Here it is that the comedy verges to tragedy.  The first minor note is struck, all unconsciously, by those worthy souls in whom consciousness of high descent brings burning desire to spread the gift abroad,—­the obligation of nobility to the ignoble.  Such sense of duty assumes two things:  a real possession of the heritage and its frank appreciation by the humble-born.  So long, then, as humble black folk, voluble with thanks, receive barrels of old clothes from lordly and generous whites, there is much mental peace and moral satisfaction.  But when the black man begins to dispute the white man’s title to certain alleged bequests of the Fathers in wage and position, authority and training; and when his attitude toward charity is sullen anger rather than humble jollity; when he insists on his human right to swagger and swear and waste,—­then the spell is suddenly broken and the philanthropist is ready to believe that Negroes are impudent, that the South is right, and that Japan wants to fight America.

After this the descent to Hell is easy.  On the pale, white faces which the great billows whirl upward to my tower I see again and again, often and still more often, a writing of human hatred, a deep and passionate hatred, vast by the very vagueness of its expressions.  Down through the green waters, on the bottom of the world, where men move to and fro, I have seen a man—­an educated gentleman—­grow livid with anger because a little, silent, black woman was sitting by herself in a Pullman car.  He was a white man.  I have seen a great, grown man curse a little child, who had wandered into the wrong waiting-room, searching for its mother:  “Here, you damned black—­” He was white.  In Central Park I have seen the upper lip of a quiet, peaceful man curl back in a tigerish snarl of rage because black folk rode by in a motor car.  He was a white man.  We have seen, you and I, city after city drunk and furious with ungovernable lust of blood; mad with murder, destroying, killing, and cursing; torturing human victims because somebody accused of crime happened to be of the same color as the mob’s innocent victims and because that color was not white!  We have seen,—­Merciful God! in these wild days and in the name of Civilization, Justice, and Motherhood,—­what have we not seen, right here in America, of orgy, cruelty, barbarism, and murder done to men and women of Negro descent.

Up through the foam of green and weltering waters wells this great mass of hatred, in wilder, fiercer violence, until I look down and know that today to the millions of my people no misfortune could happen,—­of death and pestilence, failure and defeat—­that would not make the hearts of millions of their fellows beat with fierce, vindictive joy!  Do you doubt it?  Ask your own soul what it would say if the next census were to report that half of black America was dead and the other half dying.

Unfortunate?  Unfortunate.  But where is the misfortune?  Mine?  Am I, in my blackness, the sole sufferer?  I suffer.  And yet, somehow, above the suffering, above the shackled anger that beats the bars, above the hurt that crazes there surges in me a vast pity,—­pity for a people imprisoned and enthralled, hampered and made miserable for such a cause, for such a phantasy!