The opening of the school in the Kanawha Valley brought to me one of the keenest disappointments that I ever experienced.  I had been working in a salt-furnace for several months, and my stepfather had discovered that I had a financial value, and so, when the school opened, he decided that he could not spare me from my work.  This decision seemed to cloud my every ambition.  The disappointment was made all the more severe by reason of the fact that my place of work was where I could see the happy children passing to and from school morning and afternoon.  Despite this disappointment, however, I determined that I would learn something anyway.  I applied myself with greater earnestness than ever to the mastering of what was in the blue-back speller.

My mother sympathized with me in my disappointment and sought to comfort me in all the ways she could and to help me find a way to learn.  After a while I succeeded in making arrangements with the teacher to give me some lessons at night, after the day’s work was done.  These night lessons were so welcome that I think I learned more at night than the other children did during the day.  My own experiences in the night-school gave me faith in the night-school idea, with which, in after years, I had to do both at Hampton and Tuskegee.  But my boyish heart was still set upon going to day-school and I let no opportunity slip to push my case.  Finally I won, and was permitted to go to the school in the day for a few months, with the understanding that I was to rise early in the morning and work in the furnace till nine o’clock, and return immediately after school closed in the afternoon for at least two hours more of work.

The schoolhouse was some distance from the furnace, and as I had to work till nine o’clock, and the school opened at nine, I found myself in a difficulty.  School would always be begun before I reached it, and sometimes my class had recited.  To get around this difficulty I yielded to a temptation for which most people, I suppose, will condemn me; but since it is a fact, I might as well state it.  I have great faith in the power and influence of facts.  It is seldom that anything is permanently gained by holding back a fact.  There was a large clock in a little office in the furnace.  This clock, of course, all the hundred or more workmen depended upon to regulate their hours of beginning and ending the day’s work.  I got the idea that the way for me to reach school on time was to move the hands from half-past eight up to the nine o’clock mark.  This I found myself doing morning after morning, till the furnace ‘boss’ discovered that something was wrong, and locked the clock in a case.  I did not mean to inconvenience anybody.  I simply meant to reach that schoolhouse on time.