sugar or cotton, which suggest slavery. Virtual slavery is called
_peonage_ and many examples were given me by Negroes. It is arranged
in some places that the Negro handles as little money as possible.
Instead of money he has credit checks, metal or cardboard disks,
which he can use at the general store to purchase his provisions.
He is kept in debt so that he can never get out, and so lives with
a halter round his neck. Especially during the war, when the rumor
of war wages was tempting the colored labor of the South to migrate
North in huge numbers, efforts were made to keep the Negro without
the means of straying from the locality where the labor of his hands
was the foundation of the life of the community. Other forms of
_peonage_ prevalent in rural parts is the commuting of punishment for
forced labor, the hiring out of penal labor to companies or public
authorities. This resembles the use made of prisoners during the recent
world war, and is virtual slavery.
All inroads made on the liberty of the subject might fittingly
be classed as _peonage_—the denial of the vote to those legally
enfranchised, intimidation by lynch law, etc.
I talked with an old Negro after leaving Louisville and tramping south
toward Midville. He was lolling in rags on his porch—very near white.
His father had been his black mother’s white master. He remembered
Sherman’s passing when he was a boy. A remarkably intelligent and
tragic face, where an unhappy white man looked out on the misery of
abject poverty and quasi-bondage. Cotton had proved bad this year. The
boll weevil had entered the pod early. There were but three or four
bales to the plow. He did not know how he’d foot his bills. The rations
given him in the spring had become exhausted. He had also hoped to buy
clothes. He said the traders came early in the year and supplied him
with all sorts of things on the strength of a large cotton crop, and
he pointed to a toy bicycle lying upside down in the grass. He let his
little boy stride it, and mother thought it fine. Last year God had
blessed them with a very fine crop, and why should He not be as kind
this year? So he signed on for the toy bicycle and for a gramophone as
well. Now he complained that they were cutting off his rations, mother
lay ill a-bed, the weather was getting cold, and they had no clothes.
The boss was coming presently to turn them out of the cabin altogether,
and they did not know where to go. Even while we were talking two
bullet-headed young fellows, clean-shaven, frank, and surly, came up
in an automobile, stopped short, and rated the old man from where they
sat in the car. The cabin and the little cotton plantation belonged to
them now, and the old fellow was reverting from small proprietor to be
laborer on a plantation, and to be laborer was little better than to be
slave.
“We have to let down rope ladders to our people to get them up here,”
said a colored dean of a university to me. “We live in such abysses
down below, and there is no regular way out of the pit.”
I felt as I was marching into Georgia as if I were descending the rope
ladder. What a contrast there was between the bright, radiant-faced
girls at Atlanta studying science and languages, and those whom I was
meeting now. There was a regular sequence or gradation going downward
to filth and serfdom. The first bathed twice a day, and spent hours
working “anti-kink” not only into their hair but into their souls and
minds. They were fresh and fit and happy as morning itself. That was
on the Atlanta heights. I stepped down to the world of business with
its heavier, gloomier types, the hard-faced, skillful, and acquisitive
doctors, the fire-delivering, shadowy-minded clergy, the excited
and eager yet heavy-footed politicians. I took the road and met the
troubled landowners, pathetically happy to exist, though drowning in
mortgage and debt; from them I passed to the farm laborers, with the
jowl of the savage, matted hair, bent backs, deformed with joyless
toil, exuding poisonous perspiration and foul odor, herded like cattle
or worse, nearer to the beast than our domestic animals, feared by
women and weak men, as beasts are feared when they come in the likeness
of human beings.
There were, however, steps lower still in the ladder which leads
downward from the Atlanta hills. Frequently along the road I saw men
in yellow-striped overalls, plodding together, working together,
overlooked by a white man with a gun, and as they walked sounded the
pitiful clank-clank of the chains. It is rather curious, _kandali_ in
Siberia are an atrocity, but in sections of the United States they are
quite natural.
“We do not keep ‘em in jail, but make ‘em work,” says the white man
knowingly. “When there’s much work to do on the roads we soon find
the labor.” At Springfield I remarked the terrible state of disrepair
of the highway and public buildings. The reason was that instead of
setting their criminals to work on them they handed them over to the
State authorities. Other towns knew better. But in the chain gang and
the striped convict so easily obtained at the courts the ex-slave was
seen at his worst, and the rope ladder stopped short before touching
bottom.
There is not much to endear the ordinary wooden cabins in which the
mass of America’s black peasantry is found to live. They are poorer and
barer than the worst you would see in Russia. Ex-serf has fared better
than ex-slave. However, one detail of charm on this Georgian way was
the putting up of tiny stars as a sign of boys serving in the army, a
humble star of hope and glory like some tiny flower blossoming out of
season in the wilds—one white star for a boy in the army, a golden one
for a boy who had died. In their submerged way the Negroes were proud
of having helped in the war. The glory, or the idea, or the parrot cry
of “making the world safe for democracy” had penetrated even into the
most obscure abodes. The poor Negro had discovered Europe at last, and
was especially in love with one nation—the French. The South generally
had not been very eager to see the Negro in the war and has not reacted
sympathetically to the black man’s war glory.
