ORATORS AND ACTORS, PREACHERS AND SINGERS

The aspirations and convictions of the Negroes of to-day were well voiced in a speech I heard at Harlem. I had been warned that I ought to hear the “red-hot orator of the Afro-American race,” and so I went to hear him. The orator was Dean Pickens, of Morgan College, Baltimore. When he came to the platform the colored audience not only cheered him by clapping, but stood up and cried aloud three times:

“Yea, Pickens!”

The chairman had said he would have to leave about half after five, but the speaker must not allow himself to be disturbed by that, but go right on. Pickens, who was one of the very black and very cheerful types of his race, turned to the chairman and said:

“You won’t disturb me, brother! But if you’re going at half after five, let’s shake hands right now, and then I can go straight ahead.”

And they shook hands with great gusto, and everyone laughed and felt at ease. Pickens was going to speak; nothing could disturb Pickens; they relaxed themselves to a joyful, anticipatory calm.

Just before the turn of Pickens to speak a white lady journalist had rushed on to the platform and rushed off between two pressing engagements, and had given the audience a “heart-to-heart” talk on Bolsheviks and agitators, and had told them how thankful they ought to be that they were in America and not in the Congo still. She gained a good deal of applause because she was a woman, and a White, and was glib, but the thinking Negroes did not care for her doctrine, and were sorry she could not wait to hear it debated.

“Brothers, they’re always telling us what we ought to be,” said the orator, with an engaging smile. “But there are many different opinions about what ought to be; it’s what we are that matters. As a colored pastor said to his flock one day—’Brothers and sisters, it’s not the oughtness of this problem that we have to consider, but the isness!’ I am going to speak about the isness. Sister S——, who has just spoken, has had to go to make a hurry call elsewhere, but I am sorry she could not stay. I think she might perhaps have heard something worth while this afternoon. Sister S—— warned us against agitators and radicals. Now, I am not against or for agitators. The question is: ’What are they agitating about?’ ‘Show me the agitator,’ I say. President Wilson is a great agitator; he is agitating a League of Nations. Jesus Christ was a great agitator; He agitated Christianity. The Pharisees and Sadducees didn’t like His agitating, and they fixed Him. But He was a good agitator, and we’re not against Him. Then, again, the Irish are great agitators; the Jews are great agitators; there are good and bad agitators. (Applause.) But, brothers, I’ll tell you who is the greatest agitator in this country ... the greatest agitator is injustice. (Sensation.) When injustice disappears, I’ll be against agitators, or I’ll be ready to see them put in a lunatic asylum. (Applause.)

“Sister S—— was very hard on the radicals. There, again, show me the radical, I say. A man may be radically wrong, yes, but he may also be radically right. (Laughter.)

“As for the Bolsheviks, it’s injustice is making Bolshevism. It’s injustice that changes quiet, inoffensive school teachers and workingmen into Bolsheviks, just as it is injustice is stirring up the colored people. Not that we are Bolsheviks. I am not going to say anything against Bolsheviks, either. Show me the Bolshevik first, I say, and then I’ll know whether I’m against him. People are alarmed because the number of Bolsheviks is increasing. But what is making them increase? If America is such a blessed country, why is she making all these Bolsheviks? You know a tree by its fruits, and so you may know a country by what it produces. These Bolsheviks that we read of being deported in the Soviet Ark weren’t Bolshevik when they came to this country. It comes to this: that we’ve raised a crop of Bolshevism in this country and are exporting it to Europe, and now we’re busy sowing another crop. Stop sowing injustice, and Bolshevism will cease growing. (Applause again.)

“But there is less Bolshevism among the colored people than among the white, because the colored are more humble, more subservient, more used to inequalities. We are always being told that we are backward, and we believe it; bad, and we believe it; untrustworthy, and we believe it; immoral, and we believe it. We are always being told what we ought to be. But I’ll come back to what we are.

