MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO
Chicago is generous as well as strong. There is no note of petty
jealousy in its judgment of other cities. Memphis belongs to the South
and is very different from the cities of the East and the middle West.
It is easily conceivable that Chicago might be a little contemptuous of
Memphis, just as Belfast is more than a little contemptuous of Dublin.
But Chicago displays a fine spirit. I was assured, more than once, when
I was in Chicago, that Memphis is a good business city, and I suppose
that no higher praise could be given than that. I never met a Belfast
man who would say as much for Dublin. But, of course, Chicago is not in
this matter so highly tried as Belfast is. Memphis does not assume an
air of social superiority to Chicago as Dublin does to Belfast. It is
not therefore so very hard for Chicago to be generous in her judgment.
Perhaps "generous" is the wrong word to use; "just" would be better. No
generosity is required, because Memphis really is one of those places in
which business is efficiently done. Timber, I understand, is one of the
things in which Memphis deals. Cotton is another. I do not know which of
the two is a greater source of trade, but cotton is the more impressive
to the stranger. The place is full of cotton. Mule carts drag great
bales of it to and from railway stations. Sternwheel steamers full of it
ply up and down the Mississippi. I shall never again take out a pocket
handkerchief—I use the cheaper, not the linen or silken
handkerchief—without looking to see if there is a little piece of white
fluff sticking on my sleeve. When I next visit one of the vast whirling
mills of Lancashire I shall think of a large quiet room in Memphis full
of tables on which are laid little bundles of cotton, each bearing a
neat ticket with mysterious numbers and letters written on it. As I
watch the operatives tending the huge machines which spin their endless
threads, I shall think of the men who handle the samples of the cotton
crop in that Memphis office. They take the stuff between their fingers
and thumbs and slowly pull it apart, looking attentively at the fine
fibers which stretch and separate as the gentle pull is completed. By
some exquisite sensitiveness of touch and some subtle skill of glance
they can tell to within an eighth of an inch how long these fibers are.
And on the length of the fiber depends to a great extent the value of
the crop of the particular plantation from which that sample comes.
Outside the windows of the room is the Mississippi,—a broad, sluggish,
gray river when I saw it; where the deeply laden steamers splash their
way from riverside plantations to Memphis and then down to New Orleans,
where much of the cotton is shipped to Europe.
Beyond the room where the cotton is graded is an office, a sunlit
pleasant place with comfortable writing desks and a case full of various
books. You might fancy yourself in the private room of some cultivated
lawyer in an English country town, if it were not that in a corner of
that office there stands one of those machines which, with an infinite
amount of fussy ticking, disgorge a steady stream of ribbon stamped with
figures. In New York and Liverpool men are shouting furiously at each
other across the floors of Cotton Exchanges. Prices are made, raised,
lowered by their shouts. Transactions involving huge sums of money are
settled by a gesture or two and a shouted number. A hand thrust forward,
palm outward, sells what twenty panting steamers carry to the Memphis
quays. A nod and a swiftly penciled note buys on the assurance that the
men with the sensitive fingers have rightly judged the exact length of a
fiber, impalpable to most of us. All the time the shouting and the
gestures are going on thousands of miles away this machine, with
detached and unexcited indifference, is stamping a record of the
frenzied bidding, there in the sunlit Memphis office. Chicago is no more
than just when it says that Memphis is a city where business is done.
