Once upon a time I taught school in the hills of Tennessee, where the
broad dark vale of the Mississippi begins to roll and crumple to greet
the Alleghanies. I was a Fisk student then, and all Fisk men think that
Tennessee--beyond the Veil--is theirs alone, and in vacation time they
sally forth in lusty bands to meet the county school commissioners.
Young and happy, I too went, and I shall not soon forget that summer,
ten years ago.
First, there was a teachers' Institute at the county-seat; and there
distinguished guests of the superintendent taught the teachers fractions
and spelling and other mysteries,--white teachers in the morning,
Negroes at night. A picnic now and then, and a supper, and the 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 I 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 afterward, 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 rate 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-back spelling-book.
I loved my school, and the fine faith the children had in the wisdom of
their teacher was truly marvelous. 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 bed-time 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 bedbugs
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 thirty 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,--they
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
barriers,--barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last, in dangerous
moments, against everything that opposed even a whim.
The ten years that follow youth, the years when first the realization
comes that life is leading somewhere,--these were the years that passed
after I left my little school. When they were past, I came by chance
once more to the walls of Fisk University, to the halls of the chapel
of melody. As I lingered there in the joy and pain of meeting old school
friends, there swept over me a sudden longing to pass again beyond the
blue hill, and to see the homes and the school of other days, and to
learn how life had gone with my school-children; and I went.
Josie was dead, and the gray-haired mother said simply, "We've had a
heap of trouble since you've been away." I had feared for Jim. With a
cultured parentage and a social caste to uphold him, he might have made
a venturesome merchant or a West Point cadet. But here he was, angry
with life and reckless; and when Farmer Durham charged him with stealing
wheat, the old man had to ride fast to escape the stones which the
furious fool hurled after him. They told Jim to run away; but he would
not run, and the constable came that afternoon. It grieved Josie, and
great awkward John walked nine miles every day to see his little brother
through the bars of Lebanon jail. At last the two came back together in
the dark night. The mother cooked supper, and Josie emptied her purse,
and the boys stole away. Josie grew thin and silent, yet worked the
more. The hill became steep for the quiet old father, and with the boys
away there was little to do in the valley. Josie helped them sell the
old farm, and they moved nearer town. Brother Dennis, the carpenter,
built a new house with six rooms; Josie toiled a year in Nashville,
and brought back ninety dollars to furnish the house and change it to a
home.
When the spring came, and the birds twittered, and the stream ran proud
and full, little sister Lizzie, bold and thoughtless, flushed with the
passion of youth, bestowed herself on the tempter, and brought home
a nameless child. Josie shivered, and worked on, with the vision of
schooldays all fled, with a face wan and tired,--worked until, on a
summer's day, some one married another; then Josie crept to her mother
like a hurt child, and slept--and sleeps.
I paused to scent the breeze as I entered the valley. The Lawrences have
gone; father and son forever, and the other son lazily digs in the earth
to live. A new young widow rents out their cabin to fat Reuben. Reuben
is a Baptist preacher now, but I fear as lazy as ever, though his cabin
has three rooms; and little Ella has grown into a bouncing woman, and is
ploughing corn on the hot hillside. There are babies a plenty, and one
half-witted girl. Across the valley is a house I did not know before,
and there I found, rocking one baby and expecting another, one of
my schoolgirls, a daughter of Uncle Bird Dowell. She looked somewhat
worried with her new duties, but soon bristled into pride over her neat
cabin, and the tale of her thrifty husband, the horse and cow, and the
farm they were planning to buy.
