The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe

by Booker T. Washington; Robert Ezra Park

These things are not easy to find. The guide-books mention them, but do not tell you where to look for them. Nevertheless, if one looks long enough and in the right place it is still possible to see in Sicily men scratching the field with an antique wooden plow, which, it is said, although I cannot vouch for that, is mentioned in Homer. One may see a Sicilian farmer laboriously pumping water to irrigate his cabbage garden with a water-wheel that was imported by the Saracens; or one may see, as I did, a wine press that is as old as Solomon, and men cutting the grapes and making the wine by the same methods that are described in the Bible.

It was my purpose in going to Sicily to see, if possible, some of the life of the man who works on the soil. I wanted to get to the people who lived in the little villages remote from the larger cities. I was anxious to talk with some of these herdsmen I had seen at a distance, wandering about the lonesome hillsides, tending their goats and their cows and perhaps counting the stars as the shepherds did in the time of Abraham. As there are some 800,000 persons engaged in agriculture in one way or another, it did not seem to me that this would be difficult. In spite of this fact, if I may judge by my own experience, one of the most difficult persons to meet and get acquainted with in this country, where many things are strange and hard to understand, is the man who works out in the open country on the land.

Even after one does succeed in finding this man, it is necessary to go back into history two or three hundred years and know a great deal about local conditions before one can understand the methods by which he works and thinks. In fact, I constantly had the feeling while I was in Sicily that I was among people who were so saturated with antiquity, so out of touch, except on the surface, with modern life, so imbedded in ancient habits and customs, that it would take a very long time, perhaps years, to get any real understanding of their ways of thinking and living.

In saying this I do not, of course, refer to the better classes who live in the cities, and especially I do not refer to the great landowners, who in Sicily do not live on the land, but make their homes in the cities and support themselves from the rents which are paid them by overseers or middlemen, to whom they usually turn over the entire management of their properties.

Nevertheless, in spite of the difficulties I have mentioned, I did get some insight into the condition of the rural agricultural classes in Sicily—namely, the small landowner and the agricultural labourer—and I can perhaps best tell what I learned by starting at the beginning.

The first thing I remember seeing of Sicily was a long black headland which stretches out into the sea like a great black arm toward the ships that approach Palermo from Naples. After that the dark mass of the mainland, bare and brown and shining in the morning light, seemed to rise suddenly out of the smooth and glittering sea. A little later, the whole splendid panorama of the beautiful bay of Palermo lay stretched out before me.

I recall this picture now because it suggests and partly explains the charm which so many travellers find in this island, and because it stands out in contrast with so much that I saw later when I visited the interior.

Sicily is, in this, like a great many other places I saw in Europe: it looks better on the outside than it looks on the in. All the large cities in Sicily are situated on a narrow rim of fertile land which encircles the island between the mountains and the sea. Palermo, for example, is situated on a strip of this rim which is so rich that it is called the "Shell of Gold." In this region, where the soil is constantly enriched from the weathering of the neighbouring mountains, and where agriculture has been carried to the highest perfection that science and the skill of man can bring it, are situated those wonderful orange and lemon groves for which Sicily is famous. As an illustration of what irrigation and intensive culture can do in this soil, it is stated that the value of the crop in this particular region has been increased by irrigation from $8 to $160 an acre.

When one goes to Sicily to look at the agriculture it is this region that one sees first. During my first day in Palermo I drove through miles of these magnificent fruit farms, all laid out in the most splendid style, surrounded by high stone walls, the entrance guarded by heavy iron gates, and provided with extensive works for supplying constant streams of water to the growing fruit. The whole country, which is dotted with beautiful villas and winter palaces, is less like a series of fruit farms than it is like one vast park. Here the fruit ripens practically the whole year round. The trees are heavy all winter with growing fruit, and one can wander for hours through a forest of lemon and orange trees so closely crowded together that the keen rays of the southern sun can scarcely penetrate their foliage.

Palermo, however, like many other European cities in which the masses of the people are just now emerging out of the older civilization into the newer modern life, is divided into an old and a new city. There is the northern end, with broad streets and handsome villas, which the people call the "English Garden." This is the new city and the quarter of the wealthy classes. Then at the southern end there is the old city, with crowded, narrow and often miserably dirty streets, which is the home of the poorer class.