Race Adjustment; Essays on the Negro in America (second edition), pp. 234-245. 1909. The Neale Publishing Company. New York and Washington

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The Artistic Gifts of the Negro

Kelly Miller

What contribution has the Negro race ever made or ever can make to the general culture of the human spirit? asks the critic, with a scornful disdain that allows no answer. Ridicule and contempt have characterized the habitual attitude of the American mind toward the Negro's higher strivings. The faintest suggestion as to his higher possibilities is received either with a sneer or with a smile. The African was brought to America to be a hewer of wood and a drawer of water. Requisition was made upon his physical faculties alone to perform this manual and menial mission. His function was supposed to be as purely mechanical as that of the ox which pulls the plow. No more account was taken of his higher susceptibilities than of the mental and moral faculties of the lower animals. Indeed, the Negro has never been regarded in his own right and for his own sake, but merely as a coefficient which is not detachable from the quantity whose value it enhances. The servant exists for the sake of his master. The black man's status is fixed and his usefulness is recognized on the lower level of crude service. His mission is to administer to the wants of the higher, or as it is more fitting to say, the haughtier race. "The Negro is all right in his place" phrases a feeling that is deep seated and long abiding. This historical bias of mind is brought forward in current discussion. It is so natural to base a theory upon a long-established practice that one no longer wonders at the prevalence of this belief. The African has sustained servile relations to the Aryan for so long a time that it is easy, as it is agreeable to the Aryan pride, to conclude that servitude is his ordained place in society. The dogma of Carlyle that "the Negro is useful to God's creation only as a servant" still finds wide acceptance. Much of our current social philosophy on the race problem is but a restatement of the ancient prejudice in terms of modern phraseology. Why awaken the higher faculties of the race when only the lower ones are demanded in our scheme of economy? What boots it to develop higher taste and finer feelings in a people who must of necessity perform the rougher grade of the world's work? Is it not preposterous that black men should ponder over Shakespeare and Dante and black maidens pursue music and painting when they might earn a dollar a day at useful, productive toil? Such arguments are as familiar to us as the more orthodox doctrine drawn from the curse of Canaan used to be in days gone by. To an attitude thus predisposed, manifestation of higher qualities on the part of the people held in despite is both unwelcome and embarrassing. The justification of oppression is always based on the absence of higher faculties. Phyllis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass were more persuasive and potential anti-slavery arguments than all the flood of eloquence poured forth in behalf of an oppressed race. There was serious hesitation in admitting that the Negro possessed a soul and was entitled to the rites of baptism, on the ground that it was not right to hold a Christian in slavery. There is a sneaking feeling in the breast of humanity that the ennobling circle f kindly sympathy should include all persons and peoples who display aptitude for the higher intellectual and spiritual cult.

Despite traditional theories and centuries of cruel usage, there have been more or less continual outcroppings of the Negro's suppressed and stunted soul. Any striking emanation from this dark and forbidden background was at one time called a freak of nature not to be calculated in the ordinary course of events. But when freaks become too frequent they can no longer be ignored in any rational scheme of philosophy.

