Black boy

“ But the godly farmers hitched ninety yoke of oxen to the abolition schoolhouse and dragged it into the middle of the swamp. The black boy trudged away.
The nineteenth was the first century of human sympathy,—the age when half wonderingly we began to descry in others that transfigured spark of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhoppers and peasants, and tramps and thieves, and millionaires and—sometimes—Negroes, became throbbing souls whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we half gasped with surprise, crying, “Thou too! ”

“ While the particular inclination lasts no other game is held to be worth a rap for rational black boys to play, but the relish the more speedily degenerates. In the ordinary concerns of life a black boy is incapable of self-denial. ”

“ A most quaint little half-black boy a year and a half old has taken a fancy to me and comes and sits for hours gazing at me and then dances to amuse me. He is Mahommed our guard’s son by a jet-black slave of his and is brown-black and very pretty. He wears a bit of iron wire in one ear and iron rings round his ankles, and that is all—and when he comes up little Achmet, who is his uncle, ‘makes him fit to be seen’ by emptying a pitcher of water over his head to rinse off the dust in which of course he has been rolling—that is equivalent to a clean pinafore. ”

“ It is still more remarkable that, although he was undoubtedly one of the most daring and doggedly persevering youths that could have been found among the coloured people, he was still not a solitary example of a negro boy literally making stepping-stones of difficulties. There were other black youngsters who were quite as determined, and their efforts were also destined to be crowned with success. ”

“ It must not be supposed that the Black Boy is a house where villains of this breed meet and arrange their midnight maraudings, or that it is even a likely place for a desperado fleeing from the huntsmen of Scotland Yard to seek and find safe harbourage until the ill-wind has blown over, and the huntsmen are put off the scent. ”

“ The above is the story of that wonderful black man told in splendid terms of high and well-deserved praise by a white man. Every little black boy in America may well be fired with inspiration to do something beyond the ordinary by reading the story of Banneker’s life.
LXXV.
“A LITTLE CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM.” It is truly astonishing what a boy can do when once he has made up his mind to do his best. Dr. Len. G. Broughton, the famous pastor of the Tabernacle Baptist church, Atlanta, Ga., in a little book, which he calls “The Modern Prodigal,” has told a very pathetic story about a little boy. ”

“ Oh, thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear! ”

“ A poor negro boy, without home or friends, black and unsightly enough, and clad in ragged clothing, had sat down upon the sidewalk, leaning against a tree, and, without strength enough to move, had been the unwilling stumbling-block to poor Job's progress. ”

“ "My boy, you are by blood, by appearance, by education, and by tastes a white man. Now, why do you want to throw your life away amidst the poverty and ignorance, in the hopeless struggle, of the black people of the United States? ”

“ My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white
White as an angel is the English child:
But I am black as if bereav'd of light. ”

“ For instance, I constantly see stone-fights between white boys and black boys in the open space outside our house. That doesn’t mean much, perhaps; for boys will be boys everywhere. But sometimes lately the white boys have seemed to go frantic, and have begun stoning black men and women who were going peaceably about their business. ”

“ It has often been a question with me just how much the best of it a boy has, who has his mother with him until his feet are well planted under him; who has a home and its influences until he gathers some kind of a working philosophy that helps him to face the world. There is no substitute for the home and the mother. ”

“ For of course we cannot afford to ignore the significance of accomplishments, their influence either upon [92] those who display or upon those who observe them. Accomplishments are more than an armor, a decoration,—they are a vent. A boy has his fling; a girl must have her accomplishments. ”

“ His tender limbs in chains confined,
I saw him o'er the billows borne,
And marked his agony of mind;
But still to gain this simple toy,
I gave the weeping Negro Boy.
In isles that deck the western wave
I doomed the hapless youth to dwell,
A poor, forlorn, insulted slave!
A beast that christians buy and sell!
And in their cruel tasks employ
The much-enduring Negro Boy.
His wretched parents long shall mourn,
Shall long explore the distant main
In hope to see the youth return;
But all their hopes and sighs are vain:
They never shall the sight enjoy,
Of their lamented Negro Boy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 two-ness,—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 shall we let a mawkish sentiment sweep away the culture of our fathers or the hope of our children? ”

“ Strange temptation for a child, you may think; and yet in this wide land to-day a thousand thousand dark children brood before this same temptation, and feel its cold and shuddering arms. For them, perhaps, some one will some day lift the Veil,—will come tenderly and cheerily into those sad little lives and brush the brooding hate away, just as Beriah Green strode in upon the life of Alexander Crummell. And before the bluff, kind-hearted man the shadow seemed less dark. Beriah Green had a school in Oneida County, New York, with a score of mischievous boys. ”

