John Wesley, Jr. Part 16

And Walter Drury said, "Yes, I'm glad, too." So he was; he could put down a new mark on the credit side of the Experiment.

CHAPTER VI

"IS HE NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER?"

The colored Methodists of Delafield, who called their church "Saint Marks," had always been on good terms with their white co-religionists.

Mr. Drury and the pastor of Saint Marks found many occasions of helping each other in their work. The single way in which these two showed themselves conscious of the color line was that while the pastor of First Church often "preached" in Saint Marks, when the pastor of Saint Marks appeared in the pulpit of First Church, it was "to speak on some aspect of his work."

J.W. knew Saint Marks of old. In his high-school days that church had for its preacher one of a fast-vanishing race, a man mighty in exhortation, even though narrowly circ.u.mscribed in scholastic equipment.

His preaching was redolent of the camp meeting, and he counted that sermon lost which did not evoke a shout or two from the front benches.

A few of First Church's younger people often went to sing at Saint Marks on special occasions, and went all the more cheerfully because of the chance it afforded to hear Brother King Officer preach. Where he got that name is not known, but he had no other.

Do not think the young people either went to scoff or remained to pray.

If at times they were amused at Brother Officer's peculiarities, so were some members of his own flock, and Brother Officer was wise enough to a.s.sume that no disrespect was intended. And if the white visitors treated his fervent appeals to the unconverted and backsliders as part of the program, but having no slightest application to them, this was also the regular thing, and n.o.body was troubled thereat.

But while J.W. was away at college a new pastor had come to Saint Marks, a college and seminary graduate. And he had come just in time. Brother Officer was getting old, but the determining factor which made the change necessary was that Delafield happened to be near one of the general routes by which thousands of colored people were moving northward. "Exoduses" have been before; Kansas still remembers the exodus from Tennessee of forty years ago; but this latest exodus had no one starting-point nor any single destination. It was a vast shifting of Negro populations from below Mason and Dixon's line, and it swept northward toward all the great industrial centers. Its cause and consequences make a remarkable story, for which there is no room in this chronicle.

Delafield thought it could not absorb many more Negroes, but before the exodus movement subsided the stragglers who had turned aside at Delafield had more than doubled the Negro population of the town.

A heavy burden of new responsibility was on the young pastor of Saint Marks. The newcomers had no such alertness and resourcefulness as his own people. They were helpless in the face of new experiences. Soon they became a worry and an enigma to the town authorities; but especially and inevitably they turned to the churches of their own color, of which Delafield could boast but two, a Methodist and a Baptist. So Saint Marks and its pastor found both new opportunity and new troubles.

One day in the early spring Mr. Drury dropped in to the Farwell store and asked J.W. if he would be busy that night. The road to Deep Creek was at its spring worst, and J.W. had nothing special on. He said as much, and answering his look of inquiry the pastor said, "There's a man speaking at Saint Marks to-night who's a Yale graduate and a Negro. He's also a Methodist. Does the combination interest you?"

"Why, yes," J.W. answered, "it might. You know I used to go with the bunch to Saint Marks when Brother Officer was pastor, but I haven't been since he left. I'd like to see what the new preacher is doing, and it ought to be worth something to hear a Negro alumnus of Yale."

William Hightower, it seemed, was the speaker's name--a strong-voiced; confident man in his thirties. As J.W., soon discovered, Hightower was a distinctively modern Negro. Where King Officer had been almost cringing, Hightower's thought, however diplomatically spoken, was that of an up-standing mind; where Officer accepted as part of the social order the colored man's dependence on the white, Hightower spoke of something he called racial solidarity. It was plain that he meant his Negro hearers to make much of the Negro's capacity for self-direction.

There was little bitterness and no radicalism in the speech, but to J.W.

it had a queer, new note. He said as much to Mr. Drury, on the way home.

"Why, that Hightower hardly ever mentioned the church, although he was speaking at a church meeting. And how independent he was!"

"So you noticed that, did you?" the pastor responded. "To me it is one of the signs of a new day."

"But do you think it is a good day, Mr. Drury?" queried J.W.

"Yes--perhaps; I don't know. Anyhow, it is new, and some of the blame for it is on our shoulders. The way the Negro thinks and feels to-day is a striking proof of the fact, often forgotten, that when you settle old questions you raise new ones."

"Maybe," said J.W. doubtfully, "but I didn't know we had settled the Negro question."

"Nor I," agreed Mr. Drury. "What we--I mean, we Methodists--settled when we began to deal with the Negro right after emanc.i.p.ation was not the race question. It was not even a missionary question, in the old sense, but it was the question of the nature of the education we should give the young colored people. For we set out deliberately to give them schooling first, with evangelism as an accompaniment. The stress was on education, and we decided at the outset on a certain sort of education."

"I should think," ventured J.W., "that any old sort of education would serve; the first teachers had to begin at the bottom, didn't they?"

"Yes, and lower than any beginnings you know anything about," the pastor replied. "Our first workers began without equipment, without encouragement, and without everything else except a great pity for the freedman. Did you notice, by the way, that the speaker to-night never said 'freedman' or mentioned slavery? It is a new day, I tell you."

"I wish you'd explain just what you mean by that, Mr. Drury," J.W. said.

