Part 19 (1/2)
So in the midst of this mental turmoil came Houston and East St. Louis.
At Houston black soldiers, goaded and insulted, suddenly went wild and ”shot up” the town. At East St. Louis white strikers on war work killed and mobbed Negro workingmen, and as a result 19 colored soldiers were hanged and 51 imprisoned for life for killing 17 whites at Houston, while for killing 125 Negroes in East St. Louis, 20 white men were imprisoned, none for more than 15 years, and 10 colored men with them.
Once upon a time I took a great journey in this land to three of the ends of our world and over seven thousand mighty miles. I saw the grim desert and the high ramparts of the Rocky Mountains. Three days I flew from the silver beauty of Seattle to the somber whirl of Kansas City.
Three days I flew from the brute might of Chicago to the air of the Angels in California, scented with golden flowers, where the homes of men crouch low and loving on the good, broad earth, as though they were kissing her blossoms. Three days I flew through the empire of Texas, but all these shall be tales untold, for in all this journey I saw but one thing that lived and will live eternal in my soul,--the Grand Canon.
It is a sudden void in the bosom of the earth, down to its entrails--a wound where the dull t.i.tanic knife has turned and twisted in the hole, leaving its edges livid, scarred, jagged, and pulsing over the white, and red, and purple of its mighty flesh, while down below--down, down below, in black and severed vein, boils the dull and sullen flood of the Colorado.
It is awful. There can be nothing like it. It is the earth and sky gone stark and raving mad. The mountains up-twirled, disbodied and inverted, stand on their peaks and throw their bowels to the sky. Their earth is air; their ether blood-red rock engreened. You stand upon their roots and fall into their pinnacles, a mighty mile.
Behold this mauve and purple mocking of time and s.p.a.ce! See yonder peak!
No human foot has trod it. Into that blue shadow only the eye of G.o.d has looked. Listen to the accents of that gorge which mutters: ”Before Abraham was, I am.” Is yonder wall a hedge of black or is it the rampart between heaven and h.e.l.l? I see greens,--is it moss or giant pines? I see specks that may be boulders. Ever the winds sigh and drop into those sun-swept silences. Ever the gorge lies motionless, unmoved, until I fear. It is a grim thing, unholy, terrible! It is human--some mighty drama unseen, unheard, is playing there its tragedies or mocking comedy, and the laugh of endless years is shrieking onward from peak to peak, unheard, unechoed, and unknown.
One throws a rock into the abyss. It gives back no sound. It falls on silence--the voice of its thunders cannot reach so far. It is not--it cannot be a mere, inert, unfeeling, brute fact--its grandeur is too serene--its beauty too divine! It is not red, and blue, and green, but, ah! the shadows and the shades of all the world, glad colorings touched with a hesitant spiritual delicacy. What does it mean--what does it mean? Tell me, black and boiling water!
It is not real. It is but shadows. The shading of eternity. Last night yonder tesselated palace was gloom--dark, brooding thought and sin, while hither rose the mountains of the sun, golden, blazing, ensanguined. It was a dream. This blue and brilliant morning shows all those burning peaks alight, while here, shapeless, mistful, brood the shadowed towers.
I have been down into the entrails of earth--down, down by straight and staring cliffs--down by sounding waters and sun-strewn meadows; down by green pastures and still waters, by great, steep chasms--down by the gnarled and twisted fists of G.o.d to the deep, sad moan of the yellow river that did this thing of wonder,--a little winding river with death in its depth and a crown of glory in its flying hair.
I have seen what eye of man was never meant to see. I have profaned the sanctuary. I have looked upon the dread disrobing of the Night, and yet I live. Ere I hid my head she was standing in her cavern halls, glowing coldly westward--her feet were blackness: her robes, empurpled, flowed mistily from shoulder down in formless folds of folds; her head, pine-crowned, was set with jeweled stars. I turned away and dreamed--the canon,--the awful, its depths called; its heights shuddered. Then suddenly I arose and looked. Her robes were falling. At dim-dawn they hung purplish-green and black. Slowly she stripped them from her gaunt and shapely limbs--her cold, gray garments shot with shadows stood revealed. Down dropped the black-blue robes, gray-pearled and slipped, leaving a filmy, silken, misty thing, and underneath I glimpsed her limbs of utter light.
