The Brothers' War Part 21

CHAPTER XVII

THE RACE QUESTION--THE SITUATION IN DETAIL

The distinction between the two cla.s.ses of southern negroes, glanced at in the last chapter, is to be always kept in mind--at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end, of our discussion. Its importance commands that we say something of it here. Consider how enormously the two differ in numbers. Five per cent of these negroes, that is, some four hundred thousand, in the upper; ninety-five per cent, that is, seven million and four hundred thousand, in the lower cla.s.s. The latter, being nineteen times as large as the other, first demands attention.

In the country many of the men are croppers. A group of negroes--generally parents and children--do the labor of preparation, cultivation, and gathering, while the owner contributes the land, necessary animals, and feed for the latter. The croppers get half the crop, and the land owner half. The latter retains out of their half whatever he has advanced the croppers. The advances must be limited with firmness, otherwise they will cause loss. These croppers are the great bulk of the agricultural laborers. So few of the men work for standing wages that they need not be noticed. In the towns the men subsist upon day labor, the pay of which ranges from 50 cents to $1.25. It hardly averages 80 cents. Some of the women, both in country and town, take places as house servants and nurses at weekly wages that vary from $1 to $2 with board. The growing disinclination of the women to these places is much stronger in the country than in town. In country and town the women do laundry for the whites at an average price per family of a dollar a week; and they get jobs of sewing, cleaning kitchen utensils, scrubbing, etc. In the country these women do some field labor, sometimes plowing, often hoeing. If trained in childhood they make expert cotton-pickers. But the women agricultural workers steadily decrease in number.

The negro has inherited from a thousand generations of forefathers, bred in the humid and enervating tropical West African climate, a laziness which is the extreme contrary of Caucasian energy and enterprise.[161]

Thus we are told of him in Jamaica, "In many cases a field negro will not work for his employer more than four days a week. He may till his own plot of ground on one of the other days or not as the spirit moves him."[162]

The first Sat.u.r.day in June, 1904, I saw the thriving little town of Abbeville, South Carolina, thronged with idle negroes from the surrounding plantations. A merchant, who was kept busy in his store, offered to pay several of them 75 cents to cut up a load of firewood--something more than the market price. They do not work on Sat.u.r.day unless compelled by something unusual; and so each one replied at once, without any inquiry if the logs were large or small, seasoned or not, and thus finding whether the job was hard or easy, that the weather was too hot. And yet these negroes all exhibited in their clothes and hungry looks unmistakable signs of want. Those that superintend the gangs working for contractors in Atlanta and the vicinity, all--except now and then one who has managed to form a small party of picked laborers--tell me that it is very seldom that a negro can be induced to work Sat.u.r.day; if that does happen he will make up his lost holiday by not returning to work before Tuesday. Your cook, nurse, maid, or black servant of any kind will every now and then suddenly inconvenience you by taking an utterly unnecessary rest. When Booker Was.h.i.+ngton was starting his system of industrial training, as he tells us, "Not a few of the fathers and mothers urged that because the race had worked for 250 years or more, it ought to have a chance to rest."[163]

The negro has likewise inherited lack of forecast and providence. If at the end of the year he finds himself with a small purse from his part of the crop, standing wages, or profits from a tenancy, he will often squander much of it for a top buggy, a piano which none of his family can play, or expensive furniture. Those in the gangs just mentioned always want to fool away their money before it is made. If one has been advanced $4, and his wages amount to $5, he will hardly ever abridge his holiday by turning up to get the dollar balance when the others who have not been advanced are paid Sat.u.r.day night. He will waste his cash on watermelons and fish that an average white will not even smell. When forced down to it he can live contentedly upon almost nothing. A very large proportion of both s.e.xes are happy upon a real meal every two or three days, and a sly change of mate every two or three weeks. Toombs, who was always looking at Cuffee, p.r.o.nounced him "rich in the fewness of his wants." Bring him out more clearly to yourselves by comparison with an Irishman struggling up from starvation wages of hard daily work into comfort and ease. Reflect over the only success a cotton mill has had with black labor, which was due to whipping the operatives for breach of duty.[164]

In Atlanta--which of course is but like other southern cities in the particular now to be mentioned--many of the men live upon their women. It is a common saying that you cannot keep a colored cook if you do not allow her to carry the keys. There is great complaint that the colored washerwomen help their dependents out of the clothes. The criminal cla.s.s of negro men, women, and children is large and growing much faster than that of the whites. Two very striking developments are the negro burglar and the negro footpad. There are many breakings and entries every year in Atlanta, many holdups of pedestrians, and nearly all of them are by negroes. Now and then a negro s.n.a.t.c.hes a lady's purse from her on the street. The prisoners sent to the Atlanta stockade during the twelve months beginning December 15, 1902, were

Colored. Whites.