"I don't seem to get it."

"I mean," said Mr. Drury, "that as soon as our church had decided to do something for the emanc.i.p.ated slaves, it began to work out a scheme of Negro education. That was before Tuskegee, and even before Hampton Inst.i.tute. Maybe we never thought of the Booker Washington idea, or purely industrial education, but at any rate we went on the theory that the Negro deserved and in time could take as good an education as any other American. So we started academies and colleges and even universities for him, and a medical school and a theological seminary."

"I can see myself that there's a difference between that and the industrial idea," said J.W.

"Decidedly, there is," answered the minister; "all the difference which has helped to bring this new day I'm talking about, and to produce such Negro leaders as William Hightower. You see, J.W., it's this way: Booker Washington believed that after the Negro had been taught to read and write and cipher, his next and greatest educational need was to learn to make a living."

"Well, what's the matter with that?" retorted J.W. "Seems to me it's common sense."

"Possibly," Mr. Drury answered, dryly. "But what would you say was the first thing needed in the fight against the almost total illiteracy of the freedmen?"

"Why, teachers, I suppose," said J.W. "And it would sure take a lot of teachers, even to make a start."

Mr. Drury said, "That's exactly the fact. It has called for so many that to this day there isn't anything like enough teachers, although some of our schools and those of other churches have been at work for fifty years. And, remember, that practically all of these teachers, except in a few advanced schools, must be black teachers, themselves brought up out of ignorance."

"Well," said J.W., "that's my point. The quicker we could teach the teachers, the sooner they would be ready to teach others."

"That is to say," Mr. Drury interpreted, "the less we taught them, the better? Seems to me I heard something of a small revolt in your time at Cartwright because it seemed necessary that a young tutor should be temporarily a.s.signed to the cla.s.s in soph.o.m.ore English."

J.W. chuckled. "It was my cla.s.s. Why, that fellow was never more than two jumps ahead of the daily work. We knew he had to study his own lesson a.s.signments before he could hear a recitation. We weren't getting anything out of it except the bare text. So some of the boys made things lively for a few days, and he asked to be relieved."

"Quite so. Your cla.s.s had every imaginable advantage over the colored boys and girls in our schools--just one teacher below par. And yet you think it would be all right to have all colored teachers no more than two jumps ahead of their pupils."

"Well, yes, I see," J.W. said, with a touch of thoughtfulness. "I suppose a good teacher needs more than the minimum text-book knowledge.

Is that the Methodist theory?"

"Now you're talking like yourself," Mr. Drury told him. "Yes, that's the Methodist theory. For the fifty years of the old Freedmen's Aid Society--now the Board of Education for Negroes--it has run these schools, eighteen of them now, with five thousand seven hundred and two earnest students enrolled, on a double theory. The first part of the theory is that every child--black, white, red or yellow--ought to have all the education he can use. Anything less than that would be as good as saying that America cares to develop its human resources only just so far, and not to the limit. The other part of the theory is that the last person in the world to be put off with half an education is a preacher or a teacher. The best is just good enough for all teachers, whether they teach from a desk or from a pulpit."

"I guess that's so too," said J.W. "You're getting me interested. Now go on and tell me some more."

"The new pastor of Saint Marks told me," said Mr. Drury, irrelevantly, "that they would be wanting some new roofing for the barn they're turning into a community house. I shouldn't be surprised if you sold the church a nice little bill of goods. And while you are at it, you might talk to the pastor--Driver's his name--about this thing from his side of the road. He knows more than I do."

J.W. said he would. And, though he would have meant it in any case, the hint about roofing made certain that "Elder" Driver would have a call in the morning from a rising young hardware salesman.

By this time they were at the Farwell gate, and J.W. said goodnight. Mr.

Drury walked home, but before he got ready for his beloved last hour of the day, with its easy chair and its cherished book, he called up his colored colleague, and they had a brief talk over the 'phone.

Now, Walter Drury had taken no one into his confidence about the Experiment, nor did he intend to; he had the best of reasons for keeping his own counsel, through the years. So Elder Driver could not know the true inwardness of this telephone call; indeed, it was so casual that he did not even think to mention it to J.W. when that alert roofing specialist turned up next morning.

"I heard you were going to put new roofing on that barn you are fixing up, Mr. Driver, and I thought I might get your order for the job. Maybe you know that we do a good deal of that sort of work, and we can give you expert service; the right roofing put on to stay, and to stay put."

Yes, they were thinking of that roof; had to, because it leaked like a market basket, and they needed the place right now, what with the many colored Methodists who had come to town and had no home--only rooms in the little houses of the colored settlement that had been too small for comfort even before the exodus. But the place would be worth a lot to their work when they got it.

"About how much do you think of spending, Mr. Driver?" J.W. asked.

Knowing the limited means of Saint Marks, he expected to supply the cheapest roofing the Farwell Hardware Company had in stock, but Pastor Driver had a surprise for him.

"Why," he said, "we want the best there is. That building was a barn, I'll admit, but it is strongly built, and we expect to fix it pretty thoroughly. We have a gift from the Board of Home Missions and Church Extension, and we match that with as much again of our own money, enough in all to swing the building around off the alley, put it on a new foundation next to the church, and remodel it for our needs."