Blog #10: "Education and slavery were incompatible with each other"

I experienced an immediate “AHA!” connection between Frances Harper’s “Learning to Read” and Fredrick Douglass’s slave narrative. The first stanza establishes how the North (Yankees) was sending teachers down the South to educate people, and the South (Rebels) hated this idea. The next stanza is what instantly connected this poem with Fredrick Douglass’s narrative. It says how the slave masters didn’t want their slaves to learn to read as “knowledge did’nt agree with slavery/’Twould make us all too wise.” This is the same concept in Douglass’s narrative when Mr. Auld forbids Douglass to continue reading and writing lessons with Mrs. Auld as it was “unlawful, as well as unsafe to teach a slave to read” (Vol. I, pg. 879). Masters were afraid that giving a slave education would make them wise enough to realize how horribly they were being treated and that they might rebel or disobey their masters and mass hysteria would occur. The third stanza talks about how some slaves would learn to read from other sources and “some of [them] would try to steal a little from the book/And put words together.” I found a connection with Douglass learning to read from the little children or “urchins” off the streets in his spare time. In exchange for bread, the children helped teach him to read and write. The next two stanzas describes a man named Uncle Caldwell who “took pot liquor fat/And greased the pages of his book/And hid it in his hat.” This reminded me of when Douglass would be sent out to run errands and he’d take his book with him so that he could read while he was out of his master’s sight. Stanza six talks of Ben who listened to people spelling and reading and he tried to listen and retain as many words as he could. This is also like Douglass when he found his “meat and drink” The Liberator. It was during this time that Douglass learned of abolition for the first time, and he’d try to listen to people’s conversations about slavery. It was also during this moment that he realized just how bad things were and that he then wanted freedom more than he ever had before. The next stanzas, through the end of the poem, reinforce the desire of the South not to educate the slaves, but they did it anyways. Finally, in stanza eleven, after the war when slavery was abolished the narrator took hold her new found freedom and bought her own “…little cabin/A place to call home/And [she] felt independent/As the queen upon her throne.” With her new found knowledge and independence the author was allowed to live freely and gain as much knowledge and hope for a better life, and have a better chance of achieving the “American Dream” just as Douglass had done by the end of his narrative.