Some Quaker workers were her friends in Helena, and in 1868 she went
to Lauderdale, Mississippi, to help the Friends in an orphan asylum.
Six weeks after her arrival the superintendent's daughter died, and
the parents left to take their child back to their Indiana home to
rest. Miss Moore was left in charge of the asylum. Cholera broke out.
Eleven children died within one week. She stood by her post. Often, as
she said, those who were well and happy when they retired, ere the
daylight came were in the cold grave, for they were buried the same
hour they died. Night after night the lone woman prayed to God in the
dark, and at length the fury of the plague was abated.
From time to time the failing health of her mother called her home,
and from 1870 to 1873 she once more taught school in the vicinity of
Belvidere. The first winter the school was in the country. "You can
never have a Sunday School in the winter," she was told. But she did;
in spite of the snow the house was crowded every Sunday; whole
families came in sleighs. Even at that the real work of the missionary
was still with the Negroes of the South. In her prayers and in her
public addresses they were always with her; and in 1873 friends in
Chicago made it possible for her to return to the work of her choice.
In 1877 the Woman's Baptist Home Mission Society honored itself by
giving to her its first commission.
Nine years she spent in the vicinity of New Orleans. Near Leland
University she found a small, one-room house. After buying a bed, a
table, two chairs, and a few cooking utensils, she began housekeeping.
Often she started out at six in the morning, not to return until dark.
Most frequently she read the Bible to those who could not read.
Sometimes she gave cheer to mothers busy over the washtub. Sometimes
she would teach the children to read or to sew. Often she would write
letters for those who had been separated from friends or kindred in
the dark days. She wrote hundreds and hundreds of such letters; and
once in a while, a very long while, came some response.
Most pitiful of all the objects she found in New Orleans were the old
women worn out with years of slavery. They were usually ragpickers who
ate at night old scraps for which they had begged during the day.
There was in the city an Old Ladies' Home; but this was not for
Negroes. A house was secured and the women taken in, Miss Moore and
her associates moving into the second story. Sometimes, very often,
there was real need; but sometimes, too, provisions came when it was
not known who sent them; money or boxes came from Northern friends who
had never seen the workers; and the little Negro children in the
Sunday Schools in New Orleans gave their pennies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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