I respectfully submit that there is hardly a colored church in any considerable city in this country, which could be said in any sense to represent the best colored society, in which Rhoda Aldgate could not have seen, when she opened her eyes, persons as quietly and as becomingly dressed, as cultivated in tone and as refined in manner, as herself; persons, too, as sensitive to rough contact and as horribly alive as she could be (though they had known it from childhood) to the galling distinctions in this country which insist on levelling down all individuals more or less related to the Africans. So far from the cringing deference which Mr. Howells paints as exhibited to “the young white lady,” in nine cases out of ten the congregation would have supposed intuitively that she was a quadroon, so far from the unusual was her appearance and complexion. In not a few such colored churches would she have found young women of aspiration and intellectual activity with whom she could affiliate without nausea and from whom she could learn a good many lessons—and, sadly I say it, even more outside the churches whom bitterness at racial inconsistency of white Christians had soured into a silent disbelief of all religion. In either class she would have found no trouble in reaching a heart which could enter into all the agony of her own trial and bitter grief. Nor am I so sure, if she had followed her first gushing impulse to go South and “elevate” the race with whom she had discovered her relationship, that she would have found even them so ready to receive her condescending patronage.
There are numerous other inadvertent misrepresentations in the book—such as supposing that colored people voluntarily and deliberately prefer to keep to themselves in all public places and that from choice “they have their own neighborhoods, their own churches, their own amusements, their own resorts,”—the intimation that there is a “black voice,” a black character, easy, irresponsible and fond of what is soft and pleasant, a black ideal of art and a black barbaric taste in color, a black affinity—so that in some occult and dreadful way one, only one-sixteenth related and totally foreign by education and environment, can still feel that one-sixteenth race calling her more loudly than the fifteen-sixteenths. I wish to do Mr. Howells the justice to admit, however, that one feels his blunders to be wholly unintentional and due to the fact that he has studied his subject merely from the outside. With all his matchless powers as a novelist, not even he can yet “think himself imaginatively” into the colored man’s place.
To my mind the quaintest and truest little bit of portraiture from lowlife that I have read in a long time is the little story that appeared last winter in the Harper’s, of the “Widder Johnsing and How She Caught the Preacher.” It is told with naive impersonality and appreciative humor, and is quite equal, I think, both in subject and treatment to the best of Mrs. Stowe’s New England dialect stories. It is idyllic in its charming simplicity and naturalness, and delightfully fresh in its sparkling wit and delicious humor. We do not resent such pictures as this of our lowly folk—such a homely and honest
“Pomegranate, which, if cut deep down the middle,
Shows a heart within blood tinctured of a veined humanity,”
is always sweet to the taste and dear to the heart, however plain and humble the setting.
A longer and more elaborate work, Harold, published anonymously, comes properly in our group second, the didactic novel. It gives the picture of a black Englishman cultured and refined, brought in painful contact with American—or rather un-American, color prejudice. The point of the book seems to be to show that education for the black man is a curse, since it increases his sensitiveness to the indignities he must suffer in consequence of white barbarity. The author makes Harold, after a futile struggle against American inequalities, disappear into the jungles of Africa, “there to wed a dusky savage,” at the last cursing the day he had ever suspected a broader light or known a higher aspiration; a conclusion which, to my mind, is a most illogical one. If the cultivated black man cannot endure the white man’s barbarity—the cure, it seems to me, would be to cultivate the white man. Civilize both, then each will know what is due from man to man, and that reduces at once to a minimum the friction of their contact.
In the same rank as Harold belongs that improbability of improbabilities, Doctor Huguet, by the arch-sensationalist, Ignatius Donelly. As its purpose is evidently good, I shall not undertake to review the book. Suffice it to say the plot hinges on the exchange of soul between the body of a black chicken thief and that of a cultivated white gentleman, and sets forth the indignities and wrongs to which the cultured soul, with all its past of refinement and learning, has to submit in consequence of its change of cuticle. The book is an able protest against that snobbishness which elevates complexion into a touchstone of aristocracy and makes the pigment cells of a man’s skin his badge of nobility regardless of the foulness or purity of the soul within; the only adverse criticism from the colored man’s point of view being the selection of a chicken thief as his typical black man; but on the principle of antitheses this may have been artistically necessary.
I shall pass next to what I consider the most significant contribution to this subject for the last ten years—a poem by Maurice Thompson in the New York
