House to house visits and the object-lesson of the settlement work have told for good in the matter of cleanliness. The marriage tie is respected. It is the exception rather than the rule to find unmarried mothers living with their children's fathers without even a sense of shame.
The barefoot boys and girls, men and women, who first attended the settlement Sunday School eight years ago, come neatly dressed. Men and women who could not read or write in the beginning of the work can read their Sunday School lessons and write a presentable note in a matter of business.
The Mothers' Union has brought the mothers to see the deep necessity of exerting their influence for good of home and people. The penny savings bank held by the teacher represents stockholders that mean to be owners of their own homes.
In the night school, the grown people, who are employed during the day, are taught the simple lessons which were neglected in their youth. At first many of them were ashamed to admit their ignorance. One young man, whom Mrs. Washington noticed during one of her visits as being particularly sullen when asked to join the class, has turned out to be one of the most ambitious pupils. "At first I was almost afraid to speak to him," she said, "but after I talked to him a little while, he broke down quite suddenly, and exclaimed:
"Oh, Mis' Washington! I'se so ashamed, I don't even know my letters." But it is the classes in cooking and cleaning and sewing which have been most successful, and these are responsible more than anything else for the change in the women.
From the outset, the white planters who employ most of the coloured families of the settlement have aided in the work. When Mrs. Washington first sent for permission to carry on some missionary work among his tenants, he sent a boy on a mule with a fat turkey, and a message for me to "come and do anything I liked." What seemed to be a discouragement at first was that occasionally a family moved away, thus causing the teacher to begin all over again, with a newcomer, the work which had been scarce finished with the old. Later she came to see that those who migrated served to spread the influence into other neighbourhoods, thus broadening the teachings far beyond her own limitations.
CHAPTER XI The Tillers of the Ground
There is held at the Tuskegee Institute every year a remarkable conference of Negro workers, mostly farmers, who are to work out their salvation by the sweat of their brows in tilling the soil of the South. The purpose of these gatherings is severely practical—to encourage those who have not had the advantages of training and instruction, and to give them a chance to learn from the success of others as handicapped as they what are their own possibilities. As I have said many times, it is my conviction that the great body of the Negro population must live in the future as they have done in the past, by the cultivation of the soil, and the most hopeful service now to be done is to enable the race to follow agriculture with intelligence and diligence.