Part 11

Besides, the portrayal of Negro characteristics was by no means the main object of the story, which was rather meant, I judge, to be a thumb nail sketch containing a psychological study of a morbidly sensitive conscience hectoring over a weak and vacillating will and fevered into increased despotism by reading into its own life and consciousness the analyses and terrible retributions of fiction,—a product of the Puritan’s uncompromising sense of “_right though the heavens fall_,” irritated and kept sore by being unequally yoked with indecision and cowardice. Of such strokes Mr. Howells is undoubtedly master. It is true there is little point and no force of character about the beautiful and irresponsible young heroine; but as that is an attainment of so many of Mr. Howells’ models, it is perhaps not to be considered as illustrating any racial characteristics. I cannot help sharing, however, the indignation of those who resent the picture in the colored church,—“evidently,” Mr. Howells assures us, “representing _the best colored society_”; where the horrified young prig, Rhoda Aldgate, meets nothing but the frog-like countenances and cat-fish mouths, the musky exhalations and the “bress de Lawd, Honey,” of an uncultivated people. It is just here that Mr. Howells fails—and fails because he gives only a half truth, and that a partisan half truth. One feels that he had no business to attempt a subject of which he knew so little, or for which he cared so little. There is one thing I would like to say to my white fellow countrymen, and especially to those who dabble in ink and affect to discuss the Negro; and yet I hesitate because I feel it is a fact which persons of the finer sensibilities and more delicate perceptions must know instinctively: namely, that it is an insult to humanity and a sin against God to publish any such sweeping generalizations of a race on such meager and superficial information. We meet it at every turn—this obtrusive and offensive vulgarity, this gratuitous sizing up of the Negro and conclusively writing down his equation, sometimes even among his ardent friends and bravest defenders. Were I not afraid of falling myself into the same error that I am condemning, I would say it seems an _Anglo-Saxon characteristic_ to have such overweening confidence in his own power of induction that there is no equation which he would acknowledge to be indeterminate, however many unknown quantities it may possess.

Here is an extract from Dr. Mayo, a thoroughly earnest man and sincerely friendly, as I believe, to the colored people.

“Among these women are as many grades of native, intellectual, moral and executive force as among the white people. The plantations of the Gulf, the Atlantic coast and the Mississippi bottoms swarm with negro women who seem hardly lifted above the brutes. I know a group of young colored women, many of them accomplished teachers, who bear themselves as gently and with as varied womanly charms as any score of ladies in the land. The one abyss of perdition _to this class_ is the slough of unchastity in which, _as a race_ they still flounder, half conscious that it is a slough—the double inheritance of savage Africa and slavery.”

Now there may be one side of a truth here, yet who but a self-confident Anglo-Saxon would dare make such a broad unblushing statement about a people _as a race_? Some developments brought to light recently through the scientific Christianity and investigating curiosity of Dr. Parkhurst may lead one to suspect the need of missionary teaching to “elevate” the white race; and yet I have too much respect for the autonomy of races, too much reverence for the collective view of God’s handiwork to speak of any such condition, however general, as characterizing _the race_. The colored people do not object to the adequate and truthful portrayal of types of their race in whatever degree of the scale of civilization, or of social and moral development, is consonant with actual facts or possibilities. As Mr. Howells himself says, “A man can be anything along the vast range from angel to devil, and without living either the good thing or the bad thing in which his fancy dramatizes him, he can perceive it”—and I would add, can appreciate and even enjoy its delineation by the artist. The average Englishman takes no exception to the humorous caricatures of Dickens or to the satires and cynicisms of Thackeray. The Quilps and the Bernsteins are but strongly developed negatives of our universal human nature on the dark side. We recognize them as genre sketches,—and with the Agneses and Esthers and Aunt Lamberts as foils and correctives, we can appreciate them accordingly: while we do not believe ourselves to be the original of the portrait, there is enough sympathy and fellow feeling for the character to prevent our human relationship from being outraged and insulted. But were Dickens to introduce an average scion of his countrymen to a whole congregation of _Quilps_, at the same time sagely informing him that these represented _the best there was_ of English life and morals, I strongly suspect the charming author would be lifted out on the toe of said average Englishman’s boot, in case there shouldn’t happen to be a good horsewhip handy.

