himself. "But even a larger sum might not serve so well later, perhaps."
It was all to be Marion's in either case--which would be best? Then he
remembered her sudden pallor, and that decided him. "He shall have it
now," he said. "How lucky that he was content with ten!"
Some men would have given the money also in the same circumstances; but
they would have given it to Marion. It was characteristic of Bro's deep
and minute knowledge of the girl, and what would be for her happiness,
that he planned to give the money to the man, and thus weight down and
steady the lighter nature.
He dwelt a long time upon ways and means; he was several days in making
up his mind. At last he decided what to do; and did it.
Three weeks afterward a letter came to Wilbarger, directed in a clear
handwriting to "Mr. Lawrence Broughton Vickery." It was from a Northern
lawyer, acting for another party, and contained an offer for Vickery
Island with its house, cotton-fields, and marsh; price offered, ten
thousand dollars. The lawyer seemed to be acquainted with the size of
the island, the condition of the fields and out-buildings; he mentioned
that the purchase was made with the idea of reviving the cotton-culture
immediately, similar attempts on the part of Rhode Island manufacturers,
who wished to raise their own cotton, having succeeded on the
sea-islands farther north. Lawrence, in a whirl of delight, read the
letter aloud in a cottage-parlor, tossed it over gayly to Mrs. Manning,
and clasped Marion in his arms.
"Well, little wife," he said happily, stroking her soft hair, "we shall
go over the ocean together now."
And Bro looked on.
The wedding took place in the early autumn. Although comparatively
quiet, on account of old Mr. Vickery's death, all Wilbarger came to the
church, and crowded into the cottage afterward. By a happy chance, "the
worm" was at the North, soliciting aid for his "fold," and Marion was
married by a gentle little missionary, who traversed the watery
coast-district in a boat instead of on horseback, visiting all the
sea-islands, seeing many sad, closed little churches, and encountering
not infrequently almost pure paganism and fetich-worship among the
neglected blacks. Bro gave the bride away. It was the proudest moment of
his life--and the saddest.
"Somebody must do it," Mrs. Manning had said; "and why not Bro? He has
lived in our house for twelve years, and, after all, now that old Mr.
Vickery is gone, he is in one way our nearest friend.--Do let me ask
him, Marion."
"Very well," assented the bride, caring but little for anything now but
to be with Lawrence every instant.
She did, however, notice Bro during the crowded although informal
reception which followed the ceremony. In truth, he was noticeable. In
honor of the occasion, he had ordered from Savannah a suit of black, and
had sent the measurements himself; the result was remarkable, the coat
and vest being as much too short for him as the pantaloons were too
long. He wore a white cravat, white-cotton gloves so large that he
looked all hands, and his button-hole was decked with flowers, as many
as it could hold. In this garb he certainly was an extraordinary object,
and his serious face appearing at the top made the effect all the more
grotesque. Marion was too good-hearted to smile; but she did say a word
or two in an undertone to Lawrence, and the two young people had their
own private amusement over his appearance.
But Bro was unconscious of it, or of anything save the task he had set
for himself. It was remarked afterward that "really Bro Cranch talked
almost like other people, joked and laughed, too, if you will believe
it, at that Manning wedding."
Lawrence promised to bring his wife home at the end of a year to see
her mother, and perhaps, if all went well, to take the mother back with
them. Mrs. Manning, happy and sad together, cried and smiled in a
breath. But Marion was radiant as a diamond; her gray eyes flashed
light. Not even when saying good-by could she pretend to be anything but
supremely happy, even for a moment. By chance Bro had her last look as
the carriage rolled away; he went over to the mill carrying it with him,
and returned no more that night.
Wilbarger began to wonder after a while when that Rhode Island
capitalist would begin work in his cotton-fields; they are wondering
still. In course of time, and through the roundabout way he had chosen,
Bro received the deeds of sale; he made his will, and left them to
Marion. Once Mrs. Manning asked him about the screw.
