THE SOUL OF JOHN BROWN

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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THE SOUL OF
JOHN BROWN

BY

STEPHEN GRAHAM

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1920
All Rights Reserved

Copyright, 1920,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
——
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1920.

CONTENTS

The Negro slaves were released in 1863. They and their children number twelve millions out of a total of a hundred millions of all races blending in America. Where do the children of the slaves stand to-day?

I

THOUGHTS ON SLAVERY

Although Charles Lynch of Virginia used to suspend British farmers by their thumbs until they cried out Liberty for ever! and lynching has continued ever since, America is nevertheless at bottom free, or at least was intended to be so by the idealists and politicians who brought her forth. America is a living reproof of Europe, and it has been generally conceived of as a land where men should suffer no encroachment upon their personal liberty, where they should reap duly the fruits of their labors, where no man should sap their rugged independence or infringe upon the sovereign equality of their social rights, where government should be entirely by consent of the governed, not handed down from above as from superior beings or masters, but controlled from below, from the broad base of toiling humanity.

The first discoverers were plunderers and seekers after barbaric gold and gems, but her real pioneers were God-fearing men who laid the foundations of modern American civilization by honest work and a boundless belief in the development of free democracy. The institution of slavery was therefore the thing which in theory was most abhorrent to the American mind. It is a curious anomaly that a very short while after the Declaration of Independence the land from which America separated became free of slavery, and the British flag pre-eminently the flag of freedom. But America, freed though she had become from political interference on the part of Britain, nevertheless inherited Negro slavery; and the economic prosperity of at least one-half of the country was founded on the most hideous bondage in world history. Those who had fled Europe to escape tyrants had themselves, under force of circumstances, become tyrants.

Not that anyone willed slavery in America or designed to have it. It was an economic accident. It was in America before most of the Americans. The first Negro slaves were brought up the James River in Virginia before the Mayflower arrived, and as Negro orators say to-day, “If being a long while in this country makes a good American, we are the best Americans that there are.” Slavery had grown to vast proportions by the time of the war against Britain. New America in 1783, standing on the threshold of the modern era, inherited a most terrible burden in her millions of slaves. It was a burden that was growing into the live flesh of America, and no one dared face at that time the problem of getting free of it.

The actual American people as a whole were little responsible for the institution of slavery. The pioneers hated and feared it. The planters always condemned it in theory, and after the Emancipation of 1863 no one of any sense in the South has ever wished it back. Even in those States where slavery took deepest root and showed its worst characteristics, there was throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a persistent resistance on the part of the colonists against having black servile labor introduced.

To cite one colony as in a way characteristic of the whole attitude of the colonists toward slavery, Georgia might be taken. Georgia was originally an asylum for the bad boys of too respectable British families and for discharged convicts and hopeless drunkards. Royal charter guaranteed freedom of religion (except to Papists); an embargo was placed on West Indian trade, so as to stop the inflow of rum; and Negro slavery was forbidden. All for the good of reprobates making a fresh start!

Invalids and merchants settled on the coast and made the society of Savannah. The bad boys proved to be too poor stuff with which to found a colony, and a special body of a hundred and thirty frugal and industrious Scots and a hundred and seventy carefully chosen Germans were brought in. Real work in Georgia commenced at Ebenezer, on the Savannah River, and at New Inverness. The merchants strove to get slavery introduced; the Scots and the Germans strove to keep it out. At Savannah every night polite society toasted “The One Thing Needful”—Slavery. The common talk of the townsfolk was of the extra prosperity that would come to Georgia if slaves were brought in, the extra quantities of cotton, of rice, of timber, and all that middlemen could re-sell. The ministers of religion actually preached in churches in favor of an institution sanctioned by the Bible, and it was thought that a service was done for Christ by bringing the black men out of Africa, where they were somewhat inaccessible, and throwing them into the bosom of the Christian family in America. But the Scots and the Germans remonstrated against the permission of an evil shocking to human nature and likely to prove in time not a blessing but a scourge.

Over in South Carolina slavery was in full possession, and the wealth of the Carolinian merchants was a soreness to the lean traders of Georgia. Cupidity prompted underhand means to achieve the desired end. Slaves were imported on life lease from owners in South Carolina. One could not purchase the freehold of a Negro’s liberty and energy, only a ninety-nine years’ lease of it, as it were, but that sufficed. Freedom fell, the charter was abrogated, and under the sway of a royal governor the floodgates of slavery were opened wide. In due time Georgia became one of the worst slave States of the South. It remains to this day one of those where in any case the contemporary record of burning and lynching is most lurid. It would not be unsafe to draw the conclusion that the introduction of slavery did as much harm to the souls of the original Germans, Scots, and English and their descendants as to the Negroes themselves.

The settlers were, however, loath to employ slaves, and for some years there was little change. It was the rich immigrants from South Carolina and elsewhere who embarked on large enterprises of planting with a labor basis of black slaves. The poor white laboring class was gradually ruined by competition with slave labor. And then it became generally understood that everyone had to employ slaves, and it was unbecoming for a white man to toil with his hands. The poor Whites were if anything more despised than the black slaves, and often indeed actually despised, paradoxically enough, by the latter. In some parts there sprang up bands of white gypsies and robbers called “pinelanders,” who stole from Black and White alike, and lived by their wits.

In Africa the Negro tribes strove with one another in savagery, and sold their prisoners to the Negro traders or White agents, who dragged them to the coast. There they were herded in the holds of noisome slaving vessels, indiscriminately, nakedly, fortuitously, the violent ones tied up or chained, the gentler ones unloosed. None knew whither they were going, and even those victorious tribes who sold them to the white man knew nothing of the destination of the victims they thus despatched. Hundreds of thousands, nay, millions of tribesmen of all kinds and shades of black and brown were thus exported to the Indies and the Colonies and sold into bondage to the civilized world. Arrived in America, the slaves were sold to merchants or auctioned as common cattle and sent up country to work. A healthy male slave of good dimensions and in his prime would fetch a thousand dollars and young women eight hundred dollars, and fair-sized girls five hundred. Olmsted gives a price list which was handed him by a dealer; that was in 1853.[1] In earlier years the price was considerably less, and always varied according to the demand. The raw, first-come Negro slaves were not sold as retinue for the rich, but as colonial utilities to be worked like cattle on the farms and plantations. Cotton was the staple, and in thinking of the time the eye must range over a vast expanse of cotton plantations and see all the main work done by Negro gangs of men and women in charge of slave drivers. As Olmsted describes a gang of women in a characteristic passage—“The overseer rode about them on a horse, carrying in his hand a rawhide whip ... but as often as he visited one end of the line the hands at the other end would discontinue their labor until he turned to them again. Clumsy, awkward, gross, elephantine in all their movements; pouting, grinning, and leering at us; sly, sensual, and shameless in all their expression and demeanor; I never before had witnessed, I thought, anything more revolting....” In 1837 the whole of Georgia, and indeed of the South, was worked by black slaves—the poor white labor (chiefly Irish) had diminished almost to disappearance. Slave labor was founded on slave discipline, and the discipline on punishment. There was no particular readiness on the part of the savages to do the work given them or understand what they had to do. Whether they could have been coaxed or persuaded is problematical. Farmers have not the time or the spirit for coaxing. The quickest way was by inspiring terror or inflicting pain. It might have been different if the Negro could have been given any positive incentive to work, but there was none. He had therefore to be flogged to it. The smallest gang had its driver with his whip. The type who to-day has become politely a “speeder up” was then the man with the whip. He could have had more power by using his whip infrequently and on the most stubborn slaves, but that was not the common man’s way. He flogged hard and he flogged often. On a typical Georgian plantation the field driver had power to inflict twelve lashes there and then when trouble occurred. The head driver could give thirty-six and the overseer fifty. Every morning there would be a dozen or so special floggings by the overseer or his assistant at the office. Women if anything fared worse than men. On the slightest provocation their scanty clothes were thrown over their heads and they were subjected to a beating. Naked boys and girls were tied by their wrists to boughs of trees so that their toes barely touched the ground, and lashed. The overseer did it, the owner’s son did it, upon occasion the owner himself did it.

There were pleasant exceptional homes in Virginia and the Carolinas and elsewhere where there was no flogging and no cruelty whatsoever, but instead a great mutual affection. Slavery may have been wrong there also, or it may have been justifiable. But it was not on account of the happy slaves that John Brown sallied forth at Harper’s Ferry, but because of the many unhappy ones. As the whole intensity of the Negro trouble is centered in the evils of the institution of slavery, it is necessarily on these that one must insist, though the exceptions be not lost sight of.

It is often said that the slaves were seldom hurt because, since they were property, it behooved a master to take care of them and preserve them. But that is fallacious. Men got pleasure out of beating their slaves as they get pleasure out of chewing tobacco, drinking spirits, and using bad language. It grew on them; they liked it more and more. In many cases no proficiency or industry could save the slaves from a flogging. And, besides that, there was current in Georgia and all the more commercial parts a theory that it was most profitable to use up your slaves every seven years and then re-stock.

Slaves of course were bred, and it is conceivable that it might have been generally more profitable to have a breeding farm of Negroes and sell the children than work them off in seven years. But there was little method in the minds of the planters. They tried to combine the seven-years system and breeding at the same time. Every girl of sixteen had children, every woman of thirty had grandchildren. But the women were worked up to the last moment of pregnancy on the cotton fields and sent back three weeks after delivery, and even flogged then. The poor women lay on straw on earthen floors in their torments, moaning in their agonies. When sent back to the fields too soon they suffered horrible physical torment. They often appealed to their masters: “Me make plenty nigger for massa, me useful nigger.” But more than half of their offspring were allowed to die. The mother would have been worth her keep as a mother, but, no, she must fill her place in the hoeing line instead of looking after her children.

There were few genuine Negro families. All were herded or separated and sold off in batches and re-herded with little or no regard to family relationships, though these poor, dark-minded slaves did form the most intimate and precious attachments. The slaves’ fervent hope was that massa would marry and have children, so that when he died they would not be sold up, but remain in the family.

Illegitimacy in sexual relationships raged. Almost every planter had besides his own family a dusky brood of colored women. No likely girl escaped the overseers. Poor whites and pinelanders broke into black quarters and ravished where they would. There seemed little squeamishness, and there was little enough effective resistance on the part of black girls. The institution of slavery with its cruelties had brutalized men’s minds. As for the Negro women, one can well understand how little feminine shame would remain when the bare hips were so commonly exposed and flogged.

“Oh, but don’t you know—did nobody ever tell or teach any of you that it is a sin to live with men who are not your husbands?” asked Fanny Kemble of a slave. The latter seized her vehemently by the wrist and exclaimed:

“Oh, yes, missie, we know—we know all about dat well enough; but we do anything to get our poor flesh some rest from the whip; when he make me follow him into de bush, what use me tell him no? He have strength to make me.”[2]

Probably the slave drivers and other white men obtained some sensual gratification from flogging women. Brutality of this kind is often associated with sexual perversity. The taking of Negro women showed a will toward the animal and was an act of greater depravity than ordinary deflections from the straight and moral way. Not that there was not pride in pale babies and even a readiness on the part of some Negresses to give themselves to white men. As a plantation song said: “Twenty-four black girls can’t make one mulatto baby by themselves.”

By flogging and rape and inhuman callousness did the white South express its reaction to black slavery. There were also burnings, demoniacal tortures, flogging to death, and every imaginable human horror. It may well be asked: How came it about that those who protested so high-mindedly about the introduction of slavery did not use the slaves kindly and humanly when they were forced to have them?

The answer I think lies in the fact that no man is good enough to have complete control over any other man. No man can be trusted. Give your best friend or neighbor power over you, and you’ll be surprised at the use he will make of it. Even wives and children in this respect are not safe in the hands of their husbands and parents if they are understood as possessions. “She belongs to me and I’ll kill her,” Gorky makes a drunken cobbler say. “Ah, no, she does not belong to you; she is a woman, and a woman belongs to God,” says the Russian friend.

There is indeed little more terrifying in human experience than the situation which occurs when one human being is entirely in the power of another, when the prisoner in the dungeon confronts his torturer, when the unprotected girl falls completely into the power of a man, when Shylock has Antonio delivered to him, and so forth.

