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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, CHICAGO

THE BAKER & TAYLOR CO., NEW YORK; THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, LONDON; THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA, TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO, FUKUOKA, SENDAI; THE COMMERCIAL PRESS, LIMITED, SHANGHAI

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SEEM LAK’ I AIN’T NEVER BREAK EVEN

• SHADOW OF THE PLANTATION

By

CHARLES S. JOHNSON

Fisk University

3

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO • ILLINOIS

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PUBLISHED JULY I934

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COMPOSED AND PRINTED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, U.S.A

OLD KING COTTON

STERLING BROWN

Ole King Cotton,

Ole Man Cotton,

Keeps us slavin’

Till we’se dead an’ rotten.

Bosses us ‘roun’

In his ornery way,

“Cotton needs pickin’!”

De Hell he say .

Starves us wid bumper crops,

Starves us wid po’,

Chains de lean wolf At our do’.

Tiahed uh co’n pone,

Pork an’ greens,

Fat back an’ sorghum,

An’ dried up beans.

Buy one rusty mule To git ahead —

We stays in debt Until we’se dead;

Ef flood don’t git us

It’s de damn bo’ weevil,

Crap grass in de drought,

Or sump’n else evil;

Ef we gits de bales

When de hard luck’s gone,

Bill at de commissary Goes right on.

Some planters goes broke,

An’ some gits well,

But dey sits on deir bottoms Feelin’ swell;

An’ us in de crap grass Catchin’ hell.

Cotton, cotton,

All we know;

Plant cotton, hoe it,

Baig it to grow;

What good it do to us

Gawd only know ! -Southern Road

Harcourt Brace & Co., 1932

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from

This project is made possible by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services as administered by the Pennsylvania Department of Education through the Office of Commonwealth Libraries

https://archive.org/details/shadowofplantatiOOjohn

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. The Background . i

The Pattern of the Plantation . i

The Tradition of the Plantation . 7

The Community . 12

The People . 29

II. The Family . 47

Courtship and Marriage . 47

The Children . . 57

Separation and Divorce . 71

What Is Respectable . 80

Shelter and Food . 90

III. Economic Life of the Community . 103

The Division of Labor . 103

The Pressure of the System . 119

IV. The School and the People . 129

Education of Parents and Children . 129

The Influence of Schooling on Social Changes . . 136

V. Religion and the Church . 150

The Church as a Social Institution . 150

The Changing Church . 170

VI. Play Life . 180

VII. Survival . 186

VIII. Conclusion . 208

Index . 213

• • Vll

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE method and objective of this study demanded long hours with each of the six hundred families who form the basis for these observations. Without the aid of the skilled services of sev¬ eral field assistants and their complete and enthusiastic co-opera¬ tion, it would have been impossible to satisfy the requirement of representative volume and of an intimate record of family life. In this connection the work of Miss Ophelia Settle, Mr. Lewis Wade Jones, Miss Josie Sellers, and Miss Ann Savage proved invaluable. Besides, there have been others of the staff of the Social Science Department whose work in checking and rechecking the statistical data of the study merits fullest acknowledgment.

The study itself was made possible by the Julius Rosenwald Fund, through Dr. Michael M. Davis, who has been interested and in turn has interested the United States Public Health Service in certain of the health problems of this and several other similar counties of the South. To this Fund and to Dr. O. C. Wenger of the United States Public Health Service grateful acknowledgments are made.

The willingness of a number of scholars in this field to give at¬ tention to the data and to the author’s interpretation of them has been as gratifying as their suggestions have been helpful. I wish to acknowledge a debt of gratitude for the valuable criticism and counsel of Dr. Louis Wirth, Dr. Ulrich B. Phillips, Mr. E. R. Em- bree, Professor Monroe N. Work, Dr. W. F. Ogburn, Dr. Howard W. Odum, and of my colleagues Professor Horace M. Bond and Dr. E. Franklin Frazier. I reserve for special mention the vital contribution to this volume of Dr. Robert E. Park, whose insight and long acquaintance with this field have provided a constant illumination for the whole development of the study.

C. S. J.

IX

INTRODUCTION

SOME time during the winter of 1898 and the spring of 1899 William James read to his students in philosophy a notable paper he had then just finished writing, to which he later gave the quaint and intriguing title, “A Certain Blindness in Human Beings.”

The “blindness” to which James here refers is a kind of blind¬ ness to which we are all subject, by the very limitation of our hu¬ man nature and of our individual experience, our blindness, name¬ ly, “to the feelings of creatures and peoples other than ourselves.”

“We are,” as James says, “practical beings each with limitations and duties to perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the impor¬ tance of duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth. But this feeling in each of us is a vital secret for sym¬ pathy with which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in their own vital secrets to take an interest in

_ y yT

ours. 1

It is not possible to suggest in a word the significance which this fact of the isolation and loneliness of the individual — each in his own little world, hugging his own personal secret — assumes in James’s interpretation of it. Suffice to say that the fact connects up directly with a definite philosophy to which James subscribed and to a theory of knowledge to which — if he did not first formu¬ late it — he lent a powerful support.

I

My reason for referring to this essay here and to the conception of human relations and of knowledge, which it so persuasively sets forth, is that it seems to shed light, from an unexpected source,

1 William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology; and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals.

XI

upon the problem and method of this present study and of social studies generally, particularly when they are concerned with the customs and institutions of isolated and provincial peoples; peoples who, though they live close to, and dependent upon us, as we upon them, are still outside the orbit of our ordinary life and under¬ standing.

This volume is concerned with the Negro peasants of the south¬ ern plantations, but the Negroes of the “black belts” are not the only peoples in America who live on the outer margins of our un¬ derstanding and to whose vital secrets we must confess a certain blindness. There are other peoples, white peoples, like the Acadi- ans of southwestern Louisiana; the Mennonites and so-called Penn¬ sylvania Dutch of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and vicinity. There are also the mountain whites of the Appalachians and the peoples of mixed racial ancestry like the Mexicans of New Mexico and the little isolated communities of Indian, Negro, and white mixtures, scattered about in remote parts of Virginia, North Caro¬ lina, Alabama, and Louisiana. All of these are peoples who live, to be sure, within the political boundaries of the United States but live nevertheless on the margins of our culture. In this sense, and for the further reason that they occupy a place somewhere between the more primitive and tribally organized and the urban popula¬ tions of our modern cities, they may be called “marginal peoples.” The distinction between them and the peoples by whom they are surrounded is that they are not merely people, but folk people, and their culture, in so far as it differs from that of the majority of us in the United States, is a folk culture.

What is a folk culture and what is the folk? A very simple way to state the matter is to say that the “folk” is a people whose cur¬ rent history is recorded, if at all, by the ethnologist rather than by the historian or the newspaper. Not that folk peoples do not have history, but it exists for the most part in the form of unrecorded ballads and legends which, with its folk lore, constitutes a tradi¬ tion that is handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth rather than through the medium of the printed page.

It is characteristic of the folk that it has a habitat and that its

Xll

culture is local. Gypsies are folk, too, but they are the exception. Though they wander, they manage somehow to preserve a cultural isolation and a tribal solidarity as complete as that of any other preliterate people. In all our various attempts to study human nature we invariably encounter these exceptions. They constitute, in fact, the most valuable data that an investigation ordinarily turns up: first, because they are the starting-points for fresh ob¬ servation and further reflection; and, second, because in the long run the exceptions always prove the rule.

Redfield in his volume Tepoztlan , which is a study of one of the marginal peoples of Mexico, similar in some respects to those in the United States, is at some pains to define what he conceives the folk to be. He says:

Such peoples enjoy a common stock of tradition; they are the carriers of a culture. This culture preserves its continuity from generation to generation without depending upon the printed page. Moreover, such a culture is local; the folk has a habitat. And finally, the folk peoples are country peoples. If folk lore is encountered in the cities it is never in a robust condition, but always diminishing, always a vestige.2

And then he adds:

The southern Negro is our one principal folk. He has a local tradition orally transmitted; he makes folk songs. Except for him we have to search for folk peoples in the United States. In the mountains of the south and southeast we have a sort of vestigal folk. And here and there, in such occupations as involve long periods of isolation and a relative independence of the printed page — as, for example, among lumbermen or cowboys — a sort of quasi-folk develop, who write anonymous folk songs and sometimes build up, around campfires, folk sagas of the Paul Bunyan variety.

On the other hand, the folk are not to be confused and identified with the peasant who has left the soil to live and work in the city. Such peoples constitute what might be described as the “populus” or, better still, the “proletariat.”

So the Negro of the plantation— though the two are closely re¬ lated and the history of the one goes far to explain the existence

2 Robert Redfield, Tepoztlan , A Mexican Village (University of Chicago Press, 1930), pp. 1-6.

• • • Xlll

of the other — is not to be identified with the mobile and migratory Negro laborers who crowd the slums of southern cities, or, like the hero of Howard Odum’s Rainbow round My Shoulder , go wander¬ ing about the country celebrating their freedom and their loneli¬ ness by singing “blues.”

These blues, which, by the way, first gained recognition as a form of popular ballad in night clubs of Beale Street, Memphis, are the natural idiom of the Negro proletarian, just as the “spiritu¬ als” have been, and to a very considerable extent still are, the natural expression of the mind and the mood. of the plantation Negro. The distinction between the folk of the villages and the open country and the proletarians or populus of the city is ex¬ pressed and symbolized in the difference between the folk song and the popular ballad, the spirituals and the blues.

II

Marginal peoples, peoples in transit between simpler and primi¬ tive and more sophisticated and complex cultures, such as charac¬ terize our modern industrial and urban civilization, constitute, as I have suggested, a special problem in method, but one which is after all fundamental to studies of society and human nature everywhere.

There are no special difficulties in describing the external forms and the obvious expressions of a local culture. The difficulty con¬ sists in making that culture intelligible; in discovering the mean¬ ing and the function of usages, customs, and institutions.

Anthropologists, in their studies of primitive peoples, have dis¬ tinguished between (i) material and (2) non-material elements of a culture. Material culture is represented by the tools, artifacts, and in general the technical devices employed by a people in their deal¬ ings with the external world. Non-material culture, on the other hand, includes all those institutions, ceremonial customs, ritual dances, and what not by which a people maintains its morale and is enabled to act collectively.

Institutions are, generally speaking, devices which come into existence in the effort to act collectively and exist in order to make collective action more effective.

xiv

But customs persist and preserve their external forms after they have lost their original meaning and functions. Institutions are borrowed or imposed upon peoples to whose traditions, instincts, and actual needs they are quite foreign, or have not yet been fully assimilated. Fashions change, and with the change institutions, though they still persist, are looked upon with profoundly changed attitudes.

Considerations of this sort have led anthropologists in studying culture to distinguish between form and function, and to empha¬ size the subjective and less obvious aspects of the cultural com¬ plex. The study of a society or of a people turns out under these circumstances to be the study not merely of its institutions but of its mentality.

What is meant by mentality in this sense is stated impressively by Redfield in the concluding chapter of his volume Tepoztlan. “If by mentality is understood,” he says, “a complex of habits em¬ ployed in meeting unfamiliar problems,” then mentality, too, is an aspect of culture. “If the individual undergoes experiences of a very different sort from those undergone before, he develops a cor¬ respondingly new organ, a new mind.”

But there is a less obvious aspect of social institutions in which they appear in even more intimate and vital association with the people whose life they serve. It has been observed that as long as their social institutions are functioning normally, primitive peoples ordinarily exhibit an extraordinary zest in the life they lead, even when that life, like that of the Eskimo in the frozen North or the pigmies in the steaming forest of Central Africa, seems to be one of constant privation and hardship.

On the other hand, when some catastrophe occurs which under¬ mines the traditional structure of their society, they sometimes lose their natural lust for life, and that euphoria which enabled them to support the hardships of their primitive existence fre¬ quently deserts them. That catastrophe may be, and frequently is, the sudden advent of a more highly civilized people intent upon their improvement and uplift by incorporating them in a more highly organized industrial society.

xv

Under such circumstances, a people may be so completely ob¬ sessed by a sense of their own inferiority that they no longer desire to live as a people; and if they live as individuals, they will prefer to identify themselves, as far as they are permitted to do so, with the invading or dominant people.

It is in some such way as this, i.e., by the incorporation of de¬ feated or merely disheartened people into some larger and more complex social unit, that castes are formed.

It is evident, in spite of all that has been written of human na¬ ture and of human behavior, that the sources of joy and sorrow are still obscure. It is evident also that, as Stevenson says, in a passage in Lantern Bearers quoted by James, “to miss the joy is to miss all.” That is to say, if you miss the joy you miss the one aspect of a people’s life which more than anything else gives vi¬ tality to cultural forms and ensures their persistence, possibly in some new and modified form, under changed conditions. For this reason, the most subjective and least obvious aspect of the life of peoples and cultures is nevertheless one that cannot be neglected, particularly in the case of peoples who, as I have said, are in proc¬ ess of transit and subject to all the vicissitudes of profound cul¬ tural change.

This zest for life is just that personal and vital secret which, for each one of us, gives meaning and significance not merely to the life of the individual but of the society, of whatever sort it be, of which he is a member and a part.

Ill

Although it describes itself as a study of “social and cultural change,” the materials on which this study is based are not those with which anthropologists are familiar or are likely to approve. As a matter of fact, the study starts with a different tradition — the tradition, namely, of the rural sociologist, who conceives his community rather as a statistical aggregate than as a cultural com¬ plex. One reason for this is the convenience and the necessity of making use of the available statistics, which have been collected

xvi

and classified on the basis of existing administrative units rather than of the region or of any other sort of natural area.

Thus the investigation assumed at the outset the character of a survey and study of a population rather than of a people, and the plan, as originally conceived, was, by a process of sampling, to describe and characterize statistically a population area.

The area chosen for this survey was a slice of one of the familiar “black belts,” historically the region of cotton culture in the South. Macon County, of which Tuskegee is the county seat, is the seat also of Booker Washington’s famous industrial school for Negroes and the county which, during his lifetime, was, so to speak, the rural laboratory in which he carried on his experiments in rural education — experiments which graduates of his school and others, with the assistance of the Rosenwald Fund, have extended to most other parts of the South.

It was assumed, no doubt, that Macon County offered a fair sample of Negro rural population, and that a study of its popula¬ tion would indicate what Negro education — unaccompanied, to be sure, by any special or systematic effort to reorganize on any con¬ siderable scale the plantation system — had been able to do to keep the Negro on the soil and, by raising the general level of his in¬ telligence and encouraging him to take the initiative in improving his own condition, to improve the condition of the country as a whole.

There were other reasons why a study of Negro culture should assume the technical form of a survey beside the desirability of starting with the available information in regard to the region. One was the character of the Negro community itself, and of the very tenuous lines of connections which hold the rural population into any sort of solidarity that could be described as communal. Another was the fact that the Negro community is so completely interpenetrated and dependent upon the dominant white com¬ munity that it is difficult to conceive it as having any independent existence.

Outside of the plantation the only centers of Negro life are the

XVII

rural churches and rural schools. The social situation is reflected in the human geography of the county.

A bird's-eye view of Macon County discloses a country of softly rolling uplands and interspersed with fragrant, wooded swamps.

Plantation, hamlet, and town, still rather widely dispersed, are connected by a network of rural roads which, except for a few stretches of recently constructed thoroughfare, wind their way leisurely along rolling ridges in order to escape as far as possible the perils of the sometimes heavy spring rains. Closer observation of this same countryside discloses the existence of another, nar¬ rower, and less obvious network of footpaths which — unplanned, unplotted, and without official recognition — intersect, connect, and supplement but never compete with the public highways.

These two systems of transportation — the public highways con¬ necting the towns and the plantations and the footpaths connect¬ ing the humbler habitations of the Negro tenant farmers — suggest and symbolize the complicated interrelations and divisions be¬ tween the races in Macon County and in the South generally, suggest also some of the complexities and some of the difficulties of studying one section of a population without taking some ac¬ count at the same time of the other.

IV

If the study of culture is to reveal what makes life for indi¬ viduals or peoples either significant and exciting or merely dull, what are the kinds of facts most likely to disclose this vital secret?

Undoubtedly the most revealing portions of the present study are the candid comments of the peoples studied on their own lives. As recorded here, in the language and accents in which they were uttered, most of these statements have the character of a human document.

The value of a human document as a datum is that it brings the object that is under investigation closer to the observer. Like a magnifying glass, it brings into view aspects of the object that were before that time not visible or only partially so. It sometimes hap¬ pens that a casual remark, like a ray of light through a keyhole.

xvm

will illuminate a whole interior, the character of which could only be guessed at as long as one’s observations were confined to the exterior of the structure.

A good many of the remarks recorded in this study are so con¬ crete, so pregnant with human interest, that they might have been written by Julia Peterkin or Du Bose Heyward, whose stories of Negro life exhibit an insight and “acquaintance with” the life they are describing that is unusual even in writers of realistic fiction.

As a rule, the individuals whose conversation and comments are here recorded are not in any sense a selected group of outstanding personalities in the community; rather they are just the ordinary mine-run of the population. A good many of them are old women, grandmothers, who with the freedom traditionally accorded to “old mammies” on the plantation are accustomed to express them¬ selves more vigorously and more volubly than other members of the family. Besides, grandmothers, partly because they are less mobile than other members of the families and therefore more like¬ ly to be at home, are in a position to speak with authority in re¬ gard to marriages, births, deaths, and all the other facts that the investigators’ schedules called for.

The statements recorded, while they do not represent a selected group of individuals, do exhibit an interesting diversity of types such as one would expect the intimate associations of an isolated community would inevitably produce. It is true that every kind of cultural association produces a certain degree of cultural homo¬ geneity, but it invariably produces at the same time characteristic personality types. Among these an occasional individual is suffi¬ ciently outstanding to achieve a recognition in this record that is not accorded to the others. This was the case of Zach Ivey, who was clear and convinced that he had had a better time when he was a slave than he had ever had since; and by w^ay of contrast to Zach Ivey there was Riny Biggers, who had early been impressed with the high value of literacy and differed profoundly from the views on slavery which Zach Ivey professed.

