The sentiment indicated by this letter, while widely prevalent, is by no means universal. I have seen Southern white men address Negro schools and Negro gatherings many times since I have been down here. Some of the foremost men in the South have accepted Booker T. Washington’s invitations to speak at Tuskegee. And concerning the very letter that I reproduce above, the Charlotte Observer, a strong Southern newspaper, which copied it, said:

The Rev. H. S. Bradley, for a long time one of the leading clergymen of Atlanta, now of St. Louis, said in a sermon published in the Atlanta Constitution:

Concerning the Vagrant Negro

Before I get away from observations of the low-class Negro, I must speak of the subject of vagrancy. Many white men have told me with impatience of the great number of idle or partly idle Negroes—idle while every industry and most of the farming districts of Georgia are crying for more labour. And from my observation in Atlanta, I should say that there were good many idle or partly idle Negroes—even after the riot, which served, I understand, to drive many of them away. Five days before the riot of last September, a committee of the city council visited some forty saloons one afternoon, and by actual count found 2,455 Negroes (and 152 white men) drinking at the bars or lounging around the doorways. In some of these saloons—conducted by white men and permitted to exist by the city authorities—pictures of nude white women were displayed as an added attraction. Has this anything to do with Negro crimes against white women? After the riot these conditions in Atlanta were much improved and in January, 1908, all the saloons were closed.

Increased Negro idleness is the result, in large measure, of the marvellous and rapid changes in Southern conditions. The South has been and is to-day dependent on a single labour supply—the Negro. Now Negroes, though recruited by a high birth rate, have not been increasing in any degree as rapidly as the demand for labour incident to the development of every sort of industry, railroads, lumbering, mines, to say nothing of the increased farm area and the added requirements of growing cities. With this enormous increased demand for labour the Negro supply has, relatively, been decreasing. Many have gone North and West, many have bought farms of their own, thousands, by education, have became professional men, teachers, preachers, and even merchants and bankers—always draining away the best and most industrious men of the race and reducing by so much the available supply of common labour. In short, those Negroes who were capable have been going the same way as the unskilled Irishman and German in the North—upward through the door of education—but, unlike the North, there have been no other labourers coming in to take their places.

What has been the result? Naturally a fierce contest between agriculture and industry for the limited and dwindling supply of the only labour they had.

Negro Monopoly on Labour

So they bid against one another—it was as though the Negro had a monopoly on labour—and within the last few years day wages for Negro workers have jumped from fifty or sixty cents to $1.25 and $1.50, often more—a pure matter of competition. A similar advance has affected all sorts of servant labour—cooks, waiters, maids, porters.

High wages, scarcity of labour, and the consequent loss of opportunity for taking advantage of the prevailing prosperity would, in any community, South or North, whether the labour was white or black, produce a spirit of impatience and annoyance on the part of the employing class. I found it evident enough last summer in Kansas where the farmers were unable to get workers to save their crops; and the servant problem is not more provoking, certainly, in the South than in the North and West. Indeed, it is the labour problem more than any other one cause, that has held the South back and is holding it back to-day.

But the South has an added cause of annoyance. Higher wages, instead of producing more and better labour, as they would naturally be expected to do, have actually served to reduce the supply. This may, at first, seem paradoxical: but it is easily explainable and it lies deep down beneath many of the perplexities which surround the race problem.

Most Negroes, as I have said, were (and still are, of course) farm-dwellers, and farm-dwellers in the hitherto wasteful Southern way. Their living is easy to get and very simple. In that warm climate they need few clothes; a shack for a home. Their living standards are low; they have not learned to save; there has not been time since slavery for them to attain the sense of responsibility which would encourage them to get ahead. And moreover they have been and are to-day largely under the discipline of white land owners.

What was the effect, then, of a rapid advance in wages? The poorer class of Negroes, naturally indolent and happy-go-lucky, found that they could make as much money in two or three days as they had formerly earned in a whole week. It was enough to live on as well as they had ever lived: why, then, work more than two days a week? It was the logic of a child, but it was the logic used. Everywhere I went in the South I heard the same story: high wages coupled with the difficulty of getting anything like continuous work from this class of coloured men.

