Sewing, in which they are woefully deficient, receives due attention, and girls whose hands can manage a plough or a cotton bag much more easily than they can hold a needle, become at the end of the course very nice seamstresses, whose work would rejoice the hearts of the advocates of hand sewing. In these classes, besides plain sewing of every description, the girls are taught patching and darning, and the cutting and putting together of garments, and in at least one of the colleges, each girl who graduates must leave behind a garment cut and made entirely by herself, as a specimen of her skill.
A few minutes daily are spent in giving the assembled school a brief summary of the important items of news in the great outside world, and more or less time is devoted to plain talks on practical matters, manners, morals and care of the health,—the last a subject, by the way, with which they seem wholly unacquainted, and which the girls especially need to become familiar with. Dress reform in two directions needs to be impressed upon them, as the uncouth garb of the girls from the woods, and the thin slippers, cheap finery, powder, paint and corsets laced to the last verge of human endurance donned by the city girls, bear testimony.
But this is not all. These girls are sent to us to be trained for Christ, and knowing the utter folly of attempting to build up a pure, noble womanhood on any other foundation than Christian principle, we try by all our system and watchfulness and oversight to establish them in this, earnestly praying the Master to send from on high that blessing without which all our labors will be nothing worth.
Have you never in some late Spring watched the brown leaf-buds, as day after day they seemed to remain unchanged, till you were tired of waiting for the fulfilment of their promise? And do you remember your joyful surprise when, leaving them thus at night you woke to find the whole tree aglow with the fresh, tiny bits of color from the bursting buds? So we feel often as we wake to realize that the rough, awkward girl who came to us has developed into the quiet, refined Christian woman, leaving us for her life work. Nor are we the only ones to see the transformation.
“I am looking to see what kind of a woman you are,” said a child to one of the Talladega students as she opened her log cabin school in the pine wood. “You look to me like a white lady.” The teacher’s face was of the most pronounced African type, and black as ebony, but her quiet dignity and refined manner excited the child’s wonder and elicited the unconscious compliment.
As teachers, these girls carry the missionary spirit with them, and feeling their responsibility, open Sunday-schools and engage in temperance work as surely as they begin their day schools. Into the cabins they carry, as far as may be, a regard for neatness, order, and those little adornments which make home what it is. Happy the young colored minister who wins one of them for his wife, thus establishing a home which shall supplement his sermons and act as leaven in the homes of his people. More than one graduate of the colored theological seminaries is gravely hampered in his usefulness by an ignorant, careless wife. As one frankly expressed the matter to a brother minister, “My wife is more trouble to me than all my work put together.” And in thus training our girls to be careful, efficient housewives, we know we may be moulding not them alone, nor their immediate households, but the whole community of women over whom, as ministers’ wives and the most thoroughly educated women, they will exert a powerful influence.
But we have deeply felt the need of more direct and personal influence over the women. The work of the school needs to be supplemented by that of the missionary: mother and daughter must work together for the best result. But the teacher had little time after the school duties were performed, and the lady missionaries so sorely longed for, were very few in number. Why not, then, work through our tried colored helpers? The description of the way this has been done in other States I leave to those whose experience is wider than my own. In Alabama, we have a “Woman’s Missionary Association,” holding annual meetings in connection with the State conference of churches, and having auxiliary societies in these several churches. The colored women who compose these societies have heartily and faithfully assumed the duties devolving upon them, and helping others have themselves been helped.
The work done is varied, no rigid plan being laid down. Sewing classes for the women and girls, prayer-meetings for the mothers, Bible-readings, visiting from house to house, bearing food and medicine for the sick, clothing for the destitute, and comfort and sympathy for all, health talks—than which nothing can be more needed,—literary societies to develop their untrained minds, foreign missionary meetings to broaden their sympathies; all these and other ways of working for the Lord are reported at their last meeting. In April, for the first time, this annual meeting was visited by several white Southern ladies. Our surprise at their coming was only equalled by their amazement at the revelations.
“You put our ladies to the blush,” said one. “You are far ahead of us in Christian work.”
“Only to think,” exclaimed another as she listened to the carefully prepared papers and systematic reports,—“Only to think that we have kept such women as these in slavery!”