VII
Of the Black Belt
I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
As the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.
Look not upon me, because I am black,
Because the sun hath looked upon me:
My mother's children were angry with me;
They made me the keeper of the vineyards;
But mine own vineyard have I not kept.
THE SONG OF SOLOMON.
Out of the North the train thundered, and we woke to see the
crimson soil of Georgia stretching away bare and monotonous
right and left. Here and there lay straggling, unlovely vil-
lages, and lean men loafed leisurely at the depots; then again
came the stretch of pines and clay. Yet we did not nod, nor
weary of the scene; for this is historic ground. Right across
our track, three hundred and sixty years ago, wandered the
cavalcade of Hernando de Soto, looking for gold and the Great
Sea; and he and his foot-sore captives disappeared yonder in
the grim forests to the west. Here sits Atlanta, the city of a
hundred hills, with something Western, something Southern,
and something quite its own, in its busy life. Just this side
Atlanta is the land of the Cherokees and to the southwest, not
far from where Sam Hose was crucified, you may stand on a
spot which is to-day the centre of the Negro problem,--the
centre of those nine million men who are America's dark
heritage from slavery and the slave-trade.
Not only is Georgia thus the geographical focus of our
Negro population, but in many other respects, both now and
yesterday, the Negro problems have seemed to be centered in
this State. No other State in the Union can count a million
Negroes among its citizens,--a population as large as the
slave population of the whole Union in 1800; no other State
fought so long and strenuously to gather this host of Africans.
Oglethorpe thought slavery against law and gospel; but the
circumstances which gave Georgia its first inhabitants were
not calculated to furnish citizens over-nice in their ideas about
rum and slaves. Despite the prohibitions of the trustees, these
Georgians, like some of their descendants, proceeded to take
the law into their own hands; and so pliant were the judges,
and so flagrant the smuggling, and so earnest were the
prayers of Whitefield, that by the middle of the eighteenth
century all restrictions were swept away, and the slave-trade
went merrily on for fifty years and more.
Down in Darien, where the Delegal riots took place some
summers ago, there used to come a strong protest against
slavery from the Scotch Highlanders; and the Moravians of
Ebenezer did not like the system. But not till the Haytian
Terror of Toussaint was the trade in men even checked; while
the national statute of 1808 did not suffice to stop it. How
the Africans poured in!--fifty thousand between 1790 and
1810, and then, from Virginia and from smugglers, two
thousand a year for many years more. So the thirty thousand
Negroes of Georgia in 1790 doubled in a decade,--were over
a hundred thousand in 1810, had reached two hundred thou-
sand in 1820, and half a million at the time of the war. Thus
like a snake the black population writhed upward.
But we must hasten on our journey. This that we pass as
we near Atlanta is the ancient land of the Cherokees,--that
brave Indian nation which strove so long for its fatherland,
until Fate and the United States Government drove them
beyond the Mississippi. If you wish to ride with me you must
come into the "Jim Crow Car." There will be no objection,
--already four other white men, and a little white girl with
her nurse, are in there. Usually the races are mixed in there;
but the white coach is all white. Of course this car is not so
good as the other, but it is fairly clean and comfortable. The
discomfort lies chiefly in the hearts of those four black men
yonder--and in mine.
We rumble south in quite a business-like way. The bare red
clay and pines of Northern Georgia begin to disappear, and in
their place appears a rich rolling land, luxuriant, and here and
there well tilled. This is the land of the Creek Indians; and a
hard time the Georgians had to seize it. The towns grow more
frequent and more interesting, and brand-new cotton mills
rise on every side. Below Macon the world grows darker; for
now we approach the Black Belt,--that strange land of
shadows, at which even slaves paled in the past, and whence
come now only faint and half-intelligible murmurs to the
world beyond. The "Jim Crow Car" grows larger and a
shade better; three rough field-hands and two or three white
loafers accompany us, and the newsboy still spreads his
wares at one end. The sun is setting, but we can see the great
cotton country as we enter it,--the soil now dark and fertile,
now thin and gray, with fruit-trees and dilapidated buildings,
--all the way to Albany.
