IN TENNESSEE

The South, they tell me, never alters. It is said to be the least characteristic and most uninteresting part of the United States. “You will not care for it,” I was told. “It has not changed in fifty years.” It is certainly little visited. It does not exemplify the hustle and efficiency of the North. And then you cannot lecture down there. It is not a literary domain. The consequence is that in Great Britain many people confound the “Southern States” with the Republics of South America. I was asked in letters why I had gone South. It was thought there must be less interest there. But that is a mistake. The South is as vital as the West and the East. On the whole it is more picturesque. It is not so diversified, but the vast areas of cotton on the one hand and of sugar and corn and rice on the other, and the forests, present well-marked features and give the South a handsome natural aspect. It is true that the Southern point of view as regards the Negro does not change very much, and that all vote one way, but it does not follow that the Southern point of view as regards the whole future of the United States has not been modified and will not change. The South has been very poor and is becoming rich, will perhaps become very rich and prosperous. It was almost deprived of political power, and now it has, in an extraordinary way, regained political power. It is well known that the opinion of a poor and ruined man changes when Fortune makes up to him for the past. So also with the South.

Then, in considering a people as a whole, one is bound to reckon character. Thus, in Great Britain, what important factors are the ruggedness of Yorkshire and Lancashire, the caution of the Scots, the authority-loving of the southern counties, the enthusiasm and imaginativeness of the Celts. And in America one has to reckon, not only with the Puritan fervor of New England, but with the determination and turbulence and group instinct of the more cavalier spirit of the South. Though heat makes the Southern women languid and the Southern men fiery and quick of temper, it does not seem to make them weaker. On the whole, the Southerner seems to have a stronger will than the Northerner, and despite the exuberance of North and West, and a flood of contrary ideas and sentiments, the Southerner remains, as it were, eternally incapable of being suppressed. As long as America speaks, the South will always speak. Therefore, the South is very significant in American life.

After Virginia I went by rail to the neighboring State of Tennessee. I came into Knoxville one Friday night. The sight of it in the moonlight was impressive—the broad railway bridge, the clock tower with luminous face, the main street flocking with a Tennessee crowd, all shops fully ablaze with light; bunting and wreaths hung from house to house—for it was the week of the Fair. A Salvation Army meeting bellowed forth musical offerings and hallelujahs “thro’ the flag-filled air.” Everywhere electric signs were twinkling. Laughter and talk walked arm in arm along the broad main way. “It’s a fine city, this Knoxville of yours,” I ventured to remark to a stranger. “No, not a fine city,” said he, “a fine people, but not a fine city, a wretched city; it needs pulling down and rebuilding, but fine people, the finest people in the world.” This rare self-consciousness and belief in self, this group feeling, I believe, one would look in vain for in the North.

“Sober Knoxville” is one of the most responsible of Southern cities. Tennessee as a whole is quiet and steady. Lynching is infrequent. It was therefore considered very extraordinary that a race riot should break out in the city. The race riots in Chicago and Washington in 1919 were no doubt worse, but none caused more perplexity than that which broke out at Knoxville on August 30th of that year.

Deplorable and terrible as were those Negro pogroms of the year after the war, I think they were due to special conditions. They were the expression of the frustrated ferocity that would otherwise have gone into the war. Demobilization excitements had much to do with them—the parades of Negro regiments, the idleness of white troops and of the demobilized unemployed. When the complete transition to peace conditions had been achieved, the danger of these outbreaks was averted. The year 1920 remains freer from race riots. That is not to say that they may not break out again, and on a larger scale. In any time of social upheaval and revolution they become possible. Those that have occurred show an ugly animus against the Negro still latent in the common people of the cities.

