Part 10

“It is strange to think of the history of them,” said I, “from the African wastes to the slave ship, from the slave ship to the harbors of the New World, then to these market places and to the plantations, taught baby English and hymn-singing, obtaining the Bible as an only and all-comprehending book, petted and fondled like wonderful strays from the forest in many families, tortured in others, becoming eventually a bone of fierce political contention though innocent themselves, the cause of a great war, and then released in that war and given the full rights of white American citizens.”

The young townsman’s imagination was not touched by the romance of the Negro. He was full of the wrong done to the white South by putting it under the dominance of a free Negro majority.

“You know we lynch them down here,” said he, with a smile. “They want social equality, but they are not going to get it. The nigger can’t progress any further.”

“Well, there’s a vast difference between the Negro of 1860 and the Negro of to-day,” said I. “Hundreds of universities and colleges have arisen, thousands of schools and Negro organizations for self-education. The Negro has gone a long way since in yelling crowds he followed the banners of Sherman. I do not think he is going to stop short, and I wonder where he is going to and where at last he will arrive.”

I passed through Eatonton, the birthplace of Joel Chandler Harris, on my way to the sea. He taught us much about the Negro. In England Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit have become as cherished as the toys of the nursery. I think Uncle Remus meant as much to us as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The genial point of view and the genial books do as much to help humanity as the strong and bitter ones. Both certainly have their place. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” stirred people out of a lazy attitude of mind toward the Negro slaves, but in America it aggravated a bitterness which no other book has been able to allay. The very intensity of the white man’s thought about the Negro bodes ill for the future. The White men of the North deliberately have made the effort to rear a Negro _intelligentsia_. The idealists of the North said, “You shall go on”; others said, “No, you shall stay as you were”; the clash of the two wills lit up racial war, but the Negro has sided with the idealists who sought to raise him, with the Friends of Pennsylvania and the humanitarians of New England.

In the panic of Sherman’s approach the planters and their wives told their slaves that the Yanks would flog them and burn them or put them in the front of the battle, and drown the women and children in the Ogeechee or the Chattahoochee. Many believed and fled with their masters; others hid in the woods, but the rumor of salvation was on the lips of most. The Southerner has a saying, “The nigger is the greatest union in the country.” News indeed travels faster among slaves and servants than among employers and masters. There was not much hesitation when the army arrived. The Negroes saw and believed. The incredulous were converted and the scared persuaded out of their hiding places. All with one accord forgot their fear and then went to the other extreme; that is, as far in credulity as their dull minds had lodged in incredulity. The arrival of the victors gave rise to the most extravagant hopes. The Negro had never reasoned about anything in an informed way. He knew nothing of the world except the simplicity of the plantation. He had on the one hand slavery, and on the other the vague and vast idealism of Christian hymns; the melancholy of bondage and the emotionalism of Evangelical religion. He did not think of New York, London, Paris, St. Petersburg, of the workingmen’s movement, of free thought, of political economy, but only of “de ole plantation,” and then “de ribber.” From drab slavery he looked straight to Jordan and the golden gates, and to a no-work, easy-going paradise happy as the day is long, with God as Massa, and Mary and the Son to play with. There were no between stages to which to aspire. They expected, as did the Puritan churches about them, the huge combustion of the Last Day, and they did not set much store by this world. Hence their exalted state of mind following Sherman’s army. They were ready to shout _Glory_ when the world was afire, and they displayed all the emotion which should have been saved for the coming of the Lord.

At first Sherman’s army was quite pleased, and encouraged the emotion of the freed men. But it got to be too much for the Yankee soldiers, who felt at last that the Blacks were overdoing it and that in any case they were a nuisance. The nearer they got to Savannah the more impatient did they become. At last they began to destroy bridges between themselves and the Negroes, and put rivers between them. Then, after leaving Millen for the pine forests of the Savannah shore, they deliberately destroyed the bridge over Ebenezer Creek. There was a wild panic, a stampede, and many, it is said, were drowned in the stream. The splendor of the army went by, the brass bands, the cheering and the singing of the soldiers and the standard bearers of the North in the midst of them, the wagons, the many wagons laden with spoil, and the droves of cattle. But for Georgia and the Negro there set in the twilight of ruin and disillusion.

Rural Georgia is not very much better off to-day than it was in slavery days. The large tracts of land which the Blacks thought would be given them they neither could nor would farm. They lacked experience and initiative. They could be too easily deceived by their white neighbors, and were too subservient to their erstwhile masters to make good in the race of human individuals striving one against another.

