[n.b. page numbers are unspoken, but match printed text for reference.]

I have some recollection of the house in which I was 
born, and of the great plantation which belonged, in the 
days of slavery, to one of those traditional Southern 
planters about whom we have read so much. I have seen 
the windowless house in which I first saw the light,Ñthe 
light that scantily streamed through the cracks in the 
wall. It was a little cabin, fourteen feet by sixteen feet, 
made of split pine poles, with only dirt for a floor. 

It was in this cabin, near Roanoke, Randolph County, 
Alabama, that my mother was left alone one Saturday 
night. My father had gone away to secure food for her, 
and when he returned, Sunday morning, I was there to 
greet him. My mother and I were completely alone at 
the time of my birth. 

I have always felt that I have an advantage over most 
men of my race in that I was born on a day of rest. It 
was the first piece of good fortune that came to me, and 
I want to be grateful for it. 

This was in the closing days of Reconstruction, when 
there were stirring times in nearly every part of the coun- 
try, but of course I do not remember much about what 
happened then. I recall, however, some things that oc- 
curred four or five years later when, although the South 


14 THE BLACK MANÕS BURDEN 


had been legally reconstructed, the law had not changed 
the sentiments of the people very much. 

I distinctly remember that there were no colored 
school-teachers at that time and, in my own locality, 
there were no Northern white teachers. The few colored 
schools that existed at all were taught by Southern white 
men and women. Before I was old enough to attend 
school myself I used to go along now and then with the 
others, and I remember that one of these Southern white 
teachers took a great liking to me and, passing our house 
one day on his way home, predicted to my mother that 
I would some day be a lawyer. I did not know what 
that meant then, but I got the impression that it meant I 
was going to be something great, and I did not forget it. 

Almost as soon as the Negro pupils got as far as 
Òbaker,Ó and certainly when they got as far as Òabase- 
ment,Ó in the old blue-back speller they were made as- 
sistant teachers, and in a short while, relieving the white 
teachers, they became the only teachers we had. When 
I was seven years old there was not a white teacher in 
our community. The colored teachers were doing pretty 
good work, but the best of them had advanced only 
about as far as the fourth grade. There is one thing, 
however, that they had learned to perfection, and that 
was the use of the rod, and of this kind of education I 
got my full share every day. My great trouble was that 
if I got a whipping at school, I was likely to get another 
one when I reached home. 

This was not always the case, however. One year it 
had been agreed that I should study nothing but arith- 
metic, and before I had been at school many days I had 


THE BLACK MANÕS BURDEN 15 


undoubtedly reached the limit of my teacherÕs ability in 
that branch. For several days I had no lessons. At 
length, one day, without warning, he jumped at me like 
a fierce tiger, and with a hickory switch, which he had 
previously roasted in the fire, he beat me to the floor and 
continued to flog me until some grown pupils interfered. 
When I started home that afternoon I became exhausted 
and sat down on a log on the roadside, from which I 
was not able to rise on account of the lacerated condition 
of my flesh. My father found me after dark and carried 
me home. That was the only time that I can now recall 
ever having seen my father very angry. He wanted to 
whip that school-teacher, but my motherÕs advice pre- 
vailed, and I was sent back to school as soon as I could 
walk. Those early experiences made me vow that if ever 
I got to be a school-teacher I would not whip the little 
ones and let the big ones go free. 

My father,Ñwho, like my mother, had been a slave,Ñ 
was a young and inexperienced man when he married. 
My mother, however, had been married twice before, and 
she was the mother of three children. Her first mar- 
riage was performed in slavery time by the simple act 
of jumping back and forth over a broom in the presence 
of her master and mistress. In the course of time as 
more children, including myself, came along, until there 
were six of us, my father found it very difficult to keep 
the wolf from the door. 

