Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
a single day during that year. If we take the eleven million youths
fifteen to twenty years of age for whom vocational training is
particularly adapted, we find that nearly five per cent of these, or
448,414, are absolutely illiterate; it is not too much to assume that a
million of them have not acquired enough of the ordinary tools of
intelligence to make the most of efficient vocational training.
Confining ourselves to the white people, over fifteen per cent of the
white children six to fourteen years of age, or 2,253,198, did not
attend school during the school year 1909-10. Of the native white
children of native parents ten to fourteen years of age nearly a tenth
were not in school during that year; 121,878 native white children of
native parents, fifteen to nineteen years of age, were illiterate.
If we continue our attention to the colored children, the case is, of
course, much worse.
We cannot hope to make intelligent workmen and intelligent citizens of a
group of people, over forty per cent of whose children six to fourteen
years of age were not in school a single day during 1909-10; for the
other sixty per cent the school term in the majority of cases was
probably less than five months. Of the Negro children ten to fourteen
years of age 18.9 per cent were illiterate; of those fifteen to nineteen
years of age 20.3 per cent were illiterate; of those ten to fourteen
years of age 31.4 per cent did not go to school a single day in 1909-10.
What is the trouble? It is simple. We are spending one dollar for
education where we should spend ten dollars. If tomorrow we multiplied
our effort to educate the next generation ten-fold, we should but begin
our bounden duty. The heaven that lies about our infancy is but the
ideals come true which every generation of children is capable of
bringing; but we, selfish in our own ignorance and incapacity, are
making of education a series of miserable compromises: How ignorant can
we let a child grow to be in order to make him the best cotton mill
operative? What is the least sum that will keep the average youth out of
jail? How many months saved on a high school course will make the
largest export of wheat?
If we realized that children are the future, that immortality is the
present child, that no education which educates can possibly be too
costly, then we know that the menace of Kaiserism which called for the
expenditure of more than 332 thousand millions of dollars was not a whit
more pressing than the menace of ignorance, and that no nation tomorrow
will call itself civilized which does not give every single human being
college and vocational training free and under the best teaching force
procurable for love or money.
This world has never taken the education of children seriously. Misled
by selfish dreamings of personal life forever, we have neglected the
true and practical immortality through the endless life of children's
children. Seeking counsels of our own souls' perfection, we have
despised and rejected the possible increasing perfection of unending
generations. Or if we are thrown back in pessimistic despair from making
living folk decent, we leap to idle speculations of a thousand years
hereafter instead of working steadily and persistently for the next
generation.
All our problems center in the child. All our hopes, our dreams are for
our children. Has our own life failed? Let its lesson save the
children's lives from similar failure. Is democracy a failure? Train up
citizens that will make it succeed. Is wealth too crude, too foolish in
form, and too easily stolen? Train up workers with honor and consciences
and brains. Have we degraded service with menials? Abolish the mean
spirit and implant sacrifice. Do we despise women? Train them as workers
and thinkers and not as playthings, lest future generations ape our
worst mistake. Do we despise darker races? Teach the children its fatal
cost in spiritual degradation and murder, teach them that to hate
"niggers" or "chinks" is to crucify souls like their own. Is there
anything we would accomplish with human beings? Do it with the immortal
child, with a stretch of endless time for doing it and with infinite
possibilities to work on.
Is this our attitude toward education? It is not--neither in England nor
America--in France nor Germany--with black nor white nor yellow folk.
Education to the modern world is a burden which we are driven to carry.
We shirk and complain. We do just as little as possible and only threat
or catastrophe induces us to do more than a minimum. If the ignorant
mass, panting to know, revolts, we dole them gingerly enough knowledge
to pacify them temporarily. If, as in the Great War, we discover
soldiers too ignorant to use our machines of murder and destruction, we
train them--to use machines of murder and destruction. If mounting
wealth calls for intelligent workmen, we rush tumultuously to train
workers--in order to increase our wealth. But of great, broad plans to
train all men for all things--to make a universe intelligent, busy,
good, creative and beautiful--where in this wide world is such an
educational program? To announce it is to invite gasps or Brobdingnagian
laughter. It cannot be done. It will cost too much.
What has been done with man can be done with men, if the world tries
long enough and hard enough. And as to the cost--all the wealth of the
world, save that necessary for sheer decent existence and for the
maintenance of past civilization, is, and of right ought to be, the
property of the children for their education.
I mean it. In one year, 1917, we spent $96,700,000,000 for war. We blew
it away to murder, maim, and destroy! Why? Because the blind, brutal
crime of powerful and selfish interests made this path through hell the
only visible way to heaven. We did it. We had to do it, and we are glad
the putrid horror is over. But, now, are we prepared to spend less to
make a world in which the resurgence of such devilish power will be
impossible?
