But Martha Schofield answered with these words: “As long as there is life in me to work, I shall work. The coast may not be the place but I will yet find the place.”
And she did.
So in 1868 she went to Aiken, S. C, and started work again after losing her health and all her personal income. Assisted by an auxiliary branch of the “Freedman’s Commission,” a charitable organization composed of two dozen ladies, of Germantown, Pa., she soon was able to begin work on a scale of some promise.
In 1870 the United States Government, through the “Freedman’s Bureau,” took official recognition of the necessity for the kind of work being done by her by having a small frame house erected for her. This house still stands.
CHAPTER V.
Brightness of Martha’s Pupils.
When Martha Schofield opened her first school in South Carolina it was impossible to secure the necessary text books and much of the instruction was oral. With the few books which the school did possess it was not an uncommon sight to see three and four pupils preparing their lessons from the same book. The children took the books home nights, until the “Blue Back” and Webster’s had gone the circuit round many times. Having advanced to the ability to write and read script, a pupil was no longer eligible to the benefits of the circulating library. He was then forced to copy at his spare time the lessons he was supposed to prepare during the night.
Notwithstanding the serious difficulties attending the acquisition of knowledge without the aid of books, the intellectual as well as the moral improvement of not only the children but their parents as well was soon apparent. “There was an eager desire among all the children to attend school” says Miss Schofield in writing of her experiences on the Coast and later at Aiken; “never a truant.”
The average attendance of the Negroes at school in the South today exceeds the attendance of 1900 by over 10 per cent. This thirsting after knowledge by the brother in black is one of his redeeming characteristics.
Miss Schofield once put the question to a class in Geography as to what the world rested on. A grown man replied that it rested on stumps and big wild animals. A ten year old boy corrected him by saying that it rested on the Power of God. These definitions will serve to show the dense ignorance of the race at the time Miss Schofield began teaching.
In a definition exercise the class was requested to define the word, husband. Volunteers were called for but no one volunteered. In an effort to lucify the subject and assist them to guess the meaning of the word, with an approximate accuracy, Miss Schofield asked them to tell her what she would have were she to marry. A little girl, almost ten, replied, with much enthusiasm but unconscious of any wit at all, “A baby.”