“We may be immoral; we may be a danger to the white women. But has anyone ever honestly compared the morality of Whites and Blacks? They will tell you there is not sufficient evidence to make a comparison, or they will bring you pamphlets and paragraphs out of newspapers, records of disgusting crimes; and we know very well that in twelve million Negroes there are bound to be some half-wits and criminals capable of terrible breaches of morality. But at best it is a paper evidence against the Negro, while there is flesh-and-blood evidence against the White. The moral standard of the Whites is written visibly in the flesh and blood of three million of our race. (Another sensation.) Brothers, there’s one standard for the white man, and another for the colored man. (Sensation redoubled.) A colored man’s actions are not judged in the same light as those of a white man.

“Well, I’m not against that. It is giving us a higher ideal. A colored man has got to be much more careful in this country than a white man. He’ll be more heavily punished for the same crime. If he gets into a dispute with a white man he’s bound to lose his case. So he won’t get into the dispute. (Laughter.) Where a white man gets five years’ imprisonment, the Negro gets put in the electric chair. Where the white man gets six days, he gets two years. If a white man seduces a colored girl, she never gets redress. If the other thing occurs, the Negro is legally executed, or lynched. What is the result of all that inequality? Why, it is making us a more moral, less criminal, less violent people than the Whites. Once at a mixed school they were teaching the black and white boys to jump. The white boys jumped and the black boys jumped. But when it was the black boy’s turn the teacher always lifted the jumping stick a few inches. What was the consequence? Why, after a while every colored boy in that school could jump at least a foot higher than any white boy. (Renewed sensation, in which Pickens attempted several times to resume.)

“That is what is happening to the Negro race in America. We are being taught to jump a foot higher than the Whites. We will jump it, or we will break our necks. (Laughter.)

“Of course a great difference separates the Black from the White still. And I don’t say that the white man hasn’t given us a chance. If our positions had been transposed, and we had been masters and the white folks had been the slaves, I’m not sure that we wouldn’t have treated them worse than they have treated us. But the white folk make a mistake when they think we’re not taking the chances they give us. We are taking them. We are covering the ground that separates Black from White. The white man is not outstripping us in the race. We are nearer to him than we were—not farther away. We haven’t caught up, but we’re touching. We are always doing things we never did before. (Applause.)

“We shall not have cause to regret the time of persecution and injustice and the higher standard of morality that has been set us. Brothers, it’s all worth while. Our boys here have been to France and bled and suffered for white civilization and white justice. We didn’t want to go. We didn’t know anything about it. But it’s been good for us. We’ve made the cause of universal justice our cause. We have taken a share in world sufferings and world politics. It’s going to help raise us out of our obscurity. We have discovered the French, and shall always be grateful to them. We didn’t know France before, but every colored soldier is glad now that he fought for France. If there is to be a League of Nations, we know France will stand by us. And we shall have a share in the councils of Humanity—with our colored brethren in all parts of the world.” (Sensation again.)

The orator spoke for two hours, and the above is only a personal remembrance put down afterwards. His actual speech is therefore much shortened. But that was the sense and the flavor of it. It was given in a voice of humor and challenge, resonant, and yet everlastingly whimsical. Laughter rippled the whole time. I shook hands with him afterwards; for he was warm and eloquent and moving as few speakers I have heard. He was utterly exhausted, for he had drawn his words from his audience, and two thousand people had been pulling at his spirit for two hours.

It was delightful to listen to a race propagandist so devoid of hatred, malice, and uncharitableness. Some regard humor as the greatest concomitant of wisdom, and this representative Negro certainly had both. He never touched on the tragedy of race hatred and racial injustice, but he saw the humor of them also. And the colored audience saw the humor also. With the English there would have been anger, with the French spontaneous insurrection, with the Jews gnashing of teeth, but with the Negroes it was humor. There was no collective hate or spite, but, manifest always, a desire to be happy, even in the worst circumstances.

