by W. E. B. DuBois
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Chapter 7
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
VII. Of the Black Belt
Out of the
North the train thundered, and we woke to see the crimson soil of Georgia
stretching away bare and monotonous right and left. Here and there lay
straggling, unlovely villages, and lean men loafed leisurely at the depots;
then again came the stretch of pines and clay. Yet we did not nod, nor weary of
the scene; for this is historic ground. Right across our track, three hundred
and sixty years ago, wandered the
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cavalcade of Hernando de Soto, looking for gold and the Great Sea; and
he and his foot-sore captives disappeared yonder in the grim forests to the
west. Here sits Atlanta, the city of a hundred hills, with something Western,
something Southern, and something quite its own, in its busy life. Just this
side Atlanta is the land of the Cherokees and to the southwest, not far from
where Sam Hose was crucified, you may stand on a spot which is today the centre
of the Negro problem, -- the centre of those nine million men who are America's
dark heritage from slavery and the slave-trade.
Not only is Georgia thus the geographical focus of
our Negro population, but in many other respects, both now and yesterday, the
Negro problems have seemed to be centered in this State. No other State in the
Union can count a million Negroes among its citizens, -- a population as large
as the slave population of the whole Union in 1800; no other State fought so
long and strenuously to gather this host of Africans. Oglethorpe thought
slavery against law and gospel; but the circumstances which gave Georgia its
first inhabitants were not calculated to furnish citizens over-nice in their
ideas about rum and slaves. Despite the prohibitions of the trustees, these
Georgians, like some of their descendants, proceeded to take the law into their
own hands; and so pliant were the judges, and so flagrant the smuggling, and so
earnest were the prayers of Whitefield, that by the middle of the eighteenth
century all restrictions were swept away, and the slave-trade went merrily on
for fifty years and more.
Down in Darien, where the Delegal riots took place
some summers ago, there used to come a strong protest against slavery from the
Scotch Highlanders; and the Moravians of Ebenezer did not like the system. But
not till the Haytian Terror of Toussaint was the trade in men even checked;
while the national statute of 1808 did not suffice to stop it. How the Africans
poured in! --fifty thousand between 1790 and 1810, and then, from Virginia and
from smugglers, two thousand a year for many years more. So the thirty thousand
Negroes of Georgia in 1790 doubled in a decade,-- were over a hundred thousand
in 1810, had reached two hundred thousand in 1820, and half a million at the
time of the war. Thus like a snake the black population writhed upward.
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But
we must hasten on our journey. This that we pass as we near Atlanta is the
ancient land of the Cherokees, -- that brave Indian nation which strove so long
for its fatherland, until Fate and the United States Government drove them
beyond the Mississippi. If you wish to ride with me you must come into the
"Jim Crow Car." There will be no objection, -- already four other
white men, and a little white girl with her nurse, are in there. Usually the
races are mixed in there; but the white coach is all white. Of course this car
is not so good as the other, but it is fairly clean and comfortable. The
discomfort lies chiefly in the hearts of those four black men yonder -- and in
mine.
We rumble south in quite a business-like way. The bare red clay and pines of
Northern Georgia begin to disappear, and in their place appears a rich rolling
land, luxuriant, and here and there well tilled. This is the land of the Creek
Indians; and a hard time the Georgians had to seize it. The towns grow more
frequent and more interesting, and brand-new cotton mills rise on every side.
Below Macon the world grows darker; for now we approach the Black Belt, -- that
strange land of shadows, at which even slaves paled in the past, and whence
come now only faint and half-intelligible murmurs to the world beyond. The
"Jim Crow Car" grows larger and a shade better; three rough field-hands
and two or three white loafers accompany us, and the newsboy still spreads his
wares at one end. The sun is setting, but we can see the great cotton country
as we enter it, -- the soil now dark and fertile, now thin and gray, with
fruit-trees and dilapidated buildings, -- all the way to Albany.
