The Souls of Black Folk
at the store across the way. Here, then, comes the tenant, Sam Scott,
after he has contracted with some absent landlord’s agent for hiring
forty acres of land; he fingers his hat nervously until the merchant
finishes his morning chat with Colonel Saunders, and calls out, “Well,
Sam, what do you want?” Sam wants him to “furnish” him,—_i.e._, to
advance him food and clothing for the year, and perhaps seed and tools,
until his crop is raised and sold. If Sam seems a favorable subject, he
and the merchant go to a lawyer, and Sam executes a chattel mortgage on
his mule and wagon in return for seed and a week’s rations. As soon as
the green cotton-leaves appear above the ground, another mortgage is
given on the “crop.” Every Saturday, or at longer intervals, Sam calls
upon the merchant for his “rations”; a family of five usually gets
about thirty pounds of fat side-pork and a couple of bushels of
cornmeal a month. Besides this, clothing and shoes must be furnished;
if Sam or his family is sick, there are orders on the druggist and
doctor; if the mule wants shoeing, an order on the blacksmith, etc. If
Sam is a hard worker and crops promise well, he is often encouraged to
buy more,—sugar, extra clothes, perhaps a buggy. But he is seldom
encouraged to save. When cotton rose to ten cents last fall, the shrewd
merchants of Dougherty County sold a thousand buggies in one season,
mostly to black men.
The security offered for such transactions—a crop and chattel
mortgage—may at first seem slight. And, indeed, the merchants tell many
a true tale of shiftlessness and cheating; of cotton picked at night,
mules disappearing, and tenants absconding. But on the whole the
merchant of the Black Belt is the most prosperous man in the section.
So skilfully and so closely has he drawn the bonds of the law about the
tenant, that the black man has often simply to choose between pauperism
and crime; he “waives” all homestead exemptions in his contract; he
cannot touch his own mortgaged crop, which the laws put almost in the
full control of the land-owner and of the merchant. When the crop is
growing the merchant watches it like a hawk; as soon as it is ready for
market he takes possession of it, sells it, pays the landowner his
rent, subtracts his bill for supplies, and if, as sometimes happens,
there is anything left, he hands it over to the black serf for his
Christmas celebration.
The direct result of this system is an all-cotton scheme of agriculture
and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant. The currency of the Black
Belt is cotton. It is a crop always salable for ready money, not
usually subject to great yearly fluctuations in price, and one which
the Negroes know how to raise. The landlord therefore demands his rent
in cotton, and the merchant will accept mortgages on no other crop.
There is no use asking the black tenant, then, to diversify his
crops,—he cannot under this system. Moreover, the system is bound to
bankrupt the tenant. I remember once meeting a little one-mule wagon on
the River road. A young black fellow sat in it driving listlessly, his
elbows on his knees. His dark-faced wife sat beside him, stolid,
silent.
“Hello!” cried my driver,—he has a most imprudent way of addressing
these people, though they seem used to it,—“what have you got there?”
“Meat and meal,” answered the man, stopping. The meat lay uncovered in
the bottom of the wagon,—a great thin side of fat pork covered with
salt; the meal was in a white bushel bag.
“What did you pay for that meat?”
“Ten cents a pound.” It could have been bought for six or seven cents
cash.
“And the meal?”
“Two dollars.” One dollar and ten cents is the cash price in town. Here
was a man paying five dollars for goods which he could have bought for
three dollars cash, and raised for one dollar or one dollar and a half.
Yet it is not wholly his fault. The Negro farmer started
behind,—started in debt. This was not his choosing, but the crime of
this happy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering along with its
Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war interludes and Philippine
matinees, just as though God really were dead. Once in debt, it is no
easy matter for a whole race to emerge.
In the year of low-priced cotton, 1898, out of three hundred tenant
families one hundred and seventy-five ended their year’s work in debt
to the extent of fourteen thousand dollars; fifty cleared nothing, and
the remaining seventy-five made a total profit of sixteen hundred
dollars. The net indebtedness of the black tenant families of the whole
county must have been at least sixty thousand dollars. In a more
prosperous year the situation is far better; but on the average the
majority of tenants end the year even, or in debt, which means that
they work for board and clothes. Such an economic organization is
radically wrong. Whose is the blame?
The underlying causes of this situation are complicated but
discernible. And one of the chief, outside the carelessness of the
nation in letting the slave start with nothing, is the widespread
opinion among the merchants and employers of the Black Belt that only
by the slavery of debt can the Negro be kept at work. Without doubt,
some pressure was necessary at the beginning of the free-labor system
to keep the listless and lazy at work; and even to-day the mass of the
Negro laborers need stricter guardianship than most Northern laborers.
