Part 5 (2/2)
Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton, who made arrangements by which I could procure some of the second-hand clothes and shoes sent from the North to the school for just such cases. At the end of this year my health, as a result of my work in the office, was so poor that the resident physician recommended my removal therefrom. To the surprise of Mr. J. H.
Was.h.i.+ngton, I asked to be transferred to the farm; and I think I proved while working on the school-farm that I was sincere when I said that I would work wherever I was placed.
It was during this summer that Mr. Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton showed me that I had come favorably under his notice. At one of the weekly prayer-meetings, conducted by the chaplain, Mr. Penney, and at which Mr.
Was.h.i.+ngton was present, I made some remarks relative to the agnosticism of the late Col. Robert G. Ingersoll. The following day Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton sent for me, inquired my age and cla.s.s in the school, and then said some very kind things about the talk which I had made in the prayer-meeting, and made me a conditional promise of his friends.h.i.+p, which, despite my oft-proven unworthiness, he has ever since given me in unstinted measure. After that second year my hards.h.i.+ps as a ”work-student” were practically over.
In my third year I entered the day-school, working one day in every week and every other Sat.u.r.day, and going to school the remainder of the time.
While the school made compulsory the earning of some money on the part of all students, it set no maximum limit on the amounts to be earned. I elected to earn as much as I could under the circ.u.mstances, earning, by reason of the many odd jobs which I did, often as much as $20 per month, going to school every day in the meantime. The average amount usually earned is $5 and $6 per month. At one time I worked eight days per month on the farm, sent notes of the school to 127 Negro newspapers, cleaned one laboratory every day, played in both the bra.s.s band and the orchestra, blew the bugle for the battalion, and taught two cla.s.ses in the night-school, for each of which duties I received pay; and even though I broke down under the acc.u.mulated strain soon after my graduation, I carried my point and completed the course of study as I had planned.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CARNEGIE LIBRARY BUILDING.]
In my fourth year I won the Trinity Church (Boston) Prize of $25 for oratory; and in my senior year won the Loughridge Book Prize for scholars.h.i.+p, and also the valedictory of my cla.s.s, graduating in 1898.
I was immediately sent to the Schofield School, a Quaker inst.i.tution for Negroes in Aiken, S. C., to organize farmers' conferences on the order of those conducted by the Tuskegee Inst.i.tute, and to serve as a teacher in the school. After one year's service in that position Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton asked me to accept the position of a.s.sistant Northern Financial Agent for Tuskegee. I accepted, and remained two years in New England, helping to interest friends in my _alma mater_. At my own request I was transferred from the Northern work to the South, being a.s.signed this time to the Negro Conference work in Alabama. Before beginning this work I was married to a Tuskegee girl, Miss Sallie McCann.
Within a few months a princ.i.p.al was needed for the Swayne Public School of Montgomery, Ala., and this in the middle of the school year. Mr.
Was.h.i.+ngton recommended me for the work, and I was elected to the position. At the close of the term I went to New York to study the public-school system of that city as far as possible. While there I was reelected princ.i.p.al of the Swayne School, and a notice of the election reached me one morning. Three hours later I received a letter from the secretary of the University of Arkansas (white) informing me that my name had been presented to the board of trustees of that inst.i.tution, and I had been elected to the presidency of the State Branch Normal College at Pine Bluff, Ark. I was not a candidate for the position, but seeing in it an opportunity for greater usefulness, I accepted the position in my twenty-fifth year, and have just been reelected to serve a third term as president of the school. The Branch Normal College was established in 1875 as one of the Land Grant colleges, and has a property valuation of $100,000.
Over my desk hangs a picture of the Princ.i.p.al of Tuskegee; and in my desk are views of the inst.i.tution which he has built. But these may be removed. In the book of my memory and in the secret chambers of my heart I have enshrined the two names which, with G.o.d and the parents now on the other side of the Great Divide, have shaped and given direction to my whole life--Tuskegee and Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton.
II
A SCHOOL PRINc.i.p.aL'S STORY
BY WILLIAM H. HOLTZCLAW
I was born in Randolph County, Ala., near the little town of Roanoke.
The house in which I first saw the light--or that part of it which streamed through the cracks, for there were no windows--was a little log cabin 12 by 16 feet. I know very little of my ancestry, except that my mother was the daughter of her mother's master, born in the days of slavery, and up to 1864 herself the slave of her half-brother. She was born in the State of Georgia. My father was born in Elmore County, Ala.
He never knew his father, but remembered his mother and eleven brothers.
My mother was married twice before she married my father. She married first at the age of fifteen. I am the fifth of fifteen children, and my father's oldest child. Neither my father nor my mother could read or write; mother could get a little out of some pages of the Bible by spelling each word as she came to it.
My early years were spent on a farm. When only four years old I was put to such work as I could do--such as riding a deaf and blind mule, while my brother plowed him in order to make him go forward, for he cared nothing for a.s.sault from the rear. We worked for a white man for one-fourth of the crop. He furnished the stock, land, and seeds, and we did the work, although he was supposed to help. He furnished money to ”run” us at fifteen to a hundred per cent, according to the time of the year. He grew wealthier; we grew, if possible, poorer. Before I was fifteen years old I instinctively felt the injustice of the scheme. When the crop was divided he got three loads of corn to our one, and somehow he always got all the cotton: never did a single bale come to us.
Those were hard times for us; for it must be remembered that this was in the days of reconstruction and the Ku-Klux-Klan, and if to this be added the fact that my father, a young and inexperienced man, had started out with a family of six on his hands, some idea of the situation may be had. I can recall having been without food many a day, and the pangs of hunger drove me almost to desperation. But mother and father would come late at night from a day of depressing toil and excruciating inward pain, the result of their inability to relieve our suffering, and pacify us for the night with such things as they had been able to get. When I awoke the next morning they were gone again on a food mission.
Hunger would sometimes nearly drive us mad. My brother and I were given a meal of pie-crusts from the white folks' table one day, and as we ate them, Old Buck, the family dog, who resembled an emaciated panther, stole one of the crusts. It was our dinner. We loved Old Buck, but we had to live first; so my brother lit on him, and a battle royal took place over that crust. Brother was losing ground, so I joined in, and, coming up from the rear, we conquered and saved the crust, but not till both of us were well scratched and bitten.
I was put to school at the age of six. Both mother and father were determined that their children should be educated. School lasted two months in the year--July and August. The schoolhouse was three miles from our house, but we walked every day, my oldest sister carrying me astride her neck when I gave out. Sometimes we had an ear of roasted green corn in our basket for dinner, or a roasted sweet potato, but more often simply persimmons, or fruit and nuts picked from our landlord's orchard and from the forest.
When cotton began to open, in the latter part of August, the landlord wanted us to stop school and pick cotton, and I can distinctly remember how my mother used to outgeneral him by slipping me off to school through the woods, following me through the swamps and dark places, with her hand on my back, shoving me on till I was well on the way, and then returning to try to do as much in the field that day as she and I together would be expected to do. When the landlord came to the quarters early to look for me, my mother would hide me behind the cook-pot and other vessels. When I was a little older I had to play my part on the farm. Mother now worked another scheme. I took turns with my brother at school and at the plow. What he learned at school on his school-day was taught to me at night, and vice versa. In this way we got a month of schooling each during the year, and got the habit of home study.
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