r friends. I would always add water to my milk to make it
go a long way. This bread and half-water-and-milk constituted our supper
for many nights.

In spite of these hard times I always found time to study my books.
Sometimes I borrowed books from the boys and girls who had them. We were
too poor to buy oil so I would go to the woods and get a kind of pine
that we called light-wood. This would make an excellent light and I
could study some nights until twelve o'clock. When the blackberries,
peaches, apples and plums were ripe, we fared better, as these grew wild
and we could have a plenty of them to eat. As the season came for the
corn to mature, we would sometimes make a meal of green corn. When the
corn became too hard for us to use in this way, we used to make a grater
out of an old piece of tin and would grate the corn and make meal of it
in this way until it was hard enough to go to the mill.

When the cotton picking season came on we could pick cotton for the
neighbors and in that way could have a plenty to eat. They paid fifty
cents a hundred pounds for picking cotton. I sometimes picked two
hundred pounds a day, but by picking at night, I occasionally got almost
three hundred. We children thought it great fun to go into the swamps at
night to pick cotton. We would go at seven o'clock in the evening and
spend the whole night in the cotton fields. When we got sleepy we would
lie down in the cotton row with our cotton sacks under our heads. We
would sleep a few hours and get up and begin picking again. In the
swamps at night the owls and frogs made plenty of music for us. Such was
my life for several years.

During all these years the one thing uppermost in my mind was the desire
to attend some school, but I could not see how I would ever be able to
do so. I had heard much of Talladega College, the school at Normal and
the state school at Montgomery, but board at these schools was from
seven to eight dollars per month and this had to be paid in cash. This,
of course, would keep me out, as I could never see how I could get so
much money.

It was during the month of August '87 that I first heard of Tuskegee.
There was a revival meeting going on at one of the churches at Snow
Hill. I was determined to visit this meeting. I did not have suitable
clothes, neither did I have any shoes, so my people told me that I would
not be able to attend church.

I had not been to church in seven years, and I was very anxious to