Part 7

One would expect as the accompaniment of this show life a great number of strolling musicians and a poor folk wandering from town to town. But there are practically none. Strolling musicians now obtain polite employment at the many cinema houses where sensational pictures alternate with low vaudeville. Southern talent meets with a boisterous reception from the twenty-cent houses of Atlanta and New Orleans. One hears very broad humor upon occasion, frantic burlesques of the nervous hysteria and half-witted ignorance of the “nigger”—when the white man makes up as a Negro he always shows something lower than the Negro. At one show in New Orleans the whole audience roared with mirth at a competition in what was called “fizzing,” the spitting of chewed tobacco in one another’s faces and the bandying of purely Southern epithets and slang. Music is little developed among the Whites, though the singing of “Dixie” choruses is hailed as almost national. Musical instruments are now rare, even among the Negroes, and seem to have been displaced by the gramophone. There is no “gridling,” no beggars singing hymns on the city streets. In the country there are few tramps. The ne’er-do-wells are to be found more in the market places and the cheap streets. Prohibition has subterraneanized that part of the drink traffic which it has not killed, and the hitherto unemployed find a congenial occupation leading the thirsty to the “blind tigers.” It is rare to come across a man on the road, and Vachel Lindsay, tramping Georgia and reading his poems to the farmers, must have been unique, not only as a poet, but as a tramp. I saw nothing resembling the grand procession of “hoboes” that I met when tramping to Chicago seven years ago. Perhaps it was because immigration had ceased, and throughout the whole of America there was a need for labor which absorbed all men. Yet there could have been few on the road even before the war: the vast number of Blacks makes it unfitting for a white man to be tramping, and there is, moreover, less chance for a white man to get work in any case.

Much is said against the “poor Whites” or “poor white trash,” as the white proletariat is called by the black proletariat. They are said to be the worst enemies of the Negro, and the Negro is afraid of Bolshevism or Socialism because he knows the common white people, “those who have nothing and are nothing,” are the last people likely to give him justice. As one of the most popular of Negro leaders said recently: “As long as Socialism is followed by the lower classes of Whites, we can see there is more danger coming from Socialism to the Negro than from anything else, because below the Mason and Dixon line the people who lynch Negroes are the low-down Whites.” Of course those crowds who joyfully allow themselves to be photographed around the charred remains of the Negro they have burnt, thus affording the most terrible means of propaganda to Negro societies, are more of the dull, uneducated masses than of the refined and rich. They hate the Negro more because they are thrown more in contact with him, and their women are more accessible to him. They are in competition with the Negro for work and wages, and would gladly welcome a complete exodus to the North or to Liberia, for then their wages would go up. Physically, and man for man, they are afraid of the Negro, and therefore they attack him in mobs. Fortunately, there are not in the South great numbers of poor Whites except in the large cities and at the ports.

By contrast with the people of the North, the people of the South are noisy, very polite indoors, but brusque and rough without. They will do a great deal for you as a friend, but not much for you as a stranger. They have sharp-cut features, thin lips, blank brows. The women do not take on a fair fullness of flesh, but are inclined to dry up and fade. There are an enormous number of faded women everywhere—a sign, perhaps, that the climate does not suit the race. The accent seems to vary with the State, and Tennessee speaks with far more distinction than Georgia, where the “nigger brogue” prevails, and it is difficult to tell White from Black by voice. Nearly all r’s are dropped. Moral character is said to be weak, but there is nevertheless a very high standard, at least in matters of sex. The Southern woman is by no means as conscious of her charms as the Northern woman, and an unusually susceptible male could spend a quiet time in these parts. Men are not thinking of love and composing poems, even though it is the South, but they are if anything keener on business and money. Most people seemed suspicious of strangers, not communicative, but once they have taken the stranger to their hearts they easily become warm-heartedly effusive.

