The bride is a daughter of Lucina, who stands at the left of the
bride.
]
I think of Sara whose honesty and goodness had beautified her face. Left
a widow with five young children, and very poor, she often felt the
burden of care too heavy for her shoulders; but she went bravely on.
When her daughter was married and the customary dowry of forty dollars
was offered Sara by the young husband, she refused to take it, believing
that it was not in accord with Christian principle. The king of the
Mpongwe tribe, being jealous for old customs, resented Sara’s action,
and having invited her to his town made her a prisoner, thinking to
intimidate her; but he failed even to pick a quarrel with her, and after
a few days he released her.
I think of Lucina, than whom the Mpongwe Church never had a more
faithful member. Lucina’s husband, preferring a dissolute life of
drunkenness and polygamy, left her with five young children. Indeed,
when he took other wives he had to leave her; for her character embraced
the sensibility as well as the faithfulness of Christian wifehood. She
brought up her children under great difficulties, working for them like
a very slave; and though she was young, educated and extremely
attractive, the breath of scandal never tarnished her reputation. When
her husband accepted a dowry for their daughter and sent a portion of it
to Lucina, she sent it back to him saying that if he had sold their
daughter for a price, her conscience would not allow her to share it
with him.
And, among others, there was Sonia, a white-haired old man with the
heart of a child. Sonia had as many stories as _Uncle Remus_; but his
best stories were the incidents and adventures of his own life.
One still night as we lay at anchor, in the middle of the swift-rolling
river, with the moonshine lying in silver ringlets across its surface,
the boat-boys asked Sonia to tell them a story. As usual his first reply
was that he did not know any stories—excepting a few foolish old stories
that they had heard till they were tired of them. But at length—as
usual—he thought of one, and then another, and still another.
He first told a typical story about the tortoise and his creditors. The
tortoise in African folk-lore is notorious for unscrupulous cunning.
Once upon a time there was a great famine in the land and food was very
dear. So the tortoise called upon his friends, the worm, the cock, the
bushcat, the leopard and the hunter, and borrowed from each a box of
brass rods, promising to pay them at the end of the season on different
days. On the day appointed the worm appeared and asked for the payment
of the loan. Then the tortoise asked him to wait until he should go and
fetch the money. So the tortoise went off to get the money, and the next
day he came back with the cock, who also came according to appointment
for the payment of his loan. Then the worm and the cock met, and the
cock ate the worm.
Then the cock asked for his money and the tortoise asked him to wait
until he should go and fetch it. And he went off again, and came back
next day with the bushcat, who had come for the payment of his loan.
Then the cock and the bushcat met and the bushcat killed the cock and
ate him.
Then the bushcat asked for his money and the tortoise asked him to wait
until he should go and fetch it. And he went off again, and came back
the next day with the leopard, and the leopard killed the bushcat and
ate it.
Then the leopard asked for his money, and the tortoise asked him to wait
until he should go and fetch it. And he went off again, and came back
with the hunter. And the hunter and the leopard killed each other.
Then the tortoise laughed at them all for being fools. And the moral is
that it is not wise to lend to a man lest he may wish you evil and seek
to kill you. But Sonia reminds the boys that the story contains only the
wisdom of the heathen, and that Jesus teaches us to help those who need
our help even if we should lose by it.
After various comments on the moral of the story, to the effect that
“loan oft loses both itself and friend,” Sonia tells a story of two
friends and a wag.
There were two friends who had been friends from childhood, and who were
more than brothers to each other; and these two friends had never been
known to quarrel. Now there was a wag in a neighbouring town, who one
day, when he heard the people talking about these two friends who had
never quarrelled, declared that he would make them quarrel. That day he
put on a coat of which one side was blue and the other side red and then
walked down the road that ran between the two men’s houses. In the
evening the friends met as usual and one of them said: “Did you see the
wag pass to-day with a red coat on?”
“Yes,” said the other, “I saw him pass; but it wasn’t a red coat. It was
blue.”
“I am sure it was red,” said the first.
“But it wasn’t. It was blue,” said the other.
And so they disputed until one of them called the other a fool; and then
they fought.
“Take that,” said one.
“And that,” said the other.
So they fought until their wives came running to them and parted them.
But they went to their houses with heavy hearts. For they had been
friends for a lifetime and now their friendship was broken. And all the
people felt sorrow. But the wag, when he came along, laughed and told
them how he had worn a coat which was red on one side and blue on the
other. And the friends and their wives ever afterwards hated the wag.
