Darkwater by W. E. B. Du Bois

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Capital could not only be accumulated in Africa, but attracted from the
white world, with one great difference from present usage: no return so
fabulous would be offered that civilized lands would be tempted to
divert to colonial trade and invest materials and labor needed by the
masses at home, but rather would receive the same modest profits as
legitimate home industry offers.

There is no sense in asserting that the ideal of an African State, thus
governed and directed toward independence and self-government, is
impossible of realization. The first great essential is that the
civilized world believe in its possibility. By reason of a crime
(perhaps the greatest crime in human history) the modern world has been
systematically taught to despise colored peoples. Men of education and
decency ask, and ask seriously, if it is really possible to uplift
Africa. Are Negroes human, or, if human, developed far enough to absorb,
even under benevolent tutelage, any appreciable part of modern culture?
Has not the experiment been tried in Haiti and Liberia, and failed?

One cannot ignore the extraordinary fact that a world campaign beginning
with the slave-trade and ending with the refusal to capitalize the word
"Negro," leading through a passionate defense of slavery by attributing
every bestiality to blacks and finally culminating in the evident modern
profit which lies in degrading blacks,--all this has unconsciously
trained millions of honest, modern men into the belief that black folk
are sub-human. This belief is not based on science, else it would be
held as a postulate of the most tentative kind, ready at any time to be
withdrawn in the face of facts; the belief is not based on history, for
it is absolutely contradicted by Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and
Arabian experience; nor is the belief based on any careful survey of the
social development of men of Negro blood to-day in Africa and America.
It is simply passionate, deep-seated heritage, and as such can be moved
by neither argument nor fact. Only faith in humanity will lead the world
to rise above its present color prejudice.

Those who do believe in men, who know what black men have done in human
history, who have taken pains to follow even superficially the story of
the rise of the Negro in Africa, the West Indies, and the Americas of
our day know that our modern contempt of Negroes rests upon no
scientific foundation worth a moment's attention. It is nothing more
than a vicious habit of mind. It could as easily be overthrown as our
belief in war, as our international hatreds, as our old conception of
the status of women, as our fear of educating the masses, and as our
belief in the necessity of poverty. We can, if we will, inaugurate on
the Dark Continent a last great crusade for humanity. With Africa
redeemed Asia would be safe and Europe indeed triumphant.

I have not mentioned North and South Africa, because my eye was centered
on the main mass of the Negro race. Yet it is clear that for the
development of Central Africa, Egypt should be free and independent,
there along the highway to a free and independent India; while Morocco,
Algeria, Tunis, and Tripoli must become a part of Europe, with modern
development and home rule. South Africa, stripped of its black serfs and
their lands, must admit the resident natives and colored folk to its
body politic as equals.

The hands which Ethiopia shall soon stretch out unto God are not mere
hands of helplessness and supplication, but rather are they hands of
pain and promise; hard, gnarled, and muscled for the world's real work;
they are hands of fellowship for the half-submerged masses of a
distempered world; they are hands of helpfulness for an agonized God!

* * * * *

Twenty centuries before Christ a great cloud swept over seas and settled
on Africa, darkening and well-nigh blotting out the culture of the land
of Egypt. For half a thousand years it rested there, until a black
woman, Queen Nefertari, "the most venerated figure in Egyptian history,"
rose to the throne of the Pharaohs and redeemed the world and her
people. Twenty centuries after Christ, Black Africa,--prostrated, raped,
and shamed, lies at the feet of the conquering Philistines of Europe.
Beyond the awful sea a black woman is weeping and waiting, with her sons
on her breast. What shall the end be? The world-old and fearful
things,--war and wealth, murder and luxury? Or shall it be a new
thing,--a new peace and a new democracy of all races,--a great humanity
of equal men? "_Semper novi quid ex Africa_!"

_The Princess of the Hither Isles_

Her soul was beautiful, wherefore she kept it veiled in lightly-laced
humility and fear, out of which peered anxiously and anon the white and
blue and pale-gold of her face,-beautiful as daybreak or as the laughing
of a child. She sat in the Hither Isles, well walled between the This
and Now, upon a low and silver throne, and leaned upon its armposts,
sadly looking upward toward the sun. Now the Hither Isles are flat and
cold and swampy, with drear-drab light and all manner of slimy, creeping
things, and piles of dirt and clouds of flying dust and sordid scraping
and feeding and noise.