My mother helped him by cooking for the landlordÕs 
family, while my father worked on the plantation. Our 
landlord,Ñone of those Southern planters, now com- 
monly referred to as a Ògentleman of the Old South,ÓÑ 


16 THE BLACK MANÕS BURDEN 


like many others of his class, had had his fortune, con- 
sisting largely of slaves, swept away by the ravages of 
the Civil War. The result was that, although he had a 
large amount of land left, he was nevertheless a poor 
man. The agreement between him and Father, which 
was nothing more than a verbal contract between them, 
provided that he was to furnish land, mules, feed, seed,Ñ 
in fact, everything but labor,Ñand it further provided 
that he was to help do the work and receive as his 
share three-fourths of all that the land produced, while 
we were to receive the other one-fourth. 

Although he agreed to help, he seldom did any man- 
ual labor. He was in the fields every day, however, 
going from place to place among the various Negroes 
that were serving under contracts similar to ours. At 
one time my father ventured, in the most modest way, 
to call his attention to the fact that he was doing no 
work, but he very kindly, yet firmly, explained that he 
was doing more work in a day without a tool in his hand 
than my father was doing ina month. He tried to make 
my father understand this. I do not know whether my 
father understood it or not, but I could not. 

We never prepared our land for cultivation, but simply 
planted the seeds on the hard ground in March and April 
and covered them with a turn plow; then we cultivated 
the crop for two months. Naturally, the returns were 
small. When the crop was divided in the fall of the year 
three loads of corn were thrown into the white manÕs 
crib and one into ours; but when it came to dividing the 
cotton, which was done up into bales weighing five hun- 
dred pounds each and which sold for seventeen cents a 


THE BLACK MANÕS BURDEN r7, 


pound, every bale went to the white man. He was at 
great pains to explain to my father each year that we 
ate ours during the year. 

I remember how puzzled I used to be in trying to con- 
ceive how it was possible for people to eat a crop,Ñ 
especially cotton out of which cloth is made,Ñbefore it 
was produced. In later years, however, and many times 
since then, I have seen whole crops eaten two or three 
years before they were planted. 

Our landlord furnished us food from his smoke-house 
from March to July, and from September to December. 
This food consisted of corn meal, out of which we made 
corn-pone by mixing it with water and salt, and smoked 
sides of meat, from hogs that we raised. All the rest 
of the time we had to find something to do away from 
the plantation in order to keep supplied with bread and 
clothes, which were scanty enough. The land was poor 
and would hardly have produced enough to support all 
the people that lived on it, even if it had been under bet- 
ter cultivation. 

Each year the landlord would ÒrunÓ us, and he would 
charge from twenty-five to two hundred per cent. for 
the advances, according to the time of the year. No 
wonder we ate our crops up. 

The method of obtaining food and provisions on this 
plantation was interesting. The landlord owned the store, 
Ñone large room about forty feet by sixty feet, which 
he kept well supplied with flour, meat, meal, and tobacco. 
This store was usually open only on Saturdays, when all 
the Negroes from the plantation would come up and pass 
the day at the store, which was a sort of Òsocial center.Ó 


18 THE BLACK MANÕS BURDEN 


Meantime their rations for the following week were 
being issued. For an unmarried male laborer the usual 
ration was a pound of meat, a peck of meal, three pounds 
of flour, and a plug of tobacco. 

I remember hearing the men complain very often that 
they were charged for rations that they did not get, and 
I remember that at one time a lawsuit arose between the 
landlord and a Negro on the plantation who could neither 
read nor write. When the trial came off at the store the 
landlord presented his books to show that the Negro had 
obtained certain rations during the year. The Negro 
denied having received such rations, and as proof he 
presented his ÔÒÔbook,ÕÕ which consisted of a stick, one 
yard long, trimmed in hexagon fashion and filled with 
notches, each notch representing some purchase and in 
some ingenious way the time of the purchase. After 
the jury had examined the white manÕs books they began 
an examination of the NegroÕs stick, and the more he ex- 
plained his way of keeping books the more interested the 
jurors became. When the trial was over, the Negro won 
the case, the jurors having decided that he had kept his 
books properly and that a mistake had been made by the 
white bookkeeper. 