At Albany, in the heart of the Black Belt, we stop. Two
hundred miles south of Atlanta, two hundred miles west of
the Atlantic, and one hundred miles north of the Great Gulf
lies Dougherty County, with ten thousand Negroes and two
thousand whites. The Flint River winds down from Anderson-
ville, and, turning suddenly at Albany, the county-seat, hur-
ries on to join the Chattahoochee and the sea. Andrew Jackson
knew the Flint well, and marched across it once to avenge the
Indian Massacre at Fort Mims. That was in 1814, not long
before the battle of New Orleans; and by the Creek treaty that
followed this campaign, all Dougherty County, and much
other rich land, was ceded to Georgia. Still, settlers fought
shy of this land, for the Indians were all about, and they were
unpleasant neighbors in those days. The panic of 1837, which
Jackson bequeathed to Van Buren, turned the planters from
the impoverished lands of Virginia, the Carolinas, and east
Georgia, toward the West. The Indians were removed to
Indian Territory, and settlers poured into these coveted lands
to retrieve their broken fortunes. For a radius of a hundred
miles about Albany, stretched a great fertile land, luxuriant
with forests of pine, oak, ash, hickory, and poplar; hot with
the sun and damp with the rich black swamp-land; and here
the corner-stone of the Cotton Kingdom was laid.
Albany is to-day a wide-streeted, placid, Southern town,
with a broad sweep of stores and saloons, and flanking rows
of homes,--whites usually to the north, and blacks to the
south. Six days in the week the town looks decidedly too
small for itself, and takes frequent and prolonged naps.
But on Saturday suddenly the whole county disgorges itself
upon the place, and a perfect flood of black peasantry pours
through the streets, fills the stores, blocks the sidewalks,
chokes the thoroughfares, and takes full possession of the
town. They are black, sturdy, uncouth country folk, good-
natured and simple, talkative to a degree, and yet far more
silent and brooding than the crowds of the Rhine-pfalz, or
Naples, or Cracow. They drink considerable quantities of
whiskey, but do not get very drunk; they talk and laugh
loudly at times, but seldom quarrel or fight. They walk up
and down the streets, meet and gossip with friends, stare at
the shop windows, buy coffee, cheap candy, and clothes, and
at dusk drive home--happy? well no, not exactly happy, but
much happier than as though they had not come.
Thus Albany is a real capital,--a typical Southern county
town, the centre of the life of ten thousand souls; their point
of contact with the outer world, their centre of news and
gossip, their market for buying and selling, borrowing and
lending, their fountain of justice and law. Once upon a time
we knew country life so well and city life so little, that we
illustrated city life as that of a closely crowded country
district. Now the world has well-nigh forgotten what the
country is, and we must imagine a little city of black people
scattered far and wide over three hundred lonesome square
miles of land, without train or trolley, in the midst of cotton
and corn, and wide patches of sand and gloomy soil.
It gets pretty hot in Southern Georgia in July,--a sort of
dull, determined heat that seems quite independent of the
sun; so it took us some days to muster courage enough to
leave the porch and venture out on the long country roads,
that we might see this unknown world. Finally we started. It
was about ten in the morning, bright with a faint breeze, and
we jogged leisurely southward in the valley of the Flint. We
passed the scattered box-like cabins of the brickyard hands,
and the long tenement-row facetiously called "The Ark," and
were soon in the open country, and on the confines of the
great plantations of other days. There is the "Joe Fields
place"; a rough old fellow was he, and had killed many a
"nigger" in his day. Twelve miles his plantation used to
run,--a regular barony. It is nearly all gone now; only strag-
gling bits belong to the family, and the rest has passed to
Jews and Negroes. Even the bits which are left are heavily
mortgaged, and, like the rest of the land, tilled by tenants.
Here is one of them now,--a tall brown man, a hard worker
and a hard drinker, illiterate, but versed in farmlore, as his
nodding crops declare. This distressingly new board house is
his, and he has just moved out of yonder moss-grown cabin
with its one square room.
From the curtains in Benton's house, down the road, a dark
comely face is staring at the strangers; for passing carriages
are not every-day occurrences here. Benton is an intelligent
yellow man with a good-sized family, and manages a planta-
tion blasted by the war and now the broken staff of the
widow. He might be well-to-do, they say; but he carouses too
much in Albany. And the half-desolate spirit of neglect born
of the very soil seems to have settled on these acres. In times
past there were cotton-gins and machinery here; but they have
rotted away.