Men 2325 1030 Women 1168 100 Boys 471 18 ---- ---- 3964 1148

According to the twelfth census, the negro population of Atlanta was 35,727, and the white 54,090. So, while there are in every thousand of the whites 21 of these criminals, there are in every thousand of the blacks 110. But the case is worse still. About an equal number of convicts escaped the stockade by paying fines. Allowance for this will much increase the per cent of negro criminals. I wish I could get the approximate number whose fines are paid by their employers, white friends, mothers, wives, and other relatives. I have observed facts which make me confident that it is large. The number of boys that in one year were sent to the stockade--471--is a most important fact, showing as it does that a large per cent of negroes become criminals in childhood. Nearly all of these boys have been abandoned by their fathers. There are just as many abandoned girls in the city. Of course under the prevailing conditions the proportion of criminals in each generation must increase portentously.

The depth of the negroes' debas.e.m.e.nt is shown in the impurity of the women. This is another inheritance from their ancestors. The "ancient African chast.i.ty" alleged by Professor DuBois,[165] if it ever existed, was entirely prehistoric. A white who has not been bred in close contact with the race is quite unable to understand the degree and universality of this impurity. I will ill.u.s.trate by a case which occurred in a prosperous town of Middle Georgia not very long before I settled in Atlanta. A prominent negro preacher had been caught in adultery. The woman, who was the mother of several children, and her husband, were both members of the same church as the preacher, and of unctuous piety. The detection was so complete and certain, and it had immediately become so notorious that church notice was unavoidable. The problem was how to whitewash the affair. The office of a lawyer friend of mine in the town last mentioned was waited on by a member of the church--a say-nothing sort of negro, who always applied for leave to attend the meetings at which the preacher was being tried. This office boy had returned several times with the news, when inquired of, that nothing had been done. At last, one day he answered that they had cleared the preacher. My friend commanded that this be explained. The darkie said, in his laconic way, "Well, he 'fessed de act, but he 'scused de act." "How in the world did he excuse it?" was asked.

"He said his heart wasn't in it." "Were you fools enough to believe that?" was e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. The negro, with an air as superior as was compatible with the great politeness of his race, replied, "He said it was de debble dat had his body dar; but all de time his soul was at de throne, praying for G.o.d's people. In course we couldn't blame him for what de debble done."

This defence, suggesting the make-believe loan of his body by the friar in the Decameron to the angel Gabriel, which, of course, had never been heard of by the accused, convinced the church, willing to be convinced. It appeased the injured husband, willing to be appeased. It fully vindicated the gay clergyman and the erring sister, who were in effect told to go and sin no more with such little discretion.

Had this case, or another like it, occurred at that time or since in any other negro church of that region, there would have been acquittal and justification of the accused, although perhaps the good plea and the right psychological moment to make it might not have been so aptly found.[166]

The habits and customs of the race mix men and women always and everywhere; and in those opportunities each one of the young and the old, married and unmarried of both s.e.xes--of even children just arrived at p.u.b.erty--chases a short-lived amour with ever eager zest.[167] The blacker the Lothario the more show of white blood he seeks in his fancies. Now and then furious desire for real white overmasters him. Surprising some unattended angel of a girl or matron, he chooses to see Rome and then die.

Her avengers pour kerosene on him and burn him to a crisp. His l.u.s.ty fellows think to themselves what Hermes, in the song of Demodocus, says to Apollo of the mishap to Ares and golden Aphrodite--that is, that for the same brief pleasure they would each gladly endure thrice the penalty.

Professor DuBois says that the chast.i.ty of the negro women has improved so greatly "that even in the back country districts not above nine per cent of the population may be cla.s.sed as distinctly lewd."[168] Inquire of honest witnesses who have good opportunities of observing--the farmers, small and large, and the storekeepers, in the country, those who do contract work and the police in the cities--of all who have close access to negroes at all times, and especially at night; and the concurring report will be that right correction of Professor DuBois' statement just given cannot stop with mere inversion of his percentages; that the fact is, no negroes in this lower cla.s.s which we are now dealing with are chaste except those whose physical condition has made a virtue of necessity.[169]

It is sadly true that men of all races are too p.r.o.ne to unchast.i.ty. It is chaste women that give human amelioration its main propulsion; for they make every husband to know that the children around his fireside are his own. If I were asked in what one particular had my life-long comparison convinced me that the two races are farthest apart, I would unhesitatingly answer, in the character of the women of each--the average white woman, from her marriage on, forgetting all other men but her husband, the black wife always with a paramour, if to be had.

