PLEASURE AND PROFIT OF WORK IN THE SOIL
I have always been intensely fond of outdoor life. Perhaps the
explanation for this lies partly in the fact that I was born nearly
out-of-doors. I have also, from my earliest childhood, been very fond
of animals and fowls. When I was but a child, and a slave, I had many
close and interesting acquaintances with animals.
During my childhood days, as a slave, I did not see very much of
my mother, as she was obliged to leave her children very early in
the morning to begin her day's work. Her early departure often made
the matter of my securing breakfast uncertain. This led to my first
intimate acquaintance with animals.
In those days it was the custom upon the plantation to boil the Indian
corn that was fed to the cows and pigs. At times, when I had failed to
get any other breakfast, I used to go to the places where the cows and
pigs were fed, and share their breakfast with them, or else go to the
place where it was the custom to boil the corn, and get my morning meal
there before it was taken to the animals.
If I was not there at the exact moment of feeding, I could still find
enough corn scattered around the fence or the trough to satisfy me.
Some people may think that this was a pretty bad way to get one's food,
but, leaving out the name and the associations, there was nothing very
bad about it. Any one who has eaten hard boiled corn knows that it
has a delicious taste. I never pass a pot of boiled corn now without
yielding to the temptation to eat a few grains.
Another thing that assisted in developing my fondness for animals was
my contact with the best breeds of fowls and animals when I was a
student at the Hampton Institute. Notwithstanding that my work there
was not directly connected with the stock, the mere fact that I saw the
best kinds of animals and fowls day after day increased my love for
them, and made me resolve that when I went out into the world I would
have some as nearly like those as possible.
I think that I owe a great deal of my present strength and capacity for
hard work to my love of outdoor life. It is true that the amount of
time that I can spend in the open air is now very limited. Taken on an
average, it is perhaps not more than an hour a day, but I make the most
of that hour. In addition to this, I get much pleasure out of looking
forward to and planning for that hour.
[Illustration: CLASS IN NATURE STUDY]
I do not believe that any one who has not worked in a garden can begin
to understand how much pleasure and strength of body and mind and soul
can be derived from one's garden, no matter how small it may be, and
often the smaller it is the better. If the garden be ever so limited
in area, one may still have the gratifying experience of learning how
much can be produced on a little plot carefully laid out, thoroughly
fertilised, and intelligently cultivated. And then, though the garden
may be small, if the flowers and vegetables prosper, there springs up
a feeling of kinship between the man and his plants, as he tends and
watches the growth of each individual fruition from day to day. Every
morning brings some fresh development, born of the rain, the dew, and
the sunshine.
The letter or the address you began writing the day before never grows
until you return and take up the work where it was left off; not so
with the plant. Some change has taken place during the night, in
the appearance of bud, or blossom, or fruit. This sense of newness,
of expectancy, brings to me a daily inspiration whose sympathetic
significance it is impossible to convey in words.
It is not only a pleasure to grow vegetables for one's table, but
I find much satisfaction, also, in sending selections of the best
specimens to some neighbour whose garden is backward, or to one who has
not learned the art of raising the finest or the earliest varieties,
and who is therefore surprised to receive new potatoes two weeks in
advance of any one else.
When I am at my home in Tuskegee, I am able, by rising early in the
morning, to spend at least half an hour in my garden, or with my fowls,
pigs, or cows. Whenever I can take the time, I like to hunt for the
new eggs each morning myself, and when at home I am selfish enough
to permit no one else to make these discoveries. As with the growing
plants, there is a sense of freshness and restfulness in the finding
and handling of newly laid eggs that is delightful to me. Both the
anticipation and the realisation are most pleasing. I begin the day by
seeing how many eggs I can find, or how many little chickens are just
beginning to peep through the shells.
Speaking of little chickens coming into life reminds me that one of
our students called my attention to a fact connected with the chickens
owned by the school which I had not previously known. When some of
the first little chickens came out of their shells, they began almost
immediately to help others, not so forward, to break their way out. It
was delightful to me to hear that the chickens raised at the school
had, so early in life, caught the Tuskegee spirit of helpfulness toward
others.
[Illustration: Courtesy of The Outlook Company
WHEN AT TUSKEGEE I FIND A WAY BY RISING EARLY IN THE MORNING TO SPEND
HALF AN HOUR IN MY GARDEN OR WITH THE LIVE STOCK]
I am deeply interested in the different kinds of fowls, and, aside from
the large number grown by the school in its poultry house and yards, I
grow at my own home common chickens, Plymouth Rocks, Buff Cochins, and
Brahmas, Peking ducks, and fantailed pigeons.
