as I said, there are provincialisms in the Negro language, as in the
white. The cracker dialect of Georgia differs from the mountain dialect
of Tennessee, and so the darky language in Georgia differs much from that
in Tennessee.
But at last Negro dialect devolves itself not so much in spelling—in
dialect—as in mannerism. This is the fatal mistake which many writers
make who have not been raised among Negroes and who seem to think that
bad spelling and certain other forms of spelling make Negro dialect. No
one should attempt a Negro story who is not thoroughly familiar with
his ground, and then not unless he can tell a good story anyway. In
other words, he must be an artist in that line, he must have a calling
for story-telling, he must be able to create a great deal out of very
little. For in Negro stories, as in all others, one fact, one glimpse is
often sufficient for a whole story, as often one remark, aye, one word,
shows us more plainly a person’s character than if we had spent years in
studying him.
In Negro dialect, then, it is mannerism and not spelling that counts, for
the fraud is quickly detected if the article be not genuine. The present
darkies of Puck, Judge and other comic papers, and often even the stories
in magazines, bear no more resemblance to the real article than dried
apples do to the real fruit.
I know of nothing that misses the mark further, unless it be these same
comic papers’ drawings of the Negro. These really represent nothing,
and the “Mister Johnsings” darky and the darky that ends everything in
a broad “ah” may be the product of Northern tenement houses, but his
kinfolks down here would not know him if they met him in the road.
But as far as bad spelling is concerned, all dialect writers use more of
it than is necessary. As a matter of fact, the Middle Tennessee darky,
or he of the Black Belt of Alabama, who has been raised by educated white
people, or been thrown much in their society, speaks much more correctly
than the uneducated whites. For the Negro is nothing, as I said, if not
an imitator; and of all people he loves to imitate the better class of
whites. He has, therefore, caught fairly well their pronunciation of
all common words, their tone and inflection. The real fun occurs in the
use of his words and the incongruous relations he places them in. But
the poor white—the ignorant, uneducated white—is not an imitator, but a
creator, and some of the creations are enough to make us want to call out
the National Guard to save the king’s English. For instance: “I taken
a walk,” “I taken a drink,” “I taken my corn to mill.” This invariable
use of the past participle for the past tense by the unlettered white
is never used by the darky. He will say: “I tuck a drink,” “I tuck a
walk,” which is much nearer right than the first named. “No, thank you, I
wouldn’t choose any,” is the ignorant white’s way of declining a dish at
a meal. He loves the subjunctive mood better than the indicative, as his
invariable “Might you pass me them molasses?” shows. The darky will never
make such mistakes as these. He is an imitator, pure and simple, and he
never imitates that kind of a white man.
* * * * *
The truth is, there is and always has been, a strong antipathy—nay,
positive aversion—between the poor white and the darky. Any trouble
between the two races in the South is always between these two classes.
The old-time Southerners of the better class, who owned the darky, or
whose fathers owned him, are his best friends and staunchest supporters.
But for them I sometimes think the poor white, with his ignorant,
prejudiced ways and his natural hatred of the Negro would drive the
darky out of the country. As it is, the better classes are for him,
because they know him and have been raised with him and know him to be
faithful and true and admirably adapted as a laborer to the country. The
so-called Negro problem in the South exists more in the minds of writers
of the Thomas Dixon order and in newspapers than in the land itself. And
what there is of it will be solved forever and effectually the day the
great tide of immigration is turned southward.
And not any good can come to the South in the yellow novels which Thomas
Dixon is writing. That they are not literature goes without argument; but
a novel may not be literature and yet may sell, just as oleomargarine may
be colored deep saffron and passed for butter. As literature, then, they
will deceive no one except, perhaps, the young who read them and know no
better. And this is to be regretted, because there is danger always of
the young growing up with false ideas of literature as well as of life,
and they may imitate him. There are Dixons in every age of literature.
They run from Smollett to the House of Mirth. They take advantage of the
sores under the collar of the Galled Jade of Things to put money in their
purse. They die and their stuff dies with them. They live as long as they
do because the world has many people who would rather look at a sore than
a star.
* * * * *
To the older people of the South, who really knew what the Ku Klux was
before he fell under the magnifying glass of national politics and
became the distorted Behemoth upon which to make political capital,
the lime-lighted melodramas of Mr. Dixon bring only smiles. The thing
originated in the fun-loving plethora of the surcharged idleness of a
summer afternoon among a healthy lot of grown-up boys out for a lark and
to frighten newly-freed Negroes. Silence and a mystery appals any Negro.
