Keep not Thou silent, O God!

Sit not longer blind, Lord God, deaf to our prayer and dumb to our dumb suffering.  Surely Thou, too, art not white, O Lord, a pale, bloodless, heartless thing!

Ah!  Christ of all the Pities!

Forgive the thought!  Forgive these wild, blasphemous words!  Thou art still the God of our black fathers and in Thy Soul’s Soul sit some soft darkenings of the evening, some shadowings of the velvet night.

But whisper—­speak—­call, great God, for Thy silence is white terror to our hearts!  The way, O God, show us the way and point us the path!

Whither?  North is greed and South is blood; within, the coward, and without, the liar.  Whither?  To death?

Amen!  Welcome, dark sleep!

Whither?  To life?  But not this life, dear God, not this.  Let the cup pass from us, tempt us not beyond our strength, for there is that clamoring and clawing within, to whose voice we would not listen, yet shudder lest we must,—­and it is red.  Ah!  God!  It is a red and awful shape.

Selah!

In yonder East trembles a star.

Vengeance is Mine; I will repay, saith the Lord!

Thy Will, O Lord, be done!

Kyrie Eleison!

Lord, we have done these pleading, wavering words.

We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!

We bow our heads and hearken soft to the sobbing of women and little children.

We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!

Our voices sink in silence and in night.

Hear us, good Lord!

In night, O God of a godless land!

Amen!

In silence, O Silent God.

Selah!

II

THE SOULS OF WHITE FOLK

High in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk.

Of them I am singularly clairvoyant.  I see in and through them.  I view them from unusual points of vantage.  Not as a foreigner do I come, for I am native, not foreign, bone of their thought and flesh of their language.  Mine is not the knowledge of the traveler or the colonial composite of dear memories, words and wonder.  Nor yet is my knowledge that which servants have of masters, or mass of class, or capitalist of artisan.  Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side.  I see the working of their entrails.  I know their thoughts and they know that I know.  This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious.  They deny my right to live and be and call me misbirth!  My word is to them mere bitterness and my soul, pessimism.  And yet as they preach and strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of facts and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see them ever stripped,—­ugly, human.