Burton seemed to ruminate for a long while, smoking in silence, then he muttered,
“Am I much happier when with my own race? Hardly! When I am in the society of even the most highly cultivated Haitian negroes I am unable to free myself from the thought that we are much like a lot of monkeys, such as Italian street musicians carry with them. We negroes are togged out in the dignity, education and culture of the white race, but we are only aping the natural, self-evolved civilization and culture of the whites. The clothing does not fit us, the garments were not cut according to our mental and moral measurements, and we appear ridiculous when we don the borrowed trappings of the white race’s mind, and pompously strut before an amused and jeering world.”
“When I imagined the mantle that I wore was my own it set lightly and comfortably on me. Now that I realize that it is the property of another, it has become cumbersome, unwieldy, awkward and is slipping rapidly from my shoulders.”
“On the other side of the subject are equal difficulties. If, weary of imitation and affectation, I seek the society of my race in all its natural purity and ignorance, my senses have become so acute, softened and made tender by the long use of my borrowed mantle that I am shocked, horrified or disgusted. Oh! Son of Ham, escape from the doom pronounced against you while yet time was new seems impossible. In My Book it is writ, saith the Lord!”
In melancholy musing the man tortured by so many contrary emotions and feelings, sat silently gazing at the distant stars and then cried out in anguish of spirit,
“Oh! that I should be forced to feel that the Creator of all this grand universe is unjust! That I should regard education and culture as a curse to those foredoomed to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. That I should realize that refinement is a cankerous limb, a clog and hindrance to a negro, unfitting him for association with his own race and yet impotent to change those innate characteristics inherited by him from his ancestors, that disqualify him from homogeneousness with the white race.”
The young man’s voice was full of despair and even something of reproach as his subtle intellect wove the meshes of the adamantine condition that bound him helpless, in agony, to the rack of race inferiority.
“Mother Sybella, who has proven herself my great-grandmother, urges me to fly and seek among my own people that surcease from suffering unattainable among the whites. While she fascinates me, she fills me with horror. I am drawn toward her yet I am repelled by something loathsome in the association with her. She seems to possess hypnotic power over my senses; she leads me by some magnetic influence that exerts control over the negro portion of my nature.”
“I am ashamed to be seen by the white people, especially the Dunlaps, in familiar conversation with the grandmother of my mother, but in our secret and frequent interviews she has told me much that I was unaware of concerning my ancestors and my mother. I have promised to attend a meeting of my kinsmen tomorrow night, which will be held in a secluded spot near the city, whither she herself will guide me. I do not wish to go. I did not wish to make the promise and appointment to meet her, but was compelled by the overmastering power she wields over the natural proclivities within me. I must meet her and go with her.”