Darkwater by W. E. B. Du Bois

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I went to Wilberforce with high ideals. I wanted to help to build a
great university. I was willing to work night as well as day. I taught
Latin, Greek, English, and German. I helped in the discipline, took part
in the social life, begged to be allowed to lecture on sociology, and
began to write books. But I found myself against a stone wall. Nothing
stirred before my impatient pounding! Or if it stirred, it soon slept
again.

Of course, I was too impatient! The snarl of years was not to be undone
in days. I set at solving the problem before I knew it. Wilberforce was
a colored church-school. In it were mingled the problems of
poorly-prepared pupils, an inadequately-equipped plant, the natural
politics of bishoprics, and the provincial reactions of a country town
loaded with traditions. It was my first introduction to a Negro world,
and I was at once marvelously inspired and deeply depressed. I was
inspired with the children,--had I not rubbed against the children of
the world and did I not find here the same eagerness, the same joy of
life, the same brains as in New England, France, and Germany? But, on
the other hand, the ropes and myths and knots and hindrances; the
thundering waves of the white world beyond beating us back; the scalding
breakers of this inner world,--its currents and back eddies--its
meanness and smallness--its sorrow and tragedy--its screaming farce!

In all this I was as one bound hand and foot. Struggle, work, fight as I
would, I seemed to get nowhere and accomplish nothing. I had all the
wild intolerance of youth, and no experience in human tangles. For the
first time in my life I realized that there were limits to my will to
do. The Day of Miracles was past, and a long, gray road of dogged work
lay ahead.

I had, naturally, my triumphs here and there. I defied the bishops in
the matter of public extemporaneous prayer and they yielded. I bearded
the poor, hunted president in his den, and yet was re-elected to my
position. I was slowly winning a way, but quickly losing faith in the
value of the way won. Was this the place to begin my life work? Was this
the work which I was best fitted to do? What business had I, anyhow, to
teach Greek when I had studied men? I grew sure that I had made a
mistake. So I determined to leave Wilberforce and try elsewhere. Thus,
the third period of my life began.

First, in 1896, I married--a slip of a girl, beautifully dark-eyed
and thorough and good as a German housewife. Then I accepted a job to
make a study of Negroes in Philadelphia for the University of
Pennsylvania,--one year at six hundred dollars. How did I dare these
two things? I do not know. Yet they spelled salvation. To remain at
Wilberforce without doing my ideals meant spiritual death. Both my
wife and I were homeless. I dared a home and a temporary job. But it
was a different daring from the days of my first youth. I was ready
to admit that the best of men might fail. I meant still to be captain
of my soul, but I realized that even captains are not omnipotent in
uncharted and angry seas.

I essayed a thorough piece of work in Philadelphia. I labored morning,
noon, and night. Nobody ever reads that fat volume on "The Philadelphia
Negro," but they treat it with respect, and that consoles me. The
colored people of Philadelphia received me with no open arms. They had a
natural dislike to being studied like a strange species. I met again and
in different guise those curious cross-currents and inner social
whirlings of my own people. They set me to groping. I concluded that I
did not know so much as I might about my own people, and when President
Bumstead invited me to Atlanta University the next year to teach
sociology and study the American Negro, I accepted gladly, at a salary
of twelve hundred dollars.

My real life work was done at Atlanta for thirteen years, from my
twenty-ninth to my forty-second birthday. They were years of great
spiritual upturning, of the making and unmaking of ideals, of hard work
and hard play. Here I found myself. I lost most of my mannerisms. I grew
more broadly human, made my closest and most holy friendships, and
studied human beings. I became widely-acquainted with the real condition
of my people. I realized the terrific odds which faced them. At
Wilberforce I was their captious critic. In Philadelphia I was their
cold and scientific investigator, with microscope and probe. It took but
a few years of Atlanta to bring me to hot and indignant defense. I saw
the race-hatred of the whites as I had never dreamed of it
before,--naked and unashamed! The faint discrimination of my hopes and
intangible dislikes paled into nothing before this great, red monster
of cruel oppression. I held back with more difficulty each day my
mounting indignation against injustice and misrepresentation.

