“We lay the greatest stress first and last,” he said, “on

character-building. It is not the clever self-seeker that we look for

and encourage—not the youth whose aim is personal success and

money-making. It is the service he is to do to his people that we keep

constantly before the student’s mind; and with the great majority that

is actually and effectively the dominant idea. Many of them, of course,

are training to be teachers; but all of them feel that they can teach

indirectly in their different communities, by uprightness in life and

efficiency in work. We follow carefully the careers of our students, and

I am able to say that 83 per cent. of those who are now out in the world

are Christian men and women, not merely in the sense of

church-membership, but of the practical Christianity which is known by

its fruits. We are especially careful to cultivate mutual kindliness and

good feeling among teachers and pupils alike. It was a saying of General

Armstrong’s that ‘cantankerousness is worse than heterodoxy,’ and we

still take that view.”

“Have you many students,” I asked, “who are supported by comparatively

well-to-do parents?”

“Very few,” Dr. Turner replied; “and we do not particularly care for

that class of young man or woman. All new students have to bring with

them a registration-fee of ten dollars, and eleven dollars for one

month’s board; but the great majority of them need little more than

that, for they are immediately put to various sorts of unskilled work by

which they are enabled to earn from fifteen to twenty dollars a month,

and so can not only pay their current board bills, but lay up a sum to

meet the expenses of the next year, when they go into the day-school or

into trades in which, during their apprenticeship, they are unable to

earn anything. You remember how Booker Washington, when he first

presented himself, was so ignorant that he was almost rejected; but when

he was told, by way of trial, to clean a room, the superintendent

noticed that the dark corners were as thoroughly cleaned as the most

visible parts, and accepted him on the strength of that observation.”

We were now in the boot- and harness-making division of the Trade School

building. Pursuing the theme of thoroughness suggested by the anecdote

of Booker Washington, Dr. Turner continued—

[Sidenote: Principles and Methods.]

“We insist that every student shall become highly skilled in whatever

trade or pursuit he takes up; but we allow him to acquire a partial and

rough-and-ready knowledge of other crafts subsidiary to his own. For

instance, it is found that the individual harness-maker cannot compete

with factory work, so that few students now take a complete course in

that craft; but a boy who becomes a thoroughly skilled shoemaker also

learns so much of harness-making as to render him an efficient repairer.

In the same way our thoroughly trained carpenters also acquire a certain

amount of skill in bricklaying, plastering, painting, and tinsmithing;

and the girls, in addition to complete instruction in house-work,

laundry-work, dressmaking and cooking, also learn something of simple

carpentry, paper-hanging, painting, and the repairing of tinware, shoes,

etc. In small villages and country districts it is very important to

know something of everything as well as everything of something.”

“And where, amid all this, does academic study come in?”

“Students in their first year who are working for wages attend the

night-school only. After that, if they are training for teachers, they

enter the day-school, and devote only a minor portion of their time to

manual work. But we take care that those who are mainly engaged in

handicrafts and agriculture do not neglect their mental development on

the academic side; and we find, with scarcely an exception, that the boy

who does the best work in the classroom does the best work at the bench.

The annual cost of academic training (apart from board, etc.), is

seventy dollars, or £14, of industrial training, thirty dollars, or £6.

To many of our students, in accordance with their abilities and their

necessities, we are able to allot scholarships which cover these fees;

but we are greatly in need of more such scholarships. For the general

needs of the institution an endowment fund of three million dollars is

required; but as yet we have been able to raise only about half that

sum. The United States Government pays a small sum for each of the

Indians whom it sends to the Institute; but it does not cover their

expenses.”

“And how do the negroes and the Indians get on together?”

“Without the slightest friction. They live in separate houses—there is

the Wigwam, the home of the Indian boys, and nearer the river is Winona

Lodge, the Indian girls’ dormitory. But you have seen them working side

by side in the workshops, and you will see them presently dining side by

side in Virginia Hall.”

[Sidenote: “A Changed Ideal.”]

Dr. Turner took us through the very interesting Indian Museum, used also

as a lecture-hall, and through the beautiful and admirably equipped

Huntington Memorial Library, containing, among other things, one of the

largest existing collections of books on the negro race and its

problems.

“Do you find,” I asked, “that many of your students come to you with the

idea that book-learning is a more dignified and desirable thing than

manual training?”

“No,” was the reply; “that particular form of ignorance is rapidly

passing away. But now and then students come to us with ambitions which

we can scarcely encourage. A good many years ago now, a boy presented

himself with the announcement that he wanted to be trained for the

career of a prize-fighter. We did not reject him, but we found means of

modifying his aspirations. He proved to be an unusually intelligent

youth, and at the end of his course was chosen the valedictorian of his

class. The subject of his address was ‘A Changed Ideal.’ He is now the

head of an agricultural college.”

[Sidenote: A Happy Family.]

Our perambulation of the Institute was interrupted by the bugle call

summoning us to midday dinner in Virginia Hall, a building partly “sung

up” by a travelling band of Hampton singers. The beautiful quality of

the students’ voices was manifest in the short grace which they sang. We

went through not only the dining-hall, but the kitchen, and were much

struck by the brilliant cleanliness and neatness of all the

arrangements, the rapidity of the service, and the appetizing appearance

of the meal. The young men and girls sit together at the same tables, a

lively, talkative, but well-mannered company—with enviable appetites, if

one may judge by the rapidity with which dishes were sent back to the

kitchen to be replenished. I noticed that for the most part, though not

strictly, the Indians and the negroes kept to separate tables. None of

the white instructors took part in the meal.

Hampton was the only negro college or school I ever visited in which I

saw no student who could have passed as white. There was, indeed, one

singularly beautiful girl with auburn hair, who might have been taken

for a European of peculiarly rich colouring; but she was of Indian, not

of negro, blood. There must, I think, have been some reason for the

absence of “white negroes” at Hampton; but I had not time to inquire

into it. We bade an unwilling farewell to our kind hosts, and departed

deeply impressed by the spirit and achievement of this noble

institution.

XIV

BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

Birmingham, Alabama, is a city not yet forty years old; yet it numbers,

with its suburbs, 150,000 inhabitants. It is the Pittsburg of the South,

the centre of a great and rapidly growing iron and steel industry. But

as yet it has not created anything of a “black country” around it. From

the roof of its splendidly equipped and organized High School I saw

nothing in its environment but pleasant wooded hills and flourishing

“residential” suburbs. The city itself has spacious streets, handsome

shops, at least two first-class hotels, a fine Court House, and an

excellent streetcar service. There is far less rawness in Birmingham

than in many American cities three times its age.

A very remarkable feature of the town is the splendid Union Station now

in course of completion. Among the most conspicuous proofs of the

prosperity of the South are the spacious and handsome railway stations,

which are everywhere replacing the grimy old shanties of the past. In

almost all, as though by special word of command, the Spanish Mission

style of architecture is adopted, with its two towers crowning either

end of the structure. This Union Station at Birmingham was perhaps the

finest I saw; but the new station at Atlanta runs it hard; and

Charleston, Jacksonville, even little Vicksburg, have all handsome and

commodious stations. Each has its separate entrance, waiting-rooms,

ticket-office, etc., “for White Passengers” and “for Coloured

Passengers.” In some the colour-line is very palpably drawn in the shape

of a thick brass rod running across the main hall, or “concourse,” and

dividing it into two (unequal) portions. One end of this rod runs into

the news-stand, the other into the ticket-office; so that in each of

these departments both races can be served by one staff of clerks.

Wherever I observed this rod, it was no provisional or movable device,

but fixed as the foundations of the building.

Two little traits which I noted in the streets of Birmingham are perhaps

worth reproducing. The first was a parcel-van with the legend—

IMPERIAL LAUNDRY

WE WASH FOR WHITE PEOPLE ONLY.

Tho second was a placard inspired by a more catholic spirit. It ran:

“Largest glass of beer in the city, for White or Coloured, 5 cents.”

Dr. Phillips, Superintendent of the Birmingham Public Schools, was kind

enough to take me over the really magnificent High School building above

mentioned, in which, by the way, manual and industrial training is as

largely provided for as literary training. [Sidenote: The Young Idea.]

In Dr. Phillips’s opinion, compulsory education is now well within sight

in Alabama. They have already, he said, in the Birmingham district,

approximately the school accommodation required under a system of

compulsion. From a statistical report it appears that the number of

“seats” provided in the nine white schools of the city is 4903, while in

the four negro schools only 1607 are provided; whereas it would seem

that the negro population is little, if at all, less numerous than the

white. Indeed, the same report points to the inadequate accommodation

for coloured pupils as an evil calling for prompt remedy. I note with

interest that in the school year ending June, 1907, the “Cases of

Corporal Punishment” are set down as “White: 57. Negro: 432.” As the

average daily attendance of negroes was less than half that of the

whites, these figures mean a ratio of something like sixteen to one. On

the other hand, when we come to “Cases of Suspension” we find, “White:

105. Negro: 9.” It is clear that totally different systems of discipline

are applied to the two races.

