I visited several schools in the Virgin Islands. When an American school director arrived early in 1918 he found no records either of schools, pupils, or parents. By dint of going out and hunting them up, he discovered nineteen educational buildings on the three islands. Ninety per cent. of the population can read and write after a fashion, but the majority usually have their letters written by the public scribe, of whom there is one in each of the three towns, in a set form that gives all epistles a strong family resemblance. The school system was honeycombed with all sorts of petty graft. A man who received three dollars a month for keeping a certain school clean had not seen the building in years. The town clock of Christiansted has not run for five years, yet another favored person received a monthly stipend for keeping it in order. The new director and his two American assistants have still to contend with many difficulties. There are no white teachers; those now employed were trained either in Denmark or in the Moravian schools, and the “English” of most of them almost deserves to be ranked as an independent dialect. The highest teacher’s salary is seventy-five, the average twenty-four dollars a month. Boys of sixteen, drawing the regal income of ten dollars monthly, conduct many of the classes. Those who served a certain number of years under the Danes receive a pension from the famous twenty-five millions. They are small pensions, like those that went to all the small government employees whom the Danes left behind, and those who still hold their places protest against telling their new employer how much they draw from Copenhagen, fancying it may result in a corresponding loss in the increase they fondly hope for under American rule. Lack of funds has forced the director to maintain many of the incompetents in office. One rural school we visited is still taught by the local butcher, whose inefficiency is on a par with his custom of neglecting his educational duties for his more natural calling. But as the island budget does not permit an increase of his monthly thirty-five dollars,—and in every case it is merely Danish, not American, dollars,—no more competent substitute has yet appeared to claim the butcher’s ferule.
The country schools have few desks; the children sit on backless benches, their feet usually high off the floor. The tops of the desks are in many cases painted black and used as blackboards. A rusty tin cup was found doing service for all the thirsty; when the Americans attempted to improve this condition by introducing a long-handled dipper with an edge cut in repeated V shape, the teachers bent the sharp points back and returned to the old dip-your-hand-in method. Lessons are often done on slates or pieces of slate, which the teacher periodically sprinkles with water from a bay-rum bottle, then requires the sums to be erased in rhythmical unison. Formerly the teachers sat in the middle of one large room, surrounded by eight different grades, and the resultant hubbub may be imagined. The Americans put in partitions, and the uproar is now somewhat less incoherent. In some of the larger schools there were half-height partitions, with little sliding-doors, through which the principal could peer without leaving his central “office.” Loud protests have been heard because the Americans nailed these up, forcing upon the sedentary gentlemen in charge the exertion of walking around to the several doors. The teaching methods were, and in many cases still are, of that tropically medieval type in which the instructor asks long questions that require a single-word answer, even that being chiefly suggested by the questioner.
“What is the longest river in America? Now, then, Miss-Mis-sissi—”
The answer “pi!” by some unusually bright pupil, is followed by exclamations of praise from the teacher. Like most negroes, the Virgin Islanders have tolerable memories, but little ability to apply what they learn. Not the least of the difficulties confronting the new director was the reform of the Catholic schools, which had long put great emphasis on matters of religion and treated other subjects with scant attention. The attempt to better matters sent shrieks of protest to Washington, whence the director’s hands were more or less tied by misinformed coreligionists. Bit by bit the Virgin Island schools are being improved, however, a decree permitting superintendents to fine the parents of pupils absent without due cause, simply by sending a policeman to collect the sum assessed, without any troublesome process of law, having given a badly needed weapon against the once wide-spread inattendance. Parents who decline, or are unable to pay the fines, are required to work one day on the roads for every dollar unpaid.
There is no agriculture worth mentioning in St. Thomas and no employing class in St. John, hence labor troubles have been chiefly confined to St. Croix. The present leaders of the movement in the larger island are three negroes, all of them agitators of the more or less violent type, differing only in degree, and all more or less consciously doing their best to stir up those of their own color. The one considered the most radical is the least troublesome, as he can readily be bought off. Another, a man of some education, runs a newspaper advocating civil government,—that is, negro government,—preaching that the white man is the enemy of the black, that St. Croix belongs by right to the latter, and openly accusing the white officials of incompetency and dishonesty. In addition to this, he publishes secretly a scurrilous sheet that is doing much to inflame the primitive minds of the masses. The third announced in a public meeting that “if the governor don’t do what we want, we’ll take him out in the bay and send him back where he come from.”
“Since the Americans came, it is all for the niggers,” said an old English estate-owner. “The niggers even steal our fruit and vegetables, carrying them to town a bit at a time in their clothes, for the policemen are all friendly or related to them. Let those black agitators go on a bit longer, and we whites will have to leave the island.”
There are signs that the whites are in peril of losing the upper hand in the island, particularly with the methods of the present governor, who caters to the negroes with un-American eagerness. As an example, though his private yacht may be on the point of steaming from St. Thomas to St. Croix or vice versa, even American white women are left to the mercies of the filthy Creole, lest the local merchants complain that trade is being taken away from them. Yet native negro girls are readily carried back and forth, because they happen to be the daughters, relatives, or dependents of members of the colonial council, or of some other local officials of the islands we are paying taxes to support.
The negro newspaper man sees much “social injustice” in St. Croix, of which certainly a customary amount exists; but he seems incapable of noting the great disinclination to work and the fact that the “paltry dollar a day” buys scarcely one tenth the amount of labor which constitutes a day’s work in the white man’s countries with which he strives to compare his own. In 1916 he went to Denmark and raised funds to establish several labor-union estates on the island, where the negroes might raise cattle, cane, and the like, each to get permanent possession of the piece of land on which he was working as soon as he had paid off the mortgage. But the farms are already, after a bare two years in the hands of the union, largely overgrown with weeds, bush, and miserable shacks, and about the only result of the move has been the loss of more land to world production, and the infliction of the sponsor with an exaggerated self-importance that has made him lose the one virtue of the Virgin-Islander—his courtesy.
On the other hand, the employing class is by no means immune to criticism. The larger sugar companies were paying cane-growers from six to seven cents Danish for sugar at the same time that they were selling it for from twelve to fourteen cents in American money. The diligent Yankee who controls the lighterage, wharfage, and many other monopolies at “West End,” as well as sharing with the newspaper man the political control of the island, cannot be acquitted of the native charge of exorbitance. A Danish company whose profits in 1919 were more than a million sent all its gains to Copenhagen, instead of helping to stabilize the exchange by depositing them in New York.