XVII The Negro Home and the Negro Church
Wherever I went in the South, one invariable experience awaited me, of which I scarcely know how to write. A buggy was ordered out, and I was trotted round to visit six or eight negro “homes.” I came to regard it as an established ritual, and learned to use the responses expected of me.
It would be base and stupid were I to laugh at these simple people who, in all good faith, and with a touching pride, which one felt to be more racial than personal, displayed to me their household gods. As a rule, indeed, I felt much more inclined to weep than to laugh. And yet, in one aspect, the parade was irresistibly ludicrous. It was as though one were led from window to window in Tottenham Court Road and asked to read, in the dining-room, drawing-room, and bedroom “suites,” the capacity of the British people for culture and civilization.
The point, of course, was to show what progress the coloured race had made, in wealth, education, and refinement, during the forty years which had elapsed since their emancipation. Statistics on this point, as we have seen, are apt to be a little deceptive. It is generally assumed that, after the Civil War, the race as a whole started in absolute pauperism. But this is not the fact. There were at that time many free negroes, and not a few who possessed a good deal of property.43 Thus the well-to-do, “home”-owning class of negroes is not entirely a creation of the past forty years. In Charleston, for instance, there were a good many negro slave-holders before the war; and I was told (though for this I should not like to vouch) that negro property-owners are now fewer in that city than they had once been, many of the younger generation having dissipated the savings of their elders. I may add that by far the most homelike of the homes I visited belonged to a professional man who could not truly be said to have risen from slavery.
Nevertheless, the evidence of thrift and material prosperity among a considerable class of negroes is undeniable and very striking. As I was driven from home to home, other homes and institutions were pointed out to me, with details as to the number of dollars they represented, until my head swam, and I began to wonder whether I were not back among the Vanderbilts and Goulds in Fifth Avenue. For when you get well up among the tens of thousands, my power of grasping and comparing numbers very soon fails me.
“The greater part of this street here to the left belongs to the richest man in our community. He pays taxes on half a million dollars.” “There are three or four homes in this street belonging to coloured people worth from 25,000 to 75,000 dollars.” “That is an infirmary for negroes donated by a carpenter who couldn’t read or write. It cost 50,000 dollars. It is supported by various coloured clubs, with contributions from the county and the city.” Such was the unvaried strain as the buggy rattled along.
But one thing I noticed with interest—my coloured cicerones were just as ready to point with pride to the fine residences and institutions of white men as to the homes of their own people. Whatever their grounds of complaint against the other race, they were, so far as they were suffered to be, loyal citizens of their State.
To one negro Crœsus I was personally introduced, and an interesting type he was. |A Coloured Carnegie.| An old man—well on in the sixties, I should say. He had no negro traits that I could discover, and his complexion was the very lightest yellow. His shrewd, many-wrinkled, crab-apple face would have been remarked in Europe as distinctly American, but he would scarcely have been suspected of black blood. In one respect he was ostentatiously millionairish, for every tooth in his head was of gold. Moreover, he wore in his shirt front a splendid diamond pin, which contrasted oddly with his otherwise plain and even rustic attire.
He is a banker, a general trader, an owner of real estate—and a liberal benefactor to his own people. He has established in the negro quarter of the city where he lives a sort of garden and recreation-ground for his race, which is all the more appreciated, as negroes, even when not formally excluded from the public parks, are made very unwelcome in them. In the recreation ground is a plain but well-designed and commodious wooden theatre, where companies of negro actors frequently appear. I am told there is a remarkable development of negro theatrical art in several quarters, but was not fortunate enough to come across any specimens of it.
The keen little walnut-skinned Carnegie-Chrysostom accompanied my guide and me over the garden and theatre. He said very little, but he gleamed appreciation of my guide’s remarks, all tending to impress on me his manifold activities, his astuteness, his success, and his beneficence. Yet one did not feel, as one would have felt had a white millionaire been concerned, that the poorer man was guilty of adulation, the richer of ostentation. There was something impersonal about it all. It was not the men but the race who boasted. The hero of the song of praise was not “I,” nor “he,” but “we.”
And what, now, of the “homes” themselves? |Villa Residences.| Those that I saw were without exception what are called by English house-agents suburban villa residences, which would command, in the neighbourhood of London, rents of from £40 to £70 a year. They were very nice little houses, scrupulously neat and well kept. They had (to my mind) the advantage over English houses of the same class, in the sense of spaciousness which comes with steam-heat and the consequent absence of doors. In some the doorways were filled with bead curtains—hanging strings of glass beads—which seem to be very popular just now in coloured society.
The furniture was always modern and in excellent condition, with a great deal of plush about it. Much of it conveyed the impression (not uncommon in English villa residences) of being intended rather for show than use. The wall-papers ran to large patterns, and were apt to be sombre in tint. Every home, without exception, had its piano, sometimes with open music on it. In the matter of pictures, nicknacks, etc., there was no affectation of “culture.” Æstheticism—that “unanimity of æsthetic appreciations” which so troubled Mr. Wells in Boston—has not yet penetrated the negro home. I did not see a single Wingless Victory. The works of art are simple to the point of primitiveness, and pleasing in so far as they genuinely represent the taste of their owners. One handsomely furnished parlour stands out in my memory, in which a showy overmantel was flanked by two amazing glass transparencies in heavy gilt frames, one representing a moonlit landscape and the other the Houses of Parliament and Clock Tower at Westminster.
As a rule, I would be received by the lady of the house (her husband was apt to be away at business) with the stock phrases of American politeness. In the great majority of cases the lady would be a quadroon, or lighter; and in one or two instances I fancy nature had been assisted by a whiff of the powder-puff. My inspection generally stopped short at the living-rooms on the ground floor; but sometimes I was admitted to regions of more intimate domesticity. It was embarrassing; it was ludicrous; it was, above all, pathetic.
