Darkwater by W. E. B. Du Bois

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I rose upon the Mountain of the Moon,--
I felt the blazing glory of the Sun;
I heard the Song of Children crying, "Free!"
I saw the face of Freedom--
And I died.

VIII

THE IMMORTAL CHILD

If a man die shall he live again? We do not know. But this we do know,
that our children's children live forever and grow and develop toward
perfection as they are trained. All human problems, then, center in the
Immortal Child and his education is the problem of problems. And first
for illustration of what I would say may I not take for example, out of
many millions, the life of one dark child.

* * * * *

It is now nineteen years since I first saw Coleridge-Taylor. We were in
London in some somber hall where there were many meeting, men and women
called chiefly to the beautiful World's Fair at Paris; and then a few
slipping over to London to meet Pan-Africa. We were there from Cape
Colony and Liberia, from Haiti and the States, and from the Islands of
the Sea. I remember the stiff, young officer who came with credentials
from Menelik of Abyssinia; I remember the bitter, black American who
whispered how an army of the Soudan might some day cross the Alps; I
remember Englishmen, like the Colensos, who sat and counseled with us;
but above all, I remember Coleridge-Taylor.

He was a little man and nervous, with dark-golden face and hair that
bushed and strayed. His fingers were always nervously seeking hidden
keys and he was quick with enthusiasm,--instinct with life. His bride of
a year or more,--dark, too, in her whiter way,--was of the calm and
quiet type. Her soft contralto voice thrilled us often as she sang,
while her silences were full of understanding.

Several times we met in public gatherings and then they bade me to their
home,--a nest of a cottage, with gate and garden, hidden in London's
endless rings of suburbs. I dimly recall through these years a room in
cozy disorder, strewn with music--music on the floor and music on the
chairs, music in the air as the master rushed to the piano now and
again to make some memory melodious--some allusion real.

And then at last, for it was the last, I saw Coleridge-Taylor in a
mighty throng of people crowding the Crystal Palace. We came in facing
the stage and scarcely dared look around. On the stage were a full
orchestra, a chorus of eight hundred voices, and some of the world's
famous soloists. He left his wife sitting beside me, and she was very
silent as he went forward to lift the conductor's baton. It was one of
the earliest renditions of "Hiawatha's Wedding Feast." We sat at rapt
attention and when the last, weird music died, the great chorus and
orchestra rose as a man to acclaim the master; he turned toward the
audience and then we turning for the first time saw that sea of faces
behind,--the misty thousands whose voices rose to one strong shout of
joy! It was a moment such as one does not often live. It seemed, and
was, prophetic.

This young man who stepped forth as one of the most notable of modern
English composers had a simple and uneventful career. His father was a
black surgeon of Sierra Leone who came to London for study. While there
he met an English girl and this son was born, in London, in 1875.

Then came a series of chances. His father failed to succeed and
disappeared back to Africa leaving the support of the child to the poor
working mother. The child showed evidences of musical talent and a
friendly workingman gave him a little violin. A musician glancing from
his window saw a little dark boy playing marbles on the street with a
tiny violin in one hand; he gave him lessons. He happened to gain
entrance into a charity school with a master of understanding mind who
recognized genius when he saw it; and finally his beautiful child's
treble brought him to the notice of the choirmaster of St. George's,
Croyden.

So by happy accident his way was clear. Within his soul was no
hesitation. He was one of those fortunate beings who are not called to
_Wander-Jahre_, but are born with sails set and seas charted. Already
the baby of four little years was a musician, and as choir-boy and
violinist he walked unhesitatingly and surely to his life work. He was
graduated with honors from the Royal Academy of Music in 1894, and
married soon after the daughter of one of his professors. Then his life
began, and whatever it lacked of physical adventure in the conventional
round of a modern world-city, it more than gained in the almost
tempestuous outpouring of his spiritual nature. Life to him was neither
meat nor drink,--it was creative flame; ideas, plans, melodies glowed
within him. To create, to do, to accomplish; to know the white glory of
mighty midnights and the pale Amen of dawns was his day of days. Songs,
pianoforte and violin pieces, trios and quintets for strings, incidental
music, symphony, orchestral, and choral works rushed from his fingers.
Nor were they laboriously contrived or light, thin things made to meet
sudden popularity. Rather they were the flaming bits that must be said
and sung,--that could not wait the slower birth of years, so hurried to
the world as though their young creator knew that God gave him but a
day. His whole active life was scarcely more than a decade and a half,
and yet in that time, without wealth, friends, or influence, in the face
of perhaps the most critical and skeptical and least imaginative
civilization of the modern world, he wrote his name so high as a
creative artist that it cannot soon be forgotten.

