Tenantry in the South is a very different thing from what it is in the North. In the North, a man who rents a farm is nearly as free to do as he pleases as if he were the owner. But in the South, the present tenant system is much nearer the condition that prevailed in slavery times than it is to the present Northern tenant system. This grows naturally out of slavery; the white man had learned to operate big plantations with ignorant help; and the Negro on his part had no training for any other system. The white man was the natural master and the Negro the natural dependent and a mere Emancipation Proclamation did not at once change the spirit of the relationship.
To-day a white overseer resides on every large plantation and he or the owner himself looks after and disciplines the tenants. The tenant is in debt to him (in some cases reaching a veritable condition of debt slavery or peonage) and he must see that the crop is made. Hence he watches the work of every Negro (and indeed that of the white tenants as well) sees that the land is properly fertilised, and that the dikes (to prevent washing) are kept up, that the cotton is properly chopped (thinned) and regularly cultivated. Some of the greater landowners employ assistant overseers or “riders” who are constantly travelling from farm to farm. On one plantation I saw four such riders start out one day, each with a rifle on his saddle. And on a South Carolina plantation I had a glimpse of one method of discipline. A planter was telling me of his difficulties—how a spirit of unruliness sometimes swept abroad through a plantation, inspired by some “bigoty nigger.”
“Do you know what I do with such cases?” he said. “Come with me, I’ll show you.”
He took me back through his house to the broad porch and reaching up to a shelf over the door he took down a hickory waggon spoke, as long as my arm.
“When there’s trouble,” he said, “I just go down with that and lay one or two of ’em out. That ends the trouble. We’ve got to do it; they’re like children and once in a while they simply have to be punished. It’s far better for them to take it this way, from a white man who is their friend, than to be arrested and taken to court and sent to the chain-gang.”
Troubles of the Landlord
Planters told me of all sorts of difficulties they had to meet with their tenants. One of them, after he had spent a whole evening telling me of the troubles which confronted any man who tried to work Negroes, summed it all up with the remark:
“You’ve just got to make up your mind that you are dealing with children, and handle them as firmly and kindly as you know how.”
He told me how hard it was to get a Negro tenant even in the busy season to work a full week—and it was often only by withholding the weekly food allowance that it could be done. Saturday afternoon (or “evening,” as they say in the South) the Negro goes to town or visits his friends. Often he spends all day Sunday driving about the country and his mule comes back so worn out that it cannot be used on Monday. There are often furious religious revivals which break into the work, to say nothing of “frolics” and fish suppers at which the Negroes often remain all night long. Many of them are careless with their tools, wasteful of supplies, irresponsible in their promises. One planter told me how he had built neat fences around the homes of his Negroes, and fixed up their houses to encourage them in thrift and give them more comfort, only to have the fences and even parts of the houses used for firewood.
Toward fall, if the season has been bad, and the crop of cotton is short, so short that a Negro knows that he will not be able to “pay out” and have anything left for himself, he will sometimes desert the plantation entirely, leaving the cotton unpicked and a large debt to the landlord. If he attempts that, however, he must get entirely away, else the planter will chase him down and bring him back to his work. Illiterate, without discipline or training, with little ambition and much indolence, a large proportion of Negro tenants are looked after and driven like children or slaves. I say “a large proportion”—but there are thousands of industrious Negro landowners and tenants who are rapidly getting ahead—as I shall show in my next chapter.