It is interesting to know that the relative merits of slavery and freedom are still a matter in regard to which there are differences

xix

of opinion among the Negroes on the plantations in the South. It is indicative of the immense weight of the tradition which still supports the plantation system. It makes significant and intelligible a remark made to me years ago by an old Negro farmer in Macon County who, though he could neither read nor write, owned and conducted successfully a plantation of eleven hundred acres. He said, with the peculiar quizzical expression of a man who would like more light on an obscure problem: “You know we’se jus’ so ign’rint down heah we don’ see much dif’rence ’tween freedom an’ slavery, ’cep’ den we wuz workin’ fer ole marster an’ now we’se workin’ fer oursel’s.”

V

One can hardly escape the impression in viewing the facts of this survey that it is the inheritance of a tradition, embodied in the present plantation system, which more than anything else inhibits the progress, not merely of the black tenant but the white land¬ lord, and that with the persistence of that tradition the small and independent farmer cannot make headway.

Under these conditions the Negro rural school, instead of creat¬ ing a settled class of Negro peasant proprietors, seems, particularly since the World War, to have conspired with other tendencies to hasten the movement from the rural South to the northern cities. On the whole, the plantation, as at present organized, seems to be a sick and dying institution. It still remains, however, what it was before the Civil War, the focus and center of the Negro life in the rural community; but it is no longer able to maintain either the discipline or the morale of an efficiently functioning institution; and plantation life has apparently lost whatever zest it may ever have had for the generations of white folk and black that it once nourished.

The plight of the cotton plantation is probably due not entirely to its inability to shake off its ancient heritage, which involves among other things the tradition of Negro racial inferiority. The prosperity of the cotton plantation in the southern states is de-

xx

pendent, finally, upon its ability to compete with other cotton¬ raising areas in the world-market.

Most that is still problematic in the condition of the Negro peasant seems to focus about two quite different institutions: (i) the plantation and (2) the Negro peasant family. What is the fu¬ ture of either or both, since the fate of the one seems to be bound up in that of the other?

The Negro peasant family, as it exists today, is certainly a rather amorphous social organism. In slavery, parents had little or no personal responsibility for the provision and care of their children, since that office was early taken over by the planter or his overseer, who assigned some older and experienced woman to the task. The consequence was that natural maternal affection, rather than any common economic interest, constituted the tie that held the family together. The male member of the family did not count for much in this arrangement. The family was, and still is, matriarchal in character.

It was not until freedom imposed upon the Negro tenant the necessity of making his farm pay that the Negro farmer began to reckon his children as a personal asset. The effect of this was that parents began to discourage the early marriage of their children, the consequence of which would be to deprive them of their chil¬ dren’s services.

When a Negro farmer reached the position where he owned property of his own, he had a new incentive and found a new means for maintaining the permanence of the family, since he was eager to transmit this property to his children, who in turn looked forward to inheriting it. The permanence of the property interest became the basis for a continuing family tradition, and for a more consistent life-program for both the family as a whole and its in¬ dividual members.

As long, however, as the freedman continued to live under the shadow of the plantation, these changes made but slow progress. With the advent of emancipation the status of the Negro on the plantation had been suddenly transformed from that of a field hand to tenant farmer. But the actual change was not as great as

xxi

might have been expected. The freedman was not able at once to enter into the spirit and tradition of a free competition and in¬ dustrial society. He had no conception, for example, of the secret terror that haunts the free laborer; the fear, namely, of losing his job and of being out of work. On the contrary, his first conception of freedom was that of a condition in which he would be perma¬ nently out of work. So far, therefore, from being possessed by that mania for owning things which is the characteristic, as the com¬ munists tell us, of a capitalistic society, his first impulse and aim were to get as deeply in debt as possible. If, therefore, the agents of the “Third International” find that such Negroes are as yet not ripe for communism, it is undoubtedly because they have not had as yet the opportunity to realize the evils of a free and competitive society.

What the findings of this survey suggest, then, is: (i) the ne¬ cessity of a wider — in fact, a world-wide — and comparative study of the cotton plantation not merely as an economic and industrial but as a cultural unit; and (2) a comparative study of the actual conditions of the world in which the people on the plantation live.

VI

One thing that complicates any attempt to study Negro peasant institutions and culture is the fact that, though the white man and the Negro have lived and worked together in the United States for three hundred years and more, the two races are still in a certain sense strangers to one another. One way in which this fact finds expression is in the statement that the Negro has not yet been, and perhaps never can be, assimilated. Another and more drastic expression of the same conviction is the familiar statement, re¬ peated in most every part of the world in which Europeans have settled: “This is a white man’s country.”

It is very curious that anyone in America should still think of the Negro, even the Negro peasant of the “black belts,” as in any sense an alien or stranger, since he has lived here longer than most of us, has interbred to a greater extent than the white man with the native Indian, and is more completely a product than anyone

xxii

of European origin is likely to be of the local conditions under which he was born and bred.

There is, nevertheless, a sense in which the Negro, even though culturally he be a purely native product, is not assimilated, though in just what sense this is true it is difficult to say.

One is reminded of the old lady who, visiting the Indian village at the World’s Fair, was moved to speak a friendly word to one of these aborigines. What she said was: “How do you like our coun¬ try?”

It was her view that, this being a white man’s country, an Indian would naturally feel a little strange in it. It did not occur to her that an Indian might not share this common-sense assumption.

It is just these naive assumptions, which are matters of common sense in one class, caste, sect, or ethnic group but not in others, that seem to constitute the final obstacle to the assimilation of peoples. They reveal social distances between individuals and peo¬ ples otherwise unsuspected.

William Graham Sumner has invented a word to describe the state of mind that these innocent and generally unconscious preju¬ dices betray. He calls it “ethnocentrism.” In savage people eth- nocentrism betrays itself in the disposition to call themselves “men” or “human beings.” Others are something else not defined. They are, perhaps, like the flora and fauna, part of the landscape but not human.

This trait is not confined to nature people. We are all disposed to assume that other peoples, with other customs, are not quite human in the sense that we feel this is true of ourselves. This is part of that blindness to which James refers.

The incurable ethnocentrism of peoples makes it difficult to communicate freely and candidly with strangers, particularly when the purpose of the inquirer is to go behind exteriors and dis¬ cover what is behind their faces, namely, their attitudes.

The great value and the great vogue of psychoanalysis is due to the fact that it has developed a technique for getting behind visible forms and the external expressions of the people to discover the subjective aspect of personal behavior and culture, the thing which

XXlll

at once intrigues and baffles the student of personality and of cul¬ ture.

If this ethnocentrism makes it difficulty on the one hand, to discover the subjective aspect of a people’s culture, it makes it difficult, on the other hand, to describe realistically their customs and usages when one knows that such descriptions are likely to be misinterpreted. One is often tempted under such circumstances to state things in a manner to meet and correct in advance the ex¬ pected misinterpretation. But that, too, is impracticable and no solution of the difficulty. Realistic descriptions of manners and customs are always likely to be a little shocking. In the final anal¬ ysis, however, it is undoubtedly true that if anything, at least anything customary and accepted in any human society, seems shocking or merely quaint, it is because that custom or usage is not quite intelligible.

There is an old French adage to the effect that “to comprehend all is to forgive all,” and not merely forgive but accept as some¬ thing not alien but indubitably human, like ourselves.

Only so far as this is anywhere achieved can such studies of human nature as this be said to have wholly achieved their pur¬ pose.

Robert E. Park

xxiv

Chapter I

THE BACKGROUND

THE PATTERN OF THE PLANTATION

THE plantation as represented in tradition and popular fancy is so far removed from the existing institution as to be but slightly related to the character of the folk that it bred. In the romantic fiction, which has so largely supported the concept, it is a far-flung, comfortably self-contained agricultural unit, crested by a spacious white mansion with imposing colonnades supporting cool and spacious verandas, and surrounded in ample and flower¬ laden grounds. In the background are the cotton fields stretching far and white into the distance. There are long rows of white¬ washed Negro cabins; sleek, contented slaves, laughing- and sing¬ ing as they work; little pickaninnies capering with the abandon¬ ment of irresponsible fledglings in the clearings of the cabins or on the smoothly clipped lawns. As further evidence of opulence and self-sufficiency there are the smokehouse, the sawmill, the black¬ smith and carpenter shops, and the commissary.

Phillips gives an account, written in i860 by a visitor to Oak Grove, in Alabama, on the Cocoa River.1 Four hundred acres of rich land were in cultivation. Behind the mansion, which com¬ manded a broad valley view from its verandas, were the dairy, the smokehouse (containing thirty thousand pounds of pork), the barn, the corn cribs, the wagon sheds, and, somewhat removed, the inevitable group of Negro cabins. On a stream bank stood a gristmill and sawmill, and in another part of the tract a second slave quarter and the overseer’s home.

Such a plantation as Oak Grove came nearer to the popular con-

1 Ulrich B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South.

I

ception than the preponderant majority. The stage, and particu¬ larly the minstrel, a long literary tradition, beginning no doubt with Swallow Barn> and warm memories of the past have helped build up the conception most familiar to the present generation. Economic factors have very largely been lost in the pictures hand¬ ed down. Francis Pendleton Gaines, who has studied and dis¬ cussed the southern plantation at some length, observed that

the feudalistic structure of society is probably the foremost large fact reflected in the tradition. The tradition .... manifests little interest in the number that composed a gang, or the labor that made a task, cares nothing for the difference between a full and a three quarters hand, or for the amount of furlough granted pregnant women; instead, the romancer seizes upon a bandana glistening in the sun, upon a coon hunt, a break¬ down, a mammy’s lullaby, and multiplies these things indefinitely.2

British travelers in America during the heyday of the planta¬ tion consistently pointed out the similarity of the southern planta¬ tion in social ideal to the historic English manor, and this fact has significance. For, whether or not the ideal was ever actually achieved in point of luxury or of social brilliance or in universality of fact, the tradition registers a rough conformity to the feudalistic patterns, and, as Gaines so pointedly observes, the inferences easi¬ ly included a magnificence and medieval splendor which were, in reality, lacking.3

The actual plantation devoted to cotton was based on a rigorous and dull routine, with strict diversification of labor: house serv¬ ants, field hands, cooks, blacksmiths, carpenters, the midwife ‘Tor white and black of the neighborhood, as well as a doctress of the plantation,” overseers, and, when they could be afforded, drivers to maintain discipline and order on the place, and be responsible for the quiet of the Negro houses and for the proper performance of tasks. In January there was ginning, sorting, and moting of cotton; in February more ginning and moting, ground-cleaning, fence-mending, and ditching. In March there was bedding of cot¬ ton ground; in April planting, fencing, ditching, picking joint grass, working cotton — the eternal hoe industry. In May, June,

2 The Southern Plantation. 3 Ibid p. 153.

2

July, and August more hoeing and working and some picking; in September, October, and November more picking, clearing new ground; in December moting and ginning. There were tasks and punishments for falling short. Every detail of life was regulated not by any internal compulsions but by a system of physical pun¬ ishments and rewards. Once established, custom and routine gave permanence to the structure of relations. Life, on the whole, was a grim business. Such were the imperatives of the economic system.

The Negro of the plantation came into the picture with a com¬ pletely broken cultural heritage. He came directly from Africa or indirectly from Africa through the West Indies. There had been for him no preparation for, and no organized exposure to, the dominant and approved patterns of American culture. What he knew of life was what he could learn from other slaves or from the examples set by the white planters themselves. In the towns where this contact was close there was some effect, such as has many times been noted in the cultural differences between the early Negro house servants and the plantation hands. On the planta¬ tion, however, their contact was a distant one, regulated by the strict “etiquette” of slavery and the code of the plantation.

The present Negro population of these old plantation areas can best be understood by viewing it in the light of this plantation tradition, with its almost complete dependence upon the immedi¬ ate landowner for guidance and control in virtually all those phases of life which are related to the moving world outside. The Negro families retain, through the older members of the com¬ munity, a distinct memory of this early society. They take their cues from it; they are seriously affected when the relationship fails. Such families as escape from the prevailing economy of depend¬ ence into the new responsibilities which go with independence find economic complications and shades of social conflict which mani¬ fest themselves in various ways, sometimes prompting them to migration, but as often leading to resignation and relapse from the ownership status to tenantry. The gradual decline in Negro owner¬ ship and the increase in the tenant class are evidences of this struggle.

3

In things economic there is everywhere now this dull, sometimes fatalistic, and unquestioning dependence upon the landowners and the soil, both of which are at times capricious. Toward this situa¬ tion with its uncertainties the Negro families have adopted an atti¬ tude of easy-going trustfulness, reinforced by religion and adjust¬ able in an amazing degree to the frequent discouragements of crop failures. In things social the group turns inward, finding its satis¬ factions in expressions of social life which are often elemental, but under certain traditional controls which are distinguishably a heri¬ tage of the plantation system under the institution of slavery.

In a sense the southern rural Negro population has tended to represent the surviving traditions of an earlier period. They have been the repositories of certain folk ways which, in the changing pattern of American life, are being discarded. Puckett has pointed out that the unlettered rural folk, and especially the Negroes who have had fewer educational advantages on the whole than have the rural whites, are of a “very conservative nature and often cling to outworn usages and customs, many of which were practiced by the populace at large but later discarded and forgotten by the more educated elements.”4 Their dialect is in part a survival of the English of the colonists, their superstitions most often are borrowed from whites, their religious beliefs are in large part the same as those held by isolated whites, their folk lore is scarcely dis¬ tinguishable from that brought over from Europe by the early colonists, their religious emotionalism is similar to that commonly demonstrated in white Methodist camp meetings until very re¬ cently.

When these early patterns were imperfectly copied, as would be expected from the nature of their relationship to their white mas¬ ters, it is not difficult to understand how imperfectly they would be reflected later in behavior as well as in beliefs. Viewed in this light, such matters as “illegitimacy,” relations of parents to chil¬ dren, divorce, extra-marital relations, food habits, the uses of leisure, behavior in emotional crises involving love, death, reli-

4 Newbell N. Puckett, “Religious Folk-Beliefs of Whites and Negroes,” Journal of Negro History , January, 1931, pp. 9-35.

4

gion, become more intelligible. The patterns of social behavior to which the Negroes were exposed, whether set by planters or poor whites, cannot be said to have been ideal, from the point of view of current standards. Many crudities of manners, now largely abandoned by the white population, were at one time accepted rules of conduct and still survive deeply imbedded in the modes of social life of the Negroes, modified only as they have been able to escape their cultural isolation.

An important aspect of the feudal ideal was provincialism, “the splendid isolation,” which in itself has given a certain flavor to the white former master as well as to the Negro former slave in the present survivals of the plantation. The plantation itself operated against anything like widespread culture.5 The high vogue of drinking, gambling, and dueling would perhaps be expected to be carried over to the slaves as part of their conception of the privi¬ leges of freedom. Limited as they were by the exigencies of slave marriage and slave family life, it is not unnatural that standards of morality would be imperfectly understood. Moreover, despite the strength of specific moral standards current during slavery, it was impossible for them to escape observing the broad lapses at times from these ideals, on the part of the gentlemen of the plantation themselves. The poorer whites were largely illiterate and frequent¬ ly accused by the master-class of a complete lack of culture as well as of morals. Here again, though perhaps not as close as in the for¬ mer case, was an influence which could prove of little value to the maturing of the Negro plantation slave’s social concepts and ideals.

One characteristic of folk groups is isolation. Rural areas in gen¬ eral exhibit a measure of isolation, but it is of the nature of rural life in America to destroy itself through increase of communication with the outside. There are indeed few rural areas which aspire ultimately to be self-contained and exclusive. Natural barriers are only temporary obstructions to communication, and with the rapid increase in transportation, literacy and reading, the radio and the motion picture, and the mail-order catalogue, distance — physical and social — is being steadily dissolved.

s Gaines, op. cit.

5

Of the possibilities and consequences of isolation in our own cul¬ ture the American Negroes present an excellent example — an ex¬ ample all the more interesting because Negroes now represent vir¬ tually every stage of the acculturation process in America, and have found a place somewhere in every occupation from the most backward to the most forward.

Actually, distance from the centers of larger activity plays only a minor role in an isolation which is for them fundamentally cul¬ tural. According to accepted social theory, there is no American “folk” because there is no American peasantry. But everyone knows that this is less a fact than an ideal. There are persistent social blocs which for one reason or the other defy prompt incor¬ poration into the approved general pattern.

The Negroes in areas of the South, notably in the cotton and cane belts, represent an American type which can most nearly be described as “folk,” and so far as their lives are rooted in the soil, they are, perhaps, the closest approach to an American peasantry. “To be shaped in mind and social reaction, to some extent in char¬ acter and finally in expression,” says Mary Austin, “is to be folk.” The marks of such an encircled life may be observed in their fixed accommodation, to the prevailing economic system, an accommo¬ dation so complete as to be commonplace. It may be observed in the characteristic folk ways associated with this life; in the char¬ acteristic forms of its thought and expression; in the illiteracy which shields them from the contacts and influences by which social changes are introduced, and which limits the range of their interests; restricts the development of thought and speculation beyond the requirements of their simple routine of life. It may be observed in the survival, with but small modifications, of the tra¬ dition of slavery; in the survival of the tradition of the plantation, which in turn embodies an economic system affecting the proprie¬ tors as wTell as the tenants. If these folk groups have a social life, it is unique and is due in large measure to the fact that they are cut off from the most direct channel of communication with the outside world and its interests through the economic system itself,

6

which restricts economic negotiations virtually to their immediate white landlords.

Given the setting of a high degree of Negro tenantry in the familiar cotton economy, and similar measure of isolation, dif¬ ferences between these Negro folk groups are not great. In the area studied in Macon County, Alabama, the group was a fairly homogeneous one, and was adjusted, both physically and mental¬ ly, to the tradition of cotton cultivation inherited from the period in which it reached its nadir as a system, before the Civil War.

THE TRADITION OF THE PLANTATION

The state of Alabama is a country of extremes, from the rich Black Belt area, superbly adapted to cotton cultivation, to the wretched pine barrens where impoverished whites were driven be¬ fore the Civil War by the richer and stronger slave-owning pro¬ prietors. Three belts of the Appalachian Mountains terminate in the state, merging with one another and with the gulf coastal plains. The northern portion of the state, transected by the Ten¬ nessee River, is a part of the Allegheny-Cumberland Plateau. It is fertile land, but not so richly fertile as other sections. To the south is the convulsive irregularity of the Appalachians, which became at a late period in the development of the state the center of the min¬ ing industry around Birmingham. These were sparsely populated as late as 1850. 6 Across the center of the state, extending from Randolph County on the Georgia border to Fayette County near the Mississippi line, is another area of barely fertile territory but with occasional patches of rich fertility.

