At the close of the hotel season I returned to my former home in Malden, and was elected to teach the coloured school at that place.  This was the beginning of one of the happiest periods of my life.  I now felt that I had the opportunity to help the people of my home town to a higher life.  I felt from the first that mere book education was not all that the young people of that town needed.  I began my work at eight o’clock in the morning, and, as a rule, it did not end until ten o’clock at night.  In addition to the usual routine of teaching, I taught the pupils to comb their hair, and to keep their hands and faces clean, as well as their clothing.  I gave special attention to teaching them the proper use of the tooth-brush and the bath.  In all my teaching I have watched carefully the influence of the tooth-brush, and I am convinced that there are few single agencies of civilization that are more far-reaching.

There were so many of the older boys and girls in the town, as well as men and women, who had to work in the daytime and still were craving an opportunity for an education, that I soon opened a night-school.  From the first, this was crowded every night, being about as large as the school that I taught in the day.  The efforts of some of the men and women, who in many cases were over fifty years of age, to learn, were in some cases very pathetic.

My day and night school work was not all that I undertook.  I established a small reading-room and a debating society.  On Sundays I taught two Sunday-schools, one in the town of Malden in the afternoon, and the other in the morning at a place three miles distant from Malden.  In addition to this, I gave private lessons to several young men whom I was fitting to send to the Hampton Institute.  Without regard to pay and with little thought of it, I taught any one who wanted to learn anything that I could teach him.  I was supremely happy in the opportunity of being able to assist somebody else.  I did receive, however, a small salary from the public fund, for my work as a public-school teacher.

During the time that I was a student at Hampton my older brother, John, not only assisted me all that he could, but worked all of the time in the coal-mines in order to support the family.  He willingly neglected his own education that he might help me.  It was my earnest wish to help him to prepare to enter Hampton, and to save money to assist him in his expenses there.  Both of these objects I was successful in accomplishing.  In three years my brother finished the course at Hampton, and he is now holding the important position of Superintendent of Industries at Tuskegee.  When he returned from Hampton, we both combined our efforts and savings to send our adopted brother, James, through the Hampton Institute.  This we succeeded in doing, and he is now the postmaster at the Tuskegee Institute.  The year 1877, which was my second year of teaching in Malden, I spent very much as I did the first.