I remember four women of my boyhood: my mother, cousin Inez, Emma, and
Ide Fuller. They represented the problem of the widow, the wife, the
maiden, and the outcast. They were, in color, brown and light-brown,
yellow with brown freckles, and white. They existed not for themselves,
but for men; they were named after the men to whom they were related and
not after the fashion of their own souls.
They were not beings, they were relations and these relations were
enfilmed with mystery and secrecy. We did not know the truth or believe
it when we heard it. Motherhood! What was it? We did not know or greatly
care. My mother and I were good chums. I liked her. After she was dead I
loved her with a fierce sense of personal loss.
Inez was a pretty, brown cousin who married. What was marriage? We did
not know, neither did she, poor thing! It came to mean for her a litter
of children, poverty, a drunken, cruel companion, sickness, and death.
Why?
There was no sweeter sight than Emma,--slim, straight, and dainty,
darkly flushed with the passion of youth; but her life was a wild, awful
struggle to crush her natural, fierce joy of love. She crushed it and
became a cold, calculating mockery.
Last there was that awful outcast of the town, the white woman, Ide
Fuller. What she was, we did not know. She stood to us as embodied filth
and wrong,--but whose filth, whose wrong?
Grown up I see the problem of these women transfused; I hear all about
me the unanswered call of youthful love, none the less glorious because
of its clean, honest, physical passion. Why unanswered? Because the
youth are too poor to marry or if they marry, too poor to have children.
They turn aside, then, in three directions: to marry for support, to
what men call shame, or to that which is more evil than nothing. It is
an unendurable paradox; it must be changed or the bases of culture will
totter and fall.
The world wants healthy babies and intelligent workers. Today we refuse
to allow the combination and force thousands of intelligent workers to
go childless at a horrible expenditure of moral force, or we damn them
if they break our idiotic conventions. Only at the sacrifice of
intelligence and the chance to do their best work can the majority of
modern women bear children. This is the damnation of women.
All womanhood is hampered today because the world on which it is
emerging is a world that tries to worship both virgins and mothers and
in the end despises motherhood and despoils virgins.
The future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She
must have knowledge. She must have the right of motherhood at her own
discretion. The present mincing horror at free womanhood must pass if we
are ever to be rid of the bestiality of free manhood; not by guarding
the weak in weakness do we gain strength, but by making weakness free
and strong.
The world must choose the free woman or the white wraith of the
prostitute. Today it wavers between the prostitute and the nun.
Civilization must show two things: the glory and beauty of creating life
and the need and duty of power and intelligence. This and this only will
make the perfect marriage of love and work.
God is Love,
Love is God;
There is no God but Love
And Work is His Prophet!
All this of woman,--but what of black women?
The world that wills to worship womankind studiously forgets its darker
sisters. They seem in a sense to typify that veiled Melancholy:
"Whose saintly visage is too bright
To hit the sense of human sight,
And, therefore, to our weaker view
O'er-laid with black."
Yet the world must heed these daughters of sorrow, from the primal black
All-Mother of men down through the ghostly throng of mighty womanhood,
who walked in the mysterious dawn of Asia and Africa; from Neith, the
primal mother of all, whose feet rest on hell, and whose almighty hands
uphold the heavens; all religion, from beauty to beast, lies on her
eager breasts; her body bears the stars, while her shoulders are
necklaced by the dragon; from black Neith down to
"That starr'd Ethiop queen who strove
To set her beauty's praise above
The sea-nymphs,"
through dusky Cleopatras, dark Candaces, and darker, fiercer Zinghas, to
our own day and our own land,--in gentle Phillis; Harriet, the crude
Moses; the sybil, Sojourner Truth; and the martyr, Louise De Mortie.
The father and his worship is Asia; Europe is the precocious,
self-centered, forward-striving child; but the land of the mother is and
was Africa. In subtle and mysterious way, despite her curious history,
her slavery, polygamy, and toil, the spell of the African mother
pervades her land. Isis, the mother, is still titular goddess, in
thought if not in name, of the dark continent. Nor does this all seem to
be solely a survival of the historic matriarchate through which all
nations pass,--it appears to be more than this,--as if the great black
race in passing up the steps of human culture gave the world, not only
the Iron Age, the cultivation of the soil, and the domestication of
animals, but also, in peculiar emphasis, the mother-idea.
"No mother can love more tenderly and none is more tenderly loved than
the Negro mother," writes Schneider. Robin tells of the slave who bought
his mother's freedom instead of his own. Mungo Park writes: "Everywhere
in Africa, I have noticed that no greater affront can be offered a Negro
than insulting his mother. 'Strike me,' cries a Mandingo to his enemy,
'but revile not my mother!'" And the Krus and Fantis say the same. The
peoples on the Zambezi and the great lakes cry in sudden fear or joy:
"O, my mother!" And the Herero swears (endless oath) "By my mother's
tears!" "As the mist in the swamps," cries the Angola Negro, "so lives
the love of father and mother."
A student of the present Gold Coast life describes the work of the
village headman, and adds: "It is a difficult task that he is set to,
but in this matter he has all-powerful helpers in the female members of
the family, who will be either the aunts or the sisters or the cousins
or the nieces of the headman, and as their interests are identical with
his in every particular, the good women spontaneously train up their
children to implicit obedience to the headman, whose rule in the family
thus becomes a simple and an easy matter. 'The hand that rocks the
cradle rules the world.' What a power for good in the native state
system would the mothers of the Gold Coast and Ashanti become by
judicious training upon native lines!"
Schweinfurth declares of one tribe: "A bond between mother and child
which lasts for life is the measure of affection shown among the Dyoor"
and Ratzel adds:
"Agreeable to the natural relation the mother stands first among the
chief influences affecting the children. From the Zulus to the Waganda,
we find the mother the most influential counsellor at the court of
ferocious sovereigns, like Chaka or Mtesa; sometimes sisters take her
place. Thus even with chiefs who possess wives by hundreds the bonds of
blood are the strongest and that the woman, though often heavily
burdened, is in herself held in no small esteem among the Negroes is
clear from the numerous Negro queens, from the medicine women, from the
participation in public meetings permitted to women by many Negro
peoples."
As I remember through memories of others, backward among my own family,
it is the mother I ever recall,--the little, far-off mother of my
grandmothers, who sobbed her life away in song, longing for her lost
palm-trees and scented waters; the tall and bronzen grandmother, with
beaked nose and shrewish eyes, who loved and scolded her black and
laughing husband as he smoked lazily in his high oak chair; above all,
my own mother, with all her soft brownness,--the brown velvet of her
skin, the sorrowful black-brown of her eyes, and the tiny brown-capped
waves of her midnight hair as it lay new parted on her forehead. All the
way back in these dim distances it is mothers and mothers of mothers who
seem to count, while fathers are shadowy memories.
Upon this African mother-idea, the westward slave trade and American
slavery struck like doom. In the cruel exigencies of the traffic in men
and in the sudden, unprepared emancipation the great pendulum of social
equilibrium swung from a time, in 1800,--when America had but eight or
less black women to every ten black men,--all too swiftly to a day, in
1870,--when there were nearly eleven women to ten men in our Negro
population. This was but the outward numerical fact of social
dislocation; within lay polygamy, polyandry, concubinage, and moral
degradation. They fought against all this desperately, did these black
slaves in the West Indies, especially among the half-free artisans; they
set up their ancient household gods, and when Toussaint and Cristophe
founded their kingdom in Haiti, it was based on old African tribal ties
and beneath it was the mother-idea.
The crushing weight of slavery fell on black women. Under it there was
no legal marriage, no legal family, no legal control over children. To
be sure, custom and religion replaced here and there what the law
denied, yet one has but to read advertisements like the following to see
the hell beneath the system:
"One hundred dollars reward will be given for my two fellows, Abram
and Frank. Abram has a wife at Colonel Stewart's, in Liberty
County, and a mother at Thunderbolt, and a sister in Savannah.
"WILLIAM ROBERTS."
"Fifty dollars reward--Ran away from the subscriber a Negro girl
named Maria. She is of a copper color, between thirteen and
fourteen years of age--bareheaded and barefooted. She is small for
her age--very sprightly and very likely. She stated she was going
to see her mother at Maysville.
"SANFORD THOMSON."
"Fifty dollars reward--Ran away from the subscriber his Negro man
Pauladore, commonly called Paul. I understand General R.Y. Hayne
has purchased his wife and children from H.L. Pinckney, Esq., and
has them now on his plantation at Goose Creek, where, no doubt, the
fellow is frequently lurking.
"T. DAVIS."
The Presbyterian synod of Kentucky said to the churches under its care
in 1835: "Brothers and sisters, parents and children, husbands and
wives, are torn asunder and permitted to see each other no more. These
acts are daily occurring in the midst of us. The shrieks and agony often
witnessed on such occasions proclaim, with a trumpet tongue, the
iniquity of our system. There is not a neighborhood where these
heartrending scenes are not displayed. There is not a village or road
that does not behold the sad procession of manacled outcasts whose
mournful countenances tell that they are exiled by force from all that
their hearts hold dear."
A sister of a president of the United States declared: "We Southern
ladies are complimented with the names of wives, but we are only the
mistresses of seraglios."
Out of this, what sort of black women could be born into the world of
today? There are those who hasten to answer this query in scathing terms
and who say lightly and repeatedly that out of black slavery came
nothing decent in womanhood; that adultery and uncleanness were their
heritage and are their continued portion.
Fortunately so exaggerated a charge is humanly impossible of truth. The
half-million women of Negro descent who lived at the beginning of the
19th century had become the mothers of two and one-fourth million
daughters at the time of the Civil War and five million grand-daughters
in 1910. Can all these women be vile and the hunted race continue to
grow in wealth and character? Impossible. Yet to save from the past the
shreds and vestiges of self-respect has been a terrible task. I most
sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its
fineness up through so devilish a fire.
Alexander Crummell once said of his sister in the blood: "In her
girlhood all the delicate tenderness of her sex has been rudely
outraged. In the field, in the rude cabin, in the press-room, in the
factory she was thrown into the companionship of coarse and ignorant
men. No chance was given her for delicate reserve or tender modesty.
From her childhood she was the doomed victim of the grossest passion.
All the virtues of her sex were utterly ignored. If the instinct of
chastity asserted itself, then she had to fight like a tiger for the
ownership and possession of her own person and ofttimes had to suffer
pain and lacerations for her virtuous self-assertion. When she reached
maturity, all the tender instincts of her womanhood were ruthlessly
violated. At the age of marriage,--always prematurely anticipated under
slavery--she was mated as the stock of the plantation were mated, not to
be the companion of a loved and chosen husband, but to be the breeder of
human cattle for the field or the auction block."
Down in such mire has the black motherhood of this race
struggled,--starving its own wailing offspring to nurse to the world
their swaggering masters; welding for its children chains which
affronted even the moral sense of an unmoral world. Many a man and woman
in the South have lived in wedlock as holy as Adam and Eve and brought
forth their brown and golden children, but because the darker woman was
helpless, her chivalrous and whiter mate could cast her off at his
pleasure and publicly sneer at the body he had privately blasphemed.
I shall forgive the white South much in its final judgment day: I shall
forgive its slavery, for slavery is a world-old habit; I shall forgive
its fighting for a well-lost cause, and for remembering that struggle
with tender tears; I shall forgive its so-called "pride of race," the
passion of its hot blood, and even its dear, old, laughable strutting
and posing; but one thing I shall never forgive, neither in this world
nor the world to come: its wanton and continued and persistent insulting
of the black womanhood which it sought and seeks to prostitute to its
lust. I cannot forget that it is such Southern gentlemen into whose
hands smug Northern hypocrites of today are seeking to place our women's
eternal destiny,--men who insist upon withholding from my mother and
wife and daughter those signs and appellations of courtesy and respect
which elsewhere he withholds only from bawds and courtesans.
The result of this history of insult and degradation has been both
fearful and glorious. It has birthed the haunting prostitute, the
brawler, and the beast of burden; but it has also given the world an
efficient womanhood, whose strength lies in its freedom and whose
chastity was won in the teeth of temptation and not in prison and
swaddling clothes.
To no modern race does its women mean so much as to the Negro nor come
so near to the fulfilment of its meaning. As one of our women writes:
"Only the black woman can say 'when and where I enter, in the quiet,
undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing
or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with
me.'"
They came first, in earlier days, like foam flashing on dark, silent
waters,--bits of stern, dark womanhood here and there tossed almost
carelessly aloft to the world's notice. First and naturally they assumed
the panoply of the ancient African mother of men, strong and black,
whose very nature beat back the wilderness of oppression and contempt.
