Niggardliness

“ Niggers were niggers, but white men were gods, and it was the white-gods who had trained him to chase niggers and keep them in their proper lesser place in the world. All the world was held in the hollow of the white man's hands. The niggers--well, had not he seen them always compelled to remain in their lesser place? Had he not seen them, on occasion, triced up to the palm-trees of the Meringe compound and their backs lashed to ribbons by the white-gods? ”

“ After I had talked to him awhile in his cell I realized that he owed his impending death to his sideburns and his van dyke. They had crystalized the fatal illusion of his greatness.
A nigger about to be hanged is as a rule less interesting than a white man in a similar predicament. Mystery and terror seem not to denude the black of his character, but merely to accentuate it. Under their influence he grows mystical and tuneful. Emotion does not twist his face into dramatic awkwardness. Awaiting death he becomes like a child, graceful, poignant and expectant. ”

“ A nigger, is it? darn their black skins! there was a dozen here jest now, a blockin' up the fire-side, and stinkin' so no white man could come nearst it, till I got an axe-handle, half an hour or so since, and cleared out the heap of them! Niggers! they'll be here all of them torights, I warrant; where you sees Archer, there's never no scarceness of dogs and niggers. But come, walk in boys! walk in, anyhow--Jem'll be here to rights, and he's worth two niggers any day, though he's black-fleshed, I guess, if one was jest to skin the etarnal creatur. ”

“ Amid such evil conditions ignorance necessarily abounded and moral degradation deposited its slime, generation after generation, over the souls of masters and slaves alike. And in this moral mud there bred apace bestiality and cruelty, superstition and sensuality, tyranny and fear—the black brood of man’s inhumanity to man. ”

“ My nigger slops along through the slush and tells me that my lunch is ready. He is not a happy-looking nigger by any means. A white man looks bad enough in the mud and cold, but a nigger presents a pitiful spectacle. ”

“ He's a nigger, and there's no getting round it.
"All right, sir! give you your chance directly. Don't speak yet,—ain't through, if you please. Well, sir, it's agen nature,—you may talk agen it, and work agen it, and fight agen it till all's blue, and what good'll it do? You can't get an Irishman, and, what's more, a free-born American citizen, to put himself on a level with a nigger,—not by no manner of means. ”

“ In The Nigger of the Narcissus the death of the negro, James Wait, immediately affects the lives of a number of very ordinary human beings whose friends and intimates we have become—but that shadow that traps the feet of the negro, that alarms the souls of Donkin, of Belfast, of Singleton, of the boy Charlie, creeps also to our sides and envelops for us far more than that single voyage of the Narcissus. ”

“ In their place, your people can be honest and respectful; and God knows, I’ll do what I can to help them. But when they want to reverse nature, and rule white men, and marry white women, and sit in my parlor, then, by God! we’ll hold them under if we have to lynch every Nigger in the land. Now, John, the question is, are you, with your education and Northern notions, going to accept the situation and teach the darkies to be faithful servants and laborers as your fathers were,—I knew your father, John, he belonged to my brother, and he was a good Nigger. ”

“ And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along—ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was. The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings. ”

“ Great-limbed he was also, firm-footed and bull-strengthed, showing in his face the cruelty and the cunning of a black race, mingled with the mind and mastery of the white; an evil and a terrible man, knowing no lord save his own passions, and no religion but black witchcraft and vile superstition; a foe to be feared indeed, but one who loved better to stab in the dark than to strike in the open day. ”

“ What is a nigger? He is our unequal in every manner. He is but little better than the animals and beasts of the fields. But just to study him the British Government has spread ruination throughout Jamaica. That is just what I say. What is a nigger that he should have dispoiled me of my wealth? ”

“ Famous criminals—and Nietzsche expressly ranks these among the ‘over-men’ [386] —have displayed, almost without exception, the bodily and mental stigmata characterizing them as degenerates, and hence as cripples or atavistic phenomena, not as specimens of the highest evolution and florescence. The Cæsars, whose monstrous selfishness could batten on all humanity, succumbed to madness, which it will hardly be wished to designate as an ideal condition. Nietzsche readily admits that the ‘splendid beast of prey’ is pernicious to the species, that he destroys and ravages ”

“ Although, of course, I did not believe a word of all the rubbish he had been saying, which was akin to much that is evolved by these black-hearted African wizards, I hated the creature whom I felt to be only half-human. ”

“ They ain't so bad to get along with if you keep it most pintedly shoved into their heads they is niggers. You got to do that especial in the black belt, jest because they is so many of 'em. They is children all their lives, mebby, till some one minute of craziness may strike one of them, and then he is a devil temporary. Mebby, when the crazy fit has passed, some white woman is worse off than if she was dead, or mebby she is dead, or mebby a loonatic fur life, and that nigger is a candidate fur a lynching bee and ginerally elected by an anonymous majority. ”

“ I used to think that a Southerner had to be always conscious of niggers. I thought that Northerners would expect him to. When I first came East I kept thinking You’ve got to remember to think of them as coloured people not niggers, and if it hadn’t happened that I wasn’t thrown with many of them, I’d have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone. That was when I realised that a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behaviour ”

“ You never can tell what’s wrong with a nigger anyhow. They ain’t got nacheral diseases like white folks. A hoss doctor can treat ’em better’n one that treats humans. I always said that a nigger’s more animal than human. ”

“ I wouldn’t like to live where niggers was free, they are bad enough when they are slaves: it’s hard enough to get along with them here, they’re so bad. I reckon that niggers are the meanest critters on earth ”

