I LOOK AT THE OLD SOUTH Across the entire collection, but most acutely here in “Gone with the Wind,” Brown poses American history, particularly the history of the South, as the most deeply conflicted issue vexing American civic and cultural life. Referencing with irony Margaret Mitchell and her romanticized treatment of the antebellum South, the very title of the section suggests the ongoing presence of that mythologized past, as well as its obsolescence. “Gone with the Wind” opens with Brown’s lonely traveler, ostensibly Brown himself, visiting monuments and sites dedicated to the Old South, musing over what he sees, and reflecting on the antebellum period and its effects on his own time. This persona of the itinerant reflective witness, both a part of and apart from the South, sets the tone and tenor of this deeply critical look at the past and possibilities for the future in the South.
For the entire decade of the 1930s, Brown was preoccupied with countering mythologizers’ blind nostalgia for the Old South. I’ll Take My Stand, published in 1930, was a call on the part of Vanderbilt intellectuals for the South to return to its agrarian, antebellum roots. Guidebooks to the Southern states written under the auspices of the Federal Writers’ Project were filled with willful distortions (which Brown labored to correct through his work with the FWP). And the novel Gone with the Wind, published in 1936, met with enormous popularity, as did its film version in 1939. Brown saw all these as desperate measures that betrayed the utter ruin of a romantic past that never was and yet demonstrated the seemingly endless resilience of the mythology. More to the point, the romance represented by Southern mansions and monuments to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson perpetuates a history largely defined by the subordination of blacks. If African Americans appear at all in the mythology, they appear in the role of service, their being reduced to an appendage in myths unwilling or unable to conceive of black being in and of itself.
“I Look at the Old South” opens the section by announcing Brown’s deep ambivalence toward the South and its racialized past by recording his impressions of visits to historical sites in the South, especially in Virginia. “Gone with What Wind” intensifies his scrutiny, as he focuses on Atlanta and its more recent past. “Symbol of the Old South” and “A Tour of History: Old New Orleans” continue this more concentrated look, reflecting on Natchez, Mississippi, and New Orleans, Louisiana, respectively. Moving to the lives and history unaccounted for in the romance of the Old South, “Gee’s Bend,” “Low Cotton,” and “Take Your Coat Off, Gene!” depict rural and small-town life in Georgia and Alabama from the perspective of the local folk. In a strikingly different vein, “Insurance Executive” and “Let’s Look at Your Base” take a critical look at black progress in what has been touted as the New South. Ending the section, “No Ties That Bind” returns to a sweeping overview of the South, past and present, again raising the question of historical record and thus the future for African Americans in this conflicted region. In the context of the late 1930s and early 1940s, “Gone with the Wind” looks back at a decade of economic deprivation seeking escape to a sanitized past free of economic or social strife. As Brown wanders through the ruin of latter-day romance, these resulting essays bear the weight of mythology.
I LOOK AT THE OLD SOUTH I am not much of a sightseer, but since I was born and bred in Washington, I know my share of monuments and memorials. There are some that call up for me the antebellum and Civil War past: the old homes of Georgetown ranging from such beauties as Dumbarton Oaks to the cramped brick houses hugging the sidewalks; the groundworks of Fort Stevens where Lincoln curiously awaited Jubal Early’s raiders, Ford’s Theater where he was shot, all of the Lincolniana ending with the Lincoln Memorial. I have seen the old blank hulks, most of them gone now, that were said to have been slave jails for the thriving interstate slave traffic. One was across the street from the White House; another a stone’s throw from the Capitol. And I know neighboring Maryland: have followed the trail of John Wilkes Booth in the southern counties, have seen the window from which legendary Barbara Freitchie challenged Stonewall’s army; and over where Maryland joins West Virginia, have stood truly moved before the scarred firehouse where the rifles of John Brown and his band of whites and Negroes spat angry defiance at the slave-power.
I know Arlington, too, where the stately Lee’s Mansion is supposed to introduce the Old South. I always found it difficult to fit this imitation Greek temple into the American past, finding it easier to associate the mansion with the nearby cemetery than to people; with Custises and Lees and their slave retinues. The slave quarters in the rear, even though belonging to George Washington’s adopted son and to Robert E. Lee, reminded me only of stables. Still they interested me more than the huge columns, the classic pediments, the charming furniture and chinaware. Mount Vernon struck me as more of a living place than Lee’s mansion. I know the other shrines of the George Washington country: Christ Church in Alexandria and the restored church in Pohick where Washington attended services; the markers showing the taverns where Washington took his welcome grog; and the Rappahanock across which he threw a silver dollar to show the power of his arm. And I have seen Jefferson’s Monticello, crowning the mountain, and at the University of Virginia have strolled beside the serpentine wall along the Long Walk to the Rotunda, seeing the realization in masonry of another Jefferson dream. And I have seen James Madison’s graceful Montpelier and James Monroe’s more modest Ash Lawn, set in a frame of green.
Fredericksburg boasts not only the colonial homes and taverns, but also the slave-block, used by the belles to mount their steeds before taking a gallop, and by the slaves who were to be graded before being sold South. The slave-block was for a long time more cherished than the neighboring law office of James Monroe, a small shabby house owned and dwelt in by Negroes and therefore allowed to fall into decay. Negroes still live in it, faithfully guarding the Louis XVI furniture, the desk where the Monroe Doctrine was composed, and the dispatch box that Monroe carried while dickering for the Louisiana Territory.
From Fredericksburg through Richmond, west to Williamsburg, south to Petersburg, the roads ran through much fought over, bloody ground. I looked at the relics in the National Park Museum, and at the markers recalling Sunken Road, the Bloody Angle, Seven Pines, Malvern Hill, the Wilderness to the west, Cold Harbor to the east; the death place of Stonewall Jackson, the Yellow Tavern near which Jeb Stuart was fatally wounded; and the rivers—North Anna, South Anna, Chickahominy—that once ran red. Here Lee, here Grant, and beyond Richmond toward Williamsburg, here Lafayette, here Cornwallis did thus and so. The markers reeled off the information like a rapid history survey.
With a sense of duty more than zeal, in Richmond I visited the Confederate shrine: the Capitol and the White House of the Confederacy, which has a room set apart for each seceding state, and guards the hallowed treasures of Lee’s coat and sword, Stonewall Jackson’s epaulettes and spurs, and Jeb Stuart’s plumed hat. But more than these mementos and the pseudo-classic buildings, it was a few unpretentiously beautiful homes, Glasgow House especially, that called up for me the graciousness that was the boast of old Richmond.
In that city I caught a sense of the irony of history on visiting Poe’s Shrine, with its collection of the poet’s belongings so carefully preserved now and the vast library of books written about him, which multiply a hundred fold the few books that the poet owned. The garden, with its ivied loggia, its well-tended flowers, and shaded walks about the fountain, was a shocking contrast to the place where Elizabeth Poe, his mother, died, which now stands an ugly and wretched shack in the slums of Sophie’s alley.
My friends in Richmond were uncertain whether or not I would be allowed to visit the famed manors and estates in the vicinity. Though most of them had lived in Richmond all of their lives, they had never seen Carter’s Grove, Westover, Berkley, and Shirley. They were not curious about them, nor did they see why I should be. Some of the grounds were open only during Garden Week anyway. Roscoe thought that Negroes probably weren’t wanted even then, since there were no facilities for segregation. He told how he and his party had been driven from the picnic grounds in restored Jamestown. “You should have come in a Dutch schooner, instead of that V-8,” somebody said.
So my sole view of the famous manors, where Virginia social life reached its peak, was obtained from the Charles City Ferry as it plied the broad James River. I have often ridden down the Pocahontas Trail to Williamsburg, but I never turned into the by-road that leads to the beautiful estates. When the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chartered the steamboat Robert E. Lee for a trip down the James River, I think we did not get down as far as Westover, and even so, my thoughts were not on the past that day. But I have seen enough of the manors and gardens of the Old Dominion not to feel at too great a loss. And of course I have seen Williamsburg.
The restoration of Williamsburg attracts thousands of tourists during Garden Week at the end of April. Rockefeller’s twenty million have re-created the old colonial capital as far as antiquarians, architects, engineers, and gardeners can do so. Replicas of the Capitol, the Governor’s Palace, Bruton Church and the other colonial buildings are faithful stage-props and sets for the departed drama. I strolled through the grounds of William and Mary College, seeing the restored original buildings. I belong to a fraternity that started at William and Mary—Phi Beta Kappa—but I didn’t look up the fraternity house. I probably would have had the wrong grip.
I could not recapture the past in Williamsburg. I confess that I was more struck by the engineering skill and the obvious expense than educated, as the philanthropist hoped, in what the period was like. The buildings are beautiful, the boxwood gardens are dreams. But it was Rockefeller rather than colonial governors about whom my thoughts centered. And I was inclined to agree with Frank Lloyd Wright’s caustic criticism of the architectural waste and misdirection. I could not take seriously the “atmospheric” business such as the hostesses in billowing hoopskirts and the Negro coachmen and footmen in sky-blue coats, cocked hats, knee-breeches, white stockings, and buckled shoes. I could not get the chance to talk to these eighteenth-century black ghosts. But in front of the colonial A&P store, I talked to a sharp-looking Negro who said that the coachman and foot-men had a hard time when they came back to colored Williamsburg wearing those breeches and stockings. Yessir, they certainly were low-rated at first. Negroes weren’t too enthusiastic about the project, he told me, except as it gave them jobs. A number of Negroes had owned their homes on the streets that were needed for the Restoration. The plan of “life tenures” by which the Restoration bought the property but allowed the seller to live out his life in the restored dwelling, without paying rent, didn’t hold for Negroes. Instead of getting life tenures, they were moved out. That told me more about the past than the beautiful colonial buildings did.
SISTER CITIES I have not been down to Charleston in Azalea time. Nor on any of my three trips have I climbed to the top of Charleston’s highest building to look down on the historic spots, which, the natives tell me, outnumber those to be seen from any similar vantage in America. But I am acquainted with some of the memorials to Charleston’s past: the long, double-humped Cooper River Bridge, venerable St. Philip’s Church, whose chimes cast into Confederate cannon, were never replaced; St. Michael’s Church, whose four-dialed clock in the steeple tells the time by which old Charlestonians go, regardless of what radio Bulova announces; the Old Exchange, the Dock Theatre, oldest playhouse in America. From East on High Battery, I have seen Fort Sumter, low-lying, surly in the gray distance. I have strolled the entire Battery and those other famed streets: Meeting, Broad, Church, King, Tradd, and Legare, which the natives defiantly pronounce Legree.
I remember the “single houses” set flush with the pavement, characteristically shouldering the street, fronting to the side as it were. Charlestonians told me how in this subtropical climate, galleries and piazzas were faced south to catch the winds from the sea. Like New Orleans, Charleston is a city of hidden gardens, walled in from the vulgar street. Sitting on their long piazzas, the aristocrats can revel over their flowers: wisteria, magnolias, azaleas in the spring; crepe myrtles, and oleanders in the summer; daffodils and camellia-japonicas in the fall and winter. I have seen several age-mellowed houses of the great: Miles Brewton’s Georgian masterpiece, the homes of William Rhett, John Rutledge, and Manigault; the Rainbow Row with its houses of varicolored pastel hues. Of the many examples of famous iron tracery, I especially remember “Sword Gates” with their scrolls, spears, swords, and cross, and the Sass Iron Gates, unbelievably delicate. Behind that wrought filigree I imagined Herbert Ravenal Sass, the contemporary author, lost in reveries of what he calls “The Golden Age of a region of romance . . . leisure, culture, in general a high sense of responsibility for a dependent, helpless race.” I thought how much a “helpless race” had brought to this civilization: the wealth came in large part from slave laborers in the indigo, rice, and cotton fields; and the beauty in large part from slave artisans, skillful beyond ordinary imagining in ironwork, bricklaying, carpentry, and gardening.
Charleston’s history cannot be confined to the big houses and families. The poorer houses, frame, brick, or cheap stucco, high and narrow with steep slate roofs, sharp gables, and chimney pots could tell of the old times, too, though maybe unconventionally. Ancient of ancients was Pink House, the cramped, steep tavern on a street whose cobblestones came from Europe as ballast in the sailing ships. Near at hand was the Old Slave Market, which the guidebook author, Thomas Petigree Lesesne, calls mythical since “nowhere in Charleston was there a constituted slave market for the public auctioning of blacks from Africa.” I could not quite get Mr. Lesesne’s drift, as the domestic slave-trade which he admits could have had use for a slave market too. At any rate, his authorities assure him that no slave trade flourished in Charleston. I wondered if his research included Frederic Bancrofts’s carefully documented Slave-Trading in the Old South, which lists so many of Charleston’s honored surnames as in the business of selling men and women.
A couple of blocks from the slave market in St. Philip’s Cemetery is the grave of John Calhoun. Not too far away, the Shaw Memorial School recalls another kind of hero, the young Massachusetts colonel who died leading his Negro regiment against Fort Wagner on Morris Island. Shaw’s family purchased the land and built the school. Since 1874 it has been part of the city school system, an example, according to the guidebook, of “Charleston’s tolerance as a community.” Talks with some old Charlestonians, Negro and white, convinced me that the city had examples of tolerance more real than that.
Noted for its fine houses, Charleston is also noted for its alleys. In backyards of the old homes, Negro servants still live in quarters a century old. Some white outsiders, enraptured by the romance of Charleston, rent abandoned servants’ quarters and even alley houses, traditionally the Negroes’. Most famous of Charleston’s alleys is of course Catfish Row. The guidebook told me that Du Bose Heyward got his suggestions from Cabbage Row, a renovated slum, which he renamed. After seeing the original, I understand the creativeness of Heyward and Mamoulian. A Negro friend informed me that there was a real Catfish Row, though not the setting that suggested the novel, but that Porgy’s true haunts were in Cool Blow, another kind of slum. The guidebook warns: “It would spoil a reading of ‘Porgy’ to discuss him at length.” From certain other hints I gather that Heyward created a new person out of an actual character whose real life might have jarred the romance. Heyward was within his artistic rights; he was not recording local history, and he wrote a fine novel. But the authentic Porgy now teases my curiosity.
I never got to see the world famous Cypress and Magnolia Gardens. But I saw enough columns, galleries, walled gardens, wrought-iron gates, mellow hued bricks and stucco, fan-lights, doorways, stairwells, flowers and trees, to convince me of the grace and leisure that the lords of the Low Country enjoyed years ago. I could understand how, cut off from the main arteries of trade, Charleston might grow old too fast. When I had to enter and leave Charleston from a station in North Charleston, miles away from the city proper, I learned that out of Charleston no road can lead southward. When I saw the difficult engineering problems posed by the Ashley River and Cooper River Bridges, I understood that the isolation was not only voluntary, but also enforced by geography. A symbol of the encroaching present is the village of Cool Blow, once the summering resort of planters, now a set of ramshackly tenement houses, with galleries and stairways swarming with Negroes, hard-driven for the petty rent. I knew the stories of how families richer in pride than purse have been forced to trade on the ancient glory.
The last time I saw Charleston it was astir with the bustle of World War II. Soldiers and sailors, laborers from the war plants, and farmhands from the Low Country plantations thronged King Street, with money in their pockets. Charleston was changing, trade was booming, but the natives I talked with were sad. Tourists were one thing, but these outsiders were another and, spending or not, were unwanted. Some of the outsiders returned the hostility. One night, after the theaters let out, I walked behind two sailors and heard their talk as they tried to pick up two Charleston girls. When they were rebuffed, they crossed the narrow street. One yelled over his shoulder: “And I hope you stay in Charleston until you die!” He spoke it as a dire curse, in what sounded to me like a Jersey accent.
Savannah is much like her elder sister, Charleston; larger, more with an eye to the main chance, but less assured, now clinging to the past and now striving to be up-to-date. Upon both is the stamp of the Low Country; the state boundary, the Savannah River, is no real separating line. Savannah and Charleston are more akin than Charleston is to Columbia or Savannah to Atlanta. I understand that neither city cares much for the kinship to be stressed, but to a stranger it is apparent in the grace and pride and mellowness.
I thought of these resemblances, strolling down Bull Street past the old buildings and through the flowered squares. Bull Street, named after the city planner, William Bull, is the central axis of a city that is geometrically laid off, in contrast to Charleston’s crowded jumble. The long straight street broadens at regular intervals into rectangular parks where, the natives told me, from the wealth of magnolias, oleanders, gardenias, roses, and azaleas, some flowers would be found in bloom every day of the year. I remember the cypress, palmettos, and live-oaks, the shrubs aflame with color. These parks were originally intended for defense against the Indians; when I was there last, they were trysting places for soldiers on leave and their sweethearts, and for brown nursemaids with their flaxen-haired charges. At Forsyth Square is one of the most elaborate monuments to the Confederate Soldier that I saw in all the South. Around its base I followed a Negro private first class with a good-looking brown girl on each arm, a trio quite interested in the busts of the Confederate generals.
Oglethorpe is the chief hero of Savannah’s past. The memorials of colonial and Revolutionary times seem more numerous than those of the Civil War. Out of its eighteenth century Savannah resurrects a pirate, John Flint, the model for Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and three preachers, John Wesley, Charles Wesley, and George Whitefield, whose shouting Methodism is being continued with a vengeance by the Savannah worshippers of Father Divine and Daddy Grace. George Washington, Lafayette, Mad Anthony Wayne, Count Polaski, and Nathanael Greene were tied to the city’s part in the Revolution. I saw the monument to the Revolutionary hero Sergeant William Jasper, but I found no mention in any of the guidebooks of the black Haitian soldiers, Henri Christophe among them, who were part of Count d’Estaing’s French forces that attacked the British captors of the city. I saw the boulder where the Yamacraw chief Tomochichi signed the pact with Oglethorpe, promising friendship to the forlorn settlers. And I saw Yamacraw, the site of the tribe’s village. A new highway cuts through and a few houses have been added to the section, but the over-crowded, broken-down tenements are still there to recall the time when Yamacraw was notorious as one of America’s worst Negro slums.
Charleston disdains Savannah, I have been told, because of its earliest settlers, to whom even the rector of Savannah’s Christ Church said, “My poor friends . . . you are the scum of the earth.” If convicts, these city fathers were not criminals; they came to Georgia from debtors’ prisons and almshouses, not from robbers’ cells or murderers’ row. Nevertheless, the guidebooks veer somewhat from these redemptioners; more fitting ancestors seem to be tough Jacobite Highlanders, a few wealthy Englishmen on the make, and French royalist refugees from Santo Domingo. One of the wise features of the new settlement, the prohibition of slavery, lasted sixteen years. But though slavery was slow coming to Savannah, the African slave-trade lasted longest in this vicinity, for until just three years before the Civil War, slave-ships smuggled Africans along reed-hidden waterways into the coastal islands.
Once started, an aristocratic society soon flourished in Savannah, and is memorialized as devotedly as Charleston’s. I saw the famous buildings: Christ Church looking like a Greek Temple; the Savannah Theater, younger than Charleston’s Dock Theatre but still the oldest theater in continuous operation since it now runs motion pictures; Telfair Academy, formal and neoclassic; McIntosh House, the oldest brick house in Georgia; Pink House, much younger and more pompous than Charleston’s; and those houses pointed out as pure examples of Georgian, Regency, and Greek Revival styles. Three houses caught my fancy most. Wetter House, now a female orphanage, has balustrades whose cast iron work reminded me of New Orleans; Scarborough House, once typical Regency, now much altered, is a school for Negro children. I wonder what they feel when their history teacher tells them that the portico, arched windows and hall columns are as they were when President Monroe was a houseguest here on his visit to Savannah to inspect the first steamboat to cross the Atlantic Ocean. I saw the part-French, part-Victorian Meldrim House, headquarters for General Sherman, who composed here his telegram donating the city to General Grant as a Christmas present. And I also looked through the open gateway on State Street where the owner built a fine carriage house and servant quarters, hoping to build a fitting mansion in front of them. When he learned how far he had exceeded his budget, he decided to live in the carriage house instead.
Savannah lost some of its very old buildings by fire in the Civil War, and never had so many as Charleston. Like Charleston, Savannah boasts that its inability to build immediately after the Civil War saved it from the ginger-bread architecture of that period. Its characteristic houses with high basements, high stoops with double stairways leading from the sidewalk, and fine doorways to be entered at what is really the second floor, the fan transoms, brass knockers, iron handrails, balustrades, medallions, and other intricate wrought iron, make one realize how Thackeray, visiting it, as a lionized guest, could praise the comfort and civilization of this “tranquil old city, wide-streeted and tree planted.”
Savannah’s local historians do not point with as great pride to Oglethorpe’s opposition to slavery, as to the nearby plantation manors. I visited Wormsloe, so named for the silk worms that the founder hoped to cultivate, and its low-lying land. Old Negroes on the place knew my guide’s family, and I was therefore allowed to ramble through the grounds without even paying the dollar admission fee. Wormsloe is one of the few plantations in America still owned by the family to whom it was first granted. The rambling frame houses, much added to, looms a gray ghost among the aged trees. It is no mansion; the much later marble library building has the ornateness that the legend associates with the Old South. At the rear of the house are several walled gardens where the azaleas and camel-lias are famous attractions for tourists.
On many drives in the country around Savannah, I saw other homes down long tunnels formed by the boughs of live-oaks, shaggy with Spanish moss. Some were deserted, in yards overgrown with underbrush, playgrounds, my guide told me, for rabbits and even deer. But the reminders of slavery were not only those of grandeur. A few miles from Thunderbolt, where Georgia State College faces the present, is Lazarette, facing an ugly past. Here the slaves who became ill on the middle passage from Africa were quarantined. For the many that died, there was a convenient graveyard nearby.
Savannah’s past has not been so tied up with the planters as has Charleston’s. I find it symbolic that Hermitage, Savannah’s famed mansion, is no longer even a ghost, that Henry Ford has used its “Savannah Grey” brick for his home on the Ogeechee River, that two of its slave-huts, restored, are on display in Dearborn, Michigan, and that a large bag plant now occupies the site. The old red brick buildings of Factor’s Row, with their balconies overhanging the river front, and the iron bridges spanning the cobblestoned ramps slopping to the docks, are as typical of Savannah as the colonnaded facades and double stairways. Savannah has long boasted of its vast exports of naval stores, cotton, tobacco, sugar, lumber, and turpentine. It now has over two hundred varied industries.
But many traditionalists do not want the city to grow too commercial. They look, perhaps enviously, to Charleston rather than Atlanta. In the evenings in Savannah an odor hangs heavy on the air. The natives attribute its sourest components to the fertilizer factory, or to the pulp mills making paper and bags and rayon out of the slash pines of the region. I unwisely mentioned that I had heard that the smell came from the marshlands, after the tides ebbed. My host, a Negro of an old Savannah family, was vexed. The smell of the marshes, he told me, is a salty tang, bracing and pleasing, a distinctive excellence of the old Savannah. It is the newfangled factories that are smelling up the place.