Behind this honest and widespread opinion dishonesty and cheating of
the ignorant laborers have a good chance to take refuge. And to all
this must be added the obvious fact that a slave ancestry and a system
of unrequited toil has not improved the efficiency or temper of the
mass of black laborers. Nor is this peculiar to Sambo; it has in
history been just as true of John and Hans, of Jacques and Pat, of all
ground-down peasantries. Such is the situation of the mass of the
Negroes in the Black Belt to-day; and they are thinking about it.
Crime, and a cheap and dangerous socialism, are the inevitable results
of this pondering. I see now that ragged black man sitting on a log,
aimlessly whittling a stick. He muttered to me with the murmur of many
ages, when he said: “White man sit down whole year; Nigger work day and
night and make crop; Nigger hardly gits bread and meat; white man
sittin’ down gits all. _It’s wrong._” And what do the better classes of
Negroes do to improve their situation? One of two things: if any way
possible, they buy land; if not, they migrate to town. Just as
centuries ago it was no easy thing for the serf to escape into the
freedom of town-life, even so to-day there are hindrances laid in the
way of county laborers. In considerable parts of all the Gulf States,
and especially in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, the Negroes on
the plantations in the back-country districts are still held at forced
labor practically without wages. Especially is this true in districts
where the farmers are composed of the more ignorant class of poor
whites, and the Negroes are beyond the reach of schools and intercourse
with their advancing fellows. If such a peon should run away, the
sheriff, elected by white suffrage, can usually be depended on to catch
the fugitive, return him, and ask no questions. If he escape to another
county, a charge of petty thieving, easily true, can be depended upon
to secure his return. Even if some unduly officious person insist upon
a trial, neighborly comity will probably make his conviction sure, and
then the labor due the county can easily be bought by the master. Such
a system is impossible in the more civilized parts of the South, or
near the large towns and cities; but in those vast stretches of land
beyond the telegraph and the newspaper the spirit of the Thirteenth
Amendment is sadly broken. This represents the lowest economic depths
of the black American peasant; and in a study of the rise and condition
of the Negro freeholder we must trace his economic progress from the
modern serfdom.
Even in the better-ordered country districts of the South the free
movement of agricultural laborers is hindered by the migration-agent
laws. The “Associated Press” recently informed the world of the arrest
of a young white man in Southern Georgia who represented the “Atlantic
Naval Supplies Company,” and who “was caught in the act of enticing
hands from the turpentine farm of Mr. John Greer.” The crime for which
this young man was arrested is taxed five hundred dollars for each
county in which the employment agent proposes to gather laborers for
work outside the State. Thus the Negroes’ ignorance of the labor-market
outside his own vicinity is increased rather than diminished by the
laws of nearly every Southern State.
Similar to such measures is the unwritten law of the back districts and
small towns of the South, that the character of all Negroes unknown to
the mass of the community must be vouched for by some white man. This
is really a revival of the old Roman idea of the patron under whose
protection the new-made freedman was put. In many instances this system
has been of great good to the Negro, and very often under the
protection and guidance of the former master’s family, or other white
friends, the freedman progressed in wealth and morality. But the same
system has in other cases resulted in the refusal of whole communities
to recognize the right of a Negro to change his habitation and to be
master of his own fortunes. A black stranger in Baker County, Georgia,
for instance, is liable to be stopped anywhere on the public highway
and made to state his business to the satisfaction of any white
interrogator. If he fails to give a suitable answer, or seems too
independent or “sassy,” he may be arrested or summarily driven away.
Thus it is that in the country districts of the South, by written or
unwritten law, peonage, hindrances to the migration of labor, and a
system of white patronage exists over large areas. Besides this, the
chance for lawless oppression and illegal exactions is vastly greater
in the country than in the city, and nearly all the more serious race
disturbances of the last decade have arisen from disputes in the county
between master and man,—as, for instance, the Sam Hose affair. As a
result of such a situation, there arose, first, the Black Belt; and,
second, the Migration to Town. The Black Belt was not, as many assumed,
a movement toward fields of labor under more genial climatic
conditions; it was primarily a huddling for self-protection,—a massing
of the black population for mutual defence in order to secure the peace
and tranquillity necessary to economic advance. This movement took
place between Emancipation and 1880, and only partially accomplished
the desired results. The rush to town since 1880 is the
counter-movement of men disappointed in the economic opportunities of
the Black Belt.
In Dougherty County, Georgia, one can see easily the results of this
experiment in huddling for protection. Only ten per cent of the adult
population was born in the county, and yet the blacks outnumber the
whites four or five to one. There is undoubtedly a security to the
blacks in their very numbers,—a personal freedom from arbitrary
treatment, which makes hundreds of laborers cling to Dougherty in spite
of low wages and economic distress. But a change is coming, and slowly
but surely even here the agricultural laborers are drifting to town and
leaving the broad acres behind. Why is this? Why do not the Negroes
become land-owners, and build up the black landed peasantry, which has
for a generation and more been the dream of philanthropist and
statesman?
To the car-window sociologist, to the man who seeks to understand and
know the South by devoting the few leisure hours of a holiday trip to