As a stranger I encountered a surprising lack of civility at a “non-union” plough company at Chattanooga. The employees were mostly Negroes, and I called on the white superintendent to obtain permission to go over the works. A heavy-jowled fellow kept me waiting half an hour in an anteroom, and then not only refused point-blank to let me see conditions in his factory, but was so brusque in his manner that I was forced to give him my mind roundly on his lack of courtesy, not to me personally, but to a literary man. As a rich business man he seemed to consider the profession of letters as dirt under his feet. I must say I felt shame to be so angry, and I was much amused some weeks later to read in a Chattanooga newspaper picked up by accident that Billy Sunday had visited this city and had preached in the said works, and at the close of his address, the superintendent being present, all the employees were en bloc converted to Christ.

Chattanooga is a larger city than Knoxville, better built and more spacious. One has entered the rayon of Southern steel and coal. Its many factory chimneys and its sooty sky testify to considerable industrialism. As in its sister city of Birmingham, Alabama, there are many non-union shops. A great steel strike was in progress in the United States, but while the workers in the North stood their ground in a long and bitter struggle, there was scarcely the semblance of a walkout in places like Chattanooga and Birmingham. Northern labor trouble seemed to mean Southern capitalistic prosperity.

One reason why Southern labor remains to a great extent unorganized is the Negro difficulty. Unions are not ready to accept Negro membership. Therefore the Negro can always be brought in to do the white man’s work if the latter goes on strike. Whether union or non-union, the wages seem fairly high. I talked with a Negro moulder who earned on an average six dollars a day. That is over eighteen hundred dollars American, and about five hundred pounds British money a year. A non-union unskilled man would, however, earn little more than two dollars a day—which, with the cost of food so high, is very little.

I noticed a difference in the attitude of the colored population in Chattanooga. It was much more depressed than that of Knoxville or the Virginian cities. Nothing terrible had occurred in Chattanooga, but there was said to be a bad mob, and what had happened at Knoxville had frightened them. The newspapers contained intimidating news paragraphs. On September 26th, at Omaha, Nebraska, the mob had burned down the courthouse, lynched a Negro, and tried to lynch also the mayor, E. P. Smith, who was twice hoisted to a lamp-post because he refused to hand over a prisoner to the mob. “As I stood under that lamp-post with the mob’s rope necktie circling my neck and listened to the yells ‘Lynch him,’ I took the same course any true American would have taken,” said the mayor. In the face of death he refused to yield his authority to Judge Lynch. That was at Omaha, in the West. On September 29th two Negroes were lynched by twenty-five masked men at Montgomery, Alabama, for alleged assault of a white woman. On October 1st the terrifying color riot broke out at Elaine, Arkansas, on a dispute over cotton prices. On October 6th two Negroes were burned at the stake and three were shot to death at Washington, Georgia, for supposed complicity in the murder of a deputy sheriff. Next day, at Macon, Eugene Hamilton was lynched for attempted murder, and so on. Since the Civil War one could scarcely find a more bloody and terrible period. And the poor Whites of Chattanooga kept hinting that Chattanooga’s turn would soon come. I was told Negroes did not care to stray far from their homes in the suburbs after dark. They were tormented and mauled on their way home from church. The Jim Crow portion of the trolley car was invaded by roughs trying to start trouble. In some cities in the South the Negroes have all-black motor omnibuses and jitneys running. These would obviate much of the danger of the trolley car which has only a straw screen between the races. But Negro enterprise has not risen to motor omnibuses in depressed Chattanooga. From a white point of view, the city might be improved by more light. It is a dark and extensive place. The great companies do not want to lose their Negroes and might do more to keep them. I found the Negroes scared, and many were ready to seize the first opportunity to go northward. Mr. T—— said, “They might kill us all.” Mrs. W—— said: “All who have children want to go away. There’ll be no chance for our children here. Before the war it was much better, but they seem to dislike us more now. Perhaps it would have been better if none of our men had gone to the war.” I endeavored to reassure most of those with whom I talked, for they had an exaggerated idea of their danger.