Sonia’s stories were most interesting when he recounted real incidents
in his own life. When a young man, he told us, he had lived as a trader
at this Fang town opposite which we were anchored. The noise of
drumming, dancing and singing had ceased and the town was wrapped in
untroubled sleep. There is no stillness in the world like that of an
African town in the night.
Sonia told us about a battle he had witnessed, which was fought upon the
river, at this very place where we lay; a battle between this town and a
town which then stood on the opposite bank, but of which nothing now
remained. This town was already old at the time of the war but the other
was new, the people having come recently from the far interior, being
driven forth by the hostility of more powerful clans behind. There was
no quarrel between the towns; but the people of the old town thought
that it would be good policy to give their new neighbours a whipping
upon their arrival in order to insure a wholesome respect.
First, I believe, they stole a woman. Then followed a guerrilla warfare,
in which each side killed as they had opportunity, waylaying
individuals, or rushing from ambush upon a party of venturesome
stragglers from the enemy’s town. In this way a number were killed on
each side; and the war, which was first undertaken more as a vain
exploit or adventure than from any serious motive, was soon prosecuted
with feelings of deadly hate and a purpose of revenge. Every night, from
each town, the wail of mourning for the dead was wafted across the
river; and curses were mingled with the mourning.
At length one canoe attacked another in the river, where they had been
fishing. Immediately other canoes came to their help, and still others,
ever so many of them, pushing off rapidly from each side until all the
men of the two towns, young and old, were in the middle of the river
where they fought to a finish. When fighting in canoes, whatever other
weapons they may have, they carry a small battle-ax, which is used
especially to prevent the capsizing of the canoe by those who are
already in the water. Sonia told how that, again and again, at a blow
they severed a man’s hand, or completely disabled him. They swim so well
that they could still make a strong fight after being capsized. The
battle was long, and the river ran red with their blood. Those who were
killed were carried by the current out to the sea to feed the sharks.
The people of the new town lost. Those of them who were left pulled down
their town and moved to another place. In a few years nothing remained
of it but one or two skeletons with the grass growing through their
ribs. But for years afterwards the superstitious native passing along
the river in the dead of night heard again the noise of battle—fierce
cries and dying groans. And whenever this sound is heard, they say,
again the river runs red like blood.
One incident of the war, prior to the final battle, I recall, as Sonia
told it that night.
The people of the old town captured a man of the other side, and his
son, a little boy. They bound the father, and before his eyes
deliberately killed his son—and ate his flesh. The main motive of
cannibalism, under such circumstances, would be neither wanton cruelty
nor a vicious appetite, but _fetishism_. By eating one of their number
they render the enemy powerless to do them any farther injury. Some time
afterwards they slew the father. But already they had broken his heart,
and with hands uplifted he welcomed the death-blow.
The emotion with which old Sonia told this whole story indicated how his
own heart had been wrung. He said not a word about any effort of his to
dissuade the people from their cruelty; but I knew him well, and I was
confident that the part he had taken was not unheroic. That is a story
that was never told.
Sonia in his latter years, between long intervals of sickness, was a
missionary to the Fang. They all regarded him with love and reverence.
The oldest savage among them, and the wildest, were as children when
they addressed him.
In the little graveyard, on the mission hill at Baraka, are the graves
of those who have thought that life itself was not too great a price to
pay for the saving of such men and women from degradation. Henry
Drummond said that while in Africa he had been in an atmosphere of death
all the time, and that he realized, as never before, the awful fact of
death and its desolation as something calling for an answer. One of my
first experiences in Gaboon reminded me that I was again in the land of
death, when I assisted in the burial service of the beautiful young wife
and bride of a fellow missionary, less than three months after their
arrival in Africa. So far away from home we enter deeply into each
other’s sorrows. I was standing by in the last hour, when with pale face
the stricken but silent husband stepped to the open door and nervously
plucked a flower growing there, a large crimson hibiscus, the beauty of
the tropics, which he laid on the pillow beside his unconscious wife,
and the two broken flowers drooped and died together, while the shadows
darkened around us and the night came on. In the unconscious act there
was something more affecting than in any words of grief. It seemed to
relate this death to all death everywhere, in a world where forms of
life appear only to vanish into darkness and day hurries to the night.
