“Well,” he answered, “I find I can keep a better class of tenants, if the accommodations are good.”
Liquor and “the Resulting Trouble”
Mr. Brown has other methods for keeping the tenantry on his plantation satisfied. Every year he gives a barbecue and “frolic” for his Negroes, with music and speaking and plenty to eat. A big watermelon patch is also a feature of the plantation, and during all the year the tenants are looked after, not only to see that the work is properly done, but in more intimate and sympathetic ways. On one trip through the plantation we stopped in front of a Negro cabin. Inside lay a Negro boy close to death from a bullet wound in the head. He had been at a Negro party a few nights before where there was liquor. Someone had overturned the lamp: shooting began, and the young fellow was taken out for dead. Such accidents or crimes are all too familiar in the plantation country. Although Pulaski County, Georgia, prohibits the sale or purchase of liquor (most of the South, indeed, is prohibition in its sentiment), the Negroes are able from time to time to get jugs of liquor—and, as one Southerner put it to me, “enjoy the resulting trouble.”
The boy’s father came out of the field and told us with real eloquence of sorrow of the patient’s condition.
“Las’ night,” he said, “we done thought he was a-crossin’ de ribbah.”
Mr. Brown had already sent the doctor out from the city; he now made arrangements to transport the boy to a hospital in Macon where he could be properly treated.
Use of Cocaine Among Negroes
As I have said before, the white landlord who really tries to treat his Negroes well, often has a hard time of it. Many of those (not all) he deals with are densely ignorant, irresponsible, indolent—and often rendered more careless from knowing that the white man must have labour. Many of them will not keep up the fences, or take care of their tools, or pick the cotton even after it is ready, without steady attention. A prominent Mississippi planter gave me an illustration of one of the troubles he just then had to meet. An eighteen-year-old Negro left his plantation to work in a railroad camp. There he learned to use cocaine, and when he came back to the plantation he taught the habit to a dozen of the best Negroes there, to their complete ruin. The planter had the entire crowd arrested, searched for cocaine and kept in jail until the habit was broken. Then he prosecuted the white druggist who sold the cocaine.
Some Southern planters, to prevent the Negroes from leaving, have built churches for them, and in one instance I heard of a school-house as well.
Another point of the utmost importance—for it strikes at the selfish interest of the landlord—lies in the treatment of the Negro, who, by industry or ability, can “get ahead.” A good landlord not only places no obstacles in the way of such tenants, but takes a real pride in their successes. Mr. Brown said: