THREE PICTURES FROM LE MOYNE SCHOOL, MEMPHIS, TENN.
BY MISS ESTHER H. BARNES.
I would like to bring before you three pictures which I saw this week. The first is the interior of a single room. The tattered, soiled bed and the fireplace took up a large part of the room, and the rest was nearly filled with the confusion of odds and ends that make up the belongings of such a home. A feeble fire rested on the uneven bricks of the fireplace, and the chimney above was covered with newspapers in the last stages of dilapidation and dirt. There was no window, but a little sliding shutter, moved aside a few inches, admitted light enough to make the darkness visible as it fell on the smoke-stained boards, and the dusky faces of the inmates seated close to the fire on old chairs and boxes. A home more forlorn than this little pen, which, with a smaller back shed, is the only residence of at least five human beings, I can hardly conceive.
Now for a more cheering picture. It is a cozy sitting-room, papered with taste and furnished in harmony. Everything looks neat, from the snowy bed-spread to the pretty clock on the mantel, and the dainty bunch of pansies on the wall above. Open doors give glimpses of other rooms as well ordered as this, while intelligence and kindness beam in the dark faces of gentle mother and cheery bright-eyed daughters. When people ask us how we can bear to teach "niggers," they generally have in mind those tattered, lazy persons, who are most wont to show themselves on the street corners, and so make the deepest impression on the average white mind.
But look at my third picture, and you will see both how we can like our work, and what is one of the things that make a difference between the second home I have described and the first. The large school-room is filled. More than one hundred and twenty-five students are arranged in classes, most of whom are standing in their places ready to pass to recitation rooms. One of their number is at the piano. Another stands at the desk to give the word of command. Now he strikes the bell and the pupils in long file pass out, marching with their heads up. Not a teacher is in sight. Everything is orderly and is running of itself, as it does every day. This is nothing wonderful, of course, though I know some white schools which could not be trusted to this degree to the control of monitors. But it is only a sign of the influences that here lead to self-reliance and self-control. Every year a new set of uncouth and undeveloped young people come shambling in, looking around with bewildered eyes. But they soon begin to straighten up and fall into step. Their vague ideas get settled, and their minds, slow at first, wake up. In a few years they will be made over new, not perfect, but vastly improved. They will be out teaching, spreading light from scores of new centres, and sending new pupils to "Old Le Moyne."