From Dublin to Chicago: Some Notes on a Tour in America

by George A. Birmingham

Everyone, the whole way from the lady who wants lingerie to the negro who picks at the bushes, is beset with anxiety. But fortunately no one ever really feels more than his own immediate share of it. The cotton planter will indeed be affected seriously by an epidemic of speculation in New York, or a strike in Lancashire or the legislation of some well-meaning government. He knows all this, but it does not actually trouble him much. He has his own particular worry and it is at him so constantly that it leaves all the other worries no time to get at him at all. His worry is the negro.

According to the theory of the American constitution the negro is a free man, a brother, as responsible as anyone else for the due ordering of the state. In actual practice the negro is either slowly emerging from the slave status or slowly sinking back to it again. It does not matter which way you look at it, the essential thing is, whichever way he is going, he is not yet settled down in either position. It is impossible—on account of the law—to treat him as a slave. It is impossible—on account of his nature, so I am told—to treat him as a free man. He is somewhere in between the two. He is economically difficult and socially undesirable. But he is the only means yet discovered of getting cotton picked. If anyone would invent a machine for picking cotton he would benefit the world at large immensely and make the cotton planter, save for the fear of certain insects, a happy man. But the shape of the cotton bush renders it very difficult to get the cotton off it except by the use of the human finger and thumb. We are not nearly so clever at inventing things as we think we are. The cotton bush has so far defeated us. The negro, who supplies the finger and thumb, has very nearly defeated us too. It is hard to get him to work at all and still harder to keep him at it. He does not seem to be responsive to the ordinary rules of political economy. If he can earn enough in one day to keep him for three days he sees no sense in working during the other two.

The southern American does not seem to be trying to solve this negro problem. He makes all sorts of makeshift arrangements, tries plans which may work this year and next year but which plainly will not work for very many years. These seem the best he can do. Perhaps they are the best anyone could do. Perhaps it is always wisest to be content to keep things going and to let the remoter future take care of itself. The cotton crop has to be picked somehow this year, and it may have to be picked next year too. After that—well nobody speculates in futures as far ahead as 1916.

The problem of the social position of the negro seems to be quite as difficult to solve as that created by his indifference to the laws of political economy. The "man and brother" theory has broken down hopelessly and the line drawn between the white and colored parts of the population in the South is as well defined and distinct as any line can be. The stranger is told horrible tales of negro doings and is convinced that the white men believe them by the precautions they take for the protection of women. There may be a good deal of exaggeration about these stories, and in any case the morality or immorality of the negro is not the most difficult element in the problem. Education, the steady enforcement of law, and the gradual pressure of civilization will no doubt in time render outrages rarer. It is at all events possible to look forward hopefully. The real difficulty seems to me to lie in the strong, contemptuous dislike which white people who are brought into close contact with negroes almost invariably seem to feel for them. In the northern parts of America where negroes form a very small part of the population, this feeling does not exist. A northern American or an Englishman would not feel that he were insulted if he were asked to sit next a negro at a public banquet. A southern American would decline an invitation if he thought it likely that he would be called upon to do such a thing. A southern lady, who happened to be in New York, was offered by a polite stranger a seat in a street car next a negro. She indignantly refused to occupy it. The very offer was an outrage.

The feeling would be intelligible if it were the outcome of instinctive physical prejudice. An Englishwoman, who had hardly ever come into contact with a negro, once found herself seated at tea in the saloon of a steamer opposite a negress who was in charge of some white children. She found it impossible to help herself to cake from the dish from which the negress had helped herself. The idea of doing so filled her with a sense of sickness. Yet she did not feel herself insulted or outraged at being placed where she was. A southern American woman would have felt outraged. But the southern American woman has no instinctive shrinking from physical contact with black people. She is accustomed to it. She has at home a black cook who handles the food of the household, a black nurse who minds the children, perhaps a black maid who performs for her all sorts of intimate acts of service. As servants she has no objection to negroes. There is in her nothing corresponding to the Englishwoman's instinctive shrinking from the touch of a black hand.

Nor is the southern American's contempt for the negroes anything at all analogous to the contempt which most people feel for those who are plainly their inferiors. A brave man has a thoroughly intelligible contempt for one who has shown himself to be a coward. But this is an entirely different thing, different in kind, not merely in degree, from a southern white man's contempt for a negro. It is the existence of this feeling, intensely strong and very difficult to explain, which makes the problem of the negro's social future seem hopeless of solution. No moral or intellectual advance which the negro can make affects this feeling in the slightest. It is not the brutalized negro or the ignorant negro, but the negro, whom the white man refuses to recognize as a possible equal.

Memphis, in spite of its negro problem, seems to me to be rapidly emerging from the ruins of one civilization and to be pressing forward to take a foremost place in another. I do not suppose that Memphis now regrets the past very much or even thinks often of the terrible humiliation of the Civil War and the years of blank hopeless ruin which followed it. There was that indeed in the past which must have left indelible marks behind it. It was not easy for a proud people, essentially aristocratic in their outlook upon life, to accept defeat at the hands of men whom they looked down upon. It is not easy to forget the intolerable injustice which, inevitably, I suppose, followed the defeat. But Memphis is looking forward and not back, is grasping at the possibilities of the future rather than brooding over the past.

