Negroland

by Margo Jefferson

  Free Negroes who emigrated north shortly before the war have learned the inconvenient truths that Northern Negroes have long known: many public accommodations are closed to them; most churches are closed to them; most schools are closed to their children. Law and custom restrict their right to use the job skills they have or to acquire new ones: white workers do not want them as competition.

  Two years into a war the Union fears losing, the Emancipation Proclamation frees the slaves. Negro men are at last permitted to enlist in the Union army. Approximately 180,000, North and South, do so. It’s a chance for them to prove their competence and their loyalty; it’s a new job market, even if for most of the war they are paid less than their white counterparts. War gives Negro women new jobs too, or at least new settings for old jobs. Most of them still cook, clean, launder, sew, and nurse: now they cook, clean, launder, sew, and nurse for their country, in Union hospitals and camps. They are paid less, for the war’s duration, than their white counterparts.

  Still, there are life-changing opportunities for a small group of free Negroes who claim membership in the higher ranks of the abolitionist movement. Some have been free for years; they’re leaders in their communities. Some are the former slaves who’ve won national recognition by publishing narratives of their lives. These men and women travel America and Europe to lecture on the evils of slavery, to urge immediate emancipation, to collect funds for war relief. A few even travel south to teach eager, provisionally freed slaves (Union army contrabands) to read and write. A life-changing opportunity and a profound culture shock.

  October 1862: Charlotte Forten arrives in South Carolina. She is from one of Philadelphia’s most distinguished colored families, prominent abolitionists since the eighteenth century (James Forten was her grandfather). She was the first of her race to graduate from the Salem Normal School of Salem, Massachusetts, and she has come to Port Royal to teach reading and writing to the contraband slaves freed by the Union army. “On the wharf was a motley assemblage—soldiers, officers and ‘contrabands’ of every hue and size. They were mostly black, however, and certainly the most dismal specimens I ever saw,” she tells her journal. Later that night, waiting in the commissary’s office, she encounters the “the little Commissary himself,…a perfect little popinjay, and he and a Colonel somebody who didn’t look any too sensible, talked in a very smart manner, evidently for our especial benefit. The word ‘nigger’ was plentifully used, whereupon I set them down at once as not gentlemen.”

  She is twenty-five years old and has spent her life studying French and Latin, astronomy and history; reading Spenser, Milton, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Dickens, the Brontës, Emerson, and Stowe; The Atlantic and The Liberator. She has socialized with renowned abolitionists, colored and white; she faithfully attends literary lectures and antislavery meetings; she always disparages the occasional poem or essay she contributes to antislavery journals.

  She rages against bigotries, big and small; falls into a depression (“I wonder that every colored person is not a misanthrope. Surely we have everything to make us hate mankind”), then upbraids herself for being insufficiently stoic. She strives for perfect selflessness. “Conscience answers it is wrong, it is ignoble to despair…Let us take courage, never ceasing to work,—hoping and believing that if not for us, for another generation there is a better, brighter day in store.” She sinks back into self-doubt. She is not a misanthrope, she is a melancholic—a depressed gentle-woman.

  Dutifully, doggedly, she teaches at a white elementary school in Massachusetts and a black elementary school in Philadelphia before ill health threatens her ability to earn her living. She longs to visit Italy; she longs to be a literary genius, to do something that will make her “forever known.” She doubts her abilities and opportunities. She resolves: “I will pray that God, in his goodness, will make me noble enough to find my highest happiness in doing my duty.”

  It’s so easy, so temptingly easy, to upbraid or at least mock her pieties, the decorum that dulls her, the taint of naïve snobbery. How pleased and surprised she is that some of her students are so very bright; how laughable she finds their ebullience and physical intensity. (The leader of the singers one Sunday is Prince, large, black, and “full of the shouting spirit…It was amusing to see his gymnastic performances. They were quite in the Ethiopian Methodists’ style.”)

