CHAPTER 4

Sex Without Shackles

Wherever men have lived in the world sexual relations have existed between conqueror and conquered, invader and invaded, master and slave. It was thus that Holofernes lost his head, that Napoleon dallied with his Polish mistress on his catastrophic Russian campaign, and white men of the South took Negro women as concubines during slavery and after freedom.

The records of these relationships are written for all to read in the physiognomies of thousands of Negroes, and in the probated wills of white men leaving their property to their dark mistresses and mulatto children. In the slave-markets there was a constant demand for especially attractive women. Spirited bidding ensued for them at the auctions where the prices rose as high as twenty-five hundred dollars — the modern equivalent of seventy-five hundred dollars — for a rarely desirable bed companion. And in New Orleans aristocratic young men deserted their aristocratic young women at stately balls to rush to the quadroon balls where women with magnolia-petal skins and sinuous bodies danced to barbaric music.

The Delta, in the deep South, was no exception to the general rule. Here, too, white men resorted more or less openly to Negro prostitutes or mistresses. Their progeny are everywhere. These relationships are known to nearly every Negro in the community and to many of the white people, but they seldom come to the knowledge of the families of the men involved. Sometimes, however, they are discovered, occasionally under tragic circumstances, and then the children bear, as best they can, the sins of their fathers visited upon their innocent heads, while the half-breed Negroes suffer in silence or groan in their impotent wrath.

It is not uncommon for a white man to install his Negro mistress in a home which he has provided, live with her, maintain her economically, and in every way assume toward her and their children the relationship and duties of husband and father. They dwell in peace or devotion more or less openly until they are separated by death, and no pressure of family, public opinion, or church is strong enough to make him break the ties that bind him to his mistress. And sometimes there comes to light the manner in which a Negro woman demonstrates the depths of her affection for a white man.

Many years ago a young man came to a Delta town without friends, money, or position, to begin his career in the cotton business. He found a small job at a low salary, took a room in a boarding-house, and went to work. Driven by ambition, he worked long hours, and when at leisure studied the books available on the cotton trade. He was a stranger to the nightly poker games in the lonely little town, to the cheering whisky bottle, and the gentle pleasures of buggy-riding on Sundays with some young lady of the neighborhood. He lead a monastic, almost ascetic existence. His world revolved around his work. But even a budding genius of business has his human side, and in keeping with the custom of the country he took as mistress a young Negro girl.

He remained three years in the little town. When he left it to move to Memphis he knew more about the cotton business than men who had spent their lives at it. It was plain that in the larger arena he would make a brilliant success. He took with him some money which he had saved, his accumulated knowledge of business, an overweening ambition, and his mistress.

In Memphis he moved rapidly from success to success. The larger part of his time was given to work; the rest was devoted to the Negro girl whom he had brought from the country. As he grew in business stature and in wealth he began to receive invitations to dine at the best homes, to dance at the best dances, to join the best clubs. Mothers of marriageable daughters discerned virtues in him which were not patent to less penetrating eyes. Within two years he had married and rid himself of the impedimenta of his Negro mistress. She promptly and quite obligingly disappeared from the community and was heard of no more for years.

The young cotton merchant advanced from youth to middle age, from moderate wealth to great wealth, from obscurity to influence, and in his private life, from happiness to happiness. He built a great house, bought some bad pictures, entertained lavishly, and traveled widely with his family. He made the refreshing discovery that money confers omniscience, so that he gave interviews to the press on religion, politics, immortality, prison reform, and the Boy Scouts. On the fifteenth birthday of his eldest daughter he gave large sums to charity. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of his happy marriage he endowed a hospital.

Six months later his wife fled to New York with a trombone-player. Eighteen months afterward, through a convulsion in the cotton market, he was stripped of every cent in his possession. He was now growing old and faced with a desolate end because he neither had nor could borrow money with which to recoup his fortunes.

The great house was abandoned and the lavish, offices closed. The cotton merchant moved into a one-room office in a cheap building. There he sat one day in his despair, when he became conscious of the presence of a person standing at his desk. He looked up to see a Negro woman. “You don’t know me, do you, Mister Ed?’ She smiled in vast good humor, enormously amused by the situation. “No, I’m afraid I don’t,” he said, wearily. “You sure you ain’t never seen me before, nowhere?” “No, I’ve never seen you before. What can I do for you?” She burst into peal after peal of laughter. “That is the beatinest thing I ever heard tell of,” she said. “Well, I must ‘a’ changed. You used to know me kinder well. I ain’t nobody else but Lilly Clutcher. I was mighty sorry to hear about your troubles an jes’ thought I’d come in to see you whilst I was passing by.”

Here stood his mistress of nearly thirty years before who had never lost track of him during all this time, maintaining a kind of surveillance easy for Negroes, through his successive servants. When he married she went to Saint Louis, where she had at first been a prostitute. Then she became the owner of a house of prostitution frequented by wealthy white men, and with the passage of time had herself become wealthy. The one love of her life, the one passion which she had sustained, had been for the young white man to whom she had been mistress long years before in the little country town. She had watched his rise and fall and knew every detail of his life. Now she came again to see him in his agony and poverty. She gave him a check for a large sum with which to make a new start. A little later he died.

Not all relationships between white men and Negro women have the dark beauty or the tragic-happy ending that came to this couple. Usually they are casual and transitory contacts between man and woman which leave no marked impress on either. These contacts are so widespread, however, that they have become crystallized in crude jokes and epigrams which are part of white folk-lore sharply pointing the attitude of the white community in its acceptance of them as being well within the current morality.

Occasionally a white man goes completely native, living openly with a Negro woman in a Negro section of a town, associating only with Negroes, withdrawing himself entirely from the world of whites, in the manner of men living with Polynesian women in remote atolls of the South Seas.

In a small town in the southern part of the Delta there was such an instance. A white man there of good family completely forsook his own people and his own world to live with a Negro woman. He came in contact with whites only in the daytime as he went about his work. Three daughters came of this union. They were quite pretty, with straight soft hair, skins of café au lait, softly Oriental eyes, sharply defined features of face, and voluptuous bodies. Long before they reached adolescence he had planned to move them away from the town, knowing from intimate association with Negroes that sexual relations began among them at a tender age, and if his daughters did not fall prey to disease-infested Negroes they would be promptly seduced by worthless white men in search of luscious light-colored Negro virgins. Out of these fears and his ambition for them to marry white men or cultured Negroes, he moved with his family to Chicago. There he lives in an alien world of Negroes, an exile for life from his own family and his own ways, for love of a Negro woman.

For the casual dilettante of sex there are in some Delta towns and in Memphis houses of prostitution whose inmates are Negro women and all of whose patrons are white men. White men come in through the front door at any hour of the evening. Negro men enter by the back door at four o’clock in the morning when the whites have gone. White men pay and black men spend the money they have paid. They sleep with the same women, but do not sit together in the same parlor. Thus the properties and conventions of racial separation are satisfied and everybody is made happy in his own way.

