It was not until the next day that the two women were sufficiently
composed to talk matters over sanely.
"What is your plan?" asked Zora.
"To put the money in a Northern savings bank at three per cent interest;
to supply the rest of the interest, and the deficit in the running
expenses, from our balance, and to send you North to beg."
Zora shook her head. "It won't do," she objected. "I'd make a poor
beggar; I don't know human nature well enough, and I can't talk to rich
white folks the way they expect us to talk."
"It wouldn't be hypocrisy, Zora; you would be serving in a great cause.
If you don't go, I--"
"Wait! You sha'n't go. If any one goes it must be me. But let's think it
out: we pay off the mortgage, we get enough to run the school as it has
been run. Then what? There will still be slavery and oppression all
around us. The children will be kept in the cotton fields; the men will
be cheated, and the women--" Zora paused and her eyes grew hard.
She began again rapidly: "We must have land--our own farm with our own
tenants--to be the beginning of a free community."
Miss Smith threw up her hands impatiently.
"But sakes alive! Where, Zora? Where can we get land, with Cresswell
owning every inch and bound to destroy us?"
Zora sat hugging her knees and staring out the window toward the sombre
ramparts of the swamp. In her eyes lay slumbering the madness of long
ago; in her brain danced all the dreams and visions of childhood.
"I'm thinking," she murmured, "of buying the swamp."
_Thirty-three_