Modern business seems to me the most wonderful and romantic thing that
the world has ever seen. A doctor in London takes a knife and cuts a bit
out of a man's side. By doing that he acquires, if he chooses to
exercise it, the right to levy a perpetual tax on the earnings of a
railway somewhere in the Argentine Republic. No traveler on that railway
knows of his existence. None of the engine drivers, porters, guards or
clerks who work the railway have ever heard of that doctor or of the man
whose side was cut. But of the fruit of their labors some portion will
go to that doctor and to his children after him if he chooses, with the
money his victim pays him, to buy part of the stock of that railway
company. An obscure writer, living perhaps in some remote corner of
Wales, tells a story which catches the fancy of the ladies who subscribe
to Mudie's library. He is able, because he has written feelingly of
Evangelina's first kiss, to take to himself and assure to his heirs some
part of the steel which sweating toilers make in Pittsburgh, or, if that
please him better, he can levy a toll upon the gold dug from a mine in
South Africa. What do the Pittsburgh steel workers know or care about
him or Evangelina or the ladies who thrill over her caress? Why should
they give up part of the fruit of their toil because an imaginary man is
said to have kissed a girl who never existed? It is very difficult to
explain it, but all society, all nations, peoples and languages agree
that they must. The whole force of humanity, combined for this purpose
only, agrees that the doctor, because of his knife, which has very
likely killed its victim, and the novelist because of his silly
simpering heroine, shall have an indefeasible right to tax for their own
private benefit almost any industry in the whole wide world. This is an
unimaginable romance. So is all business; but Memphis brought home the
strangeness of it to me most compellingly.
Here is a dainty lady, furclad, scented, pacing with delicate steps
across the floor of one of our huge shops. In front of her, not less
exquisitely dressed, a handsome man bows low with the courtesy of a
great lord of other days:
"Lingerie, madam, this way if you please. The second turning to the
left. _This_ way, madam. Miss Jones, _if_ you please. Madam wishes to
see——"
And madam, with her insolent eyes, deigns to survey some frothy piles of
frilly garments, touches, appraises the material, peers at the stitches
of the hems, plucks at inserted strips of lace.
Here are broad acres of black, caked earth and all across them are rows
and rows of stunted bushes, like gooseberry bushes, but thinner and much
darker. On all their prickly branches hang little tufts of white
fluff—cotton. Among the bushes go men, women and children, black,
negroes every one of them, dressed in bright yellow, bright blue and
flaming red. From their shoulders hang long sacks which trail on the
ground behind them. They steadily pick, pick, pick the fluffs of cotton
out of the opened pods, and push each little bit into a sack. There you
have the beginning of all, the ending of part of this wonderful
substance which clothes, so they tell us, nine-tenths of the men and
women in the world who wear clothes. What is in between the dainty
English lady and the negro in Tennessee?
The plantation owner drives his mule along winding tracks through the
fields where the bushes are and watches. He is a man harassed by the
unsolvable negro problem, in constant dread of insect pests, oppressed
by economic difficulties. Men in mills nearby comb the thick seeds from
the raw cotton, press it tight and bind it into huge bales. Men grade
and sort the samples of it. Men shout at each other in great marts, buy
and sell cotton yet unsorted, unpicked, ungrown; and the record of their
doings is flashed across continents and oceans. Ships laden down to the
limit of safety plunge through great seas with tired men on their
bridges guiding them. In Lancashire, in Russia, in Austria, huge
factories set their engines working and their wheels go whirling round.
Men and women sweat at the machines. In Derry and a thousand other
places women in gaunt bare rooms with sewing machines, or in quiet
chambers of French convents with needles in their hands, are working at
long strips of cotton fabric. In shops women again, officered by men,
are selling countless different stuffs made out of this same cotton
fluff.
And the whole complex organization, the last achieved result of man's
age-long struggle for civilization, works on the perilous verge of
breaking down. The fine lady at the one end of it may buy what she
cannot pay for and disturb the delicately balanced calculations of the
shopkeeper. Some well-intentioned Government somewhere may insist that
the women who sew shall have fire and a share of the sunlight, things
which cost money. Inspectors come, with pains and penalties ready in
their pockets, and it seems possible that they will dislocate the whole
machine. Labor, painfully organized, suddenly claims a larger share of
the profits which are flowing in. The wheels of all the factories stop
whirling. Their stopping affects every one through the whole length of
the tremendous chain, alters the manner of life in the tiniest of the
negroes' huts. A sanguine broker may speculate disastrously and the long
chain of the organization quivers through its entire length and
threatens breaking. A ship owner raises rates, the servants of a railway
company go on strike. Some one makes a blunder in estimating the size of
a future crop. Negroes prove less satisfactory than usual as workers.