My mother cooked for the Òwhite folks,Õ and, her 
work being very exacting, she could not always get home 
at night. At such times we children suffered an ex- 
cruciating kind of pain,Ñthe pain of hunger. I can well 
remember how at night we would often cry for food 
until falling here and there on the floor we would sob 
ourselves to sleep. Late at night, sometimes after mid- 
night, mother would reach home with a large pan of pot- 


THE BLACK MANÕS BURDEN 19 


liquor, or more often a variety of scraps from the Òwhite 
folksÕ ÓÕ table (she might have brought more, but she was 
not the kind of cook that slipped things out of the back 
door); waking us all, she would place the pan on the 
floor, or on her knees, and gathering around we would 
eat to our satisfaction. There was neither knife, fork, 
nor spoon,Ñnothing but the pan. We used our hands 
and sometimes in our haste dived head foremost into the 
pan, very much as pigs after swill. In the morning, when 
mother had to return to her work before we children 
awoke, she was accustomed to put the large pan on the 
dirt floor in the middle of the cabin where we could find 
it without difficulty. Sometimes, however, our pet pig 
would come in and find it first, and would be already 
helping himself before we could reach it. We never 
made any serious objection to dividing with him, and I 
do not recall that he showed any resentment about di- 
viding with us. 

One day my brother and I were given a meal of pie- 
crust, which my mother had brought from the Òwhite 
folksÕÓ table. As we were eating it, Old Buck, the fam- 
ily dog, who resembled an emaciated panther, stole one 
of the crusts. We loved Old Buck, but we had to live, 
and so my brother Òlit ontoÓ him and a royal battle took 
place over that crust. As my brother was losing ground, 
I joined in the struggle. We saved the crust, but not 
until both of us had been scratched and bitten. I do not 
know who needed the crust most, we or the dog, for 
those were the days of hardships. Very often we would 
go two or three days at a time without prepared food, 
but we usually found our way into the potato patches, 


20 THE BLACK MANÕS BURDEN 


and the chickens were not always safe where we passed, 
for my brother occasionally, by accident, would step on 
a little one, and of course we would then have to cook it 
as a matter of economy. I recall that in that section of 
Alabama where I lived there is a kind of root called hog 
potato, which grows abundantly in the swamps and 
marshy places. I have never known it by any other 
name. I used to spend hours every day in the swamps 
about our house wading in the slush above my knees, 
turning up the mud in search of those potatoes. After 
they were roasted they had a taste like that of the white 
potato with which people in the Northern states are fa- 
miliar. By means of these potatoes, together with ber- 
ries and other wild fruits, we were able to keep body and 
soul together during those dark days. 

As I now remember it, my fatherÕs continuous effort 
was to keep the wolf from the door. He presently quit 
the big plantation and spent a year working on the West- 
ern railway of Alabama, at Loachapoka in Lee County, 
about fifty miles from home. There were no railroads 
or stage coaches to carry him to and from his work, so it 
required two weeks to make the round trip, much of 
which lay through immense forests where a narrow foot- 
path was the only passage. He would remain away from 
home three months at a time, working for the handsome 
sum of a dollar a day, out of which he boarded himself 
and furnished his working-clothes. I remember how 
mother and we children would sit in our dark little cabin 
many nights looking for him to come at any moment, 
and sometimes it would be nearly a week after we would 
begin to look for him before he would come. I donÕt 


THE BLACK MANÕS BURDEN 21 


think we ever had a letter from him; we only knew that 
the three months were up, and that it was time for him 
to come to us. 

He usually brought from forty to fifty dollars home, 
but by the time we paid out of that amount what we 
owed the white gentleman, on whose place we still lived, 
for the advances obtained of him in my fatherÕs absence 
there would not be much left for us. 

