The Colonel's Dream

by Charles W. Chesnutt

  _Eighteen_

  Once started in his career of active benevolence, the colonel'snatural love of thoroughness, combined with a philanthropic zeal aspleasant as it was novel, sought out new reforms. They were easilyfound. He had begun, with wise foresight, at the foundations ofprosperity, by planning an industry in which the people could findemployment. But there were subtler needs, mental and spiritual, to bemet. Education, for instance, so important to real development,languished in Clarendon. There was a select private school for youngladies, attended by the daughters of those who could not send theirchildren away to school. A few of the town boys went away to militaryschools. The remainder of the white youth attended the academy, whichwas a thoroughly democratic institution, deriving its support partlyfrom the public school fund and partly from private subscriptions.There was a coloured public school taught by a Negro teacher. Neitherschool had, so far as the colonel could learn, attained any very highdegree of efficiency. At one time the colonel had contemplatedbuilding a schoolhouse for the children of the mill hands, but uponsecond thought decided that the expenditure would be more widelyuseful if made through the channels already established. If the oldacademy building were repaired, and a wing constructed, for whichthere was ample room upon the grounds, it would furnish any neededadditional accommodation for the children of the operatives, and avoidthe drawing of any line that might seem to put these in a class apart.There were already lines enough in the town--the deep and distinctcolour line, theoretically all-pervasive, but with occasional curiousexceptions; the old line between the "rich white folks" oraristocrats--no longer rich, most of them, but retaining some of theirformer wealth and clinging tenaciously to a waning prestige--and the"poor whites," still at a social disadvantage, but gradually evolvinga solid middle class, with reinforcements from the decayingaristocracy, and producing now and then some ambitious and successfulman like Fetters. To emphasise these distinctions was no part of thecolonel's plan. To eradicate them entirely in any stated time was ofcourse impossible, human nature being what it was, but he would donothing to accentuate them. His mill hands should become, like themill hands in New England towns, an intelligent, self-respecting andtherefore respected element of an enlightened population; and thewhole town should share equally in anything he might spend for theirbenefit.

  He found much pleasure in talking over these fine plans of his withLaura Treadwell. Caxton had entered into them with the enthusiasm ofan impressionable young man, brought into close contact with aforceful personality. But in Miss Laura the colonel found a sympathythat was more than intellectual--that reached down to sources ofspiritual strength and inspiration which the colonel could not touchbut of which he was conscious and of which he did not hesitate toavail himself at second hand. Little Phil had made the house almost asecond home; and the frequent visits of his father had onlystrengthened the colonel's admiration of Laura's character. He hadlearned, not from the lady herself, how active in good works she was.A Lady Bountiful in any large sense she could not be, for her means,as she had so frankly said upon his first visit, were small. But alittle went a long way among the poor of Clarendon, and the life afterall is more than meat, and the body more than raiment, and advice andsympathy were as often needed as other kinds of help. He had offeredto assist her charities in a substantial way, and she had permitted itnow and then, but had felt obliged at last to cease mentioning themaltogether. He was able to circumvent this delicacy now and thenthrough the agency of Graciella, whose theory was that money was madeto spend.

  "Laura," he said one evening when at the house, "will you go with meto-morrow to visit the academy? I wish to see with your eyes as wellas with mine what it needs and what can be done with it. It shall beour secret until we are ready to surprise the town."

  They went next morning, without notice to the principal. The schoolwas well ordered, but the equipment poor. The building was old andsadly in need of repair. The teacher was an ex-Confederate officer,past middle life, well taught by the methods in vogue fifty yearsbefore, but scarcely in harmony with modern ideals of education. Inspite of his perfect manners and unimpeachable character, theProfessor, as he was called, was generally understood to hold hisposition more by virtue of his need and his influence than of hisfitness to instruct. He had several young lady assistants who found inteaching the only career open, in Clarendon, to white women of goodfamily.

  The recess hour arrived while they were still at school. When thepupils marched out, in orderly array, the colonel, seizing a momentwhen Miss Treadwell and the professor were speaking about some of thechildren whom the colonel did not know, went to the rear of one of theschoolrooms and found, without much difficulty, high up on one of thewalls, the faint but still distinguishable outline of a pencilcaricature he had made there thirty years before. If the wall had beenwhitewashed in the meantime, the lime had scaled down to the originalplaster. Only the name, which had been written underneath, wasillegible, though he could reconstruct with his mind's eye and the aidof a few shadowy strokes--"Bill Fetters, Sneak"--in angular letters inthe printed form.

