That fact no doubt helps the Negro press in the chanting of its sorrows, but it does not help the Negro himself. In fact, it shuts out a good deal of hope which might have been derived from white sympathy, and it threatens the colored peoples as a whole with worse things to be. These are the days of democracies and white proletariats, and both show themselves less friendly toward Negroes and “natives” than the old monarchies. Their hostility is based on an old fashioned ignorant contempt; competition in the labor market, and a sort of fear. Probably it can be overcome in time, but if so it will not be through white enlightenment, but through a world organization and understanding on the part of the colored races. For while throughout the world the Whites degenerate somewhat, these others rise. The gulf between the two is being diminished, and there may come a time not very far away when the white hegemony will be lost.
XV
UP THE MISSISSIPPI
From New Orleans I traveled up the Mississippi; calling at such characteristic points as Reserve, Vicksburg, Greenville, Mound Bayou, Memphis, accomplishing the journey partly by rail and partly by boat. Reserve is a vast sugar plantation owned by five brothers. It is only thirty miles from the great city and the Whites are mostly Creoles. The Mother of Rivers, clad in brown silk, flows toward the green humps of hundreds of levees and embankments. The shores are low and level, and there grows almost to the water edge a vast, close, ten-feet-high jungle of sugar cane. You walk along the top of the levee till you see a lane running across the plantation like a trench dug through it. In the lane itself there is no view except the erect, green wall of canes on either hand and the blue sky above. Beneath your feet are cart ruts and withered stalks of sugar gone purple at the joints and straw-colored in the flanks. Take a stalk and break it across, and it breaks in shreds like a bamboo, revealing the inner fatness of sweet pith which you can suck if you will, for it is sugar. It has a dilute sweetness which rapidly cloys an unaccustomed palate, though the people of the countryside suck it continuously, and many consider the natural sugar the source of all health. The taste is reproduced very well in the pralines on which New Orleans prides itself.
A long and novel sort of lane this through the sugar! A Negro worker coming along the road sees a white man, but does not want to meet him, and he takes three steps into the dark-green depths, clawing his way inside as through many barely shut doors, and he is lost. You would seek him in vain if he wished to hide.
The lane debouches into a sun-bathed, half-cleared area which is covered with stricken canes looking like warriors tumbled in death after a great battle; for it is winter and the time of the taking of the harvest. Negro gangs with rough bills like meat choppers are slicing the side leaves from the cane and then cutting, slicing and cutting, all over the plantation, with joyous noise, and there are great numbers of dark girls in straw hats working methodically and rhythmically from the shoulder and the bosom, striking, clipping, felling, as it were automatically, unwaveringly. They break in and cut in, strewing ever more extensively the carpet of canes in their rear, but the wall they attack is ten times as dense as the thickest field of corn and twice as high. The master or overseer, on horseback, stands about and calls sharply to the workers in French patois. He may be white Creole, but is often as dark as his gang. Where sugar is not rising, beyond the plantations if you walk as far, Nature seems sunk in swamp and swarming with snakes. The low jungle over the Mississippi marshes has many alligators and a multitude of other reptiles.
In a clearing of the sugar harvest it is possible to sit on a hummock of grass and see something of a plantation as a whole. It is a cloudless day with the faintest haze over the blueness of the sky. The sun heat is tempered by a delightful air which keeps on moving all the time like an invisible river of health and vigor. There is a whispering in the myriads of the canes, and you hear the slashing and the clumping of the cutting which is going on all the while. On one hand are the rudimentary huts of the Negroes, like dressing rooms, on the other the lofty refinery of white-painted corrugated iron, with many chimneys and cranes. The refinery, using electric power taken from the river, works off all the local cane and also imports large quantities of raw sugar brought from Cuba. Pile driving is going on in the Mississippi, and there will soon be a landing stage to which the Cuban steamers themselves can approach. The Louisiana cane is red and the Cuban is yellow-green, and the latter is much the sweeter. On the plantation, where a fair stretch of ground has been cleared, the motor plough is at work with huge spiked wheels, turning the black soil over the sugar seed for next year. The cane has an eye at each joint, the eye is the seed, and from it sprouts next year’s plant, growing at right angles to the old cane in the earth. “In February,” says the young Creole ploughman, “the young plants have to be dug up and replanted. Work goes on steadily all the year round.”
I resumed my way up the Mississippi on an old, broken-down steamer with a remarkably high, wooden, dripping, splashing paddle wheel. To go by boat used to be a favorite way of traveling, but the new railways on each side of the great river have killed the water traffic by taking away all large freight. It does not seem a profitable enterprise to ply the Mississippi for passengers alone. There are therefore only a few river steamers left, and these have to call at all the tiniest and obscurest waterside places and lumber camps, and can seldom make more than forty or fifty miles a day. Few people will travel a week or ten days or a fortnight or anything you like to Memphis when a locomotive will do it in twenty-four hours. The passengers therefore sit in stuffy trains listening to the vers libre of the man who offers in a low voice: chewing gum, cigarettes, iced coco-cola; and the country whirls past them unprofitably. The cotton bales which used to go down stream in thousands upon river steamers are now closely packed in railway trucks; and the molasses goes no longer in barrels, but in huge, iron cisterns on wheels. There is therefore little traffic on the mighty river—she is happier and freer, more as she was of yore, with few steamers, few barges, few rafts—instead, only an occasional rowing boat and a ferry. The water is brown and vast and placid, and runs in many courses beyond wooded islands, beyond vast, swampy forks and tongues of the mainland. It is a sort of café-au-lait color, and the shadows mantle softly upon it deliciously. Willows grow in the water on its shores and islands, and in shadow or sunlight the water laps gently the many tree trunks or lies still under the green shade of the branches. It is a great, intricate, unexplored labyrinth of waters, and now you see it unadorned and lovely, with no advertisements on its banks and no shoddy reminder of our civilization on any hand—the Mississippi as she was when we first saw her. I traveled on a boat called Senator Cordill and we made barely thirty miles a day, so many were the stopping places, so many the accidents. It cost a little over a dollar a day, including board, and was the nearest approach to a gift. The ship had a motley gang of colored laborers fetching freight on their backs in intermittent procession, beating out dust from the long, wooden gangway up which they tramped with their burdens. The wooden paddle wheel, which was ten feet high, had got into disrepair, and at a riverside town where we stopped some colored carpenters were at work fitting new wooden parts into her while close-cropped Negroes with coal-dusted skulls shoveled coal aboard from a lighter. We had three wooden decks rolling with small freight for tiny places in Louisiana, Mississippi State, and Arkansas. In the cabins were huge family bedsteads, and no locks on the doors. When the wheel was repaired and the time came for departure the Negro crew deserted en masse, and the captain, with the unlighted cigar which he had rolled and bitten in his capacious mouth all day, stood on the bank and accosted all and sundry, begging them to come aboard and work on the ship. Meanwhile in a quayside hut Negro girls were “shimmying” as they brought in food for their colored boys, and our erstwhile crew was heard singing and shouting. Only next morning did we get enough hands, and at the misty dawn, when the river was so still that it looked like an unbroken sheet of ice, we raised anchor and plunged outward again. In the main current whole trees were seen to be floating, and our wheel might easily strike one of them and get broken again. We sat down to breakfast, the eight passengers: one was a judge, another a district attorney, a third was an agent for timber, and the rest were women. The china at table was of different shapes and sizes, and there were only three teaspoons—so the rest of the passengers were served with tablespoons for their coffee.