“Wat’s de use ob niggers pretendin’ to lurnin?” he continued, warming with his subject. “Dey’s men on dis yeah plantation, old ’s I am, studyin’ ober spellin’-book, an’ makin’ b’lieve’s if dey could larn. Wat’s de use? Wat’ll dey be but niggers wen dey gits through? Niggers good for nothin’ but to wuck in de fiel’ an’ make cotton. Can’t make white folks ob you’-selves, if you is free.”
“Dere’s dat new boy, Reuben,” chimed in one of the others. “Massa Powell sent me to weigh out his ’lowance. He brag so much ’bout readin’ an’ edication dat I try him. I put on tree poun’ po’k, an’ I say, ‘Reub, kin you read?’ He say, ‘Lord bress ye, didn’t ye know I’s edicated nigger?’ I say, ‘Well, den, read dat figger, an’ tell me how much po’k you’m got dar.’ He scratch him head, an’ look at de figger all roun’, an’ den he say, ‘Jus seben poun’ zacly.’ Den I say to de po’ fool, ‘Take you’ seben poun’ an’ go ’long!’ Much good his larnin’ did him! He los’ a poun’ ob po’k by it, for I was a gwine to gib him fo’ poun’!”
I was surprised to find a good deal of this talk among many of the plantation negroes. Wherever old Southern overseers retained the control, and the place was remote from the towns, there was at least an indifference to education, strikingly in contrast with the feverish anxiety for initiation into the mysteries of print, everywhere strikingly manifest among the negroes in cities and along the great lines of travel.
Elsewhere, however, I saw plantations where the negroes asked the proprietors to reserve out of their wages enough to hire a teacher for their children. All were willing to consent to this; those without families as well as the rest. They preferred a white teacher, if possible, but were willing to take one of their own color, if no white one could be obtained.
Even here, the proportion of young men and women who could spell out simple sentences was not more than one or two in a hundred. Men of middle age, often of considerable intelligence, professed their utter inability to learn the alphabet. “’Pears like taint no use for we uns to be tryin’ to larn; but ou’ chil’n, dey kin do better.”
On an extensive Mississippi River plantation, thirty or forty miles below Natchez, which I visited two or three times in the months of February and March, I was shown a negro who, in the old times, had been considered the most vicious and dangerous slave in the entire neighborhood. His owner, so the neighborhood gossip ran, had once sent him over to Black River to be killed; and, at another time, had himself been on the point of shooting him, but had been persuaded by his neighbors to try milder measures. Twice, last year, the overseer had tried to shoot him, but each time the cap on his revolver had snapped, and before he could try again the negro had escaped behind the quarters.
“When I came here,” said the present overseer, himself a Southern man, who had been an overseer all his life, “I was warned against him, and told that I had better drive him off the place; but I liked his looks and thought I could make a good nigger out of him.”
The “boy” walked across the space in front of the house, as he was speaking, and respectfully lifted his hat to the overseer. He was a model of muscular strength, and had a fine intelligent face; though there were lines about it that spoke of high temper and a very strong will of his own.
He had now been under the new overseer’s management two months. There was no better hand on the plantation. He had naturally taken the place of foreman of the log-rolling gang; the negroes cheerfully followed him as a leader, and he was doing splendid work. There had not been the slightest trouble with him; had never been need for the use of a single harsh word to him. “I believe he’ll steal when he gets a chance,” said the overseer; “but I’d like to see the nigger on this or any other plantation that won’t do that.” In fact, so handsomely had the vicious slave behaved under the altered conditions of freedom and kindly confidence, that his wages had been voluntarily increased one-third, and he had once or twice been sent out as a trusty man to try and hire more hands for the plantation.