Black

“ For in truth, and for once, the epithet raven was not misapplied to those soft, silky, glistening masses, which were not of the cold and hueless black, but of that nameless and indescribable hue which is never seen but in the hair of women of Moorish or Irish blood—and in the latter probably as originated of the former—black indeed, but black warmed and glowing with a rich metallic purplish lustre, unlike any thing on earth but the changeful hues that dance on the dark plumage of several of the feathered tribes. ”

“ Never his brothers before him
Showed the hint of a stain.”
Hark to the tups and wethers;
Hark to the old gray ram:
“We’re all of us white, but he’s black as night,
And he’ll never be worth a damn.” ”

“ The long black nights, when the moon hides her face, when the stars are afraid, are not so black. The silence that dwells in the forest is not so black. There is nothing in the world so black as thy hair.... ”

“ Black roads lead from blackness past blackness to blackness; and along them trudge black, savage-looking men and women; and by them black, old-looking children play grim, unchildish games.
When the sun shines on this black land, it glitters black and hard; and when the rain falls a black mist rises towards heaven, like the hopeless prayer of a hopeless soul.
By night it is less dreary, for then the sky gleams with a lurid light, and out of the darkness the red flames leap, and high up in the air they gambol and writhe—the demon spawn of that evil land, they seem. ”

“ From these sea-scented scenes, my memory travels to a weary land where dead ashes lie, and there is blackness—blackness everywhere. Black rivers flow between black banks; black, stunted trees grow in black fields ”

“ Black is, therefore, the absence of all the coloured rays.
It is evident, then, that all the various assemblages of colours which we see in the objects around us, are not in the bodies themselves, but in the light which falls upon them. There is no colour inherent in the grass, the trees, the fruits, and the flowers, nor even in the most splendid and variegated dress that adorns a lady. ”

“ Black and more black the midnight grew,
Black and more black was the water's hue;
Then a ghastly sound on the silence broke,
And I thought of the dead beneath the oak. ”

“ If that she learn not of her eye to look.
No face is fair that is not full so black.
KING.
O paradox! Black is the badge of hell,
The hue of dungeons and the school of night;
And beauty’s crest becomes the heavens well.
BEROWNE.
Devils soonest tempt, resembling spirits of light. ”

“ These shades have been selected for the following reasons:—Black is symbolical of the gloom which surrounds one when those who are nearest and dearest are taken. Black and white express sorrow mixed with hope, and white alone the light which follows the night of mourning. Blue, the tint of the heavens, to which it is hoped the spirit forms have taken flight. ”

“ One black night in Arcadia: yes, the pines,
Mountains and valleys mingling made one mass
Of black with void black heaven: the earth's confines,
The sky's embrace, — below, above, around,
All hardened into black without a bound. ”

“ Is it not the foundation of a greater or less suffusions of color in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reign in the countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? ”

“ Black hills, black hollows, black future, black world, black hearts—everything matches—everything's black. Sky's black, I'm black—you're black—little black shack won't have to stand all alone any more—little black shack's just black ashes—little black shack's all burnt up! ”

“ And as the black third of the land grows in thrift and skill, unless skilfully guided in its larger philosophy, it must more and more brood over the red past and the creeping, crooked present, until it grasps a gospel of revolt and revenge and throws its new-found energies athwart the current of advance. Even to-day the masses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the moral crookedness of yours. ”

“ Surely there shall yet dawn some mighty morning to lift the Veil and set the prisoned free. Not for me,—I shall die in my bonds,—but for fresh young souls who have not known the night and waken to the morning; a morning when men ask of the workman, not "Is he white?" but "Can he work?" When men ask artists, not "Are they black?" ”

“ How handsome she will look when she comes out. We will paint her black this time—all black—all but her bell; and that shall shine like burnished gold. Black will become us now, for we have passed through great trials since our separation. ”

“ Follow those pure beams, whose beauty burneth,
That so have scorchèd thee
As thou still black must be
Till her kind beams thy black to brightness turneth.
Follow her, while yet her glory shineth!
There comes a luckless night
That will dim all her light;
—And this the black unhappy shade divineth.
Follow still, since so thy fates ordainèd!
The sun must have his shade,
Till both at once do fade,—
The sun still proved, the shadow still disdainèd. ”

“ As the negro stood with his thick muscular fingers spread over his brawny chest, with form erect, with head thrown back, and eyes fixed in stern resolve, I was impressed with an air of grandeur about him, and could not help thinking that in the black form before me, scantily clad in coarse cotton, there was the soul and spirit of a man! ”

“ Can the black AEthiop change his skin, His native spots the leopard lose? Then may the heart obdur'd in sin Grow soft, repent, and virtue choose! Threats or advice but move disdain, And signs and wonders glare in vain. Can the black. ”

“ For the blackness—that blackness to which he had been stranger for more than half his life—had come upon him as an enemy smothering him, muffling his head in its terrible black folds, stopping his nostrils with its black fingers, gripping his windpipe with black cords, so that his breathing stopped. ”

