KENTUCKY.
Then and Now.
Berea College.
The builder working day after day placing stone upon stone, polishing here and there, might well get discouraged if he stopped to look at each day’s work. Progress in all great things is slow, and nowhere slower than in building character.
Twelve years ago, two little black children made their first appearance in our Berea School. The scholars, all of whom at that time were white, scattered before those two little bits of color, as if scared by the plague. The school that in the morning numbered fifty, by noon scarcely counted a dozen. Then commenced the long and weary work of rowing against the stream of prejudice. With a whole State against us, with even our country, so far as it knew us, looking on in doubt, with colored people, who held the most absurd notions of freedom and learning, flocking to us, we found ourselves under a heavy burden.
Our students were fresh from town and country, plantations and the army; some with misty thoughts that education was a good thing, and that about all they had to do was to open the pores and let it soak through. When the restraints of the school-room came, and the study that brought slow results, the courage of this class flagged, and they were easily wooed back to their first love, where the liberty of the corn-field and the swing of the axe was much more to their fancy.
There were some, however, of sterner stuff, who, counting the cost, came through poverty and self-denial, and are remembered as among our best students and graduates. One man, the father of fifteen children, came to Berea years ago, and has somewhat educated almost all his children. Some have taught, and others are preparing to do so. How, in their poverty, they have managed to keep four or five in school at once, we can hardly imagine. We, who are mothers, and know how the little shoes wear out, and the clothes always need a button or patch, stand almost in awe of a mother who not only prepares her children’s daily bread, but helps to earn it. If their little ones have had less than others more favored, they do not seem to mind it. Their laugh is just as merry, and their appetite, perhaps, better for the work that helped to earn the meal. On last Thanksgiving-day, the father spoke of his trials and hindrances, but counted them all as nothing for the joy that the children had gained the privileges he had so longed for, but had been denied.
Only this winter a noble girl, well on in her course of study, whose influence over her companions was always good, the help and stay of the principal, was, inexplicably to us, called to leave her work below and go to the mansion prepared for her. Another sweet, dark-eyed girl, frail in health, but strong in spirit, for two years has not only paid her own way, but has had something left to send to a tired and over-taxed mother. Last year, directly after Commencement, she engaged a school where for months she taught very successfully. At the close of her school, mounted on horseback, she rode to Berea to make final preparations for a new term, telling gleefully how she had secured this and that comfort for the year, and that now she could give herself wholly to study. Imagine her surprise and distress to find, on her return to her boarding place, that all her possessions were burned to ashes, her clothing all gone; and this with only a little money due her. But, though stunned and almost broken-hearted, her courage never failed. Using her means with the greatest economy, willing to deny herself, she is here with us, though how she manages to get along, only she and her Lord fully know.
These are but few cases out of the hundreds that might be mentioned, showing heroism of a very quiet sort; but in God’s own time, when faithfulness in little things is appreciated, many of these poor people will wonderingly receive the crown of the blessed, astonished to find that their plain, hard lives had aught of glory in them.
Missionaries to heathen lands are glad to give their lives to plant Christ’s banner on foreign soil, and we, looking back through these years, take courage, thinking of the souls which have been helped here, and are going out, carrying the good seed, and planting it in all the waste places about us.