CHILDREN FROM THE CABIN

The activities of a great plantation went on about me, but I recall none of the clamor of this business; only the ringing of the blacksmith’s hammer on the anvil in the shop under the mulberry trees. The long procession of negroes sitting sidewise on their mules coming up from the fields through the deepening dusk of the evening were a part of the day I lived, like the lengthening shadows of the trees on the grass. The thin curls of smoke that began to hurry out of the tops of the chimneys from the cabins below the avenue used to hang like long lavender scarfs in the air. I remember that from the top of the terrace I could see the negro children milling and playing before these cabin doors. But I never joined them.

There was an invisible mark between me and these little black ones that must not be crossed. The intimate association between white children and negro children has been greatly exaggerated by the sentimental literature of the South written since the Civil War, to appeal, I have always thought, to the imagination of the North, where most of the reading in this country was done after that period. Southern white children of the stock from which I sprang sustained a passionately devoted relation to the old negroes, men and women, who remained attached to our families. This attachment remains unbroken to this day.

But no such ties ever existed between us and the young ones. The basis of mutual affection and confidence had been destroyed before I was born and the doom of the negro sealed, not by the Civil War, but by propaganda that followed it for fifty years. Where enmity is created, justice will never be done. But hate and distrust beget the sense of injustice, which produces every abomination possible between a strong race and a weaker one.

I have not one recollection of having played with a negro child. My only memory lasts because it was striped in with a switch. Susan, a little negro girl, came to the house one day for a pitcher of milk. I took her aside and examined her black kinky wool wrapped in white cotton thread. I did not think much of it and said so.

Mother punished me severely for this. I do not recall the words she used. They were undoubtedly stern and simple, for she had that kind of a vocabulary; but the gist of it was that the quality of a superior was that he never took advantage of an inferior, and that it was ignoble to humiliate one by referring to his natural defects, whether of hair or color. This doctrine steadfastly kept also by my father, in the end cost him a two-thousand-acre cotton plantation. For there were a hundred negroes on the place, and they took every advantage that inferiors can take of a generous superior. The only reason why it has not been equally expensive to me is that I never had so much as a plantation to lose and have dealt with fewer people of this class.

But the impression I received that day concerning my obligations to those less fortunate by nature, as I stood tearfully diminished before mother and still stinging from the duty of her switch, has never left me. And it is now a fact, which I have proved by experience, that it is more enhancing to keep one’s self-respect than to get the advantage of an inferior person in any kind of transaction. After so many years of this kind of noble prancing morally, it produces a certain insolent sense of quality, not justified, of course, by the person you really are, all told. Still, it is a grand feeling and a part of the mind I have finally rounded up out of life.