THE NEGRO A NOVELTY.
In Heidelberg, Mayence, Cologne and other places, Dr. Walker and Dr. Carter were the observed of all observers. Hundreds of people would gather about them and inspect their clothing and feel their skin.
In Brussels, in a few minutes after they left the station and reached the streets, a crowd of nearly 500 people gathered around and plied them with all sorts of questions. They were asked what was the cause of their blackness; they were asked whether the devil made them black; one man wanted to know if everybody where they came from was black; some wanted to know if their color would wash off; another asked why the palms of their hands were so much lighter than the backs of their hands; and so on almost without limit. When they started down the street, hundreds of children followed them the same as if they were following a circus. The children gladly carried the traveling bags, bundles, and walking canes, umbrellas, etc.—anything to keep up with the strange men. Writing about this to his newspaper at Augusta, Ga., Dr. Walker said:
“In America the Negro is a problem; in Europe he is a novelty.”
CHAPTER XX.
APPEARANCE, MANNERS, HABITS.
The Rev. Dr. Walker stands five feet seven inches in his stockings. He weighs 160 pounds. He has a peculiar stoop in his shoulders, not from age, but from a constitutional pliancy of his back-bone, aided by his early habit of incessant reading. In walking, he has a peculiar swaying or swinging gait. Seen from behind, he looks, as he walks with head depressed, bended back, and swaying gait, like an old man. But the expression of his face is singularly and engagingly youthful. A smile plays ever on his countenance. The pleasant, youngish looking face is in marked contrast with his head, which is prematurely gray. Sometimes in referring to his gray hairs, Dr. Walker says that they cannot be signs of hard work or trouble, because he was told by his mother that he had a number of gray hairs in his head in his infancy. His skin is very dark, but there are many very much darker men among the colored people. He never would be taken for a great man, judging from his appearance. Not a large man in stature, without a commanding appearance, he never would be looked at for the second time when one passes him on the street and never would be taken for one of the world’s most famous preachers in any large gathering with other distinguished men. It is when he begins to speak that the latent powers of the man are at once apparent to the close student of human nature and the practiced observer of men. When seated, he is like a sea at rest, calm and undisturbed; when on his feet, he is like the sea in action, or like some dictator suddenly sent from another world to correct the faults and foibles of this world.
In manner he is still, to some extent, a rustic. His world-wide travel, his acquaintance with some of the greatest and best of earth and his life in the metropolis of America, have not been able to make much impression upon him. He is an unassimilated man. Great, indeed, are the assimilating powers of the large cities. A youth will go to New York or Boston, awkward, ill-dressed, bashful, and capable of being surprised. After only a few years’ absence, he returns to his country home a changed being; his clothes, his accent, his affectations, and his manners are “City-made.” His friends do not recognize him at first sight. They do not quite understand his language when he speaks. All his ways are changed. He is another man. It is so with most, but not with all. Some men there are—very few, yet some—who resist effectually or, one might say, unconsciously, and to the last, the assimilating influence of the large cities. They are the oddities, the stared-at, the men of whom anecdotes are told. There is one thing, though, which can be said of them which cannot be said of the other class; there is no affection about them—they do not put on. Everywhere and all the time, Dr. Walker keeps to his Southern training and his Southern style. “I am not a society man,” he often says, “and you cannot expect me to be up on etiquette and decorum, and all those fool things.” When asked to do the honors at some wedding feast, or sit down and enjoy a sumptuous repast in courses, he has been heard to say, “I am not used to that kind of thing, and I cannot get above my raising.” But it must not be thought that because it is admitted that he is still a rustic in some things that he is at all boorish, unmannered or impolite. No man enjoys the society of people, the intercourse of men, the mutual exchange and interchange of ideas and opinions more than he does, and he would not be likely to mistake finger-bowl for drinking purposes. But his politeness is the politeness of tact and good common sense rather than the politeness of the books and of so-called high society.
