The Journal of Negro History Volume IV Part 13

Finally we have societies growing up, as in the United States, by immigration. These immigrants, coming as they do from all parts of the world, bring with them fragments of divergent cultures. Here again the process of a.s.similation is slow, often painful, not always complete.

In the case where societies are formed and maintained by adoption, that is by immigration, the question arises: How far is it possible for a people of a different race and a different culture to take over the traditions and social inheritance of another and an alien people?

What are the conditions which facilitate this transmission and, in general, what happens when people of different races and cultures are brought together in the intimate relations of community life?

These questions have already arisen in connection with the education of the Negro in America and with the work of foreign missions. If the schools are to extend and rationalize the work they are already doing in the Americanization of the immigrant peoples, questions of this sort may become actual in the field of pedagogy. This paper is mainly concerned with the Negro, not because the case of the Negro is more urgent than or essentially different from that of the immigrant, but because the materials for investigation are more accessible.

Admitting, as the anthropologists now seem disposed to do, that the average native intelligence in the races is about the same, we may still expect to find in different races certain special traits and tendencies which rest on biological rather than cultural differences.

For example, over and above all differences of language, custom or historic tradition, it is to be presumed that Teuton and Latin, the Negro and the Jew--to compare the most primitive with the most sophisticated of peoples--have certain racial apt.i.tudes, certain innate and characteristic differences of temperament which manifest themselves especially in the objects of attention, in tastes and in talents. Is the Jewish intellectual, for example, a manifestation of an original and peculiar endowment of the Jewish race or is he rather a product of traditional interest and emphasis characteristic of Jewish people--a characteristic which may be explained as an accommodation to the long-continued urban environment of the race?[2]

Is the Negro's undoubted interest in music and taste for bright colors, commonly attributed to the race, to be regarded as an inherent and racial trait or is it merely the characteristic of primitive people? Is Catholicism to be regarded as the natural manifestation of the Latin temperament as it has been said that Protestantism is of the Teutonic?

Here are differences in the character of the cultural life which can scarcely be measured quant.i.tatively in terms of gross intellectual capacity. Historical causes do not, it seems, adequately account for them. So far as this is true we are perhaps warranted in regarding them as modifications of transmitted tradition due to innate traits of the people who have produced them. Granted that civilization, as we find it, is due to the development of communication and the possibility of mutual exchange of cultural materials, still every special culture is the result of a selection and every people borrows from the whole fund of cultural materials not merely that which it can use but which, because of certain organic characteristics, it finds stimulating and interesting.

The question then resolves itself into this: How far do racial characteristics and innate biological interests determine the extent to which one racial group can and will take over and a.s.similate the characteristic features of an alien civilization? How far will it merely take over the cultural forms, giving them a different content or a different inflection? This problem, so far as it is related to the lives of primitive peoples, has already been studied by the ethnologists. Rivers, in his a.n.a.lysis of the cultures of Australian people, has found that what we have hitherto regarded as primitive cultures are really fusions of other and earlier forms of culture.[3]

The evidence of this is the fact that the fusion has not been complete. In the process of interchange it frequently happens that what Rivers calls the "fundamental structure" of a primitive society has remained unchanged while the relatively formal and external elements of alien culture only have been taken over and incorporated with it.

There are indications also that, where cultural borrowings have taken place, the borrowed elements have for the people who have taken them over a meaning different from what they had for the people from whom they were borrowed. W.J. McGee, in an article ent.i.tled "Piratical Acculturation," has given an interesting ill.u.s.tration of this fact.[4]

McGee's observations of the Beri Indians go to show that they imitated the weapons of their enemies, but that they regarded them as magical instruments and the common people did not even know their names. There are numerous other ill.u.s.trations of this so-called "piratical acculturation" among the observations of ethnologists. It is said that the Negroes in Africa, when they first came into possession of the white man's guns, regarded them as magical instruments for making a noise and used them, as the Germans used the Zeppelins and the newspapers, merely to destroy the enemy's morale.

