The Law of the Land, Emerson Hough [best beach reads of all time TXT] 📗

They had a good fat new educator, half-nigger, half-white, this time—educated a heap more’n I am. He was the king bee in that lot of evangelizers and elevators. Well, I took them out over my farms and showed them the sassafras shoots coming up where the cotton ought to be. ‘Gentlemen,’ said I, ‘here’s an instance of what an intelligent and industrious race can do. Here’s the best plantation in the Delta turned over to these people to make or break. This is the richest soil in the world. They had half of all they could raise, and they had their living guaranteed them. Nobody guarantees me a living, not even God A’mighty. They didn’t put up a dollar, nor an ounce of brains, nor a bit of worry. Now, did they work, or did they sit in the shade and loaf? You look around and tell me.’

“The big half-white man began to preach to me, and I says to him, ‘Before you go on, I just want to ask you two questions. First, how much of you is nigger, and how much is white? Second, do you want to quit running a college up North, and come down here and take hold of this plantation, and so help out three hundred fellow-citizens of yours who are a heap more interested in the nigger question than you are yourself?’ I asked that fellow that. That’s when he shrunk some.”

Eddring smiled, but it was a serious smile, for the South has small inclination to jest over questions such as these.

“Well, about all the fellow could do was to fall back on his old song about education uplifting the race. ‘That’s all right,’ I said to him. ‘I’ll pay my share of that. But we’ve got to wait until your millennium comes. It’s no use saying it has come, when it hasn’t. It’s going to take a long time before you get the real useful educating done.’

“I got riled, talking to him, and at last I called up one of my field hands—he had ruined twenty acres of the best cotton land I had—and I took him by the ear and pulled out a bunch of his hair. Said I to him, ‘Sam, is your hair like mine! Would it ever get like mine?’ ‘No, boss,’ said he, ‘not in a hundred yeahs.’ He laughed at me.

“Then I said to that white fellow from the North, ‘How hard do you work? I want to know that.’ He began to swell up a little at that. Well, I put it to him this way. Says I, ‘There was a man came down through here a few years ago, and he got plumb rich. He told all these poor black people all around that for fifty cents he’d sell them a bottle of stuff that would make their hair straight like a white man’s, in less’n a month. He always put it about a month ahead, so that he’d have time to get away. Now, that hair tonic man was what I call a professional benefactor of the nigger race,’ said I. ‘He got paid for it, just the same as you do. And,’ says I, ‘he’ll straighten out their hair with his hair tonic just about as soon as you’ll straighten out their problem with your particular kind of ointment— for which you are getting better paid than he did.’

“That riled the fellow plenty, but I went on talking to him. ‘The only difference between you and him,’ says I to him, ‘is that he was whole white and was running a straight bluff, and you are part white, and are running a halfway sort of bluff. You pray to God A’mighty so much about this that you have just about got yourself half-persuaded that you’re honest. Do you reckon that you have got God A’mighty persuaded that way, too?’ said I to him. That made an awful disturbance in the evangelizing and elevating outfit, and finally I got out of patience. Says I to them, ‘I don’t want to forget that you are visitors at my place. You white folks can come to my table, if you want to, or you can eat with the oppressed and downtrodden out in my kitchen, if you like that better. Your fellow-citizen, with the specialty of elevating the downtrodden, can’t eat at my table. After you get it fixed up the way that suits you best, and have had your dinner, I want you-all to go out and take one more look at the sassafras that’s growing on as fine a cotton land as ever lay out of doors. If you can elevate my niggers so that they’ll work, why go ahead and do it. God knows they need it. Learn ‘em geometry, learn ‘em to write poetry, send ‘em to Europe to learn painting, but please put somewhere in your college a department showing how to dig up stumps and chop sassafras roots. ‘You’ll pardon me,’ says I, ‘for I’m a plain man; but I just want to say that that’s the kind of elevating that the black race in America needs most. But whatever you do, don’t be foolish. Don’t say to me that that’s done which you and I both know ain’t done.’”

Both Eddring and Blount were silent for a time. “Those folks stayed in around our country for quite a while,” resumed Blount, “and they succeeded in stirring up the niggers to thinking that they were not getting a square deal, but ought to break into politics once more. A few of us planters got together, and we were so stirred up about it that we thought we would do something right funny. Our county election was coming on, and you know we have got about ten black voters to one white down there. Under the Constitution we couldn’t elect a white man down there in a hundred years—not if we followed the Constitution. This time, just for a joke—but listen—do you know what we did?”

“Well, it’s pretty hard to tell just what Cal Blount would do, sometimes,” said Eddring, “but I don’t doubt you did something foolish.”

“No, we didn’t. We just had a joke. We let them elect a nigger sheriff for Tullahoma County! We just ‘lowed we’d give ‘em a touch of law as a sort of object lesson to the Northern elevators. Thought we’d take a shot at the educating business ourselves. The fellow’s name is Mose Taylor, and say! he’s the tickledest nigger you ever did see! He’s about half-white, too, and he always did want to break into politics one way or another. Now, he’s done broke in. We let him, just for a joke. Of course, when there’s any need for a real sheriff, we white people allow that we’ll have to use the old one— Jim Peters.”

“Well, these things aren’t always just exactly the best kind of jokes,” said Eddring. “You have been having nothing but trouble down there for a long time.”

“Trouble!” said Blount, “I should say we have. We’ve tried to keep it a white man’s country, but it’s been a fight every day of the year. Niggers stole and killed all the cattle of my neighbors down in there, and we hung two or three niggers last month for stealing cows. We put a sign on them, ‘You stole a cow, cow killed you.’ You’ve got to make things sort of plain, you know, to these people, so’s they can understand ‘em. Now, you know the trouble we had down there about that train wreck. It’s morally sure the niggers were at the bottom of that, one way or another. That ain’t all. I told you we were having a big overflow now. Well, the fact is, we found out a day or so ago that this overflow is mostly hand-made. They’ve been cutting the levees—”

“Blount,” said Eddring, quietly, “that’s just why I telegraphed you to come up here. I’ve got a boy here who knows about the whole proposition. They’re organizing, as sure as you’re born, and they’ve got a leader. They’ve got a Queen, they say.”

“A Queen!” snorted Blount, jumping to his feet. “Queen, eh? Well, now! you look here, if we ever do get hold of that Queen, I want to tell you, she’ll have the uneasiest head that ever did wear any kind of crown. Queen, eh!”

“And you’ve got a nigger sheriff now! Fine machinery for the law to have in that part of the Delta just at this time, isn’t it?”

“Sheriff! What do we need of a sheriff, if we get down to the bottom of this devilment? We have got to put it down, and that’s all there is to it, as you know very well. There’s no two ways about it. These disturbances, most of them due to politics, have upset our whole country. Now, it is for us to set it right again. We’ve got to cut politics out, and get down to common sense, down to business. The South can’t wait for ever on politics, Northern or Southern. This country’s bigger than politics, and bigger than politicians. You know we can count on every white man in my part of the Delta. Can we count on you?”

Eddring hesitated, but finally looked his friend in the face. “I’m a white man,” said he. Blount went on.

“What you tell me is not altogether news. We’re going after these people, and we’re going to put an end to this thing once for all. We’re going to have a country. Now, we want as large a number of white gentlemen as possible. We will want you.

“Now, no matter what you are doing, or where you are, will you come when I send for you!”

Eddring repeated simply, “I am a white man, too.”

“It’s for the law, Eddring—for the country.”

“Yes. I think it’s for the law.”