Darkwater by W. E. B. Du Bois

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16

"No," said the little lady in the corner (she looked like an ivory cameo
and her dress flowed on her like a caress), "we don't travel much."

* * * * *

Pessimism is cowardice. The man who cannot frankly acknowledge the
"Jim-Crow" car as a fact and yet live and hope is simply afraid either
of himself or of the world. There is not in the world a more disgraceful
denial of human brotherhood than the "Jim-Crow" car of the southern
United States; but, too, just as true, there is nothing more beautiful
in the universe than sunset and moonlight on Montego Bay in far Jamaica.
And both things are true and both belong to this our world, and neither
can be denied.

* * * * *

The sun, prepared to cross that awful border which men call Night and
Death, marshals his hosts. I seem to see the spears of mighty horsemen
flash golden in the light; empurpled banners flame afar, and the low
thunder of marching hosts thrills with the thunder of the sea. Athwart
his own path, screening a face of fire, he throws cloud masses, masking
his trained guns. And then the miracle is done. The host passes with
roar too vast for human ear and the sun is set, leaving the frightened
moon and blinded stars.

In the dusk the green-gold palms turn their star-like faces and stretch
their fan-like fingers, lifting themselves proudly, lest any lordly leaf
should know the taint of earth.

Out from the isle the serpent hill thrusts its great length around the
bay, shouldering back the waters and the shadows. Ghost rains sweep
down, smearing his rugged sides, yet on he writhes, undulant with pine
and palm, gleaming until his low, sharp head and lambent tongue, grown
gray and pale and silver in the dying day, kisses the molten gold of the
golden sea.

Then comes the moon. Like fireflies nesting in the hand of God gleams
the city, dim-swathed by fairy palms. A long, thin thumb, mist-mighty,
points shadowy to the Spanish Main, while through the fingers foam the
Seven Seas. Above the calm and gold-green moon, beneath the wind-wet
earth; and here, alone, my soul enchained, enchanted!

* * * * *

From such heights of holiness men turn to master the world. All the
pettiness of life drops away and it becomes a great battle before the
Lord. His trumpet,--where does it sound and whither? I go. I saw Montego
Bay at the beginning of the World War. The cry for service as high as
heaven, as wide as human feeling, seemed filling the earth. What were
petty slights, silly insults, paltry problems, beside this call to do
and dare and die? We black folk offered our services to fight. What
happened? Most Americans have forgotten the extraordinary series of
events which worked the feelings of black America to fever heat.

First was the refusal to accept Negro volunteers for the army, except in
the four black regiments already established. While the nation was
combing the country for volunteers for the regular army, it would not
let the American Negro furnish even his proportionate quota of regular
soldiers. This led to some grim bantering among Negroes:

"Why do you want to volunteer?" asked many. "Why should you fight for
this country?"

Before we had chance to reply to this, there came the army draft bill
and the proposal by Vardaman and his ilk to except Negroes. We protested
to Washington in various ways, and while we were insisting that colored
men should be drafted just as other citizens, the bill went through with
two little "jokers."

First, it provided that Negroes should be drafted, but trained in
"separate" units; and, secondly, it somewhat ambiguously permitted men
to be drafted for "labor."

A wave of fear and unrest spread among Negroes and while we were looking
at both these provisions askance, suddenly we received the draft
registration blank. It directed persons "of African descent" to "tear
off the corner!" Probably never before in the history of the United
States has a portion of the citizens been so openly and crassly
discriminated against by action of the general government. It was
disheartening, and on top of it came the celebrated "German plots." It
was alleged in various parts of the country with singular unanimity that
Germans were working among the Negroes, and it was further intimated
that this would make the Negroes too dangerous an element to trust with
guns. To us, of course, it looked as though the discovery and the
proposition came from the same thinly-veiled sources.

Considering carefully this series of happenings the American Negro
sensed an approaching crisis and faced a puzzling dilemma. Here was
evidently preparing fertile ground for the spread of disloyalty and
resentment among the black masses, as they were forced to choose
apparently between forced labor or a "Jim-Crow" draft. Manifestly when a
minority group is thus segregated and forced out of the nation, they can
in reason do but one thing--take advantage of the disadvantage. In this
case we demanded colored officers for the colored troops.

