essays about the contradictions and challenges of being a black American in the post-Civil War era. Reading it more than a hundred years after it was first published, I am stuck by the breadth of his analysis and the courage of his vision.
His chapter on the daunting task of the Freedman's Bureau was a revelation to me. The short-lived organization was charged with providing education, housing, health care, judicial oversight, and employment contracts for the mass of newly freed blacks in the face of the bitter post-war environment of the South. His even-handed judgement of the successes and short-comings of that program anchor his subsequent arguments for reform by establishing his integrity as a scholar.
But it is a lyrical passage in a later chapter that I append here; a chapter that recounts his early experience as a teacher in the deeply rural and abandoned hinterlands of Tennessee. Perhaps it some weariness at the end of a school year, perhaps it is some envy for my daughter's own post-college threshold, or perhaps it is just the magic of words to take me to a place I have never been that made me read the passage again and again.
There came a day when all the teachers left the Institute and began the hunt for schools. I learn from hearsay (for my mother was mortally afraid of fire-arms) that the hunting of ducks and bears and men is wonderfully interesting, but I am sure that the man who has never hunted a country school has something to learn of the pleasures of the chase. I see now the white, hot roads lazily rise and fall and wind before me under the burning July sun; I feel the deep weariness of heart and limb as ten, eight, six miles stretch relentlessly ahead; I feel my heart sink heavily as I hear again and again, “Got a teacher? Yes.” So I walked on and on—horses were too expensive—until I had wandered beyond railways, beyond stage lines, to a land of “varmints” and rattlesnakes, where the coming of a stranger was an event, and men lived and died in the shadow of one blue hill.
Sprinkled over hill and dale lay cabins and farmhouses, shut out from the world by the forests and the rolling hills toward the east. There I found at last a little school. Josie told me of it; she was a thin, homely girl of twenty, with a dark-brown face and thick, hard hair. I had crossed the stream at Watertown, and rested under the great willows; then I had gone to the little cabin in the lot where Josie was resting on her way to town. The gaunt farmer made me welcome, and Josie, hearing my errand, told me anxiously that they wanted a school over the hill; that but once since the war had a teacher been there; that she herself longed to learn,—and thus she ran on, talking fast and loud, with much earnestness and energy.
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