one sect telling of the “goings-on” in another. Each different race or
people seems to have its different characteristic religious expression.
When one has seen the exaltation of Copt and Arab in religion, when one
has heard the great choric voice of Russia at church, and the splendid,
purposeful faith of Teutonic hymns, one knows that a calm singing of
“Praise to the Holiest in the Height!” is not the only mode of praise.
There are fifty thousand ways of praising God, and every single one of
them is right.
So there is no call to chide the Negro for his excess. His ways are
part of the natural and Divine history of Man, and it is infinitely
worth while to consider them with an open and charitable mind. The
hysteria, the frenzy, of some meetings I have observed is not in the
white man. There is no use being appalled by it. It is the third part
which finishes the man downward, as St. John says in the desert.
“And after these emotional excitements they commit so many murders,”
said a Southern woman to me.
“If so, one must be upon one’s guard in the presence of a converted
man,” said I.
* * * * *
The foundation of the Negro’s great religious seriousness is to be
found in the Negro hymn or “spiritual.” These spirituals were before
there were Negro churches, before Christianity was actually allowed to
the slaves. That is why they are more often called plantation melodies.
They were sung in the twilight of the old plantations, and gave voice
to a great human sorrow and a great human need. They show that the
Negro has obtained access to the spiritual deeps, that he has a soul as
we have—a fact so often denied—and that he is capable of penetrating
the sublime. I listened very often to these songs. In several places
they were sung to honor a white visitor. I heard them rendered by
the Hampton Singers and lectured upon by Harry T. Burleigh, to whose
efforts in research the preservation of several are due. There is no
question of the excellence of them. They make a great appeal to all
people who have music in their souls.
It is, however, a musical effect, not an intellectual one. The words
have often little relevance to anything profound, and at best are
childish. There is generally a keynote which murmurs through the whole
of the song, the function of the basso-profundo who provides a river
of harmony like life itself, and the tenors and baritones and the
shriller voices move on this flowing base like ships. On the rivers
the slaves loved to sing as they rowed their masters, using most aptly
the beat of the oars and the swish of the water, while the man who
stood at the helm and steered was usually the deep bass. One of the
most unforgettable melodies is “O, Listen to the Lambs!” The tenors
seem to imitate flocks of innumerable sheep and lambs all crying to one
another, while the basso-profundo is the irrelevance of “I want to go
to Heaven when I die,” continually repeated in subterranean mumbling
and whispers——
O listen to the la-ambs
All a-cry ... in’. All a-cry ... in’.
An’ I wan’ to go to Hebn w’en I die!
“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Go Down, Moses,” “Didn’t Hear Nobody
Pray,” “The Walls of Jericho,” and many others are assuredly famous.
These and many other phenomena give indications of a distinctive Negro
point of view, and of an incipient broad-based popular culture. A
sympathetic study will always give evidence that can be set against
the point of view that the Negro is nothing, or an animal, or a scamp
at best, or a shame to the species. I was sitting in the gardens at
Baltimore in the shade of a giant plane tree one day when out came a
mixed class of Negro boys and girls and a young eager colored master
of about twenty-five. The girls were luxuriant “flappers” of every
hue of polished ebony; the boys were spindle-legged and spry and
bullet-headed. They all examined plants and trees and caterpillars and
flowers under the informing tutelage of the master. They were as noisy
and vivacious as a flock of birds that has suddenly lighted on a plain.
They minded no outsider. But a tall white man passed them, and I saw on
his face a look of unutterable contempt.
“Learning botany” said he to me in a stage whisper. “They’ll know as
much about it to-morrow morning as pigs.”
IV
IN TENNESSEE
The South, they tell me, never alters. It is said to be the least
characteristic and most uninteresting part of the United States. “You
will not care for it,” I was told. “It has not changed in fifty years.”
It is certainly little visited. It does not exemplify the hustle and
efficiency of the North. And then you cannot lecture down there. It
is not a literary domain. The consequence is that in Great Britain
many people confound the “Southern States” with the Republics of South
America. I was asked in letters why I had gone South. It was thought
there must be less interest there. But that is a mistake. The South is
as vital as the West and the East. On the whole it is more picturesque.
