I never met a Negro who thought it humorous unless it were a member of one sect telling of the “goings-on” in another. Each different race or people seems to have its different characteristic religious expression. When one has seen the exaltation of Copt and Arab in religion, when one has heard the great choric voice of Russia at church, and the splendid, purposeful faith of Teutonic hymns, one knows that a calm singing of “Praise to the Holiest in the Height!” is not the only mode of praise. There are fifty thousand ways of praising God, and every single one of them is right.
So there is no call to chide the Negro for his excess. His ways are part of the natural and Divine history of Man, and it is infinitely worth while to consider them with an open and charitable mind. The hysteria, the frenzy, of some meetings I have observed is not in the white man. There is no use being appalled by it. It is the third part which finishes the man downward, as St. John says in the desert.
“And after these emotional excitements they commit so many murders,” said a Southern woman to me.
“If so, one must be upon one’s guard in the presence of a converted man,” said I.
The foundation of the Negro’s great religious seriousness is to be found in the Negro hymn or “spiritual.” These spirituals were before there were Negro churches, before Christianity was actually allowed to the slaves. That is why they are more often called plantation melodies. They were sung in the twilight of the old plantations, and gave voice to a great human sorrow and a great human need. They show that the Negro has obtained access to the spiritual deeps, that he has a soul as we have—a fact so often denied—and that he is capable of penetrating the sublime. I listened very often to these songs. In several places they were sung to honor a white visitor. I heard them rendered by the Hampton Singers and lectured upon by Harry T. Burleigh, to whose efforts in research the preservation of several are due. There is no question of the excellence of them. They make a great appeal to all people who have music in their souls.
It is, however, a musical effect, not an intellectual one. The words have often little relevance to anything profound, and at best are childish. There is generally a keynote which murmurs through the whole of the song, the function of the basso-profundo who provides a river of harmony like life itself, and the tenors and baritones and the shriller voices move on this flowing base like ships. On the rivers the slaves loved to sing as they rowed their masters, using most aptly the beat of the oars and the swish of the water, while the man who stood at the helm and steered was usually the deep bass. One of the most unforgettable melodies is “O, Listen to the Lambs!” The tenors seem to imitate flocks of innumerable sheep and lambs all crying to one another, while the basso-profundo is the irrelevance of “I want to go to Heaven when I die,” continually repeated in subterranean mumbling and whispers——
O listen to the la-ambs
All a-cry ... in’. All a-cry ... in’.
An’ I wan’ to go to Hebn w’en I die!
“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Go Down, Moses,” “Didn’t Hear Nobody Pray,” “The Walls of Jericho,” and many others are assuredly famous.
These and many other phenomena give indications of a distinctive Negro point of view, and of an incipient broad-based popular culture. A sympathetic study will always give evidence that can be set against the point of view that the Negro is nothing, or an animal, or a scamp at best, or a shame to the species. I was sitting in the gardens at Baltimore in the shade of a giant plane tree one day when out came a mixed class of Negro boys and girls and a young eager colored master of about twenty-five. The girls were luxuriant “flappers” of every hue of polished ebony; the boys were spindle-legged and spry and bullet-headed. They all examined plants and trees and caterpillars and flowers under the informing tutelage of the master. They were as noisy and vivacious as a flock of birds that has suddenly lighted on a plain. They minded no outsider. But a tall white man passed them, and I saw on his face a look of unutterable contempt.
“Learning botany” said he to me in a stage whisper. “They’ll know as much about it to-morrow morning as pigs.”