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 Ihear 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. Iworked 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. Icarried 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 Iarrived 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. Iknew 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.
