XVIII Charleston
For any disappointment I had felt in New Orleans, Charleston more than compensated me. Mr. Owen Wister, in “Lady Baltimore,” has in no way exaggerated its charm.
In situation it is not at all unlike New York, being built on a tongue of land between the broad estuaries of the Ashley and the Cooper Rivers. At the tip of the tongue (as in New York) is the Battery; but here the Battery is a beautiful, semi-tropical garden, full of live-oaks, palmettos, and flowering shrubs, with an esplanade overlooking the blue expanse of the harbour, the historic Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie, and the low shores beyond. This garden is a fascinating spot. I returned to it again and again during my stay in the city. Passing up Meeting Street (the Broadway of Charleston), one finds, instead of the skyscrapers which shoulder one another in the lower end of New York, the simple, dignified old houses of a vanishing generation of Southern aristocrats, each standing end-on to the street, in its little plot of lawn and flowering shrubs. The typical Charlestonian house is a plain two or three storey structure, entirely surrounded at each level with broad verandahs and balconies. In several cases the floor area of verandah and balcony outside the walls must at least equal the floor area of the rooms inside the walls. Now, spacious verandahs always suggest to the mind the lazy luxury of a genial summer-land, deep lounging-chairs, cool drinks, and the glow of cigar-tips in the twilight. I am bound to say that I saw very little of this sort of life proceeding in the verandahs of Charleston; but that only enabled one all the more easily to people them with the ghosts of fifty years ago, before the guns of Fort Moultrie startled their calm. In Charleston I felt, almost for the first time, that the romance of the Old South had once been a reality. All of the South that I had hitherto seen had been remorselessly new.
Further up-town (as they would say in New York) the streets of Charleston become more commonplace, but always retain a character of their own. There is not a vestige of a sky-scraper in the whole peninsula. On the other hand, the city is dotted with old churches of the Wren style, each with its quiet burial-ground around it. Close to St. Michael’s Church and in front of the City Hall, is a sadly mutilated statue of the elder Pitt. It was erected in 1770, and its mutilation was begun by a British cannon-ball in 1780.
Let me add that Charleston, like New Orleans, is proud of its cemeteries, and with much better reason. Magnolia Cemetery, with its live-oaks and its little lake, is a really lovely garden. One historic live-oak of enormous size, draped in Spanish moss and with exquisite little ferns growing along each of its huge boughs, is not only a wonderful but an extraordinarily beautiful tree.
As to the population of Charleston my informants differed. |“No Trouble.”| A white man placed it at 60,000 in all, with 40,000 negroes; a negro at 65,000, with 33,000 negroes. As there has been no census since 1900, probably no one knows exactly; but it seems to be admitted that the blacks more or less considerably outnumber the whites. The white people, by their own account, pay nine-tenths of the taxes; the negroes aver that their real estate is assessed at a million and a half dollars—assessment representing only about 60 per cent. of actual value. Both statements are very likely true.
White Charleston plumes itself on a peculiar and hereditary understanding of the negro, and knowledge of the way to deal with him; whence it happens that there has been “no trouble”—no outrages or lynchings—in or around the city. Moreover, I was assured that negroes were employed in the police force, and that not long ago there was a black lieutenant of police, with white men under him.
But mark how the aspect of things alters according to the point of view from which they are regarded! When I mentioned to a little group of leading negroes this proof of the equal treatment accorded to the two races, I observed on their countenances an expressive smile. On inquiring its reason, I learned that there were indeed three coloured policemen out of a total force of 106; that they and a few others had been appointed at some long-past period of political compromise; and that, when they die off, there is not the smallest chance of their being replaced by men of colour. “Here, as elsewhere, the Irish control the police force; and the Irish hate us worse than the native Americans.”
It was an odd group, this coloured conclave in which I found myself. |The Negro and his Vote.| Only one member (a doctor) was dark-brown in complexion; two were very light-brown; while two others, again, were indistinguishable from white men. One reminded me strongly of a choleric old Scotch General whom I once knew; the other was very English in type, with smooth, silvery hair (prematurely white), and a large, round, placid, bovine face. Meeting him in England, you would have said he was a trifle sunburnt.
Their talk was mainly of their political grievances, and the various methods by which their race, all over the Southern States, were jockeyed out of their votes. Much of what they said I failed to follow; with a good deal of it, on the other hand, I was already pretty familiar.
The different States of the South have adopted methods differing in many details for excluding incompetent and undesirable voters from the polls; but the general principle has always been much the same. It has been to impose some slight test of education and intelligence (generally to read and explain some paragraph of the Constitution) on all who desire to have their names placed on the register.45
If these tests were applied equally to the two races, the negro would have no ground of complaint. But exceptions are made in favour of the whites in the very laws establishing the tests. Most of them contain clauses analogous to what is known in Alabama as the “grandfather clause,” which provides that illiteracy shall not bar any one whose father or grandfather was entitled to vote at the outbreak of the Civil War. This exception is defended on the ground that even an illiterate person of the original Anglo-Saxon stock (the South is nothing if not Anglo-Saxon) is generally a very shrewd fellow, and eminently capable of exercising the franchise. Under the “grandfather clause,” then, only illiterate aliens and illiterate negroes are excluded from the register; and this discrimination is naturally resented by the negro.
But if the matter stopped there, the black race would not feel themselves so very much aggrieved. The real burden of their complaint is not the inequality of the laws, but the inequality of their administration. The tests of intelligence are applied (they declare) by unscrupulous registrars, who will ask a white man some simple question, such as whether imprisonment for debt is permitted, while they will pose a negro with some impossible technicality concerning a bill of attainder or an estate in tail. The upshot is that admission to the register depends entirely on the arbitrary will and pleasure of the registrars. Their decisions can be appealed against, but the appeal is said to be practically useless.
