Following the Color Line Part 12

"Do you know what I do with such cases?" he said. "Come with me, I'll show you."

He took me back through his house to the broad porch and reaching up to a shelf over the door he took down a hickory waggon spoke, as long as my arm.

"When there's trouble," he said, "I just go down with that and lay one or two of 'em out. That ends the trouble. We've got to do it; they're like children and once in a while they simply have to be punished. It's far better for them to take it this way, from a white man who is their friend, than to be arrested and taken to court and sent to the chain-gang."

_Troubles of the Landlord_

Planters told me of all sorts of difficulties they had to meet with their tenants. One of them, after he had spent a whole evening telling me of the troubles which confronted any man who tried to work Negroes, summed it all up with the remark:

"You've just got to make up your mind that you are dealing with children, and handle them as firmly and kindly as you know how."

He told me how hard it was to get a Negro tenant even in the busy season to work a full week--and it was often only by withholding the weekly food allowance that it could be done. Sat.u.r.day afternoon (or "evening," as they say in the South) the Negro goes to town or visits his friends. Often he spends all day Sunday driving about the country and his mule comes back so worn out that it cannot be used on Monday. There are often furious religious revivals which break into the work, to say nothing of "frolics"

and fish suppers at which the Negroes often remain all night long. Many of them are careless with their tools, wasteful of supplies, irresponsible in their promises. One planter told me how he had built neat fences around the homes of his Negroes, and fixed up their houses to encourage them in thrift and give them more comfort, only to have the fences and even parts of the houses used for firewood.

Toward fall, if the season has been bad, and the crop of cotton is short, so short that a Negro knows that he will not be able to "pay out" and have anything left for himself, he will sometimes desert the plantation entirely, leaving the cotton unpicked and a large debt to the landlord. If he attempts that, however, he must get entirely away, else the planter will chase him down and bring him back to his work. Illiterate, without discipline or training, with little ambition and much indolence, a large proportion of Negro tenants are looked after and driven like children or slaves. I say "a large proportion"--but there are thousands of industrious Negro landowners and tenants who are rapidly getting ahead--as I shall show in my next chapter.

In this connection it is a noteworthy fact that a considerable number of the white tenants require almost as much attention as the Negroes, though they are, of course, treated in an entirely different way. One planter in Alabama said to me:

"Give me Negroes every time. I wouldn't have a low-down white tenant on my place. You can get work out of any Negro if you know how to handle him; but there are some white men who won't work and can't be driven, because they are white."

_Race Troubles in the Country_

In short, when slavery was abolished it gave place to a sort of feudal tenantry system which continues widely to-day. And it has worked with comparative satisfaction, at least to the landlords, until within the last few years, when the next step in the usual evolution of human society--industrial and urban development--began seriously to disturb the feudal equilibrium of the cotton country. It was a curious idea--human enough--that men should attempt to legislate slaves immediately into freedom. But nature takes her own methods of freeing slaves; they are slower than men's ways, but more certain.

The change now going on in the South from the feudal agricultural life to sharpened modern conditions has brought difficulties for the planter compared with which all others pale into insignificance. I mean the scarcity of labour. Industry is competing with agriculture for the limited supply of Negro workers. Negroes, responding to exactly the same natural laws that control the white farmers, have been moving cityward, entering other occupations, migrating west or north--where more money is to be made. Agricultural wages have therefore gone up and rents, relatively, have gone down, and had the South not been blessed for several years with wonderful returns from its monopoly crop, there might have been a more serious crisis.

_Cry of the South: "More Labour"_

If the South to-day could articulate its chief need, we should hear a single great shout:

"More labour!"

Out of this struggle for tenants, servants, and workers has grown the chief complications of the Negro problem--and I am not forgetting race prejudice, or the crimes against women. Indeed, it has seemed to me that the chief difficulty in understanding the Negro problem lies in showing how much of the complication in the South is due to economic readjustments and how much to instinctive race repulsion or race prejudice.

_A Tenant Stealer_

In one town I visited--not Hawkinsville--I was standing talking with some gentlemen in the street when I saw a man drive by in a buggy.

"Do you see that man?" they asked me. I nodded.

"Well, he is the greatest tenant-stealer in this country."

I heard a good deal about these "tenant stealers." A whole neighbourhood will execrate one planter who, to keep his land cultivated, will lure away his neighbours' Negroes. Sometimes he will offer more wages, sometimes he will give the tenants better houses to live in, and sometimes he succeeds by that sheer force of a masterful personality which easily controls an ignorant tenantry.

I found, moreover, that there was not only a struggle between individual planters for Negro tenants, but between states and sections. Many of the old farms in South Carolina and Alabama have been used so long that they require a steady and heavy annual treatment of fertiliser, with the result that cotton growing costs more than it does in the rich alluvial lands of Mississippi, or the newer regions of Arkansas and Texas. The result is that the planters of the West, being able to pay more wages and give the tenants better terms, lure away the Negroes of the East. Georgia and other states have met this compet.i.tive disadvantage in the usual way in which such disadvantages, when first felt but not fully understood, are met, by counteracting legislation. Georgia has made the most stringent laws to keep her Negroes on the land. The Georgian code (Section 601) says:

Any person who shall solicit or procure emigrants, or shall attempt to do so, without first procuring a licence as required by law, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour.

