The Call of the South

by Robert Lee Durham

"Yes; I want to know why I am not good enough to go to war along with respectable people—if there is any reason."

"Honey, you are just as good as any of them, and better than most. I wouldn't think about it any more if I were you."

"Well, I'm not going to think about it any more—after to-night; but I want to know all about it right now. Where was father from? You have never told me that."

"Well, honey, I don't know myself; for he never told me nor any one else that. All I know is that something—he never would say what—made him leave his father and mother when he was not twenty years old and he never saw them afterwards,—didn't let them know where he was or even that he was alive. Your pa was mighty high-spirited, and he never seemed to forget whatever it was that came between him and his father; though he would talk about him some too, and appeared to worship his mother's memory. They must have been very prominent people from what he said of them. His mother died very soon after he left home, he told me; and your grandfather was killed not long after that in a battle right at the beginning of the war, I've heard him say; but he didn't seem to like to talk of them."

"Didn't father say which side my grandfather was on?"

"On our side—the Union side."

"And father was in the war?"

"Yes, but I forget what he did. He had some sort of a badge or medal tied up with a red, white and blue ribbon that I found in his trunk after he died; but I gave it to you to play with when you were little and you lost it. That had something to do with the war, but I didn't understand exactly what. He didn't like to talk about the war. When we were first married he used to say that the war was the first battle and the easiest, and that he was enlisted for the second and intended to see it through. But before he died I often heard him say that the war was only clearing away the brush, and what the crop would be depended on what was planted and how it was tended, and that his great-grandchildren might see the harvest."

"Where did you first meet him?"

"Down in Alabama. He went down there soon after the war to teach school, just as I did. I had been to college and got my diploma and I wanted to teach; but it seemed I could not get a position in the whole State of New Hampshire. So when some of the people offered to send me down to Alabama to teach the negroes, I went. Your father had a school for negroes not very far from mine, and he had had a hard time from the very first. None of the respectable white people would have anything to do with him, and he could not get board from any one but negroes. But the worse the people treated him the harder he worked, and his school grew. Finally it became so large that he could not do the work alone. He tried every way to get another teacher, but could not. As a last resort he asked me to combine my school with his and see if we could not manage in that way to teach all the children who came. I never saw anybody with a heart so set as his was on giving every little negro a chance to learn.