African Americans; United States -- Race relations
city of Mound Bayou, was at Vicksburg and Greenville and Memphis, and
then repaired once more to the contrasting North.
Crossing the Mason-Dixon line was rather a magical and wonderful
event for me. After all, the North, with its mighty cities and
industrialized populations, is merely prose to one who comes from
England. Pennsylvania is a projection of Lancashire and Yorkshire, New
York is a projection of London, and massive Washington has something
of the oppressiveness of English park drives and Wellingtonias. But
southward one divines another and a better country. It has a glamour;
it lures. There the orange grows and there are palms; there is a hotter
sun and brighter flowers. Human beings there, one surmises, have a
more romantic disposition and warmer imagination. Reposing on the vast
feudalism of Negro labor there is a more stately way of living, life is
more spacious. And at the resorts on the coast of Florida and the Gulf
of Mexico a great number of people live for pleasure and happiness, and
not for business and ambition.
I journeyed on a white-painted steamer in the evening down the Potomac
to Old Point Comfort, leaving behind me the noise and glare of
Washington and the hustle of Northern American civilization. It was
the crossing of a frontier—without show of passports or examination
of trunks, the passing to a new country, with a different language and
different ways. The utter silence of the river was a great contrast
to the clangor of the streets of Philadelphia and Baltimore and the
string of towns I had been passing through on my way South. Sunset was
reflected deep in the stream, and mists crept over the surface of the
water. Then the moon silvered down on our course, my cabin window was
full open and the moon looked in. I lay in a capacious sort of cottage
bed and was enchanted by the idea of going to “Dixie,” of which we
had all sung so much; and the soft Southern airs and night and the
throbbing of the river steamer gliding over the placid water gave an
assurance of some new refreshment of spirit. With a quaint irrelevance
the whole British army, and indeed the nation, had been singing
“Dixie” songs throughout the war—“Just try to picture me, way down
in Tennessee” we were always asking of one another. Now, behold, the
war was over, and it might be possible to go there and forget a little
about all that sordid and tumultuous European quarrel.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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