The Souls of Black Folk | Page 6

into the kingdom. So the decade flew away, the
revolution of 1876 came, and left the half-free serf weary, wondering,
but still inspired. Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a new
vision began gradually to replace the dream of political power,--a pow-
erful movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, another
pillar of fire by night after a clouded day. It was the ideal of
"book-learning"; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know
and test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the longing
to know. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain

path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and law,
steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to
overlook life.
Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly;
only those who have watched and guided the faltering feet, the misty
minds, the dull understandings, of the dark pupils of these schools
know how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn. It was
weary work. The cold statistician wrote down the inches of progress
here and there, noted also where here and there a foot had slipped or
some one had fallen. To the tired climbers, the horizon was ever dark,
the mists were often cold, the Canaan was always dim and far away. If,
however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting-place, little but
flattery and criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for reflection and
self-examination; it changed the child of Emancipation to the youth
with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. In those
sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw
himself,--darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint
revelation of his power, of his mission. He began to have a dim feeling
that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not
another. For the first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon
his back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked
behind a half-named Negro problem. He felt his poverty; without a cent,
without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into
competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is
hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of
hardships. He felt the weight of his ignorance,--not simply of letters,
but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and
shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands
and feet. Nor was his burden all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of
bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro
women had stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient
African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption
from white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro
home.
A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world,

but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social
problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and
his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is
darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow
prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defence of culture
against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the
"higher" against the "lower" races. To which the Negro cries Amen!
and swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on
just homage to civilization, culture, righteousness, and progress, he
humbly bows and meekly does obeisance. But before that nameless
prejudice that leaps beyond all this he stands helpless, dismayed, and
well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery, the
ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton
license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous
welcoming of the worse, the all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain
for everything black, from Toussaint to the devil, --before this there
rises a sickening despair that would disarm and discourage any nation
save that black host to whom "discouragement" is an unwritten word.
But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable
self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever
accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and
hate. Whisperings and portents came home upon the four winds: Lo!
we are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our
voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and
serve? And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying:
Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher
culture for half-men? Away with the black man's ballot,