The possibilities of a breakdown somewhere are almost uncountable. Yet
somehow the thing works. It is a wonderful accomplishment of man that it
should work and break down as seldom as it does; but the dread of
breakdown is present everywhere.
Everyone, the whole way from the lady who wants lingerie to the negro
who picks at the bushes, is beset with anxiety. But fortunately no one
ever really feels more than his own immediate share of it. The cotton
planter will indeed be affected seriously by an epidemic of speculation
in New York, or a strike in Lancashire or the legislation of some
well-meaning government. He knows all this, but it does not actually
trouble him much. He has his own particular worry and it is at him so
constantly that it leaves all the other worries no time to get at him at
all. His worry is the negro.
According to the theory of the American constitution the negro is a free
man, a brother, as responsible as anyone else for the due ordering of
the state. In actual practice the negro is either slowly emerging from
the slave status or slowly sinking back to it again. It does not matter
which way you look at it, the essential thing is, whichever way he is
going, he is not yet settled down in either position. It is
impossible—on account of the law—to treat him as a slave. It is
impossible—on account of his nature, so I am told—to treat him as a
free man. He is somewhere in between the two. He is economically
difficult and socially undesirable. But he is the only means yet
discovered of getting cotton picked. If anyone would invent a machine
for picking cotton he would benefit the world at large immensely and
make the cotton planter, save for the fear of certain insects, a happy
man. But the shape of the cotton bush renders it very difficult to get
the cotton off it except by the use of the human finger and thumb. We
are not nearly so clever at inventing things as we think we are. The
cotton bush has so far defeated us. The negro, who supplies the finger
and thumb, has very nearly defeated us too. It is hard to get him to
work at all and still harder to keep him at it. He does not seem to be
responsive to the ordinary rules of political economy. If he can earn
enough in one day to keep him for three days he sees no sense in working
during the other two.
The southern American does not seem to be trying to solve this negro
problem. He makes all sorts of makeshift arrangements, tries plans which
may work this year and next year but which plainly will not work for
very many years. These seem the best he can do. Perhaps they are the
best anyone could do. Perhaps it is always wisest to be content to keep
things going and to let the remoter future take care of itself. The
cotton crop has to be picked somehow this year, and it may have to be
picked next year too. After that—well nobody speculates in futures as
far ahead as 1916.
The problem of the social position of the negro seems to be quite as
difficult to solve as that created by his indifference to the laws of
political economy. The "man and brother" theory has broken down
hopelessly and the line drawn between the white and colored parts of the
population in the South is as well defined and distinct as any line can
be. The stranger is told horrible tales of negro doings and is convinced
that the white men believe them by the precautions they take for the
protection of women. There may be a good deal of exaggeration about
these stories, and in any case the morality or immorality of the negro
is not the most difficult element in the problem. Education, the steady
enforcement of law, and the gradual pressure of civilization will no
doubt in time render outrages rarer. It is at all events possible to
look forward hopefully. The real difficulty seems to me to lie in the
strong, contemptuous dislike which white people who are brought into
close contact with negroes almost invariably seem to feel for them. In
the northern parts of America where negroes form a very small part of
the population, this feeling does not exist. A northern American or an
Englishman would not feel that he were insulted if he were asked to sit
next a negro at a public banquet. A southern American would decline an
invitation if he thought it likely that he would be called upon to do
such a thing. A southern lady, who happened to be in New York, was
offered by a polite stranger a seat in a street car next a negro. She
indignantly refused to occupy it. The very offer was an outrage.
