[Illustration]
Have you ever seen a cotton-field white with harvest,—its golden fleece
hovering above the black earth like a silvery cloud edged with dark
green, its bold white signals waving like the foam of billows from
Carolina to Texas across that Black and human Sea? I have sometimes
half suspected that here the winged ram Chrysomallus left that Fleece
after which Jason and his Argonauts went vaguely wandering into the
shadowy East three thousand years ago; and certainly one might frame a
pretty and not far-fetched analogy of witchery and dragons’ teeth, and
blood and armed men, between the ancient and the modern quest of the
Golden Fleece in the Black Sea.
And now the golden fleece is found; not only found, but, in its
birthplace, woven. For the hum of the cotton-mills is the newest and
most significant thing in the New South to-day. All through the
Carolinas and Georgia, away down to Mexico, rise these gaunt red
buildings, bare and homely, and yet so busy and noisy withal that they
scarce seem to belong to the slow and sleepy land. Perhaps they sprang
from dragons’ teeth. So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still
bows beneath her sceptre. Even the markets that once defied the parvenu
have crept one by one across the seas, and then slowly and reluctantly,
but surely, have started toward the Black Belt.
To be sure, there are those who wag their heads knowingly and tell us
that the capital of the Cotton Kingdom has moved from the Black to the
White Belt,—that the Negro of to-day raises not more than half of the
cotton crop. Such men forget that the cotton crop has doubled, and more
than doubled, since the era of slavery, and that, even granting their
contention, the Negro is still supreme in a Cotton Kingdom larger than
that on which the Confederacy builded its hopes. So the Negro forms
to-day one of the chief figures in a great world-industry; and this,
for its own sake, and in the light of historic interest, makes the
field-hands of the cotton country worth studying.
We seldom study the condition of the Negro to-day honestly and
carefully. It is so much easier to assume that we know it all. Or
perhaps, having already reached conclusions in our own minds, we are
loth to have them disturbed by facts. And yet how little we really know
of these millions,—of their daily lives and longings, of their homely
joys and sorrows, of their real shortcomings and the meaning of their
crimes! All this we can only learn by intimate contact with the masses,
and not by wholesale arguments covering millions separate in time and
space, and differing widely in training and culture. To-day, then, my
reader, let us turn our faces to the Black Belt of Georgia and seek
simply to know the condition of the black farm-laborers of one county
there.
Here in 1890 lived ten thousand Negroes and two thousand whites. The
country is rich, yet the people are poor. The keynote of the Black Belt
is debt; not commercial credit, but debt in the sense of continued
inability on the part of the mass of the population to make income
cover expense. This is the direct heritage of the South from the
wasteful economies of the slave _régime;_ but it was emphasized and
brought to a crisis by the Emancipation of the slaves. In 1860,
Dougherty County had six thousand slaves, worth at least two and a half
millions of dollars; its farms were estimated at three millions,—making
five and a half millions of property, the value of which depended
largely on the slave system, and on the speculative demand for land
once marvellously rich but already partially devitalized by careless
and exhaustive culture. The war then meant a financial crash; in place
of the five and a half millions of 1860, there remained in 1870 only
farms valued at less than two millions. With this came increased
competition in cotton culture from the rich lands of Texas; a steady
fall in the normal price of cotton followed, from about fourteen cents
a pound in 1860 until it reached four cents in 1898. Such a financial
revolution was it that involved the owners of the cotton-belt in debt.
And if things went ill with the master, how fared it with the man?
The plantations of Dougherty County in slavery days were not as
imposing and aristocratic as those of Virginia. The Big House was
smaller and usually one-storied, and sat very near the slave cabins.
Sometimes these cabins stretched off on either side like wings;
sometimes only on one side, forming a double row, or edging the road
that turned into the plantation from the main thoroughfare. The form
and disposition of the laborers’ cabins throughout the Black Belt is
to-day the same as in slavery days. Some live in the self-same cabins,
others in cabins rebuilt on the sites of the old. All are sprinkled in
little groups over the face of the land, centering about some
dilapidated Big House where the head-tenant or agent lives. The general
character and arrangement of these dwellings remains on the whole
unaltered. There were in the county, outside the corporate town of
Albany, about fifteen hundred Negro families in 1898. Out of all these,
only a single family occupied a house with seven rooms; only fourteen
have five rooms or more. The mass live in one- and two-room homes.
