lonely. The rich are lonely. We
are all frantic for fellow-souls, yet we shut souls out and bar the ways
and bolster up the fiction of the Elect and the Superior when the great
mass of men is capable of producing larger and larger numbers for every
human height of attainment. To be sure, there are differences between
men and groups and there will ever be, but they will be differences of
beauty and genius and of interest and not necessarily of ugliness,
imbecility, and hatred.
The meaning of America is the beginning of the discovery of the Crowd.
The crowd is not so well-trained as a Versailles garden party of Louis
XIV, but it is far better trained than the Sans-culottes and it has
infinite possibilities. What a world this will be when human
possibilities are freed, when we discover each other, when the stranger
is no longer the potential criminal and the certain inferior!
What hinders our approach to the ideals outlined above? Our profit from
degradation, our colonial exploitation, our American attitude toward the
Negro. Think again of East St. Louis! Think back of that to slavery and
Reconstruction! Do we want the wants of American Negroes satisfied? Most
certainly not, and that negative is the greatest hindrance today to the
reorganization of work and redistribution of wealth, not only in
America, but in the world.
All humanity must share in the future industrial democracy of the world.
For this it must be trained in intelligence and in appreciation of the
good and the beautiful. Present Big Business,--that Science of Human
Wants--must be perfected by eliminating the price paid for waste, which
is Interest, and for Chance, which is Profit, and making all income a
personal wage for service rendered by the recipient; by recognizing no
possible human service as great enough to enable a person to designate
another as an idler or as a worker at work which he cannot do. Above
all, industry must minister to the wants of the many and not to the few,
and the Negro, the Indian, the Mongolian, and the South Sea Islander
must be among the many as well as Germans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen.
In this coming socialization of industry we must guard against that same
tyranny of the majority that has marked democracy in the making of laws.
There must, for instance, persist in this future economics a certain
minimum of machine-like work and prompt obedience and submission. This
necessity is a simple corollary from the hard facts of the physical
world. It must be accepted with the comforting thought that its routine
need not demand twelve hours a day or even eight. With Work for All and
All at Work probably from three to six hours would suffice, and leave
abundant time for leisure, exercise, study, and avocations.
But what shall we say of work where spiritual values and social
distinctions enter? Who shall be Artists and who shall be Servants in
the world to come? Or shall we all be artists and all serve?
_The Second Coming_
Three bishops sat in San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York, peering
gloomily into three flickering fires, which cast and recast shuddering
shadows on book-lined walls. Three letters lay in their laps, which
said:
"And thou, Valdosta, in the land of Georgia, art not least among the
princes of America, for out of thee shall come a governor who shall rule
my people."
The white bishop of New York scowled and impatiently threw the letter
into the fire. "Valdosta?" he thought,--"That's where I go to the
governor's wedding of little Marguerite, my white flower,--" Then he
forgot the writing in his musing, but the paper flared red in the
fireplace.
"Valdosta?" said the black bishop of New Orleans, turning uneasily in
his chair. "I must go down there. Those colored folk are acting
strangely. I don't know where all this unrest and moving will lead to.
Then, there's poor Lucy--" And he threw the letter into the fire, but
eyed it suspiciously as it flamed green. "Stranger things than that have
happened," he said slowly, "'and ye shall hear of wars and rumors of
wars ... for nation shall rise against nation and kingdom against
kingdom.'"
In San Francisco the priest of Japan, abroad to study strange lands, sat
in his lacquer chair, with face like soft-yellow and wrinkled parchment.
Slowly he wrote in a great and golden book: "I have been strangely
bidden to the Val d' Osta, where one of those religious cults that swarm
here will welcome a prophet. I shall go and report to Kioto."
So in the dim waning of the day before Christmas three bishops met in
Valdosta and saw its mills and storehouses, its wide-throated and sandy
streets, in the mellow glow of a crimson sun. The governor glared
anxiously up the street as he helped the bishop of New York into his car
and welcomed him graciously.
"I am troubled," said the governor, "about the niggers. They are acting
queerly. I'm not certain but Fleming is back of it."
"Fleming?"
"Yes! He's running against me next term for governor; he's a firebrand;
wants niggers to vote and all that--pardon me a moment, there's a darky
I know--" and he hurried to the black bishop, who had just descended
from the "Jim-Crow" car, and clasped his hand cordially. They talked in
whispers. "Search diligently," said the governor in parting, "and bring
me word again." Then returning to his guest, "You will excuse me, won't
you?" he asked, "but I am sorely troubled! I never saw niggers act so.
