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Away down the Baysan road, where the broad flat fields
are flanked by great oak forests, is a plantation; many thousands
of acres it used to run, here and there, and beyond the
great wood. Thirteen hundred human beings here obeyed the
call of one,--were his in body, and largely in soul. One of
them lives there yet,--a short, stocky man, his dull-brown
face seamed and drawn, and his tightly curled hair gray-white.
The crops? Just tolerable, he said; just tolerable. Getting
on? No--he wasn't getting on at all. Smith of Albany
"furnishes" him, and his rent is eight hundred pounds of
cotton. Can't make anything at that. Why didn't he buy land!
Humph! Takes money to buy land. And he turns away. Free!
The most piteous thing amid all the black ruin of war-time,
amid the broken fortunes of the masters, the blighted hopes of
mothers and maidens, and the fall of an empire,--the most
piteous thing amid all this was the black freedman who threw
down his hoe because the world called him free. What did
such a mockery of freedom mean? Not a cent of money, not
an inch of land, not a mouthful of victuals,--not even ownership
of the rags on his back. Free! On Saturday, once or
twice a month, the old master, before the war, used to dole
out bacon and meal to his Negroes. And after the first flush
of freedom wore off, and his true helplessness dawned on the
freedman, he came back and picked up his hoe, and old
master still doled out his bacon and meal. The legal form of
service was theoretically far different; in practice, task-work
or "cropping" was substituted for daily toil in gangs; and the
slave gradually became a metayer, or tenant on shares, in
name, but a laborer with indeterminate wages in fact.
Still the price of cotton fell, and gradually the landlords
deserted their plantations, and the reign of the merchant began.
The merchant of the Black Belt is a curious institution,--part
banker, part landlord, part banker, and part despot. His store,
which used most frequently to stand at the cross-roads and become
the centre of a weekly village, has now moved to town;
and thither the Negro tenant follows him. The merchant keeps
everything,--clothes and shoes, coffee and sugar, pork and
meal, canned and dried goods, wagons and ploughs, seed and
fertilizer,--and what he has not in stock he can give you an
order for at the store across the way. Here, then, comes the tenant,
Sam Scott, after he has contracted with some absent landlord's
agent for hiring forty acres of land; he fingers his hat
nervously until the merchant finishes his morning chat with
Colonel Saunders, and calls out, "Well, Sam, what do you
want?" Sam wants him to "furnish" him,--i.e., to advance him
food and clothing for the year, and perhaps seed and tools, until
his crop is raised and sold. If Sam seems a favorable subject,
he and the merchant go to a lawyer, and Sam executes a chattel
mortgage on his mule and wagon in return for seed and a week's
rations. As soon as the green cotton-leaves appear above the
ground, another mortgage is given on the "crop." Every
Saturday, or at longer intervals, Sam calls upon the merchant
for his "rations"; a family of five usually gets about thirty
pounds of fat side-pork and a couple of bushels of cornmeal a
month. Besides this, clothing and shoes must be furnished; if
Sam or his family is sick, there are orders on the druggist and
doctor; if the mule wants shoeing, an order on the blacksmith,
etc. If Sam is a hard worker and crops promise well,
he is often encouraged to buy more,--sugar, extra clothes,
perhaps a buggy. But he is seldom encouraged to save. When
cotton rose to ten cents last fall, the shrewd merchants of
Dougherty County sold a thousand buggies in one season,
mostly to black men.
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