The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois (reading books for 5 year olds .TXT) đ
- Author: W. E. B. Du Bois
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Thomas Wentworth Higginson hastened to tell of these songs, and Miss McKim and others urged upon the world their rare beauty. But the world listened only half credulously until the Fisk Jubilee Singers sang the slave songs so deeply into the worldâs heart that it can never wholly forget them again.
There was once a blacksmithâs son born at Cadiz, New York, who in the changes of time taught school in Ohio and helped defend Cincinnati from Kirby Smith. Then he fought at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and finally served in the Freedmenâs Bureau at Nashville. Here he formed a Sunday-school class of black children in 1866, and sang with them and taught them to sing. And then they taught him to sing, and when once the glory of the Jubilee songs passed into the soul of George L. White, he knew his life-work was to let those Negroes sing to the world as they had sung to him. So in 1871 the pilgrimage of the Fisk Jubilee Singers began. North to Cincinnati they rode,âfour half-clothed black boys and five girl-women,âled by a man with a cause and a purpose.
They stopped at Wilberforce, the oldest of Negro schools, where a black bishop blessed them. Then they went, fighting cold and starvation, shut out of hotels, and cheerfully sneered at, ever northward; and ever the magic of their song kept thrilling hearts, until a burst of applause in the Congrega-tional Council at Oberlin revealed them to the world. They came to New York and Henry Ward Beecher dared to welcome them, even though the metropolitan dailies sneered at his âNigger Minstrels.â So their songs conquered till they sang across the land and across the sea, before Queen and Kaiser, in Scotland and Ireland, Holland and Switzerland.
Seven years they sang, and brought back a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to found Fisk University.
Since their day they have been imitatedâsometimes well, by the singers of Hampton and Atlanta, sometimes ill, by straggling quartettes. Caricature has sought again to spoil the quaint beauty of the music, and has filled the air with many debased melodies which vulgar ears scarce know from the real. But the true Negro folk-song still lives in the hearts of those who have heard them truly sung and in the hearts of the Negro people.
What are these songs, and what do they mean? I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world.
They tell us in these eager days that life was joyous to the black slave, careless and happy. I can easily believe this of some, of many. But not all the past South, though it rose from the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching witness of these songs. They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wander-ings and hidden ways.
The songs are indeed the siftings of centuries; the music is far more ancient than the words, and in it we can trace here and there signs of development. My grandfatherâs grand-mother was seized by an evil Dutch trader two centuries ago; and coming to the valleys of the Hudson and Housatonic, black, little, and lithe, she shivered and shrank in the harsh north winds, looked longingly at the hills, and often crooned a heathen melody to the child between her knees, thus: Do ba-na co-ba, ge-ne me, ge-ne me!
Do ba-na co-ba, ge-ne me, ge-ne me!
Ben dâ nu-li, nu-li, nu-li, ben dâ le.
The child sang it to his children and they to their childrenâs children, and so two hundred years it has travelled down to us and we sing it to our children, knowing as little as our fathers what its words may mean, but knowing well the meaning of its music.
This was primitive African music; it may be seen in larger form in the strange chant which heralds âThe Coming of Johnâ: âYou may bury me in the East,
You may bury me in the West,
But Iâll hear the trumpet sound in that morning,â
âthe voice of exile.
Ten master songs, more or less, one may pluck from the forest of melody-songs of undoubted Negro origin and wide popular currency, and songs peculiarly characteristic of the slave. One of these I have just mentioned. Another whose strains begin this book is âNobody knows the trouble Iâve seen.â When, struck with a sudden poverty, the United States refused to fulfill its promises of land to the freedmen, a brigadier-general went down to the Sea Islands to carry the news. An old woman on the outskirts of the throng began singing this song; all the mass joined with her, swaying. And the soldier wept.
The third song is the cradle-song of death which all men know,-âSwing low, sweet chariot,ââwhose bars begin the life story of âAlexander Crummell.â Then there is the song of many waters, âRoll, Jordan, roll,â a mighty chorus with minor cadences. There were many songs of the fugitive like that which opens âThe Wings of Atalanta,â and the more familiar âBeen a-listening.â The seventh is the song of the End and the BeginningââMy Lord, what a mourning! when the stars begin to fallâ; a strain of this is placed before âThe Dawn of Freedom.â The song of gropingââMy wayâs cloudyââbegins âThe Meaning of Progressâ; the ninth is the song of this chapterââWrestlinâ Jacob, the day is a-breaking,ââa paean of hopeful strife. The last master song is the song of songsââSteal away,ââsprung from âThe Faith of the Fathers.â
There are many others of the Negro folk-songs as striking and characteristic as these, as, for instance, the three strains in the third, eighth, and ninth chapters; and others I am sure could easily make a selection on more scientific principles.