It was a mystery and it rode in sheeted silence. It proved more effective
than a shotgun to send prowling Negroes to bed. It meant “ghostes” and if
a Negro has any religion in his bones it is the religion of ghostes. It
was so effective that it grew and was used as an admirable and effective
means of a superior race under the bayonet of their conquerors, to
maintain the racial integrity against the flood of freed and elevated
slaves. It owes its magnified proportions entirely to the red paint of
politics. Then, as with lynchings now, the busy and better people of the
South gave it neither their salvos nor their sanction. They were too
intent upon planting cotton, developing their great mines and rebuilding
their country. It was a half-mystic, half-lawless, much-talked-of lodge
of half-necessary lawlessness, whose stock in trade was blood-and-thunder
mystery and whose purchaser was ignorant, black Superstition.
It was one of the thousand and one means a superior intelligence will
always find to control inferior ignorance without butchering him in
blocks or pens.
* * * * *
But in its rollicking and rankest days it was never as bad nor had
it ever as strong a hold as lynching and homicide have to-day in all
sections of the Republic. And it never saw the day when it was half as
cruel or killed and flogged together in a month as many black Negroes
as Southern cotton mills kill of the white poor children of the South
in a day. Compared to the voiceless, swift-moving Juggernaut of the
child-killing cotton mill, Ku Klux was the painted, grinning clown of
a country show throwing rotten apples at a coon’s head stuck through a
sheet!
* * * * *
And as to child-labor—hear this metaphor:
Deep in the hills lies the little stream which is the beginning of the
river.
It is concealed in the ground that it may be protected, for so small is
its beginning that a too-rough footstep might destroy it, a ruthless
track might change it from the destiny of its way to the sea.
Growing, it creeps forth, but under leaf and mold, under the hanging
vines and protecting shrubs and only when it is strong enough to resist
all efforts to change its course does it flow out into the open and run
the race of its life.
How careful is nature to protect all things which are young.
“Youth is not for work,” she says, and she writes it from the stars of
the daisy field to the stars of heaven.
There is no flower which does not shelter its unblossomed buds, if
necessary, even with thorns. The wild doe hides her fawn in the bush; the
king of beasts hides his in the desert caverns.
Only man has decreed in his selfishness that his children must lose their
childhood to the greed of gold.
* * * * *
As for the negro himself, here are some plain, never-lying,
physiological, bred-in-the-bone truths about him which the sooner the
world recognizes, the easier will the problem of his being be. The Negro
is first and always an imitator. He cannot originate. He cannot go
upward, save as he copies from the whites, and if that prop be removed,
he will quickly go back into barbarism. There is something wanting in the
Negro character—in the very fibre of his being—that says as plainly as
God can say it of a race: “Thus far shalt thou go and no further.” And
left to himself for centuries on the most fertile continent of the globe,
he has remained to-day where he was at creation’s dawn. Egypt, Assyria,
Greece, Rome, the Saxon—all these civilizations have been added to the
world, and still the Negro remains as God made him.
There are some people who think they can improve on the Almighty’s plan.
The Maker of All did not intend that the Negro should be a white man in
a black skin, as some who are solving the Negro problem would think. If
He had, He would have made him like the white man and given him that
indefinable, inexplicable quality that makes the white man a doer of
deeds, a fighter, an advancer, a dreamer, a conqueror. The Negro is none
of these. He is merely a good natured, inferior man, a non-combative
race, made for some purpose of labor, to be directed always by a superior
mind, and in his highest development an imitator.
There has been so much said on the Negro problem lately that I have
inadvertently, as it were, thrown out this. It is good for one to be set
straight now and then, on first principles. It is easy for man to get all
wrong if he starts out on a wrong hypothesis.
* * * * *
In a letter from a correspondent in Medicine Lodge, Kans., the other
day, appears a sentence we have been looking for all our lives.
“Facts, ideals and a thrill,” he says, “is a terse definition of every
great story,” and he is kind enough to say that Trotwood’s fills the
definition. “Facts, ideals and a thrill”—I should love to know just who
originated that boiled-down recipe for real literature. If I might advise
all of my writers (and I am called on daily by letters to help advise
many of them), I would say adopt that motto and go write your story. As
for us hereafter, we will nail it to our masthead and try to build up to
it.
* * * * *
Another well-wisher suggests that we change the words on the title page
from Farm, Horse and Home to The Southland—her land and her life. That is
not bad, either. We publish this to let you know that we appreciate all
such suggestions. We feel that you would not do it if you did not like
us. And that is what we are here for—to get you to like us.