With all this came the strengthening and hardening of my own character.
The billows of birth, love, and death swept over me. I saw life through
all its paradox and contradiction of streaming eyes and mad merriment. I
emerged into full manhood, with the ruins of some ideals about me, but
with others planted above the stars; scarred and a bit grim, but hugging
to my soul the divine gift of laughter and withal determined, even unto
stubbornness, to fight the good fight.

At last, forbear and waver as I would, I faced the great Decision. My
life's last and greatest door stood ajar. What with all my dreaming,
studying, and teaching was I going to _do_ in this fierce fight? Despite
all my youthful conceit and bumptiousness, I found developed beneath it
all a reticence and new fear of forwardness, which sprang from searching
criticisms of motive and high ideals of efficiency; but contrary to my
dream of racial solidarity and notwithstanding my deep desire to serve
and follow and think, rather than to lead and inspire and decide, I
found myself suddenly the leader of a great wing of people fighting
against another and greater wing.

Nor could any effort of mine keep this fight from sinking to the
personal plane. Heaven knows I tried. That first meeting of a knot of
enthusiasts, at Niagara Falls, had all the earnestness of self-devotion.
At the second meeting, at Harper's Ferry, it arose to the solemnity of a
holy crusade and yet without and to the cold, hard stare of the world it
seemed merely the envy of fools against a great man, Booker Washington.

Of the movement I was willy-nilly leader. I hated the role. For the
first time I faced criticism and _cared_. Every ideal and habit of my
life was cruelly misjudged. I who had always overstriven to give credit
for good work, who had never consciously stooped to envy was accused by
honest colored people of every sort of small and petty jealousy, while
white people said I was ashamed of my race and wanted to be white! And
this of me, whose one life fanaticism had been belief in my Negro blood!

Away back in the little years of my boyhood I had sold the Springfield
_Republican_ and written for Mr. Fortune's _Globe_. I dreamed of being
an editor myself some day. I am an editor. In the great, slashing days
of college life I dreamed of a strong organization to fight the battles
of the Negro race. The National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People is such a body, and it grows daily. In the dark days at
Wilberforce I planned a time when I could speak freely to my people and
of them, interpreting between two worlds. I am speaking now. In the
study at Atlanta I grew to fear lest my radical beliefs should so hurt
the college that either my silence or the institution's ruin would
result. Powers and principalities have not yet curbed my tongue and
Atlanta still lives.

It all came--this new Age of Miracles--because a few persons in 1909
determined to celebrate Lincoln's Birthday properly by calling for the
final emancipation of the American Negro. I came at their call. My
salary even for a year was not assured, but it was the "Voice without
reply." The result has been the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People and _The Crisis_ and this book, which I am finishing
on my Fiftieth Birthday.

Last year I looked death in the face and found its lineaments not
unkind. But it was not my time. Yet in nature some time soon and in the
fullness of days I shall die, quietly, I trust, with my face turned
South and eastward; and, dreaming or dreamless, I shall, I am sure,
enjoy death as I have enjoyed life.

_A Litany at Atlanta_

O Silent God, Thou whose voice afar in mist and mystery hath left our
ears an-hungered in these fearful days--

_Hear us, good Lord!_

Listen to us, Thy children: our faces dark with doubt are made a mockery
in Thy Sanctuary. With uplifted hands we front Thy Heaven, O God,
crying:

_We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!_

We are not better than our fellows, Lord; we are but weak and human men.
When our devils do deviltry, curse Thou the doer and the deed,--curse
them as we curse them, do to them all and more than ever they have done
to innocence and weakness, to womanhood and home.

_Have mercy upon us, miserable sinners!_

And yet, whose is the deeper guilt? Who made these devils? Who nursed
them in crime and fed them on injustice? Who ravished and debauched
their mothers and their grandmothers? Who bought and sold their crime
and waxed fat and rich on public iniquity?

_Thou knowest, good God!_

Is this Thy Justice, O Father, that guile be easier than innocence and
the innocent be crucified for the guilt of the untouched guilty?

_Justice, O Judge of men!_

Wherefore do we pray? Is not the God of the Fathers dead? Have not seers
seen in Heaven's halls Thine hearsed and lifeless form stark amidst the
black and rolling smoke of sin, where all along bow bitter forms of
endless dead?

