SITUATED in the heart of the farming section of the State, with its
fertile soil, its equable climate, its forests of pine trees,
Central City was one of the flourishing towns of South Georgia. Its
population was between eight and ten thousand, of which some four
thousand were Negroes. The wealth and prosperity of the town
depended not so much on the town itself as it did on the farmers of
the fertile lands surrounding it. To Central City they came on
Saturday afternoons to sell their cotton, their corn, their hogs and
cows, and to buy in turn sugar, cloth, coffee, farming-implements,
shoes, and amusement. It was divided into four nearly equal sections
by the intersection of the tracks of the Central of Georgia Railroad
and of the Georgia, Southern and Florida Railway. Drowsy, indolent
during the first six days of the week, Central City awoke on
Saturday morning for "goin't town" day with its bustle and
excitement and lively trade. Then the broad dustiness of Lee Street
was disturbed by the Fords and muddied wagons of farmers, white and
black. In the wagons were usually splint-bottom chairs or boards
stretched from side to side, occupied by scrawny, lanky "po' whites"
with a swarm of children to match, clad in single-piece garments,
once red in colour and now, through many washings with lye soap, an
indeterminate reddish brown. Or, if the driver was a Negro, he
generally was surrounded by just as many little black offspring,
clad also in greyish or reddish-brown garments, and scrambling over
the farm products being brought to town for sale or exchange for the
simple and few store products needed. And beside him the usually
buxom, ample-bodied wife, clad in her finest and most gaudy clothing
to celebrate the trip to town looked forward to eagerly all the
week.
Crowded were the streets with vehicles and the sidewalks with the
jostling, laughing, loudly talking throng of humans. After the
noonday whistle had blown signalling release to the hordes of whites
working in the cotton mill over beyond the tracks, the crowd was
augmented considerably, the new-comers made up of those who had
deserted the country districts, discouraged by the hard life of
farming, by rainy and unprofitable seasons, by the ravages of the
boll weevil and of landlords, both working dire distress on poor
white and black alike. Discouraged, they had come to "the city" to
work at small wages in the cotton mill.
All the trading done on these days did not take place over the
counters of the stores that lined Lee Street. In the dirty little
alleyways from off the main street, men with furtive eyes but bold
ways dispensed synthetic gin, "real" rye whisky, and more often
"white mule," as the moonshine corn whisky is called. Bottles were
tilted and held to the mouth a long time and later the scene would
be enlivened by furious but shortlived fights. Guns, knives, all
sorts of weapons appeared with miraculous speed—the quarrel was
settled, the wounded or killed removed, and the throng forgot the
incident in some new joyous and usually commonplace or sordid
adventure.
When darkness began to approach, the wagons and Fords, loaded with
merchandise for the next week, and with the children clutching
sticky and brightly coloured candies, began to rumble countrywards,
and Central City by nightfall had resumed its sleepy, indolent, and
deserted manner.
From the corner where Oglethorpe Avenue crossed Lee Street and where
stood the monument to the Confederate Dead, the business section
extended up Lee Street for three blocks. Here the street was
dignified with a narrow "park," some twenty feet in width, which ran
the length of the business thoroughfare. Over beyond the monument
lay the section of Central City where lived the more well-to-do of
its white inhabitants. Georgia Avenue was here the realm of the
socially elect. Shaded by elms, it numbered several more or less
pretentious homes of two stories, some of brick, the majority of
frame structure. Here were the homes of Roy Ewing, president of the
local Chamber of Commerce and owner of Ewing's General Merchandise
Emporium; of George Baird, president of the Bank of Central City; of
Fred Griswold, occupying the same relation to Central City's other
bank, the Smith County Farmers' Bank; of Ralph Minor, owner and
manager of the Bon Ton Store.
Here too were the wives of these men, busying themselves with their
household duties and the minor social life of the community. In the
morning they attended to the many details of housekeeping; in the
afternoon and early evening they sat on their front porches or
visited neighbours or went for a ride. Placid, uneventful, stupid
lives they led with no other interests than the petty affairs of a
small and unprogressive town.
