and bend
beneath the burden of it all. Here and there a man has raised his head
above these murky waters. We passed one fenced stock-farm with grass
and grazing cattle, that looked very home-like after endless corn and
cotton. Here and there are black free-holders: there is the gaunt
dull-black Jackson, with his hundred acres. "I says, 'Look up! If you
don't look up you can't get up,'" remarks Jackson, philosophically.
And he's gotten up. Dark Carter's neat barns would do credit to New
England. His master helped him to get a start, but when the black man
died last fall the master's sons immediately laid claim to the estate.
"And them white folks will get it, too," said my yellow gossip.

I turn from these well-tended acres with a comfortable feeling that the
Negro is rising. Even then, however, the fields, as we proceed, begin
to redden and the trees disappear. Rows of old cabins appear filled
with renters and laborers,--cheerless, bare, and dirty, for the most
part, although here and there the very age and decay makes the scene
picturesque. 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 migration. 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. Why should he strive? Every year finds
him deeper in debt. How strange that Georgia, the world-heralded
refuge of poor debtors, should bind her own to sloth and misfortune as
ruthlessly as ever England di