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September 21 - September 24, 2024
Was it so irreconcilable, Warwick wondered, as still to peal out the curfew bell, which at nine o’clock at night had clamorously warned all negroes, slave or free, that it was unlawful for them to be abroad after that hour, under penalty of imprisonment or whipping?
On this stairway he had once seen a manacled free negro shot while being taken upstairs for examination under a criminal charge.
“Death,” quoted Warwick, with whose mood the undertaker’s remarks were in tune, “is the penalty that all must pay for the crime of living.”
The corruption of the white people’s speech was one element—only one—of the negro’s unconscious revenge for his own debasement.
For he was not only a son—a brother—but he represented to them the world from which circumstances had shut them out, and to which distance lent even more than its usual enchantment; and they felt nearer to this far-off world because of the glory which Warwick reflected from it.
A child needs some woman of its own blood to love it and look after it intelligently.”
custom is stronger than law—in these matters custom is law.
“Right and wrong,” he mused, “must be eternal verities, but our standards for measuring them vary with our latitude and our epoch. We make our customs lightly; once made, like our sins, they grip us in bands of steel; we become the creatures of our creations.
She had paid with her heart’s blood another installment on the Shylock’s bond exacted by society for her own happiness of the past and her children’s prospects for the future.
It is easy to moralize about the misfortunes of others, and to find good in the evil that they suffer; only a true philosopher could speak thus lightly of his own losses.
The influence of Walter Scott was strong upon the old South. The South before the war was essentially feudal, and Scott’s novels of chivalry appealed forcefully to the feudal heart.
She tried to place herself, in thus passing upon her own claims to consideration, in the hostile attitude of society toward her hidden disability.
The enamored man seeks his own happiness; the loving woman finds no sacrifice too great for the loved one. The fiction of chivalry made man serve woman; the fact of human nature makes woman happiest when serving where she loves.
First we have the casus belli, the cause of action;
white people had not changed their opinion of the negroes, except for the worse. The general belief was that they were just as inferior as before, and had, moreover, been spoiled by a disgusting assumption of equality, driven into their thick skulls by Yankee malignity bent upon humiliating a proud though vanquished foe.
Now, this son, with his father’s face and his father’s voice, stood before his father’s friend, demanding entrance to the golden gate of opportunity, which society barred to all who bore the blood of the despised race.
Even the law, the instrument by which tyranny riveted the chains upon its victims, had revolted now and then against the senseless and unnatural prejudice by which a race ascribing its superiority to right of blood permitted a mere suspicion of servile blood to outweigh a vast preponderance of its own.
“You are black,” he said, “and you are not free. You cannot travel without your papers; you cannot secure accommodations at an inn; you could not vote, if you were of age; you cannot be out after nine o’clock without a permit. If a white man struck you, you could not return the blow, and you could not testify against him in a court of justice. You are black, my lad, and you are not free.
“‘One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,’ says the poet. Somewhere, sometime, you had a black ancestor. One drop of black blood makes the whole man black.”
“The color line is drawn in North Carolina at four generations removed from the negro;
There are depths of fidelity and devotion in the negro heart that have never been fathomed or fully appreciated.
the human race, which is bigger and broader than Celt or Saxon, barbarian or Greek, Jew or Gentile, black or white; for we are all children of a common Father, forget it as we may, and each one of us is in some measure his brother’s keeper.
I would rather die of knowledge than live in ignorance.
“He made us, too,” continued Rena, intent upon her own thought, “and He must have had a reason for it. Perhaps He meant us to bring the others together in His own good time.
Tryon was young, and possessed of a sensitive soul—a source of happiness or misery, as the Fates decree. To those thus dowered, the heights of rapture are accessible, the abysses of despair yawn threateningly; only the dull monotony of contentment is denied.
As slaves, negroes were tolerable. As freemen, they were an excrescence, an alien element incapable of absorption into the body politic of white men. He would like to send them all back to the Africa from which their forefathers had come—unwillingly enough, he would admit—and he would like especially to banish this girl from his own neighborhood;
He felt some dim realization of the tyranny of caste, when he found it not merely pressing upon an inferior people who had no right to expect anything better, but barring his own way to something that he desired.
After a few short years of happiness or sorrow—little of joy, perhaps, and much of sadness, which had begun already—they would both be food for worms.
They were certainly both made by the same God, in much the same physical and mental mold; they breathed the same air, ate the same food, spoke the same speech, loved and hated, laughed and cried, lived and would die, the same. If God had meant to rear any impassable barrier between people of contrasting complexions, why did He not express the prohibition as He had done between other orders of creation?
Custom was tyranny. Love was the only law. Would God have made hearts to so yearn for one another if He had meant them to stay forever apart?