The Black Belt begins along the line marked by Montgomery and includes eleven counties, among which is Macon, the focal point of these observations. This section has been historically the home of the planters. South of the Black Belt is the sandy stretch which has resisted cultivation and was little known throughout the early history of the state except to be dismissed with the desig¬ nation of “Piney Woods.”

6 Boyd, Alabama in the Fifties.

7

As an important cotton-growing state Alabama utilized the plantation system to the fullest. It has always been even more agricultural than Virginia or Carolina. Importance as a cotton state was manifested for years in the state’s larger balance of ex¬ ports of cotton over the southern states, and the dominance of the plantation system is marked historically in the fact that a bare 7 per cent of the population in i860 owned 333,000 slaves.

The cotton counties were the chief slave counties and are, con¬ sequently, the plantation counties. They are Dallas, Marengo, Greene, Sumter, Lowndes, Macon, and Montgomery. Sections of the state, poorer as well as less adapted to cotton cultivation, had an average of 1.4 slaves to the household. Madison County, in the northern part of the state, actually had over two families to each slave. The average number of slaves per plantation for the state was 4.5. However, in the cotton counties the large planta¬ tions set the prevailing patterns. In 1850 there were 790 owners of from 30 to 70 slaves; 550 owners with from 70 to 100 slaves; 312 with from 100 to 200; 24 with from 200 to 300; and 10 with from 300 to 500. Thus some 150,000 of the slaves were on plantations of 50 or more, even though only a third of the white people were directly interested in slavery.7

On the one hand were the poor planters still living in their rude log houses, with unglazed windows and lacking most of the refine¬ ments, but obsessed with the urge for more land on which to plant more slaves. On the other hand were the wealthy proprietors who stretched huge plantations over a country so unhealthy and un¬ developed that they could not themselves live in it, and settled themselves in such luxury as their means would allow in Mont¬ gomery, Tuscaloosa, and Tuskegee. Around these latter a society developed. But with few exceptions there was on the plantations a complete absence of those touches of light and civilization to temper the lot of the slaves.

Macon County was a part of the territory ceded by the Musco¬ gee Indians, established by an act in 1832, and took its name from a North Carolina statesman. When General Macon died, Thomas

7 ibid.

8

Jefferson referred to him as “the last of the Romans.” The county covers about 600 square miles, devoted zealously to cotton culti¬ vation from the beginning of the English and American occupa¬ tion. It was the birthplace of Osceola, the mixed-blood Seminole chief who for many years resisted the invasion of the whites with unparalleled ferocity. From the earliest period of the Indian wars, Tuskegee, the county seat, was a garrison of one sort or the other. Many of the best known of the early founders of the county were from Georgia: Dougherty, Logan, Battle, Perry, Mason, and Echols. They came at the beginning of the nineteenth century just as the state emerged as a new territory.

When Olmstead passed through Macon County before the Civil War, going from Columbus, Georgia, to Montgomery, he was ap¬ palled and depressed by the dreary aspect of things. He labored for one full day “through a hilly wilderness, with a few dreary villages, and many isolated cotton farms, with comfortless habita¬ tions for blacks and whites upon them.”

Early foreign travelers in America always noted this dismal stretch in covering the highlights of the new republic. They would land in New York, move southward through Philadelphia, Wash¬ ington, Richmond, and Norfolk to Charleston. These all were new, separate, and unique attractions, evidences of youthful statehood. From Charleston the next point was Savannah, and then on to Macon, Georgia. From Macon the route led through Columbus across the dirty Chattahoochee into Alabama, through Macon County to Montgomery, the capital of the state, and at one time the capital of the Confederacy. Russell, of the London Times , found himself on this trail ten years after Olmstead, and it was still uninteresting country, to him, with nothing to recommend it but the natural fertility of the soil. The people were rawer, ruder, and bigger; chewed more tobacco, squirted it farther; and swore more earnestly. The towns, then as now, consisted of a huddle of small houses and cabins, an inn, a blacksmith shop, and a post station, and rearing up occasionally in the midst of these the more pretentious dwelling of a proprietor, gleaming white.

In 1850 Tuskegee was not only a thriving town but laid claims

9

to being something of an agricultural center. It had a population of 3,000, two female colleges, a male high school, two schools for boys and girls, three churches with nine ministers, two hotels, six dry-goods stores, three drug stores, three groceries, three confec¬ tionery stores, one ice-cream saloon, two jewelers and watch¬ makers, three tailor shops, three furniture stores, two carriage establishments, a steam mill, millinery and mantua-making places, three printing offices, four editors, and seventeen lawyers.8 It was the heart of a powerful plantation area.

In 1840 there were just 5,369 whites and 5,878 blacks in Macon County. In twenty years the whites added 3,000 to their numbers, but to the blacks were added 13,000 more slaves. In the back country, moving toward Montgomery, the vast plantations began. At La Place lived Dr. N. B. Cloud, described as “the giant of ante¬ bellum agriculture.” Mount Meigs was one but not the only sprawl¬ ing village. To the west and south the traveler might stumble upon other clusters of dwellings, or stage-coach stations, with their characteristic indications of frontier life.

Tuskegee is better known now for the Tuskegee Normal and In¬ dustrial Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, and for the United States Veterans Hospital (for Negro veterans of the World War). Three railroad lines cross the county, two of the Western Route and one of the Atlantic Coast Line. In addition there are three main automobile highways, a most important one being that from Atlanta to Montgomery.

Once a section of large plantations, Macon County, as many others, has gradually been broken up into smaller areas, developed by tenants. There has been some landownership by Negroes, but this, in recent years, has followed the general decline, only a bit more rapidly. In 1930 there were 3,714 farms and farm operators, 242 less than in 1920. Of these, 3,1 14 were Negroes and 600 whites. The whites lost 7 during that decade while the Negroes lost 235. The 600 white operators had 71,855 acres in farms, or an average of 103 acres per operator; the 3,114 Negroes had 145,173 acres, or 46 acres per Negro operator. That it is a tenant area is attested in

8 Ibid.

IO

the fact that 43 per cent of the white owners control 43,376 acres, the remaining 57 per cent of Negroes only 32,899 acres, while there are 140,753 acres in farms which are developed by tenants and owned, for the most part, by absentee landlords of either this state or other states. There are, to be exact, 21,688 acres developed by white tenants and 104,417 by Negro tenants.

Although the entire county is regarded roughly as a part of the Black Belt, the northern and southern sections show important differences. In the northern section, where trading is done about the town of Notasulga, are to be found many small farms operated by whites. Over many years these small proprietors, or poor whites, have filtered into the northern section as an alternative to emigration farther west, in order to escape the consequences of the plantation system. The southwestern section of the county is, and always has been, characterized by large plantations with Negro tenants.

Throughout the area are scattered the homes of Negroes which date back, for the most part, to a period of forty years and more. The small unpainted or whitewashed cabins, surrounded by a dis¬ ordered array of outhouses, are spaced at distances convenient for plantation development. Most of the buildings have the worn and sagging aspect of age, with their invariable “dog run” providing a cooling shade; vagrant and inclosed patches of garden, growing close to the house, their newspaper wall covering, and, piled in some spare corner, a dirty heap of cotton seed.

In the early summer there are wide areas of cotton, except for patches of undeveloped woods, sandy areas, where nothing will grow, and the essential stretches of corn and sorghum. Here and there is a house of different design, with weatherboarding. These are the homes of white residents, and occasionally of Negro own¬ ers. The villages are small concentrations around a general store or commissary, gin, post-office, a church, and the homes of the pro¬ prietorial white landowners and residents. Roughly, the present arrangement is a survival of the earlier plantation system under the old parish division.

The old blacksmith shop and stable of the early days of the

county have given place to an automobile repair shop. The inn is a grocery store. The houses are the same, only generations older. The white of the mansion house has gone, symbolizing, it would almost seem, the inevitable abandonment by the lords of the manor to the Negroes who still hang on, trying to nurse a living out of the earth. Foxtail and broomsedge, harbingers of senility, and the ubiquitous boll weevil, a new pestilence, keep this black labor alive, vainly fighting against the approaching final desola¬ tion. Everywhere there are the sad evidences of an artless and ex¬ hausting culture of cotton.

The hard white highways of Alabama have drawn a ring as dis¬ tinct as the color line around these decaying plantations — each with its little settlement of black peasantry. Here they live almost within sight of the passing world, dully alive, in an intricate alli¬ ance with a tradition which has survived the plantation itself. The plantation of olden times has gone, leaving them a twin part¬ ner of the earth, and upon these two — black man and the earth — the proprietor himself, growing ever poorer, depends for the mutu¬ al preservation of all. The machine has not entered here yet, for the routine of cotton cultivation, and especially weeding and pick¬ ing, demands a discrimination which can be taught the dullest peasant, but which no machine as yet has mastered. As a conse¬ quence, the system has continued to breed its own labor support in the thousands of Negroes whose lives and only hopes are bound up with its fate.

THE COMMUNITY

The area of Macon County covered by this study extends over 200 square miles and is virtually the total lower third of the coun¬ ty. There are the small village concentrations, but over four-fifths of the population live out in the open country on and around the farms which they own or rent, or the plantations on which they are employed. The village communities are, as a rule, so loosely identified by the names that confusion exists even among the resi¬ dents as to where one begins and the other ends. Since the towns are so largely built for the convenience of the white folks and there

12

is so little advantage to the Negro farming population in living in the towns, these locations are scarcely more than post-office ad¬ dresses and occasional market places for Negroes.

The center of this population is about ten miles down the high¬ way from Tuskegee and from four to ten miles in the country back of the highway. Tuskegee, if reached by horse and wagon, which is a popular method of travel, despite the vogue of the automobile, is a full day’s journey away. The school is known, but visits there are rare. Occasionally produce or chickens are carried to the vil¬ lage to be marketed. Jerry Wilson, living in Shorter, admitted a certain interest in the place. He said: “If I had some money I’d hire somebody to take me to Tuskegee. I went up dere once to commencement.” In Sambo a group of cabins had been white¬ washed eighteen years before in anticipation of a visit from Booker T. Washington. That was the last coating they had had, and to all appearances the last effective contact with the institution. The nearest large city of the state is Montgomery; there has been some migration back and forth from this city and across the Georgia line.

The distribution of these families conforms to the physical ar¬ rangement of the plantations. The most frequent layout is the cabin, or small cluster of cabins, for each convenient agricultural unit suitable for renting or tenant-farmer use. The very large plan¬ tations have close-set rows of cabins on the edge of vast stretches of cotton land. Occasionally some fortuitous division of land throws a group of cabins or frame dwellings together. Traveling through the country, one may observe, standing stark and alone at the crossroads, a church or a store, with no dwelling in sight. It is a part of the character of this community, it would seem, to be bound together over a wide area by crooked little footpaths which serve as the threads of neighborliness. Such loose physical association must, of necessity, foreclose certain advantages of co¬ operation for social improvement and protection; and make diffi¬ cult, if not impossible, the development of a sense of community such as might be found in more closely knit villages or in town life.

Here live almost hidden in the fields, or at wide intervals along

the country road, over i 1,000 Negroes. There is, however, scarcely a stretch of this territory which does not give some sign of life. Along the dusty roads men in the universal garb of blue-denim overalls are forever trudging, casually going somewhere. They are interested in every happening that crosses their vision. Around the cabins or small frame dwellings, visible from the roadway, chil¬ dren are at play, old folks are puttering about or chatting idly in the cooling shade of the dog-run. Pots of soiled clothing are boiling in the yard, attended with a stick by women too old for the fields. Old men tinker with rickety plows or the intricate disrepair of a mule’s harness. A loud laugh from out the cluttered spaces calls attention to another cabin set far back from the road. Slinking, hungry dogs infest the region of the houses. Adolescent girls, their hair twisted and held in thin stiff braids by tough threads, sit idly, dangling bare legs, scaly with pellagra. A wagon in which chairs have been placed, and occasionally an excessively noisy and anti¬ quated Ford, carry teeming families to town. Shorters, Hardaway, Sambo, Chesson, Liverpool, are only political divisions. Negroes of this area neither know nor are bound by these artificial bound¬ aries.

According to the 1930 census there were 22,320 Negroes in the total population of 27,103 persons in Macon County. The Negro population was only slightly more than that for 1910, but con¬ siderably greater than in 1920, when it was 19,614. The decrease between 1910 and 1920 may be attributed primarily to the migra¬ tions during the war period. In spite of the recent gains during the past decade, the proportion of Negroes in the total population has steadily decreased, being 84.6, 83.3, and 82.3 per cent for the three decennial censuses of 1910, 1920, and 1930. The effects of the migration are still apparent in the present age composition of the population, although it is manifest that many apparent irregulari¬ ties in the age distribution as represented by the census should be attributed to ignorance on the part of the people concerning their ages.

The 612 families on which this study is based are located in eight settlements. These settlements as indicated do not conform to po-

litical or administrative divisions. Although in some cases they have the same name as the precincts for the county, they repre¬ sent more nearly the community to which the people feel they belong. Table I shows the number of families in each subcom¬ munity included in this study.

In the 612 families there were 2,432 persons, or slightly more than a tenth of the Negro population in the county in 1930. The age distribution of the Negro population in this county showed the deviations from the normal distribution which have been attribut-

TABLE I

Location	Shorter	Hardeway	Millstead	Chesson	Liverpool	Tuskegee	Sambo	Cecil	Total
Number. . . .	276	187	33	60	21	23	5	7	6l2

ed to migration.9 It has also been recognized that these deviations from the normal distribution are due to errors in estimating ages.10 In addition to the smallness of the group between twenty and forty, there is also a smaller group of children under one than ap¬ pears in the age distribution of the native white population.11 The 612 families included in this study show the same abnormalities,

9 See U.S. Census , II (1920), 150, for the following comment: “The age distribution of Negroes in urban and in rural areas is affected by the very considerable country-to-city migration of persons of this race in the active-age periods, and probably also by differences in birth and death rates between the two classes of communities.”

10 “The age distribution of males and females among the Negroes, as reported, presents a peculiar condition. According to the returns there was in 1920 a slight excess of females below the age of 1 5, a much larger excess of the age period from 1 5 to 34, and a small excess in the 35-44 period. From the ages of 45 to 69, however, there was a very great excess of men, followed by a moderate excess in the 70-79 periods and an excess of women in the ages above 79. The ratio of males to females for the Negroes in the period 45-49 (138.7 to 100) was higher than the foreign born white ratio for any age period. The number of Negro men enumerated as in this age period in 1920 (320,506) was almost exactly the same as the number reported for the age period 35-39 in 1910 (320,450). This, of course, is an impossi¬ bility, for the reason that, disregarding the slight effect of immigration, the group of Negro men 45 to 49 years of age in 1920 would be made up solely of the survivors of those in the 35-39 age period in 1910. Inconsistencies of this character are due, wholly or in large part, to errors in estimating ages which cannot be ascertained exactly by the enumerators” (ibid., pp. 147-48).

11 “The age distribution of the Negroes and Indians, which is practically unaffected by immigration, is roughly similar to that of native whites. Among the Negroes, however,

with the exception that the deficiency of males is noticeable at an earlier age period and the preponderance of females is greater. In the Negro population for the county there were, in 1930, 98 more males than females, while in our families the difference was much greater, being 146 for the 612 families. The deficiency of males in the population surveyed was almost entirely among those between the ages of fifteen and forty. The percentage of the population composed of boys between fifteen and nineteen was 1.4 per cent smaller than for the girls. This disproportion was even greater for men between twenty and thirty, and thirty and forty. The per¬ centage in favor of the women amounted to 2.9 and 2.5, respective¬ ly, for these two age groups.

Survivals

The essential observation of this study is that the Negro popu¬ lation of this section of Macon County has its own social heritage which, in a relatively complete isolation, has had little chance for modification from without or within. Patterns of life, social codes, as well as social attitudes, were set in the economy of slavery. The political and economic revolution through which they have passed has affected only slightly the social relationships of the community or the mores upon which these relations have been based. The strength and apparent permanence of this early cultural set have made it virtually impossible for newer generations to escape the in¬ fluence of the patterns of work and general social behavior trans¬ mitted by their elders.

Macon County has a Negro population with a tradition much older than that of a Negro population in any city of either the North or the South. It offers little encouragement to new blood. The strength of tradition thus is magnified because of the low level of literacy and consequent imperviousness of the area to the modi¬ fying influence of news and the experiences of other communities.

the proportion of children under 5 is considerably smaller than in any of the native white classes, while the proportions in the age periods from 10-29 years are smaller than the corresponding ones for either the native whites of native parentage or those of foreign par¬ entage” ( ibid p. 146).

l6

Together these factors tend, naturally, to give unwonted prestige and authority to the older families, who have at least the factual argument of survival to bolster their claims to importance.

A useful clue to the character of the present population is to be found in the character of the elders themselves, and their active memories of the past. Much of this study will be concerned with the social tradition of this group and how it is being modified, even though slowly, by various new outside influences. One of the first circumstances encountered in dealing with this older population is the confusion about ages. Only with their presumed independent status have they found it necessary to reckon their own ages. It is only natural, thus, that ages are calculated from the coming of freedom, but even with such a point of reference there is a wide range of speculation. Georgiana Jackson explained: “I don’t know how old I am. I was born in slavery. I remember when the Yan¬ kees first come and say dere want no more slavery.” Liza Cloud, now blind, decrepit, and extremely dirty in her neglect, said: “Slavery I know all about, looks like. I was sixteen years old when the Yankees come through. I can’t tell about the year I was born but I know the month. I was born the first of May. You know back there colored folks didn’t know nothing about the years.” Still another, a male family head reckoned his age, with no qualms of uncertainty, from the fact that he was “a half-hour old when freedom come.” Even this type of record lends itself more satis¬ factorily to calculation than some other speculations based, for example, upon the type of clothing worn, or the amount of work one was able to do, or the condition of the plank road running through the county at the time of their first age consciousness.

