Some time afterwards, I stated this case to a loading educator of negroes, a man widely recognized as one of the best friends of the race.
“Do you think,” I asked him, “that these girls could not safely have gone to school? Or was their parents’ action the result of groundless, or, at any rate, exaggerated, panic—as of one who should forbid his children to pass through a wood lest a tree should fall upon them?”
“It would depend on the district,” was the reply. “In some districts the girls could have gone to school safely enough; in others, no!”
This, I think, was a terrible admission; for, after all, a “safe” district can only be one in which no outrage has occurred; and that is no guarantee against its occurring to-morrow.[[4]] What father, what husband, is going to rest on such security?
Here, then, I was face to face with the most hideous factor in the problem—that which keeps popular sentiment in the South chronically inflamed and exasperated. Again and again, at every turn, I came upon it; not only in the shape of revolting stories, but in accounts of the constant and most burdensome precautions which the state of affairs imposes.
To give only one instance: I asked an American long resident in Havana whether there was any trouble of this nature in Cuba. “No,” he said, “practically none. It’s true that about a year ago a sort of half-witted black was accused of an outrage on a mulatto woman, and committed suicide in prison to escape the garotte; but I believe an American nigger has since confessed that he was the real culprit. It’s very different,” he went on, “in my native State, Louisiana. I have two sisters married there. The husband of one of them never dares to leave his home unless he takes his wife with him. The husband of the other is compelled to leave home for days at a time; but he keeps a loaded shot-gun in every room in the house, and he has made his wife practice till she is a very fair shot, both with gun and revolver. There isn’t a white man in the country districts that doesn’t take similar precautions.”
Think what it means to have this nightmare constantly present to the mind of every woman and girl of a community—at any rate in the country districts, and on the outskirts of the towns. |A Malign Enchantment.| No doubt the state of “nerves” it sets up is responsible for many errors and cruelties. Many attempted outrages may be purely imaginary. Negroes may have been lynched or shot down, not only for crimes they themselves did not commit, but for crimes that were never committed at all.[[5]] But there are quite enough authentic cases of crime—denied by nobody—to justify the horror of the South.[[6]] It is all very well to say that it is the precautions taken, and most of all the lynchings, that suggests the crime to vagrant, dissolute, drink-and-drug-ruined negroes. That is probably in great measure true—the evil moves in a vicious circle. But who or what is to break the circle of malign enchantment? Education? Yes, perhaps; but education is at best a slow process. I cannot to-day throw my revolver into the Mississippi because I hope that fifty years hence my grandson may have no use for it.
“During the war,” a very intelligent coloured man said to me, “the planters’ wives and children were left to the protection of the negroes. |Who is to Blame?| Not a single case of outrage occurred, and scarcely a case of theft or breach of trust. Had we been the lecherous brutes we are now supposed to be, we should have written the darkest page in history, and brought the Southern armies home to the defence of their own hearthstones.”
That is true. It is admitted on every hand that the conduct of the slaves during the war was, on the whole, excellent, and in many cases touchingly beautiful.[[7]] And therein lies, by the way, not, certainly, an apology for slavery, but a proof that its most melodramatic horrors were exceptional. But what matters the admission that the malignant and bestial negro did not exist forty years ago, if it has to be admitted in the same breath that he exists to-day?
What has bred him? Who is responsible for his existence? History may one day apportion the burden between the doctrinaire self-righteousness of the respectable North, the rascality of the “carpet-bag” politician, the stiff-necked pride of the South, and the vanity, the resentfulness, and the savagery of the negro himself. But what avails recrimination or apportionment of blame, while the monstrous evil—none the less monstrous because it necessarily awakens a morbid imagination on both sides—exists and calls aloud to be dealt with? While the relations of the two races remain as they are, there can be no doubt that an act of brutal lust often justifies itself to a semi-savage imagination as an act of war—a racial reprisal. And who shall say that a state of war does not exist?