It seemed to be everywhere customary to reckon rent in cotton bales, and it is easy to see what an economic serf the Negro can become under such terms. This system, known as “truck” in England, was long since abolished, but its evils were so notorious that truck has remained a proverbial expression for chicane—hence the phrase “to have no truck with it.” The Negro is better off as a laborer on a white man’s plantation than he is when having the responsibility of picking a crop for master before he picks one for himself.
There are many features of life on the modern plantation, be it of sugar or cotton, which suggest slavery. Virtual slavery is called peonage and many examples were given me by Negroes. It is arranged in some places that the Negro handles as little money as possible. Instead of money he has credit checks, metal or cardboard disks, which he can use at the general store to purchase his provisions. He is kept in debt so that he can never get out, and so lives with a halter round his neck. Especially during the war, when the rumor of war wages was tempting the colored labor of the South to migrate North in huge numbers, efforts were made to keep the Negro without the means of straying from the locality where the labor of his hands was the foundation of the life of the community. Other forms of peonage prevalent in rural parts is the commuting of punishment for forced labor, the hiring out of penal labor to companies or public authorities. This resembles the use made of prisoners during the recent world war, and is virtual slavery.
All inroads made on the liberty of the subject might fittingly be classed as peonage—the denial of the vote to those legally enfranchised, intimidation by lynch law, etc.
I talked with an old Negro after leaving Louisville and tramping south toward Midville. He was lolling in rags on his porch—very near white. His father had been his black mother’s white master. He remembered Sherman’s passing when he was a boy. A remarkably intelligent and tragic face, where an unhappy white man looked out on the misery of abject poverty and quasi-bondage. Cotton had proved bad this year. The boll weevil had entered the pod early. There were but three or four bales to the plow. He did not know how he’d foot his bills. The rations given him in the spring had become exhausted. He had also hoped to buy clothes. He said the traders came early in the year and supplied him with all sorts of things on the strength of a large cotton crop, and he pointed to a toy bicycle lying upside down in the grass. He let his little boy stride it, and mother thought it fine. Last year God had blessed them with a very fine crop, and why should He not be as kind this year? So he signed on for the toy bicycle and for a gramophone as well. Now he complained that they were cutting off his rations, mother lay ill a-bed, the weather was getting cold, and they had no clothes. The boss was coming presently to turn them out of the cabin altogether, and they did not know where to go. Even while we were talking two bullet-headed young fellows, clean-shaven, frank, and surly, came up in an automobile, stopped short, and rated the old man from where they sat in the car. The cabin and the little cotton plantation belonged to them now, and the old fellow was reverting from small proprietor to be laborer on a plantation, and to be laborer was little better than to be slave.
“We have to let down rope ladders to our people to get them up here,” said a colored dean of a university to me. “We live in such abysses down below, and there is no regular way out of the pit.”
I felt as I was marching into Georgia as if I were descending the rope ladder. What a contrast there was between the bright, radiant-faced girls at Atlanta studying science and languages, and those whom I was meeting now. There was a regular sequence or gradation going downward to filth and serfdom. The first bathed twice a day, and spent hours working “anti-kink” not only into their hair but into their souls and minds. They were fresh and fit and happy as morning itself. That was on the Atlanta heights. I stepped down to the world of business with its heavier, gloomier types, the hard-faced, skillful, and acquisitive doctors, the fire-delivering, shadowy-minded clergy, the excited and eager yet heavy-footed politicians. I took the road and met the troubled landowners, pathetically happy to exist, though drowning in mortgage and debt; from them I passed to the farm laborers, with the jowl of the savage, matted hair, bent backs, deformed with joyless toil, exuding poisonous perspiration and foul odor, herded like cattle or worse, nearer to the beast than our domestic animals, feared by women and weak men, as beasts are feared when they come in the likeness of human beings.
There were, however, steps lower still in the ladder which leads downward from the Atlanta hills. Frequently along the road I saw men in yellow-striped overalls, plodding together, working together, overlooked by a white man with a gun, and as they walked sounded the pitiful clank-clank of the chains. It is rather curious, kandali in Siberia are an atrocity, but in sections of the United States they are quite natural.
“We do not keep ‘em in jail, but make ‘em work,” says the white man knowingly. “When there’s much work to do on the roads we soon find the labor.” At Springfield I remarked the terrible state of disrepair of the highway and public buildings. The reason was that instead of setting their criminals to work on them they handed them over to the State authorities. Other towns knew better. But in the chain gang and the striped convict so easily obtained at the courts the ex-slave was seen at his worst, and the rope ladder stopped short before touching bottom.
There is not much to endear the ordinary wooden cabins in which the mass of America’s black peasantry is found to live. They are poorer and barer than the worst you would see in Russia. Ex-serf has fared better than ex-slave. However, one detail of charm on this Georgian way was the putting up of tiny stars as a sign of boys serving in the army, a humble star of hope and glory like some tiny flower blossoming out of season in the wilds—one white star for a boy in the army, a golden one for a boy who had died. In their submerged way the Negroes were proud of having helped in the war. The glory, or the idea, or the parrot cry of “making the world safe for democracy” had penetrated even into the most obscure abodes. The poor Negro had discovered Europe at last, and was especially in love with one nation—the French. The South generally had not been very eager to see the Negro in the war and has not reacted sympathetically to the black man’s war glory.
“There’s no managing the neegahs now, they’s got so biggety since the war,” said a white woman at Shadydale. “Las’ year we white people jus’ had to pick the cotton usselves, men, women, and chillen.” She told me she did not think it a bit nice of the French girls to walk out with Negro soldiers, and then told a story of a French bride brought home by one of the white boys. She tittered. “Yes ... she had twins soon af’ she came, and would you b’lieve it, they were neegahs. Of course he sent her right back.” The French intimacy with the Negro soldiers has cooled the Southerner’s regard for the best-loved nation of Europe. It has also stirred up the racial fear concerning Negroes and white women. Because the black soldier was a favorite of the white girls in France it is thought that his eye roves more readily to the pure womanhood of the South.