All the trading done on these days did not take place over the counters of the stores that lined Lee Street. In the dirty little alleyways from off the main street, men with furtive eyes but bold ways dispensed synthetic gin, “real” rye whisky, and more often “white mule,” as the moonshine corn whisky is called. Bottles were tilted and held to the mouth a long time and later the scene would be enlivened by furious but shortlived fights. Guns, knives, all sorts of weapons appeared with miraculous speed—the quarrel was settled, the wounded or killed removed, and the throng forgot the incident in some new joyous and usually commonplace or sordid adventure.
When darkness began to approach, the wagons and Fords, loaded with merchandise for the next week, and with the children clutching sticky and brightly coloured candies, began to rumble countrywards, and Central City by nightfall had resumed its sleepy, indolent, and deserted manner.
From the corner where Oglethorpe Avenue crossed Lee Street and where stood the monument to the Confederate Dead, the business section extended up Lee Street for three blocks. Here the street was dignified with a narrow “park,” some twenty feet in width, which ran the length of the business thoroughfare. Over beyond the monument lay the section of Central City where lived the more well-to-do of its white inhabitants. Georgia Avenue was here the realm of the socially elect. Shaded by elms, it numbered several more or less pretentious homes of two stories, some of brick, the majority of frame structure. Here were the homes of Roy Ewing, president of the local Chamber of Commerce and owner of Ewing’s General Merchandise Emporium; of George Baird, president of the Bank of Central City; of Fred Griswold, occupying the same relation to Central City’s other bank, the Smith County Farmers’ Bank; of Ralph Minor, owner and manager of the Bon Ton Store.
Here too were the wives of these men, busying themselves with their household duties and the minor social life of the community. In the morning they attended to the many details of housekeeping; in the afternoon and early evening they sat on their front porches or visited neighbours or went for a ride. Placid, uneventful, stupid lives they led with no other interests than the petty affairs of a small and unprogressive town.
The young girls of Central City usually in the afternoon dressed in all their small-town finery and strolled down to Odell’s Drug Store where the young men congregated. Having consumed a frothy soda or a gummy, sweetish sundae, they went to the Idle Hour Moving Picture Palace to worship at the celluloid shrine of a favourite film actor, usually of the highly romantic type. Then the stroll homewards, always past the Central City Hotel, a two-storied frame structure located at the corner of Lee Street and Oglethorpe Avenue opposite the Confederate monument. In front were armchairs, occupied in warm weather, which was nearly all the year round, by travelling salesmen or other transients. Often a sidelong glance and a fleeting, would-be-coy smile would cause one of the chair-occupants to rise as casually as he could feign, yawn and stretch, and with affected nonchalance stroll down Lee Street in the wake of the smiling one. …
At the other end of Lee Street from the residential section of the well-to-do whites, past the business section of that main artery of the town, lay that portion known generally as “Darktown.” Fringing it were several better-than-the-average homes, neat, well painted, comfortable-looking, fronted with smooth lawns and tidy, colourful flowerbeds. It was one of these at the corner of Lee and State Streets that the Harpers owned and occupied.
After crossing State Street, an abrupt descent was taken by Lee Street. Here lived in squalor and filth and abject poverty the poorer class of Negroes. The streets were winding, unpaved lanes, veritable seas and rivers of sticky, gummy, discouraging mud in rainy weather, into which the wheels of vehicles sank to their hubs if the drivers of those conveyances were indiscreet enough to drive through them. In summer these eddying wallows of muck and filth and mud dry up and are transformed into swirling storms of germ-laden dust when a vagrant wind sweeps over them or a vehicle drives through them, choking the throats of unlucky passersby, and, to the despair of the dusky housewives, flying through open windows. The houses that bordered these roads were for the most part of three and four rooms, the exteriors unpainted or whitewashed, the interiors gloomy and smelly. But few of them had sanitary arrangements, and at the end of the little patch of ground that was back of each of them, in which a few discouraged vegetables strove to push their heads above the ground, there stood another unpainted structure, small, known as “the privy.” In front there was nearly always some attempt at flower-cultivation, the tiny beds bordered with bottles, shells, and bits of brightly coloured glass. The ugliness of the houses in many instances was hidden in summertime by vines and rambler roses that covered the porches and sometimes the fronts of the houses.
Around these houses, in the streets, everywhere, there played a seemingly innumerable horde of black and brown and yellow children, noisy, quarrelsome, clad usually in one-piece dresses of the same indeterminate shade of grey or red or brown that was seen on the country children on Saturday. In front of many of the houses, there sat on sunny days an old and bent man or ancient woman puffing the omnipresent corncob pipe. …
A half-mile westward from “Darktown,” and separated from it by the Central of Georgia Railroad tracks, stood the Central City Cotton Spinning-Mill. Clustered around its ugly redbrick walls stood dwellings that differed but little from those of “Darktown.” Here were the same dingy, small, unsanitary, unbeautiful, and unpainted dwellings. Here were the same muddy or dusty unpaved streets. Here were the same squalor and