At Albany, in the heart of the Black Belt, we stop. Two hundred miles south of
Atlanta, two hundred miles west of the Atlantic, and one hundred miles north of
the Great Gulf lies Dougherty County, with ten thousand Negroes and two
thousand whites. The Flint River winds down from Andersonville, and, turning
suddenly at Albany, the county-seat, hurries on to join the Chattahoochee and
the sea. Andrew Jackson knew the Flint well, and marched across it once to
avenge the Indian Massacre at Fort Mims. That was in 1814, not long before the
battle of New Orleans; and by the Creek treaty that followed this campaign, all
Dougherty County, and much
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other rich land, was ceded to Georgia. Still, settlers fought shy of
this land, for the Indians were all about, and they were unpleasant neighbors
in those days. The panic of 1837, which Jackson bequeathed to Van Buren, turned
the planters from the impoverished lands of Virginia, the Carolinas, and east
Georgia, toward the West. The Indians were removed to Indian Territory, and
settlers poured into these coveted lands to retrieve their broken fortunes. For
a radius of a hundred miles about Albany, stretched a great fertile land,
luxuriant with forests of pine, oak, ash, hickory, and poplar; hot with the sun
and damp with the rich black swamp-land; and here the corner-stone of the
Cotton Kingdom was laid.
Albany is to-day a wide-streeted, placid, Southern
town, with a broad sweep of stores and saloons, and flanking rows of homes, --
whites usually to the north, and blacks to the south. Six days in the week the
town looks decidedly too small for itself, and takes frequent and prolonged
naps. But on Saturday suddenly the whole county disgorges itself upon the
place, and a perfect flood of black peasantry pours through the streets, fills
the stores, blocks the sidewalks, chokes the thoroughfares, and takes full
possession of the town. They are black, sturdy, uncouth country folk,
good-natured and simple, talkative to a degree, and yet far more silent and
brooding than the crowds of the Rhine-pfalz, or Naples, or Cracow. They drink
considerable quantities of whiskey, but do not get very drunk; they talk and
laugh loudly at times, but seldom quarrel or fight. They walk up and down the
streets, meet and gossip with friends, stare at the shop windows, buy coffee,
cheap candy, and clothes, and at dusk drive home -- happy? well no, not exactly
happy, but much happier than as though they had not come.
Thus Albany is a real capital, -- a typical Southern
county town, the centre of the life of ten thousand souls; their point of
contact with the outer world, their centre of news and gossip, their market for
buying and selling, borrowing and lending, their fountain of justice and law.
Once upon a time we knew country life so well and city life so little, that we
illustrated city life as that of a closely crowded country district. Now the
world has well-nigh forgotten what the country is, and we must imagine a little
city of black people
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scattered far and wide over three hundred lonesome square miles of land,
without train or trolley, in the midst of cotton and corn, and wide patches of
sand and gloomy soil.
It gets pretty hot in Southern Georgia in July, -- a
sort of dull, determined heat that seems quite independent of the sun; so it
took us some days to muster courage enough to leave the porch and venture out
on the long country roads, that we might see this unknown world. Finally we
started. It was about ten in the morning, bright with a faint breeze, and we
jogged leisurely southward in the valley of the Flint. We passed the scattered
box-like cabins of the brickyard hands, and the long tenement-row facetiously
called "The Ark," and were soon in the open country, and on the confines
of the great plantations of other days. There is the "Joe Fields
place"; a rough old fellow was he, and had killed many a
"nigger" in his day. Twelve miles his plantation used to run, -- a
regular barony. It is nearly all gone now; only straggling bits belong to the
family, and the rest has passed to Jews and Negroes. Even the bits which are
left are heavily mortgaged, and, like the rest of the land, tilled by tenants.
Here is one of them now, -- a tall brown man, a hard worker and a hard drinker,
illiterate, but versed in farmlore, as his nodding crops declare. This
distressingly new board house is his, and he has just moved out of yonder
moss-grown cabin with its one square room.
From the curtains in Benton's house, down the road, a
dark comely face is staring at the strangers; for passing carriages are not
every-day occurrences here. Benton is an intelligent yellow man with a
good-sized family, and manages a plantation blasted by the war and now the
broken staff of the widow. He might be well-to-do, they say; but he carouses
too much in Albany. And the half-desolate spirit of neglect born of the very
soil seems to have settled on these acres. In times past there were cotton-gins
and machinery here; but they have rotted away.