With people of a corresponding class in England the first impulse would have been to offer a visitor “refreshment” of some sort. Never once was there a hint of anything of the kind on the part of my negro hosts. I wondered, and am still wondering, whether it simply was not the custom of the country, or whether they imagined that I would scruple to eat or drink with them.44
Though I did not partake of their bread and salt, I have a sense of perfidy in thus criticizing the interiors in which they took such a simple pride. |Resolute Refinement.| But, after all, I was there for no other purpose than to report what I saw and felt. What I felt, then, was certainly admiration for the thrift and progressiveness which were apparent on every hand; nor was it the unsophisticated order of taste displayed in furniture and adornment that qualified my admiration. Far be it from me to attribute any absolute superiority to the standards of Brixton, or even of Boston. What troubled me throughout my domiciliary visits was the sense that (with one or two exceptions) these homes were not homes at all. I do not doubt that each roof sheltered a home; but I do not believe that the prim parlours I saw had any essential connection with it. They were no more homelike than the shopwindow rooms of the up-to-date upholsterer. If they were lived in at all, it was from a sense of duty, a self-conscious effort after a life of “refinement.” They were, in short, entirely imitative and mechanical tributes to the American ideal of the prosperous, cultivated home. I could find in them no real expression of the individuality of their inhabitants.
Let it be remembered, however, that this is the first generation of negro prosperity. Will the second or third generation really assimilate the American ideal, or develop a “refined” domesticity of its own?
A remark of my guide on one of these expeditions summed up the phase of culture as I saw it. “We have a little whist club in our set,” he said. “We meet and play once a month. But the best part of it is the good dinner at the end of the season.”
The whist club, so frankly characterized, guided me to the word I had been searching for in the back of my mind through all these experiences. It was the word “veneer.”
A very different class of negro was represented in the congregation of the only church which I had an opportunity of attending.
African Methodism.
It was an African Methodist church—a spacious, airy building, capable, I should think, of seating some 2000 people. It was not full, but fairly well attended; and black, as distinct from brown or yellow, was the prevailing complexion. Every one was quite decently dressed, some of the women in gaudy colours, but many of them, too, in black. The gaudiest colours were in the awful stained-glass windows, which seemed to be made of salvage from the wreck of a cheap kaleidoscope. Two pastors sat on a platform at the end of the hall. There were flowers on a table before them; and, as it was a sweltering morning, each of them held a fan.
The whole service was conducted by one of them, a man of rather Caucasian features, but of dark-brown tint. In the hymn-singing there was nothing peculiar—it was fairly spirited and good. But after the first few sentences of the prayer, ejaculations began to break forth. Their precise meaning, if they had any, I did not catch. They seemed to me like “Yes, oh yes!” They ought, according to the best authorities, to have been “Hallelujah!” “Praise de Lord!” and such phrases; but I certainly did not distinguish them. And presently they grew quite inarticulate, passing over into wails, moans, and now and then a sort of wild, maniac laughing and yodelling.
And the whole sermon, after the first five minutes, was accompanied by similar manifestations. The text was, “Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.” I have heard many worse sermons than this competent, fluent, popular discourse, which consisted mainly of an exposition of the overpowering strength of the metaphor of “hunger and thirst.” “We may credit our backs,” said the preacher, “but we must pay our stomachs; we can put the back off, but we can’t put off the stomach.” (“Yes, oh yes!” shouts, moans, and wails.) “No doubt most of you, before you came here, have had a good drink of coffee or tea; but how many of you have had a real good drink from the fountain of everlasting life?” (Confused sounds not unlike the yelpings of a large kennel.) “If some of you didn’t eat and drink more physically than you do spiritually, you’d be skeletons. That’s plain talk.” (Shrieks, wails, and yodelling.) “Some of you good sisters are so anxious to get your people’s breakfasses that you have no time to ask a blessing on the work of the day.” (“Hu! hu!” “Bless de Lord!”—for once articulate—moans, and shrieks.)
These are but fragments of the discourse, which lasted half an hour. What particularly interested me, both in the prayer and the sermon, was the action and reaction between speaker and audience. Never once did he take any notice of the wild sounds, as a political speaker would almost necessarily have done. I do not remember that he even paused for them; his rhetoric seemed to flow smoothly on. In other words, he did not openly “play to the gallery.” Yet there is no doubt that the hysterical cries and ululations were of value to him. He worked them up, and they worked him up. It must not be understood, however, that anything like the whole congregation joined in the noises. They seemed all to proceed from two or three definite points in the hall. One could almost have supposed them the prearranged paroxysms of an epileptic claque.
I stole out, under cover of a hymn, at the end of the sermon, not sorry to find myself once more in America. In the church (where I was the only white or even approximately white person present) I could not but feel that I was in Africa—slightly veneered.
Notes
43. See pp. 33 and 35. Mr. A. H. Stone declares to be “fallacies” the two widely-accepted opinions “that the negro began life forty years ago with nothing but his freedom, and that the period of his emancipation has been one of marvellous economic achievement.”—“The American Race Problem,” p. 150.
44. Mr. Kelly Miller (coloured), author of “Race Adjustment,” in an open letter to Mr. Thomas Dixon, Junr., says: “You will doubtless remember that when I addressed the Congregational Ministers in New York City, you asked permission to be present... although you beat a precipitous retreat when luncheon was announced.” At the invitation of Professor Du Bois, I had the great pleasure of dining one evening with the (coloured) students of Atlanta University; and at Tuskegee I was most hospitably entertained in the house of the Principal. The (white) instructors at Hampton Institute take their meals apart from the students. For a cruel instance of “discrimination” in hospitality, see Du Bois: “The Souls of Black Folk,” p. 63.