The whole land seems forlorn and forsaken. Here are the
remnants of the vast plantations of the Sheldons, the Pellots,
and the Rensons; but the souls of them are passed. The
houses lie in half ruin, or have wholly disappeared; the fences
have flown, and the families are wandering in the world.
Strange vicissitudes have met these whilom masters. Yonder
stretch the wide acres of Bildad Reasor; he died in war-time,
but the upstart overseer hastened to wed the widow. Then he
went, and his neighbors too, and now only the black tenant
remains; but the shadow-hand of the master's grand-nephew
or cousin or creditor stretches out of the gray distance to
collect the rack-rent remorselessly, and so the land is uncared-
for and poor. Only black tenants can stand such a system, and
they only because they must. Ten miles we have ridden
to-day and have seen no white face.
A resistless feeling of depression falls slowly upon us,
despite the gaudy sunshine and the green cottonfields. This,
then, is the Cotton Kingdom,--the shadow of a marvellous
dream. And where is the King? Perhaps this is he,--the
sweating ploughman, tilling his eighty acres with two lean
mules, and fighting a hard battle with debt. So we sit musing,
until, as we turn a corner on the sandy road, there comes a
fairer scene suddenly in view,--a neat cottage snugly en-
sconced by the road, and near it a little store. A tall bronzed
man rises from the porch as we hail him, and comes out to
our carriage. He is six feet in height, with a sober face that
smiles gravely. He walks too straight to be a tenant,--yes, he
owns two hundred and forty acres. "The land is run down
since the boom-days of eighteen hundred and fifty," he
explains, and cotton is low. Three black tenants live on his
place, and in his little store he keeps a small stock of tobacco,
snuff, soap, and soda, for the neighborhood. Here is his
gin-house with new machinery just installed. Three hundred
bales of cotton went through it last year. Two children he has
sent away to school. Yes, he says sadly, he is getting on, but
cotton is down to four cents; I know how Debt sits staring at
him.
Wherever the King may be, the parks and palaces of the
Cotton Kingdom have not wholly disappeared. We plunge
even now into great groves of oak and towering pine, with an
undergrowth of myrtle and shrubbery. This was the "home-
house" of the Thompsons,--slave-barons who drove their
coach and four in the merry past. All is silence now, and
ashes, and tangled weeds. The owner put his whole fortune
into the rising cotton industry of the fifties, and with the
falling prices of the eighties he packed up and stole away.
Yonder is another grove, with unkempt lawn, great magno-
lias, and grass-grown paths. The Big House stands in half-
ruin, its great front door staring blankly at the street, and the
back part grotesquely restored for its black tenant. A shabby,
well-built Negro he is, unlucky and irresolute. He digs hard
to pay rent to the white girl who owns the remnant of the
place. She married a policeman, and lives in Savannah.
Now and again we come to churches. Here is one now,
--Shepherd's, they call it,--a great whitewashed barn of a
thing, perched on stilts of stone, and looking for all the world
as though it were just resting here a moment and might be
expected to waddle off down the road at almost any time.
And yet it is the centre of a hundred cabin homes; and
sometimes, of a Sunday, five hundred persons from far and
near gather here and talk and eat and sing. There is a school-
house near,--a very airy, empty shed; but even this is an
improvement, for usually the school is held in the church.
The churches vary from log-huts to those like Shepherd's,
and the schools from nothing to this little house that sits
demurely on the county line. It is a tiny plank-house, perhaps
ten by twenty, and has within a double row of rough unplaned
benches, resting mostly on legs, sometimes on boxes. Oppo-
site the door is a square home-made desk. In one corner are
the ruins of a stove, and in the other a dim blackboard. It
is the cheerfulest schoolhouse I have seen in Dougherty, save in
town. Back of the schoolhouse is a lodgehouse two stories
high and not quite finished. Societies meet there,--societies
"to care for the sick and bury the dead"; and these societies
grow and flourish.
