CHAPTER XXVI
The White Child
Upon the Southern white child of due age for schooling the effects of war fell with cruel force.
The ante-bellum planter kept a tutor or governess or both for his children; his neighbours’ children sometimes attended the school which he maintained for his own. Thus, were sons and daughters prepared for academy and college, university, finishing school. Private schools were broken up quite generally by the war. It became quite the custom for the mother or an elder sister to fill the position of instructor in families on big plantations. Such schooling as this was none too plentiful in rural Dixie just after the war. Sisters of age and capacity to teach did not stay in one family forever. Sometimes they got married; though many a beautiful and brilliant girl sacrificed her future for little brothers and sisters dependent upon her for mental food. The great mass of Southern women had, however, to drop books for broomsticks; to turn from pianos and guitars and make music with kettles and pans. Children had to help. With labour entirely disorganised, in the direst poverty and the grasp of such political convulsions as no people before them had ever endured, the hour was strenuous beyond description, and it is no wonder if the claims of children to education were often overlooked, or, in cruel necessity, set aside.
Sometimes neighbours clubbed together and opened an “old field school,” paying the teacher out of a common fund subscribed for the purpose; again, a man who could teach went around, drummed up pupils at so much a head, opened a school and took chances on collection of dues. Many neighbourhoods were too poor for even such expedients; to get bread itself was a struggle to which children must lend labour. The seventies found few or no rural districts without a quota of half-grown lads and lassies unable to read and write. It was no strange thing to see little white boys driving a plow when they were so small they had to lift their hands high to grasp the handles; or little white girls minding cows, trotting to springs or wells with big buckets to fill, bending over wash-tubs, and working in the crops.
The public school system was not put in operation at once, and if it had been, could not have met conditions of the hour. Planters lived far apart; roads in some sections long unworked, in others lately plowed by cannons or wagon-trains, were often impassable for teams—if people were so fortunate as to have teams; and much more so for little feet; then, too, the reign of fear was on; highways and by-ways were infested by roving negroes; many were harmless; would, indeed, do a child a kindness; but some were dangerous; the negro, his own master now, was free to get drunk at other times than Christmas and corn-shucking. An argument against the success of the public as of the “old field” school, lay in the strong spirit of caste animating the high-born Southerner. It was against his grain to send his children—particularly his daughters—to school with Tom, Dick and Harry; it did not please him for them to make close associates of children in a different walk of life—the children of the “poor white trash.” This spirit of exclusiveness marks people of position today, wherever found. Caste prejudice was almost inoperative, however, having small chance to pick and choose. Gaunt poverty closed the doors of learning against the white child of the South, while Northern munificence was flinging them wide to the black.
Soon as war ended, schools for negroes were organised in all directions with Government funds or funds supplied by Northern charity; and under Northern tutelage—a tutelage contributing to prejudice between the races. These institutions had further the effect of aggravating the labour problem—a problem so desperate for the Southern farmer that he could not turn from it to give his own child a chance for intellectual life.
He was not pleasantly moved by touching stories that went North of class-rooms where middle-age, hoary-head and pickaninny sat on the same bench studying the same page, all consumed with ambition to master the alphabet. It did not enter into these accounts that the plows and hoes of a sacked country had been deserted for the A B C book. He resented the whole tendency of the time, which was to make the negro despise manual labour and elevate book-learning above its just position. Along with these appealing stories did not go pictures of fields where white women and children in harness dragged plows through furrows; the artists did not portray white children in the field wistfully watching black children trooping by to school; had such pictures gone North in the sixties and seventies, some would have said, so bitter was the moment, “Just retribution for the whites,” but not the majority. The great-hearted men and women of the North would have come to the rescue.
“There were two reasons for Northern indifference to the education of the Southern white child,” an embittered educator says; “natural prejudice against the people with whom they had been at war, and the feeling that the negro had been persecuted—had been ‘snatched from his happy home in Africa’ (they forgot they had done more than a full share of the snatching); brought over here and sold into slavery (they forgot they had done more than a full share of the selling), and thereby stripped of all his brilliant opportunities of life in Africa and the advancement he might else have had; the Southern white man, instead of sending him to college, had made him work in the fields; to even up matters now, the negro must go to college and the white man work in the fields. This was the will of Providence and they its executors.”