by James Agee
We give ’em the free land for a meeting house. Keeps ’m out of a devilment.
I got a great admiration for that nigger. I tell you, if that man wasn’t a nigger he’d a gone a long ways in the world.
Niggers make better tenants than white men do. They’re more contented and less likely to get independent. They stay on one place longer, generally. Lots of them stays with you all their lives, and their father before them and their young ones after.
They don’t have nothn to worry about; no responsibility; nothn to lose. Ever thang’s furnished them. All they got to do is work and six months a the year they don’t even have to do that. (This was said of whites as well as of Negroes.)
All my tenants are niggers. Always have been, always will be. I’ll tell you the honest fact. I’m afraid of white tenants; scared some of them would up and kill me one day. (Two other landlords agreed with the first on this.)
We get along all right with our niggers around here and we don’t have to say or do nothn neither. They know what would happen if they started anything.
Why I’m mighty fond of my niggers. I get along beautifully with my niggers. Why I never hit a nigger in my life.
You hear all this talk of bad treatment. Now I ask you: would a good farmer mistreat his mules?
Those nigger burial societies are a mighty good thing. Why I had one die on me last week and it didn’t cost me a penny.
I tell you you got to go to outfigure a nigger.
We do all we can for them and then they will prodyuce a little more.
They git all that’s coming to them and more.
The essential structure of the South is, of course, economic: cold and inevitable as the laws of chemistry. But that is not how the machine is run. The machine is run on intuition, and the structures of intuition are delicate and subtle as they can be only in a society which is not merely one thing but two: a dizzy mixture of feudalism and of capitalism in its latter stages. Moreover, everyone born in the South, and no one born outside it, has a nose for this intensely specialized chemistry of local intuition: so that relationships between landlord and tenants are settled and crystallized, as a rule, quietly and even inarticulately. A tenant knows to a hair’s breadth just when and where he is out of line and just how to get back on it. Usually he does get back on it, and there is no further “trouble.” If he doesn’t, there is the whole natural system of boycott mentioned in the article. And if these things fail there is, quite naturally, violence.
Because so much goes by intuition and the power of custom, and because the trap the tenant is caught in is not only as huge as the structure of his civilization but as intimate as every breath he draws, the general inter-class tone or taste of air in the South is peculiarly tranquil. It is a tranquility both real and deceptive. It is real, and importantly real, simply because it exists. It is deceptive because of what it takes the place of, and hides.
It takes the place of, and hides, and is essentially more terrible than, a “terrorism” which becomes necessary only when the enormous, all but hypnotic strength of the tranquility has failed to suffice. The “terrorism” becomes necessary not through moustache-twirling and fiendish deliberation but once again very simply and inevitably and chemically, by intuition and by reflex. It is perfectly irrelevant to law and it goes as far as either as it “needs” or “happens” to. A given landlord may or may not take active physical part in it but you may be sure he countenances it: you may be sure there is not one in any hundred who would think twice about countenancing or, for that matter, instigating it. There is in Southern white man, distributed almost as thickly as the dialect, an epidemic capability of sadism which you would have to go as far to match and whose chief basis is possibly, but only possibly, and only one among many, a fear of the Negro, deeper and more terrible than any brief accounting can suggest or explain. This flaw of sadism can turn its victims loose into extremities which the gaudiest reports have only begun to suggest.
Trouble begins in the galled spots. That, too, is where organizers come; and, later, the sympathizers, the investigators, the reporters. By the time the latter get there all hell has broken loose and there is nothing pretty about it. Through ignorance and shock and rage fully as much as through bias, the reporters take what they find as representative of the South as a whole.
What they find is, to be sure, not a circumstance on what in the course of time seems likely to happen in the South as a whole. But what they find is also not true of the general South as the South is today, and day by day. And if the truth is not only more interesting and more complex but also more valuable than falsehood, then the truth had better be recognized.