Chapter 12

The family group, however, which is the ideal of the culture with which these folk have been born, is not based on the idea of an economically independent working mother. Rather its ideal harks back to the sheltered harem with the mother emerging at first as nurse and homemaker, while the man remains the sole breadwinner. What is the inevitable result of the clash of such ideals and such facts in the colored group? Broken families.

Among native white women one in ten is separated from her husband by death, divorce, or desertion. Among Negroes the ratio is one in seven. Is the cause racial? No, it is economic, because there is the same high ratio among the white foreign-born. The breaking up of the present family is the result of modern working and sex conditions and it hits the laborers with terrible force. The Negroes are put in a peculiarly difficult position, because the wage of the male breadwinner is below the standard, while the openings for colored women in certain lines of domestic work, and now in industries, are many. Thus while toil holds the father and brother in country and town at low wages, the sisters and mothers are called to the city. As a result the Negro women outnumber the men nine or ten to eight in many cities, making what Charlotte Gilman bluntly calls "cheap women."

What shall we say to this new economic equality in a great laboring class? Some people within and without the race deplore it. "Back to the homes with the women," they cry, "and higher wage for the men." But how impossible this is has been shown by war conditions. Cessation of foreign migration has raised Negro men's wages, to be sure--but it has not only raised Negro women's wages, it has opened to them a score of new avenues of earning a living. Indeed, here, in microcosm and with differences emphasizing sex equality, is the industrial history of labor in the 19th and 20th centuries. We cannot abolish the new economic freedom of women. We cannot imprison women again in a home or require them all on pain of death to be nurses and housekeepers.

What is today the message of these black women to America and to the world? The uplift of women is, next to the problem of the color line and the peace movement, our greatest modern cause. When, now, two of these movements--woman and color--combine in one, the combination has deep meaning.

In other years women's way was clear: to be beautiful, to be petted, to bear children. Such has been their theoretic destiny and if perchance they have been ugly, hurt, and barren, that has been forgotten with studied silence. In partial compensation for this narrowed destiny the white world has lavished its politeness on its womankind,--its chivalry and bows, its uncoverings and courtesies--all the accumulated homage disused for courts and kings and craving exercise. The revolt of white women against this preordained destiny has in these latter days reached splendid proportions, but it is the revolt of an aristocracy of brains and ability,--the middle class and rank and file still plod on in the appointed path, paid by the homage, the almost mocking homage, of men.

From black women of America, however, (and from some others, too, but chiefly from black women and their daughters' daughters) this gauze has been withheld and without semblance of such apology they have been frankly trodden under the feet of men. They are and have been objected to, apparently for reasons peculiarly exasperating to reasoning human beings. When in this world a man comes forward with a thought, a deed, a vision, we ask not, how does he look,--but what is his message? It is of but passing interest whether or not the messenger is beautiful or ugly,--the _message_ is the thing. This, which is axiomatic among men, has been in past ages but partially true if the messenger was a woman. The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty and if she is not, the mob pouts and asks querulously, "What else are women for?" Beauty "is its own excuse for being," but there are other excuses, as most men know, and when the white world objects to black women because it does not consider them beautiful, the black world of right asks two questions: "What is beauty?" and, "Suppose you think them ugly, what then? If ugliness and unconventionality and eccentricity of face and deed do not hinder men from doing the world's work and reaping the world's reward, why should it hinder women?"

Other things being equal, all of us, black and white, would prefer to be beautiful in face and form and suitably clothed; but most of us are not so, and one of the mightiest revolts of the century is against the devilish decree that no woman is a woman who is not by present standards a beautiful woman. This decree the black women of America have in large measure escaped from the first. Not being expected to be merely ornamental, they have girded themselves for work, instead of adorning their bodies only for play. Their sturdier minds have concluded that if a woman be clean, healthy, and educated, she is as pleasing as God wills and far more useful than most of her sisters. If in addition to this she is pink and white and straight-haired, and some of her fellow-men prefer this, well and good; but if she is black or brown and crowned in curled mists (and this to us is the most beautiful thing on earth), this is surely the flimsiest excuse for spiritual incarceration or banishment.

The very attempt to do this in the case of Negro Americans has strangely over-reached itself. By so much as the defective eyesight of the white world rejects black women as beauties, by so much the more it needs them as human beings,--an enviable alternative, as many a white woman knows. Consequently, for black women alone, as a group, "handsome is that handsome does" and they are asked to be no more beautiful than God made them, but they are asked to be efficient, to be strong, fertile, muscled, and able to work. If they marry, they must as independent workers be able to help support their children, for their men are paid on a scale which makes sole support of the family often impossible.

