Situated in the heart of the farming section of the State, with its fertile soil, its equable climate, its forests of pine trees, Central City was one of the flourishing towns of South Georgia. Its population was between eight and ten thousand, of which some four thousand were Negroes. The wealth and prosperity of the town depended not so much on the town itself as it did on the farmers of the fertile lands surrounding it. To Central City they came on Saturday afternoons to sell their cotton, their corn, their hogs and cows, and to buy in turn sugar, cloth, coffee, farming-implements, shoes, and amusement. It was divided into four nearly equal sections by the intersection of the tracks of the Central of Georgia Railroad and of the Georgia, Southern and Florida Railway. Drowsy, indolent during the first six days of the week, Central City awoke on Saturday morning for “goin’t town” day with its bustle and excitement and lively trade. Then the broad dustiness of Lee Street was disturbed by the Fords and muddied wagons of farmers, white and black. In the wagons were usually splint-bottom chairs or boards stretched from side to side, occupied by scrawny, lanky “po’ whites” with a swarm of children to match, clad in single-piece garments, once red in colour and now, through many washings with lye soap, an indeterminate reddish brown. Or, if the driver was a Negro, he generally was surrounded by just as many little black offspring, clad also in greyish or reddish-brown garments, and scrambling over the farm products being brought to town for sale or exchange for the simple and few store products needed. And beside him the usually buxom, ample-bodied wife, clad in her finest and most gaudy clothing to celebrate the trip to town looked forward to eagerly all the week.

Crowded were the streets with vehicles and the sidewalks with the jostling, laughing, loudly talking throng of humans. After the noonday whistle had blown signalling release to the hordes of whites working in the cotton mill over beyond the tracks, the crowd was augmented considerably, the new-comers made up of those who had deserted the country districts, discouraged by the hard life of farming, by rainy and unprofitable seasons, by the ravages of the boll weevil and of landlords, both working dire distress on poor white and black alike. Discouraged, they had come to “the city” to work at small wages in the cotton mill.

All the trading done on these days did not take place over the counters of the stores that lined Lee Street. In the dirty little alleyways from off the main street, men with furtive eyes but bold ways dispensed synthetic gin, “real” rye whisky, and more often “white mule,” as the moonshine corn whisky is called. Bottles were tilted and held to the mouth a long time and later the scene would be enlivened by furious but shortlived fights. Guns, knives, all sorts of weapons appeared with miraculous speed—the quarrel was settled, the wounded or killed removed, and the throng forgot the incident in some new joyous and usually commonplace or sordid adventure.

When darkness began to approach, the wagons and Fords, loaded with merchandise for the next week, and with the children clutching sticky and brightly coloured candies, began to rumble countrywards, and Central City by nightfall had resumed its sleepy, indolent, and deserted manner.

From the corner where Oglethorpe Avenue crossed Lee Street and where stood the monument to the Confederate Dead, the business section extended up Lee Street for three blocks. Here the street was dignified with a narrow “park,” some twenty feet in width, which ran the length of the business thoroughfare. Over beyond the monument lay the section of Central City where lived the more well-to-do of its white inhabitants. Georgia Avenue was here the realm of the socially elect. Shaded by elms, it numbered several more or less pretentious homes of two stories, some of brick, the majority of frame structure. Here were the homes of Roy Ewing, president of the local Chamber of Commerce and owner of Ewing’s General Merchandise Emporium; of George Baird, president of the Bank of Central City; of Fred Griswold, occupying the same relation to Central City’s other bank, the Smith County Farmers’ Bank; of Ralph Minor, owner and manager of the Bon Ton Store.

Here too were the wives of these men, busying themselves with their household duties and the minor social life of the community. In the morning they attended to the many details of housekeeping; in the afternoon and early evening they sat on their front porches or visited neighbours or went for a ride. Placid, uneventful, stupid lives they led with no other interests than the petty affairs of a small and unprogressive town.