At Chattanooga there was no library for the colored people. There seemed to be little Negro business. I was at once introduced to the druggist and the undertaker. Undertaking and drug-selling, which includes ice-cream-soda dispensing, seem the most popular business enterprises among the Negroes. Wherever three or four polite Negroes were gathered together and I was talking to them someone would say, “Permit me to introduce Undertaker So-and-So,” and the latter would smile blandly and offer his brown hand. At Chattanooga I visited a swell establishment and looked over a show-room of elegant coffins, and I was shown into the parlor and the embalming room, where on a stone slab the bodies were prepared. This undertaker had started originally with one coffin, and had now become, as I saw, one of the rich men of the city. Funerals cost between a hundred and a hundred and fifty dollars, and were usually defrayed by the insurance companies.

I found the large East Side drug store, kept by a young man who had been in charge of the pneumonia ward of the 92nd Divisional Hospital in France. He had as many white customers as colored. He did not sell much patent medicine, as he said the attitude of the United States Government to patent medicines had become most severe. He was a fully qualified chemist. Doctors prescribed and he dispensed in the ordinary way. Yes, many were surprised to find a Negro chemist in a position of authority in a hospital, but that was due to white people’s ignorance of the progress made by colored students of medicine.

I greatly enjoyed “Joseph’s Bondage,” a dramatic cantata sung by a colored choir. Evidently the Negroes had composed the cantata themselves, for the verbiage was very quaint and simple. In a packed hall to be the only Whites was for myself and the lady who was with me a curious position. It caused a whole row of seats to remain empty in the midst of a crowded house. No Negro male dared sit down next to the white woman for fear of what I might do. However, when I left my place to talk to a Negro I knew in another part of the hall the empty line filled up mechanically.

The production of the cantata was quite amusing. Potiphar’s guards were the smartest possible, being ex-soldiers from Pershing’s army, upright Negro boys in khaki. But Potiphar was in blue, and looked like a man in charge of an elevator, and wore the slackest of pants. Leva, his wife, pawed Joseph over and yowled: “I love you, I love you.” Pharaoh, with glistening steel crown and steel slippers, was impressive. Joseph as a slave was the Negro workingman in his shirt; as Vizier, however, with the purple on him, he looked very grand, and the jubilee chorus which he sang when at length Pharaoh stepped down and he sat in Pharaoh’s seat, was very jolly, swaying to one side of the crowd around him and singing to them, swaying to the other side and singing to them, and then to all and God——

I did not leave the city without attending church, and I heard a little black Boanerges give a brilliant address. He walked up and down his rostrum with arms folded, and cooed and wheedled, but ever and anon crouching and exploding, lifting his hand to strike, bawling, even yelling to humanity and the Almighty. In dumb show he pulled the rope of a poor fellow being lynched—_and sent straight to hell_. He spoke of the race riots, and then suddenly becoming breathless, as if he were a messenger just arrived with bad tidings, he flung both arms wide apart, dilated his eyeballs, and cried in a terrorizing shriek—“_there is riot and anarchy in the land_.”

He had chosen a fine combination of texts for his sermon: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? That which is born of the flesh is flesh and that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit.”

Though a complete stranger, I was singled out and brought to the front to give the congregation a Christian greeting. I told them I had read in a Negro paper that “the Negro church had failed. Prayer had been tried for fifty years and had been proved to be no use.” And I said what I firmly believe to be true, that only Christianity can save color.

The orator was much pleased and said to his congregation: “See what God has sent us this Sunday morning,” and he invited me to give the address in the evening. We had an amusing altercation on the platform. “I do not know what to call him, or who he is; he may be anybody, a doctor, a professor, a——” he looked at me inquiringly.

“Oh, plain Mr.,” said I.

He hung on, however, to “Professor” till I interrupted him again.