Sometimes the woman who presides over one of these houses becomes famous for hundreds of miles around, and connoisseurs travel long distances to visit them. None was ever more famous some years ago than Lulu White, whose “Mahogany Hall” in New Orleans was favorably known throughout a vast stretch of territory. Once a year Miss White issued a brochure to which she herself contributed an introduction in the first person, and a biographical note about herself written with becoming modesty in the third person. There were also photographs of her “boarders” and brief notes on their personalities.

In an introductory passage Miss White says:

In presenting this souvenir to my multitude of friends, it is my earnest desire to, in the first place, avoid any and all egotism, and, secondly, to impress them with the fact that the cause of my success must certainly be attributed to their hearty and generous support of my exertions in making their visits to my establishment a moment of pleasure. While deeming it necessary to give the history of my boarders from their birth, which would, no doubt, prove reading of the highest grade, I trust that what I have mentioned will not be misconstrued, and will be read in the same light as it was written, and in mentioning the fact that all are born and bred Louisiana girls, I trust that my exertions in that direction will be as appreciated as yours has been to me.

It is unfortunate for the student and historian of manners that Miss White in her morbid modesty does not tell us more about herself and the great house over which she so graciously presided. In a too-brief biographical note we catch tantalizing glimpses of her as a sublimated Madame de Staël conducting a salon for the gifted men of music, letters, and conversation, who sought her out in the old quarter of New Orleans.

According to this note we find that

this famous West Indian octoroon first saw the light of day thirty-one years ago. Arriving in this country at a tender age, and having been fortunately gifted with a good education, it did not take long for her to find out what the other sex were in search of.

In describing Miss Lulu, as she is most familiarly called, it would not be amiss to say that, besides possessing an elegant form, she has beautiful black hair and blue eyes which have justly gained for her the title of the “Queen of the Demi-Monde.”

Her establishment, which is situated in the central part of the city, is unquestionably the most elaborately furnished house in the city of New Orleans, and, without a doubt, one of the most elegant places in this or in any other country.

She has made a feature of boarding none but the fairest of girls —those gifted with nature’s greatest charms, and would, under no circumstances, have any but that class in her house.

As an entertainer Miss Lulu stands foremost, having made a lifelong study of music and literature. She is well read and one that can interest anybody and make a visit to her place a cantinned round of pleasure.

And when adding that she would be pleased to see her old friends and make new ones, what more could be added?

Much could have been added, Miss Lulu, had you given as frequent thought to posterity as to your “life-long study of music and literature.” How we should like to know more about the good education with which you were “fortunately gifted, that education which enabled you to peer with such unclouded vision into the vagrant souls of men and “find out what the other sex were in search of.” If only you had catalogued the books in your house, or left us, at least, a list of those that appeared most often on the night table by your bed. Did you cry yourself to sleep over the fate of Paolo and Francesca? Or did you close the book out of sheer pain and “in its leaves we read no more that day”? Did you smile at the delicious naïvetés of the Courts of Love of old Provence? Surely you collected pages’ road songs of the thirteenth century, and wept when the children went to the crusades and came home no more to England and to France?

We strain our eyes, Miss Lulu, to see you through the mists of time. Your portrait is a little blurred, although you have left to a world hungry for beauty a tiny picture of yourself drawn with Oriental economy and delicacy of line. We see you again with “your elegant form, beautiful black hair, and blue eyes,” amid a circle of enraptured men at your feet, in a house which is “without doubt one of the most elegant places in this or any other country.” The Spanish War has just ended and men long absent from the soft amenities of civilization have rushed to your side from the boats that brought them up from Cuba. They know that “Miss Lulu is well read and one that can interest anybody and make a visit to her place a continued round of pleasure.”

Here poetry dwells and harpsichords tinkle in the dusk while your boarders, “gifted with nature’s greatest charms,” wander pensive and lost in halos of mist like figures in a Watteau. Or, sometimes, the brawling world being too painful to bear, they turn the yellowing pages of old manuscripts gold-illuminated, to read how the young Dauphin of France lay dying in a wide-canopied bed beneath a silken coverlet given him by the Chinese ambassador to the Court, while the ladies-in-waiting to the Queen murmur Latin prayers on their little round knees, and tears drop into the laced sleeves of unashamed slender courtiers.

The clumsy groping fingers of the camera could not catch the fleeting tenuous beauty of Miss Lulu’s boarders, but she has depicted them for all time in imperishable prose. We see again Miss Corine Meyers, who “can sing a song and rob the canary of his sweet voice. She can perform on any musical instrument and become a bosom friend in a short while.” Surely the gods smiled on Miss Corine when they dowered her at once with the gift of intimacy and the gift of music. Miss Clara Miller was a shy, friendly, fragile creature of great spiritual strength and beauty:

“demure, everybody’s friend, and can sit up all night if necessary. Why? Because that is her disposition and who don’t want to meet such a young lady?”

Miss Clara Morris smiles for us, a rose between her teeth. She describes a parabola of light illuminating the black darkness of no-time in Miss Lulu’s portrait of her. “Pretty Miss Clara Morris is how this young lady’s friends speak of her. Accomplished, beautiful, and charming. Born and bred right here in this city and a girl which any city should be proud of.” New Orleans, dreaming by your river, remember as you toss fitfully in the hot nights that that beauty which once came to you shall never be lost. And finally, there was Miss Alda Halendar, who had a heart of gold and a tremendous talent for friendship. In her presence the leopards of lust lay still; the lions of desire switched their tails playfully upon the floor. Miss Alda was “everybody’s friend; one that is liked for her sterling worth. Why is this thus? Because of her amiable disposition. She has been in the large European cities and learned how to entertain.”

Miss Lulu, stars swarm above the Greek headlands on nights of summer and the lights of little boats en route to the craggy islands shine dimly in the darkness of the sounding sea. For a little while they seem to stand still in the immensity of great waters. Then they vanish and there is only time and space and nothingness. Yet shepherds keeping lonely vigil high above Corinth note their passing and are less lonely; peasant lovers clasping hands on wooded Olympus see them swim out of the dark ocean and feel for a moment a deeper wonder and a closer drawing together under the sky. So, too, you came briefly, with your boarders the color of cream and of old ivory, bringing with you the illusion of warm love and mirth and gaiety. Your company is scattered and dead; winds rattle the shutters of your abandoned house; mice play on its floors. But old men remember you and, remembering, conjure up again their lost youth and rapturous hours in your presence.