It is curious, however, that the Negro has a livelier sense of the humor of tragedy than the white man. For two months I visited a Negro theatre every week, and I was much struck by the fact that where there was most cause to weep or feel melancholy, the colored audience was most provoked to mirth. Negro companies, such as the Lafayette Players, play “Broadway successes,” melodramas, classical dramas, musical comedies, and indeed anything that would be staged in a white man’s theatre. But the result is nearly always comedy. As upon occasion white men burn cork and make up as Negroes, so the Negroes paint themselves white and make up as white men and women. Watching them is an entrancing study, because there is not only the original drama and its interest, but superadded the interpretation by Africans of what they think the white man is and does and says. Some of it is like the servants’ hall dressed up as master and mistress and their friends, but has remarkable felicity in acting. A large party, all in full evening dress, is very striking—only the Negro women are on the average so huge that when painted white and exposing vast fronts of bosoms, they are somewhat incredible. A typical evening party on the stage, with villain and hero, looks very handsome, but not in any way Anglo-Saxon, if conceivably foreign American. The hero may have a perfectly villainous expression. One’s mind is taken away from America to the Mediterranean. Even when painted, it is impossible to look other than children of the sun. The drama is played with a great deal of noise. When the moments of passion arrive, everyone lets himself go, and the stage is swallowed up in a hurly-burly of violent word and action. There is never any difficulty in hearing what is being said. But even the minor characters, such as butler and waiter, who should be practically mute, insist on whistling and singing as they go about, and serve the guests in a pas de danse. In one serious melodrama the butler never appeared but he hummed resonantly the popular air: “Yakky, Yekky, Yikky, Yokky Doola.” The villain or villainess is likely to act the part with great verve, and generally I remarked a true aptitude for acting, an ability which noise and violence could not hide. A white drama is literally transformed on the Negro stage. The Negroes catch hold of any childishness or piece of make-believe and give it a sort of poetry. Thus, for instance, Miss Elenor Porter’s “Polyanna,” with its gospel of “Be glad,” is a cloying sentimentalism in the hands of the ordinary white company. But the Negroes make it into a sort of “Alice in Wonderland,” very amusing, very sweet, and very touching—something entirely delightful. The consciousness of the white person sitting in the colored theater is, however, continually disturbed by ripples of tittering whenever on the stage there is a suggestion of calamity. When it is melodrama that is being played, the audience laughs all the time like a collection of intellectuals who have visited a popular theatre to watch “The Silver King” or “The Girl’s Crossroads.” The very suggestion of disaster is funny.

This is an indication of difference in soul. There are many who would see in these white-painted Negroes another instance of a passion for the imitation of white people. But one could hardly point to anything that shows more readily the sheer difference of black and white people than the Negro stage such as it is to-day.

There is not as yet a Negro drama, but it certainly will arise. Ridgely Torrence’s “Plays for a Negro Theatre” is perhaps the nearest approach so far to a genuine Negro drama, but the author is white. The great success of these plays when acted by Negroes only shows the glory that awaits the awakening of a true Negro dramatist. Every large city in America has its Negro theatre or music hall or cinema shows. The drama could become an organ of racial self-expression, and could give voice to the hopes and aspirations and sorrows of the colored people in a very moving way. I think such a drama would prove highly original. Comedy would be conceived in a different spirit. So far from the Negro imitating the white man, we should all be found imitating him—as we already imitate him in our dances and music. The new Negro humor would infect the whole Western world.

It is generally called “the blues.” We say we have a fit of the blues when we are feeling depressed. It is not at all a laughing matter, but the Negro finds that state of mind to be always humorous. A hundred new comic songs tell the humor of sorrows. All the gloomy formulas of everyday life have been set to music. Telling one’s hard fortune and howling over it and drawing it out and infinitely bewailing it, and adding circumstantial minor sorrows as one goes along and infinitely bewailing them—this is distinctively Negro humor.