At the close of my address the deacons came out to assess the congregation in the matter of collection. They looked it up and down and decided that twenty-two dollars was the amount that could be raised. So with their solemn faces they stared patiently at the congregation while the plates went round. The collection was counted, and was found to be considerably less. So the deacons addressed themselves once more to the congregation, averring that some of the young men were holding back. Then for five minutes individuals were moved to come up singly and make additional offerings. Progress was reported, and then more individuals came up till the assessment had been realized.

Then the most touching thing occurred. The pastor turned to me and offered to share the collection with me.

“Oh, no!” I whispered hurriedly, feeling, perhaps, rather shocked at the idea.

“He says ‘Oh, no,’” said the pastor to the congregation.

V

MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA

Traveling from Chattanooga to Atlanta the mind inevitably reverts to the American Civil War, for in 1863 the victory of the North marched from Chattanooga and the famous battle of Lookout Mountain to the taking of Atlanta and the discomfiture of Georgia. The glorious Stars and Stripes came victoriously out of the Northern horizon, climbed each hill, dipped and climbed again, with a clamorous, exultant Northern soldiery behind it. General Sherman began to gather his great fame, while General Lee, the adventuresome Southern leader, allowed himself to be cut off in Virginia. The efforts of the South had been very picturesque, like the play of a gambler with small resources and enormous hopes, but the shades of ruin gathered about her and began to negative the charm of her beginnings. Lincoln had proclaimed the freedom of the slaves. The South pretended that in any case slavery could not survive the war, and in token of this she enlisted Negro soldiers, making them free men from the moment of enlistment. In military extremity policy promises much which afterwards ingrate security will not ratify. The Southern planter might have obtained some measure of indemnification for the loss of his slaves had he come to terms in time. But he hoped somehow he might win the right to manage his Negroes as he wished without interference. There was the same violent state of mind on the subject of the Negroes as slaves as there is now on the subject of the Negroes as free men. All that was missing was the white-woman talk. Though originally the colonists had been generally opposed to the introduction of slavery, yet slavery had taken captive and then poisoned most men’s minds. The South chose to fight to the end rather than sacrifice the institution prematurely. There was a pride, as of Lucifer, in the Southerner, too, a belief in himself that foredoomed him to be hurled into outer darkness and to fall through space for nine days. Sherman’s army, when it burned Atlanta and marched through Georgia laying the country waste, was inspired with something like the wrath of God.

In order to see the ex-slave and ex-master to-day, it is necessary to dwell not only in cities but in the country, and I chose to walk across the State of Georgia as the best way to ascertain what life in the country was like. And I followed in the way Sherman had gone. There, if anywhere, it seemed to me, the reactions of the war and of slavery must be apparent to-day.

Sherman was something of a Prussian. He was a capable and scientific soldier. From an enemy’s standpoint, he was not a humanitarian. War to him was a trade of terror and blood, and he was logical. “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will,” said he. “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” And when he had captured Atlanta he ordered the whole population to flee.

If they cared to go North, they would find their enemies not unkind. If they thought there was safety in the South—then let them go further south to whatever protection the beaten Southern Army could afford.

So North and South they fled, the people of Atlanta, but mostly South, for they were bitter; and the roads filled with the pitiful array of thousands of men and women and children with their old-fashioned coaches, with their barrows, with their servants, with those faithful Blacks who still heeded not the fact that “the day of liberation had arrived.” All under safe-conduct to Hood’s army.