When the octoroon girls who made up Miss Lulu’s establishment left their respective communities to join her, it was no more a matter of general concern to the Negro group at large than similar departures are to the white group at large. But Negro men frequently resent deeply as individuals the fact of sexual relations between some particular Negro girl and a white man. They become deeply embittered because there is no tribunal or law or public opinion to which they can resort. Unless they acquiesce their only resort for satisfaction is to violence.

Sometimes a white man, by virtue of larger means or his authority as a member of the dominant race, literally takes a woman away from a Negro man to become his concubine. And sometimes the Negro in his rage and frustration ambushes the white man, kills him, and is in turn killed. Occasionally tragedy is wrought in quite a different way. In one of the towns of the Delta there is living a Negro man of intelligence and sensitivity who does not want to live. He had one young daughter upon whom he lavished great affection and care, rearing her to womanhood as carefully and as gently as he could, hoping that she would eventually marry some worthy member of her race. (There are among Negroes of this section so-called “respectable families,” who not only conform to the usual conventions, but are quite puritanical in their outlook.) Shortly after her adolescence she was seduced by a young white man of the community in which she lived. When it became apparent to her that she was with child, she told her father. She blamed no one but herself. He upbraided neither her nor her seducer. Quietly he took poison and tried to die. The poison failed. Now he is a wreck of a man and is drinking himself to death.

Given the conditions under which whites and blacks have for so many years lived together in the Delta, it seems inevitable that sexual relationships should have existed between white men and Negro women. The white man seeking sexual contacts felt that he was in no way impairing the morals of the Negro community when it was clearly apparent to him that these morals according to his standard or any standard, simply did not exist. The women were on the whole willing and even eager to assume a sexual relationship with him, and they were quite venial in their attitude. The white man could give them finery, money, protection, and prestige. There were not, therefore, from his point of view, any reasons for forbearing, and, human nature being what it is, he did not forbear. The white man of the Delta was merely writing his chapter in the long record of the white race throughout the world wherever it has come in contact with colored peoples of a simpler culture or weaker fiber.

It is none the less clear that the history of miscegenation in the Delta is interwoven with dark threads of blood and grief and pain. It is in startling contrast with the principles of the white man’s religion which he shares with the Negro. It marks a strange contradiction in his already contradictory relationship with this race. The white man presses certain disabilities and restrictions upon the Negro. The full-blooded Delta Negro, provided the restrictions are not too onerous and he is given a chance to lead his own way of life, brushes them lightly aside and goes gaily on. Half-breeds and quarter-breeds feel the disabilities more sharply and are restive under them. Yet white men have not hesitated to pour their blood into the veins of Negroes and increase the number of those who suffer because of that blood.

The great and inflexible taboo of sexual relationships in the Delta is that there shall not be, under any circumstances whatsoever, a sexual relationship between a white woman and a Negro. The inescapable punishment, when discovery is made, is death. It does not matter that the woman gave consent. Some years ago a white woman gave birth to a Negro child in a Delta hospital. Within a few hours her brother had come in from the country and tried to kill her, and the Negro had been quietly lynched. He had offended an inflexible taboo of which he had full knowledge and of whose penalty for offending he was aware.

Rape is a crime shockingly abhorrent to men all over the world. The white man of the Delta, living among masses of Negroes overwhelmingly superior in numbers and well armed, fears them only in one respect. He does not fear bodily harm to himself, nor an armed uprising en masse. There has never been such an uprising in the history of the Delta. He does, however, fear sexual attacks upon his women.

You cannot rationalize a fear of this kind out of a man, nor make it seem ridiculous in his eyes with structures of smooth syllogisms. He is not comforted by the fact that crimes of this kind are of infrequent occurrence, nor calmed by the thought that the chances of a rape committed upon his womenfolk are perhaps one in a million. His wife and daughters are not to him mere figures in tables of averages. They are flesh and blood whom he loves and cherishes, and he cannot ever be brought to see that the ravished body of one dear to him represents merely the haphazard workings of chance which the averages assert wifi not occur again in a million times.

The planter or overseer away on distant acres from his isolated home, the townsman absent from his house on some lonely street of the outskirts of a town, simply does not feel secure unless his womenfolk are protected in some manner in his absence. (Often the protector may be a Negro.) These people live among great masses of Negroes. They know that rapes and attempted rapes have occurred. Why may they not occur again? And why may not the victims the next time be in their own families?

Out of this fear, out of this horror at the sexual approach of a Negro man to a white woman, out of this vague and gnawing dread, grow lynchings and excesses against Negroes. The Delta was recently the scene of such an attack upon a white woman. The events which followed the commission of the crime, and the capture and trial of the criminal, show clearly the conflicts within the various strata of the white community, and the distortions and stresses which small groups of whites suffer in the presence of masses of Negroes.

The little town of Cleveland, Mississippi, is one of the two county seats of Bolivar County. Its population of about three thousand persons is almost evenly divided between whites and blacks, although within the county itself there are twenty-five hundred Negroes for every one thousand whites, and in some sections there are as many as fifty Negroes to one white person. There are, indeed, as many Negroes in Bolivar County as in all of Massachusetts, although that state has a population of over four millions and the county has only about eighty thousand. Of these fifty-two thousand are Negroes and eighteen thousand are whites.

These Negroes when gathered in groups are seen to be largely full-blooded blacks, although here, as elsewhere, there is a marked leaven of mulattoes. They are, on the whole, poor, darkly ignorant, prey to magic and voodoo doctors, unpredictable in conduct and temperament, and to the white man, however sympathetic or sensitive, essentially unknowable. They are black, with squat noses and thick lips, shambling arms and low foreheads, kinky of hair and frequently with a yellowish tinge in the whites of their eyes. They still stand close to the parent stock of Africa from which they sprang.

In the latter days of December, 1934, a family of whites composed of father, mother, and young son, were living in a little house on the outskirts of Cleveland. They were simple and obscure people, honest and industrious, awaiting now the joyful coming of Christmas within a few days, and a new baby in the spring. On an evening in December the father returned from work and took his modest meal alone. His wife, in an advanced state of pregnancy, lay in bed. His meal finished, he went in to talk to her. Their little son was asleep. Then darkness.

In the morning, when the neighbors came, they found man and woman dead, the boy’s head battered, though he was still living. The man lay face downward stretched across the bed, a bullet hole in the back of his head and his eye torn out where the bullet emerged. The woman’s body was dismembered. Her brains, beaten out of her head, splattered a pillow-case. Scattered about the room were portions of her intestines, uterus, and vagina. Her abdomen yawned an empty hole. Great slabs of flesh had been sliced from her legs and thighs. Blood stained the floors, the walls, and bedclothing.

