The Souls of Black Folk
then, thinking to shield his mother from the blow, started to meet his
sister as she came from work and break the news of his dismissal to
her. “I’ll go away,” he said slowly; “I’ll go away and find work, and
send for them. I cannot live here longer.” And then the fierce, buried
anger surged up into his throat. He waved his arms and hurried wildly
up the path.
The great brown sea lay silent. The air scarce breathed. The dying day
bathed the twisted oaks and mighty pines in black and gold. There came
from the wind no warning, not a whisper from the cloudless sky. There
was only a black man hurrying on with an ache in his heart, seeing
neither sun nor sea, but starting as from a dream at the frightened cry
that woke the pines, to see his dark sister struggling in the arms of a
tall and fair-haired man.
He said not a word, but, seizing a fallen limb, struck him with all the
pent-up hatred of his great black arm, and the body lay white and still
beneath the pines, all bathed in sunshine and in blood. John looked at
it dreamily, then walked back to the house briskly, and said in a soft
voice, “Mammy, I’m going away—I’m going to be free.”
She gazed at him dimly and faltered, “No’th, honey, is yo’ gwine No’th
agin?”
He looked out where the North Star glistened pale above the waters, and
said, “Yes, mammy, I’m going—North.”
Then, without another word, he went out into the narrow lane, up by the
straight pines, to the same winding path, and seated himself on the
great black stump, looking at the blood where the body had lain. Yonder
in the gray past he had played with that dead boy, romping together
under the solemn trees. The night deepened; he thought of the boys at
Johnstown. He wondered how Brown had turned out, and Carey? And
Jones,—Jones? Why, he was Jones, and he wondered what they would all
say when they knew, when they knew, in that great long dining-room with
its hundreds of merry eyes. Then as the sheen of the starlight stole
over him, he thought of the gilded ceiling of that vast concert hall,
heard stealing toward him the faint sweet music of the swan. Hark! was
it music, or the hurry and shouting of men? Yes, surely! Clear and high
the faint sweet melody rose and fluttered like a living thing, so that
the very earth trembled as with the tramp of horses and murmur of angry
men.
He leaned back and smiled toward the sea, whence rose the strange
melody, away from the dark shadows where lay the noise of horses
galloping, galloping on. With an effort he roused himself, bent
forward, and looked steadily down the pathway, softly humming the “Song
of the Bride,”—
“Freudig geführt, ziehet dahin.”
Amid the trees in the dim morning twilight he watched their shadows
dancing and heard their horses thundering toward him, until at last
they came sweeping like a storm, and he saw in front that haggard
white-haired man, whose eyes flashed red with fury. Oh, how he pitied
him,—pitied him,—and wondered if he had the coiling twisted rope. Then,
as the storm burst round him, he rose slowly to his feet and turned his
closed eyes toward the Sea.
And the world whistled in his ears.
XIV.
Of the Sorrow Songs
I walk through the churchyard
To lay this body down;
I know moon-rise, I know star-rise;
I walk in the moonlight, I walk in the starlight;
I’ll lie in the grave and stretch out my arms,
I’ll go to judgment in the evening of the day,
And my soul and thy soul shall meet that day,
When I lay this body down.
NEGRO SONG.
They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days—Sorrow
Songs—for they were weary at heart. And so before each thought that I
have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these
weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men. Ever
since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely. They came
out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them
as of me and of mine. Then in after years when I came to Nashville I
saw the great temple builded of these songs towering over the pale
city. To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and
its bricks were red with the blood and dust of toil. Out of them rose
for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of
the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past.
Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God
himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has
expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so
by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the
slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the
most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas.
It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above
all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but
notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of
the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.
Away back in the thirties the melody of these slave songs stirred the
nation, but the songs were soon half forgotten. Some, like “Near the
lake where drooped the willow,” passed into current airs and their
source was forgotten; others were caricatured on the “minstrel” stage
and their memory died away. Then in war-time came the singular Port
Royal experiment after the capture of Hilton Head, and perhaps for the
first time the North met the Southern slave face to face and heart to
heart with no third witness. The Sea Islands of the Carolinas, where
they met, were filled with a black folk of primitive type, touched and
moulded less by the world about them than any others outside the Black
Belt. Their appearance was uncouth, their language funny, but their
hearts were human and their singing stirred men with a mighty power.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson hastened to tell of these songs, and Miss
McKim and others urged upon the world their rare beauty. But the world
listened only half credulously until the Fisk Jubilee Singers sang the
slave songs so deeply into the world’s heart that it can never wholly
forget them again.