As explained to me, the outbreak at Knoxville seemed comparatively simple in origin. Mr. Maures Mayes, a Negro, murdered Mrs. Lindsay, a white woman. He was arrested and sent to a jail in another city. A mob formed to enter Knoxville prison and lynch the Negro. But a committee opened parley with the governor, and was allowed to satisfy itself that the prisoner was not there. Apparently, however, there was a considerable amount of whisky stored in the prison. The whisky attracted the mob also. A general assault was commenced, the place was stormed, and all prisoners were released. Troops sent to disperse the mob joined it, and a second purpose then appeared—to take revenge on the colored population. Someone started a rumor and it spread like wildfire, that thousands of Negroes were marching on the business part of the city and that two soldiers had been killed. The colored folk were taken by surprise—there was a great deal of looting and destruction and personal robbery, and a number of Negroes were killed, while many were injured. It was the first race riot that had ever taken place in Knoxville, and all reputable people were sorry for it. I was told it all sprang from the crime of one Negro. But one might just as well say it all sprang from a desire to have the whisky in the prison—O Knoxville, O sobriety!

Because in general the Negroes are well treated in Knoxville, this lapse has been discounted, and they are surprisingly free from bitterness. I called at the Carnegie Library for colored people, a quiet little building—not much by comparison with the really grand public library of the city, but still a provision, and as such to be noted, in comparison with so many other cities where the Negroes not only have not access to the general public libraries, but have no separate provision made for them. The Knoxville library for colored people was, I believe, opened by the mayor some years ago, and the city felt proud of what it had done. It is unfortunately very inadequate, but it is in the charge of a capable colored lady who will perhaps help to “agitate” a bigger and better one. The Negroes are very grateful in any case for what they have.

I called on several representative Negroes. They were much more friendly to the whites than those I found in Virginia. “We get on very well here,” was a common remark. I visited the colored lawyer H——, established in Knoxville some eight years. He was in deshabille and was sweeping out his office with a hard brush and shovel. He turned out to be very lawyer-like in conversation. I asked him a whole series of questions, to which he answered “Yes” or “No,” without volunteering any information or enlarging in any way. He called the race riot a “circumstance.” He said he had won cases even in the Supreme Court, and was respected by the Bench for his grim determination. After saying that, he went to the window and spat violently into the street below and then returned.

I praised his probable skill in handling juries, and he was mollified.

“I am practiced to read men’s faces,” said he. “I pick out the man who is likely to cause trouble and address myself exclusively to him. Judges here are absolutely devoid of color prejudice.”

A seeming half-wit had just been sentenced to death at the city of Danville for accosting a white girl. The trial was of the briefest, and the Negro’s transit to the electric chair was made the most rapid possible—so as to avoid a lynching. The lawyer thought that the sentence was harsh—but as long as lynching was so prevalent, legal punishment had to be severe.

“Did you ever hear of a white man being convicted for assaulting a Negro?” I asked.

“No,” said he, constrainedly, “not unless it were an offense against a child.”

He did not think Negroes showed much enterprise in Knoxville—there were no banks, no large businesses, no drug stores, though there were four colored lawyers and sixteen doctors.

After Lawyer H—— I visited Mr. D——, a successful colored dentist, with well-groomed head and manicured hands. He was clad in a white hospital coat which was spotless, and by the appurtenances of his cabinet he seemed to be abreast of scientific progress as far as dentistry was concerned. He had a good practice, not only among the Blacks, but with the white country population. He said the old settlers had no prejudice against a colored dentist, though the younger, newer men and women were different. While I was talking a colored girl came in to have Mr. D—— fill a hollow tooth. He said the colored folk had suffered greatly with their teeth in the past, but were taking more care of them now. He loved putting gold crowns on teeth, and most smart Negro young men felt a little gold in the mouth was very chic—just the thing. It is certainly a characteristic of the modern Negro. Mr. D—— watched the race riot from his office window, and was much alarmed at the time. But, like Lawyer H——, he felt that there was good feeling in the city. He thought it an accident. The soldiers had been inflamed against the Negroes.

In lack of Negro enterprise what a contrast Knoxville was to places like Norfolk, Virginia! I was soon to realize that the further South I went the more stagnant would Negro life show itself—until I reached the point when there would be little scope for investigation. The traveler going South from Washington is let gradually downward into a sort of pit of degradation. Chattanooga is lower than Knoxville, Birmingham lower than Chattanooga, rural Georgia and Alabama lower than all of these. This I think ought to be realized lest the glamour of Negro progress in Virginia and the North give a false impression of the whole.