General Wood was early approached and asked to admit suitable candidates
to Plattsburg. He refused. We thereupon pressed the government for a
"separate" camp for the training of Negro officers. Not only did the War
Department hesitate at this request, but strong opposition arose among
colored people themselves. They said we were going too far. "We will
obey the law, but to ask for voluntary segregation is to insult
ourselves." But strong, sober second thought came to our rescue. We said
to our protesting brothers: "We face a condition, not a theory. There is
not the slightest chance of our being admitted to white camps;
therefore, it is either a case of a 'Jim-Crow' officers' training camp
or no colored officers. Of the two things no colored officers would be
the greater calamity."

Thus we gradually made up our minds. But the War Department still
hesitated. It was besieged, and when it presented its final argument,
"We have no place for such a camp," the trustees of Howard University
said: "Take our campus." Eventually twelve hundred colored cadets were
assembled at Fort Des Moines for officers' training.

The city of Des Moines promptly protested, but it finally changed its
mind. Des Moines never before had seen such a class of colored men. They
rapidly became popular with all classes and many encomiums were passed
upon their conduct. Their commanding colonel pronounced their work first
class and declared that they presented excellent material for officers.

Meantime, with one accord, the thought of the colored people turned
toward Colonel Young, their highest officer in the regular army. Charles
Young is a heroic figure. He is the typical soldier,--silent,
uncomplaining, brave, and efficient! From his days at West Point
throughout his thirty years of service he has taken whatever task was
assigned him and performed it efficiently; and there is no doubt but
that the army has been almost merciless in the requirements which it has
put upon this splendid officer. He came through all with flying colors.
In Haiti, in Liberia, in western camps, in the Sequoia Forests of
California, and finally with Pershing in Mexico,--in every case he
triumphed. Just at the time we were looking to the United States
government to call him to head the colored officers' training at Des
Moines, he was retired from the army, because of "high blood pressure!"
There is no disputing army surgeons and their judgment in this case may
be justified, but coming at the time it did, nearly every Negro in the
United States believed that the "high blood pressure" that retired
Colonel Young was in the prejudiced heads of the Southern oligarchy who
were determined that no American Negro should ever wear the stars of a
General.

To say that Negroes of the United States were disheartened at the
retirement of Colonel Young is to put it mildly,--but there was more
trouble. The provision that Negroes must be trained separately looked
simple and was simple in places where there were large Negro
contingents, but in the North with solitary Negroes drafted here and
there we had some extraordinary developments. Regiments appeared with
one Negro where the Negro had to be separated like a pest and put into a
house or even a village by himself while the commander frantically
telegraphed to Washington. Small wonder that one poor fellow in Ohio
solved the problem by cutting his throat. The whole process of drafting
Negroes had to be held up until the government could find methods and
places for assembling them.

Then came Houston. In a moment the nation forgot the whole record of one
of the most celebrated regiments in the United States Army and its
splendid service in the Indian Wars and in the Philippines. It was the
first regiment mobilized in the Spanish-American War and it was the
regiment that volunteered to a man to clean up the yellow fever camps
when others hesitated. It was one of the regiments to which Pershing
said in December:

"Men, I am authorized by Congress to tell you all that our people back
in the States are mightily glad and proud at the way the soldiers have
conducted themselves while in Mexico, and I, General Pershing, can say
with pride that a finer body of men never stood under the flag of our
nation than we find here tonight."

The nation, also, forgot the deep resentment mixed with the pale ghost
of fear which Negro soldiers call up in the breasts of the white South.
It is not so much that they fear that the Negro will strike if he gets a
chance, but rather that they assume with curious unanimity that he has
_reason_ to strike, that any other persons in his circumstances or
treated as he is would rebel. Instead of seeking to relieve the cause of
such a possible feeling, most of them strain every effort to bottle up
the black man's resentment. Is it inconceivable that now and then it
bursts all bounds, as at Brownsville and Houston?

So in the midst of this mental turmoil came Houston and East St. Louis.
At Houston black soldiers, goaded and insulted, suddenly went wild and
"shot up" the town. At East St. Louis white strikers on war work killed
and mobbed Negro workingmen, and as a result 19 colored soldiers were
hanged and 51 imprisoned for life for killing 17 whites at Houston,
while for killing 125 Negroes in East St. Louis, 20 white men were
imprisoned, none for more than 15 years, and 10 colored men with them.

