WORKING WITH THE HANDS
WORKING WITH THE HANDS
CHAPTER I Moral Values of Hand Work
The worth of work with the hands as an uplifting power in real education was first brought home to me with striking emphasis when I was a student at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, which was at that time under the direction of the late General S. C. Armstrong. But I recall with interest an experience, earlier than my Hampton training, along similar lines of enlightenment, which came to me when I was a child. Soon after I was made free by the proclamation of Abraham Lincoln, there came the new opportunity to attend a public school at my home town in West Virginia. When the teacher said that the chief purpose of education was to enable one to speak and write the English language correctly, the statement found lodgment in my mind and stayed there. While at the time I could not put my thoughts into words clearly enough to express instinctive disagreement with my teacher, this definition did not seem adequate, it grated harshly upon my young ears, and I had reasons for feeling that education ought to do more for a boy than merely to teach him to read and write. While this scheme of education was being held up before me, my mother was living in abject poverty, lacking the commonest necessaries of life, and working day and night to give me a chance to go to school for two or three months of the year. And my foremost aim in going to school was to learn ways and means by which I might make life more endurable, and if possible even attractive, for my mother.
There were several boys of our neighbourhood who had superior school advantages, and who, in more than one instance, had reached the point where they were called "educated," which meant that they could write and talk correctly. But their parents were not far removed from the conditions in which my mother was living, and I could not help wondering whether this kind of education alone was fitted to help me in the immediate needs of relieving the hard times at home. This idea, however, ran counter to the current of widespread opinion among my people. Young as I was, I had come to have the feeling that to be a free boy meant, to a considerable extent, freedom from work with the hands, and that this new status applied especially to the educated boy.
Just after the Civil War the Negro lad was strongly influenced by two beliefs; one, that freedom from slavery brought with it freedom from hard work, the other that education of the head would bring even more sweeping emancipation from work with the hands. It is fair to add that the Negro was not directly responsible for either of these ideas, but they warped his views nevertheless, and held sway over the masses of the young generation. I had felt and observed these things, and further, as a child in Virginia, had naturally noted that young white boys whose fathers held slaves did not often work with their hands.
Not long after I had begun to think of these new conditions and their results, viewing them as seriously as could be expected of an ignorant boy, an event of my working life left important influences in its wake. There lived a little way from my mother's cabin a woman of wealth, who had lived many years in the South, although she had been born and educated in Vermont. She had a high respect for manual labour, showing actively her appreciation of the dignity of honest work well done, and, notwithstanding her own position and culture, she was not ashamed to use her hands. In the neighbourhood, this lady was reputed to be exceedingly hard to please in the performance of any sort of work on her place, and among the village boys she was called a "hard person to get along with."