No doubt the disposition of primitive peoples is to conceive everything mystically, or animistically, to use the language of ethnology, particularly where it concerns something strange. On the other hand, when the primitive man has encountered among the cultural objects to which civilization has introduced him, something which he has been able to make immediately intelligible to himself, he has at once formed a perfectly rational conception of it. Some years ago at Lovedale, South Africa, the seat of one of the first successful industrial mission schools, there was an important ceremony to which all the native African chiefs in the vicinity were formally invited.

It was the introduction and demonstration of the use of the plow, the first one that had ever been seen in those parts. The proceedings were followed with great interest by a large gathering of natives. When the demonstration was finished one old chief turned to his followers and said with great conviction: "This is a great thing which the white man has brought us. One hoe like that is worth as much as ten wives." An African chief could hardly have expressed appreciation of this one fundamental device of our civilization in more pragmatic or less mystical terms. The wise old chief grasped the meaning of the plow at once, but this was because he had been pre-adapted by earlier experience to do so.

It is the subjective, historic and ultimately, perhaps, racial and temperamental factor in the lives of peoples which makes it difficult, though not impossible, perhaps, to transmit political and religious inst.i.tutions to people of a different racial type and a different social tradition. William James' essay, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," in which he points out how completely we are likely to miss the point and mistake the inner significance of the lives of those about us, unless we share their expedience, emphasizes this fact. If then the transmission and fusion of cultures is slow, incomplete and sometimes impossible, it is because the external forms, the formulas, technical devices of every social tradition can be more easily transmitted than the aims, the att.i.tudes, sentiments and ideals which attach to them are embodied in them. The former can be copied and used; the latter must be appreciated and understood.

For a study of the acculturation process, there are probably no materials more complete and accessible than those offered by the history of the American Negro. No other representatives of a primitive race have had so prolonged and so intimate an a.s.sociation with European civilization, and still preserved their racial ident.i.ty.

Among no other people is it possible to find so many stages of culture existing contemporaneously. It has been generally taken for granted that the Negro brought a considerable fund of African tradition and African superst.i.tion from Africa to America. One not infrequently finds in the current literature and even in standard books upon the Negro, references to voodoo practices among the Negroes in the Southern States. As a matter-of-fact the last authentic account which we have of anything approaching a Negro nature worship in the United States took place in Louisiana in 1884. It is described by George W.

Cable in an article on "Creole Slave Songs" which appeared in the _Century Magazine_ in 1886. In this case it seems to have been an importation from the West Indies. I have never found an account of a genuine instance of voodoo worship elsewhere in the United States, although it seems to have been common enough in the West Indies at one time.

My own impression is that the amount of African tradition which the Negro brought to the United States was very small. In fact, there is every reason to believe, it seems to me, that the Negro, when he landed in the United States, left behind him almost everything but his dark complexion and his tropical temperament. It is very difficult to find in the South today anything that can be traced directly back to Africa. This does not mean that there is not a great deal of superst.i.tion, conjuring, "root doctoring" and magic generally among the Negroes of the United States. What it does mean is that the superst.i.tions we do find are those which we might expect to grow up anywhere among an imaginative people, living in an intellectual twilight such as exists on the isolated plantations of the Southern States. Furthermore, this superst.i.tion is in no way a.s.sociated, as it is in some of the countries of Europe, southern Italy for example, with religious beliefs and practices. It is not part of Negro Christianity. It is with him, as it is with us, folk-lore pure and simple. It is said that there are but two African words that have been retained in the English language. One of these is the word Buckra, from which comes Buckra Beach in Virginia. This seems remarkable when we consider that slaves were still brought into the United States clandestinely up to 1862.[5]

The explanation is to be found in the manner in which the Negro slaves were collected in Africa and the manner in which they were disposed of after they arrived in this country. The great markets for slaves in Africa were on the West Coast, but the old slave trails ran back from the coast far into the interior of the continent, and all the peoples of Central Africa contributed to the stream of enforced emigration to the New World. In the West Indies a good deal was known among slave-traders and plantation owners about the character and relative value of slaves from different parts of Africa, but in the United States there was less knowledge and less discrimination. Coming from all parts of Africa and having no common language and common tradition, the memories of Africa which they brought with them were soon lost.

