Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
folk. House servants secured some decencies of food and clothing and
shelter; they could more easily reach their master's ear; their personal
abilities of character became known and bonds grew between slave and
master which strengthened from friendship to love, from mutual service
to mutual blood.
Naturally out of this the West Indian servant climbed out of slavery
into citizenship, for few West Indian masters--fewer Spanish or
Dutch--were callous enough to sell their own children into slavery. Not
so with English and Americans. With a harshness and indecency seldom
paralleled in the civilized world white masters on the mainland sold
their mulatto children, half-brothers and half-sisters, and their own
wives in all but name, into life-slavery by the hundreds and thousands.
They originated a special branch of slave-trading for this trade and the
white aristocrats of Virginia and the Carolinas made more money by this
business during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than in any
other way.
The clang of the door of opportunity thus knelled in the ears of the
colored house servant whirled the whole face of Negro advancement as on
some great pivot. The movement was slow, but vast. When emancipation
came, before and after 1863, the house servant still held advantages. He
had whatever education the race possessed and his white father, no
longer able to sell him, often helped him with land and protection.
Notwithstanding this the lure of house service for the Negro was gone.
The path of salvation for the emancipated host of black folk lay no
longer through the kitchen door, with its wide hall and pillared veranda
and flowered yard beyond. It lay, as every Negro soon knew and knows, in
escape from menial serfdom.
In 1860, 98 per cent of the Negroes were servants and serfs. In 1880, 30
per cent were servants and 65 per cent were serfs. The percentage of
servants then rose slightly and fell again until 21 per cent were in
service in 1910 and, doubtless, much less than 20 per cent today. This
is the measure of our rise, but the Negro will not approach freedom
until this hateful badge of slavery and mediaevalism has been reduced to
less than 10 per cent.
Not only are less than a fifth of our workers servants today, but the
character of their service has been changed. The million menial workers
among us include 300,000 upper servants,--skilled men and women of
character, like hotel waiters, Pullman porters, janitors, and cooks,
who, had they been white, could have called on the great labor movement
to lift their work out of slavery, to standardize their hours, to define
their duties, and to substitute a living, regular wage for personal
largess in the shape of tips, old clothes, and cold leavings of food.
But the labor movement turned their backs on those black men when the
white world dinned in their ears. _Negroes are servants; servants are
Negroes._ They shut the door of escape to factory and trade in their
fellows' faces and battened down the hatches, lest the 300,000 should be
workers equal in pay and consideration with white men.
But, if the upper servants could not escape to modern, industrial
conditions, how much the more did they press down on the bodies and
souls of 700,000 washerwomen and household drudges,--ignorant,
unskilled offal of a millionaire industrial system. Their pay was the
lowest and their hours the longest of all workers. The personal
degradation of their work is so great that any white man of decency
would rather cut his daughter's throat than let her grow up to such a
destiny. There is throughout the world and in all races no greater
source of prostitution than this grade of menial service, and the Negro
race in America has largely escaped this destiny simply because its
innate decency leads black women to choose irregular and temporary
sexual relations with men they like rather than to sell themselves to
strangers. To such sexual morals is added (in the nature of
self-defense) that revolt against unjust labor conditions which
expresses itself in "soldiering," sullenness, petty pilfering,
unreliability, and fast and fruitless changes of masters.
Indeed, here among American Negroes we have exemplified the last and
worst refuge of industrial caste. Menial service is an anachronism,--the
refuse of mediaeval barbarism. Whey, then, does it linger? Why are we
silent about it? Why in the minds of so many decent and up-seeing folks
does the whole Negro problem resolve itself into the matter of their
getting a cook or a maid?
No one knows better than I the capabilities of a system of domestic
service at its best. I have seen children who were spiritual sons and
daughters of their masters, girls who were friends of their mistresses,
and old servants honored and revered. But in every such case the Servant
had transcended the Menial, the Service had been exalted above the Wage.
Now to accomplish this permanently and universally, calls for the same
revolution in household help as in factory help and public service.
While organized industry has been slowly making its help into
self-respecting, well-paid men, and while public service is beginning to
call for the highest types of educated and efficient thinkers, domestic
service lags behind and insists upon seeking to evolve the best types of
men from the worst conditions.
The cause of this perversity, to my mind, is twofold. First, the ancient
high estate of Service, now pitifully fallen, yet gasping for breath;
secondly, the present low estate of the outcasts of the world, peering
with blood-shot eyes at the gates of the industrial heaven.
The Master spoke no greater word than that which said: "Whosoever will
be great among you, let him be your servant!" What is greater than
Personal Service! Surely no social service, no wholesale helping of
masses of men can exist which does not find its effectiveness and beauty
in the personal aid of man to man. It is the purest and holiest of
duties. Some mighty glimmer of this truth survived in those who made the
First Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, the Keepers of the Robes, and the
Knights of the Bath, the highest nobility that hedged an anointed king.
