As soon as a student mastered reading, writing and arithmetic sufficiently to enable him to read without much faltering and write at all legibly and add a sum of four or five numbers, Miss Schofield set him to teaching. The scarcity of teachers made this expedient imperative.
A middle-aged man, Isaac Kimberley, who as a slave had been taught to read and write but had greatly added to his fund of knowledge by a term at Miss Schofield’s school, was one of the first to be honored with a school. It was located near Miss Schofield’s and closely supervised by her. Isaac assumed the duties of it with all the dignity of some divinely appointed potentate and proceeded at once to make use of only the most carefully chosen words possible, and put on a haughty, undignified air that made him more ridiculous than he really was. Alford Kimberley, a son of his former master, on meeting him soon after he began teaching, addressed him familiarly as “Uncle Ike.” “I’le hab yo’ to understan,’ suh, dat Ise neaver yo’ uncle or yo antie, suh, Ise yo eacle,” said Isaac in reply. “Frum dis day on, ef yo’ pleas, suh, Ise Prof. Isaak Kimberley,” continued the new teacher.
“Well, take that, and that, Prof. Isaac Kimberley, from your equal,” responded Alford, as he bent over the prostrate form of the instructor, lying in the ditch by the roadside where he had knocked him. “I’ll teach you yet how to talk to white gentlemen, you low-down lover of blue-bellied Yankees, you!”
No report of this dramatic incident ever reached the ears of Miss Schofield as Isaac was afraid it might. He concealed it from everybody in the neighborhood as much as possible, both on account of having gotten whipped in his first encounter after becoming a free man and also on account of an increasing amount of comment among both colored and white that he was daily growing too big for his breeches and would have to be whipped.
Miss Schofield’s confidence in him, at no time, it is needless to say, was very great, but it was Isaac or worse. She finally dismissed him and looked around in vain for a “worser” one.
His dismissal followed a visit to his school, which she was in the habit of making regularly.
The day was an unusually cold one for South Carolina, where the temperature in the winter seldom reaches the freezing point, and through the unsealed crevices between the poles out of which the house was built, the sleet and snow drifted joyously in. A half hundred or more half clothed and well nigh starved little black urchins shook the shackly floor with their shivering and drowned their voices with the chattering of their teeth. If ever there was a blue-lipped, blue-gummed Negro school Isaac’s was surely one on that day.
The extreme cold weather and the open condition of the house gave every student a free license to leave his seat, even without permission of the authority in charge, and crowd in close proximity around the wide open hearth at the end of the building, where with the shivering of limbs, chattering of teeth and shuffling of feet, all noise of their cries and shrieks as one would pinch the other or mash a toe or hit this one or that one over the head with a well worn book or trab ball, was drowned out.
In the midst of the greatest confusion, Isaac, with the purpose in view of dispersing the crowd and relieving the congestion around the “fire place” blurted out with an assumed air of supreme dignity: “John Thomas, why don’t yo’ add full to de flame?” With his black eyes blinking like a rabbits when shot at and trembling from head to foot and turning round like a Bob White in a trap, it was clear to Miss Schofield that the child did not understand what the master of the school wished to be done. She immediately came to the relief of all, as she always seemed capable of doing in each and every predicament in which she or any of her children (children is what she called all the students) found themselves, by saying, “Isaac, tell John Thomas to put some wood on the fire and he wilt understand thee.”
Walking along home with Isaac after dismission that afternoon she informed him that it would be necessary to suspend his school until the house could be repaired. Isaac, tired of waiting for the needed repairs, returned to the Schofield school for instruction himself and taking up the study of harness making, developed into a genius for work of this kind. After years of success at the bench in one of the best shops in a large Southern city, where he earned $22.50 a week, the government of the United States awarded a contract to him for 250 army saddles. He could not teach school but he could make saddles and harness.