At Knoxville it was Fair time. The time when I was in the South was one of fairs and carnivals. As the Russian goes on pilgrimage when the harvest has been gathered in, so the American goes to the Fair in the fall. There is in the South a vast network of the moving caravans of showmen, and a huge show business quite novel to an Englishman. I arrived in many towns at the time of their Fair, and had the greatest difficulty in obtaining shelter for the night, so crowded were they. The people from the country round rolled in to the Fair in their cars and choked every thoroughfare.

One blemish on the large State Fair is that, except as servants, no Negroes are to be seen. There is a great gathering of white people, but no Blacks. It is therefore more polite, more well dressed, more conventional, and there is less of color and life than would fairly have obtained had all been welcome. What is a Fair if it be not an outing for the poor! It is reduced to this in the South, that the Whites have their Fairs and the Negroes have theirs separately.

I accompanied an Appalachian sportsman. He told me he shot a big, black bear the day the Armistice was signed. Sure as the first of November came round he was out with gun and haversack and Negro boys hunting the bear. He hunted for the love of hunting, though bear’s flesh could be sold at a dollar a pound and was worth it, every cent. He thought Tennessee did “mighty well” in the war, and they gave the boys a fine reception when they came back. They’d had a drop of whisky in them in the riot, but a few niggers less wasn’t much matter. He pointed out to me signs of Knoxville prosperity—houses that cost ten to twenty thousand dollars to build—picturesque and wooden, but very costly from a European point of view. No cotton was grown in this district, and next to no tobacco. Many people did not even know what a stalk of cotton was like.

The Knoxville Fair was a wondrous exposition of Southern hogs (each hog docketed with personal weight and what it gains per day), bulls and chickens and pigeons and rabbits and owls and what not, and there was a hall of automobiles festooned in flags. Caged lions and tigers flanked the auditorium of the free vaudeville entertainment. Negro boys flogged bony, grunting camels round the grounds. The pop-corn stands vied with the ice-cream counters stacked with cones. There was an astonishing uproar from the various revolving “golden dreams” and of the jibbing metal horses; and outside all manner of peep shows, men who had sold their voices talked till they foamed at the lips or went hoarse—of the freaks and wonders within. Thus the two-headed child, the girl who does not die though her half-naked body is transfixed with darts; the “whole dam family” (apes dressed up as human beings); the cigarette fiend, a thin, yellow strip of humanity who is slowly but surely smoking himself to death; Bluey, the missing link between monkey and man; the fire swallower from the South Sea Islands; Zarelda, the girl with a million eyes (dotted all over her body), who has baffled all scientists; the garden of Allah and the garden of lovely girls; Leach, the human picture gallery, with the world’s masterpieces tattooed all over his body; Dagmar, the living head without a body....

And the owner of the show, and of the bought voice which must not stop advertising it to the passer by, stands at one side in shirt sleeves, and rolls his quid and spits, and seems to meditate on dollars and cents, ever and anon signaling to the man with the voice not to let the crowd get away without coming in. It was pathetic to come upon the freaks, later, on the road; see Zarelda, demurely clad in black, gripping a suitcase, and realize that she had “dates” all over the South, and showed her million eyes to-day in Knoxville, then in Macon, then in Savannah, then Jacksonville and Mobile and New Orleans and a score of other places, sometimes for a day, sometimes for three days or a week—not in any sense a music-hall artiste, but a sort of gypsy by life and by profession. How tired the freaks must get, knocking about from State to State and listening to the loud laugh that speaks the vacant mind.

