Part 2

With such an end in view, school work means much. Not only is the dormant intellect to be awakened and the knowledge of books imparted, but also that practical knowledge of every-day life in which, strange to say, they may be even more deficient. Nor do they always come with that keen thirst for improvement that insures success. How can they, when the consciousness of their own shortcomings has not yet dawned upon them? Their acquaintances are as ignorant as themselves; their own bare home is as good as their neighbors’. Not until they have mingled in the school life with companions far beyond themselves in attainment do they realise their own need, and begin to climb. Personal neatness is to be inculcated; dress, deportment, speech, expression, manner, must be watched and toned by careful teachers. A sense of honor must be cultivated, and, above all, conscience aroused and trained, that the end of all our labor may be attained and Christ be found in them.

Much of their future usefulness depends on the industrial training which is becoming more and more a feature of our schools. The difficulty of uniting this branch of instruction with the regular school duties was long ago recognized by so eminent a teacher as Mary Lyon; and what was hard in New England is even harder in Georgia and Alabama. But the need is greater, too; and on missionary ground the question cannot be, “Is it difficult?” but only “Is it best?” and, since there could be but one answer, all over the South, this work in many forms is being carried on to-day. Due attention is paid both to theory and practice. Lectures on cooking, for instance, are followed by conversations on the subject, where questions can be freely asked and difficulties explained, after which the pupils are required to test their knowledge by making bread, cooking meals and the like. This practice is repeated day by day, and the examinations are as rigid as in any other department. Sewing is as carefully taught, a part of each day being devoted to it. Darning and patching become an art, until some specimens of their skill in this line could be ranked almost as ornamental needlework. Not only sewing, but the cutting of garments, is taught; and this affords good opportunity for those wise counsels on economy, simplicity and kindred subjects which these girls need so much.

Housekeeping in its minutest details receives careful attention, and here, as everywhere else, precept follows precept and theory is supplemented by practice.

Another and no less important branch is that of nursing the sick. The ignorance of the very simplest remedies and of hygienic laws on the part of many of the colored people is appalling. The treatment of a cold, or a slight accident, is as much beyond their knowledge as the most complicated disease would be, while a sudden emergency, as a case of poisoning, would paralyze them with fear. Medicine to them is simply medicine, and one kind as good as another. “I didn’t have no sugar,” said the mother of a sick baby to the missionary who was attending to its needs, “and so I put a spoonful of the medicine that didn’t want sweetening into a spoonful of the medicine that did want sweetening and it seemed to do him good.” That this ignorance was not unusual may be inferred from the estimate that in the city where this mother lives the death rate among the negroes is three times that of the whites.

The method of imparting this knowledge of nursing varies in different schools. In every case opportunity for practice is abundant; sometimes in their own homes, sometimes among the poor of the city or in the women’s wards of the hospital. A prominent physician of Memphis, noting the examination questions required of the girls of Le Moyne School, said: “If your girls answered those questions, they ought not only to make safe nurses, but also fair physicians.” The object, however, is not to make physicians, but to give a thorough acquaintance with the details of nursing, including all those little thoughtful attentions to the sick which Northern girls learn from the lips and the practice of gentle, efficient mothers, but of which the colored women seem as ignorant as their daughters.

You can hardly imagine a more desolate scene than a case of sickness in a cabin home. There is no isolation—all family work performed in sight of the patient, the glaring light falling full on the bed, water either for drinking or bathing seeming an unknown luxury, and noise everywhere. Into such homes these eager girls penetrate, adapting their knowledge to the surroundings with wonderful tact, hanging an old quilt or shawl to give isolation, shading the light, preparing with neatness and dispatch some tempting morsel of food, and administering with their own hands that thorough bathing which is often the most potent medicine. No wonder that after such treatment one poor old creature should ejaculate, “Thank the Lord, when we get to Heaven we shall all get on clean clothes.” Alas, that in so many homes the inmates seem perfectly content to wait till that time for the delightful sensation!

Of course cleanliness and other hygienic laws are placed first in importance, and just here we are finding one answer to the question so near our hearts, “How can we make the _homes_ better.” The lessons learned by the daughters at school are duly repeated to the mothers at home, who are the more ready to receive new ideas of _house_-keeping from the young teachers who have first revealed to them the secrets of _health_-keeping. It is idle to hope to accomplish the greatest good for these girls unless for a time they are wholly under our control. Evil influences cannot be forgotten or overcome in a month or a term. They must come into our boarding-schools for a term of years, and the money to keep them there must come in part from you. By the industrial system, they can be helped to some extent and the idle and careless sifted out; but after all is done, the last hard-earned penny paid over, the last work tried, there is still need.