In some respects he is exceedingly frank: in others, no man is more reserved. He likes company and likes to talk about the things which interest him most, and there are thousands of living mortals who will testify that they have never found any man in general conversation more interesting or more entertaining than he. In Georgia, where people are always very democratic in their ways, for hours and hours great crowds of men, old and young, have considered it a privilege and an honor to be permitted to stand in some barber shop or drug store or grocery store and listen to Dr. Walker talk. It is very difficult for him to go one square in his home town without being stopped by somebody who really has no other motive than just to hear him talk. When one succeeds in detaining him for a little while, that is usually the signal for others to join the number, and by this process it is not long before Dr. Walker has been intercepted and made to talk. Such a thing would disturb and annoy an ordinary man. But when he is asked if it does not tire him to be worried out by people who merely want to take up his time in talking, he says: “It pleases them, and it doesn’t hurt me.” He loves a joke—not likes, but loves—and tells a comic story with great glee. His cheerfulness is habitual, and probably he never knew two consecutive hours of melancholy in his life.
He possesses one of the most remarkable memories for names and faces that God has ever given to any man. At one time his membership in Augusta consisted of more than 1,200 persons, and he knew them all by name, and could call their names as soon as he saw them anywhere and at anytime. In Augusta, with a population of 15,000 colored people, more or less, he knows more than half of them by name. The same is true of the people in the country districts in and around Augusta where he has been. He knows the leading men and women in religious, political, and educational circles throughout the state and nation, and can call their names without a moment’s hesitation, tell where they are, and what they are doing; in many instances, he knows about their past, about their family connections, about any difficulties they may have had. Of course, this wonderful power of memory must of necessity stand him in good stead in his sermon preparation, in his delivery of sermons, and in his literary work; but it is little short of wonderful how one man could, in the first place, know so much about so many people, and, in the second place, how, if he did know, he could remember it all, even to the smallest detail.
Though humble, meek, modest almost to the point of shyness, there is nothing of obsequiousness about him. It is not his way to bow and scrape and cater to any man, while at the same time he has a becoming respect for the deeds of men and never fails to praise a fellow-mortal for the good that he does. But he hates hypocrisy, he hates cringing. He has never found it necessary to go out of the way to speak with any of the great men of the world with whom he has come in contact or who have attended his meetings in various places from time to time. Sometimes, when he has been told that Mr. So-and-So (a person of some influence) is in the audience, he has replied, “Give him my number, please: if he desires to call, I shall be glad to see him.”
He is not what may be called a bookish preacher—that is to say, his sermons do not smell of the lamb. His sermons are, nevertheless, always carefully prepared beforehand, but it is a preparation of prayer, Bible reading and meditation. He goes to the pulpit from his knees, and has often been heard to say, “I know what I am going to say before I come into the pulpit; I know the hymns I am going to sing, the chapter that I am going to read, and I know where the text is to be found.” His favorite source of information outside of the Bible is the daily newspaper. He always reads with an eye single to the use he can make of the news in his preaching or in his public addresses. In this way, he keeps abreast of the times, and frequently has well-matured opinions on important matters, and many times has spoken of them in public before some other ministers have heard of them. When he enters the pulpit, free from the narrowness that must come to the man who uses only his Bible commentary, he seems to feel himself under divine compulsion to deliver a message of transcendent importance to dying men; there is an air about him of a soldier who has a divine commission to fight a great battle for humanity. He speaks directly to the heart, in language all hearts can understand. Humor and pathos, pleading and scorn, impassioned exhortation and cutting sarcasm, all are used in his discourses with tremendous effect.
That he is a man of unpretentious habits and winning manners is evidenced by the great love manifested toward him by the children in the city of Augusta, where he lived so long. Even the children know him and call him by name, and it is an honor without dissimulation, and a tribute without sinister motives that the little children pay when they run in great crowds at sight of the affable preacher, crying as they run, “Howdy, Brer Walker?” “Howdy, Brer Walker?” Many times Dr. Walker will stop and talk with them, ask after their mothers and fathers, and also about their schooling; often he will tell them a little story, and then invite them to church and Sunday school the following Sunday.
