The American Missionary. Volume 50, No. 04, April, 1896

FARM BUILDINGS, ENFIELD, N. C.

It is not a long journey from New York to Enfield, N. C. We will not find a New England village there when we leave the Weldon and Wilmington Railway. It is quite another part of the world. A ride[pg 118] of four miles among plantations and cotton fields brings us to the latest-born school of the Association. Here are a thousand acres of arable land, which ought to be a fortune to its owner and has been in years gone by. Now, however, cotton and corn have ceased to be kings, oftentimes they are more like beggars. Thus it came to pass that this noble plantation became the property of a benevolent lady in Brooklyn, N. Y., who made it a splendid gift to the Association, with sufficient money to build the fine brick building which stands in the center of this great farm, the beginning of the "Joseph K. Brick Normal, Agricultural, and Industrial School."

Is it needed? We will say it is when we have acquainted ourselves with the condition of the colored people in these parts. I know not what could have been their condition in slavery. Except for the buying and the selling, it could not have been worse than we find it here to-day. Rags, ignorance, poverty, and degradation indescribable are in the cabins. Have the children been taught in any school? No. Can the parents read? No. Shall we find a Bible in the cabins? No. Weak, wicked, and absolutely poor, in dumb and stolid content with animalism and dirt, here families are herding like cattle, in windowless and miserable cabins of one room. The children who fail to receive the benignity of death grow up here and exist and suffer in this dreadful life. Yet we can ride by this plantation and in sight of it any day on our way to Florida, and never see what is so near. Nevertheless, here it is a reality much worse than it reads, for ten times one are ten and ten times ten are one hundred.

In such environment and conditions is our "Agricultural and Industrial School" now half way through its first year.

PRINCIPAL T. S. INBORDEN.

If the principal of it should tell the story of his life, how he walked eight miles every day for three months of the year to learn to read and write; how he worked for 20 cents a day to raise enough money to get away from his limitations for an education; how he became bell-boy at a hotel until he earned enough to buy a grammar, an arithmetic, and a dictionary; how he found himself at last at Fisk University with $1.25 with which to continue his studies for eight years before he could graduate; how he worked his patient way along teaching in vacation, pulling himself up hand over hand, it would pay one to stay over a day for it. There were only a few times during[pg 119] the eight years in Fisk when he had money enough to stamp a half dozen letters at once. This story, however, differs only in its incidents from that of other students at all of our colleges. The story of their struggles is the story of their strength.

"Shock and strain and struggle are
Friendlier than the smiling days."

All of the teachers at Enfield are graduates of Fisk University, and they each have their own story how heavy-weighted with poverty, they kept "inching along" with a resolute faith that had divinity in it. Are they not the very ones to help upward the poor boys and girls about them who, until this year of grace, never had one chance in life, and never dreamed of one? We will keep our eyes on the school at Enfield.

YOUNG MEN'S HALL, ENFIELD, N.C.

Next accompany me to Beaufort, N. C.. It is a place to visit. After we have gone as far as the land holds out, we set sail for a queer little town as far into the sea as it could get; but when once we have arrived there we are repaid for any temporary discomfort on the waters. We find at Beaufort, "Washburn Seminary" with its excellent industrial plant–a school of much merit–and a church that gives us who are watching and caring for churches through their weaknesses and doubtful times, much encouragement. A few years ago it was a question if[pg 120] the church would survive. Now it lives and stands for not a little and has strength of its own. Here, at the time of our visit, a young man, whose only educational privileges had been those of "Washburn Seminary," preached his first sermon to a congregation which crowded the church. It was a most creditable discourse in method, matter, and manner. The best of it is that, among those who have always known him, there is the common testimony that the young preacher lives his faith. Such incidents as this are not singular in the history of our schools and churches, but they are significant. They represent the evolution that is going on.

Of our visits at Wilmington, Greenwood, Athens and Marietta, Atlanta and Anniston, we make no record.

