The Souls of Black Folk
the son rose in the night and killed his baby, and killed his wife, and
shot himself dead. And the world passed on.
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 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.
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 storekeeper 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 cardboard 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 furniture—” “Furniture? But furniture is exempt from seizure
by law.” “Well, he took it just the same,” said the hard-faced man.
VIII.
Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece
But the Brute said in his breast, “Till the mills I grind have ceased,
The riches shall be dust of dust, dry ashes be the feast!
“On the strong and cunning few
Cynic favors I will strew;
I will stuff their maw with overplus until their spirit dies;
From the patient and the low
I will take the joys they know;
They shall hunger after vanities and still an-hungered go.
Madness shall be on the people, ghastly jealousies arise;
Brother’s blood shall cry on brother up the dead and empty skies.”
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY.
Have you ever seen a cotton-field white with harvest,—its golden fleece
hovering above the black earth like a silvery cloud edged with dark
green, its bold white signals waving like the foam of billows from
Carolina to Texas across that Black and human Sea? I have sometimes
half suspected that here the winged ram Chrysomallus left that Fleece
after which Jason and his Argonauts went vaguely wandering into the
shadowy East three thousand years ago; and certainly one might frame a
pretty and not far-fetched analogy of witchery and dragons’ teeth, and
blood and armed men, between the ancient and the modern quest of the
Golden Fleece in the Black Sea.
And now the golden fleece is found; not only found, but, in its
birthplace, woven. For the hum of the cotton-mills is the newest and
most significant thing in the New South to-day. All through the
Carolinas and Georgia, away down to Mexico, rise these gaunt red
buildings, bare and homely, and yet so busy and noisy withal that they
scarce seem to belong to the slow and sleepy land. Perhaps they sprang
from dragons’ teeth. So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still
bows beneath her sceptre. Even the markets that once defied the parvenu
have crept one by one across the seas, and then slowly and reluctantly,
but surely, have started toward the Black Belt.
To be sure, there are those who wag their heads knowingly and tell us
that the capital of the Cotton Kingdom has moved from the Black to the
White Belt,—that the Negro of to-day raises not more than half of the
cotton crop. Such men forget that the cotton crop has doubled, and more
than doubled, since the era of slavery, and that, even granting their
contention, the Negro is still supreme in a Cotton Kingdom larger than
that on which the Confederacy builded its hopes. So the Negro forms
to-day one of the chief figures in a great world-industry; and this,
for its own sake, and in the light of historic interest, makes the
field-hands of the cotton country worth studying.
We seldom study the condition of the Negro to-day honestly and
carefully. It is so much easier to assume that we know it all. Or
perhaps, having already reached conclusions in our own minds, we are
loth to have them disturbed by facts. And yet how little we really know
of these millions,—of their daily lives and longings, of their homely
joys and sorrows, of their real shortcomings and the meaning of their
crimes! All this we can only learn by intimate contact with the masses,
and not by wholesale arguments covering millions separate in time and
space, and differing widely in training and culture. To-day, then, my
reader, let us turn our faces to the Black Belt of Georgia and seek
simply to know the condition of the black farm-laborers of one county
there.
Here in 1890 lived ten thousand Negroes and two thousand whites. The
country is rich, yet the people are poor. The keynote of the Black Belt
is debt; not commercial credit, but debt in the sense of continued
inability on the part of the mass of the population to make income
cover expense. This is the direct heritage of the South from the
wasteful economies of the slave _régime;_ but it was emphasized and
brought to a crisis by the Emancipation of the slaves. In 1860,
Dougherty County had six thousand slaves, worth at least two and a half
millions of dollars; its farms were estimated at three millions,—making
five and a half millions of property, the value of which depended
largely on the slave system, and on the speculative demand for land
once marvellously rich but already partially devitalized by careless
and exhaustive culture. The war then meant a financial crash; in place
of the five and a half millions of 1860, there remained in 1870 only
farms valued at less than two millions. With this came increased
competition in cotton culture from the rich lands of Texas; a steady
fall in the normal price of cotton followed, from about fourteen cents
a pound in 1860 until it reached four cents in 1898. Such a financial
revolution was it that involved the owners of the cotton-belt in debt.
And if things went ill with the master, how fared it with the man?
The plantations of Dougherty County in slavery days were not as
imposing and aristocratic as those of Virginia. The Big House was
smaller and usually one-storied, and sat very near the slave cabins.
Sometimes these cabins stretched off on either side like wings;
sometimes only on one side, forming a double row, or edging the road
that turned into the plantation from the main thoroughfare. The form
and disposition of the laborers’ cabins throughout the Black Belt is
to-day the same as in slavery days. Some live in the self-same cabins,
others in cabins rebuilt on the sites of the old. All are sprinkled in
little groups over the face of the land, centering about some
dilapidated Big House where the head-tenant or agent lives. The general
character and arrangement of these dwellings remains on the whole
unaltered. There were in the county, outside the corporate town of
Albany, about fifteen hundred Negro families in 1898. Out of all these,
only a single family occupied a house with seven rooms; only fourteen
have five rooms or more. The mass live in one- and two-room homes.
The size and arrangements of a people’s homes are no unfair index of
their condition. If, then, we inquire more carefully into these Negro
homes, we find much that is unsatisfactory. All over the face of the
land is the one-room cabin,—now standing in the shadow of the Big
House, now staring at the dusty road, now rising dark and sombre amid
the green of the cotton-fields. It is nearly always old and bare, built
of rough boards, and neither plastered nor ceiled. Light and
ventilation are supplied by the single door and by the square hole in
the wall with its wooden shutter. There is no glass, porch, or
ornamentation without. Within is a fireplace, black and smoky, and
usually unsteady with age. A bed or two, a table, a wooden chest, and a
few chairs compose the furniture; while a stray show-bill or a
newspaper makes up the decorations for the walls. Now and then one may
find such a cabin kept scrupulously neat, with merry steaming
fireplaces and hospitable door; but the majority are dirty and
dilapidated, smelling of eating and sleeping, poorly ventilated, and
anything but homes.
Above all, the cabins are crowded. We have come to associate crowding