Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
today? There are those who hasten to answer this query in scathing terms
and who say lightly and repeatedly that out of black slavery came
nothing decent in womanhood; that adultery and uncleanness were their
heritage and are their continued portion.
Fortunately so exaggerated a charge is humanly impossible of truth. The
half-million women of Negro descent who lived at the beginning of the
19th century had become the mothers of two and one-fourth million
daughters at the time of the Civil War and five million grand-daughters
in 1910. Can all these women be vile and the hunted race continue to
grow in wealth and character? Impossible. Yet to save from the past the
shreds and vestiges of self-respect has been a terrible task. I most
sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its
fineness up through so devilish a fire.
Alexander Crummell once said of his sister in the blood: "In her
girlhood all the delicate tenderness of her sex has been rudely
outraged. In the field, in the rude cabin, in the press-room, in the
factory she was thrown into the companionship of coarse and ignorant
men. No chance was given her for delicate reserve or tender modesty.
From her childhood she was the doomed victim of the grossest passion.
All the virtues of her sex were utterly ignored. If the instinct of
chastity asserted itself, then she had to fight like a tiger for the
ownership and possession of her own person and ofttimes had to suffer
pain and lacerations for her virtuous self-assertion. When she reached
maturity, all the tender instincts of her womanhood were ruthlessly
violated. At the age of marriage,--always prematurely anticipated under
slavery--she was mated as the stock of the plantation were mated, not to
be the companion of a loved and chosen husband, but to be the breeder of
human cattle for the field or the auction block."
Down in such mire has the black motherhood of this race
struggled,--starving its own wailing offspring to nurse to the world
their swaggering masters; welding for its children chains which
affronted even the moral sense of an unmoral world. Many a man and woman
in the South have lived in wedlock as holy as Adam and Eve and brought
forth their brown and golden children, but because the darker woman was
helpless, her chivalrous and whiter mate could cast her off at his
pleasure and publicly sneer at the body he had privately blasphemed.
I shall forgive the white South much in its final judgment day: I shall
forgive its slavery, for slavery is a world-old habit; I shall forgive
its fighting for a well-lost cause, and for remembering that struggle
with tender tears; I shall forgive its so-called "pride of race," the
passion of its hot blood, and even its dear, old, laughable strutting
and posing; but one thing I shall never forgive, neither in this world
nor the world to come: its wanton and continued and persistent insulting
of the black womanhood which it sought and seeks to prostitute to its
lust. I cannot forget that it is such Southern gentlemen into whose
hands smug Northern hypocrites of today are seeking to place our women's
eternal destiny,--men who insist upon withholding from my mother and
wife and daughter those signs and appellations of courtesy and respect
which elsewhere he withholds only from bawds and courtesans.
The result of this history of insult and degradation has been both
fearful and glorious. It has birthed the haunting prostitute, the
brawler, and the beast of burden; but it has also given the world an
efficient womanhood, whose strength lies in its freedom and whose
chastity was won in the teeth of temptation and not in prison and
swaddling clothes.
To no modern race does its women mean so much as to the Negro nor come
so near to the fulfilment of its meaning. As one of our women writes:
"Only the black woman can say 'when and where I enter, in the quiet,
undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing
or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with
me.'"
They came first, in earlier days, like foam flashing on dark, silent
waters,--bits of stern, dark womanhood here and there tossed almost
carelessly aloft to the world's notice. First and naturally they assumed
the panoply of the ancient African mother of men, strong and black,
whose very nature beat back the wilderness of oppression and contempt.
Such a one was that cousin of my grandmother, whom western Massachusetts
remembers as "Mum Bett." Scarred for life by a blow received in defense
of a sister, she ran away to Great Barrington and was the first slave,
or one of the first, to be declared free under the Bill of Rights of
1780. The son of the judge who freed her, writes:
"Even in her humble station, she had, when occasion required it, an
air of command which conferred a degree of dignity and gave her an
ascendancy over those of her rank, which is very unusual in persons
of any rank or color. Her determined and resolute character, which
enabled her to limit the ravages of Shay's mob, was manifested in
her conduct and deportment during her whole life. She claimed no
distinction, but it was yielded to her from her superior
experience, energy, skill, and sagacity. Having known this woman as
familiarly as I knew either of my parents, I cannot believe in the
moral or physical inferiority of the race to which she belonged.
The degradation of the African must have been otherwise caused than
by natural inferiority."
