The Souls of Black Folk
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 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 meaning 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
blacksmith 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 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.
The Jew is the heir 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 the Jew 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 wholesalers, 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 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! 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 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 inquire after the black
boy in Albany, whom it was said a policeman had shot and killed for
loud talking on the sidewalk. 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 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 marvellous 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