The whole land seems forlorn and forsaken. Here are
the remnants of the vast plantations of the Sheldons, the Pellots, and the
Rensons; but the souls of them are passed. The houses lie in half ruin, or have
wholly disappeared; the fences have flown, and the families are wandering in
the world.
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Strange vicissitudes have met these whilom masters. Yonder stretch the
wide acres of Bildad Reasor; he died in war-time, but the upstart overseer
hastened to wed the widow. Then he went, and his neighbors too, and now only the
black tenant remains; but the shadow-hand of the master's grand-nephew or
cousin or creditor stretches out of the gray distance to collect the rack-rent
remorselessly, and so the land is uncared-for and poor. Only black tenants can
stand such a system, and they only because they must. Ten miles we have ridden
to-day and have seen no white face.
A resistless feeling of depression falls slowly upon
us, despite the gaudy sunshine and the green cottonfields. This, then, is the
Cotton Kingdom, -- the shadow of a marvelous dream. And where is the King?
Perhaps this is he, -- the sweating ploughman, tilling his eighty acres with
two lean mules, and fighting a hard battle with debt. So we sit musing, until,
as we turn a corner on the sandy road, there comes a fairer scene suddenly in
view, -- a neat cottage snugly ensconced by the road, and near it a little
store. A tall-bronzed man rises from the porch as we hail him, and comes out to
our carriage. He is six feet in height, with a sober face that smiles gravely.
He walks too straight to be a tenant, -- yes, he owns two hundred and forty
acres. "The land is run down since the boom-days of eighteen hundred and
fifty," he explains, and cotton is low. Three black tenants live on his
place, and in his little store he keeps a small stock of tobacco, snuff, soap,
and soda, for the neighborhood. Here is his gin-house with new machinery just
installed. Three hundred bales of cotton went through it last year. Two
children he has sent away to school. Yes, he says sadly, he is getting on, but
cotton is down to four cents; I know how Debt sits staring at him.
Wherever the King may be, the parks and palaces of
the Cotton Kingdom have not wholly disappeared. We plunge even now into great
groves of oak and towering pine, with an undergrowth of myrtle and shrubbery.
This was the "home-house" of the Thompsons, -- slave-barons who drove
their coach and four in the merry past. All is silence now, and ashes, and
tangled weeds. The owner put his whole fortune into the rising cotton industry
of the fifties, and with the
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falling prices of the eighties he packed up and stole away. Yonder is
another grove, with unkempt lawn, great magnolias, and grass-grown paths. The
Big House stands in half-ruin, its great front door staring blankly at the
street, and the back part grotesquely restored for its black tenant. A shabby,
well-built Negro he is, unlucky and irresolute. He digs hard to pay rent to the
white girl who owns the remnant of the place. She married a policeman, and lives
in Savannah.
Now and again we come to churches. Here is one now,
-- Shepherd's, they call it, -- a great whitewashed barn of a thing, perched on
stilts of stone, and looking for all the world as though it were just resting
here a moment and might be expected to waddle off down the road at almost any
time. And yet it is the centre of a hundred cabin homes; and sometimes, of a
Sunday, five hundred persons from far and near gather here and talk and eat and
sing. There is a school-house near, -- a very airy, empty shed; but even this
is an improvement, for usually the school is held in the church. The churches
vary from log-huts to those like Shepherd's, and the schools from nothing to
this little house that sits demurely on the county line. It is a tiny plank-house,
perhaps ten by twenty, and has within a double row of rough unplaned benches,
resting mostly on legs, sometimes on boxes. Opposite the door is a square
home-made desk. In one corner are the ruins of a stove, and in the other a dim
blackboard. It is the cheerfulest schoolhouse I have seen in Dougherty, save in
town. Back of the schoolhouse is a lodgehouse two stories high and not quite
finished. Societies meet there, -- societies "to care for the sick and
bury the dead"; and these societies grow and flourish.