I visited one evening a Negro theatre where a musical comedy was going on—words and music both by Negroes. It opened with the usual singing and dancing chorus of Negro girls. They were clad in yellow and crimson and mauve combinations with white tapes on one side from the lace edge of the knicker to their dusky arms. They danced from the thigh rather than from the knee, moving waist and bosom in unrestrained undulation, girls with large, startled seeming eyes and uncontrollable masses of dark hair. A dance of physical joy and abandon, with no restraint in the toes or the knees, no veiling of the eyes, no half shutting of the lips, no holding in of the hair. Accustomed to the very Æsthetic presentment of the Bacchanalia in the Russian Ballet, it might be difficult to call one of those Negro dancers a Bacchante, and yet there was one whom I remarked again and again, a Queen of Sheba in her looks, a face like starry night, and she was clad slightly in mauve, and went into such ecstasies during the many encores that her hair fell down about her bare shoulders, and her cheeks and knees, glistening with perspiration, outshone her eyes. Following this chorus a love story begins to be developed—a humorous mother-in-law of tremendous proportions and deep bass voice, her black face blackened further to the color of boots, reprimands and pets her scapegrace son, who is the comic loafer. He confers with his “buddy” as to how to win “Baby,” the belle of Dark City. The “buddy” is the lugubriously stupid and faithful and above all comic Negro friend who in trying to help you always does you an ill turn. “Baby” is the beautiful doll of the piece—“Honey baby, sugar baby!” She is courted also by the villain, who is plausible and well dressed and polite, but still provocative of mirth. The hero and the villain do a competitive cake walk for the girl, posturizing, showing off, approaching and retiring, almost squatting and dancing, leaping and dancing, swimming through the air, throwing everything away from them and falling forward, and yet never falling, blowing out their cheeks and dilating their eyes, and, as it were, hoo-dooing and out-hoo-dooing one another, pseudo-enragement, monkey-mocking of one another, feigned stage-fright and pretended escapes. Seeing this done on a first night, the whole theatre was jammed and packed with Negro people, and they recalled the couple nine times, and still they gave encores. One of them, the villain, gave up, but the other, the hero, went on as if still matched, his mouth open and panting, and perspiration streaming through the black grease on his face—for he also had blackened himself further for fun. The wedding service was danced and sung in a “scena” which would have enravished even a Russian audience. I had seen nothing so pretty or so amusing, so bewilderingly full of life and color, since Sanine’s production of the “Fair of Sorochinsky,” in Moscow.

The most characteristic parts of the comedy, however, were to come. It was very lengthy, for Negroes do not observe white conventions regarding time. It would be tedious to describe in words what was wholly delightful to see. But there were two crises when the audience roared with joy excessively. First, when the young husband suspects his wife of flirting with the villain, and second, when he wants to make it up and every imaginable calamity descends upon his head. He arrives at his home about midnight, wearing a terribly tight pair of boots and a suit of old, dusty clothes. There is a party at the house; everyone is in evening dress. He won’t go in to the dance room. He has to sit down and take his boots off, and henceforth walks about holding them in his hands. He sees his wife dancing with the villain, makes a scene, and then dramatically leaves his wife for ever. Left behind, she stares a moment in silence, and then throws herself full length on a low table, kicks up her heels, and vents her unhappiness in a series of prolonged howls and paroxysms which put the audience into a heaven of delight. The tight boots and the limp they cause are blues; the wife’s grief is a blue; and for the rest of the drama the melancholy husband is seen tramping about in his socks, carrying his wretched boots in his hands. His unhappiness is long-drawn-out, but when at last he decides to forgive and comes back home, he is met by the lugubrious “buddy” outside his house, who tells him all his wife has suffered in his absence. The repentant husband looks very miserable.

“And then a little baby boy was born,” says Buddy.

The repentant husband cheers up.

“So like you, such a beauty.”

The husband waxes excited and happy, and asks a flood of questions.

“But the baby died,” says his lugubrious companion.

The poor hero yells with sorrow.

“How Baby wished you were there to see little baby,” says Buddy. “How she talked of you!”

“The little darling—and she has quite forgiven me?”

“She forgave you, all right. Ah, she was a fine woman. You never deserved such a woman as she was, so beautiful, so loving, so tender, so devoted—always saying your name, counting the days you had been away from her and moping and sighing. Ah, it ate into her heart!”

“Yes, Buddy, I am a worthless, miserable nigger, that’s what I am. I didn’t deserve to have her.”

“She said: ‘Oh, for one kiss; oh, for one hug—— ‘”

“I’ll go in to her at once.”

“Stop!” says Buddy impressively.

“Wha’s the matter?”

“She died day after baby was born.”

“No?”

“Yassir. Stone dead. Sure’s I live.”

