One Biscuit to Eat and no Place to Sleep
Booker T. Washington, in a letter to the Montgomery Advertiser on the Negro labour problem, tells this story:
I recall that some years ago a certain white farmer asked me to secure for him a young coloured man to work about the house and to work in the field. The young man was secured, a bargain was entered into to the effect that he was to be paid a certain sum monthly and his board and lodging furnished as well. At the end of the coloured boy’s first day on the farm he returned. I asked the reason, and he said that after working all the afternoon he was handed a buttered biscuit for his supper, and no place was provided for him to sleep.
At night he was told he could find a place to sleep in the fodder loft. This white farmer, whom I know well, is not a cruel man and seeks generally to do the right thing; but in this case he simply overlooked the fact that it would have paid him in dollars and cents to give some thought and attention to the comfort of his helper.
This case is more or less typical. Had this boy been well cared for, he would have advertised the place that others would have sought work there.
Such methods mean, of course, the lowest possible efficiency of labour—ignorant, hopeless, shiftless. The harsh planter naturally opposes Negro education in the bitterest terms and prevents it wherever possible; for education means the doom of the system by which he thrives.
Negro with Nineteen Children
Life for the tenants is often not a pleasant thing to contemplate. I spent much time driving about on the great plantations and went into many of the cabins. Usually they were very poor, of logs or shacks, sometimes only one room, sometimes a room and a sort of lean-to. At one side there was a fireplace, often two beds opposite, with a few broken chairs or boxes, and a table. Sometimes the cabin was set up on posts and had a floor, sometimes it was on the ground and had no floor at all. The people are usually densely ignorant and superstitious; the preachers they follow are often the worst sort of characters, dishonest and immoral; the schools, if there are any, are practically worthless. The whole family works from sunrise to sunset in the fields. Even children of six and seven years old will drop seed or carry water. Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, himself a Negro, who has made many valuable and scholarly studies of Negro life, gives this vivid glimpse into a home where the Negro and his wife had nineteen children. He says:
This family of twenty-one is a poverty stricken, reckless, dirty set. The children are stupid and repulsive, and fight for their food at the table. They are poorly dressed, sickly and cross. The table dishes stand from one meal to another unwashed, and the house is in perpetual disorder. Now and then the father and mother engage in a hand-to-hand fight.
Never Heard the Name of Roosevelt