Williams discusses how southern African Americans sought education during and after the Civil War, highlighting the efforts former slaves made on their own behalf by teaching, building schools, and attending school themselves.

Heather Andrea Williams, a former attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice and the New York State Attorney General's Office, is assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Self-Taught

African American Education in Slavery and FreedomBy Heather Andrea Williams

University of North Carolina Press

Copyright © 2007 Heather Andrea Williams
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780807858219

Chapter One

In Secret Places

Acquiring Literacy in Slave Communities

No child, white people never teach colored people nothing, but to be good to dey Master and Mistress. What learning dey would get in dem days, dey been get it at night. Taught demselves. -Louisa Gause, South Carolina

I have seen the Negroes up in the country going away under large oaks, and in secret places, sitting in the woods with spelling books. -Charity Bowery, North Carolina

Despite laws and custom in slave states prohibiting enslaved people from learning to read and write, a small percentage managed, through ingenuity and will, to acquire a degree of literacy in the antebellum period. Access to the written word, whether scriptural or political, revealed a world beyond bondage in which African Americans could imagine themselves free to think and behave as they chose. Literacy provided the means to write a pass to freedom, to learn of abolitionist activities, or to read the Bible. Because it most often happened in secret, the very act of learning to read and write subverted the master-slave relationship and created a private life for those who were owned by others. Once literate, many used this hard-won skill to disturb the power relations between master and slave, as they fused their desire for literacy with their desire for freedom.

Placing antiliteracy laws in dialogue with the words of enslaved people enables an examination of the tensions that slave literacy provoked between owned and owner. Masters made every attempt to control their captives' thoughts and imaginations, indeed their hearts and minds. Maintaining a system of bondage in the Age of Enlightenment depended upon the master's being able to speak for the slave, to deny his or her humanity, and to draw a line between slave consciousness and human will. The presence of literate slaves threatened to give lie to the entire system. Reading indicated to the world that this so-called property had a mind, and writing foretold the ability to construct an alternative narrative about bondage itself. Literacy among slaves would expose slavery, and masters knew it.

Understanding how enslaved people learned not only illuminates the importance of literacy as an instrument of resistance and liberation, but also brings into view the clandestine tactics and strategies that enslaved people employed to gain some control over their own lives. While it is common to view Frederick Douglass's antebellum struggle for literacy as exceptional, slave narratives, interviews with former slaves, and other documents offer a view of more widespread communities of learners who also forged the crucial link between literacy and freedom.

The story of Mattie Jackson illustrates the radical potential that enslaved African Americans perceived in literacy. Although Jackson came of age as the institution of slavery faced its final challenge, her personal efforts to free herself are suggestive of other people's experiences in slavery. Once free, Jackson told her story to a more literate black woman who wrote it down. This narrative helps us to understand the key role that literacy-and gender-could play in the crusade for freedom.

As a child in Missouri, Mattie Jackson experienced the family disruptions that so often characterized the experiences of enslaved people. When she was three years old, her father was sold, but he escaped before he could be transferred to his new owner. Months passed before the family received word that he had reached freedom. Two years later, Jackson's mother, Ellen Turner, attempted to escape to Chicago, where her husband now preached. With two children accompanying her, however, Turner was quickly captured and returned to her owner, who promptly sold her and the children. It was not unusual that the man would successfully escape while the woman remained behind, as responsibility for childbearing and child-rearing circumscribed slave women's movement. Work assignments also restricted women's mobility. Men were more likely to be hired out or sent on errands into town, thus acquiring greater knowledge of how to move about without detection as well as greater opportunity to meet people who might shield them from discovery. Turner's attempt to leave, then, spoke of her determination to be free even in the face of the discouraging odds against success. Four years after her initial escape attempt, Turner remarried, and this second husband too escaped, once again to avoid being sold. Now left with four children, Turner went about her job as cook in the household, attending to her domestic duties, even at the expense of caring for her fatally ill son. Her owners, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis, might well have thought that all was in good order with this family of slaves. Turner, it appeared, had been tamed. With the loss of two husbands and a child, she seemed to have given up any hope of ever being free. In truth, Turner had not surrendered and had in fact managed to pass on some of her resolve to her daughter, Mattie. The coming of the Civil War stirred their hopes to the surface. With Union troops stationed nearby, tension grew in the household. The Lewises' agitation at news of Union victories emboldened Mattie Jackson and her mother in their challenges to being owned. Gathering information through eavesdropping became an important weapon in their private war with their owners. According to Jackson, when husband and wife talked about the war, Mrs. Lewis "cast her eye around to us for fear we might hear her. Her suspicion was correct; there was not a word that passed that escaped our listening ear."

To learn most of their news, the Jackson women had to listen hard and remember well, tasks that slaves had perfected across the South. Such eavesdropping constituted a vital and accessible component of the intelligence network within slave communities. As important as literacy was to the slaves who employed it in service of their own freedom or for the benefit of others, enslaved African Americans also had other ways of knowing. They relied heavily on oral and aural systems of information. Those with access to white people's conversations listened closely when masters gathered and developed acute skills of perception and memory. As Henry Bibb noted, "slaves were not allowed books, pen, ink, nor paper, to improve their minds. But it seems to me now, that I was particularly observing and apt to retain what came under my observation." Specifically, Bibb recalled, "all that I heard about liberty and freedom to slaves, I never forgot. Among other good trades I learned the art of running away to perfection."

As an enslaved boy in Winchester, Virginia, John Quincy Adams similarly honed his eavesdropping skills. When he learned there was no one to teach him to read and write because whites did not want blacks to become literate, the prohibition only stoked his curiosity. Whenever he heard a white person reading aloud, he lingered to listen, replying "nothing" when asked what he wanted. Then, at the first opportunity, he repeated to his parents everything he had heard. They, in turn, encouraged him to "try to hear all you can, but don't let them know it." By listening in this manner, Adams was able to inform his parents of an impending election that the owners wanted kept from their slaves. His information-gathering skills likely helped...