We had come to the boundaries of Dougherty, and were
about to turn west along the county-line, when all these sights were pointed
out to us by a kindly old man, black, white-haired, and seventy. Forty-five
years he had lived here, and now supports himself and his old wife by the help
of the steer tethered yonder and the charity of his black neighbors. He shows
us the farm of the Hills just across the county line in Baker, -- a widow and
two strapping sons, who raised ten bales (one need not add "cotton"
down here) last year. There are fences and pigs and cows, and the soft-voiced,
velvet-
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skinned young Memnon, who sauntered half-bashfully over to greet the
strangers, is proud of his home. We turn now to the west along the county line.
Great dismantled trunks of pines tower above the green cottonfields, cracking
their na-ked gnarled fingers toward the border of living forest beyond. There
is little beauty in this region, only a sort of crude abandon that suggests
power, -- a naked grandeur, as it were. The houses are bare and straight; there
are no hammocks or easy-chairs, and few flowers. So when, as here at Rawdon's,
one sees a vine clinging to a little porch, and home-like windows peeping over
the fences, one takes a long breath. I think I never before quite realized the
place of the Fence in civilization. This is the Land of the Unfenced, where
crouch on either hand scores of ugly one-room cabins, cheerless and dirty. Here
lies the Negro problem in its naked dirt and penury. And here are no fences.
But now and then the crisscross rails or straight palings break into view, and
then we know a touch of culture is near. Of course Harrison Gohagen, -- a quiet
yellow man, young, smooth-faced, and diligent, -- of course he is lord of some
hundred acres, and we expect to see a vision of well-kept rooms and fat beds
and laughing children. For has he not fine fences? And those over yonder, why
should they build fences on the rack-rented land? It will only increase their
rent.
On we wind, through sand and pines and glimpses of
old plantations, till there creeps into sight a cluster of buildings, -- wood
and brick, mills and houses, and scattered cabins. It seemed quite a village.
As it came nearer and nearer, however, the aspect changed: the buildings were
rotten, the bricks were falling out, the mills were silent, and the store was
closed. Only in the cabins appeared now and then a bit of lazy life. I could
imagine the place under some weird spell, and was half-minded to search out the
princess. An old ragged black man, honest, simple, and improvident, told us the
tale. The Wizard of the North -- the Capitalist -- had rushed down in the
seventies to woo this coy dark soil. He bought a square mile or more, and for a
time the field-hands sang, the gins groaned, and the mills buzzed. Then came a
change. The agent's son embezzled the funds and ran off with them. Then the
agent himself disappeared. Finally the new agent stole
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even the books, and the company in wrath closed its business and its
houses, refused to sell, and let houses and furniture and machinery rust and
rot. So the Waters-Loring plantation was stilled by the spell of dishonesty,
and stands like some gaunt rebuke to a scarred land.
Somehow that plantation ended our day's journey; for
I could not shake off the influence of that silent scene. Back toward town we
glided, past the straight and thread-like pines, past a dark tree-dotted pond
where the air was heavy with a dead sweet perfume. White slender-legged curlews
flitted by us, and the garnet blooms of the cotton looked gay against the green
and purple stalks. A peasant girl was hoeing in the field, white-turbaned and
black-limbed. All this we saw, but the spell still lay upon us.
How curious a land is this, -- how full of untold
story, of tragedy and laughter, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed
with a tragic past, and big with future promise! This is the Black Belt of
Georgia. Dougherty County is the west end of the Black Belt, and men once
called it the Egypt of the Confederacy. It is full of historic interest. First
there is the Swamp, to the west, where the Chickasawhatchee flows sullenly
southward. The shadow of an old plantation lies at its edge, forlorn and dark.
Then comes the pool; pendent gray moss and brackish waters appear, and forests
filled with wildfowl. In one place the wood is on fire, smouldering in dull red
anger; but nobody minds. Then the swamp grows beautiful; a raised road, built
by chained Negro convicts, dips down into it, and forms a way walled and almost
covered in living green. Spreading trees spring from a prodigal luxuri-ance of
undergrowth; great dark green shadows fade into the black background, until all
is one mass of tangled semi-tropical foliage, marvellous in its weird savage
splendor. Once we crossed a black silent stream, where the sad trees and
writhing creepers, all glinting fiery yellow and green, seemed like some vast
cathedral, -- some green Milan builded of wildwood. And as I crossed, I seemed
to see again that fierce tragedy of seventy years ago. Osceola, the
Indian-Negro chieftain, had risen in the swamps of Florida, vowing vengeance.