* * * * *

Once upon a time I took a great journey in this land to three of the
ends of our world and over seven thousand mighty miles. I saw the grim
desert and the high ramparts of the Rocky Mountains. Three days I flew
from the silver beauty of Seattle to the somber whirl of Kansas City.
Three days I flew from the brute might of Chicago to the air of the
Angels in California, scented with golden flowers, where the homes of
men crouch low and loving on the good, broad earth, as though they were
kissing her blossoms. Three days I flew through the empire of Texas, but
all these shall be tales untold, for in all this journey I saw but one
thing that lived and will live eternal in my soul,--the Grand Canon.

It is a sudden void in the bosom of the earth, down to its entrails--a
wound where the dull titanic knife has turned and twisted in the hole,
leaving its edges livid, scarred, jagged, and pulsing over the white,
and red, and purple of its mighty flesh, while down below--down, down
below, in black and severed vein, boils the dull and sullen flood of the
Colorado.

It is awful. There can be nothing like it. It is the earth and sky gone
stark and raving mad. The mountains up-twirled, disbodied and inverted,
stand on their peaks and throw their bowels to the sky. Their earth is
air; their ether blood-red rock engreened. You stand upon their roots
and fall into their pinnacles, a mighty mile.

Behold this mauve and purple mocking of time and space! See yonder peak!
No human foot has trod it. Into that blue shadow only the eye of God has
looked. Listen to the accents of that gorge which mutters: "Before
Abraham was, I am." Is yonder wall a hedge of black or is it the rampart
between heaven and hell? I see greens,--is it moss or giant pines? I see
specks that may be boulders. Ever the winds sigh and drop into those
sun-swept silences. Ever the gorge lies motionless, unmoved, until I
fear. It is a grim thing, unholy, terrible! It is human--some mighty
drama unseen, unheard, is playing there its tragedies or mocking comedy,
and the laugh of endless years is shrieking onward from peak to peak,
unheard, unechoed, and unknown.

One throws a rock into the abyss. It gives back no sound. It falls on
silence--the voice of its thunders cannot reach so far. It is not--it
cannot be a mere, inert, unfeeling, brute fact--its grandeur is too
serene--its beauty too divine! It is not red, and blue, and green, but,
ah! the shadows and the shades of all the world, glad colorings touched
with a hesitant spiritual delicacy. What does it mean--what does it
mean? Tell me, black and boiling water!

It is not real. It is but shadows. The shading of eternity. Last night
yonder tesselated palace was gloom--dark, brooding thought and sin,
while hither rose the mountains of the sun, golden, blazing,
ensanguined. It was a dream. This blue and brilliant morning shows all
those burning peaks alight, while here, shapeless, mistful, brood the
shadowed towers.

I have been down into the entrails of earth--down, down by straight and
staring cliffs--down by sounding waters and sun-strewn meadows; down by
green pastures and still waters, by great, steep chasms--down by the
gnarled and twisted fists of God to the deep, sad moan of the yellow
river that did this thing of wonder,--a little winding river with death
in its depth and a crown of glory in its flying hair.

I have seen what eye of man was never meant to see. I have profaned the
sanctuary. I have looked upon the dread disrobing of the Night, and yet
I live. Ere I hid my head she was standing in her cavern halls, glowing
coldly westward--her feet were blackness: her robes, empurpled, flowed
mistily from shoulder down in formless folds of folds; her head,
pine-crowned, was set with jeweled stars. I turned away and dreamed--the
canon,--the awful, its depths called; its heights shuddered. Then
suddenly I arose and looked. Her robes were falling. At dim-dawn they
hung purplish-green and black. Slowly she stripped them from her gaunt
and shapely limbs--her cold, gray garments shot with shadows stood
revealed. Down dropped the black-blue robes, gray-pearled and slipped,
leaving a filmy, silken, misty thing, and underneath I glimpsed her
limbs of utter light.

