I guess the grass is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white—Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff,
I give them the same, I receive them the same.

I see ranks, colors, I go among them, I mix indiscriminately,
In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less,
We all amount to about the same thing, at the roots,
Red, white, black, are all deific. 

The great masters accept black as soon as white, reject none. In Boston, at the eating-houses, a black, when he wants his dinner, comes in and takes a vacant seat wherever he finds one—and nobody minds it.
As for me, I am too much a citizen of the world to have the least compunction about it. I do not separate the white from the black.

Many black boys join’d the army; no one can see them without feeling well pleas’d with them. As to assisting such a person, if I can do it, whether he be black or whether he be white, if he comes to me he gets what I can do for him. Among the black soldiers, wounded or sick and in the contraband camps, I also took my way whenever in their neighborhood, and did what I could for them. 

Black, divine-soul’d African,
The sun falls on the black of his polish’d and perfect limbs,
Fine-headed, nobly-form’d, his glance calm and commanding,
Superbly destin’d, on equal terms with me!

I am the poet of slaves and of the masters of slaves,
I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters,
And I will stand between the masters and the slaves,
Entering into both so that both shall understand me alike.

I see the enslaved, own’d persons dropping sweat drops or blood drops,
I hear the wheeze of the slave-coffle as the slaves march on,
As the husky gangs pass on by twos and threes,
Fasten’d together with wrist-chains and ankle-chains,
I feel the measureless shame and humiliation, it becomes all mine.

I can myself almost remember negro slaves in New York State. I remember “old Mose,” one of the liberated West Hills slaves, well. He was very genial, correct, manly, and a great friend of my childhood. I was a decided and outspoken anti-slavery believer myself, then and always. 

The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside—
Look on this wonder,
For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal or plant,
For it the revolving cycles truly and steadily roll’d.
These limbs, black or white,
Within there runs the same old blood! the same red-running blood!
There all passions, desires, reachings, aspirations.

Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,
And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him,
And brought water and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and bruis’d feet,
And gave him a room that enter’d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes,
And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles.

He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass’d north,
He has committed no crime further than seeking his liberty and defending it,
As the Lord God liveth, I would help him and be proud of it, and protect him if I could—
I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean’d in the corner. 

I am the hunted slave,
A little child, they caught me as the savage beast is caught,
Then hither me across the sea the cruel slaver brought.
I am the hounded slave who flags in the race at last, and leans up by the fence, blowing and covered with sweat,
I wince at the bite of the dogs,
Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,
The murderous buck-shot and the bullets,
And the twinges that sting like needles my breast and neck.
I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn’d with the ooze of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks—
All this I not only feel and see but am.

Slavery—the murderous, treacherous conspiracy to raise it upon the ruins of all the rest,
On and on to the grapple with it—Assassin! then your life or ours be the stake, and respite no more.
Slavery, the arch-enemy personified—
I say the land that has a place for slaves and the owners of slaves has no place for free men,
Everyone that speaks his word for slavery is himself the worst slave,
I say where liberty draws not the blood out of slavery—the absolute extirpation and erasure of slavery—there slavery draws the blood out of liberty. 

Where the slave ceases, and the master of slaves ceases,
There the great city stands,
The free city! No slaves! No owners of slaves!
In his appointed day the slave becomes a god. 

The American aborigines—the North American ‘Indians,’ as they are miscalled—are not nothing.
I work’d several months in the Interior Department at Washington, in the Indian Bureau. Along this time there came an unusual number of aboriginal visitors—men, indeed chiefs, in heroic massiveness, imperturbability, muscle, that last and highest beauty consisting of strength—the full exploitation and fruitage of a human identity, not from the culmination-points of ‘culture’ and artificial civilization, but tallying our race, as it were, with giant, vital, gnarl’d, enduring trees, or monoliths of separate hardiest rocks, and humanity holding its own with the best of the said trees or rocks, and outdoing them.

There is something about these aboriginal Americans, in their highest characteristic representations, essential traits, and the ensemble of their physique and physiognomy—something very remote, very lofty—something that our literature, portrait painting, etc., have never caught, and that will almost certainly never be transmitted to the future, even as a reminiscence. It is so different, so far outside our standards of eminent humanity.

Race of the woods, the landscapes free, and the falls! Every head and face is impressive, even artistic. Though some of the young fellows were magnificent and beautiful, I think the palm of unique picturesqueness, in body, limb, physiognomy, etc., was borne by the old or elderly chiefs, and the wise men. 

I should not apply the word savage (at any rate, in the usual sense) as a leading word in the description of those great aboriginal specimens. There were moments, as I look’d at them, when our own exemplification of personality, dignity, heroic presentation anyhow (as in the conventions of society, or even in the accepted poems and plays,) seem’d sickly, puny, inferior. 

A red squaw came one breakfast-time to the old homestead,
She had long eyelashes, her head was bare, her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach’d to her feet,
Her step was free and elastic, and her voice sounded exquisitely as she spoke.
My mother look’d in delight and amazement at the freshness of her tall-borne face and full and pliant limbs,
The more she look’d upon her she loved her,
Never before had she seen such wonderful beauty and purity.
O my mother was loth to have her go away,
She remember’d her many a winter and many a summer,
She gave her remembrance and fondness,
But the red squaw never came nor was heard of there again.

A muffled sonorous sound is borne through the air:
Yonnondio! Yonnondio!
A song, a poem of itself—the word itself a dirge,
The sense of the word is “lament for the aborigines.”
I see swarms of stalwart chieftains, medicine-men, and warriors,
As flitting by like clouds of ghosts, they pass and are gone in the twilight,
Unlimn’d they disappear.
Osceola, a young, brave, leading Seminole, surrender’d to our troops,
Imprison’d, sicken’d of his confinement and literally died of “a broken heart.” 

As to our aboriginal population, I know it seems to be agreed that they must gradually dwindle as time rolls on. They melt, they depart, and in a few generations more leave only a reminiscence, a blank—no picture, poem, statement, passing them to the future.

But I am not at all clear about that. As America, from its many far-back sources and current supplies, develops, adapts, entwines, faithfully identifies its own—are we to see it cheerfully accepting and using all the contributions of foreign lands from the whole outside globe—and then rejecting the only ones distinctively its own—the autochthonic ones?

 NEXT: MORALITY AND MONEY

The texts in this anthology should NOT be cited as direct quotations from Whitman. If you want to quote from this site for something you are writing or posting, please read this first (click here).