The Souls of Black Folk
Instinctively I bowed before this man, as one bows before the prophets
of the world. Some seer he seemed, that came not from the crimson Past
or the gray To-come, but from the pulsing Now,—that mocking world which
seemed to me at once so light and dark, so splendid and sordid.
Fourscore years had he wandered in this same world of mine, within the
Veil.
He was born with the Missouri Compromise and lay a-dying amid the
echoes of Manila and El Caney: stirring times for living, times dark to
look back upon, darker to look forward to. The black-faced lad that
paused over his mud and marbles seventy years ago saw puzzling vistas
as he looked down the world. The slave-ship still groaned across the
Atlantic, faint cries burdened the Southern breeze, and the great black
father whispered mad tales of cruelty into those young ears. From the
low doorway the mother silently watched her boy at play, and at
nightfall sought him eagerly lest the shadows bear him away to the land
of slaves.
So his young mind worked and winced and shaped curiously a vision of
Life; and in the midst of that vision ever stood one dark figure
alone,—ever with the hard, thick countenance of that bitter father, and
a form that fell in vast and shapeless folds. Thus the temptation of
Hate grew and shadowed the growing child,—gliding stealthily into his
laughter, fading into his play, and seizing his dreams by day and night
with rough, rude turbulence. So the black boy asked of sky and sun and
flower the never-answered Why? and loved, as he grew, neither the world
nor the world’s rough ways.
Strange temptation for a child, you may think; and yet in this wide
land to-day a thousand thousand dark children brood before this same
temptation, and feel its cold and shuddering arms. For them, perhaps,
some one will some day lift the Veil,—will come tenderly and cheerily
into those sad little lives and brush the brooding hate away, just as
Beriah Green strode in upon the life of Alexander Crummell. And before
the bluff, kind-hearted man the shadow seemed less dark. Beriah Green
had a school in Oneida County, New York, with a score of mischievous
boys. “I’m going to bring a black boy here to educate,” said Beriah
Green, as only a crank and an abolitionist would have dared to say.
“Oho!” laughed the boys. “Ye-es,” said his wife; and Alexander came.
Once before, the black boy had sought a school, had travelled, cold and
hungry, four hundred miles up into free New Hampshire, to Canaan. But
the godly farmers hitched ninety yoke of oxen to the abolition
schoolhouse and dragged it into the middle of the swamp. The black boy
trudged away.
The nineteenth was the first century of human sympathy,—the age when
half wonderingly we began to descry in others that transfigured spark
of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhoppers and peasants, and
tramps and thieves, and millionaires and—sometimes—Negroes, became
throbbing souls whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we
half gasped with surprise, crying, “Thou too! Hast Thou seen Sorrow and
the dull waters of Hopelessness? Hast Thou known Life?” And then all
helplessly we peered into those Other-worlds, and wailed, “O World of
Worlds, how shall man make you one?”
So in that little Oneida school there came to those schoolboys a
revelation of thought and longing beneath one black skin, of which they
had not dreamed before. And to the lonely boy came a new dawn of
sympathy and inspiration. The shadowy, formless thing—the temptation of
Hate, that hovered between him and the world—grew fainter and less
sinister. It did not wholly fade away, but diffused itself and lingered
thick at the edges. Through it the child now first saw the blue and
gold of life,—the sun-swept road that ran ’twixt heaven and earth until
in one far-off wan wavering line they met and kissed. A vision of life
came to the growing boy,—mystic, wonderful. He raised his head,
stretched himself, breathed deep of the fresh new air. Yonder, behind
the forests, he heard strange sounds; then glinting through the trees
he saw, far, far away, the bronzed hosts of a nation calling,—calling
faintly, calling loudly. He heard the hateful clank of their chains; he
felt them cringe and grovel, and there rose within him a protest and a
prophecy. And he girded himself to walk down the world.
A voice and vision called him to be a priest,—a seer to lead the
uncalled out of the house of bondage. He saw the headless host turn
toward him like the whirling of mad waters,—he stretched forth his
hands eagerly, and then, even as he stretched them, suddenly there
swept across the vision the temptation of Despair.
They were not wicked men,—the problem of life is not the problem of the
wicked,—they were calm, good men, Bishops of the Apostolic Church of
God, and strove toward righteousness. They said slowly, “It is all very
natural—it is even commendable; but the General Theological Seminary of
the Episcopal Church cannot admit a Negro.” And when that thin,
half-grotesque figure still haunted their doors, they put their hands
kindly, half sorrowfully, on his shoulders, and said, “Now,—of course,
we—we know how _you_ feel about it; but you see it is impossible,—that
is—well—it is premature. Sometime, we trust—sincerely trust—all such
distinctions will fade away; but now the world is as it is.”