On the question of the relative mental capacity of white and coloured

children Dr. Phillips holds decided views.

“Whatever the anthropologists may report,” he says, “the black race is

to all intents and purposes a young race; therefore it is imitative. The

black child has a good word-memory and a good eye-memory. He will often

learn by rote quicker than a white child—but it is a different thing

when it comes to understanding what he learns. Such an imitative

function as writing comes at least as easy to the negro as to the white;

but in anything that requires reasoning—in mathematics, for instance—the

negro soon falls behind.”

There is a general agreement, I may say, as to the remarkable brightness

of the young negro child, and a scarcely less general agreement as to

the fact that this brightness does not usually last far into the teens.

Some theorists tell you that the sutures of the skull close earlier in

the black than in the white, and thus do not leave room for brain

expansion. In the West Indies it is said that precocious sexual

development checks the mental growth of the negro. On the other hand,

negro investigators seek to show that the difference, in so far as it is

not purely imaginary, arises from such accidental causes as the inferior

nutrition of the average black child.

Dr. Phillips differs from some other authorities in holding the mulatto

distinctly superior in mental capacity to the pure black.[39] As to

industrial training, he admits its value for the negro, but adds that an

undue proportion of the race, even when brought up to a trade, manifests

an invincible preference for “some sort of teaching or preaching”—in a

word, for an easier life.

-----

Footnote 39:

This is also the view of Mr. W. B. Smith (“The Colour-Line,” p. 127),

who says: “Then comes a race of mongrels of average mental powers

higher than the lower breed, with exceptions little lower than the

higher.” See p. 108.

-----

It seemed as though all my introductions in Birmingham, save that to Dr.

Phillips, were to be of no avail. [Sidenote: A Character.] One gentleman

had gone to Kansas, another had gone to a picnic, a third had gone where

not even an inquisitive journalist could follow him—at least for the

present. I had packed my “gripsack” in preparation for an early start on

the morrow, when my telephone bell rang, and a visitor was announced. It

was the gentleman who had gone to Kansas; and to his timely return, and

kind promptitude in calling on me, I owe one of the most interesting

hours of all my pilgrimage. He stated few facts, and some of these I

have already mentioned in other contexts; he was very chary of

pronouncing judgments; but he gave me a charming glimpse of Southern

(though certainly not typical Southern) character.

A man of middle height, with a clear-cut, aquiline, rather careworn

face, and iron-grey hair. His features would certainly not strike you at

first sight as beautiful, or even as distinguished; you might class him,

in a crowd, as a well-to-do farmer; but ten minutes’ talk brought out a

curious distinction and charm in his face. It reminded me, vaguely, of

portraits of Cardinal Newman. He looked far older than his years—at

least, I found myself treating him with the deference due to marked

seniority, and was amazed when it appeared that he was three years my

junior. He had taken life earnestly, strenuously; he had been very

successful in his business career, and he felt his success, not as an

end achieved, but as an obligation imposed; so much I very soon made out

from his slow, reflective, simple, and open-hearted talk.

“I’m ve’y much attached, sir,” he said, “to the negro race. My father

was a large slaveholder, and he had a passion for them. He selected and

bought ve’y fine types of negroes. Fo’ myself, I have now an entirely

negro household, and they are all of them devoted to my wife and to my

children. Fo’ instance, we have in our house a coloured woman of

fo’ty-five or fifty—an old maid and a ve’y clever woman indeed—who is

passionately attached to my youngest daughter.”

It was curious to find such an old-time, antebellum household subsisting

in the go-ahead, intensely modern city of Birmingham. I felt, however,

that this casual survival had very small bearing upon the problems of

the present or future; so I tried to get at my visitor’s feeling on some

of the burning topics of the actual situation.

Almost in vain. He would not express himself either for or against the

“Jim Crow car,” though he was emphatic on the iniquity, which President

Roosevelt also has recently denounced, of giving negroes inferior

accommodation for the same rates as those charged to the whites. Not

even on the question of “miscegenation” would he give a decided personal

view.

[Sidenote: The Mills of God.]

“I feel,” he said, “that these people have been left on our hands

through no fault of their own, and that it is our duty to do the best we

can for them, each in his own way. It is the business of some people to

think out theoretical questions; but that is not my business. I try to

do what practical good I can from day to day—and that keeps my hands

pretty full. As for such questions as that of social equality or

inequality, they will settle themselves in time, through the thinkers

and professional men of both races. Solutions will be found for many

problems that now seem terribly difficult, if both races will only have

patience. You know,

‘God worketh in mysterious ways,

His wonders to perform.’

—these lines often come back to me.

“Many whites in the South,” he went on, “have hitherto held aloof from

the negro cause, because they felt that the negro regarded them with

suspicion and preferred to look for help to the North. That feeling is

now passing away on both sides.”

He had, naturally, no sympathy with the idea of supplanting negro labour

with imported European labour. “Even if there were nothing else against

it,” he said, “it is bad business policy. The Italians have carried four

hundred million dollars out of the country in [I forget what space of

time], whereas the earnings of the negro remain in the country.

Sixty-five per cent. of the raw material produced in this district is

mined by negroes.”

[Sidenote: Judge Not, that Ye be not Judged.]

I tried in vain even to get at what he regarded as the chief mistakes

made by white people in dealing with negroes—at the reasons, for

instance, why such households as his own were now such rare exceptions.

He could not be got to pass any judgments, even on his own race. The

nearest he came to it was in this speech, which I reproduce almost word

for word:

“My wife is a ve’y beautiful woman. Other ladies say to her, ‘Oh yes,

Mrs. ——, you get on with yo’ negroes because yo’ beautiful an’ yo’

rich—but it’s ve’y diffe’ent with us.’ But seems to me ’tisn’t he’

beauty no’ he’ wealth that makes the diffe’ence—’tis he’ ha’at.

“As to those questions you ask me,” he said, as we were parting, “I read

a’ticles upon them with great interest—oh yes, su’, with great interest

and profit. But what is happening now is to me of mo’ impo’tance than

what may possibly happen fifty years hence.

“You are going to Atlanta? Then you will see Judge Mansfield. He can

tell you far more than I can on all these matters.”

I did see Judge Mansfield, and he did tell me more.

XV

THE CITY OF A HUNDRED HILLS

The quaintly named “Seaboard Air Line” carries you from Birmingham to

Atlanta, Georgia, for the most part through a region of fresh and woody

highlands, with blue mountains on the southern horizon. The woods

consist of pine and leaf trees about evenly mixed. Large tracts of them,

unfortunately, have been ruthlessly hewn or burnt away—that crime

against the future so prevalent in America.

Atlanta is finely situated at an elevation of about 1000 feet above the

sea, on a billowy upland which has earned for it the name of “the city

of a hundred hills.” The guide-book states that it is “laid out in the

form of a circle”; but to the casual observer it seems to lack the usual

regularity of plan. It has many spacious streets and handsome buildings,

with the usual sprinkling of sky-scrapers. Its Park Lane or Fifth Avenue

is named Peachtree Street, and is a really beautiful winding road, with

handsome houses on either hand, shadowed by fine trees. It was hard to

believe that this well-built, bright, busy, windy city had, only

eighteen months before, been the scene of a sanguinary riot, almost a

massacre, in which many innocent coloured people lost their lives.

The population of Atlanta is a little over 100,000, about 40 per cent.

being coloured. [Sidenote: Gunpowder and Fire.] Most of the white

people, I was told, come of a mountain stock, who never held slaves or

came in contact with the negro before the war. Hence there is even less

of mutual comprehension between the races here than elsewhere.

The riot was the outcome of a political campaign, in which negrophobia

had been carefully worked up with a view to securing votes—yellow

journalism aiding with inflammatory headlines. Then came a series of

five or six outrages on women within twenty-four hours. Two of them,

perhaps, were genuine; the rest were figments of hysterical imagination.

The papers came out with edition after edition, piling horror on

horror’s head; the saloons seethed with virtuous and highly alcoholized

indignation; and some trifling incident sufficed to let loose the

bloodthirsty frenzy of the mob. The police judiciously made themselves

scarce, and for four days there was no law in Atlanta.

It is admitted on all hands that not one of those who were killed was

even suspected of any crime. The mob went from unprotected house to

house, ostensibly searching for firearms. But it kept carefully to parts

of the city where it knew it would meet with no real resistance. It did

not go down into the negro quarter; it avoided the criminal negro, whose

criminality might have gone the length of “putting up a fight.” It

preferred to harry the respectable and law-abiding coloured person, and

“teach him his place.”