Music is the easiest outlet of the soul. The pent-up energy within breaks through the aperture of sound while the slower and more accurate deliberations of the intellect are yet in process of formulation. Plantation melody, that blind, half-conscious poetry that rose up from "the low ground of sorrow," was the first expression of the imprisoned soul of an imprisoned race. It was the smothered voice of a race crying in the wilderness, "with no language but a cry." These weird, plaintive, lugubrious longings go straight to the heart without the interventions of cumbersome intellectual machinery. They came from the unsophisticated soul of an humble and simple-minded black folk and make the strongest appeal to the universal heart. There can be no stronger argument of the sameness of human sympathy. "As in the water face answerest to face, so the heart of man to man." Negro melody has been called the only autochthonous music of the American Continent. The inner soul of the red man is not preserved to us in song. The European brought his folk-thought and folk-song acquired by his ancestors in the unremembered ages. It was reserved for the transplanted African to sing a new song racy of the soil, which had been baptized with his blood and watered with his tears. This music is the spontaneous expression of the race soul under new and depressing environment. It is the folk-genius of the African, not indeed on his ancestral heath, but in a new though beloved land. Unlike the captive Jew, who, under like circumstances, hung his harp upon the willow tree and sat down by the rivers of Babylon and wept, the transplanted African made a contribution to the repertoire of song which moistens the eye and melts the heart of the world. These songs are not African, but American. The scene, circumstances and aspirations are not adapted to some distant continent, but to their new environment in a land, not of their sojourn, but of their abiding place. Shall they not immortalize the soil from which they sprung? Robert Burns has gathered the superstitions, the sorrows, the sufferings, the joys, the strivings of the lowly life of Scotland and woven them into soulful song, and has thus rendered old Scotia ever dear to human memory. The tourist makes his eager pilgrimage around the world to view "the banks and braes o' bonnie Doon" where the peasant lass poured out her soul in anguish. What halo of glory hovers over that ghostly route traversed that dreary night by the tippled Tam O'Shanter! The glory of a locality rests as much upon the folk-song or folk-story that grows out of and gathers about it as upon the tradition that this or that great man was born there. If the human heart ever turns with passionate yearning to our own Southland, it will not be so much in quest of the deeds and doings of her renowned warriors and statesmen, as to revel in the songs, the sorrows, the sighings, the soul strivings of her humble black folk and to realize the scenes amid which these pathetic melodies took their rise. Which of their musical achievements would the American people not gladly give in exchange for "Steal Away to Jesus" or "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"? What song yet ascribed to the glory of "Hail columbia!" equals in power of pathetic appeal and strength of local endearment the yearnful quest of the slave for his home land, "'Way Down Upon the Suwannee River"? The motif of the world renowned "Dixie," the musical inspiration of the Southern Confederacy, is based upon the yearning of a slave removed from his native Sunny South for the land where he was born. The South is the home of the Negro, not merely because he has aided in the development of its resources by his strong and brawny arm, but also because he has hallowed it by the yearnings of his soul.

There is a dispositon on the part of the more sensitive members of the colored race to affect to feel ashamed of these melodies which solaced and sustained their ancestors under burdens as grievous as any the human race has ever been called upon to bear. They fear to acknowledge a noble influence because it proceeded from a lowly place. All great people glorify their history, and look back upon their early attainment with spiritualized vision. What nation is there that cannot find in its earlier struggles those things which, if interpreted in light of present conditions, would count for humiliation and shame? But through the purifying power of spiritual perspective they are made to reveal a greater degree of glory. However trying and perplexing experiences may be while we are in the midst of them, yet a longer range of vision gives us the assurance that "it will afterwards please us to remember even these things." A race that is ashamed of itself or of its historic humiliation which has been overcome makes a pitiable spectacle in the eyes of the world to which it appeals for sympathy and tolerance. A people who are afraid of their own shadow must forever abide in the shade. These plantation melodies represent the Negro's chief contribution to the purifying influences that soften and solace the human spirit. Can the oyster be ashamed of the pearl, or the toad of the jewel in its head? For the Negro to despise his superior natural qualities because they differ from those of another class would be of the same order of folly as if the female sex, in derogation of its natural endowment, should refuse to sing soprano, because the males excel in baritone.

This music is indeed inimitable. Its racial quality is stamped on every note. The writer remembers the anomalous spectacle of a white principal trying to lead his colored pupils in the rendition of jubilee glees. The requisite melodic, pathetic quality of voice is a natural coefficient which is as inalienable as any other physical characteristic. It rings out from the blood. As we listen to its sad, sighing cadence, we naturally expect to look and see, and say, "These are they who have come up through great tribulation." A white man attempting a plantation melody is as much a racial anomaly as a Negro affecting to feel in his soul the significance of that line of a celebrated hymn in which the singer passionately avows that he will never "blush to speak His name."

