Historical voices

The size and arrangements of a people’s homes are no unfair index of their condition.

The form and disposition of the laborers’ cabins throughout the Black Belt is to-day the same as in slavery days.

This is the direct heritage of the South from the wasteful economies of the slave régime; but it was emphasized and brought to a crisis by the Emancipation of the slaves.

The keynote of the Black Belt is debt; not commercial credit, but debt in the sense of continued inability on the part of the mass of the population to make income cover expense.

The country is rich, yet the people are poor.

All this we can only learn by intimate contact with the masses, and not by wholesale arguments covering millions separate in time and space, and differing widely in training and culture.

And yet how little we really know of these millions,—of their daily lives and longings, of their homely joys and sorrows, of their real shortcomings and the meaning of their crimes!

Or perhaps, having already reached conclusions in our own minds, we are loth to have them disturbed by facts.

It is so much easier to assume that we know it all.

We seldom study the condition of the Negro to-day honestly and carefully.

So the Negro forms to-day one of the chief figures in a great world-industry; and this, for its own sake, and in the light of historic interest, makes the field-hands of the cotton country worth studying.

So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.

For the hum of the cotton-mills is the newest and most significant thing in the New South to-day.

Then, too, there are fewer signs of a romantic past, and more of systematic modern land-grabbing and money-getting.

Beggars and vulgar speculators rose to rule over them, and their children went astray.

A revolution such as that of ’63 is a terrible thing; they that rose rich in the morning often slept in paupers’ beds.

Sad and bitter tales lie hidden back of those white doors,—tales of poverty, of struggle, of disappointment.

I know not which are the more touching,—such old empty houses, or the homes of the masters’ sons.

Careless ignorance and laziness here, fierce hate and vindictiveness there;—these are the extremes of the Negro problem which we met that day, and we scarce knew which we preferred.

As it is, he is hopelessly in debt, disappointed, and embittered.

Forty-five years he had labored on this farm, beginning with nothing, and still having nothing.

At best, the natural good-nature is edged with complaint or has changed into sullenness and gloom.

There is little of the joyous abandon and playfulness which we are wont to associate with the plantation Negro.

They are not happy, these black men whom we meet throughout this region.