There was less opportunity in the United States also than in the West Indies for a slave to meet one of his own people, because the plantations were considerably smaller, more widely scattered and, especially, because as soon as they were landed in this country, slaves were immediately divided and shipped in small numbers, frequently no more than one or two at a time, to different plantations. This was the procedure with the very first Negroes brought to this country. It was found easier to deal with the slaves, if they were separated from their kinsmen.

On the plantation they were thrown together with slaves who had already forgotten or only dimly remembered their life in Africa.

English was the only language of the plantation. The att.i.tude of the slave plantation to each fresh arrival seems to have been much like that of the older immigrant towards the greenhorn. Everything that marked him as an alien was regarded as ridiculous and barbaric.[6]

Furthermore, the slave had in fact very little desire to return to his native land. I once had an opportunity to talk with an old man living just outside of Mobile, who was a member of what was known as the African colony. This African colony represented the cargo of one of the last slave ships successful in landing in this country just at the opening of the war. The old man remembered Africa and gave me a very interesting account of the way in which he was captured and brought to America. I asked him if he had ever wished to return. He said that a missionary who had been in their country and spoke their language had visited them at one time. This missionary offered to send them back to Africa and even urged them to go. "I told him," said the old man, "I crossed the ocean once, but I made up my mind then never to trust myself in a boat with a white man again."

The fact that the Negro brought with him from Africa so little tradition which he was able to transmit and perpetuate on American soil, makes that race unique among all peoples of our cosmopolitan population. Other peoples have lost, under the disintegrating influence of the American environment, much of their cultural heritage. None have been so utterly cut off and estranged from their ancestral land, traditions and people. It is just because of this that the history of the Negro offers exceptional materials for determining the relative influence of temperamental and historical conditions upon the process by which cultural materials from one racial group are transmitted to another; for, in spite of the fact that the Negro brought so little intellectual baggage with him, he has exhibited a rather marked ethnical individuality in the use and interpretation of the cultural materials to which he has had access.

The first, and perhaps the only distinctive inst.i.tution which the Negro has developed in this country is the Negro church, and it is in connection with his religion that we may expect to find, if anywhere, the indications of a distinctive Afro-American culture. The actual conditions under which the African slaves were converted to Christianity have never been adequately investigated. We know, in a general way, that there was at first considerable opposition to admitting the Negro into the church because it was feared that it would impair the master's t.i.tle to his slaves. History records too that the house servants were very early admitted to churches and that in many cases masters went to considerable pains to instruct those servants who shared with them the intimacy of the household.[7] It was not, however, until the coming of the new, free and evangelistic types of Christianity, the Baptists and the Methodists, that the ma.s.ses of the black people, that is, the plantation Negroes, found a form of Christianity that they could make their own.

How eagerly and completely the Negro did take over the religion of these liberal denominations may be gathered from some of the contemporary writings, which record the founding of the first Negro churches in America. The first Negro church in Jamaica was founded by George Liele, shortly after the close of the Revolutionary War. George Liele had been a slave in Savannah, but his master, who was a Tory, emigrated to Jamaica upon the evacuation of that city. Andrew Bryan in Savannah was one of Liele's congregation. He was converted, according to the contemporary record, by Liele's exposition of the text "You must be born again!" About eight months after Liele's departure, Andrew began to preach to a Negro congregation, "with a few white."

The colored people had been permitted to erect a building at Yamacraw, but white people in the vicinity objected to the meetings and Bryan and some of his a.s.sociates were arrested and whipped. But he "rejoiced in his whippings" and holding up his hand declared "he would freely suffer death for the cause of Jesus Christ." Bryan's master interceded for him and "was most affected and grieved" at his punishment. He gave Bryan and his followers a barn to worship in, after Chief Justice Osbourne had given them their liberty. This was the origin of what was probably the first Negro church in America.

