Part 18
While those things occur; such as burning Negroes at the stake and denying them the equable justice of a true Court of Law, America has no right to speak; her truly grand idealism is rendered almost wholly impotent. It was the same in the promulgation of the League of Nations and the idea of helping small nations; it is the same with regard to American interference, in the name of human rights and ideals, in the Irish question. It can always be objected: Why do you not look after your own subjects first, and save your Negroes? An American said to me in Philadelphia: “I am not overfond of the Bolsheviks, but of one thing I am glad—_The red hand of the Tsar will never rule again_.”
No?
And another said: “Thank God the pogroms are over.”
Are they?
And a third said: “I am sorry America refused to take a mandate for Armenia.”
But why not take a mandate for Georgia and Mississippi?
In 1919, when the question of American delegations to Ireland was being discussed, a member in the British House of Commons asked if a British delegation could not be sent to America to investigate conditions among the Negroes.
Mr. Bonar Law thought that a very humorous suggestion. The very humor of it was sufficient answer to America. No need for Britain to send investigators.
As long as America with her ideals was enough unto herself the Negro question was strictly her affair. But when she takes the moral leadership of the civilized world it becomes to a certain extent every one’s affair.
The point is that America as a whole cannot afford to tolerate what is done locally in particular States. It is not a matter of non-interference from Washington in the local affairs of Georgia and Mississippi and the rest. The baleful happenings in these States rob Americans in other States of their good name, and spoil America’s reputation in the world. The fact that the terms of the Constitution are not carried out, decreases throughout the value of the American citizenship. And the growing scandal causes America’s opinions on world politics to be seriously discounted.
Thus though America was antipathetic to the old Tsarist régime, and still talks of the “bloody Tsar,” it is a fact growing daily more obvious that compared with the present régime of the great republic the rule of the Tsar over his subject races was in some ways better. On the other hand, the American press has lately been flooded with the atrocities of the Bolsheviks. The fact is, we, all of us, believe evil readily of a country which is far away, but are not ready to face evils near at home when they affect ourselves.
* * * * *
Thus the matter affects the world and America. There is a third interest, and that is exclusively of the Negro himself. He needs a guaranteed charter, an authenticated minimum. If the vote cannot be given him, at least let him have justice; if he cannot be admitted to labor unions let his labor be adequately protected; if an offense against a white woman is regarded as specially heinous and dangerous let the legal punishment be increased; afford his women protection also. If the Whites have changed their minds about slavery let them state how much they sanction—what are its limits. Let the American Republic and the British Empire state their policy with regard to their colored population. Make it clear and manifest.
The Negro’s chief danger lies in a consensus of evil opinion concerning him. The South rejoices when a race riot disgraces some Northern city and says: “They’re beginning to find out the Negro isn’t an angel up there.” When a General Dyer uses the machine-gun argument, or a mob of dockers fall foul of Negro immigrants at Cardiff or Liverpool, America smiles and says, “You also?” When there are reports of constant trouble in South Africa someone else says, “So you cannot get on with them either?” and when one is burned to death in Georgia, South Africa says, “So you burn them to death, eh?”
Out of a cycle of happenings is derived the thought: _No one can afford to feel virtuous about the Negro_.
That fact no doubt helps the Negro press in the chanting of its sorrows, but it does not help the Negro himself. In fact, it shuts out a good deal of hope which might have been derived from white sympathy, and it threatens the colored peoples as a whole with worse things to be. These are the days of democracies and white proletariats, and both show themselves less friendly toward Negroes and “natives” than the old monarchies. Their hostility is based on an old fashioned ignorant contempt; competition in the labor market, and a sort of fear. Probably it can be overcome in time, but if so it will not be through white enlightenment, but through a world organization and understanding on the part of the colored races. For while throughout the world the Whites degenerate somewhat, these others rise. The gulf between the two is being diminished, and there may come a time not very far away when the white hegemony will be lost.
XV
UP THE MISSISSIPPI
From New Orleans I traveled up the Mississippi; calling at such characteristic points as Reserve, Vicksburg, Greenville, Mound Bayou, Memphis, accomplishing the journey partly by rail and partly by boat. Reserve is a vast sugar plantation owned by five brothers. It is only thirty miles from the great city and the Whites are mostly Creoles. The Mother of Rivers, clad in brown silk, flows toward the green humps of hundreds of levees and embankments. The shores are low and level, and there grows almost to the water edge a vast, close, ten-feet-high jungle of sugar cane. You walk along the top of the levee till you see a lane running across the plantation like a trench dug through it. In the lane itself there is no view except the erect, green wall of canes on either hand and the blue sky above. Beneath your feet are cart ruts and withered stalks of sugar gone purple at the joints and straw-colored in the flanks. Take a stalk and break it across, and it breaks in shreds like a bamboo, revealing the inner fatness of sweet pith which you can suck if you will, for it is sugar. It has a dilute sweetness which rapidly cloys an unaccustomed palate, though the people of the countryside suck it continuously, and many consider the natural sugar the source of all health. The taste is reproduced very well in the _pralines_ on which New Orleans prides itself.
