THE ROAD TO ARCADY
Before we saw the train which was to take us from Birmingham to
Columbus, Mississippi, we began to sense its quality. When we attempted
to purchase parlor car seats of the ticket agent at the Union Station
and were informed by him that our train carried no parlor car, it seemed
to us that his manner was touched with cynicism, and this impression was
confirmed by his reply to our further timid inquiry as to a dining car:
"Where do you gentlemen reckon you're a-goin' to, anyhow?"
Presently we passed through the gate and better understood the nature of
the ticket agent's thoughts. The train consisted of several untidy day
coaches, the first a Jim Crow car, the others for white people. The
negro car was already so full that many of its occupants had to stand in
the aisle, but this did not seem to trouble them, for all were gabbling
happily, and the impression one got, in glancing through the door, was
of many sets of handsome white teeth displayed in as many dark grinning
faces. There are innumerable things for which we cannot envy the negro,
but neither his teeth nor his good nature are among them.
It was Saturday afternoon, and the two or three other cars, though not
overcrowded, were well filled with people from the neighboring mining
towns who were going home after having spent the morning shopping in the
city. Almost all our fellow passengers carried packages, many had
infants with them, and we were struck with the fact that the complexions
of these people suggested a diet of pie--fried pie, if there be such a
thing--that a peculiarly high percentage of them suffered from diseases
of the eye, and that the pervading smell of the car in which we sat was
of oranges, bananas, babies, and overheated adults.
A young mother in the seat in front of us had with her three small
children, the youngest an infant in arms. She was feeding a banana to
the second child, who looked about two years old. Behind us a clean,
capable-looking woman talked in a broad Scottish dialect with another
housewife whose jargon was that of the mountaineers.
The region through which the train presently began to wind its way was
green and hilly, and there were many stops at villages, all of them
mining camps apparently, made up of shabby little cabins scattered
helter-skelter upon the hillsides. In many of the cabin doorways mothers
lingered with their broods watching the train, and on all the station
platforms stood crowds of idlers--men, women, and children, negro and
white--many of the men stamped, by their coal-begrimed faces, their
stained overalls, and the lamps above the visors of their caps, as mine
workers.
After a time my companion and I moved to the exceedingly dirty smoking
room at the end of the car, where we sat and listened to the homely
conversation of a group of men who seemed not only to know one another,
but to know the same people in towns along the line. Between stations
they gossiped, smoked, chewed, spat, and swore together like so many New
England crossroad sages, but when the train stopped they gave
encouraging attention to the droll performances of one of their number,
a shaggy, unshaven, rawboned man, of middle age, gray-haired and
collarless, who sat near the window and uttered convincing imitations of
the sounds made by chickens, roosters, pigs, goats, and crows.
The platform crowds, the negroes in particular, were mystified and lured
by this animal chorus coming from a passenger coach. On hearing it they
would first gaze in astonishment at the car, then edge up to the windows
and doors, and peer in with eyes solemn, round, and wondering, only to
be more amazed than ever by the discovery that the car housed neither
bird nor beast. This bucolic comedy was repeated at every station until
we reached Wyatt, Alabama, where our gifted fellow traveler arose,
pointed his collar button toward the door, bade us farewell, and
departed, saying that he was going to "walk over to Democrat."
Presently the conductor dropped in for a chat, in the course of which
he informed the assembly that a certain old lady in one of the towns
along the way had died the night before, whereupon our companions of the
smoking room, all of whom seemed to have known the old lady well, held a
protracted discussion of her history and traits.
After a time my companion and I put in a few questions about the State
of Mississippi. Boiled down, the principal information we gathered was
as follows:
By the 1910 census Mississippi had not one city of 25,000 inhabitants.
Meridian, with 23,000, was (and probably still is) her metropolis, with
Jackson and Vicksburg, cities of about 20,000 each, following. The
entire State has but fifteen cities having a population of 5000 or more,
so that, of a total of about a million and three-quarters of people in
the State (more than half of them colored), only about one-tenth live in
towns with a population of 5000 or over.
