“I tole de Lord dat I would have great patience,” he would reply to those who begged of him to give up so hopeless a search, and doubtless patience was doing its perfect work, for the end for which he so longed was at hand.
Story 1--Chapter VIII.
Fruit of Faith and Patience.
One very bitter day in March there was great commotion among the black people of St. Louis. The snow was falling thickly, the wind was blowing. Inclement as the whole winter had been, this day seemed the worst of all; but it did not deter the freed blacks from braving its hardships, from hurrying in crowds from place to place, and above all from repairing in vast crowds to their own churches. Every coloured church in St. Louis was full of anxious blacks, but they had not assembled for any purposes of worship. Unless, indeed, we except that heart worship which takes in the ever-present Christ, even when he comes hungry, naked, and in the guise of a stranger. The black people of St. Louis made beds in the church pews and kindled fires in the basements.
Having made all preparations, they went, headed by their preachers, to the quays; there to meet some six hundred famished and shivering emigrants, who had come up the river all the way from the States of the Mississippi Valley and Louisiana.
In extreme poverty and in wretched plight whole families had come, leaving the plantations where they were born, and severing all those local ties for which the negro has so strong an attachment. All of these poor people, including the very young and the very aged, were bound for Kansas.
This was the beginning of a great exodus of the negroes from the Southern to the Northern States.