“My dear mother,” he said, “was very nearly of the same colour as myself. You see, sir, we don’t breed straight,”—and he proceeded to give several instances in which the children either of two people of mixed blood, or of a white father and a mother of mixed blood, had varied very widely in complexion and facial type, some seeming almost pure white, others emphatically negroid. I did not say it, but I could not help thinking: This is scarcely a point in favour of that mixing of bloods which is here called miscegenation. Or is it merely another form of race-prejudice to hold that marriage undesirable in which the colour of the offspring cannot be foretold, and is apt to be variegated?
“Miscegenation.”
In a country where such terrible disabilities and humiliations await those in whom there is the slightest strain of black blood, it is surely manifest that the people who impose these humiliations, and scout the idea of legal marriage between the races, ought to visit with the severest penalties any relation (necessarily illicit) between a white man and a coloured woman—any augmentation by the white man of that half-bred caste on which colour-disabilities press with such peculiar cruelty. I asked Dr. Oberman whether there was any adequate feeling of this sort in the white community—whether the white man who was known to have relations with coloured women was denounced and ostracised?
“My dear sir,” he replied, “I can assure you that many of those who preach most loudly against miscegenation are far from practising what they preach.”
I am glad to say, however, that white men everywhere assured me that there was a strong and increasingly efficient public sentiment against this most anti-social form of transgression.[[19]] I cannot but think that the lynching of a few white men notoriously guilty of it would beneficially equalize matters.
“Our Moses.”
As I had come to Dr. Oberman with an introduction from Mr. Booker Washington, it was natural that the talk should fall upon the comparative merits of academic and of industrial education for the negro. Said the doctor: “We acquire property, and we want bankers; we fall ill, and we want physicians; we have business difficulties, and we want lawyers; we have souls, and we want preachers who can give us something better than the old ranting theology. But for every one of our race who can profit by a literary education, there are ninety-nine for whom manual training is the first essential.”
Then, looking up at a portrait of Mr. Washington on the wall of his office, he said, “Ah! he is our Moses!”
But a stronger proof of the reverence with which this leader is regarded awaited me as I left Dr. Oberman’s house. I had gone some twenty yards down the street, when I fancied I heard my name called. It must be an illusion, I thought, but nevertheless I looked round. There was the doctor, with his head thrust out of his office-window on the first floor, calling to me and beckoning me back.
“Did you take away that letter of Mr. Washington’s?” he asked.