Such a one was that cousin of my grandmother, whom western Massachusetts
remembers as "Mum Bett." Scarred for life by a blow received in defense
of a sister, she ran away to Great Barrington and was the first slave,
or one of the first, to be declared free under the Bill of Rights of
1780. The son of the judge who freed her, writes:
"Even in her humble station, she had, when occasion required it, an
air of command which conferred a degree of dignity and gave her an
ascendancy over those of her rank, which is very unusual in persons
of any rank or color. Her determined and resolute character, which
enabled her to limit the ravages of Shay's mob, was manifested in
her conduct and deportment during her whole life. She claimed no
distinction, but it was yielded to her from her superior
experience, energy, skill, and sagacity. Having known this woman as
familiarly as I knew either of my parents, I cannot believe in the
moral or physical inferiority of the race to which she belonged.
The degradation of the African must have been otherwise caused than
by natural inferiority."
It was such strong women that laid the foundations of the great Negro
church of today, with its five million members and ninety millions of
dollars in property. One of the early mothers of the church, Mary Still,
writes thus quaintly, in the forties:
"When we were as castouts and spurned from the large churches,
driven from our knees, pointed at by the proud, neglected by the
careless, without a place of worship, Allen, faithful to the
heavenly calling, came forward and laid the foundation of this
connection. The women, like the women at the sepulcher, were early
to aid in laying the foundation of the temple and in helping to
carry up the noble structure and in the name of their God set up
their banner; most of our aged mothers are gone from this to a
better state of things. Yet some linger still on their staves,
watching with intense interest the ark as it moves over the
tempestuous waves of opposition and ignorance....
"But the labors of these women stopped not here, for they knew well
that they were subject to affliction and death. For the purpose of
mutual aid, they banded themselves together in society capacity,
that they might be better able to administer to each others'
sufferings and to soften their own pillows. So we find the females
in the early history of the church abounding in good works and in
acts of true benevolence."
From such spiritual ancestry came two striking figures of
war-time,--Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.
For eight or ten years previous to the breaking out of the Civil War,
Harriet Tubman was a constant attendant at anti-slavery conventions,
lectures, and other meetings; she was a black woman of medium size,
smiling countenance, with her upper front teeth gone, attired in coarse
but neat clothes, and carrying always an old-fashioned reticule at her
side. Usually as soon as she sat down she would drop off in sound sleep.
She was born a slave in Maryland, in 1820, bore the marks of the lash on
her flesh; and had been made partially deaf, and perhaps to some degree
mentally unbalanced by a blow on the head in childhood. Yet she was one
of the most important agents of the Underground Railroad and a leader of
fugitive slaves. She ran away in 1849 and went to Boston in 1854, where
she was welcomed into the homes of the leading abolitionists and where
every one listened with tense interest to her strange stories. She was
absolutely illiterate, with no knowledge of geography, and yet year
after year she penetrated the slave states and personally led North over
three hundred fugitives without losing a single one. A standing reward
of $10,000 was offered for her, but as she said: "The whites cannot
catch us, for I was born with the charm, and the Lord has given me the
power." She was one of John Brown's closest advisers and only severe
sickness prevented her presence at Harper's Ferry.
When the war cloud broke, she hastened to the front, flitting down along
her own mysterious paths, haunting the armies in the field, and serving
as guide and nurse and spy. She followed Sherman in his great march to
the sea and was with Grant at Petersburg, and always in the camps the
Union officers silently saluted her.
The other woman belonged to a different type,--a tall, gaunt, black,
unsmiling sybil, weighted with the woe of the world. She ran away from
slavery and giving up her own name took the name of Sojourner Truth. She
says: "I can remember when I was a little, young girl, how my old mammy
would sit out of doors in the evenings and look up at the stars and
groan, and I would say, 'Mammy, what makes you groan so?' And she would
say, 'I am groaning to think of my poor children; they do not know where
I be and I don't know where they be. I look up at the stars and they
look up at the stars!'"
Her determination was founded on unwavering faith in ultimate good.
Wendell Phillips says that he was once in Faneuil Hall, when Frederick
Douglass was one of the chief speakers. Douglass had been describing the
wrongs of the Negro race and as he proceeded he grew more and more
excited and finally ended by saying that they had no hope of justice
from the whites, no possible hope except in their own right arms. It
must come to blood! They must fight for themselves. Sojourner Truth was
sitting, tall and dark, on the very front seat facing the platform, and
in the hush of feeling when Douglass sat down she spoke out in her deep,
peculiar voice, heard all over the hall:
"Frederick, is God dead?"