They're leaving by the hundreds and those who stay are getting impudent!
They seem to be expecting something. What's the crowd, Jim?"
The chauffeur said that there was some sort of Chinese official in town
and everybody wanted to glimpse him. He drove around another way.
It all happened very suddenly. The bishop of New York, in full
canonicals for the early wedding, stepped out on the rear balcony of his
mansion, just as the dying sun lit crimson clouds of glory in the East
and burned the West.
"Fire!" yelled a wag in the surging crowd that was gathering to
celebrate a southern Christmas-eve; all laughed and ran.
The bishop of New York did not understand. He peered around. Was it that
dark, little house in the far backyard that flamed? Forgetful of his
robes he hurried down,--a brave, white figure in the sunset. He found
himself before an old, black, rickety stable. He could hear the mules
stamping within.
No. It was not fire. It was the sunset glowing through the cracks.
Behind the hut its glory rose toward God like flaming wings of cherubim.
He paused until he heard the faint wail of a child. Hastily he entered.
A white girl crouched before him, down by the very mules' feet, with a
baby in her arms,-a little mite of a baby that wailed weakly. Behind
mother and child stood a shadow. The bishop of New York turned to the
right, inquiringly, and saw a black man in bishop's robes that faintly
re-echoed his own. He turned away to the left and saw a golden Japanese
in golden garb. Then he heard the black man mutter behind him: "But He
was to come the second time in clouds of glory, with the nations
gathered around Him and angels--" at the word a shaft of glorious light
fell full upon the child, while without came the tramping of unnumbered
feet and the whirring of wings.
The bishop of New York bent quickly over the baby. It was black! He
stepped back with a gesture of disgust, hardly listening to and yet
hearing the black bishop, who spoke almost as if in apology:
"She's not really white; I know Lucy--you see, her mother worked for the
governor--" The white bishop turned on his heel and nearly trod on the
yellow priest, who knelt with bowed head before the pale mother and
offered incense and a gift of gold.
Out into the night rushed the bishop of New York. The wings of the
cherubim were folded black against the stars. As he hastened down the
front staircase the governor came rushing up the street steps.
"We are late!" he cried nervously. "The bride awaits!" He hurried the
bishop to the waiting limousine, asking him anxiously: "Did you hear
anything? Do you hear that noise? The crowd is growing strangely on the
streets and there seems to be a fire over toward the East. I never saw
so many people here--I fear violence--a mob--a lynching--I fear--hark!"
What was that which he, too, heard beneath the rhythm of unnumbered
feet? Deep in his heart a wonder grew. What was it? Ah, he knew! It was
music,--some strong and mighty chord. It rose higher as the
brilliantly-lighted church split the night, and swept radiantly toward
them. So high and clear that music flew, it seemed above, around, behind
them. The governor, ashen-faced, crouched in the car; but the bishop
said softly as the ecstasy pulsed in his heart:
"Such music, such wedding music! What choir is it?"
V
"THE SERVANT IN THE HOUSE"
The lady looked at me severely; I glanced away. I had addressed the
little audience at some length on the disfranchisement of my people in
society, politics, and industry and had studiously avoided the while her
cold, green eye. I finished and shook weary hands, while she lay in
wait. I knew what was coming and braced my soul.
"Do you know where I can get a good colored cook?" she asked. I
disclaimed all guilty concupiscence. She came nearer and spitefully
shook a finger in my face.
"Why--won't--Negroes--work!" she panted. "I have given money for years
to Hampton and Tuskegee and yet I can't get decent servants. They won't
try. They're lazy! They're unreliable! They're impudent and they leave
without notice. They all want to be lawyers and doctors and" (she spat
the word in venom) "ladies!"
"God forbid!" I answered solemnly, and then being of gentle birth, and
unminded to strike a defenseless female of uncertain years, I ran; I ran
home and wrote a chapter in my book and this is it.
* * * * *
I speak and speak bitterly as a servant and a servant's son, for my
mother spent five or more years of her life as a menial; my father's
family escaped, although grandfather as a boat steward had to fight hard
to be a man and not a lackey. He fought and won. My mother's folk,
however, during my childhood, sat poised on that thin edge between the
farmer and the menial. The surrounding Irish had two chances, the
factory and the kitchen, and most of them took the factory, with all its
dirt and noise and low wage. The factory was closed to us. Our little
lands were too small to feed most of us. A few clung almost sullenly to
the old homes, low and red things crouching on a wide level; but the
children stirred restlessly and walked often to town and saw its
wonders. Slowly they dribbled off,--a waiter here, a cook there, help
for a few weeks in Mrs. Blank's kitchen when she had summer boarders.
