There were suggestions in the over-languid manner of some of its poorer inhabitants that the hookworm was prevalent in Savannah. Well-informed citizens pooh-poohed the notion, asserting that “hookworm is just a polite Northern word for laziness.” The particular sore spot of the moment was the scarcity of sugar. From Columbia onward it had been served us in tiny envelopes, as in war-days. That displayed in store windows was a mere bait, for sale only with a corresponding quantity of groceries. All of which was especially surprising in a region with its own broad green patches of cane. The unsweetened inhabitants explained the enigma by a reference to “profiteers,” and pointed out the glaringly new mansions of several of this inevitable war-time gentry. Others asserted that the ships at the wharves across the river were at that very moment loading hundreds of tons of sugar for Europe and furnishing even Germany with an article badly needed at home. An old darky added another detail that was not without its significance:
“Dey ’s plenty of sorghum an’ merlasses right now, sah, but de white folks dey cain’t eat nothin’ but de pure white.”
Men of a more thoughtful class than our guide of the “sky-scrapah” had a somewhat different view of the glories of the old South.
“Slavery,” said one of them, “was our curse and in time would have been our ruination. Not so much because it was bad for the negroes, for it wasn’t, particularly. But it was ruining the white man. It made him a haughty, irresponsible loafer, incapable of controlling his temper or his passions, or of soiling his hands with labor. We have real cause to be grateful that slavery was abolished. But that does not alter the fact that right was on our side in the war with the North—the right of each State to dissolve its union with the others if it chose, which was the real question at issue, rather than the question of holding slaves, though I grant that we are better off by sticking to the union. If the South had won, the United States would be to-day a quarrelsome collection of a score of independent countries, unprogressive as the Balkans.”
On a certain burning question even the most open-minded sons of the South were of the prevailing opinion.
“Whatever the North may think,” said one of this class, “we are forced to hold the fear of lynching constantly over the negro. In the North you are having far more trouble with them than we. And why? Because you depend on the authorities to curb them. Down here a serious crime by a negro is the general, immediate business of every man with a white skin. We cannot have our wives or daughters appearing on the public witness-stand to testify against an attacking negro. The surest, fairest, most effective, and least expensive means of dealing with a black scoundrel is to hang him at once from the nearest limb and go home and forget it. It seems to be the prevailing notion in the North that we are more apt than not to get the wrong man. That does not happen in one case out of a hundred. Our police and our deputy sheriffs know the whole history, the habits, character, and hiding-place of every nigger in their districts. When one of the bad ones commits a serious crime, they know exactly where to look for him, and the citizens who go with them take a rope along. Without lynching we would live in mortal terror day and night. As it is, we have far less trouble with the negroes than you do in the North, and the vast majority of them get along better with us than they do with you.”
Good friends squandered a considerable amount of time and gasolene to show us the region round about Savannah. Despite their warning that this floor-flat coast land was not the real Georgia, we found the mile after mile of cream-white roads, built of the oyster-shells that hang like the bluffs of mountain spurs above its coastal waters, teeming with interest to Northern eyes. The endless festoons of Spanish moss alone gave us the sense of having found a new corner of the world. Sturdy live-oaks were untroubled by these draperies of vegetation, though other trees seemed gradually to waste away beneath them. The dead-brown fields of corn had passed the stage where they would have been cut and shocked in the North, and the ears hung limply, awaiting the hand of the picker. Corn-stalks do not tempt animals that can graze all through the winter. The “crackers” whose ramshackle abodes broke the semi-wilderness carried the memory back to the peasants of Venezuela or of the Brazilian hinterland; their speech and their mode of life were but a degree less primitive, curious anachronisms in the bustling, ahead-of-date America of to-day. Here and there we passed what had once been a great plantation of the South, productive now chiefly of aggressive weeds. One such busy estate of slavery days had been revamped and partly restored to its pre-war condition. By a new generation of Southern planters? No, indeed! It is to-day the rendezvous of slangy, dollar-worshipping youths from the North, who bring with them clicking cameras and pampered movie stars. Thus is the aggressive modern world constantly treading on the heels of the leisurely past.
Through the first hint of the brief southern twilight there came marching toward us under the festooned trees a long double-column of negroes, dressed in dingy cotton garments, with broad black-and-white stripes, clanging chains pending from their waists to their legs, shovels over their broad shoulders, and flanked by several weather-browned white men in faded khaki, carrying rifles. To our unaccustomed eyes they seemed a detail of some medieval stage-setting, long since abolished from the scenes of real life, at least in our western world. Our hosts, however, accepted the group as a consistent bit of the landscape, scarcely noticeable until our interest called their attention to it.
“One of our far-famed Georgia chain-gangs,” laughed the man at the wheel, “which so frequently arouse the wet-eyed pity of your Northern philanthropists. A little experience with the ‘poor victims’ usually shows them that the system is not so satanic as it looks from the strained perspective of the North. You can take my word for it that at least half those niggers steal something else as soon as possible, once they are freed, so they can come back again to this comfortable life of irresponsibility and three square meals a day.”