Thus early did I learn that no two men can talk to you about the South without flatly contradicting each other.
It was evident that my plan must be simply to gather views and impressions as I went along, and trust to sifting and co-ordinating them later.
An invitation, equivalent to a command, called me to Washington. |Nearing the Colour-line.| For a whole day my slow train dragged wearily through Northern Ohio; and in the course of that day two young couples in succession got into my car, who interested me not a little. In each case it seemed to me that the girl had a streak of black blood in her, while the young man was in each case unimpeachably white. As to one of the girls, I was practically certain; as to the other I may have been mistaken. Her features were aquiline and she was uncommonly handsome; but the tint of her skin, and more especially of her eyeballs, strongly suggested an African strain. Both girls were lively, intelligent, well-spoken, well-dressed, well-mannered—distinctly superior, one would have said, to the commonplace youths by whom they were accompanied. Yet I felt pretty certain that a few hours’ travel would have taken them into regions where they would be forbidden by law to sit in the same railroad-car, and where marriage between them would be illegal.[[1]]
At any rate, even supposing that in these particular cases my conjecture was mistaken, it was not on the face of it improbable. On the other side of the Ohio River, these girls would have had, so to speak, to clear themselves of the suspicion of African blood, else any association on equal terms between them and their male companions would have been regarded as an outrage. This seemed a senseless and barbarous state of affairs. But I was there to observe, not (as yet) to form conclusions; and I kept my mind open, wondering whether, in the coming weeks, I should discover any reason or excuse for the apparent barbarism.
In Indiana, rain; in Ohio, torrents; at Pittsburg, a deluge. But when I awaken next morning, just on Mason and Dixon’s line, the sun is shining on the woods of Maryland, and I feel at once that the South and the spring are here. |“Summer is i-cumen in.”| These spring coppices are far richer in colour than any of our English woods. They run the whole gamut of green, from the blue-green of the pine to the silver-green of the poplar and the gold-green of the birch; and the greens are freely interspersed with red and yellow foliage, and with white and pink blossoms. The red is that of the maple, whose blush at birth is almost as vivid as its flush in death.
The new Union Station at Washington is a vast and grandiose palace of shining white. Its “concourse” (a new American word for the central hall of a station) seems a really impressive piece of architecture. But it is a Sabbath Day’s journey from the platforms to the cabs; and the porters seem to be making a Sabbath Day of it, for I cannot find a single one. Let me not embark, however, on the endless story of a traveller’s tribulations. Every country has its own inconveniences, and recriminations are not only idle but mischievous.
The city of Washington is one great sea of exquisite green, out of which the buildings rise like marble rocks and islands. Yes, I am in the South; the leafless elms of New England and the shrewd, bracing blasts of New York are left behind.
And this day of sunshine was the first of many days. Save for a few thunder-showers, the South was to be all sunshine for me.
And with the sunshine—the Negro. Here he is in his thousands, and in his deepest dye. |A Question of Elbow-room.| In the North one sees him now and then, but he is swamped and submerged in the crowds of the great cities. To be very clearly conscious of his presence you must go to special quarters of New York or Chicago. “Coloured persons” (seldom pure blacks) are waiters at hotels and clubs, but no longer at the best hotels and clubs. The Pullman porter is always coloured; so are most, if not all, of the ordinary railway porters—when there are any. But “at the North” (as they say here) you have to go out of your way to find any problem in the negro. The black strand in the web of life is not yet particularly prominent—whatever it may be destined to become.
But here in Washington the web of life is a chequer of black-and-white—a shepherd’s tartan, I think they call it. In 1900 there were over 85,000 negroes in the city—now there must be at least 100,000, in a total population of considerably under a quarter of a million, or something like the population of Nottingham.