But there are so many calls, and you are so busy. Yes, so was one of old, and you remember, “As thy servant was busy here and there, he was gone.”

Just so will it be here. The work for these girls must be done _now_. If we do not help them, there is no help for them, and instead of life and light there is nothing but blackness of darkness before them. Their influence will widen and deepen just the same, only instead of a blessing it will bring a curse, until the old sentence may be repeated for us, and our lives go for their lives and our people for their people.

* * * * *

THE RELATION OF THE FAMILY TO THE NATION’S WELFARE

BY MISS E. B. EMERY, GORHAM, ME.

The materialist boldly tells us that physical law is the only law, and that there is no sin but the violation of the laws of our physical being, and that if these were understood and obeyed by all, there would be no sorrow, suffering or disorder in the world. But with a deeper insight, we do not need to live long on earth to learn that violation of moral law for a time will bring into fearful disorder, and actually subvert, physical law. If any truth in this world is manifest, it is that a nation is well balanced and secure just in proportion to the observance of the moral law respecting the _family_; that a commonwealth is prosperous and invincible, in its material as well as spiritual interests, exactly in proportion to the strength and purity of its homes, even to the humblest. Naught can bring such dire confusion and destruction as laxity of family relations; what, then, can you expect of those for whom the family was obliterated, and that by legal statute, for many generations? The freed people are by no means the only sufferers, for in obedience to the divine principle just referred to, precisely to that degree that the colored woman refuses to recognize marriage and a home, just so far is the whole region demoralized; and this obliquity over wide extent threatens the very vitals of our great republic. Educate, Christianize, inspire the young colored woman, and you save and elevate not only the entire colored race, but you brace up the white people of the South to moral standards far from universal now; you save all, in all their interests, temporal and eternal. The domestic relations are the deepest in life; they dictate and control all others. Make the _home_ pure and powerful, and the soil will yield, and demand and supply will adjust themselves; cities will rise, and laws will protect, and schools will flourish, and the church will grow apace, and there is work and education and salvation for all. This is no idle picture; every one of us knows the reality of it. And it is because the home is the basis and centre of all earthly life—and who makes the home? Mainly, it is the woman. Therefore, save the woman; build her up hour by hour; feed her with wisdom of every kind; regulate her passion and emotion, discipline her reason, fortify her will, nerve her with principle, fire her with enthusiasm, and make her tender with Christ’s own love. In every mighty movement on earth, woman is at the bottom, and the problem which more than any other agitates this whole country to-day, is because of woman. She can wreck this nation, and she can deliver it. Man fought to save it; woman prays, teaches, suffers and sacrifices to save it.

One day at the South, while on a solitary walk, I stepped through the crazy paling, and spoke to a jolly black woman who was getting dinner in the yard just before the front door. She was about forty-five, with a superb physique, quite unfettered by fashion, for she wore but one garment, which did not hang in flounces, but in strings. The fire, or rather smoke, for I saw no fire, puffed up from a little heap of sticks, and over this swung a broken kettle, which, apart from the gourds lying about, was the only dish of the household. Into this kettle she had put a piece of grimy salt pork, with a share of bristles remaining on it, making a firm rind, and with it turnip-tops and cabbage-stumps, and she was then washing sweet potatoes; and such a nest of children in every stage of dirt and nakedness and hunger, and every one in densest ignorance and heathenism! The little hut couldn’t hold them, so they were ranged inside the paling, all in a row, forming a kind of animated hedge, their little bare, shining bodies flashing as they whisked in the sun, their big, round eyes gleaming with curiosity, and every single body of them poised to turn a somersault or two and ask me for a penny. The woman made a low courtesy, and a graceful one it was, and as I greeted the children the whole batch of them squealed and cackled, stood on their heads and came right side up with the wildest kind of a grin, in my very face.

“How many children have you,” I asked. “These are not all yours?”

“Yis, ma’am, dey is ebery one mine. I’se got fourteen.”

“Is your husband at home?” I inquired. I thought I spied a man in the cabin.

“He’s sick mos’ times,” she replied, “a’nt good for not’in’ but eat; he kin eat mo’n any nigger in all Car’line, though he don’ git de luck berry offen, dere’s so many ob us,” and she gave a chuckle.

“But how do you take care of so many?” was my question, as the vision of more than one overworked mother at the North, with her solitary child, flashed across me.

Such a loud, musical laugh!

“Why, bress yer soul, honey, I don’ car’ ob dem, dey takes car’ ob demselves,” and she leaned back and again she sang and rippled and rolled at the absurd idea of a mother’s taking care of her children.

I ask you to-day, what do you expect those children will do and become? It is for you to say.

