Black Hundred

“ I have gone as far as to cite a recent occurrence in Camden, Wilcox County, Alabama, where more than one hundred and forty Negroes were sent to the cantonments and I was asked to be one of the speakers on [Pg 125] the occasion. The white people there gave the Negroes a great banquet and in my remarks after thanking them for their hospitality, I said “That it would be foolish and cowardly on my part to stand here in your presence and say that as a race we have no grievances, for we have them, but this is no time to air them. ”

“ Elderly folks can look at a girl’s eyes and see that they are brown or blue or green, as the case may be; but the lover looks at them and sees in them the magic mirror of a hundred possible worlds. How can he fathom the sea of dreams that lies there, or tell what strange fancies or reminiscences may be involved in an absent look? ”

“ For many a day George Brand remembered that little luncheon-party; the dull, bronze glow of the room; the flowers; the soft, downcast eyes opposite him; the bright, pleasant garrulity of the little Polish lady; and always—ah, the delight of it!—that strange, trembling, sweet consciousness that Natalie Lind was listening as he listened—that almost he could have heard the beating of her heart.
And a hundred and a hundred times he swore that, whoever throughout the laboring and suffering world might regret that day, the man Kirski should not. ”

“ She takes, deliberately and with exquisite selective tact, certain entirely simple, inoffensive elements,—things which in themselves you must acknowledge to be harmless and almost rational; she takes these simple elements and she puts them together by a method, and in a manner, of which no man, if he lived to be one hundred and eighty-six, ever would discover the secret, and, waving her wizard wand over the entire mess, she calls it a hat! ”

“ When I see a woman get off a street car because it is numbered thirteen, or witness the spectacle of a hundred busy shoppers, eager to get somewhere, held at a corner by an interminable funeral, because they dare not cross between the carriages, I accept that safe inference, dear to all patriots, that the victims are foreign. ”

“ The hat is the woman. In a thousand ways the hat declares the existence of occult meanings. A woman who would cut a man who wore a made tie, who would not buy a reproduced antique or pirated print, who knows Sèvres at a hundred yards and a real Bokhara in the dark, will cover her head with linen lilies and cotton-bloated roses. A woman who would hesitate to [133] put a jewel in her hair, will heap upon the dyed straw of her hat festoons of glass and steel and wax, with the fretted carcass of a bird. ”

“ Be as positive yourself as you like, but no positive clothes. You’ve got to watch yourself, kid. You know that old maxim, ‘eternal vigilance.’ You’ll have enough trouble come to you naturally and unavoidably—accidents that you cannot foresee—without advertising for it with a loud suit of rags. Ninety-nine men out of a hundred are picked up through some peculiarity of dress and identified by the same. ”

“ Generally speaking, the Negro problem consists of twelve millions of people of African descent living in this country, mostly in the Southern states, and forming one-third of the population of this section and one-eighth of the entire population of the United States. Notwithstanding the fact that we are far from an agreement as to the answer to this problem, we are all agreed that the solution must be sought in the answers to the following questions: What is to be the economic, the political, the civil, and the social status of the Negro in this country? ”

“ One estimate is that a million Negroes came in the sixteenth century, three million in the seventeenth, seven million in the eighteenth and four million in the nineteenth or fifteen million in all. Certainly at least ten million came and this meant sixty million killed and stolen in Africa because of the methods of capture and the horror of the middle passage. ”

“ We have here a race conflict; on the one side eight millions of blacks, we will say, and perhaps eight millions of irreconcilable whites on the other. And these dominant eight millions of white men maintain, with the utmost pertinacity—and they have the power in their right hand so far as we can see—that they propose to rule and keep down those eight millions of black men. ”

“ Now I like the colored people, and sympathize with all their reasonable aspirations; but you and I both know, John, that in this country the Negro must remain subordinate, and can never expect to be the equal of white men. ”

“ The figures given by the unsentimental census-taker showing that during the past decade there has been an increase of about 34 per cent. of this race in our population does not indicate that the black belt stretching along our Southern horizon is likely to fade away. The negro is here to stay, and in adjusting him to our natural life we are faced by a permanent, not a temporary problem. ”

“ We have 680,000 blacks capable of bearing arms and who ought now to be in the field. Let us now say to every Negro who wishes to go into the ranks on condition of being free, go and fight —you are free. My own Negroes have been to me and said, ‘Master, set us free and we’ll fight for you.’ You must make up your minds to try this or see your army withdrawn from before your town. ”

“ It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. ”

“ But just as often as they come to this point, the present social condition of the Negro stands as a menace and a portent before even the most open-minded: if there were nothing to charge against the Negro but his blackness or other physical peculiarities, they argue, the problem would be comparatively simple; but what can we say to his ignorance, shiftlessness, poverty, and crime? can a self-respecting group hold anything but the least possible fellowship with such persons and survive? ”

“ And yet, with all this, the Negro has held the stage. In the South he is everything. You cannot discuss religion, morals, politics, social life, science, earth or sky, God or devil without touching the Negro. It is a perennial and continuous and continual subject of books, editorials, sermons, lectures and smoking car confabs. In the north and west while seldom in the center, the Negro is always in the wings waiting to appear or screaming shrill lines off stage. ”