GONE WITH WHAT WIND In Savannah, I had several talks with a patrician lady who was working on a book about coastal Negroes. Our talks led to recent fiction, finally to Gone with the Wind. She cavalierly dismissed my criticism that the novel was sinister in its implications about slavery and Reconstruction. “You musn’t be so sensitive,” she advised me. “That’s the way things were then. What I object to in Gone with the Wind is that Margaret Mitchell centers it about Atlanta and makes a heroine out of the upstart daughter of an Irish immigrant.”
To Savannah and Charleston, Atlanta is as much an upstart as Scarlett O’Hara. Atlanta is not bothered. After all, to a money-minded metropolis, the payoff is that Atlanta’s novel has outsold any about Charleston, Savannah, or Natchez. To the drugstore literary trade, Peachtree Street has become more famous than Savannah’s Bull Street and Charleston’s Battery. It was from shops near Five Points that the craze for antebellum hats and frocks (somewhat streamlined, of course) swept the nation. As the pert hussy, Scarlett, strode brazenly past her more retiring older cousins, so Atlanta. From low beginnings as Marthasville, Atlanta became the industrial capital of the confederacy, and is now capital of the largest state east of the Mississippi and the busiest railroad center in the South: “Look, we have come a long way, in spite of fire, hurricane, or Sherman!”
True to its go-getting spirit, Atlanta is not so enamored of the past as other cities. Sherman’s attacking and Hood’s departing armies (forerunning the “scorched earth” tactics) rid the city of what antebellum mansions it had. I saw decrepit houses, taller than the surrounding Negro slums but no prouder. They may have looked antebellum, but they merely aged too soon. The fancy scrolls and curleycews on their porches and gables dated from the General Grant period. Their favorite gray was overcast with soot from the soft coal burned in Atlanta’s furnaces. The elegant Southern style manor-houses, my friends told me, were of the twentieth century, built by the Coca-Cola and other dynasties who lived in Druid Hills, or along those winding drives like Paces Ferry Road, with strips of rolling woodland shutting out the prying passers-by. Statues of Henry Grady, advocate of an industrialized South, and of Tom Watson, populist champion, are respected in Atlanta as much as any statues of Confederate heroes. Both seemed to me to be caught in unfortunate poses: Grady looks as if he is reaching beneath his arm for a pistol as he faces the New South at Five Points, and Tom Watson as if he has just tossed a ringer in a game of horseshoes on the Capitol lawn.
But let no one be confused about Atlanta’s attachment to the Lost Cause. An anecdote tells of a woman in Ohio who was told that she could not collect insurance for her husband, because the policy did not pay off on suicides. She insisted that her husband had been murdered in Atlanta by parties unknown. “No, madame,” said the adjuster. “Anytime a Yankee enters an Atlanta hotel whistling ‘Marching through Georgia,’ we call that suicide.”
Markers and shafts of stone are not enough for Atlantans; they have a cyclorama of the Battle of Atlanta to recall the Lost Cause. With two friends, I visited the Cyclorama Building, a white terra cotta building with tall columns, set in Grant Park (named for a Confederate Colonel, not the General). At the rear of the building is the Rotunda, where in spite of the preview descriptions that I had heard, I was startled by the painting. It is 400 feet in circumference, fifty feet in height and nine tons in weight, the sole survivor of three Civil War cycloramas painted by a staff of German artists. In 1937, professional painters and sculptors continued the picture into the forty foot space between the circling canvas and the central platform. On this platform, reached through a tunnel and a stairway, observers could start anywhere, follow the vast canvas around, and return to the starting point. They could look into the muzzle of breechloaders, into the fixed glaring eyes of a charging Rebel, could almost reach over to parry the rifle-stock and bayonet being thrust at them. The plaster soldiers range from four feet to twenty-two inches, but so marvelous is the scaling for perspective that they look life-size. Clubbing, stabbing, shooting, yelling, dying soldiers, with bright red blood splashing their dusty blue and gray uniforms; corpses of men and horses, shell-shattered tree trunks, high-reaching Georgia pines, patches of bushes, weeds, and grass, log fences, cotton-bale barricades, wagon wheels, cannon and rifle smoke looking like bolls and wisps of cotton; guns jetting flame; all are done with immense realism.
My friend Anne, who directs dramatics, said briefly, “Belasco.” Dickie, our companion, was carrying a chip on each shoulder, and wise-cracked not too softly as we slowly circled the platform. But even Dickie could smell out no particular Rebel bias in the lecturer’s spiel. The lecturer, young, bespectacled, and Phi Beta Kappa, rattled off the information factually, fully, and a bit drily, as Dickie, a good actor but no historian, insisted. I told Dickie that he had probably been giving the same talk for years. I have wondered since, if after seeing the smoke-filled scenery of another kind of warfare in France, Dickie has ever thought back upon this recreated Civil War battle.
The painters and sculptors arrested one crucial moment in the important fighting around Atlanta. It was probably as close to the actuality as memory and photography could get—from the beleaguered Hurt House, red-bricked and spindly-columned, to the railroad painted on the canvas and then running a spur of real, though scaled-down rails, spikes, and ties across the field, to the picture on the other side. This railroad was a key point in this part of the battle. In the far haze are the city of Atlanta and Stone Mountain. Gone with the Wind has preserved on celluloid the scene of this furious defense of Hurt House, with the Confederates firing from behind cotton bales. It is likely that the paint and plaster of the cyclorama will outlast the celluloid. The amazing realism was produced not only by the artists’ meticulous workmanship and knowledge of color, perspective, and lighting, but also by other factors like the tons of vari-hued Georgia clay which were packed into the field upon which one might jump from the observation platform. The blue or gray-clad figures—whether plaster, sculpture, or painted—look like living, breathing men; certainly at first glance they do. For some reason I did not care much for Old Abe, the Yankee eagle, fixed high above and trying to out scream the busting shrapnel. Otherwise, the Germans wanted thorough realism and they got thorough realism. A Confederate soldier charges a Yankee, both red-faced and moustachioed, grimy and sweaty, their uniforms caked with red clay, flecked with blood, their shoes worn out and muddy. Looked at too closely they seemed stiff and artificial, a bit like wax-works, as painted statuary always seems to do. Still I thought of Keats and the Grecian Urn. These warriors were fixed for centuries, I surmised, in murderous enmity.
Forever will they fight, and the guides drone on. I murmured to Anne. “Awful,” she said. I did not know whether she was rebuking my bad line, or dreading the bad moral. But I drew no moral; the moral of permanent sectional estrangement is one that, Legend or no Legend, I refuse to accept.
Dickie was grumpy as we walked through the tall columns. “It’s a tourist’s curiosity. When it’s no longer a shrine, and doesn’t make money, it will close up,” he said hopefully. I thought it would be a civic pride of Atlanta for a long time to come.
But if the plaster and canvas of the cyclorama fade, are destroyed, or are shut away, as permanent a memorial as man’s ingenuity can devise has been planned for the granite of Stone Mountain. Of my several trips to Stone Mountain, the one that I best remember is the first, when I went with Mac, Windy, and Red. Mac wanted to see it, Connecticut Yankee that he was; Windy, a native Atlantan, had never seen it and did not want us Northern Negroes to have anything on him; Red went along for the ride, frankly indifferent. He had seen Stone Mountain from the Seaboard Railroad and that was close enough for him. “We couldn’t get away from it. Looked like it was trying to keep up with the engine.” I remembered how the Seaboard curved around it, keeping it in view for a long time.
Beyond Decatur, Stone Mountain hove into view, a gray bulge jutting out from the flat plain. “The Appalachians ran off and left it here,” said Windy. From the curving roads we got different views: now of a fairly easy parabolic slope, but more often of a solid greenish gray wall. As we got close to it, we saw the glaring, light smooth gray expanse, without tree, shrub, or grass on its face.
We drove behind a small frame tourist shop and museum. Among the few natives and the tourists, Mac’s new car and the four Negroes who got out did not occasion much interest, certainly no more than the Connecticut license plate. Our money was welcome in the store; descendants of slaves or not, if we wanted to buy the smoothed off blocks of granite with stickers of Lee, his entourage and the stars and bars on them, it was our own lookout. Other knick-knacks—tiny bales of cotton and little brown jugs—had Stone Mountain lettered on them. I bought a slab of granite, decorated with Lee and his generals, for a paper weight. Red bought up all the postcards that showed a pickaninny immersing his grinning mouth in a hunk of watermelon. He intended sending them to Harlem, he said, loud enough for the quizzical cracker behind the counter to hear him. But we knew better; he was taking as many out of circulation as he could.
Each of us got a Coke or Dr. Pepper to help against the scorching heat. Uncertain of the etiquette, Windy stood in the doorway, one foot over the threshold, one foot in, good interracialist that he was. Mac, Red, and I drank ours in the store. Nobody seemed to mind. We scratched our names with a faulty pen on the visitor’s book, Red writing his with a flourish and, unfortunately, a blot.
Then we went out to see the mountain. It was, of course, stupendous. On the sheer face of it, we saw Robert E. Lee on Traveller, the outlined face of Jefferson Davis, and behind them Stonewall Jackson. I had heard in Atlanta that a breakfast party had been held on Lee’s shoulder at the unveiling ceremony, that from the crown of Lee’s hat to Traveller’s hoof was the height of a ten story building. But the stickers and the picture postcards differed greatly from the dim scratching that showed on the face of the mountain. The likenesses were there: the Greek God Lee; Jefferson Davis, ascetic, stiffly proud; and Stonewall, Old Testament prophet. I was ready to recognize the achievement of getting more than conventional approximation into this granite. The height of the sheer drop and the massiveness of that granite formation were impressive without any doubt. But the majesty of Borglum’s dream and Lukeman’s continuation of it affected me less than the other evidence of man’s handiwork there: the flimsy stairway and scaffolding and the spikes driven into the rock. I felt more sympathy for the men who had risked their lives toting dynamite and drills, timber and cement down those ladder-like stairs than I felt awe for the classic carving of the faces. It was so unfinished. A streak of rust ran down Traveller’s flank; other streaks stained with bright gray. There was a heap of rubble at the foot of the drop, huge chunks in reality, but ordinary slabs from where we stood. Gray dust seemed to hang over everything in that heat; it lay heavy on the trees that, tall as they were, seemed just a fringe at the foot of the mountain. Buzzards soared in the windless air, not over the crown of the mountain, but against its face, still far up, however, above the tops of the Georgia pines. I thought that the Memorial Association would dearly like to have those omens away.
When we had looked our fill, we started back to the car. Mac was missing. Red and I found him in the museum gift shoppe. Mac had discovered another car from Connecticut, and was standing at the souvenir counter talking easily with two white couples from New Haven. He had not known them before but he knew some of their friends, and they had heard of him. They started rattling off names. I was afraid they’d wind up in the Yale bowl, at the last Harvard-Yale game, so I butted in. The man behind the counter was still indifferent, but a few crackers in the corner were alert and glum.
I jogged Mac’s elbow. “O.K.,” he said, “I’ll be right out. Well, I’ll be seeing you folks. Be sure to tell Anne Driscoll that you saw Mac. It certainly was good seeing people from home.”
He shook hands all around, male and female.
“Folks from New Haven,” he said to us as we passed the glowering crackers. “They know a lot of folks I know. Fancy meeting them in Georgia.”
“Yes, at Stone Mountain,” Red said drily.
We found Windy sitting in the back seat of the Dodge. He had picked up my copy of The Undefeated by Gerald Johnson, which tells the story of Borglum’s carving, which was destroyed before this one of Lukeman’s took its place. “Gentlemen, I give you the Lost Cause,” he said. Then he intoned from the book:
It is a doomed army that marches across the hill, a doomed leader that sits his charge in the foreground. The battles toward which they march are to be lost battles, the flags that flaunt above them are to be trampled in bloody mire. Yet on they must go, for they are caught in that trap of destiny against which the gods themselves strive in vain.
“Oh, shut up, Windy,” said Red. Mac got in the car. “All those going back to Atlanta, get in. The rest of you can stay out here looking at the Lost Cause.”
We piled in; Mac started the car and we were off. He had hardly meshed the gears into second when we heard a yelling and a clatter. A jalopy, packed with the young crackers we had just left at the shop, rattled alongside for a while, then shot across the front bumper. One cracker yelled back at us, “Get off the road, niggers!” Mac threw on the brakes and turned sharp off the pike to the shoulder. He yelled, but the jalopy was gone in a flurry of gray dust.
“The bastards,” said Mac, slowly turning back onto the concrete.
“What do you mean, Lost Cause?” Red asked Windy. “How do you figure lost?”
I thought about this later, wondering since Stone Mountain Memorial is so unfinished how far the Lost Cause was truly lost. The United States Government accepted the memorial as a national undertaking, in the faith that idealization of Lee and Jefferson and other secessionists would make for union. Two Republican Congressmen sponsored the adoption and President Calvin Coolidge okayed an authorization to mint five million half-dollars to aid the project. These coins were to be sold by the Memorial Association at a hundred percent profit. Other vast sums were raised. But Stone Mountain Memorial is still far from the grandiose dreams. There were charges of fraud, continual bickering, misunderstanding, and buck-passing. Borglum destroyed his models and fled from Georgia into the mountains of North Carolina, where the Governor refused to extradite him. Borglum died embittered. Lukeman is now dead. The third sculptor, Julian Harris, has had to wait out the panic and the war years. But I am not sure that the tragicomic history of this memorial means that interest in the Lost Cause is in swift decline. Against the unfinished carvings must be set the fact that on the top of Stone Mountain, the new Ku Klux Klan sprang into being, with blazing crosses and all the fixings. And under whatever new disguises, in spirit if not in name, the Ku Klux Klan still thrives in Dixie.
For a gentler reminiscence of Atlanta’s past, I went out to see “Wren’s Nest,” along with Griff Davis, a young photographer. This modest, typical old West End home, with many gables and gingerbread ornamentation, is known as a Mecca for American schoolchildren and their teachers, who want to see where the kindly Joel Chandler Harris created Uncle Remus, Brer Rabbit, Brer Tortoise, and Sister Cow.
Well, so did I; so I rang the front door bell. A little flaxen-haired girl answered. In response to my request to go through the house, she stood there with her blue eyes wide and, like Uncle Remus’s Tar Baby, “she kept on sayin’ nothin’.” Then she skittered off. In a few minutes, her father, the caretaker, came to the door, hurriedly putting on a shirt.
I told him that we would like to visit the memorial. He started to open the screen door, and then noticed Griff. I had my hat on and he hadn’t looked closely at me, but Griff is brown.
“Who’s this boy?” he asked, staccato.
“He is Mr. Davis, of Atlanta University,” I answered slowly.
“No,” the man said. “Sorry, but I can’t let you all come in. The Association has told me not to let in the colored.”
I told him that I was writing a book, that at Harvard University in Massachusetts I had written research papers on Joel Chandler Harris, that I had a scholar’s interest in Harris and his contribution to American literature, that Griff, Mr. Davis, was a serious student of photography, attempting to make camera studies of authentic Americana. I knew I wasn’t going to get in, but I poured it on. I was thinking how the lonely lad, Joel, had hung around Negro cabins, none of them shut to him, listening to every wisp of talk, storing in his memory all the anecdotes and tricks of speech and song, piling up a rich compost as it were to produce those fine flowers that made his fame and fortune. So I poured it on. His mouth was hanging open when I stopped, and Griff was grinning.
“I didn’t make the rule,” he complained. “Far as I’m concerned, it wouldn’t make no difference. But the Association won’t stand for it. They’d have my job.”
He added that it would be all right to walk around the house, even to the gardens in the backyard. We declined the honor, but stopped at the pink-marble walk leading to the side of the house. Upon each paving stone is printed the name of a Georgia author: Augustus Longstreet, Frank Stanton, Sidney Lanier, Thomas Holly Chivers.
“Now, take Chivers,” I said pompously to Griff. The caretaker was on our heels, listening. “He was an unknown poet, of rare, eccentric genius, much like, and quite influential upon Edgar Allan Poe. People in Georgia called him crazy, but I do not know that he was any crazier than the rest of them.”
Griff turned to the caretaker, and asked, “I suppose it would be all right for me to take pictures?” The man thought it over, then, “I reckon so,” he grunted, and left. As rapidly as Griff focused the camera and worked those plates, he still could get only the front of Wren’s Nest and the capacious rear of the caretaker, scrambling up the steps.
SYMBOL OF THE OLD SOUTH I should see Natchez, I had been told, “where the Old South still lives.” Here, I learned from the guidebooks, more of the old plantation homes were still maintained than anywhere else; here “the leisurely charm of the Old South has lingered long after it was supplanted elsewhere by the grim efficiency of the twentieth century.”
My host and guide, bearing an honored French name, and as courteous as any Frenchman could be, knew his native Natchez thoroughly. He started our touring at Natchez Bluffs, one of the best vantage points in the city, or for that matter in the United States, for impressive scenery. The first monument he showed me was not out of the past, however. It was the neat stone shaft erected by the city fathers in memory of the numerous Negroes who were killed in the notorious Natchez dancehall fire in 1940. Two of my host’s cousins were named on the crowded bronze plaque.
From that grim reminder of our times we turned to the river view. The cluster of toy houses opposite formed the town Vidalia; stretching beyond it for miles I could see the flat plains of Louisiana. The Mississippi curves grandly at Natchez. My host pointed out the new cutaway that shortened the course of the river eighteen miles, an engineering feat, aiding flood control, lessening erosion, and inviting the renewed day of barge and steamboat traffic. My eyes followed the old course until it was lost in the blue mists; then I looked up the canal where it met the river again. The bluff on which we stood—one of a chain extending all the way to Vicksburg—had been background for much pageantry, I knew. Across the river on Louisiana sandbars, Natchez gentlemen had settled their points of honor with dueling pistols; around its swinging curve had steamed the floating palaces; and where that one rowboat seemed immovable, flatboatmen had roared their lusty way to New Orleans. I thought of the dandies and belles, the gamblers and tricksters, quadroon fancy girls, and river rousters; I remembered Mike Fink, the greenhorn Mark Twain learning a trick or two of piloting at this wide curve, and Fate Marable beating out the new jazz on the piano while Louis Armstrong lifted his small gay horn toward the hill. From the bluffs this day the scene was quiet; the ferry was moored and the sawmill below, while busy, sent up only tiny puffs of smoke and noise.
We drove down a steep incline to Natchez-Under-the-Hill. On this narrow shelf of land there was little to see but old ramshackly houses, the saw-mill, and a few other industries. Year by year, the batture was cut away by the river; now, at last, it is protected but the history is gone. There was little to recall its wild past of lust and ferocity in the rake-hell dives, of sudden yells and curses in the dark. It was easy to imagine that dirks, or their twentieth-century descendants, could be wielded expertly now on some stranger, caught there alone after nightfall; but for all that it was merely a beaten-down slum for poor whites and Negroes, exiles now as always from the glamour of the hill above. It was hard to imagine the flat-boats tied up to the bank in long rows while the half-alligator, half-men swarmed over the sides to the brothels and saloons. Time, tornadoes, and the river had washed away this indisputable part of the Old South as effectively as the romancers expunged it from the Legend.
But the river has been no kinder to the glamour of Under-the-Hill. The century old Magnolia Vale is settling too, with famed gardens of boxwood hedge and gardenias and japonicas that the travelers admired from the steamboat decks. On the hill, however, preservation, restoration, and embellishment of the Old South has been a flourishing business. Showing me Connelly’s Tavern on Ellicott Hill, my guide told me that Aaron Burr prepared his defense in one of its rooms; he rolled off the name of Blennerhasset so easily that I was ashamed of my ignorance. We looked at King’s Tavern, a sturdy timber “blockhouse,” considered to be the oldest building in the section, with its heavy door pock-marked with bullet holes. Both taverns were simple and unpretentious, obviously built to last, but undistinguished beside the great houses.
I noticed the many styles of these: the Greek revival of Choctaw, the “grand manner” of Dunleith, the “Southern Planter” style of The Briers, and what I learned was the Irish Manor style of Cherokee. I saw so many that a welter of impressions remained with me rather than clear-cut distinctions. But I remember the exceeding beauty of Dunleith, set back in a grove of beautiful oaks, its tall white columns two stories high, spaced around the railed-in galleries. Variations in the columns struck my untutored eye; D’Evereux, a late Greek revival, had massive fluted columns across its white front; Melrose has four columns framing its doorway; the Linden has many slender columns across an admirably wide porch. I was less struck by Dunleith, D’Evereux, and the classics, however, than by some of the other homes. The “grand manner” was beautiful, but it had no element of strangeness in it; I had been here before, I felt. I learned why later: D’Evereux, for instance, was used by Hollywood for the picture “Heart of Maryland.” I had certainly been surprised when I first saw that picture, since I had been brought up in the heart of Maryland. I realized how the Legend, by using them over and over, really did injustice to the undoubted beauty of such mansions as these. D’Evereux, Dunleith, Belmont, Melrose, Auburn, Monteigne, Stanton Hall, and the few others were never common in the past; they should be left as they were: exceptional magnificence that briefly was achieved in those flush times along the Mississippi when the planters’ wealth and the architects’ genius were happily met.
The unpretentious “Southern Planter” style, which has so many representatives in Natchez, struck me as more significant. I could believe that people lived in these homes; I had wondered just what kind of life could go on in the Greek temples, the colonnaded museums. Cottage Gardens, Glenfield, Hope Farm, The Burn, and The Briers, birthplace of Jefferson Davis’s wife, Varina Howells, are charming examples of these story and a half dwellings, whose beauty is no less sure for being modest rather than grand. Here are verandas instead of porticoes, wooden pillars instead of Greek columns, steeply sloping instead of flat roofs. Some of the antebellum houses that I saw—Belvidere and Hawthorne, for instance—seemed definitely of our own times.
I saw the famed fanlights and classic doorways, the well-tended lawns and profuse gardens, the delicate grill work, and I realized that they deserved even the rhapsodies of the guidebook poets. But I had to take on faith the descriptions of the marble mantels, the spiral stairways, the massive poster beds, the Hepplewhite and Sheraton, the serving table “from the Duke of Devonshire,” the mahogany and rosewood furnishings, the china and silver, the handmade wax fruit under a glass globe, all the luxury that made Joseph Hergesheimer nearly swoon.
All of the classic doorways were not closed to me. Stanton Hall, for instance, as elegant and imposing as any, is open to the public, and in Natchez I could qualify as a member of the public. My host informed me that it was possible to enter some of the other mansions, and his mother, quite informed on the whole business, assured me that such was true. But I stayed outside. I knew in general what I would find. And I felt more in line with history, staying outside.