What complaints, what laments, as the proud Southern population took the road. A lamentation that is heard till now! And when the people had gone, the city of Atlanta was set on fire. Sherman had decided to march to the sea, and he could not afford to leave an enemy population in his rear, nor could he allow the chance that secret arsenals might exist there after he had gone. It was a never to be forgotten spectacle, “the heaven one expanse of lurid fire, the air filled with flying, burning cinders.” “We were startled and awed,” says a soldier who marched with the rest, “seeing vast waves and sheets of flames thrusting themselves heavenward, rolling and tossing in mighty billows—a gigantic sea of fire.” Small explosions arranged by the engineers were punctuated by huge explosions when hidden stores of ammunition were located, and while these added ruin to ruin in the city they sounded as lugubrious and awful detonations to the soldiery on the road. Depots, churches, shops, warehouses, homes flared from every story and every window. Those who remained in the town were few, but it was impossible not to be stirred if not appalled. A brigade of New England soldiers was the last to leave, and marched out by Decatur Street, led by the band of the 33rd Massachusetts regiment, playing

John Brown’s body lies a-mould’ring in his grave His soul is marching on—

the lurid glare of the fire gleaming upon their bayonets and equipment, inflaming their visages and their eyes which were already burning with the war faith of the North.

That was in the fall of 1864. Years have passed and healed many wounds. Now it is Atlanta in the fall of 1919 and the crush of the Fair time. All Georgia is at her capital city. The automobiles are forced to a walking pace, there are so many of them, and they vent their displeasure in a multiform chorus of barking, howling, and hooting. So great is the prosperity of the land that the little farmer and the workingman have their cars, not mere “Ford runabouts,” but resplendently enameled, capacious, smooth-running, swift-starting coaches where wife and family disport themselves more at home than at home. Atlanta’s new life has grown from the old ruins and hidden them, as a young forest springs through the charred stumps of a forest fire. On each side Atlanta’s skyscrapers climb heavenward in severe lines, and where heaven should be the sky signs twinkle. Every volt that can be turned into light is being used. The shops and the stores and the cinemas are dazzling to show what they are worth. The sidewalks are thronged with Southern youth whose hilarious faces and gregarious movements show a camaraderie one would hardly observe in the colder North. Jaunty Negro boys mingle with the crowd and are mirthful among themselves—as well dressed as the Whites, sharing in the “record trade” and the boom of the price of cotton. They are not slaves to-day, but are lifted high with racial pride and the consciousness of universities and seminaries on Atlanta’s hills, and successes in medicine, law, and business in the city. They roll along in the joyous freedom of their bodies, and make the South more Southern than it is. How pale and ghostlike the South would seem without its flocks of colored children, without those many men and women with the sun shadows in their faces!

“We love our niggers and understand them,” say the Whites, repeating their formula, and you’d think there was no racial problem whatever in the South, to see the great “Gate City” given over to merriment unrestrained and many a Negro colliding with many a White youth and yet never a fight—nothing on the crowded streets to exemplify the accepted hostility of one to the other. One has the thought that perhaps Atlanta did not burn in vain, and that the South as well as the North believes in the immortality of the soul of John Brown.

The tobacco-chewing, smiling, guffawing crowds of the street, and Peachtree Street jammed with people and cars! What a hubbub the four jammed-up processions of automobiles are making—like choruses of hoarse katydids crying only for repetition’s sake and the lust of noise! But there is more noise and more joy still a-coming! Skirling and shrieking, in strange contrast to the Negroes and to the clothed Whites and to the color of night itself, comes the parade of college youths all in their pajamas and nightshirts. Long queues of some hundreds of lads in white shouting at the top of their voices—they climb in and out of the electric cars, rush into shops and theatres in a wild game of “Follow my leader.” _Rah, rah, rah_, they cry, _rah, rah, rah_, and rush into hotels, circle the foyer, and plunge among the amazed diners in the dining rooms, thread their way around tables and up the hotel balustrade, invade bedrooms, go out at windows and down fire escapes, and then once more file along the packed streets amidst autos and cars, raving all the while with pleasure and excitement. It is good humor and boisterousness and the jollity of the Fair time. Up above all the flags and the bunting wave listlessly in the night air. It seems impossible but that the firing of Atlanta is forgotten, and the pitiful exodus of its humiliated people—forgotten also the exultancy of the soldiers of the North singing while the city burned.