The Souls of Black Folk
worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in
this period of the slave’s ethical growth. Here it was that the Home
was ruined under the very shadow of the Church, white and black; here
habits of shiftlessness took root, and sullen hopelessness replaced
hopeful strife.
With the beginning of the abolition movement and the gradual growth of
a class of free Negroes came a change. We often neglect the influence
of the freedman before the war, because of the paucity of his numbers
and the small weight he had in the history of the nation. But we must
not forget that his chief influence was internal,—was exerted on the
black world; and that there he was the ethical and social leader.
Huddled as he was in a few centres like Philadelphia, New York, and New
Orleans, the masses of the freedmen sank into poverty and listlessness;
but not all of them. The free Negro leader early arose and his chief
characteristic was intense earnestness and deep feeling on the slavery
question. Freedom became to him a real thing and not a dream. His
religion became darker and more intense, and into his ethics crept a
note of revenge, into his songs a day of reckoning close at hand. The
“Coming of the Lord” swept this side of Death, and came to be a thing
to be hoped for in this day. Through fugitive slaves and irrepressible
discussion this desire for freedom seized the black millions still in
bondage, and became their one ideal of life. The black bards caught new
notes, and sometimes even dared to sing,—
“O Freedom, O Freedom, O Freedom over me!
Before I’ll be a slave
I’ll be buried in my grave,
And go home to my Lord
And be free.”
For fifty years Negro religion thus transformed itself and identified
itself with the dream of Abolition, until that which was a radical fad
in the white North and an anarchistic plot in the white South had
become a religion to the black world. Thus, when Emancipation finally
came, it seemed to the freedman a literal Coming of the Lord. His
fervid imagination was stirred as never before, by the tramp of armies,
the blood and dust of battle, and the wail and whirl of social
upheaval. He stood dumb and motionless before the whirlwind: what had
he to do with it? Was it not the Lord’s doing, and marvellous in his
eyes? Joyed and bewildered with what came, he stood awaiting new
wonders till the inevitable Age of Reaction swept over the nation and
brought the crisis of to-day.
It is difficult to explain clearly the present critical stage of Negro
religion. First, we must remember that living as the blacks do in close
contact with a great modern nation, and sharing, although imperfectly,
the soul-life of that nation, they must necessarily be affected more or
less directly by all the religious and ethical forces that are to-day
moving the United States. These questions and movements are, however,
overshadowed and dwarfed by the (to them) all-important question of
their civil, political, and economic status. They must perpetually
discuss the “Negro Problem,”—must live, move, and have their being in
it, and interpret all else in its light or darkness. With this come,
too, peculiar problems of their inner life,—of the status of women, the
maintenance of Home, the training of children, the accumulation of
wealth, and the prevention of crime. All this must mean a time of
intense ethical ferment, of religious heart-searching and intellectual
unrest. From the double life every American Negro must live, as a Negro
and as an American, as swept on by the current of the nineteenth while
yet struggling in the eddies of the fifteenth century,—from this must
arise a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid sense of
personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence.
The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and
changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and
this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of
doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts,
double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double
words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or revolt, to
hypocrisy or radicalism.
In some such doubtful words and phrases can one perhaps most clearly
picture the peculiar ethical paradox that faces the Negro of to-day and
is tingeing and changing his religious life. Feeling that his rights
and his dearest ideals are being trampled upon, that the public
conscience is ever more deaf to his righteous appeal, and that all the
reactionary forces of prejudice, greed, and revenge are daily gaining
new strength and fresh allies, the Negro faces no enviable dilemma.
Conscious of his impotence, and pessimistic, he often becomes bitter
and vindictive; and his religion, instead of a worship, is a complaint
and a curse, a wail rather than a hope, a sneer rather than a faith. On
the other hand, another type of mind, shrewder and keener and more
tortuous too, sees in the very strength of the anti-Negro movement its
patent weaknesses, and with Jesuitic casuistry is deterred by no
ethical considerations in the endeavor to turn this weakness to the
black man’s strength. Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable
streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in
anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy. The one type of Negro stands
almost ready to curse God and die, and the other is too often found a
traitor to right and a coward before force; the one is wedded to ideals
remote, whimsical, perhaps impossible of realization; the other forgets
that life is more than meat and the body more than raiment. But, after
all, is not this simply the writhing of the age translated into
black,—the triumph of the Lie which today, with its false culture,
faces the hideousness of the anarchist assassin?