The size and arrangements of a people’s homes are no unfair index of
their condition. If, then, we inquire more carefully into these Negro
homes, we find much that is unsatisfactory. All over the face of the
land is the one-room cabin,—now standing in the shadow of the Big
House, now staring at the dusty road, now rising dark and sombre amid
the green of the cotton-fields. It is nearly always old and bare, built
of rough boards, and neither plastered nor ceiled. Light and
ventilation are supplied by the single door and by the square hole in
the wall with its wooden shutter. There is no glass, porch, or
ornamentation without. Within is a fireplace, black and smoky, and
usually unsteady with age. A bed or two, a table, a wooden chest, and a
few chairs compose the furniture; while a stray show-bill or a
newspaper makes up the decorations for the walls. Now and then one may
find such a cabin kept scrupulously neat, with merry steaming
fireplaces and hospitable door; but the majority are dirty and
dilapidated, smelling of eating and sleeping, poorly ventilated, and
anything but homes.
Above all, the cabins are crowded. We have come to associate crowding
with homes in cities almost exclusively. This is primarily because we
have so little accurate knowledge of country life. Here in Dougherty
County one may find families of eight and ten occupying one or two
rooms, and for every ten rooms of house accommodation for the Negroes
there are twenty-five persons. The worst tenement abominations of New
York do not have above twenty-two persons for every ten rooms. Of
course, one small, close room in a city, without a yard, is in many
respects worse than the larger single country room. In other respects
it is better; it has glass windows, a decent chimney, and a trustworthy
floor. The single great advantage of the Negro peasant is that he may
spend most of his life outside his hovel, in the open fields.
There are four chief causes of these wretched homes: First, long custom
born of slavery has assigned such homes to Negroes; white laborers
would be offered better accommodations, and might, for that and similar
reasons, give better work. Secondly, the Negroes, used to such
accommodations, do not as a rule demand better; they do not know what
better houses mean. Thirdly, the landlords as a class have not yet come
to realize that it is a good business investment to raise the standard
of living among labor by slow and judicious methods; that a Negro
laborer who demands three rooms and fifty cents a day would give more
efficient work and leave a larger profit than a discouraged toiler
herding his family in one room and working for thirty cents. Lastly,
among such conditions of life there are few incentives to make the
laborer become a better farmer. If he is ambitious, he moves to town or
tries other labor; as a tenant-farmer his outlook is almost hopeless,
and following it as a makeshift, he takes the house that is given him
without protest.
In such homes, then, these Negro peasants live. The families are both
small and large; there are many single tenants,—widows and bachelors,
and remnants of broken groups. The system of labor and the size of the
houses both tend to the breaking up of family groups: the grown
children go away as contract hands or migrate to town, the sister goes
into service; and so one finds many families with hosts of babies, and
many newly married couples, but comparatively few families with
half-grown and grown sons and daughters. The average size of Negro
families has undoubtedly decreased since the war, primarily from
economic stress. In Russia over a third of the bridegrooms and over
half the brides are under twenty; the same was true of the antebellum
Negroes. Today, however, very few of the boys and less than a fifth of
the Negro girls under twenty are married. The young men marry between
the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five; the young women between twenty
and thirty. Such postponement is due to the difficulty of earning
sufficient to rear and support a family; and it undoubtedly leads, in
the country districts, to sexual immorality. The form of this
immorality, however, is very seldom that of prostitution, and less
frequently that of illegitimacy than one would imagine. Rather, it
takes the form of separation and desertion after a family group has
been formed. The number of separated persons is thirty-five to the
thousand,—a very large number. It would of course be unfair to compare
this number with divorce statistics, for many of these separated women
are in reality widowed, were the truth known, and in other cases the
separation is not permanent. Nevertheless, here lies the seat of
greatest moral danger. There is little or no prostitution among these
Negroes, and over three-fourths of the families, as found by
house-to-house investigation, deserve to be classed as decent people
with considerable regard for female chastity. To be sure, the ideas of
the mass would not suit New England, and there are many loose habits
and notions. Yet the rate of illegitimacy is undoubtedly lower than in
Austria or Italy, and the women as a class are modest. The plague-spot
in sexual relations is easy marriage and easy separation. This is no
sudden development, nor the fruit of Emancipation. It is the plain
heritage from slavery. In those days Sam, with his master’s consent,
“took up” with Mary. No ceremony was necessary, and in the busy life of
the great plantations of the Black Belt it was usually dispensed with.