Soon after our patient sufferer had ceased to breathe, in the midst of
the stillness that followed the prolonged struggle with the fever, a
storm that had been gathering with the darkness broke forth with great
violence that shook the house. I had only arrived in Africa. I went out
into the storm unspeakably oppressed with doubt, to which it was a kind
of relief. Was it a noble sacrifice? or an appalling waste? In the
intervals of the storm, and mingling with it, there came the sound of a
dirge, the hopeless death-wail, from a village close by, where the poor
natives were mourning for one of their number who had died that day, a
young man at whose bed I had stood a few hours earlier, the only son of
a heart-broken mother. Those who have always known the words of One who
brought life and immortality to light cannot realize the heathen view of
death, and the abysmal darkness of the invisible world. There is no
sound so well known in Africa, and none that so haunts the memory in
after years, as the mourning dirge, in which with united voices they
chant their sorrow for the dead—their despair and desolation; the sound
that is borne upon every night-wind and becomes to the imagination the
very voice of Africa. The groaning of the palm-trees in the darkness of
that night, as they bent beneath the tempest, and in the distance the
sound of the troubled sea, were the fitting accompaniment and interlude.
But in our house, beside our dead, there was light—and doubt was
vanquished. There, hope was whispering to a stricken heart sweet
promises of life; and faith was saying: “Let not your heart be troubled,
neither let it be afraid.”
V
AFRICAN MUSIC
It was many years ago, among the Bulu, in Kamerun. Dr. Good and myself
were holding a religious service in the town of a great chief, Abesula,
whose thirty-five wives were seated around him. After we had sung
several hymns Dr. Good began to preach, but had not proceeded as far as
_secondly_ when Abesula, interrupting, exclaimed: “Say, white man, won’t
you stop talking and sing again? And I wish you would dance with your
singing; for I don’t care for singing without dancing; and I don’t like
preaching at all.”
We found that Abesula’s whole family were united in this preference for
comic opera. But Dr. Good and I were in hopeless disagreement as to
which of us should do the dancing. Besides, the Africans themselves are
expert dancers and qualified judges; and if our music had “charms to
soothe the savage breast,” I am afraid that our dancing would have made
more savages than it would have soothed.
After a few months among the Bulu I had an organ brought up from the
coast, a baby-organ, which when folded a man could carry on his head.
The people had heard that something wonderful was coming with the next
caravan; and on the day of its arrival it seemed as if the whole Bulu
tribe had assembled on our hill. Having unpacked the organ I set it on
the porch while they all stood on the ground below. The tension of
suspense during the slow progress of preparation was a test of
endurance. At last, everything being ready, I sat down at the organ,
filled the bellows, and amidst profound silence suddenly sounded a loud
chord. Instantly the crowd bolted. Nothing was to be seen but
disappearing legs. The men, being more fleet of limb, reached the
hiding-places first; then the women and larger children, the smaller
children being left to their fate. To them the organ was of course a
fetish, and full of talking spirits. Gradually they came out from their
hiding-places. Then, as fear subsided, each one began to laugh at the
others and to tell his ancestors all about it. In the ensuing noise the
organ had a rest. They soon became devotedly fond of it, and it was a
great help in our mission work. Regularly on Sunday morning after the
service I would set the organ on the porch and play for them until I was
tired—and that was not very long; for in that climate the bellows were
soon in such condition that the playing was prominently spectacular,
done with the feet, reinforced by all the muscles of the body. In after
years, among the Fang of the French Congo, I always carried an organ
with me.
To all the interior natives, Bulu and Fang, and even to the coast tribe
of Batanga, my playing of that little organ was much the most wonderful
thing about me. In going to Africa a second time, after four years’
absence, on my way to Gaboon I landed at Batanga for a few hours. The
natives remembered me as having a beard, and I was now shaved. But there
was with me a fellow traveller who had just such a beard as mine had
been; so that, to the natives, he looked more like me than I did myself.
They of course mistook him for me; and the stranger got a friendly
reception which pleased him as much as it surprised him. He said he
never had met such friendly natives. But upon my protest they discovered
their mistake and began to pay me some attention. I insisted that they
had forgotten me and that my feelings were hurt; at which they made the
most excited remonstrance. They remembered that I had played the organ.
One of the boys, in his eagerness to convince me that they had not
forgotten me, began to imitate my motions at the organ, which he
exaggerated to an outlandish caricature in which hands, feet, head,
mouth and eyes were equally active, saying as he performed: “Look me,
Mr. Milligan; this be you.” Following his example, they all engaged in a
performance that would have scandalized any company of self-respecting
monkeys, saying the while: “This be you, Mr. Milligan; this be you.”
