Darkwater
by . New York: The Macmillan Co. 1920. 8vo, viii+276 pp. $2.00.
Two things must be seared into the soul of any moderately sensitive person who reads this book. One is the poignancy of the tragedy of the black man. The second is the need of professing one’s democratic creed with humility. The peculiar poignancy of the tragedy lies in the fact that the American negro suffers in direct proportion to his personal worth. If he is high-spirited and sensitive, educated and ambitious, loyal to his race, chivalrous to his womankind, and devoted to his children, then there is everything to hurt him. If he will debase his humanity, and be a good-natured, domesticated animal, then he will be tolerated and even indulged.
As to our political and social creed, no one after reading this book can regard American democracy as better than a job half done. Of the achievement one does not feel disposed to boast. For in point of fact, American democracy stops abruptly at the color line; and there are in America some ten million human souls beyond that line. It is a sharp line, a veritable contrast of white and black.
The genius of the writer is poetic rather than political and philosophical. He has a sincere and original imagination that redeems the common things of life. He was born by ‘a golden river’ in the Berkshires, though it was golden only because of the woolenand paper-waste that soiled it. He could see the beauty of color and line in a common schoolroom, as a painter might see it. He has known how, in a few sentences, to invest with dignity the figures of his ancestors, converted from small New England farmers into cooks, barbers, and itinerant laborers by the relentless pressure of poverty; of his grandfather, a strong, embittered man, who was inwardly a poet while outwardly a steamship steward; of his patient mother, ‘dark shining bronze,’ and of his migratory and lawless father. In these and other portraits he has introduced the values of color and atmosphere peculiar to his race, and has succeeded in really communicating them. The allegories and poems with which the volume is interspersed, though more artificial, and often obscure and rhetorical, contain passages of genuine beauty. The recital of the events of his own life — of his struggle for an education, his dreams and disappointments, his student days at Fisk, at Harvard, and in Europe, his teaching and research, and his final emergence as a journal-
ist and leader among his people — threads circumstance and incident into a living fragment of American life.
In these portions of the book there is a restraint and artistry in marked contrast with other portions in which the author deals with the ugliness and cruelty of race-hatred. He tells of the Jim-Crow car, the riots of East St. Louis, the exploitation of the black races of Africa, the insults and hardships of the negro’s daily life, more in the accepted manner of one describing atrocities. The reader’s feeling is stirred, but he sees neither tragic beauty nor the light of hope. It is all too bitterly seasoned with the author’s resentment. It is not that such resentment is unintelligible, or even unjust, but only that there is less promise in it, disposing the reader to shudder and then turn away as from something both intolerable and incurable.
The virtue of the book lies, not in its mutterings of rebelliousness, or in its echo of hate; still less does it lie in the author’s rehearsal of the commonplaces of industrial reform, or in the project of an African Zionism. Its virtue lies rather in its power to awaken sympathy, both through idealizing the unique genius of a race, and at the same time interpreting that race as but a peculiar rendering of the common theme of humanity. R. B. P.