The pig, I think, is my favourite animal. In addition to some
common-bred pigs, I keep a few Berkshires and some Poland Chinas; and
it is a pleasure to me to watch their development and increase from
month to month. Practically all the pork used in my family is of my own
raising.
I heard not long ago a story of one of our graduates which delighted me
as an illustration of the real Tuskegee spirit. A man had occasion to
go to the village of Benton, Alabama, in which Mr. A. J. Wood, one of
our graduates, had settled ten years before, and gone into business as
a general merchant. In this time he has built up a good trade and has
obtained for himself a reputation as one of the best and most reliable
business men in the place. While the visitor was there, he happened to
step to the open back door of the store, and stood looking out into a
little yard behind the building. The merchant joining him there, began
to call, "Ho, Boy. Ho, Boy," and finally, in response to this calling,
there came crawling out from beneath the store, with much grunting,
because he was altogether too big to get comfortably from under the
building, an enormous black hog.
"You see that hog," the man said. "That's my hog. I raise one like that
every year as an object-lesson to the coloured farmers around here
who come to the store to trade. About all I feed him is the waste from
the store. When the farmers come in here, I show them my hog, and I
tell them that if they would shut their pigs up in a pen of rails, and
have the children pick up acorns in the woods to feed them on, they
might have just such hogs as I do, instead of their razor-backs running
around wild in the woods.
"Perhaps I can't teach a school here," the man added, "but if I can't
do that, I can at least teach the men around here how to raise hogs as
I learned to raise them at Tuskegee."
In securing the best breeds of fowls and animals at Tuskegee, I
have the added satisfaction of seeing a better grade of stock being
gradually introduced among the farmers who live near the school.
After I have gathered my eggs, and have at least said "Good morning"
to my pigs, cows, and horse, the next morning duty--no, I will not say
duty, but delight--is to gather the vegetables for the family dinner.
No pease, no turnips, radishes nor salads taste so good as those which
one has raised and gathered with his own hands in his own garden. In
comparison with these all the high-sounding dishes found in the most
expensive restaurants seem flavourless. One feels, when eating his own
fresh vegetables, that he is getting near to the heart of nature; not a
second-hand stale imitation, but the genuine thing. How delightful the
change, after one has spent weeks eating in restaurants or hotels, and
has had a bill of fare pushed before his eyes three times a day, or has
heard the familiar sound for a month from a waiter's lips: "Steak, pork
chops, fried eggs, and potatoes."
[Illustration: Courtesy of The Outlook Company
HOGS AS OBJECT LESSONS]
As I go from bed to bed in the garden, gathering my lettuce, pease,
spinach, radishes, beets, onions and the relishes with which to garnish
the dishes, and note the growth of each plant since the previous day, I
feel a nearness and kinship to the plants which makes them seem to me
like members of my own family. When engaged in this work, how short the
half-hour is, how quickly each minute goes, bringing nearer the time
when I must go to my office. When I do go there it is with a vigour and
freshness and with a steadiness of nerve that prepares me thoroughly
for what perhaps is to be a difficult and trying day--a preparation
impossible, except for the half-hour spent in my garden.
All through the day I am enabled to do more work and better work
because of the delightful anticipation of another half-hour or more in
my garden after the office work is done. I get so much pleasure out of
this that I frequently find myself beseeching Mrs. Washington to delay
the dinner hour that I may take advantage of the last bit of daylight
for my outdoor work.
My own experience in outdoor life leads me to hope that the time will
soon come when there will be a revolution in our methods of educating
children, especially in the schools of the smaller towns and rural
districts. I consider it almost a sin to take a number of children
whose homes are on farms, and whose parents earn their living by
farming, and cage them up, as if they were so many wild beasts, for six
or seven hours during the day, in a close room where the air is often
impure.
[Illustration: "THE CHILDREN'S HOUSE": CLASS IN NATURE STUDY]
I have known teachers to go so far as to frost the windows in a
school-room, or have them made high up in the wall, or keep the
window curtains down, so that the children could not even see the
wonderful world without. For six hours the life of these children is an
artificial one. The apparatus which they use is, as a rule, artificial,
and they are taught in an artificial manner about artificial things.
