Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
thought and action of this land.
For this, their promise, and for their hard past, I honor the women of
my race. Their beauty,--their dark and mysterious beauty of midnight
eyes, crumpled hair, and soft, full-featured faces--is perhaps more to
me than to you, because I was born to its warm and subtle spell; but
their worth is yours as well as mine. No other women on earth could
have emerged from the hell of force and temptation which once engulfed
and still surrounds black women in America with half the modesty and
womanliness that they retain. I have always felt like bowing myself
before them in all abasement, searching to bring some tribute to these
long-suffering victims, these burdened sisters of mine, whom the world,
the wise, white world, loves to affront and ridicule and wantonly to
insult. I have known the women of many lands and nations,--I have known
and seen and lived beside them, but none have I known more sweetly
feminine, more unswervingly loyal, more desperately earnest, and more
instinctively pure in body and in soul than the daughters of my black
mothers. This, then,--a little thing--to their memory and inspiration.
_Children of the Moon_
I am dead;
Yet somehow, somewhere,
In Time's weird contradiction, I
May tell of that dread deed, wherewith
I brought to Children of the Moon
Freedom and vast salvation.
I was a woman born,
And trod the streaming street,
That ebbs and flows from Harlem's hills,
Through caves and canons limned in light,
Down to the twisting sea.
That night of nights,
I stood alone and at the End,
Until the sudden highway to the moon,
Golden in splendor,
Became too real to doubt.
Dimly I set foot upon the air,
I fled, I flew, through the thrills of light,
With all about, above, below, the whirring
Of almighty wings.
I found a twilight land,
Where, hardly hid, the sun
Sent softly-saddened rays of
Red and brown to burn the iron soil
And bathe the snow-white peaks
In mighty splendor.
Black were the men,
Hard-haired and silent-slow,
Moving as shadows,
Bending with face of fear to earthward;
And women there were none.
"Woman, woman, woman!"
I cried in mounting terror.
"Woman and Child!"
And the cry sang back
Through heaven, with the
Whirring of almighty wings.
Wings, wings, endless wings,--
Heaven and earth are wings;
Wings that flutter, furl, and fold,
Always folding and unfolding,
Ever folding yet again;
Wings, veiling some vast
And veiled face,
In blazing blackness,
Behind the folding and unfolding,
The rolling and unrolling of
Almighty wings!
I saw the black men huddle,
Fumed in fear, falling face downward;
Vainly I clutched and clawed,
Dumbly they cringed and cowered,
Moaning in mournful monotone:
O Freedom, O Freedom,
O Freedom over me;
Before I'll be a slave,
I'll be buried in my grave,
And go home to my God,
And be free.
It was angel-music
From the dead,
And ever, as they sang,
Some winged thing of wings, filling all heaven,
Folding and unfolding, and folding yet again,
Tore out their blood and entrails,
'Til I screamed in utter terror;
And a silence came--
A silence and the wailing of a babe.
Then, at last, I saw and shamed;
I knew how these dumb, dark, and dusky things
Had given blood and life,
To fend the caves of underground,
The great black caves of utter night,
Where earth lay full of mothers
And their babes.
Little children sobbing in darkness,
Little children crying in silent pain,
Little mothers rocking and groping and struggling,
Digging and delving and groveling,
Amid the dying-dead and dead-in-life
And drip and dripping of warm, wet blood,
Far, far beneath the wings,--
The folding and unfolding of almighty wings.
I bent with tears and pitying hands,
Above these dusky star-eyed children,--
Crinkly-haired, with sweet-sad baby voices,
Pleading low for light and love and living--
And I crooned:
"Little children weeping there,
God shall find your faces fair;
Guerdon for your deep distress,
He shall send His tenderness;
For the tripping of your feet
Make a mystic music sweet
In the darkness of your hair;
Light and laughter in the air--
Little children weeping there,
God shall find your faces fair!"
I strode above the stricken, bleeding men,
The rampart 'ranged against the skies,
And shouted:
"Up, I say, build and slay;
Fight face foremost, force a way,
Unloose, unfetter, and unbind;
Be men and free!"
Dumbly they shrank,
Muttering they pointed toward that peak,
Than vastness vaster,
Whereon a darkness brooded,
"Who shall look and live," they sighed;
And I sensed
The folding and unfolding of almighty wings.
Yet did we build of iron, bricks, and blood;
We built a day, a year, a thousand years,
Blood was the mortar,--blood and tears,
And, ah, the Thing, the Thing of wings,
The winged, folding Wing of Things
Did furnish much mad mortar
For that tower.
Slow and ever slower rose the towering task,
And with it rose the sun,
Until at last on one wild day,
Wind-whirled, cloud-swept and terrible
I stood beneath the burning shadow
Of the peak,
Beneath the whirring of almighty wings,
While downward from my feet
Streamed the long line of dusky faces
And the wail of little children sobbing under earth.
Alone, aloft,
I saw through firmaments on high
The drama of Almighty God,
With all its flaming suns and stars.
