We descended at Savannah in a hopeful frame of mind, for a recent report announced it the most nearly reasonable in its food prices of the fifty principal cities of our United States. Georgia’s advantage in the contest with starvation was soon apparent. At the desk of the hotel overlooking a semi-tropical plaza the startled newcomer found staring him in the face a dire threat of incarceration, in company with the recipient, if he so far forgot himself as to offer a gratuity. There was something strangely familiar, however, about the manner of the grandson of Africa who hovered about the room to which he had conducted us, flecking away a speck of dust here, raising a curtain and lowering it again to the self-same height over yonder. I had no desire to spend even a short span of my existence in a Southern dungeon, along with this dusky bearer of the white man’s burdens. But he would have made a most unsuitable spectator to the imperative task of removing the Georgian grime of travel. Enticing him into a corner out of sight of the key-hole I called his attention to the brilliancy of a silver coin. Instead of springing to a window to shout for the police, he snatched the curiosity in a strangely orthodox manner, flashed upon us a row of dazzlingly white teeth, and wished us a pleasant evening. Possibly I had read the anti-tipping ordinance too hastily; it may merely have forbidden the public bestowal of gratuities.
A microscopic examination might possibly have proved that the reckoning which was laid before us at the end of dinner showed some signs of shrinkage; to the naked eye it was quite as robust as its twin brothers to the North. But of course the impossibility of leaving a goodly proportion of the change to be cleared away with the crumbs would account for Savannah’s low cost of living. The lengthening of the ebony face at my elbow as I scraped the remnants of my bank-note together might have been due to the exertions of the patent-leather shoes that sustained it to contain more than their fair share of contents. But it seemed best to make sure of the source of dismay; we might have to eat again before we left Savannah.
“I understand you can’t accept tips down here in Georgia?” I hazarded, reversing the usual process between money and pocket. The increasing elongation of the waiter’s expression branded the notion a calumny even sooner than did his anxious reply:
“Ah been taking ’em right along, sah. Yes, sah, thank you, sah. Dey did try to stop us makin’ a livin’, sah, but none of de gen’lemans do’n ferget us.”
I can highly commend the anti-tipping law of Georgia; it gives one a doubled sense of adventure, of American freedom from restraint, reminiscent of the super-sweetness of stolen apples in our boyhood days.
We liked Savannah; preferred it, perhaps, to any of the cities of our journey southward. We liked the Southern hospitality of its churches, consistent with their roominess and their wide-open windows. We were particularly taken with the custom of furnishing fans as well as hymn-books, though we may have wondered a bit whether the segregation of the colored people persisted clear beyond St. Peter’s gate. We were especially grateful to the genius of Oglethorpe, who had made this a city of un-American spaciousness, with every other cross street an ample boulevard, which gave the lungs and the eyes a sense of having escaped to the open country. Perhaps it was these wooded avenues, more than anything else, that made us feel we were at last approaching the tropics, where life itself is of more real importance than mere labor and business. Had we settled there, we should quickly have attuned ourselves to the domesticity of her business customs,—breakfast at nine, dinner from two to four, giving the mind harassed with the selling of cotton or the plaints of clients time to compose itself in household quiet, supper when the evening breezes have wiped out the memory of the scorching sun. We liked the atmosphere of genuine companionship between the two sections of the population, despite the line that was sternly drawn between them where social intercourse might otherwise have blended together. The stately tread of the buxom negro women bearing their burdens on heads that seemed designed for no other purpose fitted into the picture our imaginations persisted in painting against the background of the old slave-market, with its barred cells, in defiance of the assertion of inhabitants that not a black man had ever been offered for sale there.
The man who conducted us to the top of Savannah’s “sky-scrapah”—for every Southern city we visited boasted one such link between earth and heaven—was still frankly of the “rebel” turn of mind for all his youthfulness. He deplored the abolition of slavery. In the good old days a “niggah” was as valuable as a mule to-day; no owner, unless he was a fool, would have thought of abusing so costly a possession any more than he would now his automobile. The golden age of the negro was that in which he was inspected daily, as soldiers are, and sternly held to a certain standard of outward appearance and health. To-day not one out of ten of them was fit to come near a white man. Laziness had ruined them; their native indolence and the familiarity toward them of white men from the North had been their downfall. The South had no fear of race riots, however; those were things only of the North, thanks to the Northerner’s false notion of the “nigger’s” human possibilities. Why had the black laborers who had raised this pride of Savannah to its lofty fifteen stories of height always lifted their hats to him, their foreman, and addressed the Northern architects with the disrespect of covered heads? Wise men from “up east” soon learned the error of their ways in the treatment of the “niggah,” after a few weeks or months of Southern residence. Slavery, in principle, was perhaps wrong, but it was the only proper system with negroes. Besides, we should not forget that it was not the South that had introduced slavery into the United States, but New England!
Many things, I knew, were chargeable to our northeastern states, but this particular accusation was new to me. Yet this son of the old South was a modern American in other respects, for all his out-worn point of view. His civic pride, bubbling over in a boasting that was not without a suggestion of crudity, alone proved that. Savannah was destined to become sooner or later the metropolis of America; it was already second only to New York in the tonnage of its shipping. I cannot recall offhand any American town that is not destined some day, in the opinion of its proudest citizens, to become the leader of our commercial life, nor one which is not already the greatest something or other of the entire country. No doubt this conviction everywhere makes for genuine progress, even though the goal of the imagination is but a will-o’-the-wisp. What breeds regret in my soul, however, is the paucity of our cities that aspire to the place of intellectual leadership, as contrasted with the multitude of those which picture themselves the foremost in trade and commerce.
Possibly Savannah will some day outstrip New York, but I hope not, for it has something to-day the loss of which would be an unfortunate exchange for mere metropolitan uproar and which even its own leisurely ambitious people might regret when it was too late. This view from its highest roof, with its chocolate-red river winding away to the sea sixteen miles distant, and inland to swampy rice-fields and the abodes of alligators, that can be reached only by “báteau,” with its palm-flecked open spaces and its freedom from smoke, raised the hope that it might aspire to remain what it is now incontestably, a “city of trees” and a pleasant dwelling-place.