“Enter the train of the Seaboard & Roanoke Railroad and you will be carried very comfortably through a country as monotonous and unexciting as you will often find. You can bear to watch, for once, the scenery that looks so painfully uninviting it is positively entertaining: light land, scattered pines, and here and there, the so-called villages, of which you might say, ‘enough of them—such as they are.’ No bright green sward; and as for houses, homes—where are they? Surely not very near the line of the railroad, unless you can by courtesy give the name to the scanty cabins, with the tow-headed children, and the wan women, and the man scratching the top of the earth with a plow drawn by one decrepit steer or sorry mule.
“The railroad on to which you pass at Weldon, would carry you to Wilmington, famed throughout the old North State for its delightful social life. But we stop one hundred miles short of this, in the heart of the State. Your desolate ride has hardly prepared you for the pleasing aspect of the town that greets you. Comfortable houses, some of them tasteful, with abundant flower-yards, and, now and then, the familiar green turf, preserved with a good deal of pains; the county buildings, numerous and large stores, some of them doing a business of two or three hundred thousand a year, assure you that here, too, are homes and American enterprise. You are in the midst of the cotton belt—a dry, light, almost sandy soil, level like the bottom of a lake, showing signs (in beds of marl, with shells not yet absorbed) of having been once under the sea, easily tilled; large amounts of chemical fertilizers in use; plenty of work for both whites and blacks; and, although some of both races are do-nothings, numbers of both are industrious and reap the reward. The relations between the two races here appear to the casual eye entirely peaceful. Some blacks are leaving for Indiana, and a few are returning; and the departure of those who go from this particular section only gives more room and occupation for those who stay.
“A fragment of the conversation of two negroes I overheard on the street sounded true and sensible: ‘My ’pinion is, one dat’s willin’ to work, kin make a livin’ most anywhar; as fur —— he allus was too lazy to live; he’s too lazy to die. I don’t b’lieve nuffin sech as he ses.’ They were talking of a bright but indolent mulatto, well known in the place, who had lately exodusized and come back.
“The churches are Baptist, Episcopal, and Methodist, with ‘Hard-shells,’ Campbellites, etc. The colored people have churches and preachers of their own, and will never rise very high till they have schools and better churches.
“The lack of schools is a great evil, felt and deplored by some of the best people. There are private schools for the whites who can pay for them, but no public schools for them, and none of any kind for the blacks here yet. But times move forward and grow better.”
LE MOYNE INSTITUTE, MEMPHIS, TENN.
Training Nurses—Needle-Work—Preparation of Food, etc.
In the Missionary for March, 1879, Miss Milton gave some account of the industrial department of the school at Le Moyne, and also announced the purpose of giving attention to the training of nurses.
Prof. Steele writes that their plans have been more fully developed with most gratifying results. During the year, about an hour each day has been devoted to such work, without interfering with regular studies, and with the effect of stimulating the students in all other directions. The list of questions on the care of the sick, which constituted a part of their examination at the close of the winter term, indicates a varied and minute training, which must fit these pupils to be angels of mercy, and most blessed ministers of comfort and health in many cabins of the South.
Professor Steele reports a death-rate among the negroes of Memphis that is simply appalling. He says in other cities of the South it is about double that among the whites; in Memphis it is three times as great. We are confident that this disproportion does not prevail through the country. The blacks are gregarious, and crowding into the cities, as they do, in ignorance and poverty, disease is fearfully fatal among the children; but we do not believe the forthcoming census will establish such a death-rate as the above among the colored population at large.