The most common method of keeping reasonably accurate ages is through their “white folks,” who made and kept this record for the Negroes. Those who lacked the continuing relationship with a single white family would have them set down the most likely age or date of birth in a Bible. If the white folks died, or the Bible was lost, their ages were also lost and this was counted as irrevocable, not to be troubled about further. After all, ages are only needed at rare intervals, when a census is being taken or for the even less

exacting requirement of an obituary and death certificate. With the utmost casualness the matter of ages could thus be dismissed: “I had all our ages in the Bible and one of my boys what got mar¬ ried tuk it and when I got it back so many of the leaves was tore out I didn’t know it was a Bible and all the ages was gone.” Or: “I don’t know my age. My Bible got burnt up and hit was in it.”

The importance attached by the younger people to the keeping of one’s own age was one of the faint but important symbols of independent status. A young woman who had been reared by her grandmother from an infant said with some feeling: “The only thing I hate about my grandma is she wouldn’t tell me my age.” The old folks would observe that “people didn’t tell ages in dem days lak dey do now,” and make no effort to alter the easier ar¬ rangement of relying upon their white folks to supply this infor¬ mation when necessary. This continued reliance was only one of the numerous points of their dependent relationship. Occasionally there would be exhibited courage sufficient to doubt the estimate, even though made by their white folks, as in the case of Jennie Smith who gave this account of her age: “I am about seventy-sev¬ en years old this last gone February. I am satisfied I’m older’n this but that’s what the white folks gied me when I was freed, but if I don’t disremember that is my sister’s age. When the war was declared, and freedom come, I was nursing and working at the white folks’ home. They just got us niggers mixed up. I remember well when the people was drilling to free the slaves. That’s why I know I’m older’n dat.”

Memories of Slavery

The former slaves have not only retained memories of their earlier status, but have maintained a certain dignity and prestige for themselves by contrasting these memories with the pretensions to freedom of the younger generation. For these older ones it has been a part of the technique of survival to rationalize the social adjustments made. There are, at the same time, former slaves who, with a certain defiance, refer to slavery as an ill which they were fortunate and grateful to escape. This they do with vigor and

18

eloquence, but also with a becoming caution. There is enough spir¬ it in their recital of slave conditions, however, to set them apart from some of their brethren who, like many of their masters, find these memories glowing with increasing charm and romance as time separates them from the period.

The older Negro families are, indeed, divided rather sharply in their memories of slavery, and both groups have in turn passed them along in both practice and philosophy to their own offspring. Zack Ivey, for example, is one of the older heads and strong spirits of the community. He was more frank than is the custom of Ne¬ groes to be in contrasting his present condition with that of slav¬ ery. He complained: “I done had a harder time since I been free than when I was a slave. I never had such a hard time in my life as I’m having now.” Then, with awareness of the implied treason of this remark, he added, compromising: “I’m saying this for my¬ self. I ain’t saying hit for nobody else. I wish I had stayed a slave.” There was to him nothing offensive in his attachment to his master, particularly since his was a good master; besides, he drew distinction from the very power and wealth of his owner. “In slavery my master and mistress tuk care of me. I lived down in the quarters but I was always up at the house. Them quarters was ’ranged just like a garden. Here was a row and there was a row, and up there was the white folks’ house. My mother had to see atta all the chillun in the quarters ’cause they kept so much fuss. I was small and light and done ’bout most as I pleased.”

One does not have to look far to see the lively survivals of the early social attitudes in the present population which figure so largely in the memory of Zack Ivey. For a most significant feature of the culture of this group is the slow pace of its transformation. Life was regimented for Zack Ivey but not unpleasantly. The ra¬ tions were especially memorable in the face of the dull monotony of their present daily fare. “In slavery days,” he reminisced, “we et peas, onions, hog head, liver, cow’s milk, butter, Irish potatoes, and everything what grows in gardens. That’s why I’m here now. I’m just living on the strenk of that. Hit’s the strenk of that done kept me alive.” For Zack Ivey life was a simple, elemental

J9

process of love-making, child-breeding, frolics, and religion, very much as it is now in the community. “I had three chillun by my first wife and fifteen by my second wife. We had frolics. We had them in the white folks’ yard. The white folks made you play and run and jump. Your feet an’ things had ter be washed and you had ter be all clean and white ter set at table. We had guitars and blowing quills. We had the best kinda time. The only thing I didn’t like they kept me in my shirt tail so long. I thought I was too big fer ter be in my shirt tail and ever’ time they come round and tell me ter jump my shirt tail would fly up, and I’d say, ‘You gotta put some pants on me.’ I was keeping company wid my lady frien’, going cross the creek, and I looked and there my shirt tail was a floating.”

The difference in opinion as well as in memories on the question of slavery found frequent enough expression. So close was the group in the ordinary routine of life, and so well known the opin¬ ions, that they would frequently take the form of debate through the investigator.

Riny Biggers, a character of equal strength in the community, without being informed of the views of Zack Ivey, began her own reminiscences with a warning: “Don’t you believe no nigger when he says he ruther be no slave. Things happen then too awful to talk about. If they catch you with a pencil in your hand it would be too bad. When de white folks’ chillun would come through wid books from school by the quarters and dropped a piece of they school paper and if dey seed you pick hit up dey would clare you tryn’ to learn to read and write, and over Sunday for a month you’d be put in a strait-jacket.”

The immediate difference between these two types could be observed in the children of these old family heads. Riny Biggers made her own children learn their letters under the threat and free employment of a handy stick. When they had grown up and she was no longer capable of having children of her own, she adopted others and sent them to school in the same manner. Of Zack Ivey’s eighteen children, five were dead; four had left the county for Montgomery; two remained with him; of the whereabouts of the

20

others he had no knowledge. None of them had had more than a few months of schooling, and the two who remained still lived with him, one of them an unmarried daughter with four children.

Riny Biggers, taking advantage of the extended privilege of her sex, was more aggressive about her freedom and made a fetish of education, although she herself was illiterate. The high value of literacy had been implanted in her in slavery as firmly as Zack Ivey’s memory of the care-free days of frolics and food and court¬ ing. She was what one might call “race conscious.” She told her children often the story of a figure who seemed to stand out in her memory as the heroic one of slavery. “Red Ann,” as she was com¬ monly known, knew the secret of letters when she was bought by Riny’s mistress. It was a trade-off as unethical as selling a blind horse without confessing his defect. Red Ann’s literacy in this case was her defect. Riny’s mistress bought Red Ann from a specu¬ lator but she did not know that she could read. She was called “Red Ann” in contempt for nature’s presumption to endow a slave with a swarthy Caucasian complexion and quite straight soft hair, sometimes referred to as Titian. When in the presence of her mis¬ tress, or any white person, for that matter, Ann carried a blank, uncomprehending stare. She would handle papers on which there was writing without showing the slightest curiosity. Once securely out of sight, she would read them and keep her intelligence to her¬ self. Later she began to read letters coming to the house and, be¬ coming still bolder, would show them to other slaves whom she took into her confidence. They watched as she read, then one day a slave, secretly jealous, whispered to her mistress Red Ann’s secret. There was consternation confounded by unbelief. In a cul¬ ture which denied the ability of Negroes to read, it was easier to believe as well as to wish that they could not. Suspicion grew and she was questioned. Red Ann persisted that she could not read. The mistress left notes around to trap her, but Red Ann wras too clever. Finally, she wrote her mistress’ name to a pass and dis¬ appeared.

This secret power was a lasting lesson for Riny, and she ground it into her own children from the day they were large enough to

21

understand. For that reason she was accounted the equivalent of a radical in her society, and the variant fate of her children testi¬ fied to the conflict between her own determination and the pres¬ sure of environment. Of Riny’s first set there was one living and two dead. The living child, now in his fifties, eventually shook off the county, the state, and left the South forever. She knew only that he had a family in Detroit and children in school somewhere. Another son died at the age of ten. A daughter grew to woman¬ hood, married, and died in childbirth. Of the second set, one daughter, Aggie, was living with her mother; a son, Arch, was killed in a fight with a white man; and still another, Jerry, had been away from home about fifteen years and had finally worked his way through a school in South Carolina. Two other children had died at early ages and there had been three miscarriages. With her now was the second of the adopted children which she had begun to rear. Her memories of slavery were fresh, no doubt from frequent rehearsing:

My master’s people? Some of them masters would take they slaves and lock ’em in the house all day and you couldn’t stick your head out of the door. We could lay on our porch and hear ’em hollering and work¬ ing all night tel day. I seed ’em walk in sand tel they fell dead. Had been me I would been fightin’ now. I come from the fightin’ class, but I’m too old ter fight now. My master’s brother’s wife was so mean tel the Lord sent a peal of lightenin’ and put her to death. She was too mean ter let you go ter the well and git a drink of water, and God come long and “squshed” her head open. One of the other masters was so mean he made his slaves crow. Whenever he got ready ter go ter Prattville he had him a chariot fixed up wid eight horses. Lak we settin’ here done been two packs of hounds done passed chasing atta slaves and he had more slaves runned away.

“ Salt-Water ’ Men

Another class of Negroes in relation to whom there is retained, in the memory of the community, an active social distinction is the “salt-water nigger.” They were the freshly imported Negroes from Africa toward whom the Negro slaves felt a pronounced superiori¬ ty. Cass Stewart, now over eighty-five years of age, could remem¬ ber some of these. Said he: “I was wid de Africans. Dey couldn’t

22

understand what dey was saying deyselves. I seed dem salt-water niggers down my home near Selma. I knowed a man down dere working 25 acres, couldn’t work wid half of ’em ’cause when you made one of ’em mad you made all of ’em mad.”

The older slaves kept themselves aloof from the African, partly out of contempt and partly out of fear. In the community today there are contemptuous references to certain families as springing from “salt-water niggers.” This situation provides an unexpected link with Africa which might indeed yield traces of other trans¬ planted culture traits.12

Old Farming Methods Surviving

The old people, despite differences of opinion on the matter of slavery, retained numerous traits in common as a part of their heritage from the institution. Most important among these was the method of farming. Sam Thomas, still feebly active, despite his nearly ninety years, and always able to raise some sort of crop, made an observation on the development of agriculture. The method they learned was for him the best method. He said: “The way they farmed here then was a hoss ter de plow and a hoss ter de hoe hand. They works dat way round here now . They had a leader and all lumped together in one hand master.”

As a matter of fact, there has been practically no change in the farming methods except on a few advanced farms. The layout of the plantation is practically the same as it has always been. The perennial tenants go to the commissaries for food, clothing, and other essentials or get advances in small amounts of cash. The larger the plantation, the greater the prestige of the planter. From the importance of the planters the tenants draw their own social importance.

This man what we rent from got a big plantation, and he got it filled up, too. Lots of dem is renters and a lot of dem is jes workers by the day for him. He got a little commissary up dere at dat big barn where you

12 One old resident, in quoting remembered expressions of these Africans, used terms strikingly similar to the African West Coast pidgin English, which was all the more unusual because West Coast pidgin is not common in the dialect of the Negroes in this part of the

South.

23

can buy what you want. Dey puts it down on the book when you buy something. I jes tell de thing jes like it is. When you want a sack of flour or anything you go up dere and get it, but you don’t have no money to buy it with. De people last year ’vanced around $8.00 and $ 9.00 to de plow. Long bout dis time last year we got a draw and no more. Course I scuffles round here and works a little extra to keep from being worried so much.

The man what owns dis place sold it and is living ’tween five and six

miles of Montgomery. Mr. - stays near Montgomery. His men

stays up yonder in the big house. He sold it to Mr. - . Mr. -

was better than Mr - . Mr. - never did ’vance anything.

Mr. - jes got tired of staying here and he sold to Mr. - . These

here people here is regular farmers. Dey get more land den anybody in Alabama. Got about 700 and some odd acres I guess. They got a lot of people on this place. I jes couldn’t tell you how many farmers is on dis place. Dey is all back across in here and way back over yonder.

The acuteness of the struggle for a livelihood has issued from the effort to produce enough from the constantly weakening soil with the simple old tools of two generations ago. The reluctance to change has been bound up with the decreasing importance of the area itself as a cotton center, the increasing economic helpless¬ ness of the families, the high illiteracy, and the almost total ab¬ sence of money. Even if these were different, there would remain to be overcome a group inertness and habituation to their status which was notable near the beginning of their new era of freedom, and about which the old people themselves remark in their stories of the past. For years after their emancipation they not only were unable to grasp the significance of their changed status, but auto¬ matically kept up the habits of earlier association in every detail and in spite of the assurance by their “white folks” that certain controls were no longer in operation.

Even atta we was free, the niggers wouldn’t believe it. They kept going ter master and mistress atta passes to go off and they would say, “Steve, I don’t give no more passes now, dem days is over; you is as free as me.” The niggers couldn’t believe hit atta they heard hit. I’m tellin’ de truf. The niggers was still scared, too. You know the niggers and white folks b’longed ter de same church, and went ter de same church. The niggers would set behin’ de ’titions. The preacher would tell ’em slavery was over and ter come on in the church, but they wouldn’t.

24

Then the white folks got scared dat dem niggers might kill ’em. Dat de reason why niggers and white folks ain’t goin’ ter de same church now. ’Cause mattered not how the preacher would say tain’t no mo’ master and mistress now come on inside, some of them niggers wouldn’t. They stood outside by them windows wid day heads stickin’ in. Yes, honey, I ’members dis all.

Physical Survivals of the Past

Memories of the past are reinforced by numerous physical fea¬ tures — the old and sagging cabins and the decaying splendor of the big house, the rotting remains of the old plank road, and occasion¬ ally the untouched breastworks of the Civil War itself, which changed their political status. Will Daniels reckoned that the house in which he lived was ninety years old, and gave this ex¬ planation in support of his speculation:

There’s an old man ’round here who used to wait on Dr. - and

he’s about ninety years old. The house was here when he was a boy. Old man Parker owned it in slavery times. The slave cabin was tore down when I moved here. The young Missus comes up here to see it sometimes now. She says she just likes to see the old place where she was raised. She showed us the print of the man’s hand that built it. It’s right there in the hall.

Stability

Year after year these families continue to live and move about within the county, but rarely leaving it. The tenant turnover is high. Their one outstanding means of asserting freedom is this mobility, although within an extremely narrow range. Planters can never tell which of their tenants will be with them the follow¬ ing year, but of one thing they can be fairly certain — that they will not leave the county, and in time, will rotate, of their own choice, back to the point of beginning. The past is thus kept ever alive, since it is never seriously broken. This restlessness is expressed in such statements as:

We moved here in 1925. Getting time to move now, ain’t it? We been here too long now.

I just been here two months . I’ll just be here ’til the last of the

month and everything gets settlement.

\ O Co O "cL CL-O

25

We jest been moved out here from Montgomery this year, so my hus¬ band could get on his feet, but we expects ter move soon’s cotton time’s over.

When people ain’t got no home they move back from one place to the other.

We moved here from Shorter, but ’fore we went ter Shorter we lived in La Place. We been farming all our lives ’cept two years when we was in town.

The statistical evidence from the 612 families gives more exact¬ ness to these comments. About 60 per cent of the 400 husbands, or male heads of the families, were born in Macon County. About

TABLE II

Birthplace of the Male and Female Heads of 612 Negro Families in Macon County

Dead

or

Away

Border

States

Some

Other

Southern

State

Same

State

Same

Place

or

Neighbor¬

hood

Unknown

Total

Male heads of families .

Wives of female heads of

152

I

15

270

7

8

453

families .

33

O

II

354

7

2

407

34 per cent of these men were born elsewhere in the state of Ala¬ bama, and only about 5 per cent were born in other southern states. In the case of the 579 wives, or female heads of families, about the same proportions were born on the place or in the neigh¬ borhood. This seems to correspond roughly with the general im¬ mobility of the residents of the state. For the United States as a whole, 67.2 per cent of the population were born in the state in which they reside while for Alabama 87.5 per cent.

There were those who could point to the spot “where pappy was sot free, right over yonder.” One old resident pointed his foot at the stove beside which his parent had died on the very plantation where he had served his master as a slave. The second generation was there, renting from the family of the former owner of his

26

father. Ann Weaver is living in the cabin given her by her white folks when they moved to Montgomery. “It’s mine tel I die,” she said with triumph. “She went down ter de courthouse and had it done, so dat effen she die fo’ me they can’t take it.” One resident confided: “I’ve never been out of the state. Reason is, I wouldn’t know what way to go.”

The Tradition of Dependence

For those still living in the county there is, it would appear, one unfailing rule of life. If they would get along with least difficulty, they should get for themselves a protecting white family. “We have mighty good white folks friends, and ef you have white folks for your friends, dey can’t do you no harm.”

How this practical policy, so clearly a carry-over from the past, can extend to controlling advice on the most intimate matters is apparent in the domestic experience of Josh Walker, who sought the judgment of his white folks on the merits of his last wife.

This last wife I had, she was a blizzard, ’cause she was no count no way. Hers was her way and my way was my way, and she quit me and carried off all the money I had. I had done saved $80. She carried hit all off. That was six years ago. She was too old ter draw water and ter cook, but she had the devil in her. Hit tuk four men to carry her away. She went off. Said I’d be wid my chillen an’ she gwine ter hers. White folks tole me that I better let that hussy go and atta she left I jes shouted.

The sense of dependence has crystallized into a sort of practical philosophy: “You know when you get where you can’t behave yourself you better move. You got to be loyal, ’cause you know this is a white man’s country.” And again: “You can’t do nothing with white folks agin you.” Nor should it be supposed that all of this dependence upon the whites is based upon fear. There is a solid and sympathetic paternalism among some of the white plant¬ ers toward their Negro dependents which is felt by them. Max Wheeler, for example, was a stolid, illiterate, but hard-working head of a large family who experienced the perennial difficulty of breaking even. Year after year he went to his white planter friend. Times were hard in 1931. Max explained sympathetically: “He

27

said he had so many folks on his place to feed, it was hard, but he wanted to try to give all of us a little feed.” It worried Mandy Williams that she was “so sympathetic with white people.” Sarah Owens, now sixty-eight, achieved her own freedom from the sense of dependence by claiming her white folks as her own. “Honey, them’s my own good white folks. Done had me [in the family] since I been three weeks old and had my mother before me.” Booker T. Washington, in a memorial address at Hampton Insti¬ tute in 1893 on General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, was, no doubt, thinking of his neighbors back of Tuskegee when he as¬ serted with vigor: “The greatest injury that slavery did my peo¬ ple was to deprive them of that sense of self-dependence, habits of economy, and executive power which are the glory and distinction of the Anglo-Saxon race.”

