"Gentlemen, be calm ... be calm ..."

He was undoubtedly afraid that a stroke of lightning would hit our automobile.

We tried stopping and waiting for the storm to blow over, but we were afraid that the water would flood the motor and the battery would actually "go to the devil." We remembered with trepidation newspaper stories about hurricanes in Florida and photographs of gigantic trees pulled out by the roots and trains knocked off the rails.

At any rate, just as in Jules Verne, it all ended well.

We spent the night in the city of Tallahassee, and in the morning we were already in Georgia. The January day was almost sultry, and we forgot about our terrors of yesterday.

Georgia proved to be a forest country. For some inexplicable reason we had always imagined the Southern Negro states in the form of sheer cotton fields and tobacco plantations. And here suddenly we learned that besides plantations and fields, there are also thick forests. We drove through lanes over which, in the manner of goatbeards, hung down the hempen tails of a tree called "pecan," a kind we had never seen before.

We "met Negroes more and more frequently; at times for several hours at a stretch we saw no white people. But in the cities the white man ruled, and if a Negro appeared at some moss-covered mansion in the residential part, he would invariably have a broom, a pail or a package, all of which pointed to the fact that here he could be only a servant.

The high American standard of living has not yet conquered the Southern states. It has, of course, penetrated considerably—there are Southern Main Streets, drug-stores, quadrangles of butter at dinner and luncheon, pinball games, chewing gum, petrol stations, highways, T-bone steaks, girls with the coiffures of movie stars, and advertising billboards in no way distinguishable from the Eastern, Western and Northern quadrangles of butter, girls, highways, and billboards. Yet the Southern states have something of their own, something peculiar and indigenous to them which is amazingly charming and warm. Nature? Perhaps it is partly nature too. Here are no self-conscious palms, no polished suns as in California. But then there is also no dryness of desert here, something that is felt over there. The Southern states are a land of village landscapes, of forests, and of mournful songs. But, of course, it is not only a matter of nature.

The soul of the South is its people; not its white people, but its black.

We stopped in Charleston, South Carolina. After looking over the city, we were returning home in the evening over the inevitable Main Street when we saw in a dark lane a Negro girl about twelve years old. The girl did not see us. She held a basket on her arm. The walk of the girl at first seemed strange to us, but, peering more closely, we saw that the girl was dancing. It was a talented improvisation, clean-cut and rhythmic, an almost finished dance which we should have liked to call: "A Girl from a Southern State." Dancing, the little Negress went farther and farther down the dark lane, glided, made turns, little hops, and gracefully balanced the light and empty basket. After the commerce of the day, the city was asleep. It was wrapped in utter darkness. It seemed to us that we heard the sounds of the banjo, so rhythmic and musical was her dance.

Negroes are talented people. True, the whites gladly applaud them, but at the same time continue to regard them as a lower race. Negroes are graciously permitted to be artists. Evidently, when the black is on the stage and a white man in a loge, the latter can look down on the black man, and his lordly pride does not suffer therefrom.

Negroes are impressionable people. The whites regard that ironically and figure that Negroes are fools. Indeed! For success in commerce there is no need of impressionability.

Speaking now of white people, we have in view Southern gentlemen, and not them only but also the gentlemen from the North who are likewise infected with the psychology of slave-owning. We also want to say that not all the people in the South regard Negroes as lower beings, but, to our regret, these are the majority.

Negroes possess a strong imagination. They love to bear the names of famous people, for example, and occasionally some porter, elevator operator, or farm labourer, whose name is Jim Smith, pronounces his full name thus—"Jim George Washington Abraham Lincoln Grant Nebuchadnezzar Smith."

"Why, of course," says the Southern gentleman, whose imagination day and night encompasses only the splendid vision of a million dollars, "he is an utter idiot!"

In all the motion pictures and vaudevilles Negroes are represented as comic personalities who are foolish but good-natured servants.

Negroes love nature. As is peculiar of artistic characters, they are contemplative. Southern gentlemen find their own explanation for this. The Negroes, you see, are lazy and incapable of systematic labour. At that point is inevitably recounted the case of a Negro, who, having earned five dollars, does not go to work the next day, but, instead, taking his black girl by the arm, goes off with her to have a good time in the woods or by the river. And then the profound conclusion is drawn which, in a way, serves as the theoretical justification for exploiting the black man.

"No matter how much you pay him, he'll live like a pig, anyway. Therefore, pay him as little as possible."

Finally, Negroes are expansive. Oh! Here the Southern gentleman is seriously disturbed. He is already reaching for a pulley, a rope, and a piece of soap. He is already laying out the fire. He suddenly becomes incredibly noble and suspicious. Negroes are sexual criminals. It is simply necessary to hang them.

Negroes are inquisitive. For this there are a thousand explanation. It's as clear as day that they are simply an impudent and hopeless people. They stick their nose into what does not concern them. They stick their black nose into everything.

In spite of all this, the Southern gentleman figures that Negroes love him very much. In motion-picture dramas about the life of the landed gentry there is always an old grey Negro who adores his master and is| ready to give up his life for him.

Oh, if only the Southern gentleman, the kind-hearted spectator or the participant of a lynching-bee suddenly understood that in order to attain full one hundred per cent, humanity he needs what he lacks—namely, these very Negro characteristics which he derides! What would he say to that?

Negroes have almost no opportunity to develop and to grow. In the cities the careers of porters and elevator operators are open to them, while in their homeland, in the Southern states, they are farm labourers without any rights; reduced by oppression to the status of domestic animals; they are utter slaves there.

Nevertheless, if Negroes were to be taken away from America, the country would, of course, become somewhat whiter, but most certainly it would become at least, twenty times more dull.

True to our rule to take into the automobile people waiting for the occasion on the road, at an isolated petrol station in North Carolina, we picked up an eighteen-year-old boy from a CCC camp near Washington. These camps had been built by President Roosevelt: for unemployed young men, originally for six months. Roosevelt hoped to end unemployment in six months—but later, when it became clear that it was not so easy to end unemployment, the camps were left for an indefinite period The boy had to drive eighty miles from his camp to his native town of Elizabethtown. Quite a cold rain was pouring. The young man shivered in his summer khaki shirt and his perforated, broad-brimmed felt hat.

Soon our last hitchhiker warmed up in the enclosed machine and began to reply to our questions. He did not add anything new to the impression we had acquired of American young men as a type—talkative, self-confident, and lacking in curiosity.