Page:Nigger Heaven (1926).pdf/72

 they do in the cabarets on week-days. But the people who created the Spirituals must have felt a real faith, and that is why, I suppose, they touch most of us, knock us off our pins, and make us want to cry or shout.

Mary had arrived at the Park without encountering an acquaintance. She struck out down a path, the wet gravel crunching under her boots, the raindrops tossed by the wind from the dying leaves whipping her cheeks. She passed a clearing where a few days before, she remembered, she had witnessed a strange ceremony: some black people from one of the British West Indies—monkey-chasers they called them on Lenox Avenue; what a good story Rudolph Fisher had woven about one of them and the general Harlem attitude of distrust and even active dislike which they awakened—playing cricket with proper bats and wickets. She had stood for a moment watching them and listening to their Cockney speech. What a people we are! she meditated, cast into alien lands all over the earth, conforming, whether we like it or not, to the customs and manners and laws of folk who despise us, and yet everywhere, in spite of all obstacles, we manage to keep something of our own, even to make something of it. What other race in America, or anywhere else for that matter, has produced anything better than the Spirituals? Anything as good? was her succeeding interrogative boast. Yet the Spirituals had sprung from ignorant slaves, bending under the lash. Unknown black