A long and novel sort of lane this through the sugar! A Negro worker coming along the road sees a white man, but does not want to meet him, and he takes three steps into the dark-green depths, clawing his way inside as through many barely shut doors, and he is lost. You would seek him in vain if he wished to hide.
The lane debouches into a sun-bathed, half-cleared area which is covered with stricken canes looking like warriors tumbled in death after a great battle; for it is winter and the time of the taking of the harvest. Negro gangs with rough bills like meat choppers are slicing the side leaves from the cane and then cutting, slicing and cutting, all over the plantation, with joyous noise, and there are great numbers of dark girls in straw hats working methodically and rhythmically from the shoulder and the bosom, striking, clipping, felling, as it were automatically, unwaveringly. They break in and cut in, strewing ever more extensively the carpet of canes in their rear, but the wall they attack is ten times as dense as the thickest field of corn and twice as high. The master or overseer, on horseback, stands about and calls sharply to the workers in French _patois_. He may be white Creole, but is often as dark as his gang. Where sugar is not rising, beyond the plantations if you walk as far, Nature seems sunk in swamp and swarming with snakes. The low jungle over the Mississippi marshes has many alligators and a multitude of other reptiles.
In a clearing of the sugar harvest it is possible to sit on a hummock of grass and see something of a plantation as a whole. It is a cloudless day with the faintest haze over the blueness of the sky. The sun heat is tempered by a delightful air which keeps on moving all the time like an invisible river of health and vigor. There is a whispering in the myriads of the canes, and you hear the slashing and the clumping of the cutting which is going on all the while. On one hand are the rudimentary huts of the Negroes, like dressing rooms, on the other the lofty refinery of white-painted corrugated iron, with many chimneys and cranes. The refinery, using electric power taken from the river, works off all the local cane and also imports large quantities of raw sugar brought from Cuba. Pile driving is going on in the Mississippi, and there will soon be a landing stage to which the Cuban steamers themselves can approach. The Louisiana cane is red and the Cuban is yellow-green, and the latter is much the sweeter. On the plantation, where a fair stretch of ground has been cleared, the motor plough is at work with huge spiked wheels, turning the black soil over the sugar seed for next year. The cane has an eye at each joint, the eye is the seed, and from it sprouts next year’s plant, growing at right angles to the old cane in the earth. “In February,” says the young Creole ploughman, “the young plants have to be dug up and replanted. Work goes on steadily all the year round.”
I resumed my way up the Mississippi on an old, broken-down steamer with a remarkably high, wooden, dripping, splashing paddle wheel. To go by boat used to be a favorite way of traveling, but the new railways on each side of the great river have killed the water traffic by taking away all large freight. It does not seem a profitable enterprise to ply the Mississippi for passengers alone. There are therefore only a few river steamers left, and these have to call at all the tiniest and obscurest waterside places and lumber camps, and can seldom make more than forty or fifty miles a day. Few people will travel a week or ten days or a fortnight or anything you like to Memphis when a locomotive will do it in twenty-four hours. The passengers therefore sit in stuffy trains listening to the _vers libre_ of the man who offers in a low voice: _chewing gum_, _cigarettes_, _iced coco-cola_; and the country whirls past them unprofitably. The cotton bales which used to go down stream in thousands upon river steamers are now closely packed in railway trucks; and the molasses goes no longer in barrels, but in huge, iron cisterns on wheels. There is therefore little traffic on the mighty river—she is happier and freer, more as she was of yore, with few steamers, few barges, few rafts—instead, only an occasional rowing boat and a ferry. The water is brown and vast and placid, and runs in many courses beyond wooded islands, beyond vast, swampy forks and tongues of the mainland. It is a sort of café-au-lait color, and the shadows mantle softly upon it deliciously. Willows grow in the water on its shores and islands, and in shadow or sunlight the water laps gently the many tree trunks or lies still under the green shade of the branches. It is a great, intricate, unexplored labyrinth of waters, and now you see it unadorned and lovely, with no advertisements on its banks and no shoddy reminder of our civilization on any hand—the Mississippi as she was when we first saw her. I traveled on a boat called _Senator Cordill_ and we made barely thirty miles a day, so many were the stopping places, so many the accidents. It cost a little over a dollar a day, including board, and was the nearest approach to a gift. The ship had a motley gang of colored laborers fetching freight on their backs in intermittent procession, beating out dust from the long, wooden gangway up which they tramped with their burdens. The wooden paddle wheel, which was ten feet high, had got into disrepair, and at a riverside town where we stopped some colored carpenters were at work fitting new wooden parts into her while close-cropped Negroes with coal-dusted skulls shoveled coal aboard from a lighter. We had three wooden decks rolling with small freight for tiny places in Louisiana, Mississippi State, and Arkansas. In the cabins were huge family bedsteads, and no locks on the doors. When the wheel was repaired and the time came for departure the Negro crew deserted en masse, and the captain, with the unlighted cigar which he had rolled and bitten in his capacious mouth all day, stood on the bank and accosted all and sundry, begging them to come aboard and work on the ship. Meanwhile in a quayside hut Negro girls were “shimmying” as they brought in food for their colored boys, and our erstwhile crew was heard singing and shouting. Only next morning did we get enough hands, and at the misty dawn, when the river was so still that it looked like an unbroken sheet of ice, we raised anchor and plunged outward again. In the main current whole trees were seen to be floating, and our wheel might easily strike one of them and get broken again. We sat down to breakfast, the eight passengers: one was a judge, another a district attorney, a third was an agent for timber, and the rest were women. The china at table was of different shapes and sizes, and there were only three teaspoons—so the rest of the passengers were served with tablespoons for their coffee.
