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[106] been annoyed at seeing an old man or a woman, as I approached them, getting off the sidewalk altogether. Another custom of the colored people down South has frequently irritated my democratic nerves. Excepting in the business streets of the far Southern cities — or in such a place as New Orleans, where there is no time to spare, and too much of the old French gentility to tolerate so despicable a practice — whenever a slave meets a Saxon--“ivin, be jabers, if he's a Cilt” --he touches his hat reverentially. In Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina, and even in some parts of Virginia and North Carolina, if you enter into a conversation with a colored man, and keep looking at him as you speak, he touches his cap every time that he answers your interrogatories, unless you expressly command him to desist. Perhaps this custom is the consequence of a legal enactment, also; but it is certainly the result of the imperious lex non scripta of the Southern States.
A. B. Burdick, 1859.
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