One would expect as the accompaniment of this show life a great number of strolling musicians and a poor folk wandering from town to town. But there are practically none. Strolling musicians now obtain polite employment at the many cinema houses where sensational pictures alternate with low vaudeville. Southern talent meets with a boisterous reception from the twenty-cent houses of Atlanta and New Orleans. One hears very broad humor upon occasion, frantic burlesques of the nervous hysteria and half-witted ignorance of the “nigger”—when the white man makes up as a Negro he always shows something lower than the Negro. At one show in New Orleans the whole audience roared with mirth at a competition in what was called “fizzing,” the spitting of chewed tobacco in one another’s faces and the bandying of purely Southern epithets and slang. Music is little developed among the Whites, though the singing of “Dixie” choruses is hailed as almost national. Musical instruments are now rare, even among the Negroes, and seem to have been displaced by the gramophone. There is no “gridling,” no beggars singing hymns on the city streets. In the country there are few tramps. The ne’er-do-wells are to be found more in the market places and the cheap streets. Prohibition has subterraneanized that part of the drink traffic which it has not killed, and the hitherto unemployed find a congenial occupation leading the thirsty to the “blind tigers.” It is rare to come across a man on the road, and Vachel Lindsay, tramping Georgia and reading his poems to the farmers, must have been unique, not only as a poet, but as a tramp. I saw nothing resembling the grand procession of “hoboes” that I met when tramping to Chicago seven years ago. Perhaps it was because immigration had ceased, and throughout the whole of America there was a need for labor which absorbed all men. Yet there could have been few on the road even before the war: the vast number of Blacks makes it unfitting for a white man to be tramping, and there is, moreover, less chance for a white man to get work in any case.

Much is said against the “poor Whites” or “poor white trash,” as the white proletariat is called by the black proletariat. They are said to be the worst enemies of the Negro, and the Negro is afraid of Bolshevism or Socialism because he knows the common white people, “those who have nothing and are nothing,” are the last people likely to give him justice. As one of the most popular of Negro leaders said recently: “As long as Socialism is followed by the lower classes of Whites, we can see there is more danger coming from Socialism to the Negro than from anything else, because below the Mason and Dixon line the people who lynch Negroes are the low-down Whites.” Of course those crowds who joyfully allow themselves to be photographed around the charred remains of the Negro they have burnt, thus affording the most terrible means of propaganda to Negro societies, are more of the dull, uneducated masses than of the refined and rich. They hate the Negro more because they are thrown more in contact with him, and their women are more accessible to him. They are in competition with the Negro for work and wages, and would gladly welcome a complete exodus to the North or to Liberia, for then their wages would go up. Physically, and man for man, they are afraid of the Negro, and therefore they attack him in mobs. Fortunately, there are not in the South great numbers of poor Whites except in the large cities and at the ports.

By contrast with the people of the North, the people of the South are noisy, very polite indoors, but brusque and rough without. They will do a great deal for you as a friend, but not much for you as a stranger. They have sharp-cut features, thin lips, blank brows. The women do not take on a fair fullness of flesh, but are inclined to dry up and fade. There are an enormous number of faded women everywhere—a sign, perhaps, that the climate does not suit the race. The accent seems to vary with the State, and Tennessee speaks with far more distinction than Georgia, where the “nigger brogue” prevails, and it is difficult to tell White from Black by voice. Nearly all r’s are dropped. Moral character is said to be weak, but there is nevertheless a very high standard, at least in matters of sex. The Southern woman is by no means as conscious of her charms as the Northern woman, and an unusually susceptible male could spend a quiet time in these parts. Men are not thinking of love and composing poems, even though it is the South, but they are if anything keener on business and money. Most people seemed suspicious of strangers, not communicative, but once they have taken the stranger to their hearts they easily become warm-heartedly effusive.

As a stranger I encountered a surprising lack of civility at a “non-union” plough company at Chattanooga. The employees were mostly Negroes, and I called on the white superintendent to obtain permission to go over the works. A heavy-jowled fellow kept me waiting half an hour in an anteroom, and then not only refused point-blank to let me see conditions in his factory, but was so brusque in his manner that I was forced to give him my mind roundly on his lack of courtesy, not to me personally, but to a literary man. As a rich business man he seemed to consider the profession of letters as dirt under his feet. I must say I felt shame to be so angry, and I was much amused some weeks later to read in a Chattanooga newspaper picked up by accident that Billy Sunday had visited this city and had preached in the said works, and at the close of his address, the superintendent being present, all the employees were en bloc converted to Christ.

