Next day he had returned to the subject.
"Been looking up Tooms County. Find some Cresswells there--big plantations--rated at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Some others, too; big cotton county."
"You ought to know, John, if I teach Negroes I"ll scarcely see much of people in my own cla.s.s."
"Nonsense! b.u.t.t in. Show off. Give "em your Greek--and study Cotton. At any rate, I say go."
And so, howsoever reluctantly, she had gone.
The trial was all she had antic.i.p.ated, and possibly a bit more. She was a pretty young woman of twenty-three, fair and rather daintily moulded.
In favorable surroundings, she would have been an aristocrat and an epicure. Here she was teaching dirty children, and the smell of confused odors and bodily perspiration was to her at times unbearable.
Then there was the fact of their color: it was a fact so insistent, so fatal she almost said at times, that she could not escape it.
Theoretically she had always treated it with disdainful ease.
"What"s the mere color of a human soul"s skin," she had cried to a Wellesley audience and the audience had applauded with enthusiasm. But here in Alabama, brought closely and intimately in touch with these dark skinned children, their color struck her at first with a sort of terror--it seemed ominous and forbidding. She found herself shrinking away and gripping herself lest they should perceive. She could not help but think that in most other things they were as different from her as in color. She groped for new ways to teach colored brains and marshal colored thoughts and the result was puzzling both to teacher and student. With the other teachers she had little commerce. They were in no sense her sort of folk. Miss Smith represented the older New England of her parents--honest, inscrutable, determined, with a conscience which she worshipped, and utterly unselfish. She appealed to Miss Taylor"s ruddier and daintier vision but dimly and distantly as some memory of the past. The other teachers were indistinct personalities, always very busy and very tired, and talking "school-room" with their meals. Miss Taylor was soon starving for human companionship, for the lighter touches of life and some of its warmth and laughter. She wanted a glance of the new books and periodicals and talk of great philanthropies and reforms. She felt out of the world, shut in and mentally anaemic; great as the "Negro Problem" might be as a world problem, it looked sordid and small at close range. So for the hundredth time she was thinking today, as she walked alone up the lane back of the barn, and then slowly down through the bottoms. She paused a moment and nodded to the two boys at work in a young cotton field.
"Cotton!"
She paused. She remembered with what interest she had always read of this little thread of the world. She had almost forgotten that it was here within touch and sight. For a moment something of the vision of Cotton was mirrored in her mind. The glimmering sea of delicate leaves whispered and murmured before her, stretching away to the Northward.
She remembered that beyond this little world it stretched on and on--how far she did not know--but on and on in a great trembling sea, and the foam of its mighty waters would one time flood the ends of the earth.
She glimpsed all this with parted lips, and then sighed impatiently.
There might be a bit of poetry here and there, but most of this place was such desperate prose.
She glanced absently at the boys.
One was Bles Alwyn, a tall black lad. (Bles, she mused,--now who would think of naming a boy "Blessed," save these incomprehensible creatures!) Her regard shifted to the green stalks and leaves again, and she started to move away. Then her New England conscience stepped in. She ought not to pa.s.s these students without a word of encouragement or instruction.
"Cotton is a wonderful thing, is it not, boys?" she said rather primly.
The boys touched their hats and murmured something indistinctly. Miss Taylor did not know much about cotton, but at least one more remark seemed called for.
"How long before the stalks will be ready to cut?" she asked carelessly.
The farther boy coughed and Bles raised his eyes and looked at her; then after a pause he answered slowly. (Oh! these people were so slow--now a New England boy would have answered and asked a half-dozen questions in the time.)
"I--I don"t know," he faltered.
"Don"t know! Well, of all things!" inwardly commented Miss Taylor--"literally born in cotton, and--Oh, well," as much as to ask, "What"s the use?" She turned again to go.
"What is planted over there?" she asked, although she really didn"t care.
"Goobers," answered the smaller boy.
"Goobers?" uncomprehendingly.
"Peanuts," Bles specified.
"Oh!" murmured Miss Taylor. "I see there are none on the vines yet. I suppose, though, it"s too early for them."
Then came the explosion. The smaller boy just snorted with irrepressible laughter and bolted across the fields. And Bles--was Miss Taylor deceived?--or was he chuckling? She reddened, drew herself up, and then, dropping her primness, rippled with laughter.
"What is the matter, Bles?" she asked.
He looked at her with twinkling eyes.
"Well, you see, Miss Taylor, it"s like this: farming don"t seem to be your specialty."
The word was often on Miss Taylor"s lips, and she recognized it. Despite herself she smiled again.
"Of course, it isn"t--I don"t know anything about farming. But what did I say so funny?"
Bles was now laughing outright.
"Why, Miss Taylor! I declare! Goobers don"t grow on the tops of vines, but underground on the roots--like yams."
"Is that so?"
"Yes, and we--we don"t pick cotton stalks except for kindling."
"I must have been thinking of hemp. But tell me more about cotton."
His eyes lighted, for cotton was to him a very real and beautiful thing, and a life-long companion, yet not one whose friendship had been coa.r.s.ened and killed by heavy toil. He leaned against his hoe and talked half dreamily--where had he learned so well that dream-talk?
"We turn up the earth and sow it soon after Christmas. Then pretty soon there comes a sort of greenness on the black land and it swells and grows and, and--shivers. Then stalks shoot up with three or four leaves.
That"s the way it is now, see? After that we chop out the weak stalks, and the strong ones grow tall and dark, till I think it must be like the ocean--all green and billowy; then come little flecks here and there and the sea is all filled with flowers--flowers like little bells, blue and purple and white."
"Ah! that must be beautiful," sighed Miss Taylor, wistfully, sinking to the ground and clasping her hands about her knees.
"Yes, ma"am. But it"s prettiest when the bolls come and swell and burst, and the cotton covers the field like foam, all misty--"
She bent wondering over the pale plants. The poetry of the thing began to sing within her, awakening her unpoetic imagination, and she murmured:
"The Golden Fleece--it"s the Silver Fleece!"
He harkened.
"What"s that?" he asked.
"Have you never heard of the Golden Fleece, Bles?"
"No, ma"am," he said eagerly; then glancing up toward the Cresswell fields, he saw two white men watching them. He grasped his hoe and started briskly to work.
"Some time you"ll tell me, please, won"t you?"
She glanced at her watch in surprise and arose hastily.
"Yes, with pleasure," she said moving away--at first very fast, and then more and more slowly up the lane, with a puzzled look on her face.
She began to realize that in this pleasant little chat the fact of the boy"s color had quite escaped her; and what especially puzzled her was that this had not happened before. She had been here four months, and yet every moment up to now she seemed to have been vividly, almost painfully conscious, that she was a white woman talking to black folk.