Part 2

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?”