The Souls of Black Folk
unravelling the snarl of centuries,—to such men very often the whole
trouble with the black field-hand may be summed up by Aunt Ophelia’s
word, “Shiftless!” They have noted repeatedly scenes like one I saw
last summer. We were riding along the highroad to town at the close of
a long hot day. A couple of young black fellows passed us in a
muleteam, with several bushels of loose corn in the ear. One was
driving, listlessly bent forward, his elbows on his knees,—a
happy-go-lucky, careless picture of irresponsibility. The other was
fast asleep in the bottom of the wagon. As we passed we noticed an ear
of corn fall from the wagon. They never saw it,—not they. A rod farther
on we noted another ear on the ground; and between that creeping mule
and town we counted twenty-six ears of corn. Shiftless? Yes, the
personification of shiftlessness. And yet follow those boys: they are
not lazy; to-morrow morning they’ll be up with the sun; they work hard
when they do work, and they work willingly. They have no sordid,
selfish, money-getting ways, but rather a fine disdain for mere cash.
They’ll loaf before your face and work behind your back with
good-natured honesty. They’ll steal a watermelon, and hand you back
your lost purse intact. Their great defect as laborers lies in their
lack of incentive beyond the mere pleasure of physical exertion. They
are careless because they have not found that it pays to be careful;
they are improvident because the improvident ones of their acquaintance
get on about as well as the provident. Above all, they cannot see why
they should take unusual pains to make the white man’s land better, or
to fatten his mule, or save his corn. On the other hand, the white
land-owner argues that any attempt to improve these laborers by
increased responsibility, or higher wages, or better homes, or land of
their own, would be sure to result in failure. He shows his Northern
visitor the scarred and wretched land; the ruined mansions, the
worn-out soil and mortgaged acres, and says, This is Negro freedom!
Now it happens that both master and man have just enough argument on
their respective sides to make it difficult for them to understand each
other. The Negro dimly personifies in the white man all his ills and
misfortunes; if he is poor, it is because the white man seizes the
fruit of his toil; if he is ignorant, it is because the white man gives
him neither time nor facilities to learn; and, indeed, if any
misfortune happens to him, it is because of some hidden machinations of
“white folks.” On the other hand, the masters and the masters’ sons
have never been able to see why the Negro, instead of settling down to
be day-laborers for bread and clothes, are infected with a silly desire
to rise in the world, and why they are sulky, dissatisfied, and
careless, where their fathers were happy and dumb and faithful. “Why,
you niggers have an easier time than I do,” said a puzzled Albany
merchant to his black customer. “Yes,” he replied, “and so does yo’
hogs.”
Taking, then, the dissatisfied and shiftless field-hand as a
starting-point, let us inquire how the black thousands of Dougherty
have struggled from him up toward their ideal, and what that ideal is.
All social struggle is evidenced by the rise, first of economic, then
of social classes, among a homogeneous population. To-day the following
economic classes are plainly differentiated among these Negroes.
A “submerged tenth” of croppers, with a few paupers; forty per cent who
are metayers and thirty-nine per cent of semi-metayers and
wage-laborers. There are left five per cent of money-renters and six
per cent of freeholders,—the “Upper Ten” of the land. The croppers are
entirely without capital, even in the limited sense of food or money to
keep them from seed-time to harvest. All they furnish is their labor;
the land-owner furnishes land, stock, tools, seed, and house; and at
the end of the year the laborer gets from a third to a half of the
crop. Out of his share, however, comes pay and interest for food and
clothing advanced him during the year. Thus we have a laborer without
capital and without wages, and an employer whose capital is largely his
employees’ wages. It is an unsatisfactory arrangement, both for hirer
and hired, and is usually in vogue on poor land with hard-pressed
owners.
Above the croppers come the great mass of the black population who work
the land on their own responsibility, paying rent in cotton and
supported by the crop-mortgage system. After the war this system was
attractive to the freedmen on account of its larger freedom and its
possibility for making a surplus. But with the carrying out of the
crop-lien system, the deterioration of the land, and the slavery of
debt, the position of the metayers has sunk to a dead level of
practically unrewarded toil. Formerly all tenants had some capital, and
often considerable; but absentee landlordism, rising rack-rent, and
failing cotton have stripped them well-nigh of all, and probably not
over half of them to-day own their mules. The change from cropper to
tenant was accomplished by fixing the rent. If, now, the rent fixed was
reasonable, this was an incentive to the tenant to strive. On the other
hand, if the rent was too high, or if the land deteriorated, the result
was to discourage and check the efforts of the black peasantry. There
is no doubt that the latter case is true; that in Dougherty County
every economic advantage of the price of cotton in market and of the
strivings of the tenant has been taken advantage of by the landlords
and merchants, and swallowed up in rent and interest. If cotton rose in
price, the rent rose even higher; if cotton fell, the rent remained or
followed reluctantly. If the tenant worked hard and raised a large
crop, his rent was raised the next year; if that year the crop failed,
his corn was confiscated and his mule sold for debt. There were, of
course, exceptions to this,—cases of personal kindness and forbearance;
but in the vast majority of cases the rule was to extract the uttermost
farthing from the mass of the black farm laborers.
