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You Need a Schoolhouse

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS

Chapter One

Thus begins Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington's famous account of his life. Like Frederick Douglass, whose own Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave had become a best seller in 1845, Washington was deprived even of a birthday by the peculiar institution under which he was born. Douglass wrote that he had never met a slave who knew the date of his own birth and that as a boy he felt envious of white children who could tell their exact ages and the day on which they had been born. Of his birthday, Washington knew only that it was in the spring, when the hillsides of Virginia were alive with blossoming forsythia, redbud, and apple trees. Later in his life, he celebrated his birthday on Easter. He wrote that the year was 1858 or 1859, but in fact it was probably 1856. What was sure was that when Washington was born, black people descended from Africans had been slaves of white people of European ancestry for more than two hundred years in America.

Booker grew up not on an enormous plantation but on a farm where the windowless, clay-floored log cabin he shared with his mother, sister, and brother sat just steps from the master's modest farmhouse. His owner, James Burroughs, raised tobacco, as well as wheat, corn, sweet potatoes, beans, peas, flax, and livestock, on two hundred hilly acres near the little town of Hale's Ford in the foothills of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. It was, Booker later wrote, "about as near to Nowhere as any locality gets to be," and the place retains that feeling to this day. Burroughs and his wife, Betsy, had fourteen children, some of whom were grown and married, and with children of their own, during Booker's childhood. Among James Burroughs's ten slaves, Booker shows up on a property list as "1 negro boy" valued at $400. The "negro woman Jane" (worth $250) was his mother, the "negro woman Sophia" of the same value was his mother's half sister, the "negro boy John" (worth $550) was his older brother (or, possibly, half brother), and the "negro girl Amanda" (worth $200) was his younger half sister.

Normal family life, like birthdays, was denied to children born into slavery. Of his father, Booker wrote, "I do not even know his name. I have heard reports to the effect that he was a white man who lived on one of the near-by plantations. Whoever he was, I never heard of his taking the least interest in me or providing in any way for my rearing." Booker's medium-dark skin and gray eyes were certainly the legacy of a white man; children born into slavery were often "barnyard" children, fathered by the masters who owned them or by the masters' sons or nephews. Booker's brother, John, was rumored to be the son of one of the Burroughs boys. Amanda's father, though, was not white. He was Washington Ferguson, a slave on a neighboring farm, and he and Booker's mother considered themselves married. Still, that did not provide Booker with a fatherly presence, because Washington, reputed to be troublesome, was usually away, sent by his master to work for pay in the saltworks of Kanawha, to the west, beyond the mountains. He came back at Christmastime each year to regale the children with stories of life beyond the farm.

The most valuable slave on the list was Booker's uncle, Lee, his mother's half brother. He was worth $1,000. As a small child, Booker once saw Lee stripped naked and tied to a tree, whipped with a piece of rawhide. The man's cries of "Pray, master!" left an impression, Booker later wrote in his memoirs, "on my boyish heart that I shall carry with me to my grave." Powerful Lee was memorable less as a father figure than for the indignity forced on him by slavery.

Jane, Booker's mother, was the family cook and, "by the way, a good one," according to Laura, one of the Burroughs daughters. But for her own children, Jane had little time to fix meals. Slaves were denied the normal rhythms of family life. Booker wrote that he could not remember a single time that, as a child, he sat down to eat with his family. He and his sister and brother got their food "very much as dumb animals get theirs. It was a piece of bread here and a scrap of meat there. It was a cup of milk at one time and some potatoes at another. Sometimes a portion of our family would eat out of the skillet or pot, while someone else would eat from a tin plate held on the knee, and often using nothing but the hands with which to hold the food." Sometimes he scrounged com that had been cooked for the pigs. When he was old enough, Booker was sometimes sent over to the "big house" to run a pulley that worked a huge fan to cool the Burroughs family and keep the flies away from them while they ate. His own mother and siblings never had the chance to gather for meals around a dining room table or to say a simple blessing over the food, but Booker did know what a family eating together looked and sounded like.