And here let us say that the next issue of Trotwood’s will inaugurate
a long-cherished idea of its editor. Under the heading of “Trotwood’s
Travels through the South,” in a special advertising departure we will
visit various sections of our great Southland and tell what we saw. We
wish to show to the world just what we have here in the newly awakened
South, with all its natural wealth and its old ideals. Nor will we
take this space from the body of Trotwood’s—it will be additional. Our
first visit will be to the beautiful valley of the Tennessee, at the
growing little city of Florence, Ala., the head of the Mussel Shoals.
Last week the President signed a bill permitting a five million dollar
company to harness the waste waters of the great shoals, giving power
to the towns and cities within a radius of two hundred miles of it. We
will show what that means and what chances there are in Florence, with
all her resources. For the June number the cantaloupe-raising industry
of Lawrenceburg, in Lawrence County, Tenn., has been selected—Lawrence
County, where one hundred dollars and more per acre were cleared last
year in her newly discovered improvement in the Rocky Ford cantaloupe,
and lands are trebling in value. From issue to issue we will take
different sections of the South, from Georgia to Texas. And as we go we
propose to tell the history and the romance of it too. For what is a land
without its romance? A woman without a love affair is more interesting.
Business Department
There is hardly a day but we receive from one to half a dozen letters
from our subscribers telling us how they appreciate Trotwood’s Monthly
and Trotwood. His stories seem to please the people, and they are all
loud in their praise, but we do not recall having received anything of a
complimentary nature regarding his writing—with a pen. We often have to
translate some of his letters for people who fall down when they try to
read them, but the following letter written to Mr. Sterling C. Brewer,
principal of the Link School, Thomasville, Tenn., seems to hold the
record:
[Illustration]
The above is a facsimile of the letter written by Trotwood.
Mr. Brewer writes as follows.
“When I received Trotwood’s letter I saw at once that it was a rather
a tough proposition, and I turned it over to one of my pupils for
translation. She called her chum and they studied it very diligently for
awhile, and to make sure that none of it escaped, wrote it down, and it
came to me in a small vertical hand as plain as print:
“‘Dr. M. Braver:
“‘I struck pie 10 inches. Pretty if clean and well done of a
jay man. I’d like to charge it some after meat. It would make
a snake sweat trying to propel hayseed. I shall snatch and
extract a pin from prim hind legs (calling no man). Jim Wren is
in Grotmood exactly.
“‘Hoplood towhit to whoo
“‘Fleetwood,
“‘TOBE PALMWOOD MANN.’
“I then turned it over to another pupil that would eagerly chase an
obscure fact through a whole set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and here
is her translation:
“‘Dr. Bu Brur:
“‘I drank the 10 March. Poetry is clean swell done for a gay
man. I take to change it some of the time too. It would make
a great old hash story of the Prophet Daniel. I shall snatch
an extra pen point if it aint better (calm no man) Jno Der is
Trotword exactly. Hoeneald to meet you by and by
“‘Fretfully yours,
“She fell down on the signature, but said it looked like some kind of a
Woodbine, but she wasn’t sure about it.”
We see nothing out of the ordinary about this letter, and can truthfully
say that it is a great improvement over some of the “copy” Trotwood sends
in. The letter is plain enough, and reads as follows:
“Dear Mr. Brewer:
“I thank you so much. The story is clean and well done for a
young man. I’d like to change it some if I use it. It would
make a great Old Wash story if properly handled. I shall quote
an extract from your letter (calling no names). Your idea is
Trotwood’s exactly. Hoping to meet you some day,
“Faithfully yours
“JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE.”
* * * * *
We have a letter from a gentleman living in Montana as follows:
“Gentlemen: I have just learned that your magazine has been
started through my niece.”
We are extremely sorry, and hope the young lady will suffer no ill
effects, but we do not see that we are to blame, as we did not tell her
to do it. We have no clubbing arrangements with other publications, but
in this case we would recommend a copy of the Literary Digest.
Brittain Tobacco Works
Smoking and Chewing Tobaccos
Columbia, Tenn., Feb. 24, 1906.
TROTWOOD’S MONTHLY, Nashville, Tenn.
Dear Sirs—Thinking that you may be interested in knowing
something of the results obtained from our “ad” in your
esteemed magazine we wish to say that we have been highly
pleased with same.
When we began running this “ad” we thought it would pay if we
kept at it long enough, but we did not hope to reap so great
results in so short a time.
We have used other publications as a medium of advertising our
products, but yours has brought us more business than any we
have ever tried. We are in daily receipt of letters coming from
almost every state in the union in reply to the “ad” which you
have been running for us. We have received as high as twelve to
fifteen orders a day as a result of same.
We will ask that you continue same till we advise you to cut
it out and we will not do this so long as results are as
satisfactory as they have been.
Wishing you the greatest success possible, we are,
Yours very truly,
BRITTAIN TOBACCO WORKS.
By W. R. Hutton, Treas.