“No Negroes own land hereabout,” said some Negro renters to me between Shady Dale and Eatonton. “They did, but got into debt and lost it. We rent a thirty-acre farm and pay two bales of cotton rent.” At the current price of cotton, 38 cents a pound, that amounted to 380 dollars in American currency, or 95 pounds in British currency, but the tenants paid in cotton, and as cotton boomed their rents advanced.

It seemed to be everywhere customary to reckon rent in cotton bales, and it is easy to see what an economic serf the Negro can become under such terms. This system, known as “truck” in England, was long since abolished, but its evils were so notorious that truck has remained a proverbial expression for chicane—hence the phrase “to have no truck with it.” The Negro is better off as a laborer on a white man’s plantation than he is when having the responsibility of picking a crop for master before he picks one for himself.

There are many features of life on the modern plantation, be it of sugar or cotton, which suggest slavery. Virtual slavery is called _peonage_ and many examples were given me by Negroes. It is arranged in some places that the Negro handles as little money as possible. Instead of money he has credit checks, metal or cardboard disks, which he can use at the general store to purchase his provisions. He is kept in debt so that he can never get out, and so lives with a halter round his neck. Especially during the war, when the rumor of war wages was tempting the colored labor of the South to migrate North in huge numbers, efforts were made to keep the Negro without the means of straying from the locality where the labor of his hands was the foundation of the life of the community. Other forms of _peonage_ prevalent in rural parts is the commuting of punishment for forced labor, the hiring out of penal labor to companies or public authorities. This resembles the use made of prisoners during the recent world war, and is virtual slavery.

All inroads made on the liberty of the subject might fittingly be classed as _peonage_—the denial of the vote to those legally enfranchised, intimidation by lynch law, etc.

I talked with an old Negro after leaving Louisville and tramping south toward Midville. He was lolling in rags on his porch—very near white. His father had been his black mother’s white master. He remembered Sherman’s passing when he was a boy. A remarkably intelligent and tragic face, where an unhappy white man looked out on the misery of abject poverty and quasi-bondage. Cotton had proved bad this year. The boll weevil had entered the pod early. There were but three or four bales to the plow. He did not know how he’d foot his bills. The rations given him in the spring had become exhausted. He had also hoped to buy clothes. He said the traders came early in the year and supplied him with all sorts of things on the strength of a large cotton crop, and he pointed to a toy bicycle lying upside down in the grass. He let his little boy stride it, and mother thought it fine. Last year God had blessed them with a very fine crop, and why should He not be as kind this year? So he signed on for the toy bicycle and for a gramophone as well. Now he complained that they were cutting off his rations, mother lay ill a-bed, the weather was getting cold, and they had no clothes. The boss was coming presently to turn them out of the cabin altogether, and they did not know where to go. Even while we were talking two bullet-headed young fellows, clean-shaven, frank, and surly, came up in an automobile, stopped short, and rated the old man from where they sat in the car. The cabin and the little cotton plantation belonged to them now, and the old fellow was reverting from small proprietor to be laborer on a plantation, and to be laborer was little better than to be slave.

“We have to let down rope ladders to our people to get them up here,” said a colored dean of a university to me. “We live in such abysses down below, and there is no regular way out of the pit.”

I felt as I was marching into Georgia as if I were descending the rope ladder. What a contrast there was between the bright, radiant-faced girls at Atlanta studying science and languages, and those whom I was meeting now. There was a regular sequence or gradation going downward to filth and serfdom. The first bathed twice a day, and spent hours working “anti-kink” not only into their hair but into their souls and minds. They were fresh and fit and happy as morning itself. That was on the Atlanta heights. I stepped down to the world of business with its heavier, gloomier types, the hard-faced, skillful, and acquisitive doctors, the fire-delivering, shadowy-minded clergy, the excited and eager yet heavy-footed politicians. I took the road and met the troubled landowners, pathetically happy to exist, though drowning in mortgage and debt; from them I passed to the farm laborers, with the jowl of the savage, matted hair, bent backs, deformed with joyless toil, exuding poisonous perspiration and foul odor, herded like cattle or worse, nearer to the beast than our domestic animals, feared by women and weak men, as beasts are feared when they come in the likeness of human beings.