Chattanooga is a larger city than Knoxville, better built and more spacious. One has entered the rayon of Southern steel and coal. Its many factory chimneys and its sooty sky testify to considerable industrialism. As in its sister city of Birmingham, Alabama, there are many non-union shops. A great steel strike was in progress in the United States, but while the workers in the North stood their ground in a long and bitter struggle, there was scarcely the semblance of a walkout in places like Chattanooga and Birmingham. Northern labor trouble seemed to mean Southern capitalistic prosperity.

One reason why Southern labor remains to a great extent unorganized is the Negro difficulty. Unions are not ready to accept Negro membership. Therefore the Negro can always be brought in to do the white man’s work if the latter goes on strike. Whether union or non-union, the wages seem fairly high. I talked with a Negro moulder who earned on an average six dollars a day. That is over eighteen hundred dollars American, and about five hundred pounds British money a year. A non-union unskilled man would, however, earn little more than two dollars a day—which, with the cost of food so high, is very little.

I noticed a difference in the attitude of the colored population in Chattanooga. It was much more depressed than that of Knoxville or the Virginian cities. Nothing terrible had occurred in Chattanooga, but there was said to be a bad mob, and what had happened at Knoxville had frightened them. The newspapers contained intimidating news paragraphs. On September 26th, at Omaha, Nebraska, the mob had burned down the courthouse, lynched a Negro, and tried to lynch also the mayor, E. P. Smith, who was twice hoisted to a lamp-post because he refused to hand over a prisoner to the mob. “As I stood under that lamp-post with the mob’s rope necktie circling my neck and listened to the yells ‘Lynch him,’ I took the same course any true American would have taken,” said the mayor. In the face of death he refused to yield his authority to Judge Lynch. That was at Omaha, in the West. On September 29th two Negroes were lynched by twenty-five masked men at Montgomery, Alabama, for alleged assault of a white woman. On October 1st the terrifying color riot broke out at Elaine, Arkansas, on a dispute over cotton prices. On October 6th two Negroes were burned at the stake and three were shot to death at Washington, Georgia, for supposed complicity in the murder of a deputy sheriff. Next day, at Macon, Eugene Hamilton was lynched for attempted murder, and so on. Since the Civil War one could scarcely find a more bloody and terrible period. And the poor Whites of Chattanooga kept hinting that Chattanooga’s turn would soon come. I was told Negroes did not care to stray far from their homes in the suburbs after dark. They were tormented and mauled on their way home from church. The Jim Crow portion of the trolley car was invaded by roughs trying to start trouble. In some cities in the South the Negroes have all-black motor omnibuses and jitneys running. These would obviate much of the danger of the trolley car which has only a straw screen between the races. But Negro enterprise has not risen to motor omnibuses in depressed Chattanooga. From a white point of view, the city might be improved by more light. It is a dark and extensive place. The great companies do not want to lose their Negroes and might do more to keep them. I found the Negroes scared, and many were ready to seize the first opportunity to go northward. Mr. T—— said, “They might kill us all.” Mrs. W—— said: “All who have children want to go away. There’ll be no chance for our children here. Before the war it was much better, but they seem to dislike us more now. Perhaps it would have been better if none of our men had gone to the war.” I endeavored to reassure most of those with whom I talked, for they had an exaggerated idea of their danger.

At Chattanooga there was no library for the colored people. There seemed to be little Negro business. I was at once introduced to the druggist and the undertaker. Undertaking and drug-selling, which includes ice-cream-soda dispensing, seem the most popular business enterprises among the Negroes. Wherever three or four polite Negroes were gathered together and I was talking to them someone would say, “Permit me to introduce Undertaker So-and-So,” and the latter would smile blandly and offer his brown hand. At Chattanooga I visited a swell establishment and looked over a show-room of elegant coffins, and I was shown into the parlor and the embalming room, where on a stone slab the bodies were prepared. This undertaker had started originally with one coffin, and had now become, as I saw, one of the rich men of the city. Funerals cost between a hundred and a hundred and fifty dollars, and were usually defrayed by the insurance companies.