We will come to Talladega. President DeForest, with his hearty grip and whole-souled voice, gave me good welcome to Talladega. We were in old times classmates and friends at Yale, when we called ourselves boys. "You must not stop in the Hall this time, but come to my home and we will talk over what Talladega is doing and what we ought to do," he insisted. Precious days were those, as I now recall them, with this scholarly man, so instinct with faith, so earnest and hopeful in his work, so happy in his family, and so full of plans for the time to come. We talked together of the interests of the institution which, within seventeen years, he had led on from a normal school to a college. Together we went through the various classrooms and heard the recitations; the mathematics cultivating the reasoning powers, the geography giving correct views of the world, the history widening the vision of it, the astronomy unfolding God's love of order and truth. We heard together the lessons in language, in ethics, in mental philosophy, and saw the students taking on strength and character, whom he had watched from grade to grade, from year to year. Not only in the theological department, where students were intent upon their calling, but in the farm work, in the industrial classes, everywhere, and on everything, was the stamp of earnest Christianity. So, through president and teachers, the highest ideals had been constantly held before the students. It was inspiration to me to meet once more the devoted teachers of the College, and the students, greedy for knowledge and willing to work for it, on the farm, in the industries, and in whatever way they could earn enough to help themselves through the year. When the time came for the "Goodbye," with the hearty invitation "come again," he did not know, nor I, that before a month should pass I should "come again" to look my farewell upon my silent friend who could no more welcome me. He had no word for me but I heard a word, "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord, for they rest from their labors and their works do follow them." Surely the works of[pg 121] this man of God will follow him. The slow procession on that funeral day moved out of sight, and the next day the usual College work went on, but the days for Talladega have been sad.

I would that I might extend the invitation to continue and visit a score of places with schools and churches on this journey, each of which gave to me its own suggestions. There is the unique and fruitful school at Cotton Valley, with its record of transformations; there are Selma and Tougaloo, Jackson, New Orleans, Mobile, Thomasville, Albany, Marshallville, Andersonville, Macon, Savannah, Charleston, Knoxville, Jonesboro, and others, where schools and churches, hand in hand, are saving the needy peoples. I can only say that as I visited these and other places I was constantly cheered both by the fidelity of the workers and by the efficiency of their work. The story of these workers together with God will never be fully told.

In many places I found deepest poverty. The greatest luxury of the poor people is the "schooling" of their children. Parents will go hungry for this. Many of the children trudged along barefooted for miles when ice was on the pools by the roadside. I found, as I have before, churches and schools leavening their communities with more intelligent manhood and womanhood, with better homes, with wiser industries and economies, with stronger and truer characters. Many times I said: "If the good people who have ordained and sustained this work until now could only see it and know it as it actually is, our distressing debt would vanish within half a year. Our Jubilee would come, and we should 'arise and shine and give God the glory.'"

A Home Mission Work Little Understood

Secretary Frank P. Woodbury.

Those who have visited only the cities and towns of the South have not seen the black South. In the six Southern states containing what has been called the Black Belt there are four millions of negro people. Less than half a million of these live in the cities, towns, and villages, while more than three millions and a half of them dwell on the plantations of the country. Mr. Bryce in his work on America has called attention to the enormous difference between the colored churches of the cities and those of the poor negro districts, in some of which not merely have the old superstitions been retained but there has been a marked relapse into the Obeah rites and serpent worship of African heathenism. The rank superstitions, the beliefs in necromancy and witchcraft, the wild orgies of excitement, the utter divorce between the moral virtues and what is called religion, which obtain among the millions of the plantation[pg 122] negroes of the South, are but little understood. By one who knows it, the Black Belt has been called the great Dismal Swamp, the vast black malarial slough of the American republic.

Gladstone has frequently emphasized an ancient saying, "The corruption of the best thing is the very worst thing." This is emphatically true of much which has been called Christianity in the plantation churches of the South. The testimony which comes to us of the moral and religious condition of many communities in the Black Belt, is startling. One negro witness who has been in direct association for many years with ministers in this part of the South, says, "three-fourths of those who are now acting as preachers in all this region, are absolutely unfit to preach the gospel. It is rare that one can find in the country districts where the masses of the people dwell, a minister who is both intelligent and morally upright."

It is not long since the "Wilderness-Worshiper" excitement swept through a region of the South like a prairie fire. The excitement of expectancy for the immediate coming of Christ added fire to the hearts of the people. Hugh pyres of pine logs were rolled together and lit into flame as the darkness of night came on. These great fires were to light the way for the Saviour when He should come. Men rolled their bodies through the forests in a kind of pagan ecstasy of self-sacrifice to meet Him. So credulous are the negroes of the Black Belt, says a resident white lawyer, that if a fellow with a wig of long hair and a glib tongue should appear among them and say he is the Christ, inside of a week the turmoil of the Wilderness-Worship would be outdone.