On the whole, colored working women are paid as well as white working women for similar work, save in some higher grades, while colored men get from one-fourth to three-fourths less than white men. The result is curious and three-fold: the economic independence of black women is increased, the breaking up of Negro families must be more frequent, and the number of illegitimate children is decreased more slowly among them than other evidences of culture are increased, just as was once true in Scotland and Bavaria.

What does this mean? It forecasts a mighty dilemma which the whole world of civilization, despite its will, must one time frankly face: the unhusbanded mother or the childless wife. God send us a world with woman's freedom and married motherhood inextricably wed, but until He sends it, I see more of future promise in the betrayed girl-mothers of the black belt than in the childless wives of the white North, and I have more respect for the colored servant who yields to her frank longing for motherhood than for her white sister who offers up children for clothes. Out of a sex freedom that today makes us shudder will come in time a day when we will no longer pay men for work they do not do, for the sake of their harem; we will pay women what they earn and insist on their working and earning it; we will allow those persons to vote who know enough to vote, whether they be black or female, white or male; and we will ward race suicide, not by further burdening the over-burdened, but by honoring motherhood, even when the sneaking father shirks his duty.

* * * * *

"Wait till the lady passes," said a Nashville white boy.

"She's no lady; she's a nigger," answered another.

So some few women are born free, and some amid insult and scarlet letters achieve freedom; but our women in black had freedom thrust contemptuously upon them. With that freedom they are buying an untrammeled independence and dear as is the price they pay for it, it will in the end be worth every taunt and groan. Today the dreams of the mothers are coming true. We have still our poverty and degradation, our lewdness and our cruel toil; but we have, too, a vast group of women of Negro blood who for strength of character, cleanness of soul, and unselfish devotion of purpose, is today easily the peer of any group of women in the civilized world. And more than that, in the great rank and file of our five million women we have the up-working of new revolutionary ideals, which must in time have vast influence on the thought and action of this land.

For this, their promise, and for their hard past, I honor the women of my race. Their beauty,--their dark and mysterious beauty of midnight eyes, crumpled hair, and soft, full-featured faces--is perhaps more to me than to you, because I was born to its warm and subtle spell; but their worth is yours as well as mine. No other women on earth could have emerged from the hell of force and temptation which once engulfed and still surrounds black women in America with half the modesty and womanliness that they retain. I have always felt like bowing myself before them in all abasement, searching to bring some tribute to these long-suffering victims, these burdened sisters of mine, whom the world, the wise, white world, loves to affront and ridicule and wantonly to insult. I have known the women of many lands and nations,--I have known and seen and lived beside them, but none have I known more sweetly feminine, more unswervingly loyal, more desperately earnest, and more instinctively pure in body and in soul than the daughters of my black mothers. This, then,--a little thing--to their memory and inspiration.

_Children of the Moon_

I am dead; Yet somehow, somewhere, In Time's weird contradiction, I May tell of that dread deed, wherewith I brought to Children of the Moon Freedom and vast salvation.

I was a woman born, And trod the streaming street, That ebbs and flows from Harlem's hills, Through caves and cañons limned in light, Down to the twisting sea.

That night of nights, I stood alone and at the End, Until the sudden highway to the moon, Golden in splendor, Became too real to doubt.

Dimly I set foot upon the air, I fled, I flew, through the thrills of light, With all about, above, below, the whirring Of almighty wings.

I found a twilight land, Where, hardly hid, the sun Sent softly-saddened rays of Red and brown to burn the iron soil And bathe the snow-white peaks In mighty splendor.

Black were the men, Hard-haired and silent-slow, Moving as shadows, Bending with face of fear to earthward; And women there were none.

"Woman, woman, woman!" I cried in mounting terror. "Woman and Child!" And the cry sang back Through heaven, with the Whirring of almighty wings.

Wings, wings, endless wings,-- Heaven and earth are wings; Wings that flutter, furl, and fold, Always folding and unfolding, Ever folding yet again; Wings, veiling some vast And veiléd face, In blazing blackness, Behind the folding and unfolding, The rolling and unrolling of Almighty wings!

I saw the black men huddle, Fumed in fear, falling face downward; Vainly I clutched and clawed, Dumbly they cringed and cowered, Moaning in mournful monotone:

O Freedom, O Freedom, O Freedom over me; Before I'll be a slave, I'll be buried in my grave, And go home to my God, And be free.

It was angel-music From the dead, And ever, as they sang, Some wingéd thing of wings, filling all heaven, Folding and unfolding, and folding yet again,

Tore out their blood and entrails, 'Til I screamed in utter terror; And a silence came-- A silence and the wailing of a babe.