There was once a blacksmith’s son born at Cadiz, New York, who in the
changes of time taught school in Ohio and helped defend Cincinnati from
Kirby Smith. Then he fought at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and
finally served in the Freedmen’s Bureau at Nashville. Here he formed a
Sunday-school class of black children in 1866, and sang with them and
taught them to sing. And then they taught him to sing, and when once
the glory of the Jubilee songs passed into the soul of George L. White,
he knew his life-work was to let those Negroes sing to the world as
they had sung to him. So in 1871 the pilgrimage of the Fisk Jubilee
Singers began. North to Cincinnati they rode,—four half-clothed black
boys and five girl-women,—led by a man with a cause and a purpose. They
stopped at Wilberforce, the oldest of Negro schools, where a black
bishop blessed them. Then they went, fighting cold and starvation, shut
out of hotels, and cheerfully sneered at, ever northward; and ever the
magic of their song kept thrilling hearts, until a burst of applause in
the Congregational Council at Oberlin revealed them to the world. They
came to New York and Henry Ward Beecher dared to welcome them, even
though the metropolitan dailies sneered at his “Nigger Minstrels.” So
their songs conquered till they sang across the land and across the
sea, before Queen and Kaiser, in Scotland and Ireland, Holland and
Switzerland. Seven years they sang, and brought back a hundred and
fifty thousand dollars to found Fisk University.
Since their day they have been imitated—sometimes well, by the singers
of Hampton and Atlanta, sometimes ill, by straggling quartettes.
Caricature has sought again to spoil the quaint beauty of the music,
and has filled the air with many debased melodies which vulgar ears
scarce know from the real. But the true Negro folk-song still lives in
the hearts of those who have heard them truly sung and in the hearts of
the Negro people.
What are these songs, and what do they mean? I know little of music and
can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and
knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the
slave to the world. They tell us in these eager days that life was
joyous to the black slave, careless and happy. I can easily believe
this of some, of many. But not all the past South, though it rose from
the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching witness of these songs. They
are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment;
they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer
world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.
The songs are indeed the siftings of centuries; the music is far more
ancient than the words, and in it we can trace here and there signs of
development. My grandfather’s grandmother was seized by an evil Dutch
trader two centuries ago; and coming to the valleys of the Hudson and
Housatonic, black, little, and lithe, she shivered and shrank in the
harsh north winds, looked longingly at the hills, and often crooned a
heathen melody to the child between her knees, thus:
The child sang it to his children and they to their children’s
children, and so two hundred years it has travelled down to us and we
sing it to our children, knowing as little as our fathers what its
words may mean, but knowing well the meaning of its music.
This was primitive African music; it may be seen in larger form in the
strange chant which heralds “The Coming of John”:
“You may bury me in the East,
You may bury me in the West,
But I’ll hear the trumpet sound in that morning,”
—the voice of exile.
Ten master songs, more or less, one may pluck from the forest of
melody-songs of undoubted Negro origin and wide popular currency, and
songs peculiarly characteristic of the slave. One of these I have just
mentioned. Another whose strains begin this book is “Nobody knows the
trouble I’ve seen.” When, struck with a sudden poverty, the United
States refused to fulfill its promises of land to the freedmen, a
brigadier-general went down to the Sea Islands to carry the news. An
old woman on the outskirts of the throng began singing this song; all
the mass joined with her, swaying. And the soldier wept.
The third song is the cradle-song of death which all men know,—“Swing
low, sweet chariot,”—whose bars begin the life story of “Alexander
Crummell.” Then there is the song of many waters, “Roll, Jordan, roll,”
a mighty chorus with minor cadences. There were many songs of the
fugitive like that which opens “The Wings of Atalanta,” and the more
familiar “Been a-listening.” The seventh is the song of the End and the
Beginning—“My Lord, what a mourning! when the stars begin to fall”; a
strain of this is placed before “The Dawn of Freedom.” The song of
groping—“My way’s cloudy”—begins “The Meaning of Progress”; the ninth
is the song of this chapter—“Wrestlin’ Jacob, the day is a-breaking,”—a
paean of hopeful strife. The last master song is the song of
songs—“Steal away,”—sprung from “The Faith of the Fathers.”
There are many others of the Negro folk-songs as striking and
characteristic as these, as, for instance, the three strains in the
third, eighth, and ninth chapters; and others I am sure could easily
make a selection on more scientific principles. There are, too, songs
that seem to be a step removed from the more primitive types: there is
the maze-like medley, “Bright sparkles,” one phrase of which heads “The
Black Belt”; the Easter carol, “Dust, dust and ashes”; the dirge, “My
mother’s took her flight and gone home”; and that burst of melody