The feeling would be intelligible if it were the outcome of instinctive
physical prejudice. An Englishwoman, who had hardly ever come into
contact with a negro, once found herself seated at tea in the saloon of
a steamer opposite a negress who was in charge of some white children.
She found it impossible to help herself to cake from the dish from which
the negress had helped herself. The idea of doing so filled her with a
sense of sickness. Yet she did not feel herself insulted or outraged at
being placed where she was. A southern American woman would have felt
outraged. But the southern American woman has no instinctive shrinking
from physical contact with black people. She is accustomed to it. She
has at home a black cook who handles the food of the household, a black
nurse who minds the children, perhaps a black maid who performs for her
all sorts of intimate acts of service. As servants she has no objection
to negroes. There is in her nothing corresponding to the Englishwoman's
instinctive shrinking from the touch of a black hand.
Nor is the southern American's contempt for the negroes anything at all
analogous to the contempt which most people feel for those who are
plainly their inferiors. A brave man has a thoroughly intelligible
contempt for one who has shown himself to be a coward. But this is an
entirely different thing, different in kind, not merely in degree, from
a southern white man's contempt for a negro. It is the existence of this
feeling, intensely strong and very difficult to explain, which makes the
problem of the negro's social future seem hopeless of solution. No moral
or intellectual advance which the negro can make affects this feeling in
the slightest. It is not the brutalized negro or the ignorant negro, but
the negro, whom the white man refuses to recognize as a possible equal.
Memphis, in spite of its negro problem, seems to me to be rapidly
emerging from the ruins of one civilization and to be pressing forward
to take a foremost place in another. I do not suppose that Memphis now
regrets the past very much or even thinks often of the terrible
humiliation of the Civil War and the years of blank hopeless ruin which
followed it. There was that indeed in the past which must have left
indelible marks behind it. It was not easy for a proud people,
essentially aristocratic in their outlook upon life, to accept defeat at
the hands of men whom they looked down upon. It is not easy to forget
the intolerable injustice which, inevitably, I suppose, followed the
defeat. But Memphis is looking forward and not back, is grasping at the
possibilities of the future rather than brooding over the past.
But if Memphis and the South generally are content to forget the past,
it does not follow that the past has forgotten them. The spirit of the
older civilization abides. It haunts the new life like some pathetic
ghost, doomed to wander helplessly among people who no longer want to
see it. There is a certain suavity about Memphis which the stranger
feels directly he touches the life of the place. It is a lingering
perfume, delicate, faint but appreciable. I am told that it is to be
traced to Europe, that the business men in Memphis have closer relations
with England, Austria and Russia than with the northern states of their
own country. I am also told that we must look to the origin of it to the
Cavalier settlers of the southern states from whom the people who live
there now claim descent. I do not like either explanation. A man does
not catch suavity by doing business with Lancashire. The quality is not
one on which the northern Englishman prides himself, or indeed which is
very obvious in his way of living. The blood of those original
cavaliers, gentlemen all of them I am sure, must have got a good deal
mixed in the course of the last two hundred years, especially as
strangers are always pouring into the South. It must be an attenuated
fluid now, scarcely capable of flavoring perceptibly a new and vigorous
life. I prefer my own hypothesis of a ghost. Some of these creatures
smell of sulphur and leave a reek of it behind them when they pay visits
to their old homes on earth. Others betray their presence by the damp,
cold earthy air they bring with them from the tombs in which their
bodies were laid. This Memphis ghost, which no one in Memphis sees, but
which yet has its influence on Memphis life, is of quite a different
kind. It is scented with pot-pourri, and the delicate rose water which
great ladies of bygone generations made and used. It is the ghost of
some grande dame like Madame Esmond, who owned slaves and used them with
no misgiving about her right to do so, whose pride was very great, whose
manners were dignified, whose ways among those of her own caste were
exceedingly gracious. There is something, some lingering suggestion of
great ladies about Memphis still, in spite of its new commercial
prosperity. I think it must be because the spirits of them haunt the
place.
