William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 2

[170] the pains. School hours are fixed, school habits orderly; and Negroes find it hard to keep fixed hours and to maintain order in their cabins. If their imps go to school, they must be called betimes, and must be washed and combed. Clothes need making and mending. Meals must be cooked, and the youngsters must be sent out early. Children bring home slates and books, and want a quiet corner for their evening tasks. But where, in the filthy cabins of Jackson's Ward, are they to find quiet nooks? And then, though schools are free, books and slates cost money; and the dollars spent on books and slates are so much taken from the margin left for drams and quids. Improvident fathers find the cost of school a burthen; indolent mothers find the worry of school a great addition to their cares. Such parents sicken at the efforts to be made; a strain from dawn to dusk; a self-denial from year to year; and, in their indolent selfishness, they let their children loiter in the lanes, and wallow in the styes.

The schools are separate: White children in one set, coloured children in another set. They never mix the two classes. Teachers assure you they could not mix the classes if they tried.