From the leagued lying of despot and of brute,--
_Great G.o.d, deliver us!_
A city lay in travail, G.o.d 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 G.o.d; 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 h.e.l.l stink in Thy nostrils, O G.o.d? 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 h.e.l.l forever and forever!
_Forgive us, good Lord; we know not what we say!_
Bewildered we are and pa.s.sion-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, G.o.d, 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 G.o.d!_
Sit not longer blind, Lord G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, for Thy silence is white terror to our hearts! The way, O G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, not this. Let the cup pa.s.s 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! G.o.d! 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 G.o.d of a G.o.dless land!
_Amen!_
In silence, O Silent G.o.d.
_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 pa.s.s, 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 ma.s.s of cla.s.s, 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 embarra.s.sed, 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 a.s.sumption that of all the hues of G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sionately 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 sh.o.r.es 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 j.a.pan? "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 t.i.tle 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 n.o.bility to the ign.o.ble. Such sense of duty a.s.sumes 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 t.i.tle to certain alleged bequests of the Fathers in wage and position, authority and training; and when his att.i.tude 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 j.a.pan wants to fight America.