John Wesley, Jr. Part 17

"That's news to me," said J.W., "though of course I'm glad to hear it.

But I didn't know that the Board put money into such work as this.

Somehow I supposed you were under the Board of Education for Negroes."

"No, not for this sort of church work," the colored pastor answered. "I was 'under' the Board of Education for Negroes, as you put it, for a long time myself, in the days when it was called the Freedmen's Aid Society. And so was my wife. But now we're doing missionary work, and that's the other Board's job."

"Oh, yes," J.W. a.s.sented. "I might have known that. And you mean that you were under the Freedmen's Aid Society when you were going to school--is that it?"

"That's it," said Pastor Driver, with a gleaming smile. "I was in two of the schools. Philander Smith College, at Little Rock, Arkansas, and Clark University, at Atlanta, Georgia. Then I got my theological course at Gammon, on the same campus as Clark."

"You say your wife was in school too?"

"Yes"--with an even brighter smile--"she was at Clark when I met her.

Like me, she attended two schools on that campus. The other was Thayer Home, a girls' dormitory, supported by the Woman's Home Missionary Society."

"A home? Then how could it be a school?" J.W. asked.

"That's just it, Mr. Farwell," the minister explained. "It was a school of home life, not only cooking and sewing and scrubbing, and what all you think of as domestic science, but a school of the home spirit--just the thing my people need. Thayer was, and is, a place where the girl students of Clark University learn how to make real homes. And in the college cla.s.ses they learn what you might suppose any college student would learn. That's why I said Mrs. Driver went to two schools."

J.W. recalled the Hightower speech of the night before, and the discussion with Mr. Drury on the way home. He wanted to go into it all with this pastor, who wasn't much past his own age, and evidently had some ideas. For the first time he wondered too how it happened that in that draft of the Everyday Doctrines of Delafield they had altogether ignored the Negro. Was that a symptom of something? Then he remembered his errand, and the work which was waiting up at the store.

So he said: "Excuse me, Mr. Driver, for being so inquisitive. I've never thought much about our church's colored work, but what I heard at last night's meeting started me. Rather curious that I should be here talking about it with you the very next morning, isn't it? But about that roofing, now. Of course you'll look around and get other estimates, but anyway I'd be glad to take the measurements and give you our figures. I promise you they'll be worth considering."

"I'm sure of that, Mr. Farwell," said the other, heartily, "and if I have any influence with the committee--and I think I have--you needn't lose any sleep over any other figures we might get. As for being inquisitive about our work here, I wish more of this town's white Methodists would get inquisitive. And that reminds me: there's to be an Epworth League convention here week after next, and I've been told to invite one of the League leaders in your church to make a short address on the opening night. You're a League leader, I know, and the first one I've thought about. So I'm asking you, right now. Will you come over and speak for us?"

Now, though J.W. always said he was no speaker, he had never hesitated to accept invitations to take part in League conventions. But this was different. He made no answer for a minute. And in the pause his mind was busy with all he knew, and all he had acquired at second hand, about the relations of colored Christians and white, and particularly about what might be thought and said if it should be announced that he was to speak at a Negro Epworth League convention. And then he had the grace to blush, realizing that this colored pastor, waiting so quietly for his answer, must infallibly have followed his thoughts. In his swift self-blame he felt that the least amends he could make for his unspoken discourtesy was a prompt acceptance of the invitation.

So he looked up and said, hurriedly: "Mr. Driver, forgive me for not speaking sooner. I'll do the best I can"; and then, regaining his composure, "Have you any idea as to the subject I'm supposed to talk about?"

"Yes," the colored minister replied, not without a touch of curious tenseness in his voice. "The committee wanted me to get a representative from your Chapter to make a ten-minute address of welcome on behalf of the Epworthians of First Church!"

Again J.W. was forced to hesitate. Here he was an Epworthian, but knowing nothing at all about the work of these other young Methodists.

Until to-day he scarcely knew they existed. And now he was asked to welcome them to town in the name of the League!

But once again shame compelled him to take the bold course. With an apologetic smile he said, "Well, that's the last subject I could imagine you'd give to any of us at First Church. Your young people and ours have hardly been aware of each other, and it seems queer that you should ask me to make an address of welcome in your church. But as I think of it, maybe this is just what somebody ought to do, and I might as well try it. Trouble is, what am I going to say?"

"We'll risk that, Mr. Farwell," said Pastor Driver, confidently. "Just say what you think, and you'll do all right."

J.W. was by no means sure of that, and the more he thought about his speech in the next few days, the more confused he became. Any ordinary speech of welcome would be easy--"Glad you were sensible enough to come to Delafield," "make yourselves at home," "freedom of the city," "our latch strings are out," "command us for anything we can do,"

"congratulate you on the fine work you are doing," "know when we return this visit and come to the places you represent you will make us welcome"--and so on. But it was plainly impossible for him to talk like that. It wouldn't be true, and it would certainly not be prudent.

He put the thing up to J.W., Sr. "What'll I say, dad?" he asked. "You know we haven't had much to do with the people of Saint Marks, and maybe it wouldn't be best for us to make any sudden change as to that, even if some of us wanted to. But I've got to talk like a Christian, whether I feel like one or not."

"My son," his father answered him, sententiously, "it's your speech, not mine. But if an old fogy may suggest something, why not forget all about the usual sort of welcome address? Why not say something of the whole program of our church as it affects our colored people? It touches the young folks more than any others. Welcome them to that."

"That's all very fine," J.W. objected. "Everybody who's on for an address of welcome is advised by his friends to cut out the old stuff, but it means work. And you know that I don't know the first thing about what you call the whole program of our church for the colored people.

That man Driver knows, but I can't ask him."