If now the master needed Sam’s work in another plantation or in another
part of the same plantation, or if he took a notion to sell the slave,
Sam’s married life with Mary was usually unceremoniously broken, and
then it was clearly to the master’s interest to have both of them take
new mates. This widespread custom of two centuries has not been
eradicated in thirty years. To-day Sam’s grandson “takes up” with a
woman without license or ceremony; they live together decently and
honestly, and are, to all intents and purposes, man and wife. Sometimes
these unions are never broken until death; but in too many cases family
quarrels, a roving spirit, a rival suitor, or perhaps more frequently
the hopeless battle to support a family, lead to separation, and a
broken household is the result. The Negro church has done much to stop
this practice, and now most marriage ceremonies are performed by the
pastors. Nevertheless, the evil is still deep seated, and only a
general raising of the standard of living will finally cure it.
Looking now at the county black population as a whole, it is fair to
characterize it as poor and ignorant. Perhaps ten per cent compose the
well-to-do and the best of the laborers, while at least nine per cent
are thoroughly lewd and vicious. The rest, over eighty per cent, are
poor and ignorant, fairly honest and well meaning, plodding, and to a
degree shiftless, with some but not great sexual looseness. Such class
lines are by no means fixed; they vary, one might almost say, with the
price of cotton. The degree of ignorance cannot easily be expressed. We
may say, for instance, that nearly two-thirds of them cannot read or
write. This but partially expresses the fact. They are ignorant of the
world about them, of modern economic organization, of the function of
government, of individual worth and possibilities,—of nearly all those
things which slavery in self-defence had to keep them from learning.
Much that the white boy imbibes from his earliest social atmosphere
forms the puzzling problems of the black boy’s mature years. America is
not another word for Opportunity to _all_ her sons.
It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp
and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. We often
forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul. Ignorant
it may be, and poverty stricken, black and curious in limb and ways and
thought; and yet it loves and hates, it toils and tires, it laughs and
weeps its bitter tears, and looks in vague and awful longing at the
grim horizon of its life,—all this, even as you and I. These black
thousands are not in reality lazy; they are improvident and careless;
they insist on breaking the monotony of toil with a glimpse at the
great town-world on Saturday; they have their loafers and their
rascals; but the great mass of them work continuously and faithfully
for a return, and under circumstances that would call forth equal
voluntary effort from few if any other modern laboring class. Over
eighty-eight per cent of them—men, women, and children—are farmers.
Indeed, this is almost the only industry. Most of the children get
their schooling after the “crops are laid by,” and very few there are
that stay in school after the spring work has begun. Child-labor is to
be found here in some of its worst phases, as fostering ignorance and
stunting physical development. With the grown men of the county there
is little variety in work: thirteen hundred are farmers, and two
hundred are laborers, teamsters, etc., including twenty-four artisans,
ten merchants, twenty-one preachers, and four teachers. This narrowness
of life reaches its maximum among the women: thirteen hundred and fifty
of these are farm laborers, one hundred are servants and washerwomen,
leaving sixty-five housewives, eight teachers, and six seamstresses.
Among this people there is no leisure class. We often forget that in
the United States over half the youth and adults are not in the world
earning incomes, but are making homes, learning of the world, or
resting after the heat of the strife. But here ninety-six per cent are
toiling; no one with leisure to turn the bare and cheerless cabin into
a home, no old folks to sit beside the fire and hand down traditions of
the past; little of careless happy childhood and dreaming youth. The
dull monotony of daily toil is broken only by the gayety of the
thoughtless and the Saturday trip to town. The toil, like all farm
toil, is monotonous, and here there are little machinery and few tools
to relieve its burdensome drudgery. But with all this, it is work in
the pure open air, and this is something in a day when fresh air is
scarce.
The land on the whole is still fertile, despite long abuse. For nine or
ten months in succession the crops will come if asked: garden
vegetables in April, grain in May, melons in June and July, hay in
August, sweet potatoes in September, and cotton from then to Christmas.
And yet on two-thirds of the land there is but one crop, and that
leaves the toilers in debt. Why is this?
