together for long unless the Whites can manage the Blacks, and uphold
the standard of justice which was formerly lived by. Votes are not
necessary, but ordinary human rights of free existence and opportunity
are necessary. The empire is at the crossroads. It is a question
whether it can be held together by good will, or whether Britain
will be forced to inaugurate a rule of force and obedience. The old
conception of good will is being tested in South Africa and Egypt and
India as it is in Ireland. Possibly as a result of the war, political
circumstances may force it back to the ideal of force and a paramount
central authority. The belief of native races in the King, and their
hatred of the King’s intermediaries, is characteristic of the time. The
American Negro is keeping a sharp lookout on the lot of colored people
within the British Empire. As he leads in intelligence, in ideals, and
in material wealth, he intends to missionarize the native world in the
name of civilization. The missionaries are called agitators; their
press seditious; their ideals dangerous; but words do not alter the
fact that the flag of Pan-African unity has been raised, and the common
needs of all dark-skinned races have been mooted.
The Republic of Liberia has often been dismissed as a failure, by
the white man. But it is destined to be America’s advanced post in
Africa for Black civilizing Black. I was fortunate in meeting in
America Bishop Lloyd, just returned from Liberia, and he gave a very
interesting account of the positive side of development there. First
of all the American Negro is the élite, the aristocracy of Liberia. He
is taking upon himself the immense task of educating the Negro masses
of the interior. In this and in commerce and in the establishment of
law and order, Liberia is very successful. America and American ideals
are a gospel to the Liberian Negroes. Never a word is said of the
injustices and sufferings which attend Negro life in the States, but
on the contrary America is regarded as a Negro Paradise. When America
declared war on Germany it was the joy of Liberia to declare war also,
and her war effort was remarkable.
It is somewhat curious that while British difficulties with native
races obtain large advertisement in the United States and elsewhere,
the lynchings and burnings and race riots of America are in general
successfully hushed up within the States where they occur. But of
course the American Negro is very proud of the America which he
feels he helped in no small way to make. America has given the Negro
an ideal, and she is to him religion. All that is new in the Negro
movement, moreover, takes its rise from America.
We have seen inaugurated in New York recently the so-called “Black Star
Line,” a line of steamships owned by Negroes, and manned by Negroes.
Its object is to trade with Negro communities, and advance the common
interests of the dark-skinned people throughout the world. Whether
it is destined to succeed depends on the soundness of its financial
backing. But it is an interesting adventure. Its first ship out of New
York carried out the last cargo of whisky before “Prohibition” set
in. A storm forced the vessel back to port after the port had become
legally “dry,” and some thought the cargo would be seized. It was
said there were many leaks to the ship, but after many parleys and
reconnaissances with white officials the _Yarmouth_, afterwards named
_Frederick Douglass_, got away.
It is generally advertised under the caption “OVER THE TOP—FOR WHAT?”
and was started by a Negro orator called the Hon. Marcus Garvey. He
founded a society known as The Universal Negro Improvement Association
which boasts now a membership of over two millions in America, Africa,
and the Indies. This is a militant organization. But its membership
is evidently useful as a ready-to-hand investing public who can be
persuaded to put its money into a whole series of Negro business
enterprises, such as “The Negro Factories Corporation,” “West Indies
Trading Association of Canada,” and, of course, the Black Star Line.
The association has its organ, “The Negro World,” and it meets, as
far as New York is concerned, at a place called popularly “The Subway
Church,” between Seventh and Lenox Avenues. Whites are not wanted,
and indeed not admitted, but the crowds are so huge it is possible to
slip in. Musical features alternate with impassioned oratory. Whether,
like a bubble blown from the soap of commerce and the water and air of
humanitarianism, this will burst and let the members down, or whether
it is sound and genuine, it is at least instructive and interesting in
its developments. The lecturers and speakers choose the largest terms
of thought, and visualize always some four hundred millions of colored
brethren throughout the world. A universal convention is even to be
called.