Cruelty can be awakened in almost any man and woman—it can be developed. A taste for cruelty is like a taste for drink or sexual desire or drugs. It is a lust. It is indeed one of the worst of the lusts. One can forgive or excuse a man the other lusts, but cruelty one cannot—and indeed does not wish to forgive or excuse. Yet how readily does it develop.

The incredible story is told of a young girl lashed by the overseer, threatened with burning. She runs away. It is a gala day on the plantation. The white men hunt her to the swamps with bloodhounds and she is torn to bits before their eyes. They love the spectacle of terror even more than the spectacle of pain. The Negro, of nervous, excitable nature, is marked out by destiny to be a butt for cruelty. It is so to-day, long after emancipation; the Negro, in whom hysterical fear can be awakened, is the most likely to be lynched or chased by the mob or slowly burned for its delight. More terrible than the act of cruelty is the state of mind of those who can look on at it and gloat over it. After all, a lynching is often roughly excusable. A man commits a heinous crime against a woman, scandalizing the community, and the community takes the law into its own hands. The rightness of the action can be argued. But what of the state of heart of a mob of a thousand, watching a Negro burning to death, listening happily to his yells and crying out to “make him die slow”? It is an appalling revelation of the devil in man.

And despite the fact that such cruelty agonizes the mind of the tender-hearted and sympathetic, we must remain tolerant in judgment. We must not tolerate intolerance; in all other respects we must be tolerant.

Cruelty is in man. The planters did the natural thing with the slaves who came into their power. The white South would slip into the same way of life again to-day if slavery could be introduced. What is more, you and I, and every man, unless he were of an exceptional nature, would succumb to the system and disgrace ourselves with similar cruelty. A demon not altogether banished still lurks in most of us and can easily be brought back. Lust lives on lust and grows stronger; and cruelty, like other cravings, is a desire of the flesh, and can easily become devouring habit. We are greater brutes after we have committed an act of cruelty or lust than we were before we committed it, and we are made ready to commit more or worse.

Concomitant with cruelty is callousness. An indifference which is less than usual human carelessness sets in with regard to creatures on whom we have satisfied our lusts. Flogging makes a heavy flogged type of human being who looks as if he had always needed flogging. It ceases to be piquant to flog him. The old Negress with brutish human lusts written all over her body is not even horrible or repulsive, elle n’existe plus. The old, worn-out drudge lies down to die in the dirty straw, the flies gathering about his mouth, and expires without one Christian solace or one Christian sympathy. Though ministers waxed eloquent on the Christian advantages to the Blacks of being brought from pagan Africa to Christian America, there quickly sets in the belief that after all Negroes are like animals and have no souls to save.

This callousness showed worst in the selling of slaves, the separating of black husband and wife, parents and children, family and family, with the indifference with which a herdsman separates and detaches sheep from his flock. This, despite the manifest passionate tenderness and attachment of slave to slave, and even upon occasion slave to master and home.

The state of the slaves grew most forlorn, forsaken of man, unknown to God. A prison twilight eclipsed the light of the sun-flooded Southland. A consciousness of a sad, sad fate was begotten among the slaves. All the tribes of the Negroes became one in a community of suffering. And gradually they ceased to be mere savages. They grew to something higher—through suffering. It was a penal offense for many a long year even to preach Christ to them. Slaves were beaten when it was found out that they had been baptized. But before the Blacks were brought to Christ they must have got a great deal nearer Him than had their masters. It was illegal to teach a slave to read and write. But the Negroes in a mysterious way learned the white man’s code and secretly obtained his Bible and plunged into the Old Testament and the New. The white man rightly feared that the spread of education among the slaves would endanger the institution. They spoke of slavery as the institution as if it were the only one in the world. They also feared the spread of Christian teaching.

As it happened, the Negro soul was very thirsty for religion and drank very deeply of the wells of God. The Negroes learned to sing together, thus first of all expressing corporate life. They drew from the story of Israel’s sufferings a token of their own life, and they formed their scarcely articulate hymns—which survive to-day as the only folklore music of America.

Go down, Moses,

Way down in Egyp’ lan’.

Tell ole Pharaoh
Le’ ma people go!

Israel was in Egyp’ lan’,

Oppres’ so hard dey could not stan’.

Le’ ma people go!

or the infinitely pathetic and beautiful

In the valley
On my knees
With my burden
An’ my Saviour

I couldn’t hear nobody pray, O Lord,
Couldn’t hear nobody pray.
O—way down yonder
By myself
I couldn’t hear nobody pray.

Chilly waters
In the Jordan,
Crossing over
Into Canaan,

I couldn’t hear nobody pray, O Lord,
Couldn’t hear nobody pray.
O—way down yonder by myself
I couldn’t hear nobody pray.

Hallelujah!
Troubles over
In the Kingdom
With my Jesus.

I couldn’t hear nobody pray, O Lord,
Couldn’t hear nobody pray.
O—way down yonder
By myself
I couldn’t hear nobody pray.

The poor slave was very much—way down yonder by himself, and he couldn’t hear nobody pray. Jesus seemed to have been specially born for him—to love his soul when none other was ready to love it, to comfort him in all his sufferings, and to promise him that happy heaven where unabashed the old woolly-head can sit by Mary and “play with the darling Son,” as another “spiritual” expresses it.

The first Negro preachers and evangelists had the inevitable persecution, and as inevitably the persecution failed. The North grew very sympathetic, and Bibles grew as plentiful in the South as dandelion blossoms. It became the unique lesson book of the Negro. It alone fed his spiritual consciousness. He obtained at once an appreciation of its worth to him that made it his greatest treasure, his only offset against his bondage. He learned it by heart, and there came to be a greater textual knowledge of the Bible among the Black masses than among any other people in the world. It is so to-day, though it is fading. The spiritual life of the Negro became as it were an answering beacon to the fervor of the Abolitionists of the North, most of whom were passionate Christians of Puritan type.

The South grew sulky, grew infinitely suspicious and restive, and irritated and fearful. It began to fear a general slaves’ rising. The numerical superiority of the Negroes presented itself to the mind as an ever-growing menace. The idea of emancipation was fraught with the economic ruin it implied. It is difficult now to resurrect the mind of society preceding the time of the great Civil War. It is the fashion to emphasize the technical aspect of the quarrel of North and South, and to say that the war was fought in order that the Union might be preserved. But it is truer to say that it was fought because the South wanted to secede. And the South wished to secede because it saw more clearly every day that the institution of slavery was in danger. Every month, every year, saw its special occasions of irritation, premonitory splashing out of flame, petty explosions and threats. More slaves escaped every year. The Underground Railway, so called, by which the Friends succored the poor runaways and brought them out of danger and distress into the sanctuary of the North grew to be better and better organized. On the other hand, the punishments of discovered runaways grew more barbarous and more public, and the rage of the North was inflamed.

Heroic John Brown made his abortive bid to light up a slaves’ insurrection by his wild exploit of Harper’s Ferry. And then John Brown, old man as he was, of apostolic aspect and fervor, was tried and condemned. He did not fear to die. But he wrote to his children that they should “abhor with undying hatred that sum of all villainies, slavery,” and while he was being led to the gallows he handed to a bystander his last words and testament—

I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had as I now think vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done....

And in his ill-fitting suit and trousers and loose carpet slippers John Brown was hanged silently and solemnly, and all the troops watching him, even stern Stonewall Jackson himself, were stricken with a sort of premonitory terror. Soon came the great war.

And the slaves were made free. That is their story. Where do they stand to-day?

II

IN VIRGINIA

By the abolition of slavery mankind threw off a great evil. The slave owner escaped as well as the slave. For, although our human sympathy goes more readily to the slaves themselves, it is nevertheless true that it was as bad for the spirit and character of the owners as for those of their chattels. To-day in America, and especially in the South, there is a hereditary taint in the mind derived from slavery and it is to be observed in the descendants of the masters as much as in the descendants of the slaves. It would be a mistake to think of this American problem as exclusively a Negro problem. It is as necessary to study the white people as the black. The children of the owners and the overseers and the slave drivers are not the same as the children of families where no slaves were ever owned. Mastery of men and power over men have been bred in their blood. That in part explains the character of that section of the United States where slaves were most owned, and the brutality, cruelty, and sensuality which upon occasion disfigure the face of society in 1920. The old dead self leers out with strange visage from the new self, which wishes to be different.

If you see a white man in New Orleans rolling his quid and spitting out foul brutality against “niggers,” you will often find that his father was a driver on a plantation. Or if in that abnormal way so characteristic of the South you hear foul sexual talk about the Negroes rolling forth from a lowbrow in Vicksburg, it is fairly likely that he is full of strange black lust himself, and that his father and grandfather perchance assaulted promiscuously Negro women and contributed to the writing of racial shame in the vast bastardy of the South. If you hear a man urging that the Negro is not a human being, but an animal, you will often find that he himself is nearer to the animal. His fathers before him held that the Negroes were animals and not humans. And, believing them animals, they yet sinned with the animals, and so brought themselves down to animal level. You see a crowd of white men near Savannah. They are mostly proud of their English origin. Yet they are going to burn a Negro alive for killing a sheriff. How is it possible in this century? It is possible because it is in the blood of the children. They crave to see Uncle Tom’s flesh crackling in the flames and hear his hysterical howls. Their fathers did. Their children’s children will do the same unless it is stamped out by the will of society as a whole.

Of course the inheritance of evil is not the same in all classes of society. Everyone inherits something from the baleful institution, but not everyone the same. The mind of the coarse White is crude and terrible, and the mind of the refined is certainly different. One should perhaps be more lenient to the poor, and more urgent in criticism of the rich. For all stand together, and the disease is one not merely of individuals, but of the whole. The rich and cultured condone the brutality of the masses because they have a point of view which is incompatible with theirs.

Those whose ancestors treated the slaves well, claim to be immune from all criticism. There were in the old days many kind and considerate masters to whom the Negroes were wonderfully attached. But even these masters suffered from the institution of slavery, as any rich man suffers from dependence on retainers and flunkeys and servants whom he practically owns, as all suffer who are divorced from the reality of earning their living as equals with their neighbors. And their children, brought up amidst the submissive servility of the Negroes, grew to be little monarchs or chiefs, and always to expect other people to do things for them. Where ordinary white children learn to ask and say “please,” they learned to order and command and to threaten with punishment. The firm lip of the educated Southerner has an expression which is entirely military. In the army, one asks for nothing of inferiors except courage on the day of battle. All is ordered. And the power to order and to be obeyed rapidly changes the expression of the features. It has changed the physiognomy of the aristocracy in the Southern section of the United States. You can classify all faces into those who say “please” and those who do not, and the children of the slave owners are mostly in the second category. Unqualified mastership; indifference to dirt and misery in the servant class; callous disregard of others’ pain, or pleasure taken in their pain; slaves said to be animals and not human beings, and the superadded sin of bestiality, using a lower caste to satiate coarse lusts which the upper caste could not satisfy; the buying and selling of creatures who could otherwise only belong to God—all these terrible sins or sinful conditions are visited on the third and fourth generation of those who hate, though as must always be said, God’s mercy is shown to thousands of them that love Him and keep His eternal commandments.

The children of the slaves also inherit evil from their slavery. The worst of these are resentment and a desire for revenge. Doubtless, slavery sensualized the Negro. He was the passive receptacle for the white man’s lusts. Most of the Negroes arrived in America more morally pure than they are to-day. As savages, they were nearer to nature. Mentally and spiritually they are much higher now, but they have learned more about sin, and sin is written in most of their bodies. It is sharpest in the mulattoes and “near whites”—those whose ancestors were longest in slavery have the worst marks of it in them. The state of the last slaves to be imported into America is much simpler and happier than the rest. The moral character of the black Negroes is also simpler than that of the pallid ones. But this is anticipating my story. I set off to study the ex-slave because the civilized world is threatened by what may be called a vast slaves’ war. In Russia the grandchildren of the serfs have overthrown those who were once their masters, and have taken possession of the land and the state; in Germany Spartacus has arisen to overthrow the military slavery of Prussianism; and the wage slaves are rising in every land. There is a vast resentment of lower orders against upper orders, of the proletarians, who have nothing and are nothing, against those who through inheritance or achievement have reached the ruling class. The Negroes are in no way to be compared to the Russians in intellectual or spiritual capacity: they are racially so much more undeveloped. Much less divided Russian serf from Russian master than slave from planter. But it is just because the contrast between the American white man and American black man is so sharp and the quarrel so elemental in character that it has seemed worth while to explore the American situation. And if the struggle is more elemental, it can hardly be said that there is not more at stake. American industrialism is ravaged by waves of violent revolutionary ferment. If ill-treatment of the Blacks should at last force the twelve millions of them to make common cause with a revolutionary mob, polite America might be overwhelmed and the larger portion of the world be lost—if not of the world, at least of that world we call civilization.

