Part 12

Her children—or was it the children of one of her black servants?—were playing with a family of real Negro dolls, not “nigger dolls,” the stove black, red-lipped nigger of the nursery, but colored dolls, _after Nature_. This was very charming, and I should have liked to see a baby woolly head at the swelling bosom of my beautiful acquaintance. She would have made a delightful study for a black Madonna.

To have their own dolls is one of the new racial triumphs of the colored people in America. Formerly they had to put up with the pink and white darlings with yellow hair and pale blue eyes, those reflections of German babies, which have hitherto held the market of dolls. It has taken the Negroes half a century of freedom before it occurred to them that the doll, being the promise of baby-to-be, it was not entirely good for morals, and for black racial pride, that their little girls should love white dollies. Perhaps it was mooted first as a business proposition. It might be a paying enterprise to manufacture real colored folk’s dolls, brown dolls, mulatto dolls, near white dolls, black and kinky ones, sad or pretty ones. The year 1920 sees a lively doll industry in progress. It is believed that in time the white dolly will become a rarity in the Negro home. Whence children may learn a lesson: Your pet doll would not perhaps be another girl’s pet doll.

It was also at Southern Brum that, calling on Reverend Williams, I happened upon this singular conversation:

“Now, isn’t it absurd for us to have white angels?”

“You surely would not like them black?”

“We give Sunday-school cards to our children with white angels on them. It’s _wrong_.”

“Black angels would be ugly.”

“No more ugly than white.”

I thought the whiteness of the angels was as the whiteness of white light which contained all color. That, however, was lost on the reverend, who happened to be a realist.

“Christ himself was not white. He would have had to travel in a Jim Crow car,” said he. “But put it to yourself: isn’t it absurd for us to be taught that the good are all white, and that sin itself is black?”

“It does seem to leave you in the shade,” said I.

“Expressions such as ‘black as sin’ ought to be deleted from the language. One might as well say ‘white as sin.’”

I ransacked my brain rapidly.

“We say ‘pale as envy,’” said I.

“‘Black spite,’” he retorted. “Why should it be black?”

I could not say.

“Then Adam and Eve in the Garden,” he went on, “are always shown as beautifully white creatures, whereas, considering the climate, they may well have been as dark-skinned as any Negro couple in Alabama. Babylon was built by Negroes.”

“Would you have Adam and Eve painted black?”

“Why, yes, I would.”

This struck me as rather diverting, but it was quite serious. Later, in New York one night at Liberty Hall, before I was driven out as a white interloper, I heard an orator say to an admiring host of Negroes: “Why, I ask you, is God always shown as white? It is because He is the white man’s God. It is the God of our masters. (Yes, brothers, that’s it.) It’s the God of those who persecute and despise the colored people. Brothers, we’ve got to knock that white God down and put up a black God. We’ve got to rewrite the Old Testament and the New from a black man’s point of view. Our theologians must get busy on a black God.”

This was what we Whites call clap trap, and irreverent as well. But it seemed to take well with the Harlem brothers. Once more a lesson may be derived for older children—— If you make God in your own image, it does not follow that other children will agree that it is like——

It reminded me of the enthusiasm of the soldiers when they got home from the war and took a good look at their own womenkind; they thought them so much more good looking than French or German girls. Girls and dolls, angels and Gods, we like them to correspond to our own complexion.

Birmingham at night glows to the sky with furnaces. A hundred thousand black proletarians earn their living on coal and steel, stirring up soot to heaven. Though I met there the charming Mrs. J——, whom I have mentioned, and also other educated Negroes, it is not to be supposed that it is a place of culture, white or black. It is a straggling city with an ugly, misshapen, ill-balanced interior or center part like a table spread with small teacups and large jam pots. It will not stand comparison with Atlanta or New Orleans or Richmond. Strictly speaking, it is not a city, but an agglomeration of industrialism. Nevertheless, the factories which surround it are owned by companies of vast resources, and it is claimed that in the steel industry there are some of the most extensive industrial plants in the world. Business is little disturbed by strikes. On the gates of the vast factory estates is written: _We do not want you unless you are able to look after yourself. Careless men are always liable to accident._ Some notices declare “Non-Union Shops,” others “Open Shops,” but it does not seem to matter much. The unions have little power. Wages are high, though not as high as in the North, but the cost of living is very much less, and there is a lower standard of respectability. In some cases the industrials are housed on the factory grounds, and you see Negro dwellings which amount to industrial barracks. Every gate has its porter or civilian sentry, and in order to reach your workingman you may have to show what your business is with him. On the way to his door you are met by the notice that trespassers will be prosecuted.