It is not so diversified, but the vast areas of cotton on the one hand
and of sugar and corn and rice on the other, and the forests, present
well-marked features and give the South a handsome natural aspect. It
is true that the Southern point of view as regards the Negro does not
change very much, and that all vote one way, but it does not follow
that the Southern point of view as regards the whole future of the
United States has not been modified and will not change. The South has
been very poor and is becoming rich, will perhaps become very rich and
prosperous. It was almost deprived of political power, and now it has,
in an extraordinary way, regained political power. It is well known
that the opinion of a poor and ruined man changes when Fortune makes up
to him for the past. So also with the South.
Then, in considering a people as a whole, one is bound to reckon
character. Thus, in Great Britain, what important factors are the
ruggedness of Yorkshire and Lancashire, the caution of the Scots,
the authority-loving of the southern counties, the enthusiasm and
imaginativeness of the Celts. And in America one has to reckon, not
only with the Puritan fervor of New England, but with the determination
and turbulence and group instinct of the more cavalier spirit of the
South. Though heat makes the Southern women languid and the Southern
men fiery and quick of temper, it does not seem to make them weaker.
On the whole, the Southerner seems to have a stronger will than the
Northerner, and despite the exuberance of North and West, and a flood
of contrary ideas and sentiments, the Southerner remains, as it were,
eternally incapable of being suppressed. As long as America speaks, the
South will always speak. Therefore, the South is very significant in
American life.
After Virginia I went by rail to the neighboring State of Tennessee. I
came into Knoxville one Friday night. The sight of it in the moonlight
was impressive—the broad railway bridge, the clock tower with luminous
face, the main street flocking with a Tennessee crowd, all shops fully
ablaze with light; bunting and wreaths hung from house to house—for
it was the week of the Fair. A Salvation Army meeting bellowed forth
musical offerings and hallelujahs “thro’ the flag-filled air.”
Everywhere electric signs were twinkling. Laughter and talk walked arm
in arm along the broad main way. “It’s a fine city, this Knoxville of
yours,” I ventured to remark to a stranger. “No, not a fine city,” said
he, “a fine people, but not a fine city, a wretched city; it needs
pulling down and rebuilding, but fine people, the finest people in the
world.” This rare self-consciousness and belief in self, this group
feeling, I believe, one would look in vain for in the North.
“Sober Knoxville” is one of the most responsible of Southern cities.
Tennessee as a whole is quiet and steady. Lynching is infrequent. It
was therefore considered very extraordinary that a race riot should
break out in the city. The race riots in Chicago and Washington in 1919
were no doubt worse, but none caused more perplexity than that which
broke out at Knoxville on August 30th of that year.
Deplorable and terrible as were those Negro _pogroms_ of the year
after the war, I think they were due to special conditions. They were
the expression of the frustrated ferocity that would otherwise have
gone into the war. Demobilization excitements had much to do with
them—the parades of Negro regiments, the idleness of white troops
and of the demobilized unemployed. When the complete transition to
peace conditions had been achieved, the danger of these outbreaks was
averted. The year 1920 remains freer from race riots. That is not to
say that they may not break out again, and on a larger scale. In any
time of social upheaval and revolution they become possible. Those that
have occurred show an ugly animus against the Negro still latent in the
common people of the cities.
As explained to me, the outbreak at Knoxville seemed comparatively
simple in origin. Mr. Maures Mayes, a Negro, murdered Mrs. Lindsay,
a white woman. He was arrested and sent to a jail in another city.
A mob formed to enter Knoxville prison and lynch the Negro. But a
committee opened parley with the governor, and was allowed to satisfy
itself that the prisoner was not there. Apparently, however, there
was a considerable amount of whisky stored in the prison. The whisky
attracted the mob also. A general assault was commenced, the place was
stormed, and all prisoners were released. Troops sent to disperse the
mob joined it, and a second purpose then appeared—to take revenge
on the colored population. Someone started a rumor and it spread like
wildfire, that thousands of Negroes were marching on the business
part of the city and that two soldiers had been killed. The colored
folk were taken by surprise—there was a great deal of looting and
destruction and personal robbery, and a number of Negroes were killed,
while many were injured. It was the first race riot that had ever
taken place in Knoxville, and all reputable people were sorry for it.
