TRAINING COLORED GIRLS.
MISS ANNA M. CAHILL, FISK UNIVERSITY.
If an astronomer wishes to show to any one through his glass the celestial visitor whose presence brightens our morning sky, he must arrange the instrument from his point of vision. Then, stepping aside, his friend will see the object nearly as he sees it. If now I am to bring nearer to you the work for the women of the South, whose interests are uppermost in our hearts to-day, I must adjust the glass from my own standpoint, at the risk of touching upon points that have been presented at other meetings, and without showing you some of the features which you are, perhaps, anxious to see.
Were I a physician among the people for whom I speak, I should urge upon you the physical wants, many and terrible, of that people, for which the ignorance of the women is so largely responsible, and from which they especially suffer.
Were it my mission to carry help and counsel to the lowly homes of our city, I might tell you such tales of the wretchedness and discomfort of many of these homes as would fill your hearts with pity—a wretchedness growing out of an utter lack of comprehension of the meaning of home, and showing the need of instruction in the simplest facts of household economy.
To carry so much of light and knowledge into these homes as would make them abodes of health and thrift is a work worthy the noblest effort of any Christian woman.
But I come from no such special work among the women of our people. Only a few hours ago I stepped from the platform of my school-room, where were gathered before me a room full of upturned faces, some of them familiar from years of acquaintance, some just stamping themselves upon my memory by the interest they are awakening as I meet them in these first days of their stay among us. To an unusual extent this year the numbers on the boys’ side and on the girls’ side are the same, the one side gaining, then the other, as new pupils are added to the school. September’s report showed exactly the same total for each. I like this; it looks as if our girls are to stand side by side with their brothers in life’s battle; as if both were stretching out their hands for the same weapons to help them in the strife.
My interest and work are thus divided; justice to the school demands that I consider the good of the whole; that I assign lessons not for one side nor for the other; that I chide or commend without special reference to sex—in short, that I consider all as members of a common society, and plan for them as having common rights and responsibilities.
When, therefore, I bring this subject to you, it is that you may look at it from the teacher’s standpoint, that you may consider the colored woman of the future—the colored girl of to-day—in her relations as a part of the social organization of the new South.
That the South is new no one who even passes through her great centres can doubt. New railroads are opening up her resources and carrying her trade; the flames of her furnace light up the darkness of many a mountain valley; even her fields are blooming with new abundance under the improved husbandry and greater diligence of her sons. As the morning sunlight strikes the brick walls of factories in view from my window, and nearly all of which have grown up within a few months, I can almost imagine myself in a New England town.
Woman’s place in Southern society (I use the term society in its wider sense) has always been quite different from that which she holds in the North. Accustomed to be protected, and taught to consider a limited social life as her only sphere of activity, she was often beautifully womanly, but lacking in self-reliance; having no confidence in her own mental powers, and not considered as being able to plan or execute any important measures. This feeling is, I think, gradually giving way before a more just appreciation of her own power, and as that power is developed, to a change in public sentiment as to her capacity and her duty.
It was my privilege to count among my friends a young Southern girl, who not content with the average boarding-school of the South, has already partly finished a thorough course of study in a Northern school with the expressed intention of becoming a teacher at her own home.
In an Eastern city during the past summer I found several young ladies who were spending the three hot months at the North, and while there were hard at work on music and other branches of study. They were taking care of themselves, and with eyes aglow with enthusiasm were apparently enjoying their new experience.
Such cases, multiplied as they will be, show that a new leaven is working out an ambition on the part of the Southern lady to win her way by an intelligent and self-reliant womanhood, not simply to charm by her helplessness and amiability.
But all this has reference to white society; you are ready to ask what is its bearing on the colored girls? The humbler life in the old days reflected the ideas of the superior, as the second rainbow reflects the coloring of the first. It will tend to do so now. When, by a sudden revolution the cords of the colored woman’s bondage were broken, and a new society of her own people sprang up around her, especially in the cities, the impress of old ideas was plainly seen. How quickly she copied the more artificial part of her white mistress’ life, exaggerating her elegance into display and her intellectual languor into utter indifference.
In the colored society of to-day, so largely an image of the old order of things, the colored woman does not realize what she has a right to expect or what she ought to require from the other sex among her own people. She has no knowledge of her womanly power or worth; why should she object to the outside gallantry which addresses her with flattering nonsense while it covers an underlying lack of genuine respect, and a sense of superiority that practically leaves her to do all the hard work and regards her as of lower intellectual grade?
Thus, from the impulse to imitate, the colored girl has a source of hope in the advanced position held by her white sister. But her new power of independent self-direction, unshielded by the safeguards that the white girl has, unguided by the intellectual culture that the other can obtain, may work incalculable harm.
What the colored woman’s place was under the old dispensation you know too well. Body and soul the slave of her owners; while her delicate mistress was shielded by all possible safeguards from evil, she was left exposed to all the storms of passion and sin, daring not to have any sense of her own value, her will for resistance growing weaker with each generation. What an element of moral weakness to both races this state of things was, neither race had any conception.
