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James Larkin Pearson,
Boomer, N. C.
TEE LIFE STORY' OF GEORGE IORTD14, COLORED.
This story is not entirely factual. It is partly
on fact, but a considerable portion of it is drawn
fram imagination. The black mother and the mulatto
son did in fact exist, though they are now dead; but
the son did not drown himself as the present story has
it. There was something of the boy's problem —his
mental and spiritual struggle against fate --but it has
been heightened and played up for dramatic effect.
;mos LarUn 2earsons
Boomer, N. C.
THZ LITZ JTORY OF GIMRGZ HORTGN, coL4c-a),
.......••••••••••••.m
This is the story of George Horton, Negro. It is
not so much an account of his physical battles with life,
but rather the atory of his mental reef:Alone and r"Terings
as he faced the unanswerable question —the hopeless
biological and psychological problem —of being a Negro.
George Horton's mother was a full-blooded Negro
woman of the old, uneducated, servant type. Her name was
Liz. She was black, simple-minded, and humble. She came
along a generation later than slavery days, but she was
more or less a reversion to the old slave type. She was
a good servant, and to he a good servant was all that
she knew.
There was something called morals that ehite people
talked about but did not always practice. Liz had only a
faint notion of the moaning of the word morals. Hay be it
was something that Negro servants were not supposed to
have. There were certain physical appetites which called
for gratification, and Liz saw no narticulTr reason for
self-denial.
The educated white gentlemen who hired Negro women
for servants did not always practice in their private lives
the high morality which they preached in public. do it came
to pass that Liz was the mother of a son, and the son was only
half blac. The educated white gentleman who was his father
was never campelled to face the issue and acknowledge the
maatto son. Perhaps he could not know for certain that the
son was his. And perhaps Liz was not certain, either. Among
several educated whitegentlamenuith adjustable morals, why
pick on one? And 30 the matter rested.
But the son's problems were not so easily settled.
As George Horton grew up there were unmistakable signs of his
white blood. His complexion was light and his features
were far loss negroid than those of his mother. Bs was a
rathsr zoul looking yellow boy, and among his black play-
mates ho was utterly a misfit.
iut that in itself wouldn't 21we been so bad. It
rouo the white man's mind in the yellow boy which constituted
the ago -old bioloical tragedy. George Horton, long before
he reached r,anhood, was bitterly aware of the irrepairable
wrong which had been done to him. There being but little
thin_Ung capacity in the blacls: aother, it followed naturally
that the uniown white father had contributed nearly all
of the boy's mind. The boy therefore thought and felt as
a white boy, and his individual reaction to life --his
conscious sense of personal being --was essentially white.
But this white personality —this superior mind —was forever
imprisoned in a body which was half black and which could
never escape from the stigma of being a Negro's body. George
Horton hated his unknown white father for placing that brand
of shame upon him, even as he pitied bimself for being the
half-breed son of his ignorant black nother. Fr am the
mother's point of view (if she had reasoned about it at all)
it would have been a matter of pride thA she was giving
her child a white father and the blood of a superior race.
She could never have understood why her son was not proud
of it, too. 3he could not know tht i1s conscious "center
of gravity", so to speak, vould b far over on the white
side of the aividing line, while hers was on the black side.
Pram her viewpoint the boy's yellow skin was fa step upward,
a thing to be proud of. But fram his viewpoint it was a badge
of shame and humiliation.
George Horton was 20 and had graduated from the
high school of the colored rate, His schoolmates and
companions had been black and brown and yellow. For the
blacks he had a condescending pity and contempt. They
were inferior creatures and utterly beneath him. For the
browns and yellows he had a feeling of sympathy and some sort
of half -understanding. They were in a like predicament with
himself. They were the innocent and helpless victims of the
sins of the fathers. These sins could not be laid at the
door of the mothers to the sane extent. The mothers were
blaok and ignorant and dominated by their physical passions
They did not know any better. But the white fathers who
knowingly and deliberately doomed their innocent offspring
to the hopeless fate of mongrel outoastsio-such fathers
ahou.i.d be denounced and condemned and forever disowned
with all the bitter invective that the language knows.
Lad so the bitter hate of George Horton was
directod against his cruel father whose identity he never
knew. The bitter years dragged on, And the yellow boy fought
his desperate and hopeless battle f.;..1.inst the invincible
forces z): fate and destiny.
he asked bittcprly, ",;dould this thing have
"Why",
happened to me? If I had t-.) be a Negro, why wasn't I
allowed tr.;ri whole Negro? Then I wucad avt aave had this
sense 3f being divided against nyself—this feeling of
mental and spiritual warfare with my own flesh ard blood.
I have no choite but to hate r.y father, mymother)a4d myself.
I hate everything that has entered into making me what I as.
And I hate the society which compels me to go on suffering
for the sins of others. Here I am, a mongrel misfit in a
world that disowns me on every aide. I am without race or
family. I am without pride of ancestry or hope of honorable
posterity. If I marry some other unfortunate like myself
and become the father of a family, I will only be transmitting
to others the ours* that is upon me. I will be perpetuating
tc the InO of time a lost and hopeless race of half-breeds
that never can hope to be anything else. If I started such
a line of hraf-breed posterity it would not only perpetuate
itself to the end of time, but it would spread out like a
fan and increase in numbers
father's 3in and mine would
who could have no choice in
with each generation. Thus my
he visited upon helpless millions
the matter. Before I would
start such an endless chain of heartache and suffering I
would cut my own 7.:iserable throat or send a bullet crashing
throut my unprofitable brain. What must I do with my
white ,nan's aind that is doomed to live in this yellow beiy?
Must I educate ft and train it to think and feel yet mart
keenly the hopeless pain of the curse? Or should I renoun oe
and deny the unweloome gifts of intellect which have come
to me through the unknown father that I hate?"
George Horton's countenanee as he spoke was
shadowed with dark and bitter and universal hate, and his
fact, was set to a grim pattern of endless and inevitable
sorrow that would never in time or eternity be lighted up
with one fleeting glimpse f hope. It was as if r," the
combined and terrible and nameless dooms of numberless
eternities had fallen with cataclysmic thunders upon the
bowed and bloody head of one lonesome and God -forgotten
mulatto boy.
But like the fabled Wandering Tew who bore all the
sins and curses of his deathless race in his own doomed -to
life od7, Ca?.orge Horton went staaa,ering on blindly and
desperately through the begianingless and endless dark
days of his lonesome age-old youth, and the dumb cry
of his voiceless agony was lost in the loud grinding of
the heavy wheels of fate.
The other brown and yellow people of his mixed
race-a4who came into life as he did --were not burdened and
troubled with the old unanswerable questions of race and
blood and spiritual frustration. These yellow people
that he knew and associated with seemed to take it all as a
matter of course and did not worry about it. He alone of
all his mulatto race had inherited something terrible, and
tragic,and soul -splitting and eternally unbearable.
One gloomy day in winter they dragged the dark
deep river and took from it the limp and lifeless yellow
body of a your lain who could act fina bis place anywhere
in this world. His black mother was thsre to weep and
wring her black hands. But the educated white gentleman who
was his father--ah, who knows?