There were two other things Washington wanted for his school. One was a place for his students to board, and the other, a place for them to room. Washington said that he had nothing but the students and their appetites to begin a boarding department with. However, they got busy, dug a large amount of earth from beneath Porter Hall, and opened this basement up for a dining room. They had no dishes, no knives and forks to speak of, at first; they had poor arrangements of every kind. And they had bad luck. Something went wrong almost every day at first. They would spill the soup, burn the meat, or leave the salt out of the bread. Meals were served with no sort of regularity.
Washington says that one morning he was at the dining room when everything went wrong. The breakfast was a failure. One of the girls who failed to get any breakfast went to the well to get a drink of water, and found the well rope broken. Washington heard her say: “You can’t even get water to drink at this school.”[[15]] He says that remark came nearer discouraging him than anything that ever happened to him.
He may have been discouraged, but he kept on, and in a little while things were coming out all right. And to-day, one of the greatest sights at Tuskegee is the great dining hall with its white tablecloths, napkins, and vases of flowers, with elegant meals served in excellent style and order and on time.
The next thing was rooms for the boarders. Students were coming from a distance. There was no place for them at the school. Besides, Washington wanted them at the school so that he could help them learn best how to keep their rooms and live as folks ought to live. They used the cabins first for sleeping quarters, but they had almost no furniture. They made mattresses of pine needles. Their bedclothes were so scant the first winter that several were frostbitten.
Soon a good house was built, however, for all the students, and now they began to live as people ought. Among other things, Washington insisted that they use toothbrushes. He said that perhaps no one thing meant more in the real training of the negro than the proper use of this article. He went from room to room himself to see whether the students had them. “We found one room,” he says, “that contained three girls who had recently arrived at the school. When I asked them if they had toothbrushes, one of the girls replied, pointing to a brush, ‘Yes, sir, that is our brush. We bought it together yesterday.’ It did not take them long to learn a different lesson.”[[16]]
In many ways, he was able to help these students learn the proper ways of living—how to sleep properly, how to care for their bodies, and how to take care of their clothes.
This second year of the school was truly a strenuous one in clearing land, raising a crop, making bricks, building Porter Hall, starting a boarding department and a rooming department. Everybody had been busy doing good work, and everybody was happy. They were making a great beginning.
Class in Physical Training at Tuskegee
A very important event of this year was the marriage of Washington to Fannie M. Smith. They had known each other back in Malden, and, as soon as Washington’s work was well begun, they were married. She lived only two years after her marriage, dying in 1884, and leaving a daughter, Portia M. Washington. Several years later Washington married Olivia Davidson, the teacher who had been associated with him in the school almost from the first, and who had done so much to help him in getting the school started.