Even to whisper about the song of a mocking-bird or the chirp of a
squirrel in a near-by tree, or to point to a stalk of corn or a wild
flower, or to speak about a cow and her calf, or a little colt and its
mother grazing in an adjoining field, are sins for which they must
be speedily and often severely punished. I have seen teachers keep
children caged up on a beautiful, bright day in June, when all Nature
was at her best, making them learn--or try to learn--a lesson about
hills, or mountains, or lakes, or islands, by means of a map or globe,
when the land surrounding the school-house was alive and beautiful
with the images of these things. I have seen a teacher work for an
hour with children, trying to impress upon them the meaning of the
words lake, island, peninsula, when a brook not a quarter of a mile
away would have afforded the little ones an opportunity to pull off
their shoes and stockings and wade through the water, and find, not one
artificial island or lake, on an artificial globe, but dozens of real
islands, peninsulas, and bays. Besides the delight of wading through
the water, and of being out in the pure bracing air, they would learn
by this method more about these natural divisions of the earth in five
minutes than they could learn in an hour in books. A reading lesson
taught out on the green grass under a spreading oak tree is a lesson
needing little effort to hold a boy's attention, to say nothing of the
sense of delight and relief which comes to the teacher.
I have seen teachers compel students to puzzle for hours over the
problem of the working of the pulley, when not a block from the
school-house were workmen with pulleys in actual operation, hoisting
bricks for the walls of a new building.
I believe that the time is not far distant when every school in the
rural districts and in the small towns will be surrounded by a garden,
and that one of the objects of the course of study will be to teach the
child something about real country life, and about country occupations.
I am glad to say that at the Tuskegee Institute we erected a
school-house in and about which the little children of the town and
vicinity are given a knowledge, not only of books, but of the real
things which they will be called upon to use in their homes. Since
Tuskegee is surrounded by people who earn their living by agriculture,
we have near this school-house three acres of ground on which the
children are taught to cultivate flowers, shrubbery, vegetables,
grains, cotton, and other crops. They are also taught cooking,
laundering, sewing, sweeping, and dusting, how to set a table, and how
to make a bed--the employments of their daily lives. I have referred to
this building as a "school-house," but we do not call it that, because
the name is too formal. We have named it "The Children's House." And
this principle holds true, for children of a larger growth, and is
especially true of the training of the Negro minister who serves the
people of the smaller towns and country districts.
In this, as in too many other educational fields, the Negro minister is
trained to meet conditions which exist in New York or in Chicago--in
a word, it is too often taken for granted that there is no difference
between the work to be done by Negro ministers among our people after
only thirty-five years of freedom, and that to be done among the
white people who have had the advantages of centuries of freedom and
development.
[Illustration: Courtesy of The Outlook Company
TEACH THE CHILD SOMETHING ABOUT REAL COUNTRY LIFE]
The Negro ministers, except those sent to the large cities, go among
an agricultural people, a people who lead an outdoor life. They are
poor, without homes or ownership in farms, without proper knowledge of
agriculture. They are able to pay their minister so small and uncertain
a salary that he can not live on it honestly and pay his bills promptly.
During the three or four years that the minister has spent in the
theological class room, scarcely a single subject that concerns the
every-day life of his future people has been discussed. He is taught
more about the soil of the valley of the Nile, or of the valley of the
river Jordan, than about the soil of the State in which the people of
his church are to live and to work.
What I urge is that the Negro minister should be taught something about
the outdoor life of the people whom he is to lead. More than that, it
would help the problem immensely if in some more practical and direct
manner this minister could be taught to get the larger portion of his
own living from the soil--to love outdoor work, and to make his garden,
his farm, and his farm-house object-lessons for his people.
The Negro minister who earns a large part of his living on the farm is
independent, and can reprove and rebuke the people when they do wrong.
This is not true of him who is wholly dependent upon his congregation
for his bread. What is equally important, an interest in agricultural
production and a love for work tend to keep a minister from that
idleness which may prove a source of temptation.
At least once a week, when I am in the South, I make it a practice to
spend an hour or more among the people of Tuskegee and vicinity--among
the merchants and farmers, white and black. In these talks with the
real people I can get at the actual needs and conditions of those for
whom our institution is at work.
When talking to a farmer, I feel that I am talking with a real man and
not an artificial one--one who can keep me in close touch with the real
things. From a simple, honest cultivator of the soil, I am sure of
getting first-hand, original information. I have secured more useful
illustrations for addresses in a half-hour's talk with some white or
coloured farmer than from hours of reading books.
If I were a minister, I think I should make a point of spending a day
in each week in close, unconventional touch with the masses of the
people. A vacation employed in visiting farmers, it seems to me, would
often prepare one as thoroughly for his winter's work as a vacation
spent in visiting the cities of Europe.