Away down the Baysan road, where the broad flat fields are flanked by
great oak forests, is a plantation; many thousands of acres it used to
run, here and there, and beyond the great wood. Thirteen hundred human
beings here obeyed the call of one,—were his in body, and largely in
soul. One of them lives there yet,—a short, stocky man, his dull-brown
face seamed and drawn, and his tightly curled hair gray-white. The
crops? Just tolerable, he said; just tolerable. Getting on? No—he
wasn’t getting on at all. Smith of Albany “furnishes” him, and his rent
is eight hundred pounds of cotton. Can’t make anything at that. Why
didn’t he buy land! _Humph!_ Takes money to buy land. And he turns
away. Free! The most piteous thing amid all the black ruin of war-time,
amid the broken fortunes of the masters, the blighted hopes of mothers
and maidens, and the fall of an empire,—the most piteous thing amid all
this was the black freedman who threw down his hoe because the world
called him free. What did such a mockery of freedom mean? Not a cent of
money, not an inch of land, not a mouthful of victuals,—not even
ownership of the rags on his back. Free! On Saturday, once or twice a
month, the old master, before the war, used to dole out bacon and meal
to his Negroes. And after the first flush of freedom wore off, and his
true helplessness dawned on the freedman, he came back and picked up
his hoe, and old master still doled out his bacon and meal. The legal
form of service was theoretically far different; in practice, task-work
or “cropping” was substituted for daily toil in gangs; and the slave
gradually became a metayer, or tenant on shares, in name, but a laborer
with indeterminate wages in fact.
Still the price of cotton fell, and gradually the landlords deserted
their plantations, and the reign of the merchant began. The merchant of
the Black Belt is a curious institution,—part banker, part landlord,
part banker, and part despot. His store, which used most frequently to
stand at the cross-roads and become the centre of a weekly village, has
now moved to town; and thither the Negro tenant follows him. The
merchant keeps everything,—clothes and shoes, coffee and sugar, pork
and meal, canned and dried goods, wagons and ploughs, seed and
fertilizer,—and what he has not in stock he can give you an order for
at the store across the way. Here, then, comes the tenant, Sam Scott,
after he has contracted with some absent landlord’s agent for hiring
forty acres of land; he fingers his hat nervously until the merchant
finishes his morning chat with Colonel Saunders, and calls out, “Well,
Sam, what do you want?” Sam wants him to “furnish” him,—_i.e._, to
advance him food and clothing for the year, and perhaps seed and tools,
until his crop is raised and sold. If Sam seems a favorable subject, he
and the merchant go to a lawyer, and Sam executes a chattel mortgage on
his mule and wagon in return for seed and a week’s rations. As soon as
the green cotton-leaves appear above the ground, another mortgage is
given on the “crop.” Every Saturday, or at longer intervals, Sam calls
upon the merchant for his “rations”; a family of five usually gets
about thirty pounds of fat side-pork and a couple of bushels of
cornmeal a month. Besides this, clothing and shoes must be furnished;
if Sam or his family is sick, there are orders on the druggist and
doctor; if the mule wants shoeing, an order on the blacksmith, etc. If
Sam is a hard worker and crops promise well, he is often encouraged to
buy more,—sugar, extra clothes, perhaps a buggy. But he is seldom
encouraged to save. When cotton rose to ten cents last fall, the shrewd
merchants of Dougherty County sold a thousand buggies in one season,
mostly to black men.
The security offered for such transactions—a crop and chattel
mortgage—may at first seem slight. And, indeed, the merchants tell many
a true tale of shiftlessness and cheating; of cotton picked at night,
mules disappearing, and tenants absconding. But on the whole the
merchant of the Black Belt is the most prosperous man in the section.
So skilfully and so closely has he drawn the bonds of the law about the
tenant, that the black man has often simply to choose between pauperism
and crime; he “waives” all homestead exemptions in his contract; he
cannot touch his own mortgaged crop, which the laws put almost in the
full control of the land-owner and of the merchant. When the crop is
growing the merchant watches it like a hawk; as soon as it is ready for
market he takes possession of it, sells it, pays the landowner his
rent, subtracts his bill for supplies, and if, as sometimes happens,
there is anything left, he hands it over to the black serf for his
Christmas celebration.