Atlanta is now very sorry for its sport. Its better people, of course,

reprobated and deplored the riot from the first; but even the average

man soon realized what it had cost the city. Its credit was shaken;

there was an immediate fall in real estate and rise in wages. In no

community does the sane element favour such outbreaks; but I had only to

think of my Memphis bookseller to realize that nowhere in the South is

the point very far distant at which the insane element may get out of

hand.

There were fears of an outbreak last Christmas, and if it had come it

would have been a very different matter, for the negroes were armed to

the teeth.

Nor did my talk with Judge Mansfield (as I shall call him) altogether

reassure me. [Sidenote: A Friend of the Negro.] The Judge is one of the

leading citizens of the State, and took a prominent part in a sort of

conciliation movement which immediately followed the riot. He is a man

well advanced in years, was himself a slaveholder before the war, and is

full of the warm Southern sentiment for the “old-time negro.” He is well

known among white people as a friend of the coloured race and a defender

of its rights. I do not know whether the negroes themselves rank him

high among their champions.

He seemed to me more concerned with injustices done by the North to

the South than with injustices done by the South to the negro.

“Sherman said, ‘War is hell,’” so he led off; “but there is a worse

state than hell, and we passed through that state. It was called

Reconstruction.”[40]

-----

Footnote 40:

This typical Southern view is forcibly expressed by Mr. Thomas Nelson

Page: “The history of that period, of the Reconstruction period of the

South, has never been fully told. It is only beginning to be written.

When that history shall be told, it will constitute the darkest stain

on the record of the American people.... They took eight millions of

the Caucasian race, a people which in their devotion and their

self-sacrifice, in their transcendent vigour of intellect, their

intrepid valor in the field, and their fortitude in defeat, had just

elevated their race in the sight of mankind, and placed them under the

domination of their former slaves. There is nothing like it in modern

history.”—“The Negro: the Southerner’s Problem,” pp. 243, 246.

-----

As to that, however, he was content to let bygones be bygones. His real

complaint was of the immediate past and present—of the ignorant

intermeddling of Northern folk in Southern affairs, the ignorant and

contemptuous criticisms of the Northern Press.

“The other day,” he said, “Mr. Smith, a Congregationalist

minister—I’m a Baptist myself, but I have a great respect for the

Congregationalists—Mr. Smith came to me and said, ‘I hear that the

coloured people in your town are sending their children to school in

flies and waggons rather than let them ride in the street-cars. What

am I to say to my people in the North about that?’ ‘I suggest, sir,’

was my reply, ‘that you should tell them it is none of their

business.’”

He was absolutely opposed in theory to lynching, but seemed hopeless of

its being put down so long as outrages on women continued. Here, again,

his last word was a _tu quoque_ to the North: “I addressed a meeting in

Ohio last year, and I said to them, ‘Here in Ohio you have 2 per cent.

of negroes; in Georgia we have 47 per cent.; yet you have lynchings

here, not so many fewer than ours. Until we have twenty-three times as

many as you have, I don’t see that you have anything to say to us.’”

His account of negro morality was very low, and he maintained that the

negro Churches could do little to check it, because at least 25 per

cent. of the preachers—in some places a much larger percentage—lived as

loosely as their flocks. I found other Southern white men of opinion

that the influence of the negro Church was, on the whole, a bad

influence.

But it was on the necessity for absolute social separation between the

races that Judge Mansfield was most emphatic. [Sidenote: “I would Brain

him.”] “Jim Crow” regulations, he declared, are essential to prevent

constant breaches of the peace. “If a big black man got into the

street-car and pressed up against my wife, I would brain him!”

And again: “I was staying with a friend in Ohio last year—a man of

wealth and position—in a place where there are several well-to-do

coloured people, and where coloured children go to the same school with

the whites. I said to my host, ‘Does your wife take her coloured lady

friends driving with her?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Oh, because she doesn’t want

to.’ ‘Your boy has a rig?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Does he ask the coloured girl friends

he made at school to drive out with him?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Oh, he doesn’t

want to.’ ‘I’ll tell you why he doesn’t want to, and you don’t want him

to. It’s because, if he did, the girl’s brother would come to you, and

say, “I want to marry your daughter”—and you would brain him!”

A third time this phrase occurred in the Judge’s conversation—I forget

the precise context, but it referred to another instance of negro

presumption.

I felt that, after all, the key to the Atlanta riot was not so far to

seek; nor could I feel in the spirit of Judge Mansfield any absolute

guarantee against the recurrence of such unpleasantnesses. None the less

do I remember him with kindness and respect. He was as fine a type of

the Southern gentleman of the old school as any I met in my travels.

That evening I spent at Atlanta University with Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois.

Twilight fell as we stood on the eminence which is crowned by the

University buildings, and looked out over a wide expanse of red Georgian

landscape. [Sidenote: Atlanta University.] The sunset had left behind it

a delicate rosy flush, and, just where it paled off into greenish blue,

the slender crescent of a new moon hung in the sky, with a glorious

planet above it. Behind us lay the city, with its 60,000 white men ready

to “brain” its 40,000 black and brown men on the slightest provocation.

Before us lay the silent country and the ineffable peace of heaven. A

mood of deep melancholy fell upon me as I reflected that under the

silence of the country the same passions were vibrating, and that the

peace of heaven was nearer, at any rate to this generation, than any

peace on earth.

The influence of the immediate surroundings, too, had something to do

with my mood. About Atlanta University there is nothing of the cheerful

energy and optimism of Tuskegee. This is a home of intellectual culture;

and intellectual culture, however necessary, can scarcely be

exhilarating to the negro race at this stage of its history. The more

you strive to break through the veil (to use Mr. Du Bois’ favourite

metaphor), the more keenly are you conscious of its galling and

darkening encumbrance. For assuredly it galls and darkens, whether it be

a real barrier or a figment conjured up by the pride and folly of man.

At all events, his culture, which is great, and his genius, which is not

small, have not made of Mr. Du Bois a happy man. With perfect

simplicity, without an atom of pose, he is and remains a singularly

tragic figure. [Sidenote: Professor Du Bois.] He is, perhaps, more

impressive than his book, able as that is. In some of its pages we are

conscious of a little rhetorical shrillness; but there is nothing of

this in the man. He is perfectly urbane and dignified; there is nothing

of the apostle, and still less of the martyr about him. He regards and

discusses phenomena with the calm of the trained sociologist. But

beneath his calm one is conscious of a profound bitterness of spirit. If

he is hopeful at all, it is for a day that he will never see; and, in a

man still in the prime of life, such hope is not very different from

despair.

I met no man in the South with whom I felt more at ease, or seemed to

have more in common. And yet, as we talked, there lurked in my mind a

sense of hypocrisy, almost of treachery. I could not frankly expose to

him my doubts as to whether the stars in their courses did not fight

against his racial ideal.

Of his very interesting conversation I shall here record only a few

fragments.

“The problem in the South,” he said (almost echoing Mr. Shipton, of

Louisville), “is not that of the vagabond or the criminal, but of the

negro who is coming forward. That is why even the good people of the

South are taking their hands off, saying, ‘We can’t do anything.’

“The older generation of negroes had friends among the white people of

their own age; but the boys and girls now growing up have no white

friends. The younger white people have no feeling towards the negro but

dislike, founded on utter lack of comprehension.

“The race antipathy is fomented in the schools. The progressive negro is

held up as a bugbear to the white child, who is told to ‘Look out, or he

will get ahead of you!’ Fear, jealousy, and hatred are actively taught

to the rising generation of whites. But, after all, they are being

taught _something_, and that’s more than their fathers were. Where

intelligence increases there is always hope.”

At one point I did come near to hinting to Mr. Du Bois the doubt lurking

in my mind. I quoted to him this passage from “The Souls of Black Folk:”

“Deeply religious and intensely democratic as are the mass of the

whites (in the South), they feel acutely the false position in which

the negro problems place them.... But ... the present social position

of the negro stands as a menace and a portent before even the most

open-minded; if there were nothing to charge against the negro but his

blackness or other physical peculiarities, they argue, the problem

would be comparatively simple; but what can we say to his ignorance,

shiftlessness, poverty, and crime?”

“Now, tell me, Mr. Du Bois,” I said, “whatever these people may say, is

it not really just the other way about? The ignorance, shiftlessness,

etc., are manifestly temporary and corrigible; is it not precisely the

‘blackness and other physical peculiarities’ that are the true crux of

the problem?”

Mr. Du Bois smiled. “No,” he said; “that is the point of view of the

outsider, the foreigner. The Southerner, brought up among negroes, has

no such feeling.[41] In using the argument I there attribute to him he

is perfectly sincere.”

