Blanching

“ The departure of lynching waits for two events: the breeding of the animal out the most wretched Negroes until they find greater satisfaction in something higher than sensuality and revenge; and the breeding of savage cruelty out of the white man until he can find pleasure in something more humane than torture by fire. As our counsellors bid us turn our attention to the dark side of our life, we bid them turn theirs from it. ”

“ The Whiteboys would gather in obedience to some secret mandate, march by night in large and ordered companies, some to the land of one offender, others to that of another, and, making the darkness hideous with their white smocks, fall to houghing cattle, destroying fences, and spoiling pastures. ”

“ It is literally true that our black is the French white; black and blanc are only the absence of colour in its two opposite effects.
Blach, Blacheman, Blancus, and Blancard, all appear in Domesday; but Blanchefleur and Blanche, seem to have been the produce of romance. The mother of Sir Tristrem was Blanchefleur, a possible translation of some of the Keltic Gwenns or Finns, and it probably crept from romance to reality among the poetical people of southern France. ”

“ I have been told that there are still some individuals in England who cherish the idea that this vast orgy of blood, lust, rapine, hate, and pride is in some peculiar way merely the Bacchanalia of troops unused to the heady bouquet of the wines of Champagne or, stranger still, that it is the mental aberration of a people seduced by idle tales into these courses by its rulers. ”

“ One is sorely tempted at times to throw up the work in disgust. The soil seems so unpromising, so choked with poisonous weeds, as to defy cultivation. The negroes are so untrustworthy, so full of all deceitfulness and dishonesty, so enveloped in dirt and rags, that we ask in despair, Is there rain enough in the sweet heavens to cleanse them, or grace sufficient to renew them? ”

“ It is barely possible that a white vagrant of exceptional depravity might, now and then, be arrested; but the negro was arrested by wholesale on a charge of vagrancy which rested on no foundation except an arbitrary law specially enacted to fit his case. Loitering around tippling-shops, one of the offenses enumerated, was in far larger proportions the habit of white men, but they were left untouched and the negro alone was arrested and punished. ”

“ We will readily believe that the thought of torturing a white could displease none of the natives, neither Jose-Antonio Alvez, a negro like themselves, nor Coimbra, a mongrel of black blood, nor Negoro either, animated with a ferocious hatred against the whites. ”

“ Blanchett, I mean—oh, please don't go ashore. I am sure either that these dreadful savages are lurking here to destroy us, or that we have been deceived by some wicked conjuror. Oh, I am so frightened! ”

“ With regard to the immoral and improper tendency of my productions, I can only say it is not my fault if there are minds which, like negroes, cast a dark shadow on a mirror, how ever clear and pure in itself. ”

“ When robbery becomes flagrant, Nature brands sinners in the vegetable kingdom by taking away their color, and perhaps their leaves, as in the case of the broom-rape and Indian Pipe; but the fair faces of the gerardias and foxgloves give no hint of the petty thefts committed under cover of darkness in the soil below. ”

“ First, they imbibe a prejudice from their infancy, that the white men buy them for no other purpose but to drink their blood; which is owing to this, that when the first negroes saw the Europeans drink claret, they imagined it was blood, as that wine is of a deep red colour; so that nothing but the actual experience of the contrary can eradicate the false opinion. ”

“ Horrible fancies of an unknown vengeance, a Nemesis in crime unexpiated, menaced there! May I never have to preside in a court where the evidence is so strongly opposed, where the facts are so equally balanced! If, at one instant, I beheld myself the gorgeous millionnaire, launching forth into the wide ocean of unexplored enjoyment, at the next I saw myself crawling upon the earth, maimed and crippled like the old negro slave; a curse upon me; the cries of widowed mothers ringing in my ears ”

“ In a market of this kind we, of course, see every gradation of colour, from light brown to the deepest black. The white slaves, and the most beautiful of the blacks, are not however to be seen by every stranger, but are shut up in the dwellings of the traffickers in human flesh. ”

“ Lisa asked her the other day what she thought of a war with England. ‘Humph!’ she said. ‘I reckon we could stand it.’ ‘I’m not so sure,’ said Lisa. ‘We might manage very well on land; but what about our water forces?’ ‘They ain’t no trouble ’bout that,’ said Prue; ‘we got all the water we kin use. You ought just to see the way it flies out o’ the spigot.’”
“What are you two girls so merry over?” asked Mrs. Brown, putting her head in at the door, attracted by the peals of laughter.
“Oh, we’re just telling funny things. Persis was telling about old black Prue.” And Annis repeated the story. ”

“ The door was suddenly opened, and before them stood a man, his features so obscured by the dust, [Pg 263] mud, and blood which plastered him from head to foot, that he could not be recognized at first glance in the semi-darkness of the room. He looked at them wildly and burst into a hysterical laugh. “We ran,” he said, “all of us. We ran pell-mell, head over heels, every mother’s son of us.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is not strange, then, that some of my pearl shell hooks are as lustrous and sharp to-day as when the careless maker mislaid them in the sand for me to find half a century later. We leave no records on the land itself which would betray us after the lapse of half a dozen years. Is it not humiliating to find that the white man as the black records his most durable domestic history in rubbish, easily expungible by clean-fingered time? ”

“ Neither the sword and bayonet nor plague and pestilence are necessary to a work of uprooting, for by a natural racial and economic law the negro will be driven out and supplanted by the white, and Louis Blanc's theory of extermination be illustrated as never before. ”

“ Of the evil results that flowed from the contest now about to ensue—a contest that had many elements of provocation and of wrong on both sides—one of the most remarkable features was the complete control which the white men from the North, entire strangers to the negro, to his habits and to his prejudices, so readily obtained over him. ”