"Freedom!" I cried.
"Freedom!" cried heaven, earth, and stars;
And a Voice near-far,
Amid the folding and unfolding of almighty wings,
Answered, "I am Freedom--
Who sees my face is free--
He and his."
I dared not look;
Downward I glanced on deep-bowed heads and closed eyes,
Outward I gazed on flecked and flaming blue--
But ever onward, upward flew
The sobbing of small voices,--
Down, down, far down into the night.
Slowly I lifted livid limbs aloft;
Upward I strove: the face! the face!
Onward I reeled: the face! the face!
To beauty wonderful as sudden death,
Or horror horrible as endless life--
Up! Up! the blood-built way;
(Shadow grow vaster!
Terror come faster!)
Up! Up! to the blazing blackness
Of one veiled face.
And endless folding and unfolding,
Rolling and unrolling of almighty wings.
The last step stood!
The last dim cry of pain
Fluttered across the stars,
And then--
Wings, wings, triumphant wings,
Lifting and lowering, waxing and waning,
Swinging and swaying, twirling and whirling,
Whispering and screaming, streaming and gleaming,
Spreading and sweeping and shading and flaming--
Wings, wings, eternal wings,
'Til the hot, red blood,
Flood fleeing flood,
Thundered through heaven and mine ears,
While all across a purple sky,
The last vast pinion.
Trembled to unfold.
I rose upon the Mountain of the Moon,--
I felt the blazing glory of the Sun;
I heard the Song of Children crying, "Free!"
I saw the face of Freedom--
And I died.
VIII
THE IMMORTAL CHILD
If a man die shall he live again? We do not know. But this we do know,
that our children's children live forever and grow and develop toward
perfection as they are trained. All human problems, then, center in the
Immortal Child and his education is the problem of problems. And first
for illustration of what I would say may I not take for example, out of
many millions, the life of one dark child.
* * * * *
It is now nineteen years since I first saw Coleridge-Taylor. We were in
London in some somber hall where there were many meeting, men and women
called chiefly to the beautiful World's Fair at Paris; and then a few
slipping over to London to meet Pan-Africa. We were there from Cape
Colony and Liberia, from Haiti and the States, and from the Islands of
the Sea. I remember the stiff, young officer who came with credentials
from Menelik of Abyssinia; I remember the bitter, black American who
whispered how an army of the Soudan might some day cross the Alps; I
remember Englishmen, like the Colensos, who sat and counseled with us;
but above all, I remember Coleridge-Taylor.
He was a little man and nervous, with dark-golden face and hair that
bushed and strayed. His fingers were always nervously seeking hidden
keys and he was quick with enthusiasm,--instinct with life. His bride of
a year or more,--dark, too, in her whiter way,--was of the calm and
quiet type. Her soft contralto voice thrilled us often as she sang,
while her silences were full of understanding.
Several times we met in public gatherings and then they bade me to their
home,--a nest of a cottage, with gate and garden, hidden in London's
endless rings of suburbs. I dimly recall through these years a room in
cozy disorder, strewn with music--music on the floor and music on the
chairs, music in the air as the master rushed to the piano now and
again to make some memory melodious--some allusion real.
And then at last, for it was the last, I saw Coleridge-Taylor in a
mighty throng of people crowding the Crystal Palace. We came in facing
the stage and scarcely dared look around. On the stage were a full
orchestra, a chorus of eight hundred voices, and some of the world's
famous soloists. He left his wife sitting beside me, and she was very
silent as he went forward to lift the conductor's baton. It was one of
the earliest renditions of "Hiawatha's Wedding Feast." We sat at rapt
attention and when the last, weird music died, the great chorus and
orchestra rose as a man to acclaim the master; he turned toward the
audience and then we turning for the first time saw that sea of faces
behind,--the misty thousands whose voices rose to one strong shout of
joy! It was a moment such as one does not often live. It seemed, and
was, prophetic.
This young man who stepped forth as one of the most notable of modern
English composers had a simple and uneventful career. His father was a
black surgeon of Sierra Leone who came to London for study. While there
he met an English girl and this son was born, in London, in 1875.
Then came a series of chances. His father failed to succeed and
disappeared back to Africa leaving the support of the child to the poor
working mother. The child showed evidences of musical talent and a
friendly workingman gave him a little violin. A musician glancing from
his window saw a little dark boy playing marbles on the street with a
tiny violin in one hand; he gave him lessons. He happened to gain
entrance into a charity school with a master of understanding mind who
recognized genius when he saw it; and finally his beautiful child's
treble brought him to the notice of the choirmaster of St. George's,
Croyden.
So by happy accident his way was clear. Within his soul was no
hesitation. He was one of those fortunate beings who are not called to
_Wander-Jahre_, but are born with sails set and seas charted. Already
the baby of four little years was a musician, and as choir-boy and
violinist he walked unhesitatingly and surely to his life work. He was
graduated with honors from the Royal Academy of Music in 1894, and
married soon after the daughter of one of his professors. Then his life