-----

Footnote 41:

Another negro writer, Mr. W. H. Thomas (“The American Negro,” p. 295),

is still more emphatic on this point: “That colour is the prime cause

of American prejudice against negroes is not to be believed for one

moment. Every shred of authentic evidence disproves conclusions so

preposterous.” Mr. Thomas goes on to argue that the condition of “the

low class of whites” in the South is “infinitely inferior to that of

the lowest plantation negro.” Somewhat similar is the view of a

clergyman who writes to me from Clyde, Kansas: “The problem is simply

one of _caste_, and the negro is the extreme example of the _labour

caste_. The problem is one of aristocracy whatever the colour of the

plebeians.... Whatever its professions, the South is still

pro-slavery. It wants the negro, but it wants him as a slave. And it

would want to enslave any other race that came to take his place.”

Both of these views seem to me so manifestly paradoxical and excessive

that I venture to maintain the position taken up in the text. At the

same time, I would not be understood to mean that the difficulty lies

in colour alone, apart from the “other physical peculiarities.” On

this point a gentleman in Port Arthur, Texas, writes to me: “I have

long had a feeling that negrophobia is not a matter of colour.... No,

the thing that rouses a blind disgust—not superficial, not capricious,

but deep-rooted—is the body odour, the flat nose, the thick lips, the

suggestion of ‘slobber’ in the voice and the mouth-movements, together

with the unnatural hair and the animalism of bodily contour at many

points. I have often thought that some accidental discovery may at any

moment put it in the African’s power to remove the dark pigment from

his skin: if this ever happens, it will, I think, be found that the

real repulsiveness of the negroid type has been merely unveiled, not

dissipated.”

Let me take this opportunity of saying that to the best of my belief

the “body odour” of which we hear so much is mainly a superstition.

The fact probably is that the negro ought to be at least as scrupulous

in his ablutions as the white man—but often is not.

-----

I refrained from pressing the point, but Mr. Du Bois’ answer did not

quite meet my difficulty. I had no doubt of the Southerner’s sincerity;

what I questioned was rather his self-knowledge, or (perhaps I should

say) his reading of race psychology. And that doubt, I own, remains.

If the Ethiopian could but change his skin, how trifling would be the

problem raised by his ignorance, shiftlessness, poverty, and crime!

XVI

PROHIBITION

Every one agrees that the most remarkable phenomenon in the recent

history of the South is the “wave of prohibition” which has passed, and

is passing, over the country. “There are 20,000,000 people in the

fourteen Southern States, 17,000,000 of whom are under prohibitory law

in some form.” “Yes, sir,” says Mr. Dooley, “in the sunny Southland ’tis

as hard to get a dhrink now as it wanst was not to get wan.... Why,

Hinnissy, I read th’ other day iv a most unfortunate occurrence down in

Texas. A perfectly respectable an’ innocent man, of good connexions,

while attemptin’ to dhraw a revolver to plug an inimy, was hastily shot

down be th’ rangers, who thought he was pullin’ a pocket-flask. Is no

man’s life safe against th’ acts iv irresponsible officers iv the law?”

Georgia led the way in “State-wide” prohibition, by a law which came

into force on January 1, 1908. This law nominally affected only fifteen

counties, since 135 out of the 150 counties in the State had already

“gone dry” under local option. But its importance is not to be measured

by the mere number of the counties affected; it lies in the stoppage of

the “jug trade” between “wet” counties and “dry.”

Alabama and Mississippi both passed Statewide prohibition laws which

came into force in January, 1909. A strong fight is being made for

State-wide prohibition in Tennessee, though “all but five of the

ninety-six counties in the State are now ‘dry’, and only three

cities—Memphis, Nashville, and Chattanooga—remain ‘wet.’” Though

Kentucky has over £30,000,000 invested in distilleries, the saloon has

been expelled from 94 out of 119 counties, and from the great majority

of its towns and cities. All over the South, in fact, the same tale is

being told—even where Statewide prohibition cannot as yet be carried,

local option is riddling the defences of the whisky trade.

[Sidenote: First-hand Evidence.]

Of course I made it my business to inquire into the effects of this

great movement, and, of course, I received many conflicting answers to

my inquiries.

Many people told me, just as they would in England, that “You can’t make

a man sober by Act of Parliament.” They enlarged on the evils of the

“blind tiger,” or illicit saloon. They sang to me the refrain:

“Hush, little grog-shop, don’t you cry:

You’ll be a drug-store by-and-by!“

They told me of the “clubs” where each member can keep his private

locker full of alcohol, and get drunk at his leisure. As for drink and

the negro (they said), what is the use of keeping whisky out of his way,

when in ten cents’ worth of a “patent medicine” he can find enough

cocaine to make him more dangerous than could a gallon of whisky?

On the other hand, I was told of a State in which the gaol-keepers, who

(strange to say) made their living out of catering for the prisoners

under their charge, applied for a special “grant-in-aid” on the ground

that prohibition had so depopulated their preserves that they could no

longer keep body and soul together.

This, though I believe it to be true, sounded a little like a

fairy-tale; so I thought I would go to headquarters for exact

information. Atlanta was the only city I visited where prohibition was

actually in force; so I betook me to Decatur Street Police-court, in the

middle of its lowest quarters. I arrived at a fortunate moment: it

happened to be the first of May, and Mr. Preston, the Clerk of the

Court, was just making up his statistics for April. He took the trouble

of looking up the records of the previous year for me, and gave me the

following figures:

Number of cases tried in the first four months of 1907 (before

prohibition), 6056.

Number of cases tried in the first four months of 1908 (after

prohibition), 3139.

Convictions for drunkenness before prohibition, 1955.

Convictions for drunkenness after prohibition, 471.

“Take it all round,” said Mr. Preston, “our work has been reduced by

just about one-half.”[42]

-----

Footnote 42:

In _Atlanta University Publications_, No. IX. p. 49 (published in

1904, when as yet prohibition seemed scarcely within the range of

practical politics), I find the following remarkable prophecy: “The

fountain-head of crime among the negroes of Atlanta is the open

saloon. There is no doubt but that the removal of strong drink from

the city would decrease crime by half.”

-----

I afterwards attended a sitting of this Court (Judge Broyle’s), when, in

a very light calendar, there was not a single case of drunkenness.

Oddly enough, no distinction of colour seemed to appear on the records,

but I gathered that about 75 per cent. of the prisoners who come before

Judge Broyle were negroes.

Of the negroes to whom I spoke of prohibition, all but one were strongly

in its favour. That one, Dr. Oberman of Memphis, thought that more real

good would be done by a “high licence.” Mr. Millard, of Montgomery, was

emphatic in his approval. “I believe we’re the ones that are going to

get the biggest part of the bargain,“ he said. “My people are going to

have better homes and look after their families better—to pay for their

schooling and pay their bills.” It is only fair to point out, however,

that this was pure prophecy, since in Montgomery prohibition had not

then come into force.

Being myself but a small consumer of alcohol, I was not irresistibly

impelled to study the various methods of evading the liquor laws. One

mild evasion of them I did come across at one of the “Country Clubs”

which are such a delightful adjunct to American city life. [Sidenote:

Club Law.] Here each member could by law have his locker; but it was

found an intolerable nuisance to carry the system literally into effect.

So, as a matter of fact, drinks did not come from any individual locker;

they were supplied from the club cellar in the ordinary way; only the

club must not be paid for them, since that would be a confession that

the member ordering them had not stored them for his own use. What,

then, was the method adopted? Members bought of the club books of

ten-cent coupons, and with these coupons they paid the waiters who

brought the drinks—not for the drinks, but for their services in

bringing them! It appeared to me a complex and rather childish fiction,

but probably it was no one’s business to look into its seams.

It was at this club that a Senator from an adjoining State, who had been

very active in the prohibition campaign, was found one day seated before

a “high-ball” of imposing dimensions. On being reproached for

inconsistency, he replied: “Prohibition is for the masses, not for the

classes.” A most un-American sentiment, some will say; but to my

thinking characteristically American.

In Savannah, Georgia, 147 “locker clubs” were organized the day after

prohibition came into force, one of them, a negro club, numbering 1700

members. But it will not be long before this evasion is dealt with. It

is held by able jurists that, even under the present law, such clubs are

illegal. In the mean time, I suppose they exist in Atlanta no less than

in Savannah; yet, as we have seen, the work of the police court has been

reduced by one-half.

As for “blind tigers,” there is no doubt that they follow in the track

of prohibition laws, and that it is fairly easy, for those who know how,

to procure bad liquor at high prices. [Sidenote: The “Blind Tiger.”] But

in the first place you have got to “know how;” in the second place, even

for those who know how, it costs more time, trouble, and money than it

did of old, to attain the requisite exhilaration; in the third place,

“blind tigers” can, and do, have their claws pared now and then. Most of

the people I spoke to, at all events, admitted that the evils of the

“blind tiger” are not to be compared with the constant temptations

offered by the open saloon.

That these evils are serious enough, however, appears from the following

brief paragraph which I cut from the _Atlanta Constitution_:

KILLED AT A BLIND TIGER.

Nashville (Tenn.), April 29.—“At a blind tiger on Knott Creek,

Kentucky, Henry Pratt, a thirteen-year-old schoolboy, shot and killed

Howard Maunds, also aged thirteen. The boys were intoxicated, and the

killing followed a game of cards.”