“ They’re blacks. They’re niggers—look at their kinky hair. And they’re a whole lot lower than the African niggers. Really, you know, there is a vast difference.”
“They possess no gratitude, no sympathy, no kindliness. If you are kind to them, they think you are a fool. If you are gentle with them they think you are afraid. And when they think you are afraid, watch out, for they will get you. Just to show you, let me state the one invariable process in a black man’s brain when, on his native heath, he encounters a stranger. ”

“ It therefore becomes a wise man to raise his desires above all things that exist, and aspire to nigban, the state where there is no existence. J. Teacher, there are two evil futurities, and one good. A miserable future existence is evil, and annihilation, or nigban, is an evil, a fearful evil. A happy future existence is alone good. Oo. I admit that is best, if it could be perpetual; but it can not be. Whatever is, is liable to change, and misery, and destruction. Nigban is the only permanent good, and that good has been attained by Gaudama, the last deity. ”

“ To use his own words, further, he said, “If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. ”

“ The colored races outnumber us. Only our brains, our ability to rule, by word and by sword, keeps us on top. But let us once relax our grip, let the nigger only make the United States the mulatto paradise of which he dreams, and the agitator and nigger lover will wish to God he’d never started. ”

“ But a fellow who can listen to such a tarnation heart-twister as this here without runnin’ out like a water spout, must have the soul o’ a nigger.”
“Soul ob a nigger!” exclaimed the fat cook, furiously, while the drops that ran down his black cheeks evinced his sympathy for the sufferings he had heard.
“Soul ob a nigger!—What da debble you mean, you fellar! Tink a nigger no heart—tink him hab no sensebillity, you fellar?” ”

“ It always seems to me such a cruel thing to turn niggers loose to shift for themselves, when there are so many good masters to take care of them. As for myself," continued the considerate lady, "I thank the Lord my dear husband left me and my son well provided for. Therefore I care nothing for the niggers, on my own account, for they are a great deal more trouble than they are worth, I sometimes wish that there was not one of them in the world; for the un- grateful wretches are always running away. I have lost no less than ten since my poor husband died. ”

“ Now, does the folkes up north like to see white people tyrannized over by niggers? Jes tell 'em when you go back, stranger, that we's got soulds like yours up north, and we's got feelings too, by thunder! jes like other white men. This was a white man's country once—now it's all niggers and dogs. Why, them niggers in the legislature has spit-boxes lined with gold to spit in! What's this country a-coming to? We wish the niggers no harm if they lets our hogs and chickens alone."
After this tirade it was amusing to see how friendly the whites and blacks were. ”

“ Under this head are to be classed the evil tendencies within our own hearts, and, which are not different from the evil tendencies in other races; for, after all, human nature is everywhere the same. The same radical tendencies are discoverable in all men. Human nature is not different in the black man from what we find it in the white man, or in the men of any other race. ”

“ Little Bit laughed. “I’s a black Affikin nigger. Anybody dat looks how dark complected I is kin see dat.”
“I never saw many colored persons in my life,” Org explained.
“You ain’t had no eyes ef you ain’t seed no niggers,” Little Bit chuckled. “Niggers is eve’ywhar. Gawd made ’em in de night, made ’em in a hurry an’ fergot to make ’em white. Dar’s niggers in heaven, an’ dars even plenty niggers in hell.”
At the Shin Bone eating-house, Mustard helped Popsy Spout down from the wagon and the two boys jumped to the ground. ”

“ We white folks like a 'nigger' in his place only, and you find yours quick. And remember that you 'nigger' women don't come in for all that stepping back which we do for white women. We go so far as to burn your kind down here sometimes. As for that brat there, bring him up as a 'nigger' and teach him his place, if you don't want him to see trouble." So saying the young white man turned and walked away, leaving Eunice enraged and amazed at his effrontery. ”

“ A nigger was a nigger to him once more. But in Corinth, yes, even in Corinth, he had put in a word for the despised black. Once he had thought that the ideals born of the war, the spirit of democracy and justice and idealism, would last. Here it was—how many months? two months, not quite three, since his homecoming—and he was back again. Or was it simply the pressure of Corinth—Margaret, Pinkney, his father, his set. Catholic. Jew. The Trick Track Tribe. Well, one had to live in his own world. And anyway a nigger was black and ugly and overworked. ”

“ In his passion he calls him a nigger—and protests that he is not, and never will be like buckra man.
The negroes complain that the coloured men are sly and cunning; that they cannot be trusted as masters; that they tyrannize, bully, and deceive; in short, that they have their own negro faults. There may, doubtless, be some truth in this. They have still a portion of their lesson to learn; perhaps the greater portion. I affirm merely that the lesson is being learned. A race of people with its good and ill qualities is not formed in a couple of centuries. ”

“ A nigger wants what is in sight and not dat what he can't see; it can look out for itself. I is sorry I has to say all dis 'bout my own color but it is de truth. De truth makes you free and runs de devil. I is a nigger myself and I knows what they is and what they does.
"Is de nigger 'ligious? Yes, sir, many of them is very 'ligious widout 'ligion. He takes all dat from white folks. So many think 'ligion is gwine to git them somethin' widout workin' for it and fool people by makin' them think they is good and can be trusted and all dat. ”

“ That the woman should watch and nurse the black fellow, apparently with perfect single-heartedness, was not to be squared with any known laws of human association. "Nursing a nigger in her own house with her own hands," was the fashion of describing this untoward spectacle. ”