“ So great an economic and social revolution as swept the South in '63 meant a weeding out among the Negroes of the incompetents and vicious, the beginning of a differentiation of social grades. Now a rising group of people are not lifted bodily from the ground like an inert solid mass, but rather stretch upward like a living plant with its roots still clinging in the mould. The appearance, therefore, of the Negro criminal was a phenomenon to be awaited ”

“ We the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be poorer if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hearted but determined Negro humility? ”

“ Within the Veil was he born, said I; and there within shall he live,—a Negro and a Negro's son. Holding in that little head—ah, bitterly!—the unbowed pride of a hunted race, clinging with that tiny dimpled hand—ah, wearily!—to a hope not hopeless but unhopeful, and seeing with those bright wondering eyes that peer into my soul a land whose freedom is to us a mockery and whose liberty a lie. I saw the shadow of the Veil as it passed over my baby, I saw the cold city towering above the blood-red land. ”

“ For the righting of our wrongs we must look to the negroes in those States where they hold the balance of power—in Ohio, Indiana, Connecticut, New Jersey, and others. And think what an element we are destined to form in the body politic! In fifty years we shall be twenty-five millions; next century we shall be fifty millions. Not a drop of our blood is lost to us—the whites take care of that. If you haven’t got but a sixteenth part of black blood, you’re a negro all right. ”

“ On the other hand, to leave the Negro in the hands of Southern courts was impossible. In a distracted land where slavery had hardly fallen, to keep the strong from wanton abuse of the weak, and the weak from gloating insolently over the half-shorn strength of the strong, was a thankless, hopeless task. ”

“ The Negro’s Method of Solution.
There are three classes of Negroes in the South, but only one desires a solution of the problem and that is class number two, of those I shall mention. Class number one is composed chiefly of the illiterate and superstitious Negroes. They usually work on the railroads, on the steamboats, in the large saw-mills, and on the farms for wages. They have no homes and do not want any ”

“ Lowly and depressed as we have been, and as we now are, yet our interests and our welfare have agitated the chief countries of the world, and are now before all other questions, shaking this nation to its very centre. The providences of God have placed the negro race before Europe and America in the most commanding position. From the sight of us no nation, no statesman, no ecclesiastic, and no ecclesiastical institution, can escape. ”

“ On the other hand, the masters and the masters' sons have never been able to see why the Negro, instead of settling down to be day-laborers for bread and clothes, are infected with a silly desire to rise in the world, and why they are sulky, dissatisfied, and careless, where their fathers were happy and dumb and faithful. "Why, you niggers have an easier time than I do," said a puzzled Albany merchant to his black customer. ”

“ I admit that the condition of my race, whether considered in a mental, moral, or intellectual point of view, at the present time cannot compare favorably with the Anglo-Saxon. But it does not become the whites to point the finger of scorn at the blacks, when they have so long been degrading them. The negro has not always been considered the inferior race. The time was when he stood at the head of science and literature. ”

“ I noticed one unusually striking figure, a stunted negro with a pock-marked face who wore a gaudy yellow handkerchief bound about his head and heavy gold rings in his ears. I observed this sportsman looking hard at me and was a little nonplussed to see him apparently draw the attention of the man at his side to me. The negro's companion was a swarthy, lissom young fellow with handsome features and a pair of bold black eyes. The negro nudged him and broke into a torrent of words. ”

“ For none of these can be claimed any very high order of merit; the light by which they shine conspicuous among their fellows would not illustrate them very especially among the Whites. That such abilities should occasionally show themselves, even in a quite inferior race, ought surely to be expected and to arouse the wonder of no one. The really significant thing is that eight out of eleven of these champions are confessedly of mixed blood; only 27 per cent. are "black." But these "Blacks" form 80 per cent. of the total Negroid population. ”

“ The fiery trials of the young Colored men who gained admission to West Point, and the noble conduct of the four regiments of black troops in the severe service of the frontiers have strengthened the hopes of a nation in the final outcome of the American Negro.
But what of the future? Can the Negro endure the sharp competition of American civilization? Can he keep his position against the tendencies to amalgamation? ”

“ The time has not yet come for the great development of American Negro literature. The economic stress is too great and the racial persecution too bitter to allow the leisure and the poise for which literature calls. “The Negro in the United States is consuming all his intellectual energy in this gruelling race-struggle. ”

“ And, when I say Negroes, it is to avoid the "people of color" circumlocution, because it is no longer easy to find a pure black. The colored population, especially those who are free, are mixed in the first, second, third and fourth degree. ”

“ So far as my acquaintance extends, almost every family has its traditions of the good and faithful service of a black servant or slave, who was killed in battle, or served through the war, and came home to tell stories of hard fighting, and draw his pension. In my own native town,—not a large one,—I remember five such pensioners, three of whom, I believe, had been slaves, and, in fact, were slaves to the day of their death ”

“ However much the prejudice of the law and the courts may give an enforced unity to the negro race and the "colored whites," there is no ignoring the physical fact that a person who is seven eighths white, or who is but one thirty-second part colored, is not black. Of the six millions of blacks, "black" according to the United States census and the decisions of the courts, perhaps nearly two millions are of a mixed color, more white than black. ”

“ Coming now to the slowly swelling stream of a distinct group literature, by and primarily for the Negro, we enter a realm only partially known to white Americans. First, there come the rich mass of Negro folk lore transplanted from Africa and developed in America. ”