Judge T—— insisted on having a teaspoon from the colored girl who waited on us, but was obliged to content himself with the tablespoon laid.
“Teaspoons is sca’ce,” said she.
We stop at various “landing places,” points and creeks and bends, the boat generally coming close to shore. A long plank is thrown out, and then commences the cakewalk of the Negro “rousters” carrying out all manner of goods—in one place it is materials for the building of a church—and bringing back cotton bales or whatever else may be waiting for us. It is a sight at which one could gaze spellbound for hours; for the Negroes keep in step and seem listening to an inaudible music. They lurch with their shoulders, kick out with their flexible knees, and whether taking long strides or marking time they keep in unison with the whole, their heads bent, their eyes half closed and bleared with some inner preoccupation. They are in all manner of ragged garments: one has a lilac-covered hat, another an old dressing gown, others are in sloppy blue overalls, some wear shabby Cuban hats, and they go screeching and singing and dodging knocks on the head, but always keeping step with the dance. The captain, with yesterday’s unlit cigar stuck in the side of his month, gives directions about each bit of freight, using wonderful expressions of abuse and otherwise “encouraging” the “niggers.” Looking at the “rousters” you can easily understand that dancing of a certain kind is innate with the Negro and springs from him. He has an inborn sense of the beating of time which we call rhythm. It is so exaggerated that it tilts out ridiculously with his stomach and controls inanely his bobbing head and nose and dropping eyes. He looks a savage, but he is spellbound. He is completely illiterate and largely unintelligent, but he has solved the problem of carrying huge cotton bales to the ship, providing a rhythmical physical stream for them to flow upon. It is not half the effort that it would be to white people without rhythm.
One of the reasons why the Negroes box so well is because they do it in the same rhythmical way they shift these cotton bales.
Presently they commence to sing while they haul up the anchor, and a rowing boat passing us with Negro oarsmen is also choric with bright, hard, rhythmic music. These people understand music and time in their bodies, not in their minds. Their blood and their nerves have consciousness of tempo.
The many stops in Mississippi State afford opportunities of going ashore, picking up wild pecan nuts, talking to Negroes at their cabin doors. One never sees a white man. This along the Mississippi is the real black belt. According to the census, the Negro is in a clear majority. This causes the Whites to be always apprehensive. The idea prevails that the Black can only be kept in his place by terror. As regards this point of view, the Whites prize above everything solidarity of opinion. They hold that they cannot afford to discuss the matter, and they will tolerate no cleavage. In politics all are of course Democrats, and if the American Democratic party is on the whole much less liable to “splits” than the Republican party, it is largely due to the discipline of the black belt.
“They outnumber us ten to one,” says the agent for timber, exaggerating characteristically. “It’s come to such a point hereabout that they’re pulling the white women out of their houses. It’s done every day.”
I could not believe that.
“But if a Black attacks a white woman hereabouts he is certain to be lynched, and knows it,” said I.
“Yes, it’s the only way.”
“But there is not a lynching every day?”
“No.”
“So there are not really so many attacks on the women.”
But the day-moth of his thought refused to be caught in a logical net.
“Did you ever see a man tarred and feathered?” I asked of the district attorney.
“No, but I’ve seen one lynched, and helped to lynch him,” said he.
“But lynching isn’t very good for legal business,” I hazarded.
He at once felt ruffled.
“It doesn’t make any difference to the Negro,” said he. “He hasn’t got a soul. They don’t go to heaven or hell.”