  The colonel smiled at this survival of youthful bigotry. Yet even thenhis instinct had been a healthy one; his boyish characterisation ofFetters, schoolboy, was not an inapt description of Fetters,man--mortgage shark, labour contractor and political boss. Bill,seeking official favour, had reported to the Professor of that datesome boyish escapade in which his schoolfellows had taken part, and itwas in revenge for this meanness that the colonel had chased himignominiously down Main Street and pilloried him upon the schoolhousewall. Fetters the man, a Goliath whom no David had yet opposed, hadfastened himself upon a weak and disorganised community, during aperiod of great distress and had succeeded by devious ways in makinghimself its master. And as the colonel stood looking at the picture hewas conscious of a faint echo of his boyish indignation and sense ofoutraged honour. Already Fetters and he had clashed upon the subjectof the cotton mill, and Fetters had retired from the field. If it werewritten that they should meet in a life-and-death struggle for thesoul of Clarendon, he would not shirk the conflict.

  "Laura," he said, when they went away, "I should like to visit thecoloured school. Will you come with me?"

  She hesitated, and he could see with half an eye that her answer wasdictated by a fine courage.

  "Why, certainly, I will go. Why not? It is a place where a good workis carried on."

  "No, Laura," said the colonel smiling, "you need not go. On secondthought, I should prefer to go alone."

  She insisted, but he was firm. He had no desire to go counter to herinstincts, or induce her to do anything that might provoke adversecomment. Miss Laura had all the fine glow of courage, but was secretlyrelieved at being excused from a trip so unconventional.

  So the colonel found his way alone to the schoolhouse, an unpaintedframe structure in a barren, sandy lot upon a street somewhat removedfrom the centre of the town and given over mainly to the humble homesof Negroes. That his unannounced appearance created some embarrassmentwas quite evident, but his friendliness toward the Negroes had alreadybeen noised abroad, and he was welcomed with warmth, not to sayeffusion, by the principal of the school, a tall, stalwart and darkman with an intelligent expression, a deferential manner, and shrewdbut guarded eyes--the eyes of the jungle, the colonel had heard themcalled; and the thought came to him, was it some ancestral jungle onthe distant coast of savage Africa, or the wilderness of another sortin which the black people had wandered and were wandering still infree America? The attendance was not large; at a glance the colonelsaw that there were but twenty-five pupils present.

  "What is your total enrolment?" he asked the teacher.

  "Well, sir," was the reply, "we have seventy-five or eighty on theroll, but it threatened rain this morning, and as a great many of themhaven't got good shoes, they stayed at home for fear of getting theirfeet wet."

  The colonel had often noticed the black children paddling aroundbarefoot in the puddles on rainy days, but there was evidently somep
oint of etiquette connected with attending school barefoot. He hadpassed more than twenty-five children on the streets, on his way tothe schoolhouse.

  The building was even worse than that of the academy, and theequipment poorer still. Upon the colonel asking to hear a recitation,the teacher made some excuse and shrewdly requested him to make a fewremarks. They could recite, he said, at any time, but an opportunityto hear Colonel French was a privilege not to be neglected.

  The colonel, consenting good-humouredly, was introduced to the schoolin very flowery language. The pupils were sitting, the teacherinformed them, in the shadow of a great man. A distinguished member ofthe grand old aristocracy of their grand old native State had gone tothe great North and grown rich and famous. He had returned to his oldhome to scatter his vast wealth where it was most needed, and to givehis fellow townsmen an opportunity to add their applause to hisworld-wide fame. He was present to express his sympathy with theirfeeble efforts to rise in the world, and he wanted the scholars all tolisten with the most respectful attention.

  Colonel French made a few simple remarks in which he spoke of theadvantages of education as a means of forming character and of fittingboys and girls for the work of men and women. In former years hispeople had been charged with direct responsibility for the care ofmany coloured children, and in a larger and indirect way they werestill responsible for their descendants. He urged them to make thebest of their opportunities and try to fit themselves for usefulcitizenship. They would meet with the difficulties that all men must,and with some peculiarly their own. But they must look up and notdown, forward and not back, seeking always incentives to hope ratherthan excuses for failure. Before leaving, he arranged with theteacher, whose name was Taylor, to meet several of the leadingcoloured men, with whom he wished to discuss some method of improvingtheir school and directing their education to more definite ends. Themeeting was subsequently held.

