American Adventures Part 33

A BIT OF RURAL GEORGIA

To walk with the morning and watch its rose unfold; To drowse with the noontide lulled in its heart of gold; To lie with the night-time and dream the dreams of old.

--MADISON CAWEIN.

A man I know studies as a hobby something which he calls "graphics"--the term denoting the reaction of the mind to certain words. One of the words he used in an experiment with me was "winter." When he said "winter" there instantly came to me the picture of a snowstorm in Quebec. I saw the front of the Hotel Frontenac at dusk through a mist of driving snow. There were lights in the windows. A heavy wind was blowing and as I leaned against it the front of my overcoat was plastered with sticky white flakes. The streets and sidewalks were deep with snow, and the only person besides myself in the vision was a sentry standing with his gun in the lee of the vestibule outside the local militia headquarters.

If my friend were to come now and try me with the word "spring," I know what picture it would call to mind. I should see the Burge plantation, near Covington, Georgia: the simple old white house with its rose-clad porch, or "gallery," its grove of tall trees, its carriage-house, its well-house, and other minor dependencies cl.u.s.tering nearby like chickens about a white hen, its background the rolling cottonfields, their red soil glowing salmon-colored in the sun. For, as I was never so conscious of the brutality of winter as in that evening snowstorm at Quebec, I was never so conscious, as at the time of our visit to the Burge plantation, of the superlative soft sweetness of the spring.

In seasons, as in other things, we have our individual preferences.

Melancholy natures usually love autumn, with its colorings so like sweet sad minor chords. But what kind of natures they are which rejoice in spring, which feel that with each spring the gloomy past is blotted out, and life, with all its opportunities, begins anew--what kind of natures they are which recognize April instead of January as the beginning of their year I shall not attempt to tell, for mine is such a nature, and one must not act at once as subject and diagnostician.

So long as I endure, spring can never come again without turning my thoughts to northwestern Georgia; to the peculiar penetrating warmth which pa.s.sed through the clothing to the body and made one feel that one was not surrounded by mere air, but was immersed in a dry bath of some infinitely superior vapor, a vapor volatile, soothing, tonic, distilled, it seemed, from the earth, from pine trees, tulip trees, balm-of-Gilead trees, (or "bam" trees, as they call them), blossoming Judas trees, Georgia crabapple, dogwood pink and white, peach blossom, wistaria, sweet-shrub, dog violets, pansy violets, Cherokee roses, wild honeysuckle and azalia, and the evanescent green of new treetops, all carried in solution in the sunlight. By day the brilliant cardinal adds his fine note of color and sound, but at night he is silent, and when the moon comes out one hears the mockingbird and, it may be also, two whippoorwills, one in the grove near the house, one in the woods across the road, calling back and forth. Then one is tempted to step down from the porch, and follow the voices of the birds into the vague recesses of a night webbed with dark tree shadows outlined in blue moonlight.

Small wonder it is, if, as report says, no houseparty on a southern plantation is a success unless young couples become "sort of engaged,"

and if in a region so provocative in springtime under a full moon, a distinction is recognized between being merely "engaged," and being engaged _to be married_.

One Georgia belle we met, a sloe-eyed girl whose reputation not only for beauty but for charm reached through the entire South, had, at the time of our visit, recently become engaged in the more grave and permanent sense.

"How does it seem?" a girl friend asked her.

"I feel," she answered, "like a man who has built up a large business and is about to go into the hands of a receiver."

Such ways as those girls have! Such voices! Such eyes! And such names, too! Names which would not fit at all into a northern setting, relatively so hard and unsentimental, but which, when one becomes accustomed to them, take their place gracefully and harmoniously in the southern picture. The South likes diminutives and combinations in its women's names. Its Harriets, Franceses, Sarahs, and Marthas, become Hatties, Fannies, Sallies and Patsies, and Patsy sometimes undergoes a further transition and becomes Pa.s.sie. Moreover, where these diminutives have been pa.s.sed down for several generations in a family, their origin is sometimes lost sight of, and the diminutive becomes the actual baptismal name. In one family of my acquaintance, for example, the name Pa.s.sie has long been handed down from mother to daughter. The original great-grandmother Pa.s.sie was christened Martha but was at first called Patsy; then, because her black mammy was also named Patsy, the daughter of the house came to be known, for purposes of differentiation, as Pa.s.sie, and when she married and had a daughter of her own, the child was christened Pa.s.sie. In this family the name May has more recently been adopted as a middle name, and it is customary for familiars of the youngest Pa.s.sie, to address her not merely as Pa.s.sie, but as Pa.s.sie-May.

