UP THE MISSISSIPPI

From New Orleans I traveled up the Mississippi; calling at such characteristic points as Reserve, Vicksburg, Greenville, Mound Bayou, Memphis, accomplishing the journey partly by rail and partly by boat. Reserve is a vast sugar plantation owned by five brothers. It is only thirty miles from the great city and the Whites are mostly Creoles. The Mother of Rivers, clad in brown silk, flows toward the green humps of hundreds of levees and embankments. The shores are low and level, and there grows almost to the water edge a vast, close, ten-feet-high jungle of sugar cane. You walk along the top of the levee till you see a lane running across the plantation like a trench dug through it. In the lane itself there is no view except the erect, green wall of canes on either hand and the blue sky above. Beneath your feet are cart ruts and withered stalks of sugar gone purple at the joints and straw-colored in the flanks. Take a stalk and break it across, and it breaks in shreds like a bamboo, revealing the inner fatness of sweet pith which you can suck if you will, for it is sugar. It has a dilute sweetness which rapidly cloys an unaccustomed palate, though the people of the countryside suck it continuously, and many consider the natural sugar the source of all health. The taste is reproduced very well in the pralines on which New Orleans prides itself.

A long and novel sort of lane this through the sugar! A Negro worker coming along the road sees a white man, but does not want to meet him, and he takes three steps into the dark-green depths, clawing his way inside as through many barely shut doors, and he is lost. You would seek him in vain if he wished to hide.

The lane debouches into a sun-bathed, half-cleared area which is covered with stricken canes looking like warriors tumbled in death after a great battle; for it is winter and the time of the taking of the harvest. Negro gangs with rough bills like meat choppers are slicing the side leaves from the cane and then cutting, slicing and cutting, all over the plantation, with joyous noise, and there are great numbers of dark girls in straw hats working methodically and rhythmically from the shoulder and the bosom, striking, clipping, felling, as it were automatically, unwaveringly. They break in and cut in, strewing ever more extensively the carpet of canes in their rear, but the wall they attack is ten times as dense as the thickest field of corn and twice as high. The master or overseer, on horseback, stands about and calls sharply to the workers in French patois. He may be white Creole, but is often as dark as his gang. Where sugar is not rising, beyond the plantations if you walk as far, Nature seems sunk in swamp and swarming with snakes. The low jungle over the Mississippi marshes has many alligators and a multitude of other reptiles.

In a clearing of the sugar harvest it is possible to sit on a hummock of grass and see something of a plantation as a whole. It is a cloudless day with the faintest haze over the blueness of the sky. The sun heat is tempered by a delightful air which keeps on moving all the time like an invisible river of health and vigor. There is a whispering in the myriads of the canes, and you hear the slashing and the clumping of the cutting which is going on all the while. On one hand are the rudimentary huts of the Negroes, like dressing rooms, on the other the lofty refinery of white-painted corrugated iron, with many chimneys and cranes. The refinery, using electric power taken from the river, works off all the local cane and also imports large quantities of raw sugar brought from Cuba. Pile driving is going on in the Mississippi, and there will soon be a landing stage to which the Cuban steamers themselves can approach. The Louisiana cane is red and the Cuban is yellow-green, and the latter is much the sweeter. On the plantation, where a fair stretch of ground has been cleared, the motor plough is at work with huge spiked wheels, turning the black soil over the sugar seed for next year. The cane has an eye at each joint, the eye is the seed, and from it sprouts next year’s plant, growing at right angles to the old cane in the earth. “In February,” says the young Creole ploughman, “the young plants have to be dug up and replanted. Work goes on steadily all the year round.”

