"No, sir, I nuvver has."
The tie which once bound the two races together is broken forever, and entire separation in churches and schools prevents mutual interest or intercourse.
Our church schools are doing much to elevate and improve the negroes, and we have to thank many kind, warm friends in the North for timely aid in missionary boxes, books, and Bibles to carry on the colored Sunday-school work in which many Southern people are deeply interested, without the means of conducting them as they wish.
The negroes still have a strange belief in what they call "tricking," and often the most intelligent, when sick, will say they have been "tricked," for which they have a regular treatment and "trick doctors" among themselves. This "tricking" we cannot explain, and only know that when one negro became angry with another he would bury in front of his enemy's cabin door a bottle filled with pieces of snakes, spiders, bits of tadpole, and other curious substances; and the party expecting to be "tricked" would hang up an old horseshoe outside of his door to ward off the "evil spirits."
Since alienated from their former owners they are, as a general thing, more idle and improvident; and, unfortunately, the tendency of their political teaching has been to make them antagonistic to the better class of white people, which renders it difficult for them to be properly instructed. That such animosity should exist toward those who could best understand and help them is to be deplored. For the true negro character cannot be fully comprehended or described but by those who, like ourselves, have always lived with them.
At present their lives are devoted to a religious excitement which demoralizes them, there seeming to be no connection between their religion and morals. In one of their Sabbath schools is a teacher who, although often arrested for stealing, continues to hold a high position in the church.
Their improvidence has passed into a proverb, many being truly objects of charity; and whoever would now write a true tale of poverty and wretchedness may take for the hero "Old Uncle Tom without a cabin." For "Uncle Tom" of the olden time, in his cabin, with a blazing log fire and plenty of corn bread, and the Uncle Tom of to-day, are pictures of very different individuals.