Following the Color Line Part 14

_Liquor and "the Resulting Trouble"_

Mr. Brown has other methods for keeping the tenantry on his plantation satisfied. Every year he gives a barbecue and "frolic" for his Negroes, with music and speaking and plenty to eat. A big watermelon patch is also a feature of the plantation, and during all the year the tenants are looked after, not only to see that the work is properly done, but in more intimate and sympathetic ways. On one trip through the plantation we stopped in front of a Negro cabin. Inside lay a Negro boy close to death from a bullet wound in the head. He had been at a Negro party a few nights before where there was liquor. Someone had overturned the lamp: shooting began, and the young fellow was taken out for dead. Such accidents or crimes are all too familiar in the plantation country. Although Pulaski County, Georgia, prohibits the sale or purchase of liquor (most of the South, indeed, is prohibition in its sentiment), the Negroes are able from time to time to get jugs of liquor--and, as one Southerner put it to me, "enjoy the resulting trouble."

The boy's father came out of the field and told us with real eloquence of sorrow of the patient's condition.

"Las' night," he said, "we done thought he was a-crossin' de ribbah."

Mr. Brown had already sent the doctor out from the city; he now made arrangements to transport the boy to a hospital in Macon where he could be properly treated.

_Use of Cocaine Among Negroes_

As I have said before, the white landlord who really tries to treat his Negroes well, often has a hard time of it. Many of those (not all) he deals with are densely ignorant, irresponsible, indolent--and often rendered more careless from knowing that the white man must have labour.

Many of them will not keep up the fences, or take care of their tools, or pick the cotton even after it is ready, without steady attention. A prominent Mississippi planter gave me an ill.u.s.tration of one of the troubles he just then had to meet. An eighteen-year-old Negro left his plantation to work in a railroad camp. There he learned to use cocaine, and when he came back to the plantation he taught the habit to a dozen of the best Negroes there, to their complete ruin. The planter had the entire crowd arrested, searched for cocaine and kept in jail until the habit was broken. Then he prosecuted the white druggist who sold the cocaine.

Some Southern planters, to prevent the Negroes from leaving, have built churches for them, and in one instance I heard of a school-house as well.

Another point of the utmost importance--for it strikes at the selfish interest of the landlord--lies in the treatment of the Negro, who, by industry or ability, can "get ahead." A good landlord not only places no obstacles in the way of such tenants, but takes a real pride in their successes. Mr. Brown said:

"If a tenant sees that other Negroes on the same plantation have been able to save money and get land of their own, it tends to make them more industrious. It pays the planter to treat his tenants well."

_Negro with $1,000 in the Bank_

The result is that a number of Mr. Brown's tenants have bought and own good farms near the greater plantation. The plantation, indeed, becomes a sort of central sun around which revolves like planets the lesser life of the Negro landowner. Mr. Brown told me with no little pride of the successes of several Negroes. We met one farmer driving to town in a top buggy with a Negro school-teacher. His name was Robert Polhill--a good type of the self-respecting, vigorous, industrious Negro. Afterward we visited his farm. He had an excellent house with four rooms. In front there were vines and decorative "chicken-corn"; a fence surrounded the place and it was really in good repair. Inside the house everything was scrupulously neat, from the clean rag rugs to the huge post beds with their gay coverlets. The wife evidently had some Indian blood in her veins; she could read and write, but Polhill himself was a full black Negro, intelligent, but illiterate. The children, and there were a lot of them, are growing up practically without opportunity for education because the school held in the Negro church is not only very poor, but it is in session only a short time every year. Near the house was a one-horse syrup-mill then in operation, grinding cane brought in by neighbouring farmers--white as well as black--the whites thus patronising the enterprise of their energetic Negro neighbour.

"I first noticed Polhill when he began work on the plantation," said Mr.

Brown, "because he was the only Negro on the place whom I could depend upon to stop hog-cracks in the fences."

His history is the common history of the Negro farmer who "gets ahead."