What, then, of the Negro? What is he doing, what does he look like, what does he feel to-day? It is impossible to learn much from current books, so, following the dictum: “What is remarkable, learn to look at it with your own eyes,” I went to America to see.

I chose Olmsted as my model. In 1853 Olmsted made a famous journey through the seaboard States, holding up his mirror to the life of the South in slavery days. The book which records his impressions and reflections is one of the most valuable in American literature. This great student of nature went methodically through Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana. A pilgrimage not unlike his has to be repeated to-day to ascertain how the ex-slave is, what he is doing, how the experiment of his liberation has prospered, and what is his future in the American Commonwealth. But as America is so much more developed in 1920, and more problematical in the varied fields of her national life, it has been necessary to make a broader, if more rapid, survey of the whole South. I made the following journey in America: I went slowly south from New York to Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, staying some days at each and seeing America grow darker as it visibly does when you watch faces from trolley car windows going from town to town southward. I was on South Street, in Philadelphia; watched the well-paid artisans and laborers at the docks of Baltimore, visited there the polite homes of the colored working class, cleaner, richer, cozier than that of the average British workman on Tyneside or London Docks. I climbed the Lincoln Heights to talk to Nanny Burroughs and see her good training college for colored women there; was at Howard University and talked with black and gentle Professor Miller and with the pale and intellectual Emmett Scott. I sailed down the Potomac to Norfolk, Virginia, Uncle Sam’s great naval base, going to be the greatest of its kind in the world; crossed to Newport News and talked with black rivetters and chippers and others in the shipbuilding yards; then, following the way of the first English colonists and also the first Negro slaves, went up the James River to Jamestown, and on to Richmond, the fine capital of the Old Dominion. I traveled to Lynchburg and its tobacco industries, went from thence to “sober” Knoxville, investigating the race riot there and the attitude of Tennessee. From Knoxville I went to Chattanooga and Birmingham, in each of which great steel centers I met the leading Negroes and investigated conditions. I was at Atlanta, and walked across Georgia to the sea, following Sherman. A three-hundred-mile walk through the cotton fields and forests of Georgia was necessary in order to get a broad section of the mass of the people. The impression left behind by Sherman’s army which laid waste the country and freed all the Negroes there gave also something of the historical atmosphere of the South. From Savannah, which was the point on the sea to which General Sherman attained, I went to Brunswick and Jacksonville, thence to Pensacola, and on from Florida to New Orleans and the Gulf plantations. I journeyed up the Mississippi on a river steamer, stayed at the Negro city of Mound Bayou, was at Vicksburg and Greenville and Memphis, and then repaired once more to the contrasting North.

Crossing the Mason-Dixon line was rather a magical and wonderful event for me. After all, the North, with its mighty cities and industrialized populations, is merely prose to one who comes from England. Pennsylvania is a projection of Lancashire and Yorkshire, New York is a projection of London, and massive Washington has something of the oppressiveness of English park drives and Wellingtonias. But southward one divines another and a better country. It has a glamour; it lures. There the orange grows and there are palms; there is a hotter sun and brighter flowers. Human beings there, one surmises, have a more romantic disposition and warmer imagination. Reposing on the vast feudalism of Negro labor there is a more stately way of living, life is more spacious. And at the resorts on the coast of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico a great number of people live for pleasure and happiness, and not for business and ambition.

I journeyed on a white-painted steamer in the evening down the Potomac to Old Point Comfort, leaving behind me the noise and glare of Washington and the hustle of Northern American civilization. It was the crossing of a frontier—without show of passports or examination of trunks, the passing to a new country, with a different language and different ways. The utter silence of the river was a great contrast to the clangor of the streets of Philadelphia and Baltimore and the string of towns I had been passing through on my way South. Sunset was reflected deep in the stream, and mists crept over the surface of the water. Then the moon silvered down on our course, my cabin window was full open and the moon looked in. I lay in a capacious sort of cottage bed and was enchanted by the idea of going to “Dixie,” of which we had all sung so much; and the soft Southern airs and night and the throbbing of the river steamer gliding over the placid water gave an assurance of some new refreshment of spirit. With a quaint irrelevance the whole British army, and indeed the nation, had been singing “Dixie” songs throughout the war—“Just try to picture me, way down in Tennessee” we were always asking of one another. Now, behold, the war was over, and it might be possible to go there and forget a little about all that sordid and tumultuous European quarrel.

All night the river whispered its name and lulled the boat to sleep. Dawn on the broad serenity of the waters at Old Point Comfort was utterly unlike the North, from which I had come, and the last ten days of jangling trolley cars hustling along shoppy streets. A morning star shone in the pale-blue sky, lighting as it were a vestal lamp over the coast, and we looked upon Virginia. As the sun rose, vapor closed in the scene. We made the port of Norfolk in a mist which seemed each moment getting warmer. The chill winds of October were due in the North, but Virginia was immune. During the week I spent in the city of Norfolk and on Hampton Roads it did not get less than 85 in the shade, even at night. The weather, however, was hotter than is usual even in Eastern Virginia at that time of the year.

I obtained the impression of a great city rather cramped for want of space, and in this I suppose I was right. By all accounts Norfolk has trebled its population during the war, and needs to have its center rebuilt spaciously and worthily. When Olmsted came through in 1853 he records that Norfolk was a dirty, low, ill-arranged town, having no lyceum or public library, no gardens, no art galleries, and though possessing two “Bethels” having no “Seamen’s Home” and no place of healthy amusement. He rather makes fun of a Lieutenant Maury, who in those days was having a vision of the Norfolk of the future, and saw it one of the greatest ports in the world, being midmost point of the Atlantic coast and having an inner and an outer harbor with perfect facilities of ingress and egress in all weathers.

To-day Lieutenant Maury’s vision has proved prophetic. In the maps of the new America which is coming, Norfolk is destined to be printed in ever larger letters. The war showed the way. The determination of America to be worthily armed at sea made it certain, and the future of Norfolk, with Hampton Roads and Newport News, is to be the primary naval base of the Atlantic coast. The military and naval activities of Norfolk during the war were very important. Eastern Virginia was a great training ground, and Norfolk the main port of embarkation of troops for Europe. Shipbuilding and naval construction also were in full swing. Great numbers of laborers, especially Negroes, seem to have been attracted. The number no doubt is exaggerated, but the colored people there number themselves now at one hundred thousand. They have been attracted by the high wages and the record of Norfolk for immunity from mob violence. A lynching is not in anyone’s remembrance. Trouble might have broken out during the war, but Norfolk possessed an excellent “City Manager” who was always prepared.

On one occasion some five hundred sailors set out to “clean up colored town,” but they were met by an adequate force of armed police and marines and changed their minds. On the other hand, a mob of colored crews and troops started an attack on the town jail, but a few armed men quickly dispersed them.

I noticed at once that the Blacks of Norfolk were very much more black than those of Washington or New York. Their hair was more matted. Their eyes were more goggly. They were more odorous. When the black chambermaid had been in my room for two minutes it was filled with a pungent and sickening odor. The elevator reeked with this odor. It was the characteristic smell of my first Southern hotel. I noticed it on the trolley cars. It was wafted among the vegetables and fruit of the city market. Indeed, the whole town had it. I grew used to it after a while and was told by those who were liberal of mind that every race had its smell. For instance, to certain tribes of Indians there was said to be nothing so disgusting as the smell of a perfectly clean white man. Even when a man who has a bath every day and a change into perfectly fresh linen came into his presence, the Indian felt sick. Negroes were supposed to notice the smell of white men, but were too subservient or polite to remark upon it. There is, however, a good deal of doubt about this point in human natural history. The smell that we have is the smell of the animal in us, and not of the more human or spiritual part of us. One knows the smell of the bear and the fox, and that the wolf has a stronger smell than the dog, and the wild cat than the domestic cat. Bloodhounds are said to follow the trail of the Negro more readily than that of the white man, and it might reasonably be argued that the terrible odor of the Blacks is due to their greater proximity to an animal stage in development. Be that as it may, I quite see that this odor is something which the Negro will have difficulty in living down. I learned that he was very sensitive about it, as about his kinky hair, and that the more educated and refined he became the more he strove to get rid of these marks. That explained to me why in all those happy streets of prosperous Baltimore at every corner there was a “Beauty Parlor,” where specialists plied Mme. Walker’s “Anti-Kink,” and why the prosperous Negro workingman demanded a bathroom and hot water in his home. The reason why the Blacks seem blacker in the South seems to be because they are segregated in “Jim Crow” sections of the cars, and none of the black comes off on white people, but is on the contrary intensified by the shadow of black looks.

The colored folk here, moreover, seemed to talk more in the way they are supposed to talk, and are not mincing the American tongue, as in the North. Outside my room one maid says: “You’s a fool, sister Ann.” “Yas, sister Sue, dat’s ‘zackly what I am,” says the other, and laughs and repeats it as if it were the greatest joke—“Dat’s ‘zackly what I am.”

I went into the streets to seek the Rev. B——, a leading colored preacher of Norfolk. I stood in wonderment before a whitewashed chapel with large china-blue stained-glass windows luridly depicting our Lord’s baptism and the opening of the heavens over the Jordan. A grizzled old Negro in a cotton shirt stopped in front of me and exclaimed insinuatingly, “You’s looking at cullud folks’ church; ain’t it bewtiful?” I took the opportunity to ask for the Rev. B——. He led me along and pointed up a flight of wooden steps to a sufficiently handsome dwelling place.

Rev. B—— on seeing me had a gleam of doubt on his face for perhaps one second, but only for a second. One instinctively felt that here in Virginia, where the color line is sharply drawn, no white man is likely to present himself on terms of equality to a black man without the desire to patronize or some guile of some kind. It is rare for any white man to call upon any educated black man, and very rarely indeed that he comes to him in a straightforward, honest, and sincere manner. So the Rev. B—— showed doubt for a moment, and then suddenly, after a few words, his doubt vanished. In my subsequent journeying and adventures it was always thus—doubt at first glance, and then, rapidly, the awakening of implicit trust and confidence. I personally found the Negroes nearly always friendly. Mr. B—— was a sparely-colored, lean, intellectual young man, a capable white man in a veil of dark skin. He was all but white. I looked at his webby hands—what a pity, it seemed, that, being so near, he could not be altogether. And yet I realized that in such men and women, no matter how fair they be, the psyche is different. There is something intensely and insolubly Negro in even the nearest of near whites.

Rev. B—— took me all over the city. He was evidently extremely well known to the colored people, for our conversation was intertwined with a ceaseless——

“How do, Revrun?”

“How do?”

He showed me his charmingly built church (not that with the china-blue windows), contrived in graceful horseshoe style, with graduated, sloping gallery, richly-stained windows, and a vast array of red-cushioned seats. A black organist was discoursing upon the organ, and a voluminous, dusky charwoman with large arms was cleaning and dusting among the pews below.

There sat under Rev. B—— every Sunday a fair share of the quality colored folk of Norfolk. “I am glad that you have come to me, because I can show you an up-to-date and proper church,” said the pastor. “There are nine or ten like this in Norfolk, but when a stranger asks to see a Negro church he’s usually taken to some out-of-the-way tabernacle of the Holy Folks or some queer sect where everyone is shouting Hallelujah, and it all seems very funny. But if you’ll come to me on Sunday morning you’ll hear a service which for dignity and spiritual comeliness will compare with any white man’s service in any part of the world. You mustn’t think of us as still cotton pickers and minstrels and nothing more. There is a great deal of Negro wealth and refinement in this city of Norfolk.”

“How do you get on with white ministers?” I asked. “Do you work together?”

“Oh, white ministers do not recognize black ones on the street,” said he. “My neighbor, for instance, knows me well enough at the Baptist Conference, and by his talk I see he knows all about my church. But here in the city he cannot afford to know me. Yet he has not half so many worshippers at his church, nor do they pay him half the salary which my people pay me. He dare not spend on his clothes what I spend; he has not such a well-appointed home. Yet if we meet on the street—he doesn’t know me.”