CHAPTER XXI.
TRAITS AND CHARACTERISTICS.
One of the leading characteristics that may be mentioned in speaking of Dr. Walker’s traits is this: He is accustomed to bear injuries and insults with great patience and forbearance. All the great men of earth from the time of Christ to the present day have been subjected to calumny, abuse, contumely, and misrepresentation in some form or other. George Washington, during his second administration, was called a traitor, because he would not go to war with England. Epithets were applied to him which would hardly have been applied to a Nero, a notorious defaulter, or a common pickpocket. Abraham Lincoln was called a poltroon, a hypocrite, because he was deliberate, painstaking and cautious about issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. Horace Greeley, who, with his paper, the New York Tribune, did more than any other individual in America to bring about the abolition of slavery, was most bitterly denounced by the American people, because he dared to go on the bond of Jefferson Davis, the animosity and vituperation having reached their climax in his campaign against Grant for the presidency. Henry Ward Beecher, who was without a peer in the American pulpit, was hounded down by the venomous tongue of slander and dragged into court on an infamous charge. Dwight L. Moody had his bitter with his sweet. On his first evangelistic campaign in Europe the papers boldly asserted that he was in the employ of P. T. Barnum, the great show man, and that he was making thousands for his own use out of a credulous public. His issuing of the “Moody and Sankey Hymn Book” was declared to be a huge money-making venture, and people were advised not to purchase it. The great and good William McKinley, the patient, praying President, was most bitterly assailed, his motives most bitterly impugned, and he was called “the puppet president,” “the tool,” “the manakin.” President Roosevelt has said that the man who has not made mistakes is the man who has not done anything. It might be said with equal truth that the man who has not been assailed and opposed is the man who has not done anything. How could Dr. Walker escape? A man’s character is not evinced by the manner in which he is slandered and abused and traduced, nevertheless; but a man’s character is shown by the manner in which he accepts misrepresentation and abuse and slander. Dr. Walker has the courage which faces difficulties, braves rebuke and contumely, is not afraid of harsh names and ugly epithets; the courage that can look danger and persecution in the face and not shrink before them, brave before ridicule not less than before threatening; the rare courage which in the discharge of duty is not afraid of what men shall say. Though he likes popularity—and who does not?—yet no consideration of public favor can frighten him from speaking his mind, from saying what he believes to be true, from saying what he believes that the people ought to hear. Such courage is of a higher order than an animal instinct, more difficult to maintain, and more trying to a sensitive soul. The bravery that bears misunderstanding is more radical than the bravery that returns blows or fights battles. He has repeatedly said that he has tried to make these words the motto of his life: “I am determined never to be guilty of ingratitude; never to desert a friend; never to strike back at an enemy.” I have known Dr. Walker intimately for more than twenty years. I have eaten with him, slept with him, traveled with him, prayed with him, worked with him, played with him; I have known some of the indignities, which have been heaped upon him, and some of the hard things, which he has been called upon to bear; and I truly believe that, in his dealings with those who have wronged him, as well as in his dealings with humanity in general, he is the most Christlike man I ever knew. He comes nearer fulfilling in his own life and person the divine injunction, “Love your enemies; do good to them that despitefully use you,” than any man of my extended acquaintance. Perhaps the following admonition and advice sent to me by him in a letter at a time of great trial in my own life, will better show his character on this point than anything I could say. Here is what he said: “You must expect that some will misrepresent both your conduct and your motives. You must expect that your best efforts will be thwarted by the folly or wickedness of those whom you propose to serve. Be it so. Spend no time or strength in unavailing regrets. Spend no time or strength in repelling the attempted injury. Go forward in the way of duty. Let your uniform good conduct be your defence. Time is the great corrector. Your conduct will one day be seen in its true light. If not, God always sees it in its true light, and will reward every man according to his works.” These were noble words from a noble soul. God does not call his ministers to seats of ease, nor yet to the enjoyment of undisturbed comforts. Their duties are of such a nature and their environment is so peculiar that such a call in this life is impossible. Indeed, it often happens that the more faithful a minister is to his divine vocation, the more bitter will be the cup he is called upon to drain. Had it been otherwise, the name of many a noble man of God, enshrined in the hearts of millions of the race, would never have been heard beyond his parish boundaries. In every church, even those conducted on sound principles, there are a few polyphagous members whom no gospel preacher can supply. They are ever restive, ever seeking after novelties, ever grumbling, ever finding fault. Dr. Walker has met people of this class in his pastoral work, and he has won them by love and kindness. He has proved in this way that the word of the Master is true, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven.”