The young girls of Central City usually in the afternoon dressed in all their small-town finery and strolled down to Odell’s Drug Store where the young men congregated. Having consumed a frothy soda or a gummy, sweetish sundae, they went to the Idle Hour Moving Picture Palace to worship at the celluloid shrine of a favourite film actor, usually of the highly romantic type. Then the stroll homewards, always past the Central City Hotel, a two-storied frame structure located at the corner of Lee Street and Oglethorpe Avenue opposite the Confederate monument. In front were arm-chairs, occupied in warm weather, which was nearly all the year round, by travelling salesmen or other transients. Often a sidelong glance and a fleeting, would-be-coy smile would cause one of the chair-occupants to rise as casually as he could feign, yawn and stretch, and with affected nonchalance stroll down Lee Street in the wake of the smiling one. …

At the other end of Lee Street from the residential section of the well-to-do whites, past the business section of that main artery of the town, lay that portion known generally as “Darktown.” Fringing it were several better-than-the-average homes, neat, well painted, comfortable-looking, fronted with smooth lawns and tidy, colourful flower-beds. It was one of these at the corner of Lee and State Streets that the Harpers owned and occupied.

After crossing State Street, an abrupt descent was taken by Lee Street. Here lived in squalor and filth and abject poverty the poorer class of Negroes. The streets were winding, unpaved lanes, veritable seas and rivers of sticky, gummy, discouraging mud in rainy weather, into which the wheels of vehicles sank to their hubs if the drivers of those conveyances were indiscreet enough to drive through them. In summer these eddying wallows of muck and filth and mud dry up and are transformed into swirling storms of germ-laden dust when a vagrant wind sweeps over them or a vehicle drives through them, choking the throats of unlucky passers-by, and, to the despair of the dusky housewives, flying through open windows. The houses that bordered these roads were for the most part of three and four rooms, the exteriors unpainted or whitewashed, the interiors gloomy and smelly. But few of them had sanitary arrangements, and at the end of the little patch of ground that was back of each of them, in which a few discouraged vegetables strove to push their heads above the ground, there stood another unpainted structure, small, known as “the privy.” In front there was nearly always some attempt at flower-cultivation, the tiny beds bordered with bottles, shells, and bits of brightly coloured glass. The ugliness of the houses in many instances was hidden in summer-time by vines and rambler roses that covered the porches and sometimes the fronts of the houses.

Around these houses, in the streets, everywhere, there played a seemingly innumerable horde of black and brown and yellow children, noisy, quarrelsome, clad usually in one-piece dresses of the same indeterminate shade of grey or red or brown that was seen on the country children on Saturday. In front of many of the houses, there sat on sunny days an old and bent man or ancient woman puffing the omnipresent corn-cob pipe. …

A half-mile westward from “Darktown,” and separated from it by the Central of Georgia Railroad tracks, stood the Central City Cotton Spinning-Mill. Clustered around its ugly red-brick walls stood dwellings that differed but little from those of “Darktown.” Here were the same dingy, small, unsanitary, unbeautiful, and unpainted dwellings. Here were the same muddy or dusty unpaved streets. Here were the same squalor and poverty and filth and abject ignorance. There were but few superficial or recognizable differences. One was that the children wore, instead of the brown plumpness of the Negro children, a pale, emaciated, consumptive air because of the long hours in the lint-laden confines of the mills. The men were long, stooped, cadaverous-appearing. The women were sallow, unattractive, sad-looking, each usually with the end of a snuff-stick protruding from her mouth. The children, when they played at all, did so in listless, wearied, uninterested, and apathetic fashion. The houses looked even more gaunt and bare than those in the quarter which housed the poorer Negroes, for the tiny patches of ground that fronted the houses here in “Factoryville” were but seldom planted with flowers. More often it was trampled down until it became a hard, red-clay, sunbaked expanse on which the children, and dogs as emaciated and forlorn, sometimes played.

