Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
great Canadian pilgrimage when thousands of hunted black men hurried
northward and crept beneath the protection of the lion's paw. She became
teacher, editor, and lecturer; tramping afoot through winter snows,
pushing without blot or blemish through crowd and turmoil to conventions
and meetings, and finally becoming recruiting agent for the United
States government in gathering Negro soldiers in the West.
After the war the sacrifice of Negro women for freedom and uplift is one
of the finest chapters in their history. Let one life typify all: Louise
De Mortie, a free-born Virginia girl, had lived most of her life in
Boston. Her high forehead, swelling lips, and dark eyes marked her for a
woman of feeling and intellect. She began a successful career as a
public reader. Then came the War and the Call. She went to the orphaned
colored children of New Orleans,--out of freedom into insult and
oppression and into the teeth of the yellow fever. She toiled and
dreamed. In 1887 she had raised money and built an orphan home and that
same year, in the thirty-fourth year of her young life, she died, saying
simply: "I belong to God."
As I look about me today in this veiled world of mine, despite the
noisier and more spectacular advance of my brothers, I instinctively
feel and know that it is the five million women of my race who really
count. Black women (and women whose grandmothers were black) are today
furnishing our teachers; they are the main pillars of those social
settlements which we call churches; and they have with small doubt
raised three-fourths of our church property. If we have today, as seems
likely, over a billion dollars of accumulated goods, who shall say how
much of it has been wrung from the hearts of servant girls and
washerwomen and women toilers in the fields? As makers of two million
homes these women are today seeking in marvelous ways to show forth our
strength and beauty and our conception of the truth.
In the United States in 1910 there were 4,931,882 women of Negro
descent; over twelve hundred thousand of these were children, another
million were girls and young women under twenty, and two and a
half-million were adults. As a mass these women were unlettered,--a
fourth of those from fifteen to twenty-five years of age were unable to
write. These women are passing through, not only a moral, but an
economic revolution. Their grandmothers married at twelve and fifteen,
but twenty-seven per cent of these women today who have passed fifteen
are still single.
Yet these black women toil and toil hard. There were in 1910 two and a
half million Negro homes in the United States. Out of these homes walked
daily to work two million women and girls over ten years of age,--over
half of the colored female population as against a fifth in the case of
white women. These, then, are a group of workers, fighting for their
daily bread like men; independent and approaching economic freedom! They
furnished a million farm laborers, 80,000 farmers, 22,000 teachers,
600,000 servants and washerwomen, and 50,000 in trades and
merchandizing.
The family group, however, which is the ideal of the culture with which
these folk have been born, is not based on the idea of an economically
independent working mother. Rather its ideal harks back to the sheltered
harem with the mother emerging at first as nurse and homemaker, while
the man remains the sole breadwinner. What is the inevitable result of
the clash of such ideals and such facts in the colored group? Broken
families.
Among native white women one in ten is separated from her husband by
death, divorce, or desertion. Among Negroes the ratio is one in seven.
Is the cause racial? No, it is economic, because there is the same high
ratio among the white foreign-born. The breaking up of the present
family is the result of modern working and sex conditions and it hits
the laborers with terrible force. The Negroes are put in a peculiarly
difficult position, because the wage of the male breadwinner is below
the standard, while the openings for colored women in certain lines of
domestic work, and now in industries, are many. Thus while toil holds
the father and brother in country and town at low wages, the sisters and
mothers are called to the city. As a result the Negro women outnumber
the men nine or ten to eight in many cities, making what Charlotte
Gilman bluntly calls "cheap women."
What shall we say to this new economic equality in a great laboring
class? Some people within and without the race deplore it. "Back to the
homes with the women," they cry, "and higher wage for the men." But how
impossible this is has been shown by war conditions. Cessation of
foreign migration has raised Negro men's wages, to be sure--but it has
not only raised Negro women's wages, it has opened to them a score of
new avenues of earning a living. Indeed, here, in microcosm and with
differences emphasizing sex equality, is the industrial history of labor
in the 19th and 20th centuries. We cannot abolish the new economic
freedom of women. We cannot imprison women again in a home or require
them all on pain of death to be nurses and housekeepers.
What is today the message of these black women to America and to the
world? The uplift of women is, next to the problem of the color line and
the peace movement, our greatest modern cause. When, now, two of these
movements--woman and color--combine in one, the combination has deep
meaning.
