CHAPTER XXVIII. CAUGHT IN A SOUTHERN PEONAGE CAMP

It was while I was in Birmingham that the industrial depression reached

rock bottom. In the depth of this industrial paralysis the iron workers

of Birmingham struck for better pay. I, with a train load of other

strikers, went to Louisiana and the whole bunch of us were practically

forced into peonage. It was a case of “out of the frying pan into the

fire.” We had been saying that the mill owners had driven us “into

slavery,” for they had made us work under bad conditions; but after

a month in a peon camp, deep in the swamps of Louisiana, we knew more

about slavery than we did before. And we knew that work in the rolling

mills, bad as it was, was better than forced labor without pay. To-day

when I hear orators rolling out the word “slavery” in connection with

American wages and working conditions, I have to laugh. For any man who

has ever had a taste of peonage, to say nothing of slavery, knows that

the wage system is not real slavery; it's not the genuine, lash-driven,

bloodhound-hunted, swamp-sick African slavery. None is genuine without

Simon Legree and the Louisiana bloodhounds. The silk-socked wage slave,

toiling eight hours for six dollars, is not the genuine old New Orleans

molasses slave. He may carry a band and give a daily street parade, but

if he's not accompanied by Simon Legree and the bloodhounds, he is not

a genuine Uncle Tom, his slavery is less than skin deep. You can't fool

me. I know what real slavery is. I know as much about slavery as the man

that made it. He's the guy that taught me. I worked under Simon Legree

in Louisiana.

On the way to New Orleans we paused at a siding, and a native asked me,

“Who are all them men, and which way are they goin'?”

I told him “which way” we were going, and that we were needing jobs. He

replied:

“You-all are comin' down hyah now looking for food and work. In '65 you

was down hyah lookin' fo' blood!”

When we reached the great city on the Mississippi, we scattered over

the town looking for jobs. I saw a pile of coal in the street before a

boarding-house. I asked for the job of carrying in the coal. There were

two tons of it. I toted it in and was paid a dollar. New Orleans was a

popular winter resort where northerners came to escape the severe cold

of the North Atlantic States. I was given the job of yard-man in this

boarding-house. I carried in groceries, peeled potatoes, scrubbed the

kitchen floor and built fires each evening in the guests' rooms. Each

room had a grate, and I carried up kindling and coal for all of them.

For this work I received a dollar a day, with two meals (dinner and

supper) and was permitted to carry away from the kitchen all the cooked

food that remained after the guests had eaten. This privilege had grown

out of the custom of the colored help in the South having their “man”

to feed. I had several men to feed. My “gang” was still looking for work

and not finding any. Times were desperate. For five cents a man could

get a glass of beer and floor room to sleep on in a lodging-house for

homeless men. This was called a “Five Cent Flop” house. My pals were not

able at times to raise the five cents a day to buy sleeping quarters. It

was late fall and too cold to sleep in the “jungle” down by the levee.

The poor fellows were able to stave off starvation by visiting various

free lunches during the day. Every night I arrived with my dollar, and

that meant beer and beds for a score. I also brought along a flour sack

half full of biscuits, cold pancakes, corn bread, chicken necks and

wings and scraps of roasts and steaks. These hungry men, with their

schooners of beer, made a feast of these scraps. My loyalty in coming

every night and giving them everything I could scrape together touched

them deeply. They regarded me as deserving special honor, and while they

believed in democracy as a general proposition, they voted that it would

be carrying equality too far if they permitted me to get no more out

of my work than all the rest got. So they decided that I was to have a

fifteen-cent bed each night instead of a five-cent flop with the rest

of them. And I was assigned to the royal suite of that flop house, which

consisted of a cot with a mosquito bar over it.

At this time they were holding “kangaroo” court in the New Orleans

jail. Every vagrant picked up by the police was tried and sentenced and

shipped out to a chain-gang camp. Nearly every man tried was convicted.

And there were plenty of camp bosses ready to “buy” every vagrant the

officers could run in. My bunch down at the flop house was in deadly

terror of being “kangarooed” and sent to a peon camp in the rice swamps.

One day when I was renewing the fuel in the room of a Mrs. Hubbard from

Pittsburgh, I found no one in the apartment and Mrs. Hubbard's pearls

and other jewels lying on the dresser. Immediately I was terrified with

thought of the kangaroo court. I knew that the jewels were valued at

several thousands of dollars. If I went away some one else might come

into the room and possibly steal the jewels, for they were lying in

plain sight and were valuable enough to tempt a weak-willed person. I

sounded an alarm and stayed in the doorway. I refused to leave the room

until Mrs. Hubbard returned and counted her valuables.

She found them all there and thanked me for guarding them. She said

it was by an oversight that she had gone away without locking up her

treasures. She asked me how she should reward me. I told her that I

was already rewarded, for I had guarded her jewels in order to protect

myself from being suspected of their theft and so kangarooed into a

slave-camp.

But in spite of all my precautions, I landed there after all. The gang

down at the flop house was dazzled by an employment agent, who offered

to ship them out into the rice country to work on the levee for a dollar

a day and cakes. The men were wild for a square meal and the feel of a

dollar in their jeans. So they all shipped out to the river levee and I

went along with the gang.