I was told it all sprang from the crime of one Negro. But one might
just as well say it all sprang from a desire to have the whisky in the
prison—O Knoxville, O sobriety!
Because in general the Negroes are well treated in Knoxville, this
lapse has been discounted, and they are surprisingly free from
bitterness. I called at the Carnegie Library for colored people, a
quiet little building—not much by comparison with the really grand
public library of the city, but still a provision, and as such to be
noted, in comparison with so many other cities where the Negroes not
only have not access to the general public libraries, but have no
separate provision made for them. The Knoxville library for colored
people was, I believe, opened by the mayor some years ago, and the city
felt proud of what it had done. It is unfortunately very inadequate,
but it is in the charge of a capable colored lady who will perhaps
help to “agitate” a bigger and better one. The Negroes are very
grateful in any case for what they have.
I called on several representative Negroes. They were much more
friendly to the whites than those I found in Virginia. “We get on very
well here,” was a common remark. I visited the colored lawyer H——,
established in Knoxville some eight years. He was in deshabille and
was sweeping out his office with a hard brush and shovel. He turned
out to be very lawyer-like in conversation. I asked him a whole series
of questions, to which he answered “Yes” or “No,” without volunteering
any information or enlarging in any way. He called the race riot a
“circumstance.” He said he had won cases even in the Supreme Court, and
was respected by the Bench for his grim determination. After saying
that, he went to the window and spat violently into the street below
and then returned.
I praised his probable skill in handling juries, and he was mollified.
“I am practiced to read men’s faces,” said he. “I pick out the man
who is likely to cause trouble and address myself exclusively to him.
Judges here are absolutely devoid of color prejudice.”
A seeming half-wit had just been sentenced to death at the city of
Danville for accosting a white girl. The trial was of the briefest,
and the Negro’s transit to the electric chair was made the most rapid
possible—so as to avoid a lynching. The lawyer thought that the
sentence was harsh—but as long as lynching was so prevalent, legal
punishment had to be severe.
“Did you ever hear of a white man being convicted for assaulting a
Negro?” I asked.
“No,” said he, constrainedly, “not unless it were an offense against a
child.”
He did not think Negroes showed much enterprise in Knoxville—there
were no banks, no large businesses, no drug stores, though there were
four colored lawyers and sixteen doctors.
After Lawyer H—— I visited Mr. D——, a successful colored dentist,
with well-groomed head and manicured hands. He was clad in a white
hospital coat which was spotless, and by the appurtenances of his
cabinet he seemed to be abreast of scientific progress as far as
dentistry was concerned. He had a good practice, not only among the
Blacks, but with the white country population. He said the old settlers
had no prejudice against a colored dentist, though the younger, newer
men and women were different. While I was talking a colored girl came
in to have Mr. D—— fill a hollow tooth. He said the colored folk had
suffered greatly with their teeth in the past, but were taking more
care of them now. He loved putting gold crowns on teeth, and most smart
Negro young men felt a little gold in the mouth was very _chic_—just
the thing. It is certainly a characteristic of the modern Negro. Mr.
D—— watched the race riot from his office window, and was much
alarmed at the time. But, like Lawyer H——, he felt that there was
good feeling in the city. He thought it an accident. The soldiers had
been inflamed against the Negroes.
In lack of Negro enterprise what a contrast Knoxville was to places
like Norfolk, Virginia! I was soon to realize that the further South I
went the more stagnant would Negro life show itself—until I reached
the point when there would be little scope for investigation. The
traveler going South from Washington is let gradually downward into
a sort of pit of degradation. Chattanooga is lower than Knoxville,
Birmingham lower than Chattanooga, rural Georgia and Alabama lower than
all of these. This I think ought to be realized lest the glamour of
Negro progress in Virginia and the North give a false impression of the
whole.