We had come to the boundaries of Dougherty, and were
about to turn west along the county-line, when all these sights
were pointed out to us by a kindly old man, black, white-
haired, and seventy. Forty-five years he had lived here, and
now supports himself and his old wife by the help of the steer
tethered yonder and the charity of his black neighbors. He
shows us the farm of the Hills just across the county line in
Baker,--a widow and two strapping sons, who raised ten
bales (one need not add "cotton" down here) last year. There
are fences and pigs and cows, and the soft-voiced, velvet-
skinned young Memnon, who sauntered half-bashfully over
to greet the strangers, is proud of his home. We turn now to
the west along the county line. Great dismantled trunks of
pines tower above the green cottonfields, cracking their na-
ked gnarled fingers toward the border of living forest beyond.
There is little beauty in this region, only a sort of crude
abandon that suggests power,--a naked grandeur, as it were.
The houses are bare and straight; there are no hammocks or
easy-chairs, and few flowers. So when, as here at Rawdon's,
one sees a vine clinging to a little porch, and home-like
windows peeping over the fences, one takes a long breath. I
think I never before quite realized the place of the Fence in
civilization. This is the Land of the Unfenced, where crouch
on either hand scores of ugly one-room cabins, cheerless and
dirty. Here lies the Negro problem in its naked dirt and
penury. And here are no fences. But now and then the
crisscross rails or straight palings break into view, and then
we know a touch of culture is near. Of course Harrison
Gohagen,--a quiet yellow man, young, smooth-faced, and
diligent,--of course he is lord of some hundred acres, and we
expect to see a vision of well-kept rooms and fat beds and
laughing children. For has he not fine fences? And those over
yonder, why should they build fences on the rack-rented
land? It will only increase their rent.
On we wind, through sand and pines and glimpses of old
plantations, till there creeps into sight a cluster of buildings,
--wood and brick, mills and houses, and scattered cabins. It
seemed quite a village. As it came nearer and nearer, how-
ever, the aspect changed: the buildings were rotten, the bricks
were falling out, the mills were silent, and the store was
closed. Only in the cabins appeared now and then a bit of
lazy life. I could imagine the place under some weird spell,
and was half-minded to search out the princess. An old
ragged black man, honest, simple, and improvident, told us
the tale. The Wizard of the North--the Capitalist--had rushed
down in the seventies to woo this coy dark soil. He bought a
square mile or more, and for a time the field-hands sang, the
gins groaned, and the mills buzzed. Then came a change. The
agent's son embezzled the funds and ran off with them. Then
the agent himself disappeared. Finally the new agent stole
even the books, and the company in wrath closed its business
and its houses, refused to sell, and let houses and furniture
and machinery rust and rot. So the Waters-Loring plantation
was stilled by the spell of dishonesty, and stands like some
gaunt rebuke to a scarred land.
Somehow that plantation ended our day's journey; for I
could not shake off the influence of that silent scene. Back
toward town we glided, past the straight and thread-like
pines, past a dark tree-dotted pond where the air was heavy
with a dead sweet perfume. White slender-legged curlews
flitted by us, and the garnet blooms of the cotton looked gay
against the green and purple stalks. A peasant girl was hoeing
in the field, white-turbaned and black-limbed. All this we
saw, but the spell still lay upon us.
How curious a land is this,--how full of untold story, of
tragedy and laughter, and the rich legacy of human life;
shadowed with a tragic past, and big with future promise!
This is the Black Belt of Georgia. Dougherty County is the
west end of the Black Belt, and men once called it the Egypt
of the Confederacy. It is full of historic interest. First there is
the Swamp, to the west, where the Chickasawhatchee flows
sullenly southward. The shadow of an old plantation lies at its
edge, forlorn and dark. Then comes the pool; pendent gray
moss and brackish waters appear, and forests filled with
wildfowl. In one place the wood is on fire, smouldering in
dull red anger; but nobody minds. Then the swamp grows
beautiful; a raised road, built by chained Negro convicts, dips
down into it, and forms a way walled and almost covered in
living green. Spreading trees spring from a prodigal luxuri-
ance of undergrowth; great dark green shadows fade into the
black background, until all is one mass of tangled semi-
tropical foliage, marvellous in its weird savage splendor.
