The first school-house to which we were conducted was an old store-room, the second story of which had been used as a hall for the Knights of the Golden Circle, and still bore on its walls the symbols of that hollowest and most insolent of Southern humbugs. Rude partitions divided the store-room, and separated the three different grades of the primary school.
Negro Schools of New Orleans.—Page [246].
In the first we were received by a coarse, ill-dressed, rude-looking man, who evidently sprang from the poor white trash. Ranged along the wall as we entered were a dozen or more boys, reading as boys do read, in the Third Reader—with many a pause and many a tracing of hard words with a great fore-finger that blurs everything it touches. Among the class was a bright, fair-haired boy, who would have been called handsome anywhere. Seated behind the little desks were some large, coarse girls, seemingly eighteen or twenty years of age, conning their spelling-books. The hot air was languidly stirred by the hot breeze from the street windows, which brought in with it the sound of boys at play on the pavement; and one did not wonder at the noise and general inattention that prevailed.
The next room was ruled by a woman as coarse and slatternly as became the neighbor of the man whose school we had just left. A little fellow made some noise to displease her as we entered, and she bowled him against the wall as one would bowl a ball down a ten-pin alley. Children were at work mumbling over charts hung against the wall, and professing, with much noisy show of industry, to be spelling out simple sentences. But their zeal did not prevent surreptitious pinches, when the slatternly school-mistress’s back was turned, nor a trade of “five alleys for a bright-colored glass one,” on the sly. I think such scenes are not unknown even in model Northern schools.
The teacher in the third room was as great a contrast to the two we had just seen as was her school to theirs. She was smart, bright, looking for all the world like a Lowell factory girl of the better class; and her pupils, though by no means quiet as lambs, were in fine order. Their faces had evidently been washed systematically; long labors had forced upon their comprehension the advantages of clean aprons and pinafores; and they appeared attentive and noisily anxious to learn. This teacher seemed capable of giving an intelligent opinion as to the capacities of her scholars. She had taught at the North, and she saw no difference in the rapidity with which whites and blacks learned to spell and read. There were dull scholars and bright scholars everywhere. Some here were as dull as any she ever saw; others were bright as the brightest. And she called out a little coal-black creature, who had been in school eight days, and was apparently not more than as many years old. The eyes of the little thing sparkled as she began to spell! Eight days ago she had not known her letters. From spelling she went to reading, and was soon found to have mastered every sentence on the charts hung about the walls.
The more advanced scholars were found in the old hall of the K. G. C., up stairs. Here, where once schemes for taking Cuba, or perpetuating slavery in the South, were discussed, forty or fifty boys and girls, lately slaves, stood before the platform where the knights had ranged themselves for initiation, and peacefully recited their lesson in the Fourth Reader! Where once the Knight Commander sat, stalked now a loose-jointed, angular oddity from one of the Middle States—narrow-headed, and with ideas in proportion, which he seemed in nowise fitted to impart. Nigger school-teaching was manifestly not the respectable thing to do in New Orleans; and the Board seemed to have been put to sad straits sometimes for teachers. The reading was bunglingly done, but the teacher didn’t read so very much better himself. On spelling the class did better. In geography they had learned by rote the answers to the common questions; and they could point out with considerable accuracy, on the outline maps, New Orleans and Louisiana, and the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. But one woolly-headed urchin brought his teacher to grief and wrath, by selecting Cuba as the proper location for Iceland; matters were nowise improved by the further transfer of Asia to the exact latitude and longitude of San Francisco. Yet, with all the allowances, it was a fair average school. Boys and girls, ranging in age from twelve to twenty, read the Fourth Reader passably; some of them had a fair conception of geography, and they had even made an entrance on the mysteries of grammar. Arithmetic seemed to be all plain sailing till they reached long division. Here the process became too complicated, and they were sure to blunder in the multiplication of the divisor by the dividend, or to add where they should subtract, or to bring down the wrong figures at the wrong time. Was it the fault of the stupid teacher? or was their previous progress due to their imitative faculties, and did they fail now simply because they had reached a point where reasoning powers of their own were needed? It is the question which touches the marrow of the whole discussion about the average negro capacity; but the time has been too short and the experiments have been too incomplete as yet to furnish satisfactory data for its solution.
The next school to which we were conducted was kept by a middle-aged negro, in gold spectacles, and with amusingly consequential air. His assistant—what would not the Opposition journals have given for such a fact during the late political campaign?—was an English girl, young and lame, who seemed to have gone to work here, “among the niggers,” very much as she would have gone to work among the pots and kettles, simply because a living was to be earned, and this way to earn it happened to offer. The negro principal had a short, sharp way of dealing with his pupils; and strap and ferule lay convenient for immediate use beside the books upon his table. He explained that many of his pupils were “contrabans,” from the plantations, or negroes that had been “refugeed” from the Red River country; and their experiences in slavery had been such that they knew no motive for obedience but the fear of punishment. “Coax ’em and they’ll laugh at you; you’ve got to knock ’em about, or they won’t think you’ve got any power over ’em.” The theory seemed to have made a pretty good school, whether by virtue of the ferule or in spite of it.
The children were having their noon recess when we entered, and the school-room was perfectly quiet. At the sound of the bell they came trooping noisily to the door, and in a few moments the black tide had overflowed all the desks. A Fourth Reader class was called up, which read well—quite as well as the average of such classes anywhere. Now and then one noticed a curious mouthing of the words and a quaint mispronunciation that the forms of the ordinary negro dialect would not account for. In these cases the children were of French parentage, and were learning a language as well as the art of reading. “The children are taught exclusively in English,” the Board of Education say sententiously in their report. “Bound by the strong ligament of a common tongue, they will never foster the subtle enmity to national unity that lurks in diversity of speech.”