Ex-Congressman William H. Fleming, one of the ablest statesmen of Georgia, said:

"Land and other forms of capital cannot spare the Negro and will not give him up until a subst.i.tute is found. His labour is worth millions upon millions. In Georgia we now make it a crime for anyone to solicit emigrants without taking out a licence, and then we make the licence as nearly prohibitive as possible. One of the most dangerous occupations for any one to follow in this state would be that of an emigrant agent--as some have found by experience."

In this connection I have an account published in April, 1907, in an Augusta newspaper of just such a case:

The heaviest fine given in the city court of Richmond County within the last two years was imposed upon E. F. Arnett yesterday morning.

He was sentenced to pay a fine of one thousand dollars or serve six months in the county jail.

Arnett was convicted of violating the state emigration laws regarding the carrying of labour out of the state. He was alleged to have employed thirteen Negroes to work on the Georgia and Atlantic Railroad, which operates in this state and Alabama. The jury on the case returned a verdict of guilty when court convened yesterday, although it had been reported that a mistrial was probable.

_"Peg Leg" Williams_

A famous railroad emigration agent called "Peg Leg" Williams, who promoted Negro emigration from Georgia to Mississippi and Texas a few years ago, was repeatedly prosecuted and finally driven out of business. In a letter which he wrote some time ago to the Atlanta _Const.i.tution_ he said:

I know of several counties not a hundred miles from Atlanta where it's more than a man's life is worth to go in to get Negroes to move to some other state. There are farmers that would not hesitate to shoot their brother were he to come from Mississippi to get "his n.i.g.g.e.rs," as he calls them, even though he had no contract with them.

I know personally numbers of Negro men who have moved West and after acc.u.mulating a little, return to get a brother, sister, or an old father or mother, and they were compelled to return without them, their lives being imperilled; they had to leave and leave quick.

In view of such a feeling it may be imagined how futile is the talk of the deportation of the Negro race. What the Southern planter wants to-day is not fewer Negroes but more Negroes--Negroes who will "keep their place."

_Laws to Make the Negro Work_

Many other laws have been pa.s.sed in the Southern states which are designed to keep the Negro on the land, and having him there, to make him work.

The contract law, the abuses of which lead to peonage and debt slavery, is an excellent example--which I shall discuss more fully in the next chapter. The criminal laws, the chain-gang system, and the hiring of Negro convicts to private individuals are all, in one way or another, devices to keep the Negro at work on farms, in brick-yards and in mines. The vagrancy laws, not unlike those of the North and excellent in their purpose, are here sometimes executed with great severity. In Alabama the last legislature pa.s.sed a law under which a Negro arrested for vagrancy must prove that he is not a vagrant. In short, the old rule of law that a man is innocent until proved guilty is here reversed for the Negro so that the burden of proving that he is not guilty of vagrancy rests upon him, not upon the state. The last Alabama legislature also pa.s.sed a stringent game law, one argument in its favour being that by preventing the Negro from pot-hunting it would force him to work more steadily in the cotton fields.

_Race Hatred Versus Economic Necessity_

One of the most significant things I saw in the South--and I saw it everywhere--was the way in which the white people were torn between their feeling of race prejudice and their downright economic needs. Hating and fearing the Negro as a race (though often loving individual Negroes), they yet want him to work for them; they can't get along without him. In one impulse a community will rise to mob Negroes or to drive them out of the country because of Negro crime or Negro vagrancy, or because the Negro is becoming educated, acquiring property and "getting out of his place"; and in the next impulse laws are pa.s.sed or other remarkable measures taken to keep him at work--because the South can't get along without him. From the Atlanta _Georgian_ I cut recently a letter which well ill.u.s.trates the way in which racial hatred clashes with economic necessity.

TROUBLES OF COUNTRY FOLK

But aren't there two sides to every question? Here we are out here in the country, right in the midst of hundreds of Negroes, and do you know, sir, that all this talk about lynching and ku-kluxing is frightening the farm hands to such an extent we begin to fear that soon the farmers will sustain a great loss of labour, by their running away? Already it is beginning to have its effect. After night the Negroes are afraid to leave their farm to go anywhere on errands of business. Why, sir, two miles from this town, the Negroes are afraid to come here to trade at night. The country merchants are feeling the force of it very sorely, and if this foolishness isn't stopped their losses in fall trade will be very heavy.

Even some of the ladies of our community are complaining of this rashness. That it is demoralising the labour in the home department.

So in conclusion, in behalf of my community and other country communities, I feel it my duty to raise a warning voice against all such new foolish ku-kluxism.

Mableton, Ga.

T. J. LOWE.

While I was in Georgia a case came up which threw a flood of light upon the inner complexities of this problem. In the county of Habersham in North Georgia the population is largely of the type known as "poor white"--the famous mountain folk who were never slave-owners and many of whom fought in the Union army during the Civil War. Habersham is one of the "white counties" which is growing whiter. It has about 2,000 Negroes and 12,000 whites--many of the latter having come in from the North to grow peaches and raise sheep. One of the Negroes of Habersham County was Frank Grant, described by a white neighbour as "a Negro of good character, a property owner, setting an example of thrift and honesty that ought to have made his example a benefit to any community."

Grant had saved money from his labour and bought a home. He was such a good worker that people were willing sometimes to pay him twice the wages of the average labourer, white or black. On the night of December 16, 1906, the Negro's house was fired into by a party of white men who then went to the house of his tenant, Henry Scism, also a Negro, and shot promiscuously around Scism's house, and warned him to leave the country in one week, threatening him with severe penalties if he did not go. As a result Grant had to sell out his little home, won after such hard work, and he and his tenant Scism with their families both fled the county.