“ Do you know that, from my knowledge of the fanciful, morbid, perverse elements of the negroid mentality, I firmly believe that each spectacular lynching of a negro for a crime of this sort is the direct cause of others of similar character. There is no human brain upon which suggestion acts so strongly, so imperatively, as upon his. ”

“ The method of lynching Negroes was usually by hanging or by burning at the stake, sometimes in the presence of thousands of people, who came in on excursion trains to see the sight, and, possibly, carry off a trophy consisting of a finger joint, a tooth or a portion of the victim’s heart. If the lynching was for a crime committed against a woman, and she could be secured, she was consigned to the task of starting the flames with her own hands. This was supposed to add to the novelty of the occasion.5 43
“‘Why did not the Negro offer some resistance to these outrages?’ you may ask. ”

“ In the long and commonplace procession of suitors that files before us, one only touches her heart. La Blancherie has a literary and philosophic turn, and the young girl's imagination drapes him in its own glowing colors. The opposition of her father separates them, but absence only lends fuel to this virgin flame. One day she learns that his views are mercenary, that he is neither true nor disinterested, and the charm is broken. She met him afterward in the Luxembourg gardens with a feather in his hat, and the last illusion vanished. ”

“ Their drinking so much snow water is thought to be the cause of it; the men using more wine, are not so strumous as the women. The truth is, they are a peculiar race of people, and many great water drinkers here have not these prodigious tumors; it runs, as we say, in the blood, and is a vice in the race, and renders them so ugly, shriveled and deformed, by its drawing the skin of the face down, that nothing can be more frightful; to this add a strange puffing dress, furs, and that barbarous language, being a mixture of corrupt High German, French, and Italian. ”

“ The white man who begins by cheating a Negro usually ends by cheating a white man. The white man who begins to break the law by lynching a Negro soon yields to the temptation to lynch a white man. ”

“ Blanc, m. (popular) , street-walker; white wine; white brandy; one-franc piece. (Printers’) Jeter du ——, to interline. (Thieves’) N’être pas ——, to have a misdeed on one’s conscience; to be liable to be “wanted.” (Military) Faire faire —— à quelqu’un de sa bourse, to draw freely on another’s purse; to live at another’s expense in a mean and paltry manner, “to spunge.” (Familiar) Blanc, one of the Legitimist party. The appellation used to be given in 1851 to Monarchists or Bonapartists.
Enfin pour terminer l’histoire,
De mon bœuf blanc ne parlons plus. ”

“ Another evil arising from the pressure of the whites upon us, and our unavoidable communication with them, is the frequency with which our Chiefs, and Warriors, and Indians, are thrown into jail, and that too for the most trifling causes. This is very galling to our feelings, and ought not to be permitted to [60] the extent to which, to gratify their bad passions, our white neighbours now carry this practice.
“In our hunting and fishing too, we are greatly interrupted by the whites. Our venison is stolen from the trees, where we have hung it to be reclaimed after the chase. ”

“ Now they are in general the scenes of drunken and brutal broils, for the most part got up by the whites in the interior for the purpose of gratifying a corrupt curiosity to witness the antics of the aborigines when intoxicated. In these scenes we see exemplified the degradation to which humanity, even in its lowest form, may be reduced by the devices of men, when, from some cause or other, the hellish tendencies of the human heart and head conspire for such a purpose. ”

“ Of late, however, several revolting instances of lynching of Negroes in its most dreadful form: burning at the stake, have occurred in regions where hitherto such forms of barbarous punishment have been unknown; and the time appears to be ripe for some efficient concert of action, to eradicate what is recognized by cool heads as a blot on our good name and a serious menace to our civilization. ”

“ Four white men sat among them; sat doggedly in defeat. Gallantry is a noble quality when joined to wisdom and foresight; alone, it leads into pits and blind alleys. And these four men recognized with no small bitterness the truth of this aphorism. ”

“ And thus the adventures of Le Blanc may be easily accounted for.
We may form a more simple story still, by supposing these two little savages to have been transported from their northern country, to some of the French West-India islands, such as St. Domingo, Guadaloupe, or Martinico, and to have been purchased there by some Frenchman, who soon after returned, with his family, to France, and settled in Lorraine, having brought these two children thither along with him. It is probable that they would soon make their escape. ”

“ The lynching mob was given its glut of blood and egged on by purposely exaggerated and often wholly invented tales of crime on the part of perhaps the most peaceful and sweet-tempered race the world has ever known. ”

“ When the operation of lynching is practised spontaneously, under the influence of excitement caused by the atrocity of such a crime as that committed by the three negroes, and without any refinement of torture, it is, of course, comprehensible in a young society, though not excusable. ”

“ When proper restraint is removed from the Negro he gets beyond bounds. The Anglo-Saxon, indeed, or members of that race, has a way of meeting extraordinary conditions with extraordinary means—hence lynching in order to hold in check the Negro in the South. ”

“ But since the introduction among us of what you call spirituous liquors, and what we think may justly be called poison, our numbers are greatly diminished. It has destroyed a great part of your red brethren.
"My Brothers and Friends:—We plainly perceive, that you see the very evil which destroyed your red brethren; it is not an evil of our own making; we have not placed it among ourselves; it is an evil placed among us by the white people ”

“ The havoc occasioned among them by this murderous discharge was dreadful, and since then all communication with them has ceased; and the spirit of animosity and revenge which this unmerited and atrocious act of barbarity engendered, has been fostered and aggravated to the highest pitch by the incessant encounters that have subsequently taken place between them and the whites. ”