They are not happy, these black
men whom we meet throughout this region. There is little of
the joyous abandon and playfulness which we are wont to
associate with the plantation Negro. At best, the natural
good-nature is edged with complaint or has changed into
sullenness and gloom. And now and then it blazes forth in
veiled but hot anger. I remember one big red-eyed black
whom we met by the roadside. Forty-five years he had la-
bored on this farm, beginning with nothing, and still having
nothing. To be sure, he had given four children a common-
school training, and perhaps if the new fence-law had not
allowed unfenced crops in West Dougherty he might have
raised a little stock and kept ahead. As it is, he is hopelessly
in debt, disappointed, and embittered. He stopped us to in-
quire after the black boy in Albany, whom it was said a
policeman had shot and killed for loud talking on the side-
walk. And then he said slowly: "Let a white man touch me,
and he dies; I don't boast this,--I don't say it around loud, or
before the children,--but I mean it. I've seen them whip my
father and my old mother in them cotton-rows till the blood
ran; by--" and we passed on.
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