Now, a great awakening is beginning among these dark masses of people. Dr. Curry has well said: "Freedom itself is educatory. The energy of representative institutions is a valuable school-master. To control one's labor, to enjoy the earnings of it, to make contracts freely, to have the right of locomotion, and change of residence and business, have a helpful influence on mankind." Many of these people are calling for better preachers; preachers who are earnest and virtuous men and know their Bibles. "We used to listen," said a negro man at a recent meeting, "to these whooping and hollering preachers who snort so you could hear them over three hundred yards, and we would come home and say, 'That's the greatest sermon I ever heard.' But now we want men who can teach us something." "Our preachers are not what they ought to be," said one woman. "We have got too many gripsack preachers–men who go around from church to church with a gripsack, not full of sermons, but of bottles of whisky, which they sell to the members of their congregation." Great masses of negro people are beginning to feel that what they have called religion is not really religion at all.[pg 123]

It must be remembered that every man or woman of these millions who has reached middle life was born a slave. The great bulk of the population have been brought up practically in the environment of a servile life. While there was much that was tender and pathetic and strong in the mute faith with which thousands of them lived through the dark trials of slavery, looking unto Christ as their deliverer, still the superstitions and degradations of slavery, its breaking of all home ties and life, could but infect the current religion of the black people. At its best, in multitudes of cases, it is but a form of physical and sensational excitement. The deep work of regenerating the soul and the life, which is the vital need of these people, is not done; it is not even attempted in the vast majority of the negro churches of the Black Belt. "The problem of the Kanaka in my native Hawaiian Islands," General Armstrong once said to me, "is one with that of the Southern negro. The Sandwich Islander, converted, was not yet rebuilt in the forces of his manhood." On the side of his moral nature, where he is weakest, the black man of the South has still to be girded and energized. In him are still the tendencies of his hereditary paganism, the vices of his slavehood. These will sink him unless his whole nature is regenerated by the ministration of a pure and vital Christianity.

The black man needs what every human being needs, help from above. It is futile to say, he is free, let him alone. Mere freedom never yet saved a human soul. The gospel of Christ is not a mere declaration of freedom; it is regeneration and help from above. The more deeply a race is sinking in degradation and sin, the more imperative is its call for saving power from on high.

From what element of our population is this cry of distress and need more agonizing than from the poor black man of the South? He is sinking in a quicksand of ignorance, poverty, and vice. There is nothing beneath to support his feet. He must go down unless he can get help from above. Those who are nearest to him, and can see and feel most deeply his desperate condition, plead most strongly in his behalf. "The definition is very clear, sharp, and simple," says an honored white minister of the South, "that the negroes are making a tremendous struggle to get an education and be religious; but despite this struggle, the bottom strata of the race are being sucked into crime and ruin with unprecedented and increasing rapidity. But, wherever the efforts of white Christians to aid them are regular, steady, and strong, this destruction and debasement are stayed to a marvelous degree. Here, then, are conditions that seem to leave no room for either neglect or delay, so far as we are concerned. Delay is sin to us, and death to them."

Another minister of the South, whose services for the black man as[pg 124] well as the white man, have been those of a philanthropist, has said, "In our extremity we look to wise and just people in the Northern states to help us, to help both races; without Northern coöperation things will go from bad to worse." Yet the old hard word is still uttered by many and thought by many more, "The negro is free, leave him to himself. We have done enough for him in taking off his slave chains." Are we then to expect from him more than we do from the white element of our American populations, native or foreign? Do we refuse them the gospel of home missions, and demand from them self-extrication from sin and its degradations?

Our churches have not yet awakened to the vastness and promise of the home mission fields which they have put in charge of the American Missionary Association. They have not yet recognized the peculiar fitness of our free-church system for the people who have so lately come into personal freedom that the very word is indescribably precious to them. This Association ought now to have not only the means for a more ample support of its educational service, but also for the broadening of its distinctive church missions. The day has come for the planting of free Congregational churches among the shadowed millions of the South.

In the upbuilding of their minds and hearts, our fundamental work of Christian education has been developed into remarkable fruitage, and is steadily doing this imperative and successful service. This education has been broad enough to make intellectual and moral leaders. It has not been confined to those who can become only manual laborers. With prominent emphasis upon industrial training, as is evinced by the farms and gardens and workshops of our institutions all through the South, we have not shut the door against the higher training.

The Association has never given in to what may be termed the Southern theory of negro education, its confinement to the manual handicrafts, and the rudiments of primary school instruction. Nothing is more popular in the South than the practical limitation of educational opportunities for the negro people to the lines of manual training and the reserve of all the possibilities of a higher education to the white, dominant race. A prominent Southern journalist has expressed this view in the following terms: "A little education is all the negro needs. Let him learn the rudiments–to read, and to write, and to cipher, and be made to mix that knowledge with some useful labor. His only resource is manual labor." But one of the foremost colored men in the South has well said: "There is no defence or security for any, except in the highest intelligence and development of all. If anywhere there are efforts tending to curtail the fullest growth of the negro, let these efforts be[pg 125] turned into stimulating, encouraging, and making him the most useful and intelligent citizen."