Instinctively I hated such work from my birth. I loathed it and shrank
from it. Why? I could not have said. Had I been born in Carolina instead
of Massachusetts I should hardly have escaped the taint of "service."
Its temptations in wage and comfort would soon have answered my
scruples; and yet I am sure I would have fought long even in Carolina,
for I knew in my heart that thither lay Hell.
I mowed lawns on contract, did "chores" that left me my own man, sold
papers, and peddled tea--anything to escape the shadow of the awful
thing that lurked to grip my soul. Once, and once only, I felt the sting
of its talons. I was twenty and had graduated from Fisk with a
scholarship for Harvard; I needed, however, travel money and clothes and
a bit to live on until the scholarship was due. Fortson was a
fellow-student in winter and a waiter in summer. He proposed that the
Glee Club Quartet of Fisk spend the summer at the hotel in Minnesota
where he worked and that I go along as "Business Manager" to arrange for
engagements on the journey back. We were all eager, but we knew nothing
of table-waiting. "Never mind," said Fortson, "you can stand around the
dining-room during meals and carry out the big wooden trays of dirty
dishes. Thus you can pick up knowledge of waiting and earn good tips and
get free board." I listened askance, but I went.
I entered that broad and blatant hotel at Lake Minnetonka with distinct
forebodings. The flamboyant architecture, the great verandas, rich
furniture, and richer dresses awed us mightily. The long loft reserved
for us, with its clean little cots, was reassuring; the work was not
difficult,--but the meals! There were no meals. At first, before the
guests ate, a dirty table in the kitchen was hastily strewn with
uneatable scraps. We novices were the only ones who came to eat, while
the guests' dining-room, with its savors and sights, set our appetites
on edge! After a while even the pretense of meals for us was dropped. We
were sure we were going to starve when Dug, one of us, made a startling
discovery: the waiters stole their food and they stole the best. We
gulped and hesitated. Then we stole, too, (or, at least, they stole and
I shared) and we all fattened, for the dainties were marvelous. You
slipped a bit here and hid it there; you cut off extra portions and gave
false orders; you dashed off into darkness and hid in corners and ate
and ate! It was nasty business. I hated it. I was too cowardly to steal
much myself, and not coward enough to refuse what others stole.
Our work was easy, but insipid. We stood about and watched overdressed
people gorge. For the most part we were treated like furniture and were
supposed to act the wooden part. I watched the waiters even more than
the guests. I saw that it paid to amuse and to cringe. One particular
black man set me crazy. He was intelligent and deft, but one day I
caught sight of his face as he served a crowd of men; he was playing the
clown,--crouching, grinning, assuming a broad dialect when he usually
spoke good English--ah! it was a heartbreaking sight, and he made more
money than any waiter in the dining-room.
I did not mind the actual work or the kind of work, but it was the
dishonesty and deception, the flattery and cajolery, the unnatural
assumption that worker and diner had no common humanity. It was uncanny.
It was inherently and fundamentally wrong. I stood staring and thinking,
while the other boys hustled about. Then I noticed one fat hog, feeding
at a heavily gilded trough, who could not find his waiter. He beckoned
me. It was not his voice, for his mouth was too full. It was his way,
his air, his assumption. Thus Caesar ordered his legionaries or
Cleopatra her slaves. Dogs recognized the gesture. I did not. He may be
beckoning yet for all I know, for something froze within me. I did not
look his way again. Then and there I disowned menial service for me and
my people.
I would work my hands off for an honest wage, but for "tips" and
"hand-me-outs," never! Fortson was a pious, honest fellow, who regarded
"tips" as in the nature of things, being to the manner born; but the
hotel that summer in other respects rather astonished even him. He came
to us much flurried one night and got us to help him with a memorial to
the absentee proprietor, telling of the wild and gay doings of midnights
in the rooms and corridors among "tired" business men and their
prostitutes. We listened wide-eyed and eager and wrote the filth out
manfully. The proprietor did not thank Fortson. He did not even answer
the letter.
When I finally walked out of that hotel and out of menial service
forever, I felt as though, in a field of flowers, my nose had been held
unpleasantly long to the worms and manure at their roots.