How the _Yarmouth_ fared with the rest of her “wet cargo” during its
six months’ trip has not been made public, but the Negroes hailed the
progress of the vessel as a “diplomatic triumph,” and when it returned
to New York an accession of 25,000 new members was announced. Five
thousand in Cuba, two thousand five hundred in Jamaica, eight thousand
in Panama, seven thousand in Bocas del Toro and Port Limon; the staff
of the ship and its “ambassadors” were feted on their return. All made
speeches, and all were greeted with the greatest enthusiasm. Thus,
at the “Star Casino” one of the ambassadors described the arrival at
Jamaica:
“At last we came in sight of the emerald isle of the Caribbean
Sea—that beautiful island that is ever green—that wonderful island
Jamaica; and dear indeed is the island of Jamaica to me. With pleasure
I saw the people as they crowded along the docks to catch the first
view of our steamer, the first ship of the Black Star Line. I could
hear the hurrahs and the huzzahs as she majestically wended her way up
to Port Royal. We had taken on board our Negro pilot, who piloted us
into the harbor of Kingston, one of the finest harbors of the world. As
she sped along, the people of Kingston were running down the streets in
order that they might catch a sight of the _Yarmouth_. We steamed to
the dock and they came on board. They did not wait for invitation to
the captain’s cabin, but came up to the wheelhouse, they came into the
chart room, they invaded every portion of the ship.... On the second
night after our arrival a grand reception was arranged.”
The ship made a triumphal entry wherever she arrived. At one port
where the ropes were thrown out from the ship, the Negroes seized them,
pulled her alongside the dock of a fruit company, and then with their
hands pulled the vessel itself the entire length of the quay. No one
had ever seen the like, but the Blacks wanted to feel it with their
hands—their own ship.
This was strictly a new-world voyage, and a comparatively easy one,
with plenty of passengers and of freight. The cry is for more ships and
bigger enterprise, and if the company makes good Africa will no doubt
see Africa come riding toward itself on the waves. It is possible,
however, that the Whites of Africa may prove more hostile than those of
the easy-going States of South America and the Indies. The news of the
Negro line is no doubt very rousing for all intelligent colored people.
What in reality is Black Internationalism is hardly realized as yet,
especially by Great Britain. Anything said against the Negroes is
heard by a vast number of educated and intelligent colored people.
Thus you find the words of the Germanophile E. D. Morel used to stir
the masses against Britain. Says Morel, according to the Negroes: “The
results of installing black barbarians among European communities are
inevitable.... The African is the most developed sexually of any....
Sexually, they are unrestrained and unrestrainable. That is perfectly
well known.... For the working classes the importation of Negro
mercenaries by the hundred thousand from the heart of Africa to fight
the battles and execute the lusts of capitalist governments in the
heart of Europe is a terrific portent. The workers alike of Britain,
France, and Italy will be ill advised if they allow it to pass in
silence.” And when the _Daily Herald_ says that “Wherever there are
black troops who have been long distant from their own womenfolk there
follows a ghastly outbreak of prostitution, rape, and syphilis” it is
necessarily treated as a slur by Negroes. A Negro writer who protested
in a well-written and cogent letter to that newspaper fails to get
his letter printed, but he prints it all right in the Negro press
of America, and asks, “Why this obscene maniacal outburst about the
sex-vitality of black men in a proletarian paper?”
If there is a race riot as at Cardiff or Liverpool, or if a scheme is
mooted to dispossess the squatters of Rhodesia of more of their land,
or a General Dyer machine-guns a crowd of civilians in the name of
keeping order in India—it is absurd to think of the matter locally and
provincially. It is discussed throughout the world. It is impossible to
act now as if the subject races had no collective consciousness.
* * * * *
So much for the point of view of the world outside America. There
is another point of view which is perhaps closer to those subjects
specially treated in this volume. What the world does to the native and
says of him are known in America. America has power to help the native
races of dark color throughout the world, and many Americans, white
as well as dark, are willing to do so. But there is one very serious
difficulty, and that is the moral sanction.
While those things occur; such as burning Negroes at the stake and
denying them the equable justice of a true Court of Law, America has
no right to speak; her truly grand idealism is rendered almost wholly
impotent. It was the same in the promulgation of the League of Nations
and the idea of helping small nations; it is the same with regard to
American interference, in the name of human rights and ideals, in the
Irish question. It can always be objected: Why do you not look after
your own subjects first, and save your Negroes? An American said to me
in Philadelphia: “I am not overfond of the Bolsheviks, but of one thing
I am glad—_The red hand of the Tsar will never rule again_.”