I resumed my way up the Mississippi on an old, broken-down steamer with a remarkably high, wooden, dripping, splashing paddle wheel. To go by boat used to be a favorite way of traveling, but the new railways on each side of the great river have killed the water traffic by taking away all large freight. It does not seem a profitable enterprise to ply the Mississippi for passengers alone. There are therefore only a few river steamers left, and these have to call at all the tiniest and obscurest waterside places and lumber camps, and can seldom make more than forty or fifty miles a day. Few people will travel a week or ten days or a fortnight or anything you like to Memphis when a locomotive will do it in twenty-four hours. The passengers therefore sit in stuffy trains listening to the vers libre of the man who offers in a low voice: chewing gum, cigarettes, iced coco-cola; and the country whirls past them unprofitably. The cotton bales which used to go down stream in thousands upon river steamers are now closely packed in railway trucks; and the molasses goes no longer in barrels, but in huge, iron cisterns on wheels. There is therefore little traffic on the mighty river—she is happier and freer, more as she was of yore, with few steamers, few barges, few rafts—instead, only an occasional rowing boat and a ferry. The water is brown and vast and placid, and runs in many courses beyond wooded islands, beyond vast, swampy forks and tongues of the mainland. It is a sort of cafÉ-au-lait color, and the shadows mantle softly upon it deliciously. Willows grow in the water on its shores and islands, and in shadow or sunlight the water laps gently the many tree trunks or lies still under the green shade of the branches. It is a great, intricate, unexplored labyrinth of waters, and now you see it unadorned and lovely, with no advertisements on its banks and no shoddy reminder of our civilization on any hand—the Mississippi as she was when we first saw her. I traveled on a boat called Senator Cordill and we made barely thirty miles a day, so many were the stopping places, so many the accidents. It cost a little over a dollar a day, including board, and was the nearest approach to a gift. The ship had a motley gang of colored laborers fetching freight on their backs in intermittent procession, beating out dust from the long, wooden gangway up which they tramped with their burdens. The wooden paddle wheel, which was ten feet high, had got into disrepair, and at a riverside town where we stopped some colored carpenters were at work fitting new wooden parts into her while close-cropped Negroes with coal-dusted skulls shoveled coal aboard from a lighter. We had three wooden decks rolling with small freight for tiny places in Louisiana, Mississippi State, and Arkansas. In the cabins were huge family bedsteads, and no locks on the doors. When the wheel was repaired and the time came for departure the Negro crew deserted en masse, and the captain, with the unlighted cigar which he had rolled and bitten in his capacious mouth all day, stood on the bank and accosted all and sundry, begging them to come aboard and work on the ship. Meanwhile in a quayside hut Negro girls were “shimmying” as they brought in food for their colored boys, and our erstwhile crew was heard singing and shouting. Only next morning did we get enough hands, and at the misty dawn, when the river was so still that it looked like an unbroken sheet of ice, we raised anchor and plunged outward again. In the main current whole trees were seen to be floating, and our wheel might easily strike one of them and get broken again. We sat down to breakfast, the eight passengers: one was a judge, another a district attorney, a third was an agent for timber, and the rest were women. The china at table was of different shapes and sizes, and there were only three teaspoons—so the rest of the passengers were served with tablespoons for their coffee.

Judge T—— insisted on having a teaspoon from the colored girl who waited on us, but was obliged to content himself with the tablespoon laid.

“Teaspoons is sca’ce,” said she.

We stop at various “landing places,” points and creeks and bends, the boat generally coming close to shore. A long plank is thrown out, and then commences the cakewalk of the Negro “rousters” carrying out all manner of goods—in one place it is materials for the building of a church—and bringing back cotton bales or whatever else may be waiting for us. It is a sight at which one could gaze spellbound for hours; for the Negroes keep in step and seem listening to an inaudible music. They lurch with their shoulders, kick out with their flexible knees, and whether taking long strides or marking time they keep in unison with the whole, their heads bent, their eyes half closed and bleared with some inner preoccupation. They are in all manner of ragged garments: one has a lilac-covered hat, another an old dressing gown, others are in sloppy blue overalls, some wear shabby Cuban hats, and they go screeching and singing and dodging knocks on the head, but always keeping step with the dance. The captain, with yesterday’s unlit cigar stuck in the side of his month, gives directions about each bit of freight, using wonderful expressions of abuse and otherwise “encouraging” the “niggers.” Looking at the “rousters” you can easily understand that dancing of a certain kind is innate with the Negro and springs from him. He has an inborn sense of the beating of time which we call rhythm. It is so exaggerated that it tilts out ridiculously with his stomach and controls inanely his bobbing head and nose and dropping eyes. He looks a savage, but he is spellbound. He is completely illiterate and largely unintelligent, but he has solved the problem of carrying huge cotton bales to the ship, providing a rhythmical physical stream for them to flow upon. It is not half the effort that it would be to white people without rhythm.