_Awake, Thou that sleepest!_

Thou art not dead, but flown afar, up hills of endless light, through
blazing corridors of suns, where worlds do swing of good and gentle men,
of women strong and free--far from the cozenage, black hypocrisy, and
chaste prostitution of this shameful speck of dust!

_Turn again, O Lord; leave us not to perish in our sin!_

From lust of body and lust of blood,--

_Great God, deliver us!_

From lust of power and lust of gold,--

_Great God, deliver us!_

From the leagued lying of despot and of brute,--

_Great God, deliver us!_

A city lay in travail, God our Lord, and from her loins sprang twin
Murder and Black Hate. Red was the midnight; clang, crack, and cry of
death and fury filled the air and trembled underneath the stars where
church spires pointed silently to Thee. And all this was to sate the
greed of greedy men who hide behind the veil of vengeance!

_Bend us Thine ear, O Lord!_

In the pale, still morning we looked upon the deed. We stopped our ears
and held our leaping hands, but they--did they not wag their heads and
leer and cry with bloody jaws: _Cease from Crime!_ The word was mockery,
for thus they train a hundred crimes while we do cure one.

_Turn again our captivity, O Lord!_

Behold this maimed and broken thing, dear God; it was an humble black
man, who toiled and sweat to save a bit from the pittance paid him. They
told him: _Work and Rise!_ He worked. Did this man sin? Nay, but someone
told how someone said another did--one whom he had never seen nor known.
Yet for that man's crime this man lieth maimed and murdered, his wife
naked to shame, his children to poverty and evil.

_Hear us, O heavenly Father!_

Doth not this justice of hell stink in Thy nostrils, O God? How long
shall the mounting flood of innocent blood roar in Thine ears and pound
in our hearts for vengeance? Pile the pale frenzy of blood-crazed
brutes, who do such deeds, high on Thine Altar, Jehovah Jireh, and burn
it in hell forever and forever!

_Forgive us, good Lord; we know not what we say!_

Bewildered we are and passion-tossed, mad with the madness of a mobbed
and mocked and murdered people; straining at the armposts of Thy throne,
we raise our shackled hands and charge Thee, God, by the bones of our
stolen fathers, by the tears of our dead mothers, by the very blood of
Thy crucified Christ: What meaneth this? Tell us the plan; give us the
sign!

_Keep not Thou silent, O God!_

Sit not longer blind, Lord God, deaf to our prayer and dumb to our dumb
suffering. Surely Thou, too, art not white, O Lord, a pale, bloodless,
heartless thing!

_Ah! Christ of all the Pities!_

Forgive the thought! Forgive these wild, blasphemous words! Thou art
still the God of our black fathers and in Thy Soul's Soul sit some soft
darkenings of the evening, some shadowings of the velvet night.

But whisper--speak--call, great God, for Thy silence is white terror to
our hearts! The way, O God, show us the way and point us the path!

Whither? North is greed and South is blood; within, the coward, and
without, the liar. Whither? To death?

_Amen! Welcome, dark sleep!_

Whither? To life? But not this life, dear God, not this. Let the cup
pass from us, tempt us not beyond our strength, for there is that
clamoring and clawing within, to whose voice we would not listen, yet
shudder lest we must,--and it is red. Ah! God! It is a red and awful
shape.

_Selah!_

In yonder East trembles a star.

_Vengeance is Mine; I will repay, saith the Lord!_

Thy Will, O Lord, be done!

_Kyrie Eleison!_

Lord, we have done these pleading, wavering words.

_We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!_

We bow our heads and hearken soft to the sobbing of women and little
children.

_We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!_

Our voices sink in silence and in night.

_Hear us, good Lord!_

In night, O God of a godless land!

_Amen!_

In silence, O Silent God.

_Selah!_

II

THE SOULS OF WHITE FOLK

High in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the human
sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are
that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk.

Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I view
them from unusual points of vantage. Not as a foreigner do I come, for I
am native, not foreign, bone of their thought and flesh of their
language. Mine is not the knowledge of the traveler or the colonial
composite of dear memories, words and wonder. Nor yet is my knowledge
that which servants have of masters, or mass of class, or capitalist of
artisan. Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side.
I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know
that I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious.
They deny my right to live and be and call me misbirth! My word is to
them mere bitterness and my soul, pessimism. And yet as they preach and
strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of facts
and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my
tired eyes and I see them ever stripped,--ugly, human.