  “These people have really a great deal of musical talent,” she writes in a letter to The Liberator, adding, as so many white listeners have and will, that their songs are nearly impossible to describe: “They are so wild, so strange, and yet so invariably harmonious and sweet.” How she basks in the courtesies of Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Colonel Robert Shaw! Yet how could it be otherwise? Progressive white easterners have been part of her world since childhood; contraband slaves and working-class Negroes have not. And free Negroes have had to depend on the decency of progressives. We know that slaves made distinctions between good and bad white people and behaved accordingly. Free Negroes did the same. In both cases there can be a display of gratitude (excited, fawning, a touch abject) that makes us wince.

  Nevertheless, Charlotte Forten does establish genuine relations with some of the blacks in Port Royal. And when Higginson’s black regiment prepares to go to Jacksonville, Florida, she is invited along as their teacher. (The town’s evacuation prevents the trip.) Poor lungs, blinding headaches, and loneliness—what she later calls fears of insanity—send her home after eighteen months. There, filled with self-reproach, she works for organizations that educate New England’s freedmen and freedwomen. She aspires to “that noblest of compensations,” as she writes a friend: “the knowledge that you are giving your life to the regeneration of a down-trodden & long suffering people.”

  —

  The war ends; “Reconstruction” begins. Rights are asserted, granted, withdrawn; demanded, restored, amended. Opportunities are sought and fought for; bestowed and withheld. A constitutional amendment forbids slavery. Southern blacks farm their own land, start businesses, and venture into new professions; open more schools and churches, seek education in long-established white schools and newly founded black schools; demand better wages, win political representation in state and federal governments.

  And, right from the beginning, Southern states use legal and illegal means (laws, sporadic violence, organized terrorism) to thwart wage increases and fair employment practices; to force Negroes back into a plantation labor system that will be called sharecropping; to limit or deny political advancement to Negro men, women, and children; to limit or deny education to Negro men, women, and children. Every advance is met with an attack.

  1865 and ’66: Pass a civil rights act; found the Ku Klux Klan.

  1868: The Fourteenth Amendment grants Negro men the vote. The Fourteenth Amendment denies all women—Negro, white, and other—the vote. Five years later, the Fifteenth Amendment prohibits state governments from finding ways to deprive citizens of the right to vote based on race. The Fifteenth Amendment does not protect the rights of blacks to hold office. Nor does it prevent Southern states from launching their assault and battery on these constitutional rights with a flurry of laws called the Black Codes and a series of terrorist attacks by the KKK.

  —

  Despite all this, Negroes are acquiring political resources and limited amounts of political and social power. In the decades after the war, free Negroes who had privilege before the war and Negroes who were in the top tier of slavery acquire power as politicians and community leaders. They work to balance their continued and expanding social privilege with their equally expanded duties to the larger Negro community.

  But there are new players here. Those who once lived in slavery or on the lower rungs of the free Negro class are now in a position to seize opportunities and provide good schools, stores, and restaurants to an eager people along with churches, life insurance, good hair products, and cultural advantages. They too become teachers, lawyers, undertakers, doctors, journalists; som
e dare to become artists. They study chemistry and zoology, Greek, Latin, the Romance languages. They send their children to the growing number of Negro colleges; occasionally they send them to white colleges; periodically they send them abroad for cultural enrichment.

  The old families have to cope: The end of slavery has not just freed a people; it has freed achievers, strivers, arrivistes from the lower ranks. Call them what you will. That many have darker skin is often noted by the old elites; likewise their rough manners and rowdy ways. Their homes and wardrobes are said to be gaudy, their voices have a telltale Southern timbre; their grammar can be…deviant. But they are here. They will achieve and advance; they will buy or barter their way into the old elite; they will establish their own vigorous competing elite.

  What has become of those old aristocrats Joseph Willson, Cyprian Clamorgan, and Charlotte Forten?

  Joseph Willson has flourished. He is Dr. Willson now, dental surgeon. In the 1850s he moved his family to Cleveland, which boasted a Negro elite as secure as Philadelphia’s. His practice thrives; his patients are respectable Negroes and Caucasians; Joseph’s wife, Elizabeth, is known as a fine musician and gracious hostess. They join a prestigious, largely white Episcopal church, and a club whose aim is “to promote social intercourse and cultural contact among the better educated colored families” of the city. Their son becomes a lawyer, their daughters become schoolteachers (a typical gender division for that and many subsequent generations). In 1878 the youngest daughter achieves something her paternal slave grandmother never could have: a fine, fashionable marriage to a powerful Southern gentleman. Blanche K. Bruce, her new husband, is a mulatto ex-slave who grew up to be a teacher, then the owner of a 640-acre plantation, and finally a senator from the Magnolia State of Mississippi.

