The Colonel's Dream Page 21

  _Twenty-one_

  The colonel's schemes for the improvement of Clarendon went forward,with occasional setbacks. Several kilns of brick turned out badly, sothat the brickyard fell behind with its orders, thus delaying the worka few weeks. The foundations of the old cotton mill had beensubstantially laid, and could be used, so far as their positionpermitted for the new walls. When the bricks were ready, a gang ofmasons was put to work. White men and coloured were employed, under awhite foreman. So great was the demand for labour and so stimulatingthe colonel's liberal wage, that even the drowsy Negroes around themarket house were all at work, and the pigs who had slept near themwere obliged to bestir themselves to keep from being run over by thewagons that were hauling brick and lime and lumber through thestreets. Even the cows in the vacant lot between the post-office andthe bank occasionally lifted up their gentle eyes as though wonderingwhat strange fever possessed the two-legged creatures around them,urging them to such unnatural activity.

  The work went on smoothly for a week or two, when the colonel had somewords with Jim Green, the white foreman of the masons. The cause ofthe dispute was not important, but the colonel, as the master,insisted that certain work should be done in a certain way. Greenwished to argue the point. The colonel brought the discussion to aclose with a peremptory command. The foreman took offense, declaredthat he was no nigger to be ordered around, and quit. The colonelpromoted to the vacancy George Brown, a coloured man, who was the nextbest workman in the gang.

  On the day when Brown took charge of the job the white bricklayers, ofwhom there were two at work, laid down their tools.

  "What's the matter?" asked the colonel, when they reported for theirpay. "Aren't you satisfied with the wages?"

  "Yes, we've got no fault to find with the wages."

  "Well?"

  "We won't work under George Brown. We don't mind working _with_niggers, but we won't work _under_ a nigger."

  "I'm sorry, gentlemen, but I must hire my own men. Here is yourmoney."

  They would have preferred to argue their grievance, and since thecolonel had shut off discussion they went down to Clay Jackson'ssaloon and argued the case with all comers, with the usual distortionattending one-sided argument. Jim Green had been superseded by anigger--this was the burden of their grievance.

  Thus came the thin entering wedge that was to separate the colonelfrom a measure of his popularity. There had been no objection to thecolonel's employing Negroes, no objection to his helping theirschool--if he chose to waste his money that way; but there were manywho took offense when a Negro was preferred to a white man.

  Through Caxton the colonel learned of this criticism. The colonelshowed no surprise, and no annoyance, but in his usual good-humouredway replied:

  "We'll go right along and pay no attention to him. There were only twowhite men in the gang, and they have never worked under the Negro;they quit as soon as I promoted him. I have hired many men in my timeand have made it an unvarying rule to manage my own business in my ownway. If anybody says anything to you about it, you tell them justthat. These people have got to learn that we live in an industrialage, and success demands of an employer that he utilise the mostavailable labour. After Green was discharged, George Brown was thebest mason left. He gets more work out of the men than Green did--evenin the old slave times Negroes made the best of overseers; they knewtheir own people better than white men could and got more out of them.When the mill is completed it will give employment to five hundredwhite women and fifty white men. But every dog must have his day, sogive the Negro his."

  The colonel attached no great importance to the incident; the placesof the workmen were filled, and the work went forward. He knew theSouthern sensitiveness, and viewed it with a good-natured tolerance,which, however, stopped at injustice to himself or others. The veryroot of his reform was involved in the proposition to discharge acompetent foreman because of an unreasonable prejudice. Matters offeeling were all well enough in some respects--no one valued morehighly than the colonel the right to choose his own associates--butthe right to work and to do one's best work, was fundamental, as wasthe right to have one's work done by those who could do it best. Evena healthy social instinct might be perverted into an unhealthy andunjust prejudice; most things evil were the perversion of good.

