The Souls of Black Folk
with homes in cities almost exclusively. This is primarily because we
have so little accurate knowledge of country life. Here in Dougherty
County one may find families of eight and ten occupying one or two
rooms, and for every ten rooms of house accommodation for the Negroes
there are twenty-five persons. The worst tenement abominations of New
York do not have above twenty-two persons for every ten rooms. Of
course, one small, close room in a city, without a yard, is in many
respects worse than the larger single country room. In other respects
it is better; it has glass windows, a decent chimney, and a trustworthy
floor. The single great advantage of the Negro peasant is that he may
spend most of his life outside his hovel, in the open fields.
There are four chief causes of these wretched homes: First, long custom
born of slavery has assigned such homes to Negroes; white laborers
would be offered better accommodations, and might, for that and similar
reasons, give better work. Secondly, the Negroes, used to such
accommodations, do not as a rule demand better; they do not know what
better houses mean. Thirdly, the landlords as a class have not yet come
to realize that it is a good business investment to raise the standard
of living among labor by slow and judicious methods; that a Negro
laborer who demands three rooms and fifty cents a day would give more
efficient work and leave a larger profit than a discouraged toiler
herding his family in one room and working for thirty cents. Lastly,
among such conditions of life there are few incentives to make the
laborer become a better farmer. If he is ambitious, he moves to town or
tries other labor; as a tenant-farmer his outlook is almost hopeless,
and following it as a makeshift, he takes the house that is given him
without protest.
In such homes, then, these Negro peasants live. The families are both
small and large; there are many single tenants,—widows and bachelors,
and remnants of broken groups. The system of labor and the size of the
houses both tend to the breaking up of family groups: the grown
children go away as contract hands or migrate to town, the sister goes
into service; and so one finds many families with hosts of babies, and
many newly married couples, but comparatively few families with
half-grown and grown sons and daughters. The average size of Negro
families has undoubtedly decreased since the war, primarily from
economic stress. In Russia over a third of the bridegrooms and over
half the brides are under twenty; the same was true of the antebellum
Negroes. Today, however, very few of the boys and less than a fifth of
the Negro girls under twenty are married. The young men marry between
the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five; the young women between twenty
and thirty. Such postponement is due to the difficulty of earning
sufficient to rear and support a family; and it undoubtedly leads, in
the country districts, to sexual immorality. The form of this
immorality, however, is very seldom that of prostitution, and less
frequently that of illegitimacy than one would imagine. Rather, it
takes the form of separation and desertion after a family group has
been formed. The number of separated persons is thirty-five to the
thousand,—a very large number. It would of course be unfair to compare
this number with divorce statistics, for many of these separated women
are in reality widowed, were the truth known, and in other cases the
separation is not permanent. Nevertheless, here lies the seat of
greatest moral danger. There is little or no prostitution among these
Negroes, and over three-fourths of the families, as found by
house-to-house investigation, deserve to be classed as decent people
with considerable regard for female chastity. To be sure, the ideas of
the mass would not suit New England, and there are many loose habits
and notions. Yet the rate of illegitimacy is undoubtedly lower than in
Austria or Italy, and the women as a class are modest. The plague-spot
in sexual relations is easy marriage and easy separation. This is no
sudden development, nor the fruit of Emancipation. It is the plain
heritage from slavery. In those days Sam, with his master’s consent,
“took up” with Mary. No ceremony was necessary, and in the busy life of
the great plantations of the Black Belt it was usually dispensed with.
If now the master needed Sam’s work in another plantation or in another
part of the same plantation, or if he took a notion to sell the slave,
Sam’s married life with Mary was usually unceremoniously broken, and
then it was clearly to the master’s interest to have both of them take
new mates. This widespread custom of two centuries has not been
eradicated in thirty years. To-day Sam’s grandson “takes up” with a
woman without license or ceremony; they live together decently and
honestly, and are, to all intents and purposes, man and wife. Sometimes
these unions are never broken until death; but in too many cases family
quarrels, a roving spirit, a rival suitor, or perhaps more frequently
the hopeless battle to support a family, lead to separation, and a
broken household is the result. The Negro church has done much to stop
this practice, and now most marriage ceremonies are performed by the
pastors. Nevertheless, the evil is still deep seated, and only a
general raising of the standard of living will finally cure it.
Looking now at the county black population as a whole, it is fair to
characterize it as poor and ignorant. Perhaps ten per cent compose the
well-to-do and the best of the laborers, while at least nine per cent
are thoroughly lewd and vicious. The rest, over eighty per cent, are
poor and ignorant, fairly honest and well meaning, plodding, and to a
degree shiftless, with some but not great sexual looseness. Such class
lines are by no means fixed; they vary, one might almost say, with the
price of cotton. The degree of ignorance cannot easily be expressed. We
may say, for instance, that nearly two-thirds of them cannot read or
write. This but partially expresses the fact. They are ignorant of the
world about them, of modern economic organization, of the function of
government, of individual worth and possibilities,—of nearly all those
things which slavery in self-defence had to keep them from learning.
