Darkwater by W. E. B. Du Bois

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DARKWATER

Voices from within the Veil

W.E.B. DU BOIS

Originally published in 1920 by Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York.

AD NINAM

May 12, 1896

POSTSCRIPT

These are the things of which men think, who live: of their own selves
and the dwelling place of their fathers; of their neighbors; of work and
service; of rule and reason and women and children; of Beauty and Death
and War. To this thinking I have only to add a point of view: I have
been in the world, but not of it. I have seen the human drama from a
veiled corner, where all the outer tragedy and comedy have reproduced
themselves in microcosm within. From this inner torment of souls the
human scene without has interpreted itself to me in unusual and even
illuminating ways. For this reason, and this alone, I venture to write
again on themes on which great souls have already said greater words, in
the hope that I may strike here and there a half-tone, newer even if
slighter, up from the heart of my problem and the problems of my people.

Between the sterner flights of logic, I have sought to set some little
alightings of what may be poetry. They are tributes to Beauty, unworthy
to stand alone; yet perversely, in my mind, now at the end, I know not
whether I mean the Thought for the Fancy--or the Fancy for the Thought,
or why the book trails off to playing, rather than standing strong on
unanswering fact. But this is alway--is it not?--the Riddle of Life.

Many of my words appear here transformed from other publications and I
thank the _Atlantic_, the _Independent_, the _Crisis_, and the _Journal
of Race Development_ for letting me use them again.

W.E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS.
New York, 1919.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

POSTSCRIPT ix
_Credo_ 1

I. THE SHADOW OF YEARS 3
_A Litany at Atlanta_ 14

II. THE SOULS OF WHITE FOLK 17
_The Riddle of the Sphinx_ 30

III. THE HANDS OF ETHIOPIA 32
_The Princess of the Hither Isles_ 43

IV. OF WORK AND WEALTH 47
_The Second Coming_ 60

V. "THE SERVANT IN THE HOUSE" 63
_Jesus Christ in Texas_ 70

VI. OF THE RULING OF MEN 78
_The Call_ 93

VII. THE DAMNATION OF WOMEN 95
_Children of the Moon_ 109

VIII. THE IMMORTAL CHILD 114
_Almighty Death_ 128

IX. OF BEAUTY AND DEATH 130
_The Prayers of God_ 145

X. THE COMET 149
_A Hymn to the Peoples_ 161

_Credo_

I believe in God, who made of one blood all nations that on earth do
dwell. I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers,
varying through time and opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but
differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and the
possibility of infinite development.

Especially do I believe in the Negro Race: in the beauty of its genius,
the sweetness of its soul, and its strength in that meekness which shall
yet inherit this turbulent earth.

I believe in Pride of race and lineage and self: in pride of self so
deep as to scorn injustice to other selves; in pride of lineage so great
as to despise no man's father; in pride of race so chivalrous as neither
to offer bastardy to the weak nor beg wedlock of the strong, knowing
that men may be brothers in Christ, even though they be not
brothers-in-law.

I believe in Service--humble, reverent service, from the blackening of
boots to the whitening of souls; for Work is Heaven, Idleness Hell, and
Wage is the "Well done!" of the Master, who summoned all them that labor
and are heavy laden, making no distinction between the black, sweating
cotton hands of Georgia and the first families of Virginia, since all
distinction not based on deed is devilish and not divine.

I believe in the Devil and his angels, who wantonly work to narrow the
opportunity of struggling human beings, especially if they be black; who
spit in the faces of the fallen, strike them that cannot strike again,
believe the worst and work to prove it, hating the image which their
Maker stamped on a brother's soul.

I believe in the Prince of Peace. I believe that War is Murder. I
believe that armies and navies are at bottom the tinsel and braggadocio
of oppression and wrong, and I believe that the wicked conquest of
weaker and darker nations by nations whiter and stronger but foreshadows
the death of that strength.

I believe in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and
their souls, the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to
choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine, and ride on the railroads,
uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom
of beauty and love.

I believe in the Training of Children, black even as white; the leading
out of little souls into the green pastures and beside the still waters,
not for pelf or peace, but for life lit by some large vision of beauty
and goodness and truth; lest we forget, and the sons of the fathers,
like Esau, for mere meat barter their birthright in a mighty nation.

