In April, 1864, her whole colony was removed to Helena, Arkansas. The Home Farm was three miles from Helena. Here was gathered a great crowd of women and children and helpless old men, all under the guard of a company of soldiers in a fort nearby. Thither went the missionary alone, except for her faith in God. She made an arbor with some rude seats, nailed a blackboard to a tree, divided the people into four groups, and began to teach school. In the twilight every evening a great crowd gathered around her cabin for prayers. A verse of the Bible was read and explained, petitions were offered, one of the sorrow-songs was chanted, and then the service was over.
Some Quaker workers were her friends in Helena, and in 1868 she went to Lauderdale, Mississippi, to help the Friends in an orphan asylum. Six weeks after her arrival the superintendent's daughter died, and the parents left to take their child back to their Indiana home to rest. The lone woman was left in charge of the asylum. Cholera broke out. Eleven children died within one week. Still she stood by her post. Often, she said, those who were well and happy when they retired, ere daylight came were in the grave, for they were buried the same hour they died. Night after night she prayed to God in the dark, and at length the fury of the plague was abated.
From time to time the failing health of her mother called her home, and from 1870 to 1873 she once more taught school near Belvidere. The first winter the school was in the country. "You can never have a Sunday school in the winter," they told her. But she did; in spite of the snow, the house was crowded every Sunday, whole families coming in sleighs. Even at that the real work of the teacher was with the Negroes of the South. In her prayers and public addresses they were always with her, and in 1873 friends in Chicago made it possible for her to return to the work of her choice. In 1877 the Woman's Baptist Home Mission Society honored itself by giving to her its first commission.
Nine years she spent in the vicinity of New Orleans. Near Leland University she found a small, one-room house. After buying a bed, a table, two chairs, and a few cooking utensils, she began housekeeping. Often she started out at six in the morning, not to return until dark. Most frequently she read the Bible to those who could not read. Sometimes she gave cheer to mothers busy over the washtub. Sometimes she would teach the children to read or to sew. Often she would write letters for those who had been separated from friends or kindred in the dark days. She wrote hundreds and hundreds of such letters; and once in a while, a very long while, came a response.
Most pitiful of all the objects she found in New Orleans were the old women worn out with years of slavery. They were usually rag-pickers who ate at night the scraps for which they had begged during the day. There was in the city an Old Ladies' Home; but this was not for Negroes. A house was secured and the women taken in, Joanna Moore and her associates moving into the second story. Sometimes, very often, there was real need; but sometimes, too, provisions came when it was not known who sent them; money or boxes came from Northern friends who had never seen the workers; and the little Negro children in the Sunday schools in the city gave their pennies.
In 1878 the laborer in the Southwest started on a journey of exploration. In Atlanta Dr. Robert at Atlanta Baptist Seminary (now Morehouse College) gave her cheer; so did President Ware at Atlanta University. At Benedict in Columbia she saw Dr. Goodspeed, President Tupper at Shaw in Raleigh, and Dr. Corey in Richmond. In May she appeared at the Baptist anniversaries, with fifteen years of missionary achievement already behind her.
But each year brought its own sorrows and disappointments. She wanted the Society to establish a training school for women; but to this objection was raised. In Louisiana also it was not without danger that a white woman attended a Negro association in 1877; and there were always sneers and jeers. At length, however, a training school for mothers was opened in Baton Rouge. All went well for two years; and then a notice with skull and crossbones was placed on the gate. The woman who had worked through the cholera still stood firm; but the students had gone. Sick at heart and worn out with waiting, she at last left Baton Rouge and the state in which so many of her best years had been spent.
"Bible Band" work was started in 1884, and Hope in 1885. The little paper, beginning with a circulation of five hundred, has now reached a monthly issue of twenty thousand copies, and daily it brings its lesson of cheer to thousands of mothers and children in the South. In connection with it all has developed the Fireside School, than which few agencies have been more potent in the salvation and uplift of the humble Negro home.
What wisdom was gathered from the passing of fourscore years! On almost every page of her tracts, her letters, her account of her life, one finds quotations of proverbial pith:
The love of God gave me courage for myself and the rest of mankind; therefore I concluded to invest in human souls. They surely are worth more than anything else in the world.