With the changing character and views of the South the colored woman’s position must change also, and she is an important agent in the change. She is no longer a captive, bound to the wheel, obliged to advance or retrograde with the chariot of her master. The place which she will take in the new civilization; the light in which she will be regarded by the white man, and her position among her own people, will be the result of her own choice—a choice which she, in the person of her best and most intelligent representatives, shall make within the next fifty years.
What choice she will make is a question of breathless interest. How to help her make the choice wisely and in time is the problem upon which we are at work. That she labors under great disadvantages in this decision of her destiny is plain. The vain and foolish life of a shallow society has all the ignorance of her nature to work on, to lead her to a life of the most empty frivolity. The door to greater evil is wide open at her feet. The tempter can no longer command, but he may allure—allure with deadly certainty, because inherited tendencies and customs of the past aid him to gain an easy victory. Over many a poor girl who comes to my thought now I could raise the prophet’s lament: “Oh, that my head were waters and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughters of my people!”
Sometimes it seems that the colored woman is willingly—or under the irresistible pressure of circumstances—making her choice so rapidly and so fatally that the slow processes which are her only safety cannot reach the surface in time to save her. But the final decision in this matter does not rest with the present generation; the young girls who are now in our schools, and the children whose ideas they will mold, shall make the choice of her moral standing in the South in relation to both races, and of her intellectual and social standing among her own people.
Our question is how to help her most toward the end we wish.
Realizing that the foundation of a strong moral nature must be laid first of all, as the basis of true womanhood, shall we concentrate our work upon giving her religious instruction, and seek to bind her by bonds of Christian duty? Let me not seem for a moment to question the power of God’s grace to illuminate the heart and change the will; but until she better understands the force of Bible truth and has a nature more sensitive to receive it than is the case with many who come to us, religion, as she comprehends it, will do her no good. So divorced is it from morality, so satisfied as to the future, and so reckless as to the present are many who suppose they possess it, that I dare not present this last great motive of Christian principle until I see the moral sense working under direct and pointed Bible teaching, so that the Christian life may be grasped in its true meaning. Even then it will not do simply to see her converted and then to send her out to battle with evil, any more than Christian could have met Apollyon without the armor that was added to him after he had entered the wicket gate. The conscience, now in shattered ruins, must be built up that it may again perform its office in distinguishing right from wrong. A sense of her own worth—a genuine self-respect which recognizes degradation and flees from it; that will not even listen to evil, must arise as she comes gradually to know the duty and dignity to which God created her. But if we bring our girls to the point where they are inclined to choose honor and uprightness, we must make this choice possible by putting into their hands the means of supporting themselves; we must train them to habits of industry and to right ideas of labor.
The practical question is, “How shall we produce the results we seek?” Whatever of experience and knowledge I have of any one of our girls bids me answer, “Do with her just what you would do for some young girl in the North whom you wanted to save from the most corrupting influences. Take her early away from the home that oftentimes is no protection to her, and as there are no proper homes open to her, transplant her to as good a Christian home as our schools will afford; furnish her work to do when she has not money to meet the expense, and supplement this work by aid in money when necessary. Make her life in these homes as simple and true and elevating as genuine Christian culture will make it; throw around her the refinements of taste, that her own tastes may be improved; give her reading-rooms with wisely-chosen reading matter, music to refine and inspire; treat her with the courtesy and deference which she must learn to consider her due; give her training under suitable instructors in the industrial arts; and keep her through it all to a strict adherence to duty and a close and accurate course of study. Patiently and perseveringly hold her to this life until there begins to dawn upon her a vision of the noble and beautiful womanhood to which she may attain, and then help her to strive after it, through years of discouragement on the part of teacher and pupil, until a strong and true Christian character is built up to withstand the temptations and resist the tendencies that beset her.”
If you are tempted to say this is asking too much for our girls, that we ought to be content with less, at less expenditure of time and money, remember that the girls for whom I speak are the best among their people—the few who will ever have a chance to attain to higher things. Look just behind them and see the throngs, who, in ignorance and woe and sin, are turning their eyes toward you. Listen to them mutely pleading, “Do not set your standard too low, lest we who can only get a small part of our sister’s share of help, should be left to perish in our degradation.”
The objection is sometimes made that such training unfits our girls for their homes and surroundings. This is too often true. I used to think any education which placed them out of sympathy with their own lowly homes was false and wrong, but more extended knowledge of some of these homes leads me to the belief that in the struggle which must go on to save these people, the Scripture shall again be fulfilled—the mother shall be divided against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.
Much misunderstanding and suffering must result, perhaps to both sides, from this clash of the old and the new. In heathen countries, we find it unwise to change the customs which are foreign, unless some principle is involved; in our work, the differences that arise are wholly matters of knowledge or principle. The English civilization exists throughout our country, and what our girl finds as she goes to her home, that is contrary to her improved ideas of home, is the result of ignorance, or indolence, or sin. These, in a quiet, modest way, she must change. God grant her grace to be patient, true and firm through it all.