He is smooth-faced
and brown, and is fencing up his pigs. He used to run a
successful cotton-gin, but the Cotton Seed Oil Trust has
forced the price of ginning so low that he says it hardly pays
him. He points out a stately old house over the way as the
home of "Pa Willis." We eagerly ride over, for "Pa Willis"
was the tall and powerful black Moses who led the Negroes
for a generation, and led them well. He was a Baptist preacher,
and when he died, two thousand black people followed him
to the grave; and now they preach his funeral sermon each
year. His widow lives here,--a weazened, sharp-featured
little woman, who curtsied quaintly as we greeted her. Fur-
ther on lives Jack Delson, the most prosperous Negro farmer
in the county. It is a joy to meet him,--a great broad-shoul-
dered, handsome black man, intelligent and jovial. Six hun-
dred and fifty acres he owns, and has eleven black tenants. A
neat and tidy home nestled in a flower-garden, and a little
store stands beside it.
We pass the Munson place, where a plucky white widow is
renting and struggling; and the eleven hundred acres of the
Sennet plantation, with its Negro overseer.
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