Horror and dread filled the little town. The ghoulish, unfathomably savage character of the crime gripped men’s minds with a fearful fascination. Women were afraid to go into the streets, and when they did were then irresistibly drawn to drive past the little house where a man and a woman had been found lying battered in their gore. Young children, fascinated by this incredible terror in their midst, could think of nothing else. A bond of sympathy for the victims and hatred for the criminal enveloped the entire community. People in small towns live in close communion, although they may not know one another. Up and down the length of the Delta and across its breadth crept a shudder of fear and horror. In Cleveland itself one question lay like lead on the throats of every man and woman. Who would be the next victim? Christmas came sorrowfully to the town.

Shortly after the victims had been buried, obscene letters were received by white women in Cleveland, and similar letters by white women in Indianapolis, Indiana, postmarked at Cleveland, Mississippi. Federal post-office inspectors then came into the case. They learned that a local Negro, sharing a letter-box with two other Negroes, subscribed to an Indianapolis newspaper. One day the newspaper lay in the box and officers waited in the post-office. One of the men who shared the box came and took his mail. Then the other came and, finding nothing for himself, departed. In the afternoon a third Negro came, took the newspaper, and was arrested.

It was quickly learned from the prisoner that he had been born in Bolivar County and had left it eighteen years before to live in Indiana and Michigan. He had but recently returned to the Delta and was working as a farmhand on his mother’s little piece of land about a mile from Cleveland. Convinced that they had their man, the officers placed him in an automobile and lodged him safely in jail at Jackson, 150 miles away, before anyone in Cleveland realized that a suspect had been caught.

After a few days the prisoner made a complete confession before forty or more officials and newspaper men. He confessed committing not only the crime in Cleveland, but also that he had served a prison term in Michigan for robbing graves, and had successfully committed the same crime in Indiana without detection. He had lived in Indianapolis and obtained from the newspapers of that city the names of prominent white women to whom he had addressed obscene letters from Cleveland.

Immediately a loud outcry arose in Cleveland for the return and trial of the criminal. Threats of lynching were heard on many sides, particularly from the poor whites living in Bolivar and adjoining counties as far as fifty miles away. It became increasingly evident that the prisoner would be lynched unless strong armed forces were present at his trial. The militia may not be sent in such a case unless it is requested of the governor by the sheriff of the county. He was not a candidate for re-election, but the district attorney who must prosecute the criminal had announced his intention to seek the office again. His chances of election would be seriously impaired if he joined with the sheriff in requesting troops. Many voters were would-be lynchers. The district attorney none the less joined with the sheriff in asking that the militia be sent to the trial. The faculty and students of Delta State Teachers’ College situated in Cleveland requested the sheriff to ask for troops. Churches, clubs, and influential citizens added their voices.

Governor Conner commanded the adjutant-general of the Mississippi National Guard to order out enough men and equipment to take the prisoner from Jackson to Cleveland, protect him during the trial, and in the event of his conviction, return him to Jackson for safe-keeping, pending his appeal or execution.

Nearly six hundred militiamen converged upon Jackson from all parts of the state, care being taken to pick men from counties remote from the scene of the crime. Guardsmen from Bolivar County participated in the mobilization only to the extent of acting as kitchen police. They took no part in guarding the prisoner. An hour before the special train carrying the prisoner and troops was to depart from Jackson, pedestrians and automobiles in the vicinity of the jail were kept moving, and the car containing the prisoner moved to the railway station between marching columns of bayonets in the hands of troops instructed by their commander to “shoot to kill.”

The prisoner, heavily manacled, was placed for the night-long ride in a baggage car surrounded by picked officers and men. As the train moved across the state he aired his opinions to them at great length; quoted from his favorite philosophers, William James and Arthur Schopenhauer; discussed his theories of fatalism; couched his thoughts in excellent concise English and evinced little interest in his possible fate.

While the train was en route to Cleveland, the courthouse where the trial was to be held had been converted by other guardsmen into a fortress. It was surrounded completely by an intricate barbed-wire entanglement. The streets immediately adjacent to it were closed and barred to traffic. Machine-gun nests built of sand-bags were erected in the grounds, and other machine-guns were mounted in the windows and on the roofs to sweep every approach. Morning found troops with rifles and tear-gas guns thick on the lawn of the courthouse, swarming on the steps outside and the stairs inside, guarding every passage leading to and from the courtroom and the courtroom itself. The jail where the prisoner was to be held bristled with rifles and bayonets, and the passage along which he must pass to the courthouse was lined both sides with heavily armed men. Here were force and determination enough to overawe the strongest mob.

At four o’clock in the morning, when Cleveland was asleep, the prisoner arrived and was safely conveyed to the brightly lighted militia-guarded jail. A few hours later crowds began to descend on the town from all over the Delta, some to be admitted with passes to the courthouse, others to stand enviously behind the barbed-wire entanglements, or to talk in little groups on street corners near the scene of the trial.

In the crowd were many Negroes. They talked, laughed, and watched with keen interest and proud eyes the goings and comings of the guardsmen. They speculated on the destructiveness of their guns. “Nigger, ef I had me a swamp-injin like dat I could sho raise me a ruckus,” said a tall, gangling black boy, dancing with excitement. “Go ‘head, man,” replied his companion, pointing to a gas gun in the hands of a trooper, “I’d druther have me one er dem Gatlin’ guns. They shoots clean th’oo er oak tree and keeps a-goin’.” “Lawd have mussy, what you reckon us gwine do settin’ up here in de mouf er dem smoke-poles if dem white folks starts shootin’?” shrilly inquired a stripling yellow girl who had suddenly abandoned the washtub to come to this scene of carnival. “Dey ain’t studdin ‘bout shootin’ nobody,” boomed the voice of a man next to her. “De President told ‘em not to lessen folks got too bad.”

The mere presence of Negroes at such a time was extraordinary. Negroes usually remain indoors in the Delta when trials of this kind are in progress, for fear that the crowd may overpower the officers, lynch the prisoner, and inflict injuries upon them. Now however, completely reassured by the presence of troops, they were en fête, and the more business-like among them did a thriving business selling soft drinks to the soldiers and to the onlookers.

The Negroes were sure that the government at Washington had sent troops to protect them as well as the prisoner. They know that it was Lincoln who “sot ‘em free,” that he once lived in Washington and that ever since his day the white folks there have been on the alert to help the Negro in times of stress. It would have been difficult to make many of them believe that the guardsmen had been sent to Cleveland at the request of the officials of the local county. They could never have understood that they were present not primarily to protect anyone, but to uphold the processes of law and order of which the present prisoner was merely the transient object. The Negroes’ belief that the President of the United States had sent troops to Bolivar County for their benefit was an unfortunate conclusion for them to reach, given the conditions under which the two races live in the Delta. It might lead them to think that the federal government was ready to spread its sheltering wings to protect them in all their doings; they would then step out of the place to which white domination had assigned them and inevitably produce a series of racial conflicts. It is part of the hopeless tragedy of these utterly diverse peoples living in close juxtaposition, that the white man’s effort to do the right thing is as likely to cause trouble as his actual doing the wrong thing.

