Chapter VI: Front Matter (6)

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 associates 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 assume 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 assume a formal and ritualistic character.

In the voodoo practices, of which we have not any accurate records, the incantations that were pronounced by the priests, contain strange, magic words, scraps 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 scrap 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 pronunciation."[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 assume, 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 institutions; namely, the church and the "praise house." The praise house is the earlier institution 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 nobody pray,
O Lord!

Couldn't hear nobody pray.
O--way down yonder
By myself,
I couldn't hear nobody pray.

In the valley,
Couldn't hear nobody pray,
On my knees,
Couldn't hear nobody pray,
With my burden,
Couldn't hear nobody pray,
An' my Saviour,
Couldn't hear nobody pray.

O Lord!
I couldn't hear nobody pray,
O Lord!
Couldn't hear nobody pray.
O--way down yonder
By myself,
I couldn't hear nobody pray.

Chilly waters,
Couldn't hear nobody pray,
In the Jordan,
Couldn't hear nobody pray,
Crossing over,
Couldn't hear nobody pray,
Into Canaan,
Couldn't hear nobody 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 assembly. 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_, constitute the chief images of the Negro's heaven. He is tired of the world which has been a hell to him. Now on his knees, now shouting, now sorrowful and glad, the Negro comes from 'hanging over hell' 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 assertion 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 God'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.

It is interesting to note in this connection that nowhere in these songs do we discover the slightest references to Africa. They reflect no memories of a far off happier land. Before the Negro gained his emancipation Africa had, so far as he was concerned, almost ceased to exist. Furthermore, the whole tone and emphasis of these songs and of all other religious expressions of the American Negro are in marked contrast with the tone and emphasis of African religious ideas. The African knew of the existence of another world, but he was not interested in it. The world, as the African understood it, was full of malignant spirits, diseases and forces with which he was in constant mortal struggle. His religious practices were intended to gain for him immunity in this world, rather than assurance of the next. But the Negro in America was in a different situation. He was not living in his own world. He was a slave and that, aside from the physical inconvenience, implied a vast deal of _inhibition_. He was, moreover, a constant spectator of life in which he could not participate; excited to actions and enterprises that were forbidden to him because he was a slave. The restlessness which this situation provoked found expression, not in insurrection and rebellion--although, of course, there were Negro insurrections--but in his religion and in his dreams of another and freer world. I assume, therefore, that the reason the Negro so readily and eagerly took over from the white man his heaven and apocalyptic visions was because these materials met the demands of his peculiar racial temperament and furnished relief to the emotional strains that were provoked in him by the conditions of slavery.

So far as slavery was responsible for the peculiar individuality of the Negro's religion we should expect that the racial ideals and racial religion would take on another and a different character under the influence of freedom. This, indeed, is what seems to me is taking place. New ideals of life are expressed in recent Negro literature and slowly and imperceptibly those ideas are becoming institutionalized in the Negro church and more particularly in the cultural ideals of the Negro school. But this makes another chapter in the history of Negro culture in America.

I have sought in this brief sketch to indicate the modifications, changes and fortune which a distinctive racial temperament has undergone as a result of encounters with an alien life and culture. This temperament, as I conceive it, consists in a few elementary but distinctive characteristics, determined by physical organization and transmitted biologically. These characteristics manifest themselves in a genial, sunny and social disposition, in an interest and attachment to external, physical things rather than to subjective states and objects of introspection; in a disposition for expression rather than enterprise and action. The changes which have taken place in the manifestations of this temperament have been actuated by an inherent and natural impulse, characteristic of all living things, to persist and maintain themselves in a changed environment. Such changes have occurred as are likely to take place in any organism in its struggle to live and to use its environment to further and complete its own existence.

The general principle which the Negro material illustrates is that the racial temperament selects out of the masses of cultural materials, to which it had access, such technical, mechanical and intellectual devices as meet its needs at a particular period of its existence. It clothes and enriches itself with such new customs, habits, and cultural forms as it is able, or permitted to use. It puts into these relatively external things, moreover, such concrete meanings as its changing experience and its unchanging racial individuality demand.