“There’s no managing the neegahs now, they’s got so biggety since the
war,” said a white woman at Shadydale. “Las’ year we white people jus’
had to pick the cotton usselves, men, women, and chillen.” She told me
she did not think it a bit nice of the French girls to walk out with
Negro soldiers, and then told a story of a French bride brought home by
one of the white boys. She tittered. “Yes ... she had twins soon af’
she came, and would you b’lieve it, they were neegahs. Of course he
sent her right back.” The French intimacy with the Negro soldiers has
cooled the Southerner’s regard for the best-loved nation of Europe. It
has also stirred up the racial fear concerning Negroes and white women.
Because the black soldier was a favorite of the white girls in France
it is thought that his eye roves more readily to the pure womanhood of
the South.
Lynching seems often to be due to puritanical fervor, and is compatible
with a type of religiosity. Mob feeling against love is very dangerous.
A pastor kisses a girl of his congregation, a deacon happens to see
it, and his career is ended. An old man on the road volunteered the
fact that he had never “sinned” with a woman, black or white, his whole
life. Certainly there is a high standard of righteousness. Family
life is pure, and love-making is not the chief interest in life as in
some European countries. Men’s minds are more on their business, and
women’s on their homes. I am tempted to think that if the white race
which inhabits the South were French or Russian or Polish or Greek
there would be no lynchings. The great number of mixed relationships
would beget tolerance for inter-racial attraction. I said to a young
Floridan going through in his car—“I can well imagine a certain type
of European women ogling the Negro, making eyes at him and luring him
to his destruction. Have you ever come across such a type?” He answered
“No, and if there were, we’d do away with her, too.”
Of course this rigidly moral point of view falls away when it is a
matter of the white man and the black girl or the mulatto. The morality
of the Negro woman was badly undermined in slavery days, when slave
children were bred without any thought of sin or shame. But though
the moral standard has been low, it is nothing like so low as it was.
Pride of race has been born, and the moral purity of the colored woman
as a whole is now comparatively higher. Certainly even in the country
districts, where the Negro is nearest to his old state of being a
chattel, there is a great decrease in the number of half-bred children.
The solution of the racial problem by ultimate blending of color is not
one which seems likely to succeed here in the course of nature. Black
and White are far more separate and distinct in freedom than they were
in slavery. Even the black mammy is dying out. There are not so many
of that type of colored women. The white mother, moreover, has more
scruple against giving her child away from her own breast. The Southern
woman is as much against promiscuous relationships with Negro women as
her manfolk is against the Negro’s roving eyes. One woman said, “You
can understand the fondness of our young men for some of the Negro
girls when as babies they were suckled by a Negro woman.” There is much
psychological truth in that.
During these weeks on the roads of Georgia three Negroes were burned
in my neighborhood, two near Savannah for supposed complicity in the
murder of a deputy sheriff, and a mob of about a thousand white men
took pleasure in the auto-da-fé. A short while later near Macon a Negro
was accused of making love to a woman of fifty as she was coming home
from church one Sunday evening. Some one certainly attacked her, though
what was his object might be questionable. The accused man fled for
his life. He was captured at midnight by certain well-known citizens
whose names were published in the press. The sheriff argued with a
crowd of about four hundred in the public street for about an hour
and a half, and then, like Pilate, washed his hands of the matter and
let the mob have its way. Paul Brooker, the Negro, lay on the ground
maltreated, but living; gasoline was poured over him, a lighted match
was applied, and he was burned to death. This was not in Catholic Spain
in the days of the Inquisition, but in religious Georgia, solid for
Wilson and the League of Nations. I was told I could not understand why
such things had to be done. No Englishman and no Northerner could ever
penetrate the secret of it. That seemed to put me in the wrong when
conversing with the Southern people. It was a curious fact, however,
that they also for their part took no pains to understand how such
things made the blood boil in the veins of one who lived elsewhere. It
was not the execution nor the crime but the cruelty that seemed to me
unforgivable. I could understand killing the Negro, but I could not and
would not care to understand the state of mind of the four hundred who
enjoyed his torments.
Burnings and hangings and mob violence of other kinds are frequent in
most of the States of the South, but even in such cases where the names
of citizens are given in the press no prosecution or inquiry seems to
follow. Thus the great flag is flouted, and it is possible to imagine
the cynical mirth with which the ecstasy of the Negroes following the
Army of Liberation in 1864 might be compared with the hilarity of the
Southern mob in 1920 watching the ex-slave slowly burning to death on
their accusation and yelling for mercy when there was no merciful ear
to hear.
