Miss Mary Taylor did not take a college course for the purpose of
teaching Negroes. Not that she objected to Negroes as human
beings--quite the contrary. In the debate between the senior societies
her defence of the Fifteenth Amendment had been not only a notable bit
of reasoning, but delivered with real enthusiasm. Nevertheless, when the
end of the summer came and the only opening facing her was the teaching
of children at Miss Smith's experiment in the Alabama swamps, it must be
frankly confessed that Miss Taylor was disappointed.
Her dream had been a post-graduate course at Bryn Mawr; but that was out
of the question until money was earned. She had pictured herself earning
this by teaching one or two of her "specialties" in some private school
near New York or Boston, or even in a Western college. The South she had
not thought of seriously; and yet, knowing of its delightful
hospitality and mild climate, she was not averse to Charleston or New
Orleans. But from the offer that came to teach Negroes--country Negroes,
and little ones at that--she shrank, and, indeed, probably would have
refused it out of hand had it not been for her queer brother, John. John
Taylor, who had supported her through college, was interested in cotton.
Having certain schemes in mind, he had been struck by the fact that the
Smith School was in the midst of the Alabama cotton-belt.
"Better go," he had counselled, sententiously. "Might learn something
useful down there."
She had been not a little dismayed by the outlook, and had protested
against his blunt insistence.
"But, John, there's no society--just elementary work--"
John had met this objection with, "Humph!" as he left for his office.
Next day he had returned to the subject.
"Been looking up Tooms County. Find some Cresswells there--big
plantations--rated at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Some
others, too; big cotton county."
"You ought to know, John, if I teach Negroes I'll scarcely see much of
people in my own class."
"Nonsense! Butt in. Show off. Give 'em your Greek--and study Cotton. At
any rate, I say go."
And so, howsoever reluctantly, she had gone.
The trial was all she had anticipated, and possibly a bit more. She was
a pretty young woman of twenty-three, fair and rather daintily moulded.
In favorable surroundings, she would have been an aristocrat and an
epicure. Here she was teaching dirty children, and the smell of confused
odors and bodily perspiration was to her at times unbearable.
Then there was the fact of their color: it was a fact so insistent, so
fatal she almost said at times, that she could not escape it.
Theoretically she had always treated it with disdainful ease.
"What's the mere color of a human soul's skin," she had cried to a
Wellesley audience and the audience had applauded with enthusiasm. But
here in Alabama, brought closely and intimately in touch with these dark
skinned children, their color struck her at first with a sort of
terror--it seemed ominous and forbidding. She found herself shrinking
away and gripping herself lest they should perceive. She could not help
but think that in most other things they were as different from her as
in color. She groped for new ways to teach colored brains and marshal
colored thoughts and the result was puzzling both to teacher and
student. With the other teachers she had little commerce. They were in
no sense her sort of folk. Miss Smith represented the older New England
of her parents--honest, inscrutable, determined, with a conscience which
she worshipped, and utterly unselfish. She appealed to Miss Taylor's
ruddier and daintier vision but dimly and distantly as some memory of
the past. The other teachers were indistinct personalities, always very
busy and very tired, and talking "school-room" with their meals. Miss
Taylor was soon starving for human companionship, for the lighter
touches of life and some of its warmth and laughter. She wanted a glance
of the new books and periodicals and talk of great philanthropies and
reforms. She felt out of the world, shut in and mentally anæmic; great
as the "Negro Problem" might be as a world problem, it looked sordid and
small at close range. So for the hundredth time she was thinking today,
as she walked alone up the lane back of the barn, and then slowly down
through the bottoms. She paused a moment and nodded to the two boys at
work in a young cotton field.
"Cotton!"
She paused. She remembered with what interest she had always read of
this little thread of the world. She had almost forgotten that it was
here within touch and sight. For a moment something of the vision of
Cotton was mirrored in her mind. The glimmering sea of delicate leaves
whispered and murmured before her, stretching away to the Northward.
She remembered that beyond this little world it stretched on and on--how
far she did not know--but on and on in a great trembling sea, and the
foam of its mighty waters would one time flood the ends of the earth.
She glimpsed all this with parted lips, and then sighed impatiently.
There might be a bit of poetry here and there, but most of this place
was such desperate prose.
She glanced absently at the boys.
One was Bles Alwyn, a tall black lad. (Bles, she mused,--now who would
think of naming a boy "Blessed," save these incomprehensible creatures!)