No?
And another said: “Thank God the pogroms are over.”
Are they?
And a third said: “I am sorry America refused to take a mandate for
Armenia.”
But why not take a mandate for Georgia and Mississippi?
In 1919, when the question of American delegations to Ireland was being
discussed, a member in the British House of Commons asked if a British
delegation could not be sent to America to investigate conditions among
the Negroes.
Mr. Bonar Law thought that a very humorous suggestion. The very humor
of it was sufficient answer to America. No need for Britain to send
investigators.
As long as America with her ideals was enough unto herself the Negro
question was strictly her affair. But when she takes the moral
leadership of the civilized world it becomes to a certain extent every
one’s affair.
The point is that America as a whole cannot afford to tolerate
what is done locally in particular States. It is not a matter of
non-interference from Washington in the local affairs of Georgia and
Mississippi and the rest. The baleful happenings in these States rob
Americans in other States of their good name, and spoil America’s
reputation in the world. The fact that the terms of the Constitution
are not carried out, decreases throughout the value of the American
citizenship. And the growing scandal causes America’s opinions on world
politics to be seriously discounted.
Thus though America was antipathetic to the old Tsarist régime, and
still talks of the “bloody Tsar,” it is a fact growing daily more
obvious that compared with the present régime of the great republic
the rule of the Tsar over his subject races was in some ways better.
On the other hand, the American press has lately been flooded with the
atrocities of the Bolsheviks. The fact is, we, all of us, believe evil
readily of a country which is far away, but are not ready to face evils
near at home when they affect ourselves.
* * * * *
Thus the matter affects the world and America. There is a third
interest, and that is exclusively of the Negro himself. He needs a
guaranteed charter, an authenticated minimum. If the vote cannot be
given him, at least let him have justice; if he cannot be admitted
to labor unions let his labor be adequately protected; if an offense
against a white woman is regarded as specially heinous and dangerous
let the legal punishment be increased; afford his women protection
also. If the Whites have changed their minds about slavery let them
state how much they sanction—what are its limits. Let the American
Republic and the British Empire state their policy with regard to their
colored population. Make it clear and manifest.
The Negro’s chief danger lies in a consensus of evil opinion
concerning him. The South rejoices when a race riot disgraces some
Northern city and says: “They’re beginning to find out the Negro isn’t
an angel up there.” When a General Dyer uses the machine-gun argument,
or a mob of dockers fall foul of Negro immigrants at Cardiff or
Liverpool, America smiles and says, “You also?” When there are reports
of constant trouble in South Africa someone else says, “So you cannot
get on with them either?” and when one is burned to death in Georgia,
South Africa says, “So you burn them to death, eh?”
Out of a cycle of happenings is derived the thought: _No one can afford
to feel virtuous about the Negro_.
That fact no doubt helps the Negro press in the chanting of its
sorrows, but it does not help the Negro himself. In fact, it shuts out
a good deal of hope which might have been derived from white sympathy,
and it threatens the colored peoples as a whole with worse things to
be. These are the days of democracies and white proletariats, and both
show themselves less friendly toward Negroes and “natives” than the
old monarchies. Their hostility is based on an old fashioned ignorant
contempt; competition in the labor market, and a sort of fear. Probably
it can be overcome in time, but if so it will not be through white
enlightenment, but through a world organization and understanding
on the part of the colored races. For while throughout the world the
Whites degenerate somewhat, these others rise. The gulf between the two
is being diminished, and there may come a time not very far away when
the white hegemony will be lost.
XV
UP THE MISSISSIPPI
From New Orleans I traveled up the Mississippi; calling at such
characteristic points as Reserve, Vicksburg, Greenville, Mound Bayou,
Memphis, accomplishing the journey partly by rail and partly by boat.
Reserve is a vast sugar plantation owned by five brothers. It is only
thirty miles from the great city and the Whites are mostly Creoles.
