VII A White Type and a Black
In Memphis I had no difficulty in discovering what I had in vain looked for in Louisville—a book-store. There are two or three on Main Street; and into one of them I went to ask for Mr. Du Bois’s book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” which I had not yet read.
Immediately the proprietor swooped down upon me. As to the possession of that particular book he returned an evasive answer; but if I wanted information about the negro, I had, in every sense, come to the right shop. He exuded information at every pore. He had no prejudice against the negro—no, not he! Why, he employed three or four of them on his own place. (This protestation of impartiality I found to be the constant exordium of such a tirade.) But he was simply stating a matter of incontrovertible fact when he said that there was no nigger that would not assault a white woman whenever he saw a chance of doing so with impunity.
“But,” I objected, “outrages are not, after all, such daily occurrences. Do you mean to suggest that there are many outrages and lynchings that are never heard of—that don’t get into the newspapers?”
“Oh no; they get into the papers right enough. The reason there aren’t more outrages is simply that we whites have learnt to protect ourselves against the negro, just as we do against the yellow fever and the malaria—the work of noxious insects. You’re at the Hotel Gayoso, are you? Well, you see the wire-gauze screens over all the doors and windows? That’s to keep out the muskeeters; and just in the same way we must keep the nigger out of our lives.”
An Impartial Philosopher.
Then came a phrase which I was to hear repeated many times, not by irresponsible fanatics, but by Southerners of a much higher type: “I tell you, sir, no pen can describe the horrors of the Reconstruction Period, when all that was best in the white South was outlawed, and the nigger rode roughshod over us. The true story of that time will never be written in history. It is known only to those who went through it.”18
He then poured forth in terms of romantic extravagance the tale of the Ku-Klux-Klan, and how it had saved American civilization. He referred me, by way of proof, to the statue of General Forrest, right here in Memphis, who had been Grand Titan, or Grand Dragon, or I know not what, of the said organization, and whom British soldiers, General French and General Wolseley, had declared to have been the greatest military genius that ever lived.
To all this I was no unwilling listener; yet my time was limited, and now and then I sought to return to the prime object of my visit. In vain! He literally button-holed me, held me by the lapel of my coat, while he informed me that there was not an honest woman, in any sense of the word, among the whole negro race, and that the coloured population was ravaged by every sort of vice and disease. Had it been possible to take his assurances literally, one must have concluded that the race problem must quickly solve itself by the extinction of the negro. And he frankly looked forward to that consummation. “Our vagrancy laws are going to be a bitter pill for them. You see”—here he sketched a diagram to assist my understanding—“a nigger can’t come here to the front-door of my house and ring the bell; but he can go round to the back door”—a line represented his tortuous course—“and I tell you he does. Every household supports at least four or five niggers. Now the vagrancy laws are going to drive that class of niggers to the North, and the Yankee ain’t goin’ to stand his ways. We’re a long-sufferin’ people here in the South.”
As for Mr. Du Bois’s book, it was evident that, even if he had it, he was not going to sell it to me. I left the shop with two books: one was “The Clansman,” by Thomas Dixon, jun., a melodramatic romance of the Ku-Klux-Klan; the other a pseudo-scientific onslaught on the negro race—a brutal and disgusting volume.
An hour or two later I was sitting in the consulting-room or “office” of a coloured physician—Dr. Oberman, let me call him. |A Doctor’s Story.|His real name was that of a we ll-known Southern family, and I remarked upon the fact, expecting to hear that he had been born a slave in that family. In a sense this was the case; but his story was a strange one, and he told it with frank simplicity.
“My father,” he said, “was in fact a member of that family”—and he told of sundry political offices which his white kindred had filled. “But my father attached himself openly and honourably to my mother, who was a slave in the family, and for that reason had to leave his home in North Carolina. For some reason or other they chose to go to the State of Mississippi. In 1850 that was a long and toilsome journey; and I was born on the way, not far from this place. For some years they lived in Mississippi, but they were again driven from there and passed into Ohio. My father was one of the noblest of men, and as soon as he was in a State where he could legally do so, he married my mother. I was present at the wedding.”
“Your mother, Dr. Oberman,” I said, “must surely have been a quadroon, or even an octoroon?”
