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negroes more or less in the States, and they are increasing. The Americans once having made them citizens cannot unmake them. He says, in his newspapers, they ought to be elevated by education. He is trying this: but it is like to be a long job, because black blood is much more adhesive than white, and throws back with annoying persistence. When the negro gets a religion, he returns, directly as a hiving bee, to the first instincts of his people.”
    And Kipling then describes his attendance at an African-American church: “The congregation were moved by the spirit to groans and tears, and one of them danced up the aisle to the mourners’ bench. The motive may have been genuine. The movements of the shaken body were those of a Zanzibar stick-dance, such as you see at Aden on the coal-boats; and even as I watched the people, the links that bound them to the white man snapped one by one and I saw before me—the
hubshi
(the Woolly One) praying to a God he did not understand. Those neatly dressed folk on the benches, the grey-headed elder by the window, were savages—neither more nor less.”
    Phew. “The
hubshi
praying to a God he did not understand.”
    And Kipling concludes with a question and a dire prediction, which has proved lamentable but not inaccurate: “What will the American do with the negro? The South will not consort with him. In some States miscegenation is a penal offence. The North is every year less and less in need of his services. And he will not disappear. He will continue as a problem. His friends will urge that he is as good as the white man. His enemies…it is not good to be a negro in the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
    My quotation here comes from the 1914 edition of
From Sea to Sea.
The earlier edition of 1900 has no ellipsis at “His enemies.” The text runs thus: “His enemies—well, you can guess what his enemies will do from a little incident that followed on a recent appointment by the President. He made a negro an assistant in a post office where—think of it!—he had to work at the next desk to a white girl, the daughter of a colonel, one of the first families of Georgia’s modern chivalry, and
all the weary, weary rest of it
[italics mine]. The Southern chivalry howled, and hanged or burned someone in effigy. Perhaps it was the President, and perhaps it was the negro—but the principle remains the same. They said it was an insult. It is not good to be a negro in the land of the free and the home of the brave.” We don’t know why Kipling excised this passage. Perhaps because it proved apocryphal. Whatever the factual status of Kipling’s reported anecdote, his sympathies are clearly against the wearisome bogus chivalry, against segregation, and with the negro. His ironic interjection, “think of it!,” is incredulous. He had no time for segregationist cant. There were limits to his prejudice.
    Kipling’s personal relations are germane to the question of his racism—or rather the gap between the reflex assumptions of his class and his considered experiential views. In September 1907, Kipling and Carrie, his wife, went on a tour of Canada, from Montreal to Vancouver, and were given the use of their own railway car, with theirown attendant—initially designated “the Noble Nigger” in letters to the Kipling children—who “would be our guide, philosopher and friend.” In the next letter, Kipling reports that “our porter William (a negro) became a friend of the family.” He is “William (our William)” by the end of the letter, telling Kipling touching anecdotes. In a letter to a friend, William is “the Negro Potentate in charge” and “negro King” who “entertains us with stories.”
    In my audited account of Kipling’s racism, I should like to place this account of the Negro railway conductor in service in the credit column, directly opposite the irritated debit account of the Negro waiter in service of
From Sea to Sea.
    In
Something of