On the other hand the better and more industrious Negroes, who would work continuously—and there are unnumbered thousands of them, as faithful as any workers—occasionally saved their surplus, bought little farms or businesses of their own and began to live on a better scale. One of the first things they did after getting their footing was to take their wives and daughters out of the white man’s kitchen, and to send their children from the cotton fields (where the white man needed them) to the school-house where the tendency (exactly as with white children) was to educate them away from farm employment. With the development of ambition and a higher standard of living, the Negro follows the steps of the rising Irishman or Italian: he has a better home, he wants his wife to take care of it, and he insists upon the education of his children.

In this way higher wages have tended to cut down the already limited supply of labour, producing annoyance, placing greater obstacles in the way of that material development of which the Southerner is so justly proud. And this, not at all unnaturally, has given rise on the one hand to complaints against the lazy Negro who will work only two days in the week that he may loaf the other five; and on the other hand it has found expression in blind and bitter hostility to the education which enables the better sort of Negro to rise above the unskilled employment and the domestic service of which the South is so keenly in need. It is human nature to blame men, not conditions. Here is unlimited work to do: here is the Negro who has been for centuries and is to-day depended upon to do it; it is not done. The natural result is to throw the blame wholly upon the Negro, and not upon the deep economic conditions and tendencies which have actually caused the scarcity of labour.

Immigrants to Take the Negroes’ Places

But within the last year or two thinking men in the South have begun to see this particular root of the difficulty and a great new movement looking to the encouragement of immigration from foreign countries has been started. In November, 1906, the first shipload of immigrants ever brought from Europe directly to a South Carolina port were landed at Charleston with great ceremony and rejoicing. If a steady stream of immigrants can be secured and if they can be employed on satisfactory terms with the Negro it will go far toward relieving race tension in the South.

Of course idleness leads to crime, and one of the present efforts in the South is toward a more rigid enforcement of laws against vagrancy. In this the white people have the sympathy of the leading Negroes. I was struck with one passage in the discussion at the last Workers’ Conference at Tuskegee. William E. Holmes, president of a coloured college at Macon, Georgia, was speaking. Some one interrupted him:

“I would like to ask if you think the Negro is any more disposed to become a loafer or vagrant than any other people under the same conditions?”

“Well,” said Mr. Holmes, taking a deep breath, “we cannot afford to do what other races do. We haven’t a single, solitary man or woman among us we can afford to support as an idler. It may be that other races have made so much progress that they can afford to support loafers. But we are not yet in that condition. Some of us have the impression that the world owes us a living. That is a misfortune. I must confess that I have become convinced that at the present time we furnish a larger number of loafers than any other race of people on this continent.”

These frank remarks did not meet with the entire approval of the members of the conference, but the discussion seemed to indicate that there was a great deal more of truth in them than the leaders and teachers of the Negro are disposed to admit.

The Worthless Negro

I tried to see as much as I could of this “worthless Negro,” who is about the lowest stratum of humanity, it seems to me, of any in our American life. He is usually densely ignorant, often a wanderer, working to-day with a railroad gang, to-morrow on some city works, the next day picking cotton. He has lost his white friends—his “white folks,” as he calls them—and he has not attained the training or self-direction to stand alone. He works only when he is hungry, and he is as much a criminal as he dares to be. Many such Negroes are supported by their wives or by women with whom they live—for morality and the home virtues among this class are unknown. A woman who works as a cook in a white family will often take enough from the kitchen to feed a worthless vagabond of a man and keep him in idleness—or worse. A Negro song exactly expresses this state of beatitude:

“I doan has to work so ha’d
I’s got a gal in a white man’s ya’d;
Ebery night ’bout half pas’ eight
I goes ’round to the white man’s gate:
She brings me butter and she brings me la’d—
I doan has to work so ha’d!”

This worthless Negro, without training or education, grown up from the neglected children I have already spoken of, evident in his idleness around saloons and depots—this Negro provokes the just wrath of the people, and gives a bad name to the entire Negro race. In numbers he is, of course, small, compared with the 8,000,000 Negroes in the South, who perform the enormous bulk of hard manual labour upon which rests Southern prosperity.

How the Working Negro Lives

Above this low stratum of criminal or semi-criminal Negroes is a middle class, comprising the great body of the race—the workers. They are crowded into straggling settlements like Darktown and Jackson Row, a few owning their homes, but the majority renting precariously, earning good wages, harmless for the most part, but often falling into petty crime. Poverty here, however, lacks the tragic note that it strikes in the crowded sections of Northern cities. The temperament of the Negro is irrepressibly cheerful, he overflows from his small home and sings and laughs in his streets; no matter how ragged or forlorn he may be good humour sits upon his countenance, and his squalour is not unpicturesque. A banjo, a mullet supper from time to time, an exciting revival, give him real joys. Most of the families of this middle class, some of whom are deserted wives with children, have their “white folks” for whom they do washing, cooking, gardening, or other service, and all have church connections, so that they have a real place in the social fabric and a certain code of self-respect.

I tried to see all I could of this phase of life. I visited many of the poorer Negro homes and I was often received in squalid rooms with a dignity of politeness which would have done credit to a society woman. For the Negro, naturally, is a sort of Frenchman. And if I can sum up the many visits I made in a single conclusion I should say, I think, that I was chiefly impressed by the tragic punishment meted out to ignorance and weakness by our complex society. I would find a home of one or two rooms meanly furnished, but having in one corner a glittering cottage organ, or on the mantel shelf a glorified gilt clock; crayon portraits, inexpressibly crude and ugly, but framed gorgeously, are not uncommon—the first uncertain, primitive (not unpitiful) reachings out after some of the graces of a broader life. Many of these things are bought from agents and the prices paid are extortionate. Often a Negro family will pay monthly for a year or so on some showy clock or chromo or music-box or decorated mirror—paying the value of it a dozen times over, only to have it seized when through sickness, or lack of foresight, they fail to meet a single note. Installment houses prey upon them, pawnbrokers suck their blood, and they are infinitely the victims of patent medicines. It is rare, indeed, that I entered a Negro cabin, even the poorest, without seeing one or more bottles of some abominable cure-all. The amount yearly expended by Negroes for patent medicines, which are glaringly advertised in all Southern newspapers, must be enormous—millions of dollars. I had an interesting side light on conditions one day while walking in one of the most fashionable residence districts of Atlanta. I saw a magnificent gray-stone residence standing somewhat back from the street. I said to my companion, who was a resident of the city:

“That’s a fine home.”

“Yes; stop a minute,” he said, “I want to tell you about that. The anti-kink man lives there.”

“Anti-kink?” I asked in surprise.

“Yes; the man who occupies that house is one of the wealthiest men here. He made his money by selling to Negroes a preparation to smooth the kinks out of their wool. They’re simply crazy on that subject.”

“Does it work?”

“You haven’t seen any straight-haired Negroes, have you?” he asked.

Ignorance carries a big burden and climbs a rocky road!

Old Mammies and Nurses

The mass of coloured people still maintain, as I have said, a more or less intimate connection with white families—frequently a very beautiful and sympathetic relationship like that of the old mammies or nurses. To one who has heard so much of racial hatred as I have since I have been down here, a little incident that I observed the other day comes with a charm hardly describable. I saw a carriage stop in front of a home. The expected daughter had arrived—a very pretty girl indeed. She stepped out eagerly. Her father was halfway down to the gate; but ahead of him was a very old Negro woman in the cleanest of clean starched dresses.

“Honey,” she said eagerly.

“Mammy!” exclaimed the girl, and the two rushed into each other’s arms, clasping and kissing—the white girl and the old black woman.

I thought to myself: “There’s no Negro problem there: that’s just plain human love!”

“Master” Superseded by “Boss”

Often I have heard Negroes refer to “my white folks” and similarly the white man still speaks of “my Negroes.” The old term of slavery, the use of the word “master,” has wholly disappeared, and in its place has arisen, not without significance, the round term “Boss,” or sometimes “Cap,” or “Cap’n.” To this the white man responds with the first name of the Negro, “Jim” or “Susie”—or if the Negro is old or especially respected: “Uncle Jim” or “Aunt Susan.”