There is no encouragement to loiterers, but you may see the Negro gangs at work, organized squads of workers hard at it, with Negro foremen or white foremen. A myriad-fold Negro industrialism straggles near mines and furnaces, blacker than in Nature. The coaly black Negro collier, the sooted face of steel worker and tar operative are curious comments on whether it is good to be Black or to be White. Coke products flame and smoke at innumerable pipes, while locomotives are panting and steaming forward and back, and a platoon of chimney stacks belches forth dense blackness, which, enfolded in the breeze, wanders over the heavens and one’s eyes.

I strayed in at the doors of some very dirty Negro houses. Here was little of the _amour propre_ of Baltimore and Philadelphia. Anti-kink was not being generally applied, and as far as the little ones were concerned, mother’s little Alabama coon seemed to be getting a little bit too much for mother. It is not difficult to understand the disgust of people in the North when in 1917 and 1918 Negro families rolled up in their thousands from the South—the real obscure, fuzzy-wuzzy, large-featured, smelly Negro of submerged Alabama. The sight of them was responsible for much of the feeling which inspired the Northern riots. “We know our Northern Negroes,” they said in the North, “but these from the South were like no Negroes we had ever seen.” There was awakened much prejudice against these uncouth Africans, who seemed so near to the savage and the beast. It was natural, perhaps. But high wages and new hopes and ideals quickly improve the black immigrant. He is being absorbed into the generality of black Negrodom, in its established worthiness and respectability, above the Mason-Dixon line. It would be difficult after a few years to pick out a Southern Negro in a crowd in New York.

The little black children in the suburbs of Birmingham were alternately very confiding and then suddenly scared and then confiding again as I tried to talk to them. There was much fear in their bodies. They seemed if anything to be blacker than their parents, and I volunteered the opinion that a good deal of their color would come off in a course of hot baths. But washing facilities were of a rudimentary kind, and the passion for being fit and fresh could not readily be developed.

The white South could improve its Negroes infinitely if it cared to do so. On the whole, however, it does not wish its Negroes to rise and seems most happy when they can readily be identified with the beasts that perish. But if it thought more highly of the Negro, the Negro would rise.

I visited Professor K—— in his three-storied house. He had been one of the Negro Four-Minute Men who had made popular addresses to his people during the war fervor, inducing them to be “patriotic” and subscribe their dollars to various funds. He said he was deeply discouraged. He did not belong to Alabama and would much rather live in a more civilized part of the world, but he gave his life for the uplift of the children. He was doing what he could, but the Whites gave no co-operation. In these factory areas the colored children outnumbered the Whites five to one. Teaching was, of course, segregated; he had no objection to that, but very, very little was done by comparison for the black children. They had most need of blessing—but they shared only in parsimony and curses. He showed me his school—a ramshackle building of old, faded wood. “Oh, but our teachers have enthusiasm,” said he. “They’re doing a work of God, and they love it. Yes, sir.”

I obtained an impression which I think is sound, that there was more keenness to teach on the part of the colored people of Alabama than on the part of the Whites. White schools find some difficulty in obtaining good teachers; colored schools find no such difficulty. If colored students only go on in the way they have begun, there is quite a good prospect of their obtaining posts to teach white children in white schools—not perhaps soon in Alabama, for it is strongly prejudiced, but elsewhere first, and then in this State. To start off with, they would be excellent with young children. There is a broad road of conquest standing open there. As Booker T. Washington very sagaciously pointed out to his people, there is no stronger argument in their favor than personal attainment.

However, looking around the houses of the industrialized masses here, one can only be appalled at the inadequacy of civilization. There is nothing that is better than in the forlorn mining villages of the Russian Ural. It makes a sort of Negro little better than a nigger, and it is surprising that he does not run amuck more often than he does.

If the outlying settlements reminded of the Ural, the center of the city reminded of nothing better than Omsk. Here on the main street, at Eighteenth Street, is a very “jazzy” corner, resplendent with five times too much light at night, vocal with noisy music, and swarming with Negroes of all castes and colors. By day it is like a web of gregarious larvæ; by night it is the entrance to wonderland. Here is massed together the Negro enterprise of the city. Most of the characters of Octavus Roy Cohen’s clever Negro stories are thought to be derived from this corner—Mr. Florian Slappey, Lawyer Evans Chew, and the rest. Do not their ways and doings divert a vast number of readers to the _Saturday Evening Post_? I may have met some of them. I cannot say. But I met their like.