  Cyprian Clamorgan has done less well. He has had two disappointing marriages. His first wife, Joanna, died; and after a few years he sees very little of the second, Hebe, or their daughter, Mary. Since the war’s end he has worked on boats as a barber and a steward, moving among St. Louis, New Orleans, and Calhoun County, Illinois. When it’s to his advantage, he passes for white. (He spent the war in New Orleans, race and profession unknown.) When his money runs short, he sells off some of the tracts of the land he and his relatives inherited from their grandee grandfather. Much of it is no longer in Clamorgan hands: time and again—in the 1860s, the 1870s, the 1880s and ’90s—the family sues the railroad companies and the individuals who now occupy their land. Time and again they lose.

  Charlotte Forten has continued to work for “a downtrodden & long suffering people,” arranging Northern support for teachers in the South, and briefly returning South to teach. She moves to Washington, D.C., to teach in the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth that will become Dunbar High, renowned for educating future race leaders and ornaments. She works as a clerk for the U.S. Treasury. She marries the minister and race leader Francis Grimké in 1878, and spends the rest of her life as a physically frail, unswervingly diligent writer, activist, and helpmate.

  —

  These are years of ferocious industrial and technological growth: steel, iron, railroads, electricity. Of ferocious social strife: monopolies vs. labor unions; political machines vs. civic reformers; immigrants vs. nativists; economic booms and crashes; new millionaires vs. old ones; an expanding middle class vs. ever-growing numbers of the poor and the almost-poor. Whites instigate riots, South and North, and lynchings, usually South; whites pass federal and state laws that ensure exclusion of or inferior accommodation for blacks in every kind of public activity and space: train and bus travel, hospitals, restaurants, libraries, theaters, parks, beaches, and schools, from the nursery to the university.

  How do our chroniclers address this?

  Our female chroniclers cannot address any of it without addressing rape and miscegenation. First they must defend their long-debased reputation as Negro women, deemed inherently lascivious since slave times, incapable of being virtuous wives and mothers. Second, they must protest the growing number of lynchings, most of them based on postslavery claims that Negro men were compulsive rapists of white women.

  In 1895 Ida B. Wells, a young schoolteacher turned journalist, the daughter of emancipated slaves determined to advance by educating themselves and their children, publishes The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. The “record” includes the lynching of Negroes “for almost any offense from murder to a misdemeanor”; the lynching of men, women, and children charged with rioting or insurrection; the lynching of Negroes whose political or economic success threatens whites; the lynching of Negro men who have been having consensual affairs with white women.

  She collects her evidence from white newspapers and legal documents as well as from Negro witnesses and newspapers. She presents it in crisp, vivid, spicy anecdotes, followed by zealous argument.

  The Southern white man says that it is impossible for a voluntary alliance to exist between a white woman and a colored man, and therefore, the fact of an alliance is a proof of force. In numerous instances where colored men have been lynched on the charge of rape, it was positively known at the time of lynching, and indisputably proven after the victim’s death, that the relationship sustained between the man and woman was voluntary and clandestine, and that in no court of law could even the charge of assault have been successfully maintained.

  As for legions of lascivious colored women, “The miscegenation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races, they leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can,—and, [here she provides documented evidence] to rape them as well.”

  A Voice from the South, by “A Black Woman of the South,” has appeared in 1892. The black woman behind the pen name is Anna Julia Cooper, daughter of a slave master and a slave woman; educated at Oberlin (with no help from her father); a teacher of math, science, and Latin at Washington, D.C.’s respected Preparatory High School for Colored Youth.

  Her prose is that of a self-contained and rigorously cultivated Victorian, filled with literary allusions, historical comparisons, and Christian invocations. She excoriates the “masculinist” urge to dominate, first in the home, then in the nation and throughout the world.