My fellow traveller, who may have felt somewhat chagrined at finding
that the hearty reception accorded him was intended for me, turned to me
and made some remarks that have no rightful place here.
We are all familiar with the legend that Pythagoras invented the first
musical instrument after listening to the blacksmith’s hammers.
Longfellow repeats it in the poem, “To a Child”:
“As great Pythagoras of yore,
Standing beside the blacksmith’s door,
And hearing the hammers, as they smote
The anvils with a different note,
Stole from the varying tones that hung
Vibrant on every iron tongue
The secret of the sounding wire,
And formed the seven-corded lyre.”
Shakespeare also refers to this reputed origin of music in “The Two
Noble Kinsmen.” Pirithous, relating the death of Arcite, tells how he
rode the pavement on a horse so black that the superstitious would have
feared to buy him, a prancing steed whose iron-shod feet seemed only to
touch the stones—as if counting them, rather than trampling them, and—
“thus went counting
The flinty pavement, dancing as ’twere to the music
His own hoofs made—for, as they say, from iron
Came music’s origin.”
Nevertheless, this story—like many others that cluster about the name of
Pythagoras, as, for instance, that he was seen in two cities at the same
time—is seriously vulnerable, and is probably pure myth, without enough
of fact to qualify as a legend. The obvious objection, that various
hammers striking upon an anvil give out, not different notes, but the
same—for the notes vary with the anvil and not with the
hammers—Longfellow meets by using the plural, _anvils_.
In the latest of Mr. H. E. Krehbiel’s learned and interesting books,
_The Pianoforte and Its Music_, the writer holds that the first of all
stringed instruments was the bow. Every boy knows the musical twang of
the bowstring at the moment that the arrow flies. In the _Iliad_,
Apollo, the god of music, is also the god of archery, and is called the
“bearer of the silver bow.” Mr. Krehbiel also recalls the passage in the
_Odyssey_ in which Ulysses tries his bow, after the suitors of Penelope,
one by one, had tried and failed; and when Ulysses drew the arrow to its
head and let it go, the string rang shrill and sweet as the note of a
swallow. This theory of the origin of musical instruments is strikingly
supported by the instruments in present use among the savage and
primitive tribes of West Africa.
A Kombe cook, at Gaboon, each day after dinner, lay down for a nap and
played himself to sleep upon an instrument which was nothing but a bow
with a single string. The string was made of a certain runner, the fibre
of which is very tough and gives a resonant note. The cook found that by
plucking the string with a metal, rather than with his fingers, he
produced a better note; so for this purpose he regularly used the
bread-knife and took it to bed with him. When I first heard this
unclassical music I thought he was playing on a Jew’s-harp.
The native improves this instrument when he attaches to one end of it a
gourd or calabash, in the shape of a bowl, to augment the sound—the
first sound-box. When he plays he places the flat side of the gourd
against his chest. He improves the instrument immensely when he adds
three strings, making four in all, successively shorter. The four
strings pass over a central bridge, which is notched at different
heights for the different strings. This makes eight strings and produces
eight different notes. The gourd, or sound-box, is placed in the middle
of the bow, opposite the bridge. This instrument is usually made from
the midrib of a palm-leaf. The bent midrib itself forms the bow; while
the strings are the loosened fibres of its own tough skin. These are
made taut by the vertical bridge, and their vibrating length is
regulated by strong bands passing around the ends of the strings and the
bow.
Another native instrument is a harp, both in shape and in principle. The
upper end is a bow, or half-bow; the lower end is an oblong sound-box
covered with a perforated skin—monkey-skin or goatskin. The upper ends
of the strings are attached to pegs inserted in the bow, by which the
strings may be tuned. There is also a five-stringed lyre, with a
sound-box somewhat like the harp, but instead of a single bow at the
end, there are five bent fingers, each with its string. There is a very
rudimentary dulcimer, and a xylophone, and various modifications of the
instruments which I have described.
The favourite of all these instruments, and the one of largest musical
capacity, is the harp. The native uses it most frequently to accompany
his singing. There are professional singers among them, whose position
is somewhat analogous to that of minstrels several centuries ago in
Europe. The songs of these professional singers are usually lengthy
ballads—traditional tales in lyric form. The monotony of the solo, which
is a dramatic recitative, is broken by a somewhat regular and frequent
choral response. The singer half closes his eyes and sways his body as
he sings. He seems oblivious of time and place. I have sometimes thought
that there was an element of hypnotism in his influence upon his
audience. Upon the instrument he plays a running and unvaried
accompaniment to his song. But it would be a great mistake to judge the
song, or the African capacity for melody, by the miserably inadequate
instrument. The singer’s voice far exceeds the instrument, both in range
and in the division of intervals.