Once we crossed a black silent stream, where the sad trees
and writhing creepers, all glinting fiery yellow and green,
seemed like some vast cathedral,--some green Milan builded
of wildwood. And as I crossed, I seemed to see again that
fierce tragedy of seventy years ago. Osceola, the Indian-
Negro chieftain, had risen in the swamps of Florida, vowing
vengeance. His war-cry reached the red Creeks of Dougherty,
and their war-cry rang from the Chattahoochee to the sea.
Men and women and children fled and fell before them as
they swept into Dougherty. In yonder shadows a dark and
hideously painted warrior glided stealthily on,--another and
another, until three hundred had crept into the treacherous
swamp. Then the false slime closing about them called the
white men from the east. Waist-deep, they fought beneath the
tall trees, until the war-cry was hushed and the Indians glided
back into the west. Small wonder the wood is red.
Then came the black slaves. Day after day the clank of
chained feet marching from Virginia and Carolina to Georgia
was heard in these rich swamp lands. Day after day the songs
of the callous, the wail of the motherless, and the muttered
curses of the wretched echoed from the Flint to the Chickasaw-
hatchee, until by 1860 there had risen in West Dougherty
perhaps the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever
knew. A hundred and fifty barons commanded the labor of
nearly six thousand Negroes, held sway over farms with
ninety thousand acres tilled land, valued even in times of
cheap soil at three millions of dollars. Twenty thousand bales
of ginned cotton went yearly to England, New and Old; and
men that came there bankrupt made money and grew rich. In
a single decade the cotton output increased four-fold and the
value of lands was tripled. It was the heyday of the nouveau
riche, and a life of careless extravagance among the masters.
Four and six bobtailed thoroughbreds rolled their coaches to
town; open hospitality and gay entertainment were the rule.
Parks and groves were laid out, rich with flower and vine,
and in the midst stood the low wide-halled "big house," with
its porch and columns and great fireplaces.
And yet with all this there was something sordid, some-
thing forced,--a certain feverish unrest and recklessness; for
was not all this show and tinsel built upon a groan? "This
land was a little Hell," said a ragged, brown, and grave-
faced man to me. We were seated near a roadside blacksmith
shop, and behind was the bare ruin of some master's home.
"I've seen niggers drop dead in the furrow, but they were
kicked aside, and the plough never stopped. Down in the
guard-house, there's where the blood ran."
With such foundations a kingdom must in time sway and
fall. The masters moved to Macon and Augusta, and left only
the irresponsible overseers on the land. And the result is such
ruin as this, the Lloyd "home-place":--great waving oaks, a
spread of lawn, myrtles and chestnuts, all ragged and wild; a
solitary gate-post standing where once was a castle entrance;
an old rusty anvil lying amid rotting bellows and wood in the
ruins of a blacksmith shop; a wide rambling old mansion,
brown and dingy, filled now with the grandchildren of the
slaves who once waited on its tables; while the family of the
master has dwindled to two lone women, who live in Macon
and feed hungrily off the remnants of an earldom. So we ride
on, past phantom gates and falling homes,--past the once
flourishing farms of the Smiths, the Gandys, and the Lagores,
--and find all dilapidated and half ruined, even there where a
solitary white woman, a relic of other days, sits alone in state
among miles of Negroes and rides to town in her ancient
coach each day.
This was indeed the Egypt of the Confederacy,--the rich
granary whence potatoes and corn and cotton poured out to
the famished and ragged Confederate troops as they battled
for a cause lost long before 1861. Sheltered and secure, it
became the place of refuge for families, wealth, and slaves.
Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell.
The red-clay sub-soil already had begun to peer above the
loam. The harder the slaves were driven the more careless
and fatal was their farming. Then came the revolution of war
and Emancipation, the bewilderment of Reconstruction,--and
now, what is the Egypt of the Confederacy, and what mean-
ing has it for the nation's weal or woe?