The Mother of Rivers, clad in brown silk, flows toward the green humps
of hundreds of levees and embankments. The shores are low and level,
and there grows almost to the water edge a vast, close, ten-feet-high
jungle of sugar cane. You walk along the top of the levee till you
see a lane running across the plantation like a trench dug through
it. In the lane itself there is no view except the erect, green wall
of canes on either hand and the blue sky above. Beneath your feet are
cart ruts and withered stalks of sugar gone purple at the joints and
straw-colored in the flanks. Take a stalk and break it across, and it
breaks in shreds like a bamboo, revealing the inner fatness of sweet
pith which you can suck if you will, for it is sugar. It has a dilute
sweetness which rapidly cloys an unaccustomed palate, though the
people of the countryside suck it continuously, and many consider the
natural sugar the source of all health. The taste is reproduced very
well in the _pralines_ on which New Orleans prides itself.
A long and novel sort of lane this through the sugar! A Negro worker
coming along the road sees a white man, but does not want to meet him,
and he takes three steps into the dark-green depths, clawing his way
inside as through many barely shut doors, and he is lost. You would
seek him in vain if he wished to hide.
The lane debouches into a sun-bathed, half-cleared area which is
covered with stricken canes looking like warriors tumbled in death
after a great battle; for it is winter and the time of the taking
of the harvest. Negro gangs with rough bills like meat choppers are
slicing the side leaves from the cane and then cutting, slicing and
cutting, all over the plantation, with joyous noise, and there are
great numbers of dark girls in straw hats working methodically and
rhythmically from the shoulder and the bosom, striking, clipping,
felling, as it were automatically, unwaveringly. They break in and cut
in, strewing ever more extensively the carpet of canes in their rear,
but the wall they attack is ten times as dense as the thickest field of
corn and twice as high. The master or overseer, on horseback, stands
about and calls sharply to the workers in French _patois_. He may be
white Creole, but is often as dark as his gang. Where sugar is not
rising, beyond the plantations if you walk as far, Nature seems sunk
in swamp and swarming with snakes. The low jungle over the Mississippi
marshes has many alligators and a multitude of other reptiles.
In a clearing of the sugar harvest it is possible to sit on a hummock
of grass and see something of a plantation as a whole. It is a
cloudless day with the faintest haze over the blueness of the sky. The
sun heat is tempered by a delightful air which keeps on moving all the
time like an invisible river of health and vigor. There is a whispering
in the myriads of the canes, and you hear the slashing and the clumping
of the cutting which is going on all the while. On one hand are the
rudimentary huts of the Negroes, like dressing rooms, on the other the
lofty refinery of white-painted corrugated iron, with many chimneys
and cranes. The refinery, using electric power taken from the river,
works off all the local cane and also imports large quantities of raw
sugar brought from Cuba. Pile driving is going on in the Mississippi,
and there will soon be a landing stage to which the Cuban steamers
themselves can approach. The Louisiana cane is red and the Cuban is
yellow-green, and the latter is much the sweeter. On the plantation,
where a fair stretch of ground has been cleared, the motor plough is
at work with huge spiked wheels, turning the black soil over the sugar
seed for next year. The cane has an eye at each joint, the eye is the
seed, and from it sprouts next year’s plant, growing at right angles
to the old cane in the earth. “In February,” says the young Creole
ploughman, “the young plants have to be dug up and replanted. Work goes
on steadily all the year round.”
I resumed my way up the Mississippi on an old, broken-down steamer with
a remarkably high, wooden, dripping, splashing paddle wheel. To go by
boat used to be a favorite way of traveling, but the new railways on
each side of the great river have killed the water traffic by taking
away all large freight. It does not seem a profitable enterprise to
ply the Mississippi for passengers alone. There are therefore only a
few river steamers left, and these have to call at all the tiniest and
obscurest waterside places and lumber camps, and can seldom make more
than forty or fifty miles a day. Few people will travel a week or ten
days or a fortnight or anything you like to Memphis when a locomotive
will do it in twenty-four hours. The passengers therefore sit in stuffy
trains listening to the _vers libre_ of the man who offers in a low
voice: _chewing gum_, _cigarettes_, _iced coco-cola_; and the country
whirls past them unprofitably. The cotton bales which used to go down
stream in thousands upon river steamers are now closely packed in
railway trucks; and the molasses goes no longer in barrels, but in
huge, iron cisterns on wheels. There is therefore little traffic on
the mighty river—she is happier and freer, more as she was of yore,
with few steamers, few barges, few rafts—instead, only an occasional
rowing boat and a ferry. The water is brown and vast and placid, and
runs in many courses beyond wooded islands, beyond vast, swampy forks
and tongues of the mainland. It is a sort of café-au-lait color, and
the shadows mantle softly upon it deliciously. Willows grow in the
water on its shores and islands, and in shadow or sunlight the water
laps gently the many tree trunks or lies still under the green shade of
the branches. It is a great, intricate, unexplored labyrinth of waters,
and now you see it unadorned and lovely, with no advertisements on
its banks and no shoddy reminder of our civilization on any hand—the
Mississippi as she was when we first saw her. I traveled on a boat
called _Senator Cordill_ and we made barely thirty miles a day, so many
were the stopping places, so many the accidents. It cost a little over
a dollar a day, including board, and was the nearest approach to a
gift. The ship had a motley gang of colored laborers fetching freight
on their backs in intermittent procession, beating out dust from the
long, wooden gangway up which they tramped with their burdens. The
wooden paddle wheel, which was ten feet high, had got into disrepair,
and at a riverside town where we stopped some colored carpenters
were at work fitting new wooden parts into her while close-cropped
Negroes with coal-dusted skulls shoveled coal aboard from a lighter.