* * * * *
I suppose nothing begets hate so readily as cruelty. That is why in
all wars there is so much mongering of atrocities: one side tries to
find out all the cruelties and barbarities committed by the other just
to stir up its own adherents. So in the Civil War all the brutalities
of the slave owners were made known, and the Northern soldier’s blood
boiled because of them. Although the quarrel is now healed, there was,
at the time, a deep hate of the Southerners in the war. It was not only
a martial conflict but personal hatred and contempt. What was done to
the Blacks was aggravated by what was done to the white prisoners. The
North discovered a cruelty and callousness in the South which must have
been a puzzle to those who reflected that they were of the same race.
For Georgia is predominantly English by extraction, and still proud,
as I found, of grandfathers and great-grandfathers born in the old
country. Some ascribe the change of temperament to the hot sun and to
the southern latitude; more, to the brutalizing influences of slavery
itself.
When I was at Millen, which once in the glare of a burning railroad
swarmed with Sherman’s troopers, I went out to the old Southern battery
at Lawton and saw the mounds and the fields where the pen of Northern
prisoners was kept. It is waving with grass or corn to-day, and there
is a beautiful crystal spring in the midst of serene, untroubled
nature. Here the prisoners were concentrated in a space of ground three
hundred feet square, enclosed in a stockade and without covering,
exposed to all kinds of weather. When any escaped they were chased
with bloodhounds. Some seven hundred and fifty died while in this
concentration camp. No wonder a soldier of the time wrote: “It fevered
the blood of our brave boys.... God certainly will visit the authors of
all this crime with a terrible judgment.”
Sherman’s soldiers destroyed every hound they could find in Georgia
as they passed through—so strongly did they resent the barbarity
of hunting men with dogs. For the South had learned to hunt runaway
slaves with bloodhounds, and it was a type of hunting which gave a
peculiar satisfaction to the lust of cruelty. What they learned in
the maltreatment of their slaves they could put into practice against
the prisoners they obtained. There again, however, the war has failed
to bear fruit; for the hunting of Negroes with bloodhounds has become
common once more.
The Northern soldiers did not become gentler to the Southern population
as they advanced further into the depths of the country. Rather the
reverse. They would have been even more destructive than before had
they not found the country to be more and more sparsely settled. The
march from Millen to Savannah would have resulted in the harshest
treatment of the people, but happily the way lay through forests and
through the uncultivated wildernesses of Nature herself. The army had
only its prisoners to vent its displeasure upon, and they certainly
did not pet the few hundred Confederate soldiers and “civilian
personages” whom they had collected in bondage. The enemy was found
to have mined the road at one point. An officer of the Union Army had
his leg blown off. Eight-inch shells had been buried in the sand with
friction matches to explode them when trod on. Sherman was very angry,
and called it murder, not war, in a way which reminds one of the
indignation caused when in the late war the Germans started anything
novel. The answer to this mining of the road was to make the rebel
prisoners march ahead of the column in close formation so as to explode
any more which might be laid on the way. They were greatly afraid, and
begged hard to be let off—much to the mirth of the supposed victims.
It was not until nearing one of the forts of Savannah that another mine
exploded—the hurt done to the prisoners remains unrecorded.
* * * * *
The way is eastward to Sylvania and the Savannah River, and then south
to the rice fields and the harbor. The road is deep in sand, and
on each side is uncleared country with high yellow reeds below and
lofty pines above. Persimmons, ripe and yellow, grow by the wayside,
a luscious fruit, good when just rotten and full of softness and sun
heat. Large bird-like butterflies gracefully flitting down the long
corridors between the pines, and myriads of jumping mantises and
grasshoppers suggest that it is not November. The golden foliage of
an occasional beech reminds you that it is. The woods are deep and
gloomy and melancholy. A poorer population lives by pitch-boiling and
lumbering. Every pine tree is bearded with lichen. Moss hangs in long
festoons from the branches. The great dark trunks are here and there
silvered with congealed floods of sap. Trenches two inches deep have
been cut in the wood, and tin gutters and pots have been fixed up to
collect the resin. Every other tree has a brown pot tied to it, and
each pot is half full of the pearly liquid life of the trees. You
emerge from the forest to the pretty clearing of Rincom with a Lutheran
church which has a metal swan above the spire—symbol of the fact that
the first congregation, the one that built the church, had come across
the water from Europe. Six miles from Rincom is the oldest church in
all this part of Georgia, the Ebenezer Chapel, founded by those first
German settlers who sailed up the Savannah River, and in part founded
the colony of Georgia. It also is a church of the swan. The forest is
very dense, and Negroes with shotguns are potting at wild birds from
the highway. Wayside cottages and churches seem almost overcome with
the tillandsia, a subtropical mossy growth that seems to grow downward
rather than upward. There is a slight clearing and a cemetery in the
depth of the forest, and the hundreds of pines and cypresses and oaks
about it are weeping with this hanging moss. The county is that of
Effingham. Springfield, the capital, without electric light, deep
in yellow sand, with a great public square where all the many trees
look like weeping willows because of this gray-green tillandsia hair
trailing and waving ten or twenty feet to a tress, is an obscure town.
