Let them once understand that
you are unselfishly interested in them, and you can lead them to any
extent.
It was my aim from the first at Tuskegee to not only have the
buildings erected by the students themselves, but to have them make
their own furniture as far as was possible. I now marvel at the
patience of the students while sleeping upon the floor while waiting
for some kind of a bedstead to be constructed, or at their sleeping
without any kind of a mattress while waiting for something that looked
like a mattress to be made.
In the early days we had very few students who had been used to
handling carpenters' tools, and the bedsteads made by the students
then were very rough and very weak. Not unfrequently [sic] when I
went into the students' rooms in the morning I would find at least two
bedsteads lying about on the floor. The problem of providing
mattresses was a difficult one to solve. We finally mastered this,
however, by getting some cheap cloth and sewing pieces of this
together as to make large bags. These bags we filled with the pine
straw -- or, as it is sometimes called, pine needles -- which we
secured from the forests near by. I am glad to say that the industry
of mattress-making has grown steadily since then, and has been
improved to such an extent that at the present time it is an important
branch of the work which is taught systematically to a number of our
girls, and that the mattresses that now come out of the mattress-shop
at Tuskegee are about as good as those bought in the average store.
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