My G.o.d! For what am I thankful this night? For nothing. For nothing but the most commonplace of commonplaces; a table of gentlewomen and gentlemen--soft-spoken, sweet-tempered, full of human sympathy, who made me, a stranger, one of them. Ours was a fellows.h.i.+p of common books, common knowledge, mighty aims. We could laugh and joke and think as friends--and the Thing--the hateful, murderous, dirty Thing which in American we call ”n.i.g.g.e.r-hatred” was not only not there--it could not even be understood. It was a curious monstrosity at which civilized folk laughed or looked puzzled. There was no elegant and elaborate condescension of--”We once had a colored servant”--”My father was an Abolitionist”--”I've always been interested in _your people_”--there was only the community of kindred souls, the delicate reverence for the Thought that led, the quick deference to the guest. You left in quiet regret, knowing that they were not discussing you behind your back with lies and license. G.o.d! It was simply human decency and I had to be thankful for it because I am an American Negro, and white America, with saving exceptions, is cruel to everything that has black blood--and this was Paris, in the years of salvation, 1919. Fellow blacks, we must join the democracy of Europe.
Toul! Dim through the deepening dark of early afternoon, I saw its towers gloom dusky toward the murk of heaven. We wound in misty roads and dropped upon the city through the great throats of its walled bastions. There lay France--a strange, unknown, unfamiliar France. The city was dispossessed. Through its streets--its narrow, winding streets, old and low and dark, carven and quaint,--poured thousands upon thousands of strange feet of khaki-clad foreigners, and the echoes threw back awkward syllables that were never French. Here was France beaten to her knees yet fighting as never nation fought before, calling in her death agony across the seas till her help came and with all its strut and careless braggadocio saved the worthiest nation of the world from the wickedest fate ever plotted by Fools.
Tim Brimm was playing by the town-pump. Tim Brimm and the bugles of Harlem blared in the little streets of Maron in far Lorraine. The tiny streets were seas of mud. Dank mist and rain sifted through the cold air above the blue Moselle. Soldiers--soldiers everywhere--black soldiers, boys of Was.h.i.+ngton, Alabama, Philadelphia, Mississippi. Wild and sweet and wooing leapt the strains upon the air. French children gazed in wonder--women left their was.h.i.+ng. Up in the window stood a black Major, a Captain, a Teacher, and I--with tears behind our smiling eyes. Tim Brimm was playing by the town-pump.
The audience was framed in smoke. It rose ghost-like out of memories--bitter memories of the officer near dead of pneumonia whose pain was lighted up by the nurses waiting to know whether he must be ”Jim-Crowed” with privates or not. Memories of that great last morning when the thunders of h.e.l.l called the Ninety-second to its last drive.
Memories of bitter humiliations, determined triumphs, great victories, and bugle-calls that sounded from earth to heaven. Like memories framed in the breath of G.o.d, my audience peered in upon me--good, brown faces with great, kind, beautiful eyes--black soldiers of America rescuing beloved France--and the words came in praise and benediction there in the ”Y,” with its little stock of cigarettes and candies and its rusty wood stove.
”_Alors_,” said Madame, ”_quatre sont morts_”--four dead--four tall, strong sons dead for France--sons like the sweet and blue-eyed daughter who was hiding her brave smile in the dusk. It was a tiny stone house whose front window lipped the pa.s.sing sidewalk where ever tramped the feet of black soldiers marching home. There was a cavernous wardrobe, a great fireplace invaded by a new and jaunty iron stove. Vast, thick piles of bedding rose in yonder corner. Without was the crowded kitchen and up a half-stair was our bedroom that gave upon a tiny court with arched stone staircase and one green tree. We were a touching family party held together by a great sorrow and a great joy. How we laughed over the salad that got brandy instead of vinegar--how we ate the golden pile of fried potatoes and how we pored over the post-card from the Lieutenant of the Senegalese--dear little vale of crushed and risen France, in the day when Negroes went ”over the top” at Pont-a-Mousson.
Paris, Paris by purple facade of the opera, the crowd on the Boulevard des Italiens and the great swing of the Champs Elysees. But not the Paris the world knows. Paris with its soul cut to the core--feverish, crowded, nervous, hurried; full of uniforms and mourning bands, with cafes closed at 9:30--no sugar, scarce bread, and tears so interwined with joy that there is scant difference. Paris has been dreaming a nightmare, and though she awakes, the grim terror is upon her--it lies on the sand-closed art treasures of the Louvre. Only the flowers are there, always the flowers, the Roses of England and the Lilies of France.
New York! Behind the Liberty that faces free France rise the white cliffs of Manhattan, tier on tier, with a curving pinnacle, towers square and twin, a giant inkwell daintily stoppered, an ancient pyramid enthroned; beneath, low ramparts wide and mighty; while above, faint-limned against the turbulent sky, looms the vast grace of that Cathedral of the Purchased and Purchasing Poor, topping the world and pointing higher.
Yonder the gray cobwebs of the Brooklyn bridges leap the sea, and here creep the argosies from all earth's ends. We move to this swift home on dun and swelling waters and hear as we come the heartbeats of the new world.