by Various
In this connection, Joseph Wilson, in the Black Phalanx, says:
“The Negro race is the only race that has ever come in contact with the European race that has proved itself able to withstand its atrocities and oppression. All others like the Indians whom they could not make subservient to their use they have destroyed.”
Prof. Sampson in his “Mixed Races” says, “The American Negro is a new race, and is not the direct descent of any people that has ever flourished.”
On this supposition, and relying upon finely developed, native imaginative powers, and humane tendencies, I base my expectation that our Race Literature when developed will not only compare favorably with many, but will stand out preeminent, not only in the limited history of colored people, but in the broader field of universal literature.
Though Race Literature be founded upon the traditionary history of a people, yet its fullest and largest development ought not to be circumscribed by the narrow limits of race or creed, for the simple reason that literature in its loftiest development reaches out to the utmost limits of soul enlargement and outstrips all earthly limitations. Our history and individuality as a people, not only provides material for masterly treatment; but would seem to make a Race Literature a necessity as an outlet for the unnaturally suppressed inner lives which our people have been compelled to lead.
The literature of any people of varied nationality who have won a place in the literature of the world, presents certain cardinal points. French literature for instance, is said to be “not the wisest, not the weightiest, not certainly the purest and loftiest, but by odds the most brilliant and the most interesting literature in the world.”
Ours, when brought out, and we must admit in reverence to truth that, as yet, we have done nothing distinctive, but may when we have built upon our own individuality, win a place by the simplicity of the story, thrown into strong relief by the multiplicity of its dramatic situations; the spirit of romance, and even tragedy, shadowy and as yet ill-defined, but from which our race on this continent can never be disassociated.
When the foundations of such a literature shall have been properly laid, the benefit to be derived will be at once apparent. There will be a revelation to our people, and it will enlarge our scope, make us better known wherever real lasting culture exists, will undermine and utterly drive out the traditional Negro in dialect,—the subordinate, the servant as the type representing a race whose numbers are now far into the millions. It would suggest to the world the wrong and contempt with which the lion viewed the picture that the hunter and a famous painter besides, had drawn of the King of the Forest.
As a matter of history, the only high-type Negro that has been put before the American people by a famous writer, is the character Dred founded upon the deeds of Nat Turner, in Mrs. Stowe’s novel.
Except the characters sketched by the writers of folk-lore, I know of none more representative of the spirit of the writers of to-day, wherein is infiltrated in the public mind that false sense of the Negro’s meaning of inalienable rights, so far as actual practice is concerned, than is found in a story in “Harper’s Magazine” some years ago. Here a pathetic picture is drawn of a character generally known as the typical “Darkey.”
The man, old and decrepit, had labored through long years to pay for an humble cabin and garden patch; in fact, he had paid double and treble the original price, but dashing “Marse Wilyum” quieted his own conscience by believing, so the writer claimed, that the old Darkey should be left free to pay him all he felt the cabin was worth to him. The old man looked up to him, trusted him implicitly, and when he found at last he had been deceived, the moment he acknowledged to himself that “Marse Wilyum” had cheated him, a dejected listlessness settled upon him, an expression weak and vacant came in his dull eyes and hung around his capacious but characterless mouth, an exasperatingly meek smile trembled upon his features, and casting a helpless look around the cabin that he thought his own, nay, knew it was, with dragging steps he left the place! “Why did you not stand out for your rights?” a sympathizing friend questioned some years afterward. To this the writer makes the old man say:
“Wid white folks dat’s de way, but wid niggers its dif’unt.”
Here the reader is left to infer whatever his or her predilection will incline to accept, as to the meaning of the old man’s words. The most general view is that the old man had no manhood, not the sense, nothing to even suggest to his inner conscience aught that could awaken a comprehension of the word man, much less its rightful price; no moral responsibility, no spirit or, as the Negro-hating Mark Twain would say, no capacity of kicking at real or imaginary wrongs, which in his estimation makes the superior clan. In a word, there was nothing within the old man’s range of understanding to make him feel his inalienable rights.
We know the true analysis of the old man’s words was that faith, once destroyed, can never be regained, and the blow to his faith in the individual and the wound to his honest esteem so overwhelming, rendered it out of the question to engage further with a fallen idol.
With one sweep of mind he had seen the utter futility of even hoping for justice from a people who would take advantage of an aged honest man. That is the point, and this reveals a neglected subject for analytical writers to dissect in the interest of truth the real meaning of the so-called cowardice, self-negation and lack of responsibility so freely referred to by those in positions calculated to make lasting impressions on the public, that by custom scoffs at the meaning introduced in Mrs. Stowe’s burning words, when she repeated a question before answering;—“What can any individual do?” “There is one thing every individual can do. They can see to it that they feel right—an atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being; and the man or woman who feels strongly, healthily and justly on the great interests of humanity, is a constant benefactor to the human race.”
Think of the moral status of the Negro, that Mr. Ridpath in his history degrades before the world. Consider the political outline of the Negro, sketched with extreme care in “Bryce’s Commonwealth,” and the diatribes of Mr. Froude. From these, turn to the play, where impressions are made upon a heterogeneous assemblage—Mark Twain’s “Pudd’n Head Wilson,” which Beaumount Fletcher claims as “among the very best of those productions which gives us hope for a distinctive American drama.”