* * * * *

My God! For what am I thankful this night? For nothing. For nothing but
the most commonplace of commonplaces; a table of gentlewomen and
gentlemen--soft-spoken, sweet-tempered, full of human sympathy, who made
me, a stranger, one of them. Ours was a fellowship of common books,
common knowledge, mighty aims. We could laugh and joke and think as
friends--and the Thing--the hateful, murderous, dirty Thing which in
American we call "Nigger-hatred" was not only not there--it could not
even be understood. It was a curious monstrosity at which civilized folk
laughed or looked puzzled. There was no elegant and elaborate
condescension of--"We once had a colored servant"--"My father was an
Abolitionist"--"I've always been interested in _your people_"--there was
only the community of kindred souls, the delicate reverence for the
Thought that led, the quick deference to the guest. You left in quiet
regret, knowing that they were not discussing you behind your back with
lies and license. God! It was simply human decency and I had to be
thankful for it because I am an American Negro, and white America, with
saving exceptions, is cruel to everything that has black blood--and
this was Paris, in the years of salvation, 1919. Fellow blacks, we must
join the democracy of Europe.

* * * * *

Toul! Dim through the deepening dark of early afternoon, I saw its
towers gloom dusky toward the murk of heaven. We wound in misty roads
and dropped upon the city through the great throats of its walled
bastions. There lay France--a strange, unknown, unfamiliar France. The
city was dispossessed. Through its streets--its narrow, winding streets,
old and low and dark, carven and quaint,--poured thousands upon
thousands of strange feet of khaki-clad foreigners, and the echoes threw
back awkward syllables that were never French. Here was France beaten to
her knees yet fighting as never nation fought before, calling in her
death agony across the seas till her help came and with all its strut
and careless braggadocio saved the worthiest nation of the world from
the wickedest fate ever plotted by Fools.

* * * * *

Tim Brimm was playing by the town-pump. Tim Brimm and the bugles of
Harlem blared in the little streets of Maron in far Lorraine. The tiny
streets were seas of mud. Dank mist and rain sifted through the cold air
above the blue Moselle. Soldiers--soldiers everywhere--black soldiers,
boys of Washington, Alabama, Philadelphia, Mississippi. Wild and sweet
and wooing leapt the strains upon the air. French children gazed in
wonder--women left their washing. Up in the window stood a black Major,
a Captain, a Teacher, and I--with tears behind our smiling eyes. Tim
Brimm was playing by the town-pump.

The audience was framed in smoke. It rose ghost-like out of
memories--bitter memories of the officer near dead of pneumonia whose
pain was lighted up by the nurses waiting to know whether he must be
"Jim-Crowed" with privates or not. Memories of that great last morning
when the thunders of hell called the Ninety-second to its last drive.
Memories of bitter humiliations, determined triumphs, great victories,
and bugle-calls that sounded from earth to heaven. Like memories framed
in the breath of God, my audience peered in upon me--good, brown faces
with great, kind, beautiful eyes--black soldiers of America rescuing
beloved France--and the words came in praise and benediction there in
the "Y," with its little stock of cigarettes and candies and its rusty
wood stove.

"_Alors_," said Madame, "_quatre sont morts_"--four dead--four tall,
strong sons dead for France--sons like the sweet and blue-eyed daughter
who was hiding her brave smile in the dusk. It was a tiny stone house
whose front window lipped the passing sidewalk where ever tramped the
feet of black soldiers marching home. There was a cavernous wardrobe, a
great fireplace invaded by a new and jaunty iron stove. Vast, thick
piles of bedding rose in yonder corner. Without was the crowded kitchen
and up a half-stair was our bedroom that gave upon a tiny court with
arched stone staircase and one green tree. We were a touching family
party held together by a great sorrow and a great joy. How we laughed
over the salad that got brandy instead of vinegar--how we ate the golden
pile of fried potatoes and how we pored over the post-card from the
Lieutenant of the Senegalese--dear little vale of crushed and risen
France, in the day when Negroes went "over the top" at Pont-a-Mousson.

* * * * *

Paris, Paris by purple facade of the opera, the crowd on the Boulevard
des Italiens and the great swing of the Champs Elysees. But not the
Paris the world knows. Paris with its soul cut to the core--feverish,
crowded, nervous, hurried; full of uniforms and mourning bands, with
cafes closed at 9:30--no sugar, scarce bread, and tears so interwined
with joy that there is scant difference. Paris has been dreaming a
nightmare, and though she awakes, the grim terror is upon her--it lies
on the sand-closed art treasures of the Louvre. Only the flowers are
there, always the flowers, the Roses of England and the Lilies of
France.

