Children of the slaves

Front matter

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO DALLAS . SAN FRANCISCO

Contents

1. Thoughts on Slavery II. In Virginia .

III. Orators and Actors, Preachers and

Singers . . . .

II In Virginia

By the abolition of slavery mankind threw off a "great evil. The slave-owner escaped as well as 5ie slave. For although our human sympathygoes more readily to the slaves themselves, it is nevertheless true that it was as bad for the spirit and character of the owners as for those of their chattels. To-day in America, and especially in the South, there is a hereditary taint in the mind derived from slavery, and it is to be observed in the descendants of the masters as much as in the descendants of the slaves. It would be a mistake to think of this American problem as exclusively a Negro problem. It is as necessary to study the white people as the black. The children of the owners and the overseers and the slave-drivers are not the same as the children of families where no slaves were ever owned. Mastery of men, and power over men, have been bred in their blood. That in part explains the character of that section of the United States where slaves were most owned, and the brutality, cruelty, and sensuality which upon occasion disfigure tlie face of society in 1920. The old dead self leers out with strange visage from the new self which wishes to be different.

If you see a white man in New Orleans rolling his quid and spitting out foul brutality against " niggers," you will often find that his father was a driver on a plantation. Or if in that abnormal way so characteristic of the South you hear foul sexual talk about the Negroes rolling forth from a low-brow in Vicksburg, it is fairly likely that he is full of strange black lust himself, and that his father and grandfather perchance assaulted promiscuously Negro women and contributed to the writing of racial shame in the vast bastardy of the South. If you hear a man urging that the Negro is not a human being but an animal, you will often find that he himself is nearer to the animal. His fathers before him held that the Negroes were animals and not humans. And believing them animals they yet sinned with the animals and so brought themselves down to animal level. You see a crowd of white men near Savannah. They are mostly proud of English origin. Yet they are going to burn a Negro alive for killing a sheriff. How is it possible in this century ! It is possible because it is in the blood of the children. They crave to see Uncle Tom's flesh crackling in the flames and hear his hysterical howls. Their fathers did. Their children's children will do the same unless it is stamped out by the will of society as a whole.

Of course the inheritance of evil is not the same in all classes of society. Every one inherits something from the baleful institution, but not

II

IN VIRGINIA 21 every one the same. The mind of the coarse White is crude and terrible, and the mind of the refined is certainly different. One should perhaps be more lenient to the poor, and more urgent in criticism of the rich. For all stand together, and the disease is one not merely of individuals but of the whole. The rich and cultured condone the brutality of the masses because they have a point of view which is not incompatible with theirs. Those whose ancestors treated the slaves well j claim to be immune from all criticism. There I were in the old days many kind and considerate masters to whom the Negroes were wonderfully attached. But even these masters suffered from the institution of slavery, as any rich man suffers from dependence on retainers and flunkeys and servants whom he practically owns, as all suffer who are divorced from the reality of earning their living as equals with their neighbours. And their children, brought up amidst the submissive servility of the Negroes, grew to be little monarchs or chiefs, and always to expect other people to do things for them. Where ordinary white children learn to ask and say " please," they learned to order and command and to threaten with punishment. The firm lip of the educated Southerner has an expression which is entirely military. In the army, one asks for nothing of inferiors except courage on the day of battle. All is ordered. And the power to order and to be obeyed rapidly changes the expression of the features. It has changed the physiognomy of the aristocracy in the Southern section of the

United States. You can classify all faces into those who say " please " and those who do not, and the children of the slave-owners are mostly in the second category. Unqualified mastership ; indifference to dirt and misery in the servant class ; callous disregard of others' pain, or pleasure taken in their pain ; slaves said to be animals and not human beings, and the superadded sin of bestiality, using a lower caste to satiate coarse lusts which the upper caste could not satisfy ; the buying and selling of creatures who could otherwise only belong to God, — all these terrible sins or sinful conditions are visited on the third and fourth generation of those who hate, though, as must always be said, God's mercy is shown to thousands of them that love Him and keep His eternal commandments.

