In God we trust,
All others pay cash.
The sound of the axe clashes in the woods. There are many fallen trunks on which it is possible to sit down and rest. Sea mist rolls in from the Atlantic, and warm airs push through it, feeding the marvelous tropical mosses. It’s a long way to Savannah—distance seems to be intensified by the narrowness of the gray corridor of the road through the vast, high forest. There rises from the obstructed earth black oak and sterile vine and palmettoes like ladies’ hands with opened fans. The surface whence the forest grows is swampy, old, lichened, mossy, springy. It’s hard to find solid earth, so many branches seem to be overgrown with verdure and moss. In the heat long snakes glide away from your approach, having seen you before you saw them. And rat, rat, rat, the red-polled woodpeckers in their tree-top cities call upon one another and seek their insect luncheons and then flit home and knock again. The white people speak a “nigger brogue” which is almost indistinguishable from Negro talk, and they never pronounce an r. The Negro seems very poor and illiterate and afraid. “Hear comes the OLD RELIABLE FRIND with the LIFT of CHRIST” says a notice on an old wooden church of colored folk.
I am overtaken by a Negro with a wagon and twelve bales of cotton, and though he seems trying to race a huge touring car “heading for Florida” with trunks on top and whole family within, he slows down to pick me up. His is an enormous lorry, ponderous and ramshackle, shaking the bones out of your body as it takes you along. The Negro boy held the steering wheel nonchalantly with one hand and blundered along at top speed. After ten miles of this we entered one of the vast cotton warehouses outside Savannah, passed the gateman who would not have let me in but he thought I was in charge, and we saw where a hundred thousand bales were being housed and kept. Scores of Negroes were at work manipulating bales on trolley trains run by petrol engines all over the asphalted way, and from shed to shed.
“Are you shipping much cotton?” I asked of a white man who was giving us a receipt for the cotton brought in, while a dozen husky fellows were unloading the wagon. “Not much,” said he. “Holding for better prices,” he added, and smiled knowingly.
Then with the empty wagon we rolled off for Savannah, and the boy driver told me he was going to work his passage soon on a ship from Savannah to New York. “We don’t get a chance down here.”
And yet how much better off was he with his wagon, and union wages, and life in a large city than the poor ex-slave, on the land!
While unlading, it had become dark. But an hour more through the forest brought us to the outlying slums of Savannah, and then to the “red-light district” where were music and dancing, and open doors and windows, and the red glow of the lamp luring colored youth to lowest pleasures; then to the grandeur and spaciousness of modern Savannah, and the white man’s civilization, up out of Georgia, up out of the pit, through the veil of the forest and of Nature to the serene heights of world civilization once more.