The majority of the crowd was composed of poor whites, or, as they are called in the Delta, “rednecks” or “peckerwoods.” There is no love lost between them and the Negro. They stand on the same economic level and are in direct competition as croppers and laborers. Despite the fact that they are as ignorant and as poor as Negroes and are looked down upon by landed or propertied whites, they feel themselves, as white men, to be immensely superior to the Negro. Their superiority is expressed by hating and humiliating him as much as they can. The Negro in turn hates the redneck and expresses his scorn of the whole tribe with the contemptuous phrase, “Dey ain’t nuthin’ but po’ white trash.”

The poor whites stood in groups outside the barbed wire, looking out of pale-blue eyes glittering with hatred at the troops who had cheated them of their prey. They wore faded blue overalls covered sometimes by an old overcoat, and rubber boots caked with wet mud. Stubbles of beard were on their faces, blond heads bore dust-stained hats, their hands were gnarled and dirty, their broken nails were rims of black at the extremities of their fingers. Fanatically and narrowly religious, poor and .supersititon-ridden, hating Negroes and whites of a better class, they boiled with anger and impotence as they stood frustrated by the force of steel before them.

I spoke with many of them about the trial. They spat in disgust. Their sheriff had betrayed them by asking for the militia when they could so handily have lynched “the nigger.” “He couldn’t git elected to dog-ketcher in this county no mo’.” I pondered that statement. This, after all, is a democracy. The vote of an idiot is as potent as that of a savant. They were outraged by the expense of bringing the troops. A toothless old man, tin of snuff in hand, interrupted his “dipping” to tell me, “I bet it cost nigh onto twenty thousand dollar to pertect that black son of a bitch, and if they’d ‘a’ turned him over to us we’d ‘a’ made hash out of him in no time and it wouldn’t ‘a’ cost nuthin’ but a piece of rope.”

Another said that “what it cost to pertect this danged nigger who ain’t nuthin’ but a half-human varmint would ‘a’ screened ever’ share-cropper’s house in Bolivar County.” A man wearing an old army overcoat informed me that “I spent two years in the World’s War a-fightin’ them Germans what never done anything as bad as this nigger done sawin’ up people. A white man ain’t a-goin’ to be able to live in this country if we let niggers start gittin’ biggity. I wish they’d lemme have him. I’d cut out his black balls and th’ow ‘em to the hawgs.” He meant it. Near by stood three men debating. “If a fellow knowed whether they got orders to shoot or not,” said one, “then he’d know what to do.” “They got them orders, all right,” said another. “I seen it in the paper.” “Well, that might be,” said the first speaker, “but they ain’t a-goin’ to shoot into this crowd where they’s women and children. That ain’t constitutional and it’s ag’in’ the guverment.”

They were certain that the display of force would convince the Negroes that the government of the United States would protect them whatever they might do, and thus make them “uppity.” One of them pointed to the machine gun nests and rifles and said to me, “That’s what’s a-ruinin’ ‘em and makin’ fools out of the niggers. Niggers air a-braggin’ on ever’ plantation in this county that the guverment’s a-pertectin’ ‘em and we gonna haf to kill a lot of the black bastards to knock some sense into their kinky heads.”

Daylong they stood outside the courthouse, airing their grievances to one another, shifting from foot to foot, walking wearily about, talking to the guardsmen, trying to snatch news of the progress of the trial. It was not until night fell and the trial was ended that they left the scene. They went home mollified by the verdict of the jury, but discontented because they had not been permitted to torture the prisoner slowly to death and hack his body to pieces.

In the jail the prisoner, James Coyner, sits unconcernedly through the morning, and eats his lunch quietly at noon. He is six feet four inches tall and of gigantic strength. He is dressed in a blue overall coat, a blue workshirt open at the throat, rough work trousers and heavy black shoes. His hands and feet are huge. He has soft brown eyes, sharply defined features, and his gentle countenance appears at times almost benign. He looks a shepherd of men, one in whom complete trust could be reposed; a mild giant who would use his great strength but to shelter and protect. As he sits with folded hands and bowed head he is a gargantuan ginger-bread man conjured up by the vision of a child fairy-tale haunted.

He is asked if he has any regret for committing the crime. “No,” he says, slowly, “no more than if I had spilled a glass of milk. What’s done is done. What’s bothering me right now is that this jailhouse is cold.”

Shortly after one o’clock in the afternoon the prisoner was led into the courtroom between double rows of militiamen. Every seat on the ground floor was taken by spectators. The balcony was jammed with guardsmen. They stood, too, at the doors and entrances, in the aisles, and occupied the entire row of seats directly behind the prisoner. It would have been suicidal to attempt to harm him.

The prisoner did not want a lawyer to defend him. He merely wanted to plead guilty and have done with it. The court, none the less, ordered that every member of the local bar submit his name for the defense and one of the most capable was chosen by lot to represent the defendant. Then a jury was impaneled and sat to hear the case of the State of Mississippi v. James Coyner.

The trial proceeded according to the niceties of the law in a courtroom completely orderly and silent save for the wheezings and coughings of the crowd. One by one the state’s witnesses testified. A post-office inspector outlined the circumstances under which the prisoner was arrested. A watchmaker identified the watch of the dead man later found in the prisoner’s possession, and a Negro identified the victim’s pocketknife. The brother of the dead man gave his testimony, and a timid, frightened little woman, an attaché of the Circuit Court clerk’s office, presented records bearing on the location of the farm where the prisoner lived with his mother. The confession was introduced and those portions of it admitting crimes committed elsewhere were deleted. Finally the sheriff took the stand and opened a yellow box. From it he took some objects which made the crowd gasp with horror. Here were slabs of the woman’s flesh and squares of her skin tanned as leather is tanned, found where the prisoner had secreted them in his corn-crib.

James Coyner, the only Negro in a crowd of twelve hundred whites, sat unconcerned, bored or half asleep. He asked once to go to the toilet, and was led out and brought back by a squad of soldiers. That apparently was his only contact with the world around him. His intelligent and rather sensitive face remained buried most of the time in his huge hands as he walked dream-ways remote from this courthouse in Bolivar County where he had been born and was so soon to die.

In the courtroom a strange game was being played according to archaic rules laid down long ago in England, still expressed in stilted English and Anglicized Latin. The judge, a middle-aged graying mammal, sat upon a platform peering out of his skullcase with bespectacled eyes at other mammals, the lawyers. They stood upright, in contradistinction to the generality of the animal kingdom, clothed in the wool of sheep and the fiber of cotton. Their eyes looked out of bony sockets at the twelve skull-cases and twenty-four eyes which sat in the jury-box; at the twelve hundred skullcases in the audience, some of which, by their thick-piled hair, one knew to be the heads of women. The judge leaned over. The lawyers whispered to him. He seemed to be quietly admonishing children. The heads separated and seated themselves on opposite sides of a long table.

