Up from Slavery: An Autobiography
dominant race, and so done as not to run across race lines and social
lines that are the strongest forces in the community. It had to be done
for the benefit of the whole community. It had to be done, moreover,
without local help, in the face of the direst poverty, done by begging,
and done in spite of the ignorance of one race and the prejudice of the
other.
No man living had a harder task, and a task that called for more wisdom
to do it right. The true measure of Mr. Washington’s success is, then,
not his teaching the pupils of Tuskegee, nor even gaining the support
of philanthropic persons at a distance, but this—that every Southern
white man of character and of wisdom has been won to a cordial
recognition of the value of the work, even men who held and still hold
to the conviction that a mere book education for the Southern blacks
under present conditions is a positive evil. This is a demonstration of
the efficiency of the Hampton-Tuskegee idea that stands like the
demonstration of the value of democratic institutions themselves—a
demonstration made so clear in spite of the greatest odds that it is no
longer open to argument.
Consider the change that has come in twenty years in the discussion of
the Negro problem. Two or three decades ago social philosophers and
statisticians and well-meaning philanthropists were still talking and
writing about the deportation of the Negroes, or about their settlement
within some restricted area, or about their settling in all parts of
the Union, or about their decline through their neglect of their
children, or about their rapid multiplication till they should expel
the whites from the South—of every sort of nonsense under heaven. All
this has given place to the simple plan of an indefinite extension
among the neglected classes of both races of the Hampton-Tuskegee
system of training. The “problem” in one sense has disappeared. The
future will have for the South swift or slow development of its masses
and of its soil in proportion to the swift or slow development of this
kind of training. This change of view is a true measure of Mr.
Washington’s work.
The literature of the Negro in America is colossal, from political
oratory through abolitionism to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Cotton is
King”—a vast mass of books which many men have read to the waste of
good years (and I among them); but the only books that I have read a
second time or ever care again to read in the whole list (most of them
by tiresome and unbalanced “reformers”) are “Uncle Remus” and “Up from
Slavery”; for these are the great literature of the subject. One has
all the best of the past, the other foreshadows a better future; and
the men who wrote them are the only men who have written of the subject
with that perfect frankness and perfect knowledge and perfect poise
whose other name is genius.
Mr. Washington has won a world-wide fame at an early age. His story of
his own life already has the distinction of translation into more
languages, I think, than any other American book; and I suppose that he
has as large a personal acquaintance among men of influence as any
private citizen now living.
His own teaching at Tuskegee is unique. He lectures to his advanced
students on the art of right living, not out of text-books, but
straight out of life. Then he sends them into the country to visit
Negro families. Such a student will come back with a minute report of
the way in which the family that he has seen lives, what their earnings
are, what they do well and what they do ill; and he will explain how
they might live better. He constructs a definite plan for the
betterment of that particular family out of the resources that they
have. Such a student, if he be bright, will profit more by an
experience like this than he could profit by all the books on sociology
and economics that ever were written. I talked with a boy at Tuskegee
who had made such a study as this, and I could not keep from
contrasting his knowledge and enthusiasm with what I heard in a class
room at a Negro university in one of the Southern cities, which is
conducted on the idea that a college course will save the soul. Here
the class was reciting a lesson from an abstruse text-book on
economics, reciting it by rote, with so obvious a failure to assimilate
it that the waste of labour was pitiful.
I asked Mr. Washington years ago what he regarded as the most important
result of his work, and he replied:
“I do not know which to put first, the effect of Tuskegee’s work on the
Negro, or the effect on the attitude of the white man to the Negro.”
The race divergence under the system of miseducation was fast getting
wider. Under the influence of the Hampton-Tuskegee idea the races are
coming into a closer sympathy and into an honourable and helpful
relation. As the Negro becomes economically independent, he becomes a
responsible part of the Southern life; and the whites so recognize him.
And this must be so from the nature of things. There is nothing
artificial about it. It is development in a perfectly natural way. And
the Southern whites not only so recognize it, but they are imitating it
in the teaching of the neglected masses of their own race. It has thus
come about that the school is taking a more direct and helpful hold on
life in the South than anywhere else in the country. Education is not a
thing apart from life—not a “system,” nor a philosophy; it is direct
teaching how to live and how to work.