The inclusion of the second name, in this fas.h.i.+on, is another custom not uncommon in the South. In Atlanta alone I heard of ladies habitually referred to as Anna-Laura, Hattie-May, Lollie-Belle, Sally-Maud, Nora-Belle, Mattie-Sue, Emma-Belle, Lottie-Belle, Susie-May, Lula-Belle, Sallie-Fannie, Hattie-Fannie, Lou-Ellen, Allie-Lou, Clara-Belle, Mary-Ella, and Hattie-Belle. Another young lady was known to her friends as Jennie-D.

The train from Atlanta set us down at Covington, Georgia, or rather at the station which lies between the towns of Covington and Oxford--for when this railroad was built neither town would allow it a right of way, and to this day each is connected with the station by a street car line, either line equipped with one diminutive car, a pair of disconsolate mules, and a driver. Covington is the County seat, a quiet southern town, part old, part new, with a look of rural prosperity about it.

Stopping at the postoffice to inquire for mail we saw this peremptory sign displayed:

When the window is down don't bang around and ask for a stamp or two.

--J.L. CALLAWAY, Postmaster.

As the window was down we tiptoed out and went upon our way, driving through Oxford before going to the plantation. This town was named for Oxford, England, and is, like its namesake, a college town. A small and very old Methodist educational inst.i.tution, with a pretty though ragged campus and fine trees, is all there is to Oxford, save a row of ante-bellum houses. One of them, a pleasant white mansion, half concealed by the huge magnolias which stand in its front yard, was at one time the residence of General Longstreet. The old front gate, hanging on a stone post, was made by the general with his own hands--and well made, for it is to-day as good a gate as ever. Corra Harris lived at one time in Oxford; her husband, Rev. Lundy H. Harris, having been a professor at the college.

Though plantation life has necessarily changed since the war, I do not believe that there is in the whole South a plantation where it has changed less than on the Burge plantation. In appearance the place is not as Sherman's men found it, for they tore down the fences and ruined the beautiful old-fas.h.i.+oned garden, and neither has been replaced; nor, of course, is it run, so far as practical affairs are concerned, as it was before the War; that is to say, instead of being operated as a unit of nine-hundred acres, it is now worked chiefly on shares, and is divided up into "one mule farms" and "two mule farms," these being tracts of about thirty and sixty acres, respectively, thirty acres being approximately the area which can be worked by a man and a mule.

Practically all the negroes on the place--perhaps a hundred in number--are either former slaves of the Burge family, or the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of slaves who lived on the plantation. That is one reason why the plantation is less changed in spirit than are many others. The Burges were religious people, used their slaves kindly, and brought them up well, so that the negroes on the plantation to-day are respectable, and in some instances, exemplary people, very different from the vagrant negro type which has developed since the War, making labor conditions in some parts of the South uncertain, and plantation life, in some sections, not safe for unprotected women.

The present proprietors of the Burge plantation are two ladies, granddaughters of Mrs. Thomas Burge, who lived here, a widow, with a little daughter, when General Sherman and his hosts came by. These ladies frequently spend months at the plantation without male protectors save only the good negroes of their own place, who look after them with the most affectionate devotion. True, the ladies keep an ugly looking but mild mannered bulldog, of which the negroes are generally afraid; true also they carry a revolver when they drive about the country in their motor, and keep revolvers handy in their rooms; but these precautions are not taken, they told me, because of any doubts about the men on their place, their one fear being of tramp negroes, pa.s.sing by.

Of their own negroes several are remarkable, particularly one old couple, perfect examples of the fine ante-bellum type so much beloved in the South, and so much regretted as it disappears.

