were taken away until my reading lesson was learned. Sundays, with my
sisters gathered about her knees, we would sit for hours listening as
mother would read church hymns for us. These days were days of freedom,
as I do not remember, and know nothing of, those of slavery. My mother
always refrained from telling her children frightful stories of the
awful sufferings of the slave days. She occupied the position of
seamstress and house-servant in her mistress's home, and was never
allowed to mingle with plantation slaves.

My first teacher was a good-hearted Southern white woman, who knew my
mother well and lived in the town of Tuskegee.

She taught me to read from McGuffey's First Reader. I often read my
lessons by looking at the pictures, for I did not know one word from
another--so far as the letters were concerned. She detected one day,
however, that I was looking out into the street and at the same time
reading what I supposed to be the lesson. From that time on she devoted
herself to teaching me so that I should know letters, and that I should
read properly. She always claimed that I was an apt pupil. At any rate,
at a very early age I was able to both read and write. As I grew older I
was sent with my sisters to the public schools of Tuskegee. It was
always my ambition, it is not immodest to say, to excel in whatever I
undertook. That which brought tears to my eyes quicker than any other
one thing was to have some member of my class recite a better lesson, or
"turn me down"--that is, go up ahead of me in the class.

Having been brought up in the Methodist Sunday-school, I later joined
the Methodist Church. Mr. Lewis Adams, a Trustee of the Tuskegee
Institute, was then Superintendent of the Methodist Sunday-school. He
was very desirous that the young boys and girls of the Sunday-school
should take an active part in the work. I was given a class of girls to
teach much older than myself. They tried to disgust me at times by
paying no attention to my teaching. I was not to be discouraged,
although I cried many times because of their conduct. My own sister, who
was a member of the class, also rebelled because I was younger than she;
she thought that she should be teaching me instead of having it
otherwise. It was the common opinion of the girls that even if I could
read better than any of them, they were older and should be shown the
preference. I owe much of my interest in the study of the Bible to my
mother and to