The Souls of Black Folk
guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship between
the black lowly and the black men emancipated by training and culture.
The function of the Negro college, then, is clear: it must maintain the
standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of
the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact
and cooperation. And finally, beyond all this, it must develop men.
Above our modern socialism, and out of the worship of the mass, must
persist and evolve that higher individualism which the centres of
culture protect; there must come a loftier respect for the sovereign
human soul that seeks to know itself and the world about it; that seeks
a freedom for expansion and self-development; that will love and hate
and labor in its own way, untrammeled alike by old and new. Such souls
aforetime have inspired and guided worlds, and if we be not wholly
bewitched by our Rhinegold, they shall again. Herein the longing of
black men must have respect: the rich and bitter depth of their
experience, the unknown treasures of their inner life, the strange
rendings of nature they have seen, may give the world new points of
view and make their loving, living, and doing precious to all human
hearts. And to themselves in these the days that try their souls, the
chance to soar in the dim blue air above the smoke is to their finer
spirits boon and guerdon for what they lose on earth by being black.
I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move
arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women
glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between
the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon
Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all
graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell
above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is
this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of
Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between
Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?
VII.
Of the Black Belt
I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
As the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.
Look not upon me, because I am black,
Because the sun hath looked upon me:
My mother’s children were angry with me;
They made me the keeper of the vineyards;
But mine own vineyard have I not kept.
THE SONG OF SOLOMON.
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 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 to-day 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.
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 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 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