African Methodism.
It was an African Methodist church—a spacious, airy building, capable, I should think, of seating some 2000 people. It was not full, but fairly well attended; and black, as distinct from brown or yellow, was the prevailing complexion. Every one was quite decently dressed, some of the women in gaudy colours, but many of them, too, in black. The gaudiest colours were in the awful stained-glass windows, which seemed to be made of salvage from the wreck of a cheap kaleidoscope. Two pastors sat on a platform at the end of the hall. There were flowers on a table before them; and, as it was a sweltering morning, each of them held a fan.
The whole service was conducted by one of them, a man of rather Caucasian features, but of dark-brown tint. In the hymn-singing there was nothing peculiar—it was fairly spirited and good. But after the first few sentences of the prayer, ejaculations began to break forth. Their precise meaning, if they had any, I did not catch. They seemed to me like “Yes, oh yes!” They ought, according to the best authorities, to have been “Hallelujah!” “Praise de Lord!” and such phrases; but I certainly did not distinguish them. And presently they grew quite inarticulate, passing over into wails, moans, and now and then a sort of wild, maniac laughing and yodelling.
And the whole sermon, after the first five minutes, was accompanied by similar manifestations. The text was, “Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.” I have heard many worse sermons than this competent, fluent, popular discourse, which consisted mainly of an exposition of the overpowering strength of the metaphor of “hunger and thirst.” “We may credit our backs,” said the preacher, “but we must pay our stomachs; we can put the back off, but we can’t put off the stomach.” (“Yes, oh yes!” shouts, moans, and wails.) “No doubt most of you, before you came here, have had a good drink of coffee or tea; but how many of you have had a real good drink from the fountain of everlasting life?” (Confused sounds not unlike the yelpings of a large kennel.) “If some of you didn’t eat and drink more physically than you do spiritually, you’d be skeletons. That’s plain talk.” (Shrieks, wails, and yodelling.) “Some of you good sisters are so anxious to get your people’s breakfasses that you have no time to ask a blessing on the work of the day.” (“Hu! hu!” “Bless de Lord!”—for once articulate—moans, and shrieks.)
These are but fragments of the discourse, which lasted half an hour. What particularly interested me, both in the prayer and the sermon, was the action and reaction between speaker and audience. Never once did he take any notice of the wild sounds, as a political speaker would almost necessarily have done. I do not remember that he even paused for them; his rhetoric seemed to flow smoothly on. In other words, he did not openly “play to the gallery.” Yet there is no doubt that the hysterical cries and ululations were of value to him. He worked them up, and they worked him up. It must not be understood, however, that anything like the whole congregation joined in the noises. They seemed all to proceed from two or three definite points in the hall. One could almost have supposed them the prearranged paroxysms of an epileptic claque.
I stole out, under cover of a hymn, at the end of the sermon, not sorry to find myself once more in America. In the church (where I was the only white or even approximately white person present) I could not but feel that I was in Africa—slightly veneered.
[43]. See pp. 33 and 35. Mr. A. H. Stone declares to be “fallacies” the two widely-accepted opinions “that the negro began life forty years ago with nothing but his freedom, and that the period of his emancipation has been one of marvellous economic achievement.”—“The American Race Problem,” p. 150.
[44]. Mr. Kelly Miller (coloured), author of “Race Adjustment,” in an open letter to Mr. Thomas Dixon, Junr., says: “You will doubtless remember that when I addressed the Congregational Ministers in New York City, you asked permission to be present ... although you beat a precipitous retreat when luncheon was announced.” At the invitation of Professor Du Bois, I had the great pleasure of dining one evening with the (coloured) students of Atlanta University; and at Tuskegee I was most hospitably entertained in the house of the Principal. The (white) instructors at Hampton Institute take their meals apart from the students. For a cruel instance of “discrimination” in hospitality, see Du Bois: “The Souls of Black Folk,” p. 63.