Public amusements are almost wanting for the Negro. They are commonly not admitted to white theaters, concerts, and other similar performances. In the country there is nothing better than to crowd the plantation store of a Saturday night in a sort of club. Few of them read for pleasure, and there is little to relieve the monotony. Perhaps for that reason they are fond of going about the country, and you see them everywhere on horseback, or in little bull carts, or on foot. They will spend their last dollar for an excursion on the railroad, and at the turn of the year, January 1st, many of them may be seen moving. The circus is one of the greatest delights of the Negro; he will travel many miles for this pleasure. The field hand is thrown back on coarse enjoyments; hard drinking is frequent among both men and women, yet the habitual drunkard is rare; the country Negro is fond of dances, which often turn out unseemly and lead to affrays and murders.
For their social and jovial needs Negroes find some satisfaction in their church life. Their own statisticians claim 3,254,000 communicants worshiping in 27,000 church buildings, of which the greater part are in the country. Contrary to expectation forty years ago, the Negroes have been little attracted to the Catholic Church, which is so democratic in its worship, and possesses a ritual which might be expected to appeal to negro nature. Nearly half the church members are some sort of Baptists, and half of the rest adhere to the Methodist denominations. Some city churches have buildings costing twenty, thirty, and even fifty thousand dollars, and they are pertinacious about raising money for construction and other similar purposes.
These churches do not represent an advanced type of piety. Conversions are violent and lapses frequent, and the minister is not certain to lend the weight of his conduct to his words. There are many genuinely pious and hard-working ministers, but at least half of them in both city and country are distrusted by the Whites and discredited by their own people. Simply educating the minister does not solve the problem, for what the people want is somebody who will arouse them to a pleasurable excitement. That is, the present type of piety among the negro churches is about that which prevailed among the white people along the frontier fifty years ago, and which has not entirely died out in the backwoods and the mountains. A genuine colored service is extremely picturesque, the preacher working like a locomotive going up a heavy grade, while the hearers assist him with cries of, “Talk to um, preacher—Great God—Ha! Ha! You is right, brudder—Preaching now—Talk ’bout um—Holy Lord.” Then the brethren are called upon to pray; in that musical intoning which is so appropriate for the African voice; then the minister lines out the hymns and the congregation bursts out into that combination of different minor keys which is the peculiar gift of the negro race.
Another negro enjoyment is the secret orders, which are almost as numerous as the churches and probably have as many male members. These societies are first of all burial and benefit orders with dues ranging from fifty cents a month upward, for which sick benefits of four dollars a week are paid and about forty dollars for burial. The societies build lodge houses not only in cities but in plantation regions; and the judgment of those who have most carefully examined them is that they are on the whole a good thing. They give training in public speaking and in common action; they furnish employment to managers and clerks; and their considerable funds are for the most part honestly managed. Some of them publish newspapers chiefly devoted to publishing the names of officers and members. In Mississippi there are thirty-four licensed orders with 8,000 members. They carry $30,000,000 of risks, and in a year paid $430,000 to policy holders. Naturally they have rather high-sounding names, such as “Grand Court of Calanthe,” “Lone Star of Race Pride,” “United Brethren of Friendship and Sisters of Mysterious Ten,” “Sons and Daughters of I Will Arise.” Some efforts are making to build up national societies such as the “Royal Trust Company” and “The Ethiopian Progressive Association of America,” which, according to its own statement, is “incorporated with an authorized Capital Stock a hundred times larger than the next most heavily capitalized Negro corporation on Earth. It is designed to fraternize, build and cement the vital interests of Negroes throughout the world into one colossal Union.” The order and the church are both social clubs and include a good part of the race both in city and country, and these organizations are the work of the last forty years, for in slavery times the negro churches were closely watched by the Whites, and secret societies would have been impossible.
CHAPTER X
THE NEGRO AT WORK
Nobody accepts church or fraternal orders as the measure of the Negro’s place in the community, for the gospel which he hears most often is the gospel of work; and that comes less from the preacher than from the reformer; as DuBois says: “Plain it is to us that what the world seeks through desert and wild we have within our threshold—a stalwart laboring force, suited to the semi-tropics.” The labor system and labor ideal of the South are very different from those of the North. First of all, there is the old tradition of slavery times that manual toil is ignoble; that it is menial to handle prime materials, and to buy and sell goods across the counter. But somebody must perform hard labor if the community is to go on; and there is an immense field for uneducated men. Besides the so-called “public works”—that is, turpentine, sawmills, building levees and railroads, and clearing land—there is the pulling and hauling and loading in the ports, the rough work of oil mills and furnaces and mines, and above all the raising of cotton, where the demand for labor is always greater than the supply.
Some of this labor is done by white gangs, and many of the blacks are engaged in other and higher pursuits; but the chief function of the Negro in the South is the rough labor which in the North was once chiefly performed by Irishmen, later by Italians, and now in many places by Slavs. This vast industrial system is almost wholly officered by Whites, who are the owners, employers, and managers of nearly every piece of property in the South on which laborers are employed. They set, so far as they can, the terms of employment; but what they get in actual work is settled by the Negroes, notwithstanding a condition of dependence hard to realize in the North. It is firmly fixed in the average white employer’s mind that the Negro exists in order to work for him, and that every attempt to raise the Negro must steer clear of any suspicion that it will lead him to abandon work for the white man. The slow drift of Negroes to the towns and cities cannot be prevented, nor some shifting from plantation to plantation; but the white man’s ideal is that the Negro is to stay where he is, and hundreds of thousands of them are living within sight of the spot where they were born.