  "What your people need," said the colonel to the little gathering atthe schoolhouse one evening, "is to learn not only how to read andwrite and think, but to do these things to some definite end. We livein an age of specialists. To make yourselves valuable members ofsociety, you must learn to do well some particular thing, by whichyou may reasonably expect to earn a comfortable living in your ownhome, among your neighbours, and save something for old age and theeducation of your children. Get together. Take advice from some ofyour own capable leaders in other places. Find out what you can do foryourselves, and I will give you three dollars for every one you cangather, for an industrial school or some similar institution. Takeyour time, and when you're ready to report, come and see me, or writeto me, if I am not here."

  The result was the setting in motion of a stagnant pool. Who canmeasure the force of hope? The town had been neglected by missionboards. No able or ambitious Negro had risen from its midst to foundan institution and find a career. The coloured school received agrudging dole from the public funds, and was left entirely to thesupervision of the coloured people. It would have been surprising hadthe money always been expended to the best advantage.

  The fact that a white man, in some sense a local man, who had yet comefrom the far North, the land of plenty, with feelings friendly totheir advancement, had taken a personal interest in their welfare andproved it by his presence among them, gave them hope and inspirationfor the future. They had long been familiar with the friendship thatcurbed, restricted and restrained, and concerned itself mainly withtheir limitations. They were almost hysterically eager to welcome theco-operation of a friend who, in seeking to lift them up, was obsessedby no fear of pulling himself down or of narrowing in some degree thegulf that separated them--who was willing not only to help them, butto help them to a condition in which they might be in less need ofhelp. The colonel touched the reserves of loyalty in the Negro nature,exemplified in old Peter and such as he. Who knows, had these reservesbeen reached sooner by strict justice and patient kindness, that theymight not long since have helped to heal the wounds of slavery?

  "And now, Laura," said the colonel, "when we have improved the schoolsand educated the people, we must give them something to occupy theirminds. We must have a library, a public library."

  "That will be splendid!" she replied with enthusiasm.

  "A public library," continued the colonel, "housed in a beautifulbuilding, in a conspicuous place, and decorated in an artisticmanner--a shrine of intellect and taste, at which all the people, richand poor, black and white, may worship."

  Miss Laura was silent for a moment, and thoughtful.

  "But, Henry," she said with some hesitation, "do you mean thatcoloured people should use the library?"

  "Why not?" he asked. "Do they not need it most? Perhaps not many ofthem might wish to use it; but to those who do, should we deny theopportunity? Consider their teachers--if the blind lead the blind,shall they not both fall into the ditch?"

  "Yes, Henry, that is the truth; but I am afraid the white peoplewouldn't wish to handle the same books."

  "Very well, then we will give the coloured folks a library of theirown, at some place convenient for their use. We need not strain ourideal by going too fast. Where shall I build the library?"

  "The vacant lot," she said, "between the post-office and the bank."

  "The very place," he replied. "It belonged to our family once, and Ishall be acquiring some more ancestral property. The cows will need tofind a new pasture."

  The announcement of the colonel's plan concerning the academy and thelibrary evoked a hearty response on the part of the public, and the_Anglo-Saxon_ hailed it as the dawning of a new era. With regard tothe colonel's friendly plans for the Negroes, there was lessenthusiasm and some difference of opinion. Some commended thecolonel's course. There were others, good men and patriotic, men whowould have died for liberty, in the abstract, men who sought to walkuprightly, and to live peaceably with all, but who, by much broodingover the conditions surrounding their life, had grown hopelesslypessimistic concerning the Negro.

  The subject came up in a little company of gentlemen who were gatheredaround the colonel's table one evening, after the coffee had beenserved, and the Havanas passed around.

  "Your zeal for humanity does you infinite credit, Colonel French,"said Dr. Mackenzie, minister of the Presbyterian Church, who was oneof these prophetic souls, "but I fear your time and money and effortwill be wasted. The Negroes are hopelessly degraded. They havedegenerated rapidly since the war."

  "How do you know, doctor? You came here from the North long after thewar. What is your standard of comparison?"

  "I voice the unanimous opinion of those who have known them at bothperiods."

  "_I_ don't agree with you; and I lived here before the war. There iscertainly one smart Negro in town. Nichols, the coloured barber, ownsfive houses, and overreached me in a bargain. Before the war he was achattel. And Taylor, the teacher, seems to be a very sensible fellow."

  "Yes," said Dr. Price, who was one of the company, "Taylor is a veryintelligent Negro. Nichols and he have learned how to live and prosperamong the white people."

