Experience of a Highly Educated Mulatto
DuBois tells in this book how he first came to realise that he was really a Negro. He was a boy in school near his home in Massachusetts.
“Something,” he writes, “put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs not mine.... With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny; their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half-hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.”
If space permitted I could tell many stories illustrative of the daily tragedy which many mulattoes are meeting in this country, struggles that are none the less tragic for being inarticulate. Here is a letter which I received not long ago from a mulatto professor in a Western Negro college:
“I wonder how you will treat that point to which you have thus far only referred in your studies, ‘Where does the colour line really begin?’ What is to become of that large class of which I am a part, that class which is neither white nor black and yet both? There are millions of us who have the blood of both races, and, if heredity means anything, who have the traditions, feelings, and passions of both. Yet we are black in name, in law, in station, in everything save face and figure, despite the overwhelming white blood. And why? Certainly not because we have to be. America is a big country: it is easy to get lost, even in a neighbouring state. Some of us do, and the process has been going on so long in certain large cities of the North until we cease to think about it. But the majority of us stay and live and work out our destiny among the people into whom we were born, living ofttimes side by side with our white brothers and sisters. When I go back to Atlanta after an absence of two years, I can, if I wish, go back in a Pullman, go out of the main entrance of the station, get my dinner at the Piedmont Hotel, and when I am tired of being Mr. Hyde, I can stroll down Auburn Avenue with my friends in the full glory of Dr. Jekyll. As a matter of fact I shall doubtless avail myself of the privilege of a sleeper, sneak out the side entrance, get on the last seat of the car, despite the conductor’s remonstrance, go on to my friends at once and be myself all the time I am there. I wouldn’t be a white man if I had to. I want to be black. I want to love those who love me. I want to help those who need my help. And I know hundreds just like me: I know others who are not.
“I wonder if you can decide: ‘Where does the colour line really—end?’”
A Negro Who Lived First as a White Man, Then as a Negro
When I was in Philadelphia I met an intelligent Negro named A. L. Manley, who is at present the janitor of a large apartment house. He has been connected with the good-government movement in Philadelphia, being the leader of a club of coloured men who have supported the reform party. When I first met him I should not have known him for a Negro, he is so white. His white grandfather was a famous governor of North Carolina—Charles Manley. He was educated at Wilmington, N. C., and at Hampton Institute. For a time he published a Negro newspaper at Wilmington, but during the race riot in that city a number of years ago he was driven out and his property was destroyed, his office being burned to the ground. After a year or two in Washington he came to Philadelphia, where he endeavoured to get work at his trade as a painter and decorator, but the moment he informed employers that he was a coloured man they refused to hire him—usually excusing themselves on the ground that union labour would refuse to work with him.
“So I tried being white,” he said: “that is, I did not reveal the fact that I had coloured blood, and I immediately got work in some of the best shops in Philadelphia. I joined the union and had no trouble at all.”
But during all this time he had to live, as he says, “the life of a sneak.” He had to sneak out of his home in the morning and return to it only after nightfall, lest someone discover that his family (he has a wife and two children) was coloured.