THE LESSON IN EVERY-DAY LIFE.
By Charles Frederic Goss
[Charles Frederic Goss, D.D., in S. S. Times.] The spirit of Moses is born again and again. Every day and everywhere heroic souls struggle from obscurity and poverty into renown and power. We “white folks” think the obstacles in the way of our success are mountain high. But they are mole-hills compared with those which a black man has to climb. Moses was the son of a slave, and so was E. C. Berry of Athens, Ohio (the son or the grandson). Let me tell you his story. One day, when he was a little “shaver” eight or ten years of age, Berry was stumbling along the street with a tremendous basket on his arm. He bent sideways under its weight, to keep his equilibrium, until he looked like a carpenter’s square. A kind-hearted white man met him on the village street. “Little man,” said he, “you have a pretty heavy load.” “Yes,” replied the sturdy youngster, rolling up his black eyes, and showing his white teeth in a happy smile, “but I’ll get there.” When he had grown to manhood, a banker in Athens lent him fifty dollars to start a confectionery business, and he and his faithful wife began their struggles with poverty, prejudice, and bigotry on the main street of a country town. They made the best sweetmeats, fried the best oysters, and baked the best “flapjacks,” of any one in the county. By and by the guests of the village hotel began to leave its very ordinary table and steal across the street to fill their hungry stomachs with “Brer” Berry’s toothsome viands. “Why don’t you start a hotel of your own?” asked one of them at last. I can imagine how it made the black man’s heart beat. I can hear him talking it over with his wife when the shop had been closed that night, and they were seated on the back piazza, with the fragrance of the honeysuckle wafted from the garden, the stars shining down from the sky on “the just and the unjust11,” the white and the black, alike, and the “chilluns” asleep in the cradle. “Who would sleep under the roof of a tavern kept by ‘niggers’?” “What is the use of black folks ever hoping to be anything more than slaves?” “Nothing can overcome the prejudice of blood.” “We can’t make bricks without straw.” Over and over again, night after night, day after day, they traversed these hot and beaten paths of their thought, but at last courage rose with danger, purpose with difficulty. To-day they keep the best country hotel in the United States of America. I spent last Sunday there, and saw the names of sixty traveling men registered on the book. Trust them to find a good hotel! If they are anywhere within fifty miles of Athens, they make for “Berry’s.” Clean beds, refreshing baths, pure air, and such food as their mothers cooked when they were boys, or their sweethearts when they were married! And there isn’t a bar on the premises! Berry doesn’t “advertise” to keep a “temperance” hotel,—he just keeps it, and the best men on the road patronize him. One night there were forty of these commercial travelers from Berry’s hotel at the evening service of the Presbyterian Church, and some men say that drummers are only devils with grip-sacks. Behold this poor boy, then, like another Moses, “very great in the land of Ohio, in the sight of Pharaoh’s servants, and in the sight of the people,” revered by his black brethren and respected by his white. A quarter of a century after the incident of his boyhood that kind-hearted man recalled it to the landlord’s memory. “And you’ve got there,” he said. “Yes,” replied the noble black man, “I’ve got there, but I am still bearing my burden.” These great hearts never lay their burdens down. In fact (and don’t forget this, my little barefooted boy—black, white, red, or yellow), men “get there” by “bearing burdens.” Did you know that, if a horse gets “stalled,” he will “pull his load,” if you will only lay a heavy bag of wheat across his back? Moses, Booker T. Washington, and E. C. Berry! Such men belong in the same class. They surmount enormous obstacles, overcome terrific prejudices, bear intolerable burdens, but they “get there.” Just such achievements as theirs still await accomplishment at the hands of just such indomitable spirits. They have all drawn their strength from the same inexhaustible source. These men have believed in Providence. They believe in the right of every man into whom God has breathed the breath of life (irrespective of color, race, or previous condition) to take a man’s place in the world by doing a man’s part of the work of the world.