Immediately after the war troupes of Negro singers invaded the North and sang the songs whose melodic pathos melted the heart like wax. The Fisk Jubilee singers carried the ministration of this music to the remotest ends of the earth; and kings and emperors have wept before these soul-moving wailings. Many a school in the South owes its endowment to this sweet, sad singing. The plantation melodies possess the quality of endurance. It fulfils Keat's definition, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." Whenever and wherever they are faithfully rendered, the people are moved mightily.

Transition from plantation melody to the standard tunes of Watts and Wesley was as easy as the second step in walking. Indeed, the Negro's gift for psalmody and his wonderful melodic and harmonic endowment is the marvel of the musical world. The wonder is how these people can sing so well without having learned. To listen to a Negro camp-meeting in the backwoods of the Carolinas rendering the good old songs of Zion is almost enough to "rob the listening soul of sin."

The rise of rag-time music, which for the past few years has been the rage, marks another stage of Negro music. The potency of its spell has been allpervasive. Half the world has been humming its tunes. The small boy whistles it on the street; the Italian grinds it from his music box while the urchins gambol on the commons; it jingles in our ears from the slot machine while we wait for the next train or sip a glass of soda; it has captivated the European capitals; the ultra dilettante and his alabaster lady in the gilded palace of wealth glide gracefully over the tufted fabric to the movement of its catchy, snatchy airs. The critics may indeed tell us that music is one thing and rag-time another, but the common people, and the uncommon ones as well, hear it, not only gladly, but rapturously. Rag-time is essentially Negro in motive, meaning, movement, and indeed, in composition. It is neither serious nor soul deep, like its plantation prototype, but is rather the outcome of a silly, flippant, dilettantism of the "new issue." The scene is in the city, not the country. Indeed it might well be called "city airs" in contradistinction from "plantation melodies." While this music portrays faithfully the Negro race in a certain phase of development, and while some of it bites deep into the experiences of human nature, yet it lacks the element of permanence, and seems destined to pass away, like the jingles of the variety stage which tickle the ear only for a season. It is here for the first time that the Negro figures as a composer of music. The words and music of the plantation melodies are attributed to no definite authorship. The "coon songs," a sort of connecting link between the old and the new, were composed mainly by white authors. It is not generally known that such famous songs as "Ben Bolt," "Listen to the Mocking-Bird," and "Rally Round the Flag, Boys" bear the stamp of Negro workmanship, as respects either words or music. But the Negro's chief musical distinction, up to the rise of rag-time, rested upon rendition, rather than upon composition. For the past few years, however, music sheets by Negro authors have been flying from the press as thick as the traditional autumn leaves. There has scarcely been a musical collection, so the critics tell us, during that interval that has not contained songs by Negro authors. Colored troupes in the rôles of Negro authorship or improvisation have crowded the largest theaters in all parts of the land. Several such troupes have undertaken European tours with marked success. There is a group of Negro composers in New York whose works bear the imprint of the best-known publishing houses. Some of them have accumulated fortunes from their composition and performance. Such famous pieces as "All Coons Look Alike to Me," "Under the Bamboo Tree," and "Go 'Way Back and Sit Down," are sung between the oceans and, indeed, around the world. Gus L. Davis, the most famous Negro composer, died a few years ago. He belonged to the era of the "story-song" and did not attempt any piece of purely Negro sentiment. Whenever the world plays or thrums, or hums, or whistles, or sings "The Light-House by the Sea," "The Baggage Coach Ahead," or "The Fatal Wedding," it pays homage to the musical genius of the Negro race.