The lack of food was not the only hardship we had to 
endure. We found it very difficult to find clothes and 
even shoes, which was very trying when the winters were 
cold. I never wore a pair of shoes until I was fifteen, 
and when I did begin to wear shoes I never wore them 
until the weather was cold. In fact, I made it a rule 
never to put on my new shoes until Christmas morning, 
no matter how cold it was. Usually in the summertime 
the only garment that we children wore was a simple 
shirt. These shirts were not always made of shirting, 
but were often of homespun, and when this material could 
not be had a crocus sack, or something of the kind, was 
used instead. I remember that the first suit of clothes 
I owned I paid for myself with the money I had made 
by splitting rails. It took me a good part of the fall sea- 
son to split the two thousand rails that were required to 
get my little suit, but I succeeded in my undertaking, with 
occasional help from my father in finishing the job. The 
fact that I bought this suit with my own labor made me 
think all the more of it. 

Although the census taker of 1880 classed my parents 
as illiterates, they had a very clear understanding of right 
and wrong; in their own way they were moral teachers, 


22 THE BLACK MANÕS BURDEN 


and they knew how to make their lessons impressive. By 
no stretch of the imagination could either of them have 
been classed with what was known at that time as an 
ignorant Negro, though neither of them could read or 
write. 

One day while I was alone in the Òwhite folksÕ Ó 
kitchen, where I had accompanied my mother to her daily 
work, I spied a little round box on the shelf. It was a 
box of matches such as I have not seen in twenty years. 
Curious to see what a match-head was like, I pinched one 
without removing it from the box. An explosion was 
heard, and the box was blown off the shelf, to my con- 
sternation. With a switch my mother began to admin- 
ister to a rather tender part of my anatomy the treat- 
ment with which it was already familiar, explaining all 
the while that I must learn to mind my own business. 
The white lady, with whom I was a favorite, interceded 
for me, saying that I should not be whipped for a little 
thing like that; it was most natural; I had reached the 
age of investigation. My mother desisted, shaking her 
head as she left the scene, saying she would ÒinvestigateÓ 
me, and from time to time she did. So in matters of 
conduct, at least, whether large or small, I had the ad- 
vantage of a loving but firm discipline. 

In such matters of conduct, or of morality, if you 
please, my mother was always teaching me some little 
lesson. I remember that at one time, when I must have 
been five or six years old, I was sent up to the Òbig 
houseÓ to borrow some meal from the Òwhite folksÓ for 
supper. On my way back, while climbing over an old- 


THE BLACK MANÕS BURDEN 23 


fashioned rail fence, I discovered, while pausing for a 
few minutes on the top rail, a henÕs nest full of eggs. 
The bait was tempting. I was hungry and wanted the 
eggs. I had never heard anybody say anything about 
taking that which did not belong to you, but somehow I 
felt that it was wrong to take those eggs. I knew they 
belonged to the white lady up at the Òbig house.Ó After 
thinking the matter over for nearly a half hour, I de- 
cided to compromise by taking only a few of them, so I 
got as many as my little pocket would hold and carried 
them home. Sidling up to my mother in a rather sheep- 
ish fashion, I showed them to her and told her that I 
had found them, which was the truth. I remember that 
my mother was amused, but she kept her face turned 
from me and proceeded to teach me another one of those 
little lessons, which stayed by me and supported me in 
after years. 

She told me it was wrong to steal from the Òwhite 
folks,Ó that Òwhite folksÓ thought all Negroes would 
steal, and that we must show them that we would not. 
She said she knew I did not steal them, but that it would 
look that way, and that I must show that I did not by 
taking them right back to the white lady and giving them 
to her. That was a great task. After having spent an 
hour in going a distance of 300 yards, I reached the white 
lady with the eggs and told her that I had found them. 
I have always suspected that my mother had been there 
and had seen the white lady before my arrival. At least, 
that is the way it appears now, as I look back on it, for 
the good lady gave me an old-fashioned lecture about 


24 THE BLACK MANÕS BURDEN 


stealing and told me that, whenever I wanted anything 
she had, I should come up and ask for it. Then she gave 
me two of the eggs. I was quite young at that time, as I 
have said before, but I was not too young to learn, and 
that lesson and others like it remained with me.