"I have heard nothing of it for some time," he replied; and she said no
more, thinking it had also, like the valve, proved a failure. In the
course of the winter the little work-room was dismantled and the
partitions taken down; there is nothing there now but the plain wall of
the mill. The red lights no longer shine across the marsh to Vickery
Island, and there is no one there to see them. The new keeper lives in a
cabin at the bridge, and plays no tricks on the superintendent, who, a
man of spirit still, but not quite so sanguine as to the future of
Wilbarger, still rolls by on his hand-car from northeast to southeast.
Bro has grown old; he is very patient with everybody. Not that he ever
was impatient, but that patience seems now his principal characteristic.
He often asks to hear portions of Marion's letters read aloud, and
always makes gently the final comment: "Yes, yes; she _is_ happy!"
It is whispered around Wilbarger that he "has had a stroke"; Mrs.
Manning herself thinks so.
Well, in a certain sense, perhaps she is right.
KING DAVID.
I met a traveler on the road;
His face was wan, his feet were weary;
Yet he unresting went with such
A strange, still, patient mien--a look
Set forward in the empty air,
As he were reading an unseen book.
RICHARD WATSON GILDER.
The scholars were dismissed. Out they trooped--big boys, little boys,
and full-grown men. Then what antics--what linked lines of scuffling;
what double shuffles, leaps, and somersaults; what rolling laughter,
interspersed with short yelps and guttural cries, as wild and free as
the sounds the mustangs make, gamboling on the plains! For King David's
scholars were black--black as the ace of spades. He did not say that; he
knew very little about the ace. He said simply that his scholars were
"colored"; and sometimes he called them "the Children of Ham." But so
many mistakes were made over this title, in spite of his careful
explanations (the Children having an undoubted taste for bacon), that he
finally abandoned it, and fell back upon the national name of
"freedmen," a title both good and true. He even tried to make it noble,
speaking to them often of their wonderful lot as the emancipated
teachers and helpers of their race; laying before them their mission in
the future, which was to go over to Africa, and wake out of their long
sloth and slumber the thousands of souls there. But Cassius and Pompey
had only a mythic idea of Africa; they looked at the globe as it was
turned around, they saw it there on the other side, and then their
attention wandered off to an adventurous ant who was making the tour of
Soodan and crossing the mountains of Kong as though they were nothing.
Lessons over, the scholars went home. The schoolmaster went home too,
wiping his forehead as he went. He was a grave young man, tall and thin,
somewhat narrow-chested, with the diffident air of a country student.
And yet this country student was here, far down in the South, hundreds
of miles away from the New Hampshire village where he had thought to
spend his life as teacher of the district school. Extreme
near-sightedness and an inherited delicacy of constitution which he bore
silently had kept him out of the field during the days of the war. "I
should be only an encumbrance," he thought. But, when the war was over,
the fire which had burned within burst forth in the thought, "The
freedmen!" There was work fitted to his hand; that one thing he could
do. "My turn has come at last," he said. "I feel the call to go." Nobody
cared much because he was leaving. "Going down to teach the blacks?"
said the farmers. "I don't see as you're called, David. We've paid dear
enough to set 'em free, goodness knows, and now they ought to look out
for themselves."
"But they must first be taught," said the schoolmaster. "Our
responsibility is great; our task is only just begun."
"Stuff!" said the farmers. What with the graves down in the South, and
the taxes up in the North, they were not prepared to hear any talk about
beginning. Beginning, indeed! They called it ending. The slaves were
freed, and it was right they should be freed; but Ethan and Abner were
gone, and their households were left unto them desolate. Let the blacks
take care of themselves.
So, all alone, down came David King, with such aid and instruction as
the Freedman's Bureau could give him, to this little settlement among
the pines, where the freedmen had built some cabins in a careless way,
and then seated themselves to wait for fortune. Freedmen! Yes; a
glorious idea! But how will it work its way out into practical life?
What are you going to do with tens of thousands of ignorant, childish,
irresponsible souls thrown suddenly upon your hands; souls that will not
long stay childish, and that have in them also all the capacities for
evil that you yourselves have--you with your safeguards of generations
of conscious responsibility and self-government, and yet--so many
lapses! This is what David King thought. He did not see his way exactly;
no, nor the nation's way. But he said to himself: "I can at least begin;
if I am wrong, I shall find it out in time. But now it seems to me that
our first duty is to educate them." So he began at "a, b, and c"; "You
must not steal"; "You must not fight"; "You must wash your faces"; which
may be called, I think, the first working out of the emancipation
problem.
