The typical social life of the Negro is that of the field laborer, who lives in a poor and crude way. The most common residence is the one-room house, without a glass window, set in a barren and unfenced waste, with a few wretched outhouses, the worst cabins being on the land of the least progressive and humane planters. You may see on the land of a wealthy White one-room houses with chinks between the logs such that the rain drives into them, the tenant family crowded into the space between the fireplace and the unenticing beds, dirty clothing hanging about, hardly a chair to sit upon, outside the house not a paling or a building of any kind, and pigs rooting on the ground under the floor. On a tolerable Mississippi plantation with seventy-four families, seventeen had one-room cabins, and one of those families comprised eleven persons. Some Southerners have a theory that you can be sure that a cabin with a garden is occupied by a White; but that is a fallacy, for there are many negro gardens, although some planters prohibit them on the ground that they will become weed spots. In the cities the Negroes live for the most part in settlements by themselves, in which there are miserable tenements, usually owned by white people and no better than the one-room country house. Of course, thrifty colored people in country or city are able to build comfortable houses for themselves. Inasmuch as both father and mother work either in the fields or in domestic service, there is little family life either in country or city. The food is poor and monotonous; it is chiefly salt pork, bacon, corn bread (usually pone), and some sort of molasses. Fresh meat is almost impossible to get outside of town, chickens are raised though not very plentiful, vegetables are few. For little children this diet is intolerable, and that is why so many of them die in infancy. Close observers declare that Negroes are brutal to their children, but one may be much among them without seeing any instances. They are also accused of deserting their old people; children often wander away and lose track of their parents, but you will find districts where the old are well looked after by their kindred. The most serious interference in family life is the field work of the women, and the breaking up of families by the desertion of the father; but somehow in all these family jars the children are seldom left without anyone to care for them.