There were, however, steps lower still in the ladder which leads downward from the Atlanta hills. Frequently along the road I saw men in yellow-striped overalls, plodding together, working together, overlooked by a white man with a gun, and as they walked sounded the pitiful clank-clank of the chains. It is rather curious, _kandali_ in Siberia are an atrocity, but in sections of the United States they are quite natural.

“We do not keep ‘em in jail, but make ‘em work,” says the white man knowingly. “When there’s much work to do on the roads we soon find the labor.” At Springfield I remarked the terrible state of disrepair of the highway and public buildings. The reason was that instead of setting their criminals to work on them they handed them over to the State authorities. Other towns knew better. But in the chain gang and the striped convict so easily obtained at the courts the ex-slave was seen at his worst, and the rope ladder stopped short before touching bottom.

There is not much to endear the ordinary wooden cabins in which the mass of America’s black peasantry is found to live. They are poorer and barer than the worst you would see in Russia. Ex-serf has fared better than ex-slave. However, one detail of charm on this Georgian way was the putting up of tiny stars as a sign of boys serving in the army, a humble star of hope and glory like some tiny flower blossoming out of season in the wilds—one white star for a boy in the army, a golden one for a boy who had died. In their submerged way the Negroes were proud of having helped in the war. The glory, or the idea, or the parrot cry of “making the world safe for democracy” had penetrated even into the most obscure abodes. The poor Negro had discovered Europe at last, and was especially in love with one nation—the French. The South generally had not been very eager to see the Negro in the war and has not reacted sympathetically to the black man’s war glory.

“There’s no managing the neegahs now, they’s got so biggety since the war,” said a white woman at Shadydale. “Las’ year we white people jus’ had to pick the cotton usselves, men, women, and chillen.” She told me she did not think it a bit nice of the French girls to walk out with Negro soldiers, and then told a story of a French bride brought home by one of the white boys. She tittered. “Yes ... she had twins soon af’ she came, and would you b’lieve it, they were neegahs. Of course he sent her right back.” The French intimacy with the Negro soldiers has cooled the Southerner’s regard for the best-loved nation of Europe. It has also stirred up the racial fear concerning Negroes and white women. Because the black soldier was a favorite of the white girls in France it is thought that his eye roves more readily to the pure womanhood of the South.

Lynching seems often to be due to puritanical fervor, and is compatible with a type of religiosity. Mob feeling against love is very dangerous. A pastor kisses a girl of his congregation, a deacon happens to see it, and his career is ended. An old man on the road volunteered the fact that he had never “sinned” with a woman, black or white, his whole life. Certainly there is a high standard of righteousness. Family life is pure, and love-making is not the chief interest in life as in some European countries. Men’s minds are more on their business, and women’s on their homes. I am tempted to think that if the white race which inhabits the South were French or Russian or Polish or Greek there would be no lynchings. The great number of mixed relationships would beget tolerance for inter-racial attraction. I said to a young Floridan going through in his car—“I can well imagine a certain type of European women ogling the Negro, making eyes at him and luring him to his destruction. Have you ever come across such a type?” He answered “No, and if there were, we’d do away with her, too.”

Of course this rigidly moral point of view falls away when it is a matter of the white man and the black girl or the mulatto. The morality of the Negro woman was badly undermined in slavery days, when slave children were bred without any thought of sin or shame. But though the moral standard has been low, it is nothing like so low as it was. Pride of race has been born, and the moral purity of the colored woman as a whole is now comparatively higher. Certainly even in the country districts, where the Negro is nearest to his old state of being a chattel, there is a great decrease in the number of half-bred children. The solution of the racial problem by ultimate blending of color is not one which seems likely to succeed here in the course of nature. Black and White are far more separate and distinct in freedom than they were in slavery. Even the black mammy is dying out. There are not so many of that type of colored women. The white mother, moreover, has more scruple against giving her child away from her own breast. The Southern woman is as much against promiscuous relationships with Negro women as her manfolk is against the Negro’s roving eyes. One woman said, “You can understand the fondness of our young men for some of the Negro girls when as babies they were suckled by a Negro woman.” There is much psychological truth in that.

