enthusiasm. But here in Alabama, brought closely and intimately in touch with these dark skinned children, their color struck her at first with a sort of terror‚ÅÝ‚Äîit seemed ominous and forbidding. She found herself shrinking away and gripping herself lest they should perceive. She could not help but think that in most other things they were as different from her as in color. She groped for new ways to teach colored brains and marshal colored thoughts and the result was puzzling both to teacher and student.
With the other teachers she had little commerce. They were in no sense her sort of folk.
Miss Smith represented the older New England of her parents‚ÅÝ‚Äîhonest, inscrutable, determined, with a conscience which she worshipped, and utterly unselfish. She appealed to Miss Taylor‚Äôs ruddier and daintier vision but dimly and distantly as some memory of the past.
The other teachers were indistinct personalities, always very busy and very tired, and talking “schoolroom” with their meals.
Miss Taylor was soon starving for human companionship, for the lighter touches of life and some of its warmth and laughter. She wanted a glance of the new books and periodicals and talk of great philanthropies and reforms. She felt out of the world, shut in and mentally anemic; great as the “Negro Problem” might be as a world problem, it looked sordid and small at close range.
So for the hundredth time she was thinking today, as she walked alone up the lane back of the barn, and then slowly down through the bottoms.
She paused a moment and nodded to the two boys at work in a young cotton field.
“Cotton!”