At Knoxville it was Fair time. The time when I was in the South was
one of fairs and carnivals. As the Russian goes on pilgrimage when
the harvest has been gathered in, so the American goes to the Fair in
the fall. There is in the South a vast network of the moving caravans
of showmen, and a huge show business quite novel to an Englishman. I
arrived in many towns at the time of their Fair, and had the greatest
difficulty in obtaining shelter for the night, so crowded were they.
The people from the country round rolled in to the Fair in their cars
and choked every thoroughfare.
One blemish on the large State Fair is that, except as servants, no
Negroes are to be seen. There is a great gathering of white people,
but no Blacks. It is therefore more polite, more well dressed, more
conventional, and there is less of color and life than would fairly
have obtained had all been welcome. What is a Fair if it be not an
outing for the poor! It is reduced to this in the South, that the
Whites have their Fairs and the Negroes have theirs separately.
I accompanied an Appalachian sportsman. He told me he shot a big, black
bear the day the Armistice was signed. Sure as the first of November
came round he was out with gun and haversack and Negro boys hunting
the bear. He hunted for the love of hunting, though bear’s flesh could
be sold at a dollar a pound and was worth it, every cent. He thought
Tennessee did “mighty well” in the war, and they gave the boys a fine
reception when they came back. They’d had a drop of whisky in them in
the riot, but a few niggers less wasn’t much matter. He pointed out
to me signs of Knoxville prosperity—houses that cost ten to twenty
thousand dollars to build—picturesque and wooden, but very costly
from a European point of view. No cotton was grown in this district,
and next to no tobacco. Many people did not even know what a stalk of
cotton was like.
The Knoxville Fair was a wondrous exposition of Southern hogs (each hog
docketed with personal weight and what it gains per day), bulls and
chickens and pigeons and rabbits and owls and what not, and there was a
hall of automobiles festooned in flags. Caged lions and tigers flanked
the auditorium of the free vaudeville entertainment. Negro boys flogged
bony, grunting camels round the grounds. The pop-corn stands vied with
the ice-cream counters stacked with cones. There was an astonishing
uproar from the various revolving “golden dreams” and of the jibbing
metal horses; and outside all manner of peep shows, men who had sold
their voices talked till they foamed at the lips or went hoarse—of the
freaks and wonders within. Thus the two-headed child, the girl who does
not die though her half-naked body is transfixed with darts; the “whole
dam family” (apes dressed up as human beings); the cigarette fiend, a
thin, yellow strip of humanity who is slowly but surely smoking himself
to death; Bluey, the missing link between monkey and man; the fire
swallower from the South Sea Islands; Zarelda, the girl with a million
eyes (dotted all over her body), who has baffled all scientists; the
garden of Allah and the garden of lovely girls; Leach, the human
picture gallery, with the world’s masterpieces tattooed all over his
body; Dagmar, the living head without a body....
And the owner of the show, and of the bought voice which must not stop
advertising it to the passer by, stands at one side in shirt sleeves,
and rolls his quid and spits, and seems to meditate on dollars and
cents, ever and anon signaling to the man with the voice not to let
the crowd get away without coming in. It was pathetic to come upon
the freaks, later, on the road; see Zarelda, demurely clad in black,
gripping a suitcase, and realize that she had “dates” all over the
South, and showed her million eyes to-day in Knoxville, then in Macon,
then in Savannah, then Jacksonville and Mobile and New Orleans and a
score of other places, sometimes for a day, sometimes for three days or
a week—not in any sense a music-hall artiste, but a sort of gypsy by
life and by profession. How tired the freaks must get, knocking about
from State to State and listening to the loud laugh that speaks the
vacant mind.
One would expect as the accompaniment of this show life a great
number of strolling musicians and a poor folk wandering from town to
town. But there are practically none. Strolling musicians now obtain
polite employment at the many cinema houses where sensational pictures
alternate with low vaudeville. Southern talent meets with a boisterous
reception from the twenty-cent houses of Atlanta and New Orleans.
