Darkwater | Page 8

might fail. I meant still to be captain of my
soul, but I realized that even captains are not omnipotent in uncharted
and angry seas.
I essayed a thorough piece of work in Philadelphia. I labored morning,
noon, and night. Nobody ever reads that fat volume on "The
Philadelphia Negro," but they treat it with respect, and that consoles me.
The colored people of Philadelphia received me with no open arms.
They had a natural dislike to being studied like a strange species. I met
again and in different guise those curious cross-currents and inner
social whirlings of my own people. They set me to groping. I
concluded that I did not know so much as I might about my own people,
and when President Bumstead invited me to Atlanta University the next
year to teach sociology and study the American Negro, I accepted
gladly, at a salary of twelve hundred dollars.
My real life work was done at Atlanta for thirteen years, from my
twenty-ninth to my forty-second birthday. They were years of great
spiritual upturning, of the making and unmaking of ideals, of hard work
and hard play. Here I found myself. I lost most of my mannerisms. I
grew more broadly human, made my closest and most holy friendships,
and studied human beings. I became widely-acquainted with the real
condition of my people. I realized the terrific odds which faced them.
At Wilberforce I was their captious critic. In Philadelphia I was their
cold and scientific investigator, with microscope and probe. It took but

a few years of Atlanta to bring me to hot and indignant defense. I saw
the race-hatred of the whites as I had never dreamed of it

before,--naked and unashamed! The faint discrimination of my hopes
and intangible dislikes paled into nothing before this great, red monster
of cruel oppression. I held back with more difficulty each day my
mounting indignation against injustice and misrepresentation.
With all this came the strengthening and hardening of my own
character. The billows of birth, love, and death swept over me. I saw
life through all its paradox and contradiction of streaming eyes and
mad merriment. I emerged into full manhood, with the ruins of some
ideals about me, but with others planted above the stars; scarred and a
bit grim, but hugging to my soul the divine gift of laughter and withal
determined, even unto stubbornness, to fight the good fight.
At last, forbear and waver as I would, I faced the great Decision. My
life's last and greatest door stood ajar. What with all my dreaming,
studying, and teaching was I going to _do_ in this fierce fight? Despite
all my youthful conceit and bumptiousness, I found developed beneath
it all a reticence and new fear of forwardness, which sprang from
searching criticisms of motive and high ideals of efficiency; but
contrary to my dream of racial solidarity and notwithstanding my deep
desire to serve and follow and think, rather than to lead and inspire and
decide, I found myself suddenly the leader of a great wing of people
fighting against another and greater wing.
Nor could any effort of mine keep this fight from sinking to the
personal plane. Heaven knows I tried. That first meeting of a knot of
enthusiasts, at Niagara Falls, had all the earnestness of self-devotion.
At the second meeting, at Harper's Ferry, it arose to the solemnity of a
holy crusade and yet without and to the cold, hard stare of the world it
seemed merely the envy of fools against a great man, Booker
Washington.
Of the movement I was willy-nilly leader. I hated the role. For the first
time I faced criticism and _cared_. Every ideal and habit of my life was
cruelly misjudged. I who had always overstriven to give credit for good

work, who had never consciously stooped to envy was accused by
honest colored people of every sort of small and petty jealousy, while
white people said I was ashamed of my race and wanted to be white!
And this of me, whose one life fanaticism had been belief in my Negro
blood!
Away back in the little years of my boyhood I had sold the Springfield
_Republican_ and written for Mr. Fortune's _Globe_. I dreamed of
being an editor myself some day. I am an editor. In the great, slashing
days of college life I dreamed of a strong organization to fight the
battles of the Negro race. The National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People is such a body, and it grows daily. In
the dark days at Wilberforce I planned a time when I could speak freely
to my people and of them, interpreting between two worlds. I am
speaking now. In the study at Atlanta I grew to fear lest my radical