In other years women's way was clear: to be beautiful, to be petted, to
bear children. Such has been their theoretic destiny and if perchance
they have been ugly, hurt, and barren, that has been forgotten with
studied silence. In partial compensation for this narrowed destiny the
white world has lavished its politeness on its womankind,--its chivalry
and bows, its uncoverings and courtesies--all the accumulated homage
disused for courts and kings and craving exercise. The revolt of white
women against this preordained destiny has in these latter days reached
splendid proportions, but it is the revolt of an aristocracy of brains
and ability,--the middle class and rank and file still plod on in the
appointed path, paid by the homage, the almost mocking homage, of men.
From black women of America, however, (and from some others, too, but
chiefly from black women and their daughters' daughters) this gauze has
been withheld and without semblance of such apology they have been
frankly trodden under the feet of men. They are and have been objected
to, apparently for reasons peculiarly exasperating to reasoning human
beings. When in this world a man comes forward with a thought, a deed, a
vision, we ask not, how does he look,--but what is his message? It is of
but passing interest whether or not the messenger is beautiful or
ugly,--the _message_ is the thing. This, which is axiomatic among men,
has been in past ages but partially true if the messenger was a woman.
The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty and if she
is not, the mob pouts and asks querulously, "What else are women for?"
Beauty "is its own excuse for being," but there are other excuses, as
most men know, and when the white world objects to black women because
it does not consider them beautiful, the black world of right asks two
questions: "What is beauty?" and, "Suppose you think them ugly, what
then? If ugliness and unconventionality and eccentricity of face and
deed do not hinder men from doing the world's work and reaping the
world's reward, why should it hinder women?"
Other things being equal, all of us, black and white, would prefer to be
beautiful in face and form and suitably clothed; but most of us are not
so, and one of the mightiest revolts of the century is against the
devilish decree that no woman is a woman who is not by present standards
a beautiful woman. This decree the black women of America have in large
measure escaped from the first. Not being expected to be merely
ornamental, they have girded themselves for work, instead of adorning
their bodies only for play. Their sturdier minds have concluded that if
a woman be clean, healthy, and educated, she is as pleasing as God wills
and far more useful than most of her sisters. If in addition to this she
is pink and white and straight-haired, and some of her fellow-men prefer
this, well and good; but if she is black or brown and crowned in curled
mists (and this to us is the most beautiful thing on earth), this is
surely the flimsiest excuse for spiritual incarceration or banishment.
The very attempt to do this in the case of Negro Americans has strangely
over-reached itself. By so much as the defective eyesight of the white
world rejects black women as beauties, by so much the more it needs them
as human beings,--an enviable alternative, as many a white woman knows.
Consequently, for black women alone, as a group, "handsome is that
handsome does" and they are asked to be no more beautiful than God made
them, but they are asked to be efficient, to be strong, fertile,
muscled, and able to work. If they marry, they must as independent
workers be able to help support their children, for their men are paid
on a scale which makes sole support of the family often impossible.
On the whole, colored working women are paid as well as white working
women for similar work, save in some higher grades, while colored men
get from one-fourth to three-fourths less than white men. The result is
curious and three-fold: the economic independence of black women is
increased, the breaking up of Negro families must be more frequent, and
the number of illegitimate children is decreased more slowly among them
than other evidences of culture are increased, just as was once true in
Scotland and Bavaria.
What does this mean? It forecasts a mighty dilemma which the whole world
of civilization, despite its will, must one time frankly face: the
unhusbanded mother or the childless wife. God send us a world with
woman's freedom and married motherhood inextricably wed, but until He
sends it, I see more of future promise in the betrayed girl-mothers of
the black belt than in the childless wives of the white North, and I
have more respect for the colored servant who yields to her frank
longing for motherhood than for her white sister who offers up children
for clothes. Out of a sex freedom that today makes us shudder will come
in time a day when we will no longer pay men for work they do not do,
for the sake of their harem; we will pay women what they earn and insist
on their working and earning it; we will allow those persons to vote who
know enough to vote, whether they be black or female, white or male; and
we will ward race suicide, not by further burdening the over-burdened,
but by honoring motherhood, even when the sneaking father shirks his
duty.
* * * * *
"Wait till the lady passes," said a Nashville white boy.
"She's no lady; she's a nigger," answered another.
So some few women are born free, and some amid insult and scarlet
letters achieve freedom; but our women in black had freedom thrust
contemptuously upon them. With that freedom they are buying an
untrammeled independence and dear as is the price they pay for it, it
will in the end be worth every taunt and groan. Today the dreams of the
mothers are coming true. We have still our poverty and degradation, our
lewdness and our cruel toil; but we have, too, a vast group of women of
Negro blood who for strength of character, cleanness of soul, and
unselfish devotion of purpose, is today easily the peer of any group of
women in the civilized world. And more than that, in the great rank and
file of our five million women we have the up-working of new
revolutionary ideals, which must in time have vast influence on the