Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
"O King," she cried, "I am but a woman."
And the King answered: "Go, then, Mother of Men."
And the woman said, "Nay, King, but I am still a maid." Whereat the King
cried: "O maid, made Man, thou shalt be Bride of God."
And yet the third time the woman shrank at the thunder in her ears, and
whispered: "Dear God, I am black!"
The King spake not, but swept the veiling of his face aside and lifted
up the light of his countenance upon her and lo! it was black.
So the woman went forth on the hills of God to do battle for the King,
on that drear day in the land of the Heavy Laden, when the heathen raged
and imagined a vain thing.
VII
THE DAMNATION OF WOMEN
I remember four women of my boyhood: my mother, cousin Inez, Emma, and
Ide Fuller. They represented the problem of the widow, the wife, the
maiden, and the outcast. They were, in color, brown and light-brown,
yellow with brown freckles, and white. They existed not for themselves,
but for men; they were named after the men to whom they were related and
not after the fashion of their own souls.
They were not beings, they were relations and these relations were
enfilmed with mystery and secrecy. We did not know the truth or believe
it when we heard it. Motherhood! What was it? We did not know or greatly
care. My mother and I were good chums. I liked her. After she was dead I
loved her with a fierce sense of personal loss.
Inez was a pretty, brown cousin who married. What was marriage? We did
not know, neither did she, poor thing! It came to mean for her a litter
of children, poverty, a drunken, cruel companion, sickness, and death.
Why?
There was no sweeter sight than Emma,--slim, straight, and dainty,
darkly flushed with the passion of youth; but her life was a wild, awful
struggle to crush her natural, fierce joy of love. She crushed it and
became a cold, calculating mockery.
Last there was that awful outcast of the town, the white woman, Ide
Fuller. What she was, we did not know. She stood to us as embodied filth
and wrong,--but whose filth, whose wrong?
Grown up I see the problem of these women transfused; I hear all about
me the unanswered call of youthful love, none the less glorious because
of its clean, honest, physical passion. Why unanswered? Because the
youth are too poor to marry or if they marry, too poor to have children.
They turn aside, then, in three directions: to marry for support, to
what men call shame, or to that which is more evil than nothing. It is
an unendurable paradox; it must be changed or the bases of culture will
totter and fall.
The world wants healthy babies and intelligent workers. Today we refuse
to allow the combination and force thousands of intelligent workers to
go childless at a horrible expenditure of moral force, or we damn them
if they break our idiotic conventions. Only at the sacrifice of
intelligence and the chance to do their best work can the majority of
modern women bear children. This is the damnation of women.
All womanhood is hampered today because the world on which it is
emerging is a world that tries to worship both virgins and mothers and
in the end despises motherhood and despoils virgins.
The future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She
must have knowledge. She must have the right of motherhood at her own
discretion. The present mincing horror at free womanhood must pass if we
are ever to be rid of the bestiality of free manhood; not by guarding
the weak in weakness do we gain strength, but by making weakness free
and strong.
The world must choose the free woman or the white wraith of the
prostitute. Today it wavers between the prostitute and the nun.
Civilization must show two things: the glory and beauty of creating life
and the need and duty of power and intelligence. This and this only will
make the perfect marriage of love and work.
God is Love,
Love is God;
There is no God but Love
And Work is His Prophet!
All this of woman,--but what of black women?
The world that wills to worship womankind studiously forgets its darker
sisters. They seem in a sense to typify that veiled Melancholy:
"Whose saintly visage is too bright
To hit the sense of human sight,
And, therefore, to our weaker view
O'er-laid with black."
Yet the world must heed these daughters of sorrow, from the primal black
All-Mother of men down through the ghostly throng of mighty womanhood,
who walked in the mysterious dawn of Asia and Africa; from Neith, the
primal mother of all, whose feet rest on hell, and whose almighty hands
uphold the heavens; all religion, from beauty to beast, lies on her
eager breasts; her body bears the stars, while her shoulders are
necklaced by the dragon; from black Neith down to
"That starr'd Ethiop queen who strove
To set her beauty's praise above
The sea-nymphs,"
through dusky Cleopatras, dark Candaces, and darker, fiercer Zinghas, to
our own day and our own land,--in gentle Phillis; Harriet, the crude
Moses; the sybil, Sojourner Truth; and the martyr, Louise De Mortie.
The father and his worship is Asia; Europe is the precocious,
self-centered, forward-striving child; but the land of the mother is and
was Africa. In subtle and mysterious way, despite her curious history,
her slavery, polygamy, and toil, the spell of the African mother
pervades her land. Isis, the mother, is still titular goddess, in
thought if not in name, of the dark continent. Nor does this all seem to
be solely a survival of the historic matriarchate through which all
nations pass,--it appears to be more than this,--as if the great black
race in passing up the steps of human culture gave the world, not only
the Iron Age, the cultivation of the soil, and the domestication of
animals, but also, in peculiar emphasis, the mother-idea.