The tie which holds the family stanch is wanting. The men often cast aside their domestic burdens, and begin their lives over in a distant region with a new woman. The wife and mother left behind does not mope. She has generally prearranged satisfactorily with another man.

Disease is making great ravages in this lower cla.s.s of negroes. I never knew of a case of consumption among the slaves, and I can recall but one serious case of pneumonia. Now these two diseases slay the negroes by hundreds. Before the war the negro was regarded as immune from yellow fever, and almost immune from dangerous malarial affections. He has lost his charm against these also. There has been a dreadful increase of insanity among them. The only ante-bellum case that I can recall was due to an accidental injury of the head.

It is but natural that the death rate among the negroes mounts fearfully.

Their great multiplication has far outrun their reasonable means of subsistence. We note what a heavy burden a large family is to a man in hard times. I must believe that the thirteenth census will show a still greater negro death-rate.

We shall sum up as to this lower cla.s.s after we have described the displacement of black by white labor.

Now we must consider the upper cla.s.s. We need look only at its main divisions, to wit, the negro farmers, and the well-to-do urban negroes.

The rose-colored statements of Professor DuBois as to the former cannot impose upon residents of the south.[170] I shall begin with the negro farm owners of Georgia. In what he says of them in the second Bulletin mentioned in the last footnote he hardly ever looks away from the report of the comptroller-general of the State. I shall deal with relevant facts about which the comptroller-general is not required to concern himself--and of which the census takes but little note. Where agricultural land commands only a few dollars per acre a large part of it will get into possession of purchasers under t.i.tle-bond who expect to work it and pay for it in annual instalments out of its produce. Of course the vendor sees to it that he himself escapes taxation on this land, and so the purchasers, although they may have paid him but a trifle or nothing at all, are a.s.sessed as if they were the real owners, while the vendors are retaining the t.i.tle as security. Soon after the war many a white planter, in order to get out of a failing business and procure capital for something else, sold his land in whole or part. He could find no purchaser but some exceptional negro; and the latter could buy only on credit. Much of the lands so sold had to be retaken because the purchasers failed to meet their payments. It was my observation when I left Greene county twenty-three years ago that in that and the adjoining counties the number of negro owners of agricultural land was decreasing, and it is my information that such is now the case. This indicates an important fact not shown in the reports of the comptroller-general, to wit, that a large number of the negroes appearing therein as owners are really not owners, and are losing their holdings.

The next fact to be mentioned is that, as I learn from residents, many farms of which a negro had acquired the fee are heavily enc.u.mbered, and often fall to the local merchants.

Further, as Professor DuBois states, "the land owned by negroes is usually the less fertile, worn-out tracts."[171]

According to the comptroller's report for 1903 the acres of white owners.h.i.+p are 29,762,259, returned at a value of $121,629,094; which is $4,139 per acre. The per cent of the total value owned by the blacks is 4.07. This result--that the negroes own a fraction over four per cent of the improved lands of Georgia--must be corrected by proper deduction for purchase money debts, and also for enc.u.mbrances. It must be further corrected by another deduction. The negroes land is considerably below the average of the rest in quality and market value. Yet while the white returns at $4.08 an acre, the other returns at $4.13. This higher valuation is not because of conscientious avoidance of tax-dodging. It comes from that optimistic exaggeration characterizing the race, which is vividly ill.u.s.trated in Booker Was.h.i.+ngton's gravely stating that the love of knowledge by the average negroes of the south has become the "marvel of mankind,"[172] and in the extravagant a.s.sertion of Professor DuBois as to their chast.i.ty commented on a few pages back.

There are a few negro owners of farming lands that are prospering, but I am credibly informed that as a cla.s.s they are falling behind.

The tenants--the renters, as they are commonly called--are the more prosperous negro farmers. The whites hold on to their lands more firmly than they did some years ago, and the tenantry cla.s.s both of whites and blacks is becoming larger. The whites in the Black Belt all believe that the negroes generally belong to societies, in which they have bound themselves not to hire to the former as house servants or for standing wages except when they cannot otherwise subsist. So most of the cotton is made by tenants and croppers. They grade as many bad and mediocre, and a few good. The latter work with a will, and make fair crops. They send their children off to expensive schools. When they die the property they have acc.u.mulated is distributed and squandered, and a new tenant--generally, of late years, a white--succeeds.

