Darkwater | Page 4

and New Haven; later he was a small merchant in Springfield;
and finally he retired and ended his days at New Bedford. Always he
held his head high, took no insults, made few friends. He was not a
"Negro"; he was a man! Yet the current was too strong even for him.
Then even more than now a colored man had colored friends or none at
all, lived in a colored world or lived alone. A few fine, strong, black
men gained the heart of this silent, bitter man in New York and New
Haven. If he had scant sympathy with their social clannishness, he was
with them in fighting discrimination. So, when the white Episcopalians
of Trinity Parish, New Haven, showed plainly that they no longer
wanted black Folks as fellow Christians, he led the revolt which
resulted in St. Luke's Parish, and was for years its senior warden. He
lies dead in the Grove Street Cemetery, beside Jehudi Ashmun.
Beneath his sternness was a very human man. Slyly he wrote

poetry,--stilted, pleading things from a soul astray. He loved women in
his masterful way, marrying three beautiful wives in succession and
clinging to each with a certain desperate, even if unsympathetic,
affection. As a father he was, naturally, a failure,--hard, domineering,
unyielding. His four children reacted characteristically: one was until
past middle life a thin spinster, the mental image of her father; one died;
one passed over into the white world and her children's children are
now white, with no knowledge of their Negro blood; the fourth, my
father, bent before grandfather, but did not break--better if he had. He
yielded and flared back, asked forgiveness and forgot why, became the

harshly-held favorite, who ran away and rioted and roamed and loved
and married my brown mother.
So with some circumstance having finally gotten myself born, with a
flood of Negro blood, a strain of French, a bit of Dutch, but, thank God!
no "Anglo-Saxon," I come to the days of my childhood.
They were very happy. Early we moved back to Grandfather
Burghardt's home,--I barely remember its stone fireplace, big kitchen,
and delightful woodshed. Then this house passed to other branches of
the clan and we moved to rented quarters in town,--to one delectable
place "upstairs," with a wide yard full of shrubbery, and a brook; to
another house abutting a railroad, with infinite interests and astonishing
playmates; and finally back to the quiet street on which I was
born,--down a long lane and in a homely, cozy cottage, with a
living-room, a tiny sitting-room, a pantry, and two attic bedrooms. Here
mother and I lived until she died, in 1884, for father early began his
restless wanderings. I last remember urgent letters for us to come to
New Milford, where he had started a barber shop. Later he became a
preacher. But mother no longer trusted his dreams, and he soon faded
out of our lives into silence.
From the age of five until I was sixteen I went to a school on the same
grounds,--down a lane, into a widened yard, with a big choke-cherry
tree and two buildings, wood and brick. Here I got acquainted with my
world, and soon had my criterions of judgment.
Wealth had no particular lure. On the other hand, the shadow of wealth
was about us. That river of my birth was golden because of the woolen
and paper waste that soiled it. The gold was theirs, not ours; but the
gleam and glint was for all. To me it was all in order and I took it
philosophically. I cordially despised the poor Irish and South Germans,
who slaved in the mills, and annexed the rich and well-to-do as my
natural companions. Of such is the kingdom of snobs!
Most of our townfolk were, naturally, the well-to-do, shading
downward, but seldom reaching poverty. As playmate of the children I
saw the homes of nearly every one, except a few immigrant New

Yorkers, of whom none of us approved. The homes I saw impressed me,
but did not overwhelm me. Many were bigger than mine, with newer
and shinier things, but they did not seem to differ in kind. I think I
probably surprised my hosts more than they me, for I was easily at
home and perfectly happy and they looked to me just like ordinary
people, while my brown face and frizzled hair must have seemed
strange to them.
Yet I was very much one of them. I was a center and sometimes the
leader of the town gang of boys. We were noisy, but never very
bad,--and, indeed, my mother's quiet influence came in here, as I
realize now. She did not try to make me perfect. To her I was already
perfect. She simply warned me of a