To-day the two groups of Negroes, the one in the North, the other in
the South, represent these divergent ethical tendencies, the first
tending toward radicalism, the other toward hypocritical compromise. It
is no idle regret with which the white South mourns the loss of the
old-time Negro,—the frank, honest, simple old servant who stood for the
earlier religious age of submission and humility. With all his laziness
and lack of many elements of true manhood, he was at least
open-hearted, faithful, and sincere. To-day he is gone, but who is to
blame for his going? Is it not those very persons who mourn for him? Is
it not the tendency, born of Reconstruction and Reaction, to found a
society on lawlessness and deception, to tamper with the moral fibre of
a naturally honest and straightforward people until the whites threaten
to become ungovernable tyrants and the blacks criminals and hypocrites?
Deception is the natural defence of the weak against the strong, and
the South used it for many years against its conquerors; to-day it must
be prepared to see its black proletariat turn that same two-edged
weapon against itself. And how natural this is! The death of Denmark
Vesey and Nat Turner proved long since to the Negro the present
hopelessness of physical defence. Political defence is becoming less
and less available, and economic defence is still only partially
effective. But there is a patent defence at hand,—the defence of
deception and flattery, of cajoling and lying. It is the same defence
which peasants of the Middle Age used and which left its stamp on their
character for centuries. To-day the young Negro of the South who would
succeed cannot be frank and outspoken, honest and self-assertive, but
rather he is daily tempted to be silent and wary, politic and sly; he
must flatter and be pleasant, endure petty insults with a smile, shut
his eyes to wrong; in too many cases he sees positive personal
advantage in deception and lying. His real thoughts, his real
aspirations, must be guarded in whispers; he must not criticise, he
must not complain. Patience, humility, and adroitness must, in these
growing black youth, replace impulse, manliness, and courage. With this
sacrifice there is an economic opening, and perhaps peace and some
prosperity. Without this there is riot, migration, or crime. Nor is
this situation peculiar to the Southern United States, is it not rather
the only method by which undeveloped races have gained the right to
share modern culture? The price of culture is a Lie.
On the other hand, in the North the tendency is to emphasize the
radicalism of the Negro. Driven from his birthright in the South by a
situation at which every fibre of his more outspoken and assertive
nature revolts, he finds himself in a land where he can scarcely earn a
decent living amid the harsh competition and the color discrimination.
At the same time, through schools and periodicals, discussions and
lectures, he is intellectually quickened and awakened. The soul, long
pent up and dwarfed, suddenly expands in new-found freedom. What wonder
that every tendency is to excess,—radical complaint, radical remedies,
bitter denunciation or angry silence. Some sink, some rise. The
criminal and the sensualist leave the church for the gambling-hell and
the brothel, and fill the slums of Chicago and Baltimore; the better
classes segregate themselves from the group-life of both white and
black, and form an aristocracy, cultured but pessimistic, whose bitter
criticism stings while it points out no way of escape. They despise the
submission and subserviency of the Southern Negroes, but offer no other
means by which a poor and oppressed minority can exist side by side
with its masters. Feeling deeply and keenly the tendencies and
opportunities of the age in which they live, their souls are bitter at
the fate which drops the Veil between; and the very fact that this
bitterness is natural and justifiable only serves to intensify it and
make it more maddening.
Between the two extreme types of ethical attitude which I have thus
sought to make clear wavers the mass of the millions of Negroes, North
and South; and their religious life and activity partake of this social
conflict within their ranks. Their churches are differentiating,—now
into groups of cold, fashionable devotees, in no way distinguishable
from similar white groups save in color of skin; now into large social
and business institutions catering to the desire for information and
amusement of their members, warily avoiding unpleasant questions both
within and without the black world, and preaching in effect if not in
word: _Dum vivimus, vivamus_.
But back of this still broods silently the deep religious feeling of
the real Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might of powerful human
souls who have lost the guiding star of the past and seek in the great
night a new religious ideal. Some day the Awakening will come, when the
pent-up vigor of ten million souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the
Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes
life worth living—Liberty, Justice, and Right—is marked “For White
People Only.”
XI.
Of the Passing of the First-Born
O sister, sister, thy first-begotten,
The hands that cling and the feet that follow,
The voice of the child’s blood crying yet,
_Who hath remembered me? who hath forgotten?_
Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow,
But the world shall end when I forget.
SWINBURNE.
“Unto you a child is born,” sang the bit of yellow paper that fluttered
into my room one brown October morning. Then the fear of fatherhood
mingled wildly with the joy of creation; I wondered how it looked and
how it felt—what were its eyes, and how its hair curled and crumpled
itself. And I thought in awe of her,—she who had slept with Death to
tear a man-child from underneath her heart, while I was unconsciously