The American Missionary Association, in addition to its general and industrial school training, has opened the doors of a higher education to all who seek to enter in. The fruition of this opportunity now appears at the very juncture when a call is coming from among the millions of the back country for free churches, pure churches, churches which emphasize virtue and intelligence. Our great schools are bringing to us young men and young women thoroughly fitted to go preaching and teaching among these millions. But how shall they go, except they be sent?

Talladega College, Ala

The Industrial Department.

Agriculture.

Edgar A Bishop, B.S., Superintendent.

The work in the Agricultural Department the past year has been the most satisfactory of any in its history. The young men of the Junior Preparatory and Normal classes with several special students have taken the classroom work, using Gulley's "First Lessons in Agriculture" as a textbook. Among the topics considered are the following:

Origin, formation, and composition of soil. Composition of the plant. How plants feed and grow. Fertilization of the seed, and improvement of variety. Plant food in the soil and how developed. Preparing land for the crop. Cultivation of crop. Principles of drainage and irrigation. Manures and commercial fertilizers. Rotation of crops. Special diversified farming. Farm economy. Food and manure value of crops. How to propagate plants–pruning, grafting, budding, etc. Stock breeding: feeding and care; how to select for special purposes, detect unsoundness, determine age, etc.

The classroom work has been reënforced by practical talks and illustrations at the barns and in the field.

Thirty-five boys have had employment in the department this year. Six of these have worked by the month to accumulate a credit with which to enter the day school next year, meanwhile attending our night school. The others work after school hours and on Saturdays, and are paid by the hour at varying rates.

The work on the farm has been largely the production of those crops needed for consumption in the institution, the support of animals for work, beef, milk, pork, etc.

The general improvement of the land and the increase in the value of the property have been kept constantly in view. Our fields are becoming more fertile, and better crops are being raised every year.[pg 126]

An orchard of several hundred trees, consisting of pears, plums, peaches, and cherries, has been set out. Other varieties have been added, also quinces, mulberries, figs, and grapes. This year one each of the Japanese walnut, giant chestnut, and paper shell pecan are being started; also half a dozen varieties of the raspberry, some currants, rhubarb and garden plants, with a view to propagate those that prove valuable. Twenty of the standard varieties of strawberries have been grown. Grasses and forage plants have also received their share of attention. One-half acre is being devoted to a trial of three Japanese millets in comparison with our German or golden millet. Several varieties of corn and sorghum have been grown and their characteristics carefully noted.

Inquiries are often received from persons in this and other States regarding certain crops and methods of stock feeding. A creditable beginning has been made in rearing live stock, and it is our purpose to extend this branch of the work. To introduce some of the improved breeds best adapted to this section early occupied our attention, and we have met with encouragement beyond our expectation. Hundreds of pigs of good breeding have been sold all through the State to form the nucleus of better herds. Our herd of cattle is headed by a thoroughbred Jersey and contains several registered and many high-grade animals. It is increasing in quality and value each year.

Besides the work already mentioned, an annual farmers' convention is held at the college, while meetings in some of the beats of the county have been held during the year. Much enthusiasm has been raised, and a determination evinced by many for better homes, better schools, stock, crops, etc. Widespread and systematic work along this line is planned for the ensuing year. In this way not only is the Agricultural Department striving to be a help to the people by practicing and advocating better methods of farming and living, but the College is becoming more widely and favorably known among all classes of people.

Cooking

Miss Ruth K. Kingsley, Teacher.

One of the most important arts, though often neglected, is that of cookery. The kitchen is so necessary a part of the boarding school and of the home that its equipment and regulations should be such as to make the work therein both easy and successful.

Through the kindness of friends we have been able to purchase an excellent range and many of the improved cooking utensils now in use. Our girls enjoy working with these modern appliances, and they are taught the necessity of having appropriate places for them in the[pg 127] drawers and cupboards with which the room is supplied. One of the first requirements is–a tidy kitchen.

We have given attention to the preparation of the dishes found on the bill of fare of the average family, and have made much of healthful and proper methods of cooking. We do not propose to make professional cooks, but we hope that our girls will acquire skill sufficient to do all that is necessary in plain and wholesome family living. The class has been stimulated in its endeavor by the fact that the product of their daily work has found its way to the dining-tables of the boarding hall.

The Laundry

The building in which the laundry work is done was erected by student-labor under the supervision of the Mechanical Superintendent. The washing and ironing are performed in the main by our night-school girls, who are looking forward to attendance upon the day school from current earnings. Here also the day-school occupants of the girls' dormitory do their own laundering, or assist after their daily recitations in the general work of the college.

Nursing