The Souls of Black Folk
rough world was softened by laughter and song. I remember how— But I
wander.
There came a day when all the teachers left the Institute and began the
hunt for schools. I learn from hearsay (for my mother was mortally
afraid of firearms) that the hunting of ducks and bears and men is
wonderfully interesting, but I am sure that the man who has never
hunted a country school has something to learn of the pleasures of the
chase. I see now the white, hot roads lazily rise and fall and wind
before me under the burning July sun; I feel the deep weariness of
heart and limb as ten, eight, six miles stretch relentlessly ahead; I
feel my heart sink heavily as I hear again and again, “Got a teacher?
Yes.” So I walked on and on—horses were too expensive—until I had
wandered beyond railways, beyond stage lines, to a land of “varmints”
and rattlesnakes, where the coming of a stranger was an event, and men
lived and died in the shadow of one blue hill.
Sprinkled over hill and dale lay cabins and farmhouses, shut out from
the world by the forests and the rolling hills toward the east. There I
found at last a little school. Josie told me of it; she was a thin,
homely girl of twenty, with a dark-brown face and thick, hard hair. I
had crossed the stream at Watertown, and rested under the great
willows; then I had gone to the little cabin in the lot where Josie was
resting on her way to town. The gaunt farmer made me welcome, and
Josie, hearing my errand, told me anxiously that they wanted a school
over the hill; that but once since the war had a teacher been there;
that she herself longed to learn,—and thus she ran on, talking fast and
loud, with much earnestness and energy.
Next morning I crossed the tall round hill, lingered to look at the
blue and yellow mountains stretching toward the Carolinas, then plunged
into the wood, and came out at Josie’s home. It was a dull frame
cottage with four rooms, perched just below the brow of the hill, amid
peach-trees. The father was a quiet, simple soul, calmly ignorant, with
no touch of vulgarity. The mother was different,—strong, bustling, and
energetic, with a quick, restless tongue, and an ambition to live “like
folks.” There was a crowd of children. Two boys had gone away. There
remained two growing girls; a shy midget of eight; John, tall, awkward,
and eighteen; Jim, younger, quicker, and better looking; and two babies
of indefinite age. Then there was Josie herself. She seemed to be the
centre of the family: always busy at service, or at home, or
berry-picking; a little nervous and inclined to scold, like her mother,
yet faithful, too, like her father. She had about her a certain
fineness, the shadow of an unconscious moral heroism that would
willingly give all of life to make life broader, deeper, and fuller for
her and hers. I saw much of this family afterwards, and grew to love
them for their honest efforts to be decent and comfortable, and for
their knowledge of their own ignorance. There was with them no
affectation. The mother would scold the father for being so “easy”;
Josie would roundly berate the boys for carelessness; and all knew that
it was a hard thing to dig a living out of a rocky side-hill.
I secured the school. I remember the day I rode horseback out to the
commissioner’s house with a pleasant young white fellow who wanted the
white school. The road ran down the bed of a stream; the sun laughed
and the water jingled, and we rode on. “Come in,” said the
commissioner,—“come in. Have a seat. Yes, that certificate will do.
Stay to dinner. What do you want a month?” “Oh,” thought I, “this is
lucky”; but even then fell the awful shadow of the Veil, for they ate
first, then I—alone.
The schoolhouse was a log hut, where Colonel Wheeler used to shelter
his corn. It sat in a lot behind a rail fence and thorn bushes, near
the sweetest of springs. There was an entrance where a door once was,
and within, a massive rickety fireplace; great chinks between the logs
served as windows. Furniture was scarce. A pale blackboard crouched in
the corner. My desk was made of three boards, reinforced at critical
points, and my chair, borrowed from the landlady, had to be returned
every night. Seats for the children—these puzzled me much. I was
haunted by a New England vision of neat little desks and chairs, but,
alas! the reality was rough plank benches without backs, and at times
without legs. They had the one virtue of making naps
dangerous,—possibly fatal, for the floor was not to be trusted.
It was a hot morning late in July when the school opened. I trembled
when I heard the patter of little feet down the dusty road, and saw the
growing row of dark solemn faces and bright eager eyes facing me. First
came Josie and her brothers and sisters. The longing to know, to be a
student in the great school at Nashville, hovered like a star above
this child-woman amid her work and worry, and she studied doggedly.
There were the Dowells from their farm over toward Alexandria,—Fanny,
with her smooth black face and wondering eyes; Martha, brown and dull;
the pretty girl-wife of a brother, and the younger brood.
There were the Burkes,—two brown and yellow lads, and a tiny
haughty-eyed girl. Fat Reuben’s little chubby girl came, with golden
face and old-gold hair, faithful and solemn. ’Thenie was on hand
early,—a jolly, ugly, good-hearted girl, who slyly dipped snuff and
looked after her little bow-legged brother. When her mother could spare
her, ’Tildy came,—a midnight beauty, with starry eyes and tapering
limbs; and her brother, correspondingly homely. And then the big
boys,—the hulking Lawrences; the lazy Neills, unfathered sons of mother
and daughter; Hickman, with a stoop in his shoulders; and the rest.
There they sat, nearly thirty of them, on the rough benches, their
faces shading from a pale cream to a deep brown, the little feet bare
and swinging, the eyes full of expectation, with here and there a
twinkle of mischief, and the hands grasping Webster’s blue-black
spelling-book. I loved my school, and the fine faith the children had
in the wisdom of their teacher was truly marvellous. We read and
spelled together, wrote a little, picked flowers, sang, and listened to
stories of the world beyond the hill. At times the school would dwindle
away, and I would start out. I would visit Mun Eddings, who lived in
two very dirty rooms, and ask why little Lugene, whose flaming face
seemed ever ablaze with the dark-red hair uncombed, was absent all last
week, or why I missed so often the inimitable rags of Mack and Ed. Then
the father, who worked Colonel Wheeler’s farm on shares, would tell me
how the crops needed the boys; and the thin, slovenly mother, whose
face was pretty when washed, assured me that Lugene must mind the baby.
“But we’ll start them again next week.” When the Lawrences stopped, I
knew that the doubts of the old folks about book-learning had conquered
again, and so, toiling up the hill, and getting as far into the cabin
as possible, I put Cicero “pro Archia Poeta” into the simplest English
with local applications, and usually convinced them—for a week or so.
On Friday nights I often went home with some of the children,—sometimes
to Doc Burke’s farm. He was a great, loud, thin Black, ever working,
and trying to buy the seventy-five acres of hill and dale where he
lived; but people said that he would surely fail, and the “white folks
would get it all.” His wife was a magnificent Amazon, with saffron face
and shining hair, uncorseted and barefooted, and the children were
strong and beautiful. They lived in a one-and-a-half-room cabin in the
hollow of the farm, near the spring. The front room was full of great
fat white beds, scrupulously neat; and there were bad chromos on the
walls, and a tired centre-table. In the tiny back kitchen I was often
invited to “take out and help” myself to fried chicken and wheat
biscuit, “meat” and corn pone, string-beans and berries. At first I
used to be a little alarmed at the approach of bedtime in the one lone
bedroom, but embarrassment was very deftly avoided. First, all the
children nodded and slept, and were stowed away in one great pile of
goose feathers; next, the mother and the father discreetly slipped away
to the kitchen while I went to bed; then, blowing out the dim light,
they retired in the dark. In the morning all were up and away before I
thought of awaking. Across the road, where fat Reuben lived, they all
went outdoors while the teacher retired, because they did not boast the
luxury of a kitchen.
I liked to stay with the Dowells, for they had four rooms and plenty of
good country fare. Uncle Bird had a small, rough farm, all woods and
hills, miles from the big road; but he was full of tales,—he preached
now and then,—and with his children, berries, horses, and wheat he was
happy and prosperous. Often, to keep the peace, I must go where life
was less lovely; for instance, ’Tildy’s mother was incorrigibly dirty,
Reuben’s larder was limited seriously, and herds of untamed insects
wandered over the Eddingses’ beds. Best of all I loved to go to
Josie’s, and sit on the porch, eating peaches, while the mother bustled
and talked: how Josie had bought the sewing-machine; how Josie worked
at service in winter, but that four dollars a month was “mighty little”
wages; how Josie longed to go away to school, but that it “looked like”
they never could get far enough ahead to let her; how the crops failed
and the well was yet unfinished; and, finally, how “mean” some of the
white folks were.
For two summers I lived in this little world; it was dull and humdrum.
The girls looked at the hill in wistful longing, and the boys fretted
and haunted Alexandria. Alexandria was “town,”—a straggling, lazy
village of houses, churches, and shops, and an aristocracy of Toms,
Dicks, and Captains. Cuddled on the hill to the north was the village
of the colored folks, who lived in three- or four-room unpainted
cottages, some neat and homelike, and some dirty. The dwellings were
scattered rather aimlessly, but they centred about the twin temples of
the hamlet, the Methodist, and the Hard-Shell Baptist churches. These,
in turn, leaned gingerly on a sad-colored schoolhouse. Hither my little
world wended its crooked way on Sunday to meet other worlds, and
gossip, and wonder, and make the weekly sacrifice with frenzied priest
at the altar of the “old-time religion.” Then the soft melody and
mighty cadences of Negro song fluttered and thundered.
I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made it;
and yet there was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness,
sprung from common joy and grief, at burial, birth, or wedding; from a
common hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and, above all,
from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and Opportunity. All
this caused us to think some thoughts together; but these, when ripe
for speech, were spoken in various languages. Those whose eyes
twenty-five and more years before had seen “the glory of the coming of
the Lord,” saw in every present hindrance or help a dark fatalism bound
to bring all things right in His own good time. The mass of those to
whom slavery was a dim recollection of childhood found the world a
puzzling thing: it asked little of them, and they answered with little,
and yet it ridiculed their offering. Such a paradox they could not
understand, and therefore sank into listless indifference, or
shiftlessness, or reckless bravado. There were, however, some—such as
Josie, Jim, and Ben—to whom War, Hell, and Slavery were but childhood
tales, whose young appetites had been whetted to an edge by school and
story and half-awakened thought. Ill could they be content, born
without and beyond the World. And their weak wings beat against their