During the days I was in Atlanta, five blind-tiger keepers were

prosecuted and “bound over under bonds to the city court,” one in the

sum of £200, the rest in sums of £100. What this “binding over”

precisely means I cannot say, but it seems to be a painful process to

the animals in question, for I read that “their howls filled the court.”

One of the persons “bound over” was a doctor. It was noticed that his

practice had of late increased enormously. A stream of patients resorted

to his office at all hours of the day, till at last a plain-clothes

officer joined the stream. The doctor told him that he was out of

whisky, but could fix up a good substitute, which proved to be some form

of alcohol, tinctured with syrup, to take away the crude taste. Of this

beverage the officer purchased two half-pints at two different times,

and then ungratefully arrested his benefactor.

On another occasion a plain-clothes officer was told off to watch a

house where it was suspected that an illicit trade was carried on. Near

it he came upon a negro lounging against a fence.

“Nager,” said the constable, “do you know where a fellow can get a quart

of good whisky?”

“Naw, sir, I don’t; but mebbe I kin find some,” was the reply.

The constable handed him a dollar and a half, and told him to see what

he could do.

“Yessir,” said the negro. “Just you hold this shoe-box for me while I

step down the street a piece.”

The policeman held the carefully wrapped shoe-box, while his emissary

disappeared round the corner. For half an hour he waited in vain, then

searched the neighbourhood up and down, and returned to the station

enraged at having let himself be victimized. But when he investigated

the shoe-box, expecting to find it full of rubbish, behold! it contained

a quart bottle of whisky.

Such are the dodges to which the liquor-trade is reduced. But however

manifold and ingenious its sleights, I cannot be persuaded that it is so

easy to get drunk in Atlanta as it is in New Orleans, with its 2000 open

saloons—to say nothing of cities nearer home.

South Carolina was for some time, and is still partially, under the

“dispensary” system, the State undertaking the function of providing its

citizens with alcohol. The dispensary is open only during limited hours,

and no liquor may be drunk on the premises. This system has proved the

reverse of satisfactory from the point of view of the temperance

reformer, while corruption has fleeced the State of hundreds of

thousands of dollars in the purchase of its liquors.

There have been “waves” of prohibition in America before, which have

more or less receded as time went on. Will that be the history of this

wave? The best authorities do not think so.

[Sidenote: Has Prohibition Come to Stay?]

In the first place, as I have said before, the South is deeply and

earnestly religious. The Churches are all opposed to the liquor traffic,

and it has been said that “a proposition to restore it would encounter

from them almost the same reception as a proposition to restore a State

Church establishment.”

In the second place, the presence of the negro in the South is a tower

of strength to the prohibitionist.

In the third place, the rapid industrial revival of the South is making

men alive to the economic waste involved in the liquor traffic.

In the fourth place, prohibition has touched the patriotic imagination

of the South, which is a very lively faculty indeed.

On this subject I spoke to Dr. E. A. Alderman, President of the

University of Virginia. In that State local option has banished the

saloon from almost all the country districts and from most of the towns.

Charlottesville, the seat of the University, is, according to Dr.

Alderman, distinctly a better town since it “went dry.” Manners are

better, the standard of comfort is higher, there is more money to spend.

“It seems to me,” said Dr. Alderman, “that society has an absolute right

to protect itself against the evils of alcohol, just as it has the right

to take compulsory measures of sanitation. Whether the best method of

protection has as yet been reached, I won’t undertake to say. But I

think you may safely assume that in the Southern States the age of the

open grog-shop is past.”

XVII

THE NEGRO HOME AND THE NEGRO CHURCH

Wherever I went in the South, one invariable experience awaited me, of

which I scarcely know how to write. A buggy was ordered out, and I was

trotted round to visit six or eight negro “homes.” I came to regard it

as an established ritual, and learned to use the responses expected of

me.

It would be base and stupid were I to laugh at these simple people who,

in all good faith, and with a touching pride, which one felt to be more

racial than personal, displayed to me their household gods. As a rule,

indeed, I felt much more inclined to weep than to laugh. And yet, in one

aspect, the parade was irresistibly ludicrous. It was as though one were

led from window to window in Tottenham Court Road and asked to read, in

the dining-room, drawing-room, and bedroom “suites,” the capacity of the

British people for culture and civilization.

The point, of course, was to show what progress the coloured race had

made, in wealth, education, and refinement, during the forty years which

had elapsed since their emancipation. Statistics on this point, as we

have seen, are apt to be a little deceptive. It is generally assumed

that, after the Civil War, the race as a whole started in absolute

pauperism. But this is not the fact. There were at that time many free

negroes, and not a few who possessed a good deal of property.[43] Thus

the well-to-do, “home”-owning class of negroes is not entirely a

creation of the past forty years. In Charleston, for instance, there

were a good many negro slave-holders before the war; and I was told

(though for this I should not like to vouch) that negro property-owners

are now fewer in that city than they had once been, many of the younger

generation having dissipated the savings of their elders. I may add that

by far the most homelike of the homes I visited belonged to a

professional man who could not truly be said to have risen from slavery.

-----

Footnote 43:

See pp. 33 and 35. Mr. A. H. Stone declares to be “fallacies” the two

widely-accepted opinions “that the negro began life forty years ago

with nothing but his freedom, and that the period of his emancipation

has been one of marvellous economic achievement.”—“The American Race

Problem,” p. 150.

-----

Nevertheless, the evidence of thrift and material prosperity among a

considerable class of negroes is undeniable and very striking. As I was

driven from home to home, other homes and institutions were pointed out

to me, with details as to the number of dollars they represented, until

my head swam, and I began to wonder whether I were not back among the

Vanderbilts and Goulds in Fifth Avenue. For when you get well up among

the tens of thousands, my power of grasping and comparing numbers very

soon fails me.

“The greater part of this street here to the left belongs to the richest

man in our community. He pays taxes on half a million dollars.” “There

are three or four homes in this street belonging to coloured people

worth from 25,000 to 75,000 dollars.” “That is an infirmary for negroes

donated by a carpenter who couldn’t read or write. It cost 50,000

dollars. It is supported by various coloured clubs, with contributions

from the county and the city.” Such was the unvaried strain as the buggy

rattled along.

But one thing I noticed with interest—my coloured cicerones were just as

ready to point with pride to the fine residences and institutions of

white men as to the homes of their own people. Whatever their grounds of

complaint against the other race, they were, so far as they were

suffered to be, loyal citizens of their State.

To one negro Crœsus I was personally introduced, and an interesting

type he was. [Sidenote: A Coloured Carnegie.] An old man—well on in the

sixties, I should say. He had no negro traits that I could discover, and

his complexion was the very lightest yellow. His shrewd, many-wrinkled,

crab-apple face would have been remarked in Europe as distinctly

American, but he would scarcely have been suspected of black blood. In

one respect he was ostentatiously millionairish, for every tooth in his

head was of gold. Moreover, he wore in his shirt front a splendid

diamond pin, which contrasted oddly with his otherwise plain and even

rustic attire.

He is a banker, a general trader, an owner of real estate—and a liberal

benefactor to his own people. He has established in the negro quarter of

the city where he lives a sort of garden and recreation-ground for his

race, which is all the more appreciated, as negroes, even when not

formally excluded from the public parks, are made very unwelcome in

them. In the recreation ground is a plain but well-designed and

commodious wooden theatre, where companies of negro actors frequently

appear. I am told there is a remarkable development of negro theatrical

art in several quarters, but was not fortunate enough to come across any

specimens of it.

The keen little walnut-skinned Carnegie-Chrysostom accompanied my guide

and me over the garden and theatre. He said very little, but he gleamed

appreciation of my guide’s remarks, all tending to impress on me his

manifold activities, his astuteness, his success, and his beneficence.

Yet one did not feel, as one would have felt had a white millionaire

been concerned, that the poorer man was guilty of adulation, the richer

of ostentation. There was something impersonal about it all. It was not

the men but the race who boasted. The hero of the song of praise was not

“I,” nor “he,” but “we.”

And what, now, of the “homes” themselves? [Sidenote: Villa Residences.]

Those that I saw were without exception what are called by English

house-agents suburban villa residences, which would command, in the

neighbourhood of London, rents of from £40 to £70 a year. They were very

nice little houses, scrupulously neat and well kept. They had (to my

mind) the advantage over English houses of the same class, in the sense

of spaciousness which comes with steam-heat and the consequent absence

of doors. In some the doorways were filled with bead curtains—hanging

strings of glass beads—which seem to be very popular just now in

coloured society.

The furniture was always modern and in excellent condition, with a great

deal of plush about it. Much of it conveyed the impression (not uncommon

in English villa residences) of being intended rather for show than use.

