The Worthless Negro
I tried to see as much as I could of this “worthless Negro,” who is about the lowest stratum of humanity, it seems to me, of any in our American life. He is usually densely ignorant, often a wanderer, working to-day with a railroad gang, to-morrow on some city works, the next day picking cotton. He has lost his white friends—his “white folks,” as he calls them—and he has not attained the training or self-direction to stand alone. He works only when he is hungry, and he is as much a criminal as he dares to be. Many such Negroes are supported by their wives or by women with whom they live—for morality and the home virtues among this class are unknown. A woman who works as a cook in a white family will often take enough from the kitchen to feed a worthless vagabond of a man and keep him in idleness—or worse. A Negro song exactly expresses this state of beatitude:
“I doan has to work so ha’d
I’s got a gal in a white man’s ya’d;
Ebery night ’bout half pas’ eight
I goes ’round to the white man’s gate:
She brings me butter and she brings me la’d—
I doan has to work so ha’d!”
This worthless Negro, without training or education, grown up from the neglected children I have already spoken of, evident in his idleness around saloons and depots—this Negro provokes the just wrath of the people, and gives a bad name to the entire Negro race. In numbers he is, of course, small, compared with the 8,000,000 Negroes in the South, who perform the enormous bulk of hard manual labour upon which rests Southern prosperity.
How the Working Negro Lives
Above this low stratum of criminal or semi-criminal Negroes is a middle class, comprising the great body of the race—the workers. They are crowded into straggling settlements like Darktown and Jackson Row, a few owning their homes, but the majority renting precariously, earning good wages, harmless for the most part, but often falling into petty crime. Poverty here, however, lacks the tragic note that it strikes in the crowded sections of Northern cities. The temperament of the Negro is irrepressibly cheerful, he overflows from his small home and sings and laughs in his streets; no matter how ragged or forlorn he may be good humour sits upon his countenance, and his squalour is not unpicturesque. A banjo, a mullet supper from time to time, an exciting revival, give him real joys. Most of the families of this middle class, some of whom are deserted wives with children, have their “white folks” for whom they do washing, cooking, gardening, or other service, and all have church connections, so that they have a real place in the social fabric and a certain code of self-respect.
I tried to see all I could of this phase of life. I visited many of the poorer Negro homes and I was often received in squalid rooms with a dignity of politeness which would have done credit to a society woman. For the Negro, naturally, is a sort of Frenchman. And if I can sum up the many visits I made in a single conclusion I should say, I think, that I was chiefly impressed by the tragic punishment meted out to ignorance and weakness by our complex society. I would find a home of one or two rooms meanly furnished, but having in one corner a glittering cottage organ, or on the mantel shelf a glorified gilt clock; crayon portraits, inexpressibly crude and ugly, but framed gorgeously, are not uncommon—the first uncertain, primitive (not unpitiful) reachings out after some of the graces of a broader life. Many of these things are bought from agents and the prices paid are extortionate. Often a Negro family will pay monthly for a year or so on some showy clock or chromo or music-box or decorated mirror—paying the value of it a dozen times over, only to have it seized when through sickness, or lack of foresight, they fail to meet a single note. Installment houses prey upon them, pawnbrokers suck their blood, and they are infinitely the victims of patent medicines. It is rare, indeed, that I entered a Negro cabin, even the poorest, without seeing one or more bottles of some abominable cure-all. The amount yearly expended by Negroes for patent medicines, which are glaringly advertised in all Southern newspapers, must be enormous—millions of dollars. I had an interesting side light on conditions one day while walking in one of the most fashionable residence districts of Atlanta. I saw a magnificent gray-stone residence standing somewhat back from the street. I said to my companion, who was a resident of the city:
“That’s a fine home.”
“Yes; stop a minute,” he said, “I want to tell you about that. The anti-kink man lives there.”
“Anti-kink?” I asked in surprise.