LITR 5731:
Seminar in American Minority Literature
University of
Houston-Clear Lake, Fall 2001
Sample Student Midterm
Toni Sammons
LITR 5731
Dr. White
February 19, 2003
Literacy and Assimilation: The Necessary Evil
The history of slavery in the United States is one that shames our nation. It is also a history that should elicit pride. Not because of what was done, but because of how far African Americans have come. It is the determination of the early slaves to learn to read and write that led, in large part, to their emancipation. It is literacy that continues the progress of African Americans in our society. Education, by necessity, leads to assimilation, but assimilation is a necessary evil. It is assimilation through literacy that enables us to hear the voices that give us awareness not only of how far our nation has come, but how far we still have to go before it can truly be said that all are created equal.
It is the early slave narratives that gave Black slaves a voice and opened the eyes of the dominant culture to the evils of slavery. Perhaps the most well known of slave narratives is that of Frederick Douglass. Douglass was introduced to literacy by a mistress who failed to see the effect it would have on his future. Douglass might not have known, either, had it not been for the opposition of his master. Within his hearing, his master told his mistress, “’If you teach that nigger […] how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy’” (Douglass 49).
Douglass’ master was correct in his assessment. Douglass was discontented, and determined to read and write. Douglass says, “From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom” (49). The refusal of his mistress to continue to teach him did not dissuade Douglass in his pursuit of literacy. It took him over ten years, but Douglass learned to read and write. Douglass declined to disclose the method of his ultimate escape to freedom, but it is likely, based on the details of an earlier attempt, that Douglass wrote his own pass to liberty. His book, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, opened the eyes of the dominant culture in the North to the atrocities of slavery in the South.
Douglass’ slave narrative and the narratives of other former slaves were, in large part, responsible for the outcry against slavery prior to the Civil War. Douglass married, acquired employment, and was able to keep the fruit of his labor for the first time in his life. He pursued, what was for him, his American dream. When he was asked to speak out against slavery, he used his hard-won literacy to write his autobiography and to act as an anti-slavery speaker. He was able, through literacy, not only to assimilate into society, but to speak out for his brothers and sisters still held in the bondage of slavery.
The years after the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves did not, by any means, guarantee the freedom to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as promised in the Declaration of Independence. The freed slaves may have maintained the physical attributes that determine the existence of life. They may have had the liberty of calling themselves free from the institution of slavery. But their pursuit of happiness was hampered by their inability to express themselves through language. Robbed of their native languages, Blacks were forced to adopt English as their language of communication. While they were forced to speak English, they were unable to read or write it.
It did not take long for Blacks to
realize that literacy was the pathway to change.
They understood that if they were to have a voice, they must learn to
speak with the voice of the dominant culture.
Contemporary writer Toni Morrison uses literacy to give us a glimpse of
Black culture through historical fiction. Her
stories cover the lives of Black families and help readers to understand the
obstacles that they have had to overcome. In
her novel Song of Solomon,
her character, Macon Dead, speaks of his father’s illiteracy as the primary
cause of his downfall. Morrison
writes:
‘Papa couldn’t read, couldn’t even sign his name. Had a mark he used. They tricked him. He signed something, I don’t know what, and they told him they owned his property. He never read nothing. I tried to teach him, but he said he couldn’t remember those little marks from one day to the next. Wrote one word in his life—Pilate’s name; copied it out of the Bible. That’s what she got folded up in that earring. He should have let me teach him. Everything bad that ever happened to him happened because he couldn’t read.’ (53)
Macon Dead’s assessment of his father’s illiteracy is accurate as far as it goes. His father was a former slave, the first generation to live the life of a free man after the Emancipation Proclamation. But a piece of paper does not guarantee the end of racial prejudice nor equal standing within the dominant culture.