Such strong, primitive types of Negro womanhood in America seem to some
to exhaust its capabilities. They know less of a not more worthy, but a
finer type of black woman wherein trembles all of that delicate sense of
beauty and striving for self-realization, which is as characteristic of
the Negro soul as is its quaint strength and sweet laughter. George
Washington wrote in grave and gentle courtesy to a Negro woman, in 1776,
that he would "be happy to see" at his headquarters at any time, a
person "to whom nature has been so liberal and beneficial in her
dispensations." This child, Phillis Wheatley, sang her trite and halting
strain to a world that wondered and could not produce her like. Measured
today her muse was slight and yet, feeling her striving spirit, we call
to her still in her own words:
"Through thickest glooms look back, immortal shade."
Perhaps even higher than strength and art loom human sympathy and
sacrifice as characteristic of Negro womanhood. Long years ago, before
the Declaration of Independence, Kate Ferguson was born in New York.
Freed, widowed, and bereaved of her children before she was twenty, she
took the children of the streets of New York, white and black, to her
empty arms, taught them, found them homes, and with Dr. Mason of Murray
Street Church established the first modern Sunday School in Manhattan.
Sixty years later came Mary Shadd up out of Delaware. She was tall and
slim, of that ravishing dream-born beauty,--that twilight of the races
which we call mulatto. Well-educated, vivacious, with determination
shining from her sharp eyes, she threw herself singlehanded into the
great Canadian pilgrimage when thousands of hunted black men hurried
northward and crept beneath the protection of the lion's paw. She became
teacher, editor, and lecturer; tramping afoot through winter snows,
pushing without blot or blemish through crowd and turmoil to conventions
and meetings, and finally becoming recruiting agent for the United
States government in gathering Negro soldiers in the West.
After the war the sacrifice of Negro women for freedom and uplift is one
of the finest chapters in their history. Let one life typify all: Louise
De Mortie, a free-born Virginia girl, had lived most of her life in
Boston. Her high forehead, swelling lips, and dark eyes marked her for a
woman of feeling and intellect. She began a successful career as a
public reader. Then came the War and the Call. She went to the orphaned
colored children of New Orleans,--out of freedom into insult and
oppression and into the teeth of the yellow fever. She toiled and
dreamed. In 1887 she had raised money and built an orphan home and that
same year, in the thirty-fourth year of her young life, she died, saying
simply: "I belong to God."
As I look about me today in this veiled world of mine, despite the
noisier and more spectacular advance of my brothers, I instinctively
feel and know that it is the five million women of my race who really
count. Black women (and women whose grandmothers were black) are today
furnishing our teachers; they are the main pillars of those social
settlements which we call churches; and they have with small doubt
raised three-fourths of our church property. If we have today, as seems
likely, over a billion dollars of accumulated goods, who shall say how
much of it has been wrung from the hearts of servant girls and
washerwomen and women toilers in the fields? As makers of two million
homes these women are today seeking in marvelous ways to show forth our
strength and beauty and our conception of the truth.
In the United States in 1910 there were 4,931,882 women of Negro
descent; over twelve hundred thousand of these were children, another
million were girls and young women under twenty, and two and a
half-million were adults. As a mass these women were unlettered,--a
fourth of those from fifteen to twenty-five years of age were unable to
write. These women are passing through, not only a moral, but an
economic revolution. Their grandmothers married at twelve and fifteen,
but twenty-seven per cent of these women today who have passed fifteen
are still single.
Yet these black women toil and toil hard. There were in 1910 two and a
half million Negro homes in the United States. Out of these homes walked
daily to work two million women and girls over ten years of age,--over
half of the colored female population as against a fifth in the case of
white women. These, then, are a group of workers, fighting for their
daily bread like men; independent and approaching economic freedom! They
furnished a million farm laborers, 80,000 farmers, 22,000 teachers,
600,000 servants and washerwomen, and 50,000 in trades and
merchandizing.
The family group, however, which is the ideal of the culture with which
these folk have been born, is not based on the idea of an economically
independent working mother. Rather its ideal harks back to the sheltered
harem with the mother emerging at first as nurse and homemaker, while
the man remains the sole breadwinner. What is the inevitable result of
the clash of such ideals and such facts in the colored group? Broken
families.
