BRIGHTNESS OF MARTHA’S PUPILS.
When Martha Schofield opened her first school in South Carolina it
was impossible to secure the necessary text books and much of the
instruction was oral. With the few books which the school did possess
it was not an uncommon sight to see three and four pupils preparing
their lessons from the same book. The children took the books home
nights, until the “Blue Back” and Webster’s had gone the circuit round
many times. Having advanced to the ability to write and read script,
a pupil was no longer eligible to the benefits of the circulating
library. He was then forced to copy at his spare time the lessons he
was supposed to prepare during the night.
Notwithstanding the serious difficulties attending the acquisition of
knowledge without the aid of books, the intellectual as well as the
moral improvement of not only the children but their parents as well
was soon apparent. “There was an eager desire among all the children to
attend school” says Miss Schofield in writing of her experiences on the
Coast and later at Aiken; “never a truant.”
The average attendance of the Negroes at school in the South today
exceeds the attendance of 1900 by over 10 per cent. This thirsting
after knowledge by the brother in black is one of his redeeming
characteristics.
Miss Schofield once put the question to a class in Geography as to what
the world rested on. A grown man replied that it rested on stumps and
big wild animals. A ten year old boy corrected him by saying that it
rested on the Power of God. These definitions will serve to show the
dense ignorance of the race at the time Miss Schofield began teaching.
In a definition exercise the class was requested to define the word,
husband. Volunteers were called for but no one volunteered. In an
effort to lucify the subject and assist them to guess the meaning of
the word, with an approximate accuracy, Miss Schofield asked them to
tell her what she would have were she to marry. A little girl, almost
ten, replied, with much enthusiasm but unconscious of any wit at all,
“A baby.”
As soon as a student mastered reading, writing and arithmetic
sufficiently to enable him to read without much faltering and write
at all legibly and add a sum of four or five numbers, Miss Schofield
set him to teaching. The scarcity of teachers made this expedient
imperative.
A middle-aged man, Isaac Kimberley, who as a slave had been taught to
read and write but had greatly added to his fund of knowledge by a term
at Miss Schofield’s school, was one of the first to be honored with a
school. It was located near Miss Schofield’s and closely supervised
by her. Isaac assumed the duties of it with all the dignity of some
divinely appointed potentate and proceeded at once to make use of
only the most carefully chosen words possible, and put on a haughty,
undignified air that made him more ridiculous than he really was.
Alford Kimberley, a son of his former master, on meeting him soon after
he began teaching, addressed him familiarly as “Uncle Ike.” “I’le hab
yo’ to understan,’ suh, dat Ise neaver yo’ uncle or yo antie, suh, Ise
yo eacle,” said Isaac in reply. “Frum dis day on, ef yo’ pleas, suh,
Ise Prof. Isaak Kimberley,” continued the new teacher.
“Well, take that, and that, Prof. Isaac Kimberley, from your equal,”
responded Alford, as he bent over the prostrate form of the instructor,
lying in the ditch by the roadside where he had knocked him. “I’ll
teach you yet how to talk to white gentlemen, you low-down lover of
blue-bellied Yankees, you!”
No report of this dramatic incident ever reached the ears of Miss
Schofield as Isaac was afraid it might. He concealed it from everybody
in the neighborhood as much as possible, both on account of having
gotten whipped in his first encounter after becoming a free man and
also on account of an increasing amount of comment among both colored
and white that he was daily growing too big for his breeches and would
have to be whipped.
Miss Schofield’s confidence in him, at no time, it is needless to say,
was very great, but it was Isaac or worse. She finally dismissed him
and looked around in vain for a “worser” one.
His dismissal followed a visit to his school, which she was in the
habit of making regularly.
The day was an unusually cold one for South Carolina, where the
temperature in the winter seldom reaches the freezing point, and
through the unsealed crevices between the poles out of which the house
was built, the sleet and snow drifted joyously in. A half hundred or
more half clothed and well nigh starved little black urchins shook the
shackly floor with their shivering and drowned their voices with the
chattering of their teeth. If ever there was a blue-lipped, blue-gummed
Negro school Isaac’s was surely one on that day.
The extreme cold weather and the open condition of the house gave every
student a free license to leave his seat, even without permission of
the authority in charge, and crowd in close proximity around the wide
open hearth at the end of the building, where with the shivering of
limbs, chattering of teeth and shuffling of feet, all noise of their
cries and shrieks as one would pinch the other or mash a toe or hit
this one or that one over the head with a well worn book or trab ball,
was drowned out.
In the midst of the greatest confusion, Isaac, with the purpose in
view of dispersing the crowd and relieving the congestion around the
“fire place” blurted out with an assumed air of supreme dignity: “John
Thomas, why don’t yo’ add full to de flame?” With his black eyes
blinking like a rabbits when shot at and trembling from head to foot
and turning round like a Bob White in a trap, it was clear to Miss
Schofield that the child did not understand what the master of the
school wished to be done. She immediately came to the relief of all,
as she always seemed capable of doing in each and every predicament in
which she or any of her children (children is what she called all the
students) found themselves, by saying, “Isaac, tell John Thomas to put
some wood on the fire and he wilt understand thee.”
