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

by Booker T. Washington; Robert Ezra Park

I remember well a picture I saw in passing one such house. In front of the house a woman was standing holding in her arms a perfectly naked child. Another child, with nothing on but a shirt, was standing beside her holding her skirt. Through the open door I could see the whole of the single room in which this family lived. Back of the living-room and connected with it was a stall for the cattle. This was typical of many other homes that I saw.

During the day the women, the children, the pigs, and the chickens spend most of their time in the dirty, crowded street. As a rule the men, unless they are engaged in some sort of handicraft, are away in the fields at work. In many cases they do not come home once a month.

In my journeys through these villages and the poor streets of the larger cities one question constantly arose in my mind for which I was never able to find an answer. It was this: What becomes of these people, together with their pigs, goats, chickens, and other animals, at night? How does the interior of these homes look after sundown?

I have gone through some of the poorer streets of Catania at night, but invariably found them in almost total darkness. I could hear the people talking as they sat in their doorways, but I could not see them. In fact, I could not see anything but the dim outlines of the buildings, because nowhere, apparently, were there any lights.

A German author, Mr. S. Wermert, who has studied conditions closely in Sicily, and has written a great book on the social and economic conditions of the people, says, in regard to the way the people live in the little villages:

"In the south, as is well known, people live for the most part out of doors. Every one sits in the street before the house door; there the craftsman works at his trade; there the mother of the family carries on her domestic labours. At evening, however, all crowd into the cave, parents and children, the mule or the donkey. The fattening pig, which, decorated with a collar, has been tied during the day in front of the house, where, with all the affection of a dog, it has glided about among the children, must also find a place in the house. The cock and hens betake themselves at sunset into this same space, in which the air is thick with smoke, because there is no chimney to the house. All breathe this air. One can imagine what a fearful atmosphere pervades the place. Every necessity of physical cleanliness and moral decency is lacking. In the corner there is frequently only one bunk, upon which the entire family sleeps, and for the most part it consists of nothing more than a heap of straw. In the fierce heat of the summer one naturally sleeps without a cover; in winter every one seeks to protect himself under the covers. Even when there are separate sleeping places all the most intimate secrets of family life become known to the children at an early age. Brothers and sisters almost always sleep in the same bed. Frequently a girl sleeps at the feet of her parents. The stupidity and coarseness of such a family existence is beyond description. There is naturally no such thing as a serious conception of morality among a people that for generations has grown up without education. For that reason, it frequently happens that the most unspeakable crimes are committed. It is, therefore, frequently difficult to determine with exactness the parentage of the children born into the family. The saying of the Romans, that 'paternity is always uncertain,' holds good here. In fact, it is quite possible that this legal conception owes its origin to observations in regard to the condition of the rural population of that period. It is, however, probable that in the country districts of Sicily conditions have changed very little since Roman times."

From all that I can learn, the filthy promiscuity of these crowded houses and dirty streets have made the Sicilian rural villages breeding places of vices and crimes of a kind of which the rural Negro population in the United States, for example, probably never heard. There are some things, in connection with this ancient civilization, concerning which it is better the Negro should not know, because the knowledge of them means moral and physical degeneration, and at the present time, whatever else may be said about the condition of the Negro, he is not, in the rural districts at least, a degenerate. Even in those parts of the Southern States where he has been least touched by civilization, the Negro seems to me to be incomparably better off in his family life than is true of the agricultural classes in Sicily.

The Negro is better off in his family, in the first place, because, even when his home is little more than a primitive one-room cabin, he is at least living in the open country in contact with the pure air and freedom of the woods, and not in the crowded village where the air and the soil have for centuries been polluted with the accumulated refuse and offscourings of a crowded and slatternly population.

In the matter of his religious life, in spite of all that has been said in the past about the ignorance and even immorality of certain of the rural Negro preachers, I am convinced, from what I learned while I was in Sicily, that the Negro has a purer type of religion and a better and more earnest class of ministers than is true of the masses of these Sicilian people, particularly in the country districts.

In this connection, it should not be forgotten also that the Negro is what he is because he has never had a chance to learn anything better. He is going forward. The people of Sicily, who have been Christians almost since the time that the Apostle Paul landed in Syracuse, have, on the other hand, gone backward. All kinds of barbarous superstitions have grown up in connection with their religious life and have crowded out, to a large extent, the better elements.