22“Last year,” said her husband, “I was shooting in North Carolina, in a district where the population is pretty evenly divided between white and black. I boarded in a farmer’s family. The grandfather had fought in the war, of course on the Confederate side; the father and mother were solid, unpretending, intelligent people. There was a school-house only a mile and a half away, but they could not let their two daughters go to it. They could not let them stir away from home unprotected. They had to pay for their education at home, while at the same time they were being taxed for the education of the negro children of the district. That is not a pleasant state of affairs.” 22 Some time afterwards, I stated this case to a loading educator of negroes, a man widely recognized as one of the best friends of the race. “Do you think,” I asked him, “that these girls could not safely have gone to school? Or was their parents’ action the result of groundless, or, at any rate, exaggerated, panic—as of one who should forbid his children to pass through a wood lest a tree should fall upon them?” “It would depend on the district,” was the reply. “In some districts the girls could have gone to school safely enough; in others, no!” This, I think, was a terrible admission; for, after all, a “safe” district can only be one in 23which no outrage has occurred; and that is no guarantee against its occurring to-morrow.[4] What father, what husband, is going to rest on such security? 23 Here, then, I was face to face with the most hideous factor in the problem—that which keeps popular sentiment in the South chronically inflamed and exasperated. Again and again, at every turn, I came upon it; not only in the shape of revolting stories, but in accounts of the constant and most burdensome precautions which the state of affairs imposes. To give only one instance: I asked an American long resident in Havana whether there was any trouble of this nature in Cuba. “No,” he said, “practically none. It’s true that about a year ago a sort of half-witted black was accused of an outrage on a mulatto woman, and committed suicide in prison to escape the garotte; but I believe an American nigger has since confessed that he was the real culprit. It’s very different,” he went on, “in my native State, Louisiana. I have two sisters married there. The husband of one of them never dares to leave his home unless he takes his wife with him. The husband of the 24other is compelled to leave
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