But if Memphis and the South generally are content to forget the past, it does not follow that the past has forgotten them. The spirit of the older civilization abides. It haunts the new life like some pathetic ghost, doomed to wander helplessly among people who no longer want to see it. There is a certain suavity about Memphis which the stranger feels directly he touches the life of the place. It is a lingering perfume, delicate, faint but appreciable. I am told that it is to be traced to Europe, that the business men in Memphis have closer relations with England, Austria and Russia than with the northern states of their own country. I am also told that we must look to the origin of it to the Cavalier settlers of the southern states from whom the people who live there now claim descent. I do not like either explanation. A man does not catch suavity by doing business with Lancashire. The quality is not one on which the northern Englishman prides himself, or indeed which is very obvious in his way of living. The blood of those original cavaliers, gentlemen all of them I am sure, must have got a good deal mixed in the course of the last two hundred years, especially as strangers are always pouring into the South. It must be an attenuated fluid now, scarcely capable of flavoring perceptibly a new and vigorous life. I prefer my own hypothesis of a ghost. Some of these creatures smell of sulphur and leave a reek of it behind them when they pay visits to their old homes on earth. Others betray their presence by the damp, cold earthy air they bring with them from the tombs in which their bodies were laid. This Memphis ghost, which no one in Memphis sees, but which yet has its influence on Memphis life, is of quite a different kind. It is scented with pot-pourri, and the delicate rose water which great ladies of bygone generations made and used. It is the ghost of some grande dame like Madame Esmond, who owned slaves and used them with no misgiving about her right to do so, whose pride was very great, whose manners were dignified, whose ways among those of her own caste were exceedingly gracious. There is something, some lingering suggestion of great ladies about Memphis still, in spite of its new commercial prosperity. I think it must be because the spirits of them haunt the place.

Someone must surely have written a book on the philosophy of American place names. The subject is an interesting one, and the world has a lot of authors in it. It cannot have escaped them all. But I have not seen the book. If I ever do see it I shall turn straight to the chapter which deals with Memphis and Cairo, for I very much want to know how those two places came to have Egypt for their godfather. Most American place names are easy enough to understand, and they seem to me to surpass, in their fascinating suggestion of romance, our older Irish and English names. It is, of course, interesting to know that all the chesters in England—Colchester, Dorchester, Manchester and Chester itself—were once Roman camps; and that most of the Irish kils—Kilkenny, Kildare, Killaloe, Kilrush—were the churches of once honored saints. But the Romans and the saints are very remote. They were important people in their day no doubt, but it is very hard to feel the personal touch of them now. American place names bring us closer to men with whom we feel that we can sympathize. There is a whole range of names taken straight from old homes, New York, for instance, Boston, New Orleans. We do not need to go back in search of emotions to the original meaning of York or to worry over the derivation of Orleans. It is enough for us that these names suggest all the pathetic nostalgia of exiles. The men who named these places must have been thinking of dearly loved cathedral towers, of the streets and market places of country towns whose every detail was well remembered and much regretted, of homes which they would scarcely hope to see again. It is not hard, either, to catch the spirit of the Puritan settlers in theological and biblical names, in Philadelphia, Salem and so forth. The men who gave these names to their new homes must have felt that like Abraham they had gone forth from their kindred and their people, from the familiar Ur of the Chaldees, to seek a country, to find that better city whose builder and maker is God. Philadelphia is perhaps to-day no more remarkable for the prevalence of brotherly love among its people than any other city is. But there were great thoughts in the minds of the men who named it first; and reading the name to-day, even in a railway guide, our hearts are lifted up into some sort of communion with theirs. Then there are the Indian names, of lakes, mountains and rivers chiefly, but occasionally of cities too. Chicago is a city with an Indian name. Perhaps these are of all the most suggestive of romance. It must have been the hunters and explorers, pioneers of the pioneers, who fixed these names. One imagines these men, hardened with intolerable toil, skilled in all the lore of wild life, brave, adventurous, picking up here and there a word or two of Indian speech, adopting Indian names for places which they had no time to name themselves, handing on these strange syllables to those who came after them to settle and to build. Greater, so it seems, than the romance of the homesick exile, greater than the romance of the Puritan with his Bible in his hand, is the wild adventurousness which comes blown to us across the years in these Indian names.

But there are names like Memphis which entirely baffle the imagination. It is almost impossible to think that the people who named that place were homesick for Egypt. What would Copts be doing on the shores of the Mississippi? How could they have got there? Nor is it easy to think of any emotion which the name Memphis would be likely to stir in the mind of a settler. Memphis means nothing to most men. It is easy to see why there should be an American Rome. A man might never have been in Rome, might have no more than the barest smattering of its history, yet the name would suggest to him thoughts of imperial greatness. Any one who admires imperial greatness would be inclined to call a new city Rome. But Memphis suggests nothing to most of us, and to the few is associated only with the worship of some long forsaken gods. I can understand Indianapolis. There was Indiana to start with, a name which anyone with a taste for sonorous vowel sounds might easily make out of Indian. The Greek termination is natural enough. It gives a very desirable suggestion of classical culture to a scholar. But a scholar would be driven far afield indeed before he searched out Memphis for a name.