This was evidently a sore point.

We went to Brown’s Bank. Brown has gone to Philadelphia to start a second Negro bank. The first one has been in existence ten years. Brown is a financier, and something more than that. For he encourages the Negro theatres and is greatly helping his people along their way. We also visited the polite edifice of the Tidewater Bank and Trust Company, which has been built since the Armistice. “It was contracted for by Negroes and built by Negroes alone,” said the treasurer proudly—a blunt, bullet-headed, whimsical fellow, with an intense desire to push business and to hustle. All the clerks and stenographers were colored. Each teller sat in his steel cage for which he alone held the key. All the latest banking machinery was in operation, including the coin separator and counter and wrapper, and the adding machine. I worked an imaginary account under colored direction, using the adding machine, and gave assent to its infallibility. They showed me their strong room, and I peeped at their cash reserves. The treasurer and “Revrun” then took me up into a high mountain, namely, the Board Room, which was in a gallery overlooking the whole of the working part of the bank.

“My motto,” said the treasurer, “is, ‘Folks who only work for us as long as they are paid will find they are only paid for what they have done.’ We work here till we are through, be it eleven or twelve o’clock at night. The man who isn’t hard is not for us.”

We talked about the Negro.

“He must win freedom,” said the banker. “It is never a bequest, but a conquest. You can’t have redemption without the shedding of the Precious Blood, can you, Reverend? I am fighting for the Negro by succeeding in business. There’s only one thing that can bring him respect, and that is achievement.”

These were his most impressive words. We walked out of the new bank.

“He has his knock-about car and his limousine and a finely appointed house and a governess for his children,” said Rev. B——, as we footed it once more in the sun-bathed street. “But of course you can be a millionaire to-day and it won’t help you to marry even the poorest white girl. Or you can be a Negro heiress, but no amount of wealth will induce a white man to marry a colored girl. For the matter of that, though, there are Negroes so white you couldn’t tell the difference, and we’ve got plenty to choose from if our tastes lie that way. If a Negro wants to marry a white, he can find plenty within his own race.”

Rev. B—— was himself married to a woman who could pass as white, in Southern Europe, and his children were little white darlings with curly hair. We hailed a heavy “F and D” car. I will not mention the actual name of the build. A young colored dandy was sitting in it. “You see this car?” said Reverend. “It belongs to Dr. R——. It’s an ‘F and D.’ In many places the agents will not sell this build of car to a Negro, even for cash down.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, it’s a fine type of car, and rich white men in a city don’t care to see a colored man going about in one exactly the same. An agent would lose business if he sold them to Negroes. What’s more, whether he lost business or not, he wouldn’t do it. Here in Virginia, however, there is not so much prejudice, but when you go further South you’ll find it.”

We got into the car. The young dandy proved to be a doctor’s assistant, a sort of apprentice to the great physician we were about to meet. He had graduated at Fisk, which he called the Negro Athens. He was dressed in a well-cut suit of gray, a rich necktie, and a felt hat which was in excellent taste. His complexion was of the cocoa-brown, highly-polished type, and his large eyes were quiet and reflective, as if unawakened to the joy of life. Politely chatting to us, he guided the beautiful car along some of the most terribly rutty and broken streets.

“We pay equal taxes,” said he, “but because colored people live in these streets the city won’t repair the roads. They are all rich people living in these houses, all Negroes. Several of them own cars.... Now look on the other hand at this street. It’s a white street, all smoothly repaired. What a beautiful surface; see the difference!” Rev. B—— urged this point also. It was a striking example of inequality, and one that makes a strong appeal.

Dr. R—— proved to be a rich practitioner living in a delightful villa with polished floors and a French neatness and charm in the furniture and decorations. The sun blinds were all down, and a pleasant creamy light was diffused upon his books and pictures and silk-upholstered divan. He was very busy, but said he could always spare a few moments from his profession if it were a question of helping his race, and he thought nothing could help the Negroes more than a dispassionate review of their situation by a white man who could bring it not merely before America, but before the world. He had more patients than he could deal with, all Negroes, with the exception of a few Jews. The Jews have no prejudice, and are ready to be attended by a good doctor, whatever the color of his skin, which is a point in any case in favor of the Jews. For a long while the Negroes distrusted their own doctors, and thought that only a white man could possibly have the skill to treat them. But a later generation has discovered that their own folk have an excellent grasp of medicine. My further acquaintance with a considerable number of colored doctors in the South has led me to the conclusion that their temperament suits them admirably. They make good doctors. What is more, they naturally understand the Negro’s body and constitution and nervous system better than the white man, and the pathology of the Negro is very different from that of the white man. The white doctor as yet has not given much separate study to the Negro’s body—though it is certainly very different from ours in many ways. He is inclined perhaps to be a little brutal and offhand with Negro patients—and they certainly are tiresome, with their superstitious fear of ill health and evil eyes, and what not. This impatience has helped the colored practitioner. Negroes, like other people, go where they are best treated, and the medical attendance upon a hundred thousand people could make many doctors rich.

In the old slavery days the Negroes were just a broad base where all were equal. To-day the “race” has lifted up an intelligent and professional class. The working Negro population of Norfolk could lift up its intellectual apex of minister, doctor, and banker, and make them comparatively rich men, and give them all the show of luxury and culture which would have been the lot of white men in similar positions. So the broad base of slavery grows to be a pyramid of freedom.

Dr. R—— was a shrewd, capable, little human mountain. He said, “I think the time has come for the Negro to amass wealth; it’s the only thing that counts in America.” He thought the League of Nations might help the Negro if its representatives ever met at Washington. There would be Frenchmen and Englishmen and Italians, and, being so near to the South, it would be a shame to America if lynchings took place while they were sitting. As it was, the Negro South was a sort of skeleton cupboard which must not be exposed.

From him I learned first that the Negro had not access to the Carnegie libraries in the South. I was surprised. Up at Baltimore, in the North, I was talking to a librarian, and he averred that the Negroes used the public library much more than white people, and that there were so many darkies that Whites did not care to go. But I travel such a very short distance South, and I find no Negro admitted at all.

“Surely that is contrary to the spirit of the Carnegie grants,” said I.

“Yes, for Carnegie was a good friend to the Negro. But so it is,” said Dr. R——. “And I do not think Negroes should agitate about it. It would be better for Negroes to build their own libraries. We shall have to do so. But we don’t want to intrude where we’re not wanted.”

He told me what he considered the most thrilling moment of his life. He was out with a friend at midnight watching the posting of election results, when suddenly a “lewd woman” came out of a house door, screaming and waving her arms. She made right for them, and they were in terror lest she should fall down at their feet or start reviling them. Fortunately, they had the presence of mind not to run away from her, or they might have been lynched by the crowd.

The worthy doctor took us out and drove us all over the city, heartily apologizing that he could not ask me to have any meal with his wife and himself. “For, although you may have no prejudice, it would not be safe for either of us if it were known.” Which was indeed so. Throughout the whole of the South it is impossible to eat or drink with a colored man or woman.

My chief way of finding people to whom I had introductions was by reference to the city directory. Here I found that all colored people were marked with a star—as much as to say, “Watch out; this party’s colored.” White women were indicated as “Mrs.” or “Miss,” but colored women always as plain “Sarah Jones” or “Betty Thompson,” or whatever the name might be, without any prefix. This I discovered to be one of many small grievances of the Negro population, akin to that of not having their roads mended though they pay taxes, and being obliged to take back seats behind a straw screen in the trolley cars.

It was a novel impression in the Negro church on Sunday morning. I came rather early, and found an adult Bible class discussing theology in groups. One man near me exclaimed, “It says ‘He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved,’ doesn’t it, brother? Well, then, I believe, so why argufy? I an’t a-goin’ to take no chances. No, sir, I an’t a-goin’ to do it”—a serene black child of forty years or so.

In the full congregation were all types of Negroes. The men were undistinguished, but the women were very striking. One lady wore a gilded skirt and a broad-brimmed, black straw hat. Two Cleopatras sat in front of me—tall, elegant, graceful, expensively dressed as in Mayfair, one in chiffon, the other in soft gray satin, tiny gold chains about their necks, pearl earrings in their ears. They had smooth, fruit-like cheeks, curving outward to perfect bell mouths. When they sang they lifted their full, dusky throats like grand birds. They were evidently of the élite of Norfolk. On the other hand, there were numbers of baggy and voluminous ladies with enormous bosoms, almost visibly perspiring. They thronged and they thronged, and all the red-cushioned seats filled up. There were men of all types, from the perfect West African Negro to the polished American Arab, yellow men, brown men, lots with large tortoise-shell spectacles, all with close-cropped hair which showed the Runic lines of their hard heads. Fans were provided for every worshipper, and noisy religious and family talk filled the whole chapel.

We began with some fine singing—not deep and harmonious and complex as that of the Russians, but hard, resonant, and breezy, followed by conventional prayers and the reading of the Scriptures. The pastor then sent someone to ask me if I would come forward and give them Christian greeting in a few words. I was much astonished, as I did not know one ever broke into the midst of Divine Service in that way. However, I came forward and confronted the strange sea of dusky, eager faces and the thousand waving paper fans, and I said: “Dear brothers and sisters, I am an Englishman and a white man, but before these I am a Christian. In Christ, as you know, there is neither white nor black, neither inferiority nor superiority of race, unless it is that sometimes the first shall be last and the last first. We know little about the American Negro in England, but I have come to find out. I have not been sent by anybody, but was just prompted by the Spirit to come out here and make your acquaintance, and so bring tidings home to England. I hope you will take that as an assurance of loving interest in you, and a promise for the future. I am glad to see you have made such progress since slavery days and have in Norfolk fine houses and churches and banks and a theatre and restaurants and businesses, and that you have such a large measure of happiness and freedom. I believe you have great gifts to offer on the altar of American civilization, and so far from remaining a problem you will prove a treasure.” And I told some touching words of my friend Hugh Chapman, of the chapel of the Savoy, in London: “Mankind is saved, not by a white man, or by a black, but by one who combines both—the little brown Man of Nazareth.”

It was a strange sensation, that of facing the Negro congregation. I could find no touch, no point of contact, could indeed take nothing from them. The spiritual atmosphere was an entirely different one from that of a gathering of Whites. I should have been inclined to say that there was no spiritual atmosphere whatever. For me it was like speaking to an empty room and a vast collection of empty seats. But I know there was something there, though I could not realize it.

After the service there came up to me a purely delightful creature, full of an almost dangerous ardor for what I had said. She was the leading spirit at the Liberty Club for colored soldiers and jack tars. In the afternoon I listened to some wonderful singing at another church. The little black organist woman sang at the top of her voice while she bent over the keys, and waved the spirit into her choir by eager movements with the back of her hand.

“Take me, shake me, don’t let me sleep,” they sang, and it was infinitely worth while. I felt that in the great ultimate harmony we could not do without this voice, the voice of the praise of the dark children.

Next week I went over to Newport News. On a wall in Norfolk I read: “T. Adkins, Newport News,” and underneath someone had written, “You could not pay me to live there: Robert Johnson, Norfolk.”

That might possibly explain the relativity of the two places. Newport News is a ramshackle settlement on the sands across the water from Norfolk. It has a nondescript, ill-dressed, well-paid, wild, working-class population, with all manner of cheap shops and low lodging houses. On every fifth window seems to be scrawled in whitewash, “HOT DOG 5 cents.” It was explained to me that this is sausage of a rather poor quality. I had never seen the article so frankly named elsewhere. For the rest, a good deal of manifest immorality strolls the streets at night or is voiced on dark verandas. The police station is a place of considerable mystery and glamour, and I should say Newport News at this season would have proved an interesting research for the vice raker. I paid three dollars for a room whose lock had been burst off, and one of whose windows was broken, a mosquito-infested hovel, but the only room obtainable.

A very interesting young colored trainer took me over the shipbuilding yards the next day. He was an enthusiastic boxer, and I asked him the cause of Negro excellence in this sport. For there are at least three Negro boxers whom no white boxers have been able to beat, and this excellence has caused the championship rules to be altered so as to disqualify colored champions.

He said it was due to quicker eye and greater aggressiveness, above all to greater aggressiveness. The Negro is a born fighter. It is true he has greater endurance and a much harder skull, but he has also remarkable aptitude.