The fact is, however, that the only one of his musical instruments which
the African regards with profound respect is his dearly-beloved
_tom-tom_—the drum to which he dances. From this some have inferred
that, to the African savage, rhythm without melody is music, which of
course is a mistake. It is even doubtful whether his sense of melody be
not altogether as keen as his sense of rhythm, though not equally
appealed to. The drum is very easy to construct; but not so the harp or
viol; and the Negro is so lacking in mechanical genius that he cannot
invent an instrument capable of reproducing his melodies. Therefore the
melodies are always vocal. They do not dance to the drum, by itself; for
they invariably sing when they dance. Dancing without singing is almost
impossible; at least I have never seen it during seven years in Africa.
They are passionately fond of singing and have good voices. The voices
of the men are much better than those of the women and have sometimes
the resonant sonority of a deep organ-tone, or an exquisite melancholy,
which it is to be hoped they may never lose through future conditions of
civilization.
The native songs are elementary but fascinating. Few white men, however,
can sing them; for the scales, or tone-systems, upon which most of them
are based, are entirely different from our major and minor modes. Their
scales have not a distinct tonic, that is, a basal tone from which the
others in the system are derived, as, for instance, the first tone,
_do_, of our major scale. It follows that the cadences of their music
are not clearly defined; or, as a friend of mine would say, “They don’t
taper off to an end like ours.”
Although their music is so difficult for the white man, the natives
learn our music with astonishing ease, even their oldest men and women,
and sing it well—if they have half a chance. But is it surprising
that—since our scales are new to them—they at first need a little
careful training, or at least the lead of a clear-toned organ reasonably
well played? Otherwise they are not unlikely to substitute the tones of
their own scales. The result is indescribable. Imagine a large
congregation singing the doxology with all their might, and about half
of them singing it in G minor instead of G major! But the comparison is
inadequate. The singing in some mission congregations is enough to cause
a panic. The first Sunday that I spent in Africa was at Batanga, where
the people had learned the hymns before any white missionaries went to
live among them. I was near the church when the large congregation
started the first hymn. It was a translation of “God is the Refuge of
His saints, When storms of sharp distress invade.” The tune of this
_storm of sharp distress_ was good old _Ward_, but, alas, in such a
state of _decomposition_ that I did not recognize it until they had sung
it through twice. And so it was with many of the tunes. Their own music
has no extended range of high and low notes; and so, in these hymns,
whenever they came to a high passage, or even a single high note, they
sang it an octave lower, and the low notes they sang an octave higher.
It was a vocal feat, and no audience of white people could have done it
without training; but it did not sound much like music, still less like
worship.
So great a musician as Dvorak, when he came to America, was profoundly
moved by the original melodies of the American Negro, and became their
enthusiastic champion. Indeed, they inspired the most beautiful of all
his symphonies, the one entitled, “Aus der Neuen Welt.” I do not refer,
of course, to the so-called Negro melodies composed by white men. Some
of these are beautiful; but they are not Negro melodies. They do not
express the Negro’s emotional life and he does not care much for them.
Those wonderful songs of the Fisk Jubilee Singers are the real thing.
Some of those very melodies may have originated in Africa. Others are
more developed than any that I heard in Africa; but they are very
similar, and they use the same strange scales, which makes them
unfamiliar to our ears and difficult to acquire. Among them, I really
believe, are occasional motives as capable of development as those of
Hungary.
For a long time the music of Africa defied every attempt on my part to
reduce it to musical notation. Very few persons have made the attempt;
for it is easier to reduce their language to writing than their music.
At first it seemed as inarticulate and spontaneous as the sound of the
distant surf with which it blended, or the music of the night-wind in
the bamboo.
The melody of African music is strange to our ears, because, as I have
said, it is usually derived from tone-systems that are unlike either our
major or minor scales. They have the _pentatonic_ scale, that is, a
major scale without the fourth and the seventh notes, thus avoiding the
use of semitones; but their other scales are strange to most people.