Nor is this all. When a negro happens to be a man of such property, education, and position that it is absolutely impossible to reject his vote, there is always the last resource of omitting to count it. One of the Charleston group spoke of a particular election in which he himself, and others of his people to his certain knowledge, cast Republican ballots; but the result, as announced, showed not a single Republican vote.
On this matter, as on so many others, it is very hard to get at the truth. White men aver, and will prove by statistics, that in proportion to his taxation the negro has very fair voting power, and is freely permitted to exercise it. But I met no single negro who would admit this; and most of them, like my Charleston friends, were very bitter on the question, as well as on the exclusion of even the most respectable of their race from the councils, the “machine,” of their party.
A remark made by one of this very intelligent Charleston group struck me as a curious comment on the belief of white Charleston that it has a special genius for dealing with the black race. “We negroes,” said this member of the race, “have no respect for the Southern white man’s opinions or his prophecies. He has always prophesied wrong. This thing is going to work out in the usual mysterious way, that the South will be very much surprised over.”
I quote word for word. “The usual mysterious way” may seem an odd phrase, but its meaning is not very far to seek.
In Charleston, under the guidance of a genial Southern gentleman placed in high educational authority, I saw a good deal both of white and of coloured schools. My guide was an enthusiast for negro education. “What’s the good,” he said, “of talking about being a superior race if you’re afraid to educate the negro? |White Negroes.| There’s not much superiority in that.” He admitted with regret that accommodation for negro children was very deficient, and said that those who were fighting for better accommodation had been crippled by the recent appointment of a negro to a Federal office in the town.
In a school containing twelve hundred black children, the fire alarm was given, and in exactly three minutes every child was in the playground, the whole school being ranged in “column of companies,” or, rather, of classes. Assuredly, such discipline cannot but be salutary. It was in this school too, that I heard five hundred negro children (most of them quite small, for three-fourths of them drop out after passing through the primary classes) singing in their clear, shrill voices—
“In Dixie Land
I take my stand,
To live and die in Dixie.”
Poor quaint little mortals! They were unconscious of any irony in the sentiment.
In every negro school or college that I visited—at Tuskegee among the rest—I saw several young people in whom my eye could not discern the slightest trace of black blood.46 But it was in Charleston, at an endowed school for negroes, that the most remarkable instance of this kind came under my notice. I was present at the morning muster of the whole school; and while the hymn was being sung I could not take my eyes off two boys of thirteen or fourteen, evidently brothers, who stood side by side in one of the upper classes. They were not only white, but (one would have said) peculiarly and resplendently white. Their features were delicate and distinguished, their eyes blue or grey, their hair a light brown. They were slightly built, and, although their dress was quite plain, they had somehow an air of grace and breeding. They could have gone to Eton or Winchester and excited no remark.
Shall I confess that the contrast between these boys and the ebony and chocolate manikins among whom their lot was cast stirred in me the race instinct in all its unreasoning crudity? I wanted to swoop down upon them and rescue them from what I felt for the moment to be their horrible and unnatural surroundings. They seemed to me like children in a fairy-tale, carried off by some tribe of brownies or gnomes. And who shall say, indeed, that the impulse to rescue them was wholly quixotic? If they remain in America, there can be no doubt that the life that lies before them will be one of painful misunderstandings, heart burnings, and humiliations.
Before leaving Charleston, let me record a curious little street-car incident. |A Street-car Incident.| Coloured people, in this city, are not confined to a special part of the car; but, each seat being designed to accommodate two passengers, a coloured person and white person must not sit side by side on the same seat. One afternoon I was in a car which was full save for one place. The foremost seat on the left hand was occupied by one negro girl, and there was, of course, a vacant place at her side. Presently a white woman got in and sat down in this place. “Hallo!” I thought, “here is a violation of the rule,”—and I wondered what would happen. The conductor was equal to the occasion. The foremost right-hand seat was occupied by a cadet of the Charleston Military Academy in his neat grey uniform, and by a lady. The conductor touched the cadet on the shoulder and whispered to him. The young man at once stood up, the white woman who had last entered the car transferred herself to his place, and for the rest of the journey the cadet hung on to the strap, while the seat beside the negro girl remained vacant!
| Registered negro | Negro males of | Percentage of | |
| voters. | voting age. | illiterates. | |
| Virginia | 23,000 | 146,122 | 52 |
| S. Carolina | 22,000 | 152,860 | 54 |
| Louisiana | 6,400 | 147,348 | 61 |
| N. Carolina | 6,250 | 127,114 | 53 |
In several States, according to Mr. E. G. Murphy (“The Present South,” p. 198), “Many negroes have been discouraged from offering to register by reason of the fact that the State organization of the party with which they have been associated recently refused to admit even their most respected representatives to its Conventions. [This is the ‘lily-white’ policy referred to by Mr. Shipton, p. 34.] Large numbers have also refrained from registration because of their unwillingness to meet the poll-tax requirement. The interest of the masses of the negroes in things political has, for quite different reasons, been much exaggerated by the representatives of both parties.”
Notes
45. It would appear that in Mississippi there are 15,000 registered negro voters out of a negro male population of voting age stated by the census of 1900 at 197,936, of whom 53 per cent. were illiterate. For four other States the numbers stand as follows:—
46. See, however, p. 125.