George Liele and Andrew Bryan were probably not exceptional men even for their day. The Rev. James Cook wrote of Bryan: "His gifts are small but he is clear in the grand doctrines of the Gospel. I believe him truly pious and he has been the instrument of doing more good among the poor slaves than all the learned doctors in America."[8] The significant thing is that, with the appearance of these men, the Negroes in America ceased to be a mission people. At least, from this time on, the movement went on of its own momentum, more and more largely under the direction of Negro leaders. Little Negro congregations, under the leadership of Negro preachers, sprang up wherever they Were tolerated. Often they were suppressed, more often they were privately encouraged. Not infrequently they met in secret.

In 1787 Richard Allen and Absolom Jones had formed in Philadelphia the Free African Society, out of which four years later, in 1790, arose the first separate denominational organization of Negroes, the African Methodist-Episcopal Church. George Liele, Andrew Bryan, Richard Allen, and the other founders of the Negro church were men of some education, as their letters and other writings show. They had had the advantage of life in a city environment and the churches which they founded were in all essentials faithful copies of the denominational forms as they found them in the churches of that period.

The religion of the Negroes on the plantation was then, as it is today, of a much more primitive sort. Furthermore, there were considerable differences in the cultural status of different regions of the South and these differences were reflected in the Negro churches. There was at that time, as there is today, a marked contrast between the Upland and the Sea Island Negroes. Back from the coast the plantations were smaller, the contact of the master and slave were more intimate. On the Sea Island, however, where the slaves were and still are more completely isolated than elsewhere in the South, the Negro population approached more closely to the cultural status of the native African. The Sea Islands were taken possession of in the first years of the war by the Federal forces and it was here that people from the North first came in contact with the plantation Negro of the lower South. They immediately became interested in the manners and customs of the Island Negroes, and from them we have the first accurate accounts of their folk-lore and sayings.

The Sea Island Negroes speak a distinct dialect and retain certain customs which are supposed to be of African origin. It is, however, in their religious practices that we have the nearest approach to anything positively African. This has undoubtedly the characteristics of primitive ritual. But this does not mean that it is African in origin. It seems to me more likely that it is to be interpreted as a very simple and natural expression of group emotion, which is just beginning to crystallize and a.s.sume a formal character. The general tone of these meetings is that of a religious revival in which we expect a free and uncontrolled expression of religious emotion, the difference being that in this case the expression of the excitement is beginning to a.s.sume a formal and ritualistic character.

In the voodoo practices, of which we have not any accurate records, the incantations that were p.r.o.nounced by the priests, contain strange, magic words, sc.r.a.ps of ancient ritual, the meanings of which are forgotten. Lafcadio Hearne, who knew the Negro life of Louisiana and Martinique intimately and was keen on the subject of Negro folk-lore, has preserved for us this sc.r.a.p from an old Negro folk song in which some of these magic words have been preserved. Writing to his friend Edward Krehbiel he says:

"Your friend is right, no doubt about the 'Tig, tig, malaborn La Chelerna che tango Redjoum!'

"I asked my black nurse what it meant. She only laughed and shook her head. 'Mais c'est voodoo, ca; je n'en sais rien!' 'Well,'

said I, 'don't you know anything about Voodoo songs?' 'Yes,' she answered, 'I know Voodoo songs; but I can't tell you what they mean.' And she broke out into the wildest, weirdest ditty I ever heard. I tried to write down the words; but as I did not know what they meant I had to write by sound alone, spelling the words according to the French p.r.o.nunciation."[9]

So far as I know there are, among the plantation hymns, no such remains of ancient ritual, mystical words whose meanings are unknown, no traces whatever of African tradition. If there is anything that is African about the Negroes' Christianity, it is not African tradition but the African temperament which has contributed it. I a.s.sume, therefore, that what we find in the most primitive form of Negro Christianity is not the revival of an older and more barbaric religion but the inception of a new and original form of Christianity.