During these weeks on the roads of Georgia three Negroes were burned in my neighborhood, two near Savannah for supposed complicity in the murder of a deputy sheriff, and a mob of about a thousand white men took pleasure in the auto-da-fé. A short while later near Macon a Negro was accused of making love to a woman of fifty as she was coming home from church one Sunday evening. Some one certainly attacked her, though what was his object might be questionable. The accused man fled for his life. He was captured at midnight by certain well-known citizens whose names were published in the press. The sheriff argued with a crowd of about four hundred in the public street for about an hour and a half, and then, like Pilate, washed his hands of the matter and let the mob have its way. Paul Brooker, the Negro, lay on the ground maltreated, but living; gasoline was poured over him, a lighted match was applied, and he was burned to death. This was not in Catholic Spain in the days of the Inquisition, but in religious Georgia, solid for Wilson and the League of Nations. I was told I could not understand why such things had to be done. No Englishman and no Northerner could ever penetrate the secret of it. That seemed to put me in the wrong when conversing with the Southern people. It was a curious fact, however, that they also for their part took no pains to understand how such things made the blood boil in the veins of one who lived elsewhere. It was not the execution nor the crime but the cruelty that seemed to me unforgivable. I could understand killing the Negro, but I could not and would not care to understand the state of mind of the four hundred who enjoyed his torments.

Burnings and hangings and mob violence of other kinds are frequent in most of the States of the South, but even in such cases where the names of citizens are given in the press no prosecution or inquiry seems to follow. Thus the great flag is flouted, and it is possible to imagine the cynical mirth with which the ecstasy of the Negroes following the Army of Liberation in 1864 might be compared with the hilarity of the Southern mob in 1920 watching the ex-slave slowly burning to death on their accusation and yelling for mercy when there was no merciful ear to hear.

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I suppose nothing begets hate so readily as cruelty. That is why in all wars there is so much mongering of atrocities: one side tries to find out all the cruelties and barbarities committed by the other just to stir up its own adherents. So in the Civil War all the brutalities of the slave owners were made known, and the Northern soldier’s blood boiled because of them. Although the quarrel is now healed, there was, at the time, a deep hate of the Southerners in the war. It was not only a martial conflict but personal hatred and contempt. What was done to the Blacks was aggravated by what was done to the white prisoners. The North discovered a cruelty and callousness in the South which must have been a puzzle to those who reflected that they were of the same race. For Georgia is predominantly English by extraction, and still proud, as I found, of grandfathers and great-grandfathers born in the old country. Some ascribe the change of temperament to the hot sun and to the southern latitude; more, to the brutalizing influences of slavery itself.

When I was at Millen, which once in the glare of a burning railroad swarmed with Sherman’s troopers, I went out to the old Southern battery at Lawton and saw the mounds and the fields where the pen of Northern prisoners was kept. It is waving with grass or corn to-day, and there is a beautiful crystal spring in the midst of serene, untroubled nature. Here the prisoners were concentrated in a space of ground three hundred feet square, enclosed in a stockade and without covering, exposed to all kinds of weather. When any escaped they were chased with bloodhounds. Some seven hundred and fifty died while in this concentration camp. No wonder a soldier of the time wrote: “It fevered the blood of our brave boys.... God certainly will visit the authors of all this crime with a terrible judgment.”

Sherman’s soldiers destroyed every hound they could find in Georgia as they passed through—so strongly did they resent the barbarity of hunting men with dogs. For the South had learned to hunt runaway slaves with bloodhounds, and it was a type of hunting which gave a peculiar satisfaction to the lust of cruelty. What they learned in the maltreatment of their slaves they could put into practice against the prisoners they obtained. There again, however, the war has failed to bear fruit; for the hunting of Negroes with bloodhounds has become common once more.

The Northern soldiers did not become gentler to the Southern population as they advanced further into the depths of the country. Rather the reverse. They would have been even more destructive than before had they not found the country to be more and more sparsely settled. The march from Millen to Savannah would have resulted in the harshest treatment of the people, but happily the way lay through forests and through the uncultivated wildernesses of Nature herself. The army had only its prisoners to vent its displeasure upon, and they certainly did not pet the few hundred Confederate soldiers and “civilian personages” whom they had collected in bondage. The enemy was found to have mined the road at one point. An officer of the Union Army had his leg blown off. Eight-inch shells had been buried in the sand with friction matches to explode them when trod on. Sherman was very angry, and called it murder, not war, in a way which reminds one of the indignation caused when in the late war the Germans started anything novel. The answer to this mining of the road was to make the rebel prisoners march ahead of the column in close formation so as to explode any more which might be laid on the way. They were greatly afraid, and begged hard to be let off—much to the mirth of the supposed victims. It was not until nearing one of the forts of Savannah that another mine exploded—the hurt done to the prisoners remains unrecorded.

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