Everywhere and always the Negro has been interested rather in expression than in action; interested in life itself rather than in its reconstruction or reformation. The Negro is, by natural disposition, neither an intellectual nor an idealist like the Jew, nor a brooding introspective like the East Indian, nor a pioneer and frontiersman like the Anglo-Saxon. He is primarily an artist, loving life for its own sake. His metier is expression rather than action. The Negro is, so to speak, the lady among the races.

In reviewing the fortunes of the Negro's temperament as it is manifested in the external events of the Negro's life in America, our analysis suggests that this racial character of the Negro has exhibited itself everywhere in something like the rôle of the _wish_ in the Freudian analysis of dream life. The external cultural forms which he found here, like the memories of the individual, have furnished the materials in which the racial wish, that is, the Negro temperament, has clothed itself. The inner meaning, the sentiment, the emphasis, the emotional color which these forms assumed as the result of their transference from the white man to the Negro, these have been the Negro's own. They have represented his temperament--his temperament modified, however, by his experience and the tradition which he has accumulated in this country. The temperament is African, but the tradition is American.

I present this thesis merely as a hypothesis. As such its value consists in its suggestion of a point of view and program for investigation. I may, however, suggest some of the obvious practical consequences. If racial temperament--particularly when it gets itself embodied in institutions and in _nationalities_, that is, social groups based upon race--is so real and obdurate a thing that education can only enrich and develop it but not dispose of it, then we must be concerned to take account of it in all our schemes for promoting naturalization, assimilation, Americanization, Christianization, and acculturation generally.

If it is true that the Jew, as has been suggested, just because of his intellectuality is a natural born idealist, internationalist, doctrinaire, and revolutionist, while the Negro, because of his natural attachment to known, familiar objects, places and persons, is preadapted to conservatism and to local and personal loyalties: if these things are true, we shall eventually have to take account of them practically. It is certain that the Negro has uniformly shown a disposition to loyalty, during slavery to his master, and during freedom to the South and the country as a whole. He has maintained this attitude of loyalty, too, under very discouraging circumstances. I once heard Kelly Miller, the most philosophical of the leaders and teachers of his race, say in a public speech that one of the greatest hardships the Negro suffered in this country was due to the fact that he was not permitted to be patriotic.

Of course, all these alleged racial characteristics have a positive as well as a negative significance. Every race, like every individual, has the vices of its virtues. The question remains still to what extent so-called racial characteristics are actually racial, that is, biological, and to what extent they are the effect of environmental conditions. The thesis of this paper, to state it again, is: (1) That fundamental temperamental qualities, which are the basis of interest and attention, act as selective agencies and as such determine what elements in the cultural environment each race will select, in what region it will seek and find its vocation, in the larger social organization; (2) that, on the other hand, technique, science, machinery, tools, habits, discipline and all the intellectual and mechanical devices with which the civilized man lives and works, remain relatively external to the inner core of significant attitudes and values which constitute what many call the will of the group. This racial will is, to be sure, largely social, that is modified by social experience, but it rests ultimately upon a complex of inherited characteristics, which are racial.

It follows from what has been said that the individual man is the bearer of a double inheritance. As a member of a race, he transmits by interbreeding a biological inheritance. As a member of society or a social group, on the other hand, he transmits by communication a social inheritance. The particular complex of inheritable characters, which characterizes the individuals of a racial group constitutes the racial temperament. The particular group of habits, accommodations, sentiments, attitudes and ideals transmitted by communication and education constitute a social tradition. Between this temperament and this tradition there is, as has been generally recognized, a very intimate relationship. My assumption is that temperament is the basis of the _interests_; that as such it determines in the long run the general run of attention, and this, eventually, determines the selection in the case of an individual of his vocation, in the case of the racial group of its culture. That is to say, temperament determines what things the individual and the groups will be interested in; what elements of the general culture, to which they have access, they will assimilate; what, to state it in pedagogical terms, they will learn.