Later I thumbed through the picture books of Natchez. The hoopskirted belles posed on the verandas of Connelly’s Tavern, or sitting at a spinning wheel, or standing framed in the beautiful doorways, seemed doll-like and unconvincing. The Confederate ball that the Pilgrimage held annually also seemed like play-acting; I could not take it any more seriously than I could the singing of the Negroes who needed dimes and quarters for the shoes, robes and harps they sang about. These brought back no history to me. Tourists are regaled with the tragedy of Longwood. The story goes that at the call to arms of the Civil War the workers left their tools where they fell. Now the curious can see, for a price, the paint brushes stuck in paint that has hardened in the seventy-five years, the saws and hammers and nails lying where they were abandoned. The workers were in one big hurry, certainly. Treasured as a symbol of the shocking ending of the ante-bellum dream, Longwood strikes me instead as a symbol of the determination to cling to the exact past, regardless of absurdity. From the pictures, Longwood is pompous and ugly; if the interior matched the completed exterior, the workmen should have left earlier.
The society matrons and belles in flowing dimity and muslin representing the grand dames of the past, are of course more beautiful than Longwood. But they can bring back little of the past even to the unprejudiced. Quite as many of the old mansions are owned by newcomers as by members of the original families, and some of the owners are even Yankees. Nor do the participants in the Pilgrimage Week have their eyes set backward at the phantom past; many are in all likelihood concerned with the urgent present. In Deep South, the first rate cultural study by the Davises and Gardners, I read that membership in the Natchez Historical Club is a rather “hard nut for the upper-middle-class woman to crack.” In lieu of membership, these women offer their services as guides, or their homes as rooming houses for visitors. Sometimes they serve meals with Negro servants in traditional antebellum costumes. Some even become assistant hostesses in an “old home,” wearing hoopskirts for a week, and lecturing on history and architecture.
But there is more than prestige involved. The connection of pageantry and cash, which should never be forgotten in considering the Old South, is here too. The cleavage in the Garden Club was well covered a few years ago in Southern newspapers, and my host’s mother added details, siding with the older group, the seceders. The first club had set aside one-third of the proceeds from the annual week to the club for preservation, beautification, and restoration of the homes and two-thirds to the homeowners; the new Pilgrimage Garden Club gave three-fourths of the net to the home owners and one-fourth to civic purposes. Snobbishness, or if you will, family pride, also entered into the angry controversy. At any rate, there are two pilgrimages now, each one to its own preserves of ante-bellum houses.
Tourists to Natchez are guided also to the inglorious past, to the shameful and revolting Goat Castle where tourists can hear an eccentric hermit play his antique piano for twenty-five cents. The once fine mansion is in shambles, where chickens, ducks, geese, and goats have the run of the place. The curious visit the place in droves, since sex and murder and abnormality were played up when the old man stood trial for murder a few years ago. Goat Castle is the Gothic horror amidst the classic calm; the guidebooks are careful to state that the inmate’s father was a Yankee.
We drove up to the gate which had a sign on it: Keep Out. My host told me that we could get in easily enough, but I was uninterested. I merely wanted a good view of the house. I felt no tourist’s curiosity about the old man and his guardian; it seemed a bit obscene to ferret them out. Let them alone with their past, too.
What was the place of Negroes in this restoration; what was their role in the pageantry? I remember that the main highway skirted Dunleith, and then shortly afterwards passed a line of Negro shanties, well preserved and painted, but still shanties. Skilled Negro carpenters had built the glory crowing the hill; perhaps some of their descendants lived in the shacks at the bottom. Otherwise the role of Negroes was the expected one: they tended the gardens and the manors; during the Pilgrimage Weeks a few extras with good voices could sing spirituals in costume; a few servants could wait on the tourists, and a few mammies could prepare barbecue in the spacious grounds.
In the homes that were open all the time, faithful old retainers still served, with inverted pride in their quality white folks. I learned that for a long time the owners of Melrose took care of ancient ex-slaves whose primary duty was pulling the punka during meals. Most significant of the Legend, however, is the picture of Old Wash, the only Negro included in any of the guidebooks that I saw. His woe-begone face, the handkerchief wrapping his head, the worn hat, are used to illustrate a Natchez custom “of placing coins in a box for old darky beggars . . . a thoughtful, good-natured gesture to the needy Negro from his ‘white folks.’ Uncle Wash is a ‘regular customer on Penny Day.’ ” He may be free, he may be wretched, but the Old South looks out for its own; his needs will be cared for by the pennies.
The last Negro relic of the pageantry that I saw was very different from Old Wash. Outside of Natchez, as a come-on for tourists, is the Mammy Gas Station and Barbecue Stand. With clean-cut features, a trim waist, and an elegant hoopskirt, a tall, erect statue of a Mammy stands there, fronting the highway so proudly that her bandana seems out of place. My host explained why: the yarn goes that she was intended to be a Southern belle, but when the bodice was poured, the bust filled past all planning. Natchez objected to the breasts being so pendulous, and the statue’s complexion was colored to a deep chocolate. Hoopskirt and waist and features still belong to the belle, but it is a colored girl, Egyptian-like, who welcomes the tourists to Natchez and invites the white natives to barbecue. The skirts cover quite an expanse, and a dining room was built therein. It is said, however, that the place is not popular; that the doorway in the hoopskirt opens less and less frequently. Pageantry has not paid in this venture, and the crude monument may soon be destroyed.
In one antebellum home in the vicinity of Natchez, I was a guest, not a tourist. Its history held great interest, increased because it was of a kind omitted from the guidebooks. A Negro family, “people of color,” to use the distinction preferred around Natchez, owned this place. The father of the present owner had been thrifty, industrious and intelligent, and though a slave, had piled up a tidy sum, hoarding the dollars he earned by hiring himself out, until he finally had enough to buy himself. After the war, when the plantation was put up for auction, he outbid all others. It had been a rundown and mismanaged tract, but the new owner soon made a prosperous go of it. Making things click was no novelty to him. He had been a capable manager in another’s interest; now he used his brains and brawn for himself. It was not an instance of bottom rail on top; it was proof that this rail should never have been laid on the bottom.
As we crossed a rickety wooden bridge we got a full view of the house, set well back from the road. It was of the French Planter type, a story and a half tall with a gallery extending across the spacious front. The barnyard was a compact unit of barn and stables, slave kitchen, corncribs, tool buildings, and the rest. Ante-bellum in age, they were contemporary in use; they housed gleaming modern tools alongside slave heirlooms. Fat hogs browsed around the foot of fodder stacks or nursed the heap of pinders on the porch of the barn. Chickens and ducks were everywhere under foot; the son cracked his long whip, discouraging the brash young steers. A very old, very black woman, her teeth about gone, was sitting in a cane-bottomed rocker stripping peanuts from the vines. She was surly at first until, watching closely, she saw that her mistress was friendly to us. Then she opened up slightly. She was born on a neighboring plantation and had never been many miles from it.
She seemed as much a part of the history of the place as the substantial brick kitchen (the slave waiters had had to carry the trays up the long back stairs, no cooking in that house). Old iron utensils and other relics were still hanging there. There were several fine old trees, festooned with Spanish moss. A crumbling brick house well over a hundred yards away at the end of a dim patch, was pointed out as the antebellum toilet. An earlier curiosity was satisfied.
Our hostess was busy, but more glad to see us. An old friend of my guide, she conducted us graciously through the house. But I could see that her natural pride in antiques was mingled with the pressing problems of running this big place with little help. The plantation may no longer be as flourishing as once it was under the father, but the daughter seems to be doing as good a job as possible in a time when so many farmers are taking a rude beating.
Five long doors, one for each of the front rooms, let onto the broad veranda. The rooms were large and high-ceilinged, with floors and woodwork of cypress. There were many heirlooms: solid heavy furniture, old coins, really valuable pictures (our hostess rather indifferently mentioned how collectors plagued her for some of them). I was glad to see some old pictures of Negro Reconstruction legislators, and a bust of Frederick Douglass. I saw two fine old tester (teester) beds, quite the equal in age and craftsmanship, my guide told me, to more publicized beds in Natchez. And at last I saw a punka in action. As a youngster I had had the job of sweeping the flies away with a brash of leaves over my elders at meals, but here was the real thing. I gave the twine a slight pull and the graceful wooden sweep started swinging. In this high dining room it had kept the breeze and the flies from circulating over many different kinds of heads.
The back rooms, less spacious than the front but still good sized, had once opened on a minor veranda, but that was gone with the years. Whoever had built this place in the old days had certainly got himself a commodious, sturdy, dignified home. The builders had used the means close at hand; dowel pins, for instance, had been used for nails, but there was one bit of foreign luxury in the Italian marble steps to the veranda. A visitor had offered a tidy sum for this treasure, but our hostess told us she had preferred not to sell.
From the veranda the view was a grand one over the rolling hills, across the highways, to a narrow river, and brought up sharply by a sheer bluff. Cousins of the hostess owned a good-sized place over there. I imagined the old French-Negro-Indian patriarch sitting on the veranda in the cool of the evening looking over these wide acres. Once he had labored here; his kinsmen had been slaves here. Now it was his, fruit of his energy and saving.
One story of the house is that after the Civil War the family took in the old white ex-mistress of the plantation, since she had no place to go. It is not altogether a pretty story. Old mistis suffered a paralytic stroke and her ex-slaves and their children had to care for her. She sat there on the veranda in a large rocker, mute and drooling, but often attempting her former imperiousness. Once a young attendant, irritated at her lofty ways, boxed her ears. Perhaps they did take advantage of her defenselessness; perhaps there was callousness and even occasional cruelty. But they did feed her and shelter her in her weak old age. They did not put her out to starve. In short, they did to her what her grandfather allegedly had done to theirs, and what the Legend has boasted of as one of its graces.
A TOUR OF HISTORY: OLD NEW ORLEANS The stretch along the gulf from Pascagoula to Biloxi to Pass Christian to Bay St. Louis to Mulatto Bayou prepared me for New Orleans. Old French bungalows in shady thick gardens; the crosses and Catholic shrines; the shacks propped on stilts at the edge of the bays and bayous; the oyster shell roads bending into lush wildernesses where the tangled elephant-eared or lance-like plants showed all shades of green; cypress knees hunching swollen out of the muck; flowers delicately hued or like flame or startlingly white; sluggish bayous set in green frames; bearded water oaks and willows; straight long-leaf pines; palmettoes; the blue waters of the gulf, dazzling in the sunlight—all were fit settings for easy living Latins. The beauty of crepe-myrtles and magnolias belonged here, but so did the littered beaches, briny and tangy, smelling of fish at low tide. Old Spain was here—the hanging moss went by the name of “Spaniards beard,” and the yucca by the name of Spanish dagger. Old France was here in the houses, the cemeteries, and the people—Cajuns, Creole whites, Creole Negroes. It was hard to tell, looking at these olive, sloe-eyed brunettes, where one started and the other left off. The Indians had been here, leaving traces in the high cheek-bones and long, coarse, blue-black hair of many of the people, white and colored. But the Choctaws were gone; the grandsons of the Congo were here to stay.
From the singing river at Pascagoula to the stealthy Mulatto Bayou, from the drone and hiss of the breakers on the beach, or their slaps against the sea-wall, to the wind stirring in the pinetops, the refrain of the Gulf Coast seemed to be: “Tek yo’ time, mon ami, tek it easy.” The pinewoods give the turpentine and lumber; the swamps the game birds and beasts; scratch the black dirt a little so the yams, collards, and okra can grow; the close-by waters give the oysters, shrimps, flounders, and speckled sea trout; the deep waters give the Spanish mackerel, the pompano, and the lemonfish. So in comes the little money to make the pleasure, to make the good times, man. It was easy, traveling without purpose along the Gulf, to lose the perplexities of the present, to believe oneself back in a langorous timeless past. I was ready for the green city that Frenchmen, remembering Paris and Marseille, had created in Mediterranean America.
Her lovers have done well by New Orleans. Early grammarians criticized the city’s name “Nouvelle Orleans” for its feminine adjective; the Duc d’Orleans had most surely been a man. But it is a woman that the authors have written of New Orleans: Lyle Saxon as fabulous enchantress; George Washington Cable as a strange beauty, not without flashes of cruelty and morbidity; Lafcadio Hearn as an exotic mistress that he came to detest. Herbert Asbury has described her more gaily than his bishop grandfather would have approved as a harlot. Grace King praises her as an aristocratic grand dame. They all intrigue the imagination.
The first person I talked to in New Orleans disillusioned me. He was an Irish cabdriver. “Misterr,” he said in a rich brogue when I was expecting patois, “you arre in the sinkhole of the worrld.”
He did not mean that the city was low-lying, built up from swampland, nor that the day was steaming hot. His point he proved by a harangue on the current battle between the gangs led by Huey Long and the Mayor. Neither one, he said, was worth a continental damn. Not worth a breakage of the wind in a tropical storm (these were not exactly his words).
As he drove he beamed at my confusion over “uptown” and “downtown.” “It is a cockeyed city, mister,” he said. “What you strangers want to rememberr is: Uptown is downtown and vizy-verzy.”
After long figuring, I got used to going uptown or South, from Canal Street. But Canal Street does not run due East and West but southeast-northwest, so a large part of northern New Orleans is uptown too. Then there is the section known as “back of town,” that many visitors enter first. In the French Quarter corners are not identified as northeast or southwest, but as “uptown river” or “downtown lake” (that is, toward Lake Pontchartrain, which borders the city on the North). I often went uptown to the river, although in almost every other city that I know the river is downtown. But the Frenchmen were, as they boast, logical: I understand that the city sloped gently but definitely upward from Canal Street toward the southern levee. When the river is full, it is several feet higher than the city. The logic of geography, however, escaped me. New Orleans lies on the east bank of the Mississippi, but one ferry to Algiers, on the west bank, goes east. The bridge across the river slants southeast. The Mississippi runs northward alongside much of uptown New Orleans; it also runs south and east. Most of the city is enclosed by the river in a rough semicircle; the French Quarter—the oldest part—is on the crescent from which the city gets one of its nicknames. Knowledge of the snaking Mississippi and a look at the map will clear up some of the above confusion. After I had worked it out, however, I was still lost.
But an Irishman’s crusty garrulity and my slowness in catching on to the quirks of the layout did not make me believe that New Orleans was a crazy city. Instead I felt that the old Frenchmen planned the city the way they wanted it; their descendants for a long time ordered it the way they wanted. It was a city that just did not give a damn. Love me or leave me, cela ne fait rien. . . .
I liked that about it. And I enjoyed looking at the historic places of a city that had gone its own gay way under four different flags: those of France, Spain, the United States, and the Confederate States. A fifth flag would have flown over the Cabildo, but for the grace of God and Andrew Jackson’s battalions of Creole gentlemen, San Domingan refugees, Kentucky raftsmen, freemen of color, slaves, Tennessee sharpshooters, Baratarians, Lafittes’ buccaneers, and Choctaw Indians—a rabble of fighting fools.
So Jackson is one of the city’s heroes, certainly the chief American hero, commemorated more than Lee or Jefferson Davis. In Jackson Square I looked at the dour-faced hero, the new frontier issue of the medieval knight on his rearing charger, doffing his hat, as debonairly as a democrat could. The proud stance of his horse, I understand, is a sculptor’s achievement. No iron rod props this lunging steed; his own solid hindlegs support more than ten tons of bronze. Good horse, good rider. On the base of the statue General Ben Butler had cut the words: “The Union Must and Shall Be Preserved.” Local historians dislike this vandalism, another mark of the Beast. But I saw nothing wrong about the inscription: those were Jackson’s words, and they were good words. I know that Old Hickory was a slaveowner and from all reports a hard one; I know that like a typical frontiersman he was unjust to the Indians. But the Confederates cannot claim him. And I remembered with pleasure some other good words that he said. After the famous battle of New Orleans he spoke to his two Negro regiments:
I invited you to share in the perils and I divide the glory with your white countrymen. I expected much of you. . . . But you surpass my hopes. . . . The President of the United States shall be informed of your conduct . . . and the voice of the Representatives of the American nation shall applaud your valor, as your General now praises your ardor.
I got this out of Charles Rousseve’s The Negro in Louisiana, not from the many guidebooks to historic New Orleans that I thumbed through. I should like to see it engraved somewhere. Near the Pentagon Building maybe. Jackson is commemorated in several places. I noticed a big sign advertising the Jackson Brewing Co., and on the back pages of a folder dedicated to the history of the St. Louis Cathedral and the Ursulins Convent I read an advertisement: “JAX, Best Beer in Town.” (Though of the modern, this may give a clue to historic New Orleans also.) Jackson Square is much older than Old Hickory. As the Place d’Armes, it was the center of affairs of French and Spanish New Orleans. Here assembled the incoming shiploads of early settlers from France, some of them as sound and heroic as any pioneers have been. Many, however, as early historians attest with more Gallic frankness than their filial descendants, were decayed gentlemen, aristocrats who had run afoul of the law, and a goodly sprinkling of thieves, foot-pads, smugglers, confidence men, deserters, and pimps. Here also were gathered the “filles à la casset” girls approved by France as wives for the colonists and given une cassette of clothes and linen—truly a hope chest—as a parting dowry. There were also “filles de joie,” prostitutes sent over from the houses of correction in Paris. These were not given cassettes by the government, although they surely needed clothes and linen as badly as their respectable sisters. A scene in Manon Lescaut, the 18th century novel, shows the pretty grisette Manon and her chevalier about to leave for New Orleans exile. According to Prevost the girls “were fastened together in sixes by chains around the middle of the body.” Many of the girls were from hospitals and reformatories and some had been waylaid and kidnapped. They were shipped to America on a kind of middle passage for Caucasians. Like the early settlers from Africa, sometimes these girls revolted, attacking their guards. But once landed, they were grabbed up as quickly as the more respectable “casket” girls. Bienville had urged: “Send me wives for my Canadians, they are running in the woods after Indian girls.” They were probably chasing the few slave girls too. In 1724 Bienville had to forbid the marriage or concubinage of whites, freeborn or manumitted Negroes with slaves. “Casket” girls, or trollops, all got their men and were married with the blessing of the church. “This merchandise was soon disposed of, so great was the want of the country,” said city fathers, gratified.
Located at the heart of the French Quarter, or Vieux Carre (old square, meaning the old rectangular city), Jackson Square is a good place to start the round of historic spots. Facing the square are the St. Louis Cathedral, the Cabildo and the Presbytere, now housing the Louisiana Historical Museum. To the rear of the Cabildo are the old Spanish Arsenal and the site of the Calabozo (calaboose, prison). Thus, around Place d’Armes were built the institutions symbolizing civilization: the Church for worship, the Cabildo for government, the Calabozo for the sinners and law-breakers, and the Arsenal for war. The Cathedral still fills its early purpose, but the first building was destroyed by fire, and the second has been so repaired and altered that only the lower part remains as it was in 1794. The interior is ornate with frescoes, paintings, and statuary, too rich in color and meaning for my liking or understanding, an American correspondent, I imagine, to the medieval cathedrals. The Cabildo, a year younger, teaches history even in its architectural style, for Spanish-Moorish arches and French balconies are characteristic of it. Here was consummated the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson’s Folly then, Napoleon’s since. But a great deal of pleasanter history for the Creoles to contemplate had centered in the Cabildo before the Americans came.
I walked through the Quarters, hunting places that had housed such history. I saw where other needs than civic and religious were satisfied. Flanking Jackson Square on two sides are America’s oldest apartments, the Pontalba Buildings, whose galleries, extending over the sidewalk, are noted for graceful ironwork. Not far away—the entire Vieux Carre is only a dozen streets long by six or so wide, an oblong of less than a hundred squares—I saw the remodeled French Market, recreating the older style and probably the turmoil and smells on the former site.
I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say
Thirty days in the market, take him away,
Give him a new broom to sweep with, take him away.
Passing Antoine’s Restaurant, I read its advertisement in the tourist circular of “a particular atmosphere which enhances the artistically prepared dishes and develops to the highest degree the gastric fluids.” It was housed in a fittingly old building, but was younger than some other cafés in the quarter. On Royal Street I saw the Café des Exiles, where refugees from the French and San Domingan revolutions had done their plotting and drinking. On Royal too was Old Sazerac House, birthplace of the noted New Orleans cocktail. On Bourbon I found the Old Absinthe House. Noticing the coincidence, I marveled at the hardihood of the colonists.
On Bourbon also is the Blacksmith Shop where legend has it that the Lafitte brothers, master pirates, used an honorable craft as front for “blackbirding,” that is, the slave trade. Even so long ago they were in approved New Orleans fashion, using respectable fronts for shady businesses of smuggling, bootlegging, and selling “hot.” The facts of the smithy are dubious—smuggling slaves in had to be almost as secret as the Underground Railroad out. There are even doubts as to which shack was the real hangout, one circular placing it four blocks from the one that is marked by a plaque. As I looked at the squat smithy, the dormer windows still seemed to enclose something mysterious and sinister behind the closed blinds. I could easily imagine black ivory lying in the small attic, after being run in through the devious bayous under the very noses of the Federal cutters. There is no doubt of the age of the peeling plaster and the bricks showing beneath, sandwiched between solid timbers. Today the smithy is a café serving tourists, not smugglers; the pirates dispense the food and the drinks.
Near at hand were many of the houses that Cable’s magic kept alive. I thought how blessed New Orleans had been (Chamber of Commerce as well as History Societies) in having such an artist as Cable to record the city’s romance, before he was exiled because of his decency to Negroes. New Orleans still uses him, discreetly of course, for the romance, not the revelation. I saw Madame John’s Legacy, a ramshackly brick and frame house, the oldest, say the researchers, in all the Mississippi Valley. From that gallery between the slender colonnettes, pirates and gentlemen, ladies, loose and otherwise, had looked at the world passing below them. The most famous resident was Cable’s John who left the house as a legacy to Zalli, a quadroon, called Madame John, and to Tite Poulette, her octoroon daughter. Not far away is “Sieur George’s House,” the “first skyscraper” of New Orleans. Its original three stories were considered too heavy for the soft soil, and when the fourth floor was added, people felt that the good Providence was tempted too far. I saw the imperial Haunted House where Dolphine Lalaurie, sweet and elegant at her soirees, tortured her slaves sadistically in their dark, gloomy quarters. When the scandal of her neurotic cruelty broke, a mob drove her from the city. Romantic also was Le Prete House where a Turk is supposed to have lived in secret enjoyment with his harem of beauties until one morning all were found murdered.