* * * * *
"Cursed be Canaan!" cried the Hebrew priests. "A servant of servants
shall he be unto his brethren." With what characteristic complacency did
the slaveholders assume that Canaanites were Negroes and their
"brethren" white? Are not Negroes servants? _Ergo_! Upon such spiritual
myths was the anachronism of American slavery built, and this was the
degradation that once made menial servants the aristocrats among colored
folk. House servants secured some decencies of food and clothing and
shelter; they could more easily reach their master's ear; their personal
abilities of character became known and bonds grew between slave and
master which strengthened from friendship to love, from mutual service
to mutual blood.
Naturally out of this the West Indian servant climbed out of slavery
into citizenship, for few West Indian masters--fewer Spanish or
Dutch--were callous enough to sell their own children into slavery. Not
so with English and Americans. With a harshness and indecency seldom
paralleled in the civilized world white masters on the mainland sold
their mulatto children, half-brothers and half-sisters, and their own
wives in all but name, into life-slavery by the hundreds and thousands.
They originated a special branch of slave-trading for this trade and the
white aristocrats of Virginia and the Carolinas made more money by this
business during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than in any
other way.
The clang of the door of opportunity thus knelled in the ears of the
colored house servant whirled the whole face of Negro advancement as on
some great pivot. The movement was slow, but vast. When emancipation
came, before and after 1863, the house servant still held advantages. He
had whatever education the race possessed and his white father, no
longer able to sell him, often helped him with land and protection.
Notwithstanding this the lure of house service for the Negro was gone.
The path of salvation for the emancipated host of black folk lay no
longer through the kitchen door, with its wide hall and pillared veranda
and flowered yard beyond. It lay, as every Negro soon knew and knows, in
escape from menial serfdom.
In 1860, 98 per cent of the Negroes were servants and serfs. In 1880, 30
per cent were servants and 65 per cent were serfs. The percentage of
servants then rose slightly and fell again until 21 per cent were in
service in 1910 and, doubtless, much less than 20 per cent today. This
is the measure of our rise, but the Negro will not approach freedom
until this hateful badge of slavery and mediaevalism has been reduced to
less than 10 per cent.
Not only are less than a fifth of our workers servants today, but the
character of their service has been changed. The million menial workers
among us include 300,000 upper servants,--skilled men and women of
character, like hotel waiters, Pullman porters, janitors, and cooks,
who, had they been white, could have called on the great labor movement
to lift their work out of slavery, to standardize their hours, to define
their duties, and to substitute a living, regular wage for personal
largess in the shape of tips, old clothes, and cold leavings of food.
But the labor movement turned their backs on those black men when the
white world dinned in their ears. _Negroes are servants; servants are
Negroes._ They shut the door of escape to factory and trade in their
fellows' faces and battened down the hatches, lest the 300,000 should be
workers equal in pay and consideration with white men.
But, if the upper servants could not escape to modern, industrial
conditions, how much the more did they press down on the bodies and
souls of 700,000 washerwomen and household drudges,--ignorant,
unskilled offal of a millionaire industrial system. Their pay was the
lowest and their hours the longest of all workers. The personal
degradation of their work is so great that any white man of decency
would rather cut his daughter's throat than let her grow up to such a
destiny. There is throughout the world and in all races no greater
source of prostitution than this grade of menial service, and the Negro
race in America has largely escaped this destiny simply because its
innate decency leads black women to choose irregular and temporary
sexual relations with men they like rather than to sell themselves to
strangers. To such sexual morals is added (in the nature of
self-defense) that revolt against unjust labor conditions which
expresses itself in "soldiering," sullenness, petty pilfering,
unreliability, and fast and fruitless changes of masters.
Indeed, here among American Negroes we have exemplified the last and
worst refuge of industrial caste. Menial service is an anachronism,--the
refuse of mediaeval barbarism. Whey, then, does it linger? Why are we
silent about it? Why in the minds of so many decent and up-seeing folks
does the whole Negro problem resolve itself into the matter of their
getting a cook or a maid?
No one knows better than I the capabilities of a system of domestic
service at its best. I have seen children who were spiritual sons and
daughters of their masters, girls who were friends of their mistresses,
and old servants honored and revered. But in every such case the Servant
had transcended the Menial, the Service had been exalted above the Wage.
Now to accomplish this permanently and universally, calls for the same
revolution in household help as in factory help and public service.