Finally, I believe in Patience--patience with the weakness of the Weak
and the strength of the Strong, the prejudice of the Ignorant and the
ignorance of the Blind; patience with the tardy triumph of Joy and the
mad chastening of Sorrow.

I

THE SHADOW OF YEARS

I was born by a golden river and in the shadow of two great hills, five
years after the Emancipation Proclamation. The house was quaint, with
clapboards running up and down, neatly trimmed, and there were five
rooms, a tiny porch, a rosy front yard, and unbelievably delicious
strawberries in the rear. A South Carolinian, lately come to the
Berkshire Hills, owned all this--tall, thin, and black, with golden
earrings, and given to religious trances. We were his transient tenants
for the time.

My own people were part of a great clan. Fully two hundred years before,
Tom Burghardt had come through the western pass from the Hudson with his
Dutch captor, "Coenraet Burghardt," sullen in his slavery and achieving
his freedom by volunteering for the Revolution at a time of sudden
alarm. His wife was a little, black, Bantu woman, who never became
reconciled to this strange land; she clasped her knees and rocked and
crooned:

"Do bana coba--gene me, gene me!
Ben d'nuli, ben d'le--"

Tom died about 1787, but of him came many sons, and one, Jack, who
helped in the War of 1812. Of Jack and his wife, Violet, was born a
mighty family, splendidly named: Harlow and Ira, Cloe, Lucinda, Maria,
and Othello! I dimly remember my grandfather, Othello,--or "Uncle
Tallow,"--a brown man, strong-voiced and redolent with tobacco, who sat
stiffly in a great high chair because his hip was broken. He was
probably a bit lazy and given to wassail. At any rate, grandmother had a
shrewish tongue and often berated him. This grandmother was Sarah--"Aunt
Sally"--a stern, tall, Dutch-African woman, beak-nosed, but
beautiful-eyed and golden-skinned. Ten or more children were theirs, of
whom the youngest was Mary, my mother.

Mother was dark shining bronze, with a tiny ripple in her black hair,
black-eyed, with a heavy, kind face. She gave one the impression of
infinite patience, but a curious determination was concealed in her
softness. The family were small farmers on Egremont Plain, between Great
Barrington and Sheffield, Massachusetts. The bits of land were too small
to support the great families born on them and we were always poor. I
never remember being cold or hungry, but I do remember that shoes and
coal, and sometimes flour, caused mother moments of anxious thought in
winter, and a new suit was an event!

At about the time of my birth economic pressure was transmuting the
family generally from farmers to "hired" help. Some revolted and
migrated westward, others went cityward as cooks and barbers. Mother
worked for some years at house service in Great Barrington, and after a
disappointed love episode with a cousin, who went to California, she met
and married Alfred Du Bois and went to town to live by the golden river
where I was born.

Alfred, my father, must have seemed a splendid vision in that little
valley under the shelter of those mighty hills. He was small and
beautiful of face and feature, just tinted with the sun, his curly hair
chiefly revealing his kinship to Africa. In nature he was a
dreamer,--romantic, indolent, kind, unreliable. He had in him the making
of a poet, an adventurer, or a Beloved Vagabond, according to the life
that closed round him; and that life gave him all too little. His
father, Alexander Du Bois, cloaked under a stern, austere demeanor a
passionate revolt against the world. He, too, was small, but squarish. I
remember him as I saw him first, in his home in New Bedford,--white hair
close-cropped; a seamed, hard face, but high in tone, with a gray eye
that could twinkle or glare.

Long years before him Louis XIV drove two Huguenots, Jacques and Louis
Du Bois, into wild Ulster County, New York. One of them in the third or
fourth generation had a descendant, Dr. James Du Bois, a gay, rich
bachelor, who made his money in the Bahamas, where he and the Gilberts
had plantations. There he took a beautiful little mulatto slave as his
mistress, and two sons were born: Alexander in 1803 and John, later.
They were fine, straight, clear-eyed boys, white enough to "pass." He
brought them to America and put Alexander in the celebrated Cheshire
School, in Connecticut. Here he often visited him, but one last time,
fell dead. He left no will, and his relations made short shrift of these
sons. They gathered in the property, apprenticed grandfather to a
shoemaker; then dropped him.

