Читать книгу Through Afro-America: An English Reading of the Race Problem - Archer William - Страница 5

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The scene is Chicago; the occasion, a luncheon-party at the Cliff-Dwellers’ Club. All the intellect and talent of the Middle West (I am credibly assured) are gathered round one long table. I mention to an eminent man of letters that I am going into the South.

“Well,” he says, “you are going into a country that is more foreign to me than most parts of Europe. I do not understand the Southern people, or their way of looking at things. I never feel at home among them. The one thing I have in common with them is a strong antipathy to the black man.”

This, of course, is only an individual point of view; but many other men are listening, and, while some nod assent, no one protests.

But here is another point of view. A few days later I met an old friend, a Philadelphian, who said, “I like the South and the Southerners. They are men of our own stock and our own tongue—even the ‘poor whites’ whom slavery and the hookworm have driven to the wall. In the North we are being jostled and elbowed aside by the foreigner, who murders our speech, and knows nothing and cares nothing about our history or traditions. Yes; give me the South. It is true that, intellectually, it scarcely exists. The Southerner may be living in the twentieth century, but he has skipped the nineteenth. His knowledge of literature, for instance, if he have any at all, stops at the Waverley Novels and ‘The Corsair.’ But I’m not sure that that isn’t part of the charm.”

Thus early did I learn that no two men can talk to you about the South without flatly contradicting each other.

It was evident that my plan must be simply to gather views and impressions as I went along, and trust to sifting and co-ordinating them later.

An invitation, equivalent to a command, called me to Washington. |Nearing the Colour-line.| For a whole day my slow train dragged wearily through Northern Ohio; and in the course of that day two young couples in succession got into my car, who interested me not a little. In each case it seemed to me that the girl had a streak of black blood in her, while the young man was in each case unimpeachably white. As to one of the girls, I was practically certain; as to the other I may have been mistaken. Her features were aquiline and she was uncommonly handsome; but the tint of her skin, and more especially of her eyeballs, strongly suggested an African strain. Both girls were lively, intelligent, well-spoken, well-dressed, well-mannered—distinctly superior, one would have said, to the commonplace youths by whom they were accompanied. Yet I felt pretty certain that a few hours’ travel would have taken them into regions where they would be forbidden by law to sit in the same railroad-car, and where marriage between them would be illegal.^[1]

At any rate, even supposing that in these particular cases my conjecture was mistaken, it was not on the face of it improbable. On the other side of the Ohio River, these girls would have had, so to speak, to clear themselves of the suspicion of African blood, else any association on equal terms between them and their male companions would have been regarded as an outrage. This seemed a senseless and barbarous state of affairs. But I was there to observe, not (as yet) to form conclusions; and I kept my mind open, wondering whether, in the coming weeks, I should discover any reason or excuse for the apparent barbarism.

In Indiana, rain; in Ohio, torrents; at Pittsburg, a deluge. But when I awaken next morning, just on Mason and Dixon’s line, the sun is shining on the woods of Maryland, and I feel at once that the South and the spring are here. |“Summer is i-cumen in.”| These spring coppices are far richer in colour than any of our English woods. They run the whole gamut of green, from the blue-green of the pine to the silver-green of the poplar and the gold-green of the birch; and the greens are freely interspersed with red and yellow foliage, and with white and pink blossoms. The red is that of the maple, whose blush at birth is almost as vivid as its flush in death.

The new Union Station at Washington is a vast and grandiose palace of shining white. Its “concourse” (a new American word for the central hall of a station) seems a really impressive piece of architecture. But it is a Sabbath Day’s journey from the platforms to the cabs; and the porters seem to be making a Sabbath Day of it, for I cannot find a single one. Let me not embark, however, on the endless story of a traveller’s tribulations. Every country has its own inconveniences, and recriminations are not only idle but mischievous.

The city of Washington is one great sea of exquisite green, out of which the buildings rise like marble rocks and islands. Yes, I am in the South; the leafless elms of New England and the shrewd, bracing blasts of New York are left behind.

And this day of sunshine was the first of many days. Save for a few thunder-showers, the South was to be all sunshine for me.