His war-cry reached the red Creeks of Dougherty, and their war-cry rang from
the Chattahoochee to the sea.
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Men and women and children fled and fell before them as they swept into
Dougherty. In yonder shadows a dark and hideously painted warrior glided
stealthily on, -- another and another, until three hundred had crept into the
treacherous swamp. Then the false slime closing about them called the white men
from the east. Waist-deep, they fought beneath the tall trees, until the
war-cry was hushed and the Indians glided back into the west. Small wonder the
wood is red.
Then came the black slaves. Day after day the clank of
chained feet marching from Virginia and Carolina to Georgia was heard in these
rich swamp lands. Day after day the songs of the callous, the wail of the
motherless, and the muttered curses of the wretched echoed from the Flint to
the Chickasawhatchee, until by 1860 there had risen in West Dougherty perhaps
the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew. A hundred and fifty
barons commanded the labor of nearly six thousand Negroes, held sway over farms
with ninety thousand acres tilled land, valued even in times of cheap soil at
three millions of dollars. Twenty thousand bales of ginned cotton went yearly
to England, New and Old; and men that came there bankrupt made money and grew
rich. In a single decade the cotton output increased four-fold and the value of
lands was tripled. It was the heyday of the nouveau riche, and a life of
careless extravagance among the masters.
Four
and six bobtailed thoroughbreds rolled their coaches to town; open hospitality
and gay entertainment were the rule. Parks and groves were laid out, rich with
flower and vine, and in the midst stood the low wide-halled "big
house," with its porch and columns and great fireplaces.
And yet with all this there was something sordid, something forced, -- a
certain feverish unrest and recklessness; for was not all this show and tinsel
built upon a groan? "This land was a little Hell," said a ragged,
brown, and grave-faced man to me. We were seated near a roadside blacksmith
shop, and behind was the bare ruin of some master's home. "I've seen
niggers drop dead in the furrow, but they were kicked aside, and the plough
never stopped. Down in the guard-house, there's where the blood ran."
With such foundations a kingdom must in time sway and fall. The masters moved
to Macon and Augusta, and left only
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the irresponsible overseers on the land. And the result is such ruin as
this, the Lloyd "home-place": -- great waving oaks, a spread of lawn,
myrtles and chestnuts, all ragged and wild; a solitary gate-post standing where
once was a castle entrance; an old rusty anvil lying amid rotting bellows and
wood in the ruins of a blacksmith shop; a wide rambling old mansion, brown and
dingy, filled now with the grandchildren of the slaves who once waited on its
tables; while the family of the master has dwindled to two lone women, who live
in Macon and feed hungrily off the remnants of an earldom. So we ride on, past
phantom gates and falling homes, -- past the once flourishing farms of the
Smiths, the Gandys, and the Lagores, -- and find all dilapidated and half
ruined, even there where a solitary white woman, a relic of other days, sits
alone in state among miles of Negroes and rides to town in her ancient coach
each day.
This was indeed the Egypt of the Confederacy, -- the
rich granary whence potatoes and corn and cotton poured out to the famished and
ragged Confederate troops as they battled for a cause lost long before 1861.
Sheltered and secure, it became the place of refuge for families, wealth, and
slaves. Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell. The
red-clay sub-soil already had begun to peer above the loam. The harder the
slaves were driven the more careless and fatal was their farming. Then came the
revolution of war and Emancipation, the bewilderment of Reconstruction, -- and
now, what is the Egypt of the Confederacy, and what mean-ing has it for the
nation's weal or woe?