The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very
modern thing,--a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The
ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. The Middle Age
regarded skin color with mild curiosity; and even up into the eighteenth
century we were hammering our national manikins into one, great,
Universal Man, with fine frenzy which ignored color and race even more
than birth. Today we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden,
emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token,
wonderful!

This assumption that of all the hues of God whiteness alone is
inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to curious
acts; even the sweeter souls of the dominant world as they discourse
with me on weather, weal, and woe are continually playing above their
actual words an obligato of tune and tone, saying:

"My poor, un-white thing! Weep not nor rage. I know, too well, that the
curse of God lies heavy on you. Why? That is not for me to say, but be
brave! Do your work in your lowly sphere, praying the good Lord that
into heaven above, where all is love, you may, one day, be born--white!"

I do not laugh. I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly:

"But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?" Then
always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to
understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and
ever, Amen!

Now what is the effect on a man or a nation when it comes passionately
to believe such an extraordinary dictum as this? That nations are coming
to believe it is manifest daily. Wave on wave, each with increasing
virulence, is dashing this new religion of whiteness on the shores of
our time. Its first effects are funny: the strut of the Southerner, the
arrogance of the Englishman amuck, the whoop of the hoodlum who
vicariously leads your mob. Next it appears dampening generous
enthusiasm in what we once counted glorious; to free the slave is
discovered to be tolerable only in so far as it freed his master! Do we
sense somnolent writhings in black Africa or angry groans in India or
triumphant banzais in Japan? "To your tents, O Israel!" These nations
are not white!

After the more comic manifestations and the chilling of generous
enthusiasm come subtler, darker deeds. Everything considered, the title
to the universe claimed by White Folk is faulty. It ought, at least, to
look plausible. How easy, then, by emphasis and omission to make
children believe that every great soul the world ever saw was a white
man's soul; that every great thought the world ever knew was a white
man's thought; that every great deed the world ever did was a white
man's deed; that every great dream the world ever sang was a white man's
dream. In fine, that if from the world were dropped everything that
could not fairly be attributed to White Folk, the world would, if
anything, be even greater, truer, better than now. And if all this be a
lie, is it not a lie in a great cause?

Here it is that the comedy verges to tragedy. The first minor note is
struck, all unconsciously, by those worthy souls in whom consciousness
of high descent brings burning desire to spread the gift abroad,--the
obligation of nobility to the ignoble. Such sense of duty assumes two
things: a real possession of the heritage and its frank appreciation by
the humble-born. So long, then, as humble black folk, voluble with
thanks, receive barrels of old clothes from lordly and generous whites,
there is much mental peace and moral satisfaction. But when the black
man begins to dispute the white man's title to certain alleged bequests
of the Fathers in wage and position, authority and training; and when
his attitude toward charity is sullen anger rather than humble jollity;
when he insists on his human right to swagger and swear and waste,--then
the spell is suddenly broken and the philanthropist is ready to believe
that Negroes are impudent, that the South is right, and that Japan wants
to fight America.

After this the descent to Hell is easy. On the pale, white faces which
the great billows whirl upward to my tower I see again and again, often
and still more often, a writing of human hatred, a deep and passionate
hatred, vast by the very vagueness of its expressions. Down through the
green waters, on the bottom of the world, where men move to and fro, I
have seen a man--an educated gentleman--grow livid with anger because a
little, silent, black woman was sitting by herself in a Pullman car. He
was a white man. I have seen a great, grown man curse a little child,
who had wandered into the wrong waiting-room, searching for its mother:
"Here, you damned black--" He was white. In Central Park I have seen the
upper lip of a quiet, peaceful man curl back in a tigerish snarl of rage
because black folk rode by in a motor car. He was a white man. We have
seen, you and I, city after city drunk and furious with ungovernable
lust of blood; mad with murder, destroying, killing, and cursing;
torturing human victims because somebody accused of crime happened to be
of the same color as the mob's innocent victims and because that color
was not white! We have seen,--Merciful God! in these wild days and in
the name of Civilization, Justice, and Motherhood,--what have we not
seen, right here in America, of orgy, cruelty, barbarism, and murder
done to men and women of Negro descent.