The older members of the community who find ample satisfac¬ tion in the old culture are aware of some queer difference mani¬ festing themselves in the attitude of younger members who have been away from the section. Caleb Humphries went to Mont¬ gomery to try to adjust a matter of compensation due on the death of one of his sons in France. He tells the story now of how he was sitting in the Red Cross Office in Montgomery when a white man, whom he promptly assumed to be the governor of Alabama, came in. “He was tall as a tree, and I said ‘Good-morn¬ ing, Master’ — so uster slavery I still say hit. They [other Negroes] stopped me from hit ’cause dey say you don’t hafta treat white folks like dat dese days.”

The community is being affected at present by at least four fac¬ tors: migration of a portion of the younger generation away to other states and to the North; return of a small number of younger members who have been sent away to school in Tuskegee and Montgomery; the gradually increasing literacy of the group, be¬ ginning with the children; and the introduction of certain pro¬ grams of welfare from the outside. The interplay of these new in¬ fluences with the old habits of the community may be observed in some measure against the background of the present structure and functioning of the Negro family in this area.

28

THE PEOPLE

Father, mother, and their children are regarded by sociologists as constituting not only the elementary family but the fundamen¬ tal social group. It is the universal pattern, and based on this primary structure, which, in our culture, places the father most commonly at the head of the group, principles are formulated regulating marriage, defining legitimacy, and determining what is respectable, even moral. The families of this area are, by this standard, considerably atypical. In the first place, the role of the mother is of much greater importance than in the more familiar American family group. This has some explanation in the slave origins of these families. Children usually remained with the moth¬ er; the father was incidental and could very easily be sold away. The role of the mother could be extended to that of “mammy” for the children of the white families.

The position of the Negro woman always gave her greater ad¬ vantage in dealing with their white masters than the Negro men. Historically she has been the controlling influence over the chil¬ dren. Moreover, in the present economic arrangement, her earn¬ ing power is only a fraction less than that of the male, and as a rule more sustained and dependable. She, thus, in large part es¬ capes one of the most powerful factors influencing adversely the status of women generally in the American society.

A second factor marking a difference is the free grouping of rela¬ tives and adopted children in the households. Although the house¬ holds kept themselves strictly separated (92 per cent of the fami¬ lies or households lived under separate roofs), there were 30 per cent of the families with one to six relatives living with them. The families with children were the ones most likely to add relatives to their numbers. Over half of the families had other relatives in the household.

In the third place, just about two-thirds of the families could be considered normal in the sense of having both parents living or living together with the children. To this circumstance is added another factor of the almost indiscriminate gathering under the

29

same roof of half-brothers and half-sisters from various marriages, and of adopted children taken freely into the home. The makeup of households which sociologically may be regarded as families often constitutes a confusing picture. Mary Grigsby, of Harda¬ way, is head of one of the oldest families of the county. She gives an account of the present structure of her household. It contains some of her own children, her children’s children, and half-broth¬ ers’ and sisters’ natural and legal children. It is, however, as stable as most of the others. As a matter of fact, it represents a sort of selection. Those members who find themselves too violently at variance with the codes by which the family is regulated move out and away, or are expelled.

My mamma she said I was born on ole man Chum Crack’s place on Boyd’s farm. After I married I left ’em, but I been here nigh on about forty years [in the neighborhood]. I been on this spot nigh about thirty years. My mamma died this year. She were about one hundred years old. This is my son and grandson. One of my sons he married and live over yonder, but this grandson lives with me.

Charlie [grandson] was born here. My daughter were in Birmingham, but she come on here. She went back for a while and stay with her hus¬ band, then she sent Charley back and give him to me.

Richard was born in Montgomery, and Dave, my son who is Richard’s daddy, give him to me when he was three years old.

Sam Burkes is Charley’s father. I don’t know where he at. His home, though, in Birmingham. Mary Burkes, my daughter, and Charley was married, though, right down there.

Lena Parsons was Richard’s mother. She and Dave wasn’t married.

I was the mother of fifteen children in all. I got six livin’. Some come live, but didn’t live no time, yet three got to be big chillen walkin’ ’bout fo’ dey dies. One boy got to be eighteen years old. He had that fever and from that spasms and spells and from the spells he fell in the fire and got burnt and never got over it. The other two just died with the fever.

Charlie [another son], he goin’ on three years old when he died with the fever, too. With the others I go about five or six months and I lost ’em. I jest keep a losten em.

That the last one I saved right there [pointing to another son}. I had to work to save him. I had to go to the doctor. I got so weak I couldn’t hold ’em.

3°

Gregory wasn’t the father of ’em all. He was the father of Janie and David [the oldest boy in Montgomery]. Robert Pitts is the father of the other four, Mary, Richard, Jessie, and Archie. I was married to Gregory by David Bracks. I wasn’t never married to Pitts.

A further fact about this community is that in almost half of the families one or more of the members of the original family group were away in other parts of the county or state, or in northern states. Of the 612 families there were only 317 with no members away, or about half, and those include the families with no children at all. In 295 families there were from 1 to 10 members absent. One hundred and twelve families had 1 person away; 70 had 2 per¬ sons away, 40 had 3 persons away, and 61 had 4 or more persons away. Moreover, those absent members when they leave the state are often cut off completely from the parent stock.

In the case of the unlettered offspring, or even mates of the re¬ maining family heads, the ties are sometimes carelessly allowed to break. It not infrequently happens, however, that children who leave push forward their education and become consciously sepa¬ rated by a vast cultural chasm. This had occurred in the case of the family in which the mother had remarried and given birth to three children by a second husband. Her two sons by a first mar¬ riage had left the county and begun their own education, which carried them through the State Normal School in Orangeburg, South Carolina. In her dreary two-room cabin, with one large bed as the only furniture, the fly-specked photographs of these two boys in collegiate cap and gown hung like strange, alien figures from the newspaper-covered walls. She did not know where they were or what they were doing. Nor had she seen them since they left. These photographs remained as almost mocking mementos of a separation as complete as death. Another family in similar cir¬ cumstances had a son away who has become the head of a Negro educational institution, but who is likewise lost to them. Thus the community in throwing off its members escapes both the irritation of its disturbing miscreants and the elevating influence of its cul¬ tural misfits at the other extreme of the scale.

3i

Size of Families

There were 1,344 children in these 612 families. Sixty-nine of these children were under one year of age and constituted 2.7 per cent of the 2,482 persons in all the families. This was higher than for the county as a whole. This age group constitutes 2.2 per cent of the entire population. Two hundred and twenty-nine of these children were under five years of age. This was 9 per cent of the entire group, or slightly less than the figure for the county as a whole, which was 10. o per cent. Six hundred and thirty-two of the children were between the ages of five and fourteen and constituted 25.4 per cent of the 2,482 persons in these 612 families. This was

TABLE III

Number of Families with Stated Numbers of Children

Children

Families	0	1	2	3	4	S	6	7	8	9	10	11
6l2 .	189	127	83	62	41	40	28	21	IO	6	3	2

slightly higher than the figure for the county as a whole, which was 23.9 per cent in 1920. If we take into consideration all the fami¬ lies, there are, on an average, 2.2 children to a family. But 189 of these families had no children, and if the average number of chil¬ dren for these families with children is calculated, there are 3.1 children to a family. Table III shows the distribution of these families according to the number of children.

Types of Family Structure

The environment has produced not one but many family types which, however, have numbers of traits in common. It is not im¬ mediately apparent just what have been the predominant influ¬ ences in shaping their differences. There are families which are fairly stable and adjusted to the environment and its social codes. They have a distinct background, certain family traditions,, a consciousness of integration, and they are sensitive to certain

32

patterns of respectability which represent the more reflective moral sentiments of the group. These families appear among both the educated and the uneducated classes of the population and in varying proportions among owners, tenants, and croppers.

The frequency in this community of the artificial or quasi¬ families seems to warrant their classification as a type. They have the semblance of a normal and natural family, and function as one, but the members of the group are drawn into it by various circum¬ stances rather than being a product of the original union. There are, again, those families which, though not bound by the formal sanctions, are held together for years by the strength of affectional ties or the satisfactory character and mutual convenience of the arrangement. Multiple marriages are fairly common. Intransient family groups seem to be a product of the environment and are held together over periods by economic and other considerations of convenience. And just as these family forms are reflections of the environment, there have been developed physical adjustments with regard to both remarriage and the disposition of children. Equally important are the families whose organization and senti¬ ments, though in accord with more advanced ideals of other com¬ munities, are in constant conflict with the dominant patterns of both the white and the Negro local community. Finally, there are those family groups which reflect definite disorganization as a re¬ sult of the disintegration of traditional controls, and are yet un¬ able or unwilling to adjust themselves to newer patterns of rela¬ tions. All of these are affected in some degree by the social and cultural transition which the community is experiencing.

The numerical distribution of these types of families can be sug¬ gested in these figures: in the 612 households there were 404 mar¬ ried couples or couples living together in common-law association. There was no male head in 152, or 25 per cent of these families. The male parent was either away or dead. The wife or female head of the household was absent from 33 of the families. About two- thirds of the families were normal family groupings. In 231 of the 404 couples married or living together the man and woman were each married or in marital association for the first time. In 24

33

families the husband had been married more than once. In 74 families both man and woman had been married more than once. There were only 2 divorced persons who had not remarried. The community afforded no spinsters and extremely few bachelors.

Stable Old Families with Strong AJfectional Ties and a Family Tradition

The Haygood family was rooted in slavery, but father and mother, both illiterate, were married and had lived together over fifty years, reared children, established a family tradition of a sort, accumulated a little property, and retained their affection for each other. Ellen Haygood spoke thus of her background and re¬ lations with her husband until his very recent death:

Yes, indeed, I may be old but I remember everything. I was born during slavery. Dem sho’ was bad times. If the niggers hadn’t been liberated by Abe Lincoln we’d still be the white folks’ niggers. The way them folks used to beat us was shameful. My white folks want rich. They was just good livers and they want so bad. I ain’t nebber forgotten my young mistress. She had the longest nose you ever seen, but she was

sweet. Her name was S - . All the niggers on the place called her

“Miss Sis” and when I sees her now I calls her “Miss Sis.” She’s done got powerful old but she still lives right on the old place over yonder near Honey Cup. Yes’m right here in Shorters. Folks would raise the fence and put your end on one side and your head on the other and beat and beat them niggers. I was the onliest little nigger on the place when freedom come. The Yankees come through and said slavery’s done gone. Child, the niggers got to yelling and whooping all over the place. Some of ’em got kept in bondage as long as four years after freedom. The white folks jest wouldn’t loose us. Abe Lincoln touched a pen for the sign of freedom but all the niggers didn’t know. The Rebels didn’t tell us until some good white folks let the cat out of the bag. My husband he was off in the war. That was Jim. He done told me so much I ain’t neb¬ ber gonna forget. He got discharged right on Peach Street in Atlanta. Dere’s his picture on the wall. I gits here in my bed some night and puts on the flashlight on the picture and says, “I’m still all alone Jim — still your Ellen.” I know it ain’t gonna be long now ’fore I goes to him. He sho’ was a good husband. He used to cook and help me but we was mar¬ ried fifty-six years and I ain’t missed cooking his vittels but once. He got mad then and hit me . Then he was sad and said, “Scraps (used

34

to call me Scraps), I hain’t nebber gonna hit you no mo’ long’s I live,” and he sho didn’t. I loved that man.

The week ’fore he died he said, “Ellen, git my tax papers and all the pension papers. I’se gonna fix things so if I die you won’t have no trouble. I’se an old disable soldier and I’se gonna take care of you.” Well, we signed papers ’n’ all. Then he paid Miss Jessie $1.00 to come here and write all our names in the Bible in ink. See, I couldn’t write and Jim couldn’t but he’d been carryin’ all that in his head, and he knew if any¬ thing ever happen and it weren’t wrote down, it be hard for me. He was blind, too. Got blind from cooking so much. All that smoke was too much for his eyes. Well, I come nigh going blind too. Jim paid £100 for my eyes to get better. A white lady come here and tended like she was gonna do a heap for us and said she’d send some glasses but she ain’t done nothin.’ After freedom I went to school ’till the one-legged man wrote me I couldn’t go no more without no money an’ we ain’t had nothin’ then. All we got we just cummulated. When my chilluns married I gave each one two sheets, three pillow cases, one half-dozen cups and saucers, and a piece of furniture. I treated ’em all the same. Just had to save to git all this, an’ if anybody knows how to save and scrape, I do. I gits all the slop ready for the chilluns and it don’t take much the way I fixes it. I done lost $700 in this Tuskegee bank when hit closed. I’se been saving that a long time and it sho’ got me bad.

My husband died with the kidney trouble. He got drawed sores all on his legs. I got ’em now. Wait, I’m gonna show you. The children want me to go to Birmingham to the doctor. Dere’s a doctor there who can look plumb through you and see everything. Spects my heart is like this cause everything I got is dead but me and three chillun. I done had to stop breeding for six years on account of bad misfortune. I got a milk leg and a risen breast. The doctor is scared to lance it.

Tain’t easy for me to keep up with all my spenses. I miss Jim for that. He sho’ could figure. Just two years ago next month he died. I make lines like this .... for dollars and circles for nickels. I send some of the money up North to the chilluns, but I done got careless and don’t keep it up.

Families with Strong Maternal Dominance and with Specific Moral Codes

Frank Grice is forty-nine and his wife thirty-seven, and with their seven children, ranging in ages from eight to twenty years, they live in a five-room cottage which they are attempting to buy. All but one of the children are living at home. The house is old,

35

has never been painted, has half of the windows missing, and is, in the words of Mrs. Grice, “ ’bout to fall down.” They are cotton farmers and for the past three years have tried to make a living from thirty acres of questionable cotton land which they rent. Last year they raised two bales of cotton, both of which went to the white man from whom they had purchased a mule with which to do their plowing. Besides the cotton, however, Frank Grice raised three loads of corn, two hundred bundles of fodder, fifteen gallons of syrup, and three banks of potatoes, and this provided the food for the family and their total income in kind for the year.

Jerry, next to the oldest boy, is the wanderer, and left home three years ago. They do not know where he is, and indeed have not heard from him since he left. But the family stands out as a distinct type in this neighborhood. Neither of the parents can read or write and none of the children has passed through the fourth grade in school. The parents wanted the children to be educated but even education was less important than “living decent.” The mother is the stronger element of the family, and has pronounced notions about morality and respectability. All the children but one, Jerry the wanderer, live quietly in the community and in marked social isolation. The attitude of the family is unique and important for its revolt against commonplace practices in the community.

Yes, I’s the mother of seven children and every last one of dem be¬ longs to Frank Grice. I ain’t stuck on dese stolen chillun; dat’s why I married in my mother’s house ’fore I broke my virtue. I just got ’oman- ish and nothin’ would do me but to marry. Out of all of dem, I ain’t got but one bad un. He ain’t just say bad, but he wanders away. Been away now ’bout three year, and the last time I heard from him he was in Union Springs. No, he don’t get into no trouble, ’cept last year he got into trouble for carryin’ a gun. He didn’t shoot nobody, but hits ’gainst de law to have one. He got out of it all right because we have mighty good white friends.

No, hit’s been sometime now since I’s been to church. In my condi¬ tion I can’t go. I’m lookin for the baby in September. I’s so shame to go to church lookin like dis. You know yourself everybody would be lookin’ at me with my stomach so big. Maybe if I could get me a loose dress I’d go. I ’speck this will be my last time to come around. Eliza

Rose, the midwife, tells me the time when my last child was born that I would have one more time to come, but she said, too, dey would be twins. I wish they would come twins, and den I knows I would be done for all time, ’cause I’s just about tired of having chillun. Every time I look out de door I’s like dis. I’s so thankful for one thing: my oldest boy is such a good child.

Me and my family don’t never git into no trouble. De peoples right up dere next to me stole two pigs last year. Dey can’t git along wid no¬ body. No, I ain’t have no fuss wid ’em, ’cause I ain’t see no use. I just pray to the Lord and he takes care of everything.

Quasi-families: Female Heads of Assembled Families

The number of households with old women as heads and large numbers of children, although of irregular structure, is sufficiently important to be classed as a type requiring some explanation. The oldest generation is the least mobile; the children of these in the active ages move about freely and often find their own im¬ mediate offspring, while young, a burden, as they move between plantations. Marriages and remarriages bring increasing numbers of children who may be a burden to the new husband or a hin¬ drance to the mother if she must become a wage-earner. The sim¬ plest expedient is to leave them with an older parent to rear. This is usually intended as a temporary measure, but it most often ends in the establishment of a permanent household as direct parental support dwindles down. The responsibility is accepted as a mat¬ ter of course by the older woman and she thereafter employs her wits to keep the artificial family going. Charlotte Harris, in the subcommunity of Sambo, has such a family. When first visited she was in the field hoeing. On the way back to her cabin, Jose¬ phine, a small and grotesquely deformed girl-child of about twelve years of age, came reeling unsteadily down the path. She was groaning, moving her lips rapidly, and uttering unintelligible sounds. “She can’t talk,” explained the, old woman. Then calling to the other children in the rear of the cabin, she commanded, “Come here, you chillun, and git de baby.” Two of them, a few years older, appeared and led the child away. The old woman then began to talk as she cooled herself:

37

I don’t know ’zackly how old I’m is. ’Bout fifty I guess. I ’member when slavery time was. The old marster uster have lunch up ter the big house every Sunday and call all his little niggers up to the house. No, they ain’t been all one family. He had lots of niggers and he liked to show his friends how many little niggers he had. I wan’t big enough to remember much.

At this time Josephine came back to the house and attempted to get upon the steps, but could not lift her foot high enough. The children helped her up the steps. She went into the house and came back with an armful of rags, then sat on the porch, staring, groaning, sucking her tongue, and hugging the rags.