Among native white women one in ten is separated from her husband by
death, divorce, or desertion. Among Negroes the ratio is one in seven.
Is the cause racial? No, it is economic, because there is the same high
ratio among the white foreign-born. The breaking up of the present
family is the result of modern working and sex conditions and it hits
the laborers with terrible force. The Negroes are put in a peculiarly
difficult position, because the wage of the male breadwinner is below
the standard, while the openings for colored women in certain lines of
domestic work, and now in industries, are many. Thus while toil holds
the father and brother in country and town at low wages, the sisters and
mothers are called to the city. As a result the Negro women outnumber
the men nine or ten to eight in many cities, making what Charlotte
Gilman bluntly calls "cheap women."
What shall we say to this new economic equality in a great laboring
class? Some people within and without the race deplore it. "Back to the
homes with the women," they cry, "and higher wage for the men." But how
impossible this is has been shown by war conditions. Cessation of
foreign migration has raised Negro men's wages, to be sure--but it has
not only raised Negro women's wages, it has opened to them a score of
new avenues of earning a living. Indeed, here, in microcosm and with
differences emphasizing sex equality, is the industrial history of labor
in the 19th and 20th centuries. We cannot abolish the new economic
freedom of women. We cannot imprison women again in a home or require
them all on pain of death to be nurses and housekeepers.
What is today the message of these black women to America and to the
world? The uplift of women is, next to the problem of the color line and
the peace movement, our greatest modern cause. When, now, two of these
movements--woman and color--combine in one, the combination has deep
meaning.
In other years women's way was clear: to be beautiful, to be petted, to
bear children. Such has been their theoretic destiny and if perchance
they have been ugly, hurt, and barren, that has been forgotten with
studied silence. In partial compensation for this narrowed destiny the
white world has lavished its politeness on its womankind,--its chivalry
and bows, its uncoverings and courtesies--all the accumulated homage
disused for courts and kings and craving exercise. The revolt of white
women against this preordained destiny has in these latter days reached
splendid proportions, but it is the revolt of an aristocracy of brains
and ability,--the middle class and rank and file still plod on in the
appointed path, paid by the homage, the almost mocking homage, of men.
From black women of America, however, (and from some others, too, but
chiefly from black women and their daughters' daughters) this gauze has
been withheld and without semblance of such apology they have been
frankly trodden under the feet of men. They are and have been objected
to, apparently for reasons peculiarly exasperating to reasoning human
beings. When in this world a man comes forward with a thought, a deed, a
vision, we ask not, how does he look,--but what is his message? It is of
but passing interest whether or not the messenger is beautiful or
ugly,--the _message_ is the thing. This, which is axiomatic among men,
has been in past ages but partially true if the messenger was a woman.
The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty and if she
is not, the mob pouts and asks querulously, "What else are women for?"
Beauty "is its own excuse for being," but there are other excuses, as
most men know, and when the white world objects to black women because
it does not consider them beautiful, the black world of right asks two
questions: "What is beauty?" and, "Suppose you think them ugly, what
then? If ugliness and unconventionality and eccentricity of face and
deed do not hinder men from doing the world's work and reaping the
world's reward, why should it hinder women?"
Other things being equal, all of us, black and white, would prefer to be
beautiful in face and form and suitably clothed; but most of us are not
so, and one of the mightiest revolts of the century is against the
devilish decree that no woman is a woman who is not by present standards
a beautiful woman. This decree the black women of America have in large
measure escaped from the first. Not being expected to be merely
ornamental, they have girded themselves for work, instead of adorning
their bodies only for play. Their sturdier minds have concluded that if
a woman be clean, healthy, and educated, she is as pleasing as God wills
and far more useful than most of her sisters. If in addition to this she
is pink and white and straight-haired, and some of her fellow-men prefer
this, well and good; but if she is black or brown and crowned in curled
mists (and this to us is the most beautiful thing on earth), this is
surely the flimsiest excuse for spiritual incarceration or banishment.
The very attempt to do this in the case of Negro Americans has strangely
over-reached itself. By so much as the defective eyesight of the white
world rejects black women as beauties, by so much the more it needs them
as human beings,--an enviable alternative, as many a white woman knows.