Someone must surely have written a book on the philosophy of American
place names. The subject is an interesting one, and the world has a lot
of authors in it. It cannot have escaped them all. But I have not seen
the book. If I ever do see it I shall turn straight to the chapter which
deals with Memphis and Cairo, for I very much want to know how those two
places came to have Egypt for their godfather. Most American place names
are easy enough to understand, and they seem to me to surpass, in their
fascinating suggestion of romance, our older Irish and English names. It
is, of course, interesting to know that all the chesters in
England—Colchester, Dorchester, Manchester and Chester itself—were
once Roman camps; and that most of the Irish kils—Kilkenny, Kildare,
Killaloe, Kilrush—were the churches of once honored saints. But the
Romans and the saints are very remote. They were important people in
their day no doubt, but it is very hard to feel the personal touch of
them now. American place names bring us closer to men with whom we feel
that we can sympathize. There is a whole range of names taken straight
from old homes, New York, for instance, Boston, New Orleans. We do not
need to go back in search of emotions to the original meaning of York or
to worry over the derivation of Orleans. It is enough for us that these
names suggest all the pathetic nostalgia of exiles. The men who named
these places must have been thinking of dearly loved cathedral towers,
of the streets and market places of country towns whose every detail was
well remembered and much regretted, of homes which they would scarcely
hope to see again. It is not hard, either, to catch the spirit of the
Puritan settlers in theological and biblical names, in Philadelphia,
Salem and so forth. The men who gave these names to their new homes must
have felt that like Abraham they had gone forth from their kindred and
their people, from the familiar Ur of the Chaldees, to seek a country,
to find that better city whose builder and maker is God. Philadelphia is
perhaps to-day no more remarkable for the prevalence of brotherly love
among its people than any other city is. But there were great thoughts
in the minds of the men who named it first; and reading the name to-day,
even in a railway guide, our hearts are lifted up into some sort of
communion with theirs. Then there are the Indian names, of lakes,
mountains and rivers chiefly, but occasionally of cities too. Chicago is
a city with an Indian name. Perhaps these are of all the most suggestive
of romance. It must have been the hunters and explorers, pioneers of the
pioneers, who fixed these names. One imagines these men, hardened with
intolerable toil, skilled in all the lore of wild life, brave,
adventurous, picking up here and there a word or two of Indian speech,
adopting Indian names for places which they had no time to name
themselves, handing on these strange syllables to those who came after
them to settle and to build. Greater, so it seems, than the romance of
the homesick exile, greater than the romance of the Puritan with his
Bible in his hand, is the wild adventurousness which comes blown to us
across the years in these Indian names.
But there are names like Memphis which entirely baffle the imagination.
It is almost impossible to think that the people who named that place
were homesick for Egypt. What would Copts be doing on the shores of the
Mississippi? How could they have got there? Nor is it easy to think of
any emotion which the name Memphis would be likely to stir in the mind
of a settler. Memphis means nothing to most men. It is easy to see why
there should be an American Rome. A man might never have been in Rome,
might have no more than the barest smattering of its history, yet the
name would suggest to him thoughts of imperial greatness. Any one who
admires imperial greatness would be inclined to call a new city Rome.
But Memphis suggests nothing to most of us, and to the few is associated
only with the worship of some long forsaken gods. I can understand
Indianapolis. There was Indiana to start with, a name which anyone with
a taste for sonorous vowel sounds might easily make out of Indian. The
Greek termination is natural enough. It gives a very desirable
suggestion of classical culture to a scholar. But a scholar would be
driven far afield indeed before he searched out Memphis for a name.
I asked several learned and thoughtful people how Memphis came by its
name. I got no answer which was really satisfactory. It was suggested to
me that cotton grows in Egypt and also in the neighborhood of Memphis.