Humility is also a distinguishing trait in the character of Dr. Walker. The beauty of humility is delightfully displayed in him, and its influence is extensively felt and acknowledged. Hence, arise the love and respect so generally entertained for him. It has been remarked that scarcely any person could be in his presence for an hour without loving him. There has always been about him a beautiful unmindfulness of himself while engaged in his life-work. In this respect he is different from many, for self-consciousness and solicitous guardianship over their own rights and honors characterize mankind in general. At the recent meeting in Mt. Olivet Baptist Church, held to protest against his returning to labor with his old church at Augusta, one of the most prominent young men of the church spoke in substance as follows: “I want to confess something here that I have never before told anybody, not even Dr. Walker. Dr. Walker has done more to take false pride out of me than any man living. The other day I was going down Broadway, and I passed Dr. Walker. I stopped and shook his hand, and being somewhat in a hurry, kept on down the street. Shortly after I had passed him I met a young man whom I knew well, but he wasn’t well dressed—in fact, he was dressed very shabbily—and I didn’t want to speak to him. I turned my head away from him, so as to keep from speaking. I looked back to see if Dr. Walker would speak to him. Dr. Walker stopped and shook that young man’s hand and stood up in Broadway, with all the people going by, to talk with him, and Dr. Walker seemed just as glad to see him as he had been to see me. I learned a lesson from that scene that I will never forget.”
Dr. Walker, also, has a responsive feeling of gratitude for mercies and favors received. This spirit is always associated with true humility; for in proportion to the Christian’s sense of his own unworthiness, is his thankfulness for those supplies which he forfeited by his rebellion. Dr. Walker views every blessing, both temporal and spiritual, as coming to him immediately from the hand of God through the mediation of Jesus Christ.
Christian charity pre-eminently adorns the character of Dr. Walker. The love which glows in Dr. Walker’s heart was evidently enkindled by the Holy Ghost and has produced a cordial feeling of good-will toward all men, of whatever grade or country, of whatever party or sect. While he is an ardent and uncompromising Baptist, his treatment of other Christian denominations is fraternal and appreciative; his spirit is broad and catholic; there is nothing ultra-sectarian in his make-up. Those who love him because of this are found in the Methodist church, the Congregational church, the Presbyterian church, the Episcopalian church, the Baptist church, and in all churches and in no churches. He has a tender fellow-feeling for the poor and afflicted, and has many times denied himself lawful gratifications for their sake. He has cheerfully submitted to any service, and thought nothing too low or too mean, in which to engage, if thereby he could benefit either the souls or bodies of men.
There are other features which ought to be mentioned. Clearness of vision, capacity for hard work and quick decisions, executive force, the ability to guide the thoughts and energies of other men into the same channel as his own, and thus unite their force with his, and his mastery of details, are conspicuous elements in his character.