Our grievance then is not that we are not painted as angels of light or as goody-goody Sunday-school developments; but we do claim that a man whose acquaintanceship is so slight that he cannot even discern diversities of individuality, has no right or authority to hawk “the only true and authentic” pictures of a race of human beings. Mr. Howells’ point of view is precisely that of a white man who sees colored people at long range or only in certain capacities. His conclusions about the colored man are identical with the impressions that will be received and carried abroad by foreigners from all parts of the globe, who shall attend our Columbian Exposition for instance, and who, through the impartiality and generosity of our white countrymen, will see colored persons only as bootblacks and hotel waiters, grinning from ear to ear and bowing and courtesying for the extra tips. In the same way Mr. Howells has met colored persons in hotels or on the commons promenading and sparking, or else acting as menials and lazzaroni. He has not seen, and therefore cannot be convinced that there exists a quiet, self-respecting, dignified class of easy life and manners (save only where it crosses the roughness of their white fellow countrymen’s barbarity) of cultivated tastes and habits, and with no more in common with the class of his acquaintance than the accident of complexion,—beyond a sympathy with their wrongs, or a resentment at being socially and morally classified with them, according as the principle of altruism or of self love is dominant in the individual.

I respectfully submit that there is hardly a colored church in any considerable city in this country, which could be said in any sense to represent _the best colored society_, in which Rhoda Aldgate could not have seen, when she opened her eyes, persons as quietly and as becomingly dressed, as cultivated in tone and as refined in manner, as herself; persons, too, as sensitive to rough contact and as horribly alive as she could be (though they had known it from childhood) to the galling distinctions in this country which insist on _levelling down_ all individuals more or less related to the Africans. So far from the cringing deference which Mr. Howells paints as exhibited to “the young white lady,” in nine cases out of ten the congregation would have supposed intuitively that she was a quadroon, so far from the unusual was her appearance and complexion. In not a few such colored churches would she have found young women of aspiration and intellectual activity with whom she could affiliate without nausea and from whom she could learn a good many lessons—and, sadly I say it, even more outside the churches whom bitterness at racial inconsistency of white Christians had soured into a silent disbelief of all religion. In either class she would have found no trouble in reaching a heart which could enter into all the agony of her own trial and bitter grief. Nor am I so sure, if she had followed her first gushing impulse to go South and “elevate” the race with whom she had discovered her relationship, that she would have found even them so ready to receive her condescending patronage.

There are numerous other inadvertent misrepresentations in the book—such as supposing that colored people voluntarily and deliberately prefer to keep to themselves in all public places and that from choice “they have their own neighborhoods, their own churches, their own amusements, their own resorts,”—the intimation that there is a “_black_ voice,” a black character, easy, irresponsible and fond of what is soft and pleasant, a black ideal of art and a black barbaric taste in color, a black affinity—so that in some occult and dreadful way one, only one-sixteenth related and totally foreign by education and environment, can still feel that one-sixteenth race calling her more loudly than the fifteen-sixteenths. I wish to do Mr. Howells the justice to admit, however, that one feels his blunders to be wholly unintentional and due to the fact that he has studied his subject merely from the outside. With all his matchless powers as a novelist, not even he can yet “think himself imaginatively” into the colored man’s place.

To my mind the quaintest and truest little bit of portraiture from low-life that I have read in a long time is the little story that appeared last winter in the Harpers, of the “_Widder Johnsing and how she caught the preacher_.” It is told with naive impersonality and appreciative humor, and is quite equal, I think, both in subject and treatment to the best of Mrs. Stowe’s New England dialect stories. It is idyllic in its charming simplicity and naturalness, and delightfully fresh in its sparkling wit and delicious humor. We do not resent such pictures as this of our lowly folk—such a homely and honest

“Pomegranate, which, if cut deep down the middle, Shows a heart within blood tinctured of a _veined humanity_,”

is always sweet to the taste and dear to the heart, however plain and humble the setting.

A longer and more elaborate work, Harold, published anonymously, comes properly in our group second, the didactic novel. It gives the picture of a black Englishman cultured and refined, brought in painful contact with American,—or rather _un-American_, color prejudice. The point of the book seems to be to show that education for the black man is a curse, since it increases his sensitiveness to the indignities he must suffer in consequence of white barbarity. The author makes Harold, after a futile struggle against American inequalities, disappear into the jungles of Africa, “there to wed a dusky savage,” at the last cursing the day he had ever suspected a broader light or known a higher aspiration; a conclusion which, to my mind, is a most illogical one. If the cultivated black man cannot endure the white man’s barbarity—the cure, it seems to me, would be to cultivate the white man. Civilize both, then each will know what is due from man to man, and that reduces at once to a minimum the friction of their contact.