Walking along home with Isaac after dismission that afternoon she
informed him that it would be necessary to suspend his school until
the house could be repaired. Isaac, tired of waiting for the needed
repairs, returned to the Schofield school for instruction himself and
taking up the study of harness making, developed into a genius for
work of this kind. After years of success at the bench in one of the
best shops in a large Southern city, where he earned $22.50 a week,
the government of the United States awarded a contract to him for 250
army saddles. He could not teach school but he could make saddles and
harness.
The greatness of Miss Schofield’s work consisted of converting men and
women who could never develop into great singers and teachers into
useful productive workers and making them to see beauty as well as
profit in the humbler tasks.
The sad experience had with Isaac Kimberley as a teacher indicated to
Miss Schofield the necessity for raising the standard of qualification
for all applicants for teacher’s certificates, and with the cooperation
of Mose Graham, a Negro, who could scarcely read or write but who had
been made County School Commissioner by the Radical Party, then in
complete control of the State and National Government, she undertook to
do this, which proved a complete failure on account of the illiteracy
of the Negro race and the reluctance with which competent white
teachers from the North accepted the call from the South to join the
ranks of the teaching profession.
Ephriam Daniels, a six months pupil of the Schofield School, where
he acquired the art of reading fluently and writing legibly and also
mastered the four fundamental rules of arithmetic, concluded that in
staying on the farm and tilling the soil he was hiding his light under
a bushel and therefore, committing a sin which the Bible commanded him
not commit, so he made application to Mose for a certificate to engage
in the noble calling of teaching.
“Mr. Commissioner Graham,” said Ephriam, “I’se a wastin’ muh tallents
behin’ de plow handles, as I is a mi’ty smart man ef I is a nigger,
and so I haf com ter see yo’ ’bout gitten one o’ dem licenses to teach
chillen wid. Wi’l yo’ gib muh one?”
Mose explained in detail and in a very perfunctory manner the
difficulties of the teacher and discoursed considerably on the small
compensation paid them. But encouraged his friend, however, by saying
that the harvest was great and the laborers few, by which he meant that
the office of County School Commissioner had a number of schools but no
one to teach them.
“Don’t care ’bout difficultys and small pa’--dats what yo’ mean
by--what did you call it?--com--something--commishion, I beleives. All
I wants is ter teach. I’se going in der bizness fer de gud I kin do,
not fer de muney.”
“Very good, indeed,” said Mose, “but befo’ I kin lisence yo’ ter teech
I’se got to see Miss Marther Schofield and hab’ yo’ examed by her and
me. Yo’ cum ter see me termorrow, ’bout ten o’clock.”
When Miss Schofield heard of the ambitions of Ephriam that afternoon
her heart ran down in her shoes, both because of the impossibility
which she knew existed of ever making a teacher of Ephriam and the
equally impossible task of helping him to realize it. He was as
stubborn as a mule in his ways and when he made up his mind to do
anything he worked at it with all his poor brain till it either proved
successful or fizzled out. It pained her to think of the neglect which
she knew in her own mind had attended his crop throughout the spring
season when it needed most attention, which she was well aware from
the nature of Ephriam had been diverted to the subject of school
teaching.
But on the insistance of Graham, in whose favor she had often to make
some concessions, though none of any importance, she at some expense of
time and dignity consented to meet him at his office at the appointed
hour for the purpose of examining Ephriam Daniels for a certificate to
teach in the free public schools.
Dressed in a soldier’s old uniform, which was secured from the remnants
of Sherman’s Army as they passed through South Carolina; with a large
bandana handkerchief around his neck for a collar and an old stove pipe
hat which his old master, John Rutledge Daniels, had given him on the
day of his freedom, Ephriam appeared before the examining board with a
pocket full of pencils and a quire or two of ruled fools-cap paper.
Miss Schofield, who was one of the kindest and gentlest of women whom
the author ever knew, eyed Ephriam with a well concealed curiosity as
she asked him what preparations he had made for taking the examination.
“Wull, Mis’ Sch’fields,” he said, “I’se got heap ob pencils and papur.”
“Yes, I see you have,” replied the examiner, with laughter almost
bursting her throat, “but what I mean to get at is, what preparations
have you made for teaching school?”
Quick as a flash Ephriam replied that he had sold his horse and rented
out his farm.
The uproarous laughter which this answer produced was genuinely
participated in by all present, including Ephriam, although he could
not for the life of himself, as he afterwards stated, see what all the
laughing was about.
Extending the examination a little more for the purpose of entertaining
and amusing still further the board and its lone applicant, Miss
Schofield was unkind enough to ask the definition of the noun, “word.”
“Word,” repeated Ephriam, now quite seriously perplexed, “why, Mis’
Schofiels, yo’ sholey noes dat I noes dat a word is someting dat yo’
sais.”
When she put the question of the fundamental principles of Arithmetic,
Ephriam readily admitted that he did not know, and in a polite way
gave the board to understand that he did not see the necessity for
scholarship of a high grade for teaching “niggers what don’t ’no der A
B C’s.”
Not long afterward, Ephriam, his wife and their four children were
stricken with small pox--that malignant infection formerly very common
in the South--and it was beautiful the way Miss Schofield attended to
their wants during the period of illness and final death and burial
of Ephriam. On the morning of the sixth day of the appearance of the
dreaded malady, Miss Schofield appeared at the home with breakfast for
all and was horrified to find the body of the father behind the door,
his death occurring sometime during the night, unknown to the other
members of the family.
[Illustration]