“Ah, no, no glass.”
“Is it cold in winter?”
“Yes, mighty cold.”
Some cabins were poverty-stricken in the extreme. But in others there were victrolas, and in cases where the merest amenities of life were lacking you would find a ramshackle Ford car. On the road Negroes with cars were almost as common as white men, and some Negroes drove very furiously and sometimes very skillfully. There were no foot passengers on the road. I went all the way to Milledgeville before I fell in with a man on foot going a mile to a farm. The current Americanism, Don’t walk if you can ride seemed to have been changed into, Don’t stir forth till you can get a lift, and white men picked up Negroes and Negroes white men without prejudice, but with an accepted understanding of use and wont. I was looked upon with some doubt, and scanned from hurrying cars with puzzlement. Lonely Jasper County had not seen my like before. But saying “Good day!” and “How d’ye do?” convinced most that the strange foot traveler was an honest Christian. Lifts were readily proffered by men going the same way. Those who whirled past the other way may have reflected that since I was on foot I must have lost my car somewhere.
A common question put to me was, “What are you selling?” and people were a little dumbfounded when I said I was following in Sherman’s footsteps. That had not occurred to them as a likely occupation on a hot afternoon. I felt rather like a modern Rip Van Winkle who had overslept reveille by half a century and was trying in vain to catch up with the army which had long since turned the dusty corner of the road. Still, the Southerners were surprisingly friendly. They said they knew nothing about it themselves, and then took me to the old folk who remembered. The old folk quavered forth—“It’s a long, long time ago now.” It interested them always that I had been in the German war and had marched to the Rhine, and they were full of questions about that. “Oh, but this war was not a patch on that one,” they said. “I tell them they don’t know what war is yet—what we suffered then, what ruin there was, how we had to work and toil and roughen our white hands, and eat the bread of bitterness like Cain——”
After the Civil War the initial struggle of the settlers and pioneers in the founding of the colony had to be repeated. Everyone had to set to and work. The help of the Negroes was at first diminished or entirely cut off. Even the necessary tools were lacking. Nevertheless there was now a surprising absence of bitterness. “The war had to be. Slavery was bad for the South, and it took the war to end it” was an opinion on all men’s mouths. “When President McKinley said that the character of Robert E. Lee was the common inheritance of both North and South he healed the division the war had made,” I heard someone say. Even of Sherman, though there were bitter memories of him, there were not a few ready to testify to his humaneness—for instance, this from a poor store keeper:
“I suppose you’re not old enough to remember the Civil War?”
“’Deed, sir, I do.”
“Do you remember Sherman’s march?”
“Yes, I was only a child, but it made a powerful impression on me. My father was killed in the war. And we were scared to death when we heard Sherman was coming. But he never did me any harm. An officer came up, asked where my father was, learned he was dead. And he made all the soldiers march past the house, waited till the last one had gone, then saluted and left us. Captain Kelly was his name, and I shall never forget his face, it was all slashed about with old scars. He was a brave man, I’m sure.... No, they didn’t do much harm hereabout, except to those who had a lot of slaves or to those who had treated their niggers badly. If they found out that a man had been ill-treating his niggers they stripped his house and left him with not a thing——”