“The thing finally became unbearable,” he said; “no decent man could stand it. I preferred to be a Negro and hold up my head rather than to be a sneak.”
So he dropped his trade and became a janitor. In other words, he stepped back, as so many Negroes in the North are forced to do, into a form of domestic service, although in his case the position is one of responsibility and good pay.
Such stories of the problem of the mulatto are innumerable; and yet I do not wish to imply that the life is all shadow, for it isn’t. The Negro blood, wherever it is, supplies an element of light-heartedness which will not be wholly crushed. It is this element, indeed, that accounts in no small degree for the survival of the Negro in this country. Where the Indian perished for want of adaptability, the Negro has survived by sheer elasticity of temperament: it is perhaps the highest natural gift of the Negro race. One hears much of the unfavourable traits of the Negro, but certainly, judging from any point of view, the power of adaptability displayed by the Negro in a wholly foreign environment, under the harshest conditions, and his ability to thrive and increase in numbers, even meeting the competition of the dominant race, and to keep on laughing at his work, is a power which in any race would be regarded as notable.
Why Some Light Mulattoes do not “Cross over to White”
I once asked a very light mulatto why he did not “cross the line,” as they call it (or “go over to white”) and quit his people. His answer surprised me; it was so distinctly an unexpected point of view.
“Why,” he said, “white people don’t begin to have the good times that Negroes do. They’re stiff and cold. They aren’t sociable. They don’t laugh.”
Here certainly was a criticism of the white man! And it was corroborated by a curious story I heard at Memphis, of a mulatto well known among the coloured people of Tennessee. A number of years ago it came to him suddenly one day that he was white enough to pass anywhere for white, and he acted instantly on the inspiration. He went to Memphis and bought a first-class ticket on a Mississippi River boat to Cincinnati. No one suspected that he was coloured; he sat at the table with white people and even occupied a state-room with a white man. At first he said he could hardly restrain his exultation, but after a time, although he said he talked and smoked with the white men, he began to be lonesome.
“It grew colder and colder,” he said.
In the evening he sat on the upper deck and as he looked over the railing he could see, down below, the Negro passengers and deck hands talking and laughing. After a time, when it grew darker, they began to sing—the inimitable Negro songs.
“That finished me,” he said, “I got up and went downstairs and took my place among them. I’ve been a Negro ever since.”