One hears very broad humor upon occasion, frantic burlesques of the
nervous hysteria and half-witted ignorance of the “nigger”—when the
white man makes up as a Negro he always shows something lower than the
Negro. At one show in New Orleans the whole audience roared with mirth
at a competition in what was called “fizzing,” the spitting of chewed
tobacco in one another’s faces and the bandying of purely Southern
epithets and slang. Music is little developed among the Whites, though
the singing of “Dixie” choruses is hailed as almost national. Musical
instruments are now rare, even among the Negroes, and seem to have
been displaced by the gramophone. There is no “gridling,” no beggars
singing hymns on the city streets. In the country there are few tramps.
The ne’er-do-wells are to be found more in the market places and the
cheap streets. Prohibition has subterraneanized that part of the drink
traffic which it has not killed, and the hitherto unemployed find a
congenial occupation leading the thirsty to the “blind tigers.” It is
rare to come across a man on the road, and Vachel Lindsay, tramping
Georgia and reading his poems to the farmers, must have been unique,
not only as a poet, but as a tramp. I saw nothing resembling the grand
procession of “hoboes” that I met when tramping to Chicago seven years
ago. Perhaps it was because immigration had ceased, and throughout the
whole of America there was a need for labor which absorbed all men. Yet
there could have been few on the road even before the war: the vast
number of Blacks makes it unfitting for a white man to be tramping, and
there is, moreover, less chance for a white man to get work in any case.
Much is said against the “poor Whites” or “poor white trash,” as
the white proletariat is called by the black proletariat. They are
said to be the worst enemies of the Negro, and the Negro is afraid
of Bolshevism or Socialism because he knows the common white people,
“those who have nothing and are nothing,” are the last people likely
to give him justice. As one of the most popular of Negro leaders said
recently: “As long as Socialism is followed by the lower classes of
Whites, we can see there is more danger coming from Socialism to the
Negro than from anything else, because below the Mason and Dixon line
the people who lynch Negroes are the low-down Whites.” Of course those
crowds who joyfully allow themselves to be photographed around the
charred remains of the Negro they have burnt, thus affording the most
terrible means of propaganda to Negro societies, are more of the dull,
uneducated masses than of the refined and rich. They hate the Negro
more because they are thrown more in contact with him, and their women
are more accessible to him. They are in competition with the Negro for
work and wages, and would gladly welcome a complete exodus to the North
or to Liberia, for then their wages would go up. Physically, and man
for man, they are afraid of the Negro, and therefore they attack him
in mobs. Fortunately, there are not in the South great numbers of poor
Whites except in the large cities and at the ports.
By contrast with the people of the North, the people of the South are
noisy, very polite indoors, but brusque and rough without. They will do
a great deal for you as a friend, but not much for you as a stranger.
They have sharp-cut features, thin lips, blank brows. The women do
not take on a fair fullness of flesh, but are inclined to dry up and
fade. There are an enormous number of faded women everywhere—a sign,
perhaps, that the climate does not suit the race. The accent seems to
vary with the State, and Tennessee speaks with far more distinction
than Georgia, where the “nigger brogue” prevails, and it is difficult
to tell White from Black by voice. Nearly all r’s are dropped. Moral
character is said to be weak, but there is nevertheless a very high
standard, at least in matters of sex. The Southern woman is by no means
as conscious of her charms as the Northern woman, and an unusually
susceptible male could spend a quiet time in these parts. Men are not
thinking of love and composing poems, even though it is the South, but
they are if anything keener on business and money. Most people seemed
suspicious of strangers, not communicative, but once they have taken
the stranger to their hearts they easily become warm-heartedly effusive.
As a stranger I encountered a surprising lack of civility at a
“non-union” plough company at Chattanooga. The employees were mostly
Negroes, and I called on the white superintendent to obtain permission
to go over the works. A heavy-jowled fellow kept me waiting half an
hour in an anteroom, and then not only refused point-blank to let me
see conditions in his factory, but was so brusque in his manner that I
was forced to give him my mind roundly on his lack of courtesy, not to
me personally, but to a literary man. As a rich business man he seemed
to consider the profession of letters as dirt under his feet. I must
say I felt shame to be so angry, and I was much amused some weeks later
to read in a Chattanooga newspaper picked up by accident that Billy
Sunday had visited this city and had preached in the said works, and
at the close of his address, the superintendent being present, all the
employees were en bloc converted to Christ.