The Haunted House is now a welfare home; the Turk’s harem is now a bank. A couple of blocks away from the latter is the old Orleans Ballroom, the chief scene of the “quadroon balls.” It is now the Convent of the Holy Family, a community of colored nuns. Conveniently close for Quadroon Balls and often the cause for quarrels between the hot-blooded, jealous Creole aristocrats is St. Anthony’s Garden, an early dueling site. Far off from the Quarter, across Bayou St. John in City Park are the gnarled massive dueling oaks, more favored by the gentlemen when opposition to dueling arose, and the civil authorities became watchful. Though I saw these places by sunlight, no feat of the imagination was needed to conjure up the young gallants, vain almost to the point of sickness, facing each other in the chill fog, their brains, their thumping hearts confused with honor and bravado and fear and murder.
The glamour of New Orleans was only part of the story. If some of the galleries were decorated with iron lace, hand-hammered by gifted slave artisans, if they were so deep that they shaded the streets, others were mere catwalks, protected by iron railings, nothing much to look at. Doorways were both classic and frontier in style; the wide blinds, the long shutters on windows and doors were sometimes things of beauty, sometimes merely battens contrived on the frontier to fend off the elements. Some of the houses were elegant with their Spanish gateways and fan windows; others quite as historic were starkly plain, built of cypress and moss and plaster to endure, not to charm. If the patios were carefully tended refuges of rainbow-hued beauty, the vagabond blooms and weeds along the canals and gutters were as lush and lavish. I knew that the layout of the city, with each block a moat surrounded by a draining ditch, had been a health hazard. Time and again the fever of Yellow Jack had ravaged the city. I knew that all the firing of cannon to dispel the miasma, the cold water cures and the onions placed about the sick-rooms, the cry of “Bring Out Yo’ Dead” was as much a New Orleans refrain as “If [sic] Ever I Cease To Love,” or “Danse Calinda, boum, boum!”:
On somebody’s coffin
Good Lord, I know my time ain’t long . . .
The city advertises its water as the purest in the nation, because of engineering and chemical advances. But I knew the battle for sanitation that had to be waged on this built up swamp, with water only a few feet below the surface of the ground. My friends told me unsavory tales of a folk-figure—Zizi the Bucket-man—whose bucket brigades and wagons were needed since sewers were rare. In the flowered cemeteries the dead are not buried but are stored away above the ground, in vaults that the candid folk call “bake ovens,” sometimes like marble file-cares. In the first St. Louis Cemetery, I saw the grave of Marie Laveau, the famous voodoo queen, but praised on the stone as bonne mère, bonne amie. In the second St. Louis Cemetery, a second simpler resting place for Madame Laveau, her voodoo followers, colored and white, believe this grave to be the authentic one, for it is here that they mark their red crosses and deposit food and small pieces of money. Two graves for the Madame. And her voodoo goes marching on.
I have neither eaten at Antoine’s nor seen Mardi Gras (“New Orleans’s biggest business”) so some natives will say that I should not write of New Orleans. But as much as an alien can, I have done my best, on several trips to the city, to lose my ignorance. Much that I was taught in New Orleans of Creoles, the Catholic Church, the schools and of Basin and Rampart Streets, for instance, falls elsewhere in the book. Even to the historic spots, however, I feel no longer a perfect stranger. I was not kept on the outside of the showplaces here as I had so often been elsewhere in the South. My swarthiness was no bar; people swarthier than I may once have owned these places. I saw beautiful patios, lavish with the reds, yellows, and purples of the flowers and the greens of the climbing vines, yuccas, scrub palms, and large leafed banana plants. I saw the stairway masterpieces, the luxurious furnishings, the beds where the great are supposed to have slept. I can understand, with good reason, how New Orleans is a gourmet’s delight, a place of enchantment for the artist in love with the soft patina aperitif that the years have applied to the frame and stucco; and to the lovers of the past.
But to more purpose in dispelling my outlandishness, I loafed on park benches, inviting whatever thoughts would come; rambled through narrow streets and cobblestoned alleys, purposely lost; browsed in antique shops and bookstores; and stood on street corners to see the pageantry flow by. Ferd conducted me on one tour of the French Quarter. In one of the art shops in a dusty corner I found a picture of a nude, a quadroon I guess they would have called her. The large canvas showed two-thirds of the body. From a rather lifeless background, the woman’s color seemed to spring; a light brown, a sort of tangerine coloring—I recalled Hearn’s phrase, “statues of gold.” Maybe the artist recalled it too, for the woman was statuesquely proportioned, though much warmer than any statue. Her hair was gleaming black, her eyes seemed to smolder, the expression about her full lips was quizzical, her breasts were firm and proud. From his really wide knowledge of art, Ferd criticized the technique as indifferent. The proprietor had forgotten what art student had left it with him. But I was struck—not by the arrogance—slight, only suggested, but there—of this handsome, provocative woman. I think the painting told something—a great deal—about the past of New Orleans. Maybe about its present too, for all I know.
In a cluttered bookstore that was run by canny booksellers who knew the value of their old, torn, penciled, dog-eared volumes, I bought Lyle Saxon’s Fabulous New Orleans, Grace King’s New Orleans, The Place and the People, and a volume of Gayarre’s lectures, out of a broken set. A friend loaned me Perry Young’s Mystick Kreive, the flavorsome history of Mardi Gras. In my host’s walled-in yard (he laughed at me for calling it a patio), sitting in the slanting sunlight of Indian summer, I turned the pages idly. I picked up stray facts about Mardi Gras, how Carnival is thought by some to mean—Meat (carne); farewell! (vale!); that one of its mottoes is “If More of Us Would Live, There’d Be Fewer of Us Dead.” I learned about Rex and Comus and the Zulu King’s celebration, which seemed to have started partly in derisive envy, partly in derisive parody of the white folk’s gaiety and ended as one of the most original and attractive of the Carnival’s joys. I learned what a melting pot New Orleans had been: of the Chicksaw chieftains who could not keep their eyes off the beautiful ladies at the ball, believing that they “were all sisters . . . descended just as they were from heaven,” of Le Moyne and Cadillac and the other Frenchmen; of Miro and Ulloa, the Spaniards and O’Reilly, the Spanish Irishman—Iberian Hiberrian; of John Law, the Scot, and his German pioneers who were amazed that, though they lived among savages and Frenchmen, they were in no danger. The river bank for a long way above New Orleans is called German Coast, after the settlers. Their own names were lost, as Saxon points out (his name may be one that survived): Weber became Fabre; Schneider became Shexnaydre; and Zweig became Labranche. The Italians came later than their Latin cousins, and did not climb to aristocracy. The Irish came in to dig the drainage ditches (labor too risky and heavy for the more valuable slave) and to populate the Irish Channel, another of the city’s hell-holes. In the “Deep South” issue of the Saturday Review of Literature, which was not out, I read with pleasure Roark Bradford’s anecdote of the Professional Southerner who sneered at “literary trash written by poor white trash”: “I’m from Oklahoma,” George Milburn put in, “but I come from the best blood in the South, by God, suh. I’m a descendant of Moll Flanders.” I thought, reading of Manon Lescaut and her legendary grave in New Orleans, about Moll Flanders and her Latin half-sister, Manon: one from the streets of London, a grandmother of Tidewater Virginia; the other from the streets of Paris, an ancestress of proud New Orleans, and both novelists’ figments though they were symbols of authentic history.
And I read, of course, of the darker ingredients in the gumbo that was New Orleans. Lyle Saxon tells fine tales of the sophisticated people of color, such as the mulatto Basile Croquere, who could not fight a duel with whites but who could cross swords with them in his studio where, master fencer that he was, he taught the deadly art of the rapier. I read of the “tignon” decree in 1788 of Governor Miro, who fretted over the fifteen hundred “unmarried women of color, all free, living in little houses near the ramparts,” made it a misdemeanor for them to walk out of the house in silk, jewels, or plumes, and allowed them as head-dress only the madres handkerchief, or turban, or tignon (fancy name for ban-dana, in Georgia). I have read in Tinker’s Life of Lafcadio Hearn that Rose, an octoroon, showed Hearn the ways of tying the tignon for variety, adornment, maybe for shades of meaning, just as Hester Prynne embroidered the scarlet letter of her shame. My fancy roved to current feminine styles: along Canal Street in the French Quarter, or at Five Points in Atlanta, or on Broad Street in Richmond. I have seen white girls with gay bandana handkerchiefs to hold down their unruly hair or to flaunt a bit of color. Their faces, bare arms and legs were tanned by the sun or cosmetics to quadroon or even darker hue; some were brown as berries. Come to think of it, their naked toes stuck out of sandals, too. After more than a century the styles had come full circle.
Saxon told of the primitive slaves, too, the wild dancers, shouters, and drum-pounders of the Place Congo, Congo Square. Many times I had walked past the place, now known as Beauregard Square, but from the dust grass no frenzied leapers and shakers rose in the Bamboula and the Calinda. Saxon and Herbert Asbury have brought to life something of the famous square, the sea-bed of jazz, one of the nurseries of those roots of tribal song and dancing that survived the transplanting from Africa, and which now have spread sturdy tendrils over much of America.
Men like Oscar Dunn, C. C. Antoine, and P. B. S. Pinchback, governors of the state, and J. H. Minard and Charles E. Nash, Negro Congressmen, figure in the histories I read only briefly, if at all, and then as symbols of shame. For their stories, still too brief, I had to go to Charles Rousseve’s book. Charles, his brothers Ferdinand and Alvin, took me on several rides. We crossed or drove along many of the streets with names that writers from Hearn to the present use to illustrate the complex history and nature of the city. Hearn tells how the devout had to go to church by way of Craps Street, but we could not find it. But we found streets named Desire (next to Nun Street), Love, Pleasure, and Piety; Tchouopitoulas, Cherokee, and Seminole; Royal, Dauphine, Bourbon, and Burgandy, Bienville, Kerlerec, Glavez, Claiborne, Jefferson Davis, Beauregard, and Henry Clay; St. Louis, Peter, St. Ann, and Homer; Socrates, Ptolemy, Shakespeare, Dante, Rousseau, Poe, and Hawthorne (and I wondered what that New Englander was doing in this galley!); Calliope, Enterpe, Dryades, Melpomene, Terpschore, Urania, and Julia. The last is not a classic damsel, but a remarkable free woman of color, about whom the rest is silent.
What the back-country Negroes—or whites for that matter—could do with some of those names, Ferd told me, was a caution. There is a legend in New Orleans that Champs d’Elysses Street was changed to the Elysian Fields because of the murderous tongue-twisting it got. Socrates and Sryades are marvels to hear, varying in different sections, or even in the same section. Calliope is the Americanized Kalliope; Felicite becomes Filly-city (characteristically); other words get Classic Greek, French, Anglicized, or Americanized pronunciation. And who cares?
“I live out on Tawn-teye Street.”
“Where?”
“Tawn-teye, man.”
“How do you spell it?”
“T-o-n-t-i.”
“Oh you mean Tonti.”
“I mean Tawn-teye. Like I inform you. You gonna tell me where I live, mon?”
I remarked that Industry Street did not seem so important a thoroughfare as Religious and Pleasure and Independence Streets. But I was told that I should not draw any inferences from the wisecrack. Canal Street skyscrapers typify New Orleans far more than Madame John’s Legacy or even the Cabildo. Driving toward the old Spanish trail to the northeast, we saw such neighboring places as Milneberg, the early resort whose joys were celebrated in the jazz classic, and Shushan Airport, one of the most streamlined fields in America. We waited at an open drawbridge over a canal (the Industrial, I believe) while gray landing craft nosed along on their way to the Mississippi, and up perhaps to Normandy or the Philippines. Their builder, Andrew Higgins, belonged to history, too. New times, new wars. The last sight my friends showed me was the mammoth Huey Long Bridge, the only bridge across the Mississippi below Natchez, a monument to the lost leader of so many Louisianians. I was to learn in the back country parishes that Huey Long’s name meant far more than those of the Parisian or Creole cavaliers, the Spanish hidalgoes, Old Hickory, or Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard. The farmboy from the red hills of up-country Louisiana had left his mark plain.
Across the river lay the major part of Jefferson Parish. I should like to have seen the romantic fastness of this parish, but access at best is difficult and time and chance did not favor me. I saw only the sections along the river. But in a printshop where I had business I picked up copies of the Jefferson Parish Yearly Review. Though the official publication of the Police Jury, they are illustrated with imaginative photographs of water hyacinths, drowsy willows, lanes between live oaks, streaming with silver-green moss, cypress trees, swamp cabbage palms, bayous creeping into jungles, Indian shell mounds and Grande Terre and Grande Isle, the farthest island, that bar the Gulf of Mexico from Baratania Bay. Through these passes and jungle-like waterways Lafitte and his pirates steered their vessels with enormous bravado.
Lyle Saxon, Lafitte’s biographer, contributes essays on the traditions of Jefferson Parish; the boosters tell us that Jefferson Parish promises present charms and future cash dividends. Beautiful girls in abbreviated swimsuits are posed before romantic backgrounds. Shown in their pirogues in the narrow shallow canals are the trappers, sons of the original “muskrat ramblers.” All steps from the trapping of the muskrats to the finished coats for milady are pictured. Even the Spanish moss, symbol of ancient quietude, is described as a money crop; to be ginned, processed, and baled for pillows, mattresses, blankets, and horse collars, about a three million dollar industry. The Review attends to the history of Grande Terre, but is also concerned with the modernized sewage system, and the waterworks. It demands improvement of the bottleneck on what it calls Parish “Burma Road,” because it is an industrial life line for the oil derricks and refineries, the bagasse mills, the host of other industries, now going at furious speed. For the post-war world the men of Jefferson want a ship canal to be dredged almost due South from Gretna to open sea, which would halve the roundabout distance between New Orleans and the Gulf. Inviting capital to come and bide awhile, the boosters say: “Wages are lower here than in the northern and eastern states, but that is because the cost of living is lower. . . . Labor in this parish is yet generally unspoiled by the infusion of alien agitation.” And however charming were the illustrations of Lafitte’s domain, I knew that I was back in the twentieth century.
GEE’S BEND “Man, what you want to see is Gee’s Bend,” B. T. said in Atlanta, and went on to tell me how far back the place was both in the sticks and in customs. If I could get in, that is, because if the water was high I couldn’t; and if it rained while I was there, I couldn’t get out. There was no guarantee, he added, that I would get out even in dry weather, if I made any missteps while down among those people. At Tuskegee I heard that the inaccessibility of Gee’s Bend had been exaggerated. But the legend of the wildness of the natives was current. The tall waiter at the lunch-room said, “Man, they say the folks are rough down there. Live like wild people. Whenever somebody up here at school doesn’t know how to act they tell him, ‘You must be from Gee’s Bend.’ I’d sure like to see that place.”
I had read accounts of Gee’s Bend; one had made the New York Times; and I had planned definitely to see it, even before I heard the legends. Over at the Veterans Hospital, Dr. Peters expressed a long standing interest, partly professional, in the community which he had heard described as quite primitive. He wanted to go along. So did Max Bond of Tuskegee, but under the pressure of securing teachers for the coming school year, he couldn’t manage the trip. Nevertheless, with typically generous hospitality, he put a station wagon at my disposal, and Pete, and Moore the driver, an old friend by this time, and I set out one early Saturday morning.
It was a grand trip down. Pete was in fine fettle, and the anecdotes popped off one after the other like a string of firecrackers. His quick eyes missed little, and his pithy commentary smacked of the countryside, more than the laboratory.
Coming from Indiana, he was critical of the bare and wasted acres: “Look at that land. So poor a rabbit wouldn’t run over it.” He was sharp on the farmers near Tuskegee who wanted fortunes for the worn-out farms which the government intended buying for the Tuskegee Air Base: “They charged prices steep enough to bust the treasury. Their cotton crops were going to bring in more money than you could shake a stick at. Seems they had planned encasing the cotton bolls in cellophane to keep it from the evening dew.” We ran over a crushed snake on the highway, a long rope of black hide and squeezed out bloody pulp. “Humph. That’s not a long snake. I’ll bet there are snakes around here longer than I’ve been at Tuskegee.”
Even the taciturn Moore opened up. After a crazy driver, twisting all over the road, had zoomed by, he said calmly: “I don’t know whether that man was asleep or drunk or what. Some drivers take too big a chances. A car is a thaing not to be meddled with.”
Two white hitchhikers raised their hands and jerked their thumbs. As we got close enough to be made out, they snapped their arms down, almost as by a military command. Moore looked at them in the mirror as we sped by. He told about some white hitchhikers whom he had picked up once below Montgomery: “They tried their best to make me take them to Selma. I told them I had to turn off onto another road. They tried to arger me into going there. Then they got rough. I didn’t pay them no mind. I had a wrench under the seat and I felt around for it. When I got far as I was going, I stopped and took holt of it. They saw I meant business, and got out, just a cussing. I didn’t say nothing, but slammed the door and drove away. So that’s why I’ve been slow ever since about picking up white folks.”
He gave rides to several Negroes on the hundred mile trip; three fellows who were on “public works” had never heard tell of “Gee’s Bend.” Below Selma, however, we got various directions, some confusing, and warnings that we might not be able to get into the Bend. At Atlanta, which we drove a mile past, not recognizing it as a town, we met our best guide. The winding road to Gee’s Bend was soft dirt and we could imagine what heavy rain would do to it. We stopped by an old woman, a snuff stick in her mouth, a small sack balanced on her head, two buckets in her hands.
“Are we near Gee’s Bend?”
“Yes. Jes keep on a-goin.” Her mouth was toothless, there were two yellowish brown stubs showing.
“Could we give you a lift?” The buckets looked heavy for her withered arms.
She looked carefully at the station wagon, a bit suspiciously at us: “No. I’m nigh about where I’m going. I thanks you kindly just the same.”
The next person we passed was quick to ride with us. He was of Indian type, red in color, gentle in speech and manner. He was a renter (he wanted us to know that he was a cut above sharecropping). His daughter was the only one left on the place with him; his other children were in Mobile.
“I don’t zackly know how far hit is to Mobile. Somebody tole me but hit slipped my mind. Some people used to drive hit in two and a half hours, but they’ve cut down on the limit now, and don’t let you go so fast. I ain’t seen my children since they left here.”
White folks owned the land he rented. He was good white folks, a kind man. “I never heard him speak an oath to anybody on his place,” the renter said. But it was hard making ends meet; he didn’t know how he was going to make out this year. He had been on this place nigh about all of his life. He pointed to his home, a small house of logs, sagging somewhat up a gullied road. A chinaberry tree shaded it, and there were a few flower bushes in the yard, but it was little enough for a life’s work.
“That sun is so hot I wouldn’t of taken anything for that ride wid yawl,” he said, his hat in his hand. “How much you charge?” We laughed that off. “You all stay over for the Big Baptising tomorrow,” he said warmly. “Lots of people will come here from all around. Be coming in all today and tomorrow morning.”
We told him we’d see and were off. A few miles farther on and we asked another farmer about Gee’s Bend. “You’se there now,” he said simply. “Yon hit is.” Around a curve in the road we saw a sign:
From the crest of a hill we saw a scattering of neat houses, glinting in the sunlight, a windmill, a wide schoolhouse and, to the right, a large red building and a cotton gin with its stack puffing smoke.
The crowd of men around the cooperative barely acknowledged our greetings, but stared at us and the station wagon. Pete broke the ice by identifying himself as a Tuskegee doctor. Shortly after the farm supervisor came up. He introduced us to a guide and promised to be with us himself in an hour.
An old bearded fellow at the weighing platform of the cotton gin greeted us affably. He had been “bred and bawn here.” “We trying to get over de fence, now,” he said in answer to our praise of what we were seeing. “We been behind de fence so long, we trying to get over hit now. I’m an old man. But I don’t git back. No. I keep on forward. How old do you reckon I am?” I ventured in the sixties.
“Seventy-four years old,” he snapped, his eyes bright.
“How do you manage to keep so young?” Pete asked him.
“Well, I always stayed at home. I lost one wife and borrowed another one. I got seven children living, all of them on the project. I got grandchildren older than my youngest one. Yes. I stayed home and worked hard.” He grinned at us; his teeth were all there, absolutely firm and white.
“That’s our injuneer.”
The engineer, greasy, sweaty, and happy, took us through the hot engine room and the rest of the building. Over the war of the machinery, the flying wheels and belts, the gasping of the large pipe sucking in the firm small bolls, the creaking and slamming of the bale-presser, he spoke his words of loving praise for the gin and his job. He knew plenty and gladly taught us.
We watched the pressing of a couple of bales. All of the workers were Negroes except for one white man who was marking the sacking on the bales with letters, figures, and a huge V. He was tow-headed, grimy, and his hands were stained with the purple ink; he stared at us, inoffensively, and went back to his marking. The two Negroes stripped to undershirt and overalls, who worked the pressing machine, dragged a couple of bales with their cotton hooks to the lading platform. One was well-muscled, and explained, grinning to us, boasting that he could do and had done every job about the gin; the other was gloomy-faced and surly. But he was willing to have his picture taken, and after a while relaxed and put in his word too.
When we went to the commissary for lunch we were met with level stares from the thirty or forty men, sitting alongside the large commissary or sprawled on the steps and floor and the railings of the store porch. Some returned our hellos, others just looked. A few followed us into the store. Our appetites probably did not hurt our reputation; we were nearly starved and we easily got rid of a can of salmon, two small cans of Vienna sausage, a loaf of bread, a store-cake apiece, and three of those oversized bottles of pop. We wolfed those sandwiches of pink salmon in huge pieces of bread, dripping oil on the brown paper that the shopkeeper laid on the back counter. It was about as satisfying a lunch as I’ve had. We probably became more acceptable as they saw how we could eat. The storekeeper was not a native of the Bend, but came from an Alabama town; his daughter was a Fisk student and asked us questions about Tuskegee and Howard.
Waiting for the supervisor who promised to show us the place, I scanned the government mimeographed bulletin on Gee’s Bend. The geography and history go somewhat as follows:
The Alabama River, twisting and turning on its way to the Gulf makes a sharp horseshoe curve in southern Alabama around a tract of about 10,000 acres. Over a century ago, two slaveholders from North Carolina named Charles and Sterling Gee purchased this fertile land, which was thereupon named Gee’s Bend. Their nephew, Mark Pettway, bought it from them and left it to his son, John, who managed it until 1900. It was a profitable plantation.
Gee’s Bend was nearly isolated then. The slaves who were brought in seldom if ever got out. Traces of what may be African languages are still to be found there. After freedom, many of the Negroes took the name of Pettway from the owner. This caused confusion when children were christened with their parents’ names, but by adding middle initials the confusion was checked. Thus Tom-o-Pettway and Tom-i-Pettway are names of two present family heads.