The chief establishment is the savings bank building, a squat, six-story erection in red brick. It is flanked by places of amusement, but in itself it is an ark of professionalism and learning. It is a hive of many cells or cabinets, and every cabinet has its special occupant, a doctor here, a dentist there, a lawyer in the other, another doctor, a professor, an agent, and so on. You may meet nearly all who count in Birmingham Negrodom here. By the way, the local way of pronouncing the name of the city is Bumming Ham; if you say politely, Birmingham, pronouncing with lips and teeth in the front part of the mouth, no one will understand what you mean. A Negro pastor whirled me round to the hub of Bumming Ham in his brand-new car. He had lately had a very successful revival, of which the motor was an outward and visible sign. And I called on many of the notables. I met a short, scrubby Negro of fifty, whose complexion seemed to have been drenched in yellowness. He explained this by the statement that the blood of Senator H—— flowed in his veins. The senator had taken a liberty with his mother, who for her part was thoroughly black. He thanked the senator, since probably he had given him some brains; his mother’s side of the family was unusually hard-headed. He had become a professor. His daughter was a remarkable public speaker, and as Senator H—— was an orator, he used to tell his Sarah that _there_ was Senator H—— coming out in her. “The Negro has been mixed with the best blood in the South,” said he; “the blood of the masters, the English aristocrats who came first to the country.”

I did not think there was much in that.

“Are mulattoes increasing or decreasing in numbers?” I asked.

He thought they were increasing. But he did not deny the fact that Negro children tend to revert to type. When two mulattoes marry, the children are generally darker than the parents, and often real Negro types. The white man’s strain is thrown out rapidly.

“How, then, is it that mulattoes and near Whites are on the increase?” The professor thought for one reason there was still much illegitimacy, and for another the Negro race under civilized conditions was getting a little fairer on the whole. Some of the mulatto women were extremely beautiful, and consequently more attractive to white men. The white women of the South hated the mulatto women because they took their husbands away from them. He thought a good deal of race hatred was fostered by the white woman, who instinctively hated the other race.

“Did you ever hear of a union between a Negro woman and a white man that was on other than an animal plane?” I asked him.

Professor M—— knew of several instances where an infatuation for a Negro woman had inspired a white man to make good in life. It was generally a tragedy, for they could not marry, and they were subject to coarse suspicion and raillery and intrigue. It stood in the way of the white man finding a white bride, and of the Negro woman finding a Negro husband. Where a white man had become interested in a Negro woman it was not good for the health of a Negro man to pretend to her affections. The mob feeling against Negroes was so readily aroused that it was the easiest thing in Alabama for a white man who had a grudge against a Negro to “frame up” a crime or a scandal and make him leave the neighborhood or remain constantly in danger of being roughly handled.

Alabama has a bad record for lynching. It is about fifth in the list of bad States. I understood that lynching was on the increase. The old folk, the people who had been slave owners, the settled inhabitants of places like Anniston and Montgomery, and of the country, knew all the family history of their “niggers” from A to Z, and what they might do, or could do, and they were friendly, compared with the “new sort.”

The poor Whites loved to be in mobs and feel in mobs. Over their meals and at work and in the trolley cars they loved to talk in the way of the mob. Individually they don’t understand the Negro—they are afraid of him, like dogs that will only attack when in numbers. They mostly came to America after the Civil War and the Emancipation found the Negroes in possession of land or of work or of houses. They had their grievances, and instead of visiting them upon God or the Devil or Society in general, found the Negro a convenient fetish and visited their discontent on him. It soon became a habit, then it became a sort of lust and brutal sport.

The older and more solid people have been much annoyed by the growth of this brutality, and something definite is being done to combat it in Alabama. Committees have been formed, or were being formed in the fall of 1919, in every county in the State, half white, half colored, to inquire into racial strife and see what could be done for life and freedom.

An old Negro said to me: “We had two clocks on the cabin wall, and one was very slow and deliberate and always seemed to say:

“’_Take yo’ time. Take yo’ time!_’

“But the other gabbled to us:

“’_Get together, get together, get together!_’ That’s what we got to do to-day, brothers—get together.”

The Negroes are fond of emphasizing the triviality of color differences. They reprove the white man playfully. “Why get so excited about difference in color? We believe in equality of rights for all men,” I heard a leader say, “for all men of whatever color—white, black, brown, or yellow, or blue.” And his audience laughed. “Two boys go into a shop; one buys a red toy, the other a blue toy—but it is not very important which color—the toy’s the same.”

But of course color prejudice or preference is not such a haphazard matter, and prejudice against the Negro is prejudice against more than color. The toy, so to speak, is different. It may be as good, but it is different. The body, and especially the skull, of a Negro is different from that of the white man. The nervous system, the brain, the mind and soul, are different. I heard the theory put forward in the name of Christian Science that in God’s perfect plan there were no Negroes. Their dark skins were other men’s evil thought about them. All men were really white, and the outward appearance of their skin could be made to correspond to the white idea by concentrated true thought about them. That is a charitable and beautiful faith to live by. But what of the new line of Negroes who are proud of being black, who abhor pallor as nausea? There are many Negroes now who have a religion of being black. The new generation of children is being brought up to glorify Negro color. It is told of the princes and warriors from which it is descended, learns with the geography of the United States the geography of Africa, and delights in the cognomen—Afro-American. The color issue will never be settled by all Negroes becoming Whites. It seems clear also that it cannot be solved by all men becoming mulattoes. There seems to remain just one obvious solution, and that is in distinct and parallel development, equality before the law, and mutual understanding and tolerance.