Consequently, for black women alone, as a group, "handsome is that
handsome does" and they are asked to be no more beautiful than God made
them, but they are asked to be efficient, to be strong, fertile,
muscled, and able to work. If they marry, they must as independent
workers be able to help support their children, for their men are paid
on a scale which makes sole support of the family often impossible.
On the whole, colored working women are paid as well as white working
women for similar work, save in some higher grades, while colored men
get from one-fourth to three-fourths less than white men. The result is
curious and three-fold: the economic independence of black women is
increased, the breaking up of Negro families must be more frequent, and
the number of illegitimate children is decreased more slowly among them
than other evidences of culture are increased, just as was once true in
Scotland and Bavaria.
What does this mean? It forecasts a mighty dilemma which the whole world
of civilization, despite its will, must one time frankly face: the
unhusbanded mother or the childless wife. God send us a world with
woman's freedom and married motherhood inextricably wed, but until He
sends it, I see more of future promise in the betrayed girl-mothers of
the black belt than in the childless wives of the white North, and I
have more respect for the colored servant who yields to her frank
longing for motherhood than for her white sister who offers up children
for clothes. Out of a sex freedom that today makes us shudder will come
in time a day when we will no longer pay men for work they do not do,
for the sake of their harem; we will pay women what they earn and insist
on their working and earning it; we will allow those persons to vote who
know enough to vote, whether they be black or female, white or male; and
we will ward race suicide, not by further burdening the over-burdened,
but by honoring motherhood, even when the sneaking father shirks his
duty.
* * * * *
"Wait till the lady passes," said a Nashville white boy.
"She's no lady; she's a nigger," answered another.
So some few women are born free, and some amid insult and scarlet
letters achieve freedom; but our women in black had freedom thrust
contemptuously upon them. With that freedom they are buying an
untrammeled independence and dear as is the price they pay for it, it
will in the end be worth every taunt and groan. Today the dreams of the
mothers are coming true. We have still our poverty and degradation, our
lewdness and our cruel toil; but we have, too, a vast group of women of
Negro blood who for strength of character, cleanness of soul, and
unselfish devotion of purpose, is today easily the peer of any group of
women in the civilized world. And more than that, in the great rank and
file of our five million women we have the up-working of new
revolutionary ideals, which must in time have vast influence on the
thought and action of this land.
For this, their promise, and for their hard past, I honor the women of
my race. Their beauty,--their dark and mysterious beauty of midnight
eyes, crumpled hair, and soft, full-featured faces--is perhaps more to
me than to you, because I was born to its warm and subtle spell; but
their worth is yours as well as mine. No other women on earth could
have emerged from the hell of force and temptation which once engulfed
and still surrounds black women in America with half the modesty and
womanliness that they retain. I have always felt like bowing myself
before them in all abasement, searching to bring some tribute to these
long-suffering victims, these burdened sisters of mine, whom the world,
the wise, white world, loves to affront and ridicule and wantonly to
insult. I have known the women of many lands and nations,--I have known
and seen and lived beside them, but none have I known more sweetly
feminine, more unswervingly loyal, more desperately earnest, and more
instinctively pure in body and in soul than the daughters of my black
mothers. This, then,--a little thing--to their memory and inspiration.
_Children of the Moon_
I am dead;
Yet somehow, somewhere,
In Time's weird contradiction, I
May tell of that dread deed, wherewith
I brought to Children of the Moon
Freedom and vast salvation.
I was a woman born,
And trod the streaming street,
That ebbs and flows from Harlem's hills,
Through caves and cañons limned in light,
Down to the twisting sea.
That night of nights,
I stood alone and at the End,
Until the sudden highway to the moon,
Golden in splendor,
Became too real to doubt.
Dimly I set foot upon the air,
I fled, I flew, through the thrills of light,
With all about, above, below, the whirring
Of almighty wings.
I found a twilight land,
Where, hardly hid, the sun
Sent softly-saddened rays of
Red and brown to burn the iron soil
And bathe the snow-white peaks
In mighty splendor.
Black were the men,
Hard-haired and silent-slow,
Moving as shadows,
Bending with face of fear to earthward;
And women there were none.
"Woman, woman, woman!"
I cried in mounting terror.
"Woman and Child!"
And the cry sang back
Through heaven, with the
Whirring of almighty wings.
Wings, wings, endless wings,--
Heaven and earth are wings;
Wings that flutter, furl, and fold,
Always folding and unfolding,
Ever folding yet again;
Wings, veiling some vast
And veiléd face,
In blazing blackness,
Behind the folding and unfolding,
The rolling and unrolling of
Almighty wings!