My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood Progress, and Progress,
I understand, is necessarily ugly. The crazy foundation stones still
marked the former site of my poor little cabin, and not far away, on six
weary boulders, perched a jaunty board house, perhaps twenty by thirty
feet, with three windows and a door that locked. Some of the window
glass was broken, and part of an old iron stove lay mournfully under
the house. I peeped through the window half reverently, and found things
that were more familiar. The blackboard had grown by about two feet, and
the seats were still without backs. The county owns the lot now, I hear,
and every year there is a session of school. As I sat by the spring and
looked on the Old and the New I felt glad, very glad, and yet--
After two long drinks I started on. There was the great double log house
on the corner. I remembered the broken, blighted family that used to
live there. The strong, hard face of the mother, with its wilderness
of hair, rose before me. She had driven her husband away, and while
I taught school a strange man lived there, big and jovial, and people
talked. I felt sure that Ben and 'Tildy would come to naught from such
a home. But this is an odd world; for Ben is a busy farmer in Smith
County, "doing well, too," they say, and he had cared for little 'Tildy
until last spring, when a lover married her. A hard life the lad had
led, toiling for meat, and laughed at because he was homely and crooked.
There was Sam Carlon, an impudent old skinflint, who had definite
notions about niggers, and hired Ben a summer and would not pay him.
Then the hungry boy gathered his sacks together, and in broad daylight
went into Carlon's corn; and when the hard-fisted farmer set upon him,
the angry boy flew at him like a beast. Doc Burke saved a murder and a
lynching that day.
The story reminded me again of the Burkes, and an impatience seized me
to know who won in the battle, Doc or the seventy-five acres. For it is
a hard thing to make a farm out of nothing, even in fifteen years. So
I hurried on, thinking of the Burkes. They used to have a certain
magnificent barbarism about them that I liked. They were never vulgar,
never immoral, but rather rough and primitive, with an unconventionality
that spent itself in loud guffaws, slaps on the back, and naps in the
corner. I hurried by the cottage of the misborn Neill boys. It was
empty, and they were grown into fat, lazy farm hands. I saw the home of
the Hickmans, but Albert, with his stooping shoulders, had passed from
the world. Then I came to the Burkes' gate and peered through; the
inclosure looked rough and untrimmed, and yet there were the same fences
around the old farm save to the left, where lay twenty-five other acres.
And lo! the cabin in the hollow had climbed the hill and swollen to a
half-finished six-room cottage.
The Burkes held a hundred acres, but they were still in debt. Indeed,
the gaunt father who toiled night and day would scarcely be happy out of
debt, being so used to it. Some day he must stop, for his massive frame
is showing decline. The mother wore shoes, but the lionlike physique of
other days was broken. The children had grown up. Rob, the image of his
father, was loud and rough with laughter. Birdie, my school baby of
six, had grown to a picture of maiden beauty, tall and tawny. "Edgar
is gone," said the mother, with head half bowed,--"gone to work in
Nashville; he and his father couldn't agree."
Little Doc, the boy born since the time of my school, took me horseback
down the creek next morning toward Farmer Dowell's. The road and the
stream were battling for mastery, and the stream had the better of it.
We splashed and waded, and the merry boy, perched behind me, chattered
and laughed. He showed me where Simon Thompson had bought a bit of
ground and a home; but his daughter Lana, a plump, brown, slow girl, was
not there. She had married a man and a farm twenty miles away. We wound
on down the stream till we came to a gate that I did not recognize, but
the boy insisted that it was "Uncle Bird's." The farm was fat with the
growing crop. In that little valley was a strange stillness as I rode
up; for death and marriage had stolen youth, and left age and childhood
there. We sat and talked that night, after the chores were done. Uncle
Bird was grayer, and his eyes did not see so well, but he was still
jovial. We talked of the acres bought,--one hundred and twenty-five,--of
the new guest chamber added, of Martha's marrying. Then we talked of
death: Fanny and Fred were gone; a shadow hung over the other daughter,
and when it lifted she was to go to Nashville to school. At last we
spoke of the neighbors, and as night fell Uncle Bird told me how, on a
night like that, 'Thenie came wandering back to her home over yonder, to
escape the blows of her husband. And next morning she died in the home
that her little bow-legged brother, working and saving, had bought for
their widowed mother.
My journey was done, and behind me lay hill and dale, and Life and
Death. How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie
lies? How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat? How
hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And
all this life and love and strife and failure,--is it the twilight of
nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?
Thus sadly musing, I rode to Nashville in the Jim Crow car.