Been in the Storm So Long (103 page)

Like most young slaves, Booker T. Washington had viewed the mysteries of reading and writing from a distance. But the very fact that he was forbidden these practices of white people excited his curiosity. And when his mother explained that whites considered reading too dangerous for black people, that made him even more anxious to acquire this skill. “From that moment,” he would recall, “I resolved that I should never be satisfied
until I learned what this dangerous practice was like.” On several occasions, he accompanied his master’s daughter to the schoolhouse door, and the sight of the young white children inside made an impression upon him that he would never forget. “I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise.” That opportunity came for many young blacks in the aftermath of emancipation, though not all of them were in the best position to enjoy its benefits. After his family moved away from the farm on which they had been slaves, young Washington went to work in the salt furnaces and tried on his own to make some sense out of the spelling book his mother had acquired for him. When finally permitted to enroll in the newly opened freedmen’s school, he still had to work in the furnaces for five hours in the early morning and for two more hours after classes. Because work demands made it impossible for him to continue his studies in the day school, he enrolled in the night school, and it was there, he later recalled, that he acquired “the greater part” of his elementary education.
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Nothing could have been more calculated to impress upon slaves the value of education than the extraordinary measures adopted by their “white folks” to keep them from it. Even if blacks simply drew on their own experiences and observations, they had come to recognize that power, influence, and wealth in southern society were invariably associated with literacy and monopolized by the better-educated class of whites. “My Lord, ma’am, what a great thing larning is!” a freed slave exclaimed to a white teacher in South Carolina. “White folks can do what they likes, for they know so much more’na we.” No less impressed were some “contraband” children at Fortress Monroe early in the war. When placed in schools, one freed slave suggested, these children “thought it was so much like the way master’s children used to be treated, that they believed they were getting white.”
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The practical value of education never seemed clearer than in the aftermath of emancipation, when illiterate black laborers learned from bitter experience, especially on payday and at contract time, how white people used “book-larnin’ ” to take advantage of them. To an elderly Louisiana freedman, that was reason enough to send the children to school, even if their absence from the fields deprived the parents of their earnings. “Leaving learning to your children was better than leaving them a fortune; because if you left them even five hundred dollars, some man having more education than they had would come along and cheat them out of it all.” Nearly every convention of freedmen in the postwar years dwelled incessantly on this point, seeking to drive home to every black family that “knowledge is power.” Of course, nearly every black family that had survived slavery could readily understand that maxim. “They had seen the magic of a scrap of writing sent from a master to an overseer,” a missionary in the Sea Islands noted, “and they were eager to share such power if there were any chance.”
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To remain in ignorance was to remain in bondage. That conviction
alone drew hundreds of thousands, adults and children alike, to the freedmen’s schools from the moment they opened, some of the prospective students making a pilgrimage of several miles, and many of them forced to combine their schooling with rigorous work schedules. The very intensity of their commitment caught both teachers and native whites by surprise. “They will endure almost any penance rather than be deprived of this privilege,” a missionary educator in North Carolina observed. To a school official in Virginia, trying to convey his thoughts about the freedmen’s enthusiasm for education, the phrase
“anxious
to learn” was insufficient; “they are
crazy
to learn,” he reported, as if their very salvation depended on it. No doubt many ex-slaves were certain that it did. When asked why he wished to enroll in a school, an elderly black man quickly replied, “Because I want to read de Word of de Lord.” That would permit him, moreover, as an old Mississippi black man noted, to read all of the Bible, not simply the portions the master and mistress had always selected for their slaves.