During the period of twenty years or more, while the owners were absent, growing up and receiving their education, the whole place, indoors and out, was in charge of Uncle George and Aunt Sidney. The two lived, and still do live, in one wing of the house--over which Aunt Sidney presides as housekeeper and cook, as her mother, Aunt Liddy, did before her. Aunt Liddy died only a short time ago, aged several years over a hundred.

Uncle George supervises all the business of the plantation, as he has done for thirty or forty years. He collects all rents, markets the crops and receives the payments, makes purchases, pays bills, and keeps peace between the tenants--nor could any human being be more honorable or possess a finer, sweeter dignity. As for devotion, when the little girls who were away returned after all the years as grown women, every ribbon, every pin in that house was where it had been left, and the place was no less neat than if the "white folks" had constantly remained there.

Before Georgia went dry it was customary for negroes of the rougher sort to get drunk in town every Sat.u.r.day night. Drunken negroes would consequently be pa.s.sing by, all night, on their way to their homes, yelling and (after the manner of their kind when intoxicated) shooting their revolvers in the air. Every Sat.u.r.day night, when the ladies were at home, Uncle George would quietly take his gun and place himself on the porch, remaining there until the last of the obstreperous wayfarers had pa.s.sed.

Uncle Abe and Uncle Wiley are two other worthy and venerable men who live in cabins on the place. Both were there when Sherman's army pa.s.sed upon its devastating way, and both were carried off, as were thousands upon thousands of other negroes out of that wide belt across the State of Georgia, which was overrun in the course of the March to the Sea.

"Ah was goin' to mill wid de ox-caht," Uncle Abe told me, "when de soljas dey kim 'long an' got me. Dey tol' me, 'Heah, n.i.g.g.a! Git out dat caht, an' walk behin'. When _it_ moves _you_ move; when _it_ stops _you_ stop!' An' like dat Ah walk all de way to Savannah [two hundred and fifty miles]. Den, after dat, dey took us 'long up No'th--me an' ma brotha Wiley, ovah deh."

I asked him what regiment he went with. He said it was the Twenty-second Indiana, and that Dr. Joe Stilwell, of that regiment, who came from a place near Madison, Indiana ("Ah reckon de town was name Brownstown"), was good to him. An officer whom he knew, he said, was Captain John Snodgra.s.s, and another Major Tom Shay.

"All Ah was evvuh wo'ied about aftuh dey kim tuck me," he declared, "was gittin' somep'n t' eat. Dat kinda put me on de wonduh, sometahmes, but dey used us all right. Dr. Pegg--him dat did de practice on de plantation befo' de Wah--he tol' de n.i.g.g.as dat de Yankees would put gags in deh moufs an' lead 'em eroun' like dey wuz cattle. But deh wa' n't like dat nohow. I b'longed to de Secon' Division, Thuhd B'gade, Fou'teenth Co' [corps]. Cap'n Snodgra.s.s, he got to be lieutenant-cuhnel.

He was de highes' man Ah evuh hel' any convuhsation wid, but I _saw_ all de gennuls of dat ahmy."

Uncle Wiley is older than Uncle Abe. He was already a grown man with three children when taken away by some of Sherman's men. He told me he was with the Fifty-second Ohio, and mentioned Captain Shepard.

The two brothers got as far as Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

"We got los' togedduh in de U.S. buildin' in dat city," said Uncle Wiley. "De President of de U.S. right at dat tahme he was daid. He was kill', Ah don' s'pose it wuz a week befo' we got to Wash'n, D.C."

"How did you happen to come all the way back?" I asked.

"Well-l," ruminated the old man, "home was always a-restin' on mah min'.

Ah kep' thinkin' 'bout home. So aftuh de Wah ceasted Ah jus' kim 'long back."

Many of the old plantation customs still survive. A little before noon the bell is rung to summon the hands from the cotton fields. Over the red plowed soil you hear a darky cry, a melodious "Oh-_oh_-oh!" as wild and musical as the cries of the south-Italian olive gatherers. The planters cease their work, mules stand still, traces are unhooked from singletrees, and chain-ends thrown over the mules' backs; then the men mount the animals and ride in to the midday meal, the women trudging after. Those who rent land, or work on shares, go to their own cabins, while those employed by the hour or by the day (the rate of pay is ten cents an hour or seventy-five cents a day) come to the kitchen to be fed. Nor is it customary to stop there at feeding negroes. As in the old days, any negro who has come upon an errand or who has "stopped by" to sell supplies, or for whatever purpose, expects to stay for "dinner,"

and makes it a point to arrive about noon. Thus from sixteen to twenty negroes are fed daily at the Burge plantation house.

