The Soul of John Brown

by Stephen Graham

In lack of Negro enterprise what a contrast Knoxville was to places like Norfolk, Virginia! I was soon to realize that the further South I went the more stagnant would Negro life show itself—until I reached the point when there would be little scope for investigation. The traveler going South from Washington is let gradually downward into a sort of pit of degradation. Chattanooga is lower than Knoxville, Birmingham lower than Chattanooga, rural Georgia and Alabama lower than all of these. This I think ought to be realized lest the glamour of Negro progress in Virginia and the North give a false impression of the whole.

At Knoxville it was Fair time. The time when I was in the South was one of fairs and carnivals. As the Russian goes on pilgrimage when the harvest has been gathered in, so the American goes to the Fair in the fall. There is in the South a vast network of the moving caravans of showmen, and a huge show business quite novel to an Englishman. I arrived in many towns at the time of their Fair, and had the greatest difficulty in obtaining shelter for the night, so crowded were they. The people from the country round rolled in to the Fair in their cars and choked every thoroughfare.

One blemish on the large State Fair is that, except as servants, no Negroes are to be seen. There is a great gathering of white people, but no Blacks. It is therefore more polite, more well dressed, more conventional, and there is less of color and life than would fairly have obtained had all been welcome. What is a Fair if it be not an outing for the poor! It is reduced to this in the South, that the Whites have their Fairs and the Negroes have theirs separately.

I accompanied an Appalachian sportsman. He told me he shot a big, black bear the day the Armistice was signed. Sure as the first of November came round he was out with gun and haversack and Negro boys hunting the bear. He hunted for the love of hunting, though bear’s flesh could be sold at a dollar a pound and was worth it, every cent. He thought Tennessee did “mighty well” in the war, and they gave the boys a fine reception when they came back. They’d had a drop of whisky in them in the riot, but a few niggers less wasn’t much matter. He pointed out to me signs of Knoxville prosperity—houses that cost ten to twenty thousand dollars to build—picturesque and wooden, but very costly from a European point of view. No cotton was grown in this district, and next to no tobacco. Many people did not even know what a stalk of cotton was like.

The Knoxville Fair was a wondrous exposition of Southern hogs (each hog docketed with personal weight and what it gains per day), bulls and chickens and pigeons and rabbits and owls and what not, and there was a hall of automobiles festooned in flags. Caged lions and tigers flanked the auditorium of the free vaudeville entertainment. Negro boys flogged bony, grunting camels round the grounds. The pop-corn stands vied with the ice-cream counters stacked with cones. There was an astonishing uproar from the various revolving “golden dreams” and of the jibbing metal horses; and outside all manner of peep shows, men who had sold their voices talked till they foamed at the lips or went hoarse—of the freaks and wonders within. Thus the two-headed child, the girl who does not die though her half-naked body is transfixed with darts; the “whole dam family” (apes dressed up as human beings); the cigarette fiend, a thin, yellow strip of humanity who is slowly but surely smoking himself to death; Bluey, the missing link between monkey and man; the fire swallower from the South Sea Islands; Zarelda, the girl with a million eyes (dotted all over her body), who has baffled all scientists; the garden of Allah and the garden of lovely girls; Leach, the human picture gallery, with the world’s masterpieces tattooed all over his body; Dagmar, the living head without a body....

And the owner of the show, and of the bought voice which must not stop advertising it to the passer by, stands at one side in shirt sleeves, and rolls his quid and spits, and seems to meditate on dollars and cents, ever and anon signaling to the man with the voice not to let the crowd get away without coming in. It was pathetic to come upon the freaks, later, on the road; see Zarelda, demurely clad in black, gripping a suitcase, and realize that she had “dates” all over the South, and showed her million eyes to-day in Knoxville, then in Macon, then in Savannah, then Jacksonville and Mobile and New Orleans and a score of other places, sometimes for a day, sometimes for three days or a week—not in any sense a music-hall artiste, but a sort of gypsy by life and by profession. How tired the freaks must get, knocking about from State to State and listening to the loud laugh that speaks the vacant mind.