Do we really want war to cease?
Then educate the children of this generation at a cost no whit less and
if necessary a hundred times as great as the cost of the Great War.
Last year, 1917, education cost us $915,000,000.
Next year it ought to cost us at least two thousand million dollars. We
should spend enough money to hire the best teaching force possible--the
best organizing and directing ability in the land, even if we have to
strip the railroads and meat trust. We should dot city and country with
the most efficient, sanitary, and beautiful school-houses the world
knows and we should give every American child common school, high
school, and college training and then vocational guidance in earning a
living.
Is this a dream?
Can we afford less?
Consider our so-called educational "problems"; "How may we keep pupils
in the high school?" Feed and clothe them. "Shall we teach Latin, Greek,
and mathematics to the 'masses'?" If they are worth teaching to anybody,
the masses need them most. "Who shall go to college?" Everybody. "When
shall culture training give place to technical education for work?"
Never.
These questions are not "problems." They are simply "excuses" for
spending less time and money on the next generation. Given ten millions
of dollars a year, what can we best do with the education of a million
children? The real answer is--kill nine hundred and ninety thousand of
them quickly and not gradually, and make thoroughly-trained men and
women of the other ten thousand. But who set the limit of ten million
dollars? Who says it shall not be ten thousand millions, as it ought to
be? You and I say it, and in saying it we sin against the Holy Ghost.
We sin because in our befuddled brains we have linked money and
education inextricably. We assume that only the wealthy have a real
right to education when, in fact, being born is being given a right to
college training. Our wealth today is, we all know, distributed mainly
by chance inheritance and personal favor and yet we attempt to base the
right to education on this foundation. The result is grotesque! We bury
genius; we send it to jail; we ridicule and mock it, while we send
mediocrity and idiocy to college, gilded and crowned. For three hundred
years we have denied black Americans an education and now we exploit
them before a gaping world: See how ignorant and degraded they are! All
they are fit for is education for cotton-picking and dish-washing. When
Dunbar and Taylor happen along, we are torn between something like
shamefaced anger or impatient amazement.
A world guilty of this last and mightiest war has no right to enjoy or
create until it has made the future safe from another Arkansas or
Rheims. To this there is but one patent way, proved and inescapable,
Education, and that not for me or for you but for the Immortal Child.
And that child is of all races and all colors. All children are the
children of all and not of individuals and families and races. The whole
generation must be trained and guided and out of it as out of a huge
reservoir must be lifted all genius, talent, and intelligence to serve
all the world.
Almighty Death[1]
Softly, quite softly--
For I hear, above the murmur of the sea,
Faint and far-fallen footsteps, as of One
Who comes from out beyond the endless ends of Time,
With voice that downward looms thro' singing stars;
Its subtle sound I see thro' these long-darkened eyes,
I hear the Light He bringeth on His hands--
Almighty Death!
Softly, oh, softly, lest He pass me by,
And that unquivering Light toward which my longing soul
And tortured body through these years have writhed,
Fade to the dun darkness of my days.
Softly, full softly, let me rise and greet
The strong, low luting of that long-awaited call;
Swiftly be all my good and going gone,
And this vast veiled and vanquished vigor of my soul
Seek somehow otherwhere its rest and goal,
Where endless spaces stretch,
Where endless time doth moan,
Where endless light doth pour
Thro' the black kingdoms of eternal death.
Then haply I may see what things I have not seen,
Then I may know what things I have not known;
Then may I do my dreams.
Farewell! No sound of idle mourning let there be
To shudder this full silence--save the voice
Of children--little children, white and black,
Whispering the deeds I tried to do for them;
While I at last unguided and alone
Pass softly, full softly.
[Footnote 1: For Joseph Pulitzer, October 29, 1911.]
IX
OF BEAUTY AND DEATH
For long years we of the world gone wild have looked into the face of
death and smiled. Through all our bitter tears we knew how beautiful it
was to die for that which our souls called sufficient. Like all true
beauty this thing of dying was so simple, so matter-of-fact. The boy
clothed in his splendid youth stood before us and laughed in his own
jolly way,--went and was gone. Suddenly the world was full of the
fragrance of sacrifice. We left our digging and burden-bearing; we
turned from our scraping and twisting of things and words; we paused
from our hurrying hither and thither and walking up and down, and asked
in half-whisper: this Death--is this Life? And is its beauty real or
false? And of this heart-questioning I am writing.
* * * * *
My friend, who is pale and positive, said to me yesterday, as the tired
sun was nodding:
"You are too sensitive."
I admit, I am--sensitive. I am artificial. I cringe or am bumptious or
immobile. I am intellectually dishonest, art-blind, and I lack humor.
"Why don't you stop all this?" she retorts triumphantly.
You will not let us.