The poor hero breaks down and sobs and wails and howls and blubbers, distraction in his aspect, his knees knock together, he throws his hat in the dust—and all the while the audience is convulsed with laughter. The Negro women in the stalls find their chairs too small for them and all but fall on to the floor; the smartly dressed Negro youths in the boxes are guffawing from wide-opened mouths and laughing as much with their bodies as with their faces.

“Mother and I went to town to buy the coffin,” says Buddy. “Poor old Mother!”

“Did Mother forgive me?”

“Oh, yes, she forgave you all right. Such a mother as she was. She knew you were bad and wrong and a disgrace, but she loved you. Ah, how she loved you!”

“I am glad there’s poor old Mother.”

“Mother and I arranged for the funerals, but we had to sell up the home. Yes, every stick.”

More and more grief on the part of husband.

“I’ll go in and see her anyway,” says he, moving toward the door.

“Stop!” says Buddy.

“Wha’s the matter?”

“She’s dead ... run over by a trolley car as we were going to the funeral ...” and so on, the dÉnouement of course being that when he is about to go and hang himself he catches a glimpse of Mother, larger, if possible, than life, and he realizes it is all a hoax, and then Baby appears with her little baby—and all is joy.

Of course the play par excellence for a Negro theatre is “Othello,” or rather, for a Negro actor in a mixed cast. Unfortunately, no white company in the United States will allow a Negro actor to take even a subordinate role. Even “nigger” parts, humorous Negro parts, have to be taken by white men. An anomaly to be remedied! The profession of acting is too noble a one for color prejudice to lurk there. I fear, however, that it will be long before mixed companies of white and colored actors perform on the dramatic stage in the United States. “Othello” apparently is seldom played, though the old tragedy of Shakespeare is strangely of the time and apropos. The tragedy of Othello exhibits the same race prejudice existent in the sixteenth century as now, and expresses itself in similar terms. The white woman is not for Moors or Negroes on any terms. It is almost incredible that Desdemona should shun

The wealthy curled darlings of our nation, to incur a general mock,
Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom
Of such a thing as thou.

He must have used an enchantment on her. Othello is the devil. He is a black man. He is a Barbary horse—

You’ll have your nephews neigh to you.
You’ll have coursers for cousins and gennets for Germans.

There is little doubt that by Othello Shakespeare intended a Negro, or, in any case, someone whom the white denizens of New Orleans would call a nigger. “Moor” or “Blackamoor” was the common name for Negro, and the local detail of the play confirms the impression of a thick-lipped, black-bosomed, rather repulsive physical type. The psychology of Othello is, moreover, that of the modern Negro. His florid and sentimental talk, with its romantic yearning and its exaggerations, is very characteristic.

I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth ‘scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my travels’ history:
Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven,
It was my hint to speak,—such was the process;
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.

And are not his last noble words, with his dramatic and romantic gesture, and his suicide, the noble African set upon a pedestal!

Fanny Kemble in her diary tells how John Quincy Adams thought “it served Desdemona right for marrying a ‘nigger,’” and she imagines the fine effect which some American actor in the rÔle of Iago might obtain by substituting for “I hate the Moor” “I hate the nigger,” pronounced in proper Charleston or Savannah fashion. “Only think,” says Fanny Kemble, “what a very new order of interest the whole tragedy might receive acted from this standpoint and called ‘Amalgamation, or the Black Bridal.’”

The sympathy of a Southern audience would be almost exclusively with Iago and Roderigo and the father. But could they tolerate it without a lynching? No Negro company dare produce it south of the Mason-Dixon line.

How the Negroes would perform tragedy in the vein of tragedy I do not know. There is so much tragedy in their history, in their past, that they have sought only comic relief. I believe the characteristic Americanism of “Keep Smiling” or, as expressed in the song, “Smile, Smile, Smile,” comes from the Negro. The colored people as a whole seem to be serious only in church or at musical gatherings. Even the eloquent pastor has no easy task to gain the attention of his congregation. He must walk about and rage and flash, and with crashing reverberations explode the wrath of God like the voice of the Almighty in the storm. He must forget ordinary diction in forgetting himself, and chant in ecstasy and rapture, lifting up his whole soul to the Lord. If you talk to the Negro, he merely laughs; you must chant to him to be taken seriously. In this possibly lies the vein for Negro dramatic tragedy and prophetic poetry. Perhaps, however, the emotional appeal of such will be too strong for Whites.