Someone had died. Someone had indeed been brought to his death. Whence had come the bringer of death? Eyes sought him out in the courtroom. Fingers sliding along the leaves of lawbooks groped for him. Why had that man living in his little house awaiting Christmas and his new baby been chosen to die without even the garlands of a sacrfficial bull about him? Where is he now? Where has he gone? What is death?

Do you know, omniscient Judge, sitting high above the heads of men in your wide-backed chair? Do you know, Mr. District Attorney, who seem so familiar with death that you talk about it constantly? Surely you can tell us, Mr. Attorney for the Defense, for it is plain that if you defend one against something you must know the face and nature of the thing against which you interpose your learning and your strength? Or it may be that you will enlighten us, Young Guardsman, standing there with your bayoneted rifle? You are young. The down of youth is on your cheeks. Your mother is worried that you are in peril far from her side. Long ago it was written: Out of the mouths of babes shall come wisdom. But you won’t tell us. You lean silent on your long rifie, gazing into the yard below where your fellows are making the flames of bonfires leap ever higher with fresh-piled fagots.

James Coyner, a ginger-colored giant, sits at the table, half asleep, his immense strength in repose, his huge hands folded upon his knees. Then perhaps it is he who is to die, he of the more than thousand persons in the room? He about whose brown throat a hempen rope will be drawn and stretched tighter and tighter by the weight of his dangling body until his windpipe sputters and rattles, his dry lips fleck with bubbly foam, and his vertebrae, ingeniously made, are twisted and broken.

Yet at this very moment the beating of his heart floods the veins of his body to overflowing, touches to color the tiny capillaries of his toes, pours with sanguinary stream over the soft pinkish tissues of his brain. This body began to die when it was born, and all these years it has been dying to the unremitting music of his heart. The judge there on the bench, James Coyner, has a heart, too, and although he is white and free and you are black and imprisoned, it races in his separate body toward the grave even as your heart, and beats the separate tattoo which is his dirge. You are shackled and he is as free as a bird of the air, but he does not race more quickly than you nor cover the ground with firmer stride or longer step. Soon, James Coyner, you will draw away from him and his pale white figure will recede into the mist. In a little while, a day, a week, a month, some subtle chemistry will be made to work in your body so that you will be catapulted into the intersteller spaces and arrive at your dark destiny years ahead of him who now sits high and triumphant above you in his wide-backed chair.

The long afternoon wears wearily on. Outside in the gathering shadows guardsmen begin to spread the dishes for their evening meal on long wooden tables. Inside, the law goes through its measured rhythm with, “I object, Your Honor,” and, “Objection overruled,” and “Objection sustained.” In a world irreverent of form the law goes its ceremonious stylized way. There is no recess for dinner. Seven o’clock stands on the face of the dock. Is it, I wonder, really seven o’clock? It is so puzzling. How is one to know? Men measure time with superb impudence, but it is of their nature to thrust arrogantly at forces that brought about their being and will inexorably encompass their end. Yet even the magnificent egoists are confused, for if it is indeed seven o’clock here in the Mississippi courtroom where James Coyner is on trial for his life, I know that at this moment Parisians are leaving the Opéra Comique at midnight, having just heard Manon; Polynesians on Mangareva are awakening to the tropical dawn; and the ship’s bells of a British tramp in the Tasman Sea are tapping out the noon of tomorrow.

At fifteen minutes before eight the state rests. The prisoner does not take the stand. The jury is addressed by the lawyers. They receive the instructions of the court and march out. Twelve gods in rumpled suits force their way through the crowd to the jury-room. The crowd is hushed. James Coyner sleeps. On the stroke of eight the jury returns. Deity, multi-headed, sits on twelve chairs. “We, the jury, find the defendant guilty as charged.”

The crowd remains silent. There is no demonstration. Egyptian Thebes is vanished, but men still keep Books of the Dead. Now another little entry is to be made in the crowded leaves. The judge says, “James Coyner, stand up.” James stands six feet four and the color of ginger. “Have you anything to say?” “No, sir.” The judge resumes. “You have heard the verdict of the jury. You have been represented by able counsel and have had a fair trial. I now sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you are dead on Tuesday, March the fifth, between the hours specified by law. And may God Almighty in His infinite wisdom have mercy upon your soul.”

The prisoner is returned to the jail. The crowd dissolves. The courtroom is deserted. A mouse comes to nuzzle its soft gray nose among the peanut-scented papers on the floor. In the railroad yards a black locomotive coughs stertorously and backs down upon a string of cars. James Coyner will soon be on his way to Jackson, sitting manacled nightlong between rows of rifies, until he shall be brought again to Cleveland and his body buried in the rich earth of the Delta from which he sprang.

The sexual relations of Delta Negroes, particularly on the plantations where the majority of them live, are marked by a simplicity and naturalness which the white man cannot ever acquire nor fully understand. He is a creature of conventions and inhibitions. He must consider public opinion and the force of the law. Marriage, the child, and the family are still the basic units of the society in which he moves. His religion casts shadows on Eros. If it be that he is natively as sexually vigorous as the Negro, his vigor is lessened by the worries of one kind or another that constantly assail him; it is debilitated by forebodings and dark fears; it is weakened by inherited cautions of restraint, by circumlocutions of address and conflicts within his mind.

The Negro, on the other hand, is sexually completely free and untrammeled. “W’en I wants me a woman, I gits me a woman.” To him the expressions and manifestations of sex are as simple and as natural as the manifestations of nature in the wind and the sun and the rain, in the cycles of the seasons and the rounds of the growing crops. Sexual desire is an imperative need, raw and crude and strong. It is to be satisfied when and wherever it arises. It is not embroidered with the roses and raptures of romantic love. It does not proceed tortuously through devious detours of flirtation, but flies straight to its mark with the blind compulsion and devouring intensity of a speeding bullet.

Many plantation Negroes think of sexual relationships as a “po’ man’s delight.” “Cap’n,” a big black field hand told me as he shook with laughter, “niggers is as good as white folks in two places — in de bed and in de graveyard.” These Negroes, remote from the moving-picture theaters of the towns, illiterate and ignorant so that they can only spell out the Bible and the mail order catalogues, with abundant leisure which they turn to no use, regard sex as a Heaven-sent form of amusement.