One of the reasons why the Negroes box so well is because they do it in the same rhythmical way they shift these cotton bales.

Presently they commence to sing while they haul up the anchor, and a rowing boat passing us with Negro oarsmen is also choric with bright, hard, rhythmic music. These people understand music and time in their bodies, not in their minds. Their blood and their nerves have consciousness of tempo.

The many stops in Mississippi State afford opportunities of going ashore, picking up wild pecan nuts, talking to Negroes at their cabin doors. One never sees a white man. This along the Mississippi is the real black belt. According to the census, the Negro is in a clear majority. This causes the Whites to be always apprehensive. The idea prevails that the Black can only be kept in his place by terror. As regards this point of view, the Whites prize above everything solidarity of opinion. They hold that they cannot afford to discuss the matter, and they will tolerate no cleavage. In politics all are of course Democrats, and if the American Democratic party is on the whole much less liable to “splits” than the Republican party, it is largely due to the discipline of the black belt.

“They outnumber us ten to one,” says the agent for timber, exaggerating characteristically. “It’s come to such a point hereabout that they’re pulling the white women out of their houses. It’s done every day.”

I could not believe that.

“But if a Black attacks a white woman hereabouts he is certain to be lynched, and knows it,” said I.

“Yes, it’s the only way.”

“But there is not a lynching every day?”

“No.”

“So there are not really so many attacks on the women.”

But the day-moth of his thought refused to be caught in a logical net.

“Did you ever see a man tarred and feathered?” I asked of the district attorney.

“No, but I’ve seen one lynched, and helped to lynch him,” said he.

“But lynching isn’t very good for legal business,” I hazarded.

He at once felt ruffled.

“It doesn’t make any difference to the Negro,” said he. “He hasn’t got a soul. They don’t go to heaven or hell.”

“How do you make that out?”

“They’re just animals,” said he. “They were never in the Garden of Eden, for Adam and Eve were white. Consequently, as they had no part in original sin, they have no share in our salvation either. Christ did not come to save those who never fell from grace.”

“I never heard that before,” said I, and was so greatly amused I could not help showing it.

The attorney sought me out afterwards with Biblical proof. The sons of Cain, it appears, took themselves wives from the daughters of men; these other men were not descended from Adam and were probably Negroes—the attorney was perfectly serious. The judge, however, to whom we referred the matter, was of a cynical turn of mind, and chuckled heartily. “I am a subscriber to foreign missions,” said he. “If they have not Adam for their father, why do we send missionaries to Africa?”

One of the chief places which I wished to visit was the Negro city of Mound Bayou, in the Mississippi Delta. In the blackest part of the State of Mississippi this is a city which is entirely Negro, possesses a Negro mayor, Negro policemen, and indeed is entirely without accommodation for white men. I stayed there a night in a Negro hotel where the old wall paper was in hundreds of peeling strips hanging on the walls, and everything in the bedroom was broken. It is a musical sort of city, all a-jangle with the banjo and the brassy clamor of the gramophone. Places of amusement are many—the Lyceum, the Casino, the Bon-Ton cafÉ (with jazzy music), the Luck Coles restaurant, etc.; one sees many advertisements of minstrel shows. But it is a working city, and at present, with the high cotton prices, it is tasting real prosperity. It is situated in the rich land of the Delta, very malarial and snake-haunted, and therefore not very suitable for white men, but the district produces the highest quality of cotton in the United States. It is in a way a one-man city, and owes most to Charles Banks, who is one of those agreeable and talented African giants, who, like Dr. Moton and others, seem to have an unexpected capacity for greatness. His energy and calm foresight and his money guarantee the gins and the cottonseed-oil factory and the Negro bank and probably the local newspaper and one or other of the churches.