And this was but one side of the man. On the other was the
sweet-tempered, sympathetic comrade, always willing to help, never
knowing how to refuse, generous with every nerve and fiber of his being.
Think of a young musician, father of a family, who at the time of his
death held positions as Associate of the Royal College of Music,
Professor in Trinity College and Crystal Palace, Conductor of the Handel
Choral Society and the Rochester Choral Society, Principal of the
Guildhall School of Music, where he had charge of the choral choir, the
orchestra, and the opera. He was repeatedly the leader of music
festivals all over Great Britain and a judge of contests. And with all
this his house was open in cheering hospitality to friends and his hand
ever ready with sympathy and help.

When such a man dies, it must bring pause to a reasoning world. We may
call his death-sickness pneumonia, but we all know that it was sheer
overwork,--the using of a delicately-tuned instrument too commonly and
continuously and carelessly to let it last its normal life. We may well
talk of the waste of wood and water, of food and fire, but the real and
unforgivable waste of modern civilization is the waste of ability and
genius,--the killing of useful, indispensable men who have no right to
die; who deserve, not for themselves, but for the world, leisure,
freedom from distraction, expert medical advice, and intelligent
sympathy.

Coleridge-Taylor's life work was not finished,--it was but well begun.
He lived only his first period of creative genius, when melody and
harmony flashed and fluttered in subtle, compelling, and more than
promising profusion. He did not live to do the organized, constructive
work in the full, calm power of noonday,--the reflective finishing of
evening. In the annals of the future his name must always stand high,
but with the priceless gift of years, who can say where it might not
have stood.

Why should he have worked so breathlessly, almost furiously? It was, we
may be sure, because with unflinching determination and with no thought
of surrender he faced the great alternative,--the choice which the
cynical, thoughtless, busy, modern world spreads grimly before its
greater souls--food or beauty, bread and butter, or ideals. And
continually we see worthier men turning to the pettier, cheaper
thing--the popular portrait, the sensational novel, the jingling song.
The choice is not always between the least and the greatest, the high
and the empty, but only too often it is between starvation and
something. When, therefore, we see a man, working desperately to earn a
living and still stooping to no paltry dickering and to no unworthy
work, handing away a "Hiawatha" for less than a song, pausing for
glimpses of the stars when a world full of charcoal glowed far more
warmly and comfortably, we know that such a man is a hero in a sense
never approached by the swashbuckling soldier or the lying patriot.

Deep as was the primal tragedy in the life of Coleridge-Taylor, there
lay another still deeper. He smiled at it lightly, as we all do,--we who
live within the veil,--to hide the deeper hurt. He had, with us, that
divine and African gift of laughter, that echo of a thousand centuries
of suns. I mind me how once he told of the bishop, the well-groomed
English bishop, who eyed the artist gravely, with his eye-glass--hair
and color and figure,--and said quite audibly to his friends, "Quite
interesting--looks intelligent,--yes--yes!"

Fortunate was Coleridge-Taylor to be born in Europe and to speak a
universal tongue. In America he could hardly have had his career. His
genius was, to be sure, recognized (with some palpitation and
consternation) when it came full-grown across the seas with an English
imprint; but born here, it might never have been permitted to grow. We
know in America how to discourage, choke, and murder ability when it so
far forgets itself as to choose a dark skin. England, thank God, is
slightly more civilized than her colonies; but even there the path of
this young man was no way of roses and just a shade thornier than that
of whiter men. He did not complain at it,--he did not

"Wince and cry aloud."