She hated them and ever as her hands and busy feet swept back the dust
and slime her soul sat silver-throned, staring toward the great hill to
the westward, which shone so brilliant-golden beneath the sunlight and
above the sea.

The sea moaned and with it moaned the princess' soul, for she was
lonely,--very, very lonely, and full weary of the monotone of life. So
she was glad to see a moving in Yonder Kingdom on the mountainside,
where the sun shone warm, and when the king of Yonder Kingdom, silken in
robe and golden-crowned and warded by his hound, walked down along the
restless waters and sat beside the armpost of her throne, she wondered
why she could not love him and fly with him up the shining mountain's
side, out of the dirt and dust that nested between the This and Now. She
looked at him and tried to be glad, for he was bonny and good to look
upon, this king of Yonder Kingdom,--tall and straight, thin-lipped and
white and tawny. So, again, this last day, she strove to burn life into
his singularly sodden clay,--to put his icy soul aflame wherewith to
warm her own, to set his senses singing. Vacantly he heard her winged
words, staring and curling his long mustaches with vast thoughtfulness.
Then he said:

"We've found more gold in Yonder Kingdom."

"Hell seize your gold!" blurted the princess.

"No,--it's mine," he maintained stolidly.

She raised her eyes. "It belongs," she said, "to the Empire of the Sun."

"Nay,--the Sun belongs to us," said the king calmly as he glanced to
where Yonder Kingdom blushed above the sea. She glanced, too, and a
softness crept into her eyes.

"No, no," she murmured as with hesitating pause she raised her eyes
above the sea, above the hill, up into the sky where the sun hung silent
and splendid. Its robes were heaven's blue, lined and broidered in
living flame, and its crown was one vast jewel, glistening in glittering
glory that made the sun's own face a blackness,--the blackness of utter
light. With blinded, tear-filled eyes she peered into that formless
black and burning face and sensed in its soft, sad gleam unfathomed
understanding. With sudden, wild abandon she stretched her arms toward
it appealing, beseeching, entreating, and lo!

"Niggers and dagoes," said the king of Yonder Kingdom, glancing
carelessly backward and lighting in his lips a carefully rolled wisp of
fragrant tobacco. She looked back, too, but in half-wondering terror,
for it seemed--

A beggar man was creeping across the swamp, shuffling through the dirt
and slime. He was little and bald and black, rough-clothed, sodden with
dirt, and bent with toil. Yet withal something she sensed about him and
it seemed,--

The king of Yonder Kingdom lounged more comfortably beside the silver
throne and let curl a tiny trail of light-blue smoke.

"I hate beggars," he said, "especially brown and black ones." And he
then pointed at the beggar's retinue and laughed,--an unpleasant laugh,
welded of contempt and amusement. The princess looked and shrank on her
throne. He, the beggar man, was--was what? But his retinue,--that
squalid, sordid, parti-colored band of vacant, dull-faced filth and
viciousness--was writhing over the land, and he and they seemed almost
crouching underneath the scorpion lash of one tall skeleton, that looked
like Death, and the twisted woman whom men called Pain. Yet they all
walked as one.

The King of Yonder Kingdom laughed, but the princess shrank on her
throne, and the king on seeing her thus took a gold-piece from out of
his purse and tossed it carelessly to the passing throng. She watched it
with fascinated eyes,--how it rose and sailed and whirled and struggled
in the air, then seemed to burst, and upward flew its light and sheen
and downward dropped its dross. She glanced at the king, but he was
lighting a match. She watched the dross wallow in the slime, but the
sunlight fell on the back of the beggar's neck, and he turned his head.

The beggar passing afar turned his head and the princess straightened
on her throne; he turned his head and she shivered forward on her
silver seat; he looked upon her full and slow and suddenly she saw
within that formless black and burning face the same soft, glad gleam of
utter understanding, seen so many times before. She saw the suffering of
endless years and endless love that softened it. She saw the burning
passion of the sun and with it the cold, unbending duty-deeds of upper
air. All she had seen and dreamed of seeing in the rising, blazing sun
she saw now again and with it myriads more of human tenderness, of
longing, and of love. So, then, she knew. She rose as to a dream come
true, with solemn face and waiting eyes.

