Imagine nearly half the population of Nottingham suddenly converted into black and brown people—people different not only in colour but in many other physical characteristics from you and me. Imagine that all the most striking of these differences are in the direction of what our deepest instincts, inherited through a thousand generations, compel us to regard as ugliness—an ugliness often grotesque and simian.[[2]] Imagine that this horrible metamorphosis--or, if you shy at the word “horrible,” let us say fantastic—imagine this fantastic metamorphosis to have taken place as a punishment for certain ancestral crimes and stupidities, of which the living men and women of to-day are personally innocent. Can you conceive that, after the first shock of surprise was over, Nottingham would take up life again as a mere matter of course, feeling that there was no misfortune in this mingling of incongruities, no problem in the adjustment of their relations?
Do not object that in Washington there has been no sudden metamorphosis, but that the condition of things has gradually come to pass through the slow operation of historic forces. That makes no real difference, save that the Washingtonian has no “first shock of surprise” to get over. The essence of the matter is that half of the elbow-room of life is taken up by an alien race. Even disregarding, as (perhaps) temporary and corrigible, the condition of hostility between the races, we cannot but see in the bare fact of their juxtaposition in almost equal numbers, and, theoretically, on a standing of equal citizenship, an anomalous condition of affairs, as to the probable outcome of which history affords us no guidance.
Walk the streets of Washington for a single day, and you will realize that the colour-problem is not, as some English and Northern American writers assume, a chimera sprung from nothing but the inhuman prejudice of the Southern white. It is not a simple matter which a little patience and good-temper will presently arrange. It is a real, a terrible difficulty, not to be overcome by happy-go-lucky humanitarianism.
It may be a great pity that Nature implanted race-instincts deep in our breasts—Nature has done so many thoughtless things in her day. But there they are, not to be ignored or sentimentalized away. They are part of the stuff of human character, out of which the future must be shaped. The wise statesman will no more disregard them than the wise carpenter will disregard the grain of a piece of timber—or the knots in it.
One principle I arrived at very early in this investigation—namely, that black is not always white, nor white invariably black.
[1]. “Intermarriage between the races is forbidden by law in all the Southern States, and also in the following Northern and Western States: Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Utah. In all other Northern and Western States marriage between the races is lawful.”—Ray Stannard Baker: “Following the Colour-Line.”
[2]. There is no doubt, I think, that the white man—and here I mean not the Southerner, nor the American, but the white man as such—resents in extremes of the negro type just that air of caricaturing humanity which renders the monkey tribe so painful and humiliating to contemplate. This seems an inhuman saying, but instinctive emotions are fundamental facts which it is useless to blink. And the suggestion of caricature is the stronger, the more closely the negro mimics the white man in dress and bearing. In Washington, on a Sunday, one meets scores of fat, middle-aged negro women, decked out in an exaggerated extreme of European fashion, from whom one can only look away as from something grotesque and degrading—a page of Swift at his bitterest. Yet the same women in cotton gowns and bandana headgear might look far from unpleasing. No doubt the like uneasy sense of humiliation besets one on seeing white women decked in finery unsuited to their age or their contours. But that does not alter the fact that the urban negro of either sex, when he or she indulges in extremes of European adornment, is a spectacle highly disturbing to Caucasian self-complacency. Caricature is none the more agreeable for being, in a certain sense, just.
II
THE BLACK MAN’S PARADISE
It was my good fortune to have for my hosts in Washington two active sympathizers with the negro. The husband hails from a North-Western State; the wife is a New Englander. They knew personally some of the Abolitionist leaders, and are still full of their spirit.