Much that the white boy imbibes from his earliest social atmosphere
forms the puzzling problems of the black boy’s mature years. America is
not another word for Opportunity to _all_ her sons.
It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp
and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. We often
forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul. Ignorant
it may be, and poverty stricken, black and curious in limb and ways and
thought; and yet it loves and hates, it toils and tires, it laughs and
weeps its bitter tears, and looks in vague and awful longing at the
grim horizon of its life,—all this, even as you and I. These black
thousands are not in reality lazy; they are improvident and careless;
they insist on breaking the monotony of toil with a glimpse at the
great town-world on Saturday; they have their loafers and their
rascals; but the great mass of them work continuously and faithfully
for a return, and under circumstances that would call forth equal
voluntary effort from few if any other modern laboring class. Over
eighty-eight per cent of them—men, women, and children—are farmers.
Indeed, this is almost the only industry. Most of the children get
their schooling after the “crops are laid by,” and very few there are
that stay in school after the spring work has begun. Child-labor is to
be found here in some of its worst phases, as fostering ignorance and
stunting physical development. With the grown men of the county there
is little variety in work: thirteen hundred are farmers, and two
hundred are laborers, teamsters, etc., including twenty-four artisans,
ten merchants, twenty-one preachers, and four teachers. This narrowness
of life reaches its maximum among the women: thirteen hundred and fifty
of these are farm laborers, one hundred are servants and washerwomen,
leaving sixty-five housewives, eight teachers, and six seamstresses.
Among this people there is no leisure class. We often forget that in
the United States over half the youth and adults are not in the world
earning incomes, but are making homes, learning of the world, or
resting after the heat of the strife. But here ninety-six per cent are
toiling; no one with leisure to turn the bare and cheerless cabin into
a home, no old folks to sit beside the fire and hand down traditions of
the past; little of careless happy childhood and dreaming youth. The
dull monotony of daily toil is broken only by the gayety of the
thoughtless and the Saturday trip to town. The toil, like all farm
toil, is monotonous, and here there are little machinery and few tools
to relieve its burdensome drudgery. But with all this, it is work in
the pure open air, and this is something in a day when fresh air is
scarce.
The land on the whole is still fertile, despite long abuse. For nine or
ten months in succession the crops will come if asked: garden
vegetables in April, grain in May, melons in June and July, hay in
August, sweet potatoes in September, and cotton from then to Christmas.
And yet on two-thirds of the land there is but one crop, and that
leaves the toilers in debt. Why is this?
Away down the Baysan road, where the broad flat fields are flanked by
great oak forests, is a plantation; many thousands of acres it used to
run, here and there, and beyond the great wood. Thirteen hundred human
beings here obeyed the call of one,—were his in body, and largely in
soul. One of them lives there yet,—a short, stocky man, his dull-brown
face seamed and drawn, and his tightly curled hair gray-white. The
crops? Just tolerable, he said; just tolerable. Getting on? No—he
wasn’t getting on at all. Smith of Albany “furnishes” him, and his rent
is eight hundred pounds of cotton. Can’t make anything at that. Why
didn’t he buy land! _Humph!_ Takes money to buy land. And he turns
away. Free! The most piteous thing amid all the black ruin of war-time,
amid the broken fortunes of the masters, the blighted hopes of mothers
and maidens, and the fall of an empire,—the most piteous thing amid all
this was the black freedman who threw down his hoe because the world
called him free. What did such a mockery of freedom mean? Not a cent of
money, not an inch of land, not a mouthful of victuals,—not even
ownership of the rags on his back. Free! On Saturday, once or twice a
month, the old master, before the war, used to dole out bacon and meal
to his Negroes. And after the first flush of freedom wore off, and his
true helplessness dawned on the freedman, he came back and picked up
his hoe, and old master still doled out his bacon and meal. The legal
form of service was theoretically far different; in practice, task-work
or “cropping” was substituted for daily toil in gangs; and the slave
gradually became a metayer, or tenant on shares, in name, but a laborer
with indeterminate wages in fact.
Still the price of cotton fell, and gradually the landlords deserted
their plantations, and the reign of the merchant began. The merchant of
the Black Belt is a curious institution,—part banker, part landlord,
part banker, and part despot. His store, which used most frequently to
stand at the cross-roads and become the centre of a weekly village, has
now moved to town; and thither the Negro tenant follows him. The
merchant keeps everything,—clothes and shoes, coffee and sugar, pork
and meal, canned and dried goods, wagons and ploughs, seed and
fertilizer,—and what he has not in stock he can give you an order for