The young girls of Central City usually in the afternoon dressed in
all their small-town finery and strolled down to Odell's Drug Store
where the young men congregated. Having consumed a frothy soda or a
gummy, sweetish sundae, they went to the Idle Hour Moving Picture
Palace to worship at the celluloid shrine of a favourite film actor,
usually of the highly romantic type. Then the stroll homewards,
always past the Central City Hotel, a two-storied frame structure
located at the corner of Lee Street and Oglethorpe Avenue opposite
the Confederate monument. In front were arm-chairs, occupied in warm
weather, which was nearly all the year round, by travelling salesmen
or other transients. Often a sidelong glance and a fleeting,
would-be-coy smile would cause one of the chair-occupants to rise as
casually as he could feign, yawn and stretch, and with affected
nonchalance stroll down Lee Street in the wake of the smiling one. …
At the other end of Lee Street from the residential section of the
well-to-do whites, past the business section of that main artery of
the town, lay that portion known generally as "Darktown." Fringing
it were several better-than-the-average homes, neat, well painted,
comfortable-looking, fronted with smooth lawns and tidy, colourful
flower-beds. It was one of these at the corner of Lee and State
Streets that the Harpers owned and occupied.
After crossing State Street, an abrupt descent was taken by Lee
Street. Here lived in squalor and filth and abject poverty the
poorer class of Negroes. The streets were winding, unpaved lanes,
veritable seas and rivers of sticky, gummy, discouraging mud in
rainy weather, into which the wheels of vehicles sank to their hubs
if the drivers of those conveyances were indiscreet enough to drive
through them. In summer these eddying wallows of muck and filth and
mud dry up and are transformed into swirling storms of germ-laden
dust when a vagrant wind sweeps over them or a vehicle drives
through them, choking the throats of unlucky passers-by, and, to the
despair of the dusky housewives, flying through open windows. The
houses that bordered these roads were for the most part of three and
four rooms, the exteriors unpainted or whitewashed, the interiors
gloomy and smelly. But few of them had sanitary arrangements, and at
the end of the little patch of ground that was back of each of them,
in which a few discouraged vegetables strove to push their heads
above the ground, there stood another unpainted structure, small,
known as "the privy." In front there was nearly always some attempt
at flower-cultivation, the tiny beds bordered with bottles, shells,
and bits of brightly coloured glass. The ugliness of the houses in
many instances was hidden in summer-time by vines and rambler roses
that covered the porches and sometimes the fronts of the houses.
Around these houses, in the streets, everywhere, there played a
seemingly innumerable horde of black and brown and yellow children,
noisy, quarrelsome, clad usually in one-piece dresses of the same
indeterminate shade of grey or red or brown that was seen on the
country children on Saturday. In front of many of the houses, there
sat on sunny days an old and bent man or ancient woman puffing the
omnipresent corn-cob pipe. …
A half-mile westward from "Darktown," and separated from it by the
Central of Georgia Railroad tracks, stood the Central City Cotton
Spinning-Mill. Clustered around its ugly red-brick walls stood
dwellings that differed but little from those of "Darktown." Here
were the same dingy, small, unsanitary, unbeautiful, and unpainted
dwellings. Here were the same muddy or dusty unpaved streets. Here
were the same squalor and poverty and filth and abject ignorance.
There were but few superficial or recognizable differences. One was
that the children wore, instead of the brown plumpness of the Negro
children, a pale, emaciated, consumptive air because of the long
hours in the lint-laden confines of the mills. The men were long,
stooped, cadaverous-appearing. The women were sallow, unattractive,
sad-looking, each usually with the end of a snuff-stick protruding
from her mouth. The children, when they played at all, did so in
listless, wearied, uninterested, and apathetic fashion. The houses
looked even more gaunt and bare than those in the quarter which
housed the poorer Negroes, for the tiny patches of ground that
fronted the houses here in "Factoryville" were but seldom planted
with flowers. More often it was trampled down until it became a
hard, red-clay, sunbaked expanse on which the children, and dogs as
emaciated and forlorn, sometimes played.