“My dear mother,” he said, “was very nearly of the same colour as myself. You see, sir, we don’t breed straight,”—and he proceeded to give several instances in which the children either of two people of mixed blood, or of a white father and a mother of mixed blood, had varied very widely in complexion and facial type, some seeming almost pure white, others emphatically negroid. I did not say it, but I could not help thinking: This is scarcely a point in favour of that mixing of bloods which is here called miscegenation. Or is it merely another form of race-prejudice to hold that marriage undesirable in which the colour of the offspring cannot be foretold, and is apt to be variegated?
“Miscegenation.”
In a country where such terrible disabilities and humiliations await those in whom there is the slightest strain of black blood, it is surely manifest that the people who impose these humiliations, and scout the idea of legal marriage between the races, ought to visit with the severest penalties any relation (necessarily illicit) between a white man and a coloured woman—any augmentation by the white man of that half-bred caste on which colour-disabilities press with such peculiar cruelty. I asked Dr. Oberman whether there was any adequate feeling of this sort in the white community—whether the white man who was known to have relations with coloured women was denounced and ostracised?
“My dear sir,” he replied, “I can assure you that many of those who preach most loudly against miscegenation are far from practising what they preach.”
I am glad to say, however, that white men everywhere assured me that there was a strong and increasingly efficient public sentiment against this most anti-social form of transgression.19 I cannot but think that the lynching of a few white men notoriously guilty of it would beneficially equalize matters.
“Our Moses.”
As I had come to Dr. Oberman with an introduction from Mr. Booker Washington, it was natural that the talk should fall upon the comparative merits of academic and of industrial education for the negro. Said the doctor: “We acquire property, and we want bankers; we fall ill, and we want physicians; we have business difficulties, and we want lawyers; we have souls, and we want preachers who can give us something better than the old ranting theology. But for every one of our race who can profit by a literary education, there are ninety-nine for whom manual training is the first essential.”
Then, looking up at a portrait of Mr. Washington on the wall of his office, he said, “Ah! he is our Moses!”
But a stronger proof of the reverence with which this leader is regarded awaited me as I left Dr. Oberman’s house. I had gone some twenty yards down the street, when I fancied I heard my name called. It must be an illusion, I thought, but nevertheless I looked round. There was the doctor, with his head thrust out of his office-window on the first floor, calling to me and beckoning me back.
“Did you take away that letter of Mr. Washington’s?” he asked.
I searched my pockets, but had it not. Meanwhile the doctor apparently rummaged on his bureau, and found it.
“Here it is! All right!” he cried; and I passed on.
A formal type-written note of introduction, signed by the great man’s hand, was a thing to be treasured like a pearl of great price. The first thought in the doctor’s mind on parting from me had been to assure himself of its safety!
Notes
18. For the benefit of English readers, it may be well to state clearly what Reconstruction meant. I do so in the words of Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy (“The Present South,” p. 9): “The policies of reconstruction represented two cardinal movements of purpose. One was the withdrawal of political and civic power from those, especially those in official positions, who had borne arms against the United States. This effort was an expedient of distrust. It was as natural as it was unintelligent, and it was as successful as it was mischievous.... This was not all. The suffrage which the masters were denied was by the same act committed into the hands of their former slaves, vast dumb multitudes, more helpless with power than without power.” It is almost universally admitted that the Reconstruction policy was a mistake, which would never have been made had Lincoln lived, and that its results were grotesque and often tragic. I find only Professor Du Bois putting in a word for it and for some of its results. “The granting of the ballot to the black man,” he says (“The Souls of Black Folk,” p. 38), “was a necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race, and the only method of compelling the South to accept the results of the war.” But he adds, “Thus negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race feud.” The Reconstruction policy was overthrown by the “Revolution” of 1876, when the military support, on which the Reconstruction governments had rested, was withdrawn.
19. That excellent investigator, Mr. Stannard Baker, in his chapter on “The Tragedy of the Mulatto,” presents a good deal of conflicting evidence on this point. In the city of Montgomery, with its 35,000 inhabitants, it has been publicly stated without contradiction that 400 negro women live in more or less permanent concubinage with white men, while “there are thirty-two negro dives operated for white patronage”; nor does it seem that this state of things is at all exceptional. On the other hand, the feeling against such connections is certainly growing, and finds expression on every hand. The New Orleans Times Democrat, for instance, declares it to be a public scandal that no law against miscegenation should be on the statute-book of Louisiana, “and that it should be left to mobs to break up the miscegenatious couples.” Mr. Baker is, however, able to say that “the class of white men who consort with negro women is of a much lower sort than it was five or ten years ago.”