The Souls of Black Folk
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. 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 marvellous 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 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 schoolhouse 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-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 naked 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 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 luxuriance 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. 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