andria was "town,"--a straggling, lazy
village of houses, churches, and shops, and an aristocracy of Toms,
Dicks, and Captains. Cuddled on the hill to the north was the village of
the colored folks, who lived in three or four room unpainted cottages,
some neat and homelike, and some dirty. The dwellings were scattered
rather aimlessly, but they centred about the twin temples of the hamlet,
the Methodist and the Hard-Shell Baptist churches. These, in turn,
leaned gingerly on a sad-colored schoolhouse. Hither my little world
wended its crooked way on Sunday to meet other worlds, and gossip, and
wonder, and make the weekly sacrifice with frenzied priest at the altar
of the "old-time religion." Then the soft melody and mighty cadences of
Negro song fluttered and thundered.

I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made it;
and yet there was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness,
sprung from common joy and grief, at burial, birth, or wedding; from a
common hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and, above all,
from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and Opportunity. All
this caused us to think some thoughts together; but these, when ripe for
speech, were spoken in various languages. Those whose eyes thirty and
more years before had seen "the glory of the coming of the Lord" saw
in every present hindrance or help a dark fatalism bound to bring all
things right in His own good time. The mass of those to whom slavery
was a dim recollection of childhood found the world a puzzling thing:
it asked little of them, and they answered with little, and yet it
ridiculed their offering. Such a paradox they could not understand, and
therefore sank into listless indifference, or shiftlessness, or reckless
bravado. There were, however, some such as Josie, Jim, and Ben,--they
to whom War, Hell, and Slavery were but childhood tales, whose
young appetites had been whetted to an edge by school and story and
half-awakened thought. Ill could they be content, born without
and beyond the World. And their weak wings beat against their
barriers,--barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last, in dangerous
moments, against everything that opposed even a whim.

The ten years that follow youth, the years when first the realization
comes that life is leading somewhere,--these were the years that passed
after I left my little school. When they were past, I came by chance
once more to the walls of Fisk Un