“Has the Negro boxer more science?” I asked.

“No, perhaps not so much. He has fighting blood, that’s what it is. His ancestors fought for thousands of years.”

I remarked that the red Indians fought also, but they were poor boxers. He put that down to slight physique.

“I got tired of watching boxing matches in the army,” said I. “The bulkier and more brutal types always seemed to get the better of those who were merely skillful. I expect that is why we don’t like watching a Negro and a white man boxing, it is too much a triumph of body over mind.”

“There’s no finer sight than to watch two Negroes well matched,” said the trainer, with a smile.

I thought good boxing showed more the animal side of a man, and I recalled a reported saying of Jack Johnson—“I’se ready to fight mos’ any man that they is, an’ if ye cahn find any man, why, just send me down a great big black Russian bear....”

“It jarred the white folk terrible bad that Jack Johnson was the real champion of the world,” said the trainer. “When the news came through of Jack Johnson beating Jeffries so far away as Denver, Colorado, the white folk began pulling the Negroes off the street cars in Norfolk, Virginia, and beating them, just to vent their rage, they were so sore.”

I thought that rather amusing, but the trainer took a gloomy view. However, in we went to the shipbuilding yard and looked at many great vessels in dry dock. Out came a motley crowd of men, blacker than their nature through the dirt of their work. The ship painters were splashed from head to foot with the characteristic red paint of ships, and looked like some new tribe; the blue-shirted rivetters and chippers were all frayed and ragged from contact with sharp edges and iron. These Negro workers were very happy and jolly. They seemed nearly all to be on piecework and earned in most cases ten dollars a day, and in some exceptional cases and upon occasion twenty or twenty-five dollars. The rivetters, according to the scale of pay, seemed to be capable of earning huge wages, and many of them were comparatively well off, possessing their homes, and giving their children a good education. The trainer pointed out to me his athletic pets. He was employed by the company to organize competitions and races and baseball teams and the like. The strongest Negroes seemed among the gentlest. The heavyweight champion was a large and beautiful child. He never lost his temper in the ring, because, as I was told, he never needed to. His ears were not turned to “cauliflower” and his nose was not flattened out—as yet.

The lunch hour was remarkable for the swarms of men belched forth by the works. A twenty-cent lunch was ready for all. Wives and mothers also were allowed to come and bring food to supplement what was served at the stands. Lunch over, the men formed into groups, and in some places there were Bible discussions, in others sporting competitions. Despite high wages, I noticed some Negroes going about picking up crusts and putting them into paper bags, presumably to feed the chickens with when they got home. My guide said this was due to the “Save” propaganda which had been carried on. Y. M. C. A. work was very much to the fore, an industrial “Y” having been financed by the owners of the yard. I was told that a little while ago the company found it difficult to keep the young Negro boys—the heaters and passers, on whose work the rivetter depends, for one boy heats the rivet and another passes it, and the rivetter strikes it home. They found so little in the place to interest them that they drifted away from the works. It was this that had determined the firm to embark on a program of physical culture and games. There was also a Y. M. C. A. hut and its usual appurtenances. A long list of evening classes was being arranged. A large building had been promised to the “Y” if it made good.

I could not find any man who belonged to a genuine trade-union affiliated to the American Federation of Labor, though most belonged to “Colored People’s Brotherhoods.” The Whites with whom they worked, and with whom they have upon occasion great rivetting competitions, were presumably non-union also, but that is common; labor in America is poorly organized, compared with labor in Great Britain. Almost the whole of Negro labor is at present outside the recognized unions, and for that reason can almost always be used to break strikes. This is, of course, unfortunate for the Negro, who is thus branded as a “blackleg” in addition to being black by nature, which was reproach enough.

I met a strange character in the evening, one of the colored organizers, a friend of the white men, and in with the bosses of the yards. He was possibly a descendant of the type of Negro who in slavery days acted as agent for the slave merchants, and was to be found on the West African shore lording it over the batches of poor savages who with hands tied up were being hustled on to the slave ships. It used to be a recognizable type. When they themselves were brought over to America they became overseers or field drivers, and brutal enough they were to their fellow men of color. To-day they are foremen or speeders up of Negro gangs, or you find them under the auspices of “Welfare.”

This was a lazy Negro, fat and heavy, with a confused non-thinking mind, great sooty lips, and bloodshot eyes. He told me he put on a wig at night and prowled about the town, spying on vice. The great numbers of black soldiers embarking or disembarking had attracted sharps and bad women of all kinds. The streets were infested with sin, and he knew which boarding houses were disreputable and which were properly kept. He knew where there was drink, and who was organizing the “bootlegging” business, and what graft the police took. Though sluggish by nature, this gloomy soul evidently got full of life at night—spying on the people.

He told me the richest colored man in Newport News was a dentist who charged as much as six dollars an hour for stopping teeth. The example of this dentist’s success had caused several fathers to educate their children for dentistry rather than the Church or the Law. “But we Negroes don’t want to rise,” said he. “We want to show off. We are great imitators of swagger. They’ll come wearing a forty-dollar suit and a clean collar, and brandish a cigar in your face when that is all they have in the world. We’re a crude people, sir.”

There was on the one hand in Newport News a nucleus of prosperous Negro families, and on the other hand the many gambling places and dancing dens where health and ambition and money, and everything else which can help a man to rise could be squandered. In time to come, when society takes root, Newport News should become a Negro stronghold. Already there are so many Negroes no white man dare start a riot.

Not far from Newport News is Hampton Institute, the “Negro Eton,” which produces the Curzons and the Cecils of the colored race, as someone amusingly expressed it. It is the crown of Northern effort to educate the Negro. Endowment and instruction are mostly by Whites. Everyone is engaged in vital self-support, and the students plough the fields, make boots, build wagons, print books, and learn all manner of practical lessons in life. Above all, they are made ready to teach and help others of their race. It is the show place of the Negro world, and rightly so, as most of those who lead Negrodom hail as yet from Hampton.

I did not myself visit Hampton, because it has been adequately described in books, and generally speaking I would rather study the Negro in his unperfumed haunts, where he is less disguised with Northern culture. Perhaps one learns more of the needs and requirements of the Negroes by visiting a poor school where the ordinary routine of teaching is going on. I visited a high school named after Booker T. Washington, and talked to the students in the classes. The young lady who took me to the head master wore a low-cut, white blouse from which her dainty neck and her head of kinky hair grew like a palm tree. She had dog’s teeth for eardrops hanging from her ears, and large, kind, questioning eyes. The head master was a quiet young man from some Negro university, full of pent-up enthusiasm for his race and for learning. He had boundless enthusiasm for the Negro people and their possibilities. Was not the greatest French writer a colored man, and the greatest Russian poet of Negro blood? We went into the composition class. They were doing “Argumentation,” which is perhaps a trifle dull, but we discussed brevity and the principle of suspense. In the English class each child had read “Silas Marner” and was taking it in turn to re-tell the story when called upon by the teacher. This was pretty well done, though Americanisms were frequent, and the two brothers were said to be “disagreeable” when it was meant that they disagreed. In French the whole class was standing around the walls of the room, writing French sentences on the blackboards fitted into the panelling. French was very popular. Every child wanted to go to France by and by. In the Latin class we discussed the merits of Cæsar, in the cookery class whether they ate what they cooked, in the needlework, invisible mending—when suddenly the fire bell sounded. Each class at once got up and filed out in orderly manner. In one minute the whole school of seven hundred black children was cleared. Then they marched back in twos, shoulder to shoulder, in fine style, to the rub-a-dub-dub of a kettledrum. It was a surprise alarm, called by a visiting fire inspector. None, even of the teachers, had known whether the alarm was real.

The teachers here were all black, and possessed of the greatest enthusiasm; the children presented some hopeless types, but they were mostly very eager and intelligent. The methods of teaching seemed to be advanced, but there were many deficiencies, notably that of the chemistry class, where all the apparatus was in a tiny cupboard, and consisted of some bits of tubing, a few old test tubes, and some empty bottles.

It was a grievance, and I thought a legitimate one, that whereas the white schools were given good buildings with every latest convenience, less was thought good enough for the Negro children. Though white sympathizers with the ex-slave had been very generous in endowing Negro education, their good work was more than neutralized by the Southern local authorities, who held the point of view that education spoiled the “nigger.” If it were not for the enthusiasm of the Negro teachers, who carry on in any circumstances, it might easily have happened that the colored people had a whole series of well-endowed universities and colleges like Fisk and Hampton, but no elementary or secondary school education worth the name.

Lack of good will toward the Negro thus expresses itself in many ways; the failure to repair his roads, the failure to give him equal facilities for education and self-improvement, and his exclusion from the public libraries. The white man will not say “No” to grants of money which give him handsome Carnegie library buildings for nothing or will raise universities, even Negro universities, but he will not fulfill his part of the unwritten contract—and honor all philanthropy by indiscriminate good will.

After visiting the school I saw glimpses of Negro women at work in characteristic places of earning a living. The management was always very sensitive about strangers being present, so it was possible to find out little about the conditions. One shop was full of girls sewing ready-cut trousers on machines run by electricity. The trousers were cut in Baltimore and sent down here to be sewn cheaply by local colored labor. A Jew was in charge. A Negro woman was looking after the “welfare” of the girls. Another was a tobacco factory, where girls earned eleven dollars a week, working from 7:30 a. m. to 5:30 p. m., stripping tobacco leaf in airy and fragrant rooms. At piecework they earned from six cents a pound.

I visited the publishing office of the Journal and Guide, where the Negroes not only edit a paper but manufacture their own type and do everything themselves—one of a hundred Negro newspapers published in the United States. The average number of spelling errors in many of these sheets seemed to be about three a paragraph, but that in no wise renders them ridiculous or deters the pen of the ready writers. Negroes have a passion for journalism which is out of proportion to their present development and capacity.

As I came out of the publishing office with the editor we saw a hearse. It was drawn by a motor, and it was a new idea to me, that of being motored to one’s grave. The editor made a sign and the hearse stopped. “Just a moment,” said he, and a lugubriously cloaked Ethiopian with large, shining teeth stepped down.

“This is Undertaker Brown,” said the editor.

“Always at yo’ seyvice, sar,” said the undertaker. “Is yo’ thinking of taking a ride with me?”

I said I was not meditating on that sad course yet.

“It’s a fine hearse,” said Brown—“and look, they is steel clamps to keep the coffin steady (he swung open the rear doors) and speshal receppacles fo’ the flowers.”

I thanked him, and we shook hands effusively.

All the Negroes took charge of me. It was no difficult task to see their ways of life. It was impossible not to feel happy in the midst of their childish vivacity and enthusiasm and make-believe. Their grievances were almost lost sight of in the sunshine of prosperity in Eastern Virginia. Miss M—— told me how in the Red Cross drives during the war she “led the cullud folk over the top” and the vividness of her story of Negro vying with Negro as to who should subscribe most money, and how she defied the white “crackers” to continue lynching and persecuting them in the face of such patriotism as they had shown was not only instructive but extraordinarily amusing, and also touching; how a large audience of white people was listening to a combined “platform” of black and white orators, and Negro choirs were singing “spirituals” while the collection plates rolled round, and Miss M—— when she arrived at the hall was so dead-beat with rushing round the town all day that she fell in a faint and she prayed, “Lord, if I gain strength I’ll take it for a sign that I am to speak.” And she came to herself and went on to the platform and told the white folk straight—what she felt—how nine-tenths of her people could not spell the word Democracy and had indeed only just heard of it, and yet they sent their children to wounds and death, and they themselves subscribed their last dimes for patriotic causes. But what did America give in return? And at the end she overheard one of the worst “crackers” remark that he could not help admiring her, she was “so durned sincere.”

The last evening I spent in this corner of Virginia was at a resort of colored soldiers and sailors, and I had a talk with a boy who had held a commission in the Ninety-second Division, a black unit which had covered itself with glory in France. He was a lieutenant, and was at the taking of St. Mihiel. The Negro marines were also very interesting—eager, serious, and sober fellows. They were proud of being in Uncle Sam’s navy, but wanted a chance of advancement there, did not wish to remain twenty years in the same grade, but hoped desperately for a gold stripe in time, and the chance to become petty officer. Soldiers and sailors surged in and out of the hall, smoked cigarettes, drank soda, and chatted. I heard no foul talk, and I took much pleasure in their appearance. I felt what a fine body of guardians of their country could be made of them if once prejudice were finally overcome. In this part of Eastern Virginia, the apex of the South, the new black world seemed very promising and had gone far in its fifty-seven years of freedom.