Rather the hint here and there of color discrimination in England
aroused in him deeper and more poignant sympathy with his people
throughout the world. He was one with that great company of
mixed-blooded men: Pushkin and Dumas, Hamilton and Douglass, Browning
and many others; but he more than most of these men knew the call of the
blood when it came and listened and answered. He came to America with
strange enthusiasm. He took with quite simple and unconscious grace the
conventional congratulations of the musical world. He was used to that.
But to his own people--to the sad sweetness of their voices, their
inborn sense of music, their broken, half-articulate voices,--he leapt
with new enthusiasm. From the fainter shadowings of his own life, he
sensed instinctively the vaster tragedy of theirs. His soul yearned to
give voice and being to this human thing. He early turned to the sorrow
songs. He sat at the faltering feet of Paul Laurence Dunbar and he asked
(as we sadly shook our heads) for some masterpiece of this world-tragedy
that his soul could set to music. And then, so characteristically, he
rushed back to England, composed a half-dozen exquisite harmonies
haunted by slave-songs, led the Welsh in their singing, listened to the
Scotch, ordered great music festivals in all England, wrote for Beerbohm
Tree, took on another music professorship, promised a trip to Germany,
and at last, staggering home one night, on his way to his wife and
little boy and girl, fell in his tracks and in four days was dead, at
the age of thirty-seven. They say that in his death-throe he arose and
facing some great, ghostly choir raised his last baton, while all around
the massive silence rang with the last mist-music of his dying ears.

He was buried from St. Michael's on September 5, 1912, with the acclaim
of kings and music masters and little children and to the majestic
melody of his own music. The tributes that followed him to his grave
were unusually hearty and sincere. The head of the Royal College calls
the first production of "Hiawatha" one of the most remarkable events in
modern English musical history and the trilogy one of the most
universally-beloved works of modern English music. One critic calls
Taylor's a name "which with that of Elgar represented the nation's most
individual output" and calls his "Atonement" "perhaps the finest passion
music of modern times." Another critic speaks of his originality:
"Though surrounded by the influences that are at work in Europe today,
he retained his individuality to the end, developing his style, however,
and evincing new ideas in each succeeding work. His untimely death at
the age of thirty-seven, a short life--like those of Schubert,
Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Hugo Wolf--has robbed the world of one of its
noblest singers, one of those few men of modern times who found
expression in the language of musical song, a lyricist of power and
worth."

But the tributes did not rest with the artist; with peculiar unanimity
they sought his "sterling character," "the good husband and father," the
"staunch and loyal friend." And perhaps I cannot better end these
hesitating words than with that tribute from one who called this master,
friend, and whose lament cried in the night with more of depth and
passion than Alfred Noyes is wont in his self-repression to voice:

"Through him, his race, a moment, lifted up
Forests of hands to beauty, as in prayer,
Touched through his lips the sacramental cup
And then sank back, benumbed in our bleak air."

Yet, consider: to many millions of people this man was all wrong.
_First_, he ought never to have been born, for he was the mulatto son of
a white woman. _Secondly_, he should never have been educated as a
musician,--he should have been trained, for his "place" in the world and
to make him satisfied therewith. _Thirdly_, he should not have married
the woman he loved and who loved him, for she was white and the niece of
an Oxford professor. _Fourthly_, the children of such a union--but why
proceed? You know it all by heart.

If he had been black, like Paul Laurence Dunbar, would the argument have
been different? No. He should never have been born, for he is a
"problem." He should never be educated, for he cannot be educated. He
should never marry, for that means children and there is no place for
black children in this world.

* * * * *

In the treatment of the child the world foreshadows its own future and
faith. All words and all thinking lead to the child,--to that vast
immortality and the wide sweep of infinite possibility which the child
represents. Such thought as this it was that made the Master say of old
as He saw baby faces:

"And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones, it is better for
him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he were cast into
the sea."