He also knew what a school looked like, because sometimes he went with Laura to the schoolhouse where she was a teacher, sitting behind her on the horse she rode to school so he could bring it back to the farm to work in the fields. The glimpses he caught of boys and girls in a classroom made Booker feel that the chance to study that way would be "about the same as getting into paradise." School and study seemed even more attractive when he learned from his mother that for slaves learning to read was forbidden.

Of all the myriad deprivations imposed by slavery, the banning of education was arguably the most devastating. In the words of one former slave interviewed years later, "They didn't want us to learn nothin'. The only thing we had to learn was how to work." Education, it was realistically feared, would make blacks less docile, less willing to fill their assigned role in the social order. As far back as 1680, Virginia law had prohibited blacks from gathering for any reason at all; shortly after that, Maryland mandated a heavy fine on anyone teaching blacks. Other states had determined that even allowing a slave to be taught to read was a punishable offense. In Georgia, that punishment was a fine of $100 and six months' imprisonment. A black person helping another to learn could be whipped "not exceeding fifty lashes." Mississippi went even further. There it was also against the law to instruct even the state's few free blacks. By the end of the seventeenth century, individual states were fining anyone who gave any kind of book learning to blacks. Twenty-five years before Booker's birth, when Nat Turner led a violent slave rebellion in Virginia, whites told one another that Turner had been encouraged to revolt by reading inflammatory tracts from the North. In the late 1830s, when Frederick Douglass's Maryland owner discovered that his wife had taught her young slave his ABCs, he was furious and insisted the lessons stop, telling his wife, "If you teach that nigger ... how to read, there [will be] no keeping him. It [will] forever unfit him to be a slave." Douglass wrote in his Narrative that, hearing those words, he immediately "understood the pathway from slavery to freedom." Reading was denied to him because it would unfit him for slavery. Therefore, he wrote, he would learn to read.

Booker was five in the spring of 1861 when the irreconcilable differences between North and South over slavery and the sovereignty of the individual states exploded into war. One of his earliest memories was of waking up on his bed of rags to the sound of his mother's voice praying out loud that President Lincoln and his armies would win the war and make black people free.

Five of the Burroughs sons went off to fight for the Confederacy. Billy, the one everyone liked best, was killed in Virginia. Frank was taken prisoner and died in captivity. Ben was wounded in Pickett's Charge, at the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863. And Edwin, the youngest son, caused some chiding laughter back home when it was learned that he had been shot in the backside. Had he been running away? Only one Burroughs son, Tom, came through the war unhurt.

The early spring of 1865 brought a steady stream of deserters from the disintegrating Confederate Army traipsing through Hale's Ford, and they brought with them the news that Richmond had fallen to Union forces and rumors that Lee would soon surrender. One morning the Burroughs slaves were told to gather in front of the master's house. James Burroughs had died at the start of the war, but old Mrs. Burroughs and the children and grandchildren still at home gathered on their porch while the slaves lined up in the yard. Then a Union soldier came; he made a short speech and read a document that, to nine-year-old Booker, seemed very long. He later understood that it was the Emancipation Proclamation. The soldier told them that they were free. They could go wherever they wanted to.

Booker remembered the tears that streamed down his mother's face as she listened to the soldier, then leaned over to kiss her three children, to tell them she had long prayed for this day and had feared she might not live to see it. "I have never seen one who did not want to be free," Booker wrote in his memoirs, "or anyone who would return to slavery."

He also remembered that the slaves' "wild rejoicing" after hearing they were free was followed very quickly by a "feeling of deep gloom." To be free meant to provide for themselves, and the men and women who had been slaves, who were uneducated children and grandchildren of illiterate slaves, had never learned to do that. Although it was something they had longed for, freedom was also a challenge. It meant leaving the only home they had ever known.

Four months after the momentous day when they learned they were free, Booker and his mother, sister, and brother said good-bye to Mrs. Burroughs, to her children and her grandchildren (after promising to stay in touch with them, which they did). Washington Ferguson had gone to live in Malden, a small town on the Kanawha River in the new state of West Virginia—it had seceded from Virginia to side with the Union. He worked in the salt furnaces and the coal mines there, although this time the money he made was his own. He sent some to Jane, and in late summer, she and her children set off in a newly purchased horse-drawn cart to join him. For two weeks they bumped along, Jane riding, the children walking, cooking their food by the side of the road and sleeping where they could, often outside. One especially memorable night they found an abandoned cabin that seemed like a grand place to stay until an enormous black snake dropped down from the chimney and slithered across the floor. They spent the night somewhere else.