In Mound Bayou is no segregation and no racial trouble, and the Negroes show how happily they can live when unmolested. It is a type of settlement well worth encouraging. The chief interest of the city just now is the building of a “consolidated school.” All the small schools are to be pulled down, and the money has been subscribed for the building of a handsome new school on modern lines. It will be put up facing the Carnegie Library Building. I was sorry to see the latter devoid of books, and used as a Sunday school, but the building was given before the city was ready for the responsible work of organizing and controlling a public library. I talked in the infants’ school to a strange array of children with heads like marbles, and found a common chord in interest and love for animals. We imitated together all the animals we knew, and agreed that no one who did not love animals ever came to anything in this world. But if they loved their animals, they must love teacher too. I talked in the beautiful Wesleyan church on the difference between E pluribus unum and E pluribus duo, but that was to grown-ups—and they were so dull, compared with the children. The point was, however, that though the United States might fail to obtain unity of race, her peoples, white and black and yellow, Teutonic and Slav and the rest, could still be one in ideal.

“We are trying here to understand the beauty of being black,” said one of the audience edifyingly. “Solomon’s bride herself was black,” said he.

Mound Bayou is the pride of Mississippi, as far as the black part of it is concerned. The crowds that appear when a train comes in remind one of similar pictures in Africa. America seems to have disappeared and Africa to have been substituted. An entirely black South, or even one State entirely black, is, however, unthinkable. The white man has shed too much blood for his ideals there. He can never easily abandon any part of it. He must rise to the standard of his sacrifices. To my eyes, Mound Bayou was a little pathetic—like the sort of small establishment of a woman who has been separated from a rich husband through estrangement or desertion. It is not quite in the nature of things, and is more like a courageous protest than the beginning of something new. It stands, however, as a symbol of incompatibility of temperament.

There are many who say that when left to himself the Negro slips back from civilization into a primitive state of laziness or savagery, and they instance life in Haiti and the supposed failure of Liberia. It is said that he does not keep up the white man’s standard, he is not so strenuous, he is not a good organizer, nor dependable. That is not entirely true, but there is some truth in it. Mound Bayou is situated in a highly malarial region, unfitted for white habitation, but being surrounded with the best cotton-growing land in America it ought to be exceedingly prosperous. The best that can be said is that the local planters are in a better plight than their neighbors who are intermingled with Whites. Complete financial failure has threatened the little city in the past, and if it were not for the founder, Mr. Montgomery, and its financier, Mr. Banks, most of the proprietorship must have passed over into white hands. To all appearances, the Negro needs decent white co-operation in business, and mixed commercial relationships are better than segregated ones. The difficulty is to find conscientious business Whites who realize that the prosperity of the Negro is worth while. The fixed idea of the white business man is to fool the Negro and exploit him to the last penny.

Mound Bayou has its own Negro cotton buyers, who give a fair price for the cotton. But it is with the greatest difficulty that a Negro planter can obtain from a white buyer the true market price, and it is rare that a landlord who receives cotton bales as rent will take into consideration the enhanced price of cotton, even though the enhancement is supposed to be primarily due to the smallness of the harvest. Where the white man is in control it is true the Negro produces more because he has to in order to live, but he is nevertheless the victim of a systematized swindling, and he knows it. It is causing a growing discontent among the black peasantry, and I was continually told about it.

One of the worst riots of 1919 took place on the other side of the river—in the State of Arkansas, at Elaine. It is also in this so-called Delta region. The origin of the riot was rooted in the economic problem. The white buyers and landlords had been consistently defrauding the Negro countryside by overlooking the enhanced value of cotton. Cotton had risen in price from a pre-war average of ten cents a pound to twenty-eight cents in 1917 and actually to forty cents in the current year. Formerly it was generally represented to the Negro that he was always deep in debt for his “rations” or his rent. The white policy was to keep the Negro in debt. It was never the custom to render him accounts or to argue with him when he claimed more than was handed him.

“You had a fine crop—you’re just about straight,” was a common greeting in the fall of 1919.

But with the prolific Delta crop of cotton and a quadruple price, the discontent of the Negro can be imagined. It was intense, and was growing.