The wall-papers ran to large patterns, and were apt to be sombre in

tint. Every home, without exception, had its piano, sometimes with open

music on it. In the matter of pictures, nicknacks, etc., there was no

affectation of “culture.” Æstheticism—that “unanimity of æsthetic

appreciations” which so troubled Mr. Wells in Boston—has not yet

penetrated the negro home. I did not see a single Wingless Victory. The

works of art are simple to the point of primitiveness, and pleasing in

so far as they genuinely represent the taste of their owners. One

handsomely furnished parlour stands out in my memory, in which a showy

overmantel was flanked by two amazing glass transparencies in heavy gilt

frames, one representing a moonlit landscape and the other the Houses of

Parliament and Clock Tower at Westminster.

As a rule, I would be received by the lady of the house (her husband was

apt to be away at business) with the stock phrases of American

politeness. In the great majority of cases the lady would be a quadroon,

or lighter; and in one or two instances I fancy nature had been assisted

by a whiff of the powder-puff. My inspection generally stopped short at

the living-rooms on the ground floor; but sometimes I was admitted to

regions of more intimate domesticity. It was embarrassing; it was

ludicrous; it was, above all, pathetic.

With people of a corresponding class in England the first impulse would

have been to offer a visitor “refreshment” of some sort. Never once was

there a hint of anything of the kind on the part of my negro hosts. I

wondered, and am still wondering, whether it simply was not the custom

of the country, or whether they imagined that I would scruple to eat or

drink with them.[44]

-----

Footnote 44:

Mr. Kelly Miller (coloured), author of “Race Adjustment,” in an open

letter to Mr. Thomas Dixon, Junr., says: “You will doubtless remember

that when I addressed the Congregational Ministers in New York City,

you asked permission to be present ... although you beat a precipitous

retreat when luncheon was announced.” At the invitation of Professor

Du Bois, I had the great pleasure of dining one evening with the

(coloured) students of Atlanta University; and at Tuskegee I was most

hospitably entertained in the house of the Principal. The (white)

instructors at Hampton Institute take their meals apart from the

students. For a cruel instance of “discrimination” in hospitality, see

Du Bois: “The Souls of Black Folk,” p. 63.

-----

Though I did not partake of their bread and salt, I have a sense of

perfidy in thus criticizing the interiors in which they took such a

simple pride. [Sidenote: Resolute Refinement.] But, after all, I was

there for no other purpose than to report what I saw and felt. What I

felt, then, was certainly admiration for the thrift and progressiveness

which were apparent on every hand; nor was it the unsophisticated order

of taste displayed in furniture and adornment that qualified my

admiration. Far be it from me to attribute any absolute superiority to

the standards of Brixton, or even of Boston. What troubled me throughout

my domiciliary visits was the sense that (with one or two exceptions)

these homes were not homes at all. I do not doubt that each roof

sheltered a home; but I do not believe that the prim parlours I saw had

any essential connection with it. They were no more homelike than the

shopwindow rooms of the up-to-date upholsterer. If they were lived in at

all, it was from a sense of duty, a self-conscious effort after a life

of “refinement.” They were, in short, entirely imitative and mechanical

tributes to the American ideal of the prosperous, cultivated home. I

could find in them no real expression of the individuality of their

inhabitants.

Let it be remembered, however, that this is the first generation of

negro prosperity. Will the second or third generation really assimilate

the American ideal, or develop a “refined” domesticity of its own?

A remark of my guide on one of these expeditions summed up the phase of

culture as I saw it. “We have a little whist club in our set,” he said.

“We meet and play once a month. But the best part of it is the good

dinner at the end of the season.”

The whist club, so frankly characterized, guided me to the word I had

been searching for in the back of my mind through all these experiences.

It was the word “veneer.”

A very different class of negro was represented in the congregation of

the only church which I had an opportunity of attending.

[Sidenote: African Methodism.]

It was an African Methodist church—a spacious, airy building, capable, I

should think, of seating some 2000 people. It was not full, but fairly

well attended; and black, as distinct from brown or yellow, was the

prevailing complexion. Every one was quite decently dressed, some of the

women in gaudy colours, but many of them, too, in black. The gaudiest

colours were in the awful stained-glass windows, which seemed to be made

of salvage from the wreck of a cheap kaleidoscope. Two pastors sat on a

platform at the end of the hall. There were flowers on a table before

them; and, as it was a sweltering morning, each of them held a fan.

The whole service was conducted by one of them, a man of rather

Caucasian features, but of dark-brown tint. In the hymn-singing there

was nothing peculiar—it was fairly spirited and good. But after the

first few sentences of the prayer, ejaculations began to break forth.

Their precise meaning, if they had any, I did not catch. They seemed to

me like “Yes, oh yes!” They ought, according to the best authorities, to

have been “Hallelujah!” “Praise de Lord!” and such phrases; but I

certainly did not distinguish them. And presently they grew quite

inarticulate, passing over into wails, moans, and now and then a sort of

wild, maniac laughing and yodelling.

And the whole sermon, after the first five minutes, was accompanied by

similar manifestations. The text was, “Blessed are they that do hunger

and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.” I have heard

many worse sermons than this competent, fluent, popular discourse, which

consisted mainly of an exposition of the overpowering strength of the

metaphor of “hunger and thirst.” “We may credit our backs,” said the

preacher, “but we must pay our stomachs; we can put the back off, but we

can’t put off the stomach.” (“Yes, oh yes!” shouts, moans, and wails.)

“No doubt most of you, before you came here, have had a good drink of

coffee or tea; but how many of you have had a real good drink from the

fountain of everlasting life?” (Confused sounds not unlike the yelpings

of a large kennel.) “If some of you didn’t eat and drink more physically

than you do spiritually, you’d be skeletons. That’s plain talk.”

(Shrieks, wails, and yodelling.) “Some of you good sisters are so

anxious to get your people’s breakfasses that you have no time to ask a

blessing on the work of the day.” (“Hu! hu!” “Bless de Lord!”—for once

articulate—moans, and shrieks.)

These are but fragments of the discourse, which lasted half an hour.

What particularly interested me, both in the prayer and the sermon, was

the action and reaction between speaker and audience. Never once did he

take any notice of the wild sounds, as a political speaker would almost

necessarily have done. I do not remember that he even paused for them;

his rhetoric seemed to flow smoothly on. In other words, he did not

openly “play to the gallery.” Yet there is no doubt that the hysterical

cries and ululations were of value to him. He worked them up, and they

worked him up. It must not be understood, however, that anything like

the whole congregation joined in the noises. They seemed all to proceed

from two or three definite points in the hall. One could almost have

supposed them the prearranged paroxysms of an epileptic claque.

I stole out, under cover of a hymn, at the end of the sermon, not sorry

to find myself once more in America. In the church (where I was the only

white or even approximately white person present) I could not but feel

that I was in Africa—slightly veneered.

XVIII

CHARLESTON

For any disappointment I had felt in New Orleans, Charleston more than

compensated me. Mr. Owen Wister, in “Lady Baltimore,” has in no way

exaggerated its charm.

In situation it is not at all unlike New York, being built on a tongue

of land between the broad estuaries of the Ashley and the Cooper Rivers.

At the tip of the tongue (as in New York) is the Battery; but here the

Battery is a beautiful, semi-tropical garden, full of live-oaks,

palmettos, and flowering shrubs, with an esplanade overlooking the blue

expanse of the harbour, the historic Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie, and

the low shores beyond. This garden is a fascinating spot. I returned to

it again and again during my stay in the city. Passing up Meeting Street

(the Broadway of Charleston), one finds, instead of the skyscrapers

which shoulder one another in the lower end of New York, the simple,

dignified old houses of a vanishing generation of Southern aristocrats,

each standing end-on to the street, in its little plot of lawn and

flowering shrubs. The typical Charlestonian house is a plain two or

three storey structure, entirely surrounded at each level with broad

verandahs and balconies. In several cases the floor area of verandah and

balcony outside the walls must at least equal the floor area of the

rooms inside the walls. Now, spacious verandahs always suggest to the

mind the lazy luxury of a genial summer-land, deep lounging-chairs, cool

drinks, and the glow of cigar-tips in the twilight. I am bound to say

that I saw very little of this sort of life proceeding in the verandahs

of Charleston; but that only enabled one all the more easily to people

them with the ghosts of fifty years ago, before the guns of Fort

Moultrie startled their calm. In Charleston I felt, almost for the first

time, that the romance of the Old South had once been a reality. All of

the South that I had hitherto seen had been remorselessly new.

Further up-town (as they would say in New York) the streets of

Charleston become more commonplace, but always retain a character of

their own. There is not a vestige of a sky-scraper in the whole

peninsula. On the other hand, the city is dotted with old churches of

the Wren style, each with its quiet burial-ground around it. Close to

St. Michael’s Church and in front of the City Hall, is a sadly mutilated

statue of the elder Pitt. It was erected in 1770, and its mutilation was

begun by a British cannon-ball in 1780.

