He has aspirations and he lives for the morrow. The negro has none—the pure-blooded negro never had an aspiration in his life—and he lives not even for the day but for the night following it, when his work ends and he may be a nigger among his kind.
The white man works to accumulate; the negro to spend. And Saturday afternoon and night is a bully time to spend what he has made the rest of the week. There is only one better time, and that’s the next day, if there is a foot-washing or a funeral.
That’s enough for the negro. His problem is nearly solved, for the tide of immigration that has been flowing westward is being turned southward. And when it turns there will be no negro question. Like everybody else he will take his place in the order of things where his nature fits. He will be then one muscle in the South’s great arm of labor, but he will never be the biceps.
I found the people primitive, but honest and kind. They have lived around here all their lives, and this thing is a revelation to them. It is more money than they ever heard of before. Why, people actually carry bags of silver around with them to pay off pickers. Heretofore the land had been most anybody’s for the asking, but now they can make more money on one acre properly tended to berries than they had before on a whole farm.
Berry field and pickers, Marble, Alabama.
A group of berry pickers.