“What’s the trouble out there?” asked Kenneth. He wasn’t much interested, for he could hear Mamie, in the kitchen beyond, singing some popular air to the accompaniment of chicken-frying.
“It’s a case where coloured farmers claim they can’t get fair settlements from their landlords for their crops at the end of the year,” explained his mother.
“Why don’t they hire a lawyer?” Kenneth asked, with little interest.
“That shows you’ve forgotten all about things in the South,” said Bob with mingled triumph and despair at his brother’s ignorance. “There isn’t a white lawyer in Georgia who’d take a case like this. In the first place, the courts would be against him because his client’s a Negro, and in the second place, he’d have to buck this combination of landlords, storekeepers, and bankers who are getting rich robbing Negroes. If a white lawyer took a case of a Negro sharecropper, he’d either sell out to the landlord or be scared to death before he ever got to court. And as for a Negro lawyer,” here Bob laughed sardonically, “he’d be run out of town by the Ku Klux Klan or lynched almost before he took the case!”
“Oh, I don’t know so much about that!” Kenneth replied. “There are landlords, without doubt, who rob their tenants, but after all there are only a few of them. And furthermore,” he declared as Mamie entered the room with a platter of fried chicken in one hand and a plate of hot biscuits in the other, “supper looks just a little bit more interesting to me right now than landlords, tenants, or problems of any kind.”
Mamie divested herself of her apron and sat down to the table. She was an attractive girl of twenty-two or twenty-three, more slender than Bob, and about Kenneth’s height. Her hair was darker than that of either of her brothers, was parted in the middle and brushed down hard on either side. Though not a pretty girl, she had an air about her as though she was happy because of the sheer joy of living. She had graduated from Atlanta University two years before, and with two other girls had been teaching the seven grades in the little ramshackle building that served as a coloured school in the town. That hard work had not as yet begun to tell on her. She seemed filled with buoyant good health and blessed with a lively good nature. Yet she too was inclined to spells of depression like Bob’s. She resembled him more nearly than Kenneth. As has every comely coloured girl in towns of the South like Central City, she had had many repulsive experiences when she had to fight with might and main to ward off unwelcome attentions—both of the men of her own race and of white men. Especially had this been true since the death of her father. Often her face overclouded as she thought of them. She, like Bob, felt always as though they were living on top of a volcano—and never knew when it might erupt. …
The four sat at supper. Forgotten were problems other than the immediate one of Kenneth’s in getting his practice under way. Eagerly they talked of his plans, his prospects, his ambitions. Bob said nothing until they began to discuss him and his plans for returning to school the following fall, now that Kenneth was back to complete the settling of the small details that remained in connection with Joe Harper’s estate. …
It was a happy and reasonably prosperous, intelligent family group—one that can be duplicated many, many times in the South.
II
Situated in the heart of the farming section of the State, with its fertile soil, its equable climate, its forests of pine trees, Central City was one of the flourishing towns of South Georgia. Its population was between eight and ten thousand, of which some four thousand were Negroes. The wealth and prosperity of the town depended not so much on the town itself as it did on the farmers of the fertile lands surrounding it. To Central City they came on Saturday afternoons to sell their cotton, their corn, their hogs and cows, and to buy in turn sugar, cloth, coffee, farming-implements, shoes, and amusement. It was divided into four nearly equal sections by the intersection of the tracks of the Central of Georgia Railroad and of the Georgia, Southern and Florida Railway. Drowsy, indolent during the first six days of the week, Central City awoke on Saturday morning for “goin’t town” day with its bustle and excitement and lively trade. Then the broad dustiness of Lee Street was disturbed by the Fords and muddied wagons of farmers, white and black. In the wagons were usually splint-bottom chairs or boards stretched from side to side, occupied by scrawny, lanky “po’ whites” with a swarm of children to match, clad in single-piece garments, once red in colour and now, through many washings with lye soap, an indeterminate reddish brown. Or, if the driver was a Negro, he generally was surrounded by just as many little black offspring, clad also in greyish or reddish-brown garments, and scrambling over the farm products being brought to town for sale or exchange for the simple and few store products needed. And beside him the usually buxom, ample-bodied wife, clad in her finest and most gaudy clothing to celebrate the trip to town looked forward to eagerly all the week.
Crowded were the streets with vehicles and the sidewalks with the jostling, laughing, loudly talking throng of humans. After the noonday whistle had blown signalling release to the hordes of whites working in the cotton mill over beyond the tracks, the crowd was augmented considerably, the newcomers made up of those who had deserted the country districts, discouraged by the hard life of farming, by rainy and unprofitable seasons, by the ravages of the boll weevil and of landlords, both working dire distress on poor white and black alike. Discouraged,