Among them are some of the scales of the _plain-song_ of the Roman
Catholic Church—the _Gregorian chant_. The plain-song is the only
survival (among ourselves) of ancient music. Modern music is based upon
harmony, and consists essentially in a progression of chords. The
successive tones of a modern melody acquire their character not chiefly
from their own sequence, as do ancient melodies, but from the chords to
which they belong; and the chords even when they are not voiced are
always understood. But harmony itself is modern, dating from about the
thirteenth century. African melodies cannot always be harmonized, and
when the harmony is added it is not usually effective.
But in African music another scale is employed which is not Gregorian,
but oriental. It is a minor scale with an augmented interval—a tone and
a half—between the sixth and seventh notes, that is, with a minor sixth
and a major seventh. This peculiarly effective interval imparts an
intense melancholy. Verdi, with delightful propriety, makes use of this
very scale in Aïda, in the hymn of the Egyptian priestesses in the first
act, where an extant Arab melody is introduced. This scale is probably
the oldest tone-system in the world and may have come originally from
the banks of the Ganges, in the far-distant past.
The African, like the oriental, conceives of the scales, and the
melodies derived from them, as moving downward, instead of upward like
our own. All African music sings downward. Another striking peculiarity
is that they lack _tonality_, as the musician would say; that is, they
seem not to be in any particular key. The strong feeling of the key-note
which characterizes our major scale is entirely absent; and this, of
course, accounts for the absence of a well-defined cadence, to which I
have alluded. The weird fascination of the African dirge is largely due
to this absence of tonality. Musical genius could hardly surpass this
instinctive expression of despair—the desolation of an everlasting
farewell.
The emotion which it represents, however intense, is rather
disappointingly transient. Sometimes it is even unreal; I mean to say
that it is sometimes indulged for its own sake. And this is true of the
Negro everywhere. A few days ago I came upon an article in an old
magazine, in which a Southern woman, in “Rambling Talks About the
Negro,” tells of a mourning party of Negroes that assembled one night
beside her house to finish a mourning ceremony that ought to have been a
part of a funeral a few days earlier; but a storm had interrupted it.
The unearthly mournfulness of their music was intensified by their
beautiful voices until it became unbearable, and the woman bowed her
head upon the window sill and cried without restraint, while imagination
conjured up fictitious woes, such as the sudden death of her children
and of all her friends, until she was alone in a bleak world. Then it
occurred to her that it was wrong for people to indulge a voluntary
anguish and make a luxury of misery; so she sent a servant to offer a
barrel of watermelons to the party of mourners on condition that,
instead of mourning, they should dance and jollify; to which they
heartily responded, after first making sure that the melons were in good
condition, for they really preferred to mourn.
When, to the peculiar scales which Africans employ, one adds the further
fact that in African music (and indeed in the Negro melodies of our
South) the note which corresponds to our seventh in the scale (a step
below the tonic) is seldom a true seventh, but is slightly flatted,
enough to make a distinct note with a character of its own, one has
probably accounted for the peculiar plaintiveness, the elusiveness, the
vague mysteriousness, which constitutes the charm of all true Negro
music.
The rhythm of African music is a further impediment to our appreciation.
In the music of the dance the rhythm is of necessity somewhat regular.
But even in this music it is variable and does not conform throughout to
any one time-scheme but changes back and forth from duple to triple
within the same melody. This also is characteristic of oriental music.
In most African music the rhythm is regulated by the words, like the
recitative, the rhythmic imitation of declamatory speech. But it has the
symmetry that feeling secures. The best way to learn the African’s song
is to watch the swaying of his body and imitate it, and if the words
have meaning let their feeling possess one. Mr. William E. Barton, the
compiler of a small collection of choice Negro melodies, tells how that
“Aunt Dinah,” who had been trying to teach a Negro hymn to a young lady,
at last seeing her begin to sway her body slightly and pat her foot upon
the floor, exclaimed: “Dat’s right, honey! Dat’s de berry way! Now you’s
a-gittin’ it sho nuff! You’ll nebber larn ’em in de wuld till you sings
’em in de sperrit.”
The African sings not only his joy, but his grief; not only his love,
but his anger, his revenge and his despair. Livingstone was greatly
surprised, upon approaching a slave caravan, to hear some of them
singing. But as he listened he found that they were singing words of
grief and vengeance—for usually they were betrayed and sold by some of
their own people. So it was everywhere, as old men of Gaboon have told
me; they went away chanting their desolation and their curses upon those
who had betrayed them.
There is no doubt that music is the art-form of the Negro. He is the
most musical person living. His entire emotional life he utters in song.
He has not yet done any great thing. His day is still future. But I
believe that when he comes, he will come singing.
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