“You don't help me,” he goes on, “you don't help me at all. You only make it harder. Yes, this thing is worse than the others. I know that. But I want money--and fool things like this _have_ sometimes made it. No, I won't give it up. No, there's no use making any more promises now. I know myself now. And you ought to know me by this time, too. Why can't you let me alone altogether? I should think, when you see what I am, you'd let me be. “God help you! if you'd only stay away it wouldn't be so hard to go to hell!” CHAPTER XVI There's a lot of counties in Georgia where the blacks are equal in number to the whites, and two or three counties where the blacks number over the whites by two to one. It was fur a little town in one of the latter that we pinted ourselves, Doctor Kirby and me and Sam--right into the blackest part of the black belt. That country is full of big-sized plantations, where they raise cotton, cotton, cotton, and then _more_ cotton. Some of 'em raises fruit, too, and other things, of course; but cotton is the main stand-by, and it looks like it always will be. Some places there shows that things can't be so awful much changed since slavery days, and most of the niggers are sure enough country niggers yet. Some rents their land right out from the owners, and some of 'em crops it on the shares, and very many of 'em jest works as hands. A lot of 'em don't do nigh so well now as they did when their bosses was their masters, they tell me; and then agin, some has done right well on their own hook. They intrusted me, because I never had been use to looking at so many niggers. Every way you turn there they is niggers and then more niggers. Them that thinks they is awful easy to handle out of a natcheral respect fur white folks has got another guess coming. They ain't so bad to get along with if you keep it most pintedly shoved into their heads they _is_ niggers. You got to do that especial in the black belt, jest because they _is_ so many of 'em. They is children all their lives, mebby, till some one minute of craziness may strike one of them, and then he is a devil temporary. Mebby, when the crazy fit has passed, some white woman is worse off than if she was dead, or mebby she _is_ dead, or mebby a loonatic fur life, and that nigger is a candidate fur a lynching bee and ginerally elected by an anonymous majority. Not that _all_ niggers is that-a-way, nor _half_ of 'em, nor very _many_ of 'em, even--but you can never tell _which_ nigger is going to be. So in the black belt the white folks is mighty pertic'ler who comes along fooling with their niggers. Fur you can never tell what turn a nigger's thoughts will take, once anything at all stirs 'em up.