The Souls of Black Folk
barriers,—barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last, in dangerous
moments, against everything that opposed even a whim.
The ten years that follow youth, the years when first the realization
comes that life is leading somewhere,—these were the years that passed
after I left my little school. When they were past, I came by chance
once more to the walls of Fisk University, to the halls of the chapel
of melody. As I lingered there in the joy and pain of meeting old
school-friends, there swept over me a sudden longing to pass again
beyond the blue hill, and to see the homes and the school of other
days, and to learn how life had gone with my school-children; and I
went.
Josie was dead, and the gray-haired mother said simply, “We’ve had a
heap of trouble since you’ve been away.” I had feared for Jim. With a
cultured parentage and a social caste to uphold him, he might have made
a venturesome merchant or a West Point cadet. But here he was, angry
with life and reckless; and when Fanner Durham charged him with
stealing wheat, the old man had to ride fast to escape the stones which
the furious fool hurled after him. They told Jim to run away; but he
would not run, and the constable came that afternoon. It grieved Josie,
and great awkward John walked nine miles every day to see his little
brother through the bars of Lebanon jail. At last the two came back
together in the dark night. The mother cooked supper, and Josie emptied
her purse, and the boys stole away. Josie grew thin and silent, yet
worked the more. The hill became steep for the quiet old father, and
with the boys away there was little to do in the valley. Josie helped
them to sell the old farm, and they moved nearer town. Brother Dennis,
the carpenter, built a new house with six rooms; Josie toiled a year in
Nashville, and brought back ninety dollars to furnish the house and
change it to a home.
When the spring came, and the birds twittered, and the stream ran proud
and full, little sister Lizzie, bold and thoughtless, flushed with the
passion of youth, bestowed herself on the tempter, and brought home a
nameless child. Josie shivered and worked on, with the vision of
schooldays all fled, with a face wan and tired,—worked until, on a
summer’s day, some one married another; then Josie crept to her mother
like a hurt child, and slept—and sleeps.
I paused to scent the breeze as I entered the valley. The Lawrences
have gone,—father and son forever,—and the other son lazily digs in the
earth to live. A new young widow rents out their cabin to fat Reuben.
Reuben is a Baptist preacher now, but I fear as lazy as ever, though
his cabin has three rooms; and little Ella has grown into a bouncing
woman, and is ploughing corn on the hot hillside. There are babies
a-plenty, and one half-witted girl. Across the valley is a house I did
not know before, and there I found, rocking one baby and expecting
another, one of my schoolgirls, a daughter of Uncle Bird Dowell. She
looked somewhat worried with her new duties, but soon bristled into
pride over her neat cabin and the tale of her thrifty husband, and the
horse and cow, and the farm they were planning to buy.
My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood Progress; and Progress,
I understand, is necessarily ugly. The crazy foundation stones still
marked the former site of my poor little cabin, and not far away, on
six weary boulders, perched a jaunty board house, perhaps twenty by
thirty feet, with three windows and a door that locked. Some of the
window-glass was broken, and part of an old iron stove lay mournfully
under the house. I peeped through the window half reverently, and found
things that were more familiar. The blackboard had grown by about two
feet, and the seats were still without backs. The county owns the lot
now, I hear, and every year there is a session of school. As I sat by
the spring and looked on the Old and the New I felt glad, very glad,
and yet—
After two long drinks I started on. There was the great double
log-house on the corner. I remembered the broken, blighted family that
used to live there. The strong, hard face of the mother, with its
wilderness of hair, rose before me. She had driven her husband away,
and while I taught school a strange man lived there, big and jovial,
and people talked. I felt sure that Ben and ’Tildy would come to naught
from such a home. But this is an odd world; for Ben is a busy farmer in
Smith County, “doing well, too,” they say, and he had cared for little
’Tildy until last spring, when a lover married her. A hard life the lad
had led, toiling for meat, and laughed at because he was homely and
crooked. There was Sam Carlon, an impudent old skinflint, who had
definite notions about “niggers,” and hired Ben a summer and would not
pay him. Then the hungry boy gathered his sacks together, and in broad
daylight went into Carlon’s corn; and when the hard-fisted farmer set
upon him, the angry boy flew at him like a beast. Doc Burke saved a
murder and a lynching that day.
The story reminded me again of the Burkes, and an impatience seized me
to know who won in the battle, Doc or the seventy-five acres. For it is
a hard thing to make a farm out of nothing, even in fifteen years. So I
hurried on, thinking of the Burkes. They used to have a certain
magnificent barbarism about them that I liked. They were never vulgar,
never immoral, but rather rough and primitive, with an
unconventionality that spent itself in loud guffaws, slaps on the back,
and naps in the corner. I hurried by the cottage of the misborn Neill
boys. It was empty, and they were grown into fat, lazy farm-hands. I
saw the home of the Hickmans, but Albert, with his stooping shoulders,
had passed from the world. Then I came to the Burkes’ gate and peered
through; the enclosure looked rough and untrimmed, and yet there were
the same fences around the old farm save to the left, where lay
twenty-five other acres. And lo! the cabin in the hollow had climbed
the hill and swollen to a half-finished six-room cottage.
