appeared that he was three years my junior. He had taken life earnestly, strenuously; he had been very successful in his business career, and he felt his success, not as an end achieved, but as an obligation imposed; so much I very soon made out from his slow, reflective, simple, and open-hearted talk.

131

“I’m ve’y much attached, sir,” he said, “to the negro race. My father was a large slaveholder, and he had a passion for them. He selected and bought ve’y fine types of negroes. Fo’ myself, I have now an entirely negro household, and they are all of them devoted to my wife and to my children. Fo’ instance, we have in our house a coloured woman of fo’ty-five or fifty—an old maid and a ve’y clever woman indeed—who is passionately attached to my youngest daughter.”

It was curious to find such an old-time, antebellum household subsisting in the go-ahead, intensely modern city of Birmingham. I felt, however, that this casual survival had very small bearing upon the problems of the present or future; so I tried to get at my visitor’s feeling on some of the burning topics of the actual situation.

Almost in vain. He would not express himself either for or against the “Jim Crow car,” though 132he was emphatic on the iniquity, which President Roosevelt also has recently denounced, of giving negroes inferior accommodation for the same rates as those charged to the whites. Not even on the question of “miscegenation” would he give a decided personal view.

132

“I feel,” he said, “that these people have been left on our hands through no fault of their own, and that it is our duty to do the best we can for them, each in his own way. It is the business of some people to think out theoretical questions; but that is not my business. I try to do what practical good I can from day to day—and that keeps my hands pretty full. As for such questions as that of social equality or inequality, they will settle themselves in time, through the thinkers and professional men of both races. Solutions will be found for many problems that now seem terribly difficult, if both races will only have patience. You know,

—these lines often come back to me.

“Many whites in the South,” he went on, “have hitherto held aloof from the negro cause, because they felt that the negro regarded them with suspicion and preferred to look for help to the North. That feeling is now passing away on both sides.”

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