Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
"There you go, again. You know that I--"
Wait! I answer. Wait!
I arise at seven. The milkman has neglected me. He pays little attention
to colored districts. My white neighbor glares elaborately. I walk
softly, lest I disturb him. The children jeer as I pass to work. The
women in the street car withdraw their skirts or prefer to stand. The
policeman is truculent. The elevator man hates to serve Negroes. My job
is insecure because the white union wants it and does not want me. I try
to lunch, but no place near will serve me. I go forty blocks to
Marshall's, but the Committee of Fourteen closes Marshall's; they say
white women frequent it.
"Do all eating places discriminate?"
No, but how shall I know which do not--except--
I hurry home through crowds. They mutter or get angry. I go to a
mass-meeting. They stare. I go to a church. "We don't admit niggers!"
Or perhaps I leave the beaten track. I seek new work. "Our employees
would not work with you; our customers would object."
I ask to help in social uplift.
"Why--er--we will write you."
I enter the free field of science. Every laboratory door is closed and
no endowments are available.
I seek the universal mistress, Art; the studio door is locked.
I write literature. "We cannot publish stories of colored folks of that
type." It's the only type I know.
This is my life. It makes me idiotic. It gives me artificial problems. I
hesitate, I rush, I waver. In fine,--I am sensitive!
My pale friend looks at me with disbelief and curling tongue.
"Do you mean to sit there and tell me that this is what happens to you
each day?"
Certainly not, I answer low.
"Then you only fear it will happen?"
I fear!
"Well, haven't you the courage to rise above a--almost a craven fear?"
Quite--quite craven is my fear, I admit; but the terrible thing
is--these things do happen!
"But you just said--"
They do happen. Not all each day,--surely not. But now and then--now
seldom, now, sudden; now after a week, now in a chain of awful minutes;
not everywhere, but anywhere--in Boston, in Atlanta. That's the hell of
it. Imagine spending your life looking for insults or for hiding places
from them--shrinking (instinctively and despite desperate bolsterings of
courage) from blows that are not always but ever; not each day, but each
week, each month, each year. Just, perhaps, as you have choked back the
craven fear and cried, "I am and will be the master of my--"
"No more tickets downstairs; here's one to the smoking gallery."
You hesitate. You beat back your suspicions. After all, a cigarette with
Charlie Chaplin--then a white man pushes by--
"Three in the orchestra."
"Yes, sir." And in he goes.
Suddenly your heart chills. You turn yourself away toward the golden
twinkle of the purple night and hesitate again. What's the use? Why not
always yield--always take what's offered,--always bow to force, whether
of cannon or dislike? Then the great fear surges in your soul, the real
fear--the fear beside which other fears are vain imaginings; the fear
lest right there and then you are losing your own soul; that you are
losing your own soul and the soul of a people; that millions of unborn
children, black and gold and mauve, are being there and then despoiled
by you because you are a coward and dare not fight!
Suddenly that silly orchestra seat and the cavorting of a comedian with
funny feet become matters of life, death, and immortality; you grasp the
pillars of the universe and strain as you sway back to that befrilled
ticket girl. You grip your soul for riot and murder. You choke and
sputter, and she seeing that you are about to make a "fuss" obeys her
orders and throws the tickets at you in contempt. Then you slink to your
seat and crouch in the darkness before the film, with every tissue
burning! The miserable wave of reaction engulfs you. To think of
compelling puppies to take your hard-earned money; fattening hogs to
hate you and yours; forcing your way among cheap and tawdry idiots--God!
What a night of pleasure!
* * * * *
Here, then, is beauty and ugliness, a wide vision of world-sacrifice, a
fierce gleam of world-hate. Which is life and what is death and how
shall we face so tantalizing a contradiction? Any explanation must
necessarily be subtle and involved. No pert and easy word of
encouragement, no merely dark despair, can lay hold of the roots of
these things. And first and before all, we cannot forget that this world
is beautiful. Grant all its ugliness and sin--the petty, horrible snarl
of its putrid threads, which few have seen more near or more often than
I--notwithstanding all this, the beauty of this world is not to be
denied.
Casting my eyes about I dare not let them rest on the beauty of Love and
Friend, for even if my tongue were cunning enough to sing this, the
revelation of reality here is too sacred and the fancy too untrue. Of
one world-beauty alone may we at once be brutally frank and that is the
glory of physical nature; this, though the last of beauties, is divine!
And so, too, there are depths of human degradation which it is not fair
for us to probe. With all their horrible prevalence, we cannot call them
natural. But may we not compare the least of the world's beauty with the
least of its ugliness--not murder, starvation, and rapine, with love and
friendship and creation--but the glory of sea and sky and city, with the
little hatefulnesses and thoughtfulnesses of race prejudice, that out
of such juxtaposition we may, perhaps, deduce some rule of beauty and
life--or death?
* * * * *
There mountains hurl themselves against the stars and at their feet lie
black and leaden seas. Above float clouds--white, gray, and inken, while
the clear, impalpable air springs and sparkles like new wine. Last night
we floated on the calm bosom of the sea in the southernmost haven of
Mount Desert. The water flamed and sparkled. The sun had gone, but above
the crooked back of cumulus clouds, dark and pink with radiance, and on
the other sky aloft to the eastward piled the gorgeous-curtained mists
of evening. The radiance faded and a shadowy velvet veiled the
mountains, a humid depth of gloom behind which lurked all the mysteries
of life and death, while above, the clouds hung ashen and dull; lights
twinkled and flashed along the shore, boats glided in the twilight, and
the little puffing of motors droned away. Then was the hour to talk of
life and the meaning of life, while above gleamed silently, suddenly,
star on star.
Bar Harbor lies beneath a mighty mountain, a great, bare, black mountain
that sleeps above the town; but as you leave, it rises suddenly,
threateningly, until far away on Frenchman's Bay it looms above the town
in withering vastness, as if to call all that little world petty save
itself. Beneath the cool, wide stare of that great mountain, men cannot
live as giddily as in some lesser summer's playground. Before the
unveiled face of nature, as it lies naked on the Maine coast, rises a
certain human awe.
God molded his world largely and mightily off this marvelous coast and
meant that in the tired days of life men should come and worship here
and renew their spirit. This I have done and turning I go to work again.
As we go, ever the mountains of Mount Desert rise and greet us on our
going--somber, rock-ribbed and silent, looking unmoved on the moving
world, yet conscious of their everlasting strength.
About us beats the sea--the sail-flecked, restless sea, humming its tune
about our flying keel, unmindful of the voices of men. The land sinks to
meadows, black pine forests, with here and there a blue and wistful
mountain. Then there are islands--bold rocks above the sea, curled
meadows; through and about them roll ships, weather-beaten and patched
of sail, strong-hulled and smoking, light gray and shining. All the
colors of the sea lie about us--gray and yellowing greens and doubtful
blues, blacks not quite black, tinted silvers and golds and dreaming
whites. Long tongues of dark and golden land lick far out into the
tossing waters, and the white gulls sail and scream above them. It is a
mighty coast--ground out and pounded, scarred, crushed, and carven in
massive, frightful lineaments. Everywhere stand the pines--the little
dark and steadfast pines that smile not, neither weep, but wait and
wait. Near us lie isles of flesh and blood, white cottages, tiled and
meadowed. Afar lie shadow-lands, high mist-hidden hills, mountains
boldly limned, yet shading to the sky, faint and unreal.
We skirt the pine-clad shores, chary of men, and know how bitterly
winter kisses these lonely shores to fill yon row of beaked ice houses
that creep up the hills. We are sailing due westward and the sun, yet
two hours high, is blazoning a fiery glory on the sea that spreads and
gleams like some broad, jeweled trail, to where the blue and distant
shadow-land lifts its carven front aloft, leaving, as it gropes, shades
of shadows beyond.
* * * * *
Why do not those who are scarred in the world's battle and hurt by its
hardness travel to these places of beauty and drown themselves in the
utter joy of life? I asked this once sitting in a Southern home. Outside
the spring of a Georgia February was luring gold to the bushes and
languor to the soft air. Around me sat color in human flesh--brown that
crimsoned readily; dim soft-yellow that escaped description; cream-like
duskiness that shadowed to rich tints of autumn leaves. And yet a
suggested journey in the world brought no response.
"I should think you would like to travel," said the white one.
But no, the thought of a journey seemed to depress them.
Did you ever see a "Jim-Crow" waiting-room? There are always exceptions,
as at Greensboro--but usually there is no heat in winter and no air in
summer; with undisturbed loafers and train hands and broken,
disreputable settees; to buy a ticket is torture; you stand and stand
and wait and wait until every white person at the "other window" is
waited on. Then the tired agent yells across, because all the tickets
and money are over there--
"What d'ye want? What? Where?"
The agent browbeats and contradicts you, hurries and confuses the
ignorant, gives many persons the wrong change, compels some to purchase
their tickets on the train at a higher price, and sends you and me out
on the platform, burning with indignation and hatred!
The "Jim-Crow" car is up next the baggage car and engine. It stops out
beyond the covering in the rain or sun or dust. Usually there is no step
to help you climb on and often the car is a smoker cut in two and you
must pass through the white smokers or else they pass through your part,
with swagger and noise and stares. Your compartment is a half or a
quarter or an eighth of the oldest car in service on the road. Unless it
happens to be a thorough express, the plush is caked with dirt, the
floor is grimy, and the windows dirty. An impertinent white newsboy
occupies two seats at the end of the car and importunes you to the point
of rage to buy cheap candy, Coco-Cola, and worthless, if not vulgar,
books. He yells and swaggers, while a continued stream of white men
saunters back and forth from the smoker to buy and hear. The white train
crew from the baggage car uses the "Jim-Crow" to lounge in and perform
their toilet. The conductor appropriates two seats for himself and his
papers and yells gruffly for your tickets before the train has scarcely
started. It is best not to ask him for information even in the gentlest
tones. His information is for white persons chiefly. It is difficult to
get lunch or clean water. Lunch rooms either don't serve niggers or