It is a land of rapid contrasts and of curiously mingled hope
and pain. Here sits a pretty blue-eyed quadroon hiding her
bare feet; she was married only last week, and yonder in the
field is her dark young husband, hoeing to support her, at
thirty cents a day without board. Across the way is Gatesby,
brown and tall, lord of two thousand acres shrewdly won and
held. There is a store conducted by his black son, a black-
smith shop, and a ginnery. Five miles below here is a town
owned and controlled by one white New Englander. He owns
almost a Rhode Island county, with thousands of acres and
hundreds of black laborers. Their cabins look better than
most, and the farm, with machinery and fertilizers, is much
more business-like than any in the county, although the man-
ager drives hard bargains in wages. When now we turn and
look five miles above, there on the edge of town are five
houses of prostitutes,--two of blacks and three of whites; and
in one of the houses of the whites a worthless black boy was
harbored too openly two years ago; so he was hanged for
rape. And here, too, is the high whitewashed fence of the
"stockade," as the county prison is called; the white folks
say it is ever full of black criminals,--the black folks say that
only colored boys are sent to jail, and they not because they
are guilty, but because the State needs criminals to eke out its
income by their forced labor.
Immigrants are heirs of the slave baron in Dougherty; and
as we ride westward, by wide stretching cornfields and stubby
orchards of peach and pear, we see on all sides within the
circle of dark forest a Land of Canaan. Here and there are
tales of projects for money-getting, born in the swift days of
Reconstruction,--"improvement" companies, wine compa-
nies, mills and factories; most failed, and foreigners fell heir.
It is a beautiful land, this Dougherty, west of the Flint. The
forests are wonderful, the solemn pines have disappeared,
and this is the "Oakey Woods," with its wealth of hickories,
beeches, oaks and palmettos. But a pall of debt hangs over
the beautiful land; the merchants are in debt to the wholesal-
ers, the planters are in debt to the merchants, the tenants owe
the planters, and laborers bow and bend beneath the burden
of it all. Here and there a man has raised his head above these
murky waters. We passed one fenced stock-farm with grass
and grazing cattle, that looked very home-like after endless
corn and cotton. Here and there are black free-holders: there
is the gaunt dull-black Jackson, with his hundred acres. "I
says, 'Look up! If you don't look up you can't get up,'"
remarks Jackson, philosophically. And he's gotten up. Dark
Carter's neat barns would do credit to New England. His
master helped him to get a start, but when the black man died
last fall the master's sons immediately laid claim to the
estate. "And them white folks will get it, too," said my
yellow gossip.
I turn from these well-tended acres with a comfortable
feeling that the Negro is rising. Even then, however, the
fields, as we proceed, begin to redden and the trees disap-
pear. Rows of old cabins appear filled with renters and
laborers,--cheerless, bare, and dirty, for the most part, al-
though here and there the very age and decay makes the scene
picturesque. A young black fellow greets us. He is twenty-
two, and just married. Until last year he had good luck
renting; then cotton fell, and the sheriff seized and sold all he
had. So he moved here, where the rent is higher, the land
poorer, and the owner inflexible; he rents a forty-dollar mule
for twenty dollars a year. Poor lad!--a slave at twenty-two.
This plantation, owned now by a foreigner, was a part of the
famous Bolton estate. After the war it was for many years
worked by gangs of Negro convicts,--and black convicts
then were even more plentiful than now; it was a way of
making Negroes work, and the question of guilt was a minor
one. Hard tales of cruelty and mistreatment of the chained
freemen are told, but the county authorities were deaf until
the free-labor market was nearly ruined by wholesale migra-
tion. Then they took the convicts from the plantations, but
not until one of the fairest regions of the "Oakey Woods"
had been ruined and ravished into a red waste, out of which
only a Yankee or an immigrant could squeeze more blood
from debt-cursed tenants.
No wonder that Luke Black, slow, dull, and discouraged,
shuffles to our carriage and talks hopelessly. Why should he
strive? Every year finds him deeper in debt. How strange that
Georgia, the world-heralded refuge of poor debtors, should
bind her own to sloth and misfortune as ruthlessly as ever
England did! The poor land groans with its birth-pains, and
brings forth scarcely a hundred pounds of cotton to the acre,
where fifty years ago it yielded eight times as much. Of his
meagre yield the tenant pays from a quarter to a third in rent,
and most of the rest in interest on food and supplies bought
on credit. Twenty years yonder sunken-cheeked, old black
man has labored under that system, and now, turned day-
laborer, is supporting his wife and boarding himself on his
wages of a dollar and a half a week, received only part of the
year.