  "They are exceptions," said the preacher, "who only prove the rule.No, Colonel French, for a long time _I_ hoped that there was a futurefor these poor, helpless blacks. But of late I have become profoundlyconvinced that there is no place in this nation for the Negro, exceptunder the sod. We will not assimilate him, we cannot deport him----"

  "And therefore, O man of God, must we exterminate him?"

  "It is God's will. We need not stain our hands with innocent blood. Ifwe but sit passive, and leave their fate to time, they will die awayin discouragement and despair. Already disease is sapping theirvitals. Like other weak races, they will vanish from the pathway ofthe strong, and there is no place for them to flee. When they gohence, it is to go forever. It is the law of life, which God has givento the earth. To coddle them, to delude them with false hopes of anunnatural equality which not all the power of the Government has beenable to maintain, is only to increase their unhappines
s. To a doomedrace, ignorance is euthanasia, and knowledge is but pain and sorrow.It is His will that the fittest should survive, and that those shallinherit the earth who are best prepared to utilise its forces andgather its fruits."

  "My dear doctor, what you say may all be true, but, with all duerespect, I don't believe a word of it. I am rather inclined to thinkthat these people have a future; that there is a place for them here;that they have made fair progress under discouraging circumstances;that they will not disappear from our midst for many generations, ifever; and that in the meantime, as we make or mar them, we shall makeor mar our civilisation. No society can be greater or wiser or betterthan the average of all its elements. Our ancestors brought thesepeople here, and lived in luxury, some of them--or went intobankruptcy, more of them--on their labour. After three hundred yearsof toil they might be fairly said to have earned their liberty. At anyrate, they are here. They constitute the bulk of our labouring class.To teach them is to make their labour more effective and thereforemore profitable; to increase their needs is to increase our profits insupplying them. I'll take my chances on the Golden Rule. I am no loverof the Negro, _as_ Negro--I do not know but I should rather see himelsewhere. I think our land would have been far happier had none butwhite men ever set foot upon it after the red men were driven back.But they are here, through no fault of theirs, as we are. They wereborn here. We have given them our language--which they speak more orless corruptly; our religion--which they practise certainly no betterthan we; and our blood--which our laws make a badge of disgrace.Perhaps we could not do them strict justice, without a great sacrificeupon our own part. But they are men, and they should have theirchance--at least _some_ chance."

  "I shall pray for your success," sighed the preacher. "With God allthings are possible, if He will them. But I can only anticipate yourfailure."

  "The colonel is growing so popular, with his ready money and hischeerful optimism," said old General Thornton, another of the guests,"that we'll have to run him for Congress, as soon as he is reconvertedto the faith of his fathers."

  Colonel French had more than once smiled at the assumption that a merechange of residence would alter his matured political convictions. Hisfriends seemed to look upon them, so far as they differed from theirown, as a mere veneer, which would scale off in time, as had themultiplied coats of whitewash over the pencil drawing made on theschool-house wall in his callow youth.

  "You see," the old general went on, "it's a social matter down here,rather than a political one. With this ignorant black flood sweepingup against us, the race question assumes an importance whichovershadows the tariff and the currency and everything else. Forinstance, I had fully made up my mind to vote the other ticket in thelast election. I didn't like our candidate nor our platform. There wasa clean-cut issue between sound money and financial repudiation, and_I_ was tired of the domination of populists and demagogues. All mybetter instincts led me toward a change of attitude, and I boldlyproclaimed the fact. I declared my political and intellectualindependence, at the cost of many friends; even my own son-in-lawscarcely spoke to me for a month. When I went to the polls, old SamBrown, the triflingest nigger in town, whom I had seen sentenced tojail more than once for stealing--old Sam Brown was next to me in theline.

  "'Well, Gin'l,' he said, 'I'm glad you is got on de right side atlas', an' is gwine to vote _our_ ticket.'"

  "This was too much! I could stand the other party in the abstract, butnot in the concrete. I voted the ticket of my neighbours and myfriends. We had to preserve our institutions, if our finances went tosmash. Call it prejudice--call it what you like--it's human nature,and you'll come to it, colonel, you'll come to it--and then we'll sendyou to Congress."

  "I might not care to go," returned the colonel, smiling.

  "You could not resist, sir, the unanimous demand of a determinedconstituency. Upon the rare occasions when, in this State, the officehas had a chance to seek the man, it has never sought in vain."