It will be evident at once that where individuals of the same race and hence the same temperament are associated, the temperamental interests will tend to reinforce one another, and the attention of members of the group will be more completely focused upon the specific objects and values that correspond to the racial temperament. In this way racial qualities become the basis for nationalities, a nationalistic group being merely a cultural and eventually a political society founded on the basis of racial inheritances. On the other hand, when racial segregation is broken up and members of a racial group are dispersed and isolated, the opposite effect will take place. This explains the phenomena which have frequently been the subject of comment and observation, that the racial characteristics manifest themselves in an extraordinary way in large homogeneous gatherings. The contrast between a mass meeting of one race and a similar meeting of another is particularly striking. Under such circumstances characteristic racial and temperamental differences appear that would otherwise pass entirely unnoticed.

When the physical unity of a group is perpetuated by the succession of parents and children, the racial temperament, including fundamental attitudes and values which rest on it, are preserved intact. When however, society grows and is perpetuated by immigration and adaptation, there ensues, as a result of miscegenation, a breaking up of the complex of the biologically inherited qualities which constitute the temperament of the race. This again initiates changes in the mores, traditions and eventually in the institutions of the community. The changes which proceed from modification in the racial temperament will, however, modify but slightly the external forms of the social traditions but they will be likely to change profoundly their content and meaning. Of course, other factors, individual competition, the formation of classes, and especially the increase of communication, all coöperate to complicate the whole situation and to modify the effects which would be produced by racial factors working in isolation. All these factors must be eventually taken account of, however, in any satisfactory scheme of dealing with the problem of Americanization by education. This is, however, a matter for more complete analysis and further investigation.

ROBERT E. PARK

FOOTNOTES:

[1] This address was delivered before the American Sociological Society convened in annual session at Richmond in 1918.

[2] "The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City Environment," _American Journal of Sociology_, V, 44, March, 1915, p. 589.

[3] Rivers, "Ethnological Analysis of Cultures," _Nature_, Vol. I, 87, 1911.

[4] W. J. McGee, _Piratical Acculturation_.

[5] There is or was a few years ago near Mobile a colony of Africans who were brought to the United States as late as 1860. It is true, also, that Major R. R. Moton, who has succeeded Booker T. Washington as head of Tuskegee Institute, still preserves the story that was told him by his grandmother of the way in which his great-grandfather was brought from Africa in a slave ship.

[6] _Domestic Manners and Social Condition of the White, Coloured and Negro Population of the West Indies_, by Mrs. Carmichael, Vol. I. (London, Wittaker, Treacher and Co.), p. 251.

"Native Africans do not at all like it to be supposed that they retain the customs of their country and consider themselves wonderfully civilized by being transplanted from Africa to the West Indies. Creole Negroes invariably consider themselves superior people, and lord it over the native Africans."

[7] The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was founded in 1701 and the efforts to Christianize the Negro were carried on with a great deal of zeal and with some success.

[8] JOURNAL OF NEGRO HISTORY, Vol. I, 1916, p. 70.

[9] _Afro-American Folksongs: A Study in Racial and National Music_, by Henry Edward Krehbiel. (New York and London, G. Schirmer), p. 37. From a letter of Lafcadio Hearne.

[10] _Army Life in a Black Regiment_, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Boston, Fields, Osgood and Co., 1870.

[11] Krehbiel, _Afro-American Folksongs_, p. 16.

[12] Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, edited by The Faculty of Political Science of Columbia University, Vol. 37, New York, 1910, No. 3--_Social and Mental Traits of the Negro_, by Howard W. Odum, Ph.D., p. 91.

[13] Krehbiel, _Afro-American Folksongs_.

THE COMPANY OF ROYAL ADVENTURERS OF ENGLAND TRADING INTO AFRICA, 1660-1672