The Negro of Song

by Barry Pain

THE NEGRO OF SONG.

By Barry Pain.

I want it to be quite understood that I have done with the Negro of Song. He may now go away.

I should not speak like this if I had not reason. I am not telling the Negro of Song to die. That is what he is always doing; for my part, I would rather not die at all than make so much fuss about my own simple and perfectly commonplace death as the negro habitually does about his. I have no objection to his head being bare and his matted hair being buried (prematurely) in the sand. That is all right; one must have English Poetry, if only for the purposes of the Latin Elegiacs. It is when it comes to the songs that are sung, that the negro annoys me. The lights are always low. May Afric's sunny fountains roll down Greenland's icy mountains, if I can stand such sickening monotony! I would sooner roll down the icy mountains myself, than hear once more that allusion to the defective illumination of the Negro's death-scene. Then there is the Negro's excessive and terrible familiarity with the angels. He thinks he hears the angels calling "Poor Old Joe." I cannot believe it. I will not believe it. When he tells me that Sister Mary walks like that, I have nothing to say; he knows Sister Mary, and I do not; if he chooses to ridicule her misfortunes in the public streets, that is his affair. But when he tells me that the angels talk like that, I utterly decline to listen to him. I have not so low an opinion of the Hereafter.

And I do not think that his past life justifies his presumption. "I lub a lubbly gal, I do!" he says.

The sternest moralist would have nothing to say to that. But how does he continue? "And I hab lubbed a gal or two." Shocking! He goes on to inform us that we may bet he knows how a girl "should be lubbed." This is too monstrous. More missionaries is what we want. Something must be done to stem this furious tide of flirtation. One does not dispute the man's temptations; if her eyes are like the sparkling waters of the Ohio, of course, being a man, he should be impressed by it. But his lovesongs are like the table waters that have been opened for a fortnight—they have gone flat; they are unseemly.

His virtues are worse than his vices. His domesticity would even sicken a suburb—it is so domestic. He smells the cakes a-baking that Susy's been a-making. That is his high ideal. His wife does the cooking, and he sits in a long sweet ecstacy, drinking in the fragrance of food, enjoying food by anticipation, with all his soul sunk in thoughts of food. As he dreams of his coming supper, "every prospect pleases, and only man is vile." That is where Hornsey Rise and Africa clasp hands in sympathy. Of course, Susy has children—wildly, improbably, too many children. They clasp his knees. I am not a cruel man; but if a child clasped my knees, I would strike it. Yet, for the purposes of song, he is hardly ever a father, in name; he is called an uncle—"Old Uncle Pete"—and everybody loves him. There is no taste in the tropics. He is fond of his home; he is so terribly fond of his home that for three verses at a time he will talk about nothing else. One song, in particular, still madly to my memory rushes, no matter where I rove. It presupposes an interest in the negro's private and personal affairs which I, for one, do not take. It is full of the most over-ripe, dropping, flaccid, fly-consumed sentmentality that ever attracted a British audience.

Then there is his music. The negro of song is always musical. Yet does he express a wish to attend the next Richter concert? Never. He wants to hear the baby's tumming down in his good old home. That it all that he wants. On one occasion he tells us to hang up the shovel and the hoe. We can believe that; the sentimentalist never does a decent day's work if he can help it. But he also bids us to hang up the fiddle and the bow. Is it likely? If you did hang them up, he would take them down again, and ten minutes afterwards be blasting and blighting the crops of an entire cotton plantation by playing "Belle Mahone" too out of tune for halting human speech to express. His vices are bad, his virtues are worse, but his accomplishments taken alone are simply enough to account for the influenza.

After that, it is a vain thing to speak of his dialect. Ho says "ob" instead of "of." He is proud of it; yet I could teach a child to pronounce as badly as that. He calls his wife "honey"; if she were a lady, she would resent it, but she never does. No, I am tired of the negro of song. I never liked him, and now much iteration has made me mad. Therefore, I bid him to go away. The world is large; there is a land beyond England, the geographies tell us. Let him experiment upon France; soon afterwards the French nation would pay him highly to go and experiment upon Germany. Used as a weapon, he would supersede the torpedo, and add to the horrors of war. Or, if he is so fond of his good old home, let him go to it. Let him go to Africa, where, I fervently believe, he does not exist?, and never has existed.

(By arrangement with "The Granta.")