A young black fellow greets us. He is twenty-
two, and just married. Until last year he had good luck
renting; then cotton fell, and the sheriff seized and sold all he
had. So he moved here, where the rent is higher, the land
poorer, and the owner inflexible; he rents a forty-dollar mule
for twenty dollars a year. Poor lad!--a slave at twenty-two.
This plantation, owned now by a foreigner, was a part of the
famous Bolton estate. After the war it was for many years
worked by gangs of Negro convicts,--and black convicts
then were even more plentiful than now; it was a way of
making Negroes work, and the question of guilt was a minor
one. Hard tales of cruelty and mistreatment of the chained
freemen are told, but the county authorities were deaf until
the free-labor market was nearly ruined by wholesale migra-
tion. Then they took the convicts from the plantations, but
not until one of the fairest regions of the "Oakey Woods"
had been ruined and ravished into a red waste, out of which
only a Yankee or an immigrant could squeeze more blood
from debt-cursed tenants.
No wonder that Luke Black, slow, dull, and discouraged,
shuffles to our carriage and talks hopelessly.
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