Read Ebook: The Heart's Kingdom by Daviess Maria Thompson King W B Illustrator

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INSPIRED BY HIGH IDEALS.

What motive led this young woman of only twenty-six, surrounded by wealth, by culture, and every circumstance that made her not only acceptable but desirable in the highest circles of society, to abandon all--home and friends and money and the pleasures which her position in the social world brings--for a life of the most arduous toil among a barbarous, if not a savage people, whose skin, unlike hers, was black and whose habits and customs were thought to be repugnant and repelling to those of refinement? She had been fully appraised, too, of the physical dangers that lay in wait for any one who would condescend to prostitute their powers of mind in the instruction and elevation of the Negro race, at the hands of the whites of the South. Her position between the fire of social ostracism on the one hand and the fagot on the other was one not to be envied. It would have daunted the courage of any woman made of weaker stuff, but being of sterner material and obsessed with a sense of duty in a just cause, such a sense of duty as led both the blue and the gray to do and die in the cause which each conceived to be right, Martha Schofield set a star for herself and determined to go to it even if she was forced to wade through blood and fire in doing so.

Beginning her first labors on Wadmalaw Island, between Charleston and Beaufort, in South Carolina, Miss Schofield suffered every inconvenience and privation of frontier life. Aside from the annoyance and hindrances placed in her way by the few scattered white settlers in sympathy with the Order of the Ku Klux Klan, life was made unsafe by many diseases that flourish in this climate.

The enrollment in her school consisted of the children of the 1,500 Negroes who had followed Sherman in his march to the sea. She had the assistance of only one person, a white woman.

She set to work not only to educate an army of Children but the duty of clothing and feeding the naked and starving, of which there were many, fell to her lot.

It is beyond the reach of the imagination of the present generation to adequately comprehend the hardships endured by her at the time of which we write. October 24, 1865, she wrote in her diary as follows:

"This morning I took my bread to school to watch; when light enough I made it up and sent it half-mile away to be baked in the only stove in the village. We distributed clothing for 102 today."

But for the aid of the Society of Friends and the Abolitionists who supplied food and clothing to her for free distribution, hundreds would have died from starvation and thousands have gone as naked as were the custom of some of the Negroes when captured in Africa and brought to this country as slaves.

Under the conditions which Miss Schofield created an immense amount of suffering was dissipated. Not only the Negroes but she herself, faced starvation at one time for several weeks. This occurred when the steamer from Philadelphia, laden with a cargo of groceries, clothing, shoes and books, ran aground and remained motionless for thirty-one days. During this time Miss Schofield set the Negroes to work gathering oysters and acorns. With these and a few boxes of crackers, which she had hidden away for just such an emergency, she originated a kind of porridge that prevented actual starvation. "The crackers," she writes in her diary "had to be broken up in fine parts so as to remove the worms from them."

The same tale of poverty and almost inconceivable hardships followed her from Wadmalaw to Edisto in 1866 and on to the Island of St. Helena in 1867. But these were things to be expected and to be born patiently as long as she had strength and health. But these gave away right here at St. Helena in the second year of her immigration to South Carolina. It was here that malarial fever, with which this section has been infected ever since it was settled, attacked her, and for quite a long time her life was despaired of. "This illness," she writes, "occasioned hemorrhages of the lungs, from which all hope of recovery was abandoned by my friends."

It was at this very critical period in her career that those flighty and fashionable friends in the North, some of them her nearest relatives, urged her with all their might to give up the undertaking in the South and return to her home. It was very much against the will and desires of her own people as well as against the wishes of her best friends that she sacrifice her time and life in the interest of any race or cause, and she was told so before the instinct to engage in social welfare work had totally possessed her. They now drew a picture of a frail sickly woman with one foot in the grave and the other lifted up to follow, and asked her if such a feeble body even though possessed of ample means to employ teachers, had the power to direct the work so necessary to be done. She was urged to get out of the business in order to make room for some one stronger than she, who still had the strength to carry to completion the noble undertaking set in motion by her.

But Martha Schofield answered with these words: "As long as there is life in me to work, I shall work. The coast may not be the place but I will yet find the place."

And she did.

So in 1868 she went to Aiken, S. C, and started work again after losing her health and all her personal income. Assisted by an auxiliary branch of the "Freedman's Commission," a charitable organization composed of two dozen ladies, of Germantown, Pa., she soon was able to begin work on a scale of some promise.

In 1870 the United States Government, through the "Freedman's Bureau," took official recognition of the necessity for the kind of work being done by her by having a small frame house erected for her. This house still stands.

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 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 .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.

EDUCATION UNDER DIFFICULTIES.

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