The children of the slaves also inherit evil from their slavery. The worst of these are resentment and a desire for revenge. Doubtless slavery sensualised the Negro. He was the passive receptacle for the white man's lusts. Most of the Negroes arrived in America more morally pure than they are to-day. As savages they were nearer to Nature. Mentally and spiritually they are much higher now, but they have learned more about sin, and sin is written in most of their bodies. It is sharpest in the mulattos and " near whites " — those whose ancestors were longest in slavery have the worst marks of it in them. The state of the last slaves to be imported into America is much simpler and happier than the rest. The moral character of the black Negroes is also simpler than that of the pallid ones. But this is anticipating my story. I set off to study the ex-slave because the civilised world is threatened by what may be called a vast slaves' war. In Russia the grandchildren of the serfs have overthrown those who were once tlieir masters, and have taken possession of the land and the State ; in Germany Spartacus has arisen to overthrow the military slavery of Prussianism ; and the wage-slaves are rising in every land. There is a vast resentment of lower orders against upper orders, of the proletarians who have nothing and are nothing against those who through inheritance or achievement have reached the ruling class. The Negroes are in no way to be compared to the Russians in intellectual or spiritual capacity : they are racially so much more undeveloped. Much less divided Russian serf from Russian master than slave from planter. But it is just because the contrast between the American white man and American black man is so sharp and the quarrel so elemental in character that it has seemed worth while to explore the American situation. And if the struggle is more elemental it can hardly be said that there is not more at stake. American industrialism is ravaged by waves of violent revolutionary ferment. If illtreatment of the Blacks should at last force the twelve millions of them to make common cause with a revolutionary mob, polite America might be overwhelmed and the larger portion of the world be lost — if not of the world, at least of that world we call civilisation.

What then of the Negro ? What is he doing, what does he look Hke, what does he feel to-day ? It is impossible to learn much from current books, so, following the dictum, " What is remarkable, learn to look at it with your own eyes," I went to America to see.

I chose Olmsted as my model. In 1853 Olmsted made a famous journey through the seaboard States, holding up his mirror to the life of the South in slavery days. The book which records his impressions and reflections is one of the most valuable in American literature. This great student of Nature went methodically through Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana. A pilgrimage not unlike his has to be repeated to-day to ascertain how the ex-slave is, what he is doing, how the experiment of his liberation has prospered, and what is his future in the American Commonwealth. But as America is so much more developed in 1920, and more problematical in the varied fields of her national life, it has been necessary to make a broader, if more rapid, survey of the whole South. I made the following journey in America : I went slowly south from New York to Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, staying some days at each and seeing America grow darker as it visibly does when you watch faces from trolley-car windows going from town to town southward. I was on South Street in Philadelphia ; I watched the well-paid artisans and labourers at the docks of Baltimore, visited there the polite homes of the coloured working-class, cleaner, richer, cosier than that of the average British workman on Tyneside or London Docks. I climbed the Lincoln Heights to talk to Nanny Burroughs and see her good trainingcollege for coloured women there ; was at Howard University and talked with black and gentle Professor Miller and with the pale and intellectual Emmett Scott.

I sailed down the Potomac to Norfolk, Virginia, Uncle Sam's great naval base, going to be the greatest of its kind in the world ; crossed to Newport News and talked with black riveters and chippers and others in the shipbuilding yards ; then, following the way of the first English colonists and also the first Negro slaves, went up the James River to Jamestown, and on to Richmond, the fine capital of the Old Dominion. I travelled to Lynchburg and its tobacco industries, went from thence to " sober " Knoxville, investigating the race-riot there, and the attitude of Tennessee. From Knoxville I went to Chattanooga and Birmingham, in each of which great steel centres I met the leading Negroes and investigated conditions. I was at Atlanta, and walked across Georgia to the Sea, following Sherman. A three-hundred-mile walk through the cotton-fields and forests of Georgia was necessary in order to get a broad section of the mass of the people. The impression left behind by Sherman's army which laid waste the country and freed all the Negroes there gave also something of the historical atmosphere of the South. From Savannah, which was the point on the sea to which General Sherman attained, I went to New Brunswick and Jacksonville, thence to Pensacola, and on from Florida to New Orleans and the Gulf plantations. I journeyed up the Mississippi on a river steamer, stayed at the Negro city of Mound Bayou, was at Vicksburg and Greenville and Memphis, and then repaired once more to the contrasting North.

Crossing the Mason-Dixon line was rather a magical and wonderful event for me. After all, the North, with its mighty cities and industrialised populations, is merely prose to one who comes from England. Pennsylvania is a projection of Lancashire and Yorkshire, New York is a projection of London, and massive Washington has something of the oppressiveness of English park drives and Wellingtonias. But Southward one divines another and a better country. It has a glamour ; it lures. There the orange grows and there are palms ; there are a hotter sun and brighter flowers. Human beings there, one surmises, have a more romantic disposition and warmer imagination. Reposing on the vast feudalism of Negro labour there is a more stately way of living, life is more spacious. And at the resorts on the coast of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico a great number of people live for pleasure and happiness and not for business and ambition.