Nor does it differ today in what the mother does for the child or the
daughter for the mother, in all the personal attentions in the
old-fashioned home; this is Service! Think of what Friend has meant, not
simply in spiritual sympathies, but in physical helpfulness. In the
world today what calls for more of love, sympathy, learning, sacrifice,
and long-suffering than the care of children, the preparation of food,
the cleansing and ordering of the home, personal attendance and
companionship, the care of bodies and their raiment--what greater, more
intimate, more holy Services are there than these?
And yet we are degrading these services and loathing them and scoffing
at them and spitting upon them, first, by turning them over to the
lowest and least competent and worst trained classes in the world, and
then by yelling like spoiled children if our babies are neglected, our
biscuits sodden, our homes dirty, and our baths unpoured. Let one
suggest that the only cure for such deeds is in the uplift of the doer
and our rage is even worse and less explicable. We will call them by
their first names, thus blaspheming a holy intimacy; we will confine
them to back doors; we will insist that their meals be no gracious
ceremony nor even a restful sprawl, but usually a hasty, heckled gulp
amid garbage; we exact, not a natural, but a purchased deference, and we
leave them naked to insult by our children and by our husbands.
I remember a girl,--how pretty she was, with the crimson flooding the
old ivory of her cheeks and her gracious plumpness! She had come to the
valley during the summer to "do housework." I met and walked home with
her, in the thrilling shadows, to an old village home I knew well; then
as I turned to leave I learned that she was there alone in that house
for a week-end with only one young white man to represent the family.
Oh, he was doubtless a "gentleman" and all that, but for the first time
in my life I saw what a snare the fowler was spreading at the feet of
the daughters of my people, baited by church and state.
Not alone is the hurt thus offered to the lowly,--Society and Science
suffer. The unit which we seek to make the center of society,--the
Home--is deprived of the help of scientific invention and suggestion. It
is only slowly and by the utmost effort that some small foothold has
been gained for the vacuum cleaner, the washing-machine, the power tool,
and the chemical reagent. In our frantic effort to preserve the last
vestiges of slavery and mediaevalism we not only set out faces against
such improvements, but we seek to use education and the power of the
state to train the servants who do not naturally appear.
Meantime the wild rush from house service, on the part of all who can
scramble or run, continues. The rules of the labor union are designed,
not simply to raise wages, but to guard against any likeness between
artisan and servant. There is no essential difference in ability and
training between a subway guard and a Pullman porter, but between their
union cards lies a whole world.
Yet we are silent. Menial service is not a "social problem." It is not
really discussed. There is no scientific program for its "reform." There
is but one panacea: Escape! Get yourselves and your sons and daughters
out of the shadow of this awful thing! Hire servants, but never be one.
Indeed, subtly but surely the ability to hire at least "a maid" is still
civilization's patent to respectability, while "a man" is the first word
of aristocracy.
All this is because we still consciously and unconsciously hold to the
"manure" theory of social organization. We believe that at the bottom of
organized human life there are necessary duties and services which no
real human being ought to be compelled to do. We push below this mudsill
the derelicts and half-men, whom we hate and despise, and seek to build
above it--Democracy! On such foundations is reared a Theory of
Exclusiveness, a feeling that the world progresses by a process of
excluding from the benefits of culture the majority of men, so that a
gifted minority may blossom. Through this door the modern democrat
arrives to the place where he is willing to allot two able-bodied men
and two fine horses to the task of helping one wizened beldam to take
the morning air.
Here the absurdity ends. Here all honest minds turn back and ask: Is
menial service permanent or necessary? Can we not transfer cooking from
the home to the scientific laboratory, along with the laundry? Cannot
machinery, in the hands of self-respecting and well-paid artisans, do
our cleaning, sewing, moving, and decorating? Cannot the training of
children become an even greater profession than the attending of the
sick? And cannot personal service and companionship be coupled with
friendship and love where it belongs and whence it can never be divorced
without degradation and pain?
In fine, can we not, black and white, rich and poor, look forward to a
world of Service without Servants?
A miracle! you say? True. And only to be performed by the Immortal
Child.
_Jesus Christ in Texas_
It was in Waco, Texas.
The convict guard laughed. "I don't know," he said, "I hadn't thought of
that." He hesitated and looked at the stranger curiously. In the solemn
twilight he got an impression of unusual height and soft, dark eyes.
"Curious sort of acquaintance for the colonel," he thought; then he
continued aloud: "But that nigger there is bad, a born thief, and ought
to be sent up for life; got ten years last time--"
Here the voice of the promoter, talking within, broke in; he was bending