"Of course not," a.s.sented J.W., Sr., "but you can ask somebody else.

I'll venture Mr. Drury can tell you where to find all you would want to talk about. Ask him. You're never bothered by bashfulness with him, if I remember right."

J.W. admitted he had already thought of that. "He and I were talking about this very thing the night before I went to see about that roofing.

But here's the point--I'm not to represent the pastor, but the young people. And I'm not so sure that what Mr. Drury might give me, if he were willing, could be made to fit into a League speech, under the circ.u.mstances."

"I'd try it anyway," said the elder Farwell. "He's nearly always willing, seems to me, and a pretty safe adviser most of the time."

"All right," agreed J.W., "I'll see him, but he'll probably tell me to find things out for myself. He's a good scout, is Mr. Drury; the best pastor I ever knew or want to know, but sometimes he has the queerest streaks; won't help a fellow a little bit, and when you're absolutely sure he could if he would. It won't be enough to see him, though; even if he is in a generous mood and gives me more dope than I can use. I'd better talk to some of the League people." And still he gravitated toward the pastor's study. It was the easiest way.

The pastor was always in a more generous mood than J.W. gave him credit for. It was only that he never supplied crutches when people needed to use their legs, nor brains when they needed to use their heads, nor emotions when they needed to use their hearts.

He told J.W. to rummage through the one bookshelf in the study which held his small but usable collection of books and pamphlets on the Negro, and see what he might find. And, as always, they talked.

"I can tell by that preacher at Saint Marks," said J.W., "how I had the wrong end of the argument that night we came from Hightower's address. A man with a big job like his has to be a pretty big man, and he needs all the education he can get."

"There's a principle in that, J.W.," suggested Mr. Drury; "see if this seems a reasonable way to state it: In dealing with any people, the more needy they are, the better equipped and trained their leaders should be."

"Yes, sir, it sounds reasonable enough," J.W. admitted. "And yet I never thought of it until now. But you said something the other night that I don't see yet."

"That may be no fault of yours, my boy," said the minister, with a laugh. "What was it?"

"Why, you said men like Hightower are inclined to overlook the work of the church, and that it was the church's own fault; something about raising new questions when you settle old ones."

"Oh, yes," said Mr. Drury, "I remember. Maybe saying it's the church's own fault is not just the way to put it. Say instead that you can't educate children, nor yet races that are developing, and expect them to turn out exactly according to your notions of the future. Because, when their minds are growing they are developing, not according to something in you, but according to something in them. So every teacher, and I suppose every parent, has moments of wondering how it ever happens that young people learn so much that is not taught them. And it's the same way with races."

"You mean," inquired J.W., "that Hightower is like that?"

"I mean," Pastor Drury replied, "that everybody is like that. If we had given the Negro no education at all, we could probably have kept him contented for a good many years with just being 'free.' If we had given no Negro anything but a common-school chance, the race would have been pretty slow to develop discontent. But Hightower went to Yale, and Du Bois went to Harvard and Germany, and Pickens went to Yale, and so on.

Thousands of colored men and women have been graduated from colleges of liberal arts. And so they are not satisfied with conditions which would have been heavenly bliss to their grandfathers and grandmothers."

"I know I'm stupid," said J.W., a trifle ruefully, "but I've always supposed that education was good for everybody. Now you seem to say that education makes people discontented."

"Of course it does," said Mr. Drury, "that's the reason it is good for them. Would you be content to call a one-room shack home, and live as the plantation hand lives? If you would, the world's profit out of you, and your own profit out of yourself, wouldn't be much. Real education does exactly mean discontent. And the people who are discontented may be uncomfortable to live with, if we think they ought to be docile, but they get us forward."

"Maybe you're right," J.W. conceded, "and the church is not to be blamed. Still, if our work for the black man has made him troublesome, and given him ideas bigger than he can hope to realize, how does that fit in with our Christianity? Shouldn't the church be a peacemaker, instead of a trouble-maker?"

"Now, John Wesley, Jr.," the other said, in mock protest, "that sermon of mine on 'Not Peace, but a Sword' must have been wasted on you. Our Lord most certainly came to make peace, and he spoke a great blessing on peacemakers. But he was himself the world's greatest disturber. Peace while there is injustice, or ignorance, or any sort of wickedness, has nothing to do with Christ's intentions. I know that the old-time slave-traders of the North, and the more persistent slave-buyers of the South, were always asking for that sort of peace. But they couldn't have it. n.o.body ever can have it, so long as Jesus has a single follower in the world."

"Well, what has all this to do," asked J.W., "with our church's special work for the colored people?"

"Ah, yes," the pastor answered, "that's the very thing you must find out before you make that address of welcome."

By this time J.W. had gathered up a pile of books, pamphlets, reports, and papers--enough, he thought, to serve as the raw material of a Ph.D.

thesis, and he said to Mr. Drury, "Would you mind if I took this home?

I'll bring it all back, and it's not likely I'll damage it much.".

The asking was no more than a form; for years the people of First Church had known themselves freely welcome to any book in the preacher's shelves. An interest in his books was pa.s.sport to his special favor. His own evident love for books had been the best possible insurance that these particular borrowers would be more scrupulous than the general.

This bit of pastoral work, it should be said, with the frequent book-talk that grew out of it, was not least among all the reasons why First Church people thought their bachelor minister just the man for them.

So off went J.W. with his armful, and for a week thereafter you might have supposed he was cramming for a final exam of some sort. Early in his preparation he decided that his father's advice was wise, and he put the stress of his effort on the church's work and how Negro youth had responded to it. The other matter was too delicate, he felt, for his amateur handling, and, besides, he was not altogether sure even of his own position.