Silas X. Floyd's Short Stories for Colored People Both Old and Young: Entertaining, Uplifting, InterestingFloyd, Silas Xavier
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Silas X. Floyd's Short Stories for Colored People Both Old and Young: Entertaining, Uplifting, Interesting
Floyd, Silas Xavier
African Americans -- Fiction; African Americans -- Juvenile fiction; Didactic fiction; Short stories, American
With glad and thankful hearts Mr. and Mrs. Wilkins joyously embraced
their daughter when she came home at the close of her first year in
school. With keen and genuine interest, they listened to her wonderful
accounts of the great school and of the great man at the head of it.
Grace dressed differently and talked differently; and her mother said,
speaking one day in confidence to her husband shortly after Grace’s
return, “Dat gal’s sho got a new walk on her!”
Grace Wilkins brought back a toothbrush with her from school. That was
something which she had never had before. She used that toothbrush every
morning and night. That was something that she had never done before.
She was now careful to keep her hair well combed every day. That was
something that she had been accustomed to do on Sundays only or on
special occasions. She washed her face two or three times a day now, as
her mother and father noticed. Before she went to school she had been in
the habit of giving her face, as the old people say, “a lick and a
promise” early each morning. Besides, Grace kept the house cleaner than
she had kept it before. She brought home with her a brand new Bible
which she read regularly at home and always carried to church and Sunday
school. She also had a song book called “Jubilee Songs and Plantation
Melodies,” and it gladdened the hearts of the good “old folks at home”
to hear their daughter sing from a book some of the very songs that they
had sung all their lifetime and which were so dear to them.
All these things and others made a deep and abiding impression upon
Solomon and his wife. And finding that withal their daughter was just as
loving and kind as she had been before, and that she was just as
industrious and faithful as formerly, Mr. and Mrs. Wilkins were not long
in deciding that their daughter should go back to that school another
year, and that they would work hard and stint themselves in order that
they might keep her there until she had finished the normal course.
So back to school Grace Wilkins went--that year, and the next year, and
the next. It was the proudest day in Solomon’s and Amanda’s lives when
they sat in the magnificent chapel of the school and heard their
daughter read her graduation essay on “The Gospel of Service.” Glad
tears welled up in their eyes when they heard the principal call their
daughter’s name, and then saw Grace step up to receive her certificate
of graduation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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