Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
serve them at some dirty and ill-attended hole in the wall. As for
toilet rooms,--don't! If you have to change cars, be wary of junctions
which are usually without accommodation and filled with quarrelsome
white persons who hate a "darky dressed up." You are apt to have the
company of a sheriff and a couple of meek or sullen black prisoners on
part of your way and dirty colored section hands will pour in toward
night and drive you to the smallest corner.
"No," said the little lady in the corner (she looked like an ivory cameo
and her dress flowed on her like a caress), "we don't travel much."
* * * * *
Pessimism is cowardice. The man who cannot frankly acknowledge the
"Jim-Crow" car as a fact and yet live and hope is simply afraid either
of himself or of the world. There is not in the world a more disgraceful
denial of human brotherhood than the "Jim-Crow" car of the southern
United States; but, too, just as true, there is nothing more beautiful
in the universe than sunset and moonlight on Montego Bay in far Jamaica.
And both things are true and both belong to this our world, and neither
can be denied.
* * * * *
The sun, prepared to cross that awful border which men call Night and
Death, marshals his hosts. I seem to see the spears of mighty horsemen
flash golden in the light; empurpled banners flame afar, and the low
thunder of marching hosts thrills with the thunder of the sea. Athwart
his own path, screening a face of fire, he throws cloud masses, masking
his trained guns. And then the miracle is done. The host passes with
roar too vast for human ear and the sun is set, leaving the frightened
moon and blinded stars.
In the dusk the green-gold palms turn their star-like faces and stretch
their fan-like fingers, lifting themselves proudly, lest any lordly leaf
should know the taint of earth.
Out from the isle the serpent hill thrusts its great length around the
bay, shouldering back the waters and the shadows. Ghost rains sweep
down, smearing his rugged sides, yet on he writhes, undulant with pine
and palm, gleaming until his low, sharp head and lambent tongue, grown
gray and pale and silver in the dying day, kisses the molten gold of the
golden sea.
Then comes the moon. Like fireflies nesting in the hand of God gleams
the city, dim-swathed by fairy palms. A long, thin thumb, mist-mighty,
points shadowy to the Spanish Main, while through the fingers foam the
Seven Seas. Above the calm and gold-green moon, beneath the wind-wet
earth; and here, alone, my soul enchained, enchanted!
* * * * *
From such heights of holiness men turn to master the world. All the
pettiness of life drops away and it becomes a great battle before the
Lord. His trumpet,--where does it sound and whither? I go. I saw Montego
Bay at the beginning of the World War. The cry for service as high as
heaven, as wide as human feeling, seemed filling the earth. What were
petty slights, silly insults, paltry problems, beside this call to do
and dare and die? We black folk offered our services to fight. What
happened? Most Americans have forgotten the extraordinary series of
events which worked the feelings of black America to fever heat.
First was the refusal to accept Negro volunteers for the army, except in
the four black regiments already established. While the nation was
combing the country for volunteers for the regular army, it would not
let the American Negro furnish even his proportionate quota of regular
soldiers. This led to some grim bantering among Negroes:
"Why do you want to volunteer?" asked many. "Why should you fight for
this country?"
Before we had chance to reply to this, there came the army draft bill
and the proposal by Vardaman and his ilk to except Negroes. We protested
to Washington in various ways, and while we were insisting that colored
men should be drafted just as other citizens, the bill went through with
two little "jokers."
First, it provided that Negroes should be drafted, but trained in
"separate" units; and, secondly, it somewhat ambiguously permitted men
to be drafted for "labor."
A wave of fear and unrest spread among Negroes and while we were looking
at both these provisions askance, suddenly we received the draft
registration blank. It directed persons "of African descent" to "tear
off the corner!" Probably never before in the history of the United
States has a portion of the citizens been so openly and crassly
discriminated against by action of the general government. It was
disheartening, and on top of it came the celebrated "German plots." It
was alleged in various parts of the country with singular unanimity that
Germans were working among the Negroes, and it was further intimated
that this would make the Negroes too dangerous an element to trust with
guns. To us, of course, it looked as though the discovery and the
proposition came from the same thinly-veiled sources.
Considering carefully this series of happenings the American Negro
sensed an approaching crisis and faced a puzzling dilemma. Here was
evidently preparing fertile ground for the spread of disloyalty and
resentment among the black masses, as they were forced to choose
apparently between forced labor or a "Jim-Crow" draft. Manifestly when a
minority group is thus segregated and forced out of the nation, they can
in reason do but one thing--take advantage of the disadvantage. In this
case we demanded colored officers for the colored troops.
