ether? I should think, when you see what I am,
you'd let me be.

"God help you! if you'd only stay away it wouldn't be so hard to go to
hell!"

CHAPTER XVI

There's a lot of counties in Georgia where the blacks are equal in
number to the whites, and two or three counties where the blacks number
over the whites by two to one. It was fur a little town in one of the
latter that we pinted ourselves, Doctor Kirby and me and Sam--right into
the blackest part of the black belt.

That country is full of big-sized plantations, where they raise cotton,
cotton, cotton, and then MORE cotton. Some of 'em raises fruit, too, and
other things, of course; but cotton is the main stand-by, and it looks
like it always will be.

Some places there shows that things can't be so awful much changed since
slavery days, and most of the niggers are sure enough country niggers
yet. Some rents their land right out from the owners, and some of 'em
crops it on the shares, and very many of 'em jest works as hands. A lot
of 'em don't do nigh so well now as they did when their bosses was their
masters, they tell me; and then agin, some has done right well on their
own hook. They intrusted me, because I never had been use to looking at
so many niggers. Every way you turn there they is niggers and then more
niggers.

Them that thinks they is awful easy to handle out of a natcheral respect
fur white folks has got another guess coming. They ain't so bad to get
along with if you keep it most pintedly shoved into their heads they
IS niggers. You got to do that especial in the black belt, jest because
they IS so many of 'em. They is children all their lives, mebby, till
some one minute of craziness may strike one of them, and then he is a
devil temporary. Mebby, when the crazy fit has passed, some white woman
is worse off than if she was dead, or mebby she IS dead, or mebby a
loonatic fur life, and that nigger is a candidate fur a lynching bee and
ginerally elected by an anonymous majority.

Not that ALL niggers is that-a-way, nor HALF of 'em, nor very MANY of
'em, even--but you can never tell WHICH nigger is going to be. So in the
black belt the white folks is mighty pertic'ler who comes along fooling
with their niggers. Fur you can never tell what turn a nigger's thoughts
will take, once anything at all stirs 'em up.

We didn't know them things then, Doctor Kirby and me didn't. We didn't
know we was moving light-hearted right into the midd