Guideposts for Florida begin to appear, and heavy touring cars roll
past on the way to Miami and Palm Beach. There are some charming wooden
churches—the Negro ones being poorer, looking better sacrifices unto
God than those of the Whites. But above the counter in the chief store
is written
In God we trust,
All others pay cash.
The sound of the axe clashes in the woods. There are many fallen trunks
on which it is possible to sit down and rest. Sea mist rolls in from
the Atlantic, and warm airs push through it, feeding the marvelous
tropical mosses. It’s a long way to Savannah—distance seems to be
intensified by the narrowness of the gray corridor of the road through
the vast, high forest. There rises from the obstructed earth black oak
and sterile vine and palmettoes like ladies’ hands with opened fans.
The surface whence the forest grows is swampy, old, lichened, mossy,
springy. It’s hard to find solid earth, so many branches seem to be
overgrown with verdure and moss. In the heat long snakes glide away
from your approach, having seen you before you saw them. And _rat_,
_rat_, _rat_, the red-polled woodpeckers in their tree-top cities call
upon one another and seek their insect luncheons and then flit home and
knock again. The white people speak a “nigger brogue” which is almost
indistinguishable from Negro talk, and they never pronounce an _r_. The
Negro seems very poor and illiterate and afraid. “Hear comes the OLD
RELIABLE FRIND with the LIFT of CHRIST” says a notice on an old wooden
church of colored folk.
I am overtaken by a Negro with a wagon and twelve bales of cotton,
and though he seems trying to race a huge touring car “heading for
Florida” with trunks on top and whole family within, he slows down to
pick me up. His is an enormous lorry, ponderous and ramshackle, shaking
the bones out of your body as it takes you along. The Negro boy held
the steering wheel nonchalantly with one hand and blundered along at
top speed. After ten miles of this we entered one of the vast cotton
warehouses outside Savannah, passed the gateman who would not have
let me in but he thought I was in charge, and we saw where a hundred
thousand bales were being housed and kept. Scores of Negroes were at
work manipulating bales on trolley trains run by petrol engines all
over the asphalted way, and from shed to shed.
“Are you shipping much cotton?” I asked of a white man who was giving
us a receipt for the cotton brought in, while a dozen husky fellows
were unloading the wagon. “Not much,” said he. “Holding for better
prices,” he added, and smiled knowingly.
Then with the empty wagon we rolled off for Savannah, and the boy
driver told me he was going to work his passage soon on a ship from
Savannah to New York. “We don’t get a chance down here.”
And yet how much better off was he with his wagon, and union wages, and
life in a large city than the poor ex-slave, on the land!
While unlading, it had become dark. But an hour more through the
forest brought us to the outlying slums of Savannah, and then to the
“red-light district” where were music and dancing, and open doors and
windows, and the red glow of the lamp luring colored youth to lowest
pleasures; then to the grandeur and spaciousness of modern Savannah,
and the white man’s civilization, up out of Georgia, up out of the pit,
through the veil of the forest and of Nature to the serene heights of
world civilization once more.
VII
AFTER THE WAR: THE VOTE
The march to the sea, like John Brown’s soul marching to eternity, was
a moving symbol of the faith of the war. Men saw in it the march of the
cause of humanity as a whole. Sherman offered Savannah as a Christmas
gift to Abraham Lincoln, and the star of Bethlehem shone anew over a
ravaged land and ravaged hearts. The news when it came was a signal for
great popular rejoicing and a prophetic belief in the end of the war.
Four months afterward there was a general capitulation of the South.
It is true America’s most innocent and Christian man was destroyed by
hate—another Golgotha day in history, when on Good Friday in a theatre
in Washington Lincoln was assassinated—but the fight had been fought
and the victory won. It became possible to ratify the abolition of
slavery by the re-establishment of the Union and the common consent of
all the States.
“In Sixty Three the slaves were free; In Sixty Four the war was o’er,”
says a rhyme, but in truth the Negroes were not free in the South till
the South had been conquered by the United States, and the war was not
o’er till April, 1865. It was on the 24th of May, 1865, that the army
marched past the White House in its final grand review, bearing aloft
its battle-riven flags festooned with flowers. There was glory in the
North; the twilight of confusion in the South; and the Negroes were
free. Peace came once more, though not peace in men’s hearts. War hate
still bred hate, and the lust of cruelty called into being its monster
progeny of revenge.