Even today Gee’s Bend is difficult of approach. Camden, the county seat, is only about three miles as the crow flies and about eight as the road winds, but the Alabama River flows between. A ferry, little improved from antebellum days, is used to cross the river; the safer way to Camden is around a poor road forty miles long. The way we came in, by Alberta, on the same side of the river, had its difficulties too; there was a creek fordable when low but impassable by any vehicles when flooded. Gee’s Bend is what the folks call “Plumb Nearly,” plumb out of reach, nearly out of the world.
The supervisor told us that up to six years ago most of the people of Gee’s Bend had never been to Camden. As a matter of fact, there were plenty of people seventy and eighty years old who had never been eight miles from the Bend. “A few years ago,” he said, “if a station wagon like this one had come in here, there would have been a parade.”
When John Pettway died in 1900, one of the families moved into the big house, and the community rocked along with ups and downs. A credit merchant in Camden provided the “furnish” against the crop. In 1916, a July freshet on the river flooded out the cotton crop in the low grounds, but the war brought back a measure of prosperity. In the Depression, however, five cent cotton spelled doom. The merchant advanced credit for three-years running. When he died, the administrators of the estate, without his paternalistic interest, conscious only of the “debt,” sent wagons to Gee’s Bend and hauled off every piece of household property, farming tools, mules, cows, poultry, everything.
Knowing no other place, unwilling to leave, the people of Gee’s Bend were threatened with starvation. The owner of the land let them stay on, but could not supply “furnish.” The Red Cross, the CHA, and the Alabama Relief Administration did what they could to keep the people alive. In 1934, the State Rural Rehabilitation Corporation began making loans; and then the Resettlement Administration, succeeded by Farm Security Administration, bought the land and set up the project. FSA supplies yearly credit and small loans each spring. A white man superintends the project, and a white accountant aids in the management of the cooperative store. The rest of the staff is Negro.
S. T. Haynes, the farm supervisor, had studied at Tuskegee under Booker T. Washington, and was an old friend of T. M. Campbell and Tom Roberts, Negroes who have labored strongly for the improvement of farming. Mr. Haynes had always been a great one for cooperatives; in one county he had preached cooperatives until his gospel spread like wildfire and he was in danger of being run out of the county: “If I hadn’t had good white friends and good Negroes behind me, they might have made me some trouble. Then they transferred me in here and I was like Brer Rabbit in a briar patch.”
He added color to the bulletins’ history. He had seen so much of it. He satirized the old sharecropping: “The merchant and the landlord made sure that they would get back their advance. If you made forty, or if you made one, the merchant and landlord just got it. ‘You did well, ole boy, you just lacked ten dollars of coming out of debt.’ Sometimes they’d give a farmer who had done well twenty-five dollars for a Christmas gift.” Interest on the “furnish” had always run high. He was coldly earnest when he talked of the destitute people after the foreclo-sure, trying to make it on berries and rabbits: “That woman didn’t leave them a plough or a hoe, not even an axe to cut stove-wood with. They didn’t own a thing in the world.” It was a sorry picture of the past he painted; he shrugged his shoulders. There was a better present to see; and he led us to a central group of buildings, marked by a flagpole and a tall wind pump.
FSA built a fine community house but the Gee’s Bend people insisted upon adding a steeple. To them it is still more of a church than a forum. In addition to the regular minister, there are among the eight hundred inhabitants fourteen lay preachers who take their turns in expounding the gospel. Two or three weekdays these men answer the call to preach; it seems to be the chief adult entertainment. Sometimes ice cream, cake, apples, and lemon water are served at church or union meetings. Some townhall features enter, such as voting on newcomers—they will vote on who’s going to live next to them, or on community problems. But it is largely as a church that the sturdy, well-appointed meeting hall (reminiscent of New England) serves the people. The educational movies that have been shown were far less warmly received than the shouting of a neighbor whose ambition to preach they understood, and their own singing of the old melodies.
“To be fair with you,” said the superintendent, “we’re a bit back on entertainment. This is the first year for baseball. The church people fight it. If they found a member playing baseball, they’d turn him out of the church. Of course they might take him back in, but they will dead turn him out.”
I recalled the story I had heard at Tuskegee of the basketball teams that an enterprising teacher had brought down to play a game for the folks. The teams wore their sweat shirts and slacks until time for the starting whistle. They then stripped down to their jerseys and trunks. When the women of Gee’s Bend saw those ten men exposed in all their nakedness, they promptly rose in indignation, gathered their young ones together and shooed them out of the hall. They were not going to let their children be contaminated.
I asked the superintendent if the story was true. He laughed, and admitted that in large measure it was. Some womenfolk had been affronted for their children’s sake by the nakedness. He added an anecdote of the Snow Hill Band, which was brought in to play at an entertainment. After the regular concert, the band played a bit of jazz. Some outsiders who had followed the band to Gee’s Bend began to breakdown with a new kind of dancing, and the Gee’s Bend kids joined in. The church people broke that up quickly. They turned all the kids out of church on Thursday, but took them back in Sunday, after they had got to work on them. “Yessir,” he said, “They’ll almost hang you for dancing.”
“But they are the singingest people in the world,” he went on. “It would do you good to hear them moaning out some of the old hymns.” A man from the North heard about them over in Camden and came to hear the singing. From his description it sounded to me like John Hammond, and he believed that was the name. Then somebody from the Library of Congress had been down making records.
The schoolhouse was of one of the best I saw in the South for Negroes. It was a bright gray frame building with five rooms. Two large classrooms were separated by a folding door; a third room serves for home economics and a fourth for vocational training. There was a kitchen to prepare the kids’ luncheons. The chairs and tables were modern; and the many windows made the rooms cheerful. There was a fine stove in one classroom; an old piano in the other. On the wall were pictures of Booker T. Washington, Dr. Will W. Alexander, Paul Robeson (on an advertisement of a concert at Tuskegee Institute and strangely for that gallery, an advertisement of a night spot on the Pacific Coast), and a picture from the Pittsburgh Courier of the three Joe Thomases of jazz fame. Benjamin Franklin’s adages (in a sort of carbon copy) had been lettered on the walls: “Speak Little Do Much,” “Be Careful,” “We Are Always Prompt.” Student drawings and cutouts were also on the boards: one student had pasted a picture of Abe Lincoln in a big red heart. On the blackboard had been carefully written:
I Pledge Allegiance To My Country
And To The Production Program Which It Plans
One Garden And Smokehouse For Each Family
With Milk, Eggs, And Nutritious Foods For All ! ! !
Together with the pictures of race heroes were beautiful pictures of first-rate cattle and Armour’s Star Beef Chart. The masterpiece of this collection was a Polled Shorthorn Female Champion of the 1937 International. A Parent Teachers’ Association functions, and, in addition, many of the older people are learning their three R’s with a greater eagerness than the young ones. The supervisor, loyal student and friend of Booker Washington that he was, spoke glowingly of the practicality of the instruction. After the day’s work, lessons were given in making scarfs, pillowcases, and slips from old sacking; and horse collars, floor mats, hats, and belts from shucks. Examples were surprisingly well made. He showed us the first dolls made on the project. “Many girls here, eighteen years old,” he said, “never owned, never saw a doll before.”
Gee’s Bend was fortunate above most communities in the deep South in having an infirmary. The four rooms were spotless, organized for efficiency. Pete looked approvingly at the screened baby bed, Lesson One in health for the parents, and the operating room. A registered nurse had been serving Gee’s Bend for several years, bringing needed science where herb-doctoring, superstitious practices, and midwifery had naturally flourished. Though illness had marked Gee’s Bend, cleanliness had not. Lack of privies and drinking out of open springs brought on much sickness. “Eight people,” the supervisor told us, “used to bathe in one tub of water without changing it.”
Now for an annual basic fee of fifteen dollars a year, each family gets medical treatment. Two white doctors (the nearest Negro doctor is in far off Selma) come in for weekly clinics, serving a line of patients in a two-hour period. The nurse is kept busy with advice and visiting the entire community the other days. Everybody must take a medical examination and health is preached fervently. There is so much in the budget for dental work. When they “get him up fifteen or twenty patients” a dentist comes over, who because of the cooperation plan, charges fifty cents for extractions, which in town would cost a dollar and a half or two dollars each.
We sat in Mr. Haynes’s office, talking it over. He had large albums filled with pictures, illustrating the “Before and After.” The FSA had not exactly started all of the wonders, “it just latched on to what we had.” A cooperative store, with seventeen members, was the parent of the present thriving cooperative. Eight men started the building of the houses. The authorities were dubious about the houses not standing up to requirements. “Just give us a trial,” we said. “Don’t persecute us. Give us three months. Then if we fail you, put ’em out on contract. They turned us loose. And there the houses are.”
The “before” pictures showed splintery log cabins, two rooms and a runway (it was bad luck in the old days to join rooms together). Some of them had shutters on the windows, with a long prop to keep them closed. The roofs were of dilapidated shingles, and the chimneys were mud and clay. The only steps for entering the house were badly cut logs. The barns were bad; the animals might as well have been left outside. Where there had been toilets, they were merely dirty shacks.
Now each unit consisted of a house, a pump, a barn, a fowl house, a sanitary toilet, and a smokehouse. One of the pictures had the caption: “The oldest man on the Gee’s Bend Project who has seen the wonders wrought and with his son sleeps and eats in an FSA Home.”
From the famed Southern diet of the three M’s (meal, molasses, and side meat, and sparse at that), the people had progressed to more varied nutritional foods. The “pressure cooker” was their friend, and they had stored their shelves with canned produce. They were even canning butter. Canning was one cause of the rivalry between the six sections of Gee’s Bend. Each had its own thriving canning center. Mr. Haynes had his own shelves loaded at his office.
The supervisor’s heart was in scientific farming. The long bottom right on the river was the cream of the land, but stood the risk of flooding. Most of the land was pretty rich. He admired Mr. Cammack, the project manager: “I give a man what belongs to him. He’s a fine fellow.” Since Mr. Cammack was an “Auburn man,” a graduate of Alabama Polytechnic, they spoke the same scientific language. Mr. Haynes spoke lovingly of corn that grew eight to ten feet tall, of a good cross of Jersey and Whitefaced Hereford cows, of purebred bulls that served an unbelievable number of families apiece, of Poland China Boars. He moralized about a picture of two pigs of the same age, one round and fat, raised on crop pasture, and the other runted and scrawny from being allowed to run outside. He talked learnedly of replenishing the soil with kudzu, of compost fertilizer and droppings from livestock, of poisoning cotton with arsenic of lead to kill the boll weevil at the proper time, of side-dressing cotton with nitrate of soda, of the new type of cane Mr. Cammack had introduced.
It was not an ox-minded place. The Gee’s Bend people had used them because they had to do it: oxen were cheaper to buy, could forage for themselves, and could be killed and eaten when worn out. But they couldn’t make any speed. The place was definitely mule-minded.
So now there were many tight barns stored with corn, peas, peanuts, and hay; good harvests of potatoes and cotton; stables with good mules, horses, and cattle; canned goods on the shelves; clean drinking water; windows screened from flies and mosquitoes. He went on with a long list of blessings.
From impoverished, desperate, almost defeated people, they had come up, smiling and winning: “Now fourteen families don’t owe us a dime in the world, and by the end of the current year, thirty will have paid out.” Problems, of course, were not over. That of newcomers, for instance. They were allowed in only on five years’ trial as renters; then if they proved worthy, they were allowed to apply the amount they had paid for rent to the purchase price. Another problem, that of relationships with white folks in the adjoining communities, was being solved interestingly. The community hires whites occasionally, to show what “the forgotten fellows are doing” and to show that they are not prejudiced but open-minded: “We stick them on the front even if they don’t want to go there. We work ’em. You know you can get pretty close to a man when you work with him. Sometimes we take even the sorriest man in the county. He might be one of the scalawags but we give him a job, pay him well. It’s a way of Christianizing. I’d be saying too much to say that relations are 100 percent. But there’s a great improvement.”
All of Gee’s Bend people are not yet fully cooperative-minded. “A few stick their heads in the ground and go sell their cotton themselves. Sometimes it’s good to let a man get out on a limb and learn for himself. One fellow said ‘I don’t believe I can do better, but I want to do hit for myself. I want to handle my own business. I want ’em to see what I’ve raised.’ It’s a little parade you know, when he can drive from house to house showing his cotton, eight miles to Camden. ‘I want to go to town to meet those fellows,’ one will say. ‘I want to buy my fertilizer myself, and let them know I’m living.’ The merchants slap them on their back, and charge them two dollars more than we do. But sometimes,” he mused, “cents and dollars ain’t all of it.” Pete, who I fear is a rugged individualist, applauded this man with gusto; he was a good sign, he said.
Mr. Haynes definitely believes in his people. He said more than once that he has never heard a Gee’s Bend man make an oath since he has been here. He was never bothered with the squabbling between man and wife; there wasn’t any fussing all night, as in many places: “I never have a woman coming to tell me how her husband is throwing his money away gambling. And no switching or stealing of wives. No man with a family butchering up anybody. If there is any fighting it’s seldom, and then always one of the boys. If somebody meddles with their girls, they would give plenty of trouble. They aren’t cowed at all. They’re game. But there’s little fighting to speak of. But I want to give both sides. I’ll be honest. Yes, the girls do have babies out of wedlock. They sure do. It used to be that few of the girls married who didn’t already have kids. But usually they marry the fellow they have the kid by.
“There’s no stealing. These people don’t lock up a thing. The smokehouse may be full of meat, the crib full of corn, but they don’t have locks on them. These people are honest as the day is long.”
The last word in law enforcement, he told us, is a patriarchal Pettway: “Whatever he says is law and gospel. If anything serious happens, all he’d have to do is just go to the phone and call up the law. But he don’t have to do that. The Council goes to the offender and tells him, ‘If you don’t do right, you’re going to get off this project.’ That generally works.
“Our folks are all right,” he concluded. “Yessir. Just give ’em one-half chance.
“The next thing,” he said, with what isn’t so anticlimactic as it sounds, “we’re going to have a barbershop and a shoe shop.”
Since the trip, I have had a chance to read a master’s thesis on Gee’s Bend, done at Fisk University by Alice Reid, a graduate student in sociology. Like many of the students of Charles S. Johnson, Miss Reid has ability to win cooperation in her interviewing, and a quick ear for speech. Some of her quotations throw light on the history of the place. Some tell of the hard times “when that woman came and took everything we had.” A woman recalled her house before FSA:
Hit won’t nothin’—jes’ a dry weather house that I had. Look like hit leak outdoors and rained in the house. . . . Then I’d plaster the other one, everytime hit rained, de rain would blow de mud out. . . . The Lord and that good hearted government man, whoever ’tis, couldn’t have done another better thing. . . . I ain’t shame and I ain’t scared to tell nobody I’se thankful.
Miss Reid found varying degrees of acceptance of the new institutions. The cooperative store is supported; cooperation being no new thing in the Bend. The infirmary is not unanimously approved; herb-doctoring and superstitions and ignorant carelessness are still to be found. All haven’t been won over to the new diet. An old woman complained, “Dey say you got to put up six hundred jars jes’ to keep ’em filled, but us don’t eat hit after I put hit up. Food in them jars jes’ don’ taste right.” The tradition of onions and collards, cornbread, and slabs of meat cooked over an open fire does not easily die out.
Many farmers will not admit that they have learned new methods of farming. One said, “I pretty much had good arts on farming before—ain’t much to learn me ’bout dat—but jes’ gimme de right things to farm wid.” Another said, “I’m jes’ fixed more to farm.” But this is the old story of the practical “self-taught” man vs. the expert. The farmers adopt the new scientific ways though grudging in praise. And meanwhile, the farm supervisor laughs easily, seeing the improved crops and stock.
The school is too new-fangled; the old school teacher believing “that those teachers up there now, they don’t come up to me”; and some of the parents fearing that “dem dat goes too far in school won’t want to plow no more.” The church remains largely as it was, otherworldly and dogmatic. The adjustment to a new way of life is by no means completed; the student likens it to “growing pains.” There have been significant changes, socially and economically, the student concludes, but much remains to be done.
But we were filled with the supervisor’s faith in the future of Gee’s Bend when we pulled out to leave. “There are some Negroes who can do more with less, and some Negroes who can do less with more,” Pete said sententiously. “These are the first.” Moore expressed what was for him, an enthusiasm, “It sure is something. This has been one day.” And I was thinking of a favorite blues line: “You take me to Kirkwood, I’ll make St. Louis all by myself.”
On the way out to the ferry we stopped at one of the older but renovated cabins. Two women were quilting on the porch. Mr. Haynes told them he had brought us by to see their quilts. “How many spreads do you have now, Mrs. Thacker?” he asked.
“You know I ain’t gonna tell you that,” she said pertly. The other woman laughed. They brought out several from the house, as brilliantly colored as the patches of flowers in their yard. Pete and I made selections. “How much?” I asked.
“Six dollars apiece.” Mrs. Thacker spoke up promptly, without batting an eye. I think ours batted. It was take it or leave it. We took a quilt apiece. Mrs. Thacker counted the twelve dollars as if the transaction was an ordinary five minutes in her life. But when we got into the station wagon, I caught them looking down at the money. “Yawl come back again,” the second woman called after us.
A light shower fell as we headed toward the ferry. Around the shoulder of a hill we came to the steep incline to the river. It was already muddy. The brown Alabama River was high that day, swirling, quite active. We saw the dinky ferry being pulled over by the cable. It touched the steep bank; some youngsters maneuvered a Ford runabout onto the road, got about ten yards up in a dangerous spot where there was a sheer drop to the river, and stalled. We labored ten minutes more, baking and grinding, pushing, chocking wheels, to get it past the station wagon. The old ferryman watched our efforts. Then he told us he couldn’t take us over. It was even more slippery on the other side. If we made it to his ferry on this side, we most certain sure couldn’t get off it on t’other. We thanked him for that news.
“What was the name of that ferryman in the old stories, Brownie?” Pete asked. He was spattered with mud.
“Charon.”
“Carried people over the river of death, didn’t he?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, I’m glad old Charon doesn’t want any parts of us today.”
I was glad too. That frail cable and wheel and that stack of lumber looked pretty weak to be pitted against those muddy waters.
We went out the way we came in. A few miles from the Bend in front of us we saw two lovers, arms around each others’ waists. They turned their backs to us, and looked up at a tree, as we drove abreast. The man was older than the girl; the girl was a fair brown, powdered up and togged out. Always the candid camera enthusiast, Pete asked, “Do you want your picture taken?” The man said “No,” flatly. A bit abashed, Pete offered a ride. “No,” again. And then relenting, “I appreciate it.” The girl was still curious about the tree. It might have been a sundown creep, we didn’t know. But it might have been another instance of the self-sufficiency of Gee’s Bend. They had a way of running their own business.
LOW COTTON The plantation was a large one, on a backroad. Sandy, the young teacher, thought it wiser that we go there well after nightfall. He wasn’t exactly sure how Mr. Cluttsby would take our visit. I was glad that he told Ulysses to dim the lights when the road wound around Mr. Cluttsby’s big house. Though it was a hundred yards away, we lowered our voices too, feeling conspiratorial. Sandy said he knew the road as well as the back of his hand, and near the big house that was true. We stopped at the darkened commissary where the numerous families came for “furnish,” and where, beside the watering pond, they exchanged news and kidding and tall tales. Sandy told us how he had gradually been accepted by the people. One of his stories dealt with his Christmas party, when he had introduced the plantation Negroes to Santa Claus. But the party ended nearly tragically. When Santa Claus appeared, in red suit and pink mask and white beard, the smallest children screamed in terror and fled to their mothers and fathers. They must have thought that Santa was old Satan. At any rate he was a strange white man. Even the peppermint canes and gumdrops and all-day suckers could not get the party to the proper Christmas spirit of good will to men, and Sandy did not repeat the experiment. Christmas is just another day to these kids.
Sandy did not know the farthest little traveled roads so well. Ulysses finally asked, “Are those weeds or cotton I’m driving over?” and in the headlights we noticed the green bolls. We were heading toward an old log cabin, and were in what should have been a yard, but cotton was growing to the doorstep. The cabin was deserted. Ulysses turned around as well as he could in the gray mire, and drove down what we had thought was a road but what was a stretch of low cotton. “I’ll bet I’ve spoiled a bale of cotton,” Ulysses said ruefully. Sandy’s eyes were better in that pitch darkness than ours. “Stop,” he said to Ulysses. Gathering shape in the darkness we saw him coming, black as the night. I had never heard his type of dialect before; it was a staccato mutter, sounding like a speech defect. But we gathered that the man we searched for: “He gone. He ain’t there.” That was all. Just gone. Nothing else was offered.
Sandy told us that these families were allowed to live in the log houses; the men received fifty cents a day, the women forty. Since they were not sharecroppers, they got no part of the harvest. Some might leave to go on “public works” (any job not on the plantation, such as sawmill labor for private employers, was “public works”). If they left, some member of the household must work or else the family had to get off the place. The man we were searching for had just gone.
We drove through long wide cotton fields on a barely perceptible road. At certain bends our headlights momentarily would catch gray houses, all seeming deserted. There were no lights. At one clump of blackness we stopped. Sandy got out and walked ahead, brushing through the cotton plants.
Ulysses maneuvered the car so that the lights shone full on the trees and shrubs around the house. Sandy hallooed. A woman’s voice answered, halloo. We went up to the porch. Close to the house we could make out arrows of light escaping through chinks.
“Come on,” yelled Sandy. In the car light they recognized him, were downright glad to see him.
“Watch those boards there,” an older voice warned us. They did buckle and sway under our gingerly tread.
We went into the room where the light was. It came from a candle stuck in the top of an ink bottle. The flame waved dangerously close to the large black and gilt Bible on the table. On the sooty walls were pictures of the old man and of the old woman in oval gilt frames, but the features were too dim to make out in the candlelight. A musty smell of cooking grease and people hung in the air. On a large bed the quilts were thrown any which a way.
The old man, gray dignity, rose from the table where he had been writing a letter. He was grateful for the visit, happy at the “honor,” embarrassingly so. He remained standing through our visit; beg as we might, he would not sit. Sandy asked about his affliction. He had been kicked by a mule over a year ago, and had rushed to put disinfectant on the injury. He was no better. In addition he had had a “mystic” in his ear, and another one, here, around his heart. His breathing was really gasping. He was by no means, he confided to us, the man that once he was.
His two barefooted daughters, surrounded by his grands, barefooted and in long dresses for nightgowns, were surly. One talked to herself, at us. Sandy was grudgingly welcome, not the other two. We soon were lost for words to say. Pretty speeches were worse than silence. The girls’ husbands (or rather the husband of one, the other girl had merely borne children to her man) were gone, God only knew where.