It is a great ordeal for a sensitive white person to take part in a Negro revival or camp meeting. The emotional strain is tremendous. Though it is difficult to move the Negro, once he is moved he can be rapidly brought to a frenzy which surely has little enough to do with the Christian religion. But even when he is not greatly moved it is somewhat heart-searching for a white person present.

One day I went in at a chapel door. The building was full of Negroes; every seat seemed taken. Perched high above the platform was a black woman, all in black, with a large jet cross on her broad bosom. She was reading from the First Book of Samuel in a great oracular voice which never rose nor fell, but was like a pronouncement of eternal law. I was taken right up to the front and given a seat under her throne. I knew at once that there was likely to be an emotional storm in the audience. It was throbbing on the heartstrings even as I listened to the reading, and I wondered how I should combat it. After the Scripture the Lord’s Prayer was said by a portentous Negro who had the frame of an African warrior. When he went down on his knees he shook the beams of wood and the seats. He prayed angrily, and clapped as he prayed, and interjected remarks.

Thy will be done! Yes, Lord, that’s it, that’s what we want, certainly.

Give us this day our daily bread! Yes, give us it (clap, clap, clap). Give us our daily bread, Lord. Feed us! Feed us, Lord!

The congregation also on all hands interjected its remarks and clapped and praised as the Lord’s Prayer went along.

The woman all in black was a famous mover of souls, and her sermon was evidently the most looked-for religious excitement of the morning. She was a plain woman with a powerful will, a great voice, and a rare knowledge of the Bible. She preached from the text, “Saul hid himself among the stuff.” First she told the story in a quiet voice and then began to make the application. It was no use hiding from God, for He would find you out.

So rousing were her simple words, and such was the atmosphere she was begetting in the midst of her congregation, that I had to do everything in my power to avoid breaking down under the influence and sobbing like a child.

I went over in my mind the drama of “Macbeth,” and reconstructed “Richard the Third,” and called to memory the speeches I had listened to at the Bar dinner the night before, and what I had been doing during the past week and month. But all the while I registered also in my brain the whole of what the black priestess was saying.

Next to me a feminine voice kept crying out: “Help her, Lord, help her!” and I back-pedalled for all I was worth. Presently the preacher was lifted out of the ordinary, everyday voice into a barbaric chant, which rose and fell and acclaimed and declaimed in rhythmical grandeur and music. I dared not look at the woman at my side. But she now lisped out, “She’s all right now, Lord; she’s all right now,” and I thought of the relief of the Welsh when their preachers get into the strain they call the hwyl.

I then very cautiously peered round at the woman. What was my astonishment to see a girl of eighteen with a face like a huge, dusky melon. Her jaws were perfectly relaxed, her eyes half shut, and her upper lip, which was raised, exposed her smiling teeth and a layer of sweet chewing gum.

Meanwhile the Reverend Norah up above was urging us all to come out from behind the stuff. We were always hiding behind our business, behind our families, behind our bodies.

“They are hiding behind their bodies, O Lord!

“Yes, O Lord, they say that they are sick, that they are ill,

“That they cannot do this and they cannot do that because they are feeble in health.

“O come out from behind the stuff!

“You saw Saul hide behind the baggage, O Lord.

“Our Negro brothers and sisters are hiding there to-day.

“Hiding behind their wealth——

“Hiding behind their charity——

“Hiding behind their houses and their clothes and their cars,

“Yes, and their wives and their husbands,

“And other peoples’ opinions.

“But You see them, O Lord,

“You see them, and You’ll bring them out——”

“I’m hiding there right enough,” broke out from the congregation, and “Lord, save us!” “Lord, help us!”

The whole mass of black humanity swayed under the power of the emotion which the woman had kindled. They were about to stand in frenzy and give the great gospel shout of repentance, when something happened; the woman’s strength gave way, and she slipped out of the chant back into her ordinary voice. At once the spell was broken.

The tiniest tots in the congregation then came out carrying little jam jars which they bore to each individual for his collection, and we sang a rolling and clamorous hymn, and all went home.

