“Say, d’ you hear about Bud Hampton?”
“What Bud done now?”
“Why, las’ week Bud Hampton shot a buck niggah’t weighed ovah two hunderd pound!”
This particular species of quarry seemed to grow blacker with each succeeding state. The two urchins in one-piece garments who lugged our hand-bags up the slope in Columbia made coal seem of a pale tint by comparison. At the corner of a main street so business-bent as to require the constant attention of a traffic policeman they steered us toward the door of a somewhat weather-worn establishment.
“This the best hotel?” I queried, a bit suspicious that the weight of their burdens had warped their judgment. “How about that one down the street?” It was a building of very modern aspect, looming ten full stories into the brilliant Southern heavens.
“Dat ain’ no hotel, sah,” cried the two in one breath, rolling their snow-white eyeballs, their black toes seeming to wriggle with pride at the magnificence it presented, “dat’s de sky-scrapah!”
It was in Columbia that we felt for the first time irrevocably in the South. Richmond had been merely an American city with a Southern atmosphere; South Carolina’s capital was the South itself, despite its considerable veneer of modern Americanism. One must look at three faces to find one indubitably white. Clusters of mahogany-red sugar-canes lolled in shady corners, enticing the black brethren to exercise their powerful white teeth. Goats drowsed in patches of sand protected from the insistent sunshine. Motormen raised their caps with one hand and brought their dashing conveyances to a sudden halt with the other at the very feet of their “lady acquaintances,” whose male escorts returned the greeting with equal solemnity. I puzzled for some time to know what far-distant city this one, with its red soil stretching away to suburban nothingness from the points where the street paving petered out, with its goats and sugar-cane, its variegated complexions, and frank contentment with life, was insistently recalling to memory. Then all at once it came to me. Purged of its considerable American bustle, Columbia would bear a striking resemblance to Asunción, capital of far-off Paraguay. Even the wide-open airiness of its legislative halls, drowsing in the excusable inoccupancy of what was still mid-summer despite the calendar, carried the imagination back to the land of the Guaraní.
An un-Northern spaciousness was characteristic of the chief hostelry, with its ample chambers, its broad lounging-room, its generously gaping spitoons, offering not too exacting a target to the inattentive fire of Southern marksmanship. The easy-going temperament of its management came as a relief from the unflinching rule-of-thumb back over the horizon behind us. The reign of the old-fashioned “American plan,” synonymous with eating when and what the kitchen dictates rather than leaving the guest a few shreds of initiative, had begun again and was to persist for a thousand miles southward. But can some trustworthy authority tell us what enactment requires that the “choicest room” of the “best hotel” of every American city be placed at the exact junction-point of the most successful attempt to concentrate all its twenty-four hours of uproar? I ask not in wrath, for time and better slumber have assuaged that, but out of mere academic curiosity. In the good, old irresponsible days of my “hobo” youth the “jungle” beyond the railroad yards was far preferable to this aristocratic Bedlam.
The “sky-scrapah” loomed behind us for half an hour or more across the mighty expanse of rolling sand-and-pine-tree world, with its distance-purple tinge and its suggestion of the interior of Brazil, which fled northward on the next lap of our journey. The cotton-fields which interspersed the wilderness might have seemed patches of daisies to the casual glance, rather sparse and thirsty daisies, for this year the great Southern crop had sadly disappointed its sponsors. Powder-dry country roads of reddish sand straggled along through the endless stretches of scrub-pines, carrying here and there the sagging buggy and gaunt and dust-streaked horse of former days. I relegate the equine means of transportation to the past advisedly, for his doom was apparent even in these sparsely cultivated and thinly peopled regions. Before a little unpainted, wooden negro church that drifted by us there clustered twenty-eight automobiles, with a bare half-dozen steeds drooping limply on their weary legs in the patches of shade the machines afforded them. King Cotton, abetted by his royal contemporaries overseas, has drawn no color-line in deluging his favors on his faithful subjects. Forests of more genuine trees replaced the scrub growth for long spaces farther on; here and there compact rectangles of superlatively green sugar-cane contrasted with the dead-brown patches of shriveled corn. In the smoking compartment of the coach placarded “White” shirt-sleeves and open collars were the rule, but the corresponding section of the “Colored” car indulged in no such disheveled comfort. The negroes of the South seem more consistent followers of Beau Brummel than their white neighbors.