Chapter 1: Of Our Spiritual Strivings
O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand,
All night long crying with a mournful cry,
As I lie and listen, and cannot understand
The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,
O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I?
All night long the water is crying to me.
Unresting water, there shall never be rest
Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail,
And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west;
And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,
All life long crying without avail,
As the water all night long is crying to me.
ARTHUR SYMONS
Between me and the other
world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of
delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless,
flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously
or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to
be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought
at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil?
At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the
occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem?
I answer seldom a word.
And yet, being a problem
is a strange experience,--peculiar even for one who has never been anything
else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking
boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were.
I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away
up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac
and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into
the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards--ten cents a package--and
exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my
card,--refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a
certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in
heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I
had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and
great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time,
or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the
years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the worlds I longed for, and
all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should not
keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would
do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling
the wonderful tales that swam in my head,--some way. With other black boys the
strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy,
or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything
white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and
a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about
us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall,
and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat
unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the
streak of blue above.
After the Egyptian and Indian,
the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh
son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,--a
world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself
through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this
double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the
eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on
in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,--an American, a Negro;
two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one
dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American
Negro is the history of this strife,--this longing to attain self-conscious
manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging
he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America,
for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach
his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood
has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man
to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his
fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.
This, then, is the end of
his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death
and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius. These
powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or
forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia
the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single
black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before
the world has rightly gauged their brightness. Here in America, in the few days
since Emancipation, the black man's turning hither and thither in hesitant and
doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to
seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness,--it is
the contradiction of double aims. The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan--on
the one hand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and
drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken
horde--could only result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half
a heart in either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of his people, the Negro
minister or doctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism
of the other world, toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks.
The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his
people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge
which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood. The
innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing
and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist;
for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger
audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another people.
This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals,
has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousand
people,--has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of salvation,
and at times has even seemed about to make them ashamed of themselves.
Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries. To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites, In song and exhortation swelled one refrain--Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand. At last it came,--suddenly, fearfully, like a dream. With one wild carnival of blood and passion came the message in his own plaintive cadences:-
"Shout, O children!
Shout, you're free!
For God has bought your liberty!"
Years have passed away since then,--ten twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation's feast. In vain do we cry to this our vastest social problem:--
"Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble!"
The Nation has not yet found
peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised
land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of
a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,--a disappointment all the
more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance
of a lowly people.
The first decade was merely
a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely
to elude their grasp,--like a tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp, maddening and misleading
the headless host. The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the
lies of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory
advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond
the old cry for freedom. As the time flew, however, he began to grasp a new
idea. The ideal of liberty demanded for its attainment powerful means, and these
the Fifteenth Amendment gave him. The ballot, which before he had looked upon
as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining
and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him. And why
not? Had not votes made war and emancipated millions? Had not votes enfranchised
the freedmen? Was anything impossible to a power that had done all this? A million
black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom. So
the decade flew away, the revolution of 1876 came, and left the half-free serf
weary, wondering, but still inspired. Slowly but steadily, in the following
years, a new vision began gradually to replace the dream of political power,--a
powerful movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, another
pillar of fire by night after a clouded day. It was the ideal of "book-learning";
the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of the
cabalistic letters of the white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed
to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway
of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights
high enough to overlook life.
Up the new path the advance
guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly; only those who have watched and guided
the faltering feet, the misty minds, the dull understandings, of the dark pupils
of these schools know how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn.
It was weary work. The cold statistician wrote down the inches of progress here
and there, noted also where here and there a foot had slipped or some one had
fallen. To the tired climbers, the horizon was ever dark, the mists were often
cold, the Canaan was always dim and far away. If, however, the vistas disclosed
as yet no goal, no resting-place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey
at least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child
of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realizaton,
self-respect. In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before
him, and he saw himself,--darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself
some faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He began to have a dim feeling
that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another.
For the first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that
dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro
problem. He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land,
tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled
neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars
is the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of his ignorance,--not simply
of letters, but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth
and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and
feet. Nor was his burden all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy,
which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped
upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also
the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers, threatening
almost the obliteration of the Negro home.
A people thus handicapped
ought not to be asked to race with the world, but rather allowed to give all
its time and thought to its own social problems. But alas! while sociologists
gleefully count his bastards and his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling,
sweating black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the
shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defence of culture
against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the "higher"
against the "lower" races. To which the Negro cries Amen! and swears that to
so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on just homage to civilization,
culture, righteousness, and progress, he humbly bows and meekly does obeisance.
But before that nameless prejudice that leaps beyond all this he stands helpless,
dismayed, and well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery,
the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton license
of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous welcoming of
the worse, the all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain for everything black,
from Toussaint to the devil,--before this there rises a sickening despair that
would disarm and discourage any nation save that black host to whom "discouragement"
is an unwritten word.
But the facing of so vast
a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement,
and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere
of contempt and hate. Whisperings and portents came borne upon the four winds:
Lo! we are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our voting
is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and serve? And the
Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants,
and nothing more; what need of higher culture for half-men? Away with the black
man's ballot, by force or fraud,--and behold the suicide of a race! Nevertheless,
out of the evil came something of good,--the more careful adjustment of education
to real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes' social responsibilities,
and the sobering realization of the meaning of progress.
So dawned the time of Sturm
und Drang: storm and stress to-day rocks our little boat on the mad waters
of the world-sea; there is within and without the sound of conflict, the burning
of body and rending of soul; inspiration strives with doubt, and faith with
vain questionings. The bright ideals of the past,-physical freedom, political
power, the training of brains and the training of hands,--all these in turn
have waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast. Are they all
wrong,--all false? No, not that, but each alone was over-simple and incomplete,--the
dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the fond imaginings of the other world
which does not know and does not want to know our power. To be really true,
all these ideals must be melted and welded into one. The training of the schools
we need to-day more than ever,--the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears,
and above all the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds and pure hearts.
The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence,--else what shall save
us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek,--the
freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love
and aspire. Work, culture, liberty,--all these we need, not singly but together,
not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving
toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human
brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering
and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or
contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals
of the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two world-races
may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack. We the darker
ones come even now not altogether empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents
of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American
Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the
Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folk-lore are Indian and African;
and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence
in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be poorer if she replace
her brutal dyspeptic blundering with lighthearted but determined Negro humility?
or her coarse and cruel wit with loving jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music
with the soul of the Sorrow Songs?
Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the freedmen's sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers' fathers, and in the name of human opportunity.