To an unfamiliar Northerner one of the very interesting and somewhat amusing phases of conditions down here is the panic fear displayed over the use of the word “Mr.” or “Mrs.” No Negro is ever called Mr. or Mrs. by a white man; that would indicate social equality. A Southern white man told me with humour of his difficulties:

“Now I admire Booker Washington. I regard him as a great man, and yet I couldn’t call him Mr. Washington. We were all in a quandary until a doctor’s degree was given him. That saved our lives! we all call him ‘Dr.’ Washington now.”

Sure enough! I don’t think I have heard him called Mr. Washington since I came down here. It is always “Dr.” or just “Booker.” They are ready to call a Negro “Professor” or “Bishop” or “The Reverend”—but not “Mr.”

In the same way a Negro may call Miss Mary Smith by the familiar “Miss Mary,” but if he called her Miss Smith she would be deeply incensed. The formal “Miss Smith” would imply social equality.

I digress: but I have wanted to impress these relationships. There are all gradations of Negroes between the wholly dependent old family servant and the new, educated Negro professional or business man, and, correspondingly, every degree of treatment from indulgence to intense hostility.

I must tell, in spite of lack of room, one beautiful story I heard at Atlanta, which so well illustrates the old relationship. There is in the family of Dr. J. S. Todd, a well-known citizen of Atlanta, an old, old servant called, affectionately, Uncle Billy. He has been so long in the family that in reality he is served as much as he serves. During the riot last September he was terrified: he did not dare to go home at night. So Miss Louise, the doctor’s daughter, took Uncle Billy home through the dark streets. When she was returning one of her friends met her and was much alarmed that she should venture out in a time of so much danger.

“What are you doing out here this time of night?” he asked.

“Why,” she replied, as if it were the most natural answer in the world, “I had to take Uncle Billy safely home.”

Over against this story I want to reproduce a report from a Kentucky newspaper which will show quite the other extreme:

I have now described two of the three great classes of Negroes: First, the worthless and idle Negro, often a criminal, comparatively small in numbers but perniciously evident. Second, the great middle class of Negroes who do the manual work of the South. Above these, a third class, few in numbers, but most influential in their race, are the progressive, property-owning Negroes, who have wholly severed their old intimate ties with the white people—and who have been getting further and further away from them.

A White Man’s Problem

It keeps coming to me that this is more a white man’s problem than it is a Negro problem. The white man as well as the black is being tried by fire. The white man is in full control of the South, politically, socially, industrially: the Negro, as ex-Governor Northen points out, is his helpless ward. What will he do with him? Speaking of the education of the Negro, and in direct reference to the conditions in Atlanta which I have already described, many men have said to me:

“Think of the large sums that the South has spent and is spending on the education of the Negro. The Negro does not begin to pay for his education in taxes.”

Neither do the swarming Slavs, Italians, and Poles in our Northern cities. They pay little in taxes and yet enormous sums are expended in their improvement. For their benefit? Of course, but chiefly for ours. It is better to educate men in school than to let them so educate themselves as to become a menace to society. The present kind of education in the South may possibly be wrong; but for the protection of society it is as necessary to train every Negro as it is every white man.

When I saw the crowds of young Negroes being made criminal—through lack of proper training—I could not help thinking how pitilessly ignorance finally revenges itself upon that society which neglects or exploits it.

CHAPTER IV

There is no better time of year to see the South than November; for then it wears the smile of abundance. The country I went through—rolling red hills, or black bottoms, pine-clad in places, with pleasant farm openings dotted with cabins, often dilapidated but picturesque, and the busy little towns—wore somehow an air of brisk comfort. The fields were lively with Negro cotton pickers; I saw bursting loads of the new lint drawn by mules or oxen, trailing along the country roads; all the gins were puffing busily; at each station platform cotton bales by scores or hundreds stood ready for shipment and the towns were cheerful with farmers white and black, who now had money to spend. The heat of the summer had gone, the air bore the tang of a brisk autumn coolness. It was a good time of the year—and everybody seemed to feel it. Many Negroes got on or off at every station with laughter and snouted good-byes.

What Is the Black Belt?

THE BLACK BELT
In the region shaded more than half of the inhabitants are Negroes.

And so, just at evening, after a really interesting journey, I reached Hawkinsville, a thriving town of some 3,000 people just south of the centre of Georgia. Pulaski County, of which Hawkinsville is the seat, with an ambitious new court-house, is a typical county of the black belt. A census map which is here reproduced well shows the region of largest proportionate Negro population, extending from South Carolina through central Georgia and Alabama to Mississippi. More than half the inhabitants of all this broad belt, including also the Atlantic coastal counties and the lower Mississippi Valley (as shaded on the map), are Negroes, chiefly farm Negroes. There the race question, though perhaps not so immediately difficult as in cities like Atlanta, is with both white and coloured people the imminent problem of daily existence. Several times while in the black belt I was amused at the ardent response of people to whom I mentioned the fact that I had already seen something of conditions in Kentucky, Maryland, and Virginia:

“Why, they haven’t any Negro problem. They’re North.”

In Maryland, Kentucky, and Texas the problem is a sharp irritant—as it is, for that matter, in Ohio, in Indianapolis, and on the west side of New York City—but it is not the life and death question that it is in the black belt or in the Yazoo delta.

All the country of Central Georgia has been long settled. Pulaski County was laid out in 1808; and yet the population to-day may be considered sparse. The entire county has only 8,000 white people, a large proportion of whom live in the towns of Hawkinsville and Cochran, and 12,000 Negroes, leaving not inconsiderable areas of forest and uncultivated land which will some day become immensely valuable.

A Southern Country Gentleman

At Hawkinsville I met J. Pope Brown, the leading citizen of the county. In many ways he is an example of the best type of the new Southerner. In every way open to him, and with energy, he is devoting himself to the improvement of his community. For five years he was president of the State Agricultural Society; he has been a member of the legislature and chairman of the Georgia Railroad Commission, and he represents all that is best in the new progressive movement in the South.

One of the unpleasant features of the villages in the South are the poor hotels. In accounting for this condition I heard a story illustrating the attitude of the old South toward public accommodations. A number of years ago, before the death of Robert Toombs, who, as a member of Jefferson Davis’s cabinet was called the “backbone of the confederacy,” the spirit of progress reached the town where Toombs lived. The thing most needed was a new hotel. The business men got together and subscribed money with enthusiasm, counting upon Toombs, who was their richest man, for the largest subscription. But when they finally went to him, he said:

“What do we want of a hotel? When a gentleman comes to town I will entertain him myself; those who are not gentlemen we don’t want!”

That was the old spirit of aristocratic individualism; the town did not get its hotel.

One of the public enterprises of Mr. Brown at Hawkinsville is a good hotel; and what is rarer still, North and South, he has made his hotel building really worthy architecturally.

Mr. Brown took me out to his plantation—a drive of some eight miles. In common with most of the larger plantation owners, as I found not only in Georgia, but in other Southern states which I afterward visited, Mr. Brown makes his home in the city. After a while I came to feel a reasonable confidence in assuming that almost any prominent merchant, banker, lawyer, or politician whom I met in the towns owned a plantation in the country. From a great many stories of the fortunes of families that I heard I concluded that the movement of white owners from the land to nearby towns was increasing every year. High prices for cotton and consequent prosperity seem to have accelerated rather than retarded the movement. White planters can now afford to live in town where they can have the comforts and conveniences, where the servant question is not impossibly difficult, and where there are good schools for the children. Another potent reason for the movement is the growing fear of the whites, and especially the women and children, at living alone on great farms where white neighbours are distant. Statistics show that less crime is committed in the black belt than in other parts of the South. I found that the fear was not absent even among these people.

I have a letter from a white man, P. S. George, of Greenwood, Mississippi, which expresses the country white point of view with singular earnestness:

As a result of these various influences a traveller in the black belt sees many plantation houses, even those built in recent years, standing vacant and forlorn or else occupied by white overseers, who are in many parts of the South almost as difficult to keep as the Negro tenants.

Thousands of small white farmers, both owners and renters, of course, remain, but when the leading planters leave the country, these men, too, grow discontented and get away at the first opportunity. Going to town, they find ready employment for the whole family in the cotton mill or in other industries where they make more money and live with a degree of comfort that they never before imagined possible.

Story of the Mill People

Many cotton mills, indeed, employ agents whose business it is to go out through the country urging the white farmers to come to town and painting glowing pictures of the possibilities of life there. I have visited a number of mill neighbourhoods and talked with the operatives. I found the older men sometimes homesick for free life of the farm. One lanky old fellow said rather pathetically:

“When it comes to cotton picking time and I know that they are grinding cane and hunting possums, I jest naturally get lonesome for the country.”

But nothing would persuade the women and children to go back to the old hard life. Hawkinsville has a small cotton mill and just such a community of white workers around it. Owing to the scarcity of labour, wages in the mills have been going up rapidly all over the South, during the last two or three years, furnishing a still more potent attraction for country people.

All these various tendencies are uniting to produce some very remarkable conditions in the South. A natural segregation of the races is apparently taking place. I saw it everywhere I went in the black belt. The white people were gravitating toward the towns or into white neighbourhoods and leaving the land, even though still owned by white men, more and more to the exclusive occupation of Negroes. Many black counties are growing blacker while not a few white counties are growing whiter.

WHERE WHITE MILL HANDS LIVE IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA

WHERE SOME OF THE POORER NEGROES LIVE IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA

COMPANION PICTURES
to show that there is comparatively little difference in the material comfort of the two classes

Take, for example, Pulaski County, through which I drove that November morning with Mr. Brown. In 1870 the coloured and white population were almost exactly equal—about 6,000 for each. In 1880 the Negroes had increased to 8,225 while the whites showed a loss. By 1890 the towns had begun to improve and the white population grew by about 700, but the Negroes increased nearly 2,000. And, finally, here are the figures for 1900: Negroes 11,029; Whites 7,460.

I have not wished to darken our observations with too many statistics, but this tendency is so remarkable that I wish to set down for comparison the figures of a “white county” in northern Georgia—Polk County—which is growing whiter every year.

Driving out Negroes

One of the most active causes of this movement is downright fear—or race repulsion expressing itself in fear. White people dislike and fear to live in dense coloured neighbourhoods, while Negroes are often terrorised in white neighbourhoods—and not in the South only but in parts of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, as I shall show when I come to treat of Northern race conditions. I have accumulated many instances showing how Negroes are expelled from white neighbourhoods. There is a significant report from Little Rock, Arkansas:

From the New Orleans Times Democrat of March 20, 1907, I cut the following dispatch showing one method pursued by the whites of Oklahoma:

Not a few students of Southern conditions like John Temple Graves among the whites and Bishop Turner among the coloured people have argued that actual physical separation of the races (either by deportation of the Negroes to Africa or elsewhere, or by giving them certain reservation-like parts of the South to live in) is the only solution. But here is, in actuality, a natural segregation going forward in certain parts of the South, though in a very different way from that recommended by Mr. Graves and Bishop Turner; for even in the blackest counties the white people own most of the land, occupy the towns, and dominate everywhere politically, socially, and industrially.

Mr. Brown’s plantation contains about 5,000 acres, of which some 3,500 acres are in cultivation, a beautiful rolling country, well watered, with here and there clumps of pines, and dotted with the small homes of the tenantry.

As we drove along the country road we met or passed many Negroes who bowed with the greatest deference. Some were walking, but many drove horses or mules and rode not infrequently in top buggies, looking most prosperous, as indeed, Mr. Brown informed me that they were. He knew them all, and sometimes stopped to ask them how they were getting along. The outward relationships between the races in the country seem to me to be smoother than it is in the city.

Cotton, as in all this country, is almost the exclusive crop. In spite of the constant preaching of agricultural reformers, like Mr. Brown himself, hardly enough corn is raised to supply the people with food, and I was surprised here and elsewhere at seeing so few cattle and hogs. Sheep are non-existent. In Hawkinsville, though the country round about raises excellent grass, I saw in front of a supply store bales of hay which had been shipped in 400 miles—from Tennessee. Enough sugar cane is raised, mostly in small patches, to supply syrup for domestic uses. At the time of my visit the Negroes were in the cane-fields with their long knives, getting in the crop. We saw several little one-horse grinding mills pressing the juice from the cane, while near at hand, sheltered by a shanty-like roof, was the great simmering syrup kettle, with an expert Negro at work stirring and skimming. And always there were Negroes round about, all the boys and girls with jolly smeared faces—and the older ones peeling and sucking the fresh cane.