I journeyed on a white-painted steamer in the evening down the Potomac to Old Point

Comfort, leaving behind me the noise and glare of Washington and the hustle of Northern American civilisation. It was the crossing of a frontier — without show of passports or examination of trunks — the passing to a new country, with a different language and different ways. The utter silence of the river was a great contrast to the clangour of the streets of Philadelphia and Baltimore and the string of towns I had been passing through on my way South. Sunset was reflected deep in the stream, and mists crept over the surface of the water. Then the moon silvered down on our course ; my cabin-window was full open and the moon looked in. I lay in a capacious sort of cottage bed and was enchanted by the idea of going to " Dixie," of which we had all sung so much ; and the soft southern airs and night and the throbbing of the river-steamer gliding over the placid water gave an assurance of some new refreshment of spirit. With a quaint irrelevance the whole British army, and indeed the nation, had been singing " Dixie " songs throughout the war — *'Just try to picture me, Way down in Tennessee " we were always asking of one another. Now behold, the war was over, and it might be possible to go there and forget a Uttle about all that sordid and tumultuous European quarrel.

All night the river whispered its name and lulled the boat to sleep. Dawn on the broad serenity of the waters at Old Point Comfort was utterly unlike the North from which I had come and the last ten days of jangling trolley-cars hustling along shoppy streets. A morning star shone in the pale blue sky, lighting as it were a vestal lamp over the coast, and we looked upon Virginia. As the sun rose, vapour closed in the scene. We made the port of Norfolk in a mist which seemed each moment getting warmer. The chill winds of October were due in the North, but Virginia was immune. During the week I spent in the city of Norfolk and on Hampton Roads it did not get less than 85 in the shade, even at night. The weather, however, was hotter than is usual even in Eastern Virginia at that time of the year.

I obtained the impression of a great city rather cramped for want of space, and in this I suppose I was right. By all accounts Norfolk has trebled its population during the war, and needs to have its centre rebuilt spaciously and worthily. When Olmsted came through in 1853 he records that Norfolk was a dirty, low, illarranged town, having no Lyceum or public library, no gardens, no Art galleries, and though possessing two " Bethels " having no " Seamen's Home " and no place of healthy amusement. He rather makes fun of a Lieutenant Maury who in those days was having a vision of the Norfolk of the future, and saw it one of the greatest ports in the world, being midmost point of the Atlantic coast and having an inner and an outer harbour with perfect facilities of ingress and egress in all weathers.

To-day Lieutenant Maury's vision has proved prophetic. In the maps of the new America which is coming, Norfolk is destined to be printed in ever larger letters. The war showed the way. The determination of America to be worthilyarmed at sea made it certain, and the future of Norfolk, with Hampton Roads and Newport News, is to be the primary naval base of the Atlantic coast. The military and naval activities of Norfolk during the war were very important. Eastern Virginia was a great training ground, and Norfolk the main port of embarkation of troops for Europe. Shipbuilding and naval construction also were in full swing. Great numbers of labourers, especially Negroes, seem to have been attracted. The number no doubt is exaggerated, but the coloured people there number themselves now at one hundred thousand. They have been attracted by the high wages and the record of Norfolk for immunity from mob violence. A lynching is not in any one's remembrance. Trouble might have broken out during the war, but Norfolk possessed an excellent " City Manager " who was always prepared.

On one occasion some five hundred sailors set out to " clean up coloured town," but they were met by an adequate force of armed police and marines and changed their minds. On the other hand, a mob of coloured crews and troops started an attack on the town gaol, but a few armed men quickly dispersed them.

I noticed at once that the Blacks of Norfolk were very much more black than those of Washington or New York. Their hair was more matted. Their eyes were more goggly. They were more

30 CHILDREN OF THE SLAVES n

odorous. When the black chambermaid had been in my room for two minutes it was filled with a pungent and sickening odour. The elevator reeked with this odour. It was the characteristic smell of my first Southern hotel. I noticed it on the trolley-cars. It was wafted amongst the vegetables and fruit at the city market. Indeed, the whole town had it. I grew used to it after a while, and was told by those who were liberal of mind that every race had its smell. For instance, to certain tribes of Indians there was said to be nothing so disgusting as the smell of a perfectly clean white man. Even when a man who has a bath every day and a change into perfectly fresh linen came into his presence the Indian felt sick. Negroes were supposed to notice the smell of white men but were too subservient or polite to remark upon it. There is, however, a good deal of doubt about this point in human natural history. The smell that we have is the smell of the animal in us, and not of the more human or spiritual part of us. One knows the smell of the bear and the fox, and that the wolf has a stronger smell than the dog, and the wild cat than the domestic cat. Bloodhounds are said to follow the trail of the Negro more readily than that of the white man, and it might reasonably be argued that the terrible odour of the Blacks is due to their greater proximity to an animal stage in development. Be that as it may, I quite see that this odour is something which the Negro will have difficulty in living down. I learned that he was very sensitive about it, as about his kinky hair, and tliat the more educated and refined he became the more he strove to get rid of those marks. That explained to me why in all those happy streets of prosperous Baltimore at every corner there was a " Beauty Parlor " where specialists plied Madame Walker's " anti-kink," and why the prosperous Negro working-man demanded a bath-room and hot water in his home. The reason why the Blacks seem blacker in the South seems to be because they are segregated in " Jim Crow " sections of the cars, and none of the black comes off on white people, but is on the contrary intensified by the shadow of black looks.

