Historical voices

For what, forsooth, shall a Negro want with pride amid the studied humiliations of fifty million fellows?

In the poise of his little curl-crowned head did there not sit all that wild pride of being which his father had hardly crushed in his own heart?

Fool that I was to think or wish that this little soul should grow choked and deformed within the Veil!

In vain, in vain!—for where, O God! beneath thy broad blue sky shall my dark baby rest in peace,—where Reverence dwells, and Goodness, and a Freedom that is free?

The busy city dinned about us; they did not say much, those pale-faced hurrying men and women; they did not say much,—they only glanced and said, “Niggers!

I—yea, all men—are larger and purer by the infinite breadth of that one little life.

He loved the white matron, he loved his black nurse; and in his little world walked souls alone, uncolored and unclothed.

He knew no color-line, poor dear—and the Veil, though it shadowed him, had not yet darkened half his sun.

Wast thou so jealous of one little coign of happiness that thou must needs enter there,—thou, O Death?

Is not this my life hard enough,—is not that dull land that stretches its sneering web about me cold enough,—is not all the world beyond these four little walls pitiless enough, but that thou must needs enter here,—thou, O Death?

I am no coward, to shrink before the rugged rush of the storm, nor even quail before the awful shadow of the Veil.

Only in the chamber of death writhed the world’s most piteous thing—a childless mother.

I hear now that Voice at midnight calling me from dull and dreamless trance,—crying, “The Shadow of Death!

Her own life builded and moulded itself upon the child; he tinged her every dream and idealized her every effort.

So sturdy and masterful he grew, so filled with bubbling life, so tremulous with the unspoken wisdom of a life but eighteen months distant from the All-life,—we were not far from worshipping this revelation of the divine, my wife and I.

I held my face beside his little cheek, showed him the star-children and the twinkling lights as they began to flash, and stilled with an even-song the unvoiced terror of my life.

Holding in that little head—ah, bitterly!—he unbowed pride of a hunted race, clinging with that tiny dimpled hand—ah, wearily!—to a hope not hopeless but unhopeful, and seeing with those bright wondering eyes that peer into my soul a land…

Within the Veil was he born, said I; and there within shall he live,—a Negro and a Negro’s son.

And thus in the Land of the Color-line I saw, as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil.

Some day the Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of ten million souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life worth living—Liberty, Justice, and Right—is marked…

But back of this still broods silently the deep religious feeling of the real Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might of powerful human souls who have lost the guiding star of the past and seek in the great night a new religious ideal.

Feeling deeply and keenly the tendencies and opportunities of the age in which they live, their souls are bitter at the fate which drops the Veil between; and the very fact that this bitterness is natural and justifiable only serves to…

They despise the submission and subserviency of the Southern Negroes, but offer no other means by which a poor and oppressed minority can exist side by side with its masters.

What wonder that every tendency is to excess,—radical complaint, radical remedies, bitter denunciation or angry silence.