The direct result of this system is an all-cotton scheme of agriculture
and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant. The currency of the Black
Belt is cotton. It is a crop always salable for ready money, not
usually subject to great yearly fluctuations in price, and one which
the Negroes know how to raise. The landlord therefore demands his rent
in cotton, and the merchant will accept mortgages on no other crop.
There is no use asking the black tenant, then, to diversify his
crops,—he cannot under this system. Moreover, the system is bound to
bankrupt the tenant. I remember once meeting a little one-mule wagon on
the River road. A young black fellow sat in it driving listlessly, his
elbows on his knees. His dark-faced wife sat beside him, stolid,
silent.
“Hello!” cried my driver,—he has a most imprudent way of addressing
these people, though they seem used to it,—“what have you got there?”
“Meat and meal,” answered the man, stopping. The meat lay uncovered in
the bottom of the wagon,—a great thin side of fat pork covered with
salt; the meal was in a white bushel bag.
“What did you pay for that meat?”
“Ten cents a pound.” It could have been bought for six or seven cents
cash.
“And the meal?”
“Two dollars.” One dollar and ten cents is the cash price in town. Here
was a man paying five dollars for goods which he could have bought for
three dollars cash, and raised for one dollar or one dollar and a half.
Yet it is not wholly his fault. The Negro farmer started
behind,—started in debt. This was not his choosing, but the crime of
this happy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering along with its
Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war interludes and Philippine
matinees, just as though God really were dead. Once in debt, it is no
easy matter for a whole race to emerge.
In the year of low-priced cotton, 1898, out of three hundred tenant
families one hundred and seventy-five ended their year’s work in debt
to the extent of fourteen thousand dollars; fifty cleared nothing, and
the remaining seventy-five made a total profit of sixteen hundred
dollars. The net indebtedness of the black tenant families of the whole
county must have been at least sixty thousand dollars. In a more
prosperous year the situation is far better; but on the average the
majority of tenants end the year even, or in debt, which means that
they work for board and clothes. Such an economic organization is
radically wrong. Whose is the blame?
The underlying causes of this situation are complicated but
discernible. And one of the chief, outside the carelessness of the
nation in letting the slave start with nothing, is the widespread
opinion among the merchants and employers of the Black Belt that only
by the slavery of debt can the Negro be kept at work. Without doubt,
some pressure was necessary at the beginning of the free-labor system
to keep the listless and lazy at work; and even to-day the mass of the
Negro laborers need stricter guardianship than most Northern laborers.
Behind this honest and widespread opinion dishonesty and cheating of
the ignorant laborers have a good chance to take refuge. And to all
this must be added the obvious fact that a slave ancestry and a system
of unrequited toil has not improved the efficiency or temper of the
mass of black laborers. Nor is this peculiar to Sambo; it has in
history been just as true of John and Hans, of Jacques and Pat, of all
ground-down peasantries. Such is the situation of the mass of the
Negroes in the Black Belt to-day; and they are thinking about it.
Crime, and a cheap and dangerous socialism, are the inevitable results
of this pondering. I see now that ragged black man sitting on a log,
aimlessly whittling a stick. He muttered to me with the murmur of many
ages, when he said: “White man sit down whole year; Nigger work day and
night and make crop; Nigger hardly gits bread and meat; white man
sittin’ down gits all. _It’s wrong._” And what do the better classes of
Negroes do to improve their situation? One of two things: if any way
possible, they buy land; if not, they migrate to town. Just as
centuries ago it was no easy thing for the serf to escape into the
freedom of town-life, even so to-day there are hindrances laid in the
way of county laborers. In considerable parts of all the Gulf States,
and especially in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, the Negroes on
the plantations in the back-country districts are still held at forced
labor practically without wages. Especially is this true in districts
where the farmers are composed of the more ignorant class of poor
whites, and the Negroes are beyond the reach of schools and intercourse
with their advancing fellows. If such a peon should run away, the
sheriff, elected by white suffrage, can usually be depended on to catch
the fugitive, return him, and ask no questions. If he escape to another
county, a charge of petty thieving, easily true, can be depended upon
to secure his return. Even if some unduly officious person insist upon
a trial, neighborly comity will probably make his conviction sure, and
then the labor due the county can easily be bought by the master. Such
a system is impossible in the more civilized parts of the South, or
near the large towns and cities; but in those vast stretches of land
beyond the telegraph and the newspaper the spirit of the Thirteenth
Amendment is sadly broken. This represents the lowest economic depths
of the black American peasant; and in a study of the rise and condition
of the Negro freeholder we must trace his economic progress from the
modern serfdom.