The Negro race is indeed a highly musical people. The love of music crops out everywhere. The back room of every Negro barbershop is a young conservatory of music. In the ordinary Negro household the piano is as common a piece of furniture as the rocking-chair or center-table. That rosewood piano in a log cabin in Alabama, which Dr. Booker T. Washington's burlesque has made famous, is a most convincing, if somewhat grotesque, illustration of the musical genius of the Negro race. Music satisfies the Negro's longing as nothing else can do. All human faculties strive to express or utter themselves. They do not wait upon any fixed scheme or order of development to satisfy our social philosophy. When the fires of genius burn in the soul it will not await the acquiring of a bank account or the building of a fine mansion before gratifying its cravings. The famished Elijah, under a juniper tree, was the purveyor of God's message to a wicked king. Socrates in poverty and rage pointed out to mankind the path of moral freedom. John the Baptist, clad in leather girdle, and living on the wild fruits of the fields, proclaimed the coming of the kingdom of God. Would it be blasphemy to add, that the Son of Man, while dwelling in the flesh, had not where to lay His head? Our modern philosophy would have advised that these enthusiasts cease their idle ravings, go to work, earn an honest living, and leave the pursuit of truth and spiritual purity to those who had acquired a competency. Is it a part of God's economy that the higher susceptibilities of the soul must wait upon the lower faculties of the body? Should Tanner paint no pictures because his race is ignorant and poor? Should a Dunbar cease to woo the Muses till every Negro learns a trade? The Negro in poverty and rags, in ignorance and unspeakable physical wretchedness, uttered forth those melodies which are sure to lift mankind at least a little higher in the scale of spiritual purity.

There are scattered indications that the Negro possesses ambition and capacity for high-grade classical music. The love of music is not only a natural passion, it is becoming a cultivated taste. The choirs of the best colored churches usually render at least one high-grade selection at each service. Blind Tom and Black Patti are at least individual instances of the highest musical susceptibility. There are numerous colored men and women who have completed courses, both instrumental and vocal, in the best American conservatories, and several have pursued their studies under famous European masters. In almost every center where a goodly number of cultivated colored people are to be found, there is a musical organization devoted to the rendition of the standard works of the great composers.

But music is only one of the forms of art in which the Negro has given encouraging manifestations. Frederick Douglass was among the foremost orators of the anti-slavery crusade, the second great oratorical epoch in the annals of American history. Booker T. Washington, according to some, is the most effective living orator that speaks the English tongue. Phyllis Wheatley, the Black Daughter of the Sun; and Dunbar, the peerless poet of lowly life, wooed the Muse of Song, who did not disdain their suit because their skin was dark. Pictures by Tanner adorn the walls of many a gallery in two hemispheres, one of which is on its way to the Louvre. If we might be permitted to cross the ocean and include those whom the Negro race can claim through some strain of their blood, Pushkin stands as the national poet of Russia, and the Dumas as the leading romancers of France. It is noticeable that the names which the Negroes have contributed to the galaxy of the world's greatness are confined almost wholly to the fine arts. Toussaint L'Ouverture stands almost alone among Negroes of whose fame the world takes account, whose renown rests upon solid deeds.

The Negro's order of development follows that of the human race. The imaginative powers are the first to emerge; exact knowledge and its practical application come at a later stage. The first superlative Negro will rise in the domain of the arts. The poet, the artist and the musician come before the engineer and the administrator. The Negro who is to quicken and inspire his race will not be a master mechanic nor yet a man of profound erudition in the domain of exact knowledge, but a man of vision with powers to portray and project. The epic of the Negro race has not yet been written; its aspirations and strivings still await portrayal. Whenever a Dunbar or a Chestnut breaks upon us with surprising imaginative and pictorial power, his race becomes expectant and begins to ask, "Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?"

Mr. W. D. Howells, writing in the introduction of Mr. Dunbar's first volume of poems, says: "I said that a race which had come to this effect in any member of it, had attained civilization in him, and I permitted myself the imaginative prophecy that the hostilities and prejudices which had so long constrained his race were destined to vanish in the arts; that these were to be the final proof that God had made of one blood all nations of men. I accepted them as an evidence of the essential unity of the human race."