Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
wound where the dull titanic knife has turned and twisted in the hole,
leaving its edges livid, scarred, jagged, and pulsing over the white,
and red, and purple of its mighty flesh, while down below--down, down
below, in black and severed vein, boils the dull and sullen flood of the
Colorado.
It is awful. There can be nothing like it. It is the earth and sky gone
stark and raving mad. The mountains up-twirled, disbodied and inverted,
stand on their peaks and throw their bowels to the sky. Their earth is
air; their ether blood-red rock engreened. You stand upon their roots
and fall into their pinnacles, a mighty mile.
Behold this mauve and purple mocking of time and space! See yonder peak!
No human foot has trod it. Into that blue shadow only the eye of God has
looked. Listen to the accents of that gorge which mutters: "Before
Abraham was, I am." Is yonder wall a hedge of black or is it the rampart
between heaven and hell? I see greens,--is it moss or giant pines? I see
specks that may be boulders. Ever the winds sigh and drop into those
sun-swept silences. Ever the gorge lies motionless, unmoved, until I
fear. It is a grim thing, unholy, terrible! It is human--some mighty
drama unseen, unheard, is playing there its tragedies or mocking comedy,
and the laugh of endless years is shrieking onward from peak to peak,
unheard, unechoed, and unknown.
One throws a rock into the abyss. It gives back no sound. It falls on
silence--the voice of its thunders cannot reach so far. It is not--it
cannot be a mere, inert, unfeeling, brute fact--its grandeur is too
serene--its beauty too divine! It is not red, and blue, and green, but,
ah! the shadows and the shades of all the world, glad colorings touched
with a hesitant spiritual delicacy. What does it mean--what does it
mean? Tell me, black and boiling water!
It is not real. It is but shadows. The shading of eternity. Last night
yonder tesselated palace was gloom--dark, brooding thought and sin,
while hither rose the mountains of the sun, golden, blazing,
ensanguined. It was a dream. This blue and brilliant morning shows all
those burning peaks alight, while here, shapeless, mistful, brood the
shadowed towers.
I have been down into the entrails of earth--down, down by straight and
staring cliffs--down by sounding waters and sun-strewn meadows; down by
green pastures and still waters, by great, steep chasms--down by the
gnarled and twisted fists of God to the deep, sad moan of the yellow
river that did this thing of wonder,--a little winding river with death
in its depth and a crown of glory in its flying hair.
I have seen what eye of man was never meant to see. I have profaned the
sanctuary. I have looked upon the dread disrobing of the Night, and yet
I live. Ere I hid my head she was standing in her cavern halls, glowing
coldly westward--her feet were blackness: her robes, empurpled, flowed
mistily from shoulder down in formless folds of folds; her head,
pine-crowned, was set with jeweled stars. I turned away and dreamed--the
canon,--the awful, its depths called; its heights shuddered. Then
suddenly I arose and looked. Her robes were falling. At dim-dawn they
hung purplish-green and black. Slowly she stripped them from her gaunt
and shapely limbs--her cold, gray garments shot with shadows stood
revealed. Down dropped the black-blue robes, gray-pearled and slipped,
leaving a filmy, silken, misty thing, and underneath I glimpsed her
limbs of utter light.
* * * * *
My God! For what am I thankful this night? For nothing. For nothing but
the most commonplace of commonplaces; a table of gentlewomen and
gentlemen--soft-spoken, sweet-tempered, full of human sympathy, who made
me, a stranger, one of them. Ours was a fellowship of common books,
common knowledge, mighty aims. We could laugh and joke and think as
friends--and the Thing--the hateful, murderous, dirty Thing which in
American we call "Nigger-hatred" was not only not there--it could not
even be understood. It was a curious monstrosity at which civilized folk
laughed or looked puzzled. There was no elegant and elaborate
condescension of--"We once had a colored servant"--"My father was an
Abolitionist"--"I've always been interested in _your people_"--there was
only the community of kindred souls, the delicate reverence for the
Thought that led, the quick deference to the guest. You left in quiet
regret, knowing that they were not discussing you behind your back with
lies and license. God! It was simply human decency and I had to be
thankful for it because I am an American Negro, and white America, with
saving exceptions, is cruel to everything that has black blood--and
this was Paris, in the years of salvation, 1919. Fellow blacks, we must
join the democracy of Europe.
* * * * *
Toul! Dim through the deepening dark of early afternoon, I saw its
towers gloom dusky toward the murk of heaven. We wound in misty roads
and dropped upon the city through the great throats of its walled
bastions. There lay France--a strange, unknown, unfamiliar France. The
city was dispossessed. Through its streets--its narrow, winding streets,
old and low and dark, carven and quaint,--poured thousands upon
thousands of strange feet of khaki-clad foreigners, and the echoes threw
back awkward syllables that were never French. Here was France beaten to
her knees yet fighting as never nation fought before, calling in her
death agony across the seas till her help came and with all its strut
and careless braggadocio saved the worthiest nation of the world from
the wickedest fate ever plotted by Fools.