It is a land of rapid contrasts and of curiously
mingled hope and pain. Here sits a pretty blue-eyed quadroon hiding her bare
feet; she was married only last week, and yonder in the field is her dark young
husband, hoeing to support her, at thirty cents a day without board. Across the
way is Gatesby, brown and tall, lord of two thousand acres shrewdly won and
held. There is a store conducted by his black son, a black-smith shop, and a
ginnery. Five miles below here is a town owned and controlled by one white New
Englander. He owns almost a Rhode Island county, with thousands of acres and
hundreds of black laborers. Their cabins look better than most, and the farm,
with machinery and fertilizers, is much
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more business-like than any in the county, although the manager drives
hard bargains in wages. When now we turn and look five miles above, there on
the edge of town are five houses of prostitutes, -- two of blacks and three of
whites; and in one of the houses of the whites a worthless black boy was
harbored too openly two years ago; so he was hanged for rape. And here, too, is
the high whitewashed fence of the "stockade," as the county prison is
called; the white folks say it is ever full of black criminals, -- the black
folks say that only colored boys are sent to jail, and they not because they
are guilty, but because the State needs criminals to eke out its income by
their forced labor.
Immigrants are heirs of the slave baron in Dougherty;
and as we ride westward, by wide stretching cornfields and stubby orchards of
peach and pear, we see on all sides within the circle of dark forest a Land of
Canaan. Here and there are tales of projects for money-getting, born in the
swift days of Reconstruction, -- "improvement" companies, wine
companies, mills and factories; most failed, and foreigners fell heir.
It
is a beautiful land, this Dougherty, west of the Flint. The forests are
wonderful, the solemn pines have disappeared, and this is the "Oakey
Woods," with its wealth of hickories, beeches, oaks and palmettos. But a
pall of debt hangs over the beautiful land; the merchants are in debt to the
wholesal-ers, the planters are in debt to the merchants, the tenants owe the
planters, and laborers bow and bend beneath the burden of it all. Here and
there a man has raised his head above these murky waters. We passed one fenced
stock-farm with grass and grazing cattle, that looked very home-like after
endless corn and cotton. Here and there are black free-holders: there is the
gaunt dull-black Jackson, with his hundred acres. "I says, 'Look up! If
you don't look up you can't get up,'" remarks Jackson, philosophically.
And he's gotten up. Dark Carter's neat barns would do credit to New England.
His master helped him to get a start, but when the black man died last fall the
master's sons immediately laid claim to the estate. "And them white folks
will get it, too," said my yellow gossip.
I turn from these well-tended acres with a comfortable feeling that the Negro
is rising. Even then, however, the
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fields, as we proceed, begin to redden and the trees disappear. Rows of
old cabins appear filled with renters and laborers, -- cheerless, bare, and
dirty, for the most part, although here and there the very age and decay makes
the scene picturesque. A young black fellow
greets us. He is twenty-two, and just married. Until last year he had good luck
renting; then cotton fell, and the sheriff seized and sold all he had. So he
moved here, where the rent is higher, the land poorer, and the owner
inflexible; he rents a forty-dollar mule for twenty dollars a year. Poor lad!
-- a slave at twenty-two. This plantation, owned now by a foreigner, was a part
of the famous Bolton estate. After the war it was for many years worked by
gangs of Negro convicts, -- and black convicts then were even more plentiful
than now; it was a way of making Negroes work, and the question of guilt was a
minor one. Hard tales of cruelty and mistreatment of the chained freemen are
told, but the county authorities were deaf until the free-labor market was
nearly ruined by wholesale migration. Then they took the convicts from the
plantations, but not until one of the fairest regions of the "Oakey
Woods" had been ruined and ravished into a red waste, out of which only a
Yankee or an immigrant could squeeze more blood from debt-cursed tenants.
No wonder that Luke Black, slow, dull, and
discouraged, shuffles to our carriage and talks hopelessly. Why should he
strive? Every year finds him deeper in
debt. How strange that Georgia, the world-heralded refuge of poor debtors,
should bind her own to sloth and misfortune as ruthlessly as ever England did![i]
The poor land groans with its birth-pains, and brings forth scarcely a hundred
pounds of cotton to the acre, where fifty years ago it yielded eight times as
much. Of his meagre yield the tenant pays from a quarter to a third in rent,
and most of the rest in interest on food and supplies bought on credit. Twenty
years yonder sunken-cheeked, old black man has labored under that system, and
now, turned day-laborer, is supporting his wife and boarding himself on his
wages of a dollar and a half a week, received only part of the year.