With her rose the king of Yonder Kingdom, almost eagerly.

"You'll come?" he cried. "You'll come and see my gold?" And then in
sudden generosity, he added: "You'll have a golden throne,-up there-when
we marry."

But she, looking up and on with radiant face, answered softly: "I come."

So down and up and on they mounted,-the black beggar man and his
cavalcade of Death and Pain, and then a space; and then a lone, black
hound that nosed and whimpered as he ran, and then a space; and then the
king of Yonder Kingdom in his robes, and then a space; and last the
princess of the Hither Isles, with face set sunward and lovelight in her
eyes.

And so they marched and struggled on and up through endless years and
spaces and ever the black beggar looked back past death and pain toward
the maid and ever the maid strove forward with lovelit eyes, but ever
the great and silken shoulders of the king of Yonder Kingdom arose
between the princess and the sun like a cloud of storms.

Now, finally, they neared unto the hillsides topmost shoulder and there
most eagerly the king bent to the bowels of the earth and bared its
golden entrails,-all green and gray and rusted-while the princess
strained her pitiful eyes aloft to where the beggar, set 'twixt Death
and Pain, whirled his slim back against the glory of the setting sun and
stood somber in his grave majesty, enhaloed and transfigured,
outstretching his long arms, and around all heaven glittered jewels in a
cloth of gold.

A while the princess stood and moaned in mad amaze, then with one wilful
wrench she bared the white flowers of her breast and snatching forth her
own red heart held it with one hand aloft while with the other she
gathered close her robe and poised herself.

The king of Yonder Kingdom looked upward quickly, curiously, still
fingering the earth, and saw the offer of her bleeding heart.

"It's a Negro!" he growled darkly; "it may not be."

The woman quivered.

"It's a nigger!" he repeated fiercely. "It's neither God nor man, but a
nigger!"

The princess stepped forward.

The king grasped his sword and looked north and east; he raised his
sword and looked south and west.

"I seek the sun," the princess sang, and started into the west.

"Never!" cried the king of Yonder Kingdom, "for such were blasphemy and
defilement and the making of all evil."

So, raising his great sword he struck with all his might, and more. Down
hissed the blow and it bit that little, white, heart-holding hand until
it flew armless and disbodied up through the sunlit air. Down hissed the
blow and it clove the whimpering hound until his last shriek shook the
stars. Down hissed the blow and it rent the earth. It trembled, fell
apart, and yawned to a chasm wide as earth from heaven, deep as hell,
and empty, cold, and silent.

On yonder distant shore blazed the mighty Empire of the Sun in warm and
blissful radiance, while on this side, in shadows cold and dark, gloomed
the Hither Isles and the hill that once was golden, but now was green
and slimy dross; all below was the sad and moaning sea, while between
the Here and There flew the severed hand and dripped the bleeding heart.

Then up from the soul of the princess welled a cry of dark
despair,--such a cry as only babe-raped mothers know and murdered loves.
Poised on the crumbling edge of that great nothingness the princess
hung, hungering with her eyes and straining her fainting ears against
the awful splendor of the sky.

Out from the slime and shadows groped the king, thundering: "Back--don't
be a fool!"

But down through the thin ether thrilled the still and throbbing warmth
of heaven's sun, whispering "Leap!"

And the princess leapt.

IV

OF WORK AND WEALTH

For fifteen years I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the
fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of
half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and
replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder.

The teacher's life is a double one. He stands in a certain fear. He
tends to be stilted, almost dishonest, veiling himself before those
awful eyes. Not the eyes of Almighty God are so straight, so
penetrating, so all-seeing as the wonder-swept eyes of youth. You walk
into a room: to the left is a tall window, bright with colors of crimson
and gold and sunshine. Here are rows of books and there is a table.
Somber blackboards clothe the walls to the right and beside your desk is
the delicate ivory of a nobly cast head. But you see nothing of this:
you see only a silence and eyes,--fringed, soft eyes; hard eyes; eyes
great and small; eyes here so poignant with beauty that the sob
struggles in your throat; eyes there so hard with sorrow that laughter
wells up to meet and beat it back; eyes through which the mockery and
ridicule of hell or some pulse of high heaven may suddenly flash. Ah!
That mighty pause before the class,--that orison and benediction--how
much of my life it has been and made.

