By John Trotwood Moore
Castleberry, Ala., April 28, 1906.
This is the center of the strawberry industry of Alabama. As your car passes through the pine lands, stretching along the lower half of the State, you catch a whiff, now and then, from a passing car-load of the queen of fruits. It extends practically from the thriving town of Greenville to Flomaton. It is a delightful odor—these strawberries—mingled with that of the pine, and the perfume of some wild flower gifted beyond its kind. It is a pretty sight to step off at this little pine-bowered village, which, a few years ago, was virgin pine lands, and see some five hundred berry pickers in one field of a hundred acres or more. The pickers are nearly all negroes, and about half of them women and children, and they make wages while the season lasts that should easily keep them the rest of the year.
That is, it would keep anybody but a negro—who never keeps.
At two cents a quart they earn from two to four and one-half dollars per day. They could earn more and save it all if they would work Saturday afternoons.
But a negro, like a mule, has some peculiar ideas engrafted into the network of his being, garnered from a long line of holiday-taking ancestors. “Like produces like or the likeness of an ancestor” is the unchanging rule of the physical world; and it must not be forgotten that for many thousands of years the negro took nothing but holidays and whatever else he found lying around that was good to eat.
And he wore nothing but a smile. This knowledge may help you in solving the problem.
It is creditable to the white man that he has bred any work into him at all. However, he has ideas on the subject yet, and one of them is that, since his freedom, it is contrary to some amendment of his Constitution to work Saturday afternoons, even in fields carpeted with berry leaves, studded with crimson clusters of reflected sunset, cooled with healthful pine breezes and saturated with the perfume the gods loved most and the soft balminess of the eternal spring in the sky.
That sounds like heaven, but it is not the heaven the negro wants. That’s the white man’s heaven, and the white man would just be fool enough to work right on till dark, making that extra two dollars and saving it and all the rest of his week’s wages by keeping away from the dives of near-by towns.
But the white man is a vain and foolish creature to the negro.