Destitution and ignorance like this may be found all through the South, but just such families have been reached and redeemed by our missionaries, and if all are not reached, it is simply because we do not send the missionaries, for allowing every discouragement that exists the fact still remains that there is no missionary work on the earth so hopeful and so rich and so rapid in its results as work among the colored people South.

THE FREEDMEN.

REV. JOSEPH E. ROY, D.D., FIELD SUPERINTENDENT, ATLANTA, GA.

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TENNESSEE.

INTERESTING EXERCISE IN FISK UNIVERSITY.

_By Rev. H. S. Bennett, Nashville._

The first Friday night of the term we listened to reports from those of the students who had taught school during the vacation. It was expected that those who spoke would give as correct an idea as possible of the colored people, their interest in education, the condition of the crops, whether the people were getting possession of land, and all other items of interest relating to their work.

President Cravath read a letter from a county superintendent in Mississippi, who bore the strongest testimony to the honesty, morality and efficiency of the teachers who had gone out from Fisk University.

Mr. Mitchell, a new student, had taught in one neighborhood for two years, in De Soto, Miss. He had succeeded in building up a successful Sunday-school. He had in his school about 150 pupils and three assistant teachers. The citizens encouraged the education of the colored people and took great interest in his school.

Miss Murray had taught in Mississippi for five months. The people were very poor and the children were poorly clad. She taught in the Sunday-school very successfully; she did not think that the people had bought much land, but they had stock and wagons.

Geo. McLelland did not wish to exaggerate, but desired to tell the truth. He taught just above Vicksburg, Miss.; here there is little civilization. In their homes, the large majority of the people are virtually slaves; they pay $9 per acre, or 90 pounds of lint cotton for their lands; they raise nothing but cotton and corn, and often come out in debt; they buy their goods at the store on account, on fall time. In most cases last year they came out behind; in this condition they must give a lien on the next year’s work; some do better than this, but the majority are in this wretched condition. Government land is sold at 25 cents per acre, but the colored people do not buy it to any extent; this year they have done something of this, and have secured forty acres of good land. Saturday night the people go to the store and drink up an acre of government land at the rate of 25 cents a glass.

One church represents all. They worship in a very blind, ignorant, superstitious way. In the church he attended two out of five could read a little. One elder, in telling how we were to get to Heaven, said that after we were dead we must first go to hell and search all around, and if we did not find our names there we were to go to Heaven.

D. Donnel taught in southwestern Arkansas. He had much opposition, but he had, by persevering, found out that there was “a little man in him.” The people are getting homes and becoming owners of land. They had never been aroused before. They were all religious, but they all drank whisky, from the least to the greatest.

The white people did not believe in getting a good teacher from abroad, because he carried the money out of the country.

Queenie V. Moore taught in Illinois and had high ideas of the colored people, but she found them not nearly so well off as the colored people of the South. The young people spent their time near the taverns, smoking and drinking. She had a model school-house, which was also used as a church. The people were from all the Southern States. She tried to inspire the young people with a higher purpose than to wear fine dresses or smoke cigars, and succeeded in getting them into Sunday-school. The white people were very cordial and friendly.

Prof. J. D. Burrus tried to look upon the bright side at Murfreesboro, where he visited, and was surprised to find the colored people so prosperous in getting farms, houses and in educating their children. One man had paid $1,100 for his house and $1,100 for his shop. Within a radius of a few miles he counted up 30 families that owned their own homesteads.

H. C. Gray taught in Texas; was Superintendent of the Sunday-school. He had studied the land system of Texas. A man buys a piece of land and pays a little down and 10 per cent. interest on the notes. Many of them are in debt. The school law is such that each child may ask the judge to set aside his pro-rata for him to go to school upon, so that each child gets his chance to be educated.

* * * * *

GEORGIA.

STORRS SCHOOL.

_By Miss Amy Williams, Atlanta._

During the summer the city of Atlanta erected a beautiful eight room colored school building not more than sixty rods from the Storrs School. We all said, surely the number attending our school will be greatly diminished by this new free school; consequently, only four teachers were summoned to be on the ground ready for the opening of school on September 5; but as 280 pupils filed into the school building, we saw that we had underestimated the force needed, and our fifth teacher was called in, and before the expiration of two weeks the sixth one was installed in her old place, and we are now hard at work with 350 pupils enrolled, and new ones are being admitted almost every day.

This new colored school, which we can see so plainly from our home, is a constant inspiration for us to work on with new courage, for its eight faithful teachers, with one exception, have been first trained at Storrs School and afterward at Atlanta University.

This good work loses none of its fascination for us; we only mourn that time and strength are not given us to accomplish more.

