SHREDS AND PATCHES
It was Marse Harris Dickson who showed us the battlefield. As we were
driving along in the motor we overtook an old trudging negro, very
picturesque in his ragged clothing and battered soft hat. My companion
said that he would like to take a picture of this wayfarer, and asked
Marse Harris, who, as author of the "Old Reliable" stories, seemed best
fitted for the task, to arrange the matter. The automobile, having
passed the negro, was stopped to wait for him to catch up. Presently, as
he came by, Marse Harris addressed him in that friendly way Southerners
have with negroes.
"Want your picture taken, old man?" he asked.
To which the negro, still shuffling along, replied:
"I ain't got no money."
Marse Harris, knowing the workings of the negro mind, got the full
import of this reply at once, but I must confess that a moment passed
before I realized that the negro took us for itinerant photographers
looking for trade.
With the possible exception of Irvin S. Cobb, I suppose Marse Harris has
the largest collection of negro character stories of any individual in
this country. And let me say, in this connection, that I know of no
better place than Vicksburg for the study of southern negro types.
One day Marse Harris was passing by the jail. It was hot weather, and
the jail windows were open. Behind the bars of one window, looking down
upon the street, stood a negro prisoner. As Marse Harris passed this
window a negro wearing a large watch chain came by in the other
direction. His watch chain evidently caught the eye of the prisoner, who
spoke in a wistful tone, demanding:
"What tahme is it, brotha?"
"What foh you want t' know what tahme it is?" returned the other
sternly, as he continued upon his way. "You ain't goin' nowhere."
Through Marse Harris I obtained a copy of a letter written by a negro
named Walter to Mr. W.H. Reeve of Vicksburg. Walter had looked out for
Mr. Reeve's live stock during a flood, and had certain ideas about what
should be done for him in consequence. I give the letter exactly as it
was written, merely inserting, parenthetically, a few explanatory words:
_Mr. H W Reeve an bos dear sir I like to git me a par [pair] second
hand pance dont a fail or elce I will be dout [without] a pare to
go eny where so send me something. Dont a fail an send me a par of
youre pance [or] i will hafter go to work for somebody to git some.
I don't think you all is treating me right at all I stayed with
youre hogs in the water till the last tening [attending] to them
and I dont think that youre oder [ought to] fail me bout a pare old
pance_
WALTER
Though I cannot see just why it should be so, it seemed to us that the
Vicksburg negroes were happier than those of any other place we visited.
Whether drowsing in the sun, walking the streets, doing a little stroke
of work, fishing, or sitting gabbling on the curbstone, they were upon
the whole as cheerful and as comical a lot of people as I ever saw.
"Wha' you-all goin' to?" I heard a negro ask a group of mulatto women,
in clean starched gingham dresses, who went flouncing by him on the
street one Saturday afternoon.
"Oh," returned one of the women, with the elaborate superiority of a
member of the class of idle rich, "we're just serenadin' 'round."
"Serenading," as she used the word, meant a promenade about the town.
Perhaps the happiness of the negro, here, has to do with the lazy life
of the river. The succulent catfish is easily obtainable for food, and
the wages of the roustabout--or "rouster," as he is called for
short--are good.
The rouster, in his red undershirt, with a bale hook hung in his belt,
is a figure to fascinate the eye. When he works--which is to say, when
he is out of funds--he works hard. He will swing a two-hundred-pound
sack to his back and do fancy steps as he marches with it up the springy
gangplank to the river steamer's deck, uttering now and then a strange,
barbaric snatch of song. He has no home, no family, no responsibilities.
An ignorant deck hand can earn from forty to one hundred dollars a
month. Pay him off at the end of the trip, let him get ashore with his
money, and he is gone. Without deck hands the steamer cannot move. For
many years there has been known to river captains a simple way out of
this difficulty. Pay the rousters off a few hours before the end of the
trip. Say there are twenty of them, and that each is given twenty
dollars. They clear a space on deck and begin shooting craps. No one
interferes. By the time the trip ends most of the money has passed into
the hands of four or five; the rest are "broke" and therefore remain at
work. Yet despite the ingenuity of those who have the negro labor
problem to contend with, Marse Harris tells me that there have been
times when the levee was lined with steamers, full-loaded, but unable to
depart for want of a crew. Not that there was any lack of roustabouts in
town, but that, money being plentiful, they would not work. In such
times perishable freight rots and is thrown overboard.
I am conscious of a tendency, in writing of Vicksburg, to dwell
continually upon the negro and the river for the reason that the two
form an enchanting background for the whole life of the place. This
should not, however, be taken to indicate that Vicksburg is not a city
of agreeable homes and pleasant society, or that its only
picturesqueness is to be found in the river and negro life.
The point is that Vicksburg is a patchwork city. The National Park
Hotel, its chief hostelry, is an unusually good hotel for a city of
this size, and Washington Street, in the neighborhood of the hotel, has
the look of a busy city street; yet on the same square with the hotel,
on the street below, nearer the river, is an unwholesome negro
settlement. So it is all over the city; the "white folks" live on the
hills, while the "niggers" inhabit the adjacent bottoms. Nor is that the
only sense in which the town is patched together. Some of the most
charming of the city's old homes are tucked away where the visitor is
not likely to see them without deliberate search. Such a place, for
example, is the old Klein house, standing amid lawns and old-fashioned
gardens, on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi. This house was built
long before the railroad came to Vicksburg, cutting off its grounds from
the river. A patch in the paneling of the front door shows where a
cannon ball passed through at the time of the bombardment, and the ball
itself may still be seen embedded in the woodwork of one of the rooms
within.
And there are other patches. Near the old courthouse, which rears itself
so handsomely at the summit of a series of terraces leading up from the
street, are a number of old sand roads which must be to-day almost as
they were in the heyday of the river's glory, when the region in which
the courthouse stands was the principal part of the city--the days of
heavy drinking and gambling, dueling, slave markets, and steamboat
races. These streets are not the streets of a city, but of a small town.
So, too, where Adams Street crosses Grove, it has the appearance of a
country lane, the road represented by a pair of wheel tracks running
through the grass; but Cherry Street, only a block distant, is built up
with city houses and has a good asphalt pavement and a trolley line.