Upon the structure of the Negro’s own sexual freedom another freedom is superimposed. He is in his sexual and domestic relations beyond the pale of the white man’s law and the white man’s opinion. One of my friends one day asked her gardener how many times he had been married. He scratched his head in distress, trying to remember all the ladies whom he had espoused. Finally he replied. “Ole Miss, I jes doesn’t recollect.” An hour later he brought her a pad of paper and a pencil. “Does you write down dey names, us can figger hit out.” There were Lagirtha, Pocahontas, Chlorine, Exceptional, Ruby Pearl, Arcele, Cora Maud, Ruth Rebecca, Waterene, and his present wife, Honey Bunch. He had married the first of the ladies to whom he gave his name. He had “vorced” the others by the simple process of leaving them or being left.

The white community, so potent in so many activities of Negroes, does not in the slightest degree concern itself with their domestic or sexual relations save in the exceedingly rare cases of incest which come to light, and occasional complaints of rape which are received with the greatest skepticism. Authentic cases of rape occur among Negroes and rapists are sent to the state penitentiary. Often, however, Negroes knowing the gravity with which white folks regard this crime, use the charge of rape as a means of revenge.

A justice of the peace in a Delta town told me of such a case which had come before him. He cross-examined the alleged victim. “How much underwear did you have on?” he asked. “I was wearin’ a pair drawers an’ a pair teddies,” she said. “Did this man here tear your underwear?” “Naw, suh, he didn’t tear it. He was fixin’ to tear it, so I pulled ‘em down.”

The judge exploded in his wrath. “Get out of here!” he yelled. “Liie Mae,” he said to the accuser, “if I ever catch you trying to mess up a man again, I’m going to put you in jail and keep you there until the devilment gets out of your mean hide if it takes twenty years.” “Yassuh,” she said. The defendant, a ‘spectable married man, glared at her and stepped haughtily out into the sunshine of freedom.

The laws governing marriage and divorce are rarely if ever enforced against Negroes. They are free to marry or not to marry, as they see fit, although they may live in what appears to be a state of marriage. They may commit adultery, bigamy, polyandry, or polygamy, or devise any combination of relationships, however fantastic, which their fancies may create or their needs demand. There is utterly no external compulsion of law or of white opinion to confine their sexual and domestic relations within an ordered framework.

In his religion and in his sex the Negro is on his own. It is true that he took his religion from the whites, but he has adapted it to his own uses, and he is little influenced by the white churches. Nor do they in turn attempt to press their views and motivations upon him. The life of the body and the life of the spirit are his to do with as he pleases. They are beyond the reach of the white man’s pervasive influence.

Within his own community and among his own people the Negro finds himself in complete sexual freedom. Life is a long moral holiday. It is obvious that you cannot incur the wrath of group opinion for doing that which the group itself almost without exception is doing. You cannot lose caste for committing a crime which is being universally committed. You cannot offend conventions which do not exist nor contravene standards which have never been set up. The average Delta Negro has almost no criteria of conduct by which sexual and domestic relations may be judged. The few shadowy codes which exist concern themselves almost entirely with the care in infancy of bastard children.

Sexual relations among Delta Negroes begin at a tender age —puberty comes early in this warm climate and last as long as strength lasts. A girl at the age of twenty is sexually an experienced woman of the world. A boy of the same age is a mosquito-bitten Casanova of the swamps. The crowded conditions of their cabins make them au courante to the manifestations of sex when they are children. The absence of restrictions upon them flowing from their elders gives them freedom and tacit approval when they grow older. Complete sexual license within the community keeps them life long within the frame of the current morality. Both boys and girls live more or less in sexual promiscuity until they take up an arrangement which bears some of the aspects of permanency. They then confine their activities not solely to each other, but merely to a few persons in the neighborhood. That is being “respectable.” Sexual fidelity, a manifestation of romantic love, is a conception almost entirely unknown and utterly without value physical or spiritual.

Legal marriage and legal divorce are, of course, largely disregarded. It costs money to hire a preacher and get a license. It is just too much trouble to take. If a man and a woman want to live together, they do it. They have children, remain together as long as they please, leave each other when whim dictates, and repeat the same pattern with another man or another woman. If a man and two women want to live together — a not uncommon arrangement — they set up housekeeping in common and that is all there is to it. And similarly, if a woman can engage and hold the attentions of two men, all three dwell together under the same roof for as long as they desire to continue the relationship. Whatever they may do and however they may do it, they do not offend the mores of the community.

In recent years many Delta Negroes have begun to contract legal marriages for unexpectedly strange reasons. Some of the men have found that if they have a “cotehouse license to live with a lady,” and in the course of living with her kill another Negro who has been tampering with her affections, the white folks in their inexplicable ways are not likely to regard such a crime seriously. One Negro on a plantation boasted to me that he was not only married, but had a “cotehouse license.” “I had me a commissary license once, and a levee camp license once. Now I done got me de pyore-D license from the Circus Cote clerk in Greenville. Ef I catches me a nigger kickin’ in my stall, I’m sure gwine crack down on him now.” Holy matrimony has become a thing not made in heaven, but rather a home-made. product of the plantation as a form of insurance against some uncontemplated but not improbable homicide.

Negro women, too, have latterly begun to insist upon legal marriage so that they may be undisputed claimants of the funds of life insurance policies of which they are beneficiaries. Sometimes a man lives with a woman without marriage, naming “my wife” in the policy as beneficiary. He may leave her, legally marry another woman, and die. A contest over the funds then ensues between the women, each claiming that she is the wife. Or the man may marry a woman and, without legal divorce, marry or live with another. This relation again gives rise to a contest between the two women. The courts of Mississippi have been filled with cases involving disputed insurance moneys arising from these confused relationships. But sacred matrimony is slowly coming in to its own through the roundabout way of life insurance policies. If there were enough of them, the Negroes of the Delta might eventually succumb to the ways of white folks.

On the plantations there is a constant shifting about of women among the men, as well as the constant carrying on of sporadic sexual relationships with dwellers on adjoining plantations. It is a not uncommon thing for a Negro to work from sunup to Sundown in the hot fields, then walk ten miles up the road to see a woman, spend most of the night with her, and arrive on his own plantation just in time to catch his mules for the plow and begin a long day’s work. In the summer the roads are alive with Negroes at all hours of the night from the coming of darkness to dawn, as they go to and fro on missions of love to distant cabins.

During the season of almost uninterrupted leisure, which runs from the gathering of the crop in October until the planting and plowing in early spring, a man may seek a woman to live with him during these months who has a reputation for sexual ardor. It does not matter that she is a poor cook, an indifferent housekeeper, and an incompetent if not useless field worker qualities which frequently dictate the Negro’s choice when he is contemplating a union of some permanency. During the long period of leisure which stretches before him he prefers decor and warmth to utility. When however, the time comes to get the cotton out of the grass and hoe-hands are badly needed to pull the crop through, he quite unceremoniously kicks his fragile light of love out of the house and installs a strong, muscular woman who knows how to work daylong under the hot sun.