Then, at last, I saw and shamed; I knew how these dumb, dark, and dusky things Had given blood and life, To fend the caves of underground, The great black caves of utter night, Where earth lay full of mothers And their babes.

Little children sobbing in darkness, Little children crying in silent pain, Little mothers rocking and groping and struggling, Digging and delving and groveling, Amid the dying-dead and dead-in-life And drip and dripping of warm, wet blood, Far, far beneath the wings,-- The folding and unfolding of almighty wings.

I bent with tears and pitying hands, Above these dusky star-eyed children,-- Crinkly-haired, with sweet-sad baby voices, Pleading low for light and love and living-- And I crooned:

"Little children weeping there, God shall find your faces fair; Guerdon for your deep distress, He shall send His tenderness; For the tripping of your feet Make a mystic music sweet In the darkness of your hair; Light and laughter in the air-- Little children weeping there, God shall find your faces fair!"

I strode above the stricken, bleeding men, The rampart 'ranged against the skies, And shouted: "Up, I say, build and slay; Fight face foremost, force a way, Unloose, unfetter, and unbind; Be men and free!"

Dumbly they shrank, Muttering they pointed toward that peak, Than vastness vaster, Whereon a darkness brooded, "Who shall look and live," they sighed; And I sensed The folding and unfolding of almighty wings.

Yet did we build of iron, bricks, and blood; We built a day, a year, a thousand years, Blood was the mortar,--blood and tears, And, ah, the Thing, the Thing of wings, The wingéd, folding Wing of Things Did furnish much mad mortar For that tower.

Slow and ever slower rose the towering task, And with it rose the sun, Until at last on one wild day, Wind-whirled, cloud-swept and terrible I stood beneath the burning shadow Of the peak, Beneath the whirring of almighty wings, While downward from my feet Streamed the long line of dusky faces And the wail of little children sobbing under earth.

Alone, aloft, I saw through firmaments on high The drama of Almighty God, With all its flaming suns and stars. "Freedom!" I cried. "Freedom!" cried heaven, earth, and stars; And a Voice near-far, Amid the folding and unfolding of almighty wings, Answered, "I am Freedom-- Who sees my face is free-- He and his."

I dared not look; Downward I glanced on deep-bowed heads and closed eyes, Outward I gazed on flecked and flaming blue-- But ever onward, upward flew The sobbing of small voices,-- Down, down, far down into the night.

Slowly I lifted livid limbs aloft; Upward I strove: the face! the face! Onward I reeled: the face! the face! To beauty wonderful as sudden death, Or horror horrible as endless life-- Up! Up! the blood-built way; (Shadow grow vaster! Terror come faster!) Up! Up! to the blazing blackness Of one veiléd face.

And endless folding and unfolding, Rolling and unrolling of almighty wings. The last step stood! The last dim cry of pain Fluttered across the stars, And then-- Wings, wings, triumphant wings, Lifting and lowering, waxing and waning, Swinging and swaying, twirling and whirling, Whispering and screaming, streaming and gleaming, Spreading and sweeping and shading and flaming-- Wings, wings, eternal wings, 'Til the hot, red blood, Flood fleeing flood, Thundered through heaven and mine ears, While all across a purple sky, The last vast pinion. Trembled to unfold.

I rose upon the Mountain of the Moon,-- I felt the blazing glory of the Sun; I heard the Song of Children crying, "Free!" I saw the face of Freedom-- And I died.

VIII

THE IMMORTAL CHILD

If a man die shall he live again? We do not know. But this we do know, that our children's children live forever and grow and develop toward perfection as they are trained. All human problems, then, center in the Immortal Child and his education is the problem of problems. And first for illustration of what I would say may I not take for example, out of many millions, the life of one dark child.

* * * * *

It is now nineteen years since I first saw Coleridge-Taylor. We were in London in some somber hall where there were many meeting, men and women called chiefly to the beautiful World's Fair at Paris; and then a few slipping over to London to meet Pan-Africa. We were there from Cape Colony and Liberia, from Haiti and the States, and from the Islands of the Sea. I remember the stiff, young officer who came with credentials from Menelik of Abyssinia; I remember the bitter, black American who whispered how an army of the Soudan might some day cross the Alps; I remember Englishmen, like the Colensos, who sat and counseled with us; but above all, I remember Coleridge-Taylor.

He was a little man and nervous, with dark-golden face and hair that bushed and strayed. His fingers were always nervously seeking hidden keys and he was quick with enthusiasm,--instinct with life. His bride of a year or more,--dark, too, in her whiter way,--was of the calm and quiet type. Her soft contralto voice thrilled us often as she sang, while her silences were full of understanding.

