Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
preferred a steady income from my child labor rather than bank on the
precarious dividend of my higher training? _Suppose_ that pompous old
village judge, whose dignity we often ruffled and whose apples we stole,
had had his way and sent me while a child to a "reform" school to learn
a "trade"? _Suppose_ Principal Hosmer had been born with no faith in
"darkies," and instead of giving me Greek and Latin had taught me
carpentry and the making of tin pans? _Suppose_ I had missed a Harvard
scholarship? _Suppose_ the Slater Board had then, as now, distinct ideas
as to where the education of Negroes should stop? Suppose _and_ suppose!
As I sat down calmly on flat earth and looked at my life a certain great
fear seized me. Was I the masterful captain or the pawn of laughing
sprites? Who was I to fight a world of color prejudice? I raise my hat
to myself when I remember that, even with these thoughts, I did not
hesitate or waver; but just went doggedly to work, and therein lay
whatever salvation I have achieved.
First came the task of earning a living. I was not nice or hard to
please. I just got down on my knees and begged for work, anything and
anywhere. I wrote to Hampton, Tuskegee, and a dozen other places. They
politely declined, with many regrets. The trustees of a backwoods
Tennessee town considered me, but were eventually afraid. Then,
suddenly, Wilberforce offered to let me teach Latin and Greek at $750 a
year. I was overjoyed!
I did not know anything about Latin and Greek, but I did know of
Wilberforce. The breath of that great name had swept the water and
dropped into southern Ohio, where Southerners had taken their cure at
Tawawa Springs and where white Methodists had planted a school; then
came the little bishop, Daniel Payne, who made it a school of the
African Methodists. This was the school that called me, and when
re-considered offers from Tuskegee and Jefferson City followed, I
refused; I was so thankful for that first offer.
I went to Wilberforce with high ideals. I wanted to help to build a
great university. I was willing to work night as well as day. I taught
Latin, Greek, English, and German. I helped in the discipline, took part
in the social life, begged to be allowed to lecture on sociology, and
began to write books. But I found myself against a stone wall. Nothing
stirred before my impatient pounding! Or if it stirred, it soon slept
again.
Of course, I was too impatient! The snarl of years was not to be undone
in days. I set at solving the problem before I knew it. Wilberforce was
a colored church-school. In it were mingled the problems of
poorly-prepared pupils, an inadequately-equipped plant, the natural
politics of bishoprics, and the provincial reactions of a country town
loaded with traditions. It was my first introduction to a Negro world,
and I was at once marvelously inspired and deeply depressed. I was
inspired with the children,--had I not rubbed against the children of
the world and did I not find here the same eagerness, the same joy of
life, the same brains as in New England, France, and Germany? But, on
the other hand, the ropes and myths and knots and hindrances; the
thundering waves of the white world beyond beating us back; the scalding
breakers of this inner world,--its currents and back eddies--its
meanness and smallness--its sorrow and tragedy--its screaming farce!
In all this I was as one bound hand and foot. Struggle, work, fight as I
would, I seemed to get nowhere and accomplish nothing. I had all the
wild intolerance of youth, and no experience in human tangles. For the
first time in my life I realized that there were limits to my will to
do. The Day of Miracles was past, and a long, gray road of dogged work
lay ahead.
I had, naturally, my triumphs here and there. I defied the bishops in
the matter of public extemporaneous prayer and they yielded. I bearded
the poor, hunted president in his den, and yet was re-elected to my
position. I was slowly winning a way, but quickly losing faith in the
value of the way won. Was this the place to begin my life work? Was this
the work which I was best fitted to do? What business had I, anyhow, to
teach Greek when I had studied men? I grew sure that I had made a
mistake. So I determined to leave Wilberforce and try elsewhere. Thus,
the third period of my life began.
First, in 1896, I married--a slip of a girl, beautifully dark-eyed
and thorough and good as a German housewife. Then I accepted a job to
make a study of Negroes in Philadelphia for the University of
Pennsylvania,--one year at six hundred dollars. How did I dare these
two things? I do not know. Yet they spelled salvation. To remain at
Wilberforce without doing my ideals meant spiritual death. Both my
wife and I were homeless. I dared a home and a temporary job. But it
was a different daring from the days of my first youth. I was ready
to admit that the best of men might fail. I meant still to be captain
of my soul, but I realized that even captains are not omnipotent in
uncharted and angry seas.
I essayed a thorough piece of work in Philadelphia. I labored morning,
noon, and night. Nobody ever reads that fat volume on "The Philadelphia
Negro," but they treat it with respect, and that consoles me. The
colored people of Philadelphia received me with no open arms. They had a
natural dislike to being studied like a strange species. I met again and
in different guise those curious cross-currents and inner social
whirlings of my own people. They set me to groping. I concluded that I
did not know so much as I might about my own people, and when President
Bumstead invited me to Atlanta University the next year to teach
sociology and study the American Negro, I accepted gladly, at a salary
of twelve hundred dollars.