Let me add that Charleston, like New Orleans, is proud of its

cemeteries, and with much better reason. Magnolia Cemetery, with its

live-oaks and its little lake, is a really lovely garden. One historic

live-oak of enormous size, draped in Spanish moss and with exquisite

little ferns growing along each of its huge boughs, is not only a

wonderful but an extraordinarily beautiful tree.

As to the population of Charleston my informants differed. [Sidenote:

“No Trouble.”] A white man placed it at 60,000 in all, with 40,000

negroes; a negro at 65,000, with 33,000 negroes. As there has been no

census since 1900, probably no one knows exactly; but it seems to be

admitted that the blacks more or less considerably outnumber the whites.

The white people, by their own account, pay nine-tenths of the taxes;

the negroes aver that their real estate is assessed at a million and a

half dollars—assessment representing only about 60 per cent. of actual

value. Both statements are very likely true.

White Charleston plumes itself on a peculiar and hereditary

understanding of the negro, and knowledge of the way to deal with him;

whence it happens that there has been “no trouble”—no outrages or

lynchings—in or around the city. Moreover, I was assured that negroes

were employed in the police force, and that not long ago there was a

black lieutenant of police, with white men under him.

But mark how the aspect of things alters according to the point of view

from which they are regarded! When I mentioned to a little group of

leading negroes this proof of the equal treatment accorded to the two

races, I observed on their countenances an expressive smile. On

inquiring its reason, I learned that there were indeed three coloured

policemen out of a total force of 106; that they and a few others had

been appointed at some long-past period of political compromise; and

that, when they die off, there is not the smallest chance of their being

replaced by men of colour. “Here, as elsewhere, the Irish control the

police force; and the Irish hate us worse than the native Americans.”

It was an odd group, this coloured conclave in which I found myself.

[Sidenote: The Negro and his Vote.] Only one member (a doctor) was

dark-brown in complexion; two were very light-brown; while two others,

again, were indistinguishable from white men. One reminded me strongly

of a choleric old Scotch General whom I once knew; the other was very

English in type, with smooth, silvery hair (prematurely white), and a

large, round, placid, bovine face. Meeting him in England, you would

have said he was a trifle sunburnt.

Their talk was mainly of their political grievances, and the various

methods by which their race, all over the Southern States, were jockeyed

out of their votes. Much of what they said I failed to follow; with a

good deal of it, on the other hand, I was already pretty familiar.

The different States of the South have adopted methods differing in many

details for excluding incompetent and undesirable voters from the polls;

but the general principle has always been much the same. It has been to

impose some slight test of education and intelligence (generally to read

and explain some paragraph of the Constitution) on all who desire to

have their names placed on the register.[45]

-----

Footnote 45:

It would appear that in Mississippi there are 15,000 registered negro

voters out of a negro male population of voting age stated by the

census of 1900 at 197,936, of whom 53 per cent. were illiterate. For

four other States the numbers stand as follows:—

Registered negro Negro males of Percentage of

voters. voting age. illiterates.

Virginia 23,000 146,122 52

S. Carolina 22,000 152,860 54

Louisiana 6,400 147,348 61

N. Carolina 6,250 127,114 53

In several States, according to Mr. E. G. Murphy (“The Present South,”

p. 198), “Many negroes have been discouraged from offering to register

by reason of the fact that the State organization of the party with

which they have been associated recently refused to admit even their

most respected representatives to its Conventions. [This is the

‘lily-white’ policy referred to by Mr. Shipton, p. 34.] Large numbers

have also refrained from registration because of their unwillingness

to meet the poll-tax requirement. The interest of the masses of the

negroes in things political has, for quite different reasons, been

much exaggerated by the representatives of both parties.”

-----

If these tests were applied equally to the two races, the negro would

have no ground of complaint. But exceptions are made in favour of the

whites in the very laws establishing the tests. Most of them contain

clauses analogous to what is known in Alabama as the “grandfather

clause,” which provides that illiteracy shall not bar any one whose

father or grandfather was entitled to vote at the outbreak of the Civil

War. This exception is defended on the ground that even an illiterate

person of the original Anglo-Saxon stock (the South is nothing if not

Anglo-Saxon) is generally a very shrewd fellow, and eminently capable of

exercising the franchise. Under the “grandfather clause,” then, only

illiterate aliens and illiterate negroes are excluded from the register;

and this discrimination is naturally resented by the negro.

But if the matter stopped there, the black race would not feel

themselves so very much aggrieved. The real burden of their complaint is

not the inequality of the laws, but the inequality of their

administration. The tests of intelligence are applied (they declare) by

unscrupulous registrars, who will ask a white man some simple question,

such as whether imprisonment for debt is permitted, while they will pose

a negro with some impossible technicality concerning a bill of attainder

or an estate in tail. The upshot is that admission to the register

depends entirely on the arbitrary will and pleasure of the registrars.

Their decisions can be appealed against, but the appeal is said to be

practically useless.

Nor is this all. When a negro happens to be a man of such property,

education, and position that it is absolutely impossible to reject his

vote, there is always the last resource of omitting to count it. One of

the Charleston group spoke of a particular election in which he himself,

and others of his people to his certain knowledge, cast Republican

ballots; but the result, as announced, showed not a single Republican

vote.

On this matter, as on so many others, it is very hard to get at the

truth. White men aver, and will prove by statistics, that in proportion

to his taxation the negro has very fair voting power, and is freely

permitted to exercise it. But I met no single negro who would admit

this; and most of them, like my Charleston friends, were very bitter on

the question, as well as on the exclusion of even the most respectable

of their race from the councils, the “machine,” of their party.

A remark made by one of this very intelligent Charleston group struck me

as a curious comment on the belief of white Charleston that it has a

special genius for dealing with the black race. “We negroes,” said this

member of the race, “have no respect for the Southern white man’s

opinions or his prophecies. He has always prophesied wrong. This thing

is going to work out in the usual mysterious way, that the South will be

very much surprised over.”

I quote word for word. “The usual mysterious way” may seem an odd

phrase, but its meaning is not very far to seek.

In Charleston, under the guidance of a genial Southern gentleman placed

in high educational authority, I saw a good deal both of white and of

coloured schools. My guide was an enthusiast for negro education.

“What’s the good,” he said, “of talking about being a superior race if

you’re afraid to educate the negro? [Sidenote: White Negroes.] There’s

not much superiority in that.” He admitted with regret that

accommodation for negro children was very deficient, and said that those

who were fighting for better accommodation had been crippled by the

recent appointment of a negro to a Federal office in the town.

In a school containing twelve hundred black children, the fire alarm was

given, and in exactly three minutes every child was in the playground,

the whole school being ranged in “column of companies,” or, rather, of

classes. Assuredly, such discipline cannot but be salutary. It was in

this school too, that I heard five hundred negro children (most of them

quite small, for three-fourths of them drop out after passing through

the primary classes) singing in their clear, shrill voices—

“In Dixie Land

I take my stand,

To live and die in Dixie.”

Poor quaint little mortals! They were unconscious of any irony in the

sentiment.

In every negro school or college that I visited—at Tuskegee among the

rest—I saw several young people in whom my eye could not discern the

slightest trace of black blood.[46] But it was in Charleston, at an

endowed school for negroes, that the most remarkable instance of this

kind came under my notice. I was present at the morning muster of the

whole school; and while the hymn was being sung I could not take my eyes

off two boys of thirteen or fourteen, evidently brothers, who stood side

by side in one of the upper classes. They were not only white, but (one

would have said) peculiarly and resplendently white. Their features were

delicate and distinguished, their eyes blue or grey, their hair a light

brown. They were slightly built, and, although their dress was quite

plain, they had somehow an air of grace and breeding. They could have

gone to Eton or Winchester and excited no remark.

-----

Footnote 46:

See, however, p. 125.

-----

Shall I confess that the contrast between these boys and the ebony and

chocolate manikins among whom their lot was cast stirred in me the race

instinct in all its unreasoning crudity? I wanted to swoop down upon

them and rescue them from what I felt for the moment to be their

horrible and unnatural surroundings. They seemed to me like children in

a fairy-tale, carried off by some tribe of brownies or gnomes. And who

shall say, indeed, that the impulse to rescue them was wholly quixotic?

If they remain in America, there can be no doubt that the life that lies

before them will be one of painful misunderstandings, heart burnings,

and humiliations.

Before leaving Charleston, let me record a curious little street-car

incident. [Sidenote: A Street-car Incident.] Coloured people, in this

city, are not confined to a special part of the car; but, each seat

being designed to accommodate two passengers, a coloured person and

white person must not sit side by side on the same seat. One afternoon I

was in a car which was full save for one place. The foremost seat on the

left hand was occupied by one negro girl, and there was, of course, a

vacant place at her side. Presently a white woman got in and sat down in

this place. “Hallo!” I thought, “here is a violation of the rule,”—and I

wondered what would happen. The conductor was equal to the occasion. The

foremost right-hand seat was occupied by a cadet of the Charleston

Military Academy in his neat grey uniform, and by a lady. The conductor

touched the cadet on the shoulder and whispered to him. The young man at

once stood up, the white woman who had last entered the car transferred

herself to his place, and for the rest of the journey the cadet hung on

to the strap, while the seat beside the negro girl remained vacant!

