Working with the Hands

The worth of work with the hands as an uplifting power in real education was first brought home to me with striking emphasis when I was a student at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, which was at that time under the direction of the late General S. C. Armstrong. But I recall with interest an experience, earlier than my Hampton training, along similar lines of enlightenment, which came to me when I was a child. Soon after I was made free by the proclamation of Abraham Lincoln, there came the new opportunity to attend a public school at my home town in West Virginia. When the teacher said that the chief purpose of education was to enable one to speak and write the English language correctly, the statement found lodgment in my mind and stayed there. While at the time I could not put my thoughts into words clearly enough to express instinctive disagreement with my teacher, this definition did not seem adequate, it grated harshly upon my young ears, and I had reasons for feeling that education ought to do more for a boy than merely to teach him to read and write. While this scheme of education was being held up before me, my mother was living in abject poverty, lacking the commonest necessaries of

After a long record of these mutual disappointments, my mother told me that my turn had come, as the rich and exacting personage had sent to ask me to come and live with her, with the promise of five dollars a month in wages. After a long and serious talk with my mother I decided to make the effort to serve this woman, although the tidings of so many failures filled me with foreboding. A few days later, with my clothes made as presentable as possible, and with my heart thumping in fear and anxiety, I reported for duty.

I had heard so much about Mrs. Ruffner, her wealth, her fine house, and her luxurious surroundings, overshadowed by her appalling severity and exacting discipline, that I trembled with a terror which I shall not try to describe at the thought of facing her. My life had been lived in a cabin, and I was now to try to toil in what looked to me like a grand mansion, an enchanted palace filled with alarms. But I got a grip on all the courage in my scanty stock, and braced myself to endure the ordeal with all possible fortitude.

Our first conference was held in the upper story of a very dilapidated store which stands on the main street of the village. The stairs were so rickety that we were often afraid to ascend them. The room was used by the coloured firemen of the village, and was a dark and dreary place, uninviting even to me. It answered our purpose for the time. We had no rent to pay, and that was one less burden for us. How to get the women to the first meeting was not easily settled. For fear of opposition from friends, no mention had been made of the plan, except to the man who let me have the room.

That first Saturday I walked up the stairs alone, and sat down in the room with all its utter dreariness. My heart almost failed me, and not until I remembered these words: "No man, having put his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God," did I throw off the despondency. At this moment a small boy entered the room. I said to him, "Go through the streets and say to each woman, so that no one else will hear you, there is a woman up those stairs who has something for you."

Practically all the pork used in my family is of my own raising.

I heard not long ago a story of one of our graduates which delighted me as an illustration of the real Tuskegee spirit. A man had occasion to go to the village of Benton, Alabama, in which Mr. A. J. Wood, one of our graduates, had settled ten years before, and gone into business as a general merchant. In this time he has built up a good trade and has obtained for himself a reputation as one of the best and most reliable business men in the place. While the visitor was there, he happened to step to the open back door of the store, and stood looking out into a little yard behind the building. The merchant joining him there, began to call, "Ho, Boy. Ho, Boy," and finally, in response to this calling, there came crawling out from beneath the store, with much grunting, because he was altogether too big to get comfortably from under the building, an enormous black hog.

"You see that hog," the man said. "That's my hog. I raise one like that every year as an object-lesson to the coloured farmers around here who come to the store to trade. About all I feed him is the waste from the store. When the farmers come in here, I show them my hog, and I tell them that if they would shut their pigs up in a pen of rails, and have the children pick up acorns in the woods to feed them on, they might have just such hogs as I do, instead of their razor-backs running around wild in the woods.