The coloured folk here, moreover, seemed to talk more in the way they are supposed to talk, and are not mincing the American tongue as in the North. Outside my room one maid says, *' You's a fool, sister Ann." " Yas, sister Sue, dat's 'zackly what I am," says the other, and laughs and repeats it as if it were the greatest joke — " dat's 'zackly what I am."

I went into the streets to seek the Reverend

B , a leading coloured preacher of Norfolk.

I stood in wonderment before a white-washed chapel with large china-blue stained-glass windows luridly depicting our Lord's baptism and the opening of the heavens over the Jordan. A grizzled old Negro in a cotton shirt stopped in front of me and exclaimed insinuatingly, " You's looking at cullud folk's church ; an't it bewtiful ? " I took the opportunity to ask for the Rev. B . He led me along and pointed up a flight of wooden steps to a sufficiently handsome dwelling-place.

Rev. B on seeing me had a gleam of doubt

on his face for perhaps a second, but only for a second. One instinctively felt that here in Virginia, where the colour line is sharply drawn, no white man is likely to present himself on terms of equality to a black man without the desire to patronise or some guile of some kind. It is rare for any white man to call upon any educated black man, and very rarely indeed that he comes to him in a straightforward, honest,

and sincere manner. So the Rev. B showed

doubt for a moment, and then suddenly after a few words his doubt vanished. In my subsequent journeying and adventures it was always thus — doubt at first glance, and then rapidly the awakening of implicit trust and confidence. I personally found the Negroes nearly always

friendly. Mr. B was a sparely - coloured,

lean, intellectual young man, a capable white man in a veil of dark skin. He was all but white. I looked at his webby hands — what a pity it seemed that being so near he could not be altogether. And yet I realised that in such men and women, no matter how fair they be, the Psyche is different. There is sometliing intensely and insolubly Negro in even the nearest of near-whites.

Rev. B took me all over the city. He

was evidently extremely well known to the coloured people, for our conversation was- intertwined with a ceaseless —

" How do, Revrun' ? "

" How do ? "

He showed me his charmingly-built church (not tliat with the china -blue windows) contrived in graceful horse-shoe style with graduated sloping gallery, richly-stained windows, and a vast array of red -cushioned seats. A black organist was discoursing upon the organ, and a voluminous dusky charwoman with large arms was cleaning and dusting among the pews below.

There sat under Rev. B every Sunday a

fair share of the quality coloured folk of Norfolk. *' I am glad that you have come to me, because I can show you an up-to-date and proper church," said the pastor. " There are nine or ten like this in Norfolk, but when a stranger asks to see a Negro church he's usually taken to some outof-the-way tabernacle of the Holy Folks or some queer sect where every one is shouting Hallelujah, and it all seems very funny. But if you'll come to me on Sunday morning you'll hear a service which for dignity and spiritual comeliness will compare with any white man's service in any part of the world. You mustn't think of us as still cotton-pickers and minstrels and nothing more. There is a great deal of Negro wealth and refinement in this city of Norfolk."

" How do you get on with white ministers .'' " I asked. " Do you work together ? "

" Oh, white ministers do not recognise black ones on the street," said he. " My neighbour, for instance, knows me well enough at the

D

Baptist Conference, and by his talk I see he knows all about my church. But here in the city he cannot afford to know me. Yet he has not half so many worshippers at his church, nor do they pay him half the salary which my people pay me. He dare not spend on his clothes what I spend ; he has not such a well-appointed home. Yet if we meet on the street — he doesn't know me."

This was evidently a sore point.