Even in the better-ordered country districts of the South the free
movement of agricultural laborers is hindered by the migration-agent
laws. The “Associated Press” recently informed the world of the arrest
of a young white man in Southern Georgia who represented the “Atlantic
Naval Supplies Company,” and who “was caught in the act of enticing
hands from the turpentine farm of Mr. John Greer.” The crime for which
this young man was arrested is taxed five hundred dollars for each
county in which the employment agent proposes to gather laborers for
work outside the State. Thus the Negroes’ ignorance of the labor-market
outside his own vicinity is increased rather than diminished by the
laws of nearly every Southern State.
Similar to such measures is the unwritten law of the back districts and
small towns of the South, that the character of all Negroes unknown to
the mass of the community must be vouched for by some white man. This
is really a revival of the old Roman idea of the patron under whose
protection the new-made freedman was put. In many instances this system
has been of great good to the Negro, and very often under the
protection and guidance of the former master’s family, or other white
friends, the freedman progressed in wealth and morality. But the same
system has in other cases resulted in the refusal of whole communities
to recognize the right of a Negro to change his habitation and to be
master of his own fortunes. A black stranger in Baker County, Georgia,
for instance, is liable to be stopped anywhere on the public highway
and made to state his business to the satisfaction of any white
interrogator. If he fails to give a suitable answer, or seems too
independent or “sassy,” he may be arrested or summarily driven away.
Thus it is that in the country districts of the South, by written or
unwritten law, peonage, hindrances to the migration of labor, and a
system of white patronage exists over large areas. Besides this, the
chance for lawless oppression and illegal exactions is vastly greater
in the country than in the city, and nearly all the more serious race
disturbances of the last decade have arisen from disputes in the county
between master and man,—as, for instance, the Sam Hose affair. As a
result of such a situation, there arose, first, the Black Belt; and,
second, the Migration to Town. The Black Belt was not, as many assumed,
a movement toward fields of labor under more genial climatic
conditions; it was primarily a huddling for self-protection,—a massing
of the black population for mutual defence in order to secure the peace
and tranquillity necessary to economic advance. This movement took
place between Emancipation and 1880, and only partially accomplished
the desired results. The rush to town since 1880 is the
counter-movement of men disappointed in the economic opportunities of
the Black Belt.
In Dougherty County, Georgia, one can see easily the results of this
experiment in huddling for protection. Only ten per cent of the adult
population was born in the county, and yet the blacks outnumber the
whites four or five to one. There is undoubtedly a security to the
blacks in their very numbers,—a personal freedom from arbitrary
treatment, which makes hundreds of laborers cling to Dougherty in spite
of low wages and economic distress. But a change is coming, and slowly
but surely even here the agricultural laborers are drifting to town and
leaving the broad acres behind. Why is this? Why do not the Negroes
become land-owners, and build up the black landed peasantry, which has
for a generation and more been the dream of philanthropist and
statesman?
To the car-window sociologist, to the man who seeks to understand and
know the South by devoting the few leisure hours of a holiday trip to
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
ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of
them sit in hopeless serfdom. For these there is one other avenue of
escape toward which they have turned in increasing numbers, namely,
migration to town. A glance at the distribution of land among the black
owners curiously reveals this fact. In 1898 the holdings were as
follows: Under forty acres, forty-nine families; forty to two hundred
and fifty acres, seventeen families; two hundred and fifty to one
thousand acres, thirteen families; one thousand or more acres, two
families. Now in 1890 there were forty-four holdings, but only nine of
these were under forty acres. The great increase of holdings, then, has
come in the buying of small homesteads near town, where their owners
really share in the town life; this is a part of the rush to town. And
for every land-owner who has thus hurried away from the narrow and hard
conditions of country life, how many field-hands, how many tenants, how
many ruined renters, have joined that long procession? Is it not
strange compensation? The sin of the country districts is visited on
the town, and the social sores of city life to-day may, here in
Dougherty County, and perhaps in many places near and far, look for
their final healing without the city walls.
IX.
Of the Sons of Master and Man
Life treads on life, and heart on heart;
We press too close in church and mart
To keep a dream or grave apart.