“I am the prophet of the dusky race,
The poet of wild Africa. Behold,
The midnight vision brooding in my face!
Come near me,
And hear me,
While from my lips the words of Fate are told.A black and terrible memory masters me,
The shadow and the substance of deep wrong;
You know the past, hear now what is to be:
From the midnight land,
Over sea and sand,
From the green jungle, hear my Voodoo-song;A tropic heat is in my bubbling veins,
Quintessence of all savagery is mine,
The lust of ages ripens in my reins,
And burns
And yearns,
Like venom-sap within a noxious vine.Was I a heathen? Ay, I was—am still
A fetish worshipper; but I was free
To loiter or to wander at my will,
To leap and dance,
To hurl my lance,
And breathe the air of savage liberty.You drew me to a higher life, you say;
Ah, drove me, with the lash of slavery!
Am I unmindful? Every cursed day
Of pain
And chain
Roars like a torrent in my memory.You make my manhood whole with ‘equal rights!’
Poor empty words! Dream you I honor them?—
I who have stood on Freedom’s wildest hights?
My Africa,
I see the day
When none dare touch thy garment’s lowest hem.You cannot make me love you with your whine
Of fine repentance. Veil your pallid face
In presence of the shame that mantles mine;
Stand
At command
Of the black prophet of the Negro race!I hate you, and I live to nurse my hate,
Remembering when you plied the slaver’s trade
In my dear land … How patiently I wait
The day,
Not far away,
When all your pride shall shrivel up and fade.Yea, all your whiteness darken under me!
Darken and be jaundiced, and your blood
Take in dread humors from my savagery,
Until
Your will
Lapse into mine and seal my masterhood.You, seed of Abel, proud of your descent,
And arrogant, because your cheeks are fair,
Within my loins an inky curse is pent,
To flood
Your blood
And stain your skin and crisp your golden hair.As you have done by me, so will I do
By all the generations of your race;
Your snowy limbs, your blood’s patrician blue
Shall be
Tainted by me,
And I will set my seal upon your face!Yea, I will dash my blackness down your veins,
And through your nerves my sensuousness I’ll fling;
Your lips, your eyes, shall bear the musty stains
Of Congo kisses,
While shrieks and hisses
Shall blend into the savage songs I sing!Your temples will I break, your fountains fill,
Your cities raze, your fields to deserts turn;
My heathen fires shall shine on every hill,
And wild beasts roam,
Where stands your home;—
Even the wind your hated dust shall spurn.I will absorb your very life in me,
And mold you to the shape of my desire;
Back through the cycles of all cruelty
I will swing you,
And wring you,
And roast you in my passions’ hottest fire.You, North and South, you, East and West,
Shall drink the cup your fathers gave to me;
My back still burns, I bare my bleeding breast,
I set my face,
My limbs I brace,
To make the long, strong fight for mastery.My serpent fetish lolls its withered lip
And bares its shining fangs at thought of this:
I scarce can hold the monster in my grip.
So strong is he,
So eagerly
He leaps to meet my precious prophecies.Hark for the coming of my countless host,
Watch for my banner over land and sea.
The ancient power of vengeance is not lost!
Lo! on the sky
The fire-clouds fly,
And strangely moans the windy, weltering sea.”
Now this would be poetry if it were only truthful. Simple and sensuous it surely is, but it lacks the third requisite—truth. The Negro is utterly incapable of such vindictiveness. Such concentrated venom might be distilled in the cold Saxon, writhing and chafing under oppression and repression such as the Negro in America has suffered and is suffering. But the black man is in real life only too glad to accept the olive branch of reconciliation. He merely asks to be let alone. To be allowed to pursue his destiny as a free man and an American citizen, to rear and educate his children in peace, to engage in art, science, trades or industries according to his ability—and to go to the wall if he fail. He is willing, if I understand him, to let bygones be bygones. He does not even demand satisfaction for the centuries of his ancestors’ unpaid labor. He asks neither pension, nor dole nor back salaries; but is willing to start from the bottom, all helpless and unprovided for as he is, with absolutely nothing as his stock in trade, with no capital, in a country developed, enriched, and made to blossom through his father’s “sweat and toil,”—with none of the accumulations of ancestors’ labors, with no education or moral training for the duties and responsibilities of freedom; nay, with every power, mental, moral, and physical, emasculated by a debasing slavery—he is willing, even glad to take his place in the lists alongside his oppressors, who have had every advantage, to be tried with them by their own standards, and to ask no quarter from them or high Heaven to palliate or excuse the ignominy of a defeat.
The “Voodoo Prophecy” has no interest then as a picture of the black, but merely as a revelation of the white man. Maurice Thompson in penning this portrait of the Negro, has, unconsciously it may be, laid bare his own soul—its secret dread and horrible fear. And this, it seems to me, is the key to the Southern situation, the explanation of the apparent heartlessness and cruelty of some, and the stolid indifference to atrocity on the part of others, before which so many of us
