CHAPTER V.
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.
