Henry (T. 1. Sr.) Golding used to flag for the Southern Railway so it wasn’t difficult for us to interpret his signal with a garden-hose when we drove past his home a few days ago.
We stopped the truck and walked across Washington Avenue to where Mr. Golding was wetting down his St. Augustine grass.
"I’ve always believed that things happen according to the way the Good Lord plans them," said he, by way of greeting us.
"Why Henry, I thought you were a Methodist," replied Old Stuff.
"Well I am, but I’m half Presbyterian at that," admitted brother Golding.
Whereupon Henry developed his support of the providential blueprint by pointing to the recent visit of the Rev. and Mrs. Walter Cason to Greenville’s First Methodist Church. The Casons are Methodist missionaries to Liberia, and the fact that they arrived here, at the same time that Colored County Agent Charlie Burton made his decision to go to Liberia as an agricultural missionary, is regarded by Mr. Golding as nothing less than God’s own handiwork.
So he arranged for a meeting of Charlie and the latter’s wife, Bessie Burton, with the Rev. and Mrs. Cason, at First Methodist’s educational building, and Charlie received first-hand information of that far-off country which will be his and his family’s home for the next several years.
Missionary Cason pulled no punches. Greenville, Liberia, to which the Burtons will go, is 164 miles inland from Monrovia the capitol. It is primitive country, where one must make the best of discomfort, disadvantage, and danger and, no doubt, a heap of ignorance, suspicion, and superstition on the side.
After more than two hours briefing of the hazards incident to a missionary’s life in Liberia, Washington County’s colored agent was asked, quote:
"Charlie, have we discouraged you?"
"No sir, Rev. Cason," replied Charlie Burton, "you make me want to go more than ever!"
The republic of Liberia is about 130 years old and owes its beginnings to a noble experiment. Situated on the west coast of Africa, between British and French territory (in Guinea and the Ivory Coast), it was colonized by slaves who had been given their freedom, voluntarily, by owners in the West Indies and United States.
The little nation took its name, no doubt, from the word liberation, and the capital, Monrovia, may well have been called that in honor of U. S. President James Monroe who was making history, about that time, with the Doctrine which bears his name.
A few Southern slave-owners went along with the idea, freed their slaves, and paid their passage money to Liberia. They sensed the strife and disruption over the slavery question long before the latter would burst into open flames and civil war.
One of these far-sighted humanitarians was this writer’s Mother’s father’s father, Squire Bugh Cain, of Russellville, near Morristown, in upper east Tennessee. Great-grandfather Cain sent his slaves back to the continent from which they came. (That is, he sent all of them except "Aunt Sil," the cook, who refused to go.)
So when Charlie and Bessie Burton get over there, with their agricultural know-how, and are telling the story of hybrid corn, Deltapine and Stoneville cotton, Ark-soy beans, and what-have-you, we hope they run across a few Cains in those hinterlands of Liberia. For, presumably, present-day descendants of the people who colonized that country still go by the "Ole Family" name, same as they do on this side of the world.
BC