* * * * *
Tim Brimm was playing by the town-pump. Tim Brimm and the bugles of
Harlem blared in the little streets of Maron in far Lorraine. The tiny
streets were seas of mud. Dank mist and rain sifted through the cold air
above the blue Moselle. Soldiers--soldiers everywhere--black soldiers,
boys of Washington, Alabama, Philadelphia, Mississippi. Wild and sweet
and wooing leapt the strains upon the air. French children gazed in
wonder--women left their washing. Up in the window stood a black Major,
a Captain, a Teacher, and I--with tears behind our smiling eyes. Tim
Brimm was playing by the town-pump.
The audience was framed in smoke. It rose ghost-like out of
memories--bitter memories of the officer near dead of pneumonia whose
pain was lighted up by the nurses waiting to know whether he must be
"Jim-Crowed" with privates or not. Memories of that great last morning
when the thunders of hell called the Ninety-second to its last drive.
Memories of bitter humiliations, determined triumphs, great victories,
and bugle-calls that sounded from earth to heaven. Like memories framed
in the breath of God, my audience peered in upon me--good, brown faces
with great, kind, beautiful eyes--black soldiers of America rescuing
beloved France--and the words came in praise and benediction there in
the "Y," with its little stock of cigarettes and candies and its rusty
wood stove.
"_Alors_," said Madame, "_quatre sont morts_"--four dead--four tall,
strong sons dead for France--sons like the sweet and blue-eyed daughter
who was hiding her brave smile in the dusk. It was a tiny stone house
whose front window lipped the passing sidewalk where ever tramped the
feet of black soldiers marching home. There was a cavernous wardrobe, a
great fireplace invaded by a new and jaunty iron stove. Vast, thick
piles of bedding rose in yonder corner. Without was the crowded kitchen
and up a half-stair was our bedroom that gave upon a tiny court with
arched stone staircase and one green tree. We were a touching family
party held together by a great sorrow and a great joy. How we laughed
over the salad that got brandy instead of vinegar--how we ate the golden
pile of fried potatoes and how we pored over the post-card from the
Lieutenant of the Senegalese--dear little vale of crushed and risen
France, in the day when Negroes went "over the top" at Pont-a-Mousson.
* * * * *
Paris, Paris by purple facade of the opera, the crowd on the Boulevard
des Italiens and the great swing of the Champs Elysees. But not the
Paris the world knows. Paris with its soul cut to the core--feverish,
crowded, nervous, hurried; full of uniforms and mourning bands, with
cafes closed at 9:30--no sugar, scarce bread, and tears so interwined
with joy that there is scant difference. Paris has been dreaming a
nightmare, and though she awakes, the grim terror is upon her--it lies
on the sand-closed art treasures of the Louvre. Only the flowers are
there, always the flowers, the Roses of England and the Lilies of
France.
* * * * *
New York! Behind the Liberty that faces free France rise the white
cliffs of Manhattan, tier on tier, with a curving pinnacle, towers
square and twin, a giant inkwell daintily stoppered, an ancient pyramid
enthroned; beneath, low ramparts wide and mighty; while above,
faint-limned against the turbulent sky, looms the vast grace of that
Cathedral of the Purchased and Purchasing Poor, topping the world and
pointing higher.
Yonder the gray cobwebs of the Brooklyn bridges leap the sea, and here
creep the argosies from all earth's ends. We move to this swift home on
dun and swelling waters and hear as we come the heartbeats of the new
world.
* * * * *
New York and night from the Brooklyn Bridge: The bees and fireflies flit
and twinkle in their vast hives; curved clouds like the breath of gods
hover between the towers and the moon. One hears the hiss of lightnings,
the deep thunder of human things, and a fevered breathing as of some
attendant and invincible Powers. The glow of burning millions melts
outward into dim and fairy outlines until afar the liquid music born of
rushing crowds drips like a benediction on the sea.
* * * * *
New York and morning: the sun is kissing the timid dew in Central Park,
and from the Fountain of Plenty one looks along that world street, Fifth
Avenue, and walks toward town. The earth life and curves graciously down
from the older mansions of princes to the newer shops of luxury. Egypt
and Abyssinia, Paris and Damascus, London and India caress you by the
way; churches stand aloof while the shops swell to emporiums. But all
this is nothing. Everything is mankind. Humanity stands and flies and
walks and rolls about--the poor, the priceless, the world-known and the
forgotten; child and grandfather, king and leman--the pageant of the
world goes by, set in a frame of stone and jewels, clothed in scarlet
and rags. Princes Street and the Elysian Fields, the Strand and the
Ringstrasse--these are the Ways of the World today.
* * * * *
New York and twilight, there where the Sixth Avenue "L" rises and leaps
above the tenements into the free air at 110th Street. It circles like a
bird with heaven and St. John's above and earth and the sweet green and
gold of the Park beneath. Beyond lie all the blue mists and mysteries of
distance; beneath, the city rushes and crawls. Behind echo all the roar
and war and care and maze of the wide city set in its sullen darkening
walls, flashing weird and crimson farewells. Out at the sides the stars
twinkle.
* * * * *
Again New York and Night and Harlem. A dark city of fifty thousand rises
like magic from the earth. Gone is the white world, the pale lips, the
lank hair; gone is the West and North--the East and South is here
triumphant. The street is crowd and leisure and laughter. Everywhere
black eyes, black and brown, and frizzled hair curled and sleek, and