As our train rattled over the trestles and through the cypress swamps

the desperate iron workers were singing:

“We'll work a hundred days,

And we'll get a hundred dollars,

And then go North,

And all be rich and happy!”

When we reached the dyke-building camp I learned how ignorant I really

was. I could not do the things the older men could. I was young and

familiar only with the tools of an iron puddler. The other men were ten

years older and had acquired skill in handling mule-teams and swinging

an ax. They saw I couldn't do anything, so they appointed me water

carrier. The employing boss was what is now called hard-boiled. He was a

Cuban, with the face of a cutthroat. Doubtless he was the descendant of

the Spanish-English buccaneers who used to prowl the Caribbean Sea and

make headquarters at New Orleans. Beside this pirate ancestry I'll bet

he was a direct descendant of Simon Legree. He suspected that I couldn't

do much in a dyking camp, so he swarmed down on me the second week I was

there and ordered me to quit the water-carrying job and handle a mule

team and a scraper. I saw death put an arm around my neck right then and

there. But I wouldn't confess that I couldn't drive a team.

I put the lines over my head, said “Go 'long” as I had heard other

muleteers say, and, grasping the handles of the scraper, I scooped up a

slip load of clay. My arms were strong and this was no trick at all. But

getting the load was not the whole game. The hardest part was to let go.

I guided the lines with one hand and steadied the scraper with the other

as I drove up on the dump. Then I heaved up on the handles, the scraper

turned over on its nose and dumped the load. But that isn't all it

dumped. The mules shot ahead when the load was released, and the lines

around my neck jerked me wrong side up. The handle of the scraper hit

me a stunning blow in the face and the whole contraption dragged over

my body bruising me frightfully. I staggered to my feet with one eye

blinded by the blood that flowed from a gash in my brow. Simon Legree

cursed me handsomely and told me I was fired. I asked him where I would

get my pay, and he told me he was paying me a compliment by letting me

walk out of that camp alive. I went to the cook shack and washed the

blood off my face. I was a pretty sick boy. The cook was a native and

was kind to me.

“Boy, you're liable to get lockjaw from that cut,” he said. “I'll put

some of this horse liniment on it and it'll heal up.” He then bandaged

it with court-plaster.

“It's a long way back to New Orleans,” the cook concluded. “And you

might as well have something to keep your ribs from hitting together.”

He cut off a couple of pounds of raw bacon and put it in my pocket

together with a “bait” of Plowboy tobacco. And so I hit the road. When I

came to the place where my pals were working, cutting willows along the

levee, I told them of my plight.

“Never mind, boy,” they said. “You go back to New Orleans and wait for

us. After we've worked our hundred days to get a hundred dollars each,

we will work a few days more to get a hundred dollars for you. Then

we'll all go north and be rich together.”

I began footing it thirty-five miles to the city. I decided, like Queen

Isabella, to pawn my jewels to enable me to discover America again. I

had an old ring and I met a darky who had a quarter. He got my ring.

After tramping all day I was exhausted. I came to a negro cabin and went

in and offered the “mammy” a pound of bacon for a pound of corn pone. I

further bargained to give the first half of my other pound of bacon if

she'd cook the second half for me to eat. She cooked my share of the

bacon and set it and the corn bread on the table. I ate heartily for a

while, but after two or three slices of the bacon, I was fed up on it.

She hadn't cooked enough of the grease out of it. I began feeding this

bacon to a pickininny who sat beside me.

“Man, don't give away your meat,” the mammy said. I told her that I had

had all I wanted. Then she said to the pickininny:

“Child, doan eat that meat. Save it foh you papa when he come home.”

When I got into New Orleans the next morning, I traded my Plowboy

tobacco for a bar of laundry soap. With my twenty-five cents I bought

a cotton undershirt. Then I went into the “jungle” at Algiers, a town

across the river from New Orleans, and built a fire in the jungle (a

wooded place where hoboes camp) and heated some water in an old tin pail

I found there. Then I took off all my clothes and threw my underwear

away. A negro who stood watching me said:

“White man, are you throwing them clothes away?”

“I certainly am,” I replied.

“Why, them underclothes is northern underclothes. Them's woolen clothes.

Them's the kind of underclothes I like.”

“You wouldn't like that bunch of underclothes,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because if you look in the seams you will find something that is

unseemly. I've been out in a levee camp.”

“Hush mah mouf, white man,” laughed the negro. “Them little things would

never bother a Louisiana nigger. Why we have them things with us all the

time. We just call 'em our little companions.”

He picked up the garments and walked off proud and happy. I took my soap

and warm water and scrubbed myself from crown to heel. I put my clothing

in the pail with more soap and water and boiled the outfit thoroughly.

Then I went back to New Orleans and got my old job in the

boarding-house. I saved all my money except my fifteen cents for the

nightly flop. A month later my gang came roaring back from the peon

camp. They had worked thirty days and had not got a cent. Slave-driver

Legree had driven them out when they demanded a reckoning. They were

lucky to escape with their lives, their cooties and their appetites.

Instead of financing me, I had to finance them again. They finally got

cleaned up and we all went back to Birmingham, where the strike was

over.

“Show us that spieler,” they said, “who told us the wage system was the

worst kind of slavery. If daily wages is slavery, God grant that they

never set us free again.”