Sandy asked them to sing. The surly daughter wasn’t going to sing, she didn’t know nothing to sing for. She just wasn’t going to sing. The old man was pained by her unmannerliness, but retained his quiet politeness. From the door to the next room, the mother came with other grands hiding in the folds of her long shapeless dress. She spoke gently to the muttering daughter.
“Spirituals?” Sure they knew them, but they preferred to sing from the book. From a paperback edition of Gospel Hymns, Mr. Johnson read the line “Trust and Obey.” “We will sing that for you,” he said simply. The beginning refusal from the daughters he cut off in mid-flight: “All of you sing now.” Patriarchal command edged into his gentle voice:
In the light of his word.
The harmonies were weird; the mother’s alto beautiful. The old man weaved up and down around the melody. The daughters’ voices were drawn in; they could sing. A boy’s soprano rose, like a heartbroken cry:
What a glory he shine on our way
When we do his good will
He abide with us still
And with all who will
Trust and obey.
The silence was unbearable after the last wild harmonies. Mr. Johnson asked us to sing. We demurred, then finally rushed (to get it over with) into “I Shall Not Be Moved.” They let us mangle it, and then they helped us out. They knew it all right.
Singing, perhaps the fact that we couldn’t sing much, helped close the gap. The mother talked to us. Solomon was away at Fort Benning. He had been gone two weeks. They missed him, they needed his help so much. He had never been away from home before. Mr. Johnson vouched for him: “I raised my son right. He were a praying boy in church.” The surly daughter spoke to me intently, “That my brother. He in camp now.”
The mother’s voice quavered in the doorway. “I dreamed of Solomon last night. I could hear him in the room just like I hear you. Heared him moving. I said, ‘Son, are you back?’
“He say, ‘Mamma, hit’s me. Hit’s Solomon.’
“I say, ‘You got to go back?’
“And he say, ‘Mom, I ain’t gonna go back no more, not until August fust.’
” It was mid-September then.
The old man had been writing a letter to him, sending him a dollar and a quarter for cigarettes, soap, and things, since Solomon hadn’t been in long enough to get any money. He was sending the change loose in the envelope. He didn’t know what a money order was; Ulysses explained it to him and promised to mail the letter for him.
The mother talked on, increasingly tearful: “I hope no harm will come to my boy.” “He’ll be all right,” I said brashly. “The Army takes care of the soldiers. Look,” I said, yanking Ulysses over, “here is an Army officer. He’ll tell you how they look after the soldiers.”
They swarmed around Ulysses while I explained that here was one of our own, an officer in the Army. The old man was at the top of delight. “Honey, honey,” he cried. “Those bars say that he’s an officer,” I told him. “Honey,” yelled the old fellow, “let me touch them.” He rubbed the bar on Ulysses’ shirt collar like an amulet. The mother pleaded to Ulysses, “Look out for my boy. Don’t let no harm come to him.”
Ulysses took the letter; we folded a couple of dollar bills into the mother’s hand. They forced a large green pear apiece upon us, the old man polishing them carefully with his hand. We sang one song, certainly the wrong one to carry in our memories: “God Be With You Till We Meet Again.” I stumbled going out of the door onto the shaky porch, and fell against the surly daughter, striking her breast a really heavy blow. I was profusely apologetic. She listened to my stupid politeness (she had probably never been so apologized to before, for such a slight wrong). “You ain’t hurted me none,” she said shortly and finally. But her voice had friendliness in it. “Y’all come back,” she said as we plunged into the darkness toward the car. One of the grands ran out into the headlights, his dress streaming behind him, and waved a long sleeve in farewell.
TAKE YOUR COAT OFF, GENE! They were setting up an apparatus and trying out the loudspeaker when I got to the heart of the town. A steady stream of the inhabitants of that section of southeastern Georgia was already pouring in. Some had got off the train I rode; more were arriving in mule wagons, buggies, old model Fords, jiggling high above the ground, and other makes of cars, dusty and spattered. They found parking places and strolled the streets, truculent, suspicious, ready for a good time, spoiling for band music, oratory, liquor, and fighting.
The only white man I knew in town was an old friend, there on government business. I called briefly at his office. He warned me that an explosion was due, since Talmadge’s chief of constabulary had broadcast his threat against troublemakers and his advice that Southern white women should arm themselves. The time was ripe, my friend told me, and I was quite the guy, obviously a strange Negro in the town, and probably northern. I tried not to appear too scared, and hoped to sound casual. “If I get into trouble,” I said, “do I know you?”
“Sure you know me,” he said. “I have some contacts here. The worst that can happen is that you’ll be thrown in jail. They’ll hardly beat you up, or anything like that.”
When I got to the Negro side of town, however, I threw off any slight fear I had. All the Negroes I met were excited—it was like circus day—but none seemed worried about any “incident.” “You’ll be all right,” said my host at the huge lunch he set out for us, “I’ll tell them you’re a cousin of mine from below Macon.” He took it all easily; I fell back at ease. There were mean crackers in that section, but he didn’t look for any trouble, that day.
We got to Courthouse Square well in time. A few Negroes were sitting on the curbstone of the lawn. Two were preachers, one Baptist and the other Methodist. They were glad to meet me. A flurry that might have perturbed me, save for their reassuring nonchalance, took place half a block away. A bunch of white men and boys ran yelling toward a building. Somebody at a window yelled out to them. “One of them sabatoors,” said Baptist. I learned later that a soldier, AWOL and drunk, had been arrested. He had probably wanted to see the fireworks too.
We joined the rest of the Negroes who were naturally on the outskirts of the crowd, grouped round the statue to the Confederate Soldier with its legend “Loyal Unto Death.” The crowd had four fairly distinct layers; one, the Talmadge rooting section, packed tight in the street before the flag-draped stand; the second, largely neutral from its cheering and demeanor (this country was “on the Government” and hence was waiting to see which way the cat would jump); and the third, a sparse scattering of anti-Talmadge-ites, critical and aloof. Drunks weaved in and out of the crowd, cracking wise, cracking foolish. Behind the clot of Negroes, some government employees sat in folding chairs; others looked out of the courthouse windows. A large number of the “Talmadge till I die” people were the wool-hat red-necks, burnt brick in color, light-haired, blue-eyed, large and gangling. Their womenfolks, in spite of their clean and starched finery, seemed invariably tight-lipped and worn. But liquor had loosened the tongues of the men. There were also the townsmen, in summer suits, collars and ties, and straw hats. They were shaking hands and slapping backs all over the place. Attractive town girls arm-in-arm, arms about each other, paraded the grounds in bright print dresses, really fluffed on out, and vari-colored socks and sandals.
They cut a few steps, shaking their shoulders, as the phonograph record of Talmadge’s theme song blared from the loudspeaker. It was hillbilly in swing with a corny xylophone filling in the breaks:
The folks from Pabun Gap
To Tybee’s shining light
Will put Gene back in office
’Cause he stands for what is right.
So let’s elect Gene Talmadge
And bring back once again
The same administration of
That red suspendered man.
This song was played over and over; it was long the first time.
A roar told us that little dictator himself was coming. The meeting of the clan set the street resounding. Several Negroes (I was among them) stood up on the pedestal of the Confederate statue to see better. The governor was really something to look at: his broad grin as he shook hands all around belied his self-portrait: “Just mean as hell.”
“I never figured he was such a little biddy man,” said the Negro farmer on whose shoulders I was leaning.
Preliminaries immediately started. There was a long prayer from a sing-songy man who pulled out all the stops. One-third of his peroration asked for protection for Governor Talmadge’s son with the Navy. As one critic said later, you would have thought young Talmadge was MacArthur.
He took seriously the second stanza of the campaign song which began:
Gene’s only son, Young Herman,
Now sails the seven seas
To help defeat the Germans
And the Yellow Japanese.
I also heard later, how reliable it is I do not know, that the preacher was known as the town drunk. One leading citizen who was to introduce the governor showed up much later, on the outskirts of the crowd. The insurance agent who did introduce him was fulsome, praising the governor for paying the teachers their back salaries and for doubling the old age rolls in the county. A young man from the University of Georgia denounced his fellow students for burning the governor in effigy, promised to deliver the University to the governor, and read a bad poem, a sophomore’s imitation of Eddie Guest. He turned out to be the son of one of the Governor’s officials, sort of a relative of the governor’s, from the governor’s home-place, whom the governor had known since he was “so long.”
The governor started easily. He had the most voluble part of his audience in his hands and he knew it. He played his voice like—like the old trouper he was: now “giving gravy” like a backwoods preacher, now slangy and raucous, now pompously constitutional. His early discussions of finances left the audience cold; this breed of hearers was obviously not mathematical. “Take your coat off, Gene!” one minion yelled, and a gale of happiness started when he shed his coat and snapped his red galluses back and forth. At last!
He would pause to listen to some cry from his gang, as if he didn’t know what they wanted to hear. He was a vaudevillian, ready to act out any of his few skits on demand. Somebody reminded him of the education fight. “Oh yes, that,” said the governor as if he’d forgotten. So he told the admiring throng the tale he repeated every week on the radio. He had to go way back to educator Cocking’s being born and raised in Iowa, where they have the co-education of the races, whites and the blacks together. Then he attended Columbia University. Then he was brought to Georgia where he started administering the Rosenwald Fund and messing up in general.
“A white lady, the daughter of a Confederate kunnel came to my office and said that Cocking was advocating the co-education of the races. I was amazed. I asked her (don’t cheer till I’m finished) ‘Would you swear to that statement?’ The good white lady swore it; I looked her in the eye, and I believed her. I knew I could not trifle with this; I knew the gre-a-a-te danger of this, there was something here that would destroy traditions dear to us down here in Gawgia. Wait a minute. Let me go on.
“Those Rosenwalds wanted a nigra on the Board of Regents in the Chancellor’s office. The men he had driven out had said that nigra and white teachers should be paid the same. No one of them has ever denied it to this day. All the evidence he had offered to the Atlanta Constitution and the Atlanta Journal they would not print as news, but they carried anything else that would slander the good men of the state, whom they called ‘stooges, trained seals, and puppets,’ all for protecting the tradition of Georgia and our children.”
He loved the University of Georgia as much as any alumnus. His grandfather, his father, and he all went there. He sent his only son there. And those two Atlanta papers dared to have that grand old university unaccredited. But wait until after September 9th. It would be accredited then because it would be a white man’s college again.
Gross cheers from the woolhats, few of them graduates of elementary schools.
Did they want to hear how he had “stacked” his board of regents? Hell yes, they did. He told how he, the farmers’ friend, had bearded the big city feller, Clark Howell, in his den. Howell promised that if the governor would write him a letter requesting him to resign, he would write one back resigning. So the Governor wrote one right there on Clark Howell’s stationery, using Clark Howell’s typewriter and signed it on Clark Howell’s desk with Clark Howell’s pen.
“That’s the way I got rid of one of ’em,” glowered the governor to stentorian applause.
“Mixed picnics, some Tennessee nigras had come down to Athens, nigras and whites at the same picnic (and all of you know what a picnic is). Nigra advisers on equal terms with white people in Washington, under Clark Foreman, Clark Howell’s nephew, another administrator of the Rosenwald Fund. Oh it’s pitiful. White girls visiting Tuskegee, a nigra school. Didn’t stay three days but did stay one night.
“What’s this other? Naow, you good ladies present listen good to this. I remember when I was a child at my mother’s knee how my mother would read to us out of the Woman’s Home Company . . . what’s the name—Ladies’ Home Journal. And now, in the last issue, there are eight pages building up nigras, encouraging nigras to want social equality. Oh the pity of it! When the nigra newspapers call me and Governor Dixon of the gre-a-a-te state of Alabama upholders of white supremacy, I’m proud to accept that title and honor.”
Commotion in the crowd ceased only when a burly redneck demanded the chapter on the Rosenwalds. The governor enlarged on the theme song:
Gene saved our college system
From all the Rosenwalds
Who sought to end traditions
Which we know are dear to all
We don’t want all their millions
And neither their advice
On how to educate our youth
We Southerners think twice.
First he took up Ralph McGill, who received a Rosenwald fellowship. What is a fellowship, friends? It’s nothing but money. While McGill was spending Rosenwald money he was also, the governor said sadly, receiving state checks. His man Friday bustled up with the papers, and Talmadge waved checks above the heads of the crowd. There were checks cashed on shipboard, in England, France, Germany, Copenhagen, all those foreign countries. At Copenhagen the crowd groaned.
Ralph McGill, now his enemy, had fallen hook, line, and sinker for the Rosenwald Fund propaganda, which advocates amalgamation of the races. Here was a book written by Embree, the head of the Rosenwalds. He waved a book with a lurid yellow jacket and box-car letters at his panting audience. BROWN AMERICA! “Who is this man Embree? I’ll tell you, confidentially. Embree is the author of Brown America, and in this book he explains how he intends to turn this South of ours into a m’latter South!”
“Not in Gawgia, he won’t!” boomed a large cracker at the front of the bandstand. Laughter of relief, not curses, followed this outburst. And then Gene Talmadge really went to town, pointing his accusing finger, glaring from behind his black-rimmed glasses, transfixing his hearers with hypnotic gestures and Svengali glares, shaking that long hank of black hair over his face. His voice trembled as he gave out the hokum, and the crowd loved it.
All except the Jim Crow section. I looked carefully at the Negroes there: the town doctor, intent upon Talmadge’s platform mannerisms; numerous farmers, in blue denims and reddish brogans. All of their faces were set stolidly. When the crowd laughed at Talmadge’s witticisms, their masks retained that set of not exact passivity—but stolidity, grim disapproval. Only their eyes, staring glances at each other at some of the worst insults, at the use of the word nigger—it was oftener nigra or black—those only gave their feelings away. I know that they were angry and ashamed. The most expressive face was that of a youngster seated on the rear of the base of the statue. He stared at his sandaled feet. His face showed him to be in pain. I learned that he was the schoolteacher of a nearby community.
The sky was clear blue without many clouds. Three buzzards soared and circled, high up, then not so high.
I had a fairly easy time of it, caught up by the excitement of trying to follow everything. I had been stared at by some Negro farmers a bit coldly, maybe resentfully, but I had been so interested in the demonstrational debate of the two preachers before the circus began, that I was not accepted. Several whites had also stared at me fixedly; one drunk stopped squarely in front of me and looked me over a long time, insolently, before lurching off. I was startled when a finger dug into my side. I looked down into what I thought was a white man’s face, but no white man would have grinned quite that way.
“Scared you, didn’t I?” He was one of us, I knew then. “You see that white man, looking over here?” I did; the white man saw me too. “He asked me, ‘Is those two tall ones yonder niggers or white men?’ [One of the preachers was florid and pinkish tan.] I told him y’all was colored. He said, ‘I wondered what white men would be fools enough to stand over with the niggers.’ ” My new friend was tickled at the episode.
I was stared at also by the village belles, who gave me the once-over coolly. One strutted back and forth, looking over her shoulder. “Lynch-bait,” muttered one of my new friends.
I could have felt more comfortable, but there was no real bother. Tired of standing, I sat beside the young schoolteacher. The Methodist preacher found me there and told me that my host had left, but that he would get me back to my part of town. Suddenly we heard a woman’s high-pitched voice. We stood up to look. A woman was on the platform, waving her arms. She was too far from the microphone for her squealing to be articulate, but soon we heard the governor answer her. The crowd yelled at the exchange.
“I’m ready to go whenever you are,” I told the preacher.
“I’m ready now,” he said.
As we got to the edge of the lawn, Talmadge had silenced the woman, and was intoning, “And in conclusion. . . . ” When we turned into the street leading to colored town we heard the last stanza of the song blaring from the mike:
Now let’s elect Gene Talmadge
To take the helm again
For he’s the one who helps our State
In every way he can. . . .
INSURANCE EXECUTIVE Though quite busy, E. M. Martin, secretary of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, affably gave me much time, and proved to be a good talker. He is a sturdily built, sharp-featured man with shrewd eyes; his color is that of sunburned white Southerners; his thin, graying hair is straight. He is energetic and forceful, and from all quarters I heard that he was a resourceful business man.
One of his immediate concerns was an eight millimeter technicolor motion picture called “The Parade of Negro Progress” that the Atlanta Life Company had been exhibiting throughout the South. The picture took two years and a lot of money to make, he told me. The machinery belonged to the company and a photographer was employed for the filming and showing. Martin candidly admitted that the primary object of the film was to make money, but in a clean honest way, he said, “to build friendships, and to show others what we’re doing. Many Negro schoolboys in their history classes learned only one thing pertaining to the Negro and that is that Lincoln freed the slaves.”
The picture stresses the “highlights of Negro life,” with such items as the Negro hospital in St. Louis, a commencement at Atlanta University, the new plant at the Tennessee A & I State College at Nashville, the celebration at Daytona Cookman Institute when Mrs. Roosevelt went down there on Mrs. Bethune’s anniversary; Negro farmers in southwest Georgia with large mechanized farms, warehouses, fine mule and horse teams, well-fed cattle, and tractors at work in the fields; hair-dressing establishments; the bank in Atlanta; girls at the intricate statistical machines in the Atlanta Life offices; gas stations owned and manned by Negroes; Paul Laurence Dunbar’s home in Dayton, Ohio; green troops marching in the camps; Negro pilots taking off at Tuskegee; Dean William Pickens selling bonds. And so the list went. “It would be an all-day proposition if we showed all the stuff,” Martin said. So it was edited to meet local interest, with the school and church stuff varying according to the section. When shown in Texas, for instance, a few Texas churches and schools would be spliced in.
It was run off at churches and schools; Martin doubted if Negro theatres would be interested in some of the shots, and considering it to be advertising would want money to exhibit it. Martin believes the film to be worth thousands of dollars of advertisement to the businesses and colleges pictured, but he settles for good will to the company.
The picture takes about an hour to run, with the photographer and operator, J. Richardson Jones, explaining the scenes as the reels unwind. About ten minutes or so of the picture deal with the Atlanta Life Insurance Company. Then the state manager of the company makes his speech urging the people to take out policies.
The company was letting the picture ride for awhile, as “you can’t use the same picture for two years running. . . . The cost had been way up yonder, but it was a good way to sell insurance.”
Later on, I talked with Richardson Jones, the film photographer. He was a quick-jumping fellow, a go-getter if there ever was one, turning up, it seemed, at several places all at once. He was proud of the shots he had made, and wanted to give me a private showing of his masterpiece. An anecdote was told on Auburn Avenue about his absorption in his job. He had got permission from the War Department to take shots of a Negro tank unit while on maneuvers in the South. A sergeant with a detail of soldiers had been assigned to carry out Jones’s every wish. The sergeant took his orders literally. Jones ordered a foxhole dug about shoulder deep; lowered himself into it with his camera; told the sergeant to let the tank come on; and readied his camera for a few feet of reel showing the charge of a tank. The juggernaut roared forward. Suddenly an officer ran toward the hole, yelling and swearing. The tank rumbled to a stop about ten feet away. “Get out of that hole!” he ordered Jones. The tank was signaled to go ahead, while Jones stood by, rueful at missing his dramatic shot. The tank roared into action and rode over the foxhole. Jones looked down at where he had been; the earth was packed tight as if no hole had been dug there; the foxhole could have been his grave. The sergeant and the detail stood by, nonchalantly. They had obeyed orders.
But Martin told no such anecdotes. He took the picture in all seriousness. His office contained added evidence of the company’s pride in race progress. An Atlanta Life Calendar was devoted to pictures of Negro inventors. Martin reeled off the achievements of Robert A. Pelham, the inventor of a pasting machine and a tabular device for the compiling of statistics, and of Norbert Rillieux, whose invention of an evaporator for refining sugar was so useful to his native Louisiana that his statue is now in Cabildo. Martin was proud of these men and of the company’s broadcasting their place in the world of commerce and finance.
It was with relish that Martin told me the story of Alonzo Herndon. I thought idly that two Negroes who had become heroes for different segments of their people had been named Herndon, one Alonzo and one Angelo, and both had been closely connected with Atlanta. Not far away, a mile or so, probably, from the shining marble and mahogany of the Atlanta Life Company that had housed Alonzo Herndon’s enterprise, were the granite and steel of Fulton Tower, hunkering, sooty, ugly, and dismal, where Angelo Herndon had been jailed. I wondered how many Atlanta Negroes in Beaver Slide or Darktown knew of either Herndon, or, for that matter, how many whites at Five Points or in Druid Hill. Undeniably, however, both had made their marks: Alonzo, widely held to be the greatest Negro financier; and Angelo, the symbol of working class protest and unity. And both had started from scratch.
Alonzo Herndon’s story (I have pieced it out from other sources) sounded like a plagiarism from Horatio Alger. Born a slave on a farm near Social Circle, Georgia, in his youth he worked as a farmhand and developed a knack for barbering in the colored settlements in the hamlets roundabout. He opened his own shop in Jonesboro and became well known for his skill and tact, before leaving for the bigger world and money of Atlanta.
In Atlanta, a kindly disposed white man allowed the ambitious, thrifty youngster to open a shop in his hotel. This was the Atlanta of Henry Grady, Joel Chandler Harris, Frank Stanton, and Clark Howell. The serious, courteous, nearly white barber became the favorite of prominent white Atlantans, and his shop became a meeting place. Herndon was the model master barber. Though, according to a later partner, Herndon boasted that he had only been as far as Baker in the Webster’s Blue Back Speller, he spoke with care and polish. No dialect. He neither smoked nor drank. An early partner, Bill Betts, was a good barber, but preferred hunting and fishing and spinning yarns. In those days, barbershops were open only on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Bill grudged even the three-day week, but his partner made and saved, made and saved.
Two of Herndon’s shops burned down, a rather high mortality, that certainly did not result from Herndon’s carelessness. It may have resulted from his race. The burning of the second made Herndon determined to put up the finest shop in the world. He traveled over Europe for ideas. Soon he owned three Atlanta shops, employing seventy-five men. His place on Peachtree Street became nationally known. Herndon’s later partner, an old gentleman in his sixties named Howard Pitts, stated that the landlord wouldn’t stick Herndon for rent; but after he died and his heirs sold the property, the rent started jumping. For a long time it had been $255 a month; at the time of Herndon’s death it was up to $1,200 a month. Herndon died before he fulfilled his promise to give the shop to his barbers, but his wife and son fixed up the papers and gave the shop to the thirteen barbers who had been with Herndon longest. When the lease ran out, these associates bought a place on Broad Street, corner of Peachtree and Poplar, and moved “everything not nailed down—all the marble and plate glasses—across the street.” The shop is still doing well, with a board of directors, although the white barber unions try to exert pressure against “nigger” barbers. It is, of course, in the white business area; several blocks down Auburn Avenue the Negro business section begins. I have given the shop several quick look-sees; it always was busy.