And yet the mothers and fathers and the men and women of my race must
often pause and ask: Is it worth while? Ought children be born to us?
Have we any right to make human souls face what we face today? The
answer is clear: If the great battle of human right against poverty,
against disease, against color prejudice is to be won, it must be won,
not in our day, but in the day of our children's children. Ours is the
blood and dust of battle; theirs the rewards of victory. If, then, they
are not there because we have not brought them into the world, we have
been the guiltiest factor in conquering ourselves. It is our duty, then,
to accomplish the immortality of black blood, in order that the day may
come in this dark world when poverty shall be abolished, privilege be
based on individual desert, and the color of a man's skin be no bar to
the outlook of his soul.

If it is our duty as honest colored men and women, battling for a great
principle, to bring not aimless rafts of children to the world, but as
many as, with reasonable sacrifice, we can train to largest manhood,
what in its inner essence shall that training be, particularly in its
beginning?

The first temptation is to shield the child,--to hedge it about that it
may not know and will not dream of the color line. Then when we can no
longer wholly shield, to indulge and pamper and coddle, as though in
this dumb way to compensate. From this attitude comes the multitude of
our spoiled, wayward, disappointed children. And must we not blame
ourselves? For while the motive was pure and the outer menace undoubted,
is shielding and indulgence the way to meet it?

Some Negro parents, realizing this, leave their children to sink or swim
in this sea of race prejudice. They neither shield nor explain, but
thrust them forth grimly into school or street and let them learn as
they may from brutal fact. Out of this may come strength, poise,
self-dependence, and out of it, too, may come bewilderment, cringing
deception, and self-distrust. It is, all said, a brutal, unfair method,
and in its way it is as bad as shielding and indulgence. Why not,
rather, face the facts and tell the truth? Your child is wiser than you
think.

The truth lies ever between extremes. It is wrong to introduce the child
to race consciousness prematurely; it is dangerous to let that
consciousness grow spontaneously without intelligent guidance. With
every step of dawning intelligence, explanation--frank, free, guiding
explanation--must come. The day will dawn when mother must explain
gently but clearly why the little girls next door do not want to play
with "niggers"; what the real cause is of the teacher's unsympathetic
attitude; and how people may ride in the backs of street cars and the
smoker end of trains and still be people, honest high-minded souls.

Remember, too, that in such frank explanation you are speaking in nine
cases out of ten to a good deal clearer understanding than you think and
that the child-mind has what your tired soul may have lost faith
in,--the Power and the Glory.

Out of little, unspoiled souls rise up wonderful resources and healing
balm. Once the colored child understands the white world's attitude and
the shameful wrong of it, you have furnished it with a great life
motive,--a power and impulse toward good which is the mightiest thing
man has. How many white folk would give their own souls if they might
graft into their children's souls a great, moving, guiding ideal!

With this Power there comes, in the transfiguring soul of childhood, the
Glory: the vision of accomplishment, the lofty ideal. Once let the
strength of the motive work, and it becomes the life task of the parent
to guide and to shape the ideal; to raise it from resentment and revenge
to dignity and self-respect, to breadth and accomplishment, to human
service; to beat back every thought of cringing and surrender.

Here, at last, we can speak with no hesitation, with no lack of faith.
For we know that as the world grows better there will be realized in our
children's lives that for which we fight unfalteringly, but vainly now.

So much for the problem of the home and our own dark children. Now let
us look beyond the pale upon the children of the wide world. What is the
real lesson of the life of Coleridge-Taylor? It is this: humanly
speaking it was sheer accident that this boy developed his genius. We
have a right to assume that hundreds and thousands of boys and girls
today are missing the chance of developing unusual talents because the
chances have been against them; and that indeed the majority of the
children of the world are not being systematically fitted for their life
work and for life itself. Why?

Many seek the reason in the content of the school program. They
feverishly argue the relative values of Greek, mathematics, and manual
training, but fail with singular unanimity in pointing out the
fundamental cause of our failure in human education: That failure is due
to the fact that we aim not at the full development of the child, but
that the world regards and always has regarded education first as a
means of buttressing the established order of things rather than
improving it. And this is the real reason why strife, war, and
revolution have marked the onward march of humanity instead of reason
and sound reform. Instead of seeking to push the coming generation ahead
of our pitiful accomplishment, we insist that it march behind. We say,
morally, that high character is conformity to present public opinion; we
say industrially that the present order is best and that children must
be trained to perpetuate it.

