same system is in use with slight variations everywhere in the cotton country and a description of Mr. Brown’s methods, with references here and there to what I have seen or heard elsewhere, will give an excellent idea of the common procedure.

A Country of Great Plantations

The black belt is a country of great plantations, some owners having as high as 30,000 acres, interspersed with smaller farms owned by the poorer white families or Negroes. In one way the conditions are similar to those prevailing in Ireland; great landlords and a poor tenantry or peasantry, the tenants here being very largely black.

It requires about 100 families, or 600 people, to operate Mr. Brown’s plantation. Of these, 90 per cent. are coloured and 10 per cent. white. I was much interested in what Mr. Brown said about his Negro tenants, which varies somewhat from the impression I had in the city of the younger Negro generation.

“I would much rather have young Negroes for tenants,” he said, “because they work better and seem more disposed to take care of their farms. The old Negroes ordinarily will shirk—a habit of slavery.”

[Pg 74]Besides the residence of the overseer and the homes of the tenants there is on the plantation a supply store owned by Mr. Brown, a blacksmith shop and a Negro church, which is also used as a school-house. This is, I found all through the black belt, a common equipment.

[Pg 74]

Three different methods are pursued by the landlord in getting his land cultivated. First, the better class of tenants rent the land for cash, a “standing rent” of some $3 an acre, though in many places in Mississippi it ranges as high as $6 and $8 an acre. Second, a share-crop rental, in which the landlord and the tenant divide the cotton and corn produced. Third, the ordinary wage system; that is, the landlord hires workers at so much a month and puts in his own crop. All three of these methods are usually employed on the larger plantations. Mr. Brown rents 2,500 acres for cash, 400 on shares, and farms 600 himself with wage workers.

All the methods of land measurement are very different here from what they are in the North. The plantation is irregularly divided up into what are called one-mule or one-plough farms—just that amount of land which a family can cultivate with one mule—usually about thirty acres. Some ambitious tenants will take a two-mule or even a four-mule farm.

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