In the same rank as Harold belongs that improbability of improbabilities, Doctor Huguet, by the arch-sensationalist, Ignatius Donelly. As its purpose is evidently good, I shall not undertake to review the book. Suffice it to say the plot hinges on the exchange of soul between the body of a black chicken thief and that of a cultivated white gentleman, and sets forth the indignities and wrongs to which the cultured soul, with all its past of refinement and learning, has to submit in consequence of its change of cuticle. The book is an able protest against that snobbishness which elevates complexion into a touchstone of aristocracy and makes the pigment cells of a man’s skin his badge of nobility regardless of the foulness or purity of the soul within; the only adverse criticism from the colored man’s point of view being the selection of a chicken thief as his typical black man; but on the principle of antitheses this may have been artistically necessary.

I shall pass next to what I consider the most significant contribution to this subject for the last ten years—a poem by Maurice Thompson in the New York Independent for January 21, 1892, entitled _A Voodoo Prophecy_. From beginning to end it is full of ghoulish imagery and fine poetic madness. Here are a few stanzas of it:

“I am the prophet of the dusky race, The poet of wild Africa. Behold, The midnight vision brooding in my face! Come near me, And hear me, While from my lips the words of Fate are told.

A black and terrible memory masters me, The shadow and the substance of deep wrong; You know the past, hear now what is to be: From the midnight land, Over sea and sand, From the green jungle, hear my Voodoo-song;

A tropic heat is in my bubbling veins, Quintessence of all savagery is mine, The lust of ages ripens in my reins, And burns And yearns, Like venom-sap within a noxious vine.

Was I a heathen? Ay, I was—am still A fetich worshipper; but I was free To loiter or to wander at my will, To leap and dance, To hurl my lance, And breathe the air of savage liberty.

You drew me to a higher life, you say; Ah, drove me, with the lash of slavery! Am I unmindful? Every cursed day Of pain And chain Roars like a torrent in my memory.

You make my manhood whole with ‘equal rights!’ Poor empty words! Dream you I honor them?— I who have stood on Freedom’s wildest hights? My Africa, I see the day When none dare touch thy garment’s lowest hem.

You cannot make me love you with your whine Of fine repentance. Veil your pallid face In presence of the shame that mantles mine; Stand At command Of the black prophet of the Negro race!

I hate you, and I live to nurse my hate, Remembering when you plied the slaver’s trade In my dear land ... How patiently I wait The day, Not far away, When all your pride shall shrivel up and fade.

Yea, all your whiteness darken under me! Darken and be jaundiced, and your blood Take in dread humors from my savagery, Until Your will Lapse into mine and seal my masterhood.

You, seed of Abel, proud of your descent, And arrogant, because your cheeks are fair, Within my loins an inky curse is pent, To flood Your blood And stain your skin and crisp your golden hair.

As you have done by me, so will I do By all the generations of your race; Your snowy limbs, your blood’s patrician blue Shall be Tainted by me, And I will set my seal upon your face!

Yea, I will dash my blackness down your veins, And through your nerves my sensuousness I’ll fling; Your lips, your eyes, shall bear the musty stains Of Congo kisses, While shrieks and hisses Shall blend into the savage songs I sing!

Your temples will I break, your fountains fill, Your cities raze, your fields to deserts turn; My heathen fires shall shine on every hill, And wild beasts roam, Where stands your home;— Even the wind your hated dust shall spurn.

I will absorb your very life in me, And mold you to the shape of my desire; Back through the cycles of all cruelty I will swing you, And wring you, And roast you in my passions’ hottest fire.

You, North and South, you, East and West, Shall drink the cup your fathers gave to me; My back still burns, I bare my bleeding breast, I set my face, My limbs I brace, To make the long, strong fight for mastery.

My serpent fetich lolls its withered lip And bares its shining fangs at thought of this: I scarce can hold the monster in my grip. So strong is he, So eagerly He leaps to meet my precious prophecies.

Hark for the coming of my countless host, Watch for my banner over land and sea. The ancient power of vengeance is not lost! Lo! on the sky The fire-clouds fly, And strangely moans the windy, weltering sea.”

