354 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



A STUDY IN RACE PSYCHOLOGY. 



Br ANNA TOLMAN SMITH. 



THE average American negro presents a puzzling contradic- 

 tion in Ms educational progress. As rule lie masters the 

 elements of reading with ease ; but as a rule also the developed 

 language, the expressive medium of subtle relations and of com- 

 plex experiences, defies his efforts. It is true that even the un- 

 tutored roll off abstruse terms and involved phrases with peculiar 

 unction, but this is a case of " words, words," that rather proves 

 than disproves my meaning. I have in mind not sound as such, 

 but sound as " an echo of sense." 



The phenomenon which I have mentioned had so often been 

 brought to my notice that I put myself at last to find out the 

 explanation. This could only be done by examining a particular 

 case. Circumstances determined the selection, with the result, of 

 course, that there are conditions to be weighed in the balance. 

 On the whole, however, the case, I believe, is typical. The sub- 

 ject of my experiment is very nearly a full negro, if family tradi- 

 tion and family features may be trusted. No trace of white blood 

 is discernible in either parent, and their ancestors known to them 

 for two generations back were negroes like themselves. On the 

 father's side, tradition says, there was an Indian grandfather 

 three removes from the present generation, but the Indian ele- 

 ment has been lost in the transmittal, unless possibly it survives 

 in a slight modification of the African hue. The man is of a dark 

 coffee color, stout built, strong, sluggish, and extremely faithful, 

 as is shown by the fact that he has retained the same place 

 eighteen years. The mother is slightly darker in color than her 

 husband, and of tall, supple figure ; her mind is active, her move- 

 ments are quick ; she rules and guides her household by virtue of 

 a superiority that all instinctively recognize. As a girl she was 

 trained to domestic service by a painstaking mistress, while the 

 father passed his youth as an ordinary field hand. Three pre- 

 natal conditions are typified in the name which these parents 

 with due ceremony bestowed upon their son Isaiah Asbury Bell. 

 The family name is theirs only by virtue of a previous condition 

 of servitude to planter Bell ; Methodism accounts for the second 

 name, and pious reverence for a book which neither of them can 

 read, and perhaps a certain pleasure in euphonious sounds, for the 

 first. The latter inference is confirmed by the names given their 

 three daughters Triphenie, Romana, and Albertina. This sensi- 

 tiveness to sound I note as a family trait, because it may prove to 

 have sopie bearing upon the boy's personal equation. Isaiah is a 

 young edition of his father, equally sluggish, awkward, and obsti- 