There are, too, songs that seem to be a step removed from the more primitive types: there is the maze-like medley, âBright sparkles,â one phrase of which heads âThe Black Beltâ; the Easter carol, âDust, dust and ashesâ; the dirge, âMy motherâs took her flight and gone homeâ; and that burst of melody hovering over âThe Passing of the First-BornâââI hope my mother will be there in that beautiful world on high.â
These represent a third step in the development of the slave song, of which âYou may bury me in the Eastâ is the first, and songs like âMarch onâ (chapter six) and âSteal awayâ
are the second. The first is African music, the second Afro-American, while the third is a blending of Negro music with the music heard in the foster land. The result is still distinctively Negro and the method of blending original, but the elements are both Negro and Caucasian. One might go further and find a fourth step in this development, where the songs of white America have been distinctively influenced by the slave songs or have incorporated whole phrases of Negro melody, as âSwanee Riverâ and âOld Black Joe.â Side by side, too, with the growth has gone the debasements and imitationsâ
the Negro âminstrelâ songs, many of the âgospelâ hymns, and some of the contemporary âcoonâ songs,âa mass of music in which the novice may easily lose himself and never find the real Negro melodies.
In these songs, I have said, the slave spoke to the world.
Such a message is naturally veiled and half articulate. Words and music have lost each other and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theology have displaced the older sentiment. Once in a while we catch a strange word of an unknown tongue, as the âMighty Myo,â which figures as a river of death; more often slight words or mere doggerel are joined to music of singular sweetness. Purely secular songs are few in number, partly because many of them were turned into hymns by a change of words, partly because the frolics were seldom heard by the stranger, and the music less often caught.
Of nearly all the songs, however, the music is distinctly sorrowful. The ten master songs I have mentioned tell in word and music of trouble and exile, of strife and hiding; they grope toward some unseen power and sigh for rest in the End.
The words that are left to us are not without interest, and, cleared of evident dross, they conceal much of real poetry and meaning beneath conventional theology and unmeaning rhapsody. Like all primitive folk, the slave stood near to Natureâs heart. Life was a ârough and rolling seaâ like the brown Atlantic of the Sea Islands; the âWildernessâ was the home of God, and the âlonesome valleyâ led to the way of life. âWinterâll soon be over,â was the picture of life and death to a tropical imagination. The sudden wild thunder-storms of the South awed and impressed the Negroes,âat times the rumbling seemed to them âmournful,â at times imperious:
âMy Lord calls me,
He calls me by the thunder,
The trumpet sounds it in my soul.â
The monotonous toil and exposure is painted in many words.
One sees the ploughmen in the hot, moist furrow, singing: âDereâs no rain to wet you,
Dereâs no sun to burn you,
Oh, push along, believer,
I want to go home.â
The bowed and bent old man cries, with thrice-repeated wail: âO Lord, keep me from sinking down,â
and he rebukes the devil of doubt who can whisper: âJesus is dead and Godâs gone away.â
Yet the soul-hunger is there, the restlessness of the savage, the wail of the wanderer, and the plaint is put in one little phrase: My soul wants something thatâs new, thatâs new Over the inner thoughts of the slaves and their relations one with another the shadow of fear ever hung, so that we get but glimpses here and there, and also with them, eloquent omis-sions and silences. Mother and child are sung, but seldom father; fugitive and weary wanderer call for pity and affection, but there is little of wooing and wedding; the rocks and the mountains are well known, but home is unknown. Strange blending of love and helplessness sings through the refrain: âYonderâs my ole mudder,
Been wagginâ at de hill so long;
âBout time she cross over,
Git home bime-by.â
Elsewhere comes the cry of the âmotherlessâ and the âFarewell, farewell, my only child.â
Love-songs are scarce and fall into two categoriesâthe frivolous and light, and the sad. Of deep successful love there is ominous silence, and in one of the oldest of these songs there is a depth of history and meaning: Poor Ro-sy, poor gal; Poor Ro-sy,
poor gal; Ro-sy break my poor heart, Heavân shall-a-be my home.
A black woman said of the song, âIt canât be sung without a full heart and a troubled sperrit.â The same voice sings here that sings in the German folk-song:
âJetz Geh iâ anâs brunele, trinkâ aber net.â
Of death the Negro showed little fear, but talked of it familiarly and even fondly as simply a crossing of the waters, perhapsâwho knows?âback to his ancient forests
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