The average metayer pays from twenty to thirty per cent of his crop in
rent. The result of such rack-rent can only be evil,—abuse and neglect
of the soil, deterioration in the character of the laborers, and a
widespread sense of injustice. “Wherever the country is poor,” cried
Arthur Young, “it is in the hands of metayers,” and “their condition is
more wretched than that of day-laborers.” He was talking of Italy a
century ago; but he might have been talking of Dougherty County to-day.
And especially is that true to-day which he declares was true in France
before the Revolution: “The metayers are considered as little better
than menial servants, removable at pleasure, and obliged to conform in
all things to the will of the landlords.” On this low plane half the
black population of Dougherty County—perhaps more than half the black
millions of this land—are to-day struggling.
A degree above these we may place those laborers who receive money
wages for their work. Some receive a house with perhaps a garden-spot;
then supplies of food and clothing are advanced, and certain fixed
wages are given at the end of the year, varying from thirty to sixty
dollars, out of which the supplies must be paid for, with interest.
About eighteen per cent of the population belong to this class of
semi-metayers, while twenty-two per cent are laborers paid by the month
or year, and are either “furnished” by their own savings or perhaps
more usually by some merchant who takes his chances of payment. Such
laborers receive from thirty-five to fifty cents a day during the
working season. They are usually young unmarried persons, some being
women; and when they marry they sink to the class of metayers, or, more
seldom, become renters.
The renters for fixed money rentals are the first of the emerging
classes, and form five per cent of the families. The sole advantage of
this small class is their freedom to choose their crops, and the
increased responsibility which comes through having money transactions.
While some of the renters differ little in condition from the metayers,
yet on the whole they are more intelligent and responsible persons, and
are the ones who eventually become land-owners. Their better character
and greater shrewdness enable them to gain, perhaps to demand, better
terms in rents; rented farms, varying from forty to a hundred acres,
bear an average rental of about fifty-four dollars a year. The men who
conduct such farms do not long remain renters; either they sink to
metayers, or with a successful series of harvests rise to be
land-owners.
In 1870 the tax-books of Dougherty report no Negroes as landholders. If
there were any such at that time,—and there may have been a few,—their
land was probably held in the name of some white patron,—a method not
uncommon during slavery. In 1875 ownership of land had begun with seven
hundred and fifty acres; ten years later this had increased to over
sixty-five hundred acres, to nine thousand acres in 1890 and ten
thousand in 1900. The total assessed property has in this same period
risen from eighty thousand dollars in 1875 to two hundred and forty
thousand dollars in 1900.
Two circumstances complicate this development and make it in some
respects difficult to be sure of the real tendencies; they are the
panic of 1893, and the low price of cotton in 1898. Besides this, the
system of assessing property in the country districts of Georgia is
somewhat antiquated and of uncertain statistical value; there are no
assessors, and each man makes a sworn return to a tax-receiver. Thus
public opinion plays a large part, and the returns vary strangely from
year to year. Certainly these figures show the small amount of
accumulated capital among the Negroes, and the consequent large
dependence of their property on temporary prosperity. They have little
to tide over a few years of economic depression, and are at the mercy
of the cotton-market far more than the whites. And thus the
land-owners, despite their marvellous efforts, are really a transient
class, continually being depleted by those who fall back into the class
of renters or metayers, and augmented by newcomers from the masses. Of
one hundred land-owners in 1898, half had bought their land since 1893,
a fourth between 1890 and 1893, a fifth between 1884 and 1890, and the
rest between 1870 and 1884. In all, one hundred and eighty-five Negroes
have owned land in this county since 1875.
If all the black land-owners who had ever held land here had kept it or
left it in the hands of black men, the Negroes would have owned nearer
thirty thousand acres than the fifteen thousand they now hold. And yet
these fifteen thousand acres are a creditable showing,—a proof of no
little weight of the worth and ability of the Negro people. If they had
been given an economic start at Emancipation, if they had been in an
enlightened and rich community which really desired their best good,
then we might perhaps call such a result small or even insignificant.
But for a few thousand poor ignorant field-hands, in the face of
poverty, a falling market, and social stress, to save and capitalize
two hundred thousand dollars in a generation has meant a tremendous
effort. The rise of a nation, the pressing forward of a social class,
means a bitter struggle, a hard and soul-sickening battle with the
world such as few of the more favored classes know or appreciate.
Out of the hard economic conditions of this portion of the Black Belt,
only six per cent of the population have succeeded in emerging into
peasant proprietorship; and these are not all firmly fixed, but grow
and shrink in number with the wavering of the cotton-market. Fully