Her regard shifted to the green stalks and leaves again, and she started
to move away. Then her New England conscience stepped in. She ought not
to pass these students without a word of encouragement or instruction.
"Cotton is a wonderful thing, is it not, boys?" she said rather primly.
The boys touched their hats and murmured something indistinctly. Miss
Taylor did not know much about cotton, but at least one more remark
seemed called for.
"How long before the stalks will be ready to cut?" she asked carelessly.
The farther boy coughed and Bles raised his eyes and looked at her; then
after a pause he answered slowly. (Oh! these people were so slow--now a
New England boy would have answered and asked a half-dozen questions in
the time.)
"I--I don't know," he faltered.
"Don't know! Well, of all things!" inwardly commented Miss
Taylor--"literally born in cotton, and--Oh, well," as much as to ask,
"What's the use?" She turned again to go.
"What is planted over there?" she asked, although she really didn't
care.
"Goobers," answered the smaller boy.
"Goobers?" uncomprehendingly.
"Peanuts," Bles specified.
"Oh!" murmured Miss Taylor. "I see there are none on the vines yet. I
suppose, though, it's too early for them."
Then came the explosion. The smaller boy just snorted with irrepressible
laughter and bolted across the fields. And Bles--was Miss Taylor
deceived?--or was he chuckling? She reddened, drew herself up, and then,
dropping her primness, rippled with laughter.
"What is the matter, Bles?" she asked.
He looked at her with twinkling eyes.
"Well, you see, Miss Taylor, it's like this: farming don't seem to be
your specialty."
The word was often on Miss Taylor's lips, and she recognized it. Despite
herself she smiled again.
"Of course, it isn't--I don't know anything about farming. But what did
I say so funny?"
Bles was now laughing outright.
"Why, Miss Taylor! I declare! Goobers don't grow on the tops of vines,
but underground on the roots--like yams."
"Is that so?"
"Yes, and we--we don't pick cotton stalks except for kindling."
"I must have been thinking of hemp. But tell me more about cotton."
His eyes lighted, for cotton was to him a very real and beautiful thing,
and a life-long companion, yet not one whose friendship had been
coarsened and killed by heavy toil. He leaned against his hoe and talked
half dreamily--where had he learned so well that dream-talk?
"We turn up the earth and sow it soon after Christmas. Then pretty soon
there comes a sort of greenness on the black land and it swells and
grows and, and--shivers. Then stalks shoot up with three or four leaves.
That's the way it is now, see? After that we chop out the weak stalks,
and the strong ones grow tall and dark, till I think it must be like the
ocean--all green and billowy; then come little flecks here and there
and the sea is all filled with flowers--flowers like little bells, blue
and purple and white."
"Ah! that must be beautiful," sighed Miss Taylor, wistfully, sinking to
the ground and clasping her hands about her knees.
"Yes, ma'am. But it's prettiest when the bolls come and swell and burst,
and the cotton covers the field like foam, all misty--"
She bent wondering over the pale plants. The poetry of the thing began
to sing within her, awakening her unpoetic imagination, and she
murmured:
"The Golden Fleece--it's the Silver Fleece!"
He harkened.
"What's that?" he asked.
"Have you never heard of the Golden Fleece, Bles?"
"No, ma'am," he said eagerly; then glancing up toward the Cresswell
fields, he saw two white men watching them. He grasped his hoe and
started briskly to work.
"Some time you'll tell me, please, won't you?"
She glanced at her watch in surprise and arose hastily.
"Yes, with pleasure," she said moving away--at first very fast, and then
more and more slowly up the lane, with a puzzled look on her face.
She began to realize that in this pleasant little chat the fact of the
boy's color had quite escaped her; and what especially puzzled her was
that this had not happened before. She had been here four months, and
yet every moment up to now she seemed to have been vividly, almost
painfully conscious, that she was a white woman talking to black folk.
Now, for one little half-hour she had been a woman talking to a boy--no,
not even that: she had been talking--just talking; there were no persons
in the conversation, just things--one thing: Cotton.
She started thinking of cotton--but at once she pulled herself back to
the other aspect. Always before she had been veiled from these folk: who
had put the veil there? Had she herself hung it before her soul, or had
they hidden timidly behind its other side? Or was it simply a brute
fact, regardless of both of them?
The longer she thought, the more bewildered she grew. There seemed no
analogy that she knew. Here was a unique thing, and she climbed to her
bedroom and stared at the stars.
_Four_