Читать книгу The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 - Various - Страница 8

Washington Letter to New York Herald.

Gorgeously illuminated chromo-lithographs of Kansas scenes have been distributed among the blacks. The gentleman who has seen some of these chromos writes that the most ravishing presentment of rural life in Kansas is depicted. The Negroes look on the State as a second paradise, compared with which old Canaan is a Florida swamp. One of these pictures, entitled "A Freedman's Home," represents a fine landscape, with fields of ripening grain stretching away to the setting sun.

In the foreground, illuminated by a marvelous sunset, stood the freedman's home. It was a picturesque cottage with gables, dormer windows and wide verandas. French windows reached down to the floor, and through the open casements appeared a seductive scene in the family sitting room. The colored father, who had just returned from his harvest fields, sat in an easy chair reading a newspaper, while the children and babies rollicked on the floor of the piazza. Through the open door of the kitchen the colored wife could be seen directing the servants and cooks who were preparing the evening meal. In the parlor, however, was the most enchanting feature, for at a grand piano was poised the belle of the household, and beside the piano where she was playing stood her colored lover, devouring her with his eyes while he abstractedly turned the leaves of her music. Just to one side of the dwelling appeared a commodious barn and carriage house and workmen busily engaged in putting in order their reapers and mowers for the following day.

In one of these pictures, "Old Auntie" sits on the veranda knitting stockings while she gazes on herds of buffalo and antelope, which are feeding on the prairies beyond the wheat fields. Approaching the gate a handsome colored man is seen coming in from the hunt, with a dead buck and a string of wild turkeys slung over his shoulders. These agricultural cartoons, in vivid coloring, the writer reports are doing much to influence the minds of the more ignorant Negroes.