Grandfather took his bitter dose like a thoroughbred. Wild as was his
inner revolt against this treatment, he uttered no word against the
thieves and made no plea. He tried his fortunes here and in Haiti,
where, during his short, restless sojourn, my own father was born.
Eventually, grandfather became chief steward on the passenger boat
between New York and New Haven; later he was a small merchant in
Springfield; and finally he retired and ended his days at New Bedford.
Always he held his head high, took no insults, made few friends. He was
not a "Negro"; he was a man! Yet the current was too strong even for
him. Then even more than now a colored man had colored friends or none
at all, lived in a colored world or lived alone. A few fine, strong,
black men gained the heart of this silent, bitter man in New York and
New Haven. If he had scant sympathy with their social clannishness, he
was with them in fighting discrimination. So, when the white
Episcopalians of Trinity Parish, New Haven, showed plainly that they no
longer wanted black Folks as fellow Christians, he led the revolt which
resulted in St. Luke's Parish, and was for years its senior warden. He
lies dead in the Grove Street Cemetery, beside Jehudi Ashmun.

Beneath his sternness was a very human man. Slyly he wrote
poetry,--stilted, pleading things from a soul astray. He loved women in
his masterful way, marrying three beautiful wives in succession and
clinging to each with a certain desperate, even if unsympathetic,
affection. As a father he was, naturally, a failure,--hard, domineering,
unyielding. His four children reacted characteristically: one was until
past middle life a thin spinster, the mental image of her father; one
died; one passed over into the white world and her children's children
are now white, with no knowledge of their Negro blood; the fourth, my
father, bent before grandfather, but did not break--better if he had. He
yielded and flared back, asked forgiveness and forgot why, became the
harshly-held favorite, who ran away and rioted and roamed and loved and
married my brown mother.

So with some circumstance having finally gotten myself born, with a
flood of Negro blood, a strain of French, a bit of Dutch, but, thank
God! no "Anglo-Saxon," I come to the days of my childhood.

They were very happy. Early we moved back to Grandfather Burghardt's
home,--I barely remember its stone fireplace, big kitchen, and
delightful woodshed. Then this house passed to other branches of the
clan and we moved to rented quarters in town,--to one delectable place
"upstairs," with a wide yard full of shrubbery, and a brook; to another
house abutting a railroad, with infinite interests and astonishing
playmates; and finally back to the quiet street on which I was
born,--down a long lane and in a homely, cozy cottage, with a
living-room, a tiny sitting-room, a pantry, and two attic bedrooms. Here
mother and I lived until she died, in 1884, for father early began his
restless wanderings. I last remember urgent letters for us to come to
New Milford, where he had started a barber shop. Later he became a
preacher. But mother no longer trusted his dreams, and he soon faded out
of our lives into silence.

From the age of five until I was sixteen I went to a school on the same
grounds,--down a lane, into a widened yard, with a big choke-cherry tree
and two buildings, wood and brick. Here I got acquainted with my world,
and soon had my criterions of judgment.

Wealth had no particular lure. On the other hand, the shadow of wealth
was about us. That river of my birth was golden because of the woolen
and paper waste that soiled it. The gold was theirs, not ours; but the
gleam and glint was for all. To me it was all in order and I took it
philosophically. I cordially despised the poor Irish and South Germans,
who slaved in the mills, and annexed the rich and well-to-do as my
natural companions. Of such is the kingdom of snobs!

Most of our townfolk were, naturally, the well-to-do, shading downward,
but seldom reaching poverty. As playmate of the children I saw the homes
of nearly every one, except a few immigrant New Yorkers, of whom none of
us approved. The homes I saw impressed me, but did not overwhelm me.
Many were bigger than mine, with newer and shinier things, but they did
not seem to differ in kind. I think I probably surprised my hosts more
than they me, for I was easily at home and perfectly happy and they
looked to me just like ordinary people, while my brown face and frizzled
hair must have seemed strange to them.

Yet I was very much one of them. I was a center and sometimes the leader
of the town gang of boys. We were noisy, but never very bad,--and,
indeed, my mother's quiet influence came in here, as I realize now. She
did not try to make me perfect. To her I was already perfect. She simply
warned me of a few things, especially saloons. In my town the saloon was
the open door to hell. The best families had their drunkards and the
worst had little else.