IX

THE SOUTHERN POINT OF VIEW

Shoemaker: No, my lord, they don’t hurt you there.

Foppington: I tell thee, they pinch me execrably.

Shoemaker: Well, then, my lord, if those shoes pinch you, I’ll be d—— d.

Foppington: Why, wilt thou undertake to persuade me I cannot feel?

Shoemaker: Your lordship may please to feel what you think fit; but that shoe does not hurt you.

—(“A Trip to Scarborough.”)

The Southern point of view can be gathered together in a very short chapter. Its expression has so crystallized that it can be set down in a series of paragraphs and phrases. Whosoever doth not believe, without doubt he shall be damned everlastingly. Wherever you meet a Southerner, be it in the remotest corner of the earth, it is the same as in native Alabama. I was talking to the Mother Superior of a convent one day in a genial English countryside. Although I did not know it, she derived from Mississippi. I mentioned the subject of the Negro, and from her quiet face, meager with fasting and pale with meditation, there flashed nevertheless the Southern flame—like lightning across the room.

You have only to mention the Negro sympathetically in a public meeting and some one of Southern extraction will be found opposing to you a statement of the Southern creed. Thus, after speaking one morning at Carnegie Hall, some one came up to me and said very emphatically: If you had lived among the Negroes you would not speak of them as you do—the inevitable Southerner.

This is his creed:

1. We understand the niggers and they like us. When they go North they’re crazy till they get back to us. The North does not understand the nigger, pets him and spoils him, and at last dislikes him more than any Southerner.

2. We have occasionally race riots in the South, but they are generally caused by Yankees who have come South. In any case the worst riots in recent years have taken place in the North—at Washington, right under the President’s nose, and at Chicago.

3. Few Northerners or Englishmen understand or can understand the Negro problem. Those who understand, agree with us. Those who do not agree, do not understand.

4. The nigger is all right as long as he is kept in his place. You must make him keep his distance. If once you are familiar with him, you are lost. He will give himself such airs that it will be impossible to get on with him.

5. The nigger is an animal. The male of the species we generally call a “buck nigger.” Like the animals, he is full of lust. Like the animals, also, he does not feel pain. When he is burned it is not the same as a white man burning. Like the animals, he has no soul either to lose or to save, and Christianity and education are alike wasted on him. The polished Negro is merely disgusting, like an ape in evening dress. You clothe him and dress him and put him at table, but he’s an animal all the same and is bound to behave like one. You can’t trust him.

6. Under the influence of alcohol the Negro becomes a wild beast. He goes out of control. No fear of consequence can stop him. That is why some of the Southern States have been so ardently prohibitionist.

7. If you had to live with them you’d understand how terrible it is.

8. The nigger is a liar. He will say anything to your face to please you, or anything he thinks you want him to say. He’ll tell you stories of lynchings that would make you think we lynched a nigger every week, instead of it’s being the rarest occurrence.

9. When we lynch ‘em it’s for a very good reason—to protect our white women. Ask any of your English or Northern friends, who pity the Negro, whether they’d be willing to let their daughters marry a Negro. It’s a horrible thought. But that is what the Negro is always after—the white woman. His fancy runs to her, and if it were not for the terror of being lynched we should never be able to leave our wives and daughters in security. The R in the middle of the Negro’s name stands for his favorite proclivity. We burn ‘em alive, yes, and do it slow, because killing’s too good for them, and we get just so mad that everyone wants to be there, and have his part in putting them to death. In the North they do not lynch the Negro, but if one commits a crime they blame the whole Negro race. In the South we find the guilty man and punish him.

10. When the white man goes to the Negro girl, it’s different. He ought to be ashamed of himself, but there, it’s human nature, and you can’t be too stern with him.

11. The white man is master, and must remain master. But you do not realize how precarious his position is, outnumbered as he is, ten to one, in many districts. If the niggers joined hands against us we might be all killed in a night.

12. They have votes. By the greatest injustice ever committed in this country, the Constitution of the United States was amended to give these people votes and give them power over us. It is true we prevent them using their votes, and override the Constitution at every election. But political agitation goes on all the time. Every Negro would vote Republican if he had a chance, just because we vote Democrat. The Republican party knows that, and is always conspiring to restore to the Negro his lost power of voting. It will never succeed, but you can see the anxiety it causes us.

13. As for education, it’s bad for the nigger almost every way, and every new educated nigger makes it more difficult to keep ‘em down. But kept down they must be.

14. Justice? Well, you ask any nigger which he’d prefer, a Southern court of justice and a Southern judge, or a Northern one. He would always prefer the Southern one, because in the South we understand him. And we’re very fond of them and they of us. We get on very well together.

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