The Bolton convict farm formerly included the
neighboring plantation. Here it was that the convicts were lodged in the
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great log prison still standing. A dismal place it still remains, with
rows of ugly huts filled with surly ignorant tenants. "What rent do you
pay here?" I inquired. "I don't know, -- what is it, Sam?"
"All we make," answered Sam. It is a depressing place, -- bare,
unshaded, with no charm of past association, only a memory of forced human
toil, -- now, then, and before the war. They are not happy, these black men
whom we meet throughout this region. There is little of the joyous abandon and
playfulness which we are wont to associate with the plantation Negro. At best,
the natural good-nature is edged with complaint or has changed into sullenness
and gloom. And now and then it blazes forth in veiled but hot anger. I remember
one big red-eyed black whom we met by the roadside. Forty-five years he had
labored on this farm, beginning with nothing, and still having nothing. To be
sure, he had given four children a common-school training, and perhaps if the
new fence-law had not allowed unfenced crops in West Dougherty he might have
raised a little stock and kept ahead. As it is, he is hopelessly in debt, disappointed,
and embittered. He stopped us to in-quire after the black boy in Albany, whom
it was said a policeman had shot and killed for loud talking on the side-walk.
And then he said slowly: "Let a white man touch me, and he dies; I don't
boast this, -- I don't say it around loud, or before the children, -- but I
mean it. I've seen them whip my father and my old mother in them cotton-rows
till the blood ran; by -- " and we passed on.
Now Sears, whom we met next lolling under the chubby
oak-trees, was of quite different fibre. Happy? -- Well, yes; he laughed and
flipped pebbles, and thought the world was as it was. He had worked here twelve
years and has nothing but a mortgaged mule. Children? Yes, seven; but they
hadn't been to school this year, -- couldn't afford books and clothes, and
couldn't spare their work. There go part of them to the fields now, -- three
big boys astride mules, and a strapping girl with bare brown legs. Careless
ignorance and laziness here, fierce hate and vindictiveness there; -- these are
the extremes of the Negro problem which we met that day, and we scarce knew
which we preferred.
Here and there we meet distinct characters quite out
of the
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ordinary. One came out of a piece of newly cleared ground, making a wide
detour to avoid the snakes. He was an old, hollow-cheeked man, with a drawn and
characterful brown face. He had a sort of self-contained quaintness and rough
humor impossible to describe; a certain cynical earnestness that puzzled one.
"The niggers were jealous of me over on the other place," he said,
"and so me and the old woman begged this piece of woods, and I cleared it
up myself. Made nothing for two years, but I reckon I've got a crop now."
The cotton looked tall and rich, and we praised it. He curtsied low, and then
bowed almost to the ground, with an imperturbable gravity that seemed almost
suspicious. Then he continued, "My mule died last week," -- a
calamity in this land equal to a devastating fire in town, -- "but a white
man loaned me another." Then he added, eyeing us, "Oh, I gets along
with white folks." We turned the conversation. "Bears? deer?" he
answered, "well, I should say there were," and he let fly a string of
brave oaths, as he told hunting-tales of the swamp. We left him standing still in
the middle of the road looking after us, and yet apparently not noticing us.
The Whistle place, which includes his bit of land,
was bought soon after the war by an English syndicate, the "Dixie Cotton
and Corn Company." A marvelous deal of style their factor put on, with his
servants and coach-and-six; so much so that the concern soon landed in
inextricable bankruptcy. Nobody lives in the old house now, but a man comes
each winter out of the North and collects his high rents. I know not which are
the more touching, -- such old empty houses, or the homes of the masters' sons.
Sad and bitter tales lie hidden back of those white doors, -- tales of poverty,
of struggle, of disappointment. A revolution such as that of '63 is a terrible thing;
they that rose rich in the morning often slept in paupers' beds. Beggars and
vulgar speculators rose to rule over them, and their children went astray. See
yonder sad-colored house, with its cabins and fences and glad crops! It is not
glad within; last month the prodigal son of the struggling father wrote home
from the city for money. Money! Where was it to come from? And so the son rose
in the night and killed his baby, and killed his wife, and shot himself dead.
And the world passed on.