The Bolton convict farm formerly included the neighboring
plantation. Here it was that the convicts were lodged in the
great log prison still standing. A dismal place it still remains,
with rows of ugly huts filled with surly ignorant tenants.
"What rent do you pay here?" I inquired. "I don't know,
--what is it, Sam?" "All we make," answered Sam. It is a
depressing place,--bare, unshaded, with no charm of past
association, only a memory of forced human toil,--now,
then, and before the war. They are not happy, these black
men whom we meet throughout this region. There is little of
the joyous abandon and playfulness which we are wont to
associate with the plantation Negro. At best, the natural
good-nature is edged with complaint or has changed into
sullenness and gloom. And now and then it blazes forth in
veiled but hot anger. I remember one big red-eyed black
whom we met by the roadside. Forty-five years he had la-
bored on this farm, beginning with nothing, and still having
nothing. To be sure, he had given four children a common-
school training, and perhaps if the new fence-law had not
allowed unfenced crops in West Dougherty he might have
raised a little stock and kept ahead. As it is, he is hopelessly
in debt, disappointed, and embittered. He stopped us to in-
quire after the black boy in Albany, whom it was said a
policeman had shot and killed for loud talking on the side-
walk. And then he said slowly: "Let a white man touch me,
and he dies; I don't boast this,--I don't say it around loud, or
before the children,--but I mean it. I've seen them whip my
father and my old mother in them cotton-rows till the blood
ran; by--" and we passed on.
Now Sears, whom we met next lolling under the chubby
oak-trees, was of quite different fibre. Happy?--Well, yes;
he laughed and flipped pebbles, and thought the world was as
it was. He had worked here twelve years and has nothing but
a mortgaged mule. Children? Yes, seven; but they hadn't
been to school this year,--couldn't afford books and clothes,
and couldn't spare their work. There go part of them to the
fields now,--three big boys astride mules, and a strapping
girl with bare brown legs. Careless ignorance and laziness
here, fierce hate and vindictiveness there;--these are the
extremes of the Negro problem which we met that day, and
we scarce knew which we preferred.
Here and there we meet distinct characters quite out of the
ordinary. One came out of a piece of newly cleared ground,
making a wide detour to avoid the snakes. He was an old,
hollow-cheeked man, with a drawn and characterful brown
face. He had a sort of self-contained quaintness and rough
humor impossible to describe; a certain cynical earnestness
that puzzled one. "The niggers were jealous of me over on
the other place," he said, "and so me and the old woman
begged this piece of woods, and I cleared it up myself. Made
nothing for two years, but I reckon I've got a crop now."
The cotton looked tall and rich, and we praised it. He curtsied
low, and then bowed almost to the ground, with an imper-
turbable gravity that seemed almost suspicious. Then he con-
tinued, "My mule died last week,"--a calamity in this land
equal to a devastating fire in town,--"but a white man
loaned me another." Then he added, eyeing us, "Oh, I gets
along with white folks." We turned the conversation. "Bears?
deer?" he answered, "well, I should say there were," and he
let fly a string of brave oaths, as he told hunting-tales of the
swamp. We left him standing still in the middle of the road
looking after us, and yet apparently not noticing us.
The Whistle place, which includes his bit of land, was
bought soon after the war by an English syndicate, the "Dixie
Cotton and Corn Company." A marvellous deal of style their
factor put on, with his servants and coach-and-six; so much
so that the concern soon landed in inextricable bankruptcy.
Nobody lives in the old house now, but a man comes each
winter out of the North and collects his high rents. I know not
which are the more touching,--such old empty houses, or the
homes of the masters' sons. Sad and bitter tales lie hidden
back of those white doors,--tales of poverty, of struggle, of
disappointment. A revolution such as that of '63 is a terrible
thing; they that rose rich in the morning often slept in pau-
pers' beds. Beggars and vulgar speculators rose to rule over
them, and their children went astray. See yonder sad-colored
house, with its cabins and fences and glad crops! It is not
glad within; last month the prodigal son of the struggling
father wrote home from the city for money. Money! Where
was it to come from? And so the son rose in the night and
killed his baby, and killed his wife, and shot himself dead.
