An ordinary community of middle or working class white people is often singularly barren of any social or intellectual interest: it is often sombre, sodden, uninteresting. Not so the Negro community. In several cities I have tried to trace out the social life of various cliques, especially among the mulattoes, and I have been astonished to find how many societies there are, often with high-sounding names, how many church affairs must be attended to, how many suppers and picnics are constantly under way, how many clubs and secret societies are supported.
Forced upon themselves, every point of contact with the white race becomes to the Negro a story of peculiar human interest. The view they get from the outside or underneath of white civilisation is not, to say the least, altogether our view. Once, in a gathering of mulattoes I heard the discussion turn to the stories of those who had “gone over to white”—friends or acquaintances of those who were present. Few such cases are known to white people, but the Negroes know many of them. It developed from this conversation (and afterward I got the same impression many times) that there is a sort of conspiracy of silence to protect the Negro who “crosses the line” and takes his place as a white man. Such cases even awaken glee among them, as though the Negro, thus, in some way, was getting even with the dominant white man.
Stories of Negroes Who Have Crossed the Colour Line
I don’t know how many times I have heard mulattoes speak of the French novelist Dumas as having Negro blood, and they also claim Robert Browning and Alexander Hamilton (how truly I do not know). But the cases which interest them most are those in this country; and there must be far more of them than white people imagine. I know of scores of them. A well-known white actress, whose name, of course, I cannot give, when she goes to Boston, secretly visits her coloured relatives. A New York man who holds a prominent political appointment under the state government and who has become an authority in his line, is a Negro. Not long ago he entered a hotel in Baltimore and the Negro porter who ran to take his bag said discreetly:
“Hello, Bob.”
As boys they had gone to the same Negro school.
“Let me carry your bag,” said the porter, “I won’t give you away.”
In Philadelphia there lives a coloured woman who married a rich white man. Of course, no white people know she is coloured, but the Negroes do, and do not tell. Occasionally she drives down to a certain store, dismisses her carriage and walks on foot to the home of her mother and sisters.
Only a few years ago the newspapers were filled for a day or two with the story of a girl who had been at Vassar College, and upon graduation by merest accident it was discovered that she was a Negro. A similar case arose last year at Chicago University, that of Miss Cecelia Johnson, who had been a leader in her class, a member of the Pi Delta Phi Sorority and president of Englewood House, an exclusive girls’ club. She was the sister of a well-known Negro politician of Chicago.
The Chicago Tribune, after publishing a story to the effect that Miss Johnson had kept her parentage secret apologised for the publicity in these words: