The Souls of Black Folk
tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless
host. The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies
of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the
contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with
no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. As the time flew,
however, he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty demanded
for its attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment
gave him. The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign
of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and
perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him. And
why not? Had not votes made war and emancipated millions? Had not votes
enfranchised the freedmen? Was anything impossible to a power that had
done all this? A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote
themselves into the kingdom. So the decade flew away, the revolution of
1876 came, and left the half-free serf weary, wondering, but still
inspired. Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a new vision
began gradually to replace the dream of political power,—a powerful
movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, another
pillar of fire by night after a clouded day. It was the ideal of
“book-learning”; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know
and test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the
longing to know. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the
mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and
law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to
overlook life.
Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly;
only those who have watched and guided the faltering feet, the misty
minds, the dull understandings, of the dark pupils of these schools
know how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn. It was
weary work. The cold statistician wrote down the inches of progress
here and there, noted also where here and there a foot had slipped or
some one had fallen. To the tired climbers, the horizon was ever dark,
the mists were often cold, the Canaan was always dim and far away. If,
however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting-place, little
but flattery and criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for
reflection and self-examination; it changed the child of Emancipation
to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization,
self-respect. In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose
before him, and he saw himself,—darkly as through a veil; and yet he
saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He
began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he
must be himself, and not another. For the first time he sought to
analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of social
degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem. He felt
his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or
savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled
neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of
dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of his
ignorance,—not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of the
humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of
decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet. Nor was his burden
all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy, which two
centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped
upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but
also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white
adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home.
A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world,
but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social
problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and
his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is
darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow
prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defence of culture
against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime,
the “higher” against the “lower” races. To which the Negro cries Amen!
and swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on
just homage to civilization, culture, righteousness, and progress, he
humbly bows and meekly does obeisance. But before that nameless
prejudice that leaps beyond all this he stands helpless, dismayed, and
well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery, the
ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton
license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous
welcoming of the worse, the all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain
for everything black, from Toussaint to the devil,—before this there
rises a sickening despair that would disarm and discourage any nation
save that black host to whom “discouragement” is an unwritten word.
But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the
inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals
which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt
and hate. Whisperings and portents came home upon the four winds: Lo!
we are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our
voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and
serve? And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying:
Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher
culture for half-men? Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or
fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race! Nevertheless, out of the evil
came something of good,—the more careful adjustment of education to
real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes’ social
responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of
progress.
So dawned the time of _Sturm und Drang:_ storm and stress to-day rocks
our little boat on the mad waters of the world-sea; there is within and
without the sound of conflict, the burning of body and rending of soul;
inspiration strives with doubt, and faith with vain questionings. The
bright ideals of the past,—physical freedom, political power, the
training of brains and the training of hands,—all these in turn have
waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast. Are they
all wrong,—all false? No, not that, but each alone was over-simple and
incomplete,—the dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the fond
imaginings of the other world which does not know and does not want to
know our power. To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and
welded into one. The training of the schools we need to-day more than
ever,—the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all
the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds and pure hearts.
The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence,—else what shall
save us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still
seek,—the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the
freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty,—all these we need,
not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing
and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims
before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through
the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the
traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for
other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of
the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two
world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly
lack. We the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-handed:
there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the
Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true
American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the
American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in
all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in
a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be poorer if she
replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hearted but
determined Negro humility? or her coarse and cruel wit with loving
jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music with the soul of the Sorrow
Songs?
Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great
republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the
freedmen’s sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond
the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of an
historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers’ fathers,
and in the name of human opportunity.
And now what I have briefly sketched in large outline let me on coming
pages tell again in many ways, with loving emphasis and deeper detail,
that men may listen to the striving in the souls of black folk.
II.
Of the Dawn of Freedom
Careless seems the great Avenger;
History’s lessons but record
One death-grapple in the darkness
’Twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne;
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above His own.
LOWELL.
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the
color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in
Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase
of this problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who
marched South and North in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points,
of union and local autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as
we know, that the question of Negro slavery was the real cause of the
conflict. Curious it was, too, how this deeper question ever forced
itself to the surface despite effort and disclaimer. No sooner had
Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly
guised, sprang from the earth,—What shall be done with Negroes?
Peremptory military commands this way and that, could not answer the
query; the Emancipation Proclamation seemed but to broaden and
intensify the difficulties; and the War Amendments made the Negro
problems of to-day.
It is the aim of this essay to study the period of history from 1861 to
1872 so far as it relates to the American Negro. In effect, this tale
of the dawn of Freedom is an account of that government of men called
the Freedmen’s Bureau,—one of the most singular and interesting of the
attempts made by a great nation to grapple with vast problems of race
and social condition.
The war has naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, the President,
and the Nation; and yet no sooner had the armies, East and West,
penetrated Virginia and Tennessee than fugitive slaves appeared within
their lines. They came at night, when the flickering camp-fires shone
like vast unsteady stars along the black horizon: old men and thin,
with gray and tufted hair; women with frightened eyes, dragging
whimpering hungry children; men and girls, stalwart and gaunt,—a horde
of starving vagabonds, homeless, helpless, and pitiable, in their dark
distress. Two methods of treating these newcomers seemed equally
logical to opposite sorts of minds. Ben Butler, in Virginia, quickly
declared slave property contraband of war, and put the fugitives to
work; while Fremont, in Missouri, declared the slaves free under
martial law. Butler’s action was approved, but Fremont’s was hastily
countermanded, and his successor, Halleck, saw things differently.