My real life work was done at Atlanta for thirteen years, from my
twenty-ninth to my forty-second birthday. They were years of great
spiritual upturning, of the making and unmaking of ideals, of hard work
and hard play. Here I found myself. I lost most of my mannerisms. I grew
more broadly human, made my closest and most holy friendships, and
studied human beings. I became widely-acquainted with the real condition
of my people. I realized the terrific odds which faced them. At
Wilberforce I was their captious critic. In Philadelphia I was their
cold and scientific investigator, with microscope and probe. It took but
a few years of Atlanta to bring me to hot and indignant defense. I saw
the race-hatred of the whites as I had never dreamed of it
before,--naked and unashamed! The faint discrimination of my hopes and
intangible dislikes paled into nothing before this great, red monster
of cruel oppression. I held back with more difficulty each day my
mounting indignation against injustice and misrepresentation.
With all this came the strengthening and hardening of my own character.
The billows of birth, love, and death swept over me. I saw life through
all its paradox and contradiction of streaming eyes and mad merriment. I
emerged into full manhood, with the ruins of some ideals about me, but
with others planted above the stars; scarred and a bit grim, but hugging
to my soul the divine gift of laughter and withal determined, even unto
stubbornness, to fight the good fight.
At last, forbear and waver as I would, I faced the great Decision. My
life's last and greatest door stood ajar. What with all my dreaming,
studying, and teaching was I going to _do_ in this fierce fight? Despite
all my youthful conceit and bumptiousness, I found developed beneath it
all a reticence and new fear of forwardness, which sprang from searching
criticisms of motive and high ideals of efficiency; but contrary to my
dream of racial solidarity and notwithstanding my deep desire to serve
and follow and think, rather than to lead and inspire and decide, I
found myself suddenly the leader of a great wing of people fighting
against another and greater wing.
Nor could any effort of mine keep this fight from sinking to the
personal plane. Heaven knows I tried. That first meeting of a knot of
enthusiasts, at Niagara Falls, had all the earnestness of self-devotion.
At the second meeting, at Harper's Ferry, it arose to the solemnity of a
holy crusade and yet without and to the cold, hard stare of the world it
seemed merely the envy of fools against a great man, Booker Washington.
Of the movement I was willy-nilly leader. I hated the role. For the
first time I faced criticism and _cared_. Every ideal and habit of my
life was cruelly misjudged. I who had always overstriven to give credit
for good work, who had never consciously stooped to envy was accused by
honest colored people of every sort of small and petty jealousy, while
white people said I was ashamed of my race and wanted to be white! And
this of me, whose one life fanaticism had been belief in my Negro blood!
Away back in the little years of my boyhood I had sold the Springfield
_Republican_ and written for Mr. Fortune's _Globe_. I dreamed of being
an editor myself some day. I am an editor. In the great, slashing days
of college life I dreamed of a strong organization to fight the battles
of the Negro race. The National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People is such a body, and it grows daily. In the dark days at
Wilberforce I planned a time when I could speak freely to my people and
of them, interpreting between two worlds. I am speaking now. In the
study at Atlanta I grew to fear lest my radical beliefs should so hurt
the college that either my silence or the institution's ruin would
result. Powers and principalities have not yet curbed my tongue and
Atlanta still lives.
It all came--this new Age of Miracles--because a few persons in 1909
determined to celebrate Lincoln's Birthday properly by calling for the
final emancipation of the American Negro. I came at their call. My
salary even for a year was not assured, but it was the "Voice without
reply." The result has been the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People and _The Crisis_ and this book, which I am finishing
on my Fiftieth Birthday.
Last year I looked death in the face and found its lineaments not
unkind. But it was not my time. Yet in nature some time soon and in the
fullness of days I shall die, quietly, I trust, with my face turned
South and eastward; and, dreaming or dreamless, I shall, I am sure,
enjoy death as I have enjoyed life.
_A Litany at Atlanta_
O Silent God, Thou whose voice afar in mist and mystery hath left our
ears an-hungered in these fearful days--
_Hear us, good Lord!_
Listen to us, Thy children: our faces dark with doubt are made a mockery
in Thy Sanctuary. With uplifted hands we front Thy Heaven, O God,
crying:
_We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!_
We are not better than our fellows, Lord; we are but weak and human men.
When our devils do deviltry, curse Thou the doer and the deed,--curse
them as we curse them, do to them all and more than ever they have done
to innocence and weakness, to womanhood and home.
_Have mercy upon us, miserable sinners!_
And yet, whose is the deeper guilt? Who made these devils? Who nursed
them in crime and fed them on injustice? Who ravished and debauched
their mothers and their grandmothers? Who bought and sold their crime
and waxed fat and rich on public iniquity?
_Thou knowest, good God!_
Is this Thy Justice, O Father, that guile be easier than innocence and
the innocent be crucified for the guilt of the untouched guilty?
_Justice, O Judge of men!_
Wherefore do we pray? Is not the God of the Fathers dead? Have not seers
seen in Heaven's halls Thine hearsed and lifeless form stark amidst the
black and rolling smoke of sin, where all along bow bitter forms of
endless dead?
_Awake, Thou that sleepest!_