In this story we have education and fair environment attended by the most deplorable results, an educated octoroon is made out to be a most despicable, cowardly villain. “The one compensation for all this,” my friend, Professor Greener wittily remarks, “is that the ‘white nigger’ in the story though actually a pure white man, is indescribably worse in all his characteristics than the ‘real nigger,’ using the vernacular of the play, was ever known to be, and just here Mark Twain unconsciously avenges the Negro while trying his best to disparage him.”
In “Imperative Duty,” Mr. Howells, laboriously establishes for certain minds, the belief that the Negro possesses an Othello like charm in his ignorance which education and refinement destroys, or at best makes repulsive.
In explaining why Dr. Olney loves Rhoda, whose training was imparted by good taste, refined by wealth, and polished by foreign travel, he says: “It was the elder world, the beauty of antiquity which appealed to him in the luster and sparkle of this girl, and the remote taint of her servile and savage origin, gave her a fascination which refuses to let itself be put in words, it was the grace of a limp, the occult, indefinable, lovableness of deformity, but transcending these by its allurements, in indefinite degree, and going for the reason of its effect deep into the mysterious places of being, where the spirit and animal meet and part in us.
“The mood was of his emotional nature alone, it sought and could have won no justification from the moral sense which indeed it simply submerged, and blotted out for all time.”
All this tergiversation and labored explanation of how
a white man came to love a girl with a remote tinge of Negro blood! But he must have recourse to this tortuous jugglery of words, because one of his characters in the story had taken pains to assert, “That so far as society in the society sense is concerned we have frankly simplified the matter, and no more consort with the Negroes than we do with lower animals, so that one would be quite as likely to meet a cow or a horse in an American drawing-room, as a person of color.” This is the height of enlightenment! and from Dean Howells too, littérateur, diplomat, journalist, altruist!
Art, goodness, and beauty are assaulted in order to stimulate or apologize for prejudice against the educated Negro!
In Dr. Huguet, we have as a type a man pitifully trying to be self-conscious, struggling to feel within himself, what prejudice and custom demand that he feel.
In “A Question of Color” the type is a man of splendid English training, that of an English gentleman, surrounded from his birth by wealth, and accepted in the most polished society, married to a white girl, who sells herself for money, and after the ceremony like an angelic Sunday-school child, shudders and admits the truth, that she can never forget that he is a Negro, and he is cad enough to say, so says the writer, that he will say his prayers at her feet night and morning not withstanding!
We all know, no man, negro or other, ever enacted such a part; it is wholly inconsistent with anything short of a natural born idiot! And yet a reputable house offers this trash to the public, but thanks to a sensible public, it has been received with jeers. And so stuff like this comes apace, influencing the reading-world, not indeed thinkers and scholars; but the indiscriminate reading-world, upon whom rests, unfortunately, the bulk of senseless prejudice.
Conan Doyle, like Howells, also pays his thoughtful attention to the educated negro—making him in this case more blood-thirsty and treacherous and savage than the Seminole. One more, and these are mentioned only to show the kind of types of Negro characters eminent writers have taken exceeding care to place before the world as representing us.
In the “Condition of Women in the United States,” Mme. Blanc, in a volume of 285 pages, devotes less than 100 words to negro women; after telling ironically of a “Black Damsel” in New Orleans engaged in teaching Latin, she describes her attire, the arrangement of her hair, and concludes, “I also saw a class of little Negro girls with faces like monkeys studying Greek, and the disgust expressed by their former masters seemed quite justified.”
Her knowledge of history is as imperfect so far as veracity goes, as her avowal in the same book of her freedom from prejudice against the Negro. The “little girls” must have been over thirty years old to have had any former masters even at their birth! And all this is the outcome in the nineteenth century of the highest expressions of Anglo-Saxon acumen, criticism and understanding of the powers of Negroes of America!
The point of all this, is the indubitable evidence of the need of thoughtful, well-defined and intelligently placed efforts on our part, to serve as counter-irritants against all such writing that shall stand, having as an aim the supplying of influential and accurate information, on all subjects relating to the Negro and his environments, to inform the American mind at least, for literary purposes.
We cannot afford any more than any other people to be indifferent to the fact, that the surest road to real fame is through literature. Who is so well known and appreciated by the cultured minds as Dumas of France, and Pushkin of Russia? I need not say to this thoughtful and intelligent gathering that, any people without a literature is valued lightly the world round. Who knows or can judge of our intrinsic worth, without actual evidences of our breadth of mind, our boundless humanity. Appearing well and weighted with many degrees of titles, will not raise us in our own estimation while color is the white elephant in America. Yet, America is but a patch on the universe: if she ever produces a race out of her cosmopolitan population, that can look beyond mere money-getting to more permanent qualities of true greatness as a nation, it will call this age her unbalanced stage.
