Voices in Our Blood by Jon Meacham Read Free Book Online Page B

Lords of the Land do not really care. They say: “Niggers don’t know what they want. Niggers come and niggers go, but we’ll always have the niggers. Only it’s hard to keep the books with them moving all the time.”
    Soon, however, they take a more serious attitude toward us, for the Bosses of the Buildings send men with fair words down from the North, telling us how much money we can make digging in the mines, smelting ore, laying rails, and killing hogs. They tell us that we will live in brick buildings, that we will vote, that we will be able to send our children to school for nine months of the year, that if we get into trouble we will not be lynched, and that we will not have to grin, doff our hats, bend our knees, slap our thighs, dance, and laugh when we see a white face. We listen, and it sounds like religion. Is it really true? Is there not a trick somewhere? We have grown to distrust all white men. Yet they say: “Listen, we need you to work. We’ll hire trains to take you away.” Then the weekly Negro newspapers supplement their pleas; the Chicago
Defender,
the Pittsburgh
Courier,
the Baltimore
Afro-American,
and many other newspapers paint the North as a land of promise. We cannot help but believe now. We cannot work the cotton fields for thinking of it; our minds are paralyzed with the hope and dread of it. Not to go means lingering here to live out this slow death; to go means facing the unknown. But, strangely, life has already prepared us for moving and drifting. Have we not already roamed the South? Yes, we will go and see. But we do not move. We are scared. Who will go first? Then, suddenly, a friend leaves and we whisper to him to write and tell us if the dream is true. We wait. Word comes. It
is
true! “Come on!” the letters tell us. We go.
    It is like this: suddenly, while we are chopping at the clods of clay with a heavy hoe, the riding boss gallops up and says: “Hurry up there, nigger!”
    Perhaps for the first time in our lives we straighten our backs, drop the hoe, give a fleeting glance at the white man’s face, and walk off.
    â€œHey, where the hell you going, nigger?”
    â€œI’m shaking the dust of the South off my feet, white man.”
    â€œYou’ll starve up north, nigger.”
    â€œI don’t care. I’m going to die some day anyhow.”
    But so many of us are leaving that the Lords of the Land begin to worry.
    â€œDon’t go,” they say.
    â€œWe’re already going,” we say, and keep leaving.
    If we have no money, we borrow it; if we cannot borrow it, we beg it. If the Bosses of the Buildings do not furnish us with a train, we walk until we reach a railroad and then we swing onto a freight. There develops such a shortage of labor in the South that the Lords of the Land order us rounded up and threatened with jail sentences unless we consent to go to the fields and gather the waiting crops. Finally they persuade men of our own race to talk to us.
    â€œLet down your buckets where you are,” our black leaders say.
    â€œWe’re leaving,” we answer.
    â€œThe white man of the South is your friend,” they say.
    â€œHow much are they paying you to say that?” we ask.
    â€œYou’ll freeze up north.”
    â€œWe don’t care.”
    The Lords of the Land say: “You niggers are going north because you think you’ll mix with whites.”
    â€œLook at all the half-white boys and girls on the plantations,” we answer. “We black men did not do that.”
    â€œDon’t talk fresh, nigger!”
    â€œWe ain’t talking; we’re leaving!”
    â€œCome on; we’ll build you a big school!”
    â€œWe’d rather be a lamppost in Chicago than the president of Dixie!”
    While we are leaving, our black boys come back from Flanders, telling us of how their white officers of the United States Army had treated them, how they had kept