The old Christmas traditions are likewise kept up. On Christmas day the negroes come flocking up to the house for their gifts. Their first concern is to attempt to cry "Christmas gift!" to others, before it can be said to them--for according to ancient custom the one who says the words first must have a gift from the other.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

A YOUNG METROPOLIS

An observer approaching a strange city should be "neutral even in thought." He may listen to what is said of the city, but he must not permit his opinions to take form in advance; for, like other gossip, gossip about cities is unreliable, and the casual stranger's estimate of cities is not always founded upon broad appreciations. But though it is unwise to judge of cities by what is said of them, it is perhaps worth remarking that one may often judge of men by what they say of cities.

I remember an American manufacturer, broken down by overwork, who, when he looked at Pompeii, could think only of the wasted possibilities of Vesuvius as a power plant, and I remember two traveling salesmen on a southern railroad train who expressed scorn for the exquisite city of Charleston because--they said--it is but a poor market place for suspenders and barbers' supplies. There are those who think of Boston only as headquarters of the shoe trade, others who think of it only in the terms of culture, and still others who regard it solely as an abode of negrophiles.

In the case of the chief city of Alabama, however, my companion and I noticed, as we journeyed through the South, that reports were singularly in accord. Birmingham is too young to have any Civil War history. Her history is the history of the steel industry in the South, and one hears always of that: of the affluence of the city when the industry is thriving, and hard times when it is not. One is invariably told that Birmingham is not a southern city, but a northern city in the South, and the chief glories of the place, aside from steel, are (if one is to believe rumors current upon railroad trains and elsewhere), a twenty-seven story building, Senator Oscar Underwood, the distinguished Democratic leader, and the Tutwiler Hotel. Even in Atlanta it is conceded that the Tutwiler is a good hotel, and when Atlanta admits that anything in Birmingham is good it may be considered as established that the thing is very, very good--for Birmingham and Atlanta view each other with the same degree of cordiality as is exchanged between St. Louis and Kansas City, Minneapolis and St. Paul, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Having been, in the course of our southern wanderings, in several very bad hotels, and having heard the Tutwiler compared with Chicago's Blackstone, my companion and I held eager antic.i.p.ation of this hostelry.

Nor were our hopes dashed by a first glimpse of the city on the night of our arrival. It was a modern-looking city--just the sort of city that would have a fine new hotel. The railroad station through which we pa.s.sed after leaving the train was not the usual dingy little southern station, but an admirable building, and the streets along which we presently found ourselves gliding in an automobile hack, were wide, smooth, and brightly illuminated by cl.u.s.tered boulevard lights.

True, we had long since learned not to place too much reliance upon the nocturnal aspects of cities. A city seen by night is like a woman dressed for a ball. Darkness drapes itself about her as a black-velvet evening gown, setting off, in place of neck and arms, the softly glowing facades of marble buildings; lights are her diamond ornaments, and her perfume is the cool fragrance of night air. Almost all cities, and almost all women, look their best at night, and there are those which, though beautiful by night, sink, in their daylight aspect, to utter mediocrity.

Presently our motor drew up before the entrance of the Tutwiler--a proud entrance, all revolving doors and glitter and promise. A brisk bell boy came running for our bags. The signs were of the best.

The lobby, though s.p.a.cious, was crowded; the decorations and equipment were of that rich sumptuousness attained only in the latest and most magnificent American hotels; there was music, and as we made our way along we caught a glimpse, in pa.s.sing, of an attractive supper room, with small table-lights casting their soft radiance upon white s.h.i.+rt fronts and the faces of pretty girls. In all it was a place to make glad the heart of the weary traveler, and to cause him to wonder whether his dress suit would be wrinkled when he took it from his trunk.