“ How they will curse me and the copper cause of all their woes, in their baby bosoms! Do you know that little as grown negroes are admirable for their personal beauty (in my opinion, at least) , the black babies of a year or two old are very pretty; they have for the most part beautiful eyes and eyelashes, the pearly perfect teeth, which they retain after their other juvenile graces have left them; their skins are all (I mean of blacks generally) infinitely finer and softer than the skins of white people. ”

“ It seems unjust and unchristian to eject two such children from my school, because their mother has the misfortune to have a few drops of African blood in her veins. I cannot make up my mind to do it. Why, you yourself must admit that they are as white as any children in the room."
"I am willing to acknowledge they are; but they have nigger blood in them, notwithstanding; and they are, therefore, as much niggers as the blackest, and have no more right to associate with white children than if they were black as ink. I have no more liking for white niggers than for black ones." ”

“ The little negro children are the sweetest little rascals upon earth, and I can quite understand the enthusiastic lady who was heard to exclaim "Oh, why can't we have black babies who turn white when they grow up." ”

“ We have a boy employed in the house, who has all the proverbial characteristics of the negro, and is in all above mediocrity. He keeps his book constantly with him, not only studying when an opportunity is given him, but stealing time from his work for that purpose. Often when I know he should be at work, I have listened in vain for the sound of his axe, and going quietly out to the wood yard, have seen him hide his Reader under a large stick of wood, and with a sheepish look and a real negro laugh, resume his work ”

“ To-day it makes little difference to Atlanta, to the South, what the Negro thinks or dreams or wills. In the soul-life of the land he is to-day, and naturally will long remain, unthought of, half forgotten; and yet when he does come to think and will and do for himself,—and let no man dream that day will never come,—then the part he plays will not be one of sudden learning, but words and thoughts he has been taught to lisp in his race-childhood. ”

“ In the good and affectionate home in which I am now a guest, I see nothing but the most beautiful relationship between white and black, and have occasion afresh to admire and marvel at the musical genius of the negro-people. A young negro, who is house-servant and waits at table, sings songs as naturally as he breathes, sings even in the stomach, as a ventriloquist, and when he, during meal-times, brushes away the flies, as is usual here, with a large besom of feathers, he does it unconsciously to the tune of some melody which silently sounds in his memory. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For, after all, these black men were but men, neither more nor less wonderful than other men. In build and stature, they were for the most part among the taller nations and sturdily made. In their mental equipment and moral poise, they showed themselves full brothers to all men—"intensely human"; and this too in their very modifications and peculiarities—their warm brown and bronzed color and crisp curled hair under the heat and wet of Africa; their sensuous enjoyment of the music and color of life; their instinct for barter and trade; their strong family life and government. ”

“ For the Negro everywhere discriminated against, segregated and shunned, mobbed and murdered—he it is whose melodies are on all our lips, and whose rhythms impel our marching feet in a ‘war for democracy.’ The irresistible music that wells up from this sunny and unresentful people is hummed and whistled, danced to and marched to, laughed over and wept over, by high and low and rich and poor throughout the land. The downtrodden black man whose patient religious faith has kept his heart still unembittered, is fast becoming the singing voice of all America. ”

“ The Negro has already been pointed out many times as a religious animal,—a being of that deep emotional nature which turns instinctively toward the supernatural. Endowed with a rich tropical imagination and a keen, delicate appreciation of Nature, the transplanted African lived in a world animate with gods and devils, elves and witches; full of strange influences,—of Good to be implored, of Evil to be propitiated. Slavery, then, was to him the dark triumph of Evil over him. All the hateful powers of the Under-world were striving against him, and a spirit of revolt and revenge filled his heart. ”

“ A white man has no right a negro need respect. The children of the breed of men who speak the tongue of Burns and Shakespeare, Drake and Raleigh, have been disarmed and made subject to the black spawn of an African jungle! ”

“ From the double life every American Negro must live, as a Negro and as an American, as swept on by the current of the nineteenth while yet struggling in the eddies of the fifteenth century,—from this must arise a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence. The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way ”

“ While most far-minded men would recognize this as extreme and overdrawn, still without doubt many are asking, Are there a sufficient number of Negroes ready for college training to warrant the undertaking? Are not too many students prematurely forced into this work? Does it not have the effect of dissatisfying the young Negro with his environment? And do these graduates succeed in real life? Such natural questions cannot be evaded, nor on the other hand must a nation naturally skeptical as to Negro ability assume an unfavorable answer without careful inquiry and patient openness to conviction. ”

“ If it be true that there are an appreciable number of Negro youth in the land capable by character and talent to receive that higher training, the end of which is culture, and if the two and a half thousand who have had something of this training in the past have in the main proved themselves useful to their race and generation, the question then comes, What place in the future development of the South might the Negro college and college-bred man to occupy? ”