“ Black grew so pale he might have been going to faint if the glitter in his black eyes hadn’t told the tale of a vitality which was simply taking it out that way instead of by showing red, as most men do. ”

“ Her countenance becomes dejected—she seldom smiles—clothes herself in rags, and with disheveled hair and spots of black paint on her cheeks, wanders about in a pensive mood, seldom shedding tears, except when alone in the woods. ”

“ Black sat in his red-cushioned wooden rocker, that most incongruous piece of furniture in the midst of the black walnut dignity of the manse study, and in it his appearance suggested that of a sick boy who has taken refuge in his mother’s arms. ”

“ Black is a symbol of envy, for the thoughts which aim at another’s injury cloud the soul and afflict the body. The book of laws treating of dispositions made in view of death was bound in black. The sinister significance of black is well illustrated by what is told of the ruthless Tartar Tamerlane. ”

“ Therefore I ask, if we must wear a distinct dress to typify our sorrow, why black? Black has now become objectionable from having lost all the sacred meaning it once possessed. It is no longer the livery of grief. ”

“ If so, why do we see so much black in common use as clothing among all classes? Indeed, black is preferred to either white or colors. How often the young man speaks in ecstasies of the black eyes and black hair of his lady-love! ”

“ To utter the name Negro, therefore, or the name Black-man, is to form and pronounce at least two judgments touching an individual object of sensuous perception—to wit, that it is a man, and that he is black. ”

“ Sometimes the White shows in spurts of fierce, childish pride—which is Pride of Race run crooked—and sometimes the Black in still fiercer abasement and humility, half heathenish customs and strange, unaccountable impulses to crime. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now the world has well-nigh forgotten what the country is, and we must imagine a little city of black people scattered far and wide over three hundred lonesome square miles of land, without train or trolley, in the midst of cotton and corn, and wide patches of sand and gloomy soil. ”

“ Aged negro men and women, half-naked negro children, ladies richly attired, little girls in Parisian dresses, with lustrous black eyes and a profusion of ringlets, cast themselves down before the image, and pressed their lips to its feet in a passion of devotion. ”

“ The negro, in spite of his name, is not black, but deep brown, and even this darkest hue does not appear at the beginning of life, for the new-born negro child is reddish brown, soon becoming slaty grey, and then darkening. ”

“ They astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory; such as prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated. But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never seen even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. ”

“ It says 'the negro.' A negro is black; I am white, and not black."
"Black as ink, my lad," returned the lawyer, shaking his head. "'One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,' says the poet. Somewhere, sometime, you had a black ancestor. One drop of black blood makes the whole man black." ”

“ There are as many blue blackguards as there are orange, and as many white as there are purple, or any other colour, and I won't have any of my family mixed up with it. Even women and children are ready to quarrel for the sake of a colour, and not one in ten of them knows what it is about. ”

“ Far away the wide black land that belts the South, where Miss Smith worked and Miss Taylor drudged and Bles and Zora dreamed, the dense black land sensed the cry and heard the bound of answering life within the vast dark breast. All that dark earth heaved in mighty travail with the bursting bolls of the cotton while black attendant earth spirits swarmed above, sweating and crooning to its birth pains. ”

“ Look at the hundreds of advertised hair-dyes, used for the purpose of changing Nature! See men with their gray beards dyed black; women with those beautiful [Pg 388] black locks, which but yesterday were as white as the driven snow! Not only this, but even those with light or red whiskers run to the dye-kettle, steal a color which Nature has refused them, and an hour after curse the negro for a complexion that is not stolen. If black is so hateful, why do not gentlemen have their boots whitewashed? If the slaves of the South had been white, the same prejudice would have existed against them. ”

“ These slight and momentary differences of blackness, these fleeting rudiments of a pattern, may serve as a sensuous base for the projected images: the child's excited fancy sees in these faint differentiations of the black, formless waste definite forms. ”

“ It is pretty late in the day to call black white now that he is dead, when it was allowed to be black during all his lifetime.”
“He hath his dismissal; who knows what awaits us.”
“A pleasing spectacle, truly to see you begin now to condemn what you approved for thirty years. ”

“ Black′-wash, a lotion of calomel and lime-water: anything that blackens.—Black and blue, with the livid colour of a bruise in the flesh; Black book, an official book bound in black, a book recording the names of persons deserving punishment; Black eye, an eye of which the iris is dark—a point of beauty: a discoloration around the eye due to a blow or fall; Black fellow, a native in Australia.—In black and white, in writing or in print: in art, in no colours but black and white.—To be black in the face, to have the face purple through strangulation, passion, or effort ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus, when we say black man, black horse, black coat, and so of all other black things, the word black is associated with the cluster, man, as often as black man is the expression; with the cluster horse, as often as black horse is the expression, and so on with infinite variety: but at the same time that it is associated with each of those various clusters, it is also associated with the peculiar sensation of colour which it is intended to mark. ”