XIX

THE FRINGE OF FLORIDA

At Charleston I was in some sense at a parting of the ways. In order to

attend the Educational Conference at Memphis I had been compelled to

leave out Virginia and North Carolina from the itinerary I had

originally planned. Should I now return to New York, repairing this

omission—taking Raleigh, Richmond, the Hampton Institute, and other

interesting places, on my way? Or should I set my face once more

southward, and return to England by way of the West Indies?

Several considerations determined me in favour of the latter course.

Chief among them, perhaps, was the desire to visit the southernmost

portion of the United States—a portion unknown to the past, but destined

to figure largely in the history of the future—the Canal Zone of Panama.

Still, then, my motto was “Southward Ho!”

A slight misadventure frustrated my design of paying a short visit to

Savannah. [Sidenote: St. Augustine.] At Jacksonville, the capital of

Florida, I stayed just long enough to find it intolerably hot and

excessively uninteresting; though here, as almost everywhere else on the

east coast of Florida, a magnificent sheet of water (the St. John’s

River) compensates for the monotony of the surrounding country.

I hurried on to St. Augustine, with its huge and really picturesque

hotels (the Alcazar and the Ponce de Leon), its narrow, semi-Spanish

streets, its fine old fort of the Vauban period, its beautiful lagoon,

and (on Anastasia Island) its glorious stretch of silver-white ocean

beach. But there was no temptation to linger anywhere in Florida, for

the hotels were all shut up and the season was entirely over. I can

imagine that, in the season, the Plaza de la Constitucion at St.

Augustine is a busy and amusing spot. But no one could explain to me why

the great hotels, instead of being placed in view of the bay or (still

better) of the open sea, were huddled together, on no “situation” at

all, in the centre of the little town. There is no doubt some reason for

this; but it passed my divining.

Onward, then, by the Florida East Coast Railway, which is, if I am

rightly informed, practically the undivided property of Mr. Flagler, a

Standard Oil magnate. [Sidenote: The American Riviera.] (I heard the

Governor of the State, Mr. Broward, deliver an attack on its monopolist

pretensions in the Plaza at St. Augustine.) With a few hours’ pause at

Daytona, I went right on to Miami, which was, till lately, the terminus

of the railway—366 miles from Jacksonville.

Undoubtedly this margin of the great peninsula—this Riviera of the

United States—has a charm of its own. Physically, however, nothing could

be less like the Riviera. Here there are no Alps, no Esterels. There is

not even a molehill that can be magnified into a mountain. It is a

region of broad skies and broad waters, green scrub, and leagues on

leagues of smooth, white beach, with the blue ocean curling idly over

it. Apart from gardens and a very few neglected orange groves, I saw

absolutely not one patch of cultivation between St. Augustine and Miami.

The railroad would pass through miles of tangled scrub and acres of

dwarf palmetto; the most dreary and monotonous country imaginable. Then

suddenly a blue lagoon would open out, with delightful, low,

board-veranda’d houses skirting it, and rich tropical gardens running

down to the water’s edge. Then into the wilderness again, with only here

and there a clearance and a cabin, and here and there, I grieve to say,

acres of beautiful pine-trees bleeding to death for the enrichment of

some turpentine company.

Miami—known to the natives as My-ammy—has the air of a busy and

prosperous frontier town. It has the usual huge hotel, unusually well

situated, at the junction between a beautiful river and a beautiful

lagoon. Here we are quite clearly on the very verge of the

tropics—coco-nut palms abound on every hand; coco-nut husks cumber the

white shell roads; the gardens are full of hybiscus and other splendid

flowering shrubs; and everywhere the gorgeous poinsiana regia flames in

unabashed vermilion against the deep blue of the sky.

[Sidenote: An Ocean-going Railroad.]

A wonderful piece of engineering is the railway over the Florida

Keys—the low margin of islands, like those of the upper Adriatic, in

which the peninsula tails off. By this time it may be completed all the

way from Miami to Key West; but when I was there it had a half-way

terminus at Knight’s Key.

For an hour after leaving Miami the railway runs through an almost

unbroken pine forest. Here and there a rude cabin is visible, occupied,

no doubt by platelayers; but there is not a single clearing or attempt

at cultivation. Then, all of a sudden, the forest ceases, and we emerge

upon open swamp prairies, dotted with clumps of low green scrub. To the

north we can see the edge of the pine forest running off, like a black

wall, into the dim distance. For another hour or thereabouts we trail

through the coarse grass of the swamp prairies or salt marshes, broken

only by occasional channels of water. Of habitation or cultivation there

is no sign. Then we run out upon vast lagoons dotted with occasional

scrub-covered islands. The railroad is built on a piled-up causeway of a

sort of white shell-limestone—or is it, perhaps, coral?

On the whole, the outlook is rather monotonous; but there are patches of

beauty. I remember vividly a huge green lagoon, with a low green shore

beyond; in the foreground some sort of heron lazily flapping its way

over the surface; and in the distance the white sails of a fore-and-aft

schooner shining in the sun.

Then we pass through many miles of amazing and fantastic jungle. No

tree, perhaps, is over thirty feet high; but all are strangely contorted

and interwoven with vines and creepers—like the forest round the

Sleeping Beauty’s castle. A few clearings are burnt away in this jungle,

and things like banana trees are growing in them. But for an hour and a

half after leaving Homestead (the station at the edge of the pine

forest) I saw not a single human habitation.

Soon, however, we begin to catch occasional glimpses of the open

sea—iridescent and exquisite—through gaps in the outer barrier of reefs.

And now there are one or two houses to be seen. We stop at what seems to

be a station. Some one in the car calls to a negro navvy on the line:

“Say, what’s the name of this town?” Negro: “Illago, sa’.” Passenger:

“How many people live here?” Negro: “None at all, sa’.”

[Sidenote: Under the Palm-trees.]

Now we are practically out at sea, crossing miles of blue water between

the islands, sometimes on limestone (or coral?) causeways, sometimes on

long bridges of wooden trestles. At one point there lies, about half a

mile from the line, a little island, perhaps a mile long, entirely

covered with palm-trees, and with a single wooden house upon

it—suggesting an atoll of the Southern Seas.

At a place called Long Key we stopped for lunch. Long Key is a

settlement of some twenty one-storey wooden houses, all raised on piles

about four feet from the ground, and with every doorway and window

screened with wire gauze. The whole place is embowered in palms; and

under the palms, twenty yards from the green sea, a wooden counter had

been set up, with the word “lunch,” rudely painted on a shingle,

displayed above it. Two white women served behind the counter and

dispensed coffee (the milk poured through a gimlet hole in a tin),

sandwiches, coco-nut milk, and little packages of coco-nut candy. I had

never before tasted coco-nut milk and am not eager to quaff it again. It

suggests nothing so much as weak _eau sucrée_. The frugal meal, in its

romantic surroundings, was pleasant enough; but I could wish that the

wire-gauze screens had been run round the lunch-counter. It was a “quick

lunch”—only fifteen minutes allowed—yet when I returned to the train I

found my neck quite rough with mosquito-bites.

From Long Key we presently ran out on an immense viaduct, some two miles

long, I should say, of concrete arches. [Sidenote: Asia and Africa.]

Then again across jungle-covered islands and some smaller lagoons. Here

signs of life grew more frequent, for we were approaching the point

where the extension of the line is actively proceeding. The labourers

seem to be for the most part accommodated in huge house-boats, which we

saw here and there moored in convenient creeks and channels. The

majority, I think, are negroes, with a considerable intermixture of

“Dagos” and some East Indian coolies.

At one point we passed a large truck crowded with half-naked negro

navvies, who swarmed over it and clung on to it in every possible

attitude, grinning, joking, indulging in horse-play, so far as their

close quarters would allow—the very picture, in short, of good-humoured,

muscular animalism. And in the middle of the swarm, penned in on every

side, and yet utterly aloof, stood two turbaned Easterns; austere,

unbending, sombre, a trifle sinister. The negroes’ vivacity and humour

made them, in a way, more sympathetic, but, at the same time, threw into

relief the distinction of the Orientals. They looked like kings in exile

among a rabble of savages. “Mere Aryan prejudice,” you will say. Yes;

but that means that it is prehistoric and inveterate.

Knight’s Key is but a temporary settlement with a wharf, a railway yard,

and one or two warehouses. Thence the comfortable little steamship Miami

conveyed us in about five hours to Key West, and in another seven or

eight hours to Havana—from the New World to the Old.