Suburban Sketches | Page 6

there,--an
impressively respectable figure in black clothes, with a black face
rendered yet more effective by a pair of green goggles. It appeared that
this dark professor was a light of phrenology in Rhode Island, and that
he was believed to have uncommon virtue in his science by reason of
being blind as well as black.
I am loath to confess that Mrs. Johnson had not a flattering opinion of
the Caucasian race in all respects. In fact, she had very good
philosophical and Scriptural reasons for looking upon us as an upstart
people of new blood, who had come into their whiteness by no
creditable or pleasant process. The late Mr. Johnson, who had died in
the West Indies, whither he voyaged for his health in quality of cook
upon a Down-East schooner, was a man of letters, and had written a
book to show the superiority of the black over the white branches of the
human family. In this he held that, as all islands have been at their
discovery found peopled by blacks, we must needs believe that
humanity was first created of that color. Mrs. Johnson could not show
us her husband's work (a sole copy in the library of an English
gentleman at Port au Prince is not to be bought for money), but she
often developed its arguments to the lady of the house; and one day,

with a great show of reluctance, and many protests that no personal
slight was meant, let fall the fact that Mr. Johnson believed the white
race descended from Gehazi the leper, upon whom the leprosy of
Naaman fell when the latter returned by Divine favor to his original
blackness. "And he went out from his presence a leper as white as
snow," said Mrs. Johnson, quoting irrefutable Scripture. "Leprosy,
leprosy," she added thoughtfully,--"nothing but leprosy bleached you
out."
It seems to me much in her praise that she did not exult in our taint and
degradation, as some white philosophers used to do in the opposite idea
that a part of the human family were cursed to lasting blackness and
slavery in Ham and his children, but even told us of a remarkable
approach to whiteness in many of her own offspring. In a kindred spirit
of charity, no doubt, she refused ever to attend church with people of
her elder and wholesomer blood. When she went to church, she said,
she always went to a white church, though while with us I am bound to
say she never went to any. She professed to read her Bible in her
bedroom on Sundays; but we suspected, from certain sounds and odors
which used to steal out of this sanctuary, that her piety more commonly
found expression in dozing and smoking.
I would not make a wanton jest here of Mrs. Johnson's anxiety to claim
honor for the African color, while denying this color in many of her
own family. It afforded a glimpse of the pain which all her people must
endure, however proudly they hide it or light-heartedly forget it, from
the despite and contumely to which they are guiltlessly born; and when
I thought how irreparable was this disgrace and calamity of a black skin,
and how irreparable it must be for ages yet, in this world where every
other shame and all manner of wilful guilt and wickedness may hope
for covert and pardon, I had little heart to laugh. Indeed, it was so
pathetic to hear this poor old soul talk of her dead and lost ones, and try,
in spite of all Mr. Johnson's theories and her own arrogant
generalizations, to establish their whiteness, that we must have been
very cruel and silly people to turn her sacred fables even into matter of
question. I have no doubt that her Antoinette Anastasia and her Thomas
Jefferson Wilberforce-- it is impossible to give a full idea of the
splendor and scope of the baptismal names in Mrs. Johnson's
family--have as light skins and as golden hair in heaven as her reverend

maternal fancy painted for them in our world. There, certainly, they
would not be subject to tanning, which had ruined the delicate
complexion, and had knotted into black woolly tangles the once wavy
blonde locks of our little maid-servant Naomi; and I would fain believe
that Toussaint Washington Johnson, who ran away to sea so many
years ago, has found some fortunate zone where his hair and skin keep
the same sunny and rosy tints they wore to his mother's eyes in infancy.
But I have no means of knowing this, or of telling whether he was the
prodigy of intellect that he was declared to be. Naomi could no more be
taken in proof, of the one assertion than of the other. When