After a little visit the conductor went away. Now and then a man would
leave us and get off at a station, or some new passenger would join our
group. Presently I found myself thinking about dinner, and asked a man
wearing an electric-blue cap if he knew what provision was made for the
evening meal.
Before he could reply the train boy, who had come into the smoking room
a few minutes before, piped up. He was a train boy of a type I had
supposed extinct: the kind of train boy one might have encountered on
almost any second-rate train twenty years ago,--a bold, impudent young
smartaleck, full of insistent salesmanship and obnoxious conversation.
He declared that dinner was not to be had, and that the only sustenance
available en route consisted in the uninviting assortment of fruit,
nuts, candy, and sweet tepid beverages contained in his basket.
Fortunately for us, the man we had addressed knew better.
"What do you want to lie like that for, boy?" he demanded. "You know as
well as I do that the brakeman takes on five boxes of lunch at Covin."
"Well," said the boy, with a grin, "I gotta sell things, ain't I? The
brakeman hadn't oughta have that graft anyhow. _I'd_ oughta have it. He
gets them lunches fer two bits and sells 'em for thirty-five cents." Far
from feeling abashed, he was pleased with himself.
"Folks is funny people," remarked a man with a weather-beaten face who
sat in the corner seat, and seemed to be addressing no one in
particular. "I know a boy that's going to git hung some day. And when
they've got the noose rigged nice around his neck, and everything ready,
and the trap a-waitin' to be sprung, why, then that boy is goin' to be
so sorry for hisself that he won't hardly know what to do. He'll say: 'I
ain't never had no chance in life, I ain't. The world ain't never used
me right.' ... Yes, folks is funny people."
After this soliloquy there occurred a brief silence in the smoking
room, and presently the train boy took up his basket and went upon his
way.
"You say they take on the lunches at Covin now?" one of the passengers
asked of the man in the electric-blue cap.
"Yes."
"What's become of old man Whitney, over to Fayetteville?"
"They used to git lunches off of him," replied the other, "but the old
man wasn't none too dependable. Now and then he'd oversleep, and folks
on the 5 A.M. out of Columbus was like to starve for breakfast."
"Right smart shock-headed boy the old man's got," put in another. "The
old man gives 'im anything he wants. He wanted a motorcycle, and the old
man give 'im one. Then he wanted one of them hot-candy machines; they
cost about two hundred and fifty dollars, but the old man give it to 'im
just the same."
"The kid went to San Francisco with it, didn't he?" asked the man with
the electric-blue cap.
"He started to go there," replied the former speaker, "but he only got
as fur as Little Rock; then he come on back home, and the old man bought
'im a wireless-telegraph plant. Yeaup! That boy gets messages right outa
the air--from Washington, D.C., and Berlin, and every place. The
Govamunt don't allow 'im to tell you much of it. He tells a little,
though--just to give you a notion."
So, through the five-hour ride the conversation ran. Several times the
talk drifted to politics and to the European War, but the politics
discussed were local and lopsided, and the war was all too clearly
regarded as something interesting but vague and remote. On the entire
journey not one word was spoken indicating that the people of this
section had the least grasp on any national question, or that they were
considering national questions, or that they realized what the war in
Europe is about--that it is a war for freedom and democracy, a war
against war, a war to prevent a few individuals from ever again plunging
the world into war. Nor, though the day of our entry into the war was
close at hand, had the idea that we might be forced to take part in the
conflict so much as occurred to any of them.
They were not stupid people; on the contrary, some of them possessed a
homely and picturesque philosophy; but they were not informed, and the
reason they were not informed has to do with one of the chief needs of
our rural population--especially the rural population of the South.
What they need is good newspapers. They need more world news and
national news in place of county news and local briefs. In the whole
South, moreover, there is need for general political news instead of
biased news written always from inside the Democratic party, and
sandwiched in between patent medicine advertisements.