Before Herndon died, his influence defeated a bill introduced in the Georgia legislature making it illegal for white people to have their hair cut or their beards shaved by colored barbers. This bill was reportedly instigated by Herndon’s disgruntled white competitors.
Well, the money came in and Herndon knew how to put it out again. According to Martin, he took a number of namby-pamby church benefit societies and welded them into a strong unit. Several associations that were too financially weak to comply with the Georgia insurance laws were taken over and reinsured by Herndon’s Atlanta Mutual Company. In 1922, the company was named the Atlanta Life Insurance Company; it had been developed by sound, conservative business practice and its future was assured.
When Alonzo Herndon died in 1927, he was praised by Negroes and whites for his business shrewdness and Christian character. Fuzzy Woodruff, a columnist in the Atlanta Georgian wrote: “Thousands of Atlanta’s colored citizens passed the ball and gazed with awe and reverence on the features of the man whose life had pointed them the way out of darkness. . . . Hundreds of the best white citizens [were] there to mourn the passing of a man whose life had told the story of how a Negro could achieve eminence and retain the friendship and regard of every kind and class and creed in his community.”
I was, of course, not convinced that Herndon had shown Negroes the way out of darkness. That was too much to ask of one man. But I realized that Herndon was a striking representative of the handful of Negroes with foresight and shrewdness who had laid the bases for thriving Negro businesses, generally insurance companies.
I asked Martin why so many wealthy Negro families and businesses had started from successful barbers. I was thinking of men like John Merrick of Durham, William Johnson of Natchez, and Clayborne Pride of Lynchburg. “Here’s the story,” he said to me. “Negro life in slavery was stratified. The ploughhand did the dirtiest, coarsest work, where he didn’t have to think. A large group of white people were down as low as slaves. The more intelligent slaves were trained as wheel-wrights, carriage makers, painters, and tinkers. They carried on the necessary industrial life of that time. My granddaddy was a carriage maker. Then, of course, there were the house servants, who did the cooking, laundering, anything else the big bourbons wanted of them. Those bourbons lived like princes.
“It was advantageous to the South to make use of the smart Negroes. But in the adjustment period, after the Civil War, dirty work became Negro work. The artisans lost out. But barbering was not closed to Negroes; it was a field of personal service that he did well in. Nearly every town had a barbershop for whites run by Negroes. Recently there was a drive to run Negroes out of barbering white folks. I remember when cards were passed out with pictures of black hands on white faces. When bobbed hair came in, Negro barbers decided automatically not to cut white women’s hair, but to stick to men’s and children’s. The women might get fresh or cute or scared. So the young people left barbering, or wouldn’t learn it. But the older barbers had made hay while the sun shined.”
Martin then started talking of his own career. He had attended Atlanta University: “The missionary schools wanted to develop preachers and missionaries. They stressed the ‘spiritual’ and a little culture along religious lines. They were run by good people, but their vision didn’t reach out to industry and commerce. When I started in insurance, Truman Gibson offered me fifty dollars a month and board. When I decided on insurance, the missionary people deplored the fact that I was going out to make money. Well, it certainly wasn’t money that decided me.
“Booker T. Washington was wise so far as industrial training goes, but he was all wet in telling the Negro to stay out of politics. He was wrong in social matters too. The Negro will never be anything but a serf until he has the right to free movement in public affairs. Whites call that social equality. I call it civic equality. In social life people are bound to pick their friends. I do. So do you. Booker Washington—he and the South—set the race back fifty years. In some ways he was just a front man for the white capitalists. Northern capitalists thought the Negro was not worth the ballot. So they set up a hell of a compromise, delaying the progress of the Negro. The South’s progress too. Negroes will never have anything until they vote. No vote, no economic opportunities; no economic opportunities, we’re in one hell of a fix.
“We pay taxes; there’s a basis of equality there. Yet we’re only one-tenth of the people, and the poorest of the poor. We’re shut out, at the mercy of the nine-tenths. We’re circumscribed from opportunity. The Negro as a race is an economic factor only as a laborer. That’s a hard thing to say. But of the billions of capital in America, we’re just on the fringe. The North Carolina Mutual and the Atlanta Life are our biggest institutions. A few more concerns are making money, but as far as big money goes, where the hell are they? No sir; it’s a social problem all right. The Negro will never get to be a man, a free man, until he can go where’s he’s got the right to go. The race will never get out of the barrel until we have business equality, the right to go into public places. I don’t call that social equality. Philip Randolph and some of those other young leaders are on the right track. The only thing is that we’ll all have to pull together.”
In Martin’s opinion, one weakness of the Interracial Group, of which he is a member, is the insistence that “each race was cut out for certain specific things.” The Negro, they said, was especially adapted to teach spirituality. And he had a sense of politeness and docility. Martin snorted. He told a few chestnuts about the Negro’s excessive politeness: the Negro bellboy who, seeing a white woman nude, murmured “Excuse me, sir”; the Uncle Tom at the courthouse who took off his hat, kidded, bowed, and scraped unduly much, telling the Negroes who low-rated him, “Sure, I’m taking my hat off, but I’m doing it for money”; the head waiter who refused to answer when the guest asked for the head nigger, until the guest waved a ten dollar bill, when he walked up and said, “Oh, you want de head nigger? Well, I’se de head nigger here.” “Politeness Humph,” laughed Martin, “that’s business tact.”
Martin was a bit sore at the concept that all Negroes can sing and dance. “Anywhere they see the Negro, on the chain gang, in the street, anywhere, they expect him to give them a song and a dance. Then they figure that in the better class, every Negro can preach. That’s a hangover from slavery. The slaves who could sing and dance got special treatment, the best medical attention and food. To keep them healthy cattle. The preacher got special treatment too, as long as he would preach ‘Jesus and Him Crucified,’ and ‘You Take the World and Give Me Heaven.’ So naturally we have a lot of preachers, singers, and dancers. Too many.”
Well, he had decided on a business career. In his early years of insurance work he had had some tough experiences: “It used to be, yesterday, that no outside Negro could go into Monticello, Georgia, unless he was a minister. And even then it wouldn’t be too safe. Monticello was in Jasper County, one of the meanest counties in Georgia, the county where Williams had his notorious peonage farm. You must have heard of it. Monticello was just a handful of houses, a block of stores. If a strange Negro came in, they’d pick him up for vagrancy and fine him fifty dollars. When the Negro couldn’t pay, he’d have to go down on the plantation and work his time out. They kept the local Negroes in line. An old jackleg preacher was down there, bootlegging insurance. One day a white man came to him: ‘Hello, Uncle Ike. How’s Aunt Martha?’
‘She’s all right, I reckon.’
‘She gets a little unruly sometimes, don’t she?’
‘Well, I reckon she do, sah. Yassah.’
‘Well if she gets too unruly, we’ll do her like we done Leo Frank.’ Then the white man made a half circle with his finger around his throat. He wanted to tell Uncle Ike that he had an eye on him.
“When I went down to see Uncle Ike on insurance business, the sheriff came up. ‘Hello, preacher,’ he said to Uncle Ike. He just looked me over carefully. I walked around with the preacher and the schoolchildren followed us yelling, ‘Nigger and a white man, nigger and a white man!’ I stayed around until five o’clock before the preacher thought it wise to go visit prospects. ‘What did you bring me down here for?’ I asked him, but he convinced me that writing policies on Negroes in Jasper County was a sundown job.
“While there, I visited a Negro doctor. He had as many white patients as colored. He was making good money, but he didn’t have a fine house. As a rule, the successful Negro in a place like that, won’t buy too good a house. No need in incurring the enmity of the white people. Most of them get their money all right. They’re treated somewhat as exceptions, things apart, as long as they do their work and stay off the race issue. Stay off education and better pay. That’s crossing into social issues, and is dangerous.
“It’s better now in Jasper County after the government went in to expose the Williams case. But it still can be rough down there.”
The hostility of Southern whites to Negroes in the insurance game was an old story to Martin: “Folks who are in business can see the manipulations, the chicanery of the old Bourbonic South. For instance, in Mississippi, a group of Negroes went to the commissioner of insurance. They told him how they wanted to give the Negro a stake, that they wanted Negroes to develop into dependable farm workers, with some incentive to save their money. The commissioner said ‘Well, boys, what you said about the farm is O.K. But I’m not going to grant any insurance license to niggers.’ So business had to be bootlegged. A law was set up to discourage bootlegging business. It was a good law, but the real object was to get rid of Negro business. The Ku Klux Klan worked behind the scenes to keep Negroes out of insurance. Before 1912 this was the attitude: ‘If those goddam niggers get $100,000 capital stock, we’re gonna make it $150,000. If they get that, we’re gonna make it $200,000.’ Old man Herndon at the outset couldn’t get a license. He had to sell his business up in Kentucky.
“Now, they can’t make laws hurting one without hurting the other. There are a lot of things behind the scenes. Burial societies, out of which insurance companies grew, are not purely racial. There were a lot of white ones. Those societies, white or colored, did not have the reserve to guarantee the public the same as insurance companies. When laws are passed to kill them off, it’s not racial, it’s just big business killing off little business. They couldn’t pass the law without hurting the little white man as well as the Negro. But in the administration of the law, that’s where the damage was done. Big business wanted to destroy all Negro insurance. Negro insurance caught it both ways. For instance, the Mississippi Life was stolen from Negroes.
“The Negro is still a disadvantaged group in business, with his whole economic outlook determined. They can tax you out of business. Take Mrs. Malone of Poro College, St. Louis. They put up such a tax on her that she couldn’t live under it. Georgia, now, is one of the cheapest states to do business in. The old law was running all of the capital away. Even Coca-Cola was having a hard time. That law was repealed for a more reasonable law, and now capital is coming back to Atlanta.
“Most Negro banks, insurance companies, and so forth, were started by un-lettered men, ignorant of the laws of business. Take Rutherford. What did he know about business? He had only been in the fish business over in Memphis. What did he know about investment? Any eighth or ninth grade student in Atlanta would know more than he did when he started. What did Heman Perry know about insurance in the large? Negroes were ostracized, shut off from the councils of state. How in hell could they know anything?
“Well, old man Herndon believed in intelligence. He encouraged Truman Gibson to go off and study, and Gibson went from Atlanta University to Harvard. He insisted that young Norris Herndon should learn business administration. Now the company employs over two hundred college graduates. The key men are all college men, from Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Amherst, Atlanta University, Fisk, Morehouse, Howard.”
Martin led me into Alonzo Herndon’s office, now occupied by his son. I studied an advertisement that had appeared in the “Georgia Prosperity Issue” of the Atlanta Constitution for May 12, 1914. This gave an interior view of Herndon’s shop that extended from 66 Peachtree to 65 North Broad Street. The advertisement was in the familiar Booker Washington pattern:
Anyone who can “pull” a razor without cutting a person’s throat can OPEN a barbershop. It is the man who “knows how” to CONDUCT a barbershop that keeps his place open.
The advertisement boasted of “cleanliness and workmanship,” clean and sharp tools, and sanitation.
Every barber changes his white linen suit daily. Every barber sterilizes his hands four times a day in a medicinal solution. Every towel, razor, comb, brush, and shaving brush is sterilized before and after using. Compounds, calculated to kill any possible germ, are used in washing the floors in Herndon’s Barber Shop. . . . These are the reasons why Herndon’s Barber Shops are known the country over as the finest establishments of their kind in the universe.
An interior view of the shop showed the leather seated barber chairs, the massive spittoons, the bottles, mugs, instruments; it was of old-fashioned elegance, a sort of O. Henry setting, but it must have been something in its day.
We walked through the marble corridors of the Herndon building. The Georgia marble in the old building, the Alabama marble in the annex were as spotless as Herndon kept his palatial shop. The recreation yard also showed the continuance of the passion for order and cleanliness. Crepe myrtles were in flower then, and Martin assured me that the shrubbery was of various sorts so that there would be all year round blooming. The pleasing rock work in the cleanly swept yard was done by colored people. Generally, corners are left junky, Martin said, but one order of the yard was “to keep tidy the places that do not meet the eye.” In the recreation hall were a dozen or so bridge tables, a ping-pong table, a radio, and a Coca-Cola stand. A picket fence, by no means ordinary, I was assured, but made of French saplings, nailed with cooper nails, enclosed the yard. It shut out a bad-looking, littered area. I thought that this garden closet, with its protective fence, a stone’s throw from teeming Auburn Avenue, was symbolic.
I was shown the printing department where all the necessary matter except policies was printed; the officer in charge, Pap Conley, whom I had been especially advised to see, was on vacation. Much of the real work, Martin told me, was done in the tabulating department, where girls were busy at the clicking, roaring tabulators and sorting machines. One young woman interpreted the services of these machines. They were too precious to be bought, Martin told me, so the company had to rent them. They were absolutely the best, however. I could well believe that; the process that they performed of sorting by names, states, agents, districts, struck me as amazing. They performed with superhuman accuracy and speed the tasks that ordinary humans once performed, but they were Greek to me as I heard of them, and in reviewing my notes they seem even more Greek. I visited several of the clerical departments; the people in charge explained the layouts carefully. They were used to curious visitors, I knew. “Who is the new kibitzer?” seemed to be the attitude of some of the girls. I could see that this was a growing concern; I did not need to read the credentials, framed like diplomas, on the walls of the board of directors room to assure me of that.
Back in his office, Martin handed over to me a pep-letter from the Director of Agencies to the Managers to be passed on to the seven hundred agents in the fields. Clipped to it was the 1942 Dunne’s Insurance Report: Analysis of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company. Dunne had rated the company as A+. Facts that were stressed were that for each $100 of Liabilities, the average assets for the twenty largest companies in America was $105.12, whereas the Atlanta Life Insurance Company’s average was $145.96 (nearly forty dollars over New York Life and Metropolitan, for instance); the average surplus per $1,000 insurance in force was $14.39; Atlanta Life surplus was $25.21; the average liquidity of assets was 60.23 percent to Atlanta Life’s 84.49 percent; the average net interest earnings was 3.42 percent, whereas Atlanta Life’s was 3.48 percent. There was a surplus of $1,685,438. “This type of report should enhance our opportunities to produce more business and earn more money,” wrote the Director of Agencies.
Well, I thought, this is a long way to come from a barber shop in Senoia. But Martin, for all of his pride in his organization, in its sound business sense, did not want to leave too roseate a view of Negro business.
“The white powers that be don’t like to see the Negro get but so far in business. The Negro has got so little at present, not enough to worry about. The crumbs from the table. But if the Negro got so that he was a threat, an economic power, then you’d have the same spirit as toward the Jew, only more accentuated. Right now, however, there’s not enough wealth to worry them. The business field is wide open. Any kind of business if it’s half way run will make money down here in the South.
“But it is a mistake to speak of Negro capitalists. They’re just pseudo-capitalists, token capitalists. They’re shut out from the Chamber of Commerce, from the law making bodies. They aren’t in a place where they can even peek into what government and business are all about.
“My heart,” said Martin, seriously looking at the cigarette smoke curling over his head, “is in the race problem.” He was sharp against the half-hearted friends of the Negro: “They call a Negro sane when he is taking low ground. They call cowardice meekness. They’ve worked out a technique of adjustment, of finesse in compromise. It’s not the poor whites the Negro has to look out for; it’s his so-called friends, his fair-weather friends.
“Now you take Aza Gordon. He is a quiet, inoffensive fellow but he has spunk. Well he wrote newspaper columns attacking the failure of white folks to say Mister and Miss when addressing Negroes; and he favored equalization of school teachers’ salaries. I ran into a fellow on Auburn Avenue, who said to me ‘You know old Gordon is gone. He might as well have handed in his resignation when he wrote that piece.’ He was teaching at Georgia State in Savannah, but Hubert didn’t make any fight to save his job. He also lost his job in the U.S.O. These folks never let up on you when you’ve got in bad once. They cut you off economically.”
Martin was bitterly convinced that if a man takes a stand on any issue, he is “just burnt up in any school system of the South, he just can’t hold a job.” Incidentally, he told me that no bright skinned Negroes were wanted as teachers in the rural counties. “The general belief is that bright Negroes have got more fight in them.” Early in his career a white man told him of his prejudice: “The m’latter seems more bitter,” he said. But Martin mused, “The white South is mixed up on whether the mulatto wants to be white or wants to be a man.”
He was unenthusiastic, as so many old Atlanta University people were, about the merger, in which his old college lost its identity and became a graduate school. The old Atlanta University had stood like a rock against segregation; its charter stating that it was a school for youth, not Negro youth. He recognized that nothing in the new charter did away with the “original intent and purposes of the University” but he wasn’t sure. And many old A.U. people felt the same. Some were inflexible. “Better not have a merger than sacrifice principle,” they said. They felt there was too much compromise, too many palliatives, too much “suave talking behind closed doors.” There was a moral effect, Martin said, in “so many of the old Yankees leaving here.” But Northern philanthropy seemed to line up with Booker Washington’s ideas about segregation. When things came to a showdown, to an issue, too many race diplomats took the lateral, not frontal approach. Martin shook his head sadly. “They can cut out the funds if you don’t toe the line; they can get you at the source. Or if you get the money, they will manipulate it.” Some Negroes, at whom the powers can’t quite get, may make a strong stand. But three Negroes, E. Franklin Frazier, Howard Thurman, and Rayford Logan, had been forced to leave the Atlanta University system. “In the deep South,” was Martin’s studied conclusion, “no Negro of guts can stay in a big school position.”
A brother-in-law of Walter White, Martin is a staunch NAACP worker. The Interracial Committee went too gradually; the white members, working for increases of Negro rights, and the few Negro members, working for equalization, couldn’t quite hitch. Many Negro leaders in the South faced a dilemma. If they took a manly stand, they got in bad with the Interracialists. If unmanly, they got in bad with Negroes. Well, as an executive of a thriving Negro business that had made it on its own, Martin had definitely solved his dilemma and had taken his stand.
LET’S LOOK AT YOUR BASE He comes naturally by his spunk. He and his sister told me tales of the family proving that. Their grandmother Ellen was their pride. Her slave master found places for all the good-looking slaves to work in the house, and when she came to Louisiana from far off Virginia, a fine looking fair woman, he put her to work in the house too. Old Mistis didn’t like her as well as Master did. Once when they were having a big party, Ellen made some mistake, and she was threatened with a whipping after the party was over. When the time came, Ellen was made to take off every piece she had on. At the third lick, however, she flew through the yard and sat on the front gallery on the base of one of the columns: “Stark bark naked” was the phrase her grandson used.
Ellen was still young, but she was the mother of a child. The white children made a great fuss, yelling, “Look at Ellen, stark naked!” Mistis got all upset and ordered Ellen around to the back. But Ellen would not leave her perch until assured that she wouldn’t be whipped. Every time after that when Ellen was threatened with a whipping, she would dutifully strip and then go around to the front gallery, stark naked, to wait. Ole Mistis got sick of seeing Ellen walking around naked in front of her children and menfolks, and soon Ellen was no longer whipped. She had made a front porch affair out of what was supposed to be a back door matter.
Ellen’s master gave Ellen’s firstborn child to his daughter for a marriage gift. This child was old enough to work in the kitchen so they just took her without a word to Ellen. Accidentally, while washing a valuable dog, she got soap in its eyes. For this she was whipped severely and kicked into a creek. Smart and brave, the child made her way along the levee on Bayou Fourche from Thibodeaux to Napoleonville, around eighteen miles. She was about done for when, with weariness and fear, she reached Ellen’s place. Ellen was then the cook at the big house on the huge plantation and had her own cabin.
In the daytime the child was hidden in the cool weedy darkness under the house, which was built off the ground on brick columns. In the evening Ellen would shake out a quilt or some other large cloth and the child would take the food put there for her, or would crawl out and scurry into the house. Her master tried to make Ellen talk, even forcing her to haul wheelbarrows of earth for seven days to break her will. But Ellen wouldn’t tell. She didn’t deny knowing the child’s whereabouts, but she said they could whip her until she died before she’d tell where she was. Every day the child would cower in the darkness under the house; every night Ellen would manage to get her into the house. Ellen kept her child safely hidden until the Yankees came.
All the tales her grandchildren cherished showed Ellen’s unbroken spirit. When she combed and brushed her mistress’ hair, she’d pull on it until it hurt, and then apologize blandly. Her mistress wanted to marry her off to a bad buck of the plantation. Ellen reminisced, “If they had give me to old Black John, I’d a killed myself. I’d a jumped in the bayou. I swear I’d a done it.”
The man she favored was a free Negro, their grandfather. Finally old master had said to him, “If you work hard and save your money I’ll let you buy Eleanor.” Grandpa bought her, and thereafter any child was his. Some of their uncles, therefore, were never slaves. Gramma and grandpa got married after emancipation, having a distaste for the ceremony that had been performed when Ellen was a slave.
This grandfather was a wheelwright by trade and made good money, which he never banked, but used to keep about the house, sunning it ever so often to keep it from mildewing. The family judiciously bought a large amount of property in Napoleonville.
Their father was a contractor, who taught himself the trade. He built a couple of houses “that looked right good” and people started hiring him. Then he built up quite a prosperous business. He was a member of the Louisiana state legislature, getting eight dollars a day. At the end of the century, he was deputy clerk of court in Napoleonville. In the turbulent times, when the whites were driving Negroes out of power, threatening some Negroes, beating up others, buying from some the right to vote, he was offered big money to get out of politics. For certain records and lists he was offered $4,000. He refused to sell. “I have plenty of money,” he said. “I’ve lived honest all these years; I’d like to die honest.” The white politicians were surprised; many Negroes had sold out or been run away and they thought this deal was in the bag. They lost patience and called on the Ku Klux Klan which was then vigorously rampant, battling the Knights of Labor. The Klan threatened him with a lashing.
He knew what he was up against; the grim, determined reckless white men in their long white dusters, big hats and masks. He told them calmly, “This is where I live, this is what I’ve tried to make home. I built this home to live in, and this is where I intend to live. If you come after me, this is right where you will find me. If you kill me I’m not going alone. I’m satisfied I’ll take somebody else along with me.”
He got rifles and bullets from a friendly white man, a big supply, enough for two days, and sat there. The Klan never came, his children told me proudly.
They had other anecdotes of spunk. Their brother was beaten by a white boy one day and came home crying. He said that he hadn’t fought back. The father said, “If you ever let a white boy beat you again without fighting back, I’ll beat you myself. I mean it.”
It was this tradition of spunk that helped to strengthen Alvin’s backbone. Without any bragging, he told me that he had played end on Columbia’s football team with Lou Gehrig in the mid-1920s. He hadn’t played football in the Louisiana high schools he had attended, and at Columbia, he said, he didn’t do much but study like hell. But he was strong and rangy, and some of his white friends persuaded him to go out for the team.
