Can Anything Beat White?: A Black Family's Letters

Chapter 10: Achieving a Dream

Chapter 10 ACHIEVING A DREAM S In early October 1906, Helen arrived at the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College in Tallahassee, where she taught school Tuesday through Saturday. Mondays she filled with sweeping, dusting, and scrubbing her residence, going into town, playing tennis, entertaining students, and preparing the next day’s lessons. She told Bertha that she found her fellow teachers “most congenial” and said she wished she had gone there three years before when the president, Nathan B. Young, first made the offer. She was assigned to teach Latin but substituted a class in first-year German, which “gives me some concern.” Her class in first-year technical grammar, “which I thought would be my Jonah, is one of my chief delights,” while the fourth-year English class was a source of genuine pleasure, much to her surprise. She assigned Chaucer and texts on fourteenth -century life, including “Chivalry” and “Sir Galahad.” Each student was required to read one additional book a month for each class. “Keeping up with them quite refreshes my acquaintance with characters familiar but neglected. In connection with this work, I am perusing Conan Doyle’s ‘The White Company’ to see whether I shall add it to the list of assigned books. It is a tale of 14th century England and very illuminating. Conan Doyle has brought out the minor points with as much care as he does in his detective stories.” 173 As the semester progressed, even the German lessons began to go “fairly well. Once in a while some one runs me up a tree in grammar, but on the whole I hold my own.” While enjoying her success, she was anticipating greater challenges. “I believe I am to teach physical geography and that Ancient History which I dread so much. The benefit to me will be great, I know, but oh! the work it requires! Studying ahead of a class is hard work!” She found her schedule overwhelming by the second semester. “I am in my schoolroom now from 8 A.M. until 5.30 P.M. To morrow though I shall be out at 12.30. It is getting too strenuous. I am preparing a very long program for the Public Rhetorical the 22nd inst. [February] Rehearsing students takes every moment from 12 N. until 8.30 P.M. However, each program has been a great success, and there are to be only two more, March and April. May is given over to commencement doings, so I am relieved and mighty glad too.” She added a Sunday school class “of twelve or fifteen boys which I think I shall enjoy. So far, however, it has seemed like experimenting. They are large boys, who are in the lowest grades. Having upper class students, all the week, makes it seem like a transition to come to these on Sunday.” For recreation, Helen visited her new friends. Mr. and Mrs. Cardoza “are dear people, quite after my own heart. Mr. Cardoza is a TuskeegeeCornell graduate. His wife is a pretty South Carolina girl, a friend of the Bampfields. I feel perfectly at home with them.” She had been invited to join the weekly sessions of the whist club. “I notice that colored society has taken up bridge almost wholly so of course I must learn it too.” She eventually joined the club and played once a week. “I . . . hope soon to be able to play a good game. It requires all of one’s mental faculties, I can assure you.” As at Whittier and at the Penn School, Helen confronted the problem of delayed pay. She had hoped to write to Louise before she went to Brooklyn but “financially was unable” because October’s salary did not arrive until the first of December, and as of December 8 she had not been paid her salary for November. When the money started to flow, she paid a number of bills and had to “replenish from the bottom” her 174 Achieving a Dream wardrobe with undervests, long-sleeved corset covers, stockings and a Ferris waist. “Some how expenses keep abreast of one’s salary.” Helen was spending money on clothing but not on Christmas gifts for her family because “This seems to be an off year to me.” Presents would arrive, she promised, but not in time for the holiday. She decided not to spend much money decorating her surroundings because it meant discarding...