And with the sunshine—the Negro. Here he is in his thousands, and in his deepest dye. |A Question of Elbow-room.| In the North one sees him now and then, but he is swamped and submerged in the crowds of the great cities. To be very clearly conscious of his presence you must go to special quarters of New York or Chicago. “Coloured persons” (seldom pure blacks) are waiters at hotels and clubs, but no longer at the best hotels and clubs. The Pullman porter is always coloured; so are most, if not all, of the ordinary railway porters—when there are any. But “at the North” (as they say here) you have to go out of your way to find any problem in the negro. The black strand in the web of life is not yet particularly prominent—whatever it may be destined to become.

But here in Washington the web of life is a chequer of black-and-white—a shepherd’s tartan, I think they call it. In 1900 there were over 85,000 negroes in the city—now there must be at least 100,000, in a total population of considerably under a quarter of a million, or something like the population of Nottingham.

Imagine nearly half the population of Nottingham suddenly converted into black and brown people—people different not only in colour but in many other physical characteristics from you and me. Imagine that all the most striking of these differences are in the direction of what our deepest instincts, inherited through a thousand generations, compel us to regard as ugliness—an ugliness often grotesque and simian.^[2] Imagine that this horrible metamorphosis--or, if you shy at the word “horrible,” let us say fantastic—imagine this fantastic metamorphosis to have taken place as a punishment for certain ancestral crimes and stupidities, of which the living men and women of to-day are personally innocent. Can you conceive that, after the first shock of surprise was over, Nottingham would take up life again as a mere matter of course, feeling that there was no misfortune in this mingling of incongruities, no problem in the adjustment of their relations?

Do not object that in Washington there has been no sudden metamorphosis, but that the condition of things has gradually come to pass through the slow operation of historic forces. That makes no real difference, save that the Washingtonian has no “first shock of surprise” to get over. The essence of the matter is that half of the elbow-room of life is taken up by an alien race. Even disregarding, as (perhaps) temporary and corrigible, the condition of hostility between the races, we cannot but see in the bare fact of their juxtaposition in almost equal numbers, and, theoretically, on a standing of equal citizenship, an anomalous condition of affairs, as to the probable outcome of which history affords us no guidance.

Walk the streets of Washington for a single day, and you will realize that the colour-problem is not, as some English and Northern American writers assume, a chimera sprung from nothing but the inhuman prejudice of the Southern white. It is not a simple matter which a little patience and good-temper will presently arrange. It is a real, a terrible difficulty, not to be overcome by happy-go-lucky humanitarianism.

It may be a great pity that Nature implanted race-instincts deep in our breasts—Nature has done so many thoughtless things in her day. But there they are, not to be ignored or sentimentalized away. They are part of the stuff of human character, out of which the future must be shaped. The wise statesman will no more disregard them than the wise carpenter will disregard the grain of a piece of timber—or the knots in it.

One principle I arrived at very early in this investigation—namely, that black is not always white, nor white invariably black.

1. “Intermarriage between the races is forbidden by law in all the Southern States, and also in the following Northern and Western States: Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Utah. In all other Northern and Western States marriage between the races is lawful.”—Ray Stannard Baker: “Following the Colour-Line.”

2. There is no doubt, I think, that the white man—and here I mean not the Southerner, nor the American, but the white man as such—resents in extremes of the negro type just that air of caricaturing humanity which renders the monkey tribe so painful and humiliating to contemplate. This seems an inhuman saying, but instinctive emotions are fundamental facts which it is useless to blink. And the suggestion of caricature is the stronger, the more closely the negro mimics the white man in dress and bearing. In Washington, on a Sunday, one meets scores of fat, middle-aged negro women, decked out in an exaggerated extreme of European fashion, from whom one can only look away as from something grotesque and degrading—a page of Swift at his bitterest. Yet the same women in cotton gowns and bandana headgear might look far from unpleasing. No doubt the like uneasy sense of humiliation besets one on seeing white women decked in finery unsuited to their age or their contours. But that does not alter the fact that the urban negro of either sex, when he or she indulges in extremes of European adornment, is a spectacle highly disturbing to Caucasian self-complacency. Caricature is none the more agreeable for being, in a certain sense, just.