Up through the foam of green and weltering waters wells this great mass
of hatred, in wilder, fiercer violence, until I look down and know that
today to the millions of my people no misfortune could happen,--of death
and pestilence, failure and defeat--that would not make the hearts of
millions of their fellows beat with fierce, vindictive joy! Do you doubt
it? Ask your own soul what it would say if the next census were to
report that half of black America was dead and the other half dying.

Unfortunate? Unfortunate. But where is the misfortune? Mine? Am I, in my
blackness, the sole sufferer? I suffer. And yet, somehow, above the
suffering, above the shackled anger that beats the bars, above the hurt
that crazes there surges in me a vast pity,--pity for a people
imprisoned and enthralled, hampered and made miserable for such a cause,
for such a phantasy!

Conceive this nation, of all human peoples, engaged in a crusade to
make the "World Safe for Democracy"! Can you imagine the United States
protesting against Turkish atrocities in Armenia, while the Turks are
silent about mobs in Chicago and St. Louis; what is Louvain compared
with Memphis, Waco, Washington, Dyersburg, and Estill Springs? In short,
what is the black man but America's Belgium, and how could America
condemn in Germany that which she commits, just as brutally, within her
own borders?

A true and worthy ideal frees and uplifts a people; a false ideal
imprisons and lowers. Say to men, earnestly and repeatedly: "Honesty is
best, knowledge is power; do unto others as you would be done by." Say
this and act it and the nation must move toward it, if not to it. But
say to a people: "The one virtue is to be white," and the people rush to
the inevitable conclusion, "Kill the 'nigger'!"

Is not this the record of present America? Is not this its headlong
progress? Are we not coming more and more, day by day, to making the
statement "I am white," the one fundamental tenet of our practical
morality? Only when this basic, iron rule is involved is our defense of
right nation-wide and prompt. Murder may swagger, theft may rule and
prostitution may flourish and the nation gives but spasmodic,
intermittent and lukewarm attention. But let the murderer be black or
the thief brown or the violator of womanhood have a drop of Negro blood,
and the righteousness of the indignation sweeps the world. Nor would
this fact make the indignation less justifiable did not we all know that
it was blackness that was condemned and not crime.

In the awful cataclysm of World War, where from beating, slandering, and
murdering us the white world turned temporarily aside to kill each
other, we of the Darker Peoples looked on in mild amaze.

Among some of us, I doubt not, this sudden descent of Europe into hell
brought unbounded surprise; to others, over wide area, it brought the
_Schaden Freude_ of the bitterly hurt; but most of us, I judge, looked
on silently and sorrowfully, in sober thought, seeing sadly the prophecy
of our own souls.

Here is a civilization that has boasted much. Neither Roman nor Arab,
Greek nor Egyptian, Persian nor Mongol ever took himself and his own
perfectness with such disconcerting seriousness as the modern white man.
We whose shame, humiliation, and deep insult his aggrandizement so often
involved were never deceived. We looked at him clearly, with world-old
eyes, and saw simply a human thing, weak and pitiable and cruel, even as
we are and were.

These super-men and world-mastering demi-gods listened, however, to no
low tongues of ours, even when we pointed silently to their feet of
clay. Perhaps we, as folk of simpler soul and more primitive type, have
been most struck in the welter of recent years by the utter failure of
white religion. We have curled our lips in something like contempt as we
have witnessed glib apology and weary explanation. Nothing of the sort
deceived us. A nation's religion is its life, and as such white
Christianity is a miserable failure.

Nor would we be unfair in this criticism: We know that we, too, have
failed, as you have, and have rejected many a Buddha, even as you have
denied Christ; but we acknowledge our human frailty, while you, claiming
super-humanity, scoff endlessly at our shortcomings.

The number of white individuals who are practising with even reasonable
approximation the democracy and unselfishness of Jesus Christ is so
small and unimportant as to be fit subject for jest in Sunday
supplements and in _Punch_, _Life_, _Le Rire_, and _Fliegende Blaetter_.
In her foreign mission work the extraordinary self-deception of white
religion is epitomized: solemnly the white world sends five million
dollars worth of missionary propaganda to Africa each year and in the
same twelve months adds twenty-five million dollars worth of the vilest
gin manufactured. Peace to the augurs of Rome!

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