I saw the black men huddle,
Fumed in fear, falling face downward;
Vainly I clutched and clawed,
Dumbly they cringed and cowered,
Moaning in mournful monotone:
O Freedom, O Freedom,
O Freedom over me;
Before I'll be a slave,
I'll be buried in my grave,
And go home to my God,
And be free.
It was angel-music
From the dead,
And ever, as they sang,
Some wingéd thing of wings, filling all heaven,
Folding and unfolding, and folding yet again,
Tore out their blood and entrails,
'Til I screamed in utter terror;
And a silence came--
A silence and the wailing of a babe.
Then, at last, I saw and shamed;
I knew how these dumb, dark, and dusky things
Had given blood and life,
To fend the caves of underground,
The great black caves of utter night,
Where earth lay full of mothers
And their babes.
Little children sobbing in darkness,
Little children crying in silent pain,
Little mothers rocking and groping and struggling,
Digging and delving and groveling,
Amid the dying-dead and dead-in-life
And drip and dripping of warm, wet blood,
Far, far beneath the wings,--
The folding and unfolding of almighty wings.
I bent with tears and pitying hands,
Above these dusky star-eyed children,--
Crinkly-haired, with sweet-sad baby voices,
Pleading low for light and love and living--
And I crooned:
"Little children weeping there,
God shall find your faces fair;
Guerdon for your deep distress,
He shall send His tenderness;
For the tripping of your feet
Make a mystic music sweet
In the darkness of your hair;
Light and laughter in the air--
Little children weeping there,
God shall find your faces fair!"
I strode above the stricken, bleeding men,
The rampart 'ranged against the skies,
And shouted:
"Up, I say, build and slay;
Fight face foremost, force a way,
Unloose, unfetter, and unbind;
Be men and free!"
Dumbly they shrank,
Muttering they pointed toward that peak,
Than vastness vaster,
Whereon a darkness brooded,
"Who shall look and live," they sighed;
And I sensed
The folding and unfolding of almighty wings.
Yet did we build of iron, bricks, and blood;
We built a day, a year, a thousand years,
Blood was the mortar,--blood and tears,
And, ah, the Thing, the Thing of wings,
The wingéd, folding Wing of Things
Did furnish much mad mortar
For that tower.
Slow and ever slower rose the towering task,
And with it rose the sun,
Until at last on one wild day,
Wind-whirled, cloud-swept and terrible
I stood beneath the burning shadow
Of the peak,
Beneath the whirring of almighty wings,
While downward from my feet
Streamed the long line of dusky faces
And the wail of little children sobbing under earth.
Alone, aloft,
I saw through firmaments on high
The drama of Almighty God,
With all its flaming suns and stars.
"Freedom!" I cried.
"Freedom!" cried heaven, earth, and stars;
And a Voice near-far,
Amid the folding and unfolding of almighty wings,
Answered, "I am Freedom--
Who sees my face is free--
He and his."
I dared not look;
Downward I glanced on deep-bowed heads and closed eyes,
Outward I gazed on flecked and flaming blue--
But ever onward, upward flew
The sobbing of small voices,--
Down, down, far down into the night.
Slowly I lifted livid limbs aloft;
Upward I strove: the face! the face!
Onward I reeled: the face! the face!
To beauty wonderful as sudden death,
Or horror horrible as endless life--
Up! Up! the blood-built way;
(Shadow grow vaster!
Terror come faster!)
Up! Up! to the blazing blackness
Of one veiléd face.
And endless folding and unfolding,
Rolling and unrolling of almighty wings.
The last step stood!
The last dim cry of pain
Fluttered across the stars,
And then--
Wings, wings, triumphant wings,
Lifting and lowering, waxing and waning,
Swinging and swaying, twirling and whirling,
Whispering and screaming, streaming and gleaming,
Spreading and sweeping and shading and flaming--
Wings, wings, eternal wings,
'Til the hot, red blood,
Flood fleeing flood,
Thundered through heaven and mine ears,
While all across a purple sky,
The last vast pinion.
Trembled to unfold.
I rose upon the Mountain of the Moon,--
I felt the blazing glory of the Sun;
I heard the Song of Children crying, "Free!"
I saw the face of Freedom--
And I died.