"No mother can love more tenderly and none is more tenderly loved than
the Negro mother," writes Schneider. Robin tells of the slave who bought
his mother's freedom instead of his own. Mungo Park writes: "Everywhere
in Africa, I have noticed that no greater affront can be offered a Negro
than insulting his mother. 'Strike me,' cries a Mandingo to his enemy,
'but revile not my mother!'" And the Krus and Fantis say the same. The
peoples on the Zambezi and the great lakes cry in sudden fear or joy:
"O, my mother!" And the Herero swears (endless oath) "By my mother's
tears!" "As the mist in the swamps," cries the Angola Negro, "so lives
the love of father and mother."
A student of the present Gold Coast life describes the work of the
village headman, and adds: "It is a difficult task that he is set to,
but in this matter he has all-powerful helpers in the female members of
the family, who will be either the aunts or the sisters or the cousins
or the nieces of the headman, and as their interests are identical with
his in every particular, the good women spontaneously train up their
children to implicit obedience to the headman, whose rule in the family
thus becomes a simple and an easy matter. 'The hand that rocks the
cradle rules the world.' What a power for good in the native state
system would the mothers of the Gold Coast and Ashanti become by
judicious training upon native lines!"
Schweinfurth declares of one tribe: "A bond between mother and child
which lasts for life is the measure of affection shown among the Dyoor"
and Ratzel adds:
"Agreeable to the natural relation the mother stands first among the
chief influences affecting the children. From the Zulus to the Waganda,
we find the mother the most influential counsellor at the court of
ferocious sovereigns, like Chaka or Mtesa; sometimes sisters take her
place. Thus even with chiefs who possess wives by hundreds the bonds of
blood are the strongest and that the woman, though often heavily
burdened, is in herself held in no small esteem among the Negroes is
clear from the numerous Negro queens, from the medicine women, from the
participation in public meetings permitted to women by many Negro
peoples."
As I remember through memories of others, backward among my own family,
it is the mother I ever recall,--the little, far-off mother of my
grandmothers, who sobbed her life away in song, longing for her lost
palm-trees and scented waters; the tall and bronzen grandmother, with
beaked nose and shrewish eyes, who loved and scolded her black and
laughing husband as he smoked lazily in his high oak chair; above all,
my own mother, with all her soft brownness,--the brown velvet of her
skin, the sorrowful black-brown of her eyes, and the tiny brown-capped
waves of her midnight hair as it lay new parted on her forehead. All the
way back in these dim distances it is mothers and mothers of mothers who
seem to count, while fathers are shadowy memories.
Upon this African mother-idea, the westward slave trade and American
slavery struck like doom. In the cruel exigencies of the traffic in men
and in the sudden, unprepared emancipation the great pendulum of social
equilibrium swung from a time, in 1800,--when America had but eight or
less black women to every ten black men,--all too swiftly to a day, in
1870,--when there were nearly eleven women to ten men in our Negro
population. This was but the outward numerical fact of social
dislocation; within lay polygamy, polyandry, concubinage, and moral
degradation. They fought against all this desperately, did these black
slaves in the West Indies, especially among the half-free artisans; they
set up their ancient household gods, and when Toussaint and Cristophe
founded their kingdom in Haiti, it was based on old African tribal ties
and beneath it was the mother-idea.
The crushing weight of slavery fell on black women. Under it there was
no legal marriage, no legal family, no legal control over children. To
be sure, custom and religion replaced here and there what the law
denied, yet one has but to read advertisements like the following to see
the hell beneath the system:
"One hundred dollars reward will be given for my two fellows, Abram
and Frank. Abram has a wife at Colonel Stewart's, in Liberty
County, and a mother at Thunderbolt, and a sister in Savannah.
"WILLIAM ROBERTS."
"Fifty dollars reward--Ran away from the subscriber a Negro girl
named Maria. She is of a copper color, between thirteen and
fourteen years of age--bareheaded and barefooted. She is small for
her age--very sprightly and very likely. She stated she was going
to see her mother at Maysville.
"SANFORD THOMSON."
"Fifty dollars reward--Ran away from the subscriber his Negro man
Pauladore, commonly called Paul. I understand General R.Y. Hayne
has purchased his wife and children from H.L. Pinckney, Esq., and
has them now on his plantation at Goose Creek, where, no doubt, the
fellow is frequently lurking.
"T. DAVIS."
The Presbyterian synod of Kentucky said to the churches under its care
in 1835: "Brothers and sisters, parents and children, husbands and
wives, are torn asunder and permitted to see each other no more. These
acts are daily occurring in the midst of us. The shrieks and agony often
witnessed on such occasions proclaim, with a trumpet tongue, the
iniquity of our system. There is not a neighborhood where these
heartrending scenes are not displayed. There is not a village or road
that does not behold the sad procession of manacled outcasts whose
mournful countenances tell that they are exiled by force from all that
their hearts hold dear."
A sister of a president of the United States declared: "We Southern
ladies are complimented with the names of wives, but we are only the
mistresses of seraglios."
Out of this, what sort of black women could be born into the world of