I don’t know ’zackly how old Josephine is. I think she ’bout nine years old. She old ’nough to ’menstrate. She kinder like a young lady. Looka here, got a little breast coming. You know she old. She is my granddaughter’s child, who died the other day. Janie Lou and Ethel her chillun too, but I been had Josephine all her life. Dese other two just come since she dead. I ain’t know ’zackly what she died with. Charlotte died in the hospital in Montgomery. Left five chillun. James and the other boy live over dere with his father. Dis one here is ’nother child, belong to my other grandchild. Charlotte named for me. The doctor said she had an abscess in her stomach.

Josephine ain’t right bright. She ain’t crazy, though. Been like dat all her life. She don’t never git into no trouble. She burned her foot once but she ain’t fall in the fire. She stepped on the hot coal. When I went to the burial last week she wouldn’t go with me. I paid my brother Dan to stay here with the child ’cause I hates ter leave her here alone, but old people so contrary.

No, Josephine ain’t foolish. Her mother said ’fore she was born that she stayed on the creek fishing too long. One day when she had been fishing, on her way back home somebody put a ground hog in the road. Somebody killed the ground hog and laid it on a sheet for her to pass, and it skeered her to death. Then when the baby was borned she started to walk but she ain’t walk, just crawled like a turtle. Tried to talk; says “mama” sometimes. She always plays wid rags and sticks; gathers ’em up in a pile.

My husband been dead. I don’t know how come he died. When he died he jest hollered. He was a good Christian, though. Said he had pains and all the misery was in his head. Lie went so naked I said he died with the pneumonia. He didn’t wear no clothes atall. Yes, he had plenty of clothes, but too stingy to wear ’em. I don’t care how hot it is,

38

clothes made for the flesh. During cotton-picking time I talked to him but it ain’t do no good. Had good clothes, den laid down and died and left ’em all here. After he died I called in the little boy and gie’d him a whole sack of clothes. I’d a worn ’em out to rags myself if I’d had dat many. Mine all full o’ holes, but I does pretty well.

I gits the house and patch for nothing. John Henry Davis, my grand¬ daughter’s husband over there, lets me stay here-. -I:he’pS‘him-s6me wid his farm and then I takes care o’ the chillun. She -gives me $2.00 a week, sometimes rations. Davis furnishes my food ’cause all of ’em been eating here since my granddaughter dies.

I plum’ out of all the ’cieties now. Susie Williams was the president. I’ll have to join some others ’cause my overcoat [coffin] cost too much. I was b’long to the Home Mission. Just throw my moriey a\va'y j-oming the Union Aid. I hate to lose all dat money. Got to work now to -pay the $30 to the overseer. He buried my husband. I’ll work till the Lord calls me, ’cause I ain’t paid the overseer back yet. He wouldn’t take my cow, ’cause he told me my cow was my living. He sure was good not to

take my cow. The church give me $$.oo. Mr. - said he would

give me a chance. He wanted me to live on his place but I didn’t ’cept the offer ’cause I mighta taken sick and had nobody to wait on me. I come over here to be near my granddaughter after my husband died; and then she died.

The Red Cross he’ped me once. Me an my brother Dan went over dere. The white folks was over der figuring and my brother looks like he wanted to talk imposin’ talk. They was handing out letters to the folks, but they ain’t had none for me. The white man got fretted so I pulled

Dan’s coat tail. Miss - told us not to blame her ’cause she only had

letters for the people what give her they names.

I had one granddaughter to die with pellagacy. No, she ain’t died here. She stayed here all last winter then went to her husband in Montgomery and then died.

Quasi-families : Male Heads of Transient Families with

Shifting Family Members

Another and curious type of family is that in which the male head remains constant while various other types of relationship, including a succession of wives and their children by him, shift around him. The children and grandchildren and wives who fail to accommodate themselves to the pattern drift out and away, or are thrown off while others remain, constituting essentially a fami-

39

ly organization. An example of this type is the family of Grants. The husband, who in this case is the pivotal figure, is fifty-two and his present wife thirty-eight. Besides them there are three chil¬ dren: Lulu Harris, eighteen, the unmarried daughter of the mother and her two-year-old child; and two sons of James Grant, by other wives, twenty- two and fifteen years old, respectively. He owns a ‘small twp-rodm frame house. In point of organization there is no difference between such an adjusted type of family and a natural* qne.y It Js<r perhaps, even more efficient when pointed toward producciye^ends — a circumstance which lends cohesion to the natural 'family-., As a matter of fact, in spite of its transient nature, the family, changes are, realistically viewed, little different from those which, occur in course of the growth of children. What is conspicuously lacking is a family tradition, and this lack is not, incidentally, wholly confined to the transient family.

I’m about fifty-two years old, but I don’t remember how long I’ve been living here in this county. It’s been so far back. I just go by what the folks say. They say I was a little boy when I come here.

That’s my grandchild, Lilly Mae’s child. Will Jackson is the father. He don’t live here. You know just about how it come here. Lilly is my wife’s first husband’s child. He somewhere. She got a divorce. I mean she didn’t but her husband did.

Yes, I got a divorce in Union Springs for my wife. Mrs. Murray, the lady we was working for, got the divorce, and I ain’t know how much it cost. This is my fourth wife. The first one died in Mississippi. I heered that she died and they fetched her back home in Mississippi. I ain’t leave the second one; she got away from me. The third one, I ain’t know where she is, and there is the fourth one right over there. I ain’t got no divorce from none of them. I got two sons and a daughter done left home. One son left home around the war when the people got all stirred up. I don’t know where he is. My other son and daughter, I don’t know where they is neither.

Stable N on-legal Unions

Families cohere over a long period with all the semblance of stability, but without the legal sanctions. In the Johnson family are: Will Johnson, fifty-three; Mary Lucas, his common-law wife, thirty-five; Annie Lee, fifteen; Willie Lee, eight; Alice, five; Ma-

40

mie, three; Thomas, two; and Salina, five months. Two other chil¬ dren died in infancy, and two of the father’s children by a previous connection had been away in Montgomery about a year. The moth¬ er also has one girl from another unsanctioned alliance. Two of the children in the present household are able to work. The parents are unmarried, but this omission seems relatively unimportant. The arrangement is one of mutual convenience and desire, and has sur¬ vived shocks sufficient to provoke permanent separation and di¬ vorce. Mary Lucas was muscular, large fisted, self-reliant, and not afraid to “hit the sun” in the field. Carelessness was added to poverty in their household and the children were unusually dirty and ragged. Will Johnson was vigorous but older. He had a heavy tangled beard, and one eye was missing. He would sit with his hand over his face and his evident self-consciousness suggested that the injury was not an old one. The mother spoke first:

He is the father of all dese chillun. No, we ain’t married. I ain’t never been married. I’m the mother of seven chillun. The other one ain’t here. She is a girl. Ethel Harris is her name. She married now and lives over there in Hardaway somewhere. Dave Gregory is her father, and he is in Montgomery. I got two chillun dead. One died when it was a day old and the other one a few hours. Both of dem come too soon. Both of ’em was born alive with the eyes open. I knows they was alive ’cause they both cried. I fell out de wagon with the first one, and ain’t nothin’ wrong that I knows of wid the second one.

Man: I been knowing her [Mary Lucas] a long time.

Woman: I was raised up under him. He lived ’bout half a mile from me. My mother knowed his mother ’fore she dies. They been well ac¬ quainted.

Man: Yes, I’s been married once, and my wife, her name was Mary Hunter ’fore we married and then she named Mary Johnson, live now in Montgomery. Had two chillun and they with her in Montgomery. I don’t know how long they been gone. I thought of marryin’ Mary once. Just as soon as I git able I goin’ to get married. May be a good while and it may not.

Woman: I likes him all right.

Man: I likes her better than any other woman in a way [speaking very hesitatingly ]. She understands the way we gits along. We done talked this thing over .

The last time I went to the doctor it was fer my eye. I went to

Dr. - and he charged me $24. It been ’bout three years ago. Dat

woman over dere hit me in it.

Woman: Dat what he say. I have to say like he say, and he said like it was. He hit me the fust lick. If he hadn’t hit me I wouldn’t a hit him. I hit him wid a stick. I didn’t mean to hit him in the eye. Tried to git around it. Didn’t mean to hit him in the face, let ’lone his eye.

N on-agricultural Families

Some of the male heads of families are able to let their wives stay at home. The arrangement is easier where the man is en¬ gaged in work other than farming. Albert O’Neal is a laborer in a log mill, earning seven dollars a week. He has held this job for seven years, and he makes a point of keeping his wife at home. They have been married eight years and seem happy, although the wife has recently developed a keen interest in education, and confessed that if she were not married she would be going to school somewhere. Her husband is a hard-working man who seems to live for the happiness and comfort of his young wife. But she is bored

with the life of the community. Said she:

*

I love my husband but it seems like he has such a hard time keeping up his family. I married in 1923. I was going ter school and my father had died and I had ter take care of myself. My mother just died last year. She had pellagacy. I stayed with my godmother in Milstead. I never did stay with my mother. She left and went ter Louisiana and never did return. She left papa. She never could git along. I met my husband in Milstead and we married in Godmother’s house. We done been going tergether when we married ’bout three years. I uster like the farm all right tel they wasn’t gittin’ nothin’ for cotton.

We would be living in town but my husband can’t git nothin’ ter do up there. I gits tired out here sometimes. I wish I was in town. I’m tired of picnics and suppers and ball games. That’s ’bout all we hafta do. My husband goes ter work wid sunrise ever’ morning and works tel dark. I git up ’fo day and cooks his breakfast. He don’t come back home ter dinner ’cause hits so far. Hits ’bout seven miles from here. He comes home ’bout dark, half dead. Then we eat supper and ’round a hour he’s sleep.

Stable Legal Unions

Domestic relations are rarely ever continually peaceful in the households, but the real test of the union is the ability to sustain

the shocks of marital strife without following the easier path to separation. The Keys have been married twenty-seven years and have never separated. Their two sons and a daughter-in-law live with them in the household. Cotton farmers all, they raised not only three bales (1,270 lb.) of cotton which they sold for cash at eight cents a pound, but also 200 bushels of peas and 27 gallons of syrup. Together they raised chickens, had seven hogs, and, what is most important, have been buying their home for the past six years.

We been married twenty-seven years and ain’t never parted. We fight and scratch and I stay right here. He has never fought me. I get mad, throw chairs, and stay home, ’cause if I ever left I would never

come back . We done lost much money in lodges, and it’s been so

long I can’t remember. My husband was a member of the American Workmen and I use to be a member of the Sons and Daughters of Job. The man what organized it called hisself the Grand Debit.

I’s had two miscarriages. I toted some wood under my arm and mashed its head.

Disorganized Legal Unions

The influence of exposure to the city of one parent, while the other remains at home is marked in another type. In a more gen¬ eral sense, there is revealed a family organization in contact both with the culture of this isolated section and with certain externals of the culture of the city. In the family of Robinsons the organiza¬ tion remained stable as long as the husband remained in the coun¬ ty. Then he got a job as a section hand on the railroad and even¬ tually got passes to town. Mr. and Mrs. Robinson have been mar¬ ried about eighteen years and have eight children, including the twins, Isaac and Isaiah. There have been four stillbirths. The mother comments on her family:

Mary stays here wid us. She jest started here Friday. She and her sister’s husband can’t get along, and she and her sister neither. Bama ain’t no good. She named after me. She sick all the time wid her eyes, and I jest keeps her home. I don’t rent. They jest let me stay in here; as long as they got work fer me ter do I work.

The children done all stopped school ’cause they had ter help take care of theyselves. I couldn’t support ’em by myself. I is a day laborer

43

and makes 50 cents a day. Mariah works by the day and makes 50 cents a day to help. Lizzie [the oldest girl] ain’t here. She is in Detroit. She runned away and married and went there. She sent us some money but hit was stole out the letter. I got the letter but didn’t seed no money. I sho’ didn’t like hit fer her ter git married.

We owes this man, and he gives us two $$.oo a week for working, and he takes half of it and we have ter live off the rest. I didn’t have nobody ter help me and I had ter go down there ter git stuff ’nuf ter live off at the end of the fall. My husband left us a year this July. Say after they laid him off the railroad he couldn’t find no job ter do and he wasn’t going ter work on no farm. He worked on the railroad with the Phillips gang, and when they cut him off he jest went ’bout his business. I aint’ heard of him, but the last concern I heard of him he was in Montgomery, and I knowed that ’bout all the far he could get. I ain’t going ter look fer dat man. He might have some rotten woman there who might jump on me. I’m jest going ter stay here and do the best I can. We was mar¬ ried in 1914, the fifteenth of July. He was an awful gambler and sold ever’ thing he could git his hands on. He even sold my clothes and the cows we had. I stayed wid him ’cause I cared for him. I uster worry over him, but I don’t think ’bout him now. Better leave this marrying business alone, Honey, ’cause these men will git you a house full of chillun den up and leave you.

The mother and all the children were barefooted; and far into the day the beds in the two-room cabin were unmade, the bedding sticky and black with dirt, piled in the center of a corn-shuck mat¬ tress.

Stable Families with Advanced Standards

There is the type of family which in organization and sentiment is out of harmony with its local environment. It takes its pattern and social codes from other and more advanced areas. While the family lives in the community, the members take but small part in its life. They are, however, not isolated even though contacts with the outside world are limited and rare. They are usually own¬ ers of both their homes and their farms, and are not dependent upon the prevailing economic system for their support or their ideals. Their homes are conspicuously out of place as Negro homes

44

and are readily mistaken by the stranger for the dwellings of one of the white planters. There is usually a reason for their remaining in the locality, and some extraordinary circumstance out of the line of normal development responsible for their independence.

The Hennings were born in Macon County and have lived in their present home for nineteen years. The father is fifty, the mother fifty-two, and there are three children — twenty-seven, twenty-five, and seventeen, respectively. Neither parent has been married before, and all of their children are with them at home. The five-room house is a frame cottage, well built. They own a small automobile and a piano, and subscribe to a daily and a week¬ ly paper. The father is a machinist in the L. and N. Shops in Birmingham and comes home every two months for a week-end. All the children have been sent away to school: two to the Ala¬ bama State College in Montgomery and one to Fort Valley in Georgia. The living-room of the house is furnished in conventional style with duofold, bookcases (containing some two hundred or more volumes), and a phonograph. On their farm they raised dur¬ ing the year sixty bushels of corn, six and one-half bales of cotton, and a considerable quantity of peas, potatoes, and peanuts. They kept a budget and had exact figures on income and expenditures.

The circumstances enabling this family to maintain a cultural level above that of the majority in this community are as follows: A grandfather, who had been an adventurous migrant, found his way to Oklahoma and before his death purchased some land on which oil was later found. At his death he willed a sum of money to each of his two sons and to his grandchildren. In the family to which the head of the present Henning family belonged there were six children, each of whom received $600. This was used to make one-half payment on the farm on which they now live. After a period he went to Birmingham for work and from his savings, while his children were still young, completed the payment on the house and farm.

Sixty-one of the 612 families (about 10 per cent) owned or are buying their homes. Four hundred and forty-three families rented

45

as tenants or croppers, and 108 lived in cabins on plantations. Again, the majority of these families live in either two- or three- room cabins; there are 259 families (42 per cent) in two-room and 176 (28 per cent) in three-room cabins, and 59 families live in one- room cabins. In two of these one-room cabins there were seven and eight persons, but in most of them only one or two persons resided.

46

THE FAMILY

COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE

BEFORE a child reaches the age of twelve there are duties de- 1 manding, with the same insistence felt by his parents, his presence in the field. The routine of cotton cultivation has lent itself with a fatal pliancy to a division of labor capable of extension with each stage of growth from childhood to maturity. Where there are children there is always work to be done to earn the bare living they require. Where there are no children it is less possible to perform all the tasks required to earn enough to survive. Herein lies a first disorganizing factor in the family organization of the community. Immediate as well as remote survival imposes relent¬ less demand for children’s labor and the exactions of an economic system of ever increasing severity impose a forced growth upon the children from the moment of birth. Every aspect of the life urges to the earliest possible attainment of adulthood. Where there is early maturity we have come to expect early marriages, especially for women. There is, as a rule, among Negro women generally a greater tendency to early marriage than among white families, and this tendency is accentuated in cities. In southern cities it is much more pronounced than in southern rural areas, but in this special group studied the tendency is considerably less than in other southern rural areas.

The trend in this community runs in an exactly opposite direc¬ tion from that of the population in general. For the general popu¬ lation not only are there earlier marriages in the country, but, on the whole, more marriages. Ogburn and Groves explain this by observing that women are the ones most markedly affected by

47

urban trends. They become dissatisfied with their rural economic and social status in a monotonous environment, and move to the city where there is more life and greater economic opportunity. This independence in time results in surplus of women at the mar¬ riageable ages in the cities. The men are more rooted in the soil.

There is a population unbalance in the rural Negro group studied but the heavier migration has been on the part of the men. The women are the stable element. There is ample support of the statistical differences observed in the large number of women heads of families, their importance to the agriculture of this area, their approximation to economic equality with the men, and their present dominant role in the family.

Other factors play an even more important part in accentuating this difference. The organization of the Negro families in this area to make it the most efficient economic unit tends to discourage early marriage of either men or women. When a young person marries the original family unit is seriously disturbed. The eco¬ nomic returns from the period of nurturing unproductive children come only when the children, male or female, reach an age which enables them to contribute to the support and earnings of the family group. Custom and practice recognize this situation. Young people are simply not expected to marry early, and, apart from the insecurity of such a venture, when such marriages occur they encounter a pronounced disapproval. When such early mar¬ riages occur the couple is expected to live in and become a part of the household of the parents of the boy or girl.

The situation of economic independence of women in cities is reversed in this community, and is reflected rather strikingly in the economic independence on the part of the Negro women in the country. Their earning power is not very much less than that of men, and for those who do not plan independent work there is greater security in their own family organization where many hands contribute to the raising of cotton and of food than there is for them alone with a young and inexperienced husband. It is practically impossible for two young persons alone to attend all the details of cotton cultivation on a scale sufficient for adequate sup-

48

port of themselves. Likewise, it is extremely unlikely that any young man will be able to accumulate sufficiently to ‘‘get on his feet” before marrying.