This was the temptation of Despair; and the young man fought it
doggedly. Like some grave shadow he flitted by those halls, pleading,
arguing, half angrily demanding admittance, until there came the final
_No;_ until men hustled the disturber away, marked him as foolish,
unreasonable, and injudicious, a vain rebel against God’s law. And then
from that Vision Splendid all the glory faded slowly away, and left an
earth gray and stern rolling on beneath a dark despair. Even the kind
hands that stretched themselves toward him from out the depths of that
dull morning seemed but parts of the purple shadows. He saw them
coldly, and asked, “Why should I strive by special grace when the way
of the world is closed to me?” All gently yet, the hands urged him
on,—the hands of young John Jay, that daring father’s daring son; the
hands of the good folk of Boston, that free city. And yet, with a way
to the priesthood of the Church open at last before him, the cloud
lingered there; and even when in old St. Paul’s the venerable Bishop
raised his white arms above the Negro deacon—even then the burden had
not lifted from that heart, for there had passed a glory from the
earth.
And yet the fire through which Alexander Crummell went did not burn in
vain. Slowly and more soberly he took up again his plan of life. More
critically he studied the situation. Deep down below the slavery and
servitude of the Negro people he saw their fatal weaknesses, which long
years of mistreatment had emphasized. The dearth of strong moral
character, of unbending righteousness, he felt, was their great
shortcoming, and here he would begin. He would gather the best of his
people into some little Episcopal chapel and there lead, teach, and
inspire them, till the leaven spread, till the children grew, till the
world hearkened, till—till—and then across his dream gleamed some faint
after-glow of that first fair vision of youth—only an after-glow, for
there had passed a glory from the earth.
One day—it was in 1842, and the springtide was struggling merrily with
the May winds of New England—he stood at last in his own chapel in
Providence, a priest of the Church. The days sped by, and the dark
young clergyman labored; he wrote his sermons carefully; he intoned his
prayers with a soft, earnest voice; he haunted the streets and accosted
the wayfarers; he visited the sick, and knelt beside the dying. He
worked and toiled, week by week, day by day, month by month. And yet
month by month the congregation dwindled, week by week the hollow walls
echoed more sharply, day by day the calls came fewer and fewer, and day
by day the third temptation sat clearer and still more clearly within
the Veil; a temptation, as it were, bland and smiling, with just a
shade of mockery in its smooth tones. First it came casually, in the
cadence of a voice: “Oh, colored folks? Yes.” Or perhaps more
definitely: “What do you _expect?_” In voice and gesture lay the
doubt—the temptation of Doubt. How he hated it, and stormed at it
furiously! “Of course they are capable,” he cried; “of course they can
learn and strive and achieve—” and “Of course,” added the temptation
softly, “they do nothing of the sort.” Of all the three temptations,
this one struck the deepest. Hate? He had outgrown so childish a thing.
Despair? He had steeled his right arm against it, and fought it with
the vigor of determination. But to doubt the worth of his life-work,—to
doubt the destiny and capability of the race his soul loved because it
was his; to find listless squalor instead of eager endeavor; to hear
his own lips whispering, “They do not care; they cannot know; they are
dumb driven cattle,—why cast your pearls before swine?”—this, this
seemed more than man could bear; and he closed the door, and sank upon
the steps of the chancel, and cast his robe upon the floor and writhed.
The evening sunbeams had set the dust to dancing in the gloomy chapel
when he arose. He folded his vestments, put away the hymn-books, and
closed the great Bible. He stepped out into the twilight, looked back
upon the narrow little pulpit with a weary smile, and locked the door.
Then he walked briskly to the Bishop, and told the Bishop what the
Bishop already knew. “I have failed,” he said simply. And gaining
courage by the confession, he added: “What I need is a larger
constituency. There are comparatively few Negroes here, and perhaps
they are not of the best. I must go where the field is wider, and try
again.” So the Bishop sent him to Philadelphia, with a letter to Bishop
Onderdonk.
Bishop Onderdonk lived at the head of six white steps,—corpulent,
red-faced, and the author of several thrilling tracts on Apostolic
Succession. It was after dinner, and the Bishop had settled himself for
a pleasant season of contemplation, when the bell must needs ring, and
there must burst in upon the Bishop a letter and a thin, ungainly
Negro. Bishop Onderdonk read the letter hastily and frowned.
Fortunately, his mind was already clear on this point; and he cleared
his brow and looked at Crummell. Then he said, slowly and impressively:
“I will receive you into this diocese on one condition: no Negro priest
can sit in my church convention, and no Negro church must ask for
representation there.”
I sometimes fancy I can see that tableau: the frail black figure,
nervously twitching his hat before the massive abdomen of Bishop
Onderdonk; his threadbare coat thrown against the dark woodwork of the
bookcases, where Fox’s “Lives of the Martyrs” nestled happily beside
“The Whole Duty of Man.” I seem to see the wide eyes of the Negro
wander past the Bishop’s broadcloth to where the swinging glass doors
of the cabinet glow in the sunlight. A little blue fly is trying to
cross the yawning keyhole. He marches briskly up to it, peers into the
chasm in a surprised sort of way, and rubs his feelers reflectively;
then he essays its depths, and, finding it bottomless, draws back
again. The dark-faced priest finds himself wondering if the fly too has
faced its Valley of Humiliation, and if it will plunge into it,—when
lo! it spreads its tiny wings and buzzes merrily across, leaving the
watcher wingless and alone.
Then the full weight of his burden fell upon him. The rich walls
wheeled away, and before him lay the cold rough moor winding on through
life, cut in twain by one thick granite ridge,—here, the Valley of
Humiliation; yonder, the Valley of the Shadow of Death. And I know not