We went to Brown's Bank. Brown has gone to Philadelphia to start a second Negro bank. The first one has been in existence ten years. Brown is a financier, and something more than that. For he encourages the Negro theatres and is greatly helping his people along their way.. We also visited the polite edifice of the Tidewater Bank and Trust Company which has been built since the Armistice. " It was contracted for by Negroes and built by Negroes alone," said the Treasurer proudly, a blunt, bullet-headed, whimsical fellow, with an intense desire to push business and to hustle. All the clerks and stenographers were coloured. Each teller sat in his steel cage for which he alone held the key. All the latest banking machinery was in operation, including the coin separator and counter and wrapper, and the adding machine. I worked an imaginary account under coloured direction, using the adding machine, and gave assent to its infallibility. They showed me their strong-room, and I peeped at their cash reserves. The Treasurer and " Revrun' " then took me up into a high mountain, namely, the Board Room,

11 IN VIRGINIA which was in a gallery overlooking the whole of the working part of the bank.

" My motto," said the Treasurer, " is ' Folks who only work for as long as they are paid will find they are only paid for what they have done.' We work here till we are through, be it eleven or twelve o'clock at night. The man who isn't hard is not for us."

We talked about the Negro.

" He must win freedom," said the banker. *' It is never a bequest, but a conquest. You can't have redemption without the shedding of the Precious Blood, can you. Reverend ? I am fighting for the Negro by succeeding in business. There's only one thing that can bring him respect, and that is achievement."

These were his most impressive words. We walked out of the new bank.

" He has his knock-about car and his limousine and a finely-appointed house and a governess

for his children," said Rev. B as we footed

it once more in the sun-bathed street. " But of course you can be a millionaire to-day and it won't help you to marry even the poorest white girl. Or you can be a Negro heiress, but no amount of wealth will induce a white man to marry a coloured girl. For the matter of that, though, there are Negroes so white you couldn't tell the difference, and we've got plenty to choose from if our tastes lie that way. If a Negro wants to marry a White he can find plenty within his own race."

Rev. B was himself married to a woman who could pass as white in Southern Europe, and his children were Httle white darlings with curly hair. We hailed a heavy " F and D " car. I will not mention the actual name of the build. A young coloured dandy was sitting in it. " You see this car," said Reverend. " It belongs to

Dr. R . It's an ' F and D.' In many places

the agents will not sell this build of car to a Negro, even for cash down."

" Why is that .? "

'' W>11, it's a fine type of car, and rich white men in a city don't care to see a coloured man going about in one exactly the same. An agent would lose business if he sold them to Negroes. What's more, whether he lost business or not, he wouldn't do it. Here in Virginia, however, there is not so much prejudice, but when you go farther South you'll find it."

We got into the car. The young dandy proved to be a doctor's assistant, a sort of apprentice to the great physician we were about to meet. He had graduated at Fisk, which he called the Negro Athens. He was dressed in a well-cut suit of grey, a rich necktie, and a felt hat which was in excellent taste. His complexion was of the cocoa-brown, highly-polished type, and his large eyes were quiet and reflective, as if unawakened to the joy of life. Politely chatting to us, he guided the handsome car along some of the most terribly rutty and broken streets.

" We pay equal taxes," said he, " but because coloured people live in these streets the city won't repair the roads. They are all rich people living in these houses, all Negroes. Several of them own cars. . . . Now look on the other hand at this street. It's a White street, all smoothly repaired. What a beautiful surface ;

see the difference ! " Rev. B urged this point

also. It was a striking example of inequality, and one that makes a strong appeal to any one from England.

Dr. R proved to be a rich practitioner,

living in a delightful villa with polished floors and a French neatness and charm in the furniture and decorations. The sun-blinds were all down, and a pleasant creamy light was diffused upon his books and pictures and silk-upholstered divan. He was very busy, but said he could always spare a few moments from his profession if it were a question of helping his race, and he thought nothing could help the Negroes more than a dispassionate review of their situation by a white man who could bring it not merely before America but before the world. He had more patients than he could deal with, all Negroes, with the exception of a few Jews. The Jews have no prejudice, and are ready to be attended by a good doctor whatever the colour of his skin, which is a point in any case in favour of the Jews. For a long while the Negroes distrusted their own doctors, and thought that only a white man could possibly have the skill to treat them. But a later generation has discovered that their own folk have an excellent grasp of medicine. My further acquaintance with a considerable number of coloured doctors in the South has led me to the conclusion that their temperament suits them admirably. They make good doctors. What is more, they naturally understand the Negro's body and constitution and nervous system better than the white man, and the pathology of the Negro is very different from that of the white man. The white doctor as yet has not given much separate study to the Negro's body — though it is certainly very different from ours in many ways. He is inclined perhaps to be a little brutal and offhand with Negro patients — and they certainly are tiresome, with their superstitious fear of ill-health and evil-eyes and what not. This impatience has helped the coloured practitioner. Negroes, like other people, go where they are best treated, and the medical attendance upon a hundred thousand people could make many doctors rich.