The way from Norfolk to Richmond is up the James River, and I continued my journey on a boat that had evidently come from New York—redolent as it was of long-distance passengers. There was a seat, however, just under the captain’s lookout, and there was nothing before me but the progressing prow and the silver expanse of the river. A classical voyage this—for it was up the James River, named after James the First, that the first pioneers of Raleigh’s virgin land made their way. It is felt to be romantic, because they were not Roundheads nor Quakers nor Plymouth Brethren nor other sober-liveried folk, but gentlemen of sword and ruff, courtier-sailors who upon occasion would be ready to throw their cloaks in the mud for a Queen to tread upon. The tradition of courtier survives, and a rich man of Virginia is to-day a Virginian gentleman, though there is scarcely another State in America where the landed proprietors claim to be gentry. The James River is significant for another reason. At little Jamestown, which never came to anything as a city, the first Negro slaves were landed in America in 1618, and from the small beginning of one shipload three hundred years ago nation-wide Negrodom, with all its black millions, has arisen.

Virginia grew prosperous in the cultivation of tobacco, which remains to-day the staple production of a comparatively poor State. It is too far north for the cultivation of cotton, and though doubtless possessing great mineral wealth, industrial research has not gone so far as in Pennsylvania. It is essentially a conservative State. Slavery is said to have depressed its economic life so that neighboring Northern States, whose development began much later, easily overtook it. A somewhat patriarchal settled state of life took possession of Virginia, a new feudalism which was out of keeping with hustling and radical America. It is remarkable, however, how many lawmakers, administrators, soldiers, and Presidents Virginia has given to the United States. Starting with gentry, it has bred gentry.

And with regard to the Negro, the State has a good record. Despite the various inequalities of treatment and Jim-Crowism noticeable by anyone who is observant, there is little or no brutality or nigger-baiting. Lynching is rare, and it must be supposed the alleged Negro attacks upon white women must be rare also. Such relatively good conditions prevail in Virginia that the whole South takes shelter behind her. And as the proud Virginian reckons himself par excellence the Southerner, he is often annoyed when he reads of the worse treatment of the Negroes further south. Virginia should remember she is not the whole South, and she does not exert even a moral influence upon Georgia and Mississippi. In that respect she seems to be as helpless as New England and the Puritans, to whom politically she has generally been in opposition.

The old Virginian families bound the Negroes to them with undying devotion. They became part of the family, with all the license of pet children. They fought for them and assisted them in the Civil War with the creature-like devotion of clansmen for their chief. The “veterans” who still survive, Negroes like Robert E. Lee’s cook, who was one of many picturesque personalities at the Atlanta reunion, are of a different type from the Negroes of to-day. They identified themselves with their master and mistress’s estate and person in a way that is truly touching. Surely of all beings the Negro is capable of the strongest and most pathetic human attachments.

Freedom, however, and the new ideas blew autumnly over the Virginian summer. All changed. The family retinues broke up. The affections were alienated. The new race of Negro individualists arose. The old “mammies” and “uncles” were a people apart, and are dying out fast now. The new Negroes are with and for themselves. They make shift to be happy and to amuse themselves without the white man. And they have now their schools, their churches which are like religious clubs, their political societies, theatres, and other segregated interests.

These segregated interests have produced and tend to produce an ever-increasing Negro culture, and though that culture may be somewhat despised because of its humble beginnings, there seems no reason why it should not have a future which will compare with that of white America. But south of Richmond and south of Virginia there is progressively less of this Negro culture to be found. There are the oases of Tuskegee Institute and Atlanta and Fisk Universities, but white opinion is adverse to Negro education, and the black masses have been unable to over-crow their neighbors. In Richmond and north of it, however, the black man has leave to breathe awhile, and there are interesting developments.

Richmond, which in 1853 reminded Olmsted of Edinburgh in its picturesqueness, has now quintupled its population, and spread greatly. It is still a handsome city, and its center of Grecian Capitol and public gardens is very pleasant. It is the third blackest city in the United States, between thirty-five and forty per cent of its population being colored. A certain General Gabriel led an insurrection of Negro slaves against Richmond in 1801, and the city has always adopted itself as self-constituted warden of the white man’s safety. The city has, however, been free enough from disturbance since the Civil War. It has its well-endowed Negro colleges, and on the other hand its less satisfactorily placed elementary and secondary schools. As in Norfolk, Negro business is thriving, though it has deeper roots.

It is less promising west of Richmond. A duller economic life prevails, and conditions are more normal, less affected by the prosperity of war industrialism. I traveled by train to Lynchburg. As this was my first experience of trains south of the Mason-Dixon line, I was interested to observe the Jim Crow arrangements. The Negroes are kept to separate waiting rooms, and book their tickets at other booking windows, and they are put into separate carriages in the trains, and not allowed promiscuously with white people, as in the North. They have not quite so good accommodation, though they pay the same fare; sometimes there is less space, sometimes there is no separate smoking compartment. Drawing-room cars and “sleepers” are generally unavailable. Colored people consider it a great grievance, but it is probably the insult implied in their segregation that affects them most. There is not an enormous disparity in the comfort. Inability to obtain food on long-distance trains was often mentioned to me as the chief injustice, but the personal aspect of the matter was always to the fore: “We don’t want to mix in with white people, or with those who don’t want us. We can get on very well by ourselves ...” they were always protesting.

In the North, promiscuously seated black and white passengers all seem quite happy and at ease. Mixing them works well. There is never any hitch. In the South, however, segregation seems to be for the Negro’s good. The less personal contact he has with the white man the safer he is from sudden outbursts of racial feeling. Of course, the railway companies ought to give the Negro equal accommodation for equal fare, but that is another matter.

Lynchburg is a beautifully situated little city beside the Blue Ridge Mountains. It is a great market for dark tobacco. It manufactures iron pipes, ploughs, boots and shoes, and a number of other articles, and boasts of “ideal labor conditions and no strikes.” It is named after the original planter, Charles Lynch, an Irish boy, who ran from home and married a Quaker. It lapsed from Quakerism to a very sinful state, and then is said to have been reformed by the Methodists. Now there is nothing to trouble the mind unpleasantly at Lynchburg.

The public library seemed to have paused sick in 1905. It is called the Jones Memorial Library, an impressive white building with an array of white steps leading up to it. Jones himself, who was a business man and served a very short while in the war of North and South, is shown in full martial attire drawing his sword, halfway up the stone steps—as it were in act of driving readers away. A cold cloister-like air pervaded the building. Negroes were not permitted in, and white people did not enter much. The librarian, however, was unusually kind and obliging, and lent me a book without taking a deposit. This lady said she would rather sit next to a decent black woman in a train than to the average White.

“We all had our black mammies—they treated us as if we were their own babies. Can you blame us if sometimes we love them as our own flesh and blood? All the trouble we have is due to Northerners coming South. And if a Negro gets lynched, what a fuss is made of it!”

I met the manager of a tobacco warehouse. He was not willing that I should see his Negroes at work and talk to them, but he assured me in a bland way, cigar in hand, that his pickers were a jolly crowd who knew they were well paid and would never go on strike. He paid thirty to thirty-five cents the hour for Negro labor.

“The war has played the devil with the niggers,” said he. “It has spread about the idea of high wages. The North has been especially to blame, luring the niggers up there with the bait of big money. It has caused a rise in wages all over the South.”

His employees were unskilled. In his opinion no Negroes were ever used for skilled work. What I had to tell him of Newport News and its shipyards was beyond his comprehension. As for Hampton Institute, he averred that he had never heard that it produced capable artisans. In his opinion there had been some good Negro carpenters and wheelwrights in slavery, but none since. Freedom had been very bad for the Negro. Yes, he utterly approved of lynching. It was always justified, and mistakes were never made. He had a water-tight mind.

A mile or so away was Virginia College, a red-brick structure in the woods, where in happy seclusion a few hundred colored men and women were being enfranchised of civilization and culture. A student took me to his study-bedroom, hung with portraits of John Brown and Booker T. Washington. The Bible was still the most important book, and it occupied the pride of place, though it was interleaved with pages of the Negro radical monthly, The Crisis. The student was an intense and earnest boy with all the extra seriousness of persecuted race consciousness. He said, in a low voice, that he would do anything at any cost for his people. He said the present leaders of the Negro world would fail, because of narrow outlook, but the next leaders would win great victories for color. And he would be ready to follow the new leaders. What a contrast they were!—the boss of the tobacco factory, cigar in hand, “talking wise” on the nigger, and the quiet Negro intellectual in his college, whetting daily the sword of learning and ambition.

III

ORATORS AND ACTORS, PREACHERS AND SINGERS

The aspirations and convictions of the Negroes of to-day were well voiced in a speech I heard at Harlem. I had been warned that I ought to hear the “red-hot orator of the Afro-American race,” and so I went to hear him. The orator was Dean Pickens, of Morgan College, Baltimore. When he came to the platform the colored audience not only cheered him by clapping, but stood up and cried aloud three times:

“Yea, Pickens!”

The chairman had said he would have to leave about half after five, but the speaker must not allow himself to be disturbed by that, but go right on. Pickens, who was one of the very black and very cheerful types of his race, turned to the chairman and said:

“You won’t disturb me, brother! But if you’re going at half after five, let’s shake hands right now, and then I can go straight ahead.”

And they shook hands with great gusto, and everyone laughed and felt at ease. Pickens was going to speak; nothing could disturb Pickens; they relaxed themselves to a joyful, anticipatory calm.

Just before the turn of Pickens to speak a white lady journalist had rushed on to the platform and rushed off between two pressing engagements, and had given the audience a “heart-to-heart” talk on Bolsheviks and agitators, and had told them how thankful they ought to be that they were in America and not in the Congo still. She gained a good deal of applause because she was a woman, and a White, and was glib, but the thinking Negroes did not care for her doctrine, and were sorry she could not wait to hear it debated.

“Brothers, they’re always telling us what we ought to be,” said the orator, with an engaging smile. “But there are many different opinions about what ought to be; it’s what we are that matters. As a colored pastor said to his flock one day—’Brothers and sisters, it’s not the oughtness of this problem that we have to consider, but the isness!’ I am going to speak about the isness. Sister S——, who has just spoken, has had to go to make a hurry call elsewhere, but I am sorry she could not stay. I think she might perhaps have heard something worth while this afternoon. Sister S—— warned us against agitators and radicals. Now, I am not against or for agitators. The question is: ’What are they agitating about?’ ‘Show me the agitator,’ I say. President Wilson is a great agitator; he is agitating a League of Nations. Jesus Christ was a great agitator; He agitated Christianity. The Pharisees and Sadducees didn’t like His agitating, and they fixed Him. But He was a good agitator, and we’re not against Him. Then, again, the Irish are great agitators; the Jews are great agitators; there are good and bad agitators. (Applause.) But, brothers, I’ll tell you who is the greatest agitator in this country ... the greatest agitator is injustice. (Sensation.) When injustice disappears, I’ll be against agitators, or I’ll be ready to see them put in a lunatic asylum. (Applause.)

“Sister S—— was very hard on the radicals. There, again, show me the radical, I say. A man may be radically wrong, yes, but he may also be radically right. (Laughter.)

“As for the Bolsheviks, it’s injustice is making Bolshevism. It’s injustice that changes quiet, inoffensive school teachers and workingmen into Bolsheviks, just as it is injustice is stirring up the colored people. Not that we are Bolsheviks. I am not going to say anything against Bolsheviks, either. Show me the Bolshevik first, I say, and then I’ll know whether I’m against him. People are alarmed because the number of Bolsheviks is increasing. But what is making them increase? If America is such a blessed country, why is she making all these Bolsheviks? You know a tree by its fruits, and so you may know a country by what it produces. These Bolsheviks that we read of being deported in the Soviet Ark weren’t Bolshevik when they came to this country. It comes to this: that we’ve raised a crop of Bolshevism in this country and are exporting it to Europe, and now we’re busy sowing another crop. Stop sowing injustice, and Bolshevism will cease growing. (Applause again.)

“But there is less Bolshevism among the colored people than among the white, because the colored are more humble, more subservient, more used to inequalities. We are always being told that we are backward, and we believe it; bad, and we believe it; untrustworthy, and we believe it; immoral, and we believe it. We are always being told what we ought to be. But I’ll come back to what we are.