But, it is objected, what else can we do? Can we teach Revolution to the
inexperienced in hope that they may discern progress? No, but we may
teach frankly that this world is not perfection, but development: that
the object of education is manhood and womanhood, clear reason,
individual talent and genius and the spirit of service and sacrifice,
and not simply a frantic effort to avoid change in present institutions;
that industry is for man and not man for industry and that while we must
have workers to work, the prime object of our training is not the work
but the worker--not the maintenance of present industrial caste but the
development of human intelligence by which drudgery may be lessened and
beauty widened.

Back of our present educational system is the philosophy that sneers at
the foolish Fathers who believed it self-evident, "that all men were
created free and equal." Surely the overwhelming evidence is today that
men are slaves and unequal. But is it not education that is the creator
of this freedom and equality? Most men today cannot conceive of a
freedom that does not involve somebody's slavery. They do not want
equality because the thrill of their happiness comes from having things
that others have not. But may not human education fix the fine ideal of
an equal maximum of freedom for every human soul combined with that
minimum of slavery for each soul which the inexorable physical facts of
the world impose--rather than complete freedom for some and complete
slavery for others; and, again, is not the equality toward which the
world moves an equality of honor in the assigned human task itself
rather than equal facility in doing different tasks? Human equality is
not lack of difference, nor do the infinite human differences argue
relative superiority and inferiority. And, again, how new an aspect
human differences may assume when all men are educated. Today we think
of apes, semi-apes, and human beings; tomorrow we may think of Keir
Hardies, Roosevelts, and Beethovens--not equals but men. Today we are
forcing men into educational slavery in order that others may enjoy
life, and excuse ourselves by saying that the world's work must be done.
We are degrading some sorts of work by honoring others, and then
expressing surprise that most people object to having their children
trained solely to take up their father's tasks.

Given as the ideal the utmost possible freedom for every human soul,
with slavery for none, and equal honor for all necessary human tasks,
then our problem of education is greatly simplified: we aim to develop
human souls; to make all intelligent; to discover special talents and
genius. With this course of training beginning in early childhood and
never ceasing must go the technical training for the present world's
work according to carefully studied individual gifts and wishes.

On the other hand, if we arrange our system of education to develop
workmen who will not strike and Negroes satisfied with their present
place in the world, we have set ourselves a baffling task. We find
ourselves compelled to keep the masses ignorant and to curb our own
thought and expression so as not to inflame the ignorant. We force
moderate reformers and men with new and valuable ideas to become red
radicals and revolutionists, since that happens to be the only way to
make the world listen to reason. Consider our race problem in the South:
the South has invested in Negro ignorance; some Northerners proposed
limited education, not, they explained, to better the Negro, but merely
to make the investment more profitable to the present beneficiaries.
They thus gained wide Southern support for schools like Hampton and
Tuskegee. But could this program be expected long to satisfy colored
folk? And was this shifty dodging of the real issue the wisest
statesmanship? No! The real question in the South is the question of the
permanency of present color caste. The problem, then, of the formal
training of our colored children has been strangely complicated by the
strong feeling of certain persons as to their future in America and the
world. And the reaction toward this caste education has strengthened the
idea of caste education throughout the world.

Let us then return to fundamental ideals. Children must be trained in a
knowledge of what the world is and what it knows and how it does its
daily work. These things cannot be separated: we cannot teach pure
knowledge apart from actual facts, or separate truth from the human
mind. Above all we must not forget that the object of all education is
the child itself and not what it does or makes.

It is here that a great movement in America has grievously sinned
against the light. There has arisen among us a movement to make the
Public School primarily the hand-maiden of production. America is
conceived of as existing for the sake of its mines, fields and
factories, and not those factories, fields and mines as existing for
America. Consequently, the public schools are for training the mass of
men as servants and laborers and mechanics to increase the land's
industrial efficiency.

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