There are two versions of the outcome of it. One is that a firm of white lawyers approached some of the Negro planters with an idea of taking the matter to court and seeing what could be obtained in redress. The other is that the Negroes “got together,” organized a body called “The Farmers’ Progressive Union,” which then approached the firm of lawyers on its own account. I incline to think that the former is the more probable. The white firm thought there was money to be made from fighting Negro claims. Some of the Negroes were actually agreed to take the matter to a Federal Grand Jury, and charge the Whites with frustration of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

The Negroes were undoubtedly daring, and held public meetings and used sufficient bravado to alarm the local white population. The rumor flew from farm to farm that the Negroes were plotting an insurrection. Someone discovered a heap of rifles stacked where they had been left and forgotten when the Armistice had interrupted drilling. This gave the necessary color to the idea. Besides the rusty rifles, the Negroes were seen to be not without firearms of one kind or another. The Negro loves weapons, as an Oriental loves jewelry. Shotguns and revolvers in plenty are to be found in the cabins of the colored country folk. The Whites put up a provocateur as before a pogrom in Russia. He started firing on Negroes at random in the Elaine streets. Then two white officials attempted to break into a Negro meeting, resorted to arms, and were met by firing in return. One of the Whites was killed, the other wounded. This started the three days of destruction in Phillips County. The whole Negro population was rounded up by white troops and farmers with rifles. Machine guns were even brought into play against an imaginary black army. A great number of Negroes were put in a stockade under military arrest, many were killed, many wounded. And three hundred were placed in jail and charged with riot and murder. No Whites were arrested. The governor, a Mr. Brough, was largely responsible for this method of investigating the alleged conspiracy of the Negroes to make an insurrection. The whole occurrence was astonishingly ugly, and it was followed by ten-minute trials before exclusively white juries, and swift sentences to electrocution for some Negro prisoners, and to long terms of penal servitude for others. The riot and the trials so exasperated Negroes throughout the United States that there is no doubt a Federal Commission of impartial men might well have been appointed to investigate the whole affair, both as regards its inception and as regards its military culmination and its aftermath of trial and punishment. As it is, though Governor Brough says to the Negroes, “You did plan an insurrection,” and though the Whites of Elaine may feel happier and more secure, it is an obvious truism that the white population of other States cannot be feeling more secure because of it, and that the Negroes in other districts feel less secure—they feel the need to arm. It has caused a great increase in public insecurity. Perhaps because of this the riot has been more discussed than other riots. Somewhat shocked and fretful, the governor, who is probably a brisk business man, and in no way like one of those more neurotic governors of Russian provinces which occur in AÙdreyev’s tales, called a meeting. Some four hundred Whites and tamed Negroes were brought together to see what could be done to improve race relationship. This was a month after these events.

The Commercial Appeal of Memphis reports the governor’s remarks:

“This meeting has been called for the purpose of a heart-to-heart discussion of the relations between the white people and the Negroes of the State. These relations have become strained, especially by the recent rebellion in Phillips County. I say ‘rebellion’ advisedly and without qualifications, for it was an insurrection, and a damnable one.

“And I want to say in the beginning that Arkansas is going to handle her own problems. I do not intend to go to New York City or to Topeka, Kansas. When I want advice from Negroes I shall ask it from Arkansas Negroes, and when I want similar advice from white people, I shall get it from the white people of Arkansas.

“I also wish to say that I do not intend to be intimidated by any publications or any letters I may receive. I have already received several letters which said that if I permitted the execution of these twelve Negroes from Phillips County to go through, I would be assassinated. One of the letters contained a crude drawing of a coffin, represented to be my own in case the Negroes were electrocuted. I received one letter to-day which stated that the entire city of Helena would be burned if these Negroes went to their death. But I repeat that I will not be intimidated by any outside influence in this question. Our own questions must be settled within the boundaries of our State, and I believe that there are not enough representative Negroes in the State to do this.”

So said the governor, but it is rather a question whether in these days of Leagues of Nations and Alliances and “sympathies” one State like Arkansas, washed partly by a great river, can live entirely within its own boundaries and without outside consideration.

The mighty Mississippi rolls onward, bearing the spars and the sands of half the States of America to the sea. And after the massacre at Elaine, for some days, dead bodies of Negroes were washed up on other shores. Doleful messengers, these, on the river of Time.