* * * * *

New York! Behind the Liberty that faces free France rise the white
cliffs of Manhattan, tier on tier, with a curving pinnacle, towers
square and twin, a giant inkwell daintily stoppered, an ancient pyramid
enthroned; beneath, low ramparts wide and mighty; while above,
faint-limned against the turbulent sky, looms the vast grace of that
Cathedral of the Purchased and Purchasing Poor, topping the world and
pointing higher.

Yonder the gray cobwebs of the Brooklyn bridges leap the sea, and here
creep the argosies from all earth's ends. We move to this swift home on
dun and swelling waters and hear as we come the heartbeats of the new
world.

* * * * *

New York and night from the Brooklyn Bridge: The bees and fireflies flit
and twinkle in their vast hives; curved clouds like the breath of gods
hover between the towers and the moon. One hears the hiss of lightnings,
the deep thunder of human things, and a fevered breathing as of some
attendant and invincible Powers. The glow of burning millions melts
outward into dim and fairy outlines until afar the liquid music born of
rushing crowds drips like a benediction on the sea.

* * * * *

New York and morning: the sun is kissing the timid dew in Central Park,
and from the Fountain of Plenty one looks along that world street, Fifth
Avenue, and walks toward town. The earth life and curves graciously down
from the older mansions of princes to the newer shops of luxury. Egypt
and Abyssinia, Paris and Damascus, London and India caress you by the
way; churches stand aloof while the shops swell to emporiums. But all
this is nothing. Everything is mankind. Humanity stands and flies and
walks and rolls about--the poor, the priceless, the world-known and the
forgotten; child and grandfather, king and leman--the pageant of the
world goes by, set in a frame of stone and jewels, clothed in scarlet
and rags. Princes Street and the Elysian Fields, the Strand and the
Ringstrasse--these are the Ways of the World today.

* * * * *

New York and twilight, there where the Sixth Avenue "L" rises and leaps
above the tenements into the free air at 110th Street. It circles like a
bird with heaven and St. John's above and earth and the sweet green and
gold of the Park beneath. Beyond lie all the blue mists and mysteries of
distance; beneath, the city rushes and crawls. Behind echo all the roar
and war and care and maze of the wide city set in its sullen darkening
walls, flashing weird and crimson farewells. Out at the sides the stars
twinkle.

* * * * *

Again New York and Night and Harlem. A dark city of fifty thousand rises
like magic from the earth. Gone is the white world, the pale lips, the
lank hair; gone is the West and North--the East and South is here
triumphant. The street is crowd and leisure and laughter. Everywhere
black eyes, black and brown, and frizzled hair curled and sleek, and
skins that riot with luscious color and deep, burning blood. Humanity is
packed dense in high piles of close-knit homes that lie in layers above
gray shops of food and clothes and drink, with here and there a
moving-picture show. Orators declaim on the corners, lovers lark in the
streets, gamblers glide by the saloons, workers lounge wearily home.
Children scream and run and frolic, and all is good and human and
beautiful and ugly and evil, even as Life is elsewhere.

* * * * *

And then--the Veil. It drops as drops the night on southern seas--vast,
sudden, unanswering. There is Hate behind it, and Cruelty and Tears. As
one peers through its intricate, unfathomable pattern of ancient, old,
old design, one sees blood and guilt and misunderstanding. And yet it
hangs there, this Veil, between Then and Now, between Pale and Colored
and Black and White--between You and Me. Surely it is a thought-thing,
tenuous, intangible; yet just as surely is it true and terrible and not
in our little day may you and I lift it. We may feverishly unravel its
edges and even climb slow with giant shears to where its ringed and
gilded top nestles close to the throne of God. But as we work and climb
we shall see through streaming eyes and hear with aching ears, lynching
and murder, cheating and despising, degrading and lying, so flashed and
fleshed through this vast hanging darkness that the Doer never sees the
Deed and the Victim knows not the Victor and Each hates All in wild and
bitter ignorance. Listen, O Isles, to these Voices from within the Veil,
for they portray the most human hurt of the Twentieth Cycle of that poor
Jesus who was called the Christ!

* * * * *

There is something in the nature of Beauty that demands an end. Ugliness
may be indefinite. It may trail off into gray endlessness. But Beauty
must be complete--whether it be a field of poppies or a great life,--it
must end, and the End is part and triumph of the Beauty. I know there
are those who envisage a beauty eternal. But I cannot. I can dream of
great and never-ending processions of beautiful things and visions and
acts. But each must be complete or it cannot for me exist.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16