What awaited Booker's family in Malden, five miles from Charleston, West Virginia, was not exactly the Promised Land, although it did give them their first experience of going to church regularly. One Sunday morning, Booker was outside playing marbles with some other boys when the local black Baptist minister walked by on his way to church. Didn't some of them want to come with him, he asked. Booker recorded this story in his memoirs, seeing it as the beginning of his religious education and adding that, a few years later, the minister, Father Rice, baptized him in the Kanawha River.

The place Washington Ferguson had for his family was a dreary, crowded cabin, a "shanty" according to Booker's memoirs. It was not in the country, as their place on the Burroughs farm had been, but in a squalid village. And it became even more crowded when Jane brought home an orphaned boy a few years younger than Booker, a child whom she adopted into the family and named James.

For Booker and his brother John, freedom meant going off with their stepfather to work in a salt furnace, where they earned fifty cents a day. When they were paid, Washington Ferguson pocketed the money. They earned even more when they went down into the coal mines. Years later, Booker remembered his fright from going "a long distance under the mountain into a damp and dark coal mine." When William Davis, a young black veteran of the Union Army came to town and opened a small school, Booker's excitement was immediately quashed. He couldn't go, his stepfather said. He had to keep working. The family needed his income.

Booker had a strong early memory of a group of men in town crowded around another man who was reading to them out loud from the newspaper. He decided that he wanted to be the person in the middle of the circle, reading, telling people things they wanted to know. His mother managed to find him a reading book, "an old copy of Webster's 'blue-back' spelling-book, which contained the alphabet followed by such meaningless words as 'ab,' 'ba,' 'ca,' 'da.'" This was, Booker wrote, the first book he ever actually held in his hands, but because he had no one to explain it to him, it meant little. At last, his stepfather gave in to his nagging and said he could go to school, but only if he put in four hours of work in the mine before he went. Booker began getting up at four in the morning to go to work before school.

Later, Booker remembered that school presented challenges beyond just getting there. Everyone had two names, so he decided on the spot that his last name was Washington. He later added the exotic middle name his mother said she had wanted for him but couldn't quite say the origin of, Taliaferro. The second challenge was a hat; all the boys in the class wore caps, "store hats" as Booker called them. Not wanting him to be the only bareheaded boy, Booker's mother sewed together two pieces of "homespun" denim and made him a hat that he prized even though the other boys made fun of it. He later wrote, with the sense of thrift that had become part of his persona, that he was proud that his mother had not gone into debt for something she could not afford.

About the time he was learning to read the numbers and letters used to mark the barrels of salt he was packing, and attending school as often as he could, Booker had an experience that, years later, he described dramatically in his memoirs:

One day, while at work in the coal-mine, I happened to overhear two miners talking about a great school for coloured people somewhere in Virginia. This was the first time that I had ever heard anything about any kind of school or college that was more pretentious than the little coloured school in our town.

In the darkness of the mine I noiselessly crept as close as I could to the two men who were talking. I resolved at once to go to that school, although I had no idea where it was, or how many miles away, or how I was going to reach it; I remembered only that I was on tire constantly with one ambition and that was to go to Hampton.

Booker was helped in getting to Hampton Institute by a bit of good luck and by the ability to latch on to opportunity, which would prove one of his distinctive traits. When he was about eleven, he heard that the man who owned the local coal mine, one of the town's wealthiest residents, Colonel Lewis Ruffner, was looking for a servant to work in his house. Everyone said that his wife, Viola Ruffner, a "Yankee," was so fussy and strict that houseboys usually lasted only a few weeks with her. But Booker applied for the job and got it. He found that Mrs. Ruffner was indeed hard to please, just as everyone had said, and at first he thought it wasn't worth it to even try. Several times he ran away from her comfortable house by the river. But after a few weeks of other jobs, he always went back to work for her.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from You Need a Schoolhouse by STEPHANIE DEUTSCH Copyright © 2011 by Stephanie Deutsch . Excerpted by permission of NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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