starched dresses.

“Honey,” she said eagerly.

“Mammy!” exclaimed the girl, and the two rushed into each other’s arms, clasping and kissing—the white girl and the old black woman.

I thought to myself: “There’s no Negro problem there: that’s just plain human love!”

“Master” Superseded by “Boss”

Often I have heard Negroes refer to “my white folks” and similarly the white man still speaks of “my Negroes.” The old term of slavery, the use of the word “master,” has wholly disappeared, and in its place has arisen, not without significance, the round term “Boss,” or sometimes “Cap,” or “Cap’n.” To this the white man responds with the first name of the Negro, “Jim” or “Susie”—or if the Negro is old or especially respected: “Uncle Jim” or “Aunt Susan.”

To an unfamiliar Northerner one of the very interesting and somewhat amusing phases of conditions down here is the panic fear displayed over the use of the word “Mr.” or “Mrs.” No Negro is ever called Mr. or Mrs. by a white man; that would indicate social equality. A Southern white man told me with humour of his difficulties:

[Pg 64]“Now I admire Booker Washington. I regard him as a great man, and yet I couldn’t call him Mr. Washington. We were all in a quandary until a doctor’s degree was given him. That saved our lives! we all call him ‘Dr.’ Washington now.”

[Pg 64]

Sure enough! I don’t think I have heard him called Mr. Washington since I came down here. It is always “Dr.” or just “Booker.” They are ready to call a Negro “Professor” or “Bishop” or “The Reverend”—but not “Mr.”

In the same way a Negro may call Miss Mary Smith by the familiar “Miss Mary,” but if he called her Miss Smith she would be deeply incensed. The formal “Miss Smith” would imply social equality.

I digress: but I have wanted to impress these relationships. There are all gradations of Negroes between the wholly dependent old family servant and the new, educated Negro professional or business man, and, correspondingly, every degree of treatment from indulgence to intense hostility.

I must tell, in spite of lack of 

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