Jubilee Town was the name of the settlement; and when the schoolmaster
announced his own, David King, the title struck the imitative minds of
the scholars, and, turning it around, they made "King David" of it, and
kept it so. Delighted with the novelty, the Jubilee freedmen came to
school in such numbers that the master was obliged to classify them;
boys and men in the mornings and afternoons; the old people in the
evenings; the young women and girls by themselves for an hour in the
early morning. "I can not do full justice to all," he thought, "and in
the men lies the danger, in the boys the hope; the women can not vote.
Would to God the men could not either, until they have learned to read
and to write, and to maintain themselves respectably!" For, abolitionist
as he was, David King would have given years of his life for the power
to restrict the suffrage. Not having this power, however, he worked at
the problem in the only way left open: "Take two apples from four
apples, Julius--how many will be left?" "What is this I hear, Cæsar,
about stolen bacon?"
On this day the master went home, tired and dispirited; the novelty was
over on both sides. He had been five months at Jubilee, and his
scholars were more of a puzzle to him than ever. They learned, some of
them, readily; but they forgot as readily. They had a vast capacity for
parrot-like repetition, and caught his long words so quickly, and
repeated them so volubly, with but slight comprehension of their
meaning, that his sensitive conscience shrank from using them, and he
was forced back upon a rude plainness of speech which was a pain to his
pedagogic ears. Where he had once said, "Demean yourselves with
sobriety," he now said, "Don't get drunk." He would have fared better if
he had learned to say "uncle" and "aunty," or "maumer," in the familiar
Southern fashion. But he had no knowledge of the customs; how could he
have? He could only blunder on in his slow Northern way.
His cabin stood in the pine forest, at a little distance from the
settlement; he had allowed himself that grace. There was a garden around
it, where Northern flowers came up after a while--a little pale,
perhaps, like English ladies in India, but doubly beautiful and dear to
exiled eyes. The schoolmaster had cherished from the first a wish for a
cotton-field--a cotton-field of his own. To him a cotton-field
represented the South--a cotton-field in the hot sunshine, with a gang
of slaves toiling under the lash of an overseer. This might have been a
fancy picture, and it might not. At any rate, it was real to him. There
was, however, no overseer now, and no lash; no slaves and very little
toil. The negroes would work only when they pleased, and that was
generally not at all. There was no doubt but that they were almost
hopelessly improvident and lazy. "Entirely so," said the planters. "Not
quite," said the Northern schoolmaster. And therein lay the difference
between them.
David lighted his fire of pitch-pine, spread his little table, and began
to cook his supper carefully. When it was nearly ready, he heard a knock
at his gate. Two representative specimens of his scholars were waiting
without--Jim, a field-hand, and a woman named Esther, who had been a
house-servant in a planter's family. Jim had come "to borry an axe,"
and Esther to ask for medicine for a sick child.
"Where is your own axe, Jim?" said the schoolmaster.
"Somehow et's rusty, sah. Dey gets rusty mighty quick."
"Of course, because you always leave them out in the rain. When will you
learn to take care of your axes?"
"Don' know, mars."
"I have told you not to call me master," said David. "I am not your
master."
"You's schoolmars, I reckon," answered Jim, grinning at his repartee.
"Well, Jim," said the schoolmaster, relaxing into a smile, "you have the
best of it this time; but you know quite well what I mean. You can take
the axe; but bring it back to-night. And you must see about getting a
new one immediately; there is something to begin with.--Now, Esther,
what is it? Your boy sick? Probably it is because you let him drink the
water out of that swampy pool. I warned you."
"Yes, sah," said the woman impassively.