While organized industry has been slowly making its help into
self-respecting, well-paid men, and while public service is beginning to
call for the highest types of educated and efficient thinkers, domestic
service lags behind and insists upon seeking to evolve the best types of
men from the worst conditions.
The cause of this perversity, to my mind, is twofold. First, the ancient
high estate of Service, now pitifully fallen, yet gasping for breath;
secondly, the present low estate of the outcasts of the world, peering
with blood-shot eyes at the gates of the industrial heaven.
The Master spoke no greater word than that which said: "Whosoever will
be great among you, let him be your servant!" What is greater than
Personal Service! Surely no social service, no wholesale helping of
masses of men can exist which does not find its effectiveness and beauty
in the personal aid of man to man. It is the purest and holiest of
duties. Some mighty glimmer of this truth survived in those who made the
First Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, the Keepers of the Robes, and the
Knights of the Bath, the highest nobility that hedged an anointed king.
Nor does it differ today in what the mother does for the child or the
daughter for the mother, in all the personal attentions in the
old-fashioned home; this is Service! Think of what Friend has meant, not
simply in spiritual sympathies, but in physical helpfulness. In the
world today what calls for more of love, sympathy, learning, sacrifice,
and long-suffering than the care of children, the preparation of food,
the cleansing and ordering of the home, personal attendance and
companionship, the care of bodies and their raiment--what greater, more
intimate, more holy Services are there than these?
And yet we are degrading these services and loathing them and scoffing
at them and spitting upon them, first, by turning them over to the
lowest and least competent and worst trained classes in the world, and
then by yelling like spoiled children if our babies are neglected, our
biscuits sodden, our homes dirty, and our baths unpoured. Let one
suggest that the only cure for such deeds is in the uplift of the doer
and our rage is even worse and less explicable. We will call them by
their first names, thus blaspheming a holy intimacy; we will confine
them to back doors; we will insist that their meals be no gracious
ceremony nor even a restful sprawl, but usually a hasty, heckled gulp
amid garbage; we exact, not a natural, but a purchased deference, and we
leave them naked to insult by our children and by our husbands.
I remember a girl,--how pretty she was, with the crimson flooding the
old ivory of her cheeks and her gracious plumpness! She had come to the
valley during the summer to "do housework." I met and walked home with
her, in the thrilling shadows, to an old village home I knew well; then
as I turned to leave I learned that she was there alone in that house
for a week-end with only one young white man to represent the family.
Oh, he was doubtless a "gentleman" and all that, but for the first time
in my life I saw what a snare the fowler was spreading at the feet of
the daughters of my people, baited by church and state.
Not alone is the hurt thus offered to the lowly,--Society and Science
suffer. The unit which we seek to make the center of society,--the
Home--is deprived of the help of scientific invention and suggestion. It
is only slowly and by the utmost effort that some small foothold has
been gained for the vacuum cleaner, the washing-machine, the power tool,
and the chemical reagent. In our frantic effort to preserve the last
vestiges of slavery and mediaevalism we not only set out faces against
such improvements, but we seek to use education and the power of the
state to train the servants who do not naturally appear.
Meantime the wild rush from house service, on the part of all who can
scramble or run, continues. The rules of the labor union are designed,
not simply to raise wages, but to guard against any likeness between
artisan and servant. There is no essential difference in ability and
training between a subway guard and a Pullman porter, but between their
union cards lies a whole world.
Yet we are silent. Menial service is not a "social problem." It is not
really discussed. There is no scientific program for its "reform." There
is but one panacea: Escape! Get yourselves and your sons and daughters
out of the shadow of this awful thing! Hire servants, but never be one.
Indeed, subtly but surely the ability to hire at least "a maid" is still
civilization's patent to respectability, while "a man" is the first word
of aristocracy.
All this is because we still consciously and unconsciously hold to the
"manure" theory of social organization. We believe that at the bottom of
organized human life there are necessary duties and services which no
real human being ought to be compelled to do. We push below this mudsill
the derelicts and half-men, whom we hate and despise, and seek to build
above it--Democracy! On such foundations is reared a Theory of
Exclusiveness, a feeling that the world progresses by a process of
excluding from the benefits of culture the majority of men, so that a
gifted minority may blossom. Through this door the modern democrat
arrives to the place where he is willing to allot two able-bodied men
and two fine horses to the task of helping one wizened beldam to take
the morning air.
