Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [356]
But no matter how fully committed they might be to the principle of schooling, not all black parents could afford the luxury of losing the labor of their children. As teachers and school officials would quickly discover, the turnover in students and erratic attendance usually reflected work demands and planting seasons, and in some places teachers tried to adjust their instruction to accommodate the laborers. “We work all day,” a group of freedmen in Macon, Georgia, explained to the teacher, “but well come to you in the evening for learning, and we want you to make us learn; we’re dull, but we want you to beat it into us!” Many of her students, a teacher reported from New Bern, North Carolina, were unable to leave work before eight o’clock in the evening but they still insisted on spending at least an hour afterwards “in earnest application to study.” Even when at work, however, some freedmen took their primers with them, much to the neglect of their duties. “I dont wonder E. learns so fast and reads so well,” one pupil told his teacher, “for while she sits in the field watching the crows, she minds her book so hard they come and eat up her corn.”49
The demand for schools increased so rapidly that the initial problem lay not in finding willing students but in hiring teachers and locating quarters to house the classes. Until new structures could be built with money raised by the freedmen or donated by the northern benevolent societies, almost any place would have to suffice—a mule stable (Helena, Arkansas), a billiard room (Seabrook plantation, Sea Islands), a courthouse (Lawrence, Kansas), an abandoned white school (Charleston), the plantation cotton house (St. Simon’s Island), warehouses and storerooms (New Orleans), and, most commonly, the black church. Where buildings could not be found, whether because of the expense or white opposition, classes might alternate from day to day in the cabins of the freedmen. Some of the more unusual temporary school quarters evoked memories that would be lost on neither teachers, students, nor visitors. In Savannah, the Bryant Slave Mart was converted into a school; the windows in the three-story brick structure still had their iron grates, the handcuffs and whips found inside became instant museum pieces, and the children were taught in what had been the auction room. In New Orleans, a slave pen became the Frederick Douglass School, with the auction block now serving as a globe stand. And when the old cotton house on Tom Butler King’s plantation in Georgia was turned into a Sabbath school, a missionary teacher was moved to write: “Strange transition from the rattle of the cotton gin, to the sweet songs of Zion, but this is a day of great changes, when God is overturning old systems, old practices, to give place to new, and I trust better.” Not far from this scene, a visitor in Augusta, Georgia, observed classes in a small room above a store—the same place where the teacher had imparted lessons clandestinely during the war. “I was shown the doors and passages by which they used to escape and disperse, at the approach of white persons.”50
When field hands on a plantation near Selma, Alabama, erected a schoolhouse near where they worked, they were fulfilling an agreement made with their employer: he would furnish the materials and they would perform the labor and pay for the teacher out of their earnings. Such arrangements were by no means rare in the postwar South. Whether to entice his former slaves to remain with him or