ogress that he graduated
from Tabor College at the age of eighteen.

Prof. Blackshear is now principal of Prairie View State
Normal School and Industrial College of Texas.

The following is the testimony of Prof. Blackshear
concerning his grandmother. These words give us a glimpse of
the bright side of slave life, and of the ideal "mammy" of
the ante-bellum Southern plantation home.

"My grandmother was a remarkable woman. She idolized my
mother, the only child that slavery had allowed her to keep.
When grandma was sold from Georgia to Alabama, the humanity
of her Georgia owners caused them to sell mother and child
to the same people.

"My grandmother, although ignorant, had a profound belief in
education. But if she knew absolutely nothing of the world
of letters, she had something as good, perhaps better--a
warm, honest, loving heart and Christian principles. She had
genuine hatred for dirt and disorder, a regard, amounting to
a fearful reverence, for white people of 'quality,' and a
great and ill-disguised contempt for common, shiftless,
'darkies,' and low-bred whites. She was the best type of the
faithful and efficient slave. But it was as a cook that
'Grandma's' reputation was known in two States. To my
youthful imagination she was a magician; things she cooked
for the white folks seemed so good to me. I think now of the
batter-cakes, the light rolls, the syllabub, the sally-lunn,
the ship-ships and the wafers grandma made. The light-bread
she made is made no more. It is a lost art, an art that died
with grandma."

When the Negroes were set free the first aim of thousands was to learn
to read and write. Gray-haired veterans of the plantations sat side by
side in the day schools as well as in the night schools with the
smallest pickaninnies. And all seemed eager to learn the mysterious
arts of the schoolroom. The school-book, in the eyes of the unlettered
slave, was a sort of fetich to which he attributed the power of the
white man. The young slave could follow his master to the door of the
schoolhouse, but thus far and no farther. The mysterious rites and
ceremonies which went on within were forbidden him. Human nature has
ever been curious to know that the knowledge of which is prohibited,
and so the slave had a great curiosity to master the printed page and
to be admi