When the coloured girl grows up, she goes to service in a white family, where she either sleeps in an outbuilding (the survival of the old system of Negro “quarters”) or goes home at night. In either event the mistress rarely pays the slightest attention to her conduct in this particular. I talked with a woman, a fine type of the old gentlefolk, who expressed with frankness a common conviction in the South.
“We don’t consider,” she said, “that the Negroes have any morals. Up North where I was visiting this summer I was amazed to find women with coloured servants looking after them, trying to keep them in at night and prevent mischief. We never do that; we know it isn’t any use.”
It may be imagined how difficult it is in such an atmosphere for Negroes to build up moral standards, or to live decently. If there ever was a human tragedy in this world it is the tragedy of the Negro girl.
Relations Between White Men and Negro Women
Illicit relationships between the races have not gone on without causing many a troubled conscience. Nor has a difference in colour always deadened the deeper feelings of the human heart. In spite of laws and colour lines, human nature, wherever found, is profoundly alike. In making my inquiries among coloured colleges I found to my astonishment that in nearly all of them mulatto boys and girls are being educated, and well educated, by their white fathers. A number of them are at Atlanta University, Tuskegee, Hampton, Fisk—indeed, at all of the colleges. And Wilberforce College, next after Lincoln University of Chester County, Pa., the oldest Negro institution of learning in the country, founded in 1856, was largely supported in slavery times by Southern white men who felt a moral obligation to educate their coloured sons and daughters. Large farms around Wilberforce (near Xenia) which I have visited were originally bought by Southern slave-owners for their mulatto children, where they could get away from the South and grow up in a free state. Some of these mulatto children, educated in Latin and Greek, with too much money and little to do, went straight to the devil, while others conserved their property, and it is to-day in the hands of their descendants.
Thus the relations between white men and Negro women even to-day, though marriage is forbidden by law, are sometimes remarkable in their expression of the deepest emotions of the human heart. I shall never forget the story of one such case among many that I heard in the South. I withhold the names in this case although the story is widely known among the people in that part of Alabama. At —— lives a planter of prominence who was formerly on the staff of the governor of the state. He had no white family, but everyone knew that he lived with a mulatto woman and was raising a coloured family. When the boys and girls were old enough, he sent them to Atlanta University, to Tuskegee, and to Spellman Seminary, providing them plentifully with money. He also paid for his wife’s sister’s schooling.
A year or so ago his mulatto “wife” died; and he was heart-broken. He sent for his boys to come from college and let it be known that he would have something to say at the funeral. Many white and coloured people, therefore, attended and followed the body of the Negro woman to the cemetery. At the grave, General —— stepped forward and raised his hand.
“I have just one word to say here to-day. These children who are here have always gone by their mother’s name. I want to acknowledge them now in front of all these people as my children; and henceforth they will bear my name. I wish also to say that this woman who lies here was my wife, not by law, but in the sight of God. I here acknowledge her. This is a duty I have to do not only to this woman but to God. When I leave my property I shall leave it to those children, and shall see that they get it.”
Intermarriage of the Races in the North
So much for Southern conditions. How is it in the North where intermarriage is not forbidden by law?