“’Cause dey didn’t want it dere,” sez he. “Dat’s what I spoze wuz de influential reason.”
And then he went on and told me the hull story, and mebby I’d better tell it a little faster than he did. It took place some years before, but he had lived right there in Eden Centre, and wuz knowin’ to the hull thing.
A white minister had come down from the North, a man who had some property, and wuz a good man, and seein’ the grievous need of schools for the black man, had used his own money to build the academy.
He tried to get land for the school nearer the city, where more could be helped by it, but nobody would sell land for such a purpose.
Finally, he come here, and on this poor tract of land that the negroes owned he put up his buildings.
It took about all the money he had to build the house and get the school started.
He had jest got it started, and had fifty pupils—grown people and children of the freedmen—when some ruffians come one stormy night and set it on fire.
The white prejudice wuz so strong aginst havin’ the colored race taught, that they burned down the buildings, destroyed all the property that that good man had spent there.
It wuz on a cold, stormy night. His wife wuz ill in bed when the fire broke out; the fright and exposure of that night killed her.