Dear Sir: My boy ran away from home during my absence from home in January. After he was gone, I learned from his associates that he said he was going to Tuskegee to school. Please inform me whether he has made his appearance there or not.
Dear Sir: Do you think it best for me to enter as soon as possible, or wait until the next term, but I would rather enter as soon as possible. But will do as you think best. I have a mother and grandmother to support, and if I can get an education I know that I will be better fitted to support them, and I am sure that you will agree with me in the matter. And if you will give me a chance, I will be a man among my people some day.
Dear Sir: I am sorry that I cannot be admitted. In case of a vacancy, will you notify me, or until there is a chance could I come to the school in the summer? I am a poor girl. If I can't come in the summer, I am going to try to earn enough money to come and stay two or three months as soon as you will let me, even if there is no room to live at the school.
"I will write you a few lines to ask if you please to let me enter into your band of coloured scholars. That is, I want to come to your school in the daytime, or at night and work the rest of the time. If there is any way fixed, let me know whether my name can be put in your roll book. I have just left school a few days ago, and I want to get in as soon as possible. I have been striving to come to your school going on three years, and at last I have got to the point that if you will let me in I will be over there the first day of March. Please, sir, let me in, if there is any way that can be fixed to do so. I would be one of the happiest boys in the world if you say I could come. Please write me word just as soon as you read it."
Dear Sir: Having just read again a short biography of your life, and being desirous of obtaining a better education, I thought I would write you and perhaps gain the necessary information. Last year I completed the course in the High School here. When school opened in September, I joined the Normal Training Class here and since then I have been training in for a second and third grade teacher. I have had about eight months of piano music and two of vocal, and one school year in the elements of elocution. I am desirous of becoming a school teacher, and realise how necessary it is to have a better education. I have no support but an aged mother. I had almost given up hope, but when I read of others working their way through college, I am resolved to try. Is there any possible way of earning my schooling at Tuskegee? I thought perhaps I could teach in the primary grades a part of the day to pay for what I should get. Or perhaps I could work in some other way. I am willing to do any honest labour to get an education. You doubtless get letters of this kind daily, but I only ask that you please answer and tell me if there is any chance for a poor girl obtaining knowledge. I am so anxious that I would willingly work during the vacations and holidays. Please answer this, and if I cannot gain entrance at Tuskegee, perhaps you can tell me of some school where I can. If your answer is favorable, I will immediately begin to earn money to pay my way there, for those of us who are in the training class receive no salary.
CHAPTER XV The Value of Small Things
A lifetime of hard work has shown me the value of little things of every day. We preach them at Tuskegee, and try to enforce them in the daily round of sixteen hundred students' lives. We speak of them because they are at the bottom of character-building, and because no person can go on year by year forgetting them, without having his soul warped and made small and weak. We want young men and women to go out, not as slaves of their daily routine, but masters of their circumstances. But the structure must be built a brick at a time, and no act is without its influence. I am in the habit of talking to the student body when it is assembled in the chapel for the first time after the opening of the school year with a good deal of practical exhortation about the "value of little things," unimportant as some of them may seem to the new-comers at Tuskegee. They are told, for example, that among the resolutions which each should abide by through the term, is to keep in close and constant touch with their homes. "You can do this," I have said, "in no better way than by forming the habit of writing a letter home once every week. I fear that this is not always done. I want to see each one of you grow into the habit of writing a letter to your parents or your friends at home, as often as you can find the time. I do not mean by this that you shall get a little piece of waste paper, snatch up a lead pencil, and scribble a hasty note, asking them to send you some money, or to send you a dress, or a hat. I mean for you to select a time—the Sabbath, if you can find no other time—and sit down in your rooms, or go to the library, take plenty of time, get good paper, the best ink, and write your mother and father, your brothers and sisters, a good, encouraging, well-thought-out letter. It will pay you to do that, even if you look at it from a selfish standpoint. Grow into the habit of doing that every week while you are students here.