An interesting fact in regard to the religious practices of the Negroes of the Sea Islands, which has not, so far as I know, been recorded in any of the descriptions of that people, is the existence among them of two distinct religious inst.i.tutions; namely, the church and the "praise house." The praise house is the earlier inst.i.tution and represents apparently a more primitive and more characteristically Negro or African type. In slavery days, the church was the white man's place of worship. Negroes were permitted to attend the services and there was usually a gallery reserved for their use. Churches, however, were relatively few and not all the slaves on the plantation could attend at any one time. Those who did attend were usually the house servants. On every large plantation, however, there was likely to be, and this was characteristic of the Sea Island plantations, a "praise house" where the slaves were permitted to worship in their own peculiar way. It was here that the "shout" took place. After the Civil War, churches were erected and regular congregations of the Negro denominations were formed. The Negro churches, however, never wholly displaced the praise houses on Port Royal and some of the other islands. It is a singular fact that today, among the Negroes of Port Royal, at any rate, no one is converted in church. It is only in the praise houses that Negroes get religion. It is only through the praise house that one enters the church. The whole process involves, as I have been informed, not merely an "experience," the precise nature of which is not clear, but also an examination by the elders to determine whether the experience is genuine, before candidates are admitted in good standing as members of the congregation.

On the whole the plantation Negro's religion was a faithful copy of the white man's. It was content rather than the form which suffered sea change in the process of transmission from the white man to the black. What this content was, what new inflection and color the Negro slave imparted to the religious forms which he borrowed from his master we may, perhaps, gather from a study of the plantation hymns.

These folksongs represent, at any rate, the naive and spontaneous utterance of hopes and aspirations for which the Negro slave had no other adequate means of expression. The first and most interesting account we have of these Negro spirituals is that of Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in his _Army Life in a Black Regiment_.[10] He collected them from the lips of his own black soldiers as they sang them about the campfire at night. He was almost the first to recognize that these rude plantation hymns represented a real literature, the only literature the American Negro has produced, until very recent times.

Col. Higginson has compared the Negro spirituals to the Scotch ballads and to the folk songs of other races. It is, however, not so much their similarities as their differences which are interesting and significant. Negro folk songs are ruder and more primitive. The verses, often but not always rhymed, are, as in the case of the example given below, composed almost entirely of single phrases, followed by a refrain, which is repeated again with slight modifications, ending, not infrequently, in an exclamation.

An' I couldn't hear n.o.body pray, O Lord!

Couldn't hear n.o.body pray.

O--way down yonder By myself, I couldn't hear n.o.body pray.

In the valley, Couldn't hear n.o.body pray, On my knees, Couldn't hear n.o.body pray, With my burden, Couldn't hear n.o.body pray, An' my Saviour, Couldn't hear n.o.body pray.

O Lord!

I couldn't hear n.o.body pray, O Lord!

Couldn't hear n.o.body pray.

O--way down yonder By myself, I couldn't hear n.o.body pray.

Chilly waters, Couldn't hear n.o.body pray, In the Jordan, Couldn't hear n.o.body pray, Crossing over, Couldn't hear n.o.body pray, Into Canaan, Couldn't hear n.o.body pray.

In Negro folk songs the music and expression are everything. The words, often striking and suggestive, to be sure, represent broken fragments of ideas, thrown up from the depths of the Negroes'

consciousness and swept along upon a torrent of wild, weird and often beautiful melody. One reason the verses of the Negro folk songs are so broken and fragmentary is that the Negroes were not yet in secure possession of the English language. Another explanation is the conditions under which they were produced. The very structure of these verses indicate their origin in the communal excitement of a religious a.s.sembly. A happy phrase, a striking bit of imagery, flung out by some individual was taken up and repeated by the whole congregation.

Naturally the most expressive phrases, the lines that most adequately voiced the deep unconscious desires of the whole people, were remembered longest and repeated most frequently. New lines and variations were introduced from time to time. There was, therefore, a process of natural selection by which the best, the most representative verses, those which most adequately expressed the profounder and more permanent moods and sentiments of the Negro were preserved and became part of the permanent tradition of the race.