The condition most favorable to early marriage of a girl is that in which the girl is being sought by a widower considerably her senior, who has had years of experience with the system and who, at the same time, has already some other persons in the household; or a condition in which a young girl is sought by a younger man who is working as a plantation hand with no personal responsi¬ bilities at all. In this latter case the addition of a wife, young or old, is welcome as an additional farm hand. The experience of one of these girl-brides will make this situation more real. “I married Tore I was fourteen years old. I run off and got married; no preach¬ er ain’t married me. The man, Mr. - ,that my husband worked

for, married us. He didn’t tell me to go back home, ’cause he knowed I was a good hand and then he could have me there too.”

The postponement of marriage in the section which has been noted does not preclude courtship, but accentuates it, and gives rise to other social adjustments based upon this obvious economic necessity. The active passions of youth and late adolescence are present but without the usual formal social restraints. Social be¬ havior rooted in this situation, even when its consequences are understood, is lightly censured or excused entirely. Conditions are favorable to a great amount of sex experimentation. It cannot al¬ ways be determined whether this experimentation is a phase of courtship, or love-making without the immediate intention of marriage, or recreation and diversion. Whether or not sexual inter¬ course is accepted as a part of courtship it is certain no one is surprised when it occurs. When pregnancy follows, pressure is not strong enough to compel the father either to marry the mother or to support the child. The girl does not lose status, perceptibly, nor are her chances for marrying seriously threatened. An inci¬ dental compensation for this lack of a censuring public opinion is the freedom for children thus born from warping social condemna¬ tion. There is, in a sense, no such thing as illegitimacy in this com¬ munity.

49

The community tends to act upon the patterns of its own social heritage. This is true of sex relations as well as of economic rela¬ tions. The tradition of the plantation in relation to morals, sex relations, and marriage never has conformed to that of the world outside. Unique moral codes may develop from isolation. It has happened elsewhere. Even in America there have developed pat¬ terns of sex relations among white communities not very different. In rustic villages of Bavaria, Austria, Norway, and Switzerland the presence of illegitimate children is not a handicap to women who wish to marry, but the conditions there have been different.

In the families of this study the customary courtship period is observed, but in conformity with a tradition older than the county itself, when pregnancy follows this relationship it is not socially imperative that marriage follows. A woman may have several beaux but only one with whom she is intimate. This was more than once mentioned in the course of this study, as an approximate virtue. The character of the present concern about premarital re¬ lations is to some extent apparent in the comment of one of the women:

The first man I ever courted got me in “family way.” I uster live on

P - ’s place ’fore I married. My baby was ten months old when me

and my husband married. I was trying to wait ’til he got on his feet and

got something ’fore we married, but he never did get nothin’ . He

knowed it was his child, ’cause he looked jest like his daddy, and after he was born we went on together jest like we was at first. I never did fool around [have sex relations] with nobody else but him, though I had other beaux and he knowed it. Then after a while me and him jest got married.

Another woman, now the mother of five children and married to a man from one of the older families in the section, remarked casu¬ ally and frankly: “Our first child was born before we was married. Then he wanted to marry me, so I married him.”

Younger people may court, but their affairs are not often of long duration or binding. Church meetings, church suppers, festivals and frolics, and the Saturday trip to town are the occasions on which they usually meet. At the church suppers and other more public affairs the younger men and the younger women group

5°

separately. The men entertain themselves loudly with jokes and stories, frequently ribald, and with various actions to attract the attention of the girls or to provoke laughter. The young girls when together, whether experienced or not, affect shyness but are rarely, if ever, unaware of the boys. In the course of the evening a boy may take one of the girls aside for more intimate conversation which may then lead to a less decorous intimacy.

The courtship of older couples is from the beginning a more seri¬ ous adventure. When one of the older men is courting, either a young woman or one nearer to his age, a change is noted in his personal behavior. At public affairs he leaves off the familiar over¬ alls and “dresses up.” The act conspicuously alters his personality. He escorts the young woman to parties and buys ice-cream or pigs’ feet or chicken or chitterlings for her. The relationship is thus noted by their friends. Where courting has gone on publicly and the sanctions thus recorded, marriage tends most often to follow the legal and approved form, whether the divorce has been legal or not.

In so general a condition of uncertainty and indifference about the legality of marriage or divorce the question is not often raised, but it is nevertheless true that for the particular ones — that is, those who have begun taking over the pattern of the new culture — the fact of legality is worth mentioning, with at least the expecta¬ tion of approval.

Jealousy and the violent expressions of this passion are mani¬ fested by both men and women during the courtship period, by legally married couples and by companions in a common-law rela¬ tionship. Because Ben Mason began courting Alice Harris’ daugh¬ ter another woman shot him five times. But Ben Mason had not himself the best reputation. A few years earlier he had accidental¬ ly killed one girl while shooting at another who had spurned his attentions. The gossip of the community for the greater part of a month centered around the murder of a young woman at one of the frolics, by a man who came in a blind rage of jealousy to kill his wife because she was “running ’round with other men.’’ The story comes most vividly from the mother of the murdered girl:

My little gal got killed just one week ago today. She was a good chile. Never give no trouble. Yes, she was married and had a baby two years old. She and me went to one of those suppers the other night. I was sitting on the bed in one room and all of a sudden Jake Johnson run in and said, “Willa’s done been killed.” I run out there and there she was all heaped on the bed— limp. The house was so full, but I just screamed and run to her. I picked her up in my arms and her brains was all shot out in her hair. When I put her down I was covered with blood and I couldn’t do nothing but scream. Some nigger come in there to kill his wife ’cause she was going running ’round with other men, but he missed her and put a steel bullet in my baby. This is the dress she got killed in. And I’m going to show you her wedding dress, too. The society I belongs to paid $40 for the burial. I didn’t lose nothing that way. That was such a good chile; she was a good wife. Her husband said he’d get that nigger yet, but they found him. The sheriff’s got him now at Tuskegee. I sure hopes they punish him good ’cause he’s caused me so much pain.

In one family the wife displayed a face grotesquely twisted. Her teeth protruded through a vicious slash in her upper lip. She said:

My husband did it — jest jealous-hearted. He hit me right up there

with a fence post and it wasn’t bout nothing . Lots of times we’d

get to scrapping off of nothing. I used to could do as much wid him as he could wid me, tell he got me down, then I’d stop him. Folks used to say, “Carrie, you must be mighty bad.” But I tell ’em no I ain’t bad, and if they’d look at the starting of it they would see it was his fault. We hardly ever have any falling out now though. He said he didn’t believe I was doing all them things he ’cused me of, but he would git in behind me for fear.

Older and more experienced men have decided that jealousy does not pay. It is a disturbing force capable of sapping the spirit of every activity.

Husband: My wife and me, us been married, this coming Saturday, nigh forty years. I slapped her once since I been married. Any friends we know she meets ’em, kiss ’em, and we go right along. I ain’t going to let nothing disturb me but the Lord. When you jealous you don’t live long.

Wife: You be jealous and you may be up at the church but you can’t rest. The meeting won’t do you a bit of good; you may be thinking about that man riding with some woman.

52

Sex, as such, appears to be a thing apart from marriage. A dis¬ tinction is very well drawn by one unmarried middle-aged woman with several children who said: “What I wants now is a husband not a man. I wants somebody to help me take keer of these chil- lun.” The legal relationship had little to do with her romantic life. Jealousy is manifested not so much when infidelity to the institu¬ tion has been discovered as where there is evidence of a transfer of affection, whether it involves sexual intercourse or not. A woman came back from her parents’ and found her husband with women in her own home. He became angry at her intrusion and began swearing. When she responded he struck her with a stick. She went home and considered herself permanently separated. The ob¬ jection was not primarily to the irregularity of her husband’s as¬ sociation with women, but to the fact that he beat her.

Tom Bright was my husband, but he fight me so I just couldn’t live with him. He treat me so bad. I didn’t do nothing a-tall. I uster cook his breakfast and he’d come home with a big stick and beat me. Said I did¬ n’t have breakfast done. He drank but he wa’n’t drunk when he beat me. One time I went away to mamma’s and come back I found some women in my house. When I come in he got mad and went to cussin’, so I packed up and went back home.

The comment of a woman of twenty-five who had been married twice suggests an attitude from the other side of the picture. The husband v/as jealous but trifling. The woman seemed to feel that he had no right to be jealous unless he was also useful.

The first man [husband] wasn’t no good — just trifling. I soon got rid of him. First we kept separating and then going back. Then I met Major and my first old man started right away to' getting jealous. So I left him, but I did right. I went down there to Montgomery and got my divorce. It cost me $32.50, but it was worth it, seein’ it ’liminated all his ’tach- ment to me.

Ceremonial recognition is more often given to weddings than to any other event in the life of the family. Even though this seldom occurs now, there are sufficient traces of an old custom to allow it to be revived when it is especially desired to give formal public sanction to marriage. On these occasions the nuptials are cele-

53

brated with wine and cake and festivities, by the friends and rela¬ tives of the couple. Occasionally small tokens are exchanged. There has been a practice, tracing back several generations to slavery, of making this an occasion of festivity. Slaves, although not always encouraged to marry, and deprived of the civil sanction of a ceremony, when there was mutual desire, provided it was with¬ in the limits of the master’s circumstances, were allotted a cabin, given small tokens by the master and mistress, and a ceremony, conducted by a Negro preacher and patterned after the custom of the whites. It is spoken of now by some of the older members of the community, and little change is noted in the forms of the cere¬ mony. Speaking of slavery, one said:

The folks married then jest like they do now. They did jump over a broomstick [a custom now abandoned] but the preacher had a Bible and married them. Sometimes the sheriff married them. If you and this

sister come engaged you would ask Mr. - for her and he would say,

“Do you love this nigger?” and he would go and ask if she loved you. Then, whatever place you stayed on your master would have to buy whichever one would come there.

The Ideal Wife

Young men when they marry want someone whose labor can help them “get on their feet.” Middle-aged men want younger women who can combine this labor with some of the feminine graces. Old men want companionship. A good woman, it is con¬ ceded, can be of moral assistance to a man.

I always tell my old lady that every man ought to have a good woman to ’courage and help him. My old lady and me always says the young married folks gets along better. She and me, we don’t have no difficulties, but Lordy, you ought to a see that chile I married first! She was a pretty little thing, but she up and died and never had no chilluns.

A man of thirty-five, still unmarried, stipulated three conditions which a woman should meet before he would be willing to marry. She must be able to work, she must be nice looking, and she must be willing to acknowledge him as the head of the house.

The most desirable mates for girls in those families ambitious to

54

maintain a stable unit are men who can assure further stability. Unfortunately for romantic love, the economic arrangement under which they live does not develop many eligibles for daughters of such families, and family authority is exerted, sometimes to the point of physical force, to keep the girls from marrying at all, be¬ cause it would seriously disturb the economic balance of the origi¬ nal family unit. Elopements have been a means of escaping these complications.

Me and my husband was courtin’ a long time, and we jest ’cided to git married. Hit was on a Wednesday night and me and my brother went down ter my cousin’s to carry a turkey hen, and I seed a light of a car and we got in the car and drove home. We stayed home ’bout half a hour, and I had done got my clothes and carried them over ter my girl friend’s house, then to my grandma’s home. I set up till all went to bed. So I pretended I was going to set on the front porch, and I got my coat and started running. He was up the road. I got scared after I got out of the house ’cause I knowed papa would know my clothes wasn’t home, and if I went back he’d kill me. We got married, and I didn’t have time to drink no wine and cake, and we went over to his mother’s house. We heard the horn coming and runned in the house, and sho’ nuff it was papa, and he axed my husband’s mother, “Is my little Gracey here?” He had a shot gun and he was so mad my husband’s mother told him I wasn’t there, and he left. Reason I didn’t ask papa, I knowed he wouldn’t give me away. Mamma done said it was all right with her, but papa

always said no, ’cause he wouldn’t give my two oldest sisters away.

•

The conflict here is between the basic requirement of the family group for the added value of the services of its grown children, the prospect of transferring this service to another family, and the im¬ peratives of romantic love.

Hodman Speeks was a widower about fifty-eight years old, and reputed to have saved some money over the years. He owned his home and was now ready to marry again, and felt that he could afford to select a wife without being bound by the usual economic considerations. He was not particular about the women of his com¬ munity. He had seen too much of them. They not only were a disappointment, but failed also to respect sufficiently his own valu¬ ation of the advantages which he, as a husband, could bring. But

55

if a young and attractive woman came in from the outside he would attire himself in his old Prince Albert coat, a cane, and a high collar, and begin a round of visits in the neighborhood.

Pm looking for a good woman right now [he confided to a visitor to the neighborhood]. You know a man gits filled with betterment after he gits a good wife. Now, I tells you, I’m this kind of a man. I feels that ’tain’t a man’s place to slave a woman to death. I’m going to take care of a wife. When my other wife got taken sick I had a doctor to her in less than fifteen minutes. I owns this home, but ’tain’t fit for a woman. I got some money and I’d build a new house. I know something ’bout telephones, too. I’d see that they git a telephone put in here. My wife could have her own little patch and we’d be right happy together — she’n me. ’Tain’t meant for a man to be all alone in the world — reckon he gits too reckless with hisself.

Neither the young women of the country nor the old ones, how¬ ever, were much impressed with the widower. As he passed the house of one of his neighbors a woman remarked, “Here comes that old man Speeks. He ain’t got good sense. He got more land than he knows what to do with, but he’s so mean and foolish nobody goes near him.”

The Ideal Husband

When a very young woman marries it is usually for security. A more mature young woman marries to insure herself the exclusive attention and earning power of a man who is already or likely to be the father of her children. The middle-aged woman offers her¬ self or accepts a husband on approximately equal terms of working value. An old woman, when she marries at all, seeks companion¬ ship and that shadowy security afforded by a man of her own age. Unlike the men, an old woman does not often marry a person younger than herself. A mother of a young girl set this ideal before her daughter: “I wants my daughter to marry a good man, so she won’t haveter work in the field and be diggin’ here and dere, like me.” Millie Williams had been married once, but was separated from her husband, who left the section and went to Pittsburgh to live. She was carefully considering remarriage, and thus described her ideal:

Rubin is so good to me. He buys me groceries; sometimes $1.50 and sometimes $1.75 worth, every two weeks. You know he is jest a young man, only twenty-five years old, and a preacher, too. He is sure good to me. He works at the Veneer plant and gits $1.25 a day, and he sure sees after me. We going to git married pretty soon.

Although the young women frequently marry older men, they are sometimes brutally contemptuous of them once their earning power is affected. “That old man, if he could do something I could tell you how much we made. But he don’t do no work. He’s jest a lazy nigger.” Another said: “Aw, my old man won’t do. He ain’t no count now nohow. He’s so old he can’t do nothing. Can’t even see.” This particular husband was about fifty and his wife thirty-seven.

Color consciousness plays a part in the selection of mates. On several occasions women remarked that they wanted a husband, but he “must be good and dark,” meaning by “good” in this case “completely” and by dark “black.” There are few mulatto women in the community, and mulatto men have a reputation for being “run-roun’ men” and poor providers for dark women.

A man who has been unsuccessful in holding other wives is not regarded favorably as a prospect. “No, indeed, I don’t want him. He done had two wives and couldn’t keep ’em. Ain’t nobody goin’ to live wid dat man.” Men who do women’s work are similarly unpopular. “You know when a man’s used to washing and cook¬ ing for hisself, jest like a woman, he’s hard to git ’long wid.” Physi¬ cal strength, dogged industry, and a good disposition were the chief virtues hoped for in a husband. They took precedence over all considerations of possession of money, social position, educa¬ tion, physical attractiveness, or that kind of ambition which sought to abandon the familiar round of life.

THE CHILDREN

In a system which requires the labor of the entire family to earn a living, children of a certain age are regarded as an economic as¬ set. They come fast, and there is little conscious birth control. The coming of children is “the Lord’s will.” The number of mis-

57

carriages and stillbirths is extraordinarily high and the infant mor¬ tality great. There is pride in large families. “Good breeders” are regarded with admiration. One woman quoted a doctor as explain¬ ing that she was “sickly” because she “needed to breed.” For men the size of the family is a test of virility and for women fecundity has tremendous weight in their valuation as mates. This was a conscious boast: “Course my wife she done been laid up with dead chillun until she marry me. She ain’t never lost no chillun by me, but that other man she had made her chillun all die.” Interest in children and in large families, and the high fecundity rate, may indeed carry over from the period of slavery when social status among Negro slave women was in an important measure based upon their breeding power. Again it may reflect adjustment to a high mortality-rate which demands a correspondingly high birth¬ rate to insure a balanced survival in the population. Assertion that a woman cannot have children by a man constitutes a slur. Some of the most cheerful women were those with large families. The contented comment of one very large and comfortably sprawling mother of thirteen children offers a good illustration of a sentiment not uncommon: “Lordy, I’m jest building up dis world wid babies, and can’t help it. Well, dey says it’s healthy to have chillun, so I jest goes on.”

Mary Harris, another mother of a large family, had been mar¬ ried to Jim only six years, but they had fifteen children. Jim’s wife had been barren but Mary was not, and, although unmarried herself, she gave Jim ten children before his wife died. Then they married and she presented him with five more, and may yet pre¬ sent others.

Children, in the average family group, once a part of the family are accepted good-naturedly and as a matter of course. There were indications of conflicting types of interest in children. The uncon¬ trolled fecundity, the almost universal set for large families, and the acceptance of parents, mothers particularly, of the responsi¬ bility for supporting any number which they happened to have, point to a fundamental interest in children, whatever the motiva¬ tion. This interest as expressed, however, was almost without ex-

58

ception in “children.” There was little indication of individualiza¬ tion of attention, or recognition of separate personalities, and very imperfect expression of those sentiments of strong emotional at¬ tachment to separate child personalities which are noted in the more advanced families. The affectional relationship was mani¬ fest, but not emotionally stressed. Parents as a rule clung to their children as long as they could provide them subsistence. The harsh and frequent incidence of hard times created so many occasions for failure in this respect, particularly if one of the chief bread¬ winners withdrew, that passing over children for adoption was fairly common and the community had attempted to meet this need by making adoption a simple and natural procedure.