If some southern blacks viewed with suspicion the ministers from the North who presumed to “civilize” their religious worship, they usually extended an effusive welcome to both white and black teachers. Unable in many regions to pay the salaries of the teachers, black parents did what they could to sustain them with gifts of eggs, vegetables, and fruit—anything that might persuade them to remain. “The people sent for tuition 5 eggs and a chicken,” a black teacher in Virginia noted. Delighted that a school had been opened in her neighborhood, a freedwoman vowed to “work her fingers off” if necessary to send her children there. This was the first time in her life, she told the teacher, that any white person had shown any interest in her or in her children; until now, she had been driven, kicked about, and made to work for others for nothing. When teachers encountered resistance from native whites, freedmen in some places stood guard outside their lodgings and the schoolhouse, alternating day and night shifts with their own work schedules. In Augusta, Georgia, Asa B. Whitfield, who had learned to write in a freedmen’s school, expressed his gratitude to the teacher in the terms he knew best. “We know that Christ is our best friend because he suffered the most painful treatment for us. Now I will say that the teachers are suffering on the account of us. And they are our most perticular friends.”
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But no matter how fully committed they might be to the principle of schooling, not all black parents could afford the luxury of losing the labor of their children. As teachers and school officials would quickly discover, the turnover in students and erratic attendance usually reflected work
demands and planting seasons, and in some places teachers tried to adjust their instruction to accommodate the laborers. “We work all day,” a group of freedmen in Macon, Georgia, explained to the teacher, “but well come to you in the evening for learning, and we want you to make us learn; we’re dull, but we want you to beat it into us!” Many of her students, a teacher reported from New Bern, North Carolina, were unable to leave work before eight o’clock in the evening but they still insisted on spending at least an hour afterwards “in earnest application to study.” Even when at work, however, some freedmen took their primers with them, much to the neglect of their duties. “I dont wonder E. learns so fast and reads so well,” one pupil told his teacher, “for while she sits in the field watching the crows, she minds her book so hard they come and eat up her corn.”
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The demand for schools increased so rapidly that the initial problem lay not in finding willing students but in hiring teachers and locating quarters to house the classes. Until new structures could be built with money raised by the freedmen or donated by the northern benevolent societies, almost any place would have to suffice—a mule stable (Helena, Arkansas), a billiard room (Seabrook plantation, Sea Islands), a courthouse (Lawrence, Kansas), an abandoned white school (Charleston), the plantation cotton house (St. Simon’s Island), warehouses and storerooms (New Orleans), and, most commonly, the black church. Where buildings could not be found, whether because of the expense or white opposition, classes might alternate from day to day in the cabins of the freedmen. Some of the more unusual temporary school quarters evoked memories that would be lost on neither teachers, students, nor visitors. In Savannah, the Bryant Slave Mart was converted into a school; the windows in the three-story brick structure still had their iron grates, the handcuffs and whips found inside became instant museum pieces, and the children were taught in what had been the auction room. In New Orleans, a slave pen became the Frederick Douglass School, with the auction block now serving as a globe stand. And when the old cotton house on Tom Butler King’s plantation in Georgia was turned into a Sabbath school, a missionary teacher was moved to write: “Strange transition from the rattle of the cotton gin, to the sweet songs of Zion, but this is a day of great changes, when God is overturning old systems, old practices, to give place to new, and I trust better.” Not far from this scene, a visitor in Augusta, Georgia, observed classes in a small room above a store—the same place where the teacher had imparted lessons clandestinely during the war. “I was shown the doors and passages by which they used to escape and disperse, at the approach of white persons.”
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When field hands on a plantation near Selma, Alabama, erected a schoolhouse near where they worked, they were fulfilling an agreement made with their employer: he would furnish the materials and they would perform the labor and pay for the teacher out of their earnings. Such arrangements were by no means rare in the postwar South. Whether to entice his former slaves to remain with him or to attract laborers, the
planter might offer them facilities for the education of their children. More often, the blacks themselves demanded a plantation school as a condition of employment and insisted that such a clause be written into the contract. Not all planters were necessarily averse to such an arrangement, for they believed it would help to keep laborers content, discourage premature departures from the plantation, and enable them to retain “the better class” of former slaves to perform the work. Even where such agreements were reached, however, implementation tended to vary from place to place, depending on the attitude of the planter and the persistence of his laborers. Once a contract had been signed, a Freedmen’s Bureau superintendent of education reported from Arkansas, “the school is, in some cases, purposely left to run down under an incompetent or intemperate teacher.” Nor were the results always satisfactory when the planter himself undertook to teach the school. “Massa teach school for us at night,” a former Texas slave recalled. “Us learn ABC and how spell cat and dog and nigger. Den one day he git cross and scold us and us didn’t go back to school no more.”
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Although a few states began to take some faltering steps toward establishing schools for whites and blacks, the development of a system of tax-supported public education would be largely an achievement of Radical Reconstruction. During the interim years, the work of educating the newly freed slaves would have to be undertaken by the freedmen themselves, and by that host of white and black teachers who came to the South in the wake of Union occupation. As the northern emissaries boarded the ships and trains that brought them to their various destinations, and as they began their work, they came increasingly to believe that the very wisdom of emancipation itself was at stake—whether or not black people possessed the capacity for mental improvement and would be able to function as citizens and free workers in a competitive, white-dominated civilization.

“T
HE BEST WAY
to take Negroes to your heart,” Mary Chesnut once observed, “is to get as far away from them as possible.” When this plantation mistress confided these remarks to her diary in 1862, she had in mind not herself but those northern do-gooders like Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote so authoritatively about people of whom they were personally ignorant and from whom they would no doubt recoil at meeting face to face.

But even Mary Chesnut, for all of her insights into the character of whites and blacks, could not have anticipated the sight of scores of Yankee “schoolmarms” descending upon her native South to work on a day-to-day basis with the same people who had previously been the objects of distant solicitude and verbal indulgence. “I have written and politized about them,” a teacher wrote from Norfolk in 1864, “but now I see the reality and that has the highest coloring of all! … O Mr. Whipple! what shall I say? my heart is full. My sensitive spirit was lacerated through and through by the sights and sounds I heard and witnessed last Sunday. No Eva shed more tears in one day than fell streaming down my cheeks last Sabbath.”
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