Negro melodies still spring up on the plantations of the South as they did in the days of slavery. The Negro is, like the Italian, an improviser, but the songs he produces today have not, so far as my knowledge goes, the quality of those he sang in slavery. The schools have introduced reading, and this, with the reflection which writing enforces, is destroying the folk songs of the Negro, as it has those of other races.

Not only are the Negro folk songs more primitive--in the sense I have indicated--than the folk songs of other peoples with which we are familiar but the themes are different. The themes of the Scotch ballads are love and battles, the adventures and tragedies of a wild, free life. The Negro songs, those that he has remembered best, are religious and other worldly. "It is a singular fact," says Krehbiel, "that very few secular songs--those which are referred to as 'reel tunes,' 'fiddle songs,' 'corn songs' and 'devil songs,' for which slaves generally expressed a deep abhorrence, though many of them no doubt were used to stimulate them while in the fields--have been preserved while 'shout songs' and other 'speritchils' have been kept alive by the hundred."[11]

If it is the plantation melodies that, by a process of natural selection, have been preserved in the traditions of the Negro people, it is probably because in these songs they found a free and natural expression of their unfulfilled desires. In the imagery of these songs, in the visions which they conjure up, in the themes which they again and again renew, we may discern the reflection of dawning racial consciousness, a common racial ideal.

The content of the Negro folk songs has been made the subject of a careful investigation by Howard Odum in his _Study of the Social and Mental Traits of the Negro_. He says: "The Negro's fancies of 'Heaven's bright home' are scarcely exceeded by our fairy tales. There are silver and golden slippers, crowns of stars, jewels and belts of gold. There are robes of spotless white and wings all bejeweled with heavenly gems. Beyond the Jordan the Negro will outshine the sun, moon and stars. He will slip and slide the golden street and eat the fruit of the trees of paradise.... With rest and ease, with a golden band about him and with palms of victory in his hands and beautiful robes, the Negro will indeed be a happy being.... To find a happy home, to see all the loved ones and especially the Biblical characters, to see Jesus and the angels, to walk and talk with them, to wear robes and slippers as they do, and to _rest forever_, const.i.tute the chief images of the Negro's heaven. He is tired of the world which has been a h.e.l.l to him. Now on his knees, now shouting, now sorrowful and glad, the Negro comes from 'hanging over h.e.l.l' to die and sit by the Father's side."[12]

In the imagery which the Negro chooses to clothe his hopes and dreams, we have, as in the musical idiom in which he expresses them, reflections of the imagination and the temperament of Africa and the African. On the other hand, in the themes of this rude rhapsodical poetry--the House of Bondage, Moses, the Promised Land, Heaven, the apocalyptic visions of Freedom--but freedom confined miraculously and to another world--these are the reflections of the Negro's experience in slavery.

The Negro's songs of slavery have been referred to by Du Bois in his _Soul of Black-Folk_ as sorrow songs, and other writers have made the a.s.sertion that all the songs of the slaves were in a plaintive minor key. As a matter of fact, investigation has shown that actually less than twelve per cent of Negro songs are in a minor.[13] There are no other folk songs, with the exception of those of Finland, of which so large a percentage are in the major mood. And this is interesting as indicating the racial temperament of the Negro. It tends to justify the general impression that the Negro is temperamentally sunny, cheerful, optimistic. It is true that the slave songs express longing, that they refer to "hard trials and great tribulations," but the dominant mood is one of jubilation, "Going to sing, going to shout, going to play all over G.o.d's heaven."

Other worldliness is not peculiar to the religion of the slave. It is a trait which the slave encountered in the religion of his master. But in the Negro's conception of religion it received a peculiar emphasis.

In fact, these ecstatic visions of the next world, which the Negro slave songs portrayed with a directness and simplicity that is at once quaint and pathetic, are the most significant features of the Negro's songs of slavery.