To say that Mr. Washington has won the gratitude of all thoughtful
Southern white men, is to say that he has worked with the highest
practical wisdom at a large constructive task; for no plan for the
up-building of the freedman could succeed that ran counter to Southern
opinion. To win the support of Southern opinion and to shape it was a
necessary part of the task; and in this he has so well succeeded that
the South has a sincere and high regard for him. He once said to me
that he recalled the day, and remembered it thankfully, when he grew
large enough to regard a Southern white man as he regarded a Northern
one. It is well for our common country that the day is come when he and
his work are regarded as highly in the South as in any other part of
the Union. I think that no man of our generation has a more noteworthy
achievement to his credit than this; and it is an achievement of moral
earnestness of the strong character of a man who has done a great
national service.
Walter H. Page.
UP FROM SLAVERY
Chapter I.
A Slave Among Slaves
I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia. I am
not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth, but at any
rate I suspect I must have been born somewhere and at some time. As
nearly as I have been able to learn, I was born near a cross-roads
post-office called Hale’s Ford, and the year was 1858 or 1859. I do not
know the month or the day. The earliest impressions I can now recall
are of the plantation and the slave quarters—the latter being the part
of the plantation where the slaves had their cabins.
My life had its beginning in the midst of the most miserable, desolate,
and discouraging surroundings. This was so, however, not because my
owners were especially cruel, for they were not, as compared with many
others. I was born in a typical log cabin, about fourteen by sixteen
feet square. In this cabin I lived with my mother and a brother and
sister till after the Civil War, when we were all declared free.
Of my ancestry I know almost nothing. In the slave quarters, and even
later, I heard whispered conversations among the coloured people of the
tortures which the slaves, including, no doubt, my ancestors on my
mother’s side, suffered in the middle passage of the slave ship while
being conveyed from Africa to America. I have been unsuccessful in
securing any information that would throw any accurate light upon the
history of my family beyond my mother. She, I remember, had a
half-brother and a half-sister. In the days of slavery not very much
attention was given to family history and family records—that is, black
family records. My mother, I suppose, attracted the attention of a
purchaser who was afterward my owner and hers. Her addition to the
slave family attracted about as much attention as the purchase of a new
horse or cow. Of my father I know even less than of my mother. 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. But I do not find especial fault with him. He
was simply another unfortunate victim of the institution which the
Nation unhappily had engrafted upon it at that time.
The cabin was not only our living-place, but was also used as the
kitchen for the plantation. My mother was the plantation cook. The
cabin was without glass windows; it had only openings in the side which
let in the light, and also the cold, chilly air of winter. There was a
door to the cabin—that is, something that was called a door—but the
uncertain hinges by which it was hung, and the large cracks in it, to
say nothing of the fact that it was too small, made the room a very
uncomfortable one. In addition to these openings there was, in the
lower right-hand corner of the room, the “cat-hole,”—a contrivance
which almost every mansion or cabin in Virginia possessed during the
ante-bellum period. The “cat-hole” was a square opening, about seven by
eight inches, provided for the purpose of letting the cat pass in and
out of the house at will during the night. In the case of our
particular cabin I could never understand the necessity for this
convenience, since there were at least a half-dozen other places in the
cabin that would have accommodated the cats. There was no wooden floor
in our cabin, the naked earth being used as a floor. In the centre of
the earthen floor there was a large, deep opening covered with boards,
which was used as a place in which to store sweet potatoes during the
winter. An impression of this potato-hole is very distinctly engraved
upon my memory, because I recall that during the process of putting the
potatoes in or taking them out I would often come into possession of
one or two, which I roasted and thoroughly enjoyed. There was no
cooking-stove on our plantation, and all the cooking for the whites and
slaves my mother had to do over an open fireplace, mostly in pots and
“skillets.” While the poorly built cabin caused us to suffer with cold
in the winter, the heat from the open fireplace in summer was equally
trying.
The early years of my life, which were spent in the little cabin, were
not very different from those of thousands of other slaves. My mother,
of course, had little time in which to give attention to the training
of her children during the day. She snatched a few moments for our care
in the early morning before her work began, and at night after the
day’s work was done. One of my earliest recollections is that of my
mother cooking a chicken late at night, and awakening her children for
the purpose of feeding them. How or where she got it I do not know. I
presume, however, it was procured from our owner’s farm. Some people
may call this theft. If such a thing were to happen now, I should
condemn it as theft myself. But taking place at the time it did, and
for the reason that it did, no one could ever make me believe that my
mother was guilty of thieving. She was simply a victim of the system of
slavery. I cannot remember having slept in a bed until after our family
was declared free by the Emancipation Proclamation. Three
children—John, my older brother, Amanda, my sister, and myself—had a