* * * * *

“Wait till the lady passes,” said a Nashville white boy.

“She’s no lady; she’s a nigger,” answered another.

So some few women are born free, and some amid insult and scarlet letters achieve freedom; but our women in black had freedom thrust contemptuously upon them.  With that freedom they are buying an untrammeled independence and dear as is the price they pay for it, it will in the end be worth every taunt and groan.  Today the dreams of the mothers are coming true.  We have still our poverty and degradation, our lewdness and our cruel toil; but we have, too, a vast group of women of Negro blood who for strength of character, cleanness of soul, and unselfish devotion of purpose, is today easily the peer of any group of women in the civilized world.  And more than that, in the great rank and file of our five million women we have the up-working of new revolutionary ideals, which must in time have vast influence on the thought and action of this land.

For this, their promise, and for their hard past, I honor the women of my race.  Their beauty,—­their dark and mysterious beauty of midnight eyes, crumpled hair, and soft, full-featured faces—­is perhaps more to me than to you, because I was born to its warm and subtle spell; but their worth is yours as well as mine.  No other women on earth could have emerged from the hell of force and temptation which once engulfed and still surrounds black women in America with half the modesty and womanliness that they retain.  I have always felt like bowing myself before them in all abasement, searching to bring some tribute to these long-suffering victims, these burdened sisters of mine, whom the world, the wise, white world, loves to affront and ridicule and wantonly to insult.  I have known the women of many lands and nations,—­I have known and seen and lived beside them, but none have I known more sweetly feminine, more unswervingly loyal, more desperately earnest, and more instinctively pure in body and in soul than the daughters of my black mothers.  This, then,—­a little thing—­to their memory and inspiration.

Children of the Moon

    I am dead;
    Yet somehow, somewhere,
    In Time’s weird contradiction, I
    May tell of that dread deed, wherewith
    I brought to Children of the Moon
    Freedom and vast salvation.

    I was a woman born,
    And trod the streaming street,
    That ebbs and flows from Harlem’s hills,
    Through caves and canons limned in light,
    Down to the twisting sea.

    That night of nights,
    I stood alone and at the End,
    Until the sudden highway to the moon,
    Golden in splendor,
    Became too real to doubt.

    Dimly I set foot upon the air,
    I fled, I flew, through the thrills of light,
    With all about, above, below, the whirring
    Of almighty wings.