The Burkes held a hundred acres, but they were still in debt. Indeed,
the gaunt father who toiled night and day would scarcely be happy out
of debt, being so used to it. Some day he must stop, for his massive
frame is showing decline. The mother wore shoes, but the lion-like
physique of other days was broken. The children had grown up. Rob, the
image of his father, was loud and rough with laughter. Birdie, my
school baby of six, had grown to a picture of maiden beauty, tall and
tawny. “Edgar is gone,” said the mother, with head half bowed,—“gone to
work in Nashville; he and his father couldn’t agree.”
Little Doc, the boy born since the time of my school, took me horseback
down the creek next morning toward Farmer Dowell’s. The road and the
stream were battling for mastery, and the stream had the better of it.
We splashed and waded, and the merry boy, perched behind me, chattered
and laughed. He showed me where Simon Thompson had bought a bit of
ground and a home; but his daughter Lana, a plump, brown, slow girl,
was not there. She had married a man and a farm twenty miles away. We
wound on down the stream till we came to a gate that I did not
recognize, but the boy insisted that it was “Uncle Bird’s.” The farm
was fat with the growing crop. In that little valley was a strange
stillness as I rode up; for death and marriage had stolen youth and
left age and childhood there. We sat and talked that night after the
chores were done. Uncle Bird was grayer, and his eyes did not see so
well, but he was still jovial. We talked of the acres bought,—one
hundred and twenty-five,—of the new guest-chamber added, of Martha’s
marrying. Then we talked of death: Fanny and Fred were gone; a shadow
hung over the other daughter, and when it lifted she was to go to
Nashville to school. At last we spoke of the neighbors, and as night
fell, Uncle Bird told me how, on a night like that, ’Thenie came
wandering back to her home over yonder, to escape the blows of her
husband. And next morning she died in the home that her little
bow-legged brother, working and saving, had bought for their widowed
mother.
My journey was done, and behind me lay hill and dale, and Life and
Death. How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie
lies? How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat? How
hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all
this life and love and strife and failure,—is it the twilight of
nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?
Thus sadly musing, I rode to Nashville in the Jim Crow car.
V.
Of the Wings of Atalanta
O black boy of Atlanta!
But half was spoken;
The slave’s chains and the master’s
Alike are broken;
The one curse of the races
Held both in tether;
They are rising—all are rising—
The black and white together.
WHITTIER.
South of the North, yet north of the South, lies the City of a Hundred
Hills, peering out from the shadows of the past into the promise of the
future. I have seen her in the morning, when the first flush of day had
half-roused her; she lay gray and still on the crimson soil of Georgia;
then the blue smoke began to curl from her chimneys, the tinkle of bell
and scream of whistle broke the silence, the rattle and roar of busy
life slowly gathered and swelled, until the seething whirl of the city
seemed a strange thing in a sleepy land.
Once, they say, even Atlanta slept dull and drowsy at the foot-hills of
the Alleghanies, until the iron baptism of war awakened her with its
sullen waters, aroused and maddened her, and left her listening to the
sea. And the sea cried to the hills and the hills answered the sea,
till the city rose like a widow and cast away her weeds, and toiled for
her daily bread; toiled steadily, toiled cunningly,—perhaps with some
bitterness, with a touch, of _réclame_,—and yet with real earnestness,
and real sweat.
It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream; to
see the wide vision of empire fade into real ashes and dirt; to feel
the pang of the conquered, and yet know that with all the Bad that fell
on one black day, something was vanquished that deserved to live,
something killed that in justice had not dared to die; to know that
with the Right that triumphed, triumphed something of Wrong, something
sordid and mean, something less than the broadest and best. All this is
bitter hard; and many a man and city and people have found in it excuse
for sulking, and brooding, and listless waiting.
Such are not men of the sturdier make; they of Atlanta turned
resolutely toward the future; and that future held aloft vistas of
purple and gold:—Atlanta, Queen of the cotton kingdom; Atlanta, Gateway
to the Land of the Sun; Atlanta, the new Lachesis, spinner of web and
woof for the world. So the city crowned her hundred hills with
factories, and stored her shops with cunning handiwork, and stretched
long iron ways to greet the busy Mercury in his coming. And the Nation
talked of her striving.
Perhaps Atlanta was not christened for the winged maiden of dull
Boeotia; you know the tale,—how swarthy Atalanta, tall and wild, would
marry only him who out-raced her; and how the wily Hippomenes laid
three apples of gold in the way. She fled like a shadow, paused,
startled over the first apple, but even as he stretched his hand, fled
again; hovered over the second, then, slipping from his hot grasp, flew
over river, vale, and hill; but as she lingered over the third, his
arms fell round her, and looking on each other, the blazing passion of
their love profaned the sanctuary of Love, and they were cursed. If
Atlanta be not named for Atalanta, she ought to have been.