And the world passed on.
I remember wheeling around a bend in the road beside a
graceful bit of forest and a singing brook. A long low house
faced us, with porch and flying pillars, great oaken door, and
a broad lawn shining in the evening sun. But the window-
panes were gone, the pillars were worm-eaten, and the moss-
grown roof was falling in. Half curiously I peered through the
unhinged door, and saw where, on the wall across the hall,
was written in once gay letters a faded "Welcome."
Quite a contrast to the southwestern part of Dougherty
County is the northwest. Soberly timbered in oak and pine, it
has none of that half-tropical luxuriance of the southwest.
Then, too, there are fewer signs of a romantic past, and more
of systematic modern land-grabbing and money-getting. White
people are more in evidence here, and farmer and hired labor
replace to some extent the absentee landlord and rack-rented
tenant. The crops have neither the luxuriance of the richer
land nor the signs of neglect so often seen, and there were
fences and meadows here and there. Most of this land was
poor, and beneath the notice of the slave-baron, before the
war. Since then his poor relations and foreign immigrants
have seized it. The returns of the farmer are too small to
allow much for wages, and yet he will not sell off small
farms. There is the Negro Sanford; he has worked fourteen
years as overseer on the Ladson place, and "paid out enough
for fertilizers to have bought a farm," but the owner will not
sell off a few acres.
Two children--a boy and a girl--are hoeing sturdily in the
fields on the farm where Corliss works. He is smooth-faced
and brown, and is fencing up his pigs. He used to run a
successful cotton-gin, but the Cotton Seed Oil Trust has
forced the price of ginning so low that he says it hardly pays
him. He points out a stately old house over the way as the
home of "Pa Willis." We eagerly ride over, for "Pa Willis"
was the tall and powerful black Moses who led the Negroes
for a generation, and led them well. He was a Baptist preacher,
and when he died, two thousand black people followed him
to the grave; and now they preach his funeral sermon each
year. His widow lives here,--a weazened, sharp-featured
little woman, who curtsied quaintly as we greeted her. Fur-
ther on lives Jack Delson, the most prosperous Negro farmer
in the county. It is a joy to meet him,--a great broad-shoul-
dered, handsome black man, intelligent and jovial. Six hun-
dred and fifty acres he owns, and has eleven black tenants. A
neat and tidy home nestled in a flower-garden, and a little
store stands beside it.
We pass the Munson place, where a plucky white widow is
renting and struggling; and the eleven hundred acres of the
Sennet plantation, with its Negro overseer. Then the character
of the farms begins to change. Nearly all the lands belong to
Russian Jews; the overseers are white, and the cabins are bare
board-houses scattered here and there. The rents are high, and
day-laborers and "contract" hands abound. It is a keen, hard
struggle for living here, and few have time to talk. Tired with
the long ride, we gladly drive into Gillonsville. It is a silent
cluster of farmhouses standing on the crossroads, with one of
its stores closed and the other kept by a Negro preacher. They
tell great tales of busy times at Gillonsville before all the
railroads came to Albany; now it is chiefly a memory. Riding
down the street, we stop at the preacher's and seat ourselves
before the door. It was one of those scenes one cannot soon
forget:--a wide, low, little house, whose motherly roof reached
over and sheltered a snug little porch. There we sat, after the
long hot drive, drinking cool water,--the talkative little store-
keeper who is my daily companion; the silent old black
woman patching pantaloons and saying never a word; the
ragged picture of helpless misfortune who called in just to see
the preacher; and finally the neat matronly preacher's wife,
plump, yellow, and intelligent. "Own land?" said the wife;
"well, only this house." Then she added quietly. "We did
buy seven hundred acres across up yonder, and paid for it;
but they cheated us out of it. Sells was the owner." "Sells!"
echoed the ragged misfortune, who was leaning against the
balustrade and listening, "he's a regular cheat. I worked for
him thirty-seven days this spring, and he paid me in card-
board checks which were to be cashed at the end of the
month. But he never cashed them,--kept putting me off.
Then the sheriff came and took my mule and corn and furni-
ture--" "Furniture? But furniture is exempt from seizure by
law." "Well, he took it just the same," said the hard-faced
man.
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