Starting as a wages' hand, he worked hard and steadily, saving enough finally to buy a mule--the Negro's first purchase; then he rented land, and by hard work and close calculating made money steadily. With his first $75 he started out to see the world, travelling by railroad to Florida, and finally back home again. The "moving about" instinct is strong in all Negroes--sometimes to their destruction. Then he bought 100 acres of land on credit and having good crops, paid for it in six or seven years. Now he has a comfortable home, he is out of debt, and has money in the bank, a painted house, a top buggy and a cabinet organ! These are the values of his property:

His farm is worth $2,000 Two mules 300 Horse 150 Other equipment 550 Money in the bank 1,000 ------ $4,000

_Negro Who Owns 1,000 Acres of Land_

All of this shows what a Negro who is industrious, and who comes up on a plantation where the landlord is not oppressive, can do. And despite the fact that much is heard on the one hand of the lazy and worthless Negro, and on the other of the landlord who holds his Negroes in practical slavery--it is significant that many Negroes are able to get ahead. In Pulaski County there are Negroes who own as high as 1,000 acres of land.

Ben Gordon is one of them, his brother Charles has 500 acres, John Nelson has 400 acres worth $20 an acre, the Miller family has 1,000 acres, January Lawson, another of Mr. Brown's former tenants, has 500 acres; Jack Daniel 200 acres, Tom Whelan 600 acres. A mulatto merchant in Hawkinsville, whose creditable store I visited, also owns his plantation in the country and rents it to Negro tenants on the same system employed by the white landowners. Indeed, a few Negroes in the South are coming to be not inconsiderable landlords, and have many tenants.

Hawkinsville also has a Negro blacksmith, Negro barbers and Negro builders--and like the white man, the Negro also develops his own financial sharks. One educated coloured man in Hawkinsville is a "note shaver"; he "stands for" other Negroes and signs their notes--at a frightful commission.

Statistics will give some idea of how the industrious Negro in a black belt county like Pulaski has been succeeding.

Total a.s.sessed Acres of Value of Land Owned Property

1875 4,490 $ 43,230 1880 5,988 60,760 1885 6,901 59,022 1890 12,294 122,926 1895 14,145 144,158 1900 13,205 138,800

It is surprising to an unfamiliar visitor to find out that the Negroes in the South have acquired so much land. In Georgia alone in 1906 coloured people owned 1,400,000 acres and were a.s.sessed for over $28,000,000 worth of property, practically all of which, of course, has been acquired in the forty years since slavery.

Negro farmers in some instances have made a genuine reputation for ability. John Roberts, a Richmond County Negro, won first prize over many white exhibitors in the fall of 1906 at the Georgia-Carolina fair at Augusta for the best bale of cotton raised.

_Little Coloured Boy's Famous Speech_

I was at Macon while the first State fair ever held by Negroes in Georgia was in progress. In spite of the fact that racial relations.h.i.+ps, owing to the recent riot at Atlanta, were acute, the fair was largely attended, and not only by Negroes, but by many white visitors. The brunt of the work of organisation fell upon R. R. Wright, president of the Georgia State Industrial College (coloured) of Savannah. President Wright is of full-blooded African descent, his grandmother, who reared him, being an African Negro of the Mandingo tribe. Just at the close of the war he was a boy in a freedman's school at Atlanta. One Sunday General O. O. Howard came to address the pupils. When he had finished, he expressed a desire to take a message back to the people of the North.

"What shall I tell them for you?" he asked.

A little black boy in front stood up quickly, and said:

"Tell 'em, ma.s.sa, we is rising."

Upon this incident John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a famous poem: and at the Negro fair, crowning the charts which had been prepared to show the progress of the Negroes of Georgia, I saw this motto:

"WE ARE RISING"

The little black boy grew up, was graduated at Atlanta University, studied at Harvard, travelled in Europe, served in the Spanish-American War, and is now seeking to help his race to get an industrial training in the college which he organised in 1891. The attendance at the fair in Macon was between 25,000 and 30,000, the Negroes raised $11,000 and spent $7,000, and planned for a greater fair the next year. In this enterprise they had the sympathy and approval of the best white people. A vivid glimpse of what the fair meant is given by the _Daily News_ of Macon--a white newspaper:

The fair shows what progress can be accomplished by the industrious and thrifty Negro, who casts aside the belief that he is a dependent, and sails right in to make a living and a home for himself. Some of the agricultural exhibits of black farmers have never been surpa.s.sed in Macon. On the whole, the exposition just simply astounded folks who did not know what the Negro is doing for himself.