There is at least one definite strongly rooted sexual convention among the Delta Negroes. It is that if a man is living with a woman he may quite freely have sexual relations with other women with the more or less tacit knowledge and consent of his wife or mistress, and the same freedom is permitted the woman. However, neither may carry on these extra-marital relations under the nose of each other nor flaunt them in each other’s faces. They sum up this convention in these words: “If you does it in a nice kinder way — don’t disturb nobody’s peace — keeps peace at home and peace where it’s at — and wipes yo’ mouf [that is, the relationship must be secret], dat’s all right and won’t no trouble come.”

Delta Negroes neither know nor recognize such a status as the illegitimacy of children. If a child is the result of a casual sexual contact with a passer-by in a haystack or a henhouse, no stigma is cast upon it at birth or thereafter. The prospective mother may sometimes leave the neighborhood to bear the child. Upon her return with it she will invariably reply to questions concerning its paternity that, “Its papa he dead”; or, “Its papa he runned off.” There is a tacit and dignified acceptance of this explanation, although every person in the community knows that it is untrue. A child is a child, for all that, whether it was born within or without the bonds of wedlock. It is a creature to be loved at birth and later on will be useful in the fields.

The mother of an illegitimate child loses neither caste nor the opportunity of marriage. Plantation Negro men feel, indeed, that there is something vaguely amiss with a girl who has not had sexual relations with a number of men, or has not borne a child or two before she has gone to live with some one man. They much prefer a woman of this kind to the rare virgin or non-promiscuous woman.

Negroes undoubtedly love children. It is for this reason, perhaps, that Negro women in the South are prized as nurses and often achieve lifelong attachments with the children they nurse. The child, too, has a definite economic value in the rural family as a farmhand. For these reasons and because no stigma attaches to an unmarried mother or to illegitimate children, a man has no hesitation in marrying or taking to live with him a woman who has had children by unnamed and unknown men. If she does not find a man and is unable to care for them, dozens of Negro families will eagerly adopt them into their households. Despite the fact that there are nearly three hundred thousand Negroes in the Delta, there is no orphan problem.

The use of contraceptives among Delta Negroes is almost unknown, although in the towns there is some knowledge of contraceptual devices. In the country women occasionally use for this purpose a tea brewed from the roots of the cotton plant at a certain stage of its growth. On a plantation I saw a young Negro woman pull up two young cotton plants. The Negro overseer yelled at her across the fields. “I sees you, gal,” he shouted. “Gwine be big doin’s tonight. Dat ole big-headed nigger mus’ be done come back fum town.” The girl giggled. “How come you sees so much, Mr. Galley?” she said. “Dat’s what de boss-man keeps me for,” he replied. She went giggling down the dusty road, the green plants clutched to her bosom.

The majority of Negroes here see no need for contraceptives. Children are a definite economic asset. It is unwise, therefore, to limit the size of families. If too many arrive, the Negro household is extraordinarily flexible. If there isn’t room in the beds there is always room on pallets laid on the floor or by the chimney-corner. The Negro may with complete assurance invite more people to dinner than there are places at the table. Nor have contraceptives any value in preventing the birth of children whose coming would cast a social stigma upon the unmarried mother.

In quite the same way sexual prophylaxis as a preventive of venereal diseases is frequently unknown, and when known is almost completely disregarded. Those who know of the existence of prophylactics — and the knowledge is fairly general in the towns — feel that they are either too expensive to use or too troublesome to apply. The incidence of syphillis and gonnorrhea in the Delta is incredibly high. In the opinion of physicians, health officers, prison officials, plantation managers, and others who come in contact with masses of Negroes, nearly 80 per cent of the Negroes in the whole area suffer from venereal diseases.

It is inevitable under the circumstances that this condition should arise. These illnesses are regarded as having the transiency and triviality of common head colds. They are worthy of thought only to the extent that they interrupt normal sexual activities. The person infected is interested not primarily in curing the disease, but merely in arresting its symptoms so that he may resume his sexual life. It is common knowledge that when a white man offers to send a Negro at his own expense to a reputable physician for the treatment of syphilis, the Negro usually will not go. In the first place, he regards the illness as of no great importance to his health or happiness. In the second place, it is too much trouble to go for frequent and perhaps prolonged treatments. The regimen of the cure is too severe, and pending its duration he is sternly forbidden to drink or indulge in sexual relatipns. He goes, therefore, to some white or Negro quack who quickly arrests the symptoms and discharges the patient as cured. Or he applies some patent nostrum purchased at a drug store and skips merrily on his way, a victim and a carrier for life of a dread disease.

The Delta Negro is not only appallingly ignorant of the causes, cures, and consequences of venereal diseases, but almost invariably if a white man tries to enlighten him on the subject he will politely listen, regard him as slightly cracked, and leave him to apply his own remedies. A little while ago on the streets of a Delta town I met an old Negro whom I knew. We stopped to chat. He had a bundle under his arm. By way of conversation I asked him where he was going. “Well, suh,” he replied, “I’m jes’ carryin’ dese things to ole brother Williamson. Us b’longs to de same lodge, de Independent Brothers of Charity. He at home down sick wid de runnin’ range [gonorrhoea]. I was jes’ takin’ him some shirts, dese fat-pine knots for a fire, an’ a little bit er cawn whisky in dis jug.”

I told him that if brother Williamson did not go to a physician he would be down sick with the runnin’ range until Gabriel blew his horn; and that corn whisky would have the same effect on the brother’s illness that the fat-pine knots would have on his fire. My friend fervently “yassuh’d” everything I said, and he “sho wuz gwine tell brother Williamson.” But I knew very well that he would not say anything, and although he regarded me as a fool with good intentions, I was none the less a fool.

The spread of venereal diseases among Delta Negroes is accelerated by their ignorance of or refusal to apply sexual prophylaxis, by their refusal to interrupt sexual activities while infected, and because many of them think that a cure may be had by infecting another person. Most of them feel utterly no social responsibility to the community, and therefore no restraint in spreading these diseases. Some of them are filled with a motive of revenge which can be satisfied only by passing their infection on to unnamed and unknown persons. So common is this practice, that Negroes have created a formula which expresses their feelings. “She gave it to me — he gave it to her — I’m going to give it to somebody else.”

The conditions outlined are those which characterize the sexual lives of masses of Negroes in this area. It would be neither fair nor accurate, however, to conclude that there are not many exceptions to the general rule. Hundreds of Negroes as individuals and in family groups lead orderly, correct, and upright lives of the utmost probity sexually as well as in other ways. Their standards are those of sound people everywhere, whether white or black. Their points of view are stable and high-minded. Their conduct is in the best tradition of the good life. They are living examples of rectitude and sanity whom the mass of their brethren might well emulate.