The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-03-14
LiOe Talks With Dead Ones
An Interview With Uncle Tom At His Cabin
BY IRWIN S. cOBB

ignorant to be allowed to have a voice in the government and if he does get it then he's practically spoiled for those vacations which his fellow southerners regard him as being best qualified to adorn-I refer to whitewashing and the shuck door mat industry. If he stays in one place he prevents desirable Euro pean immigrants from coming in and settling and if a labor agent undertakes to move him over into the next state to pick a cotton crop the neighborhood cir cle of night riders hold one of their famous moonlight outings, with feather ornaments. In the south he can get into the good hotels as a waiter but in the north he can't, owing to the fact that Swiss knows so many more ways of insulting a customer And heaven help him if he tries to get in as a guest. All the food he gets will be tilted off tray down the back of his neck in warm moist liquid form and if he buys drink at a Broadway bar the size of the check will make him think Cleopatra must have dissolved her whole set of pearls in it. If a southern mob starts after him it gets him, and, if he's bowiegged enough to make good draught, very frequently burns him. If northern mob organizes for his benefit it hangs his aged grandmother to lamp post, burns down all his end of the town, marches hurriedly up to the county jail, marches hurriedly away from 1t and then with a fol-de-rol-day and a half a brick, spends the remainder of pleasant and congenial evening chasing everybody whose complexion is darker than Turkish tobacco. The border states drive him out and New York offers him an asylum, and that he may suitably provide for his family, a job as an all-night hall boy in an apartment house al S6 a week the first two years and $6.55 for all years after that. He goes south to exhibit the ward robe he collected on Sixth avenue among his old friends and a deputy sheriff in Galloway county, Kentucky, peels his forehead all the way back for acting biggotty. The chivalric descendent of the Cavaliers sells him plush parlor set and a portrait of Booker T. Washington eating fried ham with Roosevelt at the White House in gold frame nine inches deep in exchange for his seasons cotton, and then sits down and writes a maga- zine article calling him improvident. The stalwart son of the Boston abolitlonist rents him a two-room inside flat in tenement house where the germs are so thick they sit on one anothers laps, for twice what the Polack family next door is paying, and then accuses him in medical journal of spreading tubercuA losis He'd like to be a pusson and all he succeeds in being is a problem.
 And so, boss" concluded Uncle lom, "as I was too stiff to run an elevator in a fathouse and not gifted enough to play the guitar in colored string pand as I had no knowledge of the barber ing business, and hadn't driven a team in so many years, there didn't seem 10 be any congenial pursuit left open to one of my age and color, north or south. So came on back here. This cabin is just as comfortable as it ever was and I've got a steady job at the Shades Palace hotel on Eternity avenue. All the help over there is colored. Dred Scott drives the hack to the station. Man Friday tends the furnace and the president of Hayti neat yellow lady. I look after the lawn and the tennis courts. If it were New York a Swede or a German would have my job, so 1 suppose I ought to be very thankful. see Miss Eva nearly every day. She lives at the hotel with her ma and pa and Miss Oph ella and belongs to the local southern society. By the way, it wasn't angel that Miss Eva saw in the flies that time when she e.ed and started up to heaven. It was a stage hand.
 Uncle Tom." I said, as I rose to take my departure, "in your opinion is there any one thing that stands in the way Of the black man in his desire to be at tn top."
 There is,' said Uncle Tom
 And what is the make of it?' said I.
 James J. Jeffries," said Uncle Tom.