“We may be immoral; we may be a danger to the white women. But has anyone ever honestly compared the morality of Whites and Blacks? They will tell you there is not sufficient evidence to make a comparison, or they will bring you pamphlets and paragraphs out of newspapers, records of disgusting crimes; and we know very well that in twelve million Negroes there are bound to be some half-wits and criminals capable of terrible breaches of morality. But at best it is a paper evidence against the Negro, while there is flesh-and-blood evidence against the White. The moral standard of the Whites is written visibly in the flesh and blood of three million of our race. (Another sensation.) Brothers, there’s one standard for the white man, and another for the colored man. (Sensation redoubled.) A colored man’s actions are not judged in the same light as those of a white man.

“Well, I’m not against that. It is giving us a higher ideal. A colored man has got to be much more careful in this country than a white man. He’ll be more heavily punished for the same crime. If he gets into a dispute with a white man he’s bound to lose his case. So he won’t get into the dispute. (Laughter.) Where a white man gets five years’ imprisonment, the Negro gets put in the electric chair. Where the white man gets six days, he gets two years. If a white man seduces a colored girl, she never gets redress. If the other thing occurs, the Negro is legally executed, or lynched. What is the result of all that inequality? Why, it is making us a more moral, less criminal, less violent people than the Whites. Once at a mixed school they were teaching the black and white boys to jump. The white boys jumped and the black boys jumped. But when it was the black boy’s turn the teacher always lifted the jumping stick a few inches. What was the consequence? Why, after a while every colored boy in that school could jump at least a foot higher than any white boy. (Renewed sensation, in which Pickens attempted several times to resume.)

“That is what is happening to the Negro race in America. We are being taught to jump a foot higher than the Whites. We will jump it, or we will break our necks. (Laughter.)

“Of course a great difference separates the Black from the White still. And I don’t say that the white man hasn’t given us a chance. If our positions had been transposed, and we had been masters and the white folks had been the slaves, I’m not sure that we wouldn’t have treated them worse than they have treated us. But the white folk make a mistake when they think we’re not taking the chances they give us. We are taking them. We are covering the ground that separates Black from White. The white man is not outstripping us in the race. We are nearer to him than we were—not farther away. We haven’t caught up, but we’re touching. We are always doing things we never did before. (Applause.)

“We shall not have cause to regret the time of persecution and injustice and the higher standard of morality that has been set us. Brothers, it’s all worth while. Our boys here have been to France and bled and suffered for white civilization and white justice. We didn’t want to go. We didn’t know anything about it. But it’s been good for us. We’ve made the cause of universal justice our cause. We have taken a share in world sufferings and world politics. It’s going to help raise us out of our obscurity. We have discovered the French, and shall always be grateful to them. We didn’t know France before, but every colored soldier is glad now that he fought for France. If there is to be a League of Nations, we know France will stand by us. And we shall have a share in the councils of Humanity—with our colored brethren in all parts of the world.” (Sensation again.)

The orator spoke for two hours, and the above is only a personal remembrance put down afterwards. His actual speech is therefore much shortened. But that was the sense and the flavor of it. It was given in a voice of humor and challenge, resonant, and yet everlastingly whimsical. Laughter rippled the whole time. I shook hands with him afterwards; for he was warm and eloquent and moving as few speakers I have heard. He was utterly exhausted, for he had drawn his words from his audience, and two thousand people had been pulling at his spirit for two hours.

It was delightful to listen to a race propagandist so devoid of hatred, malice, and uncharitableness. Some regard humor as the greatest concomitant of wisdom, and this representative Negro certainly had both. He never touched on the tragedy of race hatred and racial injustice, but he saw the humor of them also. And the colored audience saw the humor also. With the English there would have been anger, with the French spontaneous insurrection, with the Jews gnashing of teeth, but with the Negroes it was humor. There was no collective hate or spite, but, manifest always, a desire to be happy, even in the worst circumstances.

It is curious, however, that the Negro has a livelier sense of the humor of tragedy than the white man. For two months I visited a Negro theatre every week, and I was much struck by the fact that where there was most cause to weep or feel melancholy, the colored audience was most provoked to mirth. Negro companies, such as the Lafayette Players, play “Broadway successes,” melodramas, classical dramas, musical comedies, and indeed anything that would be staged in a white man’s theatre. But the result is nearly always comedy. As upon occasion white men burn cork and make up as Negroes, so the Negroes paint themselves white and make up as white men and women. Watching them is an entrancing study, because there is not only the original drama and its interest, but superadded the interpretation by Africans of what they think the white man is and does and says. Some of it is like the servants’ hall dressed up as master and mistress and their friends, but has remarkable felicity in acting. A large party, all in full evening dress, is very striking—only the Negro women are on the average so huge that when painted white and exposing vast fronts of bosoms, they are somewhat incredible. A typical evening party on the stage, with villain and hero, looks very handsome, but not in any way Anglo-Saxon, if conceivably foreign American. The hero may have a perfectly villainous expression. One’s mind is taken away from America to the Mediterranean. Even when painted, it is impossible to look other than children of the sun. The drama is played with a great deal of noise. When the moments of passion arrive, everyone lets himself go, and the stage is swallowed up in a hurly-burly of violent word and action. There is never any difficulty in hearing what is being said. But even the minor characters, such as butler and waiter, who should be practically mute, insist on whistling and singing as they go about, and serve the guests in a pas de danse. In one serious melodrama the butler never appeared but he hummed resonantly the popular air: “Yakky, Yekky, Yikky, Yokky Doola.” The villain or villainess is likely to act the part with great verve, and generally I remarked a true aptitude for acting, an ability which noise and violence could not hide. A white drama is literally transformed on the Negro stage. The Negroes catch hold of any childishness or piece of make-believe and give it a sort of poetry. Thus, for instance, Miss Elenor Porter’s “Polyanna,” with its gospel of “Be glad,” is a cloying sentimentalism in the hands of the ordinary white company. But the Negroes make it into a sort of “Alice in Wonderland,” very amusing, very sweet, and very touching—something entirely delightful. The consciousness of the white person sitting in the colored theater is, however, continually disturbed by ripples of tittering whenever on the stage there is a suggestion of calamity. When it is melodrama that is being played, the audience laughs all the time like a collection of intellectuals who have visited a popular theatre to watch “The Silver King” or “The Girl’s Crossroads.” The very suggestion of disaster is funny.

This is an indication of difference in soul. There are many who would see in these white-painted Negroes another instance of a passion for the imitation of white people. But one could hardly point to anything that shows more readily the sheer difference of black and white people than the Negro stage such as it is to-day.

There is not as yet a Negro drama, but it certainly will arise. Ridgely Torrence’s “Plays for a Negro Theatre” is perhaps the nearest approach so far to a genuine Negro drama, but the author is white. The great success of these plays when acted by Negroes only shows the glory that awaits the awakening of a true Negro dramatist. Every large city in America has its Negro theatre or music hall or cinema shows. The drama could become an organ of racial self-expression, and could give voice to the hopes and aspirations and sorrows of the colored people in a very moving way. I think such a drama would prove highly original. Comedy would be conceived in a different spirit. So far from the Negro imitating the white man, we should all be found imitating him—as we already imitate him in our dances and music. The new Negro humor would infect the whole Western world.

It is generally called “the blues.” We say we have a fit of the blues when we are feeling depressed. It is not at all a laughing matter, but the Negro finds that state of mind to be always humorous. A hundred new comic songs tell the humor of sorrows. All the gloomy formulas of everyday life have been set to music. Telling one’s hard fortune and howling over it and drawing it out and infinitely bewailing it, and adding circumstantial minor sorrows as one goes along and infinitely bewailing them—this is distinctively Negro humor.

I visited one evening a Negro theatre where a musical comedy was going on—words and music both by Negroes. It opened with the usual singing and dancing chorus of Negro girls. They were clad in yellow and crimson and mauve combinations with white tapes on one side from the lace edge of the knicker to their dusky arms. They danced from the thigh rather than from the knee, moving waist and bosom in unrestrained undulation, girls with large, startled seeming eyes and uncontrollable masses of dark hair. A dance of physical joy and abandon, with no restraint in the toes or the knees, no veiling of the eyes, no half shutting of the lips, no holding in of the hair. Accustomed to the very æsthetic presentment of the Bacchanalia in the Russian Ballet, it might be difficult to call one of those Negro dancers a Bacchante, and yet there was one whom I remarked again and again, a Queen of Sheba in her looks, a face like starry night, and she was clad slightly in mauve, and went into such ecstasies during the many encores that her hair fell down about her bare shoulders, and her cheeks and knees, glistening with perspiration, outshone her eyes. Following this chorus a love story begins to be developed—a humorous mother-in-law of tremendous proportions and deep bass voice, her black face blackened further to the color of boots, reprimands and pets her scapegrace son, who is the comic loafer. He confers with his “buddy” as to how to win “Baby,” the belle of Dark City. The “buddy” is the lugubriously stupid and faithful and above all comic Negro friend who in trying to help you always does you an ill turn. “Baby” is the beautiful doll of the piece—“Honey baby, sugar baby!” She is courted also by the villain, who is plausible and well dressed and polite, but still provocative of mirth. The hero and the villain do a competitive cake walk for the girl, posturizing, showing off, approaching and retiring, almost squatting and dancing, leaping and dancing, swimming through the air, throwing everything away from them and falling forward, and yet never falling, blowing out their cheeks and dilating their eyes, and, as it were, hoo-dooing and out-hoo-dooing one another, pseudo-enragement, monkey-mocking of one another, feigned stage-fright and pretended escapes. Seeing this done on a first night, the whole theatre was jammed and packed with Negro people, and they recalled the couple nine times, and still they gave encores. One of them, the villain, gave up, but the other, the hero, went on as if still matched, his mouth open and panting, and perspiration streaming through the black grease on his face—for he also had blackened himself further for fun. The wedding service was danced and sung in a “scena” which would have enravished even a Russian audience. I had seen nothing so pretty or so amusing, so bewilderingly full of life and color, since Sanine’s production of the “Fair of Sorochinsky,” in Moscow.

The most characteristic parts of the comedy, however, were to come. It was very lengthy, for Negroes do not observe white conventions regarding time. It would be tedious to describe in words what was wholly delightful to see. But there were two crises when the audience roared with joy excessively. First, when the young husband suspects his wife of flirting with the villain, and second, when he wants to make it up and every imaginable calamity descends upon his head. He arrives at his home about midnight, wearing a terribly tight pair of boots and a suit of old, dusty clothes. There is a party at the house; everyone is in evening dress. He won’t go in to the dance room. He has to sit down and take his boots off, and henceforth walks about holding them in his hands. He sees his wife dancing with the villain, makes a scene, and then dramatically leaves his wife for ever. Left behind, she stares a moment in silence, and then throws herself full length on a low table, kicks up her heels, and vents her unhappiness in a series of prolonged howls and paroxysms which put the audience into a heaven of delight. The tight boots and the limp they cause are blues; the wife’s grief is a blue; and for the rest of the drama the melancholy husband is seen tramping about in his socks, carrying his wretched boots in his hands. His unhappiness is long-drawn-out, but when at last he decides to forgive and comes back home, he is met by the lugubrious “buddy” outside his house, who tells him all his wife has suffered in his absence. The repentant husband looks very miserable.

“And then a little baby boy was born,” says Buddy.

The repentant husband cheers up.

“So like you, such a beauty.”

The husband waxes excited and happy, and asks a flood of questions.

“But the baby died,” says his lugubrious companion.

The poor hero yells with sorrow.

“How Baby wished you were there to see little baby,” says Buddy. “How she talked of you!”

“The little darling—and she has quite forgiven me?”

“She forgave you, all right. Ah, she was a fine woman. You never deserved such a woman as she was, so beautiful, so loving, so tender, so devoted—always saying your name, counting the days you had been away from her and moping and sighing. Ah, it ate into her heart!”

“Yes, Buddy, I am a worthless, miserable nigger, that’s what I am. I didn’t deserve to have her.”

“She said: ‘Oh, for one kiss; oh, for one hug—— ‘”

“I’ll go in to her at once.”

“Stop!” says Buddy impressively.

“Wha’s the matter?”

“She died day after baby was born.”

