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There are four chief causes of these wretched homes: First,
long custom born of slavery has assigned such homes to
Negroes; white laborers would be offered better accommodations,
and might, for that and similar reasons, give better
work. Secondly, the Negroes, used to such accommodations,
do not as a rule demand better; they do not know what better
houses mean. Thirdly, the landlords as a class have not yet
come to realize that it is a good business investment to raise
the standard of living among labor by slow and judicious
methods; that a Negro laborer who demands three rooms and
fifty cents a day would give more efficient work and leave a
larger profit than a discouraged toiler herding his family in
one room and working for thirty cents. Lastly, among such
conditions of life there are few incentives to make the laborer
become a better farmer. If he is ambitious, he moves to town
or tries other labor; as a tenant-farmer his outlook is almost
hopeless, and following it as a makeshift, he takes the house
that is given him without protest.
In such homes, then, these Negro peasants live. The families
are both small and large; there are many single tenants,
--widows and bachelors, and remnants of broken groups.
The system of labor and the size of the houses both tend to
the breaking up of family groups: the grown children go away
as contract hands or migrate to town, the sister goes into
service; and so one finds many families with hosts of babies,
and many newly married couples, but comparatively few
families with half-grown and grown sons and daughters. The
average size of Negro families has undoubtedly decreased
since the war, primarily from economic stress. In Russia over
a third of the bridegrooms and over half the brides are under
twenty; the same was true of the antebellum Negroes. Today,
however, very few of the boys and less than a fifth of
the Negro girls under twenty are married. The young men
marry between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five; the
young women between twenty and thirty. Such postponement
is due to the difficulty of earning sufficient to rear and
support a family; and it undoubtedly leads, in the country
districts, to sexual immorality. The form of this immorality,
however, is very seldom that of prostitution, and less frequently
that of illegitimacy than one would imagine. Rather,
it takes the form of separation and desertion after a family
group has been formed. The number of separated persons is
thirty-five to the thousand,--a very large number. It would
of course be unfair to compare this number with divorce
statistics, for many of these separated women are in reality
widowed, were the truth known, and in other cases the
separation is not permanent. Nevertheless, here lies the seat
of greatest moral danger. There is little or no prostitution
among these Negroes, and over three-fourths of the families, as
found by house-to-house investigation, deserve to be classed
as decent people with considerable regard for female chastity.
To be sure, the ideas of the mass would not suit New
England, and there are many loose habits and notions. Yet
the rate of illegitimacy is undoubtedly lower than in Austria
or Italy, and the women as a class are modest. The plague-spot
in sexual relations is easy marriage and easy separation.
This is no sudden development, nor the fruit of Emancipation.
It is the plain heritage from slavery. In those days Sam,
with his master's consent, "took up" with Mary. No ceremony
was necessary, and in the busy life of the great plantations
of the Black Belt it was usually dispensed with. If now
the master needed Sam's work in another plantation or in
another part of the same plantation, or if he took a notion to
sell the slave, Sam's married life with Mary was usually
unceremoniously broken, and then it was clearly to the master's
interest to have both of them take new mates. This
widespread custom of two centuries has not been eradicated
in thirty years. To-day Sam's grandson "takes up" with a
woman without license or ceremony; they live together decently
and honestly, and are, to all intents and purposes, man
and wife. Sometimes these unions are never broken until
death; but in too many cases family quarrels, a roving spirit,
a rival suitor, or perhaps more frequently the hopeless battle
to support a family, lead to separation, and a broken household
is the result. The Negro church has done much to stop
this practice, and now most marriage ceremonies are performed
by the pastors. Nevertheless, the evil is still deep
seated, and only a general raising of the standard of living
will finally cure it.
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