One note further in the sermon, and there would have been a great scene of conversion at the close of the service, and everyone would have decided to come out from behind his stuff, as the preacher recommended. But it’s better for one’s religion not to be converted every Sunday.

Many white people would no doubt be so greatly amused by a sermon of this kind that they would find difficulty in containing their laughter. One laugh from a white stranger might have proved calamitous, and would certainly have evoked hostility. On the other hand, there are Whites who love psycho-physical religious emotionalism. Such a type is the poet who wrote—

We mourned all our terrible sins away,
And we all found Jesus at the break of the day.
Blessed Jesus!

I never met a Negro who thought it humorous unless it were a member of one sect telling of the “goings-on” in another. Each different race or people seems to have its different characteristic religious expression. When one has seen the exaltation of Copt and Arab in religion, when one has heard the great choric voice of Russia at church, and the splendid, purposeful faith of Teutonic hymns, one knows that a calm singing of “Praise to the Holiest in the Height!” is not the only mode of praise. There are fifty thousand ways of praising God, and every single one of them is right.

So there is no call to chide the Negro for his excess. His ways are part of the natural and Divine history of Man, and it is infinitely worth while to consider them with an open and charitable mind. The hysteria, the frenzy, of some meetings I have observed is not in the white man. There is no use being appalled by it. It is the third part which finishes the man downward, as St. John says in the desert.

“And after these emotional excitements they commit so many murders,” said a Southern woman to me.

“If so, one must be upon one’s guard in the presence of a converted man,” said I.

The foundation of the Negro’s great religious seriousness is to be found in the Negro hymn or “spiritual.” These spirituals were before there were Negro churches, before Christianity was actually allowed to the slaves. That is why they are more often called plantation melodies. They were sung in the twilight of the old plantations, and gave voice to a great human sorrow and a great human need. They show that the Negro has obtained access to the spiritual deeps, that he has a soul as we have—a fact so often denied—and that he is capable of penetrating the sublime. I listened very often to these songs. In several places they were sung to honor a white visitor. I heard them rendered by the Hampton Singers and lectured upon by Harry T. Burleigh, to whose efforts in research the preservation of several are due. There is no question of the excellence of them. They make a great appeal to all people who have music in their souls.

It is, however, a musical effect, not an intellectual one. The words have often little relevance to anything profound, and at best are childish. There is generally a keynote which murmurs through the whole of the song, the function of the basso-profundo who provides a river of harmony like life itself, and the tenors and baritones and the shriller voices move on this flowing base like ships. On the rivers the slaves loved to sing as they rowed their masters, using most aptly the beat of the oars and the swish of the water, while the man who stood at the helm and steered was usually the deep bass. One of the most unforgettable melodies is “O, Listen to the Lambs!” The tenors seem to imitate flocks of innumerable sheep and lambs all crying to one another, while the basso-profundo is the irrelevance of “I want to go to Heaven when I die,” continually repeated in subterranean mumbling and whispers——

O listen to the la-ambs
All a-cry ... in’. All a-cry ... in’.
An’ I wan’ to go to Hebn w’en I die!

“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Go Down, Moses,” “Didn’t Hear Nobody Pray,” “The Walls of Jericho,” and many others are assuredly famous.

These and many other phenomena give indications of a distinctive Negro point of view, and of an incipient broad-based popular culture. A sympathetic study will always give evidence that can be set against the point of view that the Negro is nothing, or an animal, or a scamp at best, or a shame to the species. I was sitting in the gardens at Baltimore in the shade of a giant plane tree one day when out came a mixed class of Negro boys and girls and a young eager colored master of about twenty-five. The girls were luxuriant “flappers” of every hue of polished ebony; the boys were spindle-legged and spry and bullet-headed. They all examined plants and trees and caterpillars and flowers under the informing tutelage of the master. They were as noisy and vivacious as a flock of birds that has suddenly lighted on a plain. They minded no outsider. But a tall white man passed them, and I saw on his face a look of unutterable contempt.

“Learning botany” said he to me in a stage whisper. “They’ll know as much about it to-morrow morning as pigs.”