Darkwater | Page 3

OF YEARS
I was born by a golden river and in the shadow of two great hills, five
years after the Emancipation Proclamation. The house was quaint, with
clapboards running up and down, neatly trimmed, and there were five
rooms, a tiny porch, a rosy front yard, and unbelievably delicious
strawberries in the rear. A South Carolinian, lately come to the
Berkshire Hills, owned all this--tall, thin, and black, with golden
earrings, and given to religious trances. We were his transient tenants
for the time.
My own people were part of a great clan. Fully two hundred years
before, Tom Burghardt had come through the western pass from the
Hudson with his Dutch captor, "Coenraet Burghardt," sullen in his
slavery and achieving his freedom by volunteering for the Revolution
at a time of sudden alarm. His wife was a little, black, Bantu woman,
who never became reconciled to this strange land; she clasped her
knees and rocked and crooned:
"Do bana coba--gene me, gene me!
Ben d'nuli, ben d'le--"
Tom died about 1787, but of him came many sons, and one, Jack, who
helped in the War of 1812. Of Jack and his wife, Violet, was born a
mighty family, splendidly named: Harlow and Ira, Cloë, Lucinda,
Maria, and Othello! I dimly remember my grandfather, Othello,--or
"Uncle Tallow,"--a brown man, strong-voiced and redolent with
tobacco, who sat stiffly in a great high chair because his hip was broken.
He was probably a bit lazy and given to wassail. At any rate,
grandmother had a shrewish tongue and often berated him. This
grandmother was Sarah--"Aunt Sally"--a stern, tall, Dutch-African
woman, beak-nosed, but beautiful-eyed and golden-skinned. Ten or
more children were theirs, of whom the youngest was Mary, my
mother.

Mother was dark shining bronze, with a tiny ripple in her black hair,
black-eyed, with a heavy, kind face. She gave one the impression of
infinite patience, but a curious determination was concealed in her
softness. The family were small farmers on Egremont Plain, between
Great Barrington and Sheffield, Massachusetts. The bits of land were
too small to support the great families born on them and we were
always poor. I never remember being cold or hungry, but I do
remember that shoes and coal, and sometimes flour, caused mother
moments of anxious thought in winter, and a new suit was an event!
At about the time of my birth economic pressure was transmuting the
family generally from farmers to "hired" help. Some revolted and
migrated westward, others went cityward as cooks and barbers. Mother
worked for some years at house service in Great Barrington, and after a
disappointed love episode with a cousin, who went to California, she
met and married Alfred Du Bois and went to town to live by the golden
river where I was born.
Alfred, my father, must have seemed a splendid vision in that little
valley under the shelter of those mighty hills. He was small and
beautiful of face and feature, just tinted with the sun, his curly hair
chiefly revealing his kinship to Africa. In nature he was a
dreamer,--romantic, indolent, kind, unreliable. He had in him the
making of a poet, an adventurer, or a Beloved Vagabond, according to
the life that closed round him; and that life gave him all too little. His
father, Alexander Du Bois, cloaked under a stern, austere demeanor a
passionate revolt against the world. He, too, was small, but squarish. I
remember him as I saw him first, in his home in New Bedford,--white
hair close-cropped; a seamed, hard face, but high in tone, with a gray
eye that could twinkle or glare.
Long years before him Louis XIV drove two Huguenots, Jacques and
Louis Du Bois, into wild Ulster County, New York. One of them in the
third or fourth generation had a descendant, Dr. James Du Bois, a gay,
rich bachelor, who made his money in the Bahamas, where he and the
Gilberts had plantations. There he took a beautiful little mulatto slave
as his mistress, and two sons were born: Alexander in 1803 and John,

later. They were fine, straight, clear-eyed boys, white enough to "pass."
He brought them to America and put Alexander in the celebrated
Cheshire School, in Connecticut. Here he often visited him, but one last
time, fell dead. He left no will, and his relations made short shrift of
these sons. They gathered in the property, apprenticed grandfather to a
shoemaker; then dropped him.
Grandfather took his bitter dose like a thoroughbred. Wild as was his
inner revolt against this treatment, he uttered no word against the
thieves and made no plea. He tried his fortunes here and in Haiti, where,
during his short, restless sojourn, my own father was born. Eventually,
grandfather became chief steward on the passenger boat between New
York