He assured me that he wasn’t a star. But some of his adventures bear repeating. Head line coach Crowley one day called him “Smoke.”
“I knew he was talking to me. I didn’t look.”
“What the hell’s the matter with you, Smoke,” Crowley said. “Didn’t you hear me tell you to come in?”
“I’m sorry, coach. I didn’t know you were talking to me. I heard you say Smoke. Didn’t think you were talking to me.”
Crowley ordered him to go turn in his uniform. Walking off Baker Field, he was stopped by Head Coach Haughton, “Where the hell are you going?” He explained the flare-up. Haughton called the entire squad together.
“This is Percy Haughton,” he barked out in his usual introduction. “I’m the coach of the Columbia team. Now, goddamnit, there are no goddam smokes on my team. That man’s name is Jones. Call him by it. That go for everybody. Now go to work.”
“If that man had told me to run through a brick wall after that I would have tried it.”
At West Point, the Army was set against Alvin’s presence. At first they didn’t want him to eat in the dining room. That’s where the boys raised hell. “What difference does it make to you,” they said to the West Pointers, “he’s going to eat with us, isn’t he?” That settled out all right. Then Haughton ran Alvin out on the first team. The cry really went up then. Army announced they couldn’t play against a Negro.
“Goddamnit, this is Percy Haughton. I’m the coach of the Columbia team and I say who’s going to play on it. I’m goddamned glad you told me you won’t play; we’ve just got time to catch the next train for New York.”
The stadium was fairly crowded, and the Army had to beat a retreat.
Alvin ran up against much dirty playing. Oddly enough, the end coach who taught him how to protect himself was Reynolds, from Georgia Tech: “One tack-ler kept hitting me behind the headpiece and my ear with the heel of his hand. Reynolds knew all about playing dirty. He told me to throw my arm up fast, elbow out. That tackle hit my elbow point with the heel of his hand. He grabbed it and wrung it, then pretended it was all right, but I knew it wasn’t going to be much use to him.”
Often down in the scrimmage he’d hear them saying, “Get the nigger, get the nigger.” Alvin would crack back with whatever came in his mind. He had protectors, and one of them he remembered proudly was a big husky named Lou Gehrig.
He showed me a clipping from a New York rotogravure of himself, Gehrig, and a couple of other players talking to Percy Haughton. He showed it modestly. “I’m no great ex-athlete,” he said, but I could see he cherished the brown clipping, nearly twenty years old, which showed a stringy but well built young Negro on equal terms with two of the greats of the American sports world. His people’s spunk that they had shown on Bayou Fourche, on a sugar plantation in Napoleonville, he had carried in some measure to Baker Field.
Therefore I was not surprised when in a collision with a white man, Alvin was calm, polite but unbending. The white man had inclined to bluster, but Alvin pointed out with cold logic exactly where the white man had been driving against the law. There was no soft-soaping; it wasn’t white man against colored man; it was man versus man; and one man, not Alvin, was in the wrong. I went with Alvin early one morning to the voting booths. As he entered the curtained box, I noticed the whites in charge looking and whispering. But Alvin acted as if this were nothing out of the ordinary, as if he voted every morning.
He is a trained statistician, and is called on for community studies. For the Carnegie-Myrdal Study he made a careful study of the racket of policy playing. He is not making an analysis of the economic cost of segregation, of the dual system prevailing in New Orleans. His figures on the costs of so many screens for so many New Orleans streetcars are coldly reckoned and presented, but the totals as he announces them cause warmth in the public conferences. He is himself not cold in pointing out the absurdities of the segregation practices, but he points these out, with canniness in terms of economic waste. I thought idly, while listening to his long arrays of facts and figures and costs and losses, of his grandfather sunning his paper dollars, distrusting the banks; of his father’s buying real estate in reconstruction Napoleonville. Alvin himself is well-fixed financially. He repeats over and over that the Southern white man listens to arguments of dollars and cents more than of abstract justice.
The Negro needs to learn some economic horse sense, he insists. He told scornfully of some New Orleans Negroes who had a protest meeting, and did a whole lot of heated talking “down at the big gate.” Afterwards they formed a committee and met with some white officials of the city.
“The white men talked politely. They showed figures that proved that they had given the Negras a 60 percent increase, while limiting the white increase to 25 percent. The increases were accurate. ‘So you can see what we’re trying to do for your people,’ the white representative said, giving them a sort of pat on the back and getting them out fast. The Negroes were flattered by the nice white folks, and were going out, glowing and glistening. Then I broke in, ‘Let us look at your base. In this instance, a 60 percent increase for Negroes raises one dollar to one dollar and sixty cents. A 25 percent increase for whites raises one hundred dollars to one hundred and twenty-five dollars. Before we can be grateful for what you say you are doing, we first must have a look at your base.’ ”
MEEKNESS IN BRONZE In Natchitoches, Louisiana, at Washington and Lafayette Streets, a famous statue was “Erected by the City . . . in Grateful Recognition of the Arduous and Faithful Service of the Good Darkies of Louisiana.” An old Negro, clad in a prince-albert, stands on a flower-decked pedestal. His shoulders are bent by age, his knees by servility; his head is bowed like Chesterfield’s valet; his misshapen hat is in hand, doffed politely. My Natchitoches friends were somewhat ashamed of this civic pride, and they took me to see it only at dusk. I repeated to them the folklore of the Louisiana Guide that “Plantation Negroes, inebriated after a spree in town, go to the statue to ask the way home and the Good Darky never fails to tell them the right direction.”
“No such lie,” a friend, born and bred in Natchitoches, told me impatiently. “They are more likely to wake up Dr. Johnson or John C. Lewis. And borrow bus fare or a dollar or so.”
From Virginia to this farthest South, I had seen the souvenirs and statues of the ex-slaves, or the preserved relics themselves, who were supposed to charm the tourists with tales that ran on like deep-grooved phonograph records. And I suspected, as in this instance my Natchitoches friends insisted, that much of the business was no such lie.
The old darky’s posture did not lie; that goes without saying. Many in the past could have been found to whom it was second nature to fall into the pose that this statue immortalizes in bronze. Too many in the present could be found willing to assume the pose, though in better clothing than the rusty jimswinger and baggy breeches, doffing an Adams or Knox hat rather than the crushed lid. Nor did those ex-slaves lie who earn a few dollars soliloquizing in Richmond, Charleston, and Montgomery, dredging good times out of a carefully diverted stream. Books like Old Massa’s People do not lie in the separate entries; they just do not add up to the correct total. Too many other items are not entered. Thomas Nelson Page was not lying in his eulogy of the mammy:
Who may picture a mother? We may dab and dab at it, but when we have done our best we know that we have stuck on a little paint; and the eternal verity stands forth like the eternal verity of the Holy Mother, outside our conception, only to be apprehended in our highest moments. . . . So, no one can describe what the Mammy was, and only those can apprehend her who were rocked on her bed, fed at her table, were directed by her unsleeping eye, and led by her precept in the way of truth, justice, and humanity.
Page’s feeling is honest if childlike. I am sure that he loved his mammy to death. And I am perfectly ready to believe that she loved him right back. But E. C. L. Adams also reveals honest truth about the mammy when he reports the overheard conversation of his unlettered but philosophical farmhands:
Ole mammy ain’t nothin’ but a ole ooman wid a han’k’ch’ef tied ’round she head. Dere’s all kind er ole ’ceitful niggers gittin’ dey self called ole mammy—more’n you can shake a stick at. Dere’s all kinds er white folks runnin’ ’round lookin’ for ole mammys wuh been in dey fam’ly an’ tooken care on ’em ever since dey was born—an’ afore.
Sprawled on a really superior antebellum bed in the high and wide front room of a Natchitoches home that always stands open to visitors like me, I explained to my host and the friends he had gathered why I had wanted to see the statue. I led the talk around to something I had been digging out recently. I mentioned an essay on Calhoun by Christopher Hollis, who goes out of his way to prove that “there is very little reason to think that the Negro race has at all benefited by the abolition of slavery.” For proof, he writes:
I have heard Negroes spontaneously appealing back to “seventy years ago”—the end of slavery-time—as to one “when de niggers all was good,” and contrasting it with the evil present “when de devil, he go up and down in Montgomery County.”
I did not have the exact quotation then, but I had the substance correct.
Though long residents in a parish above Aleck (i.e., north of Alexandria, La., where the white folks run tough and nasty), my friends were still amazed at this contemporary defense of slavery.
“He said that? Is that the only argument he gave?” said my host.
“No,” I admitted. “He also pointed out that white and black babies no longer play together freely.”
“Damn,” said one. “I’d like to see that in print. Where could I find it?”
“In Approach to Literature, a college text by Brooks, Purser, and Warren,” I told them.
One of the company, not a college man, broke in. “You mean they teach that in a college?”
“Yes,” I answered. “Not far away. At Louisiana State University, I’m reasonably sure. All three editors taught there when the book came out.”
“They teach that in our colleges, too,” he went on, “down at Southern University?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “I hope not, anyway.”
“Damn,” said my newly found friend.
This spirit of skepticism I found as prevalent among Negroes in the South as among whites I found the feeling of sentimental attachment to old aunties and uncles. Negroes notice the straight contrast: whites are idealized for dashing courage, self-assertiveness, and rebellion against injustice or subjection; Negroes are idealized for loyalty to others, humility, and uncomplaining acceptance. Sweet and glorious it is to die for one’s country, honor, liberty (if white); sweet it is for Negroes to live for their white folks. Well, the Negroes I found, whether illiterates or booklearned, were not being fooled. So protest in a white skin is heroic, and protest in a black skin is impudent, incendiary, unnatural. “Damn,” said my newly found friend.
NO TIES THAT BIND I saw other historical cities: Lynchburg, Virginia; Augusta and Athens, Georgia; Nashville, Louisville, Montgomery, Mobile, and Vicksburg. Although called a “valley of humility between two mountains of conceit,” North Carolina still cherishes its old homesteads like its neighbors. In New Bern I saw the well-preserved homes and churches that resembled those of far-off Salem, Massachusetts, with whom the town traded, more than they do those of nearer Williamsburg and Charleston. In the Salem part of Winston-Salem, the compact and rugged dwellings and churches, graced with the hooded entrances that the Moravian settlers brought down from Pennsylvania, had a warm dignity that pleased me more than the ostentatious homes of the tobacco barons in the suburbs of Winston.
Throughout the South almost every town had one or two showplaces. Sometimes on a back road an old columned big house would suddenly loom at the end of an avenue of cedars or out of a grove, or from high grown scrub pine. I saw many houses falling to pieces, the paint peeling or gone, the floors sprung, the roofs sagging, the blinds askew. In the towns, several decaying mansions took in poor whites or Negro roomers; I found two that were colored Y.M.C.A.s, and one that was an old folks’ home.
I saw the many styles that varied so from the hackneyed idealizations. I saw homes more beautiful than Hollywood sets, but I also saw the gimcracked ornateness that Mister Big, Major Huge, and Colonel Vast needed to bolster their egos. Many of the most imposing colonial mansions were those recently built by the South’s new rich on the outskirts of the cities. And I saw a large number of old homesteads that were merely overgrown farmhouses, some of them with incongruously pompous columns in front of frame structures that would hardly be noticed as anything special elsewhere. I saw some Georgian masterpieces, but I also covered many states. I knew that there were many more examples than those I saw, that big houses were off the beaten highways, and I allowed for the destruction of the Federal armies and the long years. But I also am sure that mansions were not the chief features of the antebellum landscape. Even if they were as numerous as the legend counts them, they were still the graceful, charming homesteads of the few who were on top of the heap.
Looking at old manors and baronies is not the same as looking at the historical Old South. I sensed quite as much history on seeing the sooty brick buildings of the Tredepan Ironworks on the canal at Richmond; the dirty aged but still busy tobacco warehouses at Lynchburg; Factors Row and the docks of Savannah, Cotton Row, Augusta; and the wharves at New Orleans.
And even more a part of the historic landscape I knew were the notched log houses. If climate dictated the piazzas of Charleston, the balconies of New Orleans, and the high-ceilinged spacious rooms of Nashville, climate and material also dictated these homesteads of the poor: the single cabins, or those enlarged into double, as the family or the income grew, by building another shack and roofing over the runway between them. When that was finally walled in as a hall, a porch might be added across the front with posters that sometimes grew into poor-man’s columns. Time and the advertisers have of course not been kind to the older log cabins of the modern descendants; battered and weather-beaten, but numerous, these soft gray and brown [relics] merging with the worn-out land, itself a legacy of the antebellum South.
Slave markets and quarters were also part of the architectural distinctiveness. Some have been preserved or restored to advertise departed glory. In Fayetteville, N.C., the city fathers will not consent to the removal of the old slave market house even though it creates traffic jams because of its location at the juncture of four main streets. And one of the few points of interest that I was directed to in Louisville, Georgia, is the slave market, praised as one of the last standing in the South. The slave quarters that I saw throughout the South certainly left me few illusions about slavery. I could understand their being preserved as London might preserve Newgate Prison or Baltimore might preserve a prison ship. But it is beyond my understanding how these wretched mud-daubed log-huts, or even the brick houses which at their best resembled ovens, could be preserved as witness of a chivalrous past. The pride that vibrates in “Look, my people once owned slaves” I cannot get; it needs a different wave-length from mine.
I could not see this historical romance through the eyes of the Daughters of the Confederate Veterans, the Chambers of Commerce, the organizers of Garden Clubs, the keepers of the Gift Shops and Tea Rooms. I was ready to believe that many of these were people of goodwill, and I wondered if they knew what the thing really was that they wanted restored. A Southern white liberal advised me not to be concerned about it. They don’t want restoration of the past so much as a thriving business in the present. “The South is poor,” he said, “and the people need this money.”
I realized that the worship of the past had its commercial aspects, some of them unsavory, outdoing even the maligned Yankee of the Legend. I knew the rather sordid story of the fiasco on Stone Mountain, with charges and counter-charges of fraud and bad faith. I had read about the battle of the two garden-clubs in Natchez, and money was the root of that evil. I knew the commercial slant of the Boosters Clubs’ folders and postcards and billboards. It may have taken General Grant a long time to conquer these parts, but Babbitt made a swift, more infiltrating advance.
As my memory unveils, I find that I have glimpsed many of the places named in Southern history. I have seen the several oldest houses of Saint Petersburg, Florida, and have paid my quarter for the green bottle of water from Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth. I have seen reminders of Indian warfare: the little South Carolina whistle-stops called Yemassee, the Chickasaw-Choctaw country along the Natchez Trace, the beginning of the San Antone Trace at Natchitoches. I have crossed and recrossed the storied rivers: James, Roanoke, Savannah, Santee, Pedee, St. Mary’s, Swannee, Chattahoochee, Clinch, Cumberland, Alabama, Tennessee, Ocmulgee, Black Warrior, Tombigbee, Peal, Yazoo, Red, the little Muddy, the big Muddy, and the Old Man himself. I have visited presidents’ homes from Washington’s Mount Vernon to Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage. I have seen many of the river towns from Red Stick up to Mark Twain’s Cairo and Paducah. As for the Civil War sites, I have seen Fort Sumter where the first shot was fired and Appomattox where Lee surrendered, along with various battlefields: those around Richmond, those of the Shenandoah Valley, Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, Kennesaw Mountain, Atlanta, and Vicksburg.
In Montgomery, the old silver-haired lady at the First White House of the Confederacy told us as we were going out of the door of the museum, that visitors were supposed to leave something in the coinplate for looking at the relics. “But you don’t have to do it,” she added graciously. “I know your feelings.”
She sensed correctly. The war relics, oil paintings, and the table upon which Jefferson Davis wrote his autobiographical The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, those were not our past. We thanked her, graciously too we hoped, and left the cool darkness for Montgomery’s sunlight.
I made some attempt to discover my links to the past. I had a natural curiosity about the birthplaces of my mother and father. Once I made a layover in Gallatin, Tennessee, between L & N trains and wandered about the sleepy hamlet. It was here that my mother was born, but I knew that asking questions was fruitless, as it had been long ago, and my mother had been carried to Nashville as a baby. I knew that her childhood had been spent in the shadow of the state capitol, where her aunt had reared a large family of her own children, nieces and nephews, on the earnings of a first-rate seamstress. But Aunt Mercy’s cottage had long ago been torn down to make way for progress. The landmarks that I think mother may have known were the homes of her cousins: dark-red brick dwellings, narrow-fronted but long because of frame additions with long side porches, high-ceilinged rooms, and the odd fronts decorated with the gingerbread ornaments of Victorian Nashville. And of course Fisk University, truly an Alma Mater for my mother, since she attended all the classes there from graded school through college. The somber magnolias on the campus looked old enough to have been there when my mother, a young fair-haired slip of a girl, recited a poem at the laying of the cornerstone for Livingstone Hall.
I remember driving through Roane County, in Eastern Tennessee, the birthplace of my father. Coming down off the mountain into Rockwood, one gray daybreak, I remembered with a warming at the heart that it was here that my father, even as a young man, had been boss molder of a brick kiln, earning and saving money to attend Fisk University—so far away in those days. That morning, with the Rockwood foundries going full blast under a pall of smoke and haze, it seemed a tough place to make a living in. I knew it had been tougher fifty years earlier, and I grew proud, visualizing my father’s doing a man-sized job even as a boy. “So this was where it was,” I said to myself, as we drove around the horseshoe curves.
With that sort of past I had links. But with much of the past celebrated in the guidebooks I found no ties to bind me. I could not people the broomsedge and pine barrens near Richmond with the young fellows in blue and butternut gray slogging it out for four bitter, bloody years; nor could I people the better preserved forts, breastworks, redans, and redoubts, sapworks and trenches at Vicksburg National Military Park. I knew that important battles in an important war for me and my people and America had been fought over these grounds. I was impressed, but my imagination did not spring.
I confess that less renowned memorials quickened my fancy more. One was Negro Foot, so-named because various members of the bodies of offending slaves, runaways and the like, were displayed there as gruesome warnings. Negro Foot is not far from Hanover, Virginia, and is the section famous for Patrick Henry, the Nelsons, and the Pages. While Roscoe Lewis was working on The Negro In Virginia he drove me to Cross Keys, where Nat Turner began his slave revolt. We retraced Nat’s route down to Jerusalem, now Courtland, in South-hampton County. We saw the swamp land along the Nottoway River where, after his mad ill-fated stab for freedom, Nat hid safely for six weeks, from over three thousand searches. In an old brick-house, blackened with age, in whose heavy doors were bullet holes, we talked to a Negro tenant family. They were raising peanuts on shares for a big white farmer. The father knew nothing about the tradition associating his bullet-scarred house with the uprising. He recollected some kind of wooden marker at the crossroads, but it had long since been used for kindling sticks. He had heard something about Nat Turner; he disremembered what. We told him of Nat’s march on Jerusalem. “So he fought to be free,” the fellow said: “Well . . . ” He hadn’t been long in these parts, he apologized; really, he came from up around Emporia, about twenty-five miles up the big road.
In Florida I visited Apalachicola, where Seminole Indians, halfbreed Seminoles and Negroes, and runaway slaves fought so gamely against Federal troops, in one of the earlier wars against slavery and aggression. I should like to have visited Brackettville, Texas, where Kenneth Porter tells me the descendants of these Seminole Negro warriors still cling to their proud traditions. I have visited the Crater at Petersburg where Negro soldiers proved again at terrible cost that they were fit to fight in America’s armies, which the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 should have already proved, and which it seems must be proved periodically in every war. I did not see Fort Pillow where General Nathan Bedford Forrest ordered the captured Negro garrison to be indiscriminately massacred.
The Dismal Swamp in lower Virginia and upper North Carolina also stirred my imagination. We drove around its edge from the western rim to the outlet of the Washington Canal that links up with Lake Drummond. The swamp—consisting of the Big Dismal and the Little Dismal—is vast in spite of the recent drainage. A guide born and bred on the fringes of the Swamp led us a short way into its tricky fastness. The peat was spongy and soggy underfoot; oxen could walk on it, our guide told us, but no horses or mules. The streams in which large tree trunks lay water-logged were amber-colored, and ran over reddish-brown beds. “That water’s got juniper logs sunk on the bottom,” the guide explained. “Makes it good for what ails you. Juniper is what they makes gin out of.” It was not long before we were in rank undergrowth, our faces stung by lashing twigs, our clothing caught by briers, our feet tripping over roots or sloshing into waterholes, even through the built-up peat. Cypress knees bulged out of still waters and the blackish streams became more and more serpentine. In two senses, I feared when our guide pleasantly told us of cottonmouth moccasins and rattlers he had seen, as thick around as his muscular black arm. Even though we had not penetrated far, it was not difficult for me to imagine a runaway Negro lurking in these wilds, marooned on one of the myriad hummocks, fighting off the froth-mouthed blood-hounds with a stolen rifle, or up to his neck in water and ooze as that fugitive of whom the slave-hunters reported: “Seeable but not come-at-able.”
When we left the swamp, we stopped at the shanty of an ex-slave named Henry Milteer. He knew the swamp-lore, and told us of the whitened human bones found so often, the numerous lost travelers (a pair had been lost only recently) and the gaunt, haggard outlaws and fugitive slaves. These last had fled for freedom’s sake into those dangerous morasses, had grown as wild and savage as the swamp bears and cougars and rattlers they met up with and would die before they would be retaken. He remembered how, during his boyhood, runaway slaves had slunk out of the Dismal to make forays on the corn-shocks and smokehouses of neighboring farms. Milteer’s family had been free Negroes, who sometimes set out food for the outlaws. “But we had to be mos’ keerful,” he said. “Efn de white folks had found it out, we would have fared right common.”
I realized that these reminders of Negro revolters, maroons, and fugitives are of exceptions in the past of the Old South. But so are reminders of wealth and glamour. For me they recall thrusts for freedom, as so many Old South memorials and monuments do. Insignificantly marked, most of them along byways and back roads, they are a welcome relief from the only Negroes allowed on the picture postcards and folders advertising the Old South. I collected many of the latter. A few will indicate the type: “The Home Stretch,” which shows a young blue-black buck straddling an alligator, both grinning toothily; “Negro Heben,” with four kids about to douse their brown noses and gleaming teeth into slices of watermelon; “A Coon Trees a Possum in Dixieland,” where a gray-haired Negro is about to grasp a possum by his tail; and “A Darkey’s Prayers,” where an alligator grasps a praying Negro by his hands; “Sitting Soft in Dixieland,” where a cute kid sprawls on a heap of cotton; and “Working Hard for the Family Dinner,” where three boys fish drowsily and successfully from a wharf. And, of course, ex-slaves are allowed in the advertisement if only they are sufficiently grizzled and gracious, beaming relics of the good old days.