XIII
Visitors came to see us—among them Captain Jones. I don’t know that I ever heard his first name, but that wasn’t necessary as there was only one “Captain Jones” in that world. He had built the Gulfport harbor, also the railroad that connected Gulfport with the North, and also the trolley line that paralleled the road in front of Ashton Hall and carried me into town when I wanted to play tennis at Captain Jones’s Great Southern Hotel.
The old gentleman and his wife came to Ashton Hall, and he poured out his heart to us. He was probably the richest man in Mississippi; but nobody loved him, nobody wanted anything but money from him, and some of their ways were wicked and cruel. His railroad, which ran through the desolate “piney woods” of southern Mississippi, was a blessing to everybody along the way; but the miserable piney-woods people, “clayeaters” as they were called, had only one thought—to plunder Captain Jones’s railroad. They would cut the wire fence that protected both sides of the track and turn some scrawny old cow onto the railroad right of way; when the creature was struck and killed by a train, they would demand the price of a prize bull in a cattle show.
I was duly sympathetic, of course, and was somewhat embarrassed when a strike of the dockworkers developed in Captain Jones’s Gulfport. He had made all the prosperity of that town, and here was one more case of ingratitude. It was embarrassing to me and to the Kimbrough family when the strikers sent a deputation to ask me to speak at a meeting in the largest hall in Gulfport. I had never refused an invitation from strikers, and I wasn’t going to begin at the age of thirty-six. I told them I couldn’t discuss their particular issues because I didn’t know the circumstances and didn’t have time to investigate them; but I would tell them my ideas of democracy in industry, otherwise known as socialism, where strikes would be unnecessary because workers would be striking against themselves.
The meeting was duly announced, and the Kimbrough family were too polite to tell me what they thought about the matter. What the wife of Captain Jones thought about it surprised both Craig and me. She called us up and said she would be glad to go to the meeting with us; and would we come to the Great Southern Hotel and have dinner with her before the meeting? Of course we said we would be pleased.
It was Craig’s practice to sit in the very back of a hall, where she would be inconspicuous and if possible unrecognized. But Mrs. Jones wouldn’t have it that way. She took me by an arm and Craig by an arm, and marched us straight down the center aisle to the front seats in the hall so that everybody would know who had brought us. I have had a number of experiences like that with the very rich, and they have encouraged me to realize that democracy is a real force in America.