But cotton does not immediately suggest Egypt to the mind. Mummies
suggest Egypt. So, though less directly, does corn. If a caché of
mummies had been discovered on the banks of the Mississippi it would be
easy to account for Memphis. If Tennessee were a great wheat state one
could imagine settlers saying "There is corn in Egypt, according to the
Scriptures. Let us call our new city by an Egyptian name." But I doubt
whether cotton suggested Memphis. It certainly did not suggest Cairo,
for Cairo is not a cotton place. I was told,—though without any strong
conviction—that the sight of the Mississippi reminded somebody once of
the Nile. It would of course remind an Egyptian fellah of the Nile; but
the original settlers in Memphis were almost certainly not Egyptian
fellaheen. Why should it remind any one else of the Nile? It reminds me
of the Shannon, and I should probably have wanted to call Memphis
Athlone if I had had a voice in the naming of it. It would remind an
Englishman of the Severn, a German of the Rhine, an Austrian of the
Danube, a Spaniard—it was, I think, a Spaniard who went there first—of
the Guadalquiver. I cannot believe that the sight of a very great river
naturally suggests the Nile to anyone who is not familiar with Egypt
beforehand.
It is indeed true that both the Mississippi and the Nile have a way of
overflowing their banks, but most large rivers do that from time to
time. The habit is not so peculiar as to force the thought of the Nile
on early observers of the Mississippi. Indeed there is a great
difference between the overflowings of the Nile and those of the
Mississippi. The Nile, so I have always understood, fertilizes the land
round it when it overflows. The Mississippi destroys cotton crops when
it breaks loose. South of Memphis for very many miles the river is
contained by large dykes, called levees, a word of French origin. These
are built up far above the level of the land which they protect. It is a
very strange thing to stand on one of these dykes and look down on one
side at the roofs of the houses of the village, and on the other side at
the river. When we were there the river was very low. Long banks of sand
pushed their backs up everywhere in the main stream and there was half a
mile of dry land between the river and the bank on which we stood. But
at flood time the river comes right up to the dyke, rises along the
slope of it, and the level of the water is far above that of the land
which the dykes protect. Then the people in the villages near the dyke
live in constant fear of inundation, and I saw, beside a house far
inland, a boat moored—should I in such a case say tethered?—to a tree
in a garden ready for use if the river swept away a dyke. I suppose the
people get accustomed to living under such conditions. Men cultivate
vines and make excellent wine on the slopes of Vesuvius though Pompeii
lies, a bleached skeleton, at their feet. I should myself rather plant
cotton behind a dyke, than do that. But I am not nearly so much afraid
of water as I am of fire.
I was told that at flood time men patrol the tops of the dykes with
loaded rifles in their hands, ready to shoot at sight anyone who
attempts to land from a boat. The idea is that unscrupulous people on
the left bank, seeing that their own dyke is in danger of collapsing,
might try to relieve the pressure on it by digging down a dyke on the
right bank and inundating the country behind it. The people on the other
side of course take similar precautions. Most men, such unfortunately is
human nature, would undoubtedly prefer to see their neighbors' houses
and fields flooded rather than their own. But I find it difficult to
believe that anyone would be so entirely unscrupulous as to dig down a
protecting dyke. The rifle men can scarcely be really necessary but
their existence witnesses to the greatness of the peril.
I saw, while I was in Memphis, a place where the river had torn a large
piece of land out of the side of a public park. The park stood high
above the river and I looked down over the edge of a moderately lofty
cliff at the marks of the river's violence. Some unexpected obstacle or
some unforeseen alteration in the river bed had sent the mighty current
in full force against the land in this particular place. The result was
the disappearance of a tract of ground and a semicircle of clay cliff
which looked as if it had been made with a gigantic cheese scoop. The
river was placid enough when I saw it, a broad but lazy stream. But for
the torn edge of the park I should have failed to realize how terrific
its force can be. The dykes were convincing. So were the stories of the
riflemen. But the other brought the reality home to me almost as well as
if I had actually seen a flood.