“For instance, only yesterday,” said he, “I went to a nigger woman’s house where they had bought two skirt patterns. When I knocked at the door, a little girl came, and she says: ‘Mammy ain’t to home,’ says she, but I walked right in, and there was a bigger girl, who says, ‘Mamma has gone down street,’ but I says, ‘I know better than that, you —— nigger!’ And I pushed right into the kitchen, and there she was behind the door, and I walked right up to her, and I says, ‘Do you think I’ll allow you to teach that innocent child to lie, you —— nigger? I’ll show you,’ says I; and I hit her a couple of good ones right in the face. She come back at me with a kind of an undercut right under the jaw. I knew it wouldn’t do any good to hit her on the head, but I landed a solid one in the middle of her nose; and I made those women go and get those skirts and give them up before I left the place.”
Once entered on these agreeable reminiscences, he went on in language the tenor of which is fortified by a memorandum made at the time. “But that isn’t a circumstance to what happened three weeks ago last Tuesday. There’s a nigger in this town that bought a cravenette coat from us for thirteen dollars and a half. It costs us about nine dollars, but he only paid instalments of four and a half, and then, for about six months, he dodged me; but my brother and I saw him on the street, and I jumped out of the buggy before he could run away, and says I, ‘I want you to pay for that coat.’ He had it on. He says, ‘I hain’t got any money.’ Says it sarcastic-like. Well, of course I wouldn’t take any lip from a nigger like that, and I sailed right in. I hit him between the eyes, and he up with a shovel and lambasted me with the flat of it right between the shoulder-blades, but I could have got away with him all right if his wife hadn’t have come up with a piece of board and caught me on the side; my brother jumped right out of the buggy, and he hit her square and knocked her down, and we had a regular mix-up. We got the coat, and when we came away, we left the man lying senseless on the ground.” “But don’t those people ever get out warrants against you?” “Warrants against me, I guess not! I lay in bed five days, and when I got up, my brother and I swore out warrants against the nigger and his wife. We brought them up in court and the judge fined them forty-seven dollars, and he says to me, ‘All the fault I find with you is that you didn’t kill the double adjective nigger. He’s the worst nigger in town!’”
With all allowances for the lies visibly admixed in this unpleasant tale, it undoubtedly lifts the cover off a kind of thing that goes on every day between the superior and the inferior races. On the one side stand the negro customers, shiftless, extravagant, slinking away from their debts, yet doubtless afterward puffed with pride to be able to boast that they had a knock-down fight with a white man and were not shot; the other actor in this drama of race hatred could not even claim to be a Poor White; he was the son of a traveling man, had some education, was successful above the average, and until he began to talk about himself might for a few minutes have passed as a gentleman; yet to save a loss of less than five dollars, and to assert his superiority of race, he was perfectly willing to put himself on the level of the lowest Negro, and to engage in fisticuffs with a woman.
It is not to be supposed that this thoroughgoing blackguard is a spokesman for the whole South, or that every local court inflicts a heavy penalty upon black people for the crime of having been thrashed by a white man. The story simply illustrates a feeling toward the Negroes which is widespread and potent among a considerable class of Whites; and it bears witness also to a disposition to settle difficulties between members of the two races by the logic of hard fists. It is a lurid example of race antagonism.
No section of the Union has a monopoly of violence or injustice. Men as coarse and brutal as the man encountered in South Carolina could probably be found in every Northern city. Homicides are no novelty in any state in the Union, and it is as serious for a Northern crowd to put a man to death because somebody calls him “Scab” as for an equally tigerish Southern mob to burn a Negro because he has killed a white man. The annals of strikes are almost as full of ferocity as the annals of lynching, and it would be hard to find anything worse than the murder, in 1907, of some watchmen in New York City who were thrown down a building by striking workmen, who were allowed by the police to leave the building, and were never brought to justice.
Nevertheless, there is in the North a strong impression that crime is on a different footing in the South; that assaults, affrays, and homicides are more frequent; that the South has a larger crime record than seems reconcilable with its numerous churches, its moral standards, and its fairly good state and city governments. Light may be thrown on the problem of race relations by inquiring whether the South is as much shocked by certain kinds of crime and violence as the North, whether a criminal is as likely to be tried and convicted, whether the superior race, by its practice in such matters, is setting before the inferior race a high standard of conduct.
Statistics indicate that in desperate crimes against the person, and especially in murder, the South far surpasses other civilized countries, and other parts of the United States. In London, with a population of 6,500,000, there were in a year 24 homicides; 4 of the criminals committed suicide, and the 20 others were brought to justice. In New York City, with about two thirds the population of London, there were 331 homicides with only 61 indictments and 46 convictions. In the state of South Carolina, with a population about one third that of New York City, there were 222 homicides in a year, and not a single execution of a white man.
Popular phrases and the press in the South habitually put a gloss upon many of these crimes by calling them “duels”; but a careful study of newspaper cuttings shows that the old-fashioned affairs of honor with seconds and exactly similar weapons, measured distance, and the word to fire, have almost disappeared. Nearly all the affrays in which the murdered man is conscious of his danger are simply street fights, in which each man lodges in the body of the other as many shots as he can before he himself sinks down wounded. It can hardly be considered an affair of honor when Mr. John D. Twiggs, of Albany, Ga., walks through the streets with a shotgun loaded with buckshot, looking for Mr. J. B. Palmer, who has gone home to arm himself.
Even this uneven kind of warfare is less frequent than the outright assassination of one white man by another. Where was Southern chivalry when Gonzales, the editor of the Columbia State, was in 1902 killed in the open street before he could draw his pistol, by Lieutenant-Governor Tillman of South Carolina, about whom the editor had been telling unpleasant truths? Where do you find the high-toned Southern gentleman when a man walks up to a total stranger, seizes him, and with the remark, “You are the man who wanted to fight me last night,” plunges his knife into the victim’s back. The newspapers are full of the shooting of men through windows, of their disappearance on lonely roads, of the terror that walketh by night, and the pestilence that waiteth at noonday.
Then there are the numerous murders of friend by friend, on all kinds of frivolous occasions; a man trespasses on another man’s land, goes to apologize, and is shot; another makes a joke which his friend does not appreciate, and there is nothing for it but pistols. The feeling that a man must assert his dignity at the end of a revolver was revealed in New Orleans in 1908 when Inspector Whittaker, head of the police, with five of his men, walked into the office of the New Orleans World, which had criticised his enforcement of the liquor laws, struck the editor in the face and several times shot at him. After he had taken such pains to vindicate the majesty of the law, it seems a hardship that his superiors compelled the Inspector to resign. There is hardly a part of the civilized world where homicide is so common as in the South, and the crime is quite as frequent in the cities as in the back country. Pitched battles by white men with policemen and with sheriffs are not uncommon; and sometimes three or four bodies are picked up after such a fight.