The keen little walnut-skinned Carnegie-Chrysostom accompanied my guide and me over the garden and theatre. He said very little, but he gleamed appreciation of my guide’s remarks, all tending to impress on me his manifold activities, his astuteness, his success, and his beneficence. Yet one did not feel, as one would have felt had a white millionaire been concerned, that the poorer man was guilty of adulation, the richer of ostentation. There was something impersonal about it all. It was not the men but the race who boasted. The hero of the song of praise was not “I,” nor “he,” but “we.”
And what, now, of the “homes” themselves? |Villa Residences.| Those that I saw were without exception what are called by English house-agents suburban villa residences, which would command, in the neighbourhood of London, rents of from £40 to £70 a year. They were very nice little houses, scrupulously neat and well kept. They had (to my mind) the advantage over English houses of the same class, in the sense of spaciousness which comes with steam-heat and the consequent absence of doors. In some the doorways were filled with bead curtains—hanging strings of glass beads—which seem to be very popular just now in coloured society.
The furniture was always modern and in excellent condition, with a great deal of plush about it. Much of it conveyed the impression (not uncommon in English villa residences) of being intended rather for show than use. The wall-papers ran to large patterns, and were apt to be sombre in tint. Every home, without exception, had its piano, sometimes with open music on it. In the matter of pictures, nicknacks, etc., there was no affectation of “culture.” Æstheticism—that “unanimity of æsthetic appreciations” which so troubled Mr. Wells in Boston—has not yet penetrated the negro home. I did not see a single Wingless Victory. The works of art are simple to the point of primitiveness, and pleasing in so far as they genuinely represent the taste of their owners. One handsomely furnished parlour stands out in my memory, in which a showy overmantel was flanked by two amazing glass transparencies in heavy gilt frames, one representing a moonlit landscape and the other the Houses of Parliament and Clock Tower at Westminster.
As a rule, I would be received by the lady of the house (her husband was apt to be away at business) with the stock phrases of American politeness. In the great majority of cases the lady would be a quadroon, or lighter; and in one or two instances I fancy nature had been assisted by a whiff of the powder-puff. My inspection generally stopped short at the living-rooms on the ground floor; but sometimes I was admitted to regions of more intimate domesticity. It was embarrassing; it was ludicrous; it was, above all, pathetic.
With people of a corresponding class in England the first impulse would have been to offer a visitor “refreshment” of some sort. Never once was there a hint of anything of the kind on the part of my negro hosts. I wondered, and am still wondering, whether it simply was not the custom of the country, or whether they imagined that I would scruple to eat or drink with them.[[44]]
Though I did not partake of their bread and salt, I have a sense of perfidy in thus criticizing the interiors in which they took such a simple pride. |Resolute Refinement.| But, after all, I was there for no other purpose than to report what I saw and felt. What I felt, then, was certainly admiration for the thrift and progressiveness which were apparent on every hand; nor was it the unsophisticated order of taste displayed in furniture and adornment that qualified my admiration. Far be it from me to attribute any absolute superiority to the standards of Brixton, or even of Boston. What troubled me throughout my domiciliary visits was the sense that (with one or two exceptions) these homes were not homes at all. I do not doubt that each roof sheltered a home; but I do not believe that the prim parlours I saw had any essential connection with it. They were no more homelike than the shopwindow rooms of the up-to-date upholsterer. If they were lived in at all, it was from a sense of duty, a self-conscious effort after a life of “refinement.” They were, in short, entirely imitative and mechanical tributes to the American ideal of the prosperous, cultivated home. I could find in them no real expression of the individuality of their inhabitants.
Let it be remembered, however, that this is the first generation of negro prosperity. Will the second or third generation really assimilate the American ideal, or develop a “refined” domesticity of its own?
A remark of my guide on one of these expeditions summed up the phase of culture as I saw it. “We have a little whist club in our set,” he said[said]. “We meet and play once a month. But the best part of it is the good dinner at the end of the season.”
The whist club, so frankly characterized, guided me to the word I had been searching for in the back of my mind through all these experiences. It was the word “veneer.”
A very different class of negro was represented in the congregation of the only church which I had an opportunity of attending.