General Wood was early approached and asked to admit suitable candidates
to Plattsburg. He refused. We thereupon pressed the government for a
"separate" camp for the training of Negro officers. Not only did the War
Department hesitate at this request, but strong opposition arose among
colored people themselves. They said we were going too far. "We will
obey the law, but to ask for voluntary segregation is to insult
ourselves." But strong, sober second thought came to our rescue. We said
to our protesting brothers: "We face a condition, not a theory. There is
not the slightest chance of our being admitted to white camps;
therefore, it is either a case of a 'Jim-Crow' officers' training camp
or no colored officers. Of the two things no colored officers would be
the greater calamity."
Thus we gradually made up our minds. But the War Department still
hesitated. It was besieged, and when it presented its final argument,
"We have no place for such a camp," the trustees of Howard University
said: "Take our campus." Eventually twelve hundred colored cadets were
assembled at Fort Des Moines for officers' training.
The city of Des Moines promptly protested, but it finally changed its
mind. Des Moines never before had seen such a class of colored men. They
rapidly became popular with all classes and many encomiums were passed
upon their conduct. Their commanding colonel pronounced their work first
class and declared that they presented excellent material for officers.
Meantime, with one accord, the thought of the colored people turned
toward Colonel Young, their highest officer in the regular army. Charles
Young is a heroic figure. He is the typical soldier,--silent,
uncomplaining, brave, and efficient! From his days at West Point
throughout his thirty years of service he has taken whatever task was
assigned him and performed it efficiently; and there is no doubt but
that the army has been almost merciless in the requirements which it has
put upon this splendid officer. He came through all with flying colors.
In Haiti, in Liberia, in western camps, in the Sequoia Forests of
California, and finally with Pershing in Mexico,--in every case he
triumphed. Just at the time we were looking to the United States
government to call him to head the colored officers' training at Des
Moines, he was retired from the army, because of "high blood pressure!"
There is no disputing army surgeons and their judgment in this case may
be justified, but coming at the time it did, nearly every Negro in the
United States believed that the "high blood pressure" that retired
Colonel Young was in the prejudiced heads of the Southern oligarchy who
were determined that no American Negro should ever wear the stars of a
General.
To say that Negroes of the United States were disheartened at the
retirement of Colonel Young is to put it mildly,--but there was more
trouble. The provision that Negroes must be trained separately looked
simple and was simple in places where there were large Negro
contingents, but in the North with solitary Negroes drafted here and
there we had some extraordinary developments. Regiments appeared with
one Negro where the Negro had to be separated like a pest and put into a
house or even a village by himself while the commander frantically
telegraphed to Washington. Small wonder that one poor fellow in Ohio
solved the problem by cutting his throat. The whole process of drafting
Negroes had to be held up until the government could find methods and
places for assembling them.
Then came Houston. In a moment the nation forgot the whole record of one
of the most celebrated regiments in the United States Army and its
splendid service in the Indian Wars and in the Philippines. It was the
first regiment mobilized in the Spanish-American War and it was the
regiment that volunteered to a man to clean up the yellow fever camps
when others hesitated. It was one of the regiments to which Pershing
said in December:
"Men, I am authorized by Congress to tell you all that our people back
in the States are mightily glad and proud at the way the soldiers have
conducted themselves while in Mexico, and I, General Pershing, can say
with pride that a finer body of men never stood under the flag of our
nation than we find here tonight."
The nation, also, forgot the deep resentment mixed with the pale ghost
of fear which Negro soldiers call up in the breasts of the white South.
It is not so much that they fear that the Negro will strike if he gets a
chance, but rather that they assume with curious unanimity that he has
_reason_ to strike, that any other persons in his circumstances or
treated as he is would rebel. Instead of seeking to relieve the cause of
such a possible feeling, most of them strain every effort to bottle up
the black man's resentment. Is it inconceivable that now and then it
bursts all bounds, as at Brownsville and Houston?
So in the midst of this mental turmoil came Houston and East St. Louis.
At Houston black soldiers, goaded and insulted, suddenly went wild and
"shot up" the town. At East St. Louis white strikers on war work killed
and mobbed Negro workingmen, and as a result 19 colored soldiers were
hanged and 51 imprisoned for life for killing 17 whites at Houston,
while for killing 125 Negroes in East St. Louis, 20 white men were
imprisoned, none for more than 15 years, and 10 colored men with them.
* * * * *
Once upon a time I took a great journey in this land to three of the
ends of our world and over seven thousand mighty miles. I saw the grim
desert and the high ramparts of the Rocky Mountains. Three days I flew
from the silver beauty of Seattle to the somber whirl of Kansas City.
Three days I flew from the brute might of Chicago to the air of the
Angels in California, scented with golden flowers, where the homes of
men crouch low and loving on the good, broad earth, as though they were
kissing her blossoms. Three days I flew through the empire of Texas, but
all these shall be tales untold, for in all this journey I saw but one
thing that lived and will live eternal in my soul,--the Grand Canon.
It is a sudden void in the bosom of the earth, down to its entrails--a