It was a great time of year!

How does the landlord—and a lord he is in a very true sense—manage his great estate? The same system is in use with slight variations everywhere in the cotton country and a description of Mr. Brown’s methods, with references here and there to what I have seen or heard elsewhere, will give an excellent idea of the common procedure.

A Country of Great Plantations

The black belt is a country of great plantations, some owners having as high as 30,000 acres, interspersed with smaller farms owned by the poorer white families or Negroes. In one way the conditions are similar to those prevailing in Ireland; great landlords and a poor tenantry or peasantry, the tenants here being very largely black.

It requires about 100 families, or 600 people, to operate Mr. Brown’s plantation. Of these, 90 per cent. are coloured and 10 per cent. white. I was much interested in what Mr. Brown said about his Negro tenants, which varies somewhat from the impression I had in the city of the younger Negro generation.

“I would much rather have young Negroes for tenants,” he said, “because they work better and seem more disposed to take care of their farms. The old Negroes ordinarily will shirk—a habit of slavery.”

Besides the residence of the overseer and the homes of the tenants there is on the plantation a supply store owned by Mr. Brown, a blacksmith shop and a Negro church, which is also used as a school-house. This is, I found all through the black belt, a common equipment.

Three different methods are pursued by the landlord in getting his land cultivated. First, the better class of tenants rent the land for cash, a “standing rent” of some $3 an acre, though in many places in Mississippi it ranges as high as $6 and $8 an acre. Second, a share-crop rental, in which the landlord and the tenant divide the cotton and corn produced. Third, the ordinary wage system; that is, the landlord hires workers at so much a month and puts in his own crop. All three of these methods are usually employed on the larger plantations. Mr. Brown rents 2,500 acres for cash, 400 on shares, and farms 600 himself with wage workers.

All the methods of land measurement are very different here from what they are in the North. The plantation is irregularly divided up into what are called one-mule or one-plough farms—just that amount of land which a family can cultivate with one mule—usually about thirty acres. Some ambitious tenants will take a two-mule or even a four-mule farm.

The Negro Tenant

Most of the tenants, especially the Negroes, are very poor, and wholly dependent upon the landlord. Many Negro families possess practically nothing of their own, save their ragged clothing, and a few dollars’ worth of household furniture, cooking utensils and a gun. The landlord must therefore supply them not only with enough to live on while they are making their crop, but with the entire farming outfit. Let us say that a Negro comes in November to rent a one-mule farm from the landlord for the coming year.

“What have you got?” asks the landlord.

“Noting’, boss,” he is quite likely to say.

The “boss” furnishes him with a cabin to live in—which goes with the land rented—a mule, a plough, possibly a one-horse waggon and a few tools. He is often given a few dollars in cash near Christmas time which (ordinarily) he immediately spends—wastes. He is then allowed to draw upon the plantation supply store a regular amount of corn to feed his mule, and meat, bread, and tobacco, and some clothing for his family. The cost of the entire outfit and supplies for a year is in the neighbourhood of $300, upon which the tenant pays interest at from 10 to 30 per cent. from the time of signing the contract in November, although most of the supplies are not taken out until the next summer. Besides this interest the planter also makes a large profit on all the groceries and other necessaries furnished by his supply store. Having made his contract the Negro goes to work with his whole family and keeps at it until the next fall when the cotton is all picked and ginned. Then he comes in for his “settlement”—a great time of year. The settlements were going forward while I was in the black belt. The Negro is credited with the amount of cotton he brings in and he is charged with all the supplies he has had, and interest, together with the rent of his thirty acres of land. If the season has been good and he has been industrious, he will often have a nice profit in cash, but sometimes he not only does not come out even, but closes his year of work actually in deeper debt to the landlord.