She was a slow, dull-witted creature, who had executed her tasks
marvelously well in the planter's family, never varying by a hair's
breadth either in time or method during long years. Freed, she was lost
at once; if she had not been swept along by her companions, she would
have sat down dumbly by the wayside, and died. The schoolmaster offered
supper to both of his guests. Jim took a seat at the table at once,
nothing loath, and ate and drank, talking all the time with occasional
flashes of wit, and an unconscious suggestion of ferocity in the way he
hacked and tore the meat with his clasp-knife and his strong white
teeth. Esther stood; nothing could induce her to sit in the master's
presence. She ate and drank quietly, and dropped a courtesy whenever he
spoke to her, not from any especial respect or gratitude, however, but
from habit. "I may possibly teach the man something," thought the
schoolmaster; "but what a terrible creature to turn loose in the world,
with power in his hand! Hundreds of these men will die, nay, must die
violent deaths before their people can learn what freedom means, and
what it does not mean. As for the woman, it is hopeless; she can not
learn. But her child can. In truth, our hope is in the children."
And then he threw away every atom of the food, washed his dishes, made
up the fire, and went back to the beginning again and cooked a second
supper. For he still shrank from personal contact with the other race. A
Southerner would have found it impossible to comprehend the fortitude it
required for the New-Englander to go through his daily rounds among
them. He did his best; but it was duty, not liking. Supper over, he went
to the schoolhouse again: in the evenings he taught the old people. It
was an odd sight to note them as they followed the letters with a big,
crooked forefinger, slowly spelling out words of three letters. They
spelled with their whole bodies, stooping over the books which lay
before them until their old grizzled heads and gay turbans looked as if
they were set on the table by the chins in a long row. Patiently the
master taught them; they had gone no further then "cat" in five long
months. He made the letters for them on the blackboard again and again,
but the treat of the evening was the making of these letters on the
board by the different scholars in turn. "Now, Dinah--B." And old Dinah
would hobble up proudly, and, with much screwing of her mouth and
tongue, and many long hesitations, produce something which looked like a
figure eight gone mad. Joe had his turn next, and he would make,
perhaps, an H for a D. The master would go back and explain to him
carefully the difference, only to find at the end of ten minutes that
the whole class was hopelessly confused: Joe's mistake had routed them
all. There was one pair of spectacles among the old people: these were
passed from hand to hand as the turn came, not from necessity always,
but as an adjunct to the dignity of reading.
"Never mind the glasses, Tom. Surely you can spell 'bag' without them."
"Dey helps, Mars King David," replied old Tom with solemn importance. He
then adorned himself with the spectacles, and spelled it--"g, a, b."
But the old people enjoyed their lesson immensely; no laughter, no
joking broke the solemnity of the scene, and they never failed to make
an especial toilet--much shirt-collar for the old men, and clean turbans
for the old women. They seemed to be generally half-crippled, poor old
creatures; slow in their movements as tortoises, and often unwieldy;
their shoes were curiosities of patches, rags, strings, and carpeting.
But sometimes a fine old black face was lifted from the slow-moving
bulk, and from under wrinkled eyelids keen sharp eyes met the master's,
as intelligent as his own.
There was no church proper in Jubilee. On Sundays, the people, who were
generally Baptists, assembled in the schoolroom, where services were
conducted by a brother who had "de gif' ob preachin'," and who poured
forth a flood of Scripture phrases with a volubility, incoherence, and
earnestness alike extraordinary. Presbyterian David attended these
services, not only for the sake of example, but also because he
steadfastly believed in "the public assembling of ourselves together for
the worship of Almighty God."
"Perhaps they understand him," he thought, noting the rapt black faces,
"and I, at least, have no right to judge them--I, who, with all the
rights I have had, still find myself unable to grasp the great doctrine
of Election." For David had been bred in Calvinism, and many a night,
when younger and more hopeful of arriving at finalities, had he wrestled
with its problems. He was not so sure, now, of arriving at finalities
either in belief or in daily life; but he thought the fault lay with
himself, and deplored it.