Morrison’s novels also speak of the atrocities of whites against Blacks in the years after the Emancipation Proclamation. In her novel Sula, Morrison has her title character describe the view of society toward black men:
‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I mean, everything in the world loves you. White men love you. They spend so much time worrying about your penis they forget their own. The only thing they want to do is cut off a nigger’s privates. And if that ain’t love and respect, I don’t know what is. And white women? They chase you all to every corner of earth, feel for you under every bed. I knew a white woman wouldn’t leave the house after 6 o’clock for fear one of you would snatch her. Now ain’t that love? They think rape soon’s they see you, and if they don’t get the rape they looking for, they scream it anyway just so the search won’t be in vain. Colored women worry themselves into bad health just trying to hang on to your cuffs. Even little children—white and black, boys and girls—spend all their childhood eating their hearts out ‘cause they think you don’t love them. And if that ain’t enough, you love yourselves. Nothing in this world loves a black man more than another black man. You hear of solitary white men, but niggers? Can’t stay away from one another a whole day. So. It looks to me like you the envy of the world.’ (103-4).
After graduating from high school,
Morrison attended Howard University and Cornell University.
Her first teaching experience was at Texas Southern University.
She was raised in the North because her parents left the South to escape
the very racial tension that Morrison so vividly describes in her novels.
It is, perhaps, her ability to see the history of Blacks from this
somewhat distant, yet informed, perspective that gives her novels their
intensity. In “Salon Magazine,”
Morrison is quoted as saying “I’m just trying to look at something without
blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had
something to do with the way we live now. Novels
are always inquiries for me’ (Voices from the Gaps).
Through Morrison’s inquiries, readers are given a glimpse, through
fiction, into the reality of Black life in America.
Ramona Loftin, who writes under the name Sapphire, gives readers an even more contemporary view of the lives of Blacks in America and their struggle for literacy. Through her own life and the lives of the characters in her novel Push, Sapphire reveals the disparity between an inquiring mind and the acquisition of knowledge. Lofton graduated from high school and started college, but soon dropped out. Her jobs included topless dancing and cleaning houses. It was sixteen years before she went back to college. After graduating with honors, she “taught reading to students in the Bronx and Harlem and enrolled in graduate school at Brooklyn College’ (Voices from the Gaps). Her real life experiences equipped her to write about the fictional lives of her characters.
Push is a brutally frank representation of life for inner city Blacks in America. Sapphire’s central character in the novel is Precious who, throughout her life, has been anything but precious to those who should love her most. Her mother prostitutes her to her father and she has two children by him. Precious is physically and emotionally abused by both her father and her mother. To make matters worse, she is ignored and bypassed/passed by a school system that fails to humanize the child in favor of eliminating the problem. Precious has an excellent mind. Given adequate opportunity to learn, she excels, but the effort may be too late for a child who now has children of her own and who has a life-threatening disease. Through Precious, however, Sapphire offers the hope that education can supply. By learning to read and write, Precious is given a voice and she realizes that literacy is the key to a brighter future for her child.
The battlefield that Sapphire depicts is not the battle for emancipation of Blacks from slavery. Hers is the battle for the Black mind in a society that denigrates the individual. If literacy is the designated key to success for the dominant culture, it is even more vital to the success of Black Americans. In Lives on the Boundary, Mike Rose discusses the increased emphasis on literacy. He says:
In the 1930’s ‘functional literacy’ was defined by the Civilian Conservation Corps as a state of having three or more years of schooling; during World War II the army set the fourth grade as a standard; in 1947 the Census Bureau defined functional illiterates as those having fewer than five years of schooling; by 1960 the Office of Education was setting the eighth grade as a benchmark; and by the late 1970’s some authorities were suggesting that completion of high school should be the defining criterion of functional literacy. In the United States just over 75 percent of our young people complete high school. (6-7)
The current standard for literacy emphasizes not only the completion of high school, but the completion of college. Students who receive a Bachelors degree are being told that without a Masters degree they will find if difficult to find a job. These standards do not bode well for Blacks who are lost in an educational system that fails to meet their needs. Blacks are forced to assimilate. They have no language of their own. They have no land other than the one their ancestors were forced to enter through slavery. They must achieve literacy in order to have a voice. It is through voice that they acquire choice. The current emphasis on Black history is evidence that Black Americans have come a long way in the identification of their heritage. The addition of Black literature into the educational canon is evidence that literacy is crucial to identifying that heritage. Literacy is the key that opens the doors to the past, present and future for Black Americans.
Works Cited
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. New York: Signet. 1968.
Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Plume. 1987.
Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Plume. 1982.
Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary. New York: The Free Press. 1989.
Sapphire. Push. New York: Vintage. 1997.
Voices from the Gaps. http://voices.cla.umn.edu/authors.