We had three wooden decks rolling with small freight for tiny places
in Louisiana, Mississippi State, and Arkansas. In the cabins were
huge family bedsteads, and no locks on the doors. When the wheel was
repaired and the time came for departure the Negro crew deserted en
masse, and the captain, with the unlighted cigar which he had rolled
and bitten in his capacious mouth all day, stood on the bank and
accosted all and sundry, begging them to come aboard and work on the
ship. Meanwhile in a quayside hut Negro girls were “shimmying” as they
brought in food for their colored boys, and our erstwhile crew was
heard singing and shouting. Only next morning did we get enough hands,
and at the misty dawn, when the river was so still that it looked like
an unbroken sheet of ice, we raised anchor and plunged outward again.
In the main current whole trees were seen to be floating, and our wheel
might easily strike one of them and get broken again. We sat down to
breakfast, the eight passengers: one was a judge, another a district
attorney, a third was an agent for timber, and the rest were women.
The china at table was of different shapes and sizes, and there were
only three teaspoons—so the rest of the passengers were served with
tablespoons for their coffee.
Judge T—— insisted on having a teaspoon from the colored girl who
waited on us, but was obliged to content himself with the tablespoon
laid.
“Teaspoons is sca’ce,” said she.
We stop at various “landing places,” points and creeks and bends, the
boat generally coming close to shore. A long plank is thrown out,
and then commences the cakewalk of the Negro “rousters” carrying out
all manner of goods—in one place it is materials for the building
of a church—and bringing back cotton bales or whatever else may be
waiting for us. It is a sight at which one could gaze spellbound for
hours; for the Negroes keep in step and seem listening to an inaudible
music. They lurch with their shoulders, kick out with their flexible
knees, and whether taking long strides or marking time they keep in
unison with the whole, their heads bent, their eyes half closed and
bleared with some inner preoccupation. They are in all manner of ragged
garments: one has a lilac-covered hat, another an old dressing gown,
others are in sloppy blue overalls, some wear shabby Cuban hats, and
they go screeching and singing and dodging knocks on the head, but
always keeping step with the dance. The captain, with yesterday’s unlit
cigar stuck in the side of his month, gives directions about each
bit of freight, using wonderful expressions of abuse and otherwise
“encouraging” the “niggers.” Looking at the “rousters” you can easily
understand that dancing of a certain kind is innate with the Negro and
springs from him. He has an inborn sense of the beating of time which
we call rhythm. It is so exaggerated that it tilts out ridiculously
with his stomach and controls inanely his bobbing head and nose
and dropping eyes. He looks a savage, but he is spellbound. He is
completely illiterate and largely unintelligent, but he has solved
the problem of carrying huge cotton bales to the ship, providing a
rhythmical physical stream for them to flow upon. It is not half the
effort that it would be to white people without rhythm.
One of the reasons why the Negroes box so well is because they do it in
the same rhythmical way they shift these cotton bales.
Presently they commence to sing while they haul up the anchor, and a
rowing boat passing us with Negro oarsmen is also choric with bright,
hard, rhythmic music. These people understand music and time in
their bodies, not in their minds. Their blood and their nerves have
consciousness of tempo.