I fought earnestly against posing before my class. I tried to be natural
and honest and frank, but it was a bitter hard. What would you say to a
soft, brown face, aureoled in a thousand ripples of gray-black hair,
which knells suddenly: "Do you trust white people?" You do not and you
know that you do not, much as you want to; yet you rise and lie and say
you do; you must say it for her salvation and the world's; you repeat
that she must trust them, that most white folks are honest, and all the
while you are lying and every level, silent eye there knows you are
lying, and miserably you sit and lie on, to the greater glory of God.

I taught history and economics and something called "sociology" at
Atlanta University, where, as our Mr. Webster used to say, we professors
occupied settees and not mere chairs. I was fortunate with this teaching
in having vivid in the minds of my pupils a concrete social problem of
which we all were parts and which we desperately desired to solve. There
was little danger, then, of my teaching or of their thinking becoming
purely theoretical. Work and wage were thrilling realities to us all.
What did we study? I can tell you best by taking a concrete human case,
such as was continually leaping to our eyes and thought and demanding
understanding and interpretation and what I could bring of prophecy.

* * * * *

St. Louis sprawls where mighty rivers meet,--as broad as Philadelphia,
but three stories high instead of two, with wider streets and dirtier
atmosphere, over the dull-brown of wide, calm rivers. The city overflows
into the valleys of Illinois and lies there, writhing under its grimy
cloud. The other city is dusty and hot beyond all dream,--a feverish
Pittsburg in the Mississippi Valley--a great, ruthless, terrible thing!
It is the sort that crushes man and invokes some living superman,--a
giant of things done, a clang of awful accomplishment.

Three men came wandering across this place. They were neither kings nor
wise men, but they came with every significance--perhaps even
greater--than that which the kings bore in the days of old. There was
one who came from the North,--brawny and riotous with energy, a man of
concentrated power, who held all the thunderbolts of modern capital in
his great fists and made flour and meat, iron and steel, cunning
chemicals, wood, paint and paper, transforming to endless tools a
disemboweled earth. He was one who saw nothing, knew nothing, sought
nothing but the making and buying of that which sells; who out from the
magic of his hand rolled over miles of iron road, ton upon ton of food
and metal and wood, of coal and oil and lumber, until the thronging of
knotted ways in East and real St. Louis was like the red, festering
ganglia of some mighty heart.

Then from the East and called by the crash of thunderbolts and
forked-flame came the Unwise Man,--unwise by the theft of endless ages,
but as human as anything God ever made. He was the slave for the miracle
maker. It was he that the thunderbolts struck and electrified into
gasping energy. The rasp of his hard breathing shook the midnights of
all this endless valley and the pulse of his powerful arms set the great
nation to trembling.

And then, at last, out of the South, like a still, small voice, came the
third man,--black, with great eyes and greater memories; hesitantly
eager and yet with the infinite softness and ancient calm which come
from that eternal race whose history is not the history of a day, but
of endless ages. Here, surely, was fit meeting-place for these curiously
intent forces, for these epoch-making and age-twisting forces, for these
human feet on their super-human errands.

Yesterday I rode in East St. Louis. It is the kind of place one quickly
recognizes,--tireless and with no restful green of verdure; hard and
uneven of street; crude, cold, and even hateful of aspect; conventional,
of course, in its business quarter, but quickly beyond one sees the ruts
and the hollows, the stench of ill-tamed sewerage, unguarded railroad
crossings, saloons outnumbering churches and churches catering to
saloons; homes impudently strait and new, prostitutes free and happy,
gamblers in paradise, the town "wide open," shameless and frank; great
factories pouring out stench, filth, and flame--these and all other
things so familiar in the world market places, where industry triumphs
over thought and products overwhelm men. May I tell, too, how yesterday
I rode in this city past flame-swept walls and over gray ashes; in
streets almost wet with blood and beside ruins, where the bones of dead
men new-bleached peered out at me in sullen wonder?

