"A thousand volumes in a thousand tongues THE -M. F. TUPPER. HE age of swiftest acquisition for a boy is at about five. He is then a wholesale gatherer of facts. He is a living interrogation point. He is then the butt of jokes, and most frequently a general nuisance. He is too small to spank, and just won't mind. He is heedless of the things you tell him. He never knows that the corner of the table is sharp or that the poker is hot. IIe never thinks to take care of his fingers when he shuts the door. He never goes around a mud-puddle in the yard. He gets flogged by the turkey-gobbler, and a thousand like things happen him. A boy suffers too much from not knowing anything, from five to six, to have much of a good time. He does not eat his white bread just then. The element of distrust also is frequently driven into the child-life, like a prod of cold steel. It always hurts. It sometimes kills. It is an intense pain to a child to discover the treachery of the world. In our neighborhood there lived one Negro. Shalem was his name. He had no other that any one knew. There was nothing more to it fore or aft. He said that was all there was of it. Shalem had a wife and two small boys. There was little disposition among the whites to tolerate this crowd. Nigger equality was the highest crime in the decalogue. Work was scarce for Shalem. But he lived better on less work than any one in the country. Father had a coal-mine; and it was agreed that the coalmine was a suitable place for Shalem to work. It suited his complexion. Shalem's two boys were my first playmates. They were seven and eight respectively, and I was five. To say that these boys were black is a feeble expression. They were like Brother Gardner's wife, "about two shades darker than coal-tar." Their faces glistened in the sun. To me, they were indescribably interesting, because they were black and I was white. Not knowing anything about color or "previous condition of servitude," I was open to all the influences that might come down on me from these two boys. We had stabled our stick horses, one day, by a burnt log in the clearing, and I asked them what made them black. They answered that God did, and that all the best people in the world were made black. "Nobody around here is black but you." "And nobody is first-class but us." "Are you better than anybody else?" "We are blacker and more beautiful; God is a black man with curly hair." "How did God make you black?" "He took black off of a log like this, and rubbed it on us; and we can black you with that log, and make you look like us, and you will be ever so much finer." "Well, then, black me." No sooner said than done. They blacked me, hands and face and neck and feet. The charcoal, rubbed with coarse palms, brought the blood from my face in a place or two; but it was a case in which the end justified the means, and I stood it without a cry. "Now," said Pogus, the older boy, "run home and ask your mother if you are not a very fine boy." |