with the master,
how fared it with the man?

The plantations of Dougherty County in slavery days were not as
imposing and aristocratic as those of Virginia. The Big House was
smaller and usually one-storied, and sat very near the slave cabins.
Sometimes these cabins stretched off on either side like wings;
sometimes only on one side, forming a double row, or edging the road
that turned into the plantation from the main thoroughfare. The form
and disposition of the laborers' cabins throughout the Black Belt is
to-day the same as in slavery days. Some live in the self-same cabins,
others in cabins rebuilt on the sites of the old. All are sprinkled in
little groups over the face of the land, centering about some
dilapidated Big House where the head-tenant or agent lives. The
general character and arrangement of these dwellings remains on the
whole unaltered. There were in the county, outside the corporate town
of Albany, about fifteen hundred Negro families in 1898. Out of all
these, only a single family occupied a house with seven rooms; only
fourteen have five rooms or more. The mass live in one- and two-room
homes.

The size and arrangements of a people's homes are no unfair index of
their condition. If, then, we inquire more carefully into these Negro
homes, we find much that is unsatisfactory. All over the face of the
land is the one-room cabin,--now standing in the shadow of the Big
House, now staring at the dusty road, now rising dark and sombre amid
the green of the cotton-fields. It is nearly always old and bare,
built of rough boards, and neither plastered nor ceiled. Light and
ventilation are supplied by the single door and by the square hole in
the wall with its wooden shutter. There is no glass, porch, or
ornamentation without. Within is a fireplace, black and smoky, and
usually unsteady with age. A bed or two, a table, a wooden chest, and
a few chairs compose the furniture; while a stray show-bill or a
newspaper makes up the decorations for the walls. Now and then one may
find such a cabin kept scrupulously neat, with merry steaming
fireplaces and hospitable door; but the majority are dirty and
dilapidated, smelling of eating and sleeping, poorly ventilated, and
anything but homes.

Above all, the cabins are crowded. We have come to associate crowding
with homes in cities almost exclusively. This is primarily because we
have so little accurate knowledge of country life. Here in Dougher