“Look at some of these coloured folks around you,” he had said to her, “most of them poor, having to work like dogs for a meagre living, deprived of practically every ordinary outlet in the way of amusement. Are they depressed, morbid, bitter? Not on your life! They can find amusement where nobody else can. But look at the white folks who are just about as bad off financially—they’re grouchy and morose, hating everybody on earth and themselves most of all though they don’t know it.”
Mimi could see, though as yet with some difficulty, just what Carl had meant. She wondered if she were in such a plight as these convicts if she could have had the courage to sing. She was afraid she would not have been that optimistic—she doubted that she could have used song even as an opiate to forget hard circumstance as these men were doing. She marvelled at their toughness of fibre which seemed to be a racial characteristic, which made them able to live in the midst of a highly mechanized civilization, enjoy its undoubted advantages, and yet keep free that individual and racial distinctiveness which did not permit the surrender of individuality to the machine.
In slavery it had kept them from being crushed and exterminated as oppression had done to the Indian. In freedom it had kept them from becoming mere cogs in an elaborately organized machine. Some people called it shiftlessness, laziness, inherent racial inferiority. Mimi herself at times had heard these charges made and frequently she had believed them and had been ashamed of them, especially during the years she had lived in Atlanta and particularly since that terrible night during the riot. The forced growth of her race-conscious attitude had accelerated this shamedness of her people’s apparent lack of assimilation by industrialism—now she began to feel glad that this was so.
She wished she could make up her mind just what she would have them be. When she listened to Mr. Hunter and the type of hustling, progressive, acquisitive men which he represented, she doubted seriously the wisdom of the Negro’s doing anything other than acquire wealth, forge ahead in business and commerce and manufacture as many of them were doing. But when she talked with Carl or, more strongly, when she heard Negroes sing or laugh, she wondered which road would lead to greater happiness.
On Communion Sundays she went through the same process of ratiocination. The passing of the bread and wine after the sermon, the bread hard and tasteless, the wine in a huge silver cup passed from hand to hand, was followed always by a silent prayer ending with the singing of a Spiritual, “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” She never forgot the emotions which the song created within her as plaintive, eerily sweet, stirring verse after verse winged its way through the small church and lost itself among the age-stained rafters. For years afterward the song made her imagine she had pains in her neck and back, for the song was always sung bent forward in prayer. It was with this weariness that she associated the terrifyingly real agony of Jesus which the words evoked. “Were you there when they nailed Him to the tree?” “When they pierced Him in the side?” “When He bowed His head and died?” “When they laid Him in the tomb?”
Verse after verse told with terrible inevitableness the grim story of His agony and sacrifice and to Mimi she lived each time she heard the song the tortures of the Crucified One. Always she longed for them to come to the verses of hope and happiness, when they rolled away the stone, when He rose from the dead. The rising and falling “Oh—oh—oh—oh—” which preceded the wail, “Sometimes it causes me to tremble—tremble—tremble,” changed now from dolour and pity and pain to an exultant, happy paean of exuberant joy in the resurrection. Always Mimi was glad to reach the open air outside—the song did too many things to her down inside. Afterwards she felt as though she had been the victim of some peculiar metempsychosis—that during the minutes of the song her soul had taken flight from her own body to that of some other rarer, more sentient, more delicately strung being of infinite beauty and understanding, to return only when the spell had been broken.
The other spirituals worked spells upon her of varied kinds. Carl took her frequently to out-of-the-way churches, some of them housed in miserably poor, ramshackle edifices, others in more pretentious buildings. In them all she found that deep earnestness, that abiding faith and hope and patience which she found herself able more and more to understand. Humble, simple folk most of the worshippers were, with envy and malice and smallness like all other humans, but blessed with that rare gift of lifting themselves emotionally and spiritually far, far above their material lives and selves. She was filled with inarticulate rage when she sensed all too often that the preacher was far inferior to his flock, that he played upon their emotions and fears and hopes only to earn for himself a comfortable livelihood free from too much toil. These leeches, fattening on the sacrifice of washerwomen and other humble ones who worked terrifically hard to earn their small wage, stirred in Mimi and Carl the desire to wreak some sort of vengeance upon them. Their rage usually resulted in avoiding such churches and there were many to which they never went a second time for this reason. Mimi soon was convinced she had found an accurate measuring-rod of worth in Negro preachers—the worse