It is to be observed everywhere that some reliable white man is generally backing or superintending a negro farmer that can get credit. The negro farmers, in almost any large county in the Black Belt that you may select, that are an exception can usually be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Their implements and methods are primitive;[173] and they employ hardly any labor except that of their own families.[174] As soon as the negro farmer's children have grown up they leave him; the negro laborers in his neighborhood become more idle every year, and they become also more scarce. It is not to be thought of that he employ white labor. This cla.s.s will give no help to the new agriculture, which I have glanced at in the last chapter.

Twenty-odd years ago when I left the planting section, the white landowners all preferred negro tenants. But white tenants are now preferred. They do not send their children to school as much as the negroes do, but keep them at work while the hoeing, which is the first main thing to the cotton farmer, and the gathering, which is the second and last and greatest by far, are unfinished. The negroes' hoeing and other cultivation are bad; and after the crop is laid by until Christmas, during which time comes the all-important laborious cotton-picking, they spend so much of their nights at church they are incapacitated from doing good work. They lose much time by going to camp-meetings in the late summer and early autumn, and riding on railroad excursion trains at every opportunity. The white tenants and their families, by careful "chopping out" and hoeing, get the proper "stand" and they pick clean; the negroes fall behind in both respects. The bettering credit of the white steadily hits the negro harder. The only tenants who are good for the rent are the cla.s.s a few of whom have cash of their own and the rest can get credit with the local merchant for necessary supplies. Such tenants the landowners seek after, and find every year more and more among the whites, and less and less among the blacks.

Every year a larger part of the staple crops of the south is made by whites. The negroes have lately decreased in Kentucky. Mr. Tillinghast brings forward, from Hoffman, weighty proofs that in the State just mentioned, which has just become the princ.i.p.al seat of tobacco growing, and also in the largest yielding counties of Virginia, that black labor constantly grows less of the crop.[175] He uses Hoffman, too, to show that white labor is slowly expelling black from rice production.[176] The old south believed that rice culture was sure death to the white, Mr.

Tillinghast quotes, as to the greatest agricultural product of the south, this from Professor Wilc.o.x: "It would probably be a conservative statement to say that at least four-fifths of the cotton was ... in 1860 grown by negroes; at the present time [i.e. in 1899] probably not one-half is thus grown."[177]

Compare this further: "He [Hoffman] finds that 'with less than one-half as large a colored population as Mississippi,... Texas produced in 1894 almost three times the cotton crop of the former State.' Even more significant is the fact that with almost twice the colored population of 1860, Mississippi, in 1894, produced less cotton than thirty-four years ago.'"[178]

Very significant are the facts lately published by the Agricultural Department which show that in an area of some sixty-three per cent of the production, the white outpicks the negro. "One hundred and fifty-two counties, with a negro population amounting to seventy-five per cent of the whole, averaged one hundred and eleven pounds per day, whereas one hundred and ninety-two counties, with a white population const.i.tuting seventy-five per cent or more of the whole, averaged one hundred and forty-eight pounds per day,"[179] that is, the white picked one-third more than the black. There are other statements in this bulletin of importance here. I can give this one only:

"In the Indian Territory and Oklahoma, where the whites represent about eighty per cent of the population (including Indians) the average number of pounds picked is greater than in any of the States except Arkansas and Texas. The highest number of pounds picked in any State is one hundred and seventy-two in Texas, the counties represented having a white population of eighty per cent."[180]

In Arkansas the population of the counties mentioned was fifty-nine per cent white, the rest negro.

It is almost certain that the foregoing estimates do great injustice to the whites. They a.s.sume that there is no inferiority of the negro to the white except the per diem quant.i.ty of cotton picked. Ponder the statement as to a county of Georgia which I now give.

"According to the ginners' report, Madison county made sixteen thousand bales of cotton in 1902. Its negro population is about three thousand, its white, twelve thousand. The negroes are one-fifth and the whites four-fifths, and out of every five bales the negroes ought to have made at least one and the whites four. But the former do not average as well as the others. The white who runs one plow, whose wife and children do the hoeing and picking, probably makes ten bales. The negro who runs one plow, whose wife and children hoe and pick, hardly makes more than five or six bales. The greater part of the cotton credited to negro labor is made by negroes who are superintended by white men."[181]

Weighing all that I have just told, I am as sure as I can be of anything in the near future, that the negro will soon be of greatly diminished importance as laborer, cropper, renter, or farming landowner in the staples of southern agriculture.