Mr. Kent, our new pastor, comes with perfect health, and is brim-full of enthusiasm and earnest desire to do the people good. His earnestness, supplemented by the experience and good judgment of Miss Stevenson, the city missionary, must tell upon the church and people generally.

* * * * *

MISSISSIPPI.

DEDICATION OF STRIEBY HALL.

_By Mrs. M. E. H. Pope, Tougaloo._

THANKSGIVING DAY, 1881.

One year ago to-day we gathered in the old chapel of Washington Hall to recount the mercies of the year which God had crowned with goodness.

How little did we anticipate the changes which one year more would bring to us. We were trying to make the best of the (dis) comforts and (in) conveniences of the old building; but it could not hold half of the young men, and it seemed to us that the old rooms over the shop and wood-house, and the temporary barracks, had served their day and generation, and we needed—yes, there was no doubt of it—we needed a new building. We asked the Lord for one, and the beginning of the answer to our prayer was the sweeping away by the flames, in one short hour, of our main school building, which included chapel and boys’ dormitories. But, though cast down, we were not destroyed utterly, for we had a large new barn, out of which we turned the cattle; dubbed it “Ayrshire Hall,” and moved in. We were sure the Lord Jesus would not forget that His birthplace was a manger, and would glorify this refuge with His presence; and so He did.

Our numbers were larger than ever, and it was a wonder to us sometimes where they were all stowed away; but we were always able to find a place for “one more,” and so the year went on and ended. The boarding hall had been enlarged during the last half of the year by the addition of a wing and another story, so it could accommodate more than twice as many girls as before. And now followed a busy summer, during which the boarding hall was finished off and a substantial three story brick building erected. A good many buildings have been put up at various places by legacies and named for the dead, but we thought it right to give honor to the living as well, and by request of the Faculty, the Executive Committee voted to name this building after the Association’s representative man, Dr. M. E. Strieby. And so a tablet over the main entrance bears the words “Strieby Hall.” The work upon this building has been entirely done by colored men, except a few days work by the traditional “plumber.”

To-day we met to keep our Thanksgiving feast and to dedicate this building to the cause of Christian education. Oh, such gladness and thankfulness as filled our hearts, and was voiced by the choir in the opening anthem, “Praise the Lord!” After the opening exercises voluntary expressions of thanksgiving were called for. Mr. Hartsfield, our head carpenter, said he could not help comparing the present with twenty-five years ago, when he little dreamed of ever participating in such exercises as these, and said his heart was so full of thankfulness he could not express it. Others spoke of their gratitude for the blessings of the year and of this day. Mr. H. W. Hubbard, our genial Treasurer, who was with us, told the young people where the money to furnish them these advantages comes from.

An address was then delivered by Rev. B. A. Imes, of Memphis, which will be long remembered by us all, but especially by our students, to whom it has already proved a real inspiration. Dr. Roy followed in a wonderfully appropriate dedicatory prayer.

The day seemed all too short to express the joy and thanksgiving that filled our hearts. Truly He has brought “the blind by a way that they knew not.” We finished up the day with a lecture at night from Dr. Roy, who always has something good for us.

Our new building has, besides chapel and recitation rooms, family rooms now occupied by Prof. Hatch and wife, who have charge of the young men, and dormitories for sixty-eight young men.

And what will you say when I tell you that there are seventy-five here now, with a prospect for a much larger number after the holidays?

* * * * *

WORK IN THE SOUTH.

During my visit North last summer a friend asked: “Haven’t you had enough of life and work in the South? Aren’t you ready to come back and take hold of the Home Missionary work again?” The friend looked so incredulous at my expressions of satisfaction, and even of desire to get back into the work again as soon as the extreme heat was over, it occurs to me that a little glimpse of the past few days of life and labor in this especial corner of the great field might convince a good many that the work is not only very hopeful, but also exceedingly interesting. Previous to my restful vacation North, I had not been able to visit our people in their homes, but now, with renewed strength, I ventured a long, rough walk, leaning on my husband’s arm, to the home of one of our women, who was very sick. Down a steep, long hill, over deep ravines worn by swift-running brooks, with slender poles thrown over to serve for bridges, up the long hill beyond, and we had reached the little house where the sick one lay. We cheered her as best we could with sympathy and comforting words, spreading out the little delicacies we had brought to tempt her appetite, admired the new baby, and won the hearts of the other little people standing shyly back with the gingersnaps we had brought for their special comfort.

Just as we were leaving we noticed a young girl crouching near the door. “My sister Mag,” said the sick one. We shook hands cordially, said a few pleasant words to her, then came back to our home tired, so very tired, that the rest of that day and the next, which was the Sabbath, was full of weariness and pain.