Following the Color Line Part 23

Even among those Negroes who are most emphatic in defence of the race there is, deep down, the pathetic desire to be like the dominant white man. It is not unreasonable, nor unnatural, for all outward opportunity of development lies open to the white man. To be coloured is to be handicapped in the race for those things in life which men call desirable.

I remember discussing the race question one evening with a group of intelligent coloured men. They had made a strong case for the Negro spirit, and the need of the race to stand for itself, but one of them said in a pa.s.sing remark (what the investigator overhears is often of greater significance than what he hears), speaking of a mulatto friend of his:

"His hair is _better_ than mine."

He meant _straighter_, more like that of the white man.

The same evening, another Negro, referring to a light-complexioned coloured man, said:

"Thank G.o.d, he is pa.s.sing now for white."

At Philadelphia a dark Negro made this comment on one of the coloured churches where mulattoes are in the ascendancy:

"You can't have a good time when you go there unless you have straight hair."

This remark indicated not only the ideal held by the speaker, but showed the line drawn by the light-coloured man against his darker brother.

In the same way it is almost a universal desire of Negroes to "marry whiter;" that is, a dark man will, if possible, marry a mulatto woman, the lighter the better. The ideal is whiteness: for whiteness stands for opportunity, power, progress.

Give a coloured man or woman white blood, educate him until he has glimpses of the greater possibilities of life and then lock him forever within the bars of colour, and you have all the elements of tragedy. Dr.

DuBois in his remarkable book, "The Souls of Black Folk," has expressed more vividly than any other writer the essential significance of this tragedy. I read the book before I went South and I thought it certainly overdrawn, the expression of a highly cultivated and exceptional Mulatto, but after meeting many Negroes I have been surprised to find how truly it voices a wide experience.

_Experience of a Highly Educated Mulatto_

DuBois tells in this book how he first came to realise that he was really a Negro. He was a boy in school near his home in Ma.s.sachusetts.

"Something," he writes, "put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting cards--ten cents a package--and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card--refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs not mine.... With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny; their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did G.o.d make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half-hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above."

If s.p.a.ce permitted I could tell many stories ill.u.s.trative of the daily tragedy which many mulattoes are meeting in this country, struggles that are none the less tragic for being inarticulate. Here is a letter which I received not long ago from a mulatto professor in a Western Negro college:

"I wonder how you will treat that point to which you have thus far only referred in your studies, 'Where does the colour line really begin?' What is to become of that large cla.s.s of which I am a part, that cla.s.s which is neither white nor black and yet both? There are millions of us who have the blood of both races, and, if heredity means anything, who have the traditions, feelings, and pa.s.sions of both. Yet we are black in name, in law, in station, in everything save face and figure, despite the overwhelming white blood. And why? Certainly not because we have to be.

America is a big country: it is easy to get lost, even in a neighbouring state. Some of us do, and the process has been going on so long in certain large cities of the North until we cease to think about it. But the majority of us stay and live and work out our destiny among the people into whom we were born, living ofttimes side by side with our white brothers and sisters. When I go back to Atlanta after an absence of two years, I can, if I wish, go back in a Pullman, go out of the main entrance of the station, get my dinner at the Piedmont Hotel, and when I am tired of being Mr. Hyde, I can stroll down Auburn Avenue with my friends in the full glory of Dr. Jekyll. As a matter of fact I shall doubtless avail myself of the privilege of a sleeper, sneak out the side entrance, get on the last seat of the car, despite the conductor's remonstrance, go on to my friends at once and be myself all the time I am there. I wouldn't be a white man if I had to. I want to be black. I want to love those who love me. I want to help those who need my help. And I know hundreds just like me: I know others who are not.

"I wonder if you can decide: 'Where does the colour line really--end?'"

_A Negro Who Lived First as a White Man, Then as a Negro_

When I was in Philadelphia I met an intelligent Negro named A. L. Manley, who is at present the janitor of a large apartment house. He has been connected with the good-government movement in Philadelphia, being the leader of a club of coloured men who have supported the reform party. When I first met him I should not have known him for a Negro, he is so white.

His white grandfather was a famous governor of North Carolina--Charles Manley. He was educated at Wilmington, N. C., and at Hampton Inst.i.tute.

For a time he published a Negro newspaper at Wilmington, but during the race riot in that city a number of years ago he was driven out and his property was destroyed, his office being burned to the ground. After a year or two in Was.h.i.+ngton he came to Philadelphia, where he endeavoured to get work at his trade as a painter and decorator, but the moment he informed employers that he was a coloured man they refused to hire him--usually excusing themselves on the ground that union labour would refuse to work with him.

"So I tried being white," he said: "that is, I did not reveal the fact that I had coloured blood, and I immediately got work in some of the best shops in Philadelphia. I joined the union and had no trouble at all."

But during all this time he had to live, as he says, "the life of a sneak." He had to sneak out of his home in the morning and return to it only after nightfall, lest someone discover that his family (he has a wife and two children) was coloured.

"The thing finally became unbearable," he said; "no decent man could stand it. I preferred to be a Negro and hold up my head rather than to be a sneak."

So he dropped his trade and became a janitor. In other words, he stepped back, as so many Negroes in the North are forced to do, into a form of domestic service, although in his case the position is one of responsibility and good pay.