One would expect as the accompaniment of this show life a great number of strolling musicians and a poor folk wandering from town to town. But there are practically none. Strolling musicians now obtain polite employment at the many cinema houses where sensational pictures alternate with low vaudeville. Southern talent meets with a boisterous reception from the twenty-cent houses of Atlanta and New Orleans. One hears very broad humor upon occasion, frantic burlesques of the nervous hysteria and half-witted ignorance of the “nigger”—when the white man makes up as a Negro he always shows something lower than the Negro. At one show in New Orleans the whole audience roared with mirth at a competition in what was called “fizzing,” the spitting of chewed tobacco in one another’s faces and the bandying of purely Southern epithets and slang. Music is little developed among the Whites, though the singing of “Dixie” choruses is hailed as almost national. Musical instruments are now rare, even among the Negroes, and seem to have been displaced by the gramophone. There is no “gridling,” no beggars singing hymns on the city streets. In the country there are few tramps. The ne’er-do-wells are to be found more in the market places and the cheap streets. Prohibition has subterraneanized that part of the drink traffic which it has not killed, and the hitherto unemployed find a congenial occupation leading the thirsty to the “blind tigers.” It is rare to come across a man on the road, and Vachel Lindsay, tramping Georgia and reading his poems to the farmers, must have been unique, not only as a poet, but as a tramp. I saw nothing resembling the grand procession of “hoboes” that I met when tramping to Chicago seven years ago. Perhaps it was because immigration had ceased, and throughout the whole of America there was a need for labor which absorbed all men. Yet there could have been few on the road even before the war: the vast number of Blacks makes it unfitting for a white man to be tramping, and there is, moreover, less chance for a white man to get work in any case.

Much is said against the “poor Whites” or “poor white trash,” as the white proletariat is called by the black proletariat. They are said to be the worst enemies of the Negro, and the Negro is afraid of Bolshevism or Socialism because he knows the common white people, “those who have nothing and are nothing,” are the last people likely to give him justice. As one of the most popular of Negro leaders said recently: “As long as Socialism is followed by the lower classes of Whites, we can see there is more danger coming from Socialism to the Negro than from anything else, because below the Mason and Dixon line the people who lynch Negroes are the low-down Whites.” Of course those crowds who joyfully allow themselves to be photographed around the charred remains of the Negro they have burnt, thus affording the most terrible means of propaganda to Negro societies, are more of the dull, uneducated masses than of the refined and rich. They hate the Negro more because they are thrown more in contact with him, and their women are more accessible to him. They are in competition with the Negro for work and wages, and would gladly welcome a complete exodus to the North or to Liberia, for then their wages would go up. Physically, and man for man, they are afraid of the Negro, and therefore they attack him in mobs. Fortunately, there are not in the South great numbers of poor Whites except in the large cities and at the ports.

By contrast with the people of the North, the people of the South are noisy, very polite indoors, but brusque and rough without. They will do a great deal for you as a friend, but not much for you as a stranger. They have sharp-cut features, thin lips, blank brows. The women do not take on a fair fullness of flesh, but are inclined to dry up and fade. There are an enormous number of faded women everywhere—a sign, perhaps, that the climate does not suit the race. The accent seems to vary with the State, and Tennessee speaks with far more distinction than Georgia, where the “nigger brogue” prevails, and it is difficult to tell White from Black by voice. Nearly all r’s are dropped. Moral character is said to be weak, but there is nevertheless a very high standard, at least in matters of sex. The Southern woman is by no means as conscious of her charms as the Northern woman, and an unusually susceptible male could spend a quiet time in these parts. Men are not thinking of love and composing poems, even though it is the South, but they are if anything keener on business and money. Most people seemed suspicious of strangers, not communicative, but once they have taken the stranger to their hearts they easily become warm-heartedly effusive.

As a stranger I encountered a surprising lack of civility at a “non-union” plough company at Chattanooga. The employees were mostly Negroes, and I called on the white superintendent to obtain permission to go over the works. A heavy-jowled fellow kept me waiting half an hour in an anteroom, and then not only refused point-blank to let me see conditions in his factory, but was so brusque in his manner that I was forced to give him my mind roundly on his lack of courtesy, not to me personally, but to a literary man. As a rich business man he seemed to consider the profession of letters as dirt under his feet. I must say I felt shame to be so angry, and I was much amused some weeks later to read in a Chattanooga newspaper picked up by accident that Billy Sunday had visited this city and had preached in the said works, and at the close of his address, the superintendent being present, all the employees were en bloc converted to Christ.