And now for a moment we will run down into the rice swamps of Georgia. Come into the house of old Aunt Peggy. A bed and two boxes form all the furniture of the room. The house is a borrowed one. Aunt Peggy is having a new one built. It will cost five dollars, and when we ask her how she is going to pay for it she tells us she has a quarter saved toward it, and she has promised the man who is building it her blankets, her only bedding beside an old comforter. But the weather is growing warm, she says, and "mebbe before it done turn cold I'll be in the hebbenly mansions." One of the saddest relics of the old slavery days is these childless, friendless, companionless old people, childless because slavery separated them from their children; husbands and wives were parted, and all family life rendered impossible. Two old people in the region of McIntosh, Ga., have recently died, each alone in a little cabin, and the tragedy was not discovered until the buzzards were seen circling around the place.
Aunt Peggy's sole comfort and dependence is a little boy eleven or twelve years old, whom she picked up by the roadside where he, a tiny baby, had been left by a heartless mother. Although then at least eighty years old, she strapped him on her back as she went to her "tasses" (tasks) in the field. She named him Calvary Baker, and now he has become her dependence and support, although the light in her shadowed cabin comes from the ministrations of the teachers in Dorchester Academy; and as she put her old, gaunt, claw-like black fingers on the face of the delicate, refined academy teacher, Aunt Peggy said: "Oh, you're my Jesus mudder;" and then, turning to me, she said, while a smile lit up the old black face, "Oh, missus, I bress de Lord for the Jesus school, for if it had not been for these Jesus mudders, I reckon hunger would have carried me off."
It is a wonderful work at McIntosh, as is true of all our schools. There are great lessons to be learned there. The student of the negro problem would do well to visit this section of the country with its historic interest, to note the influence of the old Midway Church, whose members were obliged to allow their slaves to attend church, so that at one time the black membership of this church was double the white; and to learn from a careful statistician that there is a less per cent. of crime and immorality, and a greater per cent. of full-blooded negroes here, under the influence of this old religious regimé, than can be found in any like number of our colored population throughout the Black Belt, save where the Christian school has changed the life during this last generation.
We are solving the negro problem in the only way possible, in the opinion of all statesmen, all publicists and all philanthropists, by the farm and the shop, and the school and the church, and over them all the Stars and Stripes. But we are doing more than this; we are setting the solitary in families; the wilderness and the solitary places are being made glad, and the desert is rejoicing and blossoming as the rose.
COMMENCEMENT AT FISK UNIVERSITY, TENN.
Fisk graduated classes of usual size. It deeply lamented the absence of President Cravath, who was ill in the East, and the late death of Prof. Spence. The Dean, J. G. Merrill, was deputed to preside at the varied functions of commencement week. The weather was unusually temperate, audiences very large.
The largest college preparatory class in the history of the university was graduated. It catalogued thirty-nine. Ten States were represented on its list, and a larger number of young women than have ever entered Fisk before were made Freshmen.
SENIOR CLASS, FISK UNIVERSITY.