It was such strong women that laid the foundations of the great Negro
church of today, with its five million members and ninety millions of
dollars in property. One of the early mothers of the church, Mary Still,
writes thus quaintly, in the forties:
"When we were as castouts and spurned from the large churches,
driven from our knees, pointed at by the proud, neglected by the
careless, without a place of worship, Allen, faithful to the
heavenly calling, came forward and laid the foundation of this
connection. The women, like the women at the sepulcher, were early
to aid in laying the foundation of the temple and in helping to
carry up the noble structure and in the name of their God set up
their banner; most of our aged mothers are gone from this to a
better state of things. Yet some linger still on their staves,
watching with intense interest the ark as it moves over the
tempestuous waves of opposition and ignorance....
"But the labors of these women stopped not here, for they knew well
that they were subject to affliction and death. For the purpose of
mutual aid, they banded themselves together in society capacity,
that they might be better able to administer to each others'
sufferings and to soften their own pillows. So we find the females
in the early history of the church abounding in good works and in
acts of true benevolence."
From such spiritual ancestry came two striking figures of
war-time,--Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.
For eight or ten years previous to the breaking out of the Civil War,
Harriet Tubman was a constant attendant at anti-slavery conventions,
lectures, and other meetings; she was a black woman of medium size,
smiling countenance, with her upper front teeth gone, attired in coarse
but neat clothes, and carrying always an old-fashioned reticule at her
side. Usually as soon as she sat down she would drop off in sound sleep.
She was born a slave in Maryland, in 1820, bore the marks of the lash on
her flesh; and had been made partially deaf, and perhaps to some degree
mentally unbalanced by a blow on the head in childhood. Yet she was one
of the most important agents of the Underground Railroad and a leader of
fugitive slaves. She ran away in 1849 and went to Boston in 1854, where
she was welcomed into the homes of the leading abolitionists and where
every one listened with tense interest to her strange stories. She was
absolutely illiterate, with no knowledge of geography, and yet year
after year she penetrated the slave states and personally led North over
three hundred fugitives without losing a single one. A standing reward
of $10,000 was offered for her, but as she said: "The whites cannot
catch us, for I was born with the charm, and the Lord has given me the
power." She was one of John Brown's closest advisers and only severe
sickness prevented her presence at Harper's Ferry.
When the war cloud broke, she hastened to the front, flitting down along
her own mysterious paths, haunting the armies in the field, and serving
as guide and nurse and spy. She followed Sherman in his great march to
the sea and was with Grant at Petersburg, and always in the camps the
Union officers silently saluted her.
The other woman belonged to a different type,--a tall, gaunt, black,
unsmiling sybil, weighted with the woe of the world. She ran away from
slavery and giving up her own name took the name of Sojourner Truth. She
says: "I can remember when I was a little, young girl, how my old mammy
would sit out of doors in the evenings and look up at the stars and
groan, and I would say, 'Mammy, what makes you groan so?' And she would
say, 'I am groaning to think of my poor children; they do not know where
I be and I don't know where they be. I look up at the stars and they
look up at the stars!'"
Her determination was founded on unwavering faith in ultimate good.
Wendell Phillips says that he was once in Faneuil Hall, when Frederick
Douglass was one of the chief speakers. Douglass had been describing the
wrongs of the Negro race and as he proceeded he grew more and more
excited and finally ended by saying that they had no hope of justice
from the whites, no possible hope except in their own right arms. It
must come to blood! They must fight for themselves. Sojourner Truth was
sitting, tall and dark, on the very front seat facing the platform, and
in the hush of feeling when Douglass sat down she spoke out in her deep,
peculiar voice, heard all over the hall:
"Frederick, is God dead?"
Such strong, primitive types of Negro womanhood in America seem to some
to exhaust its capabilities. They know less of a not more worthy, but a
finer type of black woman wherein trembles all of that delicate sense of
beauty and striving for self-realization, which is as characteristic of
the Negro soul as is its quaint strength and sweet laughter. George
Washington wrote in grave and gentle courtesy to a Negro woman, in 1776,
that he would "be happy to see" at his headquarters at any time, a
person "to whom nature has been so liberal and beneficial in her
dispensations." This child, Phillis Wheatley, sang her trite and halting
strain to a world that wondered and could not produce her like. Measured
today her muse was slight and yet, feeling her striving spirit, we call
to her still in her own words:
"Through thickest glooms look back, immortal shade."
Perhaps even higher than strength and art loom human sympathy and
sacrifice as characteristic of Negro womanhood. Long years ago, before
the Declaration of Independence, Kate Ferguson was born in New York.
Freed, widowed, and bereaved of her children before she was twenty, she
took the children of the streets of New York, white and black, to her
empty arms, taught them, found them homes, and with Dr. Mason of Murray
Street Church established the first modern Sunday School in Manhattan.
Sixty years later came Mary Shadd up out of Delaware. She was tall and
slim, of that ravishing dream-born beauty,--that twilight of the races
which we call mulatto. Well-educated, vivacious, with determination
shining from her sharp eyes, she threw herself singlehanded into the