Several times we met in public gatherings and then they bade me to their home,--a nest of a cottage, with gate and garden, hidden in London's endless rings of suburbs. I dimly recall through these years a room in cozy disorder, strewn with music--music on the floor and music on the chairs, music in the air as the master rushed to the piano now and again to make some memory melodious--some allusion real.

And then at last, for it was the last, I saw Coleridge-Taylor in a mighty throng of people crowding the Crystal Palace. We came in facing the stage and scarcely dared look around. On the stage were a full orchestra, a chorus of eight hundred voices, and some of the world's famous soloists. He left his wife sitting beside me, and she was very silent as he went forward to lift the conductor's baton. It was one of the earliest renditions of "Hiawatha's Wedding Feast." We sat at rapt attention and when the last, weird music died, the great chorus and orchestra rose as a man to acclaim the master; he turned toward the audience and then we turning for the first time saw that sea of faces behind,--the misty thousands whose voices rose to one strong shout of joy! It was a moment such as one does not often live. It seemed, and was, prophetic.

This young man who stepped forth as one of the most notable of modern English composers had a simple and uneventful career. His father was a black surgeon of Sierra Leone who came to London for study. While there he met an English girl and this son was born, in London, in 1875.

Then came a series of chances. His father failed to succeed and disappeared back to Africa leaving the support of the child to the poor working mother. The child showed evidences of musical talent and a friendly workingman gave him a little violin. A musician glancing from his window saw a little dark boy playing marbles on the street with a tiny violin in one hand; he gave him lessons. He happened to gain entrance into a charity school with a master of understanding mind who recognized genius when he saw it; and finally his beautiful child's treble brought him to the notice of the choirmaster of St. George's, Croyden.

So by happy accident his way was clear. Within his soul was no hesitation. He was one of those fortunate beings who are not called to _Wander-Jahre_, but are born with sails set and seas charted. Already the baby of four little years was a musician, and as choir-boy and violinist he walked unhesitatingly and surely to his life work. He was graduated with honors from the Royal Academy of Music in 1894, and married soon after the daughter of one of his professors. Then his life began, and whatever it lacked of physical adventure in the conventional round of a modern world-city, it more than gained in the almost tempestuous outpouring of his spiritual nature. Life to him was neither meat nor drink,--it was creative flame; ideas, plans, melodies glowed within him. To create, to do, to accomplish; to know the white glory of mighty midnights and the pale Amen of dawns was his day of days. Songs, pianoforte and violin pieces, trios and quintets for strings, incidental music, symphony, orchestral, and choral works rushed from his fingers. Nor were they laboriously contrived or light, thin things made to meet sudden popularity. Rather they were the flaming bits that must be said and sung,--that could not wait the slower birth of years, so hurried to the world as though their young creator knew that God gave him but a day. His whole active life was scarcely more than a decade and a half, and yet in that time, without wealth, friends, or influence, in the face of perhaps the most critical and skeptical and least imaginative civilization of the modern world, he wrote his name so high as a creative artist that it cannot soon be forgotten.

And this was but one side of the man. On the other was the sweet-tempered, sympathetic comrade, always willing to help, never knowing how to refuse, generous with every nerve and fiber of his being. Think of a young musician, father of a family, who at the time of his death held positions as Associate of the Royal College of Music, Professor in Trinity College and Crystal Palace, Conductor of the Handel Choral Society and the Rochester Choral Society, Principal of the Guildhall School of Music, where he had charge of the choral choir, the orchestra, and the opera. He was repeatedly the leader of music festivals all over Great Britain and a judge of contests. And with all this his house was open in cheering hospitality to friends and his hand ever ready with sympathy and help.

When such a man dies, it must bring pause to a reasoning world. We may call his death-sickness pneumonia, but we all know that it was sheer overwork,--the using of a delicately-tuned instrument too commonly and continuously and carelessly to let it last its normal life. We may well talk of the waste of wood and water, of food and fire, but the real and unforgivable waste of modern civilization is the waste of ability and genius,--the killing of useful, indispensable men who have no right to die; who deserve, not for themselves, but for the world, leisure, freedom from distraction, expert medical advice, and intelligent sympathy.

Coleridge-Taylor's life work was not finished,--it was but well begun. He lived only his first period of creative genius, when melody and harmony flashed and fluttered in subtle, compelling, and more than promising profusion. He did not live to do the organized, constructive work in the full, calm power of noonday,--the reflective finishing of evening. In the annals of the future his name must always stand high, but with the priceless gift of years, who can say where it might not have stood.