Frequently there was confusion on the matter of names and ages of children. Numbers of mothers could not remember the names of all the children, unless they were looking at them. This may have been due to the habit of ignoring names of children, and supplying simple “pet names” for identification. Ages require a reflection and counting which is not always done accurately in communities of higher literacy. On a visit to the home of a family in which there were fifteen children the question of the ages of the children came up. The mother, squat, dark, and glistening with perspiration, sat on her porch, making her breast available al¬ ternately to an infant in arms and one about a year old. When asked about the names and ages of her children her first response was one of exasperation that she should be expected to remember a mass of details of this character. She shouted to one of the chil¬ dren, “Go in the house and git the Bible, ’cause God knows I don’t remember how old them chilluns is.” After a moment she said, “All dese you see here ain’t mine, but most of ’em is.” Actually, there were several adopted children in the group who were so completely incorporated into the family as to be considered her own. She had to separate, in her thinking, those whom she had “birthed” and those whom she had acquired by other means. The names and ages of seven were read from the Bible and she assented, and thought these were all. Then the name of Robert was men¬ tioned, and she explained that she had forgotten to account for

59

him. Later three other names were mentioned by the children which had not been listed in the Bible. “All dem mine too,” she said. “Jest been having chillun all my life.”

On another occasion when a large family was being visited, the father was trying unsuccessfully to name his children as his wife returned from the field. She scolded him for his ignorance and began naming them herself. When she failed it became a hilarious joke, and the husband ran into the yard rocking and roaring with laughter.

The families cited in this connection are exceptional in the sense of having a large number of children still alive. The fecundity rate is very high, but the number of children who survive even the first period of infancy is comparatively small.

I got so many chillun dead I don’t know how long they been dead, ’bout six of ’em. The first boy was a grown man, twenty years old. He died with consumption, but I ain’t had no consumption. The other girl I don’t know how come she died. There was one that I “overlaid.”1 I went to sleep and the child was nursing, and I give so much milk that she smothered. The other boy was four years old. We had a mule and Mensi- field [the husband] wanted to come to the master’s home. Louis [the son] was right smart so he jumped at the mule data way. I was in condition [pregnant] at that time. Said to him, “Mensy, don’t you spose dat mule kick you in de side?” It raised a knot on Louis’ head. He tuck to his bed; had a hot fever, and died.

Jest one child I had had fits. She had two spasms, and I jest giver her a little pepper and salt and she ain’t had no more. She grown now and got a cowpen full of chillun herself.

The actual number of cases in which children were given away to other relatives or friends and the fact that adopted children taken into these families with such small distinction between them and the natural offspring suggest that the ties between parents and children, especially where the families are large, are as much in¬ fluenced by the opinion current in the community as by the in¬ terests of the family as a separate unit. Parents hesitated to give away their children to non-relatives for adoption, although this

1 Accidentally smothered to death in a crowded bed.

6o

happened numbers of times, but very frequently turned them over to another relative, usually the grandparents of the children.

In the economy of the family the relationship of members of the family to one another is not so strongly stressed as in families of the conventional type. Once out of immediate contact, the affec- tional basis of the relationship was perceptibly weakened. Interest frequently dwindled away and the child most often became a rec¬ ognized and permanent part of the family of the grandparents. The fathers showed much less concern than the mothers when these physical ties were broken. This is the general situation pat¬ tern which fosters so considerable an amount of child adoption. The frequency of separations of families with children and the large number of children born outside of formal family relations normally throw a considerable burden of responsibility upon grandparents, and this responsibility, in turn, is accepted as a matter of course. Actually there was a marked sense of social obli¬ gation to children, expressed more by grandparents than by par¬ ents with numbers of children.

Sadie Thompson not only had a family of her own, now prac¬ tically grown, but had undertaken the rearing of some of the grandchildren and other adopted ones. She had enterprise and ini¬ tiative and both virtues were required to keep up her household. There was in her solicitude for the children a feeling rarely ex¬ pressed, whether experienced or not, by families regarding their own immediate offspring. And with this feeling there was mixed some appreciation of the economic value of the children them¬ selves.

I got these little motherless children here and got nothing to give them to eat. I never had a mouthful to give them yesterday and last night Mr. Walker just give them boys a dollar and I couldn’t buy nothing but a lit¬ tle meal and a spoonful of lard. These children got a father but he don’t give them nothing. These my dead daughter’s children. Sometimes I look at them and tears get in my eyes. We made fourteen bales of cotton last year, and didn’t get a penny for it. The little children was barefooted and didn’t have a thing. If they hadn’t had a little pig and I made some syrup I don’t know what the little things woulda done. Every time they go to the white man they say they can’t let you have nothing. Something

6l

is wrong somewhere but they ain’t letting the nigger know where it is. I hate to go so far and not get nothing. “I don’t reckon we will die,” said one of my sons. But you will die ’cause every one of you all look sick in the eyes and it’s cause you ain’t had enough food. This is a starving

land . This is the worst place I ever run on in my life. If you could

jest get out of it all you put in it you could live happy. This is good rich land, and you could make money if we was treated right. The mules ain’t even got nothing to eat, and we have to pull up the little corn and feed it to them. I look at my children sometimes and I’m sorry I ever born a child in the world. I believe in living like people. My children is smart ’cause I taught them to work. Us never do hire no day hands. We all help one ’nother get through with the chopping. They busy all the time. How they hold up I can’t see.

Economic considerations almost without exception constitute the nexus which binds parents and children, and in the constant economic stress of the section it is what would be expected. “All my children is big enough to work, but three, and I got ten here. I got two children by my first wife and got ’bout two or three more ’sides that. I don’t know where they is.”

It was, however, impossible to escape the observation that once separation came it was complete and final. Once children leave home they rarely return. There was, besides, the frequency of pa¬ ternal desertion, the uncertainty of support for the children loaned to friends or relatives, the frequent confusion and indifference about their names and ages, and the failure to remember the dead. Children who had died were seldom referred to in terms which suggested emotional ties. They were merely lost children. It was as if the role of fate and numbers was blended with a dour philoso¬ phy which accepted these crises as inevitable incidents of the strug¬ gle for survival. Moreover, it was apparent that hopelessly crip¬ pled or deformed children, like the hopelessly decrepit old, were not objects of pathos or sentiment. They were tolerated with some fortitude despite the general economic strain as a phase of the mutualism of their community relations. A woman was asked if she had any crippled or deformed children. She responded prompt¬ ly: “No, I ain’t got no cripple chillun. If I had I ’spect I would uv kilt ’em.” This was probably an extreme expression, under a situ-

62

ation of economic stress, of a very real sentiment. Actually there were few such children in the community. It v/ould indeed be diffi¬ cult for them to survive in a situation which made survival dif¬ ficult even for normal children in infancy. Another woman was explaining the presence of a female relative in the home: “This lady who stays here is my husband’s cousin. She gonna have a baby soon. She got two more, but she gie’d dem away. She ain’t married; the child’s father he ’round here somewheres.” In this instance the responsibility of children would obviously be a bur¬ den to the woman. The family to which she had given her chil¬ dren regarded them freely and easily as their own, but their own children were regarded primarily as potential helpers in the severe struggle for existence. The comments about their children, and almost always about the adult ones, were followed by some such

consideration: “She’s a good chile . She bring me something

to eat when she can.” Or: “I can’t let dat boy marry. He all I got to help me.”

Separations and divorce frequently divide the children or leave all of them with one parent. The natural handicaps, for illiterate people, of communication contribute to a stretching-out of filial ties, often to the vanishing-point. “My girl, Fannie Mae, is with her father in Pittsburgh. She been gone ’bout ten years. I ain’t heard ’bout her since Christmas ’fore last. I speck she still dere.”

There are, on the other hand, examples of strong and more ob¬ vious attachment between parents and children above the age of dependence, who remain at home, and this is especially true of widowed mothers and their sons. One of the most extraordinary instances of parental devotion, however, was observed in the case of one family, incidentally one of the few farm-owners in the area, whose son had been prostrate and deformed from infantile paraly¬ sis for more than ten years. The father had made himself a char¬ acter in the town, stalking about like one in a daze, and asking the white doctors with annoying persistence and regularity if the doc¬ tors outside (medical science) had discovered anything yet to cure his boy.

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Pregnancy

Pregnancy is treated both in fact and in the verbal allusions to it occasionally with a moderate gesture of concealment, but just as frequently with practical matter-of-factness. A woman is “close to the bed,” or “cripple,” or in plain terms “ ’bout to have a baby,” or “stomach stickin’ out.” The situation of most of the women permits little opportunity in the period of pregnancy to experience exhilaration and consciousness of the psychic values of such func¬ tioning.

I’s cripple and ain’t able to lift nothing. When I says cripple dat means what you see, dat Fs going to have a baby. I jest been spitting and heaving all over this house. Dis heat make it worse. Girls what ain’t married don’t never ought to get deyselves no rainbow. First thing she be so sick and heaving and all de man is gonna say is “You’ll be better

soon,” and go ’long ’bout sumpin else . My mother is staying here

till my cripple is better. That what I done to git this here baby sho’ ain’t worth all this sufferin’ and sickness.

The economic consideration is evident even in the incidence of this temporary handicap. When John Edwards was asked why all of his six children were born in July, he said people teased him about this, but, whether intended or not, “It’s lucky for me, ’cause she [his wife] can hoe up till ’bout time and then she’s ready to pick when fall comes.”

Adoption

Adoption of children is a fairly common practice. Several factors appear to be responsible. Children after a certain age are, as indi¬ cated earlier, an economic asset. Childless couples, for whatever reason, have not the social standing in the community of families with children. The breaking-up of families, through desertion or migration, results in the turning-over of children to relatives or friends, and since little distinction in treatment enters, they soon are indistinguishable from the natural children, and assist them by dividing the load of heavy families. Moreover, adoption is re¬ lated to illegitimacy, and frequently the children in families which are referred to as adopted are really the illegitimate offspring of

64

one’s own daughter or neighbor’s daughter. The child of an un¬ married daughter becomes another addition to the children of the parents of the girl with all the obligations. Discipline is in the hands of the original parents and the young mother’s relationship to her son is in most respects the same as her relationship to her younger brother. These children call her by her first name and refer to their natural grandparents as “mama” and “papa.” It has happened that men have adopted into their legitimate families extra-legal children by other women, and with no apparent dis¬ tinction that would make them unfavorably conspicuous among the other children. Again, children orphaned by any circumstances are spontaneously taken into childless families.

This girl, we find here when us come down here. She be’s both orphan by mother and father, and nobody to look atta her. So we jest tuk her as one of the family, and don’t sho’ no difference. We don’t tell no differ¬ ence. This little boy is my sister’s boy. I can’t ’dopt him long as she live, ’cause I don’t want no dissatisfaction. But he won’t stay with her. She carry him home and have to bring him back.

One way of getting rid of children of low mentality who are likely to become an economic burden is to give them to childless couples.

H is wife left him [the adopted son]. He’s my boy. He thinks I’m his mother. She give him to me when he was a baby, and I ain’t never told him no better. He’s not right bright, but he’s got sense nuff to treat you right, and he is so much help. His mother wasn’t right bright either. I kept him in school till he was twenty, but he never did finish the first grade. The teacher said I was doing my duty, but he jest couldn’t learn. Course, he can write and read, too. When he is away, he writes to me, and he can’t read his own letters. He’s jest sort of frenzy.

The ease with which the adoptions are made is interesting. There are few families, indeed, however poor, that would not at¬ tempt to rear a child left with them. Adoption, in a sense, takes the place of social agencies and orphans’ homes.

No, I ain’t got no husband; he ain’t dead, I don’t guess. I ain’t seen him in eight years. He left me here wid these chillun, so I try to take keer of them. The girl is my niece. Her mother and father both dead.

65

Me and my wife been married thirty-two years. We ain’t got no chil- lun of our own. My wife ’dopted this little boy. He eleven years old. His mamma gie’d him ter my wife soon atta he was born. His mamma ’round here in Shorter somewhere. We don’t know nothing ’bout his daddy. His mamma ain’t never been married as we knows of.

Children and School

This much is recognized — that when educating children is con¬ sidered, the economic advantage of having them disappears. Al¬ most unvaryingly, too, an interest in education goes along with landownership.

We moved here in 1905. My father started buying this place. Getting time to move now, ain’t it? I own no acres here. The rest of them chillun didn’t want to stay on the farm. They just got tired and moved differ¬ ent places. My father just worked this place up from the muscle. No¬ body didn’t help him. He was a old slavery-time fellow, and lived to get about seventy-two years old. It’s about 1 66 acres in the whole place. I got four tenants. My brother was off when my father died but he was here when my mother died. He’s got I don’t know how many chillun. He’s most too smart for me. I ain't got but one and she cost me 'bout as much as his whole crowd , I reckon. She goes to Tuskegee. It costs a lot of money to educate children. She fell down in one study, and she is going to summer school to catch up in algebra. I have to pay her tuition and buy books and carry her to and from school every day. It costs some¬ thing, I tell you.

Children Born out of IVedlock

The sexual unions resulting in the birth of children without the legal sanctions are of several types, and cannot properly be grouped together under the single classification of “illegitimate.” Children of common-law relationships are not illegitimate, from the point of view of the community or of their stability, for many of these unions are as stable as legally sanctioned unions. They hold together for twenty and thirty years, in some cases, and lack only the sense of guilt. Again, there are competent, self-sufficient women who not only desire children but need them as later aids in the struggle for survival when their strength begins to wane, but who want neither the restriction of formal marriage nor the con-

66

stant association with a husband. They get their children not so much through weakness as through their own deliberate selection of a father. Sexual unions for pleasure frequently result in chil¬ dren. There is a term for children born under the two latter cir¬ cumstances. They are called “stolen children.” “Stolen children,” observed one mother, “is the best.” A woman with children and who has been married though later separated from her husband may add other children to her family, without the benefit of the formal sanctions. These are “children by the way.” The youthful sex experimentation, which is in part related to the late marriages, often results in children. These are normally taken into the home of the girl’s parents and treated without distinction as additions to the original family. Finally, there are the children who result from the deliberate philandering of young men who “make fool- ments” on young girls. They are universally condemned. These children, as circumstance directs, may be placed with the parents of the mother or father of the child, an uncle, sister, or grand¬ mother. They are accepted easily into the families on the simple basis of life and eventually are indistinguishable from any of the other children. Even if there were severe condemnation for true “illegitimates,” confusion as to origin would tend both to mitigate some of the offenses and to obscure them all from specific con¬ demnation.

The sense of guilt may be noted in some of the more advanced families but within the community as a whole social censure is not severe, nor is there any notable loss of status because of “illegiti¬ macy.” It does not appear to be regarded as severely as, for ex¬ ample, the use of certain artificial forms of birth control, or “being closed out,” which means having all of one’s crops, stock, and tools taken over for debt.

The church recognizes illegitimacy as a “sin of the mother,” and if the mother is brought into church meeting with other evidences of “sin,” like card-playing or frolicking, she may be “put out of church”; but readmission is possible with a solemn promise not to do it again. Actually, there is less stress placed by the churches

67

upon illegitimacy as a “social sin” than upon card-playing and playing ball.

The danger, from the point of view of health, is the promiscuity of relations and the passing-on of venereal infection. Some men in this section of the county have numerous children scattered about, as a result of their tireless love-making with single girls, married women with children of their own, and with widows.

The sense of shame and lowered status follows illegitimacy when the family has, for one reason or another, become compact and self-conscious; when there has been exposure to recognized stand¬ ards of a higher level, as a result of children returning from board¬ ing-school, or when the family has acquired some education. Under such circumstances families are more careful about the opinions of outsiders, and frequently force the father of the child to marry the daughter. Ownership of property tends to restrict illegitimate relations because of the economic complexities intro¬ duced, and the efFect of loose domestic relations upon credit and leadership in relationships beyond the immediate community is a restraining factor.

An attempt was made to measure the extent of illegitimacy. One hundred and twenty-two women in 114 families had had 181 illegitimate children. The illegitimate children were present in all but 3 of these 1 14 families. It is necessary, however, to make clear, as far as possible, the condition under which illegitimacy was found in these families. In the case of 24 couples now married the wife had a child before marriage. In 14 of these 24 cases the father of these children was the present husband, and in 10 cases the woman had had the child by another man before marriage. In 2 cases the women, who had subsequently married the father of their il¬ legitimate children, had had 4 children each. There were also 3 widowed women who had had illegitimate children since the death of their husbands. In 13 families the mother was living alone with her illegitimate children. Two of these mothers had 4 children, 2 had 3 children, and 4 had 2 children each.

One unmarried mother of thirty-three years of age had 6 chil-

68

dren of whom 4 were living. The oldest of those living was a girl of twenty-one and the youngest a girl of ten. The father of all of them was a man legally married, with a considerable family of his own. The oldest daughter was unmarried and had 2 children. Neither of the fathers of the children had offered any support and the women have not asked for it. The mother is a one-half-share cropper, and with the children she manages her farm about as successfully as the average family with a male head. There were 8 women, separated from their husbands, who had illegitimate chil¬ dren. In one case the separated woman was living with her mother. Illegitimate children were also found in the case of 10 common-law couples. In 8 of these cases the children were by the men with whom the wives were living, and in some cases there were 5 or 6 illegitimate children in the family. In 31 of the families a daughter had 1 or more illegitimate children, and in 1 family 2 daughters had an illegitimate child each. Illegitimate children were also found in 9 families in which the daughter, who was the mother of the children, was dead or away. In some cases the illegitimate children in the home had been adopted. This was found to be the case in 9 families. In 6 of the families the illegitimate child be¬ longed to relatives, as, for example, a cousin, or a sister of the mother, or a nephew’s child outside of marriage. In 2 families a son’s illegitimate child had been taken into the home, and in one case the father’s illegitimate child had been taken in. In 5 of the families the illegitimate child belonged to a granddaughter or to a great granddaughter.

How the Children Come

I got so many chillun I don’t know where they all is. I got four living

and one dead that Mr. - is the father of. I been married once, but

me and him separated. They tell me he lives some place there near Tus- kegee. I ain’t get no divorce. Don’t know whether he left me or no;

we jest ’cided to depart, and it’s been a good while ago. C - B -

was the father of two of my children. I ain’t know nothing else ’bout the father of any of the rest of them, aside from them that he [pointing to

Mr. - ] been the father of. I can’t ’member nothing ’bout them. I

got frost-bitten one time and I can’t ’member so well.

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The daughter emulated the mother. When asked about her daugh¬ ter’s child, she said:

How can I