Across the river, in the greater city, where bronze St. Louis,--that
just and austere king--looks with angry, fear-swept eyes down from the
rolling heights of Forest Park, which knows him not nor heeds him, there
is something of the same thing, but this city is larger and older and
the forces of evil have had some curbing from those who have seen the
vision and panted for life; but eastward from St. Louis there is a land
of no taxes for great industries; there is a land where you may buy
grafting politicians at far less rate than you would pay for franchises
or privileges in a modern town. There, too, you may escape the buying of
indulgences from the great terminal fist, which squeezes industry out of
St. Louis. In fact, East St. Louis is a paradise for high and frequent
dividends and for the piling up of wealth to be spent in St. Louis and
Chicago and New York and when the world is sane again, across the seas.

So the Unwise Men pouring out of the East,--falling, scrambling, rushing
into America at the rate of a million a year,--ran, walked, and crawled
to this maelstrom of the workers. They garnered higher wage than ever
they had before, but not all of it came in cash. A part, and an
insidious part, was given to them transmuted into whiskey, prostitutes,
and games of chance. They laughed and disported themselves. God! Had not
their mothers wept enough? It was a good town. There was no veil of
hypocrisy here, but a wickedness, frank, ungilded, and open. To be sure,
there were things sometimes to reveal the basic savagery and thin
veneer. Once, for instance, a man was lynched for brawling on the public
square of the county seat; once a mayor who sought to "clean up" was
publicly assassinated; always there was theft and rumors of theft,
until St. Clair County was a hissing in good men's ears; but always,
too, there were good wages and jolly hoodlums and unchecked wassail of
Saturday nights. Gamblers, big and little, rioted in East St. Louis. The
little gamblers used cards and roulette wheels and filched the weekly
wage of the workers. The greater gamblers used meat and iron and undid
the foundations of the world. All the gods of chance flaunted their wild
raiment here, above the brown flood of the Mississippi.

Then the world changed; then civilization, built for culture, rebuilt
itself for wilful murder in Europe, Asia, America, and the Southern
Seas. Hands that made food made powder, and iron for railways was iron
for guns. The wants of common men were forgotten before the groan of
giants. Streams of gold, lost from the world's workers, filtered and
trickled into the hands of gamblers and put new power into the
thunderbolts of East St. Louis.

Wages had been growing before the World War. Slowly but remorselessly
the skilled and intelligent, banding themselves, had threatened the
coffers of the mighty, and slowly the mighty had disgorged. Even the
common workers, the poor and unlettered, had again and again gripped the
sills of the city walls and pulled themselves to their chins; but, alas!
there were so many hands and so many mouths and the feet of the
Disinherited kept coming across the wet paths of the sea to this old El
Dorado.

War brought subtle changes. Wages stood still while prices fattened. It
was not that the white American worker was threatened with starvation,
but it was what was, after all, a more important question,--whether or
not he should lose his front-room and victrola and even the dream of a
Ford car.

There came a whirling and scrambling among the workers,--they fought
each other; they climbed on each others' backs. The skilled and
intelligent, banding themselves even better than before, bargained with
the men of might and held them by bitter threats; the less skilled and
more ignorant seethed at the bottom and tried, as of old, to bring it
about that the ignorant and unlettered should learn to stand together
against both capital and skilled labor.

It was here that there came out of the East a beam of unearthly
light,--a triumph of possible good in evil so strange that the workers
hardly believed it. Slowly they saw the gates of Ellis Island closing,
slowly the footsteps of the yearly million men became fainter and
fainter, until the stream of immigrants overseas was stopped by the
shadow of death at the very time when new murder opened new markets over
all the world to American industry; and the giants with the thunderbolts
stamped and raged and peered out across the world and called for men and
evermore,--men!

The Unwise Men laughed and squeezed reluctant dollars out of the fists
of the mighty and saw in their dream the vision of a day when labor, as
they knew it, should come into its own; saw this day and saw it with
justice and with right, save for one thing, and that was the sound of
the moan of the Disinherited, who still lay without the walls. When they
heard this moan and saw that it came not across the seas, they were at
first amazed and said it was not true; and then they were mad and said
it should not be. Quickly they turned and looked into the red blackness
of the South and in their hearts were fear and hate!

What did they see? They saw something at which they had been taught to
laugh and make sport; they saw that which the heading of every newspaper
column, the lie of every cub reporter, the exaggeration of every press
dispatch, and the distortion of every speech and book had taught them
was a mass of despicable men, inhuman; at best, laughable; at worst, the
meat of mobs and fury.

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