Here there was but one strong conviction, but one firm rock of faith
to which they clung—the inherent and carefully nurtured hatred of
"niggers" and a belief in their own infinite superiority over their
dark-skinned neighbours. Their gods were Tom Watson and Hoke Smith
and Tom Hardwick and other demagogic politicians and office-seekers
who came to them every two or four years and harangued them on the
necessity of their upholding white civilization by re-electing them
to office. But one appeal was needed—but one was used—and that one
always successfully. Meanwhile, their children left school and
entered the mill to work the few years that such a life gave them.
And, in the meantime, the black children they hated so-deprived by
prejudice from working in the mills, and pushed forward by often
illiterate but always ambitious black parents—went to school. …
This, in brief, was the Central City to which Kenneth had returned.
A typical Southern town—reasonably rich as wealth is measured in
that part of Georgia—rich in money and lands and cot—amazingly
ignorant in the finer things of life. Noisy, unreflective, their
wants but few and those easily satisfied. The men, self-made, with
all that that distinctly American term implies. The women concerned
only with their petty household affairs and more petty gossip and
social intercourse. But, beyond these, life was and is a closed
book. Or, more, a book that never was written or printed.
The companionship and inspiration of books was unknown. Music, even
with the omnipresent Victrola, meant only the latest bit of cheap
jazz or a Yiddish or Negro dialect song. Art, in its many forms was
considered solely for decadent, effete "furriners." Hostility would
have met the woman of the town's upper class who attempted to
exhibit any knowledge of art. Her friends would have felt that she
was trying "to put something over on them." As for any man of the
town, at best he would have been considered a "little queer in the
head," at the worst suspected of moral turpitude or perversion. But
two releases from the commonplace, monotonous life were left. The
first, liquor. Bootlegging throve. The woods around Central City
were infested with "moonshine" stills that seldom were still. The
initiated drove out to certain lonely spots, deposited under
well-known trees a jug or other container with a banknote stuck in
its mouth. One then gave a certain whistle and walked away. Soon
there would come an answering signal. One went back to the tree and
found the money gone but the container filled with a colourless or
pale-yellow liquid. … Or, the more affluent had it brought to them
in town hidden under wagon-loads of fodder or cotton.
The other and even more popular outlet of unfulfilled and suppressed
emotions was sex. Central City boasted it had no red-light district
like Macon and Savannah and Atlanta. That was true. All over the
town were protected domiciles housing slatternly women. To them went
by circuitous routes the merchants whose stores were on Lee Street.
To them went the gangs from the turpentine camps on their periodic
pilgrimages to town on pay-day. And a traveller on any of the roads
leading from the town could see, on warm evenings, automobiles
standing with engines stilled and lights dimmed on the side of the
road. Down on Harris and Butler Streets in "Darktown" were other
houses. Here were coloured women who seemed never to have to work.
Here was seldom seen a coloured man. And the children around these
houses were usually lighter in colour than in other parts of
"Darktown."
Negro fathers and mothers of comely daughters never allowed them to
go out unaccompanied after dark. There were too many dangers from
men of their own race. And even greater ones from men of the other
race. There had been too many disastrous consequences from
relaxation of vigil by certain bowed and heart-broken coloured
parents. And they had no redress at law. The laws of the State
against intermarriage saw to it that there should be none. Central
City inhabitants knew all these things. But familiarity with them
had bred the belief that they did not exist—that is, they were
thought a natural part of the town's armament against scandal. One
soon grew used to them and forgot them. The town was no worse than
any other—far better than most.
It was a rude shock to Kenneth when he began to see these things
through an entirely different pair of eyes than those with which he
had viewed them before he left Central City for the North. The
sordidness, the blatant vulgarity, the viciousness of it
all—especially the houses on Butler and Harris Streets—appalled and
sickened him. Even more was he disgusted by the complacent
acceptance of the whole miserable business by white and black alike.
On two or three occasions he tentatively mentioned it to a few of
those he had known intimately years before. Some of them laughed
indulgently—others cautioned him to leave it alone. Finding no
response, he shrugged his shoulders and dismissed the whole affair
from his mind. "It was here long before I was born," he said to
himself philosophically, "it'll probably be here long after I'm
dead, and the best thing for me to do is to stick to my own business
and let other people's morals alone."