The Fire in the Flint

poverty and filth and abject ignorance. There were but few superficial or recognizable differences. One was that the children wore, instead of the brown plumpness of the Negro children, a pale, emaciated, consumptive air because of the long hours in the lint-laden confines of the mills. The men were long, stooped, cadaverous-appearing. The women were sallow, unattractive, sad-looking, each usually with the end of a snuff-stick protruding from her mouth. The children, when they played at all, did so in listless, wearied, uninterested, and apathetic fashion. The houses looked even more gaunt and bare than those in the quarter which housed the poorer Negroes, for the tiny patches of ground that fronted the houses here in “Factoryville” were but seldom planted with flowers. More often it was trampled down until it became a hard, red-clay, sunbaked expanse on which the children, and dogs as emaciated and forlorn, sometimes played.

Here there was but one strong conviction, but one firm rock of faith to which they clung⁠—the inherent and carefully nurtured hatred of “niggers” and a belief in their own infinite superiority over their dark-skinned neighbours. Their gods were Tom Watson and Hoke Smith and Tom Hardwick and other demagogic politicians and office-seekers who came to them every two or four years and harangued them on the necessity of their upholding white civilization by reelecting them to office. But one appeal was needed⁠—but one was used⁠—and that one always successfully. Meanwhile, their children left school and entered the mill to work the few years that such a life gave them. And, in the meantime, the black children they hated so-deprived by prejudice from working in the mills, and pushed forward by often illiterate but always ambitious black parents⁠—went to school.⁠ ⁠…

This, in brief, was the Central City to which Kenneth had returned. A typical Southern town⁠—reasonably rich as wealth is measured in that part of Georgia⁠—rich in money and lands and cot⁠—amazingly ignorant in the finer things of life. Noisy, unreflective, their wants but few and those easily satisfied. The men, self-made, with all that that distinctly American term implies. The women concerned only with their petty household affairs and more petty gossip and social intercourse. But, beyond these, life was and is a closed book. Or, more, a book that never was written or printed.

The companionship and inspiration of books was unknown. Music, even with the omnipresent Victrola, meant only the latest bit of cheap jazz or a Yiddish or Negro dialect song. Art, in its many forms was considered solely for decadent, effete “furriners.” Hostility would have met the woman of the town’s upper class who attempted to exhibit any knowledge of art. Her friends would have felt that she was trying “to put something over on them.” As for any man of the town, at best he would have been considered a “little queer in the head,” at the worst suspected of moral turpitude or perversion. But two releases from the commonplace, monotonous life were left. The first, liquor. Bootlegging throve. The woods around Central City were infested with “moonshine” stills that seldom were still. The initiated drove out to certain lonely spots, deposited under well-known trees a jug or other container with a banknote stuck in its mouth. One then gave a certain whistle and walked away. Soon there would come an answering signal. One went back to the tree and found the money gone but the container filled with a colourless or pale-yellow liquid.⁠ ⁠… Or, the more affluent had it brought to them in town hidden under wagon-loads of fodder or cotton.

The other and even more popular outlet of unfulfilled and suppressed emotions was sex. Central City boasted it had no red-light district like Macon and Savannah and Atlanta. That was true. All over the town were protected domiciles housing slatternly women. To them went by circuitous routes the merchants whose stores were on Lee Street. To them went the gangs from the turpentine camps on their periodic pilgrimages to town on payday. And a traveller on any of the roads leading from the town could see, on warm evenings, automobiles standing with engines stilled and lights dimmed on the side of the road. Down on Harris and Butler Streets in “Darktown” were other houses. Here were coloured women who seemed never to have to work. Here was seldom seen a coloured man. And the children around these houses were usually lighter in colour than in other parts of “Darktown.”

Negro fathers and mothers of comely daughters never allowed them to go out unaccompanied after dark. There were too many dangers from men of their own race. And even greater ones from men of the other race. There had been too many disastrous consequences from relaxation of vigil by certain bowed and heartbroken coloured parents. And they had no redress at law. The laws of the State against intermarriage saw to it that there should be none. Central City inhabitants knew all these things. But familiarity with them had bred the belief that they did not exist⁠—that is, they were thought a natural part of the town’s armament against scandal. One soon grew used to them and forgot them. The town was no worse than any other⁠—far better than most.

It was a rude shock to Kenneth when he began to see these things through an entirely different pair of eyes than those with which he had viewed them before he left Central City for the North. The sordidness, the blatant vulgarity, the viciousness of it all⁠—especially the houses on Butler and Harris Streets⁠—appalled and sickened him. Even more was he disgusted by the complacent acceptance of the whole miserable business by white and black alike. On two or three occasions he tentatively mentioned it to a few of those he had known intimately years before. Some of them laughed indulgently⁠—others cautioned him to leave it alone. Finding no response, he shrugged his shoulders and dismissed the whole affair from his mind. “It was here long before I was born,”