I got my first teaching job in New York in the fall of 1920. I think I was paid fifteen hundred dollars for the year. It was at RS. 119 in Harlem, which was an elementary school, mostly colored. This was a typical assignment for a colored teacher. They most certainly did not want us in schools where the children were white. The parents would object. One way that the principals kept us out was to say they could not hire anyone with a Southern accent because it would be damaging to the children. Well, most of us colored teachers at the time had Southern accents. So it was just a way of keeping us out.

When my accent was considered a problem, I found a way around that. I signed up with a speech coach, a woman in Manhattan. She was a white woman, a lovely woman. I don’t think she had too many colored clients. I remember that when I would go to her apartment for the lessons, the doorman made me take the freight elevator. I didn’t make a fuss because I wanted those speech lessons.

You had to decide: Am I going to change the world, or am I going to change me? Or maybe change the world a little bit just by changing me? If I can get ahead, doesn’t that help my people?

I was very ambitious. Much of the time that I taught at P.S. 119 I made money on the side by baking cakes and selling them for a nickel a slice to the teachers at school. Another thing I would do is make lollipops at home and sell them in the school cafeteria for a penny each. Sometimes I’d make lemon; other times I’d make cinnamon or something else. You might think that making lollipops and cakes is an awful slow way to get money, but I liked doing it. Besides, you’d be surprised at how it adds up—a penny here, a nickel there —after a few years. I never let a nickel get by me, that’s what Bessie always says.

Miss Larson, the principal at P.S. 119, got this idea that her boyfriend could peddle my candy. He had trouble holding on to a job, and she was looking for something or him to do. So I rented a loft at 121st Street, in the business district. We called the candy Delany’s Delights and had tins made up with that name. The candy was handdipped chocolate fondant, and we had three sizes: a halfpound, a pound, and two pounds. We charged two dollars per pound, and we just sold that stuff all over New York. Even at Abraham & Straus, the department store! I made it, and he sold it.

Eventually I gave up the candy business. The Depression came along, and people had no money for chocolate fondant, that’s for sure. Also, I had