The negro: the southerner's problem

by Thomas Nelson Page

One going through the South now—even through those parts where the old-time darky was once the regular and ordinary picture—unless he should happen to drift into some secluded region so far out of the sweep of the current that its life has been caught as in an eddy, would never know what the old life had been, and what the old-time Negroes were in that life. Their memory is still cherished in the hearts of those to whom they stood in a relation which cannot be explained to and cannot be understood by those who did not know it as a vital part of their home-life. Even these will soon have passed from the stage, and in another decade or two the story of that relation, whose roots were struck deep in the sacredest relations of life, will be only a tradition kept alive for a generation or two, but gradually fading until it is quite blurred out by time.

Curiously, whatever the Southerners may think of slavery—and there were many who reprobated its existence—whatever they may think of “the Negro” of to-day, there is scarcely one who knew the Negro in his old relation who does not speak of him with sympathy and think of him with tenderness. The writer has known men begin to discuss new conditions fiercely, and on falling to talking of the past, drift into reminiscences of old servants and turn away to wipe their eyes. And not the least part of the bitterness of the South over the Negro question as it has existed grows out of resentment at the destruction of what was once a relation of warm friendship and tender sympathy.

Of African slavery it may be said that whatever its merits and demerits, it divided this country into two sections, with opposing interests, and finally plunged it into a vast and terrible war. This is condemnation enough.

One need not be an advocate of slavery because he upsets ideas that have no foundation whatever in truth and sets forth facts that can be substantiated by the experience of thousands who knew them at first hand.

II

It is well known by those who knew the old plantation-life that there were marked divisions between the Negroes. There were among them what might almost be termed different orders. These were graded by the various relations in which the individuals stood to the “white folks”—that is, to the master and mistress and their family.

The house-servants represented a class quite distinct from and quite above the “field-hands,” of whom they were wont to speak scornfully as “cornfield niggers,” while among the former were degrees as clearly defined as ever existed in an English gentleman’s house, where the housekeeper and the butler held themselves above the rest of the servants, only admitting to occasional fellowship the lady’s maid.

Among the first in station were the mammy, the butler, the body-servant, the carriage-driver, the ladies’ maids, the cook, and the gardener, with, after an interval, the “boys” who were attached to one or the other position as assistants and were in training for the places when the elders should fail. Among the “field-hands” was, first, the “head man.”[58]

The “head man” was the equal of any other servant—a rank due, perhaps, partly to his authority and partly to the character that brought him this authority. He was the foreman, or assistant superintendent of the plantation. He carried the keys; he called the hands to work; directed them, and was, to some extent, in authority over them. Such a one I knew, mighty in word and act, who towered above the hands he led, a “head man,” indeed.

A somewhat inaccurate idea prevails of the Southern plantation life, due, possibly, to the highly colored pictures that have been painted of it in books of a romantic order, in which the romance much outweighed the ha’penny-worth of verisimilitude. The current idea is that a Southern plantation was generally a great estate, teeming with black slaves who groaned under the lash of the drivers and at night were scourged to their dungeons, while their masters revelled in ill-used luxury and steeped themselves in licentiousness, not stopping at times to “traffic in their own flesh and blood.”