Darkwater | Page 9

beliefs should so hurt the college that either my silence or the
institution's ruin would result. Powers and principalities have not yet
curbed my tongue and Atlanta still lives.
It all came--this new Age of Miracles--because a few persons in 1909
determined to celebrate Lincoln's Birthday properly by calling for the
final emancipation of the American Negro. I came at their call. My
salary even for a year was not assured, but it was the "Voice without
reply." The result has been the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People and _The Crisis_ and this book, which
I am finishing on my Fiftieth Birthday.
Last year I looked death in the face and found its lineaments not unkind.
But it was not my time. Yet in nature some time soon and in the
fullness of days I shall die, quietly, I trust, with my face turned South
and eastward; and, dreaming or dreamless, I shall, I am sure, enjoy
death as I have enjoyed life.
_A Litany at Atlanta_
O Silent God, Thou whose voice afar in mist and mystery hath left our
ears an-hungered in these fearful days--

_Hear us, good Lord!_
Listen to us, Thy children: our faces dark with doubt are made a
mockery in Thy Sanctuary. With uplifted hands we front Thy Heaven,
O God, crying:
_We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!_
We are not better than our fellows, Lord; we are but weak and human
men. When our devils do deviltry, curse Thou the doer and the
deed,--curse them as we curse them, do to them all and more than ever
they have done to innocence and weakness, to womanhood and home.
_Have mercy upon us, miserable sinners!_
And yet, whose is the deeper guilt? Who made these devils? Who
nursed them in crime and fed them on injustice? Who ravished and
debauched their mothers and their grandmothers? Who bought and sold
their crime and waxed fat and rich on public iniquity?
_Thou knowest, good God!_
Is this Thy Justice, O Father, that guile be easier than innocence and the
innocent be crucified for the guilt of the untouched guilty?
_Justice, O Judge of men!_
Wherefore do we pray? Is not the God of the Fathers dead? Have not
seers seen in Heaven's halls Thine hearsed and lifeless form stark
amidst the black and rolling smoke of sin, where all along bow bitter
forms of endless dead?
_Awake, Thou that sleepest!_
Thou art not dead, but flown afar, up hills of endless light, through
blazing corridors of suns, where worlds do swing of good and gentle
men, of women strong and free--far from the cozenage, black hypocrisy,
and chaste prostitution of this shameful speck of dust!

_Turn again, O Lord; leave us not to perish in our sin!_
From lust of body and lust of blood,--
_Great God, deliver us!_
From lust of power and lust of gold,--
_Great God, deliver us!_
From the leagued lying of despot and of brute,--
_Great God, deliver us!_
A city lay in travail, God our Lord, and from her loins sprang twin
Murder and Black Hate. Red was the midnight; clang, crack, and cry of
death and fury filled the air and trembled underneath the stars where
church spires pointed silently to Thee. And all this was to sate the greed
of greedy men who hide behind the veil of vengeance!
_Bend us Thine ear, O Lord!_
In the pale, still morning we looked upon the deed. We stopped our
ears and held our leaping hands, but they--did they not wag their heads
and leer and cry with bloody jaws: _Cease from Crime!_ The word was
mockery, for thus they train a hundred crimes while we do cure one.
_Turn again our captivity, O Lord!_
Behold this maimed and broken thing, dear God; it was an humble
black man, who toiled and sweat to save a bit from the pittance paid
him. They told him: _Work and Rise!_ He worked. Did this man sin?
Nay, but someone told how someone said another did--one whom he
had never seen nor known. Yet for that man's crime this man lieth
maimed and murdered, his wife naked to shame, his children to poverty
and evil.
_Hear us, O heavenly Father!_

Doth not this justice of hell stink in Thy nostrils, O God? How long
shall the mounting flood of innocent blood roar in Thine ears and
pound in our hearts for vengeance? Pile the pale frenzy of blood-crazed
brutes, who do such deeds, high on Thine Altar, Jehovah Jireh, and
burn it in hell forever and forever!
_Forgive us, good Lord; we know not what we say!_
Bewildered we are and passion-tossed, mad with the madness of a
mobbed and mocked and murdered people; straining at the armposts of
Thy throne,