Becky Coleman
The nation should look with encouragement and gratitude to Booker T. Washington as the real Moses who, by industrial education, proposes to lead his people out of their real bondage. Only by making themselves worthy will they be able to exist on kindly terms with the white race. The same slow process of the ages which has wrought out Anglo Saxon civilization will elevate this race. Nature’s law of growth for them, as for white people, is struggle. The fittest will survive.
CHAPTER XI.
LAURA’S DEATH IN THE EPIDEMIC OF ’78.
The war fully ended and our city home recovered, we removed to New Orleans. I devoted myself wholly to my family and to domestic affairs. Friends gathered about us and some delightful people made our neighborhood very pleasant. It was in my present home that my daughter Laura was married to Louis J. Bright, and soon after, Clara was united to James B. Guthrie; both young men were settled in New Orleans, so that I was spared the pain of total separation. My son David established himself on his own plantation in Point Coupe, and soon after married Miss Lula Dowdell of Alabama. Our summers were spent alternately in Myrtle Grove and the North, or the Virginia Springs.
Mothers are usually held responsible for the shortcomings of their children. Sometimes this is just, but children often cruelly misrepresent good parents. It should never be forgotten that mothers and children are very human, and that the vocation upon which young people enter with least training is parenthood. Children and parents get their training together. It takes love and wisdom and proper environment to bring both to their best; but sometimes evil hereditary and vicious social institutions prove stronger than all of these combined forces of the home. The nation can never know the power and beauty of the mother until it evolves a true protective tenderness for the child, and encompasses it with safest conditions for its development. It is a growing wonder that women have borne so long in silence the existence of establishments which the State fosters to the debasement of their sons. Only the habit of subjection—the legacy of the ages—could have produced this pathetic stoicism. If a horse knew his strength, no man could control him. When women realize their God-given power, the community in which their children are born will not tempt them to their death by the open saloon, the gambling den and the haunt of shame. Until that happy time the inexhaustible supply of love and sympathy which goes out from the mother-heart is the child’s chiefest shelter. Obedience is what parents should exact from infants if they expect it from grown children. The slaves of the severer masters stayed with them during the war, when those of indulgent ones ran away. It is the petted, spoiled darlings whose ultimate “ingratitude is sharper than the serpent’s tooth.”
When friends were won by my daughters it was gratifying to me, for it proved that the womanly accomplishment of making themselves beloved was a lesson they had laid to heart—and they had learned it by their own fireside where love ruled and reigned. I was glad in all my children, and a devoted mother is sure of her ultimate reward. I was very proud when Clara replied to a friend who expressed surprise that she should visit me on my reception day: “I should be happy to claim a half-hour of my mother’s society if she were not related to me.” I was very content with my two daughters happily married and settled near me—doubly mine by the tie of congenial tastes and pursuits.
In 1878 my household had gone North for the summer. On September 1st a telegram reached me at Wilbraham, Mass., saying, “Laura died at 12 o’clock, M.” I had plead with her to leave New Orleans with me, but in her self-sacrificing devotion to her husband, who was never willing that she should be absent from him, she remained at home and fell a victim in the great yellow fever epidemic.