Such stories of the problem of the mulatto are innumerable; and yet I do not wish to imply that the life is all shadow, for it isn't. The Negro blood, wherever it is, supplies an element of light-heartedness which will not be wholly crushed. It is this element, indeed, that accounts in no small degree for the survival of the Negro in this country. Where the Indian perished for want of adaptability, the Negro has survived by sheer elasticity of temperament: it is perhaps the highest natural gift of the Negro race. One hears much of the unfavourable traits of the Negro, but certainly, judging from any point of view, the power of adaptability displayed by the Negro in a wholly foreign environment, under the harshest conditions, and his ability to thrive and increase in numbers, even meeting the compet.i.tion of the dominant race, and to keep on laughing at his work, is a power which in any race would be regarded as notable.

_Why Some Light Mulattoes do not "Cross over to White"_

I once asked a very light mulatto why he did not "cross the line," as they call it (or "go over to white") and quit his people. His answer surprised me; it was so distinctly an unexpected point of view.

"Why," he said, "white people don't begin to have the good times that Negroes do. They're stiff and cold. They aren't sociable. They don't laugh."

Here certainly was a criticism of the white man! And it was corroborated by a curious story I heard at Memphis, of a mulatto well known among the coloured people of Tennessee. A number of years ago it came to him suddenly one day that he was white enough to pa.s.s anywhere for white, and he acted instantly on the inspiration. He went to Memphis and bought a first-cla.s.s ticket on a Mississippi River boat to Cincinnati. No one suspected that he was coloured; he sat at the table with white people and even occupied a state-room with a white man. At first he said he could hardly restrain his exultation, but after a time, although he said he talked and smoked with the white men, he began to be lonesome.

"It grew colder and colder," he said.

In the evening he sat on the upper deck and as he looked over the railing he could see, down below, the Negro pa.s.sengers and deck hands talking and laughing. After a time, when it grew darker, they began to sing--the inimitable Negro songs.

"That finished me," he said, "I got up and went downstairs and took my place among them. I've been a Negro ever since."

An ordinary community of middle or working cla.s.s white people is often singularly barren of any social or intellectual interest: it is often sombre, sodden, uninteresting. Not so the Negro community. In several cities I have tried to trace out the social life of various cliques, especially among the mulattoes, and I have been astonished to find how many societies there are, often with high-sounding names, how many church affairs must be attended to, how many suppers and picnics are constantly under way, how many clubs and secret societies are supported.

Forced upon themselves, every point of contact with the white race becomes to the Negro a story of peculiar human interest. The view they get from the outside or underneath of white civilisation is not, to say the least, altogether our view. Once, in a gathering of mulattoes I heard the discussion turn to the stories of those who had "gone over to white"--friends or acquaintances of those who were present. Few such cases are known to white people, but the Negroes know many of them. It developed from this conversation (and afterward I got the same impression many times) that there is a sort of conspiracy of silence to protect the Negro who "crosses the line" and takes his place as a white man. Such cases even awaken glee among them, as though the Negro, thus, in some way, was getting even with the dominant white man.

_Stories of Negroes Who Have Crossed the Colour Line_

I don't know how many times I have heard mulattoes speak of the French novelist Dumas as having Negro blood, and they also claim Robert Browning and Alexander Hamilton (how truly I do not know). But the cases which interest them most are those in this country; and there must be far more of them than white people imagine. I know of scores of them. A well-known white actress, whose name, of course, I cannot give, when she goes to Boston, secretly visits her coloured relatives. A New York man who holds a prominent political appointment under the state government and who has become an authority in his line, is a Negro. Not long ago he entered a hotel in Baltimore and the Negro porter who ran to take his bag said discreetly:

"h.e.l.lo, Bob."

As boys they had gone to the same Negro school.

"Let me carry your bag," said the porter, "I won't give you away."

In Philadelphia there lives a coloured woman who married a rich white man.

Of course, no white people know she is coloured, but the Negroes do, and do not tell. Occasionally she drives down to a certain store, dismisses her carriage and walks on foot to the home of her mother and sisters.

Only a few years ago the newspapers were filled for a day or two with the story of a girl who had been at Va.s.sar College, and upon graduation by merest accident it was discovered that she was a Negro. A similar case arose last year at Chicago University, that of Miss Cecelia Johnson, who had been a leader in her cla.s.s, a member of the Pi Delta Phi Sorority and president of Englewood House, an exclusive girls' club. She was the sister of a well-known Negro politician of Chicago.

The Chicago _Tribune_, after publis.h.i.+ng a story to the effect that Miss Johnson had kept her parentage secret apologised for the publicity in these words:

The Tribune makes this reparation spontaneously and as a simple act of justice.

There is not the slightest mystery about Miss Johnson. Her life has been an open book. She has won distinction at high school, and university, and her career appears to have been free from any blemish that should lessen the love of her intimate friends or the respect in which she is held by her acquaintances.

Some mulattoes I know of, one a prominent Wall Street broker, have "crossed the line" by declaring that they are Mexicans, Brazilians, Spanish or French; one says he is an Armenian. Under a foreign name they are readily accepted among white people where, as Negroes, they would be instantly rejected. No one, of course, can estimate the number of men and women with Negro blood who have thus "gone over to white"; but it must be large.

_Does Race Amalgamation Still Continue?_