Up From Slavery

I was born a slave on a small plantation in Virginia, in a cramped log cabin with a dirt floor, and I never learned the exact day of my birth.My mother worked as the plantation’s cook, and at night, after her long hours in the kitchen, I sometimes heard her kneel and pray quietly for freedom.I had no bed of my own; I slept on the bare, hard floor of our cabin, in a small opening that was more like a storeroom than a room for a family.

One day, when I was still a small boy, we were all called to stand in front of the big house, and a man read a paper aloud that said we were free.For a few minutes everyone was too surprised to move, and then a great, joyful noise rose up — but by afternoon, my mother’s face already looked worried about what would come next.Soon after, we moved to a small town in West Virginia, where, still a boy, I began working long hours packing salt at a furnace to help support our family.

Later I also worked in a coal mine, in dark passages so low that I often had to bend nearly double, and I hated every hour I spent underground.But even then, I could not stop thinking about school, ever since the day I had seen a group of children, once enslaved like me, sitting inside a real schoolhouse with books.I remember watching one young boy read a newspaper aloud to a small crowd of grown men, and thinking that to be able to do that must be the greatest privilege in the whole world.

My mother somehow found an old, worn copy of Webster’s blue-back spelling book, and with no teacher at all, I set about learning my letters from it alone.I studied at night, by whatever light I could find, and slowly, letter by letter, the strange marks on the page began to turn into real words.Eventually I convinced my stepfather to let me attend the new school for a few hours each day, as long as I still finished all my work at the furnace first.

On my very first day, when the teacher went around the room asking each child’s full name, I realized with some embarrassment that I had never had a last name at all.Without thinking too long about it, when my turn came, I simply gave myself the name Booker Washington, and that was the name I carried for the rest of my life.Looking back now, I believe that no book, no lesson, and no single day of my life ever meant more to me than the day I first taught myself to read a word.