"An' last year's bill was bigger'n common 'cause I hurt my leg working at the gin and had to have some medicine."
"Why, as far as I can see, Mr. Sykes, you've paid Cresswell about a thousand dollars in the last ten years. How large is your place?"
"Yes'm, but I ain't finished paying yet; de Cunnel say as how I owes him two hundred dollars still, and I can't see it. Dat's why I come over here to talk wid you."
He handed it to her and her heart sank. It was no deed, but a complicated contract binding the tenant hand and foot to the landlord. She sighed, he watching her eagerly.
"I'se getting old," he explained, "and I ain't got nobody to take care of me. I can't work as I once could, and de overseers dey drives me too hard. I wants a little home to die in."
Miss Smith's throat swelled. She couldn't tell him that he would never get one at the present rate; she only said:
"I'll--look this up. You come again next Saturday."
Then sadly she watched the ragged old slave hobble away with his cherished "papers." He greeted the young man at the gate and passed out, while the latter walked briskly up to the door and knocked.
"Well, are you getting things in shape so as to enter school early next year?"
"That's what I came to tell you, Miss Smith. Mr. Cresswell has offered me forty acres of good land."
"Robert, here you are almost finished, and my heart is set on your going to Atlanta University and finishing college. With your fine voice and talent for drawing--"
A dogged look settled on Robert's young bright face, and the speaker paused.
"What's the use, Miss Smith--what opening is there for a--a nigger with an education?"
"Why--why, every chance," she protested, "and where there's none _make_ a chance!"
"Miss Taylor says"--Miss Smith's heart sank; how often had she heard that deadening phrase in the last year!--"that there's no use. That farming is the only thing we ought to try to do, and I reckon she thinks there ain't much chance even there."
"Robert, farming is a noble calling. Whether you're suited to it or not, I don't yet know, but I'd like nothing better than to see you settled here in a decent home with a family, running a farm. But, Robert, farming doesn't call for less intelligence than other things; it calls for more. It is because the world thinks any training good enough for a farmer that the Southern farmer is today practically at the mercy of his keener and more intelligent fellows. And of all people, Robert, your people need trained intelligence to cope with this problem of farming here. Without intelligence and training and some capital it is the wildest nonsense to think you can lead your people out of slavery. Look round you." She told him of the visitors. "Are they not hard working honest people?"