No one thinks of mere color when looking upon the Chinese, but the dignified character of the literature of his race, and he for monotony of expression, color and undesirable individual habits is far inferior in these points to the ever-varying American Negro. So our people must awaken to the fact, that our task is a conquest for a place for ourselves, and is a legitimate ground for action for us, if we shall resolve to conquer it.
While we of to-day view with increasing dissatisfaction the trend of the literary productions of this country, concerning us, yet are we standing squarely on the foundation laid for us by our immediate predecessors?
This is the question I would bring to your minds. Are we adding to the structure planned for us by our pioneers? Do we know our dwelling and those who under many hardships, at least, gathered the material for its upbuilding? Knowing them do we honor—do we love them—what have they done that we should love? Your own Emerson says—“To judge the production of a people you must transplant the spirit of the times in which they lived.”
In the ten volumes of American Literature edited by H. L. Stoddard only Phyllis Wheatley and George W. Williams find a place. This does not show that we have done nothing in literature; far from it, but it does show that we have done nothing so brilliant, so effective, so startling as to attract the attention of these editors. Now it is a fact that thoughtful, scholarly white people do not look for literature in its highest sense, from us any more than they look for high scholarship, profound and critical learning on any one point, nor for any eminent judicial acumen or profound insight into causes and effects.
These are properly regarded as the results only of matured intellectual growth or abundant leisure and opportunity, when united with exceptional talents, and this is the world’s view, and it is in the main a correct one. Even the instances of precocious geniuses and the rare examples of extraordinary talent appearing from humble and unpromising parentage and unfortuitous surroundings, are always recognized as brilliant, sporadic cases, exceptions.
Consequently our success in Race Literature will be looked upon with curiosity and only a series of projected enterprises in various directions—history, poetry, novel writing, speeches, orations, forensic effort, sermons, and so on, will have the result of gaining for us recognition.
You recall Poteghine’s remark in Turgenev’s novel of “Smoke.” How well it applies to us.
“For heaven’s sake do not spread the idea in Russia that we can achieve success without preparation. No, if your brow be seven spans in width study, begin with the alphabet or else remain quiet and say nothing. Oh! it excites me to think of these things.”
Dr. Blyden’s essays, Dr. Crummell’s sermons and addresses, and Professor Greener’s orations, all are high specimens of sustained English, good enough for any one to read, and able to bear critical examination, and reflect the highest credit on the race.
Your good city of Boston deserves well for having given us our first real historian, William C. Nell—his history of “The Colored Patriots of the Revolution”—not sufficiently read nowadays or appreciated by the present generation; a scholarly, able, accurate book, second to none written by any other colored man.
William Wells Brown’s “Black Man” was a worthy tribute in its day, the precursor of more elaborate books, and should be carefully studied now; his “Sights and Scenes Abroad” was probably the first book of travel written by an American Negro. The same is doubtless true of his novel, Clotel. The “Anglo-African” magazine published in New York City in 1859, is adjudged by competent authority to be the highest, best, most scholarly written of all the literature published by us in fifty years.
We have but to read the graphic descriptions and eloquent passages in the first edition of the “Life and Times” of Frederick Douglass to see the high literary qualities of which the race is capable. “Light and Truth,” a valuable volume published many years ago; Dr. Perr
y’s “Cushite!” “Bond and Free, or Under the Yoke,” by John S. Ladue; “The Life of William Lloyd Garrison,” by Archibald Grimké; Joseph Wilson’s “Black Phalanx”; and “Men of Mark,” by Rev. W. J. Simmons; “Noted Women,” by Dr. Scruggs; “The Negro Press and Its Editors’, by I. Garland Penn”; “Paul Dunbar’s Dialect Poems,” which have lately received high praise from the Hoosier Poet, James Whitcomb Reilly, “Johnson’s School History”; “From a Virginia Cabin to the Capitol,” by Hon. J. M. Langston; “Iola Leroy,” by Mrs. F. E. W. Harper; “Music and Some Highly Musical People,” by James M. Trotter, are specimen books within easy reach of the public, that will increase in interest with time.
Professor R. T. Greener as a metaphysician, logician, orator, and prize essayist, holds an undisputed position in the annals of our literature second to none. His defense of the Negro in the “National Quarterly Review,” 1880, in reply to Mr. Parton’s strictures, has been an arsenal from which many have since supplied their armor. It was quoted extensively in this country and England.
And it is not generally known that one of the most valuable contributions to Race Literature, has appeared in the form of a scientific treatise on “Incandescent Lighting” published by Van Nostrand of New York, and thus another tribute is laid to Boston’s credit by Lewis H. Latimer.
In the ecclesiastical line we have besides those already mentioned, the writings of the learned Dr. Pennington, Bishops Payne and Tanner of the A. M. E. Church.
The poems, songs and addresses by our veteran literary women F. E. W. Harper, Charlotte Forten Grimké, H. Cordelia Ray, Gertrude Mossell, “Clarence and Corinne,” “The Hazeltone Family” by Mrs. G. E. Johnson, and “Appointed” by W. H. Stowers, and W. H. Anderson are a few of the publications on similar subjects; all should be read and placed in our libraries, as first beginnings it is true, but they compare favorably with similar work of the most advanced people.