Very gradually,--I cannot now distinguish the steps, though here and
there I remember a jump or a jolt--but very gradually I found myself
assuming quite placidly that I was different from other children. At
first I think I connected the difference with a manifest ability to get
my lessons rather better than most and to recite with a certain happy,
almost taunting, glibness, which brought frowns here and there. Then,
slowly, I realized that some folks, a few, even several, actually
considered my brown skin a misfortune; once or twice I became painfully
aware that some human beings even thought it a crime. I was not for a
moment daunted,--although, of course, there were some days of secret
tears--rather I was spurred to tireless effort. If they beat me at
anything, I was grimly determined to make them sweat for it! Once I
remember challenging a great, hard farmer-boy to battle, when I knew he
could whip me; and he did. But ever after, he was polite.

As time flew I felt not so much disowned and rejected as rather drawn up
into higher spaces and made part of a mightier mission. At times I
almost pitied my pale companions, who were not of the Lord's anointed
and who saw in their dreams no splendid quests of golden fleeces.

Even in the matter of girls my peculiar phantasy asserted itself.
Naturally, it was in our town voted bad form for boys of twelve and
fourteen to show any evident weakness for girls. We tolerated them
loftily, and now and then they played in our games, when I joined in
quite as naturally as the rest. It was when strangers came, or summer
boarders, or when the oldest girls grew up that my sharp senses noted
little hesitancies in public and searchings for possible public opinion.
Then I flamed! I lifted my chin and strode off to the mountains, where I
viewed the world at my feet and strained my eyes across the shadow of
the hills.

I was graduated from high school at sixteen, and I talked of "Wendell
Phillips." This was my first sweet taste of the world's applause. There
were flowers and upturned faces, music and marching, and there was my
mother's smile. She was lame, then, and a bit drawn, but very happy. It
was her great day and that very year she lay down with a sigh of content
and has not yet awakened. I felt a certain gladness to see her, at last,
at peace, for she had worried all her life. Of my own loss I had then
little realization. That came only with the after-years. Now it was the
choking gladness and solemn feel of wings! At last, I was going beyond
the hills and into the world that beckoned steadily.

There came a little pause,--a singular pause. I was given to understand
that I was almost too young for the world. Harvard was the goal of my
dreams, but my white friends hesitated and my colored friends were
silent. Harvard was a mighty conjure-word in that hill town, and even
the mill owners' sons had aimed lower. Finally it was tactfully
explained that the place for me was in the South among my people. A
scholarship had been already arranged at Fisk, and my summer earnings
would pay the fare. My relatives grumbled, but after a twinge I felt a
strange delight! I forgot, or did not thoroughly realize, the curious
irony by which I was not looked upon as a real citizen of my birth-town,
with a future and a career, and instead was being sent to a far land
among strangers who were regarded as (and in truth were) "mine own
people."

Ah! the wonder of that journey, with its faint spice of adventure, as I
entered the land of slaves; the never-to-be-forgotten marvel of that
first supper at Fisk with the world "colored" and opposite two of the
most beautiful beings God ever revealed to the eyes of seventeen. I
promptly lost my appetite, but I was deliriously happy!

As I peer back through the shadow of my years, seeing not too clearly,
but through the thickening veil of wish and after-thought, I seem to
view my life divided into four distinct parts: the Age of Miracles, the
Days of Disillusion, the Discipline of Work and Play, and the Second
Miracle Age.

The Age of Miracles began with Fisk and ended with Germany. I was
bursting with the joy of living. I seemed to ride in conquering might. I
was captain of my soul and master of fate! I _willed_ to do! It was
done. I _wished!_ The wish came true.

Now and then out of the void flashed the great sword of hate to remind
me of the battle. I remember once, in Nashville, brushing by accident
against a white woman on the street. Politely and eagerly I raised my
hat to apologize. That was thirty-five years ago. From that day to this
I have never knowingly raised my hat to a Southern white woman.

I suspect that beneath all of my seeming triumphs there were many
failures and disappointments, but the realities loomed so large that
they swept away even the memory of other dreams and wishes. Consider,
for a moment, how miraculous it all was to a boy of seventeen, just
escaped from a narrow valley: I willed and lo! my people came dancing
about me,--riotous in color, gay in laughter, full of sympathy, need,
and pleading; darkly delicious girls--"colored" girls--sat beside me and
actually talked to me while I gazed in tongue-tied silence or babbled in
boastful dreams. Boys with my own experiences and out of my own world,
who knew and understood, wrought out with me great remedies. I studied
eagerly under teachers who bent in subtle sympathy, feeling themselves
some shadow of the Veil and lifting it gently that we darker souls might
peer through to other worlds.