Charles T. Walker has his faults, like other men. These are not to be overlooked, and I mention this fact, in closing this chapter, in order to say that Charles T. Walker is not a perfect man. A perfect man has not trod this planet since Christ left it. It is said of Charles Lamb, that he liked his friends, not in spite of their faults, but faults and all. And Charles Lamb was no less right than kind. The errors of a true man are not discreditable to him, for his errors spring from the same source as his excellencies. Moreover, it is very difficult to judge character. Generally speaking, those who are familiar with a man are blind to his faults, and those who are not intimate are blind to his virtues. Still, in summing up the traits and characteristics of Dr. Walker, it may be truthfully said that he is no ordinary man, and that one would be compelled to search among sinful mortals many and many a day before he would find one man who, in all respects, possesses more of the traits of genuine honor, manhood and sterling worth than does the present pastor of the Mount Olivet Baptist Church, New York City.
CHAPTER XXII.
CONCLUSION.
Of the countless gifts which God bestows upon man, the rarest, the most divine, is an ability to take supreme interest in human welfare. If any pious soul will accurately ascertain what it is in the character of the Man Christ Jesus, the contemplation of which fills his heart with rapture and his eyes with tears, that pious soul will know what is here meant by the expression “supreme interest in human welfare.” Most of us, alarmed at the dangers which beset our lives, distracted with cares, blinded with desires to secure our own safety, are absorbed in schemes of personal advantage. Only a few men go apart, ascend the heights, survey the scene with serene, unselfish eye, and make discoveries which those engaged in their own selfish pursuits could never arrive at. But for such, the race of mankind would long ago have extirpated itself in its mad, blind strife. But for such, it never would have been discovered that no individual can be safe in welfare while any other individual is not.
In summing up the life story of Dr. Walker, I ask myself what it is that has given this man of God such a place in the affection, regard and sincere esteem of those who know and love and honor him. Is it mere intellectual ability? Great as is his intellectual strength, there are many men in his same calling of greater intellect but they are not known and loved as he is. Is it official station? He holds no office except that of an humble minister of the gospel. Is it wealth? Dr. Walker is a poor man. In his case, I believe that the secret lies in active Christian charity, or what might be called the magnetism of simple goodness. I need not say that Dr. Walker’s heart is as large as his brain—that love for humanity is an inwrought element of his nature. It is manifested in a kindness and regard that keep a silent record in many hearts; in a hand ever open and ready to help; in one of the kindest faces ever worn by man, the expression of which is
“A meeting of gentle lights without a name.”
How wide, how manifold is the circle of interests which he has touched! How many, many minds has he instructed with practical wisdom! How many lives has he stimulated to wholesome energy! How many young men gratefully acknowledge him as their teacher and guide! How many aged people, how many orphans have looked up to him for succor! How many precious souls have been saved for truth, for righteousness, for God! His pen never idle, his lips never still, his feet never weary, what a blessing he has been to his day and generation! In his eyes, the noblest career is that which is given up to others’ wants. The successful life is that which is worn out in conflict with wrong and woe. The only ambition worth following is the ambition to alleviate human misery and leave the world better—a little better for one’s having lived in it.
And this, verily, is the greatness which the world at last acknowledges, confesses, honors—the greatness of goodness. Those who read this story of Dr. Walker’s life ought, therefore, to be encouraged, not discouraged, because the greatness of goodness is a communicable power for the goodness of mankind and, unlike intellectual power, unlike official station, unlike wealth, may be attained by all. Let the reader, then, drink from this story inspiration for his best endeavors, while he thanks God that the achievement in Dr. Walker’s case has been so large and so effective. The real forces of the world are not those which science chiefly delights to celebrate, but those other inward spiritual forces, such as righteousness, justice and truth, which lie behind the more visible energies, giving them all the real power that they possess, and guiding them, not blindly, but intelligently, to rational and beneficent ends.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Archaic spellings have been retained.
Mismatched ending quotes for nested quotes have not been changed.
A number of typographical errors have been corrected silently.
La Grange and LaGrange were normalized to LaGrange.
Normalize old fashioned to old-fashioned.
A notable change involving two characters was made:
Before: “the judicial. The executive”.
After: “the judicial, the executive”.