“No?”

“Yassir. Stone dead. Sure’s I live.”

The poor hero breaks down and sobs and wails and howls and blubbers, distraction in his aspect, his knees knock together, he throws his hat in the dust—and all the while the audience is convulsed with laughter. The Negro women in the stalls find their chairs too small for them and all but fall on to the floor; the smartly dressed Negro youths in the boxes are guffawing from wide-opened mouths and laughing as much with their bodies as with their faces.

“Mother and I went to town to buy the coffin,” says Buddy. “Poor old Mother!”

“Did Mother forgive me?”

“Oh, yes, she forgave you all right. Such a mother as she was. She knew you were bad and wrong and a disgrace, but she loved you. Ah, how she loved you!”

“I am glad there’s poor old Mother.”

“Mother and I arranged for the funerals, but we had to sell up the home. Yes, every stick.”

More and more grief on the part of husband.

“I’ll go in and see her anyway,” says he, moving toward the door.

“Stop!” says Buddy.

“Wha’s the matter?”

“She’s dead ... run over by a trolley car as we were going to the funeral ...” and so on, the dénouement of course being that when he is about to go and hang himself he catches a glimpse of Mother, larger, if possible, than life, and he realizes it is all a hoax, and then Baby appears with her little baby—and all is joy.

Of course the play par excellence for a Negro theatre is “Othello,” or rather, for a Negro actor in a mixed cast. Unfortunately, no white company in the United States will allow a Negro actor to take even a subordinate role. Even “nigger” parts, humorous Negro parts, have to be taken by white men. An anomaly to be remedied! The profession of acting is too noble a one for color prejudice to lurk there. I fear, however, that it will be long before mixed companies of white and colored actors perform on the dramatic stage in the United States. “Othello” apparently is seldom played, though the old tragedy of Shakespeare is strangely of the time and apropos. The tragedy of Othello exhibits the same race prejudice existent in the sixteenth century as now, and expresses itself in similar terms. The white woman is not for Moors or Negroes on any terms. It is almost incredible that Desdemona should shun

The wealthy curled darlings of our nation, to incur a general mock,
Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom
Of such a thing as thou.

He must have used an enchantment on her. Othello is the devil. He is a black man. He is a Barbary horse—

You’ll have your nephews neigh to you.
You’ll have coursers for cousins and gennets for Germans.

There is little doubt that by Othello Shakespeare intended a Negro, or, in any case, someone whom the white denizens of New Orleans would call a nigger. “Moor” or “Blackamoor” was the common name for Negro, and the local detail of the play confirms the impression of a thick-lipped, black-bosomed, rather repulsive physical type. The psychology of Othello is, moreover, that of the modern Negro. His florid and sentimental talk, with its romantic yearning and its exaggerations, is very characteristic.

I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth ‘scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my travels’ history:
Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven,
It was my hint to speak,—such was the process;
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.

And are not his last noble words, with his dramatic and romantic gesture, and his suicide, the noble African set upon a pedestal!

Fanny Kemble in her diary tells how John Quincy Adams thought “it served Desdemona right for marrying a ‘nigger,’” and she imagines the fine effect which some American actor in the rôle of Iago might obtain by substituting for “I hate the Moor” “I hate the nigger,” pronounced in proper Charleston or Savannah fashion. “Only think,” says Fanny Kemble, “what a very new order of interest the whole tragedy might receive acted from this standpoint and called ‘Amalgamation, or the Black Bridal.’”

The sympathy of a Southern audience would be almost exclusively with Iago and Roderigo and the father. But could they tolerate it without a lynching? No Negro company dare produce it south of the Mason-Dixon line.

How the Negroes would perform tragedy in the vein of tragedy I do not know. There is so much tragedy in their history, in their past, that they have sought only comic relief. I believe the characteristic Americanism of “Keep Smiling” or, as expressed in the song, “Smile, Smile, Smile,” comes from the Negro. The colored people as a whole seem to be serious only in church or at musical gatherings. Even the eloquent pastor has no easy task to gain the attention of his congregation. He must walk about and rage and flash, and with crashing reverberations explode the wrath of God like the voice of the Almighty in the storm. He must forget ordinary diction in forgetting himself, and chant in ecstasy and rapture, lifting up his whole soul to the Lord. If you talk to the Negro, he merely laughs; you must chant to him to be taken seriously. In this possibly lies the vein for Negro dramatic tragedy and prophetic poetry. Perhaps, however, the emotional appeal of such will be too strong for Whites.

It is a great ordeal for a sensitive white person to take part in a Negro revival or camp meeting. The emotional strain is tremendous. Though it is difficult to move the Negro, once he is moved he can be rapidly brought to a frenzy which surely has little enough to do with the Christian religion. But even when he is not greatly moved it is somewhat heart-searching for a white person present.

One day I went in at a chapel door. The building was full of Negroes; every seat seemed taken. Perched high above the platform was a black woman, all in black, with a large jet cross on her broad bosom. She was reading from the First Book of Samuel in a great oracular voice which never rose nor fell, but was like a pronouncement of eternal law. I was taken right up to the front and given a seat under her throne. I knew at once that there was likely to be an emotional storm in the audience. It was throbbing on the heartstrings even as I listened to the reading, and I wondered how I should combat it. After the Scripture the Lord’s Prayer was said by a portentous Negro who had the frame of an African warrior. When he went down on his knees he shook the beams of wood and the seats. He prayed angrily, and clapped as he prayed, and interjected remarks.

Thy will be done! Yes, Lord, that’s it, that’s what we want, certainly.

Give us this day our daily bread! Yes, give us it (clap, clap, clap). Give us our daily bread, Lord. Feed us! Feed us, Lord!

The congregation also on all hands interjected its remarks and clapped and praised as the Lord’s Prayer went along.

The woman all in black was a famous mover of souls, and her sermon was evidently the most looked-for religious excitement of the morning. She was a plain woman with a powerful will, a great voice, and a rare knowledge of the Bible. She preached from the text, “Saul hid himself among the stuff.” First she told the story in a quiet voice and then began to make the application. It was no use hiding from God, for He would find you out.

So rousing were her simple words, and such was the atmosphere she was begetting in the midst of her congregation, that I had to do everything in my power to avoid breaking down under the influence and sobbing like a child.

I went over in my mind the drama of “Macbeth,” and reconstructed “Richard the Third,” and called to memory the speeches I had listened to at the Bar dinner the night before, and what I had been doing during the past week and month. But all the while I registered also in my brain the whole of what the black priestess was saying.

Next to me a feminine voice kept crying out: “Help her, Lord, help her!” and I back-pedalled for all I was worth. Presently the preacher was lifted out of the ordinary, everyday voice into a barbaric chant, which rose and fell and acclaimed and declaimed in rhythmical grandeur and music. I dared not look at the woman at my side. But she now lisped out, “She’s all right now, Lord; she’s all right now,” and I thought of the relief of the Welsh when their preachers get into the strain they call the hwyl.

I then very cautiously peered round at the woman. What was my astonishment to see a girl of eighteen with a face like a huge, dusky melon. Her jaws were perfectly relaxed, her eyes half shut, and her upper lip, which was raised, exposed her smiling teeth and a layer of sweet chewing gum.

Meanwhile the Reverend Norah up above was urging us all to come out from behind the stuff. We were always hiding behind our business, behind our families, behind our bodies.

“They are hiding behind their bodies, O Lord!

“Yes, O Lord, they say that they are sick, that they are ill,

“That they cannot do this and they cannot do that because they are feeble in health.

“O come out from behind the stuff!

“You saw Saul hide behind the baggage, O Lord.

“Our Negro brothers and sisters are hiding there to-day.

“Hiding behind their wealth——

“Hiding behind their charity——

“Hiding behind their houses and their clothes and their cars,

“Yes, and their wives and their husbands,

“And other peoples’ opinions.

“But You see them, O Lord,

“You see them, and You’ll bring them out——”

“I’m hiding there right enough,” broke out from the congregation, and “Lord, save us!” “Lord, help us!”

The whole mass of black humanity swayed under the power of the emotion which the woman had kindled. They were about to stand in frenzy and give the great gospel shout of repentance, when something happened; the woman’s strength gave way, and she slipped out of the chant back into her ordinary voice. At once the spell was broken.

The tiniest tots in the congregation then came out carrying little jam jars which they bore to each individual for his collection, and we sang a rolling and clamorous hymn, and all went home.

One note further in the sermon, and there would have been a great scene of conversion at the close of the service, and everyone would have decided to come out from behind his stuff, as the preacher recommended. But it’s better for one’s religion not to be converted every Sunday.

Many white people would no doubt be so greatly amused by a sermon of this kind that they would find difficulty in containing their laughter. One laugh from a white stranger might have proved calamitous, and would certainly have evoked hostility. On the other hand, there are Whites who love psycho-physical religious emotionalism. Such a type is the poet who wrote—

We mourned all our terrible sins away,
And we all found Jesus at the break of the day.
Blessed Jesus!

I never met a Negro who thought it humorous unless it were a member of one sect telling of the “goings-on” in another. Each different race or people seems to have its different characteristic religious expression. When one has seen the exaltation of Copt and Arab in religion, when one has heard the great choric voice of Russia at church, and the splendid, purposeful faith of Teutonic hymns, one knows that a calm singing of “Praise to the Holiest in the Height!” is not the only mode of praise. There are fifty thousand ways of praising God, and every single one of them is right.

So there is no call to chide the Negro for his excess. His ways are part of the natural and Divine history of Man, and it is infinitely worth while to consider them with an open and charitable mind. The hysteria, the frenzy, of some meetings I have observed is not in the white man. There is no use being appalled by it. It is the third part which finishes the man downward, as St. John says in the desert.

“And after these emotional excitements they commit so many murders,” said a Southern woman to me.

“If so, one must be upon one’s guard in the presence of a converted man,” said I.

The foundation of the Negro’s great religious seriousness is to be found in the Negro hymn or “spiritual.” These spirituals were before there were Negro churches, before Christianity was actually allowed to the slaves. That is why they are more often called plantation melodies. They were sung in the twilight of the old plantations, and gave voice to a great human sorrow and a great human need. They show that the Negro has obtained access to the spiritual deeps, that he has a soul as we have—a fact so often denied—and that he is capable of penetrating the sublime. I listened very often to these songs. In several places they were sung to honor a white visitor. I heard them rendered by the Hampton Singers and lectured upon by Harry T. Burleigh, to whose efforts in research the preservation of several are due. There is no question of the excellence of them. They make a great appeal to all people who have music in their souls.

It is, however, a musical effect, not an intellectual one. The words have often little relevance to anything profound, and at best are childish. There is generally a keynote which murmurs through the whole of the song, the function of the basso-profundo who provides a river of harmony like life itself, and the tenors and baritones and the shriller voices move on this flowing base like ships. On the rivers the slaves loved to sing as they rowed their masters, using most aptly the beat of the oars and the swish of the water, while the man who stood at the helm and steered was usually the deep bass. One of the most unforgettable melodies is “O, Listen to the Lambs!” The tenors seem to imitate flocks of innumerable sheep and lambs all crying to one another, while the basso-profundo is the irrelevance of “I want to go to Heaven when I die,” continually repeated in subterranean mumbling and whispers——

O listen to the la-ambs
All a-cry ... in’. All a-cry ... in’.
An’ I wan’ to go to Hebn w’en I die!

“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Go Down, Moses,” “Didn’t Hear Nobody Pray,” “The Walls of Jericho,” and many others are assuredly famous.

These and many other phenomena give indications of a distinctive Negro point of view, and of an incipient broad-based popular culture. A sympathetic study will always give evidence that can be set against the point of view that the Negro is nothing, or an animal, or a scamp at best, or a shame to the species. I was sitting in the gardens at Baltimore in the shade of a giant plane tree one day when out came a mixed class of Negro boys and girls and a young eager colored master of about twenty-five. The girls were luxuriant “flappers” of every hue of polished ebony; the boys were spindle-legged and spry and bullet-headed. They all examined plants and trees and caterpillars and flowers under the informing tutelage of the master. They were as noisy and vivacious as a flock of birds that has suddenly lighted on a plain. They minded no outsider. But a tall white man passed them, and I saw on his face a look of unutterable contempt.

“Learning botany” said he to me in a stage whisper. “They’ll know as much about it to-morrow morning as pigs.”