  The feeling with which the colonel thus came for the first timedirectly in contact, a smouldering fire capable always of being fannedinto flame, had been greatly excited by the political campaign whichbegan about the third month after his arrival in Clarendon. Anambitious politician in a neighbouring State had led a successfulcampaign on the issue of Negro disfranchisement. Plainlyunconstitutional, it was declared to be as plainly necessary for thepreservation of the white race and white civilisation. The example hadproved contagious, and Fetters and his crowd, who dominated theirState, had raised the issue there. At first the pronouncement met withslight response. The sister State had possessed a Negro majority,which, in view of reconstruction history was theoretically capable ofinjuring the State. Such was not the case here. The State had survivedreconstruction with small injury. White supremacy existed, in themain, by virtue of white efficiency as compared with efficiency of alower grade; there had been places, and instances, where other methodshad been occasionally employed to suppress the Negro vote, but, takenas a whole, the supremacy of the white man was secure. No Negro hadheld a State office for twenty years. In Clarendon they had evenceased to be summoned as jurors, and when a Negro met a white man, hegave him the wall, even if it were necessary to take the gutter to doso. But this was not enough; this supremacy must be made permanent.Negroes must be taught that they need never look for any differentstate of things. New definitions were given to old words, new picturesset in old frames, new wine poured into old bottles.

  "So long," said the candidate for governor, when he spoke at Clarendonduring the canvas, at a meeting presided over by the editor of the_Anglo-Saxon_, "so long as one Negro votes in the State, so long arewe face to face with the nightmare of Negro domination. For example,suppose a difference of opinion among white men so radical as todivide their vote equally, the ballot of one Negro would determine theissue. Can such a possibility be contemplated without a shudder? Ourduty to ourselves, to our children, and their unborn descendants, andto our great and favoured race, impels us to protest, by word, byvote, by arms if need be, against the enforced equality of an inferiorrace. Equality anywhere, means ultimately, equality everywhere.Equality at the polls means social equality; social equality meansintermarriage and corruption of blood, and degeneration and decay.What gentleman here would want his daughter to marry a blubber-lipped,cocoanut-headed, kidney-footed, etc., etc., nigger?"

  There could be but one answer to the question, and it came in thundersof applause. Colonel French heard the speech, smiled at the oldarguments, but felt a sudden gravity at the deep-seated feeling whichthey evoked. He remembered hearing, when a boy, the same arguments.They had served their purpose once before, with other issues, toplunge the South into war and consequent disaster. Had the lesson beenin vain? He did not see the justice nor the expediency of the proposedanti-Negro agitation. But he was not in politics, and confined hisprotests to argument with his friends, who listened but were notconvinced.

  Behind closed doors, more than one of the prominent citizens admittedthat the campaign was all wrong; that the issues were unjust andreactionary, and that the best interests of the State lay in upliftingevery element of the people rather than selecting some one class fordiscouragement and degradation, and that the white race could hold itsown, with the Negroes or against them, in any conceivable state ofpolitical equality. They listened to the colonel's quiet argument thatno State could be freer or greater or more enlightened than theaverage of its citizenship, and that any restriction of rights thatrested upon anything but impartial justice, was bound to re-act, asslavery had done, upon the prosperity and progress of the State. Theylistened, which the colonel regarded as a great point gained, and theyagreed in part,
and he could almost understand why they let theirfeelings govern their reason and their judgment, and said no word toprevent an unfair and unconstitutional scheme from going forward to asuccessful issue. He knew that for a white man to declare, in such acommunity, for equal rights or equal justice for the Negro, or to takethe Negro's side in any case where the race issue was raised, was tocourt social ostracism and political death, or, if the feelingprovoked were strong enough, an even more complete form of extinction.

  So the colonel was patient, and meant to be prudent. His own argumentsavoided the stirring up of prejudice, and were directed to the highermotives and deeper principles which underlie society, in the light ofwhich humanity is more than race, and the welfare of the State abovethat of any man or set of men within it; it being an axiom as true instatesmanship as in mathematics, that the whole is greater than anyone of its parts. Content to await the uplifting power of industry andenlightenment, and supremely confident of the result, the colonel wentserenely forward in his work of sowing that others might reap.