Now this would be poetry if it were only truthful. Simple and sensuous it surely is, but it lacks the third requisite—truth. The Negro is utterly incapable of such vindictiveness. Such concentrated venom might be distilled in the cold Saxon, writhing and chafing under oppression and repression such as the Negro in America has suffered and is suffering. But the black man is in real life only too glad to accept the olive branch of reconciliation. He merely asks to be let alone. To be allowed to pursue his destiny as a free man and an American citizen, to rear and educate his children in peace, to engage in art, science, trades or industries according to his ability,—and _to go to the wall if he fail_. He is willing, if I understand him, to let bygones be bygones. He does not even demand satisfaction for the centuries of his ancestors’ unpaid labor. He asks neither pension, nor dole nor back salaries; but is willing to start from the bottom, all helpless and unprovided for as he is, with absolutely nothing as his stock in trade, with no capital, in a country developed, enriched, and made to blossom through his father’s “sweat and toil,”—with none of the accumulations of ancestors’ labors, with no education or moral training for the duties and responsibilities of freedom; nay, with every power, mental, moral, and physical, emasculated by a debasing slavery—he is willing, even glad to take his place in the lists alongside his oppressors, who have had every advantage, to be tried with them by their own standards, and to ask no quarter from them or high Heaven to palliate or excuse the ignominy of a defeat.

The Voodoo Prophecy has no interest then as a picture of the black, but merely as a revelation of the white man. Maurice Thompson in penning this portrait of the Negro, has, unconsciously it may be, laid bare his own soul—its secret dread and horrible fear. And this, it seems to me, is the key to the Southern situation, the explanation of the apparent heartlessness and cruelty of some, and the stolid indifference to atrocity on the part of others, before which so many of us have stood paralyzed in dumb dismay. The Southerner is not a cold-blooded villain. Those of us who have studied the genus in its native habitat can testify that his impulses are generous and kindly, and that while the South presents a solid phalanx of iron resistance to the Negro’s advancement, still as individuals to individuals they are warm-hearted and often even tender. And just here is the difference between the Southerner and his more philosophical, less sentimental Northern brother. The latter in an abstract metaphysical way rather wants you to have all the rights that belong to you. He thinks it better for the country, better for him that justice, universal justice be done. But he doesn’t care to have the blacks, in the concrete, too near him. He doesn’t know them and doesn’t want to know them. He really can’t understand how the Southerner could have let those little cubs get so close to him as they did in the old days—nursing from the same bottle and feeding at the same breast.

To the Southerner, on the other hand, race antipathy and color-phobia _as such_ does not exist. Personally, there is hardly a man of them but knows, and has known from childhood, some black fellow whom he loves as dearly as if he were white, whom he regards as indispensable to his own pleasures, and for whom he would break every commandment in the decalogue to save him from any general disaster. But our Bourbon seems utterly incapable of generalizing his few ideas. He would die for A or B, but suddenly becomes utterly impervious to every principle of logic when you ask for the simple golden rule to be applied to the class of which A or B is one. Another fact strikes me as curious. A Southern white man’s regard for his black friend varies in inverse ratio to the real distance between them in education and refinement. Puck expresses it—“I can get on a great deal better with a nigger than I can with a Negro.” And Mr. Douglass puts it: “Let a colored man be out at elbows and toes and half way into the gutter and there is no prejudice against him; but let him respect himself and be a man and Southern whites can’t abide to ride in the same car with him.”

Why this anomaly? Is it pride? Ordinarily, congeniality increases with similarity in taste and manners. Is it antipathy to color? It does not exist. The explanation is the white man’s dread dimly shadowed out in this Voodoo Prophecy of Maurice Thompson, and fed and inspired by such books as Minden Armais and a few wild theorizers who have nothing better to do with their time than spend it advocating the fusion of races as a plausible and expedient policy. Now I believe there are two ideas which master the Southern white man and incense him against the black race. On this point he is a monomaniac. In the face of this feeling he would not admit he was convinced of the axioms of Geometry. The one is personal and present, the fear of Negro political domination. The other is for his posterity—the future horror of being lost as a race in this virile and vigorous black race. Relieve him of this nightmare and he becomes “as gentle as the sucking dove.” With that dread delusion maddening him he would drive his sword to the hilt in the tender breast of his darling child, did he fancy that through her the curse would come.