  The pen name shows her wish to invoke the collective voice of an unheeded, uncelebrated female Anonymous, a black Anonymous who speaks to and for all of the oppressed. Woman’s cause is—or should be—“linked with that of every agony that has been dumb—every wrong that needs a voice.”

  Like so many women’s rights leaders, she insists on believing women possess sympathies and spiritual gifts men lack. But— and here she becomes a tough-minded political pragmatist—women cannot reform society without working to educate themselves. And white women can reform nothing until and unless they are willing to relinquish their caste privilege, those codes of racial and social superiority they extol in their men and instill in their children.

  Nevertheless, she is filled with hope: “such new and alluring vistas are opening out before us, such original and radical suggestions for the adjustment of labor and capital, of government and the governed, of the family, the church and the state.” She exults: “To be a woman in such an age carries with it privilege and an opportunity never implied before. But to be a woman of the Negro race in America, and to be able to grasp the deep significance of the possibilities of the crisis, is to have a heritage, it seems to me, unique in the ages.”

  And this sense of destiny galvanizes a critical mass of privileged Negro women. Few are willing to call themselves black, as Cooper did; few are as militantly forthright as Wells. Many insist overmuch that they be recognized as ladies. Proud of their education and cultivation, they are angered and ashamed to be classed with “the lowly, the illiterate and even the vicious, to whom they are bound by the ties of race and sex.” But they go to work. They set about to reclaim and redeem these women, and in doing so to uplift the race. They form clubs and associations
to raise money for schools and settlement houses; organize nurseries and kindergartens; teach reading, writing, sewing, homemaking, and hygiene; work for women’s suffrage, for temperance, for better work conditions, and for anti-lynching laws. When they form a National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, they choose as their motto “Lifting As We Climb.” Arduous. Virtuous. High-minded and high-handed.

  The twentieth century beckons. In 1903 the high-minded, high-handed New Englander W. E. B. Du Bois publishes The Souls of Black Folk, in which he joins scholarship, reflection, exhortation, and confession. He is a Victorian, but he is a modernist too. Stern and stringent. And he is proud: “Does any race produce more than a small percentage of exceptional men and women—ten percent at most?” he demands in another essay published that same year. “Is any nation civilized from the bottom up?” The demure exclusivity of Willson’s “colored elite” is now the more sociologically rigorous, politically aggressive “Talented Tenth,” from whose ranks race leaders must come. Clamorgan’s gleeful frivolity has been altogether banished. Cooper’s Christianity is not a deeply held faith; it’s a moral trope, a way for Du Bois to invoke the eternal verities of justice and injustice.

  He shares Cooper’s radical romanticism; he shares Wells’s outrage at lynchings and other Southern barbarities. He knows their work.

  But he is intent on cutting a much wider swath, sometimes at their expense. The soul of a grandly confident Negro intellectual—a Negro male intellectual—is on display. Du Bois is blazingly entitled. And Du Bois sets the agenda for generations to come: The educated and privileged must guide the Mass of Negroes forward, fight oppression, and champion achievement. Unlike its predecessors, The Souls of Black Folk excites intellectual debate and stirs serious readers on both sides of the increasingly rigid color line. James Weldon Johnson compares its impact to that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Henry James calls it “the only Southern book of any real distinction to appear in years”—and laments the fact that a depleted white Southern culture has made it so. His reaction illustrates another crucial Du Boisian theme. Men and women of the Talented Tenth may cherish Shakespeare, Dumas, and Balzac (or Henry James) all they want, but they know that in the hearts and minds of most Americans they are unwelcome pretenders trying to escape their rightful place in the lower social and biological order. That is the double consciousness they must bear. Or one form of it. The other is the double consciousness that comes from knowing history has bound them to cruelties and calumnies that many hours of the day, many days of the week, many weeks of the year they feel or want to feel little attachment to. No, they tell themselves then, I have worked to earn the right to go about the business of my well-appointed life—to fulfill my professional obligations, social aspirations, familial responsibilities. I do not want to think constantly about Them as Us.