This experience of a whole race beginning to go to school for the first time, presents one of the most interesting studies that has ever occurred in connection with the development of any race.  Few people who were not right in the midst of the scenes can form any exact idea of the intense desire which the people of my race showed for an education.  As I have stated, it was a whole race trying to go to school.  Few were too young, and none too old, to make the attempt to learn.  As fast as any kind of teachers could be secured, not only were day-schools filled, but night-schools as well.  The great ambition of the older people was to try to learn to read the Bible before they died.  With this end in view men and women who were fifty or seventy-five years old would often be found in the night-school.  Some day-schools were formed soon after freedom, but the principal book studied in the Sunday-school was the spelling-book.  Day-school, night-school, Sunday-school, were always crowded, and often many had to be turned away for want of room.

The opening of the school in the Kanawha Valley, however, 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 mornings and afternoons.  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 the 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 more hours of work.