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I
remember wheeling around a bend in the road beside a graceful bit of forest and
a singing brook. A long low house faced us, with porch and flying pillars,
great oaken door, and a broad lawn shining in the evening sun. But the
window-panes were gone, the pillars were worm-eaten, and the moss-grown roof
was falling in. Half curiously I peered through the unhinged door, and saw
where, on the wall across the hall, was written in once gay letters a faded
"Welcome."
Quite a contrast to the southwestern part of Dougherty County is the northwest.
Soberly timbered in oak and pine, it has none of that half-tropical luxuriance
of the southwest. Then, too, there are fewer signs of a romantic past, and more
of systematic modern land-grabbing and money-getting. White people are more in
evidence here, and farmer and hired labor replace to some extent the absentee
landlord and rack-rented tenant. The crops have neither the luxuriance of the
richer land nor the signs of neglect so often seen, and there were fences and
meadows here and there. Most of this land was poor, and beneath the notice of
the slave-baron, before the war. Since then his poor relations and foreign
immigrants have seized it. The returns of the farmer are too small to allow
much for wages, and yet he will not sell off small farms. There is the Negro
Sanford; he has worked fourteen years as overseer on the Ladson place, and
"paid out enough for fertilizers to have bought a farm," but the
owner will not sell off a few acres.
Two children -- a boy and a girl -- are hoeing sturdily in the fields on the
farm where Corliss works. He is smooth-faced and brown, and is fencing up his
pigs. He used to run a successful cotton-gin, but the Cotton Seed Oil Trust has
forced the price of ginning so low that he says it hardly pays him. He points
out a stately old house over the way as the home of "Pa Willis." We
eagerly ride over, for "Pa Willis" was the tall and powerful black
Moses who led the Negroes for a generation, and led them well. He was a Baptist
preacher, and when he died, two thousand black people followed him to the
grave; and now they preach his funeral sermon each year. His widow lives here,
-- a weazened, sharp-featured little woman, who curtsied quaintly as we greeted
her. Further on lives Jack Delson, the most prosperous Negro farmer
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in the county. It is a joy to meet him, -- a great broad-shouldered,
handsome black man, intelligent and jovial. Six hundred and fifty acres he
owns, and has eleven black tenants. A neat and tidy home nestled in a flower-garden,
and a little store stands beside it.[ii]
We pass the Munson place, where
a plucky white widow is renting and struggling; and the eleven hundred acres of
the Sennet plantation, with its Negro overseer. Then the character of the farms
begins to change. Nearly all the lands belong to Russian Jews; the overseers
are white, and the cabins are bare board-houses scattered here and there. The
rents are high, and day-laborers and "contract" hands abound. It is a
keen, hard struggle for living here, and few have time to talk. Tired with the
long ride, we gladly drive into Gillonsville. It is a silent cluster of
farmhouses standing on the crossroads, with one of its stores closed and the
other kept by a Negro preacher. They tell great tales of busy times at
Gillonsville before all the railroads came to Albany; now it is chiefly a
memory. Riding down the street, we stop at the preacher's and seat ourselves
before the door. It was one of those scenes one cannot soon forget: -- a wide,
low, little house, whose motherly roof reached over and sheltered a snug little
porch. There we sat, after the long hot drive, drinking cool water, -- the
talkative little store-keeper who is my daily companion; the silent old black
woman patching pantaloons and saying never a word; the ragged picture of
helpless misfortune who called in just to see the preacher; and finally the
neat matronly preacher's wife, plump, yellow, and intelligent. "Own
land?" said the wife; "well, only this house." Then she added
quietly. "We did buy seven hundred acres across up yonder, and paid for
it; but they cheated us out of it. Sells was the owner."
"Sells!" echoed the ragged misfortune, who was leaning against the
balustrade and listening, "he's a regular cheat. I worked for him
thirty-seven days this spring, and he paid me in card-board checks which were
to be cashed at the end of the month. But he never cashed them, -- kept putting
me off. Then the sheriff came and took my mule and corn and furni-ture --
" "Furniture? But furniture is exempt from seizure by law."
"Well, he took it just the same," said the hard-faced man.
Chapter Seven.