I willed and lo! I was walking beneath the elms of Harvard,--the name of
allurement, the college of my youngest, wildest visions! I needed money;
scholarships and prizes fell into my lap,--not all I wanted or strove
for, but all I needed to keep in school. Commencement came and standing
before governor, president, and grave, gowned men, I told them certain
astonishing truths, waving my arms and breathing fast! They applauded
with what now seems to me uncalled-for fervor, but then! I walked home
on pink clouds of glory! I asked for a fellowship and got it. I
announced my plan of studying in Germany, but Harvard had no more
fellowships for me. A friend, however, told me of the Slater Fund and
how the Board was looking for colored men worth educating. No thought of
modest hesitation occurred to me. I rushed at the chance.

The trustees of the Slater Fund excused themselves politely. They
acknowledged that they had in the past looked for colored boys of
ability to educate, but, being unsuccessful, they had stopped searching.
I went at them hammer and tongs! I plied them with testimonials and
mid-year and final marks. I intimated plainly, impudently, that they
were "stalling"! In vain did the chairman, Ex-President Hayes, explain
and excuse. I took no excuses and brushed explanations aside. I wonder
now that he did not brush me aside, too, as a conceited meddler, but
instead he smiled and surrendered.

I crossed the ocean in a trance. Always I seemed to be saying, "It is
not real; I must be dreaming!" I can live it again--the little, Dutch
ship--the blue waters--the smell of new-mown hay--Holland and the Rhine.
I saw the Wartburg and Berlin; I made the Harzreise and climbed the
Brocken; I saw the Hansa towns and the cities and dorfs of South
Germany; I saw the Alps at Berne, the Cathedral at Milan, Florence,
Rome, Venice, Vienna, and Pesth; I looked on the boundaries of Russia;
and I sat in Paris and London.

On mountain and valley, in home and school, I met men and women as I had
never met them before. Slowly they became, not white folks, but folks.
The unity beneath all life clutched me. I was not less fanatically a
Negro, but "Negro" meant a greater, broader sense of humanity and
world-fellowship. I felt myself standing, not against the world, but
simply against American narrowness and color prejudice, with the
greater, finer world at my back urging me on.

I builded great castles in Spain and lived therein. I dreamed and loved
and wandered and sang; then, after two long years, I dropped suddenly
back into "nigger"-hating America!

My Days of Disillusion were not disappointing enough to discourage me. I
was still upheld by that fund of infinite faith, although dimly about me
I saw the shadow of disaster. I began to realize how much of what I had
called Will and Ability was sheer Luck! _Suppose_ my good mother had
preferred a steady income from my child labor rather than bank on the
precarious dividend of my higher training? _Suppose_ that pompous old
village judge, whose dignity we often ruffled and whose apples we stole,
had had his way and sent me while a child to a "reform" school to learn
a "trade"? _Suppose_ Principal Hosmer had been born with no faith in
"darkies," and instead of giving me Greek and Latin had taught me
carpentry and the making of tin pans? _Suppose_ I had missed a Harvard
scholarship? _Suppose_ the Slater Board had then, as now, distinct ideas
as to where the education of Negroes should stop? Suppose _and_ suppose!
As I sat down calmly on flat earth and looked at my life a certain great
fear seized me. Was I the masterful captain or the pawn of laughing
sprites? Who was I to fight a world of color prejudice? I raise my hat
to myself when I remember that, even with these thoughts, I did not
hesitate or waver; but just went doggedly to work, and therein lay
whatever salvation I have achieved.

First came the task of earning a living. I was not nice or hard to
please. I just got down on my knees and begged for work, anything and
anywhere. I wrote to Hampton, Tuskegee, and a dozen other places. They
politely declined, with many regrets. The trustees of a backwoods
Tennessee town considered me, but were eventually afraid. Then,
suddenly, Wilberforce offered to let me teach Latin and Greek at $750 a
year. I was overjoyed!

I did not know anything about Latin and Greek, but I did know of
Wilberforce. The breath of that great name had swept the water and
dropped into southern Ohio, where Southerners had taken their cure at
Tawawa Springs and where white Methodists had planted a school; then
came the little bishop, Daniel Payne, who made it a school of the
African Methodists. This was the school that called me, and when
re-considered offers from Tuskegee and Jefferson City followed, I
refused; I was so thankful for that first offer.

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