The Yankee schoolmaster was, of course, debarred from intercourse with
those of his own color in the neighborhood. There were no "poor whites"
there; he was spared the sight of their long, clay-colored faces, lank
yellow hair, and half-open mouths; he was not brought into contact with
the ignorance and dense self-conceit of this singular class. The whites
of the neighborhood were planters, and they regarded the schoolmaster as
an interloper, a fanatic, a knave, or a fool, according to their various
degrees of bitterness. The phantom of a cotton-field still haunted the
master, and he often walked by the abandoned fields of these planters,
and noted them carefully. In addition to his fancy, there was now
another motive. Things were not going well at Jubilee, and he was
anxious to try whether the men would not work for good wages, paid
regularly, and for their Northern teacher and friend. Thus it happened
that Harnett Ammerton, retired planter, one afternoon perceived a
stranger walking up the avenue that led to his dilapidated mansion; and
as he was near-sighted, and as any visitor was, besides, a welcome
interruption in his dull day, he went out upon the piazza to meet him;
and not until he had offered a chair did he recognize his guest. He said
nothing; for he was in his own house; but a gentleman can freeze the
atmosphere around him even in his own house, and this he did. The
schoolmaster stated his errand simply: he wished to rent one of the
abandoned cotton-fields for a year. The planter could have answered with
satisfaction that his fields might lie for ever unfilled before Yankee
hands should touch them; but he was a poor man now, and money was money.
He endured his visitor, and he rented his field; and, with the perplexed
feelings of his class, he asked himself how it was, how it could be,
that a man like that--yes, like that--had money, while he himself had
none! David had but little money--a mere handful to throw away in a day,
the planter would have thought in the lavish old times; but David had
the New England thrift.
"I am hoping that the unemployed hands over at Jubilee will cultivate
this field for me," he said--"for fair wages, of course. I know nothing
of cotton myself."
"You will be disappointed," said the planter.
"But they must live; they must lay up something for the winter."
"They do not know enough to live. They might exist, perhaps, in Africa,
as the rest of their race exists; but here, in this colder climate, they
must be taken care of, worked, and fed, as we work and feed our
horses--precisely in the same way."
"I can not agree with you," replied David, a color rising in his thin
face. "They are idle and shiftless, I acknowledge that; but is it not
the natural result of generations of servitude and ignorance?"
"They have not capacity for anything save ignorance."
"You do not know then, perhaps, that I--that I am trying to educate
those who are over at Jubilee," said David. There was no aggressive
confidence in his voice; he knew that he had accomplished little as yet.
He looked wistfully at his host as he spoke.
Harnett Ammerton was a born patrician. Poor, homely, awkward David felt
this in every nerve as he sat there; for he loved beauty in spite of
himself, and in spite of his belief that it was a tendency of the old
Adam. (Old Adam has such nice things to bother his descendants with;
almost a monopoly, if we are to believe some creeds.) So now David tried
not to be influenced by the fine face before him, and steadfastly went
on to sow a little seed, if possible, even upon this prejudiced ground.
"I have a school over there," he said.
"I have heard something of the kind, I believe," replied the old
planter, as though Jubilee Town were a thousand miles away, instead of a
blot upon his own border. "May I ask how you are succeeding?"
There was a fine irony in the question. David felt it, but replied
courageously that success, he hoped, would come in time.
"And I, young man, hope that it will never come! The negro with power
in his hand, which you have given him, with a little smattering of
knowledge in his shallow, crafty brain--a knowledge which you and your
kind are now striving to give him--will become an element of more danger
in this land than it has ever known before. You Northerners do not
understand the blacks. They are an inferior race by nature; God made
them so. And God forgive those (although I never can) who have placed
them over us--yes, virtually over us, their former masters--poor
ignorant creatures!"
At this instant an old negro came up the steps with an armful of wood,
and the eye of the Northerner noted (was forced to note) the contrast.
There sat the planter, his head crowned with silver hair, his finely
chiseled face glowing with the warmth of his indignant words; and there
passed the old slave, bent and black, his low forehead and broad animal
features seeming to typify scarcely more intelligence than that of the
dog that followed him. The planter spoke to the servant in his kindly
way as he passed, and the old black face lighted with pleasure. This,
too, the schoolmaster's sensitive mind noted: none of his pupils looked
at him with anything like that affection. "But it _is_ right they should
be freed--it _is_ right," he said to himself as he walked back to
Jubilee; "and to that belief will I cling as long as I have my being. It
_is_ right." And then he came into Jubilee, and found three of his
freedmen drunk and quarreling in the street.