results than harshness and force.

[Pg 88]

The bad landlord represents the degeneration of the feudal system: he is in farming to make all he can out of it this year and next, without reference to human life.

I have already told something of J. Pope Brown’s plantation near Hawkinsville. On the November day, when we drove out through it, I was impressed with the fact that nearly all the houses used by the Negro tenants were new, and much superior to the old log cabins built either before or after the war, some of which I saw still standing, vacant and dilapidated, in various parts of the plantation. I asked the reason why he had built new houses:

“Well,” he answered, “I find I can keep a better class of tenants, if the accommodations are good.”

Liquor and “the Resulting Trouble”

Mr. Brown has other methods for keeping the tenantry on his plantation satisfied. Every year he gives a barbecue and “frolic” for his Negroes, with music and speaking and plenty to eat. A big watermelon patch is also a feature of the plantation, and during all the year the tenants are looked after, not only to see that the work is properly done, but in more intimate and sympathetic ways. On one trip through the plantation we stopped in front of a Negro cabin. Inside lay a Negro boy close to death from a bullet wound in the head. He had been at a Negro party a few nights before where there was liquor. Someone had overturned the lamp: shooting began, and the young fellow was taken out for dead. Such accidents or crimes are all too familiar in the plantation country. Although Pulaski County, Georgia, prohibits the sale or purchase of liquor (most of the South, indeed, is prohibition in its sentiment), the Negroes are able from time to time to get jugs of liquor—and, as one Southerner put it to me, “enjoy the resulting trouble.”

The boy’s father came out of the field and told us with real eloquence of sorrow of the patient’s condition.

“Las’ night,” he said, “we done thought he was a-crossin’ de ribbah.”

[Pg 89]Mr. Brown had already sent the doctor out from the city; he now made arrangements to transport the boy to a hospital in Macon where he could be properly treated.

[Pg 89]

 Prev. P 81/279 next