A different mirror chapter 5 in “no more peck O' Corn, Study Guides, Projects, Research of American literature

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A Different Mirror Ronald Takaki,

Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror ) “NO MORE PECK O’ CORN” Slavery and Its Discontents ety’s borders; rather they were within what James Madi- gon called the “bosom” of the republic, living in northern ghettos and on southern plantations. David Walker lived in both of these worlds. Born in North Carolina in 1785, he was the son of a slave father and a free mother. Inheriting the status of his mother, walker felt rage against the cruelty and injustice of slav- ery. Living below the Mason-Dixon Line was a painful contra- diction for him: he saw people who shared his color defined as property. Somehow, Walker learned to read and write; he stud- ied history and pondered why blacks in America were in such a wretched condition? Walker continued to reflect on this question after he moved to Boston, where he sold ald clothes. Freedam in northern society, he realized, was only a facade for the reality of caste. Blacks were allowed only menial jobs. “Here we are—reduced to degradation,” ‘Walker observed. “Here we are cleaning the white man’s shoes.” Resentful of the stereotypes of blacks as savages, Walker coun- tered that whites were the true barbarians: the enslavement of blacks, the selling and whipping of slaves—such practices were signs of savagery, not civilization. Slavery, he believed, could only be destroyed through violence. “Masters want us fur their slaves and think nothing of murdering Lares INDIANS, BLACKS were not outside of white soci- “NO MORE PECK 0’ CORN” a» 99 us in order to subject us to that wretched condition — therefore, if there is an attempt made by us, kill or be killed.”? In 1829, Walker published his revolutionary thoughts in an Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. Southern legislators denounced the pamphlet as “seditious” and restricted its circula- tion; even northern white abolitionists like Benjamin Lundy and William Lloyd Garrison criticized it as “inflammatory” and “inju- dicious.” A year later, Walker died, mysteriously. What he had presented was a candid, disturbing assessment of the condition of blacks: they had been reduced to slaves in the South and pariahs in the North? “North of Slavery” In 1860, 225,000 African Americans lived in the North. They were “free,” for the northern states had abolished slavery after the American Revolution. Their presence was far from pervasive, and blacks certainly did not threaten the racial homogeneity of white society. Yet they were the target of virulent racism. “The same schools do not receive the children of the black and Euru- pean,” Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the 1830s. In the theaters gold cannot procure a seat for the servile race beside their former masters; in the hospitals they lie apart; and although they are allowed ta invoke the same God as the whites, it must be at a different altar and in their own churches, with their own clergy. The gates of heaven are not closed against them, but their inferiority is continued to the confines of the other world. When the Negro dies, his bones arc cast aside, and the distinction of condition prevails even in the equality of death.* As historian Leon Litwack described their situation, Afri- can Americans were only “north of slavery.” Indeed, everywhere blacks experienced discrimination and segregation. They were barred from most hotels and restaurants and were forced to sit in separate sections in theaters and churches, invariably in the back. Black children usually attended separate and inferior schools. “The colored people are...charged with want of desire for educa- tion and improvement,” a black protested, “yet, if a colored man comes to the door of our institutions of learning, with desires ever so strong, the lords of these institutions rise up and shut the doar; and then you say we have not the desire nor the ability to acquire