There are other kinds of property than improved lands set out in the report of the comptroller-general, such as $3,531,471 of horses, cattle, and stock of all kinds, $810,553 of plantation and mechanical tools. Such needs no separate consideration. These holdings do not in view of what we have told, give the negro farmer any strong foothold.

Nearly all that remains of the rural upper cla.s.s--the negroes in trades, professions, mercantile business, etc.--is so evidently dependent upon the ma.s.ses of the lower cla.s.s, now gravitating away from the country that the most of it can be incidentally disposed of at certain places later on in the chapter and the rest be treated as negligible.

The "city or town property" of the negroes of Georgia, according to the report of the comptroller-general for 1903, amounts in value to $44,668,620. From all that I can learn, while it is largely, it is considerably less, enc.u.mbered than the real and personal property of the negro farmers.

A large admixture of Caucasian blood marks nearly every member of the upper cla.s.s both in country and town. I note that occasionally a coalblack acquires property, on which his miser grip is tighter than that of an acc.u.mulating Irishman; but such are very few. There is hardly a well-to-do negro in work, occupation, profession, or property, who is not several shades at least removed from coalblack. Mr. Tillinghast observes "that the porters, cooks, and waiters on a Pullman train are usually mulattoes, while the laborers in the gang on the roadbed are nearly all black."[182]

In this day when the pictures of prominent men and women are in many ill.u.s.trated magazines and papers, it is to be observed that hardly one of a negro shows unmixed blood. Thus a recent monthly contains pictures of Judson W. Lyons, R. H. Terrell, Kelly Miller, Archibald H. Grinke, T.

Thomas Fortune, Daniel Murray, and Booker Was.h.i.+ngton.[183] Of these the third only, to my eye, seems all negro; and I cannot be confident that he is wholly without appreciable white blood. His head has the shape of a white man's.

It is my observation that a negro entirely pure in blood hardly ever gets out of the lower cla.s.s; and that if he does he is much more unprogressive than an average member of the upper cla.s.s. Note what Bishop Holsey says of how amalgamation with the white improves the descendants of the blacks, in a pa.s.sage quoted later herein.

This upper cla.s.s contains only persons of exceptional blood, talent, or some other rare fortune. The higher education, and the education which is now best of all for the negro--industrial education--is for this little circle only. Hampton and Tuskegee do not open to all comers. Mr.

Tillinghast convincingly proves that those who have got really good training at the two inst.i.tutions just named are far above the average negro in physical stamina, education, and other important particulars.[184] The graduates go forth, not to benefit their brothers in the lower cla.s.s, but to win for themselves surer and higher standing in the upper cla.s.s.

Some of the resources which this urban section of the upper cla.s.s have enjoyed for a while they are losing, as I shall tell when I hereinafter summarize the details of white encroachment. But other resources open to them. Such are professions like dentists, eye, ear, and throat surgeons, doctors, barbers, and others who must content themselves with only colored patronage; such the growing retail trade, multiplying boarding-houses, restaurants, and saloons, finding their custom exclusively in the increasing negro town population. The number of negroes who become teachers, lecturers, preachers, authors, etc., steadily augments. Other resources of this upper cla.s.s can be pointed out, but it needs not here.

Although nearly always when the father who has struggled up dies, his property, as we saw to be the case with the negro farmer, goes, and no child succeeds to his occupation, there is perhaps generally compensation for his loss by the accession of some other who has got up out of the lower cla.s.s by an extraordinarily lucky jump. It is clear that the cla.s.s is without the wholesome influence of uninterrupted inheritance, from generation to generation, of faculty and character progressively improving. Take this inheritance away from the men and women of any enlightened nation and it would be to lower them very near to the level of barbarism. It is also nearly certain that there will be no further infusion of white blood into this cla.s.s, by reason of the hostility to inter-mixture which becomes stronger--yea, intenser--every year. The probable consequence will be the dilution of much of the white blood now in the upper cla.s.s through the lower cla.s.s to such an extent that it will practically disappear. But some of it, I think, will persist, perhaps increase in degree--preserved by the aversion of many to intermarriage with persons less white than themselves, and occasional intermarriage with white persons in northern States.