I found the large East Side drug store, kept by a young man who had been in charge of the pneumonia ward of the 92nd Divisional Hospital in France. He had as many white customers as colored. He did not sell much patent medicine, as he said the attitude of the United States Government to patent medicines had become most severe. He was a fully qualified chemist. Doctors prescribed and he dispensed in the ordinary way. Yes, many were surprised to find a Negro chemist in a position of authority in a hospital, but that was due to white people’s ignorance of the progress made by colored students of medicine.

I greatly enjoyed “Joseph’s Bondage,” a dramatic cantata sung by a colored choir. Evidently the Negroes had composed the cantata themselves, for the verbiage was very quaint and simple. In a packed hall to be the only Whites was for myself and the lady who was with me a curious position. It caused a whole row of seats to remain empty in the midst of a crowded house. No Negro male dared sit down next to the white woman for fear of what I might do. However, when I left my place to talk to a Negro I knew in another part of the hall the empty line filled up mechanically.

The production of the cantata was quite amusing. Potiphar’s guards were the smartest possible, being ex-soldiers from Pershing’s army, upright Negro boys in khaki. But Potiphar was in blue, and looked like a man in charge of an elevator, and wore the slackest of pants. Leva, his wife, pawed Joseph over and yowled: “I love you, I love you.” Pharaoh, with glistening steel crown and steel slippers, was impressive. Joseph as a slave was the Negro workingman in his shirt; as Vizier, however, with the purple on him, he looked very grand, and the jubilee chorus which he sang when at length Pharaoh stepped down and he sat in Pharaoh’s seat, was very jolly, swaying to one side of the crowd around him and singing to them, swaying to the other side and singing to them, and then to all and God——

I did not leave the city without attending church, and I heard a little black Boanerges give a brilliant address. He walked up and down his rostrum with arms folded, and cooed and wheedled, but ever and anon crouching and exploding, lifting his hand to strike, bawling, even yelling to humanity and the Almighty. In dumb show he pulled the rope of a poor fellow being lynched—and sent straight to hell. He spoke of the race riots, and then suddenly becoming breathless, as if he were a messenger just arrived with bad tidings, he flung both arms wide apart, dilated his eyeballs, and cried in a terrorizing shriek—“there is riot and anarchy in the land.”

He had chosen a fine combination of texts for his sermon: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? That which is born of the flesh is flesh and that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit.”

Though a complete stranger, I was singled out and brought to the front to give the congregation a Christian greeting. I told them I had read in a Negro paper that “the Negro church had failed. Prayer had been tried for fifty years and had been proved to be no use.” And I said what I firmly believe to be true, that only Christianity can save color.

The orator was much pleased and said to his congregation: “See what God has sent us this Sunday morning,” and he invited me to give the address in the evening. We had an amusing altercation on the platform. “I do not know what to call him, or who he is; he may be anybody, a doctor, a professor, a——” he looked at me inquiringly.

“Oh, plain Mr.,” said I.

He hung on, however, to “Professor” till I interrupted him again.

At the close of my address the deacons came out to assess the congregation in the matter of collection. They looked it up and down and decided that twenty-two dollars was the amount that could be raised. So with their solemn faces they stared patiently at the congregation while the plates went round. The collection was counted, and was found to be considerably less. So the deacons addressed themselves once more to the congregation, averring that some of the young men were holding back. Then for five minutes individuals were moved to come up singly and make additional offerings. Progress was reported, and then more individuals came up till the assessment had been realized.

Then the most touching thing occurred. The pastor turned to me and offered to share the collection with me.

“Oh, no!” I whispered hurriedly, feeling, perhaps, rather shocked at the idea.

“He says ‘Oh, no,’” said the pastor to the congregation.