Booker T. Washington: “What position you are to occupy must be left to your future and to your capacity.”

I never saw a man who so completely lost sight of himself.

Despite this disappointment, however, I determined that I would learn something, anyway.

I cannot remember having slept in a bed until after our family was declared free by the Emancipation Proclamation.

Until that question was asked it had never occurred to me that there was no period of my life that was devoted to play.