Here there was but one strong conviction, but one firm rock of faith to which they clung—the inherent and carefully nurtured hatred of “niggers” and a belief in their own infinite superiority over their dark-skinned neighbours. Their gods were Tom Watson and Hoke Smith and Tom Hardwick and other demagogic politicians and office-seekers who came to them every two or four years and harangued them on the necessity of their upholding white civilization by re-electing them to office. But one appeal was needed—but one was used—and that one always successfully. Meanwhile, their children left school and entered the mill to work the few years that such a life gave them. And, in the meantime, the black children they hated so-deprived by prejudice from working in the mills, and pushed forward by often illiterate but always ambitious black parents—went to school. …

This, in brief, was the Central City to which Kenneth had returned. A typical Southern town—reasonably rich as wealth is measured in that part of Georgia—rich in money and lands and cot—amazingly ignorant in the finer things of life. Noisy, unreflective, their wants but few and those easily satisfied. The men, self-made, with all that that distinctly American term implies. The women concerned only with their petty household affairs and more petty gossip and social intercourse. But, beyond these, life was and is a closed book. Or, more, a book that never was written or printed.

The companionship and inspiration of books was unknown. Music, even with the omnipresent Victrola, meant only the latest bit of cheap jazz or a Yiddish or Negro dialect song. Art, in its many forms was considered solely for decadent, effete “furriners.” Hostility would have met the woman of the town’s upper class who attempted to exhibit any knowledge of art. Her friends would have felt that she was trying “to put something over on them.” As for any man of the town, at best he would have been considered a “little queer in the head,” at the worst suspected of moral turpitude or perversion. But two releases from the commonplace, monotonous life were left. The first, liquor. Bootlegging throve. The woods around Central City were infested with “moonshine” stills that seldom were still. The initiated drove out to certain lonely spots, deposited under well-known trees a jug or other container with a banknote stuck in its mouth. One then gave a certain whistle and walked away. Soon there would come an answering signal. One went back to the tree and found the money gone but the container filled with a colourless or pale-yellow liquid. … Or, the more affluent had it brought to them in town hidden under wagon-loads of fodder or cotton.

The other and even more popular outlet of unfulfilled and suppressed emotions was sex. Central City boasted it had no red-light district like Macon and Savannah and Atlanta. That was true. All over the town were protected domiciles housing slatternly women. To them went by circuitous routes the merchants whose stores were on Lee Street. To them went the gangs from the turpentine camps on their periodic pilgrimages to town on pay-day. And a traveller on any of the roads leading from the town could see, on warm evenings, automobiles standing with engines stilled and lights dimmed on the side of the road. Down on Harris and Butler Streets in “Darktown” were other houses. Here were coloured women who seemed never to have to work. Here was seldom seen a coloured man. And the children around these houses were usually lighter in colour than in other parts of “Darktown.”

Negro fathers and mothers of comely daughters never allowed them to go out unaccompanied after dark. There were too many dangers from men of their own race. And even greater ones from men of the other race. There had been too many disastrous consequences from relaxation of vigil by certain bowed and heart-broken coloured parents. And they had no redress at law. The laws of the State against intermarriage saw to it that there should be none. Central City inhabitants knew all these things. But familiarity with them had bred the belief that they did not exist—that is, they were thought a natural part of the town’s armament against scandal. One soon grew used to them and forgot them. The town was no worse than any other—far better than most.

It was a rude shock to Kenneth when he began to see these things through an entirely different pair of eyes than those with which he had viewed them before he left Central City for the North. The sordidness, the blatant vulgarity, the viciousness of it all—especially the houses on Butler and Harris Streets—appalled and sickened him. Even more was he disgusted by the complacent acceptance of the whole miserable business by white and black alike. On two or three occasions he tentatively mentioned it to a few of those he had known intimately years before. Some of them laughed indulgently—others cautioned him to leave it alone. Finding no response, he shrugged his shoulders and dismissed the whole affair from his mind. “It was here long before I was born,” he said to himself philosophically, “it’ll probably be here long after I’m dead, and the best thing for me to do is to stick to my own business and let other people’s morals alone.”