“How do you make that out?”
“They’re just animals,” said he. “They were never in the Garden of Eden, for Adam and Eve were white. Consequently, as they had no part in original sin, they have no share in our salvation either. Christ did not come to save those who never fell from grace.”
“I never heard that before,” said I, and was so greatly amused I could not help showing it.
The attorney sought me out afterwards with Biblical proof. The sons of Cain, it appears, took themselves wives from the daughters of men; these other men were not descended from Adam and were probably Negroes—the attorney was perfectly serious. The judge, however, to whom we referred the matter, was of a cynical turn of mind, and chuckled heartily. “I am a subscriber to foreign missions,” said he. “If they have not Adam for their father, why do we send missionaries to Africa?”
One of the chief places which I wished to visit was the Negro city of Mound Bayou, in the Mississippi Delta. In the blackest part of the State of Mississippi this is a city which is entirely Negro, possesses a Negro mayor, Negro policemen, and indeed is entirely without accommodation for white men. I stayed there a night in a Negro hotel where the old wall paper was in hundreds of peeling strips hanging on the walls, and everything in the bedroom was broken. It is a musical sort of city, all a-jangle with the banjo and the brassy clamor of the gramophone. Places of amusement are many—the Lyceum, the Casino, the Bon-Ton café (with jazzy music), the Luck Coles restaurant, etc.; one sees many advertisements of minstrel shows. But it is a working city, and at present, with the high cotton prices, it is tasting real prosperity. It is situated in the rich land of the Delta, very malarial and snake-haunted, and therefore not very suitable for white men, but the district produces the highest quality of cotton in the United States. It is in a way a one-man city, and owes most to Charles Banks, who is one of those agreeable and talented African giants, who, like Dr. Moton and others, seem to have an unexpected capacity for greatness. His energy and calm foresight and his money guarantee the gins and the cottonseed-oil factory and the Negro bank and probably the local newspaper and one or other of the churches.
In Mound Bayou is no segregation and no racial trouble, and the Negroes show how happily they can live when unmolested. It is a type of settlement well worth encouraging. The chief interest of the city just now is the building of a “consolidated school.” All the small schools are to be pulled down, and the money has been subscribed for the building of a handsome new school on modern lines. It will be put up facing the Carnegie Library Building. I was sorry to see the latter devoid of books, and used as a Sunday school, but the building was given before the city was ready for the responsible work of organizing and controlling a public library. I talked in the infants’ school to a strange array of children with heads like marbles, and found a common chord in interest and love for animals. We imitated together all the animals we knew, and agreed that no one who did not love animals ever came to anything in this world. But if they loved their animals, they must love teacher too. I talked in the beautiful Wesleyan church on the difference between _E pluribus unum_ and _E pluribus duo_, but that was to grown-ups—and they were so dull, compared with the children. The point was, however, that though the United States might fail to obtain unity of race, her peoples, white and black and yellow, Teutonic and Slav and the rest, could still be one in ideal.
“We are trying here to understand the beauty of being black,” said one of the audience edifyingly. “Solomon’s bride herself was black,” said he.
Mound Bayou is the pride of Mississippi, as far as the black part of it is concerned. The crowds that appear when a train comes in remind one of similar pictures in Africa. America seems to have disappeared and Africa to have been substituted. An entirely black South, or even one State entirely black, is, however, unthinkable. The white man has shed too much blood for his ideals there. He can never easily abandon any part of it. He must rise to the standard of his sacrifices. To my eyes, Mound Bayou was a little pathetic—like the sort of small establishment of a woman who has been separated from a rich husband through estrangement or desertion. It is not quite in the nature of things, and is more like a courageous protest than the beginning of something new. It stands, however, as a symbol of incompatibility of temperament.
There are many who say that when left to himself the Negro slips back from civilization into a primitive state of laziness or savagery, and they instance life in Haiti and the supposed failure of Liberia. It is said that he does not keep up the white man’s standard, he is not so strenuous, he is not a good organizer, nor dependable. That is not entirely true, but there is some truth in it. Mound Bayou is situated in a highly malarial region, unfitted for white habitation, but being surrounded with the best cotton-growing land in America it ought to be exceedingly prosperous. The best that can be said is that the local planters are in a better plight than their neighbors who are intermingled with Whites. Complete financial failure has threatened the little city in the past, and if it were not for the founder, Mr. Montgomery, and its financier, Mr. Banks, most of the proprietorship must have passed over into white hands. To all appearances, the Negro needs decent white co-operation in business, and mixed commercial relationships are better than segregated ones. The difficulty is to find conscientious business Whites who realize that the prosperity of the Negro is worth while. The fixed idea of the white business man is to fool the Negro and exploit him to the last penny.