Here the absurdity ends. Here all honest minds turn back and ask: Is
menial service permanent or necessary? Can we not transfer cooking from
the home to the scientific laboratory, along with the laundry? Cannot
machinery, in the hands of self-respecting and well-paid artisans, do
our cleaning, sewing, moving, and decorating? Cannot the training of
children become an even greater profession than the attending of the
sick? And cannot personal service and companionship be coupled with
friendship and love where it belongs and whence it can never be divorced
without degradation and pain?
In fine, can we not, black and white, rich and poor, look forward to a
world of Service without Servants?
A miracle! you say? True. And only to be performed by the Immortal
Child.
_Jesus Christ in Texas_
It was in Waco, Texas.
The convict guard laughed. "I don't know," he said, "I hadn't thought of
that." He hesitated and looked at the stranger curiously. In the solemn
twilight he got an impression of unusual height and soft, dark eyes.
"Curious sort of acquaintance for the colonel," he thought; then he
continued aloud: "But that nigger there is bad, a born thief, and ought
to be sent up for life; got ten years last time--"
Here the voice of the promoter, talking within, broke in; he was bending
over his figures, sitting by the colonel. He was slight, with a sharp
nose.
"The convicts," he said, "would cost us $96 a year and board. Well, we
can squeeze this so that it won't be over $125 apiece. Now if these
fellows are driven, they can build this line within twelve months. It
will be running by next April. Freights will fall fifty per cent. Why,
man, you'll be a millionaire in less than ten years."
The colonel started. He was a thick, short man, with a clean-shaven face
and a certain air of breeding about the lines of his countenance; the
word millionaire sounded well to his ears. He thought--he thought a
great deal; he almost heard the puff of the fearfully costly automobile
that was coming up the road, and he said:
"I suppose we might as well hire them."
"Of course," answered the promoter.
The voice of the tall stranger in the corner broke in here:
"It will be a good thing for them?" he said, half in question.
The colonel moved. "The guard makes strange friends," he thought to
himself. "What's this man doing here, anyway?" He looked at him, or
rather looked at his eyes, and then somehow he felt a warming toward
him. He said:
"Well, at least, it can't harm them; they're beyond that."
"It will do them good, then," said the stranger again.
The promoter shrugged his shoulders. "It will do us good," he said.
But the colonel shook his head impatiently. He felt a desire to justify
himself before those eyes, and he answered: "Yes, it will do them good;
or at any rate it won't make them any worse than they are." Then he
started to say something else, but here sure enough the sound of the
automobile breathing at the gate stopped him and they all arose.
"It is settled, then," said the promoter.
"Yes," said the colonel, turning toward the stranger again. "Are you
going into town?" he asked with the Southern courtesy of white men to
white men in a country town. The stranger said he was. "Then come along
in my machine. I want to talk with you about this."
They went out to the car. The stranger as he went turned again to look
back at the convict. He was a tall, powerfully built black fellow. His
face was sullen, with a low forehead, thick, hanging lips, and bitter
eyes. There was revolt written about his mouth despite the hang-dog
expression. He stood bending over his pile of stones, pounding
listlessly. Beside him stood a boy of twelve,--yellow, with a hunted,
crafty look. The convict raised his eyes and they met the eyes of the
stranger. The hammer fell from his hands.
The stranger turned slowly toward the automobile and the colonel
introduced him. He had not exactly caught his name, but he mumbled
something as he presented him to his wife and little girl, who were
waiting.
As they whirled away the colonel started to talk, but the stranger had
taken the little girl into his lap and together they conversed in low
tones all the way home.
In some way, they did not exactly know how, they got the impression that
the man was a teacher and, of course, he must be a foreigner. The long,
cloak-like coat told this. They rode in the twilight through the lighted
town and at last drew up before the colonel's mansion, with its
ghost-like pillars.
The lady in the back seat was thinking of the guests she had invited to
dinner and was wondering if she ought not to ask this man to stay. He
seemed cultured and she supposed he was some acquaintance of the
colonel's. It would be rather interesting to have him there, with the
judge's wife and daughter and the rector. She spoke almost before she
thought:
"You will enter and rest awhile?"
The colonel and the little girl insisted. For a moment the stranger
seemed about to refuse. He said he had some business for his father,
about town. Then for the child's sake he consented.
Up the steps they went and into the dark parlor where they sat and
talked a long time. It was a curious conversation. Afterwards they did
not remember exactly what was said and yet they all remembered a certain
strange satisfaction in that long, low talk.
