VIII
IN ALABAMA: COLOR AND COLOR PREJUDICE
I made an expedition into Alabama from Atlanta, and again saw something of that State when I got down to the Gulf of Mexico. In the matter of Negro life it is first of all important because of Tuskegee Institute, which, like the college at Hampton, is sometimes called the Mecca of the American Negro. It was founded by Booker T. Washington, and is the visible expression of the self-help idea. There, as at Hampton, the ex-slave is taught to do something as the end of his schooling. The establishment is now under the guidance of the beloved Dr. Moton, a wise and genial African giant of pure Negro extraction: his father is said to have been a prince who in selling his captives was himself lured on to a slaver, and suddenly found himself in the position of his own captive enemies. This was during Civil War time, and he came to America a slave but to be made free. As a boy barely able to sign his name young Moton first appeared at Hampton, and the authorities were at first doubtful about accepting him as a student. But what they would have missed! Dr. Moton is the very best type of Negro teacher, the worthy successor of Booker Washington. Tuskegee, besides its educational work, does much to combat race hatred, and keeps public opinion in America well informed on the lynchings that take place. The presence of the institute in the backward State of Alabama is very important for the future of the South.
At Birmingham, Alabama, I was presented to a very charming young widow who had been left rather rich, a well-educated lady of leisure, who lived well and dressed well, and was possessed of a recognizable American chic. I met her in town, and then in response to an invitation called on her at her house. She was certainly a Negro beauty, and I have no doubt was highly desired in marriage. There was a clear five thousand a year besides her charms, and it was impossible not to feel some of the glamour of that fact—
The belle of the season is wasting
an hour upon you.
Mmmmmm she cooed to everything I said. She was shy as a pedestal without its statue; her eyes burned, and I could not help feeling all the atmosphere of “romance.” If she had been a shade lighter in complexion any white man might have fallen in love with her.
Her children—or was it the children of one of her black servants?—were playing with a family of real Negro dolls, not “nigger dolls,” the stove black, red-lipped nigger of the nursery, but colored dolls, after Nature. This was very charming, and I should have liked to see a baby woolly head at the swelling bosom of my beautiful acquaintance. She would have made a delightful study for a black Madonna.
To have their own dolls is one of the new racial triumphs of the colored people in America. Formerly they had to put up with the pink and white darlings with yellow hair and pale blue eyes, those reflections of German babies, which have hitherto held the market of dolls. It has taken the Negroes half a century of freedom before it occurred to them that the doll, being the promise of baby-to-be, it was not entirely good for morals, and for black racial pride, that their little girls should love white dollies. Perhaps it was mooted first as a business proposition. It might be a paying enterprise to manufacture real colored folk’s dolls, brown dolls, mulatto dolls, near white dolls, black and kinky ones, sad or pretty ones. The year 1920 sees a lively doll industry in progress. It is believed that in time the white dolly will become a rarity in the Negro home. Whence children may learn a lesson: Your pet doll would not perhaps be another girl’s pet doll.