Another significant feature about the fair was the excellent behaviour of the great throngs of coloured people who poured into the city during its progress. There was not an arrest on the fair grounds and very few in the city.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CANE SYRUP KETTLE. EXPERT NEGRO STIRRING AND SKIMMING]

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHAIN-GANG WORKERS ON THE ROADS]

The better cla.s.s of Negro farmers, indeed, have shown not only a capacity for getting ahead individually, but for organising for self-advancement, and even for working with corresponding a.s.sociations of white farmers. The great cotton and tobacco a.s.sociations of the South, which aim to direct the marketing of the product of the farms, have found it not only wise, but necessary to enlist the cooperation of Negro farmers. At the annual rally of the dark-tobacco growers at Guthrie, Kentucky, last September, many Negro planters were in the line of parade with the whites. The farmers' conferences held at Hampton, Tuskegee, Calhoun, and at similar schools, ill.u.s.trate in other ways the possibilities of advancement which grow out of landowners.h.i.+p by the Negroes.

_The Penalties of Being Free_

So much for the sunny side of the picture: the broad-gauge landlord and the prosperous tenantry. Conditions in the black belt are in one respect much as they were in slavery times, or as they would be under any feudal system: if the master or lord is "good," the Negro prospers; if he is harsh, grasping, unkind, the Negro suffers bitterly. It gets back finally to the white man. In a.s.suming supreme rights in the South--political, social, and industrial, the white man also a.s.sumes heavy duties and responsibilities; he cannot have the one without the other: and he takes to himself the pain and suffering which goes with power and responsibility.

Of course, scarcity of labour and high wages have given the really ambitious and industrious Negro his opportunity, and many thousands of them are becoming more and more independent of the favour or the ill-will of the whites. And therein lies a profound danger, not only to the Negro, but to the South. Gradually losing the support and advice of the best type of white man, the independent Negro finds himself in compet.i.tion with the poorer type of white man, whose jealousy he must meet. He takes the penalties of being really free. Escaping the exactions of a feudal life, he finds he must meet the sharper difficulties of a free industrial system. And being without the political rights of his poor white compet.i.tor and wholly without social recognition, discredited by the b.e.s.t.i.a.l crimes of the lower cla.s.s of his own race, he has, indeed, a hard struggle before him. In many neighbourhoods he is peculiarly at the mercy of this lower cla.s.s white electorate, and the self-seeking politicians whose stock in trade consists in playing upon the pa.s.sions of race-hatred.

II

I come now to the reverse of the picture. When the Negro tenant takes up land or hires out to the landlord, he ordinarily signs a contract, or if he cannot sign (about half the Negro tenants of the black belt are wholly illiterate) he makes his mark. He often has no way of knowing certainly what is in the contract, though the arrangement is usually clearly understood, and he must depend on the landlord to keep both the rent and the supply-store accounts. In other words, he is wholly at the planter's mercy--a temptation as dangerous for the landlord as the possibilities which it presents are for the tenant. It is so easy to make large profits by charging immense interest percentages or outrageous prices for supplies to tenants who are too ignorant or too weak to protect themselves, that the stories of the oppressive landlord in the South are scarcely surprising. It is easy, when the tenant brings in his cotton in the fall not only to underweigh it, but to credit it at the lowest prices of the week; and this dealing of the strong with the weak is not Southern, it is human. Such a system has encouraged dishonesty, and wastefulness; it has made many landlords cruel and greedy, it has increased the helplessness, hopelessness and s.h.i.+ftlessness of the Negro. In many cases it has meant downright degeneration, not only to the Negro, but to the white man. These are strong words, but no one can travel in the black belt without seeing enough to convince him of the terrible consequences growing out of these relations.h.i.+ps.

_The Story of a Negro Tenant_

A case which came to my attention at Montgomery, Alabama, throws a vivid light on one method of dealing with the Negro tenant. Some nine miles from Montgomery lives a planter named T. L. McCullough. In December, 1903, he made a contract with a Negro named Jim Thomas to work for him. According to this contract, a copy of which I have, the landlord agreed to furnish Jim the Negro with a ration of 14 lbs. of meat and one bushel of meal a month, and to pay him besides $96 for an entire year's labour.