Finally the nurse came for the reluctant child and the hostess
bethought herself:
"We will have a cup of tea; you will be dry and tired."
She rang and switched on a blaze of light. With one accord they all
looked at the stranger, for they had hardly seen him well in the
glooming twilight. The woman started in amazement and the colonel half
rose in anger. Why, the man was a mulatto, surely; even if he did not
own the Negro blood, their practised eyes knew it. He was tall and
straight and the coat looked like a Jewish gabardine. His hair hung in
close curls far down the sides of his face and his face was olive, even
yellow.
A peremptory order rose to the colonel's lips and froze there as he
caught the stranger's eyes. Those eyes,--where had he seen those eyes
before? He remembered them long years ago. The soft, tear-filled eyes of
a brown girl. He remembered many things, and his face grew drawn and
white. Those eyes kept burning into him, even when they were turned half
away toward the staircase, where the white figure of the child hovered
with her nurse and waved good-night. The lady sank into her chair and
thought: "What will the judge's wife say? How did the colonel come to
invite this man here? How shall we be rid of him?" She looked at the
colonel in reproachful consternation.
Just then the door opened and the old butler came in. He was an ancient
black man, with tufted white hair, and he held before him a large,
silver tray filled with a china tea service. The stranger rose slowly
and stretched forth his hands as if to bless the viands. The old man
paused in bewilderment, tottered, and then with sudden gladness in his
eyes dropped to his knees, and the tray crashed to the floor.
"My Lord and my God!" he whispered; but the woman screamed: "Mother's
china!"
The doorbell rang.
"Heavens! here is the dinner party!" exclaimed the lady. She turned
toward the door, but there in the hall, clad in her night clothes, was
the little girl. She had stolen down the stairs to see the stranger
again, and the nurse above was calling in vain. The woman felt
hysterical and scolded at the nurse, but the stranger had stretched out
his arms and with a glad cry the child nestled in them. They caught some
words about the "Kingdom of Heaven" as he slowly mounted the stairs with
his little, white burden.
The mother was glad of anything to get rid of the interloper, even for a
moment. The bell rang again and she hastened toward the door, which the
loitering black maid was just opening. She did not notice the shadow of
the stranger as he came slowly down the stairs and paused by the newel
post, dark and silent.
The judge's wife came in. She was an old woman, frilled and powdered
into a semblance of youth, and gorgeously gowned. She came forward,
smiling with extended hands, but when she was opposite the stranger,
somewhere a chill seemed to strike her and she shuddered and cried:
"What a draft!" as she drew a silken shawl about her and shook hands
cordially; she forgot to ask who the stranger was. The judge strode in
unseeing, thinking of a puzzling case of theft.
"Eh? What? Oh--er--yes,--good evening," he said, "good evening." Behind
them came a young woman in the glory of youth, and daintily silked,
beautiful in face and form, with diamonds around her fair neck. She came
in lightly, but stopped with a little gasp; then she laughed gaily and
said:
"Why, I beg your pardon. Was it not curious? I thought I saw there
behind your man"--she hesitated, but he must be a servant, she
argued--"the shadow of great, white wings. It was but the light on the
drapery. What a turn it gave me." And she smiled again. With her came a
tall, handsome, young naval officer. Hearing his lady refer to the
servant, he hardly looked at him, but held his gilded cap carelessly
toward him, and the stranger placed it carefully on the rack.
Last came the rector, a man of forty, and well-clothed. He started to
pass the stranger, stopped, and looked at him inquiringly.
"I beg your pardon," he said. "I beg your pardon,--I think I have met
you?"
The stranger made no answer, and the hostess nervously hurried the
guests on. But the rector lingered and looked perplexed.
"Surely, I know you. I have met you somewhere," he said, putting his
hand vaguely to his head. "You--you remember me, do you not?"
The stranger quietly swept his cloak aside, and to the hostess'
unspeakable relief passed out of the door.
"I never knew you," he said in low tones as he went.
The lady murmured some vain excuse about intruders, but the rector stood
with annoyance written on his face.
"I beg a thousand pardons," he said to the hostess absently. "It is a
great pleasure to be here,--somehow I thought I knew that man. I am sure
I knew him once."
The stranger had passed down the steps, and as he passed, the nurse,
lingering at the top of the staircase, flew down after him, caught his
cloak, trembled, hesitated, and then kneeled in the dust.