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

by Booker T. Washington; Robert Ezra Park

As a result the poor man who, as some one has said, "has watered the soil with his sweat," who has perhaps not slept more than two hours a night during the harvest time, and that, too, in the open field, is happy if he receives as much as a third or a quarter of the grain he has harvested.

In the end the share cropper sinks, perhaps, still lower into the ranks of day labourer and becomes a wanderer over the earth, unless, before he reaches this point, he has not sold what little property he had and gone to America.

I remember meeting one of these outcasts and wornout labourers, who had become a common beggar, tramping along the road toward Catania. He carried, swung across his back in a dirty cloth of some indescribable colour, a heavy pack. It contained, perhaps, some remnants of his earthly goods, and as he stopped to ask for a penny to help him on his way, I had a chance to look in his face and found that he was not the usual sort. He did not have the whine of the sturdy beggars I had been accustomed to meet, particularly in England. He was haggard and worn; hardship and hunger had humbled him, and there was a beaten look in his eyes, but suffering seemed to have lent a sort of nobility to the old man's face.

I stopped and talked with him and managed to get from him some account of his life. He had been all his life a farm labourer; he could neither read nor write, but looked intelligent. He had never married and was without kith or kin. Three years before he had gotten into such a condition of health, he said, that they wouldn't let him work on the farm any more, and since that time he had been wandering about the country, begging, and living for the most part upon the charity of people who were almost as poor as he.

I asked him where he was going. He said he had heard that in Catania an old man could get a chance to sweep the streets, and he was trying to reach there before nightfall.

Several hours later, in returning from the country, I turned from the highway to visit the poorer districts of the city. As I turned into one of the streets which are lined with grimy little hovels made of blocks hewn from the great black stream of lava which Mt. Ætna had poured over that part of the city three hundred and fifty years before, I saw the same old man lying in the gutter, with his head resting on his bundle, where he had sunken down or fallen.

I have described at some length the condition of the farm labourers in Italy because it seems to me that it is important that those who are inclined to be discouraged about the Negro in the South should know that his case is by no means as hopeless as that of some others. The Negro is not the man farthest down. The condition of the coloured farmer in the most backward parts of the Southern States in America, even where he has the least education and the least encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of the agricultural population in Sicily.

The Negro farmer sometimes thinks he is badly treated in the South. Not infrequently he has to pay high rates of interest upon his "advances" and sometimes, on account of his ignorance, he is not fairly treated in his yearly settlements. But there is this great difference between the Negro farmer in the South and the Italian farmer in Sicily: In Sicily a few capitalists and descendants of the old feudal lords own practically all the soil and, under the crude and expensive system of agriculture which they employ, there is not enough land to employ the surplus population. The result is the farm labourers are competing for the privilege of working on the land. As agriculture goes down and the land produces less, the population increases and the rents go up. Thus between the upper and the nether millstone the farmer is crushed.

In the South we have just the contrary situation. We have land crying for the hand to till it; we have the landowners seeking labour and fairly begging for tenants to work their lands.

If a Negro tenant does not like the way he is treated he can go to the neighbouring farm; he can go to the mines or to the public works, where his labour is in demand. But the only way the poor Italian can get free is by going to America, and that is why thousands sail from Palermo every year for this country. In certain places in Sicily, in the three years including 1905 and 1907, more than four persons in every hundred of the population left Sicily for America.