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224 

THE CRISIS

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THE LATE CAROLINE PUTNAM
who died at Lottsburgh, Va., where she had been laboring among the colored people for some forty years. She was a New England woman, educated, refined, highly cultivated, with a taste for all that is best in literature, in art, in life. And yet such was her interest in the uplift of our poor struggling race, that she left her home and friends and all the delightful associations which contact with them meant to her, and went down to a section of Virginia which was greatly in need of help. And there she remained for forty years, living in the simplest way, content to endure the privations and the hardships which necessarily went along with the work which she had undertaken, with never a word or complaint, but with only a great joy filling her soul because she was able to be helpful to those people. Even when age began to creep on her and it seemed best, by some of her friends, for her to get into more comfortable surroundings, still she preferred to remain at the old post of duty. There she had given the best days of her life, there she was happiest, and there she wanted to remain. And it was there, in the providence of God, that the great silence fell upon her.


I knew her well. She was often at our home and at our table, and many delightful moments we have spent together. She was one of the saints of God,--one of the noblest of womankind. Utterly forgetful was she of herself, with one great desire filling her soul, the desire to be of service to this struggling Negro race. Everything that she had she gladly laid on the altar of her devotion. She not only gave herself absolutely to the uplift of our race, but she also burned with righteous indignation at every act of injustice and oppression from which it suffered. So completely had she identified herself with us that when tidings of her death reached me I found myself saying, "Well, we have lost one of our noblest women," forgetting entirely that she was white and not colored. 

In Lottsburgh before the body was removed to Baltimore to be cremated, the simple people, whom she had served so long and well, met and paid the last tribute of respect to her memory,--a memory that will ever be precious to them.

In contrast with these simple services, on Saturday, following the cremation ceremonies in Baltimore, another funeral took place in Washington, D.C.,--the funeral of Admiral Dewey. The services were held in the Rotunda of the Capitol. It was attended by the President of the United States, by the members of his cabinet, by both Houses of Congress, by the Judges of the Supreme Court, by great officials of the Army and Navy, by foreign Ambassadors and other celebrities, and the body was escorted to its last resting place by a great procession. The avenue was also thronged by thousands of citizens. It was a magnificent and impressive display. And all, to do honor to a man, whose most conspicuous service, the thing that stands out most prominently in his career, and that gave him the great notoriety which he enjoyed, was the sending to the bottom of the Bay of Manila a few wooden war vessels belonging to Spain, with whom we were then at war. 

As between the services rendered by the great Admiral and this humble, self-effacing, God-fearing, and man-loving worker at Lottsburgh, as looked at from the Divine standpoint, as measured by the higher standard of service as set forth in the life and character of Jesus, who went about doing good, who was the friends of publicans and sinners, and who came not to be ministered unto but to minister and to give Himself for others, there is, it seems to me, no compari-.
225

THE HEGIRA 
son. She was laid to rest very simply, very sweetly, with no outward display of pomp and power, but on the other side, we may be sure that all the hosts of Heaven were there to greet her, after such a life of self-denying service to the humble black folk among whom she lived her simple and beautiful life. She may have occupied a very humble place in the estimation of the great ones on earth, but very different is the estimate put upon her by the One who said, "In as much as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto Me." In the "Who's Who," which God is preparing, this noble woman will be sure to have a conspicuous place.

One by one, the old friends of the race are leaving us. There are not a great many of the stamp of Caroline Putnam left. Let us cherish their memory; let us hold them ever in grateful remembrance.
F.J. GRIMKE.

THE HEGIRA
BY G. DOUGLAS JOHNSON

OH, black man, why do you northward
roam and leave all the farmlands
bare?

Is your house not warm, tightly thatched 
from storm, and a larder replete your 
share? 

And have you not schools fit with books and 
with tools, the steps of your young to 
guide?

Then--what do you seek in the North cold
and bleak, 'mid the whirl of its teeming
tide?

I have toiled in your cornfields and parched 
in the sun, I have bowed beneath your 
load of care;

I have patiently garnered your bright golden 
grain in seasons of storm and fair;

I have lifted a smile to your glowering
gloom while my wounded heart, quivering,
bled;

Trailing mute in your awake as your rosy-dawns break, I have curtained the mound 
of my dead.

While my children are taught in the schools 
you have wrought, they are blind to the 
sheen of the sky,

For the brand of your hand casts a pall o'er
the land that enshadows the gleam of
the eye.

My sons deftly sapped of the brawn-hood 
of man, self-rejected and impotent stand;

My daughters unhaloed, unhonored, undone,
feed the lust of a dominant land.

Unstrange is the pathway to Calvary's Hill,
--oft I wend in my dumb agony

Up its perilous height, in the pale morning 
light, to dissever my own from the 
tree.

I would not remember, yet cannot forget,
how to hearts beating true to your own,

You've tortured, and wounded, and filtered
their blood, 'til a budding Hegira has
blown.